Search results for "bepress|Arts and Humanities|Philosophy"

Different Languages - Different Sentence Types? On Exclamative Sentences

2016

It is not equally easy for all languages to establish an exclamative sentence type. It seems the easiest for those languages that feature a morphological marking for an exclamative sentence type like Turkish or Vietnamese. English on the other hand is a language that does not mark exclamative clauses with an easily identifiable marker but uses certain preferred constructions, which allow us to separate a class of ‘exclamative sentences’ from other sentence types. However, there is another class of languages for which it is even harder to determine if ‘exclamative sentences’ exist as a sentence type. In those languages, these sentences share a striking amount of formal properties with senten…

Indexing epistemic incongruence: uy as a formal sign of disagreement in agreement sequences in Spanish

2018

Abstract This study explores epistemic incongruence in Spanish by focusing on the particle uy in Iberian Spanish. It is claimed that this interjection has a basic change-of-state meaning and that it is commonly used to stress disagreement. Despite its general association to disagreement, the particle can be used in agreeing responses, where it also treats the previous turn as problematic. In this sequential environment, however, it is not the content of the previous turn but rather the underlying assumptions (the basic epistemic configuration of an assertion-answer adjacency pair) that are challenged by the second speaker. The evidence for this analysis comes from the sequential context. Ty…

Constructed Action, the Clause and the Nature of Syntax in Finnish Sign Language

2017

AbstractThis paper investigates the interplay of constructed action and the clause in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). Constructed action is a form of gestural enactment in which the signers use their hands, face and other parts of the body to represent the actions, thoughts or feelings of someone they are referring to in the discourse. With the help of frequencies calculated from corpus data, this article shows firstly that when FinSL signers are narrating a story, there are differences in how they use constructed action. Then the paper argues that there are differences also in the prototypical structure, linkage type and non-manual activity of clauses, depending on the presence or non-prese…

Detransitivisation as a support strategy for causativebring

2016

This article presents diachronic corpus analyses of causativebring(bringcaus) which provide new insights into a fairly novel research paradigm in language change: the role of ‘Moderate Transitivity Contexts’ (MTCs) as a refuge for waning verbs and as a breeding ground for waxing verbs (see Mondorf 2010, 2011, 2016; Rohdenburg 2014b; Schneider & Mondorf 2015). It argues that the modulation of transitivity serves as a support strategy for a formerly well-established verb that is leaving the language.The potential of semantic transitivity for the development of explanatory principles in language change has been hinted at by Hopper & Thompson (1980: 279). Empirically investigating the d…

Rozan and Matyssek: Are they really that different?

2005

Cet article porte sur la technique de prise de notes lors de l’interpretation consecutive tout en abordant les objectifs du cours de prise de notes, qui ne se limite pas simplement a faire connaitre des symboles et des abreviations. Cette discussion est suivie d’une presentation et d'une comparaison des systemes de prise de notes de Rozan (1956) et de Matyssek (1989) et de leurs principes generaux, afin de demontrer que ces deux ecoles « classiques » ont nombre de points communs bien qu'elles soient frequemment considerees comme etant tres differentes.

Progress Checking for Dummies

2018

Verification of progress properties is both conceptually and technically significantly more difficult than verification of safety and deadlock properties. In this study we focus on the conceptual side. We make a simple modification to a well-known model to demonstrate that it passes progress verification although the resulting model is intuitively badly incorrect. Then we point out that the error can be caught easily by adding a termination branch to the system. We compare the use of termination branches to the established method of addressing the same need, that is, weak fairness. Then we discuss another problem that may cause failure of catching progress errors even with weak fairness. Fi…

Animacy shifts and resolution of semantic conflicts: A typological commentary onShifting animacyby de Swart & de Hoop

2018

Chapter 3. Measuring translation literality

2017

“ArgumenteHin, ArgumenteHer.” Regularity and Idiomaticity in GermanN Hin,N Her

2017

This paper seeks to find the best linguistic analysis of the German semispecified, productive patternN hin, N her(for example,Krieg hin, Krieg her, es muss eine gute Show werden‘War or no war, it must be a good show’). The basic question is whether the properties ofN hin, N hercan be accounted for in a rule-based approach or whether they are to be regarded as idiosyncratic properties of this construction. One of the characteristic features ofN hin, N heris the identity of the nouns. This raises the question of whether or notN hin, N heris an instance of syntactic reduplication. It is shown that rule-based copying accounts fail when they are applied to the case ofN hin, N her. The paper argu…

ABDUCTIVE INFERENCES IN PRAGMATIC PROCESSES

2018

Abstract In pragmatic theories, the notion of inference plays a central role, together with the communicative act in which it is activated. Although some scholars, such as Levinson, Sperber and Wilson, propose detailed and accurate analyses of this notion, we will maintain that these analyses can be better systematized if seen through Peirce’s notion of abduction. We will try to maintain that the variety of inferential processes in play in a linguistic act is mostly of an abductive nature. Moreover, we will maintain that the typological tripartition of abductions discussed by Eco (1981) allows to account for a signi cant part of the mechanisms involved in the comprehension of an utterance, …