Moving Words

We move words and words move us. To describe and explain how and why this happens, the present article focuses on Prague traditions, both on the philosophical and linguistic elements. The semantic and syntactic approach is summarized, as developed by Anton Marty, belonging to the Brentano school, and by Vil\ue9m Mathesius, founder of the Prague Linguistic Circle, as well as by Jan Firbas, who developed the functional sentence perspective (FSP) into the theory of communicative dynamism (CD). The four Principles of FSP and the four factors of CD are highlighted, together with the related criticism that stems from a systematic work of corpus annotation, a true test procedure for any theory concerned with word order, the interplay between lexicon and morphology, rhythm, intonation and their effects on the addressee\u2019s psychic and emotive processes and life.Wir bewegen W\uf6rter und W\uf6rter bewegen uns. Um zu beschreiben und zu erkl\ue4ren, wie und warum das geschieht, stellt dieser Beitrag Prager Traditionen in den Mittelpunkt, sowohl vom philosophischen als auch vom sprachwissenschaftlichen Standpunkt aus. Der semantische und syntaktische Ansatz, entwickelt von Anton Marty, einem Sch\ufcler Brentanos, und von Vil\ue9m Mathesius, dem Begr\ufcnder des Prager Linguistischen Kreises, wird dargestellt, im Anschluss auch der von Jan Firbas, der die Funktionale-Satz- Perspektive (FSP) zur Theorie des Communicative Dynamism (CD) weiter entwickelte. Die vier Prinzipien der FSP und die vier Faktoren des CD werden herausgearbeitet und mit der diesbez\ufcglichen, aus einer systematischen Arbeit eines annotierten Korpus abgeleiteten Kritik verbunden: eine wirkliche Testprozedur f\ufcr jede Theorie \ufcber Wortstellung, Zusammenspiel zwischen Lexikon und Morphologie, Rhythmus, Intonation und ihren Auswirkungen auf die psychischen und emotiven Prozesse und auf das Leben des Empf\ue4ngers

A Collaborative Model of Treebank Development

Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories. Editors: Koenraad De Smedt, Jan Hajič and Sandra Kübler. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 1 (2007), 1-6. © 2007 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/4476

Pi\uf9 di cent'anni di filosofia del linguaggio, a Milano. Tra fonetica sperimentale e linguistica computazionale

The article recounts the story of the research concerning language hosted at the Catholic University in Milan since its foundation and even earlier, thanks to its founder, Agostino Gemelli. According to the ideal of the gradual ascent from experimental research to rational inquiry, from observed particulars to scientific and philosophical explanations, Gemelli develops electro-acoustical research on the human voice through his long-term search regarding personality. On the philosophical side, the data which are used as a point of departure are the texts of the authors themselves in the history of thought, with the discovery of their questions and answers, which are sometimes surprisingly alike in spite of their quite diverse theoretical or extra-theoretical frameworks. In between, Natural Language Processing (NLP) encounters the requirements of semantic annotation, fostered by semantic theory: an investigation which began in the sixties and is still in progress. Although all these trends belong to a perennial, context independent, quest for the essence and function of language, there are indeed certain projects which aim to place language and languages in public, situated contexts, especially those dealing with socio- and cultural-political side effects. The article attempts to highlight the golden thread unifying different epistemological and disciplinary traditions, the recurrent commitment to instrumental, technologically assisted research, and the core function attributed to language in human life, under the shared banner of realis

Che cos'\ue8 la forma linguistica interna?

The paper takes into consideration the humboldtian notion of 'inner linguistic form', its definition and range. It discusses its development in Marty's philosophy of language, with special attention to the meanings of 'form' as a correlative concept. The pros and cons of conservative terminology in philosophy are specifically evaluated, while representing Buehler's review of Marty's work

Du centre \ue0 la p\ue9riph\ue9rie : structuration des langues en diachronie, ou la forme interne des langues et ses axes de d\ue9veloppement

Since it is difficult to define language, an effective method of proceeding is by deepening and strengthening the knowledge of its properties, in particular through comparisons. This paper aims to clarify the well known property of human languages, which are characterized by having a centre and a periphery. The notions of centricity-peripherality, developed within the Prague linguistic tradition, apply to many other entities, both cultural and natural: towns first of all, but also physiological systems (the circulatory and nervous systems), and physical phenomena (the formation of crystals, the propagation of circles in the water resulting from the impact of a water droplet\u2026). The lines followed are twofold: i. the primacy of the linguistic activity of the community of speakers over metalinguistic considerations; ii. the identification of three layers of the metalinguistic enterprise: the system (lexicon and grammar) and the inner form of its structuring ; the sentence and its syntagmatic structure; the utterance and its indexical origin. The Praguian linguistic tradition finds itself in conversation with authors from outside its ranks, from Aristotle to Wittgenstein, through Humboldt and Marty. If science needs metaphors and can\u2019t do without them, constitutive metaphors have to be preferred. The metaphor of centre and periphery proves to be one of these

