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- Volume 31, Issue, 2007
Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 31, Issue 2, 2007
Volume 31, Issue 2, 2007
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A two-dimensional approach to the study of motivation in lexical typology and its first application to French high-frequency vocabulary
Author(s): Peter Koch and Daniela Marzopp.: 259–291 (33)More Less‘Morphological’ and ‘semantic’ motivation are not just two types (Ullmann 1966), but two interrelated dimensions of the problem of lexical motivation. For instance, Fr. poire ‘pear’ — poirier ‘pear-tree’ expresses the same cognitive relation as the polysemy of Russ. gruša, and, at the same time, polysemy is only one formal device among others expressing cognitive relations that underlie lexical motivation. So the two dimensions of formal and cognitive relations in motivation only exist in combination. A sub-dimension of the formal aspect of motivation is the degree of formal transparency (cf. Fr. jouer ‘to play a game’ — jeu ‘game’). This factorization in different dimensions leads to a universally applicable grid for the description of lexical motivation. As a first step of a future comparative research project of lexical motivation in different languages it is applied to the 500 most frequent lexical words of French and yields a systematic motivational profile of French high-frequency vocabulary. In Section 5.3 the French pilot study is discussed in view of an approach to lexical typology which could be applied to any other language.
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Relative Clauses in English conversation: Relativizers, frequency, and the notion of construction
Author(s): Barbara A. Fox and Sandra A. Thompsonpp.: 293–326 (34)More LessThis paper is a usage-based study of the grammar of that set of English Relative Clauses with which a relativizer has been described as optional. We argue that the regularities in the use of relativizers in English can be seen as systematically arising from pragmatic-prosodic factors, creating frequency effects, resulting in some cases highly grammaticized formats: the more the Main Clause and the Relative Clause are integrated with each other, that is, approach monoclausal status, the more likely we are to find no relativizer used; conversely, the more separate the two clauses are, the more likely we are to find an overt relativizer. These findings have led us to suggest that the more monoclausal combinations have become unitary storage and processing chunks. We thus see these findings as a contribution not only to our understanding of Relative Clauses, but to our understanding of syntactic organization in general and of the nature of the grammatical practices in which speakers engage in everyday interactions.
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Backgrounding and suppression of reciprocal participants: A cross-linguistic study
Author(s): Leila Behrenspp.: 327–408 (82)More LessAccording to traditional wisdom, reciprocal predicates can only occur with plural subjects. This is assumed either because the reciprocal predicates in question are constructed by means of a reciprocal anaphor, which is considered as being inherently plural and hence requiring a plural antecedent, or, if there is no binding requirement, the following principle of argument mapping is implicitly assumed: all participants of a reciprocal situation need an overt realization by the same highest syntactic argument. Since a reciprocal relation minimally involves the existence of two participants, and since (in the languages considered so far) the highest syntactic argument is the subject, this mapping principle leads to the idea that the subjects of reciprocal predicates should be confined to plural or conjoined phrases. In this paper, I will show that this principle turns out to be unrealistically strong, once real discourse data are considered, in particular from a cross-linguistic perspective. Under certain structural and pragmatic conditions, participants of reciprocal relations may be backgrounded and also suppressed, with the result that, in the second case, they will lack an overt realization altogether. It will be argued that there is a typological correlation between the following three phenomena: discontinuous reciprocals (where one participant is backgrounded and hence realized as an oblique phrase), “true” singular subject reciprocals (where only one participant is realized overtly, while the other is suppressed), and plural subject reciprocals, admitting the interpretation that each individual among the subject’s referents participates in a reciprocal relation with some other (unknown or arbitrary) individual that is, however, suppressed, i.e. not referred to by the subject phrase or any other phrase in the sentence. I will present data from four languages: Hungarian, German, (Modern) Greek and Serbian/Croatian. In general, a cross-linguistic approach will be favored which considers differences and similarities at all relevant levels of description, e.g. discourse pragmatics, verbal aspect, lexical-semantic fields, interfering effects of ambiguity, etc. in addition to structural constraints in marking reciprocity.
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Beyond Aristotle and gradience: A reply to Aarts
Author(s): William A. Croftpp.: 409–430 (22)More LessAarts (2004) argues that the best way to model grammatical categories is a compromise preserving Aristotelian form classes with sharp boundaries on the one hand, and allowing gradience in terms of the number of syntactic properties that a category member possesses on the other. But the assumption of form classes causes serious theoretical and empirical problems. Constructions differ in their distributional patterns, but no a priori principles exist to decide which constructions should be used to define form classes. Grammatical categories must be defined relative to specific constructions; this is the position advocated in Radical Construction Grammar (Croft 2001). Constructionally defined categories may have sharp boundaries, but they do not divide words into form classes. Nevertheless, the most important traditional intuitions for parts of speech (Aarts’ chief examples) are reinterpretable in terms of crosslinguistic universals that constrain distributional variation but do not impose Aristotelian form classes, gradable or not, on the grammars of particular languages.
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In defence of distributional analysis, pace Croft
Author(s): Bas Aartspp.: 431–443 (13)More LessIn a number of publications (e.g. Croft 2001, 2004, 2006) Bill Croft has argued that distributional analysis as a methodology for setting up grammatical categories poses problems which can be avoided if constructions, not word classes, are grammatically primitive, and if categories are derived from constructions. He writes: The Radical Construction Grammar analysis of parts of speech does not have Aristotelian grammatical categories of the sort envisioned by Aarts for particular language grammars. There are categories for each construction and each constructional role in a language. These construction-specific categories will have sharp boundaries to the extent that there are sharp acceptability judgements of what can and cannot occur in the relevant constructional role. In this sense, the categories are Aristotelian. But they do not lead to a small set of mutually exclusive word classes, which is what Aarts assumes we must posit. Instead, there are overlapping categories of formatives representing their diverse distributional behavior — which is what a speaker actually knows about her language. (Croft 2006: 10–11)In this paper I will not be discussing the merits of Radical Construction Grammar, except to say that it is an interesting, challenging and exciting new approach to language. My aim here is more modest: I hope to show that distributional analysis is not as flawed as Croft suggests, and I will defend the distributional analyses discussed in Aarts (2004).
Volumes & issues
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Volume 49 (2025)
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Volume 48 (2024)
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Volume 47 (2023)
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Volume 46 (2022)
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Volume 45 (2021)
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Volume 44 (2020)
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Volume 43 (2019)
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Volume 42 (2018)
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Volume 41 (2017)
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Volume 40 (2016)
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Volume 39 (2015)
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Volume 38 (2014)
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Volume 37 (2013)
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Volume 36 (2012)
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Volume 35 (2011)
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Volume 34 (2010)
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Volume 33 (2009)
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Volume 32 (2008)
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Volume 31 (2007)
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Volume 30 (2006)
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Volume 29 (2005)
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Volume 28 (2004)
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Volume 27 (2003)
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Volume 26 (2002)
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Volume 25 (2001)
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Volume 24 (2000)
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Volume 23 (1999)
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Volume 22 (1998)
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Volume 21 (1997)
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Volume 20 (1996)
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Volume 19 (1995)
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Volume 18 (1994)
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Volume 17 (1993)
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Volume 16 (1992)
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Volume 15 (1991)
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Volume 14 (1990)
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Volume 13 (1989)
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Volume 12 (1988)
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Volume 11 (1987)
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Volume 10 (1986)
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Volume 9 (1985)
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Volume 8 (1984)
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Volume 7 (1983)
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Volume 6 (1982)
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Volume 5 (1981)
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Volume 4 (1980)
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Volume 3 (1979)
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Volume 2 (1978)
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Volume 1 (1977)
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