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The paper at hand discusses productivity in German compound formation – as a case of morphological variation – from a lexeme-based synchronic perspective. In particular, we focus on groups of compounds with semantically closely related head words, e.g., compounds denoting colors.
Our approach is characterized by a qualitative as well as a quantitative perspective on productivity. Taking the properties of the head lexeme as a starting point and applying corpus-based statistical methods, we try to gain new insights into compound formation, especially into potential factors which govern their productivity. In a first step, we determine the productivity of compounds on the basis of current productivity measures and data from a large corpus of German. In a second step, we try to systematically explain observable differences in productivity.
The approach presented here is one of the first attempts to apply the concept of productivity, which has been predominantly used in the domain of derivation, to compounding. Since compounding is a dominant factor for the expansion of the German lexicon, we assume that our investigation also sheds an important light on the dynamics of the lexicon.
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.
The "imperfective-paradox" paradox and other problems with the semantics of the progressive aspect
(2000)
This paper is about the meaning of the progressive aspect, of which it has been notoriously difficult to give a satisfying account. 1 A number of intriguing properties of its meaning were first brought out in formal semantic treatments. An event semantics approach to the progressive that integrates concepts of nonnality and perspective as well as adequate lexical representations seems to be particularly promising. In section 1 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. 2 In section 2 I will sketch a preliminary account of the meaning of the progressive aspect. In section 2.1 the basic components that underlie the truth conditions of the progressive will be described. In section 2.2 I will present underlying lexical assumptions and the truth conditions for the progressive. Finally, in section 2.3, I will evaluate the proposal by revisiting the problems discussed.
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.
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.
German loanwords are found in many languages in the South Pacific, in particular in those areas which were under German administration before WW I. The Austronesian languages in this area differ greatly with respect to the number of lexemes of German origin. The paper focuses on two languages of Micronesia, namely Palauan, with a comparatively high number of German loans, and Kosraean which had no German influence on its lexicon. The paperconsiders the balance of factors that contribute to the different loanword amounts. That German was taught in local schools for up to two decades did not, by itself, enhance borrowing from German. More weighty factors for the amount of borrowings from German are the length and strength of language contact with English and the use of German as a means of communication in particular settings in the years before WW I.
The paper reports on a dictionary of German loanwords in the languages of the South Pacific that is compiled at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache in Mannheim. The loanwords described in this dictionary mainly result from language contact between 1884 and 1914, when the German empire was in possession of large areas of the South Pacific where overall more than 700 indigenous languages were spoken. The dictionary is designed as an electronic XML-based resource from which an internet dictionary and a printed dictionary can be derived. Its printed version is intended as an ‘inverted loanword dictionary’, that is, a dictionary that – in contrast to the usual praxis in loanword lexicography – lemmatizes the words of a source language that have been borrowed by other languages. Each of the loanwords will be described with respect to its form and meaning and the contact situation in which it was borrowed. Among the outer texts of the dictionary are (i) a list of all sources with bibliographic and archival information, (ii) a commentary on each source, (iii) a short history of the language contact with German for each target language, and perhaps (iv) facsimiles of source texts.The dictionary is supposed to (i) help to reconstruct the history of language contact of the source language, (ii) provide evidence for the cultural contact between the populations speaking the source and the target languages, (iii) enable linguistic theories about the systematic changes of the semantic, morphosyntactic, or phonological lexical properties of the source language when its words are borrowed into genetically and typologically different languages, and (iv) establish a thoroughly described case for testing typological theories of borrowing.
Der vorliegende Beitrag stellt einen neuartigen Typ von mehrsprachiger elektronischer Ressource vor, bei dem verschiedene Lehnwörterbücher zu einem "umgekehrten Lehnwörterbuch" für eine bestimmte Gebersprache zusammengefasst werden. Ein solches Wörterbuch erlaubt es, die zu einem Etymon der Gebersprache gehörigen Lehnwörter in verschiedenen Nehmersprachen zu finden. Die Entwicklung einer solchen Webanwendung, insbesondere der zugrundeliegenden Datenbasis, ist mit zahlreichen konzeptionellen Problemen verbunden, die an der Schnittstelle zwischen lexikographischen und informatischen Themen liegen. Der Beitrag stellt diese Probleme vor dem Hintergrund wünschenswerter Funktionalitäten eines entsprechenden Internetportals dar und diskutiert einen möglichen Lösungsansatz: Die Artikel der Einzelwörterbücher werden als XML-Dokumente vorgehalten und dienen als Grundlage für die gewöhnliche Online-Ansicht dieser Wörterbücher; insbesondere für portalweite Abfragen werden aber grundlegende, standardisierte Informationen zu Lemmata und Etyma aller Portalwörterbücher samt deren Varianten und Wortbildungsprodukten (hier zusammenfassend als "Portalinstanzen" bezeichnet) sowie die verschiedenartigen Relationen zwischen diesen Portalinstanzen zusätzlich in relationalen Datenbanktabelle nabgelegt, die performante und beliebig komplex strukturierte Suchabfragen gestatten.