Descriptivity in the domain of body-part terms

  • In an earlier paper, I proposed a system for evaluating the relative descriptivity of lexical items in a consistent manner in terms of the interrelations of three metrics. The first of these, including five possible degrees of descriptivity, is based on the premise that the sum of the meaningful parts of a given form is or is not equal to the meaning of the whole. The second, also composed of five degrees, is based on paraphrase-term relations in which the logical quantifiers: all, some and no, are applied to the terms of the paraphrase in one test and to the meaningful parts of the term (linguistic form) in the reversibility test. Both tests are applied in the form of logical propositions. The third metric, with three degrees, deals with the relative explicitness of the meaningful parts of a given form: explicit, implicit or neither. […] This system was then tested in a pilot study involving the fairly limited and semantically homogeneous lexical domain of body-part terms in a specific language, Finnish. The purpose of the present paper is to subject comparable data from other languages to the same kind of analysis and compare the results in order to ascertain whether the generalizations arrived at with the Finnish data also hold for the other languages or, more specifically, which of these generalizations are more or less universal and which language or language-type specific? The additional languages to be examined here are: French, German, Ewe, Maasai and Swahili.

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Metadaten
Author:Russell Ultan
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-251192
Parent Title (German):Kölner Universalienprojekt: Arbeiten des Kölner Universalien-Projekts ; Nr. 21
Series (Serial Number):Arbeiten des Kölner Universalien-Projekts : akup (21)
Publisher:Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Institut für Linguistik, Universität zu Köln
Place of publication:Köln
Document Type:Working Paper
Language:English
Year of first Publication:1976
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2012/08/07
GND Keyword:Deskriptivität; Körperteil; Sprachliche Universalien; Sprachtypologie
Issue:Februar 1976
Page Number:30
HeBIS-PPN:349586241
Dewey Decimal Classification:4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik
Sammlungen:Linguistik
Linguistik-Klassifikation:Linguistik-Klassifikation: Sprachtypologie / Language typology
Linguistik-Klassifikation: Sprachtheorie / Theory of language
Linguistik-Klassifikation: Semantik / Semantics
Licence (German):License LogoDeutsches Urheberrecht