Leila Behrens - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Leila Behrens

Different languages employ different morphosyntactic devices for expressing genericity. And, of c... more Different languages employ different morphosyntactic devices for expressing genericity. And, of course, they also make use of different morphosyntactic and semantic or pragmatic cues which may contribute to the interpretation of a sentence as generic rather than episodic. [...] We will advance the strong hypo thesis that it is a fundamental property of lexical elements in natural language that they are neutral with respect to different modes of reference or non-reference. That is, we reject the idea that a certain use of a lexical element, e.g. a use which allows reference to particular spatio-temporally bounded objects in the world, should be linguistically prior to all other possible uses, e.g. to generic and non-specific uses. From this it follows that we do not consider generic uses as derived from non-generic uses as it is occasionally assumed in the literature. Rather, we regard these two possibilities of use as equivalent alternative uses of lexical elements. The typological ...

Im weiteren Teil dieses Einleitungsartikels werde ich […] auf einige offene Fragen in der Argumen... more Im weiteren Teil dieses Einleitungsartikels werde ich […] auf einige offene Fragen in der Argumentationstheorie generell eingehen und dann auf solche, die speziell durch die beiden Arbeiten in diesem Arbeitspapier aufgeworfen wurden. Danach werde ich auf die Wahl des Datenmaterials eingehen und auf die speziellen Probleme, die das gewählte Medium (Internet-Forum) mit sich bringt. Anschließend werden sowohl konvergente als auch divergente Ergebnisse der beiden Arbeiten diskutiert, letztere insbesondere in Hinblick auf die Frage, ob sie durch den unterschiedlichen Diskussionsgegenstand bedingt sind. Zum Schluss werden dann noch einige terminologische Details angesprochen

Dieses Arbeitspapier geht aus einem Hauptseminar zur Argumentationstheorie hervor, das [von Leila... more Dieses Arbeitspapier geht aus einem Hauptseminar zur Argumentationstheorie hervor, das [von Leila Behrens] im Wintersemester 2008/09 am Institut für Linguistik der Universität zu Köln gehalten [wurde]. In den beiden Arbeiten in diesem Band (Badtke et al. und Benning et al.) stellen die Studierenden dieses Hauptseminars die Ergebnisse vor, die sie (in zwei parallelen Projektgruppen mit unterschiedlichen Diskussionsgegenständen) bei der empirischen Analyse von Argumentationen in einem Internet-Forum gewonnen haben. Der Gegenstand der Diskussion betraf bei der einen Gruppe (Badtke et al.) die Unabhängigkeit des Kosovo, bei der anderen Gruppe (Benning et al.) die Einführung eines generellen Rauchverbots in europäischen Hauptstädten

When something is in focus, light falls on it from different angles. The lexicon can be viewed fr... more When something is in focus, light falls on it from different angles. The lexicon can be viewed from different sides. Six views are represented in this volume: a cognitivist view of vagueness and lexicalization, a psycholinguistic view of lexical

Human Cognitive Processing

Metadiscourse is a fundamental property of human communication in a way similar to speech acts. F... more Metadiscourse is a fundamental property of human communication in a way similar to speech acts. From a cross-linguistic study of metadiscourse, we can learn ‘how humans bridge the divide between self and others’ in communication. This chapter concentrates on those pragmatic aspects of metadiscourse which are associated, in some languages, with markers of evidentiality, epistemic modality, and focus (information structure). With respect to typological comparison, I advocate a domain-centered, onomasiologically-oriented approach. I argue that we have to distinguish between a subjective, speaker-related dimension of metadiscourse and an intersubjective, interactionally-oriented one in order to solve some longstanding puzzles in this domain. Data from Quechua, Tibetan, Hungarian, Albanian, and some other languages is used to support the presented claims. Keywords: Albanian; epistemic modality; evidentiality; focus; Hungarian; information structure; metadiscourse; mirative; Quechua; Tibetan

