This book systematically investigates what follows about meaning in language if current views on the limited, or even redundant, role of linguistic semantics are taken to their radical conclusion. Focusing on conditionals, the book defends a wholly pragmatic, wholly inferential account of meaning - one which foregrounds a reasoning subject's individual state of mind. The topics discussed in the book include conceptual content, internalism and externalism, the semantics-pragmatics distinction, meaning holism and explicit versus implicit communication. These topics and the author's analysis of conditionals will allow the reader to engage with some traditional and current research in linguistics, philosophy and psychology.

Linguistic constructions such as the English a ~Mary is cleverer than/as clever as Johna (TM) reveal a number of non-trivial problems, particularly if one includes Italian, which the present study resolves with the aid of a new grammatical model. What is new for Italian is the extension of the perspective beyond the comparative to other types of comparative construction, which are examined here systematically and in detail for the first time. It is shown that apparently differing constructions can actually be described on the syntactic level in a unitary manner.

How is it that words come to stand for the things they stand for? Is the thing that a word stands for - its reference - fully identified or described by conventions known to the users of the word? Or is there a more roundabout relation between the reference of a word and the conventions that determine or fix it? Do words like 'water', 'three', and 'red' refer to appropriate things, just as the word 'Aristotle' refers to Aristotle? If so, which things are these, and how do they come to be referred to by those words? In Roads to Reference, Mario Gomez-Torrente provides novel answers to these and other questions that have been of traditional interest in the theory of reference. The book introduces a number of cases of apparent indeterminacy of reference for proper names, demonstratives, and natural kind terms, which suggest that reference-fixing conventions for them adopt the form of lists of merely sufficient conditions for reference and reference failure. He then provides arguments for a new anti-descriptivist picture of those kinds of words, according to which the reference-fixing conventions for them do not describe their reference. This book also defends realist and objectivist accounts of the reference of ordinary natural kind nouns, numerals, and adjectives for sensible qualities. According to these accounts these words refer, respectively, to 'ordinary kinds', cardinality properties, and properties of membership in intervals of sensible dimensions, and these things are fixed in subtle ways by associated reference-fixing conventions.

This book addresses different linguistic and philosophical aspects of referring to the self in a wide range of languages from different language families, including Amharic, English, French, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Newari (Sino-Tibetan), Polish, Tariana (Arawak), and Thai. In the domain of speaking about oneself, languages use a myriad of expressions that cut across grammatical and semantic categories, as well as a wide variety of constructions. Languages of Southeast and East Asia famously employ a great number of terms for first person reference to signal honorification. The number and mixed properties of these terms make them debatable candidates for pronounhood, with many grammar-driven classifications opting to classify them with nouns. Some languages make use of egophors or logophors, and many exhibit an interaction between expressing the self and expressing evidentiality qua the epistemic status of information held from the ego perspective. The volume's focus on expressing the self, however, is not directly motivated by an interest in the grammar or lexicon, but instead stems from philosophical discussions on the special status of thoughts about oneself, known as de se thoughts. It is this interdisciplinary understanding of expressing the self that underlies this volume, comprising philosophy of mind at one end of the spectrum and cross-cultural pragmatics of self-expression at the other. This unprecedented juxtaposition results in a novel method of approaching de se and de se expressions, in which research methods from linguistics and philosophy inform each other. The importance of this interdisciplinary perspective on expressing the self cannot be overemphasized. Crucially, the volume also demonstrates that linguistic research on first-person reference makes a valuable contribution to research on the self tout court, by exploring the ways in which the self is expressed, and thereby adding to the insights gained through philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.

Wylie Breckenridge offers a fresh understanding of the character of visual experience by deploying the methods of semantics. He develops a theory of what we mean by the 'look' sentences that we use to describe the character of our visual experiences, and on that basis develops a theory of what it is to have a visual experience with a certain character. The result is a new and stronger defence of a neglected view, the adverbial theory of perception.

