Linguistik-Klassifikation
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Working Paper (5)
- Part of a Book (4)
- Article (3)
Language
- English (12) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (12)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (12)
Keywords
- Sprachliche Universalien (3)
- Sprachtypologie (3)
- Sprachtheorie (2)
- Bedeutungswandel (1)
- Chaostheorie (1)
- Deskriptivität (1)
- Disjunktion <Logik> (1)
- Empirische Linguistik (1)
- Everyday language (1)
- Evolutionstheorie (1)
Institute
1. The functionalist’s view: linguistic forms are instruments used to convey meaningful elements. This is the basis of European structuralism. 2. The formalist’s view: linguistic forms are abstract structures which can be filled with meaningful elements. This is the basis of generative grammar. 3. The parasitologist’s view: linguistic forms are vehicles for the reproduction of meaningful elements. This is the view which I advocated twenty years ago in the Festschrift for Werner Winter’s 60th birthday (1985). Here I intend to discuss the evolutionary origin and the physiological nature of the linguistic parasite. My theory of language is wholly consistent with Gerald Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection.
Sperber and Wilson (1996) and Wilson and Sperber (1993) have argued that communication involves two processes, ostension and inference, but they also assume there is a coding-decoding stage of communication and a functional distinction between lexical items and grammatical marking (what they call 'conceptual' vs. 'procedural' information). Sperber and Wilson have accepted a basically Chomskyan view of the innateness of language structure and Universal Grammar.
Some conceptual and empirical issues in linguistic theory : an illustration with pronominal clitics
(2001)
I would like to discuss a few general conceptual issues in linguistic theory, and see how they bear on some empirical facts about pronominal clitics. In particular, I would like to show that the conception of linguistic theory, justified on independent grounds, limits the class of issues and possible explanations for grammatical properties of specific linguistic expressions. I argue that this is not simply a consequence of a specific conception of grammar, conceived of as a system of principles and rules governing language, but has non-trivial empirical ramifications. Pronominal clitics are a good case study, since their grammatical properties bear on a wide range of facts falling under the purview of principles of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics.
This paper discusses critically a number of developments at the heart of current syntactic theory. These include the postulation of a rich sequence of projections at the left periphery of the sentence; the idea that movement is tied to the need to eliminate uninterpretable features; and the conception put forward by Chomsky and others that advances in the past decade have made it reasonable to raise the question about whether language might be in some sense ‘perfect’. However, I will argue that there is little motivation for a highly-articulated left-periphery, that there is no connection between movement and uninterpretable features, and that there is no support for the idea that language might be perfect.
In my paper "Thesen zum Universalienprojekt" (1976) I mention two complementary procedures for discovering language universals: 1. The investigation of the dimensions and principles whose existence is necessitated by the communicative function of language; 2. The development of a formal language in which all syntactic rules are explicitly formulated and in which all syntactic categories are defined by their relation to a minimally necessary number of syntactic categories. Since the first procedure is treated in many of the other papers of this volume, I wish to discuss the role of formal methods in the research of language universals. As an example I want to take the dimensions of determination and show how expressions denoting concepts are modified and turned into reference identifying expressions. There is a general end a specific motivation for the introduction of formal methods into linguistics. The general motivation is to make statements in linguistics as exact and verifiable as they are in the natural sciences. The specific motivation is to make the grammars of various languages comparable by describing them with the same form of rules. The form has to be flexible enough to describe the phenomena of any possible natural language. All natural languages have in common that they may potentially express any meaning. The flexibility of the form of grammatical rules may therefore be attained, if syntactic rules are not isolated from the semantic function they express and syntactic classes are not defined merely by the relative position of their elements in the sentence, but also by the communicative function their elements fulfill in their combination with elements of other classes.
Montague (1974) has shown that this flexibility may be attained by using the language of algebra combined with categorial grammar. Algebraic systems have been developed by mathematicians to model any systems whose operations are definable. Montague does not merely use the tools of mathematics for describing the features of language, but regards syntax, semantics and pragmatics as branches of mathematics. One of the advantages of this approach is that we may apply the laws developed by mathematicians to the systems constructed by linguists for the description and explanation of natural language.
This article develops a Gricean account for the computation of scalar implicatures in cases where one scalar term is in the scope of another. It shows that a cross-product of two quantitative scales yields the appropriate scale for many such cases. One exception is cases involving disjunction. For these, I propose an analysis that makes use of a novel, partially ordered quantitative scale for disjunction and capitalizes on the idea that implicatures may have different epistemic status.
The medium of (oral) language is mostly disregarded (or overlooked) in contemporary media theories. This "ignoring of language" in media studies is often accompanied by an inadequate transport model of communication, and it converges with an "ignoring of mediality" in mentalistic theories of language. In the present article it will be argued that this misleading opposition of language and media can only be overcome if one already regards oral language, not just written language, as a medium of the human mind. In my argumentation I fall back on Wittgenstein’s conception of language games to try to show how Wittgenstein’s ideas can help us to clear up the problem of the mediality of language and also to show to what extent the mentalistic conception of Chomskyan provenance cannot be adequate to the phenomenon of language.
The human mind may produce prototypization within virtually any realm of cognition and behavior. A "comparative prototype-typology" might prove to be an interesting field of study – perhaps a new subfield of semiotics. This, however, would presuppose a clear view on the samenesses and differences of prototypization in these various fields. It seems realistic for the time being that the linguist first confine himself to describing prototypization within the realm of language proper. The literature on prototypes has steadily grown in the past ten years or so. I confine myself to mentioning the volume on Noun Classes and Categorization, edited by C. Craig (1986), which contains a wealth of factual information on the subject, along with some theoretical vistas. By and large, however, linguistic prototype research is still basically in a taxonomic stage - which, of course, represents the precondition for moving beyond. The procedure is largely per ostensionem, and by accumulating examples of prototypes. We still lack a comprehensive prototype theory. The following pages are intended, not to provide such, a theory, but to do the first steps in this direction. Section 2 will feature some elements of a functional theory of prototypes. They have been developed by this author within the frame of the UNITYP model of research on language universals and typology. Section 3 will bring a discussion of prototypization with regard to selected phenomena of a wide range of levels of analysis: Phonology, morphosyntax, speech acts, and the lexicon. Prototypization will finally be studied within one of the universal dimensions, that of APPREHENSION - the linguistic representation of the concepts of objects – as proposed by Seiler (1986).
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.