A preliminary bibliography on focus

[I]n its present form, the bibliography contains approximately 1100 entries. Bibliographical work is never complete, and the present one is still modest in a number of respects. It is not annotated, and it still contains a lot of mistakes and inconsistencies. It has nevertheless reached a stage which justifies considering the possibility of making it available to the public. The first step towards this is its pre-publication in the form of this working paper. […] The bibliography is less complete for earlier years. For works before 1970, the bibliographies of Firbas and Golkova 1975 and Tyl 1970 may be consulted, which have not been included here

Theticity

The subject matter of this chapter is the semantic, syntactic and discoursepragmatic background as well as the cross-linguistic behavior of types of utterance exemplified by the following English sentences […]: (1) My NECK hurts. […] (2) The PHONE's ringing. [...] Sentences such as […] are usually held to stand in opposition to sentences with a topical subject. The difference is said to be formally marked, for example, by VS order vs. topical SV order (as in Albanian po bie telefoni 'the PHONE is ringing' vs. telefoni po bie 'the PHONE is RINGING'), or by accent on the subject only vs. accent on both the subject and the verb (as in the English translations). The term theticity will be used in the following to label the specific phenomenological domain to which the sentences in (1) and (2) belong. It has long been commonplace that these and similar expressions occur at particular points in the discourse where "a new situation is presented as a whole". We will try to depict and classify the various discourse situations in which these expressions have been found in the different languages, and we will try to trace out areas of cross-linguistic comparability. Finally, we will raise the question whether or not there is a common denominator which would justify a unified treatment of all these expressions in functional/semantic terms

Qualities, objects, sorts, and other treasures : gold digging in English and Arabic

In the present monograph, we will deal with questions of lexical typology in the nominal domain. By the term "lexical typology in the nominal domain", we refer to crosslinguistic regularities in the interaction between (a) those areas of the lexicon whose elements are capable of being used in the construction of "referring phrases" or "terms" and (b) the grammatical patterns in which these elements are involved. In the traditional analyses of a language such as English, such phrases are called "nominal phrases". In the study of the lexical aspects of the relevant domain, however, we will not confine ourselves to the investigation of "nouns" and "pronouns" but intend to take into consideration all those parts of speech which systematically alternate with nouns, either as heads or as modifiers of nominal phrases. In particular, this holds true for adjectives both in English and in other Standard European Languages. It is well known that adjectives are often difficult to distinguish from nouns, or that elements with an overt adjectival marker are used interchangeably with nouns, especially in particular semantic fields such as those denoting MATERIALS or NATlONALlTIES. That is, throughout this work the expression "lexical typology in the nominal domain" should not be interpreted as "a typology of nouns", but, rather, as the cross-linguistic investigation of lexical areas constitutive for "referring phrases" irrespective of how the parts-of-speech system in a specific language is defined

Lexical typology : a programmatic sketch

The present paper is an attempt to lay the foundation for Lexical Typology as a new kind of linguistic typology.1 The goal of Lexical Typology is to investigate crosslinguistically significant patterns of interaction between lexicon and grammar

Aspektsemantik und Lexikonorganisation : Beobachtungen zum Cayuga (Nordirokesisch)

Der vorliegende Beitrag präsentiert zum ersten Mal eine detaillierte Darstellung des Aspektsystems im Cayuga, einer nordirokesischen Sprache. Das Cayuga verfügt über drei flexionelle Aspektkategorien, den perfektiven "Punctual" und die imperfektiven "Habitual" und "Stative". Jede dieser Kategorien hat eine größere Anzahl unterschiedlicher Lesarten. Es wird gezeigt, in welcher Weise diese Lesarten von der lexikalischen Semantik der betreffenden Verben abhängt bzw. mit dieser interagiert. Die hieraus resultierende Verbklassifizierung fördert eine Reihe konzeptueller Idiosynkrasien zutage, die den sprachspezifischen Charakter der Lexikonorganisation des Cayuga ausmachen. Dennoch läßt sich zeigen, daß es trotz der andersartigen kompositionellen Struktur in der aspektuellen Klassenbildung zu ähnlichen Effekten der Interaktion von morphologischer Aspektsemantik und lexikalischer Verbsemantik kommt wie in Sprachen anderen Typs

Recent activity in the theory of aspect : accomplishments, achievements, or just non-progressive state?

It has become commonplace to introduce works on aspect with the remark that there is hardly another field in linguistics so much plagued by terminological and notional confusion. [..] About 20 major books claiming a comprehensive treatment have come to my attention during little more than the past half decade […]. Among these books are five that form the subject of this paper in a narrower sense, given that the present article originally started out as a combined review of these five works: […] Even if one is not at all keen on monocultures, it is clear that the obvious disunity in fundamental points of view makes the situation increasingly difficult for the "ordinary working linguist". It is getting impossible to keep up with the many different issues raised in the theoretical literature when, for instance, writing a chapter on aspect for a descriptive grammar of a language. As a result, a tremendous gap between descriptive and theoretical work has arisen. This has not gone unnoticed in the literature. There are several recent publications in which explicit attempts are made to bridge this gap […], all of them trying to add a typological perspective to aspect theory and to free it from its purely truth-conditional embedding, which was the dominant paradigm in the 70ies and 80ies. But again, these works are often themselves cast into specific theoretical frameworks, more often than not ignoring other approaches to the field if they do not fit their persuasions. I will therefore avail myself of the opportunity of this review article by briefly sorting out the differences in the fundamental assumptions and theoretical primitives of the various approaches, in order to come to grips with the aspectological landscape. A general, chiefly historically oriented assessment is presented in the first part of this paper (see section 1). The second part is then devoted to a detailed discussion of the books under review against the background etablished in this survey (see section 2). At the end, I will try to draw some conclusions and hint at some directions for future work with aspect in a descriptive and/or typological context (see section 3)

