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Valency and aspectuality : syntactic and semantic motivation for the notion of "change of state"
(1994)
Certain semantic properties of verbs have syntactic consequences in that they restrict the ability of the verb to occur in particular constructions. It will be argued that such semantic properties may not be introduced for syntactic purposes alone, but that the semantic nature and relevance of these properties has to be proved. In the following sections it will be shown which semantic verbal properties have to be assumed to capture the restrictions for the occurrence of a certain syntactic pattern in German, the so-called a construction These same properties will also turn out to be necessary for the explanation of semantic phenomena like sentential aspect. Finally, the meaning of the introduced notions and their theoretical status will be discussed.
Was es heißt, "in sechs Monaten zu promovieren"! Unergative Accomplishments in der Aspektkomposition
(1997)
Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, unter welchen Bedingungen intransitive, unergative Verben in Accomplishments auftreten. Den Überlegungen liegt das im Anhang enthaltene Korpus von Beispielen zugrunde, das solche Sätze enthält wie sie frühstückte in fünf Minuten, er räumte in wenigen Minuten auf oder sie duschte in zehn Minuten. Solche unergativen Accomplishments sind meines Wissens in der Literatur zu aspektuellen Klassen und Aspektkomposition bisher nicht beschrieben oder erklärt worden. Die Verben gehören einer Vielfalt von lexikalischen Gruppen an, für deren aspektuelles Verhalten jeweils unterschiedliche Erklärungen erforderlich sind, die zum Teil noch sehr tentativen Charakter haben. Ausgangspunkt dieser Überlegungen ist KRIFKAs Theorie zur Aspektkomposition. Ich werde versuchen, KRIFKAs (1989a, 1989b) Grundideen der Aspektkomposition in etwas modifizierter Form zu bestätigen und die Erklärungen für den Accomplishment-Status der Unergativa in einer reichen Repräsentation lexikalisch-semantischer Eigenschaften von Verben zu suchen.
Lexical-semantic theories often suffer from the imprecision of the concepts they employ in their representations. This leads to a considerable decrease in empirical strength by inviting circular argumentation. A demonstration of how to go about overcoming such shortcomings will be carried out, using the lexical semantic concept of "punctuality" as an example. Firstly, I will argue that the distinction between punctuality and durativity plays a crucial role for the explanation of a wide range of syntactic and semantic phenomena. Secondly, I will discuss methodological issues involved in arriving at a more precise definition of punctuality and, finally, the notion of "punctuality" will be given an interpretation on the basis of extensive consultation of research on cognitive time concepts.
Whether verbs have to be marked as punctual vs. durative has been a controversial issue from the very beginnings of research on aktionsarten in the last century right on up to modern theories of aspectual classes and aspect composition. Debates about the linguistic necessity of this distinction have often been accompanied by the question of what it means for a verb to be temporally punctual. In this paper I will, firstly, sketch the history of research on the punctual-durative distinction and present several linguistic arguments in its favor. Secondly, I will show how this distinction is captured in an eventstructure- based approach to lexical semantics. Thirdly, I will discuss the extent to which a precise definition of the notions used in lexical
representations helps avoid circular argumentation in lexical semantics. Finally, I will demonstrate how this can be done for the notion of ‘punctuality’ by clarifying the logical type of this predicate and relating it to central cognitive time concepts.
The "imperfective-paradox" paradox and other problems with the semantics of the progressive aspect
(2000)
This paper is about the meaning of the progressive aspect, of which it has been notoriously difficult to give a satisfying account. 1 A number of intriguing properties of its meaning were first brought out in formal semantic treatments. An event semantics approach to the progressive that integrates concepts of nonnality and perspective as well as adequate lexical representations seems to be particularly promising. In section 1 I will present several problems connected with the semantics of the progressive that are crucial for shaping its truth conditions. Several solutions to these problems that have been suggested in the literature will be discussed. 2 In section 2 I will sketch a preliminary account of the meaning of the progressive aspect. In section 2.1 the basic components that underlie the truth conditions of the progressive will be described. In section 2.2 I will present underlying lexical assumptions and the truth conditions for the progressive. Finally, in section 2.3, I will evaluate the proposal by revisiting the problems discussed.
