Linguistic evaluation has become an important area of inquiry in recent years. In the traditions of, e.g., lexical semantics, phraseology, corpus linguistics, and interactional linguistics, a large inventory of linguistic means have been identified by which speakers can express evaluative meanings. However, the class of German sentential idioms, e.g., Das kannst du dir in die Haare schmieren (lit. 'You can smear that into your hair' , fig. 'That is useless'), has not gained much attention. This paper explores how the evaluative meaning of German sentential idioms is constructed syntactically, semantically, and pragmatically. In particular, it is investigated how the meaning of these idioms interacts with the context in which they are used. A context model of evaluation is developed in which the cognitive category of cause plays a central role. The model is applied to contextualized examples, the findings supporting the hypothesis that cause is one of the core categories of evaluation.
The status of identical constituent compounds (ICCs) (e.g. Künstler-Künstler, ‘artist-artist’) is discussed controversially in the morphological literature on German. In this paper, it is claimed that ICC formation is a productive word formation pattern in German. In the first part of the paper, I investigate the formal, semantic and pragmatic properties of ICCs in German. Based on this description, I discuss in more detail two conflicting claims about their meaning constitution: the ‘prototype reading claim’ and the ‘context-dependency claim’. I argue that ICCs do not behave differently, in principle, from canonical N+N compounds with respect to context-dependency. Based on a discussion of selected theoretical models of nominal compounds, an approach is sketched that takes into account not only semantic and contextual, but also stored conceptual and experiential knowledge as main sources of knowledge in ICC interpretation. In the second part of the paper, the results of a pilot experimental study are presented in which 40 native speakers were asked to paraphrase a set of context-free German ICCs. The findings clearly indicate that ICCs are systematically interpretable in isolation, with a significant preference for ‘prototype’ (e.g. Winter-Winter: ‘very cold winter’) and ‘real’ readings (e.g. Holz-Holz: ‘real wood, not artificial wood’).
This article deals with the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of the x und x ('x and x') construction in German, cf. A: Schade, dass die [Schabracken] so teuer sind! Ϫ B: Naja, teuer und teuer, wenn die Qualität stimmt, dann finde ich den Preis okay. (A: 'What a pity that the horsetrappers are so expensive!' Ϫ B: 'Well, expensive and expensive, if the quality is good, the price is fine with me.'). The specific discourse function of this construction is to negotiate the situational meaning of a previously used lexical item. Typologically, it has been claimed that the pattern is language-specific for Scandinavian. The paper challenges this assumption, providing empirical evidence from a questionnaire study with German students and a corpus of German examples from internet forum and newsgroup dialogues. Theoretically, the aim of the paper is to show that the specific discourse function of the pattern can be accounted for by regular interactions between syntax, semantics and pragmatics. A central assumption is that the x-expressions are pure quotations. The quotation analysis can account for the fact that the construction licenses a range of different syntactic categories as x-expressions. It also accounts for the fact that it is the lexical meaning of the x-expressions which is focused by the construction. The illocutionary force of the construction is derived via an I-implicature.
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