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Gothic gen.pl. -e
(2007)
Humans possess a number concept that differs from its predecessors in animal cognition in two crucial respects: (1) it is based on a numerical sequence whose elements are not confined to quantitative contexts, but can indicate cardinal/quantitative as well as ordinal and even nominal properties of empirical objects (e.g. ‘five buses’: cardinal; ‘the fifth bus’: ordinal; ‘the #5 bus’: nominal), and (2) it can involve recursion and, via recursion, discrete infinity. In contrast to that, the predecessors of numerical cognition that we find in animals and human infants rely on finite and iconic representations that are limited to cardinality and do not support a unified concept of number. In this paper, I argue that the way such a unified number concept could evolve in humans is via verbal sequences that are employed as numerical tools, that is, sequences of words whose elements are associated with empirical objects in number assignments. In particular, I show that a certain kind of number words, namely the counting sequences of natural languages, can be characterised as a central instance of verbal numerical tools. I describe a possible scenario for the emergence of such verbal numerical tools in human history that starts from iconic roots and that suggests that in a process of co-evolution, the gradual emergence of counting sequences and the development of an increasingly comprehensive number concept supported each other. On this account, it is language that opened the way for numerical cognition, suggesting that it is no accident that the same species that possesses the language faculty as a unique trait, should also be the one that developed a systematic concept of number.
Sprache als kranker Organismus : linguistische Anmerkungen zum Spiegel-Titel "Rettet dem Deutsch!"
(2007)
Contrastive focus
(2007)
The article puts forward a discourse-pragmatic approach to the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. It is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of "contrastive focus", "kontrast" (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or "identificational focus" (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms like introduction of alternatives or exhaustivity. Rather, an adequate analysis must take into account discourse-pragmatic notions like hearer expectation or discourse expectability of the focused content in a given discourse situation. The less expected a given content is judged to be for the hearer, relative to the Common Ground, the more likely a speaker is to mark this content by means of special grammatical devices, giving rise to emphasis.
Focus presuppositions
(2007)
This paper reviews notions related to focus and presupposition and addresses the hypothesis that focus triggers an existential presupposition. Presupposition projection behavior in certain examples appears to favor a presuppositional analysis of focus. It is argued that these examples are open to a different analysis using givenness theory. Overall, the analysis favors a weak semantics for focus not including an existential presupposition.
Die Familiennamen sind als einziger Bereich der europäischen Sprachen in ihrer ausgeprägten räumlichen Vielfalt noch höchst unzureichend erfasst. Noch sind die geschichtlich gewachsenen Namenlandschaften in erstaunlicher Stabilität erhalten. Sie werden im Bereich der Bundesrepublik Deutschland durch den seit 2005 in Kooperation der Universitäten Freiburg und Mainz in Angriff genommenen und durch die DFG geförderten 'Deutschen Familiennamenatlas' (OFA) auf der Basis von Telefonanschlüssen (Stand 2005) dokumentiert. Im vorliegenden Beitrag werden Vorarbeiten, Ziele, Gesamtanlage des Projekts, Systematik und Repräsentativität der Themenauswahl in den beiden Hauptteilen (grammatischer und lexikalischer Teil) sowie Kriterien und Methoden der inhaltlichen Konzipierung und formalen Gestaltung der Karten und Kommentare vorgestellt und begründet. Aus den genannten Vorarbeiten werden auch schon Perspektiven künftiger Auswertung der in den Datenbanken archivierten Materialien und der im Atlas exemplarisch dokumentierten Strukturen der Namenlandschaften ersichtlich.
Beyond unpluggability
(2007)
We consider evidentials embedded in complement clauses with new data from Bulgarian. For Tibetan, Garrett has shown that embedded evidentials are always shifted to the perspective of the reported speech. In Bulgarian, we show that such a shift is almost never possible. This shows that Bulgarian evidentials should not be analyzed as modals, but rather as presuppositional.