Semantic theories based on predicate-argument structures have always acknowledged that lexical information associated with verbs is the basic source for the rudimentary semantic structure of sentences. The central role of verbs in sentence structure has become a major insight of modern syntactic theories since the lexical turn in linguistics, too. As a result of this development there has been an increasing interest in theories on the lexical representation of verbs. This paper will briefly review prevailing theories on verb semantics (section 1), showing that they can capture only a part of the wide range of syntactic and semantic phenomena dependent on verb meaning. For several of these phenomena (section 2) it will turn out that a theory based on highly structured events is more suitable for representing verb meaning. This theory is based on the idea that verbs refer to events that consist of several subevents which are temporally related, classified according to their duration, and whose event participants are connected to some but not necessarily all subevents by semantic relations (section 3).
The paper argues that lexical-semantic representations within event semantics often suffer from a severe lack of empirical content. To demonstrate this, some main tenets of truth conditional semantics and its consequences for the lexical-semantic metalanguage are discussed. It will be shown that lexical semantic meaning postulates have to be improved in the following ways: i) the formulation of empirically verifiable definitions of the metalinguistic predicates, ii) the clarification of the logical type of these predicates, iii) the establishment of a procedure by which the predication can be verified, iv) the careful observation of the semantics of the logical operators, and v) the establishment of identity criteria for the basic ontological sorts. Furthermore, the strategies many lexical-semantic theories develop in order to immunize themselves against empirical falsification will be identified in several examples. Finally, it will be argued that an empircally sound lexical-semantic theory within truth-conditional event semantics has to be based on empirical research in cognitive science
This paper is about the meaning of the progressive aspect, which has been notoriously difficult to give a satisfying account of. A number of intriguing properties of its meaning were first brought out in formal semantic treatments. An event semantics approach to the progressive which integrates concepts of normality and perspective as well as adequate lexical representations seems to be particularly promising. In section 2 I will present several problems connected with the semantics of the progressive that are crucial for shaping its truth conditions. Several solutions to these problems that have been suggested in the literature will be discussed. In section 3 I will sketch a preliminary account of the meaning of the progressive aspect. In section 3.1 the basic components that underlie the truth conditions of the progressive will be described. In section 3.2 I will present underlying lexical assumptions and the truth conditions for the progressive. Finally, in section 4, I will evaluate the proposal by revisiting the problems discussed.
Theories of aspectual composltlon assume that accomplishments arise when a transitive verb has an incremental theme argument which is realized as a quantized NP-foremost, an NP which is not a mass noun or a bare plural-in direct object position. A problem confronting this assumption is the large number of intransitive, unergative verbs in Getman and English that occur in accomplishment expressions. The paper argues that this problem can be solved within a Standard theory of aspectual composition if additional, independently motivated lexical assumptions about argmnent structure, the representation of implicit arguments and lexical presuppositions are made. It turns out that a distinction between lexically detennined definitcness versus non-definiteness of implicit arguments in particular plays a cmcial role, as weil as one between implicitly reflexive and non-reflexive arguments in that implicitly definite and implicitly reflexive arguments allow for accomplishment expressions. This is explained by the semantics of definiteness and refl.exivity, respectively. Apart from these verbs, there is another large group of unergatives which show that, in contrast to a common assumption in aspectual composition theory, verbs thermselves and not only VPs can be quantized. This leads to a lexical distinction between "mass" and "count" verbs.
