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Der folgende unterrichtspraktische Beitrag ist die Fortsetzung eines bereits erschienenen Aufsatzes zur Phraseologismenvermittlung im DaF-Unterricht (vgl. Bergerová 2005). Während es dort im Wesentlichen um grundlegende theoretische Fragestellungen der Phraseodidaktik ging, behandelt der vorliegende Beitrag die Umsetzung der neuesten Erkenntnisse der phraseodidaktischen Forschung am Beispiel eines Didaktisierungsvorschlages anhand der Textsorte Filmankündigung. Vorangestellt wird dafür zunächst eine instruktive Einleitung zu ausgewählten Fragen der Phraseologie im Allgemeinen und der Phraseodidaktik im Besonderen, um auf dieser Grundlage den Didaktisierungsvorschlag entwerfen und erklären zu können.
In dem Beitrag wird am Beispiel von zwei Emotionsverben des Deutschen und Tschechischen exemplarisch der Frage nachgegangen, wie typische Kollokationen zum Emotionswortschatz für die Belange eines zweisprachigen (tschechischdeutschen und deutsch-tschechischen) (Lerner-)Wörterbuches zu ermitteln sind. Im Mittelpunkt des Interesses befinden sich Kollokationen des Strukturtyps Verb + Adverb, weil dieser Typ von der Forschung bis jetzt nur ungenügend beachtet wurde. In einem ersten Schritt wird die Beschreibungspraxis in neueren ein- und zweisprachigen Wörterbüchern untersucht. In einem zweiten Schritt werden die Ergebnisse der Kookkurrenzanalyse zu den ausgewählten Ausdrücken anhand des Deutschen Referenzkorpus des IDS Mannheim und des Tschechischen Nationalkorpus ausgewertet. Zum Schluss werden aus den Ergebnissen der Gegenüberstellung Beschreibungsvorschläge für die lexikographische Praxis gemacht.
The contribution deals with a selected lexical field related to the emotion 'anger'. It is treated from a German-Czech perspective and with respect to its underlying psychological aspects. It begins by investigating the nature of lexical fields, and explains the framework of the chosen field in terms of its content and form. On this basis the author tries to find an answer to the question whether this particular field can in fact be considered to be a lexical field. In conclusion the paper discusses the question of whether psychological findings on emotions generally, and on the emotion of 'anger' in particular, can be of help in establishing both an outer delimitation and an internal structuring of the field.
Ausgehend von der Ansicht, dass Wörterbücher als kulturelle Gebrauchsgegenstände, als Werkzeuge aufzufassen sind, widmet sich der Beitrag ausgewählten Fragestellungen der phraseologischen Lernerlexikographie. Anhand von Überlegungen über die Benutzer- (gruppen), Benutzersituationen und Benutzerbedürfnisse wird auf die Frage eingegangen, warum die Praxis des Fremdsprachenerwerbs solche Wörterbücher braucht und was deren Autoren beherzigen sollten. Am Beispiel von Idiomen aus dem semantischen Feld ÄRGER werden Probleme der Auswahl sowie Möglichkeiten korpusbasierter Beschreibung von Phraseologismen angesprochen. Abgerundet wird der Beitrag durch eine Bildgeschichte, die ein typisches ärgerbezogenes Handlungsszenario reflektiert und sich somit zu einer lernfördernden Präsentation von Phraseologismen aus diesem semantischen Feld eignet.
Rezension zu Marta Medved Krajnović: Od jednojezičnosti do višejezičnosti. Uvod u istraživanja procesa ovladavanja inim jezikom. Zagreb: Leykam international, 2010, 193 S.
We present an effort for the development of multilingual named entity grammars in a unification-based finite-state formalism (SProUT). Following an extended version of the MUC7 standard, we have developed Named Entity Recognition grammars for German, Chinese, Japanese, French, Spanish, English, and Czech. The grammars recognize person names, organizations, geographical locations, currency, time and date expressions. Subgrammars and gazetteers are shared as much as possible for the grammars of the different languages. Multilingual corpora from the business domain are used for grammar development and evaluation. The annotation format (named entity and other linguistic information) is described. We present an evaluation tool which provides detailed statistics and diagnostics, allows for partial matching of annotations, and supports user-defined mappings between different annotation and grammar output formats.
