No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
The following postulates are formulated with respect to a scientific description of a language:
1. It is usable for whatever linguistic purpose.
2. It comprises an account of the linguistic system, a lexicon, a text corpus and a statement of the historical situation of the language.
3. The description of the language system accounts not only for core, but also for peripheral subsystems.
4. The linguistic system and the lexicon are presented both in a synthetic and in an analytic form.
5. The description brings out the dynamic character of the language.
These postulates can be complied with if the description of the language system instantiates a general comparative grammar. This in itself obeys the postulates. Specific proposals for the implementation of a general comparative grammar, esp. with respect to postulate 4, are made.
An overview of the life and achievements of Hansjakob Seiler.
The article deals with the notion of category and the linguists' operations for delimiting linguistic categories. A threefold organization is suggested that subdivides categories into features and features into values. Every word of a natural language can be categorically described via a matrix of values that represent the implementation of features that, in their turn, are categorial properties. Since there exist many non-clear-cut cases, that is, items that may paradigmatically belong to more than one category, it is necessary to use both a functional and a formal approach in order to get a categorial definition of the items. The traditional "parts of speech" still seem to be the best categorization, in spite of the fact that typology has become acquainted with languages that show very different morphosyntactic structures.
The purpose of this contribution is to explore the lexicon as an area of linguistic structure which may possibly supply features relevant for linguistic typology. The presentation is organized as follows: §2 briefly outlines a model of language structure in which the lexicon finds its place as the equal partner of grammar. In §3, postulates for a linguistic typology are put forward, and the idea of basing a typology on lexical structure is checked against them. The following three sections present case studies on the linguistic categorization of concepts of properties, parts of space and situation perspective. §6 draws the theoretical conclusions from this experiment.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
The categorization alluded to in the title is the assignment of a class of concepts to a lexeme class and/or a syntactic category. The purpose of the paper is to establish converseness of strategies of categorization among languages as a typological concept. It is argued that, quite in general, coding strategies in a given functional domain may be oriented in opposite directions across languages. Particular attention will be paid to the relationship between basic/lexical categorization and derived/syntactic categorization.A particular kind of converseness is produced by the alternative of basically lexicalizing some concept in grammatical category Ci and transferring it into category Cj by derivational or grammatical operations, or vice versa. The chief empirical domain to illustrate the principle is the categorization of dynamic relational concepts as verbs vs. non-verbs, the latter paired with prominence of light-verb constructions in the grammar. A couple of other functional domains susceptible of the same kind of analysis are analyzed more summarily.Whenever the elements of a certain conceptual field or functional domain are uniformly lexicalized in some particular category, this is typically coupled with a regular operation of recategorization into its complementary category. In such cases, both the basic category assignment and the presence of the operation shape the structure of sentences and of texts in the language.
The article refines Dependency Grammar by explaining the make-up of syntactic and morphological constructions on the basis of the relational properties of their components.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.