In diesem Artikel soll es darum gehen, neuere theoretische Arbeiten zum Lexikon für lexikographische Anwendungen nutzbar zu machen. Insbesondere möchte ich einige Ergebnisse der neueren Valenzforschung skizzieren und sie zur gängigen lexikographischen Praxis der Valenzinformation in einsprachigen Lernerwörterbüchern in Beziehung setzen. Ich werde dabei vor allem auf einzelne der Forschungsergebnisse Bezug nehmen, die in den letzten zehn Jahren in dem Wuppertaler Forschungsprojekt „Valenz im Lexikon“ im Rahmen des Sonderforschungsbereichs 282 „Theorie des Lexikons“ entstanden sind. 1 Dazu werde ich im folgenden Abschnitt einige Annahmen der multidimensionalen Valenztheorie darstellen. In Abschnitt 3 wird es um typische Lernerfehler in den einzelnen Valenzdimensionen gehen, in Abschnitt 4 um Nicht-Notwendigkeit und die Interpretation impliziter Argumente und in Abschnitt 5 um semantische Bedingungen für Valenzalternanzen.
The paper introduces a theory of Lexical Event Structures as a means to represent the meaning of verbs. The theory is guided by the assumption that verbs refer to events that are internally structured in the sense that they consist of several subevents and states. The temporal properties and relations of these have to be specified. The occurrence of subevents is either implied or presupposed by the verb, and event participants are related to some, but not necessarily all subevents by semantic relations.
The paper explores how verbs like helfen "help" should be treated within event semantics. These verbs allow both agentive NP-subjects and sentential CP-subjects. Their behavior with respect to adverbial modification reveals that in their agentive variant these verbs refer to events, while in their sentential variant they refer to states. The meaning that sentential helfen conveys is that the beneficiary is in a good disposition and that this state is brought about by what is expressed by the sentential subject. This involves a kind of subjective value statement about what is good for the beneficiary and what is not. The relation of "bringing about" involved here is not mainly one of causal dependence - lacking the typical denseness of causal chains - but one that involves supervenience. Supervenience, a notion widely used in moral theory and philosophy of the mind, allows accounting for the dependence of the rather subjective nature of the resultant state of helfen on particular events which occur in the world. The agentive variant of helfen is derived by embedding the meaning of sentential helfen into an event description.
Zwischen Hawaii und Neuseeland, Neuguinea und der Osterinsel erstreckt sich die Inselwelt des Pazifiks, die wir als „Südsee“ kennen. Traditionell wird sie in drei große Inselgebiete aufgeteilt: Polynesien im Osten, Mikronesien im Nordwesten und Melanesien im Westen (s. Abb. 1 auf Seite 3). Die Südsee weist eine Sprachenvielfalt auf wie kaum eine andere Region der Erde. Überraschenderweise haben dabei nicht wenige der etwa 1000 Sprachen, die in der Südsee gesprochen werden, deutsche Lehnwörter in ihren Wortschatz integriert. So stößt man auf Wörter wie kaisa im Samoanischen (aus dt. Kaiser), kumi im Marshallesischen (aus dt. Gummi) und karmoból im Palauischen (aus dt. Grammophon).
The paper will give a concise account of the theory of Lexical Event Structures. The paper has three objectives which correspond to the following three sections. In section 2 I will sketch the theory and discuss the empirical goals the theory pursues (section 2.1) and the semantic components Lexical Event Structures consist of (section 2.2). Section 3 is devoted to linguistic phenomena whose explanation depends on Lexical Event Structures. In section 3.1 I will briefly illustrate in how far Lexical Event Structures are related to phenomena from five central empirical domains of lexical semantics and in section 3.2 it will be shown how Lexical Event Structures function in a linking theory. Section 4 aims to show how the central semantic concepts in Lexical Event Structures can be anchored to concepts which are well-founded in cognitive science. Section 4.1 discusses the event concept employed and illustrates the relation between the perception of movements and the use of verbs of movement. Section 4.2 deals with the concept of volition with respect to the licensing conditions for intransitive verb passives. In section 4.3 the distinction between durativity and punctuality, which has proven relevant for a number of verb semantic phenomena, is tied to the way we perceive events and structure our own actions. Section 5 provides a conclusion.
German loanwords are found in many languages in the South Pacific, in particular in those areas which were under German administration before WW I. The Austronesian languages in this area differ greatly with respect to the number of lexemes of German origin. The paper focuses on two languages of Micronesia, namely Palauan, with a comparatively high number of German loans, and Kosraean which had no German influence on its lexicon. The paperconsiders the balance of factors that contribute to the different loanword amounts. That German was taught in local schools for up to two decades did not, by itself, enhance borrowing from German. More weighty factors for the amount of borrowings from German are the length and strength of language contact with English and the use of German as a means of communication in particular settings in the years before WW I.