No presente artigo, apresentamos a rede polissêmica da preposição alemã "über", que é resultante da pesquisa produzida para a dissertação de mestrado. Como base teórica, fizemos uso dos preceitos da linguística cognitiva, mais especificamente dos estudos de polissemia que se baseiam na semântica cognitiva. Para definir a rede semântica polissêmica, utilizamos o modelo de Polissemia Sistemática apresentado por Andrea Tyler e Vyvyan Evans na obra "The semantics of English prepositions – spatial scenes, embodied meaning and cognition" (2003) e o adaptamos para a análise da preposição "über". Neste artigo, exporemos os significados mais produtivos para esta preposição.
Zieht man ein Fazit aus den verschiedenen Aspekten der Disziplinen Fremdsprachenerwerb, Musikerziehung und Interkulturelle Erziehung, führt dies zu interdisziplinären Überlegungen darüber, inwieweit sich eine Kooperation miteinander für jeden der Bereiche als sinnvoll erweist bzw. erweisen kann. Musik und Sprache haben sehr viel gemeinsam - beide sind nach einem Regelsystem konstruiert d.h. Wörter und Klänge werden zu größeren funktionellen Einheiten wie Sätzen und Phrasen zusammengefügt. Diese Regelsysteme bestimmen jeweils auch die Beziehungen ihrer einzelnen Teile zum Ganzen und bestimmte Abhängigkeiten der sprachlichen und musikalischen Elemente voneinander. Sie werden vom Menschen durch unbewusste Lernprozesse erworben. Der Beitrag stellt die Ergebnisse einer Studie dar, die an der Pädagogischen Fakultät Hradec Králové durchgeführt wurde und die sich dem Thema Musik im Fremdsprachenunterricht widmet. Es wurden ausgewählte Deutschlehrwerke analysiert und anschließend eine Umfrage unter Fremdsprachenlehrern durchgeführt. Musik im Fremdsprachenunterricht (FSU) zu verwenden, hat ein großes Potenzial. Deshalb sollte sie ein fester Bestandteil in jeder Phase des Fremdsprachenerwerbens sein.
Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit dem muttersprachlich Erwerb (L1) des Genus im Deutschen. Im Zentrum der Untersuchung steht die Frage, wie ein Kind aus dem ihm angebotenen Sprachinformationen das komplexe System der Genusmarkierung erwirbt. Sie wird anhand von Daten aus einer Langzeitstudie eines monolingual aufwachsenden deutschen Kindes erörtert. Der Rahmen dieser Arbeit erforderte bei ihrem Aufbau gewisse Einschränkungen. So habe ich mich in der Auswertung der Erwerbsdaten auf den bestimmten Artikel als Genusanzeiger konzentriert. Als Artikel zeichnet er sich gegenüber den ebenfalls genusabhängigen Adjektiven dadurch aus, dass er eine meist obligatorische Konstituente einer Nominalphrase (NP) mit einem Substantiv darstellt. Der bestimmte Artikel wiederum ist einerseits der frequenteste unter den Artikelwörtern und weist andererseits das differenzierteste Formeninventar auf, wobei er als einziger Artikel im Nominativ alle drei Genera differenziert. Auch habe ich mich entschlossen, auf eine Gegenüberstellung und Diskussion verschiedener Spracherwerbstheorien zu verzichten und stattdessen ausführlicher auf die Aspekte, die im Erwerbsprozess selbst und somit für die Datenanalyse relevant sind, einzugehen. Dabei sollen unterschiedliche Ansätze berücksichtigt sowie die aktuelle Forschungslage dargestellt werden.
The distribution of linguistic structures in the world is the joint product of universal principles, inheritance from ancestor languages, language contact, social structures, and random fluctuation. This paper proposes a method for evaluating the relative significance of each factor — and in particular, of universal principles — via regression modeling: statistical evidence for universal principles is found if the odds for families to have skewed responses (e.g. all or most members have postnominal relative clauses) as opposed to having an opposite response skewing or no skewing at all, is significantly higher for some condition (e.g. VO order) than for another condition, independently of other factors.
Language universals are statements that are true of all languages, for example: “all languages have stop consonants”. But beneath this simple definition lurks deep ambiguity, and this triggers misunderstanding in both interdisciplinary discourse and within linguistics itself. A core dimension of the ambiguity is captured by the opposition “absolute vs. statistical universal”, although the literature uses these terms in varied ways. Many textbooks draw the boundary between absolute and statistical according to whether a sample of languages contains exceptions to a universal. But the notion of an exception-free sample is not very revealing even if the sample contained all known languages: there is always a chance that an as yet undescribed language, or an unknown language from the past or future, will provide an exception.
