Lotte Hogeweg

Rich lexical representations and conflicting features

This paper argues that interpretations are fine-grained and that, to come to a full understanding of meaning, it is important to find out more about how such detailed interpretations are derived. As a first step towards answering this question it is insightful to look at the interpretation of metaphors. Psycholinguistic experiments have shown that the interpretation of metaphors involves the suppression of irrelevant or incompatible features. These studies could be taken as an indication against the common view that word meanings are underspecified and enriched in a context. In contrast with this underspecification view, this paper suggests a view of the lexicon in which words come with very rich semantic representations. When two representations are combined, a conflict may arise when elements of the representations are incompatible. This paper argues that such a conflict is best analyzed in Optimality Theory. The optimization process of combining rich lexical representations is illustrated with an analysis of the adjective-noun combination stone lion.

The use of secondary pronouns in a literary work

Abstract For this study we investigated all occurrences of Dutch second person pronoun subjects in a literary novel, and determined their interpretation. We found two patterns that can both be argued to be functionally related to the de-velopment of the story. First, we found a decrease in the generic use of second person, a decrease which we believe goes hand in hand with an increased distancing of oneself as a reader from the narrator/main character. Second, we found an increase in the use of the descriptive second person. The increased descriptive use of second person pronouns towards the end of the novel is very useful for the reader, because the information provided by the first person narrator himself becomes less and less reliable. Thus, the reader depends more strongly on information provided by other characters and what these characters tell the narrator about himself.

Semantic markedness in gender opposition, blocking and fossilization

Abstract The semantics of natural gender in animate nouns is modeled in the framework of bidirectional Optimality Theory (OT). This allows for the interaction of lexical, conceptual and contextual constraints and for a straightforward treatment of the effect of blocking in this domain. Two versions of bidirectional OT are discussed and related to each other in terms of Blutner’s (2007) notion of fossilization.

The L2 acquisition of the German particle 'doch'

Abstract Discourse particles are notoriously difficult to acquire for second language learners. It has been argued that this difficulty is caused by a lack of equivalent concepts in the learner’s native language. In this article we compare the acquisition of the German particle doch by speakers of Dutch and speakers with a native language other than Dutch. Like German, Dutch has a rich inventory of discourse particles and one of them can be considered the cognate of doch: toch. We performed our investigation by means of an online cloze test among 85 Dutch students of German and 76 learners of German with a first language other than Dutch. We tested five different functions of doch, some of which overlapped with the functions of Dutch toch and some which did not. Our results indicate that it is beneficial to have similar particles in one’s mother tongue but we did not find evidence that it is extra beneficial to have form-meaning equivalents between the L1 and L2.

Person and perspective in language and literature

This special issue investigates the language of literature, focusing in particular on person and perspective, which both play an important part in narrative strategies. Because much of what emerges as literary meaning is the outcome of ordinary everyday language, the challenge is to find a way to model the interaction between linguistic and other sources of information (context, culture) that yield literary interpretation. The questions we address in this special issue concern the linguistic means by which perspective or narrative point of view is realized in literary texts. Since linguistic elements steer the understanding of a text, linguistic research into the use and interpretation of person and perspective markers is very relevant for literary studies. Moreover, the investigation of literary texts can shed new insight on the mechanisms of language and communication as well. Perspective and related notions such as focalization (Genette 1980) and orientation (Toolan 2001) refer to the point of view from which the events in a narrative are described or perceived. Whose perspective is taken is usually seen as a matter of answering (one of) two possible questions, i.e., ‘who speaks?’ or ‘who describes?’ and ‘who sees?’ or ‘who perceives?’ (Genette 1980, Rimmon-Kenan 1983, Toolan 2001). These questions and their answers diverge when an omniscient first person narrator tells a story (‘who describes’) taking the perspective of a third person character (‘who sees’). In the case of a first person narrator who is also a character in the story, the two questions and answers usually converge, while a retrospective first person narrator entails double focalization (RimmonKenan 1983). An important determinant of perspective is thus formed by the use of personal pronouns.