Between 1884 and 1900, Germany established protectorates in large areas of the South Pacific. The authorities assumed that the linguistically extremely diverse areas would pose communication problems. Thus the question arose whether German should become the lingua franca in the South Pacific. After a controversial discussion; the German government implemented language policies to promote the German language in the colonies. This chapter shows why, on the one hand, German language policies were doomed to failure and why, on the other, they unintentionally supported other linguistic developments such as the introduction of borrowing from German into indigenous languages, the development of German settler varieties, and the spread of pidgin languages.
The paper reports on a dictionary of German loanwords in the languages of the South Pacific that is compiled at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. The loanwords described in this dictionary mainly result from language contact between 1884 and 1914, when the German empire was in possession of large areas of the South Pacific where overall more than 700 indigenous languages were spoken. The dictionary is designed as an electronic XML-based resource from which an internet dictionary and a printed dictionary can be derived. Its printed version is intended as an ‘inverted loanword dictionary’, that is, a dictionary that – in contrast to the usual praxis in loanword lexicography – lemmatizes the words of a source language that have been borrowed by other languages. Each of the loanwords will be described with respect to its form and meaning and the contact situation in which it was borrowed. Among the outer texts of the dictionary are (i) a list of all sources with bibliographic and archival information, (ii) a commentary on each source, (iii) a short history of the language contact with German for each target language, and perhaps (iv) facsimiles of source texts.The dictionary is supposed to (i) help to reconstruct the history of language contact of the source language, (ii) provide evidence for the cultural contact between the populations speaking the source and the target languages, (iii) enable linguistic theories about the systematic changes of the semantic, morphosyntactic, or phonological lexical properties of the source language when its words are borrowed into genetically and typologically different languages, and (iv) establish a thoroughly described case for testing typological theories of borrowing.
Die lexikographische Behandlung von Argumentstrukturvarianten in Valenz- und Lernerwörterbüchern
(2010)
Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt einen neuartigen Typ von mehrsprachiger elektronischer Ressource vor, bei dem verschiedene Lehnwörterbücher zu einem "umgekehrten Lehnwörterbuch" für eine bestimmte Gebersprache zusammengefasst werden. Ein solches Wörterbuch erlaubt es, die zu einem Etymon der Gebersprache gehörigen Lehnwörter in verschiedenen Nehmersprachen zu finden. Die Entwicklung einer solchen Webanwendung, insbesondere der zugrundeliegenden Datenbasis, ist mit zahlreichen konzeptionellen Problemen verbunden, die an der Schnittstelle zwischen lexikographischen und informatischen Themen liegen. Der Beitrag stellt diese Probleme vor dem Hintergrund wünschenswerter Funktionalitäten eines entsprechenden Internetportals dar und diskutiert einen möglichen Lösungsansatz: Die Artikel der Einzelwörterbücher werden als XML-Dokumente vorgehalten und dienen als Grundlage für die gewöhnliche Online-Ansicht dieser Wörterbücher; insbesondere für portalweite Abfragen werden aber grundlegende, standardisierte Informationen zu Lemmata und Etyma aller Portalwörterbücher samt deren Varianten und Wortbildungsprodukten (hier zusammenfassend als "Portalinstanzen" bezeichnet) sowie die verschiedenartigen Relationen zwischen diesen Portalinstanzen zusätzlich in relationalen Datenbanktabelle nabgelegt, die performante und beliebig komplex strukturierte Suchabfragen gestatten.
