Search results for "Semantics"
showing 10 items of 407 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…
Subjective definitions of spirituality and religion. An explorative study in Germany and the USA
2015
This paper shows how corpus methods can be usefully employed in the field of psychology of religion in triangulation with other empirical instruments. Current international surveys mirror an on-going transformation in subjective meanings in religious discourse cumulating in the question: what do people actually mean when they describe themselves as spiritual, religious or neither? The paper presents results of a cross-cultural study with 1,886 participants in the US and Germany. The thematic goal is to explore subjective understandings by examining personal definitions ofreligionandspirituality. Methodologically, the study shows how the key word procedure can be used to compare the semantic…
Reconciling time, space and function: a new dorsal-ventral stream model of sentence comprehension.
2013
We present a new dorsal–ventral stream framework for language comprehension which unifies basic neurobiological assumptions (Rauschecker & Scott, 2009) with a cross-linguistic neurocognitive sentence comprehension model (eADM; Bornkessel & Schlesewsky, 2006). The dissociation between (time-dependent)syntactic structure-building and (time-independent) sentence interpretation assumed within thee ADM provides a basis for the division of labour between the dorsal and ventral streams in comprehension.We posit that the ventral stream performs time-independent unifications of conceptual schemata,serving to create auditory objects of increasing complexity. The dorsal stream engages in the time-depe…
The Linguistics of Lying
2018
This review deals with the communicative act of lying from a linguistic point of view, linguistics comprising both grammar and pragmatics. Integrating findings from the philosophy of language and from psychology, I show that the potential for lying is rooted in the language system. The tasks of providing an adequate definition of lying and of distinguishing lying from other concepts of deception (such as bald-faced lying and bullshitting) can be solved when interfaces between grammar and pragmatics are taken into account and when experimental results are used to narrow down theoretical approaches. Assuming a broadly neo-Gricean background, this review focuses on four theoretical topics: the…
Discourse Markers of French: Multifaceted Look at a Controversial Category
2021
In this paper, we discuss the question of discourse markers (DM) – a category conceived differently by theoretical and applied linguistic approaches. Unlike in applied approaches, in which DMs are considered desemantized/grammaticalized lexical units devoid of their own semantics and therefore of status in the language, we consider DMs to constitute a full-fledged category of language, having its own semantics and distribution, both of which play a crucial role in the construction of discourse (Paillard 2011, 2012; Franckel 2008, 2019). This hypothesis has been developed in theoretical linguistics and has seen little evidence from a perspective of the acquisition and didactics of foreign la…
From pragmatics to semantics:Esto esin formulaic expressions
2006
Abstract This paper explores the transition of the Spanish marker esto es (English that is) from a free construction into a reformulative marker, as well as the pragmatic variables involved in this shift. Based on the occurrences of esto es between the 13th and the 15th centuries in the CORDE corpus, the study shows that, in order to account for this change, external factors have to be considered, especially the discourse traditions associated with the texts in which this marker appears. If this hypothesis is correct, then the problem of the pragmatics-semantics interface will have to include a new front, where non-linguistic factors trigger changes in language structure.
Evaluative meaning
2012
Linguistic evaluation has become an important area of inquiry in recent years. In the traditions of, e.g., lexical semantics, phraseology, corpus linguistics, and interactional linguistics, a large inventory of linguistic means have been identified by which speakers can express evaluative meanings. However, the class of German sentential idioms, e.g., Das kannst du dir in die Haare schmieren (lit. ‘You can smear that into your hair’, fig. ‘That is useless’), has not gained much attention. This paper explores how the evaluative meaning of German sentential idioms is constructed syntactically, semantically, and pragmatically. In particular, it is investigated how the meaning of these idioms i…
Between historical semantics and pragmatics
2006
This paper discusses the methodology of conceptual history, a branch of the study of the history of political thought which focuses on the changing meanings of political concepts over the course of time. It is suggested here that methodological disputes among historians of political thought frequently arise out of differing theories of language and meaning and that historians should be more open-minded to the idea of combining various research strategies in their work. Conceptual history, for instance, can be viewed as the combination of historical versions of semantics and pragmatics. While the study of the macro-level semantic changes in the language of politics can reveal interesting lon…
Semantic Models and Translating
1994
Abstract: This paper examines the relevance of three semantic models for translation. Structural semantics, more specifically semantic feature analysis, has given rise to the maxim that we should translate "bundles of semantic features". Prototype semantics suggests that word-meanings have cores and fuzzy edges which are influenced by culture. For translation this means that we do not necessarily translate bundles of features but have to decide whether to focus on the core or the fuzzy edges of the meaning of a particular word. Scenes-and-frames semantics suggests that word meaning is influenced by context and the situation we are in. Word-meaning is thus not static but dynamic, and it is t…
Crossing Modalities: A Cognitive Semantics Perspective on Quoting
2015
Elaborating on Talmy (2007a, forthcoming) and Lampert (2013, 2014), this follow- up study probes into quoting as an attention-and modality-sensitive phenomenon at the interface of speech and writing, taking inaugural addresses from Kennedy to Obama as cases in point. Lexicalized to redirect some attention from a quotation’s referential content to concomitants closely associated with it, quotatives medium-specifically prime speech-internal properties of their targets, animating the ‘other voice’ through prosodic and gestural prompts in face-to-face interactions, while figural prompts demarcate verbatim citations in print. Quotations from pre-scripted videotaped presidential inaugurals reveal…