Sprache im 20. Jahrhundert. Gegenwartssprache
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This paper investigates emergent pseudo-coordination in spoken German. In a corpus-based study, seven verbs in the first conjunct are analyzed regarding the degree of semantic bleaching and the development of subjective or aspectual meaning components. Moreover, it is shown that each verb shows distinct tendencies for co-ocurrences, especially with deictic adverbs in the first conjunct and with specific verbs and verb classes in the second conjunct. It is argued that pseudo-coordination is originally motivated by the need for ‘chunking’ in unplanned speech and that it is still prominently used in this function in German, in contrast to languages in which pseudo-coordination is grammaticalized further.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.