Search results for "Meaning"
showing 10 items of 756 documents
Identical constituent compounds in German
2014
The status of identical constituent compounds (ICCs) (e.g. Künstler-Künstler, ‘artist-artist’) is discussed controversially in the morphological literature on German. In this paper, it is claimed that ICC formation is a productive word formation pattern in German. In the first part of the paper, I investigate the formal, semantic and pragmatic properties of ICCs in German. Based on this description, I discuss in more detail two conflicting claims about their meaning constitution: the ‘prototype reading claim’ and the ‘context-dependency claim’. I argue that ICCs do not behave differently, in principle, from canonical N+N compounds with respect to context-dependency. Based on a discussion o…
Polar meaning and “expletive” negation in approximative adverbs
2005
In this paper we provide a synchronic and diachronic analysis of an instance of so-called “expletive” negation in the Spanish approximative adverb por poco. Synchronically, we show that this adverb, when combined with the sentence negator no, is ambiguous between ~p (“expletive”) and ~~p (“canonical”) meanings. Diachronically, we show that this ambiguity arose due to a change in the negation system of Spanish around the fifteenth century. As a result, the supposed instances of “expletive” negation found in present-day uses of por poco are not really expletive at all, but rather are a holdover from the Old Spanish requirement of preverbal negative concord.
Barack Obama's South Carolina speech
2010
Abstract In this paper, I shall analyze US Presidential Barack Obama's South Carolina victory speech from the perspective of pragmemes. In particular, I shall explore the idea that this speech is constituted by many voices (in other words, it displays polyphony, to use an idea due to Bakhtin, 1981 , Bakhtin, 1986 ) and that the audience is part of this speech event, adding and contributing to its text in a collaborative way (in particular, in constructing meaning). As many are aware (including the journalists who report day by day on Barack Obama's achievements), Obama uses the technique of ‘personification’ 1 ( The Economist , December 13th, 2007). When he voices an idea, he does not just …
Translational transitions: “Translation proper” and translation studies in the humanities
2009
The increasing use of “translation” in the humanities during the past few years has brought about a broader variety of perspectives on translation than previously allowed for by modernist and positivist approaches. For centuries, attempts to control meaning and the metaphysical idea of translation which extended this desire for control beyond linguistic boundaries have resulted in a concept of translation which, since the second half of the eighteenth century, has progressively added to the constraints faced by both translators and translation theorists. The fact that now their “master word” is being celebrated by other disciplines is understandably being welcomed with enthusiasm by scholar…
Tautology as presumptive meaning
2008
Ever since the seminal work of Paul Grice, tautologies such as Business is business have been discussed from a number of angles. While most approaches assume that tautological utterances have to do with the operation of conversational maxims, an integrated analysis is still lacking. This paper makes an attempt at analysing tautologies within the framework of Levinson (2000), who proposes a distinction between three pragmatic levels, namely Indexical Pragmatics, Gricean Pragmatics 1, and Gricean Pragmatics 2. It is shown that observations of Ward and Hirschberg (1991) on the exclusion of alternatives, the claim of Autenrieth (1997) that the second NP in nominal equatives is predicative, and …
Some Notes on Andrapolis, the Royal City: Apocryphal Acts of Thomas 3
2021
The following paper aims to explore the meaning and significance of the so-called royal city Andrapolis (Ἀνδράπολις) within the context of the Apocryphal Acts of Thomas’ s narrative (chapter 3). The identification of this Indian toponym have attracted the attention of many scholars during the last century and nowadays again, as witness of the few reliable historical traces supposedly transmitted by the apocryphal. For doing so, after a short introduction, we deal with the allegedly historicity of the text; then, we focus on the issue related mainly to the different variants of the location depending on the Syriac and Greek versions of the Acts of Thomas, and propose a new interpretatio…
Fixing meaning
2012
This contribution looks into a speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin after the terrorist attack against a high school in the Northern Caucasian town Beslan in September 2004, widely seen as marking the end of the liberal hegemony in the Russia of the post-soviet period. However, a closer look reveals the many possible readings that are made of the speech. According to the reactions found in a corpus of press articles, the speech activates both “internationalist” and “sovereignist” readings in media discourse. By pointing out the polyphonic organization of discourse, I make the case for a productive exchange between the French tradition of discourse analysis, interactionism and critical…
La variación formal de los cuantificadores en catalán: estudio diacrónico (siglos XV‒XX)
2020
AbstractThis article studies the formal variation of the existential quantifiers u/un (‘one; a, an’), algú/algun (‘someone; some’), ningú/ningun (‘no one, anyone; any’) and the distributive universal quantifier cada u/cada un (‘everyone’) in Catalan. The research is based on an extensive diachronic corpus of texts written between the 15th and 20th centuries. The author classifies the syntactic structures of these quantifiers and analyses their meaning and formal vacillations: apocopated form (without ‑n) vs. non-apocopated form (with ‑n). Although hesitations tend to disappear gradually during the period under analysis, the uses of these quantifiers change in Catalan dialects. In fact, dist…
The agreement of existential haber in three varieties of spoken Spanish
2020
Abstract This paper aims to present one of the most relevant linguistic phenomena of spoken Spanish on both sides of the Atlantic. The singular/plural forms of the verb haber with existential meaning have received considerable attention due to the fact that it is a linguistic variable that changes according to the variety of Spanish that is used. We report the findings from the research carried out within three speech communities: Valencia, Las Palmas and Mexico City, analysing the internal and external factors that may explain this linguistic variation. For this study we have selected these communities because all the data have been obtained according to the guidelines proposed in the PRES…
From Adjectives to Quantifiers. Evidence from Old and Modern Catalan
2011
La història dels quantificadors indefinits de les llengües romàniques és la història del desenvolupament de nous trets distribucionals per un grup escollit d’adjectius llatins (Company 1991, 1997; Batllori 1998). Aquesta distribució serà responsable de la constitució posterior de la nova subclasse de determinants que anomenem quantificadors. Com s’explica a Zamparelli (2000), l’augment de la complexitat estructural del marge esquerre del SDet suposa l’especialització de paraules que pertanyien a antigues categories per aquestes noves posicions. És així com la posició de quantificador genera la categoria quantificador. Estem devant un procés de llarga durada amb conseqüències que encara són …