Refine
Document Type
- Article (2)
- Conference Proceeding (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (3)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (3) (remove)
Keywords
- Afrikanische Sprachen (3) (remove)
Publicationstate
Reviewstate
- Peer-Review (2)
Publisher
Ways out of the dictionary: hyperlinks to other sources in German and African online dictionaries
(2023)
This study examines a number of German and African online dictionaries to see how they make use of the possibility of linking to external sources (e.g. other dictionaries, encyclopaedias, or even corpus data). The article investigates which hyperlinks occur at which places in the word articles and how these are presented to the dictionary users. This is done against the background of metalexicographic considerations on the planning of outer features and the mediostructure in online dictionaries as well as different categorizations of hyperlinks in online reference works. The results show that retro-digitized dictionaries make virtually no use of hyperlinks to external sources. Genuine online dictionaries, on the other hand, do, but often in a form that needs improvement, since, for example, explanations of dictionary-external links are not always found in the user guide and their design is different even within a dictionary.
This paper provides a formal semantic analysis of past interpretation in Medumba (Grassfields Bantu), a graded tense language. Based on original fieldwork, the study explores the empirical behavior and meaning contribution of graded past morphemes in Medumba and relates these to the account of the phenomenon proposed in Cable (Nat Lang Semant 21:219–276, 2013) for Gĩkũyũ. Investigation reveals that the behavior of Medumba gradedness markers differs from that of their Gĩkũyũ counterparts in meaningful ways and, more broadly, discourages an analysis as presuppositional eventuality or reference time modifiers. Instead, the Medumba markers are most appropriately analyzed as quantificational tenses. It also turns out that Medumba, though belonging to the typological class of graded tense languages, shows intriguing similarities to genuinely tenseless languages in allowing for temporally unmarked sentences and exploiting aspectual and pragmatic cues for reference time resolution. The more general cross-linguistic implication of the study is that the set of languages often subsumed under the label “graded tense” does not in fact form a natural class and that more case-by-case research is needed to refine this category.
In recent years, formal semantic research on the meaning of tense and aspect has benefited from a number of studies investigating languages with graded tense systems. This paper contributes a first sketch of the temporal marking system of Awing (Grassfields Bantu), focusing on two varieties of remote past and remote future. We argue that the data support a "symmetric" analysis of past and future tense in Awing. In our specific proposal, Awing temporal remoteness markers are uniformly analyzed as quantificational tense operators, and both the past and the future paradigm include a form that prevents contextual restriction of this temporal quantifier.