General Linguistics Colloquium (SoSe 2024)

It has long been claimed for various levels of linguistic representation that change is essentially determined or at least confined by structure. While in phonology there is general agreement that structural constraints play a role but are by no means pervasive, work on modeling morphological change, especially analogy, often starts from the premise that structure is crucial. As for syntax, the general consensus is that structure is at the very core of change. See for grammaticalization e.g. Lehmann 2015; van Gelderen 2004, but also Eckardt 2012 for the role of compositionality in semantic reanalysis.

It is not the aim of this talk to dismiss the role of structure in language change. However, I intend to show that a-structural change based on the simple extension of surface patterns is equally important and that it occurs at all levels of linguistic representation. To push things one step further, I claim that analogical change may even be anti-structural. Anti-structural analogical change is a type of pattern extension which overrides structural requirements or constraints.The talk illustrates anti-structural change and discusses its consequences for the theory of language change.

In current classifications of semantic change, amelioration and pejoration are treated as major process types, along with generalization, specialization, metaphor, and metonymy. Amelioration and pejoration, however, pose a number of challenges which will be addressed in the paper: Both terms are notoriously ill-defined, there is a lack of sufficient empirical data, and it is not even clear whether both are semantic developments in their own right rather than mere by-products of other mechanisms such as metaphors or euphemisms. On the basis of historical dictionaries and corpora, it will be tried to provide some answers to these questions and to show how both phenomena fit into a broader picture of non-denotational meaning change.

The presentation departs from the observation that in expressing ideas, some languages encode more details than others. It investigates whether languages encode events and objects at a coarse-grained (e.g., put, glass) as opposed to a fine-grained (e.g., lay, wine glass) level systematically. The level of detail is termed granularity, which is viewed as a cline from fine-grained (semantic specificity) to coarse-grained meaning (semantic generality). Four languages are investigated: German, English, Greek, and Turkish. The study draws on elicited data from a naming task. The verbalization of events is based on event and object descriptions in selected semantic domains. The results reveal significant granularity effects between languages and language types (satellite-framed vs. verb-framed)..

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Um eine Entität zu bezeichnen, die aus dem Kontext oder der Gesprächssituation bekannt ist, wird im Deutschen normalerweise ein Personalpronomen gebraucht. Eine solche Entität wird aber im Koreanischen gegebenfalls als Nomen realisiert (Was hast du zu ihm gesagt? vs. nwuna-nun mwue(s)-lako ha-ess-nuntey? ‘ältere.Schwester-TOP was-KONJ sag-PRÄT-Q’; Freuen Sie sich denn gar nicht? vs. thimcangnim-un kippu-cito anh-supni-kka? ‘Abteilungsleiter-TOP froh-ADVL nicht.sein-HON-Q’). In meinem Vortrag möchte ich also zeigen, welche nominalen Entsprechungen der deutschen Personalpronomina im Koreanischen zu finden sind, und in welchen kommunikativen Situationen bzw. unter welchen Bedingungen sie auftreten. Hierfür werden in deutschen und koreanischen Spielfilmen die Verwendung der deutschen Personalpronomina und deren nominalen Entsprechungen im Koreanischen verglichen. Dadurch lässt sich feststellen, dass im Koreanischen zum Ausdruck der bekannten Person in Bezug auf das soziale Verhältnis zum Sprecher ein Eigen- oder Gattungsname gebraucht werden kann.

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