August Fenk

Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt

En utilisant le terme icone dans toutes ses varietes et toutes ses manifestations, le concept d'iconicite est devenu central dans la plupart des disciplines traitant de la representation des connaissances. Toutefois, de nombreuses questions theoriques restent irresolues. L'A. souligne ici les insuffisances de quelques unes des conceptualisations co...

Menzerath describes two regularities governing the relation between the number of syllables and the number of phonemes in German words. The interpretations given by Menzerath (1954) are aimed at what nowadays is called “cognitive economy”:

Language is viewed as a combinatorial symbol system, and speech as a specialization within multimodal symbolic communication. This paper assumes that a growing ability to suppress reflexive responses to stimuli (Striedter 2005) intensified anticipatory, hypothesis-testing activity, and that the (inner) try-out of vocalizations facilitated the explo...

Complexity trade-offs are often considered as evidence for the hypothesis that all languages are equally complex; simplicity in one component of grammar is balanced by complexity in another. According to Shosted (2006), this "negative correlation hypothesis", as he calls it, was never validated using quantitative methods. The present paper recalls,...

This paper is in line with the principles of numerical taxonomy and with the program of holistic typology. It integrates the level of phonology with the morphological and syntactical level by correlating metric properties (such as n of phonemes per syllable and n of syllables per clause) with non-metric variables such as the number of morphological...

In the perennial debate whether languages differ in their complexity, quite a number of linguists hold the opinion that all languages are equally complex. This might be inter alia an understandable reaction to 19th century typologists [e.g.1] who classified morphologically less complex languages as inferior and highly inflectional languages "as the...

Basic language-inherent tempo cannot be isolated by the current metrics of speech rhythm. Here we propose the number of syllables per intonation unit as an appropriate measure, also for large-scale comparisons between languages. Applying it to an extended sample of in the meantime 51 languages has not only corroborated our previously reported negat...

In this paper we try to answer the following questions: Why do frequently used words tend to polysemy and homophony? And what comes first -frequency or the higher number of meanings per word? We shall stress the key role of frequency in the emergence of polysemy and assume an interactive step-up initiated by frequency: High frequency not only favor...

Parallels between language and music are considered as a useful basis for examining possible evolutionary pathways of these achievements. Such parallels become apparent if we compare clauses and syllables in language with phrases and notes in music: Clauses as well as musical phrases typically span about 2 sec and about 5 to 10 pulses, i.e. syllabl...

In a first step we present correspondences between the inventories of vowel systems and musical scales across cultures. These correspondences concern an upper limit of roughly 12 elements, a lower limit of 2-3 elements and the 5-vowel systems and pentatonic scales as the most frequent patterns. Since vowels play a decisive role in generating the so...

Für Saussure sind die beiden Seiten des sprachlichen Zeichens – Vorstellung (Bezeichnetes) und Lautbild (Bezeichnung) – "gleichermaßen psychisch", womit er laut Ogden & Richards den Interpretationsprozess ins Zeichen hinein verlegt und jene Dinge negiert, für welche das Zeichen steht. Glasersfeld (1982) hingegen sieht Saussure auf dem richtigen Weg...

Starting from a view on language as a combinatorial and hierarchically organized system we assumed that a high syllable complexity favours a high number of syllable types , which in turn favours a high number of monosyllables . Relevant crosslinguistic correlations based on Menzerath's (1954) data on monosyllables in 8 languages turned out to be st...

Scales or hierarchies are most commonly viewed as determinants of grammatical relations. The respective principle in the domain of differential object marking (DOM): objects ranking higher on a relevant scale – e.g. the animacy scale or the definiteness scale – are more likely to be overtly case marked. In the domain of word order the higher rankin...

Experiments with free immediate recall of lists of unconnected words usually reveal a saddle-shaped ‘serial position curve’: high frequency of recall in the items obtaining the first positions (‘primacy effect’) of the list and those obtaining the last positions (‘recency effect’), and, in the words of Murdock Jr., “a horizontal asymptote spanning...