Vor gut vierzig Jahren hat Milewski (1950) das Werkzeug der Syntaxtypologie um das Begriffspaar "kon- und exzentrische Struktur" vermehrt. Dieses Klassifikationsmittel wurde später von Nichols (1984,1986) erneuert und terminologisch mit der Unterscheidung von head- und dependent-marking erfasst. Dabei hat die Autorin vorgeschlagen, diese Unterscheidung auch für die Typologie der Relativkonstruktion fruchtbar zu machen.
It is often assumed that the goal of typology is to define the notion ‘possible human language’. This view, which I call the Universalist Typology view is shared, for example, by virtually all contributors to Bynon & Shibatani’s 1995 volume Approaches to Language Typology, and by Moravscik in her review of this volume in Linguistic Typology 1 (p.105). In the following I claim that this assumption is fundamentally mistaken. To clarify the theoretical status of what is meant by ‘possible human language’, I argue here for a distinction between typological theory (theoretical typology) and grammatical theory (theoretical syntax and theoretical morphology) as distinct subdisciplines of linguistics.
Traditionally, the term "grammatical relation" (GR) refers to the morphosyntactic properties that relate an argument to a clause, as, for example, its subject or its object. Alternative terms are "syntactic function" or "syntactic role", and they highlight the fact that GRs are defined by the way in which arguments are integrated syntactically into a clause, i.e. by functioning as subject, object etc. Whatever terminology one prefers, what is crucial about the traditional notion of GRs is (a) that they are identified by syntactic properties, and (b) that they relate an argument to the clause.
Verb agreement and epistemic marking : a typological journey from the Himalayas to the Caucasus
(2008)
Studies of the epistemic categories expressed in Tibetan auxiliaries and copulas have mostly compared the phenomena with mirativity marking, and this is no doubt the correct comparandum in diachronic research. However, synchronic descriptions are also often tempted to compare the relevant categories with agreement systems or similar reference-related structures, at least for expository purposes when explaining how the system works (e. g. Denwood 1999, Tournadre 1996, Goldstein et al. 1991).
Sino-Tibetan is a prime example of how strongly a language family can typologically diversify under the pressure of areal spread features (Matisoff 1991, 1999). One of the manifestation of this is the average length of prosodic words. In Southeast Asia, prosodic words tend to average on one or one-and-a-half syllables. In the Himalayas, by contrast, it is not uncommon to encounter prosodic words containing five to ten syllables. The following pair of examples illustrates this.
Languages vary in whether or not primary grammatical relations (PGRs) are sensitive to information from clause-level case or phrase structures. This variation correlates with a difference between verb agreement systems based on feature unification and systems based on feature composition. The choice between different PGR and agreement principles is found to be highly stable genetically and to characterize Indo-European as systematically different from Sino-Tibetan. Although the choice is partially similar to the Configurationality Parameter, it is shown that Indo-European languages of South Asia are nonconfigurational due to areal pressure but follow their European relatives in PGR and agreement principles.
Ever since Wilhelm von Humboldt’s (1836) pioneering study of Nahuatl, linguists have recurrently recognized that languages differ fundamentally in the syntactic weight they attribute to noun-phrases as the arguments of a verb. Currently, the most prominent attempts to turn this intuition into a precise hypothesis revolve around the notion of ‘configurationality’.
In Belhare (Sino-Tibetan, Nepal), consonant prothesis at morpheme boundaries and deletion of stem "augments" is found if either metrical or morphological parsing would violate the bimoraic trochee pattern that underlies the stress system of the language. This finding corroborates Dresher & Lahiri’s (1991) "Principle of Metrical Coherence" and provides new evidence for the cross-linguistic applicability of Crowhurst’s (1994) "Tautomorphemic Foot" constraint. The data also support a view of the Prosodic Hierarchy as weakly layered, allowing consonants to be directly dominated by the foot or word node if they are prothetic and do not therefore need feature licensing within the syllable canon.
