Relativism and Universalism in Linguistics - Fachbereich 10 ...

118 Sections
Versprecherkorpora mehrerer Sprachen zeigen aber wesentliche Unterschiede in Proportionen
ihrer Zusammenstellung.
1. Die Erklärung hierfür liegt vor allem darin, daß lexikalische Einheiten in einzelner
Sprachen unterschiedliche Häufigkeitswerte aufweisen.
2. Es gibt aber auch Sprechfehler, die durch die typologische Aufbau der einzelnen
Sprachen bedingt sind. Ein Beispiel: die Zeit- Raum-, Ursache-, Wirkung-Verhältnisse
werden in den sog. flektierenden Sprachen durch vor den Nomina stehende
Propositionen, in den agglitunativen Sprachen durch an den Endungen der Nomina
auftretende Nachsilben ausgedrückt. Aufgrund dieser Differenz entstehen wesentliche
Unterschiede in der Zusammenstellung der Versprecherkorpora flektierender vs.
agglitunativer Sprachen.
Es wird der Versuch unternommen, englischsprachige (Dell) und deutschsprachige Korpora
(Berg, Jescheniak) mit den von dem Verfasser zusammengestellten ungarischsprachigen
Korpora aus sprachtypologischer Sicht zu vergleichen.
Linguistic evidence for speech act operators
Seuren, Pieter A.M.
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen
Pieter.Seuren@mpi.nl
A number of syntactic and lexical phenomena in different languages are discussed, which
show that speech act operators have structural linguistic reality. The arguments in Ross (1970)
are discussed and judged to be insufficient. It is shown that speech act operators occur not
only at the top of a semantic analysis but may also occur further down the structure. The
evidence adduced is derived from German, English, Turkish, Tibetan, Sabanê (an Amazonian
language), and perhaps other languages as well. Epithet phenomena are interpreted as
evidence for underlying speech acts of lexical choice ("I hereby call x a runt"). Cases of
reference to speech acts ("Stop giggling, and I mean it!") are treated as evidence, as well as
specific uses of propositional connectives ("Hands up or I'll shoot!").
Reference:
John R. Ross (1970) "On declarative sentences" In: R. Jacobs and P. Rosenbaum (eds),
Readings in English Transformational Grammar. Ginn & Co, Boston: 222–272.
The concept of definiteness
Stroh-Wollin, Ulla
Uppsala University, Sweden
Ulla.Stroh-Wollin@Nordiska.UU.SE
There is a very long debate about the meaning of definite noun phrases. Key words in this
debate are identifiability (or familiarity) and uniqueness. A term like identifiability is
principally a pragmatic notion, whereas the proponents of the uniqueness description differ
over whether uniqueness is part of the semantics of the phrase or derived pragmatically.
As a grammarian, I have tackled the meaning of definiteness in a quite different way. The
majority of definite noun phrases are used in contexts where both the identifiability description
and the uniqueness description work. However, I do not believe neither identifiability,
nor uniqueness to be grammatically encoded meanings of definite noun phrases, but (contextually,
conventionally etc.) interpretations within the limits given by the encoded meaning.