Sprache im 20. Jahrhundert. Gegenwartssprache
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One major issue in the accomplishment of contrasts in conversation is lexical choice of items which carry the semantic Ioad of the two states of affair which are represented as being opposed to one another. These items or expressions are co-selected to be understood as being contrastively related to each other. In this paper, it is argued that the activity of contrasting itself provides them with a specific local opposite meaning which they would not obtain in other contexts. Practices of contrastingare thus seen as an example of conversational activities which creatively and systematically affect situated meanings. Basedon data from various genres, such as meetings, mediation sessions and conversations, the paper discusses two practices of contrasting, their sequential construction and their interpretative effects. It is concluded that the interpretative effects of conversational contrasting rest on the sequential deployment oflinguistic resources and on the cognitive procedures of frame-based interpretation and constructing a maximally contrastive interpretation for the co-selected expressions.
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.