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The late physicist Carl Sagan, whom I quote in the first part of my title, skillfully phrased the common sense view on evidence in the mature sciences. In linguistics, however, evidence has become a controversial issue, especially so when it comes to the investigation of less well studied languages. In this paper, I argue that Sagan's principle should be applied to linguistics. The growing accessibility of a wide array of experimental techniques and computational tools to analyze such data makes it feasible to back up extraordinary claims with evidence from a variety of sources. At the same time, it is in many cases possible to agree on what constitutes an ordinary claim and focus the extra effort on extraordinary claims. For non-controversial claims no more than the minimum effort to establish the claim and properly document the evidence is necessary.
In German, non-finite forms of verbs that are traditionally labelled as "nominalized infinitives", but are better categorized as gerunds, can show very unusual features. Although they carry a definitive article and therefore clearly seem to belong to the class of nouns, they still govern objects and adverbials in exactly the same way the verb does. It is therefore argued that in spite of the determiners, these forms are essentially verbal in nature. The syntactic functions they fulfil can be anything from subject or object to adverbial or attributive modifier, i. e. functions that are usually fulfilled by subordinate clauses. Since this is the same kind of behavior that converbs in languages like Turkish show, this leads to the suggestion that they can indeed be considered as a functionally similar to converbs.
The relation between word-formation and syntax and whether they form distinct domains of grammar or not has been discussed controversially in different theoretical frameworks. The answer to this question is closely connected to the languages under discussion, among other things, because languages seem to differ considerably in this regard. The discussion in this paper focuses on nominal compounds and phrases. On the basis of a great variety of data from a total of 14 European languages, it is argued that the relation between compounds and phrases, and, more generally, between word formation and syntax, should be characterized not in terms of a categorical but instead in terms of a gradient distinction.
"Ausgangssperre light" und "digitales Semester" – Wortgruppenlexeme zwischen Lexikon und Syntax
(2022)
In recent years, the relation between lexicon and syntax as distinct domains has been questioned repeatedly. For all languages under discussion word-like examples that do not fit the category word have been found, so that the boundary between lexical unit and syntactic unit becomes leaky. Furthermore, relative borderlines vary from language to language. One of the problematic domains are phrasemes (phraseological units). This article concentrates on German multi-word lexemes which are very similar to compounds in respect to structure, semantics, and cognitive aspects (rechter Winkel 'right angle'). Though mostly neglected or treated peripherally, this group is not exactly small, and patterns are productive – in contrast to the rest of phrasemes. We argue in favor of a transition between words and phrases and gradient distinctions between categories and a position of the problematic examples close to compounds and rather not among phrasemes. Finally, we look at how theoretical approaches deal with the problem.