Typological parameters of genericity

  • Different languages employ different morphosyntactic devices for expressing genericity. And, of course, they also make use of different morphosyntactic and semantic or pragmatic cues which may contribute to the interpretation of a sentence as generic rather than episodic. [...] We will advance the strong hypo thesis that it is a fundamental property of lexical elements in natural language that they are neutral with respect to different modes of reference or non-reference. That is, we reject the idea that a certain use of a lexical element, e.g. a use which allows reference to particular spatio-temporally bounded objects in the world, should be linguistically prior to all other possible uses, e.g. to generic and non-specific uses. From this it follows that we do not consider generic uses as derived from non-generic uses as it is occasionally assumed in the literature. Rather, we regard these two possibilities of use as equivalent alternative uses of lexical elements. The typological differences to be noted therefore concern the formal and semantic relationship of generic and non-generic uses to each other; they do not pertain to the question of whether lexical elements are predetermined for one of these two uses. Even supposing we found a language where generic uses are always zero-marked and identical to lexical sterns, we would still not assume that lexical elements in this language primarily have a generic use from which the non-generic uses are derived. (Incidentally, none of the languages examined, not even Vietnamese, meets this criterion.)

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Metadaten
Author:Leila BehrensGND
URN:urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-245490
ISSN:1615-1496
Parent Title (German):Institut für Sprachwissenschaft (Köln): Arbeitspapier ; N.F., Nr. 37
Series (Serial Number):Arbeitspapier / Institut für Sprachwissenschaft, Universität Köln (N.F. 37)
Publisher:Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Institut für Linguistik, Universität zu Köln
Place of publication:Köln
Document Type:Working Paper
Language:English
Year of Completion:2000
Year of first Publication:2000
Publishing Institution:Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg
Release Date:2012/04/25
GND Keyword:Sprachtypologie; Generizität; Generische Aussage
Page Number:115
HeBIS-PPN:347237738
Dewey Decimal Classification:4 Sprache / 41 Linguistik / 410 Linguistik
Sammlungen:Linguistik
Linguistik-Klassifikation:Linguistik-Klassifikation: Sprachtypologie / Language typology
Licence (German):License LogoDeutsches Urheberrecht