In a Mediative Mood: The Semantics of the German Reportive Subjunctive

Fabricius‐Hansen, Cathrine; Sæbø, Kjell Johan

doi:10.1023/b:nals.0000034514.27887.d9

Cited by 34 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…If John learned that Mary were pregnant, he would be devastated does not imply that Mary is in fact pregnant; but in the sentence If John learned that Mary is pregnant, he would be devastated, we obtain a peculiar (‘Double Access’) reading in which the worlds referred to in the embedded clause must include both the counterfactual world(s) picked out by the if ‐clause and the world of utterance (this was the effect we saw in the temporal domain in: John knew two months ago that Mary is pregnant; see Schlenker, 2004b for a comparison between temporal and modal ‘Double Access’ readings ). In addition, there are moods (the ‘Konjunktiv I’ in German) which can exclusively be evaluated with respect to the context of a reported speech act—they are the direct counterpart of the ‘logophoric’ pronominal elements of Ewe and Gokana that were discussed earlier (Roncador, 1988; Schlenker, 2003; Stechow, 2003; Fabricius‐Hansen and Saebø, 2004).…”

Section: Systems Of Referential Classification Across Ontologicalmentioning

confidence: 87%

Ontological Symmetry in Language: A Brief Manifesto

Schlenker

2006

Mind & Language

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: In the tradition of quantified modal logic, it was assumed that significantly different linguistic systems underlie reference to individuals, to times and to ‘possible worlds’. Various results from recent research in formal semantics suggest that this is not so, and that there is in fact a pervasive symmetry between the linguistic means with which we refer to these three domains. Reference to individuals, times and worlds is uniformly effected through generalized quantifiers, definite descriptions, and pronouns, and in each domain grammatical features situate the reference of terms as near, far or ‘further’ from the actual or from a reported speech act. We outline various directions in which a program of ontological symmetry could be developed, and we offer in the a symmetric fragment developed in a logic that can be seen as a compromise between an extensional and an intensional system.

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Section: Systems Of Referential Classification Across Ontologicalmentioning

confidence: 87%

Ontological Symmetry in Language: A Brief Manifesto

Schlenker

2006

Mind & Language

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“…Summing up, the above arguments indicate that a presupposition-like analysis of durch is plausible and that such an approach involves an extension of presupposition theory to apply also to the sentence-internal level (see also Fabricius-Hansen and Saebø 2004).…”

Section: The Semantics Of Durch As a Sentence-internal Presuppositionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Lexical Pragmatics and Unification

Solstad

2007

Res on Lang and Comput

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The German causal preposition durch ('by', 'by means of', 'through') specifies the nature of the causing event in a causal relation between events. In combination with a causative predicate, durch simply contributes additional information concerning the causing event in the causal relation expressed by the predicate. When combined with a non-causative change of state predicate, however, durch may also introduce such a causal relation by itself. It is shown that modelling this varying contribution of durch poses a challenge to formal-semantic analyses applying mechanisms of strict compositionality such as functional application. An alternative formalism based on recent developments in Discourse Representation Theory is developed, including unification as a mode of composition as well as a more elaborate analysis of presuppositional phenomena. It is further argued that the analysis can be restated in pragmatic terms, providing an argument for presuppositions applying solely to the sentence-internal level.

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“…Insofern zeichnet sich bei dem deutschen Indikativ ein gewissermaßen 'liberaleres' System als im Norwegischen ab; vgl. das folgende Solfjeld (2007: 13) Es werden im Folgenden weitgehend Fragestellungen aufgegriffen, die schon in Pütz (1989Pütz ( , 1994, Askedal (1997), Fabricius-Hansen (1989, Fabricius -Hansen /Saebø (2004), Solfjeld (2007) und nicht zuletzt neuerdings in Vadøy (2008) aufgegriffen worden sind.…”

Section: Evidentialität Und Referatindikatoren Im Deutschen Und Norweunclassified

Redewiedergabe in verschiedener Form - ein Vergleich Deutsch-Norwegisch

Solfjeld¹

2017

HJLCB

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The subject of the present empirical study -based on both fi ctional texts and newspaper texts -is direct and indirect reported speech in German and Norwegian. The focus of the study is the broader range of structural possibilities for marking reported speech in German, for instance the subjunctive mood, which can be exploited to signal reported speech in syntactically independent sentences, i.e. on discourse top-level, in a way that is not possible in Norwegian. The study shows that the structural differences create different possibilities in German and Norwegian for identifying propositions as having another origin than the actual speaker/writer. Generally, Norwegian readers must rely on pragmatic inferences to a higher degree than German readers in order to identify the source. Furthermore, direct reported speech is more frequent in the Norwegian than in the German newspaper texts.

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In a Mediative Mood: The Semantics of the German Reportive Subjunctive

Cited by 34 publications

References 24 publications

Ontological Symmetry in Language: A Brief Manifesto

Ontological Symmetry in Language: A Brief Manifesto

Lexical Pragmatics and Unification

Redewiedergabe in verschiedener Form - ein Vergleich Deutsch-Norwegisch

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