Towards a Typology of Diagrams in Linguistics (original) (raw)

Diagrammatic Exploration of Some Concepts in Linguistics

This paper aims to strengthen the relationship between the fields of computer science and linguistics, as they share common problems, especially in the area of natural language understanding. The paper explores some issues in linguistics, including the notion of telic and atelic predicates, in an attempt to understand and enhance knowledge about natural language. A diagrammatic tool for computer science is utilized to comprehend and interpret linguistics concepts. The resulting representation is an example of its use as an apparatus for clarifying linguistics writings for computer scientists.

Diagramming Grammatical and Lexical Aspect

Studies in African Linguistics

The interaction of grammatical aspect and lexical aspect has been a topic of interest to linguists for many years, yet only recently has more attention been focused on this topic specifically in relation to Bantu languages. The difficulty of mapping Bantu actional types onto the commonly accepted categorizations has resulted in new frameworks being proposed to take these complex lexicalisations into account. In this paper, we use Croft’s (2012) two-dimensional diagrammatic representations of events to represent the aspectual contour encoded by certain predicates in the South Tanzanian Bantu language Bungu [wun]. We investigate the semantics of the Progressive, Anterior, and Resultative aspects in Bungu, and by identifying the phases within each aspectual contour that are profiled by each of these grammatical aspects, we show that the particular interpretation of each aspect depends on the type of predicate that it modifies. By using Croft’s diagrammatic representations of events to ...

The Diagram as The Universal Language

2017

"Within the conceptual diaspora of diagrammatic visualization exists a vast array of applications for the diagram as a medium of universal language—ubiquity, accessibility and concise or otherwise linguistically useful convection of informations and systems are hallmarks of the diagram as a language. Within this array, most outstanding is diagrammatic reasoning, or the application of diagrams as visual convections of concepts and ideas. Of the many modes of diagrammatic reasoning is German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz' (1646-1716) postulation of the Characteristica Universalis, or universal characteristic, a universal and formal language which could, in application, express both complex scientific and metaphysical concepts, further usable within a framework of universal logic and calculation (Leibniz' calculus ratiocinator, a " theoretical universal logical calculation framework " which would serve the philosopher's intentions to render an encyclopedia comprising all human knowledge. Leibniz' application of the diagrammatic structure as a means of universal language attests to the diagram's ubiquity and immense capacitation as an accessible language which defies traditional linguistic, cultural, and in many instances socioeconomic divides. The universality of the image, drawing on the compendium of objective semiotics (that images and signs prevail as a universal language, often recognized as inhabiting the same meaning across a multitude of cultures), indicates that diagrammatic visualization is I) a language, or dialect and II) within the framework of language, perhaps among the most accessible thereof qua logical reasoning. Further indicated, then, is the immense potency of the diagram to transcend language boundaries and to thereby make accessible to the layman concepts and ideas precedently reserved within the agency of class or particular socioeconomic perimeters..."

Seeing the language: a diagrammatic approach to natural discourse

The key idea behind the diagrammatic approach presented in the paper is that the sophisticated mechanisms of human visual construction also play an important role in natural languages. We propose a diagrammatic representation of English, giving examples, translation rules, and semantics. Special attention will be paid to anaphoric phenomena, in particular, the possibility of a uniform treatment of anaphoric pronouns.

Introducing the diagrammatic semiotic mode

arXiv (Cornell University), 2020

As the use and diversity of diagrams across many disciplines grows, there is an increasing interest in the diagrams research community concerning how such diversity might be documented and explained. In this article, we argue that one way of achieving increased reliability, coverage, and utility for a general classification of diagrams is to draw on recently developed semiotic principles developed within the field of multimodality. To this end, we sketch out the internal details of what may tentatively be termed the diagrammatic semiotic mode. This provides a natural account of how diagrammatic representations may integrate natural language, various forms of graphics, diagrammatic elements such as arrows, lines and other expressive resources into coherent organisations, while still respecting the crucial diagrammatic contributions of visual organisation. We illustrate the proposed approach using two recent diagram corpora and show how a multimodal approach supports the empirical analysis of diagrammatic representations, especially in identifying diagrammatic constituents and describing their interrelations in a manner that may be generalised across diagram types and be used to characterise distinct kinds of functionality.

2006, From conceptualization to linguistic expression: Where languages diversify, In: S. Gries & A. Stefanowitsch (eds), Corpora in Cognitive Linguistics, Berlin etc: Mouton de Gruyter, 297-344.From conceptualization to linguistic expression: Where languages diversify

The study presented here reports on a corpus-based analysis of English, German and Russian expressions of posture scenes focussing on the conceptualizations they reflect. With the focus being on the verbal elements habitually and regularly realizing the trajector of a posture scene and the location at which a person or object is positioned, it can be shown that even for the verbalization of such commonly experienced scenes as posture scenes, different speech communities may conventionalize different routes or diverging construals, and thus cause language-specific ‘idiosyncrasies’ in the form of particular collocations. The languages at issue are found to exhibit such differences for scenes in which the trajector of a posture scene is construed relative to a location that is independent of the posture, and they turn out to be mainly due to the variation in the salience attributed to image-schematic aspects involved in the construal of the respective scenes. Keywords: Corpus analysis, cross-linguistic, collocations, construal, image-schemas

Promoting the Visualisation of Linguistic Theories (2013)

Facets of Linguistics | editors: Anne Ammermann, Alexander Brock, Jana Pflaeging, Peter Schildhauer

This paper seeks to promote the idea of visualising linguistic theories in the context of teaching (English) linguistics to beginner students. Drawing on a typology of pic-tures of knowledge transfer commonly applied in (educational) psychology, I use a semiotic approach to refine the categorisation. Having gained a workable terminolo-gy, I investigate a small corpus of chapters on semantics extracted from contempo-rary introductory books to English linguistics. My analysis focusses on the quantity and quality of picture use. A suggestion concerning the question of how linguistic theories could be visualised concludes my paper.