The study uses a broad empirical database to clarify the variable time reference and modal reading ("unreal"/"potential") of non-past related (i.e. temporally refunctioned) forms such as 'wAre gekommen' [would have come] (e.g. 'Morgen wAre sie gekommen' [She would have come tomorrow]) and differences in meaning compared with forms such as 'kAme/wA1/4rde kommen' [would come]. The study concludes with a survey of the temporal refunctioning of the past subjunctive back into the 16th century.

This book is an introduction to the relationship between the morphosyntactic properties of sentences and their associated illocutionary forces or force potentials. The volume begins with several chapters dedicated to important theoretical and methodological issues, such as sentence and utterance meaning, illocutionary force, clause types, and cross-linguistic comparison. The bulk of the book is then composed of chapter-length case studies that systematically investigate typologically prominent clause types and their forces, such as declaratives and assertions, interrogatives and questions, and imperatives and commands. These case studies begin with an overview of the necessary theoretical foundations, followed by a discussion of the grammatical structures of English, and an assessment of the relevant cross-linguistic facts. Each chapter ends with a succinct summary of the most important findings, practice exercises, and recommendations for further reading and research. Overall, the book works towards developing a gradient model of clause types that goes substantially beyond the traditional distinction between major and minor clause types. It draws on insights from linguistics, philosophy, and sociology, and may be used as a textbook for undergraduate or graduate courses in semantics, pragmatics, and morphosyntax.

The continental Germanic languages are well known to possess a wealth of modal particles (such as eigentlich, auch, and denn in German), whereas this is not the case in the Romance languages. The argument advanced here is that in Romance languages their functions are expressed by other means. To supply a tertium comparationis the study elaborates a communicative definition of modality, enabling us to identify forms of modal shading independently of translation comparisons. The investigation also demonstrates that in diachronic terms forms of modal shading (whether particles or not) are recruited from a specific type of language change.

The subject of this extensive corpus-based study is the distribution and the functional role played by a total of 22 indefinite nouns in 9 key texts for Italian linguistic and literary history dating from the late 13th to the early 16th century (including ANovellinoA, ADecameronA, and Bembo's AProseA). The central issue is the semantic and functional differentiation of these indefinite forms as encountered in the texts. This is pinpointed by way of comparison with their Latin etyma and modern Italian equivalents. A further essential aspect is the problem of the grammaticalization of indefinite noun determinants in Italian and the Romance languages in general.

The book discusses the central concepts of National Socialist art policy: 'degenerate art' and 'German art'. With the aid of linguistic discourse analysis the history of these concepts is traced from their emergence in the 18th century and their development investigated up to the deontic potential they were invested with in National Socialist criticism of literature and art. The author demonstrates how these two concepts were drawn upon in word and text as a foundation for bans on artists and the burning of paintings in the Third Reich.

The 'profile' of a word is understood here as the totality of the semantic, combinatory, and grammatical features determining its specific communicative potential. The book provides profiles of well over 100 French nouns and verbs, thus supplying new foundations for the distinction of synonyms, the differentiation of subordinate meanings, and the etymology of the words in question. The study draws upon large-scale electronic corpora (modern novels, newspapers). The purpose of this approach is to demonstrate that the typical collocations encountered in everyday usage can be explained with reference to deeper semantic and cognitive structures.

This book provides an introduction to the theory and methods of historical semantics. It gives a survey of the most important types of semantic innovation (metaphor, metonymy etc.), it describes typical paths and results of semantic change (polysemy, competition of lexical units, shifts of prototypical meaning), and it presents historical case studies on various fields of German vocabulary (from speech act verbs to forms of address). The book is designed for readers with no background knowledge of semantics and can be used for seminar discussion or self-study. It contains extensive exercises and suggestions for further reading.