Aus den Argumentstrukturen von Verben lassen sich vielfach eigenständige Argumentstrukturmuster mit idiosynkratischen formalen oder inhaltlichen Eigenschaften abstrahieren. Der Artikel zeigt, dass sich Ähnlichkeiten zwischen solchen Mustern nicht, wie von Goldberg (1995) vorgeschlagen, über das Konzept polysemer Argumentstrukturkonstruktionen erfassen lassen, sondern adäquater über ein Netz von Familienähnlichkeiten modelliert werden können. Die einzelnen Argumentstrukturmuster zeigen dabei eine Vielzahl von idiosynkratischen lexikalischen Kookkurrenzen, die spezifisch für die je einzelnen Argumentstrukturmuster sind und in einer implikativen Beziehung zu diesen stehen. Überlegungen zur angemessenen sprachtheoretischen Modellierung der Daten zeigen dabei sowohl Schwächen valenzbasierter Theorien als auch Mängel konstruktionsbasierter Ansätze auf.
Zwischenräume – Phänomene, Methoden und Modellierung im Bereich zwischen Lexikon und Grammatik
(2011)
Der Beitrag führt in den Sammelband „Sprachliches Wissen zwischen Lexikon und Grammatik“ ein und diskutiert zunächst den Zusammenhang zwischen den drei Dichotomien Lexikon versus Grammatik, Wort versus Phrase und Idiosynkrasie versus Regel. Im Folgenden werden Varianten des Konstruktionsbegriffs dargestellt und hinsichtlich verschiedener Dimensionen analysiert. Einer Darstellung der im Zusammenhang mit der Lexikon-Grammatik-Abgrenzung diskutierten Phänomene und angewandten empirischen Methoden schließt sich eine Übersicht über die Aufsätze des Sammelbandes an.
Starting from early approaches within Generative Grammar in the late 1960s, the article describes and discusses the development of different theoretical frameworks of lexical decomposition of verbs. It presents the major subsequent conceptions of lexical decompositions, namely, Dowty’s approach to lexical decomposition within Montague Semantics, Jackendoff’s Conceptual Semantics, the LCS decompositions emerging from the MIT Lexicon Project, Pustejovsky’s Event Structure Theory, Wierzbicka’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage, Wunderlich’s Lexical Decompositional Grammar, Hale and Kayser’s Lexical Relational Structures, and Distributed Morphology. For each of these approaches, (i) it sketches their origins and motivation, (ii) it describes the general structure of decompositions and their location within the theory, (iii) it explores their explanative value for major phenomena of verb semantics and syntax, (iv) and it briefl y evaluates the impact of the theory. Referring to discussions in article 7 (Engelberg) Lexical decomposition, a number of theoretical topics are taken up throughout the paper concerning the interpretation of decompositions, the basic inventory of decompositional predicates, the location of decompositions on the different levels of linguistic representation (syntactic, semantic, conceptual), and the role they play for the interfaces between these levels.
Theories of lexical decomposition assume that lexical meanings are complex. This complexity is expressed in structured meaning representations that usually consist of predicates, arguments, operators, and other elements of propositional and predicate logic. Lexical decomposition has been used to explain phenomena such as argument linking, selectional restrictions, lexical-semantic relations, scope ambiguites, and the inference behavior of lexical items. The article sketches the early theoretical development from nounoriented semantic feature theories to verb-oriented complex decompositions. It also deals with a number of theoretical issues, including the controversy between decompositional and atomistic approaches to meaning, the search for semantic primitives, the function of decompositions as defi nitions, problems concerning the interpretability of decompositions, and the debate about the cognitive status of decompositions.
Der Artikel stellt die Projekte vor, die sich im Rahmen der Projektmesse zur „Elektronischen Lexikografie“ präsentiert haben. Diese Messe wurde begleitend zur 46. Jahrestagung des Instituts für Deutsche Sprache veranstaltet. Es wird in diesem Beitrag auf der Basis der Messepräsentationen dargelegt, inwiefern Entwicklungen der Korpuslexikografie und der Internetlexikografie die lexikografische Erfassung syntagmatischer Aspekte des deutschen Wortschatzes befördern und welche lexikografischen Internetressourcen dazu verfügbar sind.
