Franz Davis - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Franz Davis

Satztypen und Konstruktionen, 2015

Revue de sémantique et pragmatique, 2017

These considerations are partly based on a talk I gave on the annual conference of the German soc... more These considerations are partly based on a talk I gave on the annual conference of the German society for linguistics (DGfS) 3/2012 and on d'Avis (2001, 2013a). See also Rett (2011) for a si'i'ar dei‚itio‚. I a'so tha‚k the audie‚ce of the co‚fere‚ce o‚ « Exc'a'atio‚ and intersubjectivity », Nice 12/2015, Isabelle Ohles for help with the french abstract, and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. (4) a. Das ist üblicherweise/herkömmlicherweise/gewöhnlicherweise so. 'This is generally/customarily/commonly so' b. Das ist in der Regel/im Allgemeinen so. 'This is so as a rule/in general' 2 Cf. d'Avis (2013a, 2016a, 2016c).

Language and Linguistics Compass, 2016

It is not equally easy for all languages to establish an exclamative sentence type. It seems the ... more It is not equally easy for all languages to establish an exclamative sentence type. It seems the easiest for those languages that feature a morphological marking for an exclamative sentence type like Turkish or Vietnamese. English on the other hand is a language that does not mark exclamative clauses with an easily identifiable marker but uses certain preferred constructions, which allow us to separate a class of ‘exclamative sentences’ from other sentence types. However, there is another class of languages for which it is even harder to determine if ‘exclamative sentences’ exist as a sentence type. In those languages, these sentences share a striking amount of formal properties with sentences used for different speech acts. German is a case in point, and we will look at the properties of exclamative sentences in this language in detail.

The Syntax and Semantics of the Left Periphery, 2004

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 1996

Satztypen des Deutschen, 2013

How tolerant is universal grammar?

Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 2000

Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik, 2013

In German, singular count nouns usually are accompanied by a determiner (cf. Ich habe ein Auto, ‘... more In German, singular count nouns usually are accompanied by a determiner (cf. Ich habe ein Auto, ‘I have a car’ vs. *Ich habe Auto, ‘I have car’). In recent years, however, the singular count noun Vertrag (‘contract’) is frequently used without a determiner, as in Er hat Vertrag bis 2013 (‘He has contract until 2013’). Although there is some doubt, intuitively, whether or not this construction is grammatically acceptable to native speakers, it definitely exists in today’s German. In this contribution, we examine the in-between status of the Vertrag+haben-construction in German in more detail. We try to find an answer to the following question: How can we explain that Vertrag haben, on the one hand, is less acceptable than the regular Hunger haben (‘be hungry’ [‘have hunger’]) but, on the other hand, is much more acceptable than *Auto haben (‘have car’)? In a diachronic corpus study on (Er) hat Vertrag, we show, first, that this construction is used in German newspaper texts since 199...

Theoretical Linguistics, 2002

Pejorative statements are often based on generic sentences. But what makes generic sentences so s... more Pejorative statements are often based on generic sentences. But what makes generic sentences so suitable for expressing pejoration? This article discusses the relevant properties of generics and their relation to a speaker’s normalcy conceptions (NC), i.e. to what a speaker considers to be normal w.r.t. to the world. What NC and generic sentences have in common is that they allow exceptions. This property is exploited when we use generic sentences for pejoration. In a pejorative statement, the basic pattern – which is indifferent to content – is filled with negative content and we arrive at our negative prejudices, typically expressed by generic sentences.