Im alltaglichen Sprachgebrauch werden Somatismen, d.h. Phraseologismen, die ein Koerperteil als Komponente beinhalten, besonders in der gesprochenen Sprache verwendet. Die UEbersetzbarkeit dieser formelhaften Konstituenten ist aufgrund ihrer komplexen lexikalischen und semantischen Zusammensetzung sowie der soziokulturellen Unterschiede bisweilen problematisch. UEbersetzer und Sprachlehrer sehen sich immer wieder vor die Herausforderung gestellt, in der Zielsprache nach einer moeglichen AEquivalenz suchen zu mussen. Das vorliegende Woerterbuch, in dem die deutschen somatischen Redewendungen mit ihren synonymen turkischen Entsprechungen in Gruppen gegliedert sind, kann als Hilfsmittel bei der ubersetzerischen Tatigkeit verwendet werden und eignet sich fur den Fremdsprachenunterricht.

Das Buch untersucht die Semantik der Substantivkomposita des Mittelhochdeutschen. Grundlage ist das Korpus des Projekts "Mittelhochdeutsche Grammatik" von Th. Klein, K.-P. Wegera und H.-J. Solms. Der Autor bestimmt die aktuellen Bedeutungen der Belege in ihrem jeweiligen UEberlieferungskontext, der moeglichst vollstandig mitgeteilt wird. Vor diesem Hintergrund werden die Wortbildungsbedeutungen der einzelnen Woerter angesetzt, die wiederum Grundlage der anschliessenden semantischen Klassifizierung der Komposita sind. Das Bindungsverhaltnis zwischen Grundwort und Bestimmungswort wird nach einem bereits fur die Gegenwartssprache erprobten Raster ermittelt.

Die Studien greifen den Widerspruch zwischen der bestandigen Prasenz von Schrifttexten im Alltag und deren mangelnder empirischer textlinguistisch-stilistischer Bearbeitung auf. Der Kommunikationsbereich Alltag ist uber seine soziokulturelle und historische Wesenheit charakterisiert, deshalb fokussieren die Beitrage innerhalb eines kommunikationsorientierten Ansatzes synchronische, diachronische, interkulturelle und produktiv-rezeptive Aspekte ausgewahlter Schrifttexte. Aufgrund der Unabgeschlossenheit dieses Kommunikationsbereichs, seiner UEberschneidungen und Vernetzungen mit anderen Kommunikationsbereichen sind keine prototypischen Schrifttextsorten des Alltags inferierbar. Es wird gezeigt, dass es bezuglich einzelner Textsorten Zuordnungen von Formulierungsweisen gibt, dass jedoch das Ausloten von Polaritaten, wie Privatheit - Offizialitat, Usualitat - Kreativitat, Normbefolgung - Saloppheit, eine gangige kommunikative Praxis darstellt. Die Besonderheit des Bandes besteht darin, dass ein Ausschnitt schriftlicher Alltagskommunikation sowie deren sozio-kulturell-historische Determination starker in den Fokus empirisch-linguistischen Interesses geruckt werden.

Das Buch eroertert die Verbalisierungsschwierigkeiten von olfaktorischen Wahrnehmungen. Hierfur betrachtet der Autor zunachst die Olfaktorik aus kulturell-philosophischer, neurophysiologischer und anthropolinguistischer Perspektive. Des Weiteren legt er dar, wie man uber Geruche im Deutschen und Polnischen spricht. Er geht auf zweierlei Art und Weise vor. Zunachst erfolgen anhand von Woerterbuchern Analyse und Vergleich des deutschen und polnischen Geruchswortschatzes auf der synchronen und diachronen Ebene. Anschliessend zeigt der Autor mithilfe von sprachlichen Korpora und unter Anwendung der kognitiv-linguistischen Methodologie (Frame-Semantik, konzeptuelle Metapher) auf, wie heute Geruche im Deutschen und Polnischen verbalisiert und konzeptualisiert werden.