A scuola gli uni degli altri. Nascita e primi passi del CISPELS

The article tells the story of birth (2014) and growth of CISPELS, Coordinamento Intersocietario per la Storia del Pensiero Linguistico e Semiotico. It shows the variety of epistemological attitudes in the language sciences and throughout their history. Both summer schools and conferences develop the project at the national level, while preparing its insertion into the international network. CiSPElS is here introduced as a young, italian enterprise devoted to the history of linguistic and semiotic thought, and to its initial steps. in thebackground, the preceding initiatives are mentioned: iCHolS; SHESl, theHenry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas, the Studienkreis f\ufcr die Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft. the importance of the relationship among scientific societies, multidisciplinary research, a united commitment between historiographical reconstruction and explanation, on the one hand, and highly specialised, active inquiries on the other, is highlighted, together with a number of initiatives already in progress: a yearly summer school (2016-), a national conference (2018) and the hosting of an international one (2020). The foundation of the present hosting journal, Blityri, has been a pathfinder in this newly established tradition

Porre,comporre, disporre. Dai giudizi tetici agli enunciati tetici, ai temi e ai loro correlati

L\u2019articolo si propone di individuare la genesi teorica \u2013 e terminologica \u2013 di una delle due nozioni fondamentali della prospettiva funzionale dell\u2019enunciato (PFE): quella di tema, o base, dell\u2019enunciato. L\u2019origine viene individuata nello studio dedicato da Mathesius all\u2019ellissi nel 1911. L\u2019argomento si presta a entrare nel merito dell\u2019elaborazione logicopsicologica delle unit\ue0 discorsive, posto che l\u2019ellissi viene riconosciuta consistere in omissione vocabuli, quod non dictum tamen cogitatur. La scelta di frasi unimembri, e in particolare prive di verbo, determina una doppia opportunit\ue0: d\ue0 spazio al riconoscimento di strutture nonstandard rispetto al canone della doppia articolazione in soggetto e predicato e le valorizza in quanto rappresentative par excellence della funzione non sintetica, bens\uec tetica del giudicare e dell\u2019enunciare. Le \u201cfrasi tetiche a un membro\u201d sono cos\uec chiamate sulla scorta della teoria del giudizio, che Mathesius ha appreso dalla filosofia del linguaggio di Marty, a sua volta modellata sulla base della classificazione dei fenomeni psichici proposta da Brentano. Si pu\uf2 quindi ricostruire una feconda disseminazione del pensiero filosofico mitteleuropeo nella ricerca linguistica del primo Novecento in Boemia, anticipandola rispetto a quanto finora si riteneva in letteratura. Della PFE inoltre si evidenziano le radici non solo sintattiche, bens\uec logico-semantiche e semanticocomunicative, ben innestate nella tradizione praghese prima ancora della fondazione del Circolo.The aim of this paper is to identify the theoretical and terminological genesis of one of the two basic notions of Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP), namely that of theme, or basis, of the sentence. Its origin is found in Mathesius\u2019 1911 article on ellipsis. The choice of such a topic permits a logico-psychological elaboration of speech units inasmuch as ellipsis is taken into consideration as consisting of a missing word, quod non dictum tamen cogitatur. The choice of one-member sentences, especially those without a verb, is convenient from two different perspectives: it recognizes non-standard structures, if compared to the ideal type of the subject \u2013 predicate double articulation, and it considers them to be par excellence representatives of the non- synthetic, but rather thetic function of judgements and sentences. The term \u201cone-member thetic sentences\u201d derives from the theory of judgement Mathesius learned from Marty\u2019s philosophy of language. This in turn was fashioned according to Brentano\u2019s classification of psychic phenomena. It is thus possible to reconstruct a fine dissemination of philosophical middle-European thought in linguistic research at the beginning of the Twentieth Century in Bohemia, which is significantly earlier than previously attested to in the literature. Moreover, not only are the syntactic roots of FSP put in evidence, but also the logico-semantic and semantic-communicative ones , a well-established Prague tradition, long before the Circle\u2019s foundation