Gerhard Schaden

Modelling the “Aoristic Drift of the Present Perfect” as Inflation An Essay in Historical Pragmatics

In this article, the diachronic tendency of present perfect forms to become more and more past tense-like is analysed in terms of an inflationary process within an Iterated Learning Model. The paper proposes to improve on current accounts of the diachrony of present perfects (mostly set in the framework of grammaticalisation theory) by making explicit a selfreinforcing causal mechanism that drives the process, namely that speakers overestimate the current relevance contribution of their utterances. The main theoretical issue is to develop an explicit account of language change where modifications in a linguistic system are long-term effects of the use of language, or, put differently, of speaker-hearer interaction and the biases that act upon them.

Relevance and utility in an argumentative framework: an application to the accommodation of discourse topics

In this paper, we address the question of the exact place one should attribute to game theory in the analysis and modelisation of meaning in natural language. One can think of at least three possible positions with respect to this issue:

Semiotic systems with duality of patterning and the issue of cultural replicators

Two major works in recent evolutionary biology have in different ways touched upon the issue of cultural replicators in language, namely Dawkins’ Selfish Gene and Maynard Smith and Szathmáry’s Major Transitions in Evolution. In the latter, the emergence of language is referred to as the last major transition in evolution (for the time being), a claim we argue to be derived from a crucial property of language, called Duality of Patterning. Prima facie, this property makes natural language look like a structural equivalent to DNA, and its peer in terms of expressive power. We will argue that, if one takes seriously Maynard Smith and Szathmáry’s outlook and examines what has been proposed as linguistic replicators, amongst others phonemes and words, the analogy meme-gene becomes problematic. A key issue is the fact that genes and memes are assumed to carry and transmit information, while what has been described as the best candidate for replicatorhood in language, i.e. the phoneme, does by definition not carry meaning. We will argue that semiotic systems with Duality of Pattering (like natural languages) force us to reconsider either the analogy between replicators in the biological and the cultural domain, or what it is to be a replicator in linguistics.

Zur Syntax und Semantik des doppelten Perfekts aus alemannischer Sicht

In diesem Artikel analysieren wir Funktion und Syntax des doppelten Perfekts (DPF) mit besonderer Berücksichtigung von alemannischen Daten. Wir argumentieren für eine intervallbasierte Herangehensweise an die Semantik der Konstruktion, wonach sie eine Zeitspanne bezeichnet, die ein Ereignis sowie einen Resultatszustand enthält, der bis zu einem Referenzzeitpunkt in der Vergangenheit anhält. Wir werden zeigen, dass sich damit die Hauptlesarten der Konstruktion wie auch ihre interpretatorischen Einschränkungen im Vergleich zu Perfekt und Plusquamperfekt gut erklären lassen. Die Interpretationen ergeben sich direkt aus der syntaktischen Struktur, bei der das Partizip von sein/haben als Kopula und das lexikalische Partizip als adjektivisch analysiert werden. Für den adjektivischen Status führen wir neue morphosyntaktische Evidenz (Wortstellungsrestriktionen, Flexion am Partizip) aus alemannischen Dialekten an.

Appropriate Pragmatic Behaviour: Response to Foster-Cohen and Wong

In my comment on Foster-Cohen and Wong (Early intervention at the interface: semantic-pragmatic strategies for facilitating conversation with children with developmental disabilities. In: Depraetere I, Salkie R (eds) Drawing a line. Perspectives on the semantics-pragmatics interface. Springer, Cham, pp 00–01, 2016), I focus on how pragmatic impairment and strategies to improve pragmatic behaviour contribute to our understanding of the semantics-pragmatics interface. I argue that the two main points papers like theirs show are the following: first, in studying pragmatics, we cannot purely rely on competence, but we have to take into account performance, that is, actual behaviour; second, there is no straightforward subsequency relation between semantics and pragmatics: pragmatics intervenes before and after semantics.