Sproget poesi eller poesiens sprog:Et essay om og med Roman Jakobson

This essay contemplates the question of whether human languages have some especially poetic features and what the special features of poetry are – as conceived of by Roman Jakobson. As is well known, Jakobson says that one of the linguistic functions is the poetic function, and to him poetry emerges out of unexpected combinations of syntax, lexical semantics, phonology and prosody underpinned by the musical features of the human voice. On the background of Jakobson’s insight that some words, i.e. <i>mama</i> and <i>papa</i>, may have a 'natural origin' in that the sounds the newborn baby will produce spontaneously are often <i>m</i> (also during breastfeeding) and <i>a</i> (when crying), I claim that the emotional bonds established in early childhood associated with these sounds may be the experiences founding the later aesthetic perception of poetry. The way I see it the musical features may arouse emotional responses effected by these ASSOCIATIVE (semiotic) characteristics in connection with the emotional and intellectual responses effected by the REFERENTIAL (semantic) characteristics of the words. Accordingly, I claim that Jakobson’s conceptual framework is an adequate way of bringing together linguistics proper and poetry

Sætningsled, kasus og signifikation

In this presentation I try to conceive of the theme of the colloquium as a problem concerning semantic or thematic roles. I find it hard to support an idea about these roles as being semantic entities and/or explaining tools in grammar. My basis for this is a certain linguistic theory, Formative Grammar, developed by me, and implying that the linguistic functions of human beings have a specific architecture. The theory is both formal, including formalisms, and incorporated in a pragmatic framework, a theory of universal pragmatics.
 
 It follows from this that the way in which sentences are often regarded as mirrors of roles acting in scenarios, is inadequate. Not all, if even most, of the situations we encounter can be depicted by means of role theories since fairly large parts of nature is inhabited by nonhuman entities, and sentences have to deal with these too. Another objection deals the philosophical basis that claims about role theory. My main concern is they cannot be defined in a satisfactory way as entities and that one is not able to set up criteria for the falsification of the claims mentioned.
 
 As for sentences constituents I see them as expressions of concepts, and I see grammatical case as one way of telling the language users what syntactic status a specific constituent has. Case is a part of what I call morphological signification (another part is verbal conjugation), and this is opposed to what I call topological signification, i.e. the syntactic categories are revealed by the linear distribution of the constituents. Roles play no part in this model of syntactic functions

An Approach to Conceptualisation and Semantic Knowledge: Some Preliminary Observations

The paper below takes up the question of whether it is possible to transfer the notion of ‘semantic knowledge’—as a human process of making language generate and confer meanings—to machines, which have as one of their properties the capability of handling high amounts of information. This issue is presented in an extended introduction to the paper’s account of and solutions to this intricate problem. Thereafter, the theoretical notion of ‘knowledge’ is considered in its philosophical, and thereby scientific, context, and the basis of its modern import is pointed to being Immanuel Kant’s deliberations on a priori vs. a posteriori knowledge. The author’s solution to the predicament of modern ideas about knowledge is the proposed theory of Occurrence Logic, invented by the author, which abandons truth-values from valid reasoning, and this approach is briefly accounted for. It presupposes a theoretical model of human cognitive systems, and the author has such a model under development which, in the future, may be able to solve the question of what ‘semantic knowledge’ actually is. So far, the theoretical account in this paper points to the critical issue of whether natural language semantics can be grasped as words explaining words or must include the connection between words and objects in the world. The author is in favour of the last option. This leads to the question of the functions of the human brain as the organ connecting words with the outer world. The idea of the so-called ‘predictive brain’ is referred to as a possible solution to the brain/cognition issue, and the paper concludes with a suggestion that an emulation of the interaction between the mentioned cognitive systems may cast some new light on the field of Artificial Intelligence

Sætningsled, kasus og signifikation

In this presentation I try to conceive of the theme of the colloquium as a problem concerning semantic or thematic roles. I find it hard to support an idea about these roles as being semantic entities and/or explaining tools in grammar. My basis for this is a certain linguistic theory, Formative Grammar, developed by me, and implying that the linguistic functions of human beings have a specific architecture. The theory is both formal, including formalisms, and incorporated in a pragmatic framework, a theory of universal pragmatics. It follows from this that the way in which sentences are often regarded as mirrors of roles acting in scenarios, is inadequate. Not all, if even most, of the situations we encounter can be depicted by means of role theories since fairly large parts of nature is inhabited by nonhuman entities, and sentences have to deal with these too. Another objection deals the philosophical basis that claims about role theory. My main concern is they cannot be defined in a satisfactory way as entities and that one is not able to set up criteria for the falsification of the claims mentioned. As for sentences constituents I see them as expressions of concepts, and I see grammatical case as one way of telling the language users what syntactic status a specific constituent has. Case is a part of what I call morphological signification (another part is verbal conjugation), and this is opposed to what I call topological signification, i.e. the syntactic categories are revealed by the linear distribution of the constituents. Roles play no part in this model of syntactic functions

Sproget poesi eller poesiens sprog. Et essay om og med Roman Jakobson

This essay contemplates the question of whether human languages have some especially poetic features and what the special features of poetry are – as conceived of by Roman Jakobson. As is well known, Jakobson says that one of the linguistic functions is the poetic function, and to him poetry emerges out of unexpected combinations of syntax, lexical semantics, phonology and prosody underpinned by the musical features of the human voice. On the background of Jakobson’s insight that some words, i.e. mama and papa, may have a 'natural origin' in that the sounds the newborn baby will produce spontaneously are often m (also during breastfeeding) and a (when crying), I claim that the emotional bonds established in early childhood associated with these sounds may be the experiences founding the later aesthetic perception of poetry. The way I see it the musical features may arouse emotional responses effected by these ASSOCIATIVE (semiotic) characteristics in connection with the emotional and intellectual responses effected by the REFERENTIAL (semantic) characteristics of the words. Accordingly, I claim that Jakobson’s conceptual framework is an adequate way of bringing together linguistics proper and poetry