Die in diesem Band vereinigten Beitrage nehmen Bezug auf Forschungsgegenstande der Germanistik und angewandten Sprachwissenschaft, insbesondere der Morphologie, Syntax, Phraseologie, der Text- und Diskurslinguistik sowie der Translations- und Literaturwissenschaft. Die Autorinnen und Autoren wurdigen mit ihren Beitragen die wissenschaftlichen Leistungen der polnischen Germanistin und ehemaligen Prasidentin des Verbandes Polnischer Germanisten Zofia Berdychowska, Professorin an der Jagiellonen-Universitat Krakow. Die Publikation erscheint anlasslich ihres 65. Geburtstages im Jahr 2016.

Ziel der Autorin ist die Entwicklung einer morphologisch-semantischen Modellierungsmethode zur Klarung semantischer Probleme in einer mehrsprachigen Terminologie (in der sicherheitsrelevanten Ortungsterminologie der Landverkehrsfachsprache in Deutsch, Englisch, Turkisch). Intralinguale Probleme (Synonymie, Polysemie, Homonymie) klart sie durch einen morphologischen Ansatz und interlinguale Probleme (AEquivalenzprobleme) durch einen semantischen Ansatz (durch Klarung intralingualer Probleme). Folglich entsteht eine konsistente mehrsprachige Terminologie. Aus der Untersuchung resultiert, dass intralinguale Probleme interlinguale Probleme verursachen. Insofern fuhrt ihre Behebung zur Behebung interlingualer Probleme. Ausgenommen von diesem Zusammenhang sind terminologische Lucken.

Multimodalitat ist ein typisches Merkmal der Kommunikation im Social Web. Der Fokus dieses Bandes liegt auf der Kommunikation in Foto-Communitys, insbesondere auf den beiden kommunikativen Praktiken des Social Taggings und des Verfassens von Notizen innerhalb von Bildern. Bei den Tags stehen semantische Text-Bild-Relationen im Vordergrund: Tags dienen der Wissensreprasentation, eine adaquate Versprachlichung der Bilder ist folglich unabdingbar. Notizen-Bild-Relationen sind aus pragmatischer Perspektive von Interesse: Die Informationen eines Kommunikats werden komplementar auf Text und Bild verteilt, was sich in verschiedenen sprachlichen Phanomenen niederschlagt. Ein diachroner Vergleich mit der Postkartenkommunikation sowie ein Exkurs zur Kommunikation mit Emojis runden das Buch ab.

Thema des Buches ist eine korpus- und framebasierte Beschreibung der semantischen und syntaktischen Struktur der prapositionalen Komplemente bei Adjektiven unter Berucksichtigung der Ergebnisse der aktuellen Valenzforschung. Eine weitere Komponente ist die Bestimmung von Kriterien und Testverfahren zur Unterscheidung zwischen obligatorischen und fakultativen prapositionalen Komplementen und Supplementen. Das vom Autor verwendete Untersuchungsmodell enthalt die Angaben zu Argumentstruktur, semantischer und syntaktischer Valenz des entsprechenden Adjektivs, zur Obligatheit bzw. Fakultativitat des prapositionalen Komplements und zum Frame, zu welchem dieses Adjektiv gehoert.

This volume explores the linguistic expression of modality in natural language from a cross-linguistic perspective. Modal expressions provide the basic tools that allow us to dissociate what we say from what is actually going on, allowing us to talk about what might happen or might have happened, as well as what is required, desirable, or permitted. Chapters in the book demonstrate that modality involves many more syntactic categories and levels of syntactic structure than traditionally assumed. The volume distinguishes between three types of modality: 'low modality', which concerns modal interpretations associated with the verbal and nominal cartographies in syntax; 'middle modality', or modal interpretation associated with the syntactic cartography internal to the clause; and 'high modality', relating to the left periphery. It combines cross-linguistic discussions of the more widely studied sources of modality with analyses of novel or unexpected sources, and shows how the meanings associated with the three types of modality are realized across a wide range of languages.