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TripleA is a workshop series founded by linguists from the University of Tübingen and the University of Potsdam. Its aim is to provide a forum for semanticists doing fieldwork on understudied languages, and its focus is on languages from Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania. The second TripleA workshop was held at the University of Potsdam, June 3-5, 2015.
The article investigates the ways in which organic-medical metaphors were used to set the boundary of discourse between the economy and politics. The successful establishment of organic-medical metaphors for the economy is mainly explained by their connectivity to different political views. Concepts such as ‘Wirtschaftsleben’ or perceptions of the economy as an ‘organism’ laid the foundation for diagnosing sick or healthy conditions. From the end of the 19th to beyond the mid-20th century typical statements illustrate that the use of such metaphors supported the naturalization and stabilization of the boundary-setting discourse, insofar as it seemed natural that the relation between the two spheres should be formulated in terms of health and disease. Within liberal economic discourse in particular, politics was on the one hand targeted as a potential cause for economic disease, while on the other, it was claimed that politics had the task of keeping economic forces healthy.
This thesis investigates temporal and aspectual reference in the typologically unrelated African languages Hausa (Chadic, Afro–Asiatic) and Medumba (Grassfields Bantu). It argues that Hausa is a genuinely tenseless language and compares the interpretation of temporally unmarked sentences in Hausa to that of morphologically tenseless sentences in Medumba, where tense marking is optional and graded. The empirical behavior of the optional temporal morphemes in Medumba motivates an analysis as existential quantifiers over times and thus provides new evidence suggesting that languages vary in whether their (past) tense is pronominal or quantificational (see also Sharvit 2014). The thesis proposes for both Hausa and Medumba that the alleged future tense marker is a modal element that obligatorily combines with a prospective future shifter (which is covert in Medumba). Cross-linguistic variation in whether or not a future marker is compatible with non-future interpretation is proposed to be predictable from the aspectual architecture of the given language.
TripleA is a workshop series founded by linguists from the University of Tübingen and the University of Potsdam. Its aim is to provide a forum for semanticists doing fieldwork on understudied languages, and its focus is on languages from Africa, Asia, Australia and Oceania. The second TripleA workshop was held at the University of Potsdam, June 3-5, 2015.