The Verbal Construction of Reality

1975 ◽  
Vol 20 (10) ◽  
pp. 807-808
Author(s):  
R. P. MCDERMOTT
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Remus Gergel ◽  
Martin Kopf-Giammanco

Abstract The goal of this article is to diagnose a verbal construction which has made it to common use in Austrian German and is typically unknown to many speakers of Federal German who have not been exposed to Austrian German. This construction is based on the verb gehen (‘go’) conjoined by a particle and the reflexive. An argument for its analysis as a degree-based sufficiency construction is developed, which is constructed by extending existing approaches in the literature on enough constructions and suggesting a meaning of the construction at hand, which is presuppositional in multiple respects. The results of diachronic corpus searches as well as the significance of the results of this work for the space of possibilities of the semantic change of motion verbs are discussed.


2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-388
Author(s):  
Margreet Dorleijn

AbstractThis paper considers the relevance of studying metalinguistic comments about the embedding of Turkish infinitives in Dutch morphology. It focusses on bilingual Dutch and Turkish spoken in the Netherlands. Data of computer mediated communication (CMC) is used. The paper reports on an analysis of the (sparse) occurrence of Turkish verb embedding in Dutch and the accompanying metalinguistic comments. For this, an exploration of the internet as well as of a data set compiled form Turkish-Dutch discussion fora consisting of 1.335.592 words was conducted. I am indebted to Dirk Vet, University of Amsterdam, for invaluable help and assistance with technical issues concerning the compilation of the data corpus. Also I would like to thank Maarten Kossmann and Yaron Matras for their valuable comments. Remaining flaws are mine. A comparison is made with the reverse verbal construction in Turkish-Dutch bilingual speech (Dutch infinitives + Turkish infinitive yapmak ‘to do’). The absence of evaluative comments on the latter construction suggests it has been accepted as norm-behavior in the Turkish-Dutch community. Embedding of Turkish verbs in Dutch morphology, by contrast, is not accepted. The paper discusses the extent to which metalinguistic comment can be used as a diagnostic tool to uncover implicit norms of non-standard varieties.


1992 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 411-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Wylie

Literary practitioners have long been, often uncomfortably, aware of the ambivalently fruitful and constraining rhetorical influences of the past. Writers successively utilize or rebel against traditional tropes, poetic conventions, and narrative norms, balancing cultural depth against individualist innovation, acceptability against rejection, public intelligibility against the opacity of private connotation. By such gestures towards the traditions, literature challenges, upholds, or leaves unquestioned the moral, political, and cultural pre-suppositions of its day.South African historiography is less aware than it might be of its textuality, in this sense, of its immersion in a similar “anxiety of influence,” as Harold Bloom has termed it. Little attention has been paid to its rhetorical lineaments and heritage or to the ways historians have read, used, and departed from one another. This is dramatically illustrated by the case of the historiography of Shaka Zulu (assassinated in 1828). Nowhere else has such poverty of evidence and research spawned such a massively unquestioned, long-lived, and monolithic “history.” Only in the last decade has the legendary, verbal construction of the Shaka figure been seriously questioned; only in 1991, at an important colloquium at the University of the Witwatersrand, was something approaching an academic consensus reached that themfecane—the notion of Shaka's Zulus as the “storm-center” of a sub-continental explosion of autophagous, black-on-black violence—was no longer a credible vehicle for understanding the early nineteenth century in southern Africa.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 56-83
Author(s):  
Elena V. Kapinos

The article deals with the first poetry book by S. Tretyakov “Iron Pause” (“Zheleznaya pauza”) published in Vladivostok in 1919 but prepared for publication earlier in Moscow – in 1915–1917. “Iron Pause” (“Zheleznaya pauza”) belongs to rare and little investigated books for which the approach used in the article with respect to poetics is topical. The author analyzed the key texts of the first and second parts of the books: “The Match Box” (“Spichechnaya korobka”), “You in Darkness Read, Like a Cat” (“Vy v temnote chitaete, kak koshka”), “Carpet” (“Kover”), “Allegro Trills” (“Treli allegro”), “Impudent People” (“Nakhaly”). All these poems are interconnected not only by common motifs, but also by verbal construction; they are characterized by intensive word dynamics and geometry, numerous metonymic substitutions, high-level sematic concentration and complicated rhythmic and phonetic patterns. Special attention in the article is paid to the undertones of the enigmatic poem “Impudent People” (“Nakhaly”) depicting some scenes of aggression, violence, “brutality” under the semblance of a festive event with fireworks. The poem’s underlying idea displays traces of works by V. Khlebnikov (“The Star Alphabet”), by V. Mayakovsly (“The War and the World” poem) and by poets belonging to the Vladivostok creative group “Tvorchestvo”. Lyrical plots of the poems assembled in the book “Iron Pause” (“Zheleznaya pauza”) are not original; they are traditional for avant-garde poetry and in a broader sense – for modernist poetry. However, Tretyakov vitalizes traditional lexical repertory of modernist poetry giving it occasional meaning and using all lexical units to achieve complex phonics and rhythmic structure. Except that the article offers the implications review of the key poems of “Iron Pause” (“Zheleznaya pauza”), “Impudent People” (“Nakhaly”), just like the entire book “Iron Pause” (“Zheleznaya pauza”), is read by the article author in presence of the Far-Eastern publicism and criticisim from newspapers and magazines published at the turn of 1920s by various Far-Eastern political and literary entities. The article bibliography includes rare 1918–1922 editions of the Far East: newspapers “Echo” («Ekho»), “Vladivo-Nippo”, “Far Eastern Review” (“Dalnevostochnoe obozrenie”), “Manchurian Life” (“Manzhurskaya zhisn’”), journals “Creation” (“Tvorchestvo”), “Biruch”, “Lel’”, “Yun’”, “Week” (“Nedelya”), etc.


Author(s):  
Romana Łapa

The text is about modality from a linguistic point of view. The author takes a broad understanding of a modal category (modality indentified with communicative intention) and analyses the so called basic modal units: verbs and predicates, which together with an infinitive create a verbal construction. She examines a function of the mentioned expressions in the Code of Canon Law. Willing to accept a specific character of contexts with modal expressions, she includes in the description conclusions coming from earlier study of newspaper texts, homilies and speeches of John Paul II.


2014 ◽  
pp. 199-208
Author(s):  
James P. Allen
Keyword(s):  

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