Text, Context, Concepts, 2003

STUF - Language Typology and Universals, 2000

grammar) is conceived of as a structured inventory of interconnected morphosyntactic categories. ... more grammar) is conceived of as a structured inventory of interconnected morphosyntactic categories. Especially for those approaches with a functionalist orientation, it holds that the study of semantics is considered important on two levels: (a) on a languageindependent level, on which abstract morpho-syntactic categories such as ASPECT, TENSE, NUMBER, PLURAL, are defined as having certain functions in natural language in general; (b) on the level of the interpretation of data while determining and theoretically evaluating translation equivalents. Concerning (a), Whaley’s recent ”Introduction to Typology” (1997) may be quoted. After defining the chief task of typology as comparing formal properties across languages, he points out that it does not follow from this that semantic considerations would be entirely excluded from typological studies given that ”typologists have always been concerned with semantic categories, such as ”tense”, ”agent,” or ”gender,” and how these categories are manifested by the formal units of language” (p. 14). It is probable that the difference between two types of approaches to morpho-syntactic typology earlier ones, more strongly rooted in the structuralist tradition, which claim that the tertium comparationis in typology lies in the formal aspect of language, and those propagating a meaning-to-form method, claiming the tertium comparationis must be a semantic one3 is smaller than it may appear at first sight. Both approaches actually compare formal properties, while only the second approach makes it explicit that such comparison necessarily presupposes a language-independent semantic basis. Note, however, that late American structuralists already had an implicit notion of language-independent categories partly shaped by semantic considerations. This is attested in the fact that the earlier practice of representing morphemes as sets of allomorphs was often abandoned in favor of a morphemic representation by means of small-caps category labels (e.g. ”the {PLURAL} morpheme”).4 As far as the ”semantic basis” in typology is concerned, there is, nevertheless, a subtle but important difference between that which Talmy calls ”semantic domain” and the hypothesis that language-specific manifestations of universal morpho-syntactic categories share a common core meaning. While ”semantic basis” in the first sense is a methodologically guided semantic restriction on the domain of investigation without strong claims about the existence of universal categories in this domain, it is tied to just such claims in the second sense, where it is understood as the semantic part of universally defined grammatical categories. In the case of the latter, heuristic assumptions about such language-independent core meanings are sometimes even used as a kind of justification for abstracting from semantic peculiarities in language-specific constructions when treating these as manifestations of certain universal categories (cf. Croft 1990). This point is strongly emphasized also by Anna Wierzbicka (1995: 181): 3 ”The ”meaning-to-form” method of description has its basis in typological research. For a typological point of view concerning various linguistic entities always demonstrates that the highest degree of generalization is available on the semantic level, if the functional nature of an entity is clear.” (Kibrik 1986: 166) 4 We should bear in mind that the structuralist practice of representation and grammar writing has strongly influenced (and still influences) the way hitherto undocumented languages are described for the first time in the form of a grammar. Large-scale typology projects comparing a great number of languages inevitably rely on such grammatical descriptions as the only source of information, since for a considerable number of languages, this is the only kind of written information easily accessible.

Studies in Language, 2007

According to traditional wisdom, reciprocal predicates can only occur with plural subjects. This ... more According to traditional wisdom, reciprocal predicates can only occur with plural subjects. This is assumed either because the reciprocal predicates in question are constructed by means of a reciprocal anaphor, which is considered as being inherently plural and hence requiring a plural antecedent, or, if there is no binding requirement, the following principle of argument mapping is implicitly assumed: all participants of a reciprocal situation need an overt realization by the same highest syntactic argument. Since a reciprocal relation minimally involves the existence of two participants, and since (in the languages considered so far) the highest syntactic argument is the subject, this mapping principle leads to the idea that the subjects of reciprocal predicates should be confined to plural or conjoined phrases. In this paper, I will show that this principle turns out to be unrealistically strong, once real discourse data are considered, in particular from a cross-linguistic persp...

Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 1994

Human Cognitive Processing

Text, Context, Concepts, 2003

STUF - Language Typology and Universals, 2000

Studies in Language, 2007

Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft, 1994