It is well-known that in many if not most Sino-Tibetan languages relative clause and attribute/genitive markers are identical with nominalization devices and that sentences bearing such markers can also function as independent utterances (cf. Matisoff 1972, Kölver 1977, DeLancey 1989, Genetti 1992, Ebert 1994, Bickel 1995, Noonan 1997, etc.). This morphological convergence of syntactic functions, which we may dub the ‘Standard Sino-Tibetan Nominalization’ (SSTN) pattern, is particularly prominent in some languages spoken in the eastern and southeastern part of the Kirant because these languages not only feature prenominal relative clauses, but also allow, albeit as a minor type, internally headed constructions.
Recent research has adduced growing evidence for a distinct stratum of cultural practices that underlies various "tribal" traditions in the Himalayan region and that also seems to be characteristic of various local versions of the Bon tradition. Bon literature is not uncommonly embedded in cultural patterns that are more specifically Himalayan than belonging to the greater South Asian heritage. Two aspects of this that have received attention in Ramble's (1997) study of a Bon guide to the sacred Kong-po mountain (rKong-po bon- ri) are the symbolism of wild boar hunting involved in marriage rituals and poison cults with their corresponding beliefs about poisoning. Another pattern of cultoral organization that may help better understand the Bon tradition against its Himalayan background is spatial conceptualization.
In many languages, clauses can be subordinated by means of case markers. For Bodic languages, a branch of Sino-Tibetan, Genetti (1986) has shown that the meaning of case markers on clauses is in most instances a natural extension of their function on nouns. A dative, for example, which marks a referential goal with a noun, signals a situational goal, i.e., a purpose, when used on a clause. Among the case markers recruited for subordination, we not only get relatively concrete cases like datives, comitatives and various types of locatives, but also core argument relators such as ergatives and accusatives. In this paper, I focus on ergative markers in one subgroup of Bodic, viz. in Kiranti languages spoken in Eastern Nepal, especially in Belhare.
In the late seventies, Bernard Comrie was one of the first linguists to explore the effects of the referential hierarchy (RH) on the distribution of grammatical relations (GRs). The referential hierarchy is also known in the literature as the animacy, empathy or indexibability hierarchy and ranks speech act participants (i.e. first and second person) above third persons, animates above inanimates, or more topical referents above less topical referents. Depending on the language, the hierarchy is sometimes extended by analogy to rankings of possessors above possessees, singulars above plurals, or other notions. In his 1981 textbook, Comrie analyzed RH effects as explaining (a) differential case (or adposition) marking of transitive subject ("A") noun phrases in low RH positions (e.g. inanimate or third person) and of object ("P") noun phrases in high RH positions (e.g. animate or first or second person), and (b) hierarchical verb agreement coupled with a direct vs. inverse distinction, as in Algonquian (Comrie 1981: Chapter 6).
The present volume results from an initiative to foster cooperation between scholars of Himalayan languages in Europe. The initiative was launched five years ago and has brought about a series of annual workshop meetings and individual cooperative projects (cf. http://www.isw.unibe.ch/EuroHimal). The 1998 workshop, held in Heidelberg, was devoted to the role that notions of speech act participants play in the grammar of various Himalayan languages, and the present collection represents, with some additions and some subtractions, the proceedings of this workshop. In the following I will give some background on the rationale for the topics covered in this volume, especially on the ways in which the indexing of speech act participants is related in Himalayan languages to evidentials and other epistemological operators. I will close this introduction with a brief outline of the structure of the volume.
Nominalinkorporation
(1980)
Inkorporation ist [...] eine Technik, die zur Wortkomplexität beiträgt. Es handelt sich dabei um eine besondere Art von Wortbildung: eine (evtl. mehrere) Prädikatsbestimmung (Subjekt, direktes Objekt, adverbiale Bestimmungen) wird ins Prädikat einverleibt. Das besondere an dieser Wortbildungstechnik ist – A. ihre syntaktische Relevanz: es werden zwei syntaktische Elemente zu einem Wort komponiert; gleichzeitig muss aber betont werden, dass die ursprüngliche syntaktische Relation der Mitglieder in dem Kompositum nicht unverändert bestehen bleibt; – B. die Offenheit des Prozesses, die erlaubt, Inkorporation sowohl gegenüber Derivationsprozessen als auch gegenüber anderen Arten von Komposition abzugrenzen. [...] Die hier relevanten Prädikatsbestimmungen (diejenigen also, die inkorporiert werden können) sind zwar nicht immer, aber vorwiegend durch Nomina realisiert. In dieser Arbeit wird nur die Inkorporation von Nomina berücksichtigt.