Experiments with free immediate recall of lists of unconnected words usually reveal a saddle-shaped ‘serial position curve’: high frequency of recall in the items obtaining the first positions (‘primacy effect’) of the list and those obtaining the last positions (‘recency effect’), and, in the words of Murdock Jr., “a horizontal asymptote spanning...

The present study examines a specific version of Menzerath's first law: The more syllables per word, the fewer phonemes per syllable. The search for the best fitting function revealed the best fits for a model of exponential decay in two of three single languages as well as in a crosslinguistic computation with each of 33 different languages repres...

The classification of languages is an old issue but is most commonly guided by a genetic and/or areal perspective, or, when guided by the perspective of structural relationships, attempts for divisions on separate levels of linguistic description such as morphology or syntax. Our study, however, contributes to the alternative but "hopeful" program...

Previous crosslinguistic studies by the authors have shown that a small number of phonemes per syllable is associated with a high number of sylla-bles per word and per clause, and, moreover, with Object-Verb (OV) order and agglutinative morphology. And since OV order is often connected with a tendency to postpositions (e.g. Greenberg 1966) and aggl...

The "systemic" approach of language typology takes into account that each language goes through selfregulatory processes optimizing the interaction between its (phonological, morphological, syntactical) subsystems. In this paper we refer at first to statistically significant crosslinguistic correlations reported in previous studies between metric p...

This article starts with Zipf's (1949) "Tool Analogy", where the artisan arranges and re- designs his tools in a way minimizing his total work; as a result, more frequently used tools tend to be nearer to him (better accessible), smaller and multifunctional. We then argue that short distance, small size and multifunctionality reflect not only a hig...

Die Studie beschäftigt sich mit dem nach wie vor aktuellen Problem (z.B. Shiffrin & Nosofsky 1994, Engle et al. 1999), wie denn das Konzept oder die Konzepte eines "Kurzzeitgedächtnisses", eines "Arbeitsgedächtnisses" und eines "immediate memory" operational zu definieren seien – informational (in bits), als fixe Anzahl (von Elementen oder "chunks"...

The first part of this paper is a collection of more or less confirmed occurrences of the magical number 7 in language and of more or less explicit assumptions regarding limits such as the following: In crosslinguistic comparison the mean number of syllables per clause seems to be restricted to a range of 5 to 10 and the mean length of lexemes to a...

This paper argues for the relevance of quantitative and cognitive linguistics for typology. Crosslinguistic correlations between the size of syllables, words, and sentences, as suggested earlier (Fenk & Fenk-Oczlon 1993), have been confirmed in a wider sample of 18 Indo-European and 16 non-Indo-European languages from all continents except Australi...

The distinction between symbolizing, i.e., representing concepts or propositions, and simulating allows a simple description of (a) representations where symbolizing and simulating coincide ("iconic symbols", like in pictograms and onomato-poetic words), (b) representations realizing simulating and symbolizing functions by separate elements (as in...

L'A. propose une approche theoretico-systemique et typologico- fonctionnelle de l'explication linguistique, qui prend en compte le fait que chaque langue se realise a travers des processus naturels optimisant l'interaction entre ses sous-systemes (phonologique, morphologique, syntaxique) et l'interaction avec son environnement naturel (articulation...

This paper studies the following, closely related questions: Where do "logical" pictures said to be arbitrary and non-representational get their form? And what makes them an appropriate cognitive and communicative instrument? Obviously these pictures do not portray visible objects and they cannot portray invisible mental models. Thus, logical pictu...

60 Ss were asked to listen to 27 pieces of texts and were either given no particular instructions or were asked to pay special attention to the meaning or the form of the texts. Immediately after the text, or after having heard 80 or 160 more syllables, Ss received a particular test sentence out of the text. Ss were required to judge if the test se...

This quasi-experimental study is a first attempt to explore possibilities of an application of test-psychological methods in the psychology of literature in order to clarify rather general tendencies in the construction of more or less fictional literary figures. A short form of Cattell’s 16 PF-Test was constructed and used for an external assessme...