On Inflection Steinkrüger, Patrick O; Krifka, Manfred
2009, 2009-02-18, Letnik:
184
eBook
The volume is dedicated to the German linguist Wolfgang Ullrich "Gustav" Wurzel (1940-2001), who has influenced linguistic thought in his work on paradigm-based morphology. All contributors to the ...volume deal with Wurzel's work and thinking, who in his theoretical writings focused on the concepts of naturalness, markedness and complexity in human language. The authors discuss diachronic and typological aspects of morphology, i.e. the nature of paradigms, the rise and fall of inflectional morphology, and the development and systems of gender marking, also in regard to the interface with phonology and syntax.
Während andere Arbeiten zur natürlichen Morphologie die Bedeutung von Erscheinungen wie Ikonismus, Uniformität und Transparenz für den Aufbau morphologischer Systeme untersuchen, expliziert diese ...Studie Eigenschaften und Entwicklungstendenzen von Flexionssystemen, die sich mit dem Stichwort "systembezogene morphologische Natürlichkeit" umschreiben lassen, d. h. solche flexionsmorphologischen Erscheinungen, die - wiewohl durch universelle Prinzipien determiniert - ihre konkrete Ausprägung auf Grund von einzelsprachlichen Struktureigenschaften erfahren. Diese Eigenschaften und Tendenzen haben deutliche Parallelen auch in anderen grammatischen Bereichen, so daß eine Anwendung des hier entwickelten Konzepts einer systembezogenen Natürlichkeit auch auf andere Komponenten des Sprachsystems sinnvoll scheint.
The study describes a detailed and original piece of research work, investigating a very important genre of human communication, and that is conversation. It provides a definition of the genre of ...conversation by describing nine features of conversation, namely multiple sources, discourse coherence, language as doing, co-operation, unfolding, open-endedness, artifacts, inexplicitness and shared responsibility. These nine features of naturalness in conversation serve to distinguish conversation from specialized discourse types. The study illustrates the nine defining features of conversation with authentic conversational data collected surreptitiously in England. While this study is of native speakers of English, the nine defining features of naturalness of English conversation are applicable to conversations conducted in other languages.
The idea that some aspects of language are 'natural', while others are arbitrary, artificial or derived, runs all through modern linguistics, from Chomsky's GB theory and Minimalist program and his ...concept of E- and I-language, to Greenberg's search for linguistic universals, Pinker's views on regular and irregular morphology and the brain, and the markedness-based constraints of Optimality Theory. This book traces the heritage of this linguistic naturalism back to its locus classicus, Plato's dialogue Cratylus. The first half of the book is a detailed examination of the linguistic arguments in the Cratylus. The second half follows three of the dialogue's naturalistic themes through subsequent linguistic history - natural grammar and conventional words, from Aristotle to Pinker; natural dialect and artificial language, from Varro to Chomsky; and invisible hierarchies, from Jakobson to Optimality Theory - in search of a way forward beyond these seductive yet spurious and limiting dichotomies.
