Linguistik
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Part of a Book (591)
- Article (375)
- Working Paper (117)
- Conference Proceeding (106)
- Preprint (97)
- Report (32)
- Book (26)
- Doctoral Thesis (16)
- Part of Periodical (16)
- Review (16)
Language
- English (1397) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (1397)
Keywords
- Syntax (113)
- Englisch (109)
- Deutsch (86)
- Spracherwerb (79)
- Semantik (71)
- Phonologie (63)
- Phonetik (48)
- Informationsstruktur (42)
- Thema-Rhema-Gliederung (41)
- Sprachtest (36)
Institute
- Extern (141)
- Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) Mannheim (97)
- Neuere Philologien (26)
- Sprachwissenschaften (8)
- Medizin (2)
- Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaften (2)
- Gesellschaftswissenschaften (1)
- Informatik (1)
- SFB 268 (1)
In a similar way to dramatic performances and plays, song lyrics establish a complex discourse structure whereby listeners are placed in a position to overhear ‘the pretence of a conversation constructed to convey the performer’s meaning’ (Nahajec 2019: 25; see also Short 1996: 169). In Taylor Swift’s songwriting, listeners are positioned not only to eavesdrop on the narratives presented but are also invited to conceptualise and enact particular roles and scenarios in the discourse. This paper offers a stylistic analysis of songwriting and narrative structure across Swift’s oeuvre to identify how disnarration strategies are used to build stories in her two sister albums written and produced during the Covid-19 pandemic, folklore (2020) and evermore (2020). Specifically, this study examines how disnarration characterises the albums’ narrators, establishes narrator-narratee relationships and invites listeners to adopt a participatory role in the meaning-making process. Through close analysis of four songs across the two albums, this paper builds on developing studies of the stylistics of songwriting (see West 2019) and argues that disnarration strategies foreground particular themes within the discourse, such as nostalgia, wistfulness and regret, and contribute to the fictionalisation and self-aware storytelling characteristic of these albums’ storyworlds.
This dissertation investigates a special class of anaphoric form, yè, in Ewe known as the logophoric pronoun. This research makes a number of novel observations.
In the first chapter, I introduce the reader to the phenomenon under investigation as well as provide information on Ewe and its dialects and, methodology. In Chapter 2, I present the pronominal system of Ewe which is categorised into strong and weak forms following Cardinaletti & Starke (1994) and Agbedor (1996). The distribution of pronouns is outlined which sets the tone for an overview of logophoric marking. In this respect, I present variations in logophoric marking strategies cross linguistically and show that Ewe differs significantly from other pronouns in this category. In an effort to explain the deviant case of yè, I entertain the idea that yè is a pure logophoric pronoun in the sense of Clements (1975) and thus, its additional de re and strict interpretation does not imply non-logophoricity.
Chapter 3 demonstrates that yè is sensitive to contexts which portray the intention of an individual. Following Sells (1987), the antecedent of yè must have an intention to communicate. I broadly categorize logophoric contexts into reportative (direct-indirect speech) or non-reportative (speaker’s mental attitude, reporter’s observation or background knowledge of a situation). Based on this categorization, indirect speech report (Clements 1975), dis- course units such as a paragraph or an episode (Clements 1975), and sentential adjuncts such as purpose, causal and consequence clauses (Culy 1994a) are reviewed. The logophoric pro- noun occurs in the complement of attitude verbs (Clements 1975), also termed logocentric (à la (Stirling 1994)) or logophoric predicates (à la (Culy 1994a)) as well as with non-attitudinal verbs (e.g. va ‘come’ or wO ‘do’ as in sentential adjuncts). I argue contra Clements (1975) and Culy (1994a) that yè can occur with perception predicates. I further provide three new instances of non-reportative contexts which are compatible with yè namely, as-if clauses, benefactive na clauses and alesi ‘how’ clauses. I show, corroborating previous studies that contexts which are necessary for the licensing of yè include all of the aforementioned except causal clauses. Among these contexts, the complementizer be or regarding cases where there is no be, an element in C (due to the Doubly-Filled-Comp Filter (DFCF) c.f. Chomsky & Lasnik (1977)), is sufficient to license yè. Following Bimpeh & Sode (2021), yè is licensed by feature checking (in the spirit of von Stechow (2004)): be bears the interpretatble [log] feature which checks the uninterpretable [log] feature of yè. I include a redefinition of logophoricity as pertaining to Ewe.
