Hans-Heinrich Lieb

Freie Universität Berlin | FUB · Institute of German and Dutch Languages and Literature

The essay is divided into four Parts A to D: Part A (Sections 1 to 3), Topic and background; B. Grammatical description (Sections 4 to 6); C. Grammars and theories of language: motivating axiomatization (Sections 7 to 9); and D. Grammars as axiomatic theories (Sections 10 and 11). The essay characterizes grammatical description, both informal and f...

The meanings of certain referential expressions (definite singular noun phrases of the form Def Art + N, and simple singular proper names) are studied in connection with fictionality and the problem of a fictitious narrator. Author-independent meanings of Art + N expressions are distinguished from textual meanings. The former are constructed as rel...

A conception of word meaning is suggested in which a meaning of a word is a concept in a psychological sense. Traditional conceptions of this type have been severely criticized. It is argued that the proposed conception satisfies a number of basic requirements that should be taken as conditions of adequacy for any linguistic conception of word mean...

The problem of distinguishing ‘semantic’ and ‘pragmatic’ aspects of sentences has not yet been solved. One of the most suggestive lines of attack is based on the following idea: ‘semantic’ aspects are those which can be related to truth conditions, ‘pragmatic’ aspects are the ones that concern ‘conditions of use’.

Part II contains a detailed account of partial idiolect grammars as applied axiomatic theories that are formulated in terms of a theory of language. These grammars serve as a test case for the possibilities of axiomatic grammar writing in the sense of I. Phonological, morpho-syntactic, and semantic idiolect grammars are discussed. In each case, the...

For some time now linguistics has been witnessing a revival of interest in psychological questions, which recently has been matched by growing interest in the social aspects of language and language use. At the same time preoccupation with morpho-syntactic questions has given way to conceptions that explicitly include semantics, and during the past...

(Part I) Inspite of growing interest in research on language universals the concept of language universal itself has not been clarified beyond its status in Greenberg (ed.) 1966. The present paper is an attempt at further clarification. The concept of language universal presents at least the following basic problems (treated inadequately in generat...

“Syntactics, semantics, pragmatics” — if the reader has ever heard of semiotic, he will immediately associate with it this triad of terms. It may be surprising that anybody should wish to discuss a distinction as well known as the subdivision they designate: one tends to speak unhesitatingly of a semantical investigation or a pragmatical one, so pr...