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Institute
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 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.
Actually, the title should include intralinguistic variation along with the interlinguistic one. For variation within one and the same language is the thing which directly presents itself to the observation while it still remains to be demonstrated that phenomena in different languages can be regarded as variants to be assigned to one and the same invariant principle. There are two senses in which the terms of variant, variation are used in the following remarks: one, which has just been mentioned, concerns the assignment of variants to some definite invariant. The other implies the possibility of gradient transitions and opposes the notions of discreteness and of yes-or-no. I shall not try here to reconcile these two senses and I trust that what I intend to show will become intelligible nevertheless. Henri Delacroix (1924:126f) has reformulated an old hypothesis which seems worth exploring in connection with the search for language universals: "Une langue est une variation historique sur le grand thème humain du langage." It remains to be seen what "le grand thème" or rather "les grands thèmes" are about and what particular language-specific properties could be shown to be variants of one and the same theme. One such major theme which we shall now investigate is the interrelation between, on one side, a word or a sequence of words, and, on the other, a sentence. As this for us is not only a syntactic but also a semantic problem, we might rephrase the anti thesis as that between a term or sequence of terms and a proposition. Two alternative views on the nature of this interrelation seem conceivable: A. The interrelation is yes-or-no, i. e. an element or a string of elements either constitutes a term (sequence of terms) or a proposition. B. The interrelation is of gradient nature, i. e. we find intermediary stages. Both alternatives are appropriate, but under different circumstances.
The search for universals is a tendency which is based in the structure of human knowledge and which correlates with a complementary search for individual properties. The recurrence to universals is inherent in both classificatory and deductive knowledge. Admittingly, the attempt to classify the definitorial universals of human language hierarchically meets various difficulties. In contrast to the universals of the formal systems of logic and mathematics, the universals of human language are of a heterogeneous character. Often the relation among the universals of language is not to be determined merely as a relation of logical compatibility or implication, but, additionally, as a relation of means and end. Not everything which is logically possible according to certain basic universals of language is also realized by the languages. Beyond the logical possibilities linguistics must recognize structural, perceptual and cognitive restrictions. – Universal properties have the merit that they are, presumably, more fundamental in the language system than the mere particular properties. – One of the important discoveries of the more recent investigation in language universals is that diversities, in particular certain types of interlingual inversions and gradual distinctions in the development of a dimension, are also subject to universal laws. – As a motive for research in language universals, which is also a motive for the opposed inquiry in linguistic relativity, one must ultimately consider a psycho-sociological factor. According to the level at which one seeks identification with a gruppe (ethnocentric or anthropocentric) one will be more likely to advocate a constrative linguistics (in the broadest sense of the term) or a universal linguistics.
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 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.
Ich möchte für das Folgende annehmen, daß ein Paradigmenwechse1 in den Wissenschaften sich als Wechsel der methodisch leitenden grammatischen Sätze rekonstruieren läßt. Oder mindestens möchte ich behaupten; die Betrachtung eines Paradigmenwechsels als Wechsel der grammatischen Sätze sei wenigstens bei einer Wissenschaft zwingend: bei der Linguistik. Daß die Linguistik längst keine vorparadigmatische Wissenschaft mehr ist, läßt sich bereits daran erkennen, daß sie sich stark genug fühlt, nicht abseits zu stehen, sondern ihrerseits mit einer linguistischen Definition von Wissenschaft aufzuwarten.[…] Daß es inzwischen Untersuchungen über die Sprache der Physik gibt, die linguistische Ergebnisse berücksichtigen, hat sicherlich unter anderem damit zu tun, daß die Linguistik seit der Jahrhundertwende, seit Ferdinand de Saussure, selbstbewußt und sehr vernehmlich im Chor der Wissenschaften mitgesungen hat, bisweilen so laut, daß viele Wissenschaften, besonders in der Abteilung Geisteswissenschaft, sich gezwungen sahen, die Melodie der Linguistik zu übernehmen, wenn anders sie nicht gänzlich übertönt werden wollten. In dieser Situation ist es also auch für andere Wissenschaften von einigem Interesse, davon Kenntnis zu nehmen, daß in der kräftigen Stimme der Linguistik ziemlich genau um das Jahr 1957 ein etwas abrupter Melodiewechsel nicht zu überhören war: Noam Chomskys Buch 'Syntactic Structures' kündigte weiteren Kreisen eine wissenschaftliche Revolution, ein neues Paradigma an. Das heißt […], daß die Wissenschaft der Grammatik, die ja insgesamt nur aus grammatischen Sätzen besteht, das System ihrer methodologischen, […] rein-grammatischen Sätze gegenüber ihren empirisch-grammatischen Sätzen über einzelne Sprachen gründlich veränderte. Der Linguist würde sagen: die Vorstellung von den linguistischen Universalien änderte sich radikal gegenüber derjenigen, die in dem paradigmatischen Lehrbuch der strukturalistischen Epoche entwickelt worden war, dem Cours de linguistique generale Saussures von 1916. Diese Revolution vom Jahre 1957 möchte ich nun zum Gegenstand einer näheren Betrachtung machen.
In der Indogermanistik sehen wir einen Zweig der historisch-vergleichenden Sprachwissenschaft. Die histor.-vergl. Sprachwissenschaft geht davon aus, dass einander ähnliche Wörter in nicht voneinander abstammenden Sprachen, die gleiche oder vergleichbare Inhalte bezeichnen, nicht zufällig in diese verschiedenen Sprachen gelangt sein können. Solche Übereinstimmungen wären anders erklärbar, wenn die Natur des Bezeichneten die Lautfolgen jeder einzelnen Sprache in irgendeiner Weise bedingen. Wir nehmen aber an, dass es also kein Abbildungsverhältnis zwischen Inhalt und Ausdrucksform sprachlicher Zeichen gibt, dass ein sprachliches Zeichen seine willkürlich festgesetzte konventionelle Form behält. Dann muss man Ähnlichkeiten solcher Zeichen in nicht voneinander abstammenden Sprachen auf irgendwelche ursprünglichen Zusammenhänge der Konventionen zurückführen. Die Deutung solcher Zusammenhänge ist das Thema der histor.-vgl. Sprachwissenschaft. […] Die Indogermanistik ist eine von vielen histor.-vgl. Sprachwissenschaften, neben der Finno-Ugristik, der Semitistik usw. Dass die Indogermanistik sich eine gewisse Sonderstellung zuspricht, liegt an drei ganz zufälligen Gegebenheiten: erstens ist die Indogermanistik die älteste und am intensivsten betriebene Sektion der vergl. Snrachwissenschaft; sie hat bis jetzt das grösste Kapital an geleisteter Arbeit zu verwalten; zweitens sind unter den Gliedern, die wir als indogermanische Sprachen zu einer Familie zusammenfassen, besonders früh bezeugte, lang überlieferte und zu grosser Ausdrucksleistung gelangte Sprachen, und drittens gehört zu diesen Sprachen unsere eigene und alle die Sprachen, mit denen wir im europäischen Raum, in der Gestaltung der europäischen Geisteswelt, am meisten zu tun haben.
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.