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The shortening of linguistic expressions naturally involves some sort of correspondence between short forms and (some portion of) the respective full forms. Based mostly on data from English and Hebrew this article explores the hypothesis that such correspondence concerns necessary sameness of symbolic form, referring either to graphemic or to a specific level of phonological representation. That level indicates a degree of abstractness defined by language-specific contrastiveness (i.e. “phonemic”). Reference to written form can be shown to be highly systematic in certain contexts, including cases where full forms consist of multiple stems. Specific asymmetries pertaining to the targeting of material by correspondence (e.g. initial vs. non-initial position) appear to be alike for both types of representation, a claim supported by a study based on a nomenclature strictly confined to writing (chemical element symbols).
This paper investigates the long-term diachronic development of the perfect and preterite tenses in German and provides a novel analysis by supplementing Reichenbach’s (1947) classical theory of tense by the notion of underspecification. Based on a newly compiled parallel corpus spanning the entire documented history of German, we show that the development in question is cyclic: It starts out with only one tense form (preterite) compatible with both current relevance and narrative past readings in (early) Old High German and, via three intermediate stages, arrives at only one tense form again (perfect) compatible with the same readings in modern Upper German dialects. We propose that in order to capture all attested stages we must allow tenses to be unspecified for R (reference time), with R merely being inferred pragmatically. We then propose that the transitions between the different stages can be explained by the interplay between semantics and pragmatics.
The article investigates the hypothesis that prominence phenomena on different levels of linguistic structure are systematically related to each other. More specifically, it is hypothesized that prominence relations in morphosyntax reflect, and contribute to, prominence management in discourse. This hypothesis is empirically based on the phenomenon of agentivity clines, i.e. the observation that the relevance of agentivity features such as volition or sentience is variable across different constructions. While some constructions, including German DO-clefts, show a strong preference for highly agentive verbs, other constructions, including German basic active constructions, have no particular requirements regarding the agentivity of the verb, except that at least one agentivity feature should be present. Our hypothesis predicts that this variable relevance of agentivity features is related to the discourse constraints on the felicitous use of a given construction, which in turn, of course, requires an explicit statement of such constraints. We propose an original account of the discourse constraints on DO-clefts in German using the ‘Question Under Discussion’ framework. Here, we hypothesize that DO-clefts render prominent one implicit question from a set of alternative questions available at a particular point in the developing discourse. This then yields a prominent question-answer pair that changes the thematic structure of the discourse. We conclude with some observations on the possibility of relating morphosyntactic prominence (high agentivity) to discourse prominence (making a Question Under Discussion prominent by way of clefting).
So far, Sepedi negations have been considered more from the point of view of lexicographical treatment. Theoretical works on Sepedi have been used for this purpose, setting as an objective a neat description of these negations in a (paper) dictionary. This paper is from a different perspective: instead of theoretical works, corpus linguistic methods are used: (1) a Sepedi corpus is examined on the basis of existing descriptions of the occurrences of a relevant verb, looking at its negated forms from a purely prescriptive point of view; (2) a "corpus-driven" strategy is employed, looking only for sequences of negation particles (or morphemes) in order to list occurring constructions, without taking into account the verbs occurring in them, apart from their endings. The approach in (2) is only intended to show a possible methodology to extend existing theories on occurring negations. We would also like to try to help lexicographers to establish a frequency-based order of entries of possible negation forms in their dictionaries by showing them the number of respective occurrences. As with all corpus linguistic work, however, we must regard corpus evidence not as representative, but as tendencies of language use that can be detected and described. This is especially true for Sepedi, for which only few and small corpora exist. This paper also describes the resources and tools used to create the necessary corpus and also how it was annotated with part of speech and lemmas. Exploring the quality of available Sepedi part-of-speech taggers concerning verbs, negation morphemes and subject concords may be a positive side result.