Investigations of the relationship between language and German colonialism are mainly based on historical sources. The article aims to develop a systematic foundation of source studies as a methodological background for these investigations. This is exemplified by sources reflecting the particular situation of the former German colonies in the South Pacific. Firstly, the article addresses terminological problems, in particular the relation between "documents", "sources", and "data". Secondly, a detailed typology of historical sources is presented and related to object-, meta-, and extralinguistic aspects of language contact. Finally, the article informs about how and where to look for historical sources.
Colonial language contact is shaped by many extralinguistic factors that, in turn, lead to different linguistic outcomes. The project outlined here aims at documenting contact contexts that existed during the German colonial rule in the Pacific, with special emphasis on German New Guinea. Trading places, institutions (e.g. schools), plantations and other settings that involved (language) interaction between the colonizers and the colonized are charted on a historical map of the area to determine where contact intensity is likely to have been high, and what languages were involved and can be expected to show traces of such interaction (e.g. loanwords). It is intended to digitize this information in form of an interactive map, allowing to show and hide different types of information and thus being able to draw conclusions on historical language contact settings and their long-term linguistic results.
Dictionary portals
(2013)
Der Aufsatz befasst sich mit den Besonderheiten der Struktur, der Funktion, der Selektion und des Gebrauchs von Subjektsätzen im Deutschen und Rumänischen. Am Beispiel der Argumentrealisierung bei Psych-Verben wird erkundet, inwiefern sprachübergreifende semantische Bedingungen diese Besonderheiten erklären und in welchem Maße sie von einzelsprachlichen und lexikalischen Besonderheiten gesteuert sind. Im Fokus der Studie stehen dabei (i) die Einordnung des Deutschen und des Rumänischen hinsichtlich der zu beobachtenden typologischen Varianz bei Subjektsätzen, (ii) die Besonderheiten der Aufteilung von Argumenten von Psych-Verben auf zwei Satzglieder durch Argumentdoppelung und Argumentspaltung und (iii) die Ermittlung verbidiosynkratischer, sprachspezifischer und sprachübergreifender Präferenzen bei der Realisierung der Argumente von Psych-Verben über eine quantitative Korpusstudie.
Gegenwart und Zukunft der Abteilung Lexik am IDS: Plädoyer für eine Lexikographie der Sprachdynamik
(2014)
The web portal Lehnwortportal Deutsch <lwp.ids-mannheim.de>, developed at the Institute for the German Language (IDS), aims to provide unified access to a growing number of lexicographical resources on German loanwords in other languages. This paper discusses different possibilities of creating an onomasiological access structure for portal users. We critically examine the meaning list of the “World Loanword Database” project (Haspelmath/Tadmor 2009a) as well as WordNet-based taxonomies and propose a new way of inductively creating a semantic classification scheme that takes both hyperonymic relations and semantic fields into account. We show how such a classification can be integrated into the underlying graph-based data representation of the Lehnwortportal and thus be exploited for advanced onomasiological search options.
Klaus Fischer / Fabio Mollica (Hrsg.): Valenz, Konstruktion und Deutsch als Fremdsprache [Rezension]
(2015)
Das Lexikon menschlicher Sprachen basiert auf quantitativen Verteilungen, die sich am Zipfschen Gesetz orientieren: Wenige Lexeme werden extrem häufig verwendet und sehr, sehr viele Lexeme sind extrem selten. Auch funktional zusammenhängende Teilwortschätze wie Wörter einer bestimmten Wortart, Verben, die in einem bestimmten Argumentstrukturmuster auftreten, oder Komposita zu einem bestimmten Grundwort zeigen ähnliche Frequenzverteilungen, weisen aber auch jeweils typische Abweichungen von einer Zipfschen Verteilung auf. Zipfnahe Verteilungen sind charakteristisch für dynamische, selbstorganisierende Systeme, und Veränderungen im Wortschatz oder in Teilwortschätzen sind insofern auf der Basis solcher Verteilungen zu interpretieren. Der Artikel plädiert dafür, lexikologischen Sprachdokumentationen ein dynamisches Lexikonkonzept zugrunde zu legen, in dem die Verteilungscharakteristika als Grundlage der Wortschatzstruktur eine zentrale Rolle spielen.