Fra rappresentazioni concettuali, categorie grammaticali e accidenti della storia: «il fascino inquieto della ricerca scientifica» di Romano Lazzeroni

This paper discusses the impact of Romano Lazzeroni’s scholarship on Historical Linguistics and Indo-European studies altogether, by analyzing his groundbreakingworks and long-lasting legacy in relation to the state of the art and current research on four main questions: 1. morphosyntax/semantics interface; 2. linguistic andcultural reconstruction; 3. linguistic categorization; 4. language change. A portrait of Romano Lazzeroni as a brilliant and unique Teacher is also provided, as a modest token of gratitude to a giant of science and big-hearted Mentor.

Embodiment, Semantics and Social Action: The Case of Object-Transfer in L2 Classroom Interaction

Using conversation analysis and usage-based linguistics, I focus on a beginning L2 user in an ESL classroom and trace his use of a “family of expressions” which, from the perspective of linguistic theory, are instantiations of either the ditransitive dative construction (e.g., “he told me the story”) or a prepositional dative construction (e.g., “he told the story to me”). The semantics of both constructions denotes transfer of an object, physically or metaphorically, from one agent to another. Therefore, I investigate them as one type of object-transfer construction. The instances of the construction are found predominantly in instruction sequences, and I show how the L2 user co-employs talk and recycled embodied work that elaborates the deictic references of the talk and the relation of agent-object-recipient roles among them. Through my analyses, I will showcase the embodied nature of linguistic categorization (Langacker, 1987) but take the argument further and suggest that the semiotic resource known as “language” is a residual of embodied social sense-making practices (aus der Wieschen and Eskildsen, 2019). The study draws on the MAELC database at Portland State University, a longitudinal audio-visual corpus of American English L2 classroom interaction.

S (Bachmanns) Anna.

In rural speech communities, when speakers refer to persons, their family of origin is omnipresent, not only by passing on the name of the family patriarch, but also in the serialization of surname and first name and in the grammatical structures of reference forms (der Müller Peter, s Müllers Peter). This paper portrays the diachronic development of reference forms and elaborates on their preservation in synchronic reference systems. Furthermore, it explores a referent’s linguistic categorization into social groups and shows that different grammatical structures foreground certain distinctions, which can also overlap. In rural villages, inofficial house names, derived from the patriarch’s first name or profession, are still in use. When an individual marries into another house, the reference to this person can change accordingly.

La reduplicación léxica como mecanismo metalingüístico

The aim of the present article is to analyse the metalinguistic function of the nominal reduplication in Spanish. The lexical reduplication is a mechanism that consists in repeating a lexical unit within one phrase. The study shows that the nominal reduplication presents metalinguistic functions that reveal the interest of the speakers in a number of semantic issues related to the linguistic categorization and the concept of prototype. What is more, the metalinguistic aspect of the reduplicative constructions play a crucial role in a variety of situations as it entails some intersubjective meanings that are of a great importance for the interaction.

The grammar of ‘non-realization’

On the basis of cross-linguistic data from both genetically and geographically related and unrelated languages, in this article we argue that the linguistic phenomena usually referred to as the avertive, the frustrative and the apprehensional belong not to three but to five – semantically related, and yet distinct grammatical categories, all of which involve different degrees of non-realization of the verb situation in the area of Tense-Aspect-Mood: apprehensional, avertive, frustrated initiation, frustrated completion, inconsequential. Our major goal here is to account for these grammatical categories in terms of an adequate model of linguistic categorization. For this purpose, we apply the notion of Intersective Gradience (introduced for the first time in the morphosyntactic domain in Aarts (2004, 2007) to the morphosemantic domain. Thus the present approach reconciles two major approaches to linguistic categorization: (i) the classical, Aristotelian approach and (ii) a more recent, gradience/fuzziness approach.

Prototype-driven alternations: The case of German weak nouns

Over the past years, multifactorial corpus-based explorations of alternations in grammar have become an accepted major tool in cognitively oriented corpus linguistics. For example, prototype theory as a theory of similarity-based and inherently probabilistic linguistic categorization has received support from studies showing that alternating constructions and items often occur with probabilities influenced by prototypical formal, semantic or contextual factors. In this paper, I analyze a low-frequency alternation effect in German noun inflection in terms of prototype theory, based on strong hypotheses from the existing literature that I integrate into an established theoretical framework of usage-based probabilistic morphology, which allows us to account for similarity effects even in seemingly regular areas of the grammar. Specifically, the so-calledweakmasculine nouns in German, which follow an unusual pattern of case marking and often have characteristic lexical properties, sporadically occur in forms of the dominantstrongmasculine nouns. Using data from the nine-billion-token DECOW12A web corpus of contemporary German, I demonstrate that the probability of the alternation is influenced by the presence or absence of semantic, phonotactic, and paradigmatic features. Token frequency is also shown to have an effect on the alternation, in line with common assumptions about the relation between frequency and entrenchment. I use a version of prototype theory with weighted features and polycentric categories, but I also discuss the question of whether such corpus data can be taken as strong evidence for or against specific models of cognitive representation (prototypes vs. exemplars).

Jak (wy)tłumaczyć punkt widzenia kota?

How to Explain a Cat’s Viewpoint? (On Russian Translations of Wisława Szymborska’s Poem Cat in an Empty Apartment) This paper deals with some difficulties related to Russian translations of Wisława Szymborska’s poem Cat in an empty apartment. The question of presence and visibility of lyrical subject in the original text and its translations is one of the major issues presented in the article. An analysis of N. Astafiewa’s and N. Gorbaniewska’s tranlations has been conducted with special respect to the agentivity phenomenon on the level of verb forms. Linguistic categorization has also been mentioned. The author tries to present how differently Russian translators, who perform their typical role of poetry translators, strive for faithfulness of form and content of the original text and in what manner their solutions can influence the lyrical subject’s viewpoint.