Esme Winter-Froemel

Expanding the Lexicon: At the crossroads of innovation, productivity, and ludicity

Traditionally, the creation of new lexical units and patterns – understood in a wide sense as not being necessarily limited to the word level – has been studied in different research frameworks. Whereas approaches focusing on morphological productivity are directed at system-internal (‘grammatical’) morphological processes, other approaches have aimed at identifying general types of lexical innovation and describing them in the larger context of lexical change, thus integrating system-external factors related to the historical background of the innovations and their diffusion. In this way, lexical change provides insights into general motives of language change and basic mechanisms of language processing. The aim of this volume is to discuss fundamental aspects of dynamic processes in the lexicon, including recent and ongoing changes as well as historical processes of change, and to bring new evidence to bear on the traditional dividing line between approaches oriented towards system-internal and system-external aspects. Current research in language change is marked by a renewed interest in the lexicon, as documented by recent international conferences and publications on structural, typological and cognitive approaches to the lexicon and on regularities of lexical change in the larger context of language change (see, among many others, Blank 1997; Ágel et al. 2002; Brinton and Traugott 2005; Haspelmath and Tadmor 2009; Libben et al. 2012; Zeschel 2012; Ostermann 2015). At the same time, within theoretical linguistics, recent years have seen an increase in more and more psycholinguistically informed work on morphological complexity and productivity, which explicitly relates issues of productivity and modularity in the lexicon to what we know about lexical processing (e.g. Hay 2003; Baayen et al. 2011; Pirelli et al., in press). The strong interest in this topic was also documented by the high number of submissions we received for the call for papers for our international workshop Expanding the lexicon / Extensions du lexique / Erweiterungen des Lexikons – Linguistic Innovation, Morphological Productivity, and the Role of Discourse-Related

The Semiotics of Multilingual Wordplay in Linguistic Landscapes: Communicative Settings, the Hearer-Origo, and Contextual Knowledge

Notions like linguistic vs. social context, or co-text and context, as well as the range of phenomena to be included within these categories have been intensely discussed in previous research. The present paper approaches these issues from a usage-based perspective. I will focus on selected examples of multilingual wordplay in advertising messages in the Linguistic Landscape (LL). Multilingual wordplay appears to be particularly informative, as it implies that several linguistic codes are involved. Moreover, linguistic utterances which form part of the LL are characterised by spatial boundedness and may refer to various kinds of situational facts. In addition, this paper aims at reflecting upon the semiotic and communicative foundations of LL advertising. It will be argued that the messages are mostly characterised by communicative distance between the speaker and the addressees, but that a more immediate communicative setting is often simulated, involving a referential shift to the hearer-origo functioning as the basic point of reference. The spatial boundedness of LL messages can be interpreted from a general semiotic perspective, which underlines the importance of different types of contextual information. I will finally argue that the different types of knowledge involved can be systematised with the help of two distinctions: 1) linguistic vs. extra-linguistic knowledge, and 2) knowledge related to the concrete situation of communication vs. general, situation-independent knowledge.

Ambiguitätsphänomene im Umfeld des Verbs in der Diachronie der romanischen Sprachen

Abstract The French indefinite pronoun on and the Spanish existential haber show processes of evolution in the verb domain which go beyond the traditional concept of grammaticalization: On develops into a 1st person plural pronoun in spoken French, and for haber we can find uses where the verb agreement reveals that the participant has been reinterpreted as a subject instead of an object, e. g. habían soldados ‘there were soldiers’. I will argue that these processes of change can be analyzed in a unified framework built on the notion of ambiguity. In order to develop such a framework, I will start by discussing previous approaches to ambiguity in logics and semantics. In a next step, I will propose a wider definition of this concept which integrates cases of ambiguity in the language system as well as cases of ambiguity in discourse, and I will outline semantico-cognitive and pragmatic parameters which permit us to define basic situations of ambiguity in speaker-hearer interaction. These situations of ambiguity characterize basic scenarios of innovation, and analyses focusing on the development of new ambiguities in discourse may thus offer valuable perspectives on language change.

Ambiguität in der Sprecher-Hörer-Interaktion: Linguistische und literaturwissenschaftliche Perspektiven

In our paper, we explore the use and functions of ambiguity in communication, i. e. in speaker-hearer-interaction. A pragmatic point of view opens up the possibility to include parameters such as the roles of speaker and hearer, the salience of ambiguity in communication and its effects on ongoing communication as well as contexts that frame the occurrence of ambiguity. These parameters are applicable onto examples from everyday speech and literary communication alike.Our interdisciplinary approach, together with our choice of examples, goes beyond traditional perspectives on ambiguity in several ways. Including examples of pragmatic ambiguity that are not inherent to the language system allows us to investigate the central role of ambiguity in language change. The study of literary examples shows that ambiguity also involves several levels of speakers and hearers so that ambiguity can be analyzed both within the text and on a level outside the text. All this contributes to an increase of complexity in the communicative situation and thus gives us a more comprehensive perspective on ambiguity in its manifold varieties.