Searching for meaning in the Library of Babel: field semantics and problems of digital archiving

Languages are made up of linguistic signs, each of which is a conventional pairing of a form and a meaning. In spoken languages, the form is sound; in signed languages, it is a visual sign. A central task in documenting any spoken language is to lay bare the processes and structures - grammatical, lexical and prosodic - by which its speakers infer meaning from sound, and produce sound to express meaning. Technological advances in recent decades have seen our ability to both record and archive these sounds advance steadily, as witnessed by the many new tools and projects discussed at this workshop. Yet the other side of language - what these recordings mean - remains problematic, and presents difficult problems for archiving that receive all too little discussion. The worst case - found all too often - is an immaculate sound recording of a passage in language, without translation - for a language about which little is known this is about as helpful as tablets in the Indus or other undeciphered scripts: we recognize that language is there, without knowing what it means. Such cases can result either from language materials that are recorded without being analysed, or through a prevalent asymmetry by which the original text is recorded, but not the process of arriving at a translation through subsequent discussion and probing. The next worst case might follow the language passage with a short explanation or partial translation in some more widely-known language such as English, e.g. by the storyteller: because such translations are rarely complete, this is far from satisfactory. Even the canonical situation, in which a full and careful translation (e.g. by the linguist) is given, conceals a host of unanswered questions: how was the translation arrived at? what other translations would have been possible? what is the semantic range of each word or other linguistic sign, used in isolation? what cultural knowledge underlies the interpretation of particular figures of speech? how did the immediate context, including gesture, setting, other participants present, and so forth, contribute to the particular translation? Did local traditions of commentary and exegesis play a role in the translation - these could include, for example, explanatory asides or further texts that arose at particular points in working over the original texts. The fact that meaning is, at least in part, inside the minds of speaker and hearer, makes it inherently more difficult to capture than sound, which is physically present. However, a range of techniques that linguists use are, in principle, documentable. Some involve links to visual presentations of one sort or another, labelled realia: the meaning of a word or expression may be illustrated by photographs (e.g. of plants) or videos (e.g. of movement types, or processes); elicitation protocols (picture books, space game or video prompts); sand diagrams drawn to illustrate schematic concepts; keyed botanical specimens; GPS references for site names. These links need not be confined to illustrating reference: they may also illustrate motivations for metaphorical or metonymic extensions of terms, e.g. by zooming in on salient shapes of body parts used in metaphors, or on habitat links (e.g. particular fish that feed on the fallen fruit of particular trees) that underlie 'sign metonymies' by which the same name may be used both for a plant and an animal found in its vicinity. Other techniques, yet to be widely used in documenting little-known languages, can be adapted from the hermeneutic methods of linked commentaries on sacred texts in, e.g. in the Talmudic, Islamic and Buddhist traditions, using hypertext to link recorded interpretive comments to primary recorded materials in as many places as necessary (Bernard Muir's Ductus project begins to do this with medieval texts). This may also include speakers volunteering example sentences or other material illustrating how to use words that crop up in texts. Further methods, such as videoing responses by one speaker to language material presented by another (e.g. in the Nijmegen space games) can furnish visual evidence of how speakers interpret directives, hence documenting the decoding aspect of meaning as well. Techniques such as the above will never capture all aspects of how a semantic analysis is arrived at - the hyperrealistic illusion that every moment of a field investigator's investigation should be captured is untenable and interferes both with the daily human interactions that form part of learning a language, and with the serendipitous moments at which investigators suddenly click what something means. However, more explicit recognition of their role, during both recording and subsequent archiving, goes some way towards correcting the current asymmetry faced in the process of documentation of form and documentation of meaning.Volkswagen-Stiftung DOBES project; Australian Academy of the Humanities; Australian E-Humanities Network; Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sydney; School of Society, Culture and Performance, Faculty of Arts, University of Sydne

Der irokesische Sprachtyp

Im folgenden wird versucht, eine Interpretation der funktionalen Gesamtzusammenhänge des irokesischen Sprachbaus zu geben

Aspektsysteme

„Die folgenden Papiere sind im Umfeld eines Hauptseminars "Aspekt und Tempus" entstanden, das im Wintersemester 1989/90 am Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität zu Köln stattfand. In den folgenden Beiträgen werden nicht alle Aspekte des Aspekts gedeckt; im Vordergrund steht hauptsächlich die Frage der Interaktion von lexikalischer Semantik und Aspektmorphologie, so daß sich die Beschreibung der Aspektmorphologie auf aspektrelevante Fälle beschränkt und Nebenfunktionen (z.B. temporale), Konventionalisierungen, Neutralisierungen usw. weitgehend vernachlässigt werden. Kritik und Anregungen sind höchst willkommen.“ --- Inhalt: Aspekttheorie (Hans-Jürgen Sasse); Albanisch (Christina Leluda); Spanisch (Olga Chapado Chorro & Luisa Garcia Garcia); Japanisch (Antje Seidel & Helga Weyerts); Maa (Christa König); Modemes Chinesisch (Chor-Shing Li); Samoanisch (Mario Longino