Given the disparity found in the literature concerning the interpretation of yè: Ewedome (pronounce EVedome) has only de se readings (Bimpeh 2019); while ‘pure’ Ewe, Mina (variety of Ewe spoken in Togo) Pearson (2015), Danyi (O’Neill 2015) and Anlo (pronounced ANlO) (Satık 2019) has de re readings; chapter 4 aims at lending empirical support to the ungoing discussion by verifying the interpretation of yè. Two acceptability judgment tasks were conducted namely, truth value judgment task and binary forced choice task. The results corroborates Pearson (2012, 2015) and others’ discovery that yè has a de re interpretation in the Ewedome (contra Bimpeh (2019); Bimpeh et al. (2022)), Anlo and Tonu (pronounced TONu) dialects of Ewe.
In chapter 5, I discuss the relation between logophoricity (yè, yè a) and Control (PRO). I show that yè may be restricted to a set of verbs which obligatorily require the morpheme a ‘potential marker’ (Essegbey 2008), in subject position. This set of verbs are those that are known as control verbs c.f. (Landau 1999) in English. As a result of this restriction, research such as Satık (2019) claims that yè a is the overt instantiation of PRO in English. According to the Ewe facts, it appears as though on one hand, yè and PRO share similar properties in logophoric contexts and on the other hand, yè in combination with the potential marker, a also share properties with PRO in subject control environments. Against this background, I discuss the relation between yè, yè a and PRO and show that neither yè in isolation nor yè in combination with a, contrary to Satık (2019), is the overt instantiation of PRO. I clarify that the potential morpheme a is not cliticised or combined with the logophoric yè. The two forms are seperate morphemes. The potential marker a only shows up in control environments because a sub-class of verbs require it for grammaticality purposes. As such, the property of de se-ness does not come from yè by itself, yè a or a but rather from the sub-class of verbs which require the potential marker a...
This article addresses the controversial question how non-derived denominal verbs (e.g. wingsuit, kennel, trombone) build their argument structures. Based on selected subsets of conceptually related verbs it will be shown that the argument structures of these verbs are flexible though not arbitrary. Without context, these verbs evoke frame-like default situations which are determined by speakers' shared encyclopaedic knowledge and sensorimotor experience and which are mapped onto a small set of abstract event schemata that 'predesign' thematic configurations. The discourse context, which also provides the syntactic context, either meets or models our expectations as to the context-free readings. In the latter case, new (metaphorical) readings are contextually created. These configurations are not arbitrary either because the meanings of verbalized nouns should always be (a) in a relation of contiguity to the base-noun concepts and (b) compatible with the semantics of the syntactic constructions.
This study proposes a cross-linguistic, corpus-based, and constructionist analysis of denominal verbs (DNVs) in English, Dutch and German. DNV constructions include various morphological construction types, such as conversion (e.g. English bottle > to bottle), prefixation (e.g. Dutch arm 'arm' > omarmen 'to embrace') and suffixation (e.g. German Katapult 'catapult' > katapultieren 'to catapult'). We investigate the correlation between the distribution of DNV constructions and the typological properties of the languages, focusing on boundary permeability, inflectional complexity, syntactic configurationality and word-class assignment. The study shows that, although the three languages have the same repertoire of DNV constructions at their disposal, a Germanic cline can be detected in their preferences for non-overt vs overt marking of the word-class change. As such, the study highlights the impact of typological factors on the shape of language-specific constructional networks.