In hindsight, the debate about presupposition following Frege’s discovery that the referential function of names and definite descriptions depended on the fulfillment of an existence and a uniqueness condition was curiously limited for a very long time. On the one hand, it was only in the 1960s that linguists began to take an interest and showed that presupposition was an allpervasive phenomenon far beyond this philosophers’ pet definite descriptions. And on the other hand, and this is our real concern, it is now only too obvious that the uniqueness condition is too restrictive to be applicable to the general case. An utterance of “The cat is on the mat” should not imply that there is only one cat and one mat in the whole world. The obvious move is to limit the uniqueness condition to some notion of utterance context.
Simplicity as a methodological orientation applies to linguistic theory just as to any other field of research: ‘Occam’s razor’ is the label for the basic heuristic maxim according to which an adequate analysis must ultimately be reduced to indispensible specifications. In this sense, conceptual economy has been a strict and stimulating guideline in the development of Generative Grammar from the very beginning. Halle’s (1959) argument discarding the level of taxonomic phonemics in order to unify two otherwise separate phonological processes is an early characteristic example; a more general notion is that of an evaluation metric introduced in Chomsky (1957, 1975), which relates the relative simplicity of alternative linguistic descriptions systematically to the quest for explanatory adequacy of the theory underlying the descriptions to be evaluated. Further proposals along these lines include the theory of markedness developed in Chomsky and Halle (1968), Kean (1975, 1981), and others, the notion of underspecification proposed e.g. in Archangeli (1984), Farkas (1990), the concept of default values and related notions. An important step promoting this general orientation was the idea of Principles and Parameters developed in Chomsky (1981, 1986), which reduced the notion of language particular rule systems to universal principles, subject merely to parametrization with restricted options, largely related to properties of particular lexical items. On this account, the notion of a simplicity metric is to be dispensed with, as competing analyses of relevant data are now supposed to be essentially excluded by the restrictive system of principles.
Metaphern bestimmen nicht nur unser alltägliches Leben, etwa wenn wir vom Rad der Geschichte oder der Bühne des Lebens sprechen, sie geben auch nützliche Orientierung in vielen Bereichen der Wissenschaft, von den schwarzen Löchern der Physiker bis zur Computermetapher des Gehirns in der Kognitionswissenschaft. Eine solche Metapher ist auch die Deutung der Sprache als Werkzeug.
Generative grammar
(2001)
Generative Grammar is the label of the most influential research program in linguistics and related fields in the second half of the 20. century. Initiated by a short book, Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957), it became one of the driving forces among the disciplines jointly called the cognitive sciences. The term generative grammar refers to an explicit, formal characterization of the (largely implicit) knowledge determining the formal aspect of all kinds of language behavior. The program had a strong mentalist orientation right from the beginning, documented e.g. in a fundamental critique of Skinner's Verbal behavior (1957) by Chomsky (1959), arguing that behaviorist stimulus-response-theories could in no way account for the complexities of ordinary language use. The "Generative Enterprise", as the program was called in 1982, went through a number of stages, each of which was accompanied by discussions of specific problems and consequences within the narrower domain of linguistics as well as the wider range of related fields, such as ontogenetic development, psychology of language use, or biological evolution. Four stages of the Generative Enterprise can be marked off for expository purposes.
The structure of natural languages as studied by linguists is connected in several ways with phenomena outside this domain. Problems of this kind are, to mention only three: (a) the acoustical and physiological interpretation of the primitive elements in which the sound structure is represented; (b) the conceptual or referential interpretation of the primitive elements that build up the meanings of the utterances; (c) the structural relationships that go beyond the single sentences, usually taken as the largest units to be analyzed linguistically, i.e., the question as to the conditions that two or more sentences must meet in order to form a connected text. ...
Die drei Bereiche, die hier verglichen werden sollen, entsprechen in etwa der überkommenen Trias von Literatur, Musik und bildender Kunst, einer Gliederung, die im Medienzeitalters mit Videos, CDs, Installationen oder Happenings eigentlich obsolet ist. Allerdings geht es hier nur um die Eigenart der Zeichensysteme, auf denen die verschiedenen Bereiche beruhen, nicht um die Werke, die dadurch möglich werden, obgleich natürlich auch die Kunstwerke im emphatischen Sinn, die bedeutenden und die banalen, die großen und die misslungenen Gestaltungen nur möglich und verstehbar sind aufgrund der Zeichen, auf denen sie beruhen.
