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Names in competition: A corpus-based quantitative investigation into the use of colonial place names
(2016)
Referentially equivalent toponyms occur very often in colonial and postcolonial contexts. These names are in competition, and this competition is reflected in language use and in changing frequencies of use in large corpora. The main theoretical and methodological assumption of this paper is that corpus frequencies of referentially equivalent toponyms change according to particular patterns, and that the Google Ngram Corpora and Google Ngram Viewers can be used to detect these patterns. The aims of this paper are twofold: firstly, a corpus-linguistic method for investigations into the use of names will be presented, applied, and critically evaluated; secondly, it will be shown that the correlation between patterns of frequency changes and patterns of socio-historical colonial and postcolonial events gives rise to cross-linguistic generalizations, for example, that an increase in public interest in a place strongly promotes one of the referenlially equivalent names, or that in renaming scenarios colonial toponyms in relation to new toponyms remain in stronger use in the language of the former colonial power than in languages of other colonial powers.
Theories of lexical decomposition assume that lexical meanings are complex. This complexity is expressed in structured meaning representations that usually consist of predicates, arguments, operators, and other elements of propositional and predicate logic. Lexical decomposition has been used to explain phenomena such as argument linking, selectional restrictions, lexical-semantic relations, scope ambiguites, and the inference behavior of lexical items. The article sketches the early theoretical development from nounoriented semantic feature theories to verb-oriented complex decompositions. It also deals with a number of theoretical issues, including the controversy between decompositional and atomistic approaches to meaning, the search for semantic primitives, the function of decompositions as defi nitions, problems concerning the interpretability of decompositions, and the debate about the cognitive status of decompositions.
Investigations of the relationship between language and German colonialism are mainly based on historical sources. The article aims to develop a systematic foundation of source studies as a methodological background for these investigations. This is exemplified by sources reflecting the particular situation of the former German colonies in the South Pacific. Firstly, the article addresses terminological problems, in particular the relation between "documents", "sources", and "data". Secondly, a detailed typology of historical sources is presented and related to object-, meta-, and extralinguistic aspects of language contact. Finally, the article informs about how and where to look for historical sources.