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These notes grew out of my preoccupation with writing a grammar of a particular language, Cahuilla, which is spoken in Southern California and belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family. [...] The Introduction to the Grammar as a whole – of which two sections are reproduced here in a modified version – tries to integrate the synoptic views of the different chapters into a series of comprehensive statements. The statements cluster around two topics: 1. A presentation of Cahuilla as a type of language. 2. Remarks on writing a grammar.
Issues on topics
(2000)
The present volume contains papers that bear mainly on issues concerning the topic concept. This concept is of course very broad and diverse. Also, different views are expressed in this volume. Some authors concentrate on the status of topics and non-topics in so-called topic prominent languages (i.e. Chinese), others focus on the syntactic behavior of topical constituents in specific European languages (German, Greek, Romance languages). The last contribution tries to bring together the concept of discourse topic (a non-syntactic notion) and the concept of sentence topic, i.e. that type of topic that all the preceding papers are concerned with.
Kant, Piaget et Unityp
(1988)
Le livre de H. Seiler, "Apprehension. Language, Object and Order", présente un grand intérêt même pour und épistémologue ne disposant pas d'une formation de linguíste. A cela il y a au moins deux raísons: en premier lieu "Apprehension. Language, Object and Order" étudie la notion d'objet introduisant la DIMENSION de l'APPREHENSION et, en deuxième lieu, à travers l'étude des langues elle vise une universalité fonctionelle de l'activité cognitive. La notion d'objet est traditionellement importante pour toute recherche épistémologique et ces dernières années elle a été définitivement liée aux recherches sémantiques (Tugendhat 1976: 48). "Apprehension. Language, Object, and order" englobe cet aspect; en effet, le terme de APPREHENSION indique l'activité de saisie notionelle de l'objet telle qu'elle apparaît dans les langues. La structure des langues, mise en évidence dans cette DIMENSION de l'APPREHENSION, est considerée comme la manifestation (REPRAESENTATIO) d'un concept, le REPRAESENTANDUM. Dans notre cas, il s'agit du concept d'objet, dont la richesse esst détectable par la complexité de la REPRAESENTATIO línguistique, qui en met en évidence la nature fonctionelle. Mais sa nature polymorphe, apparaissant dans les TECHNIQUES de la DIMENSION, fait que la saisie due réel mise en oeuvre par ce concept ne pourra pas se reduire à une simple perception de l'objet. En developpant les recherches de "Apprehension. Language, Object and Order", on purra dépasser non seulement les conceptions de la sémantique fondées sur la notion d'adéquation (ou de satisfaction), mais aussi celle qui se réclament d'un 'jeu de vérification' (Tugendhat 1976: 265). Ces conceptions, loin de se vider de leur sens, seront intégrées dans un cadre plus général. En effet, la nature même de l'objet dépend, dans sa définition et dans sa saisie, de cette activité. Le dépassement de la notion d'adéquation amène à une reformulation de l'ontologie, que l'ensemble de "Apprehension. Language, Object and Order" suggère. Il faudra introduire, à mon avis, une conception constructiviste.
The aim of this contribution is to embed the question of an antinomy between "integral" vs. "partial typology", inscribed as the topic of this plenary session, into the comprehensive framework of the dimensional model of the research group on language universals and typology (UNITYP). In this introductory section I shall evoke some cardinal points in the theory of linguistic typology, as viewed "from outside", viz. on the basis of striking parallelisms with psychological typology. Section 2 will permit a brief look on the dimensional model of UNITYP. In section 3 I shall present an illustration of a typological treatment on the basis of one particular dimension. In section 4 I shall draw some conclusions with special reference to the "integral vs. partial" antinomy.
Why should we engage in language universals research and language typology? What do we want to explain? It is a fact that, although languages differ significantly and considerably. indeed, no one would deny, that they have something in common; how else could they be labelled 'language'? - There is obviously unity among them, no matter how vaguely felt and for what reasons: Scientific, practical, moral, etc. Neither diversity per se nor unity per se is what we want to explain. There is no reason whatsoever to consider either one of them as primary, and the other as derived. What we do want to explain is "equivalence in difference" – cf. our motto – which manifests itself, among others, in the translatability from one language to another, the learnability of any language, language change – which all presuppose that speakers intuitively find their way from diversity to unity. This is a highly salient property which deserves to be brought into our consciousness. Generally then, our basic goal is to explain the way in which language-specific facts are connected with a unitarian concept of language – "die Sprache" – "le langage".
Using Ultan's theory of descriptivity grading as a starting point, I will attempt to capture this differential utility in terms of [...] criteria of literalness, explicitness and syntactic complexity. I will first briefly present his System and investigate some generalizations which he has proposed on the basis of his study of body part terminologies in numerous languages. I will apply his theory to nouns in this and four other semantic domains, in three North American Indian languages. I will test his generalizations and propose some new ones. I will then present an alternative system of descriptivity grading and compare the results of its application with those of Ultan's system. In the final section I will suggest another methodology for quantification. An appendix at the end of the paper lists all of the descriptive lexical items mentioned, graded according to both systems.
Nominalizations
(2002)
The present volume is a selection of the papers presented in workshops at ZAS in Berlin in November 2000 and at theUniversity of Tübingen in April 2001, devoted to synchronic and, diachronic aspects of various types of nominalizations. Nominalization has a long history in linguistic research. Its nature can only be captured by taking into account the interface between morphology, syntax and semantics on the one hand, and the interface between semantics and conceptual structure on the other.