The semantics of gradation
(1989)
The term 'gradation' is meant to cover a range of phenomena which for the time being I shall call quantitative evaluations regarding dimensions or features. I shall actually be looking into the principles governing the way gradation is expressed in language. The quantitative aspect of the adjectives of dimension occupies a key position which can be systematically explained and this aspect will be the crucial point of the discussion. I shall focus on the various grammatical forms of comparison: comparative, equative, superlative and some related constructions, and indications of measurement and adverbial indications of degree.
Thematic Roles (or Theta-Roles) are theoretical constructs that account for a variety of well known empirical facts, which are more or less clearly delimited. In other words, Theta-Roles are not directly observable, but they do have empirical content that is open to empirical observation. The objective of the present paper is to sketch the nature and content of Theta-Roles, distinguishing their universal foundation as part of the language faculty, their language particular realization, which depends on the conditions of individual languages, and idiosyncratic properties, determined by specific information of individual lexical items.
Semantic form as interface
(2007)
The term interface had a remarkable career over the past several decades, motivated largely by its use in computer science. Although the concept of a "surface common to two areas" (Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, 1980) is intuitively clear enough, the range of its application is not very sharp and well defined, a "common surface" is open to a wide range of interpretations.
Linguistik, Poetik, Ästhetik
(2008)
The paper briefly summarizes the proposal made in 1965 that "Poetic Competence" is the basis for creating and evaluating poetry. That this competence lives on, but is different from linguistic competence is exemplified by a close look at the segmental and supra-segmental, morpho-syntactic, lexical, and conceptual structure of Hölderlin's poem "An Zimmern", revealing a surprisingly complex and balanced structure of the apparently simple four lines. The second part of the paper discusses the question whether judgments about poetry are to be studied as based on the relation between specific properties of poems and persons. Finally the problem is raised, whether literary art is based on a specific Poetic Competence, or instantiates a general aesthetic ability applied to linguistic objects. This is construed as a speculative, but still empirical question.
Reflexive pronouns as central anaphoric elements are subject to general principles determined by Universal Grammar and shared by all languages that use reflexives as part of their grammatical structure. In addition to these general conditions, there are language particular properties, which different languages can exhibit on the basis of different regulations. One variation of this sort is the particular role of Reflexives in German, which can show up as improper Arguments, which are subject to standard syntactic and morphological conditions, but do not represent an argument of the head they belong to. Hence the particular property is the effect of syntactic, morphological and semantic conditions. A simple illustration of the phenomena I will explore in this contribution is based on the following observation.
The main tenet of the present paper is the thesis that nominalization – like other cases of derivational morphology – is an essentially lexical phenomenon with well defined syntactic (and semantic) conditions and consequences. More specifically, it will be argued that the relation between a verb and the noun derived from it is subject to both systematic and idiosyncratic conditions with respect to lexical as well as syntactic aspects.
Daß die Sprache Voraussetzung und Grundlage für die Gesamtheit menschlicher Vollzüge und kultureller Gestaltung ist, dieser Gedanke ist nicht erst in der sprachanalytischen Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts zum Thema geworden. Allerdings nimmt er hier mit der These von der Unhintergehbarkeit der Sprache, also der Feststellung, daß nur in der Sprache die Grundlagen der Sprache behandelt und geklärt werden können, einen zentralen Platz ein. Aber die Reihe der Vorläufer ist lang. Herder etwa hatte befunden "Ohne Sprache hat der Mensch keine Vernunft, und ohne Vernunft keine Sprache." (1772), und Heidegger hat in seiner raunenden Art die Sprache zum "Haus des Seins" (1947) erklärt. Über die möglichen Grenzen dieses unhintergehbaren Mediums haben auf sehr unterschiedliche Weise Ludwig Wittgenstein und Samuel Beckett gegrübelt. Die Titelfrage dieses Beitrags beruht auf Wittgensteins These 5. 6 in der Logisch-philosophischen Abhandlung: Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt.
Romance suffix rivalry of action nouns from Middle English verbs in the OED textual prototypes
(2007)
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...