Why Private Meanings Are Incoherent. Commentary on target article "Who Conceives of Society?" by Ernst von Glasersfeld
Open peer commentary on the target article “Who Conceives of Society?” by Ernst von Glasersfeld. Excerpt: I will focus on one crucial step in von Glasersfeld’s argumentation, viz. his view that every individual constructs his own private meanings...
mehr
|
Volltext:
|
|
|
Zitierfähiger Link:
|
|
|
Open peer commentary on the target article “Who Conceives of Society?” by Ernst von Glasersfeld. Excerpt: I will focus on one crucial step in von Glasersfeld’s argumentation, viz. his view that every individual constructs his own private meanings (understood as conceptual structures or elements thereof) for linguistic expressions, so that linguistic interaction and even communication in general is based on a notion of compatibility between different speakers’ private conceptual schemes. The central question here is: “Just what does it mean that different private conceptual schemes (private meanings) are compatible, or what constitutes a viable criterion to this end?” As von Glasersfeld himself stresses twice (§28, §37), the criteria to be looked for can only be “public,” residing in properties of verbal and non-verbal actions of the interacting individuals, properties that can be sensed and processed by the participating system.
|
Word‐Length distribution in Inuktitut narratives: Empirical and theoretical findings
This paper deals with the distribution of word length in short native mythological and historical Eskimo narrative texts. To my knowledge, no Eskimo‐Aleut data have been the object of quantitative linguistic investigation so far. Due to the strong...
mehr
|
Volltext:
|
|
|
Zitierfähiger Link:
|
|
|
This paper deals with the distribution of word length in short native mythological and historical Eskimo narrative texts. To my knowledge, no Eskimo‐Aleut data have been the object of quantitative linguistic investigation so far. Due to the strong linguistic and Stylistic homogeneity of the examined texts it was assumed that these texts can be subsumed under a single law of word length distribution, if word length distribution of a text is considered as a function of certain of its properties, such as author, language, and genre. So far, word length distribution in texts of a wide variety of languages and genres has been demonstrated to follow distributions of the compound Poisson family of discrete probability distributions. In view of the morphological idiosyncrasies of the Eskimo language in general, which are responsible for an unusually high mean word length of about 4.5 to 5.2 syllables per word in the texts, it is interesting to see whether Eskimo texts show a significantly different behaviour with respect to word length. The results demonstrate that the Eskimo data employed in this study can be fitted well by the Hyperpoisson distribution. Two further discrete probability distributions will be deduced from certain morphology‐based assumptions about Eskimo. It turns out that most of the Eskimo data can be fitted by these two distributions. The question to what extent these results point to a more grammar‐oriented theory of word length is also discussed.
|
Relating Word Length to Morphemic Structure: A Morphologically Motivated Class of Discrete Probability Distributions
In this article an alternative way of accounting for the distribution of word length – as measured in terms of number of syllables per word – in texts of certain natural languages will be explored.
mehr
|
Volltext:
|
|
|
Zitierfähiger Link:
|
|
|
In this article an alternative way of accounting for the distribution of word length – as measured in terms of number of syllables per word – in texts of certain natural languages will be explored.
|
Laws and Theories in Quantitative Linguistics
According to a widespread conception, quantitative linguistics will eventually be able to explain empirical quantitative findings (such as Zipf’s Law) by deriving them from highly general stochastic linguistic ‘laws’ that are assumed to be part of a...
mehr
|
Volltext:
|
|
|
Zitierfähiger Link:
|
|
|
According to a widespread conception, quantitative linguistics will eventually be able to explain empirical quantitative findings (such as Zipf’s Law) by deriving them from highly general stochastic linguistic ‘laws’ that are assumed to be part of a general theory of human language (cf. Best (1999) for a summary of possible theoretical positions). Due to their formal proximity to methods used in the so-called exact sciences, theoretical explanations of this kind are assumed to be superior to the supposedly descriptive-only approaches of linguistic structuralism and its successors. In this paper I shall try to argue that on close inspection such claims turn out to be highly problematic, both on linguistic and on science-theoretical grounds.
|
Consistency of Sense Relations in a Lexicographic Context
The representation of semantic relations between word senses of different entries in a dictionary is subject to a number of consistency requirements. This paper discusses the issue of maintaining and accessing consistent information on...
mehr
|
Volltext:
|
|
|
Zitierfähiger Link:
|
|
|
The representation of semantic relations between word senses of different entries in a dictionary is subject to a number of consistency requirements. This paper discusses the issue of maintaining and accessing consistent information on cross-references between sense-related items in electronic dictionaries from a mainly text-technological point of view. We present a number of consistency criteria for cross-referencing related senses and propose a practical approach to handling sense relations in an online dictionary. Our proposal is currently being tested in a large ongoing online dictionary project for German called elexiko. We focus on three different aspects of the dictionary development and editing process where consistency is an important issue: lexicographic data modelling, implementation of a lexicographic database system for an electronic dictionary, and development of practical tools for the lexicographer’s workbench.
|
vernetziko: A Cross-Reference Management Tool for the Lexicographer’s Workbench
vernetziko is an assistive software tool primarily designed for managing cross-references in XML-based electronic dictionaries. In its current form it has been developed as an integral part of the lexicographic editing environment for the German...
mehr
|
Volltext:
|
|
|
Zitierfähiger Link:
|
|
|
vernetziko is an assistive software tool primarily designed for managing cross-references in XML-based electronic dictionaries. In its current form it has been developed as an integral part of the lexicographic editing environment for the German monolingual dictionary elexiko developed and compiled at the Institut für Deutsche Sprache, Mannheim. This paper first briefly outlines how vernetziko fits into the XML-based dictionary editing technology of elexiko. Then vernetziko’s core functionality and some of the auxiliary tools integrated into the program are presented from both a practical and a technological point of view. The concluding sections discuss some software engineering aspects of extending the tool to handle cross-references between multiple resources and point out some of the advantages of vernetziko vis-à-vis corresponding features of proprietary dictionary writing systems. The software can be adapted to interconnect off-the-shelf components (database management systems and editors), thus providing a tailor-made lexicographical workbench for a wide range of XML-based dictionaries without vendor lock-in.
|
| Export in Literaturverwaltung |
|
Aligning word senses and more: tools for creating interlinked resources in historical loanword lexicography
This paper presents a dictionary writing system developed at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim (IDS) for an ongoing international lexicographical project that traces the way of German loanwords in the East Slavic languages Russian,...
mehr
|
Volltext:
|
|
|
Zitierfähiger Link:
|
|
|
This paper presents a dictionary writing system developed at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim (IDS) for an ongoing international lexicographical project that traces the way of German loanwords in the East Slavic languages Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian that were possibly borrowed via Polish. The results will be published in the Lehnwortportal Deutsch (LWP, lwp.ids-mannheim.de), a web portal for loanword dictionaries with German as the common donor language. The system described here is currently in use for excerpting data from a large range of historical and contemporary East Slavic monolingual dictionaries. The paper focuses on the tools that help in merging excerpts that are etymologically related to one and the same Polish etymon. The merging process involves eliminating redundancies and inconsistencies and, above all, mapping word senses of excerpted entries onto a common cross-language set of ‘metasenses’. This mapping may involve literally hundreds of excerpted East Slavic word senses, including quotations, for one ‘underlying’ Polish etymon.
|
| Export in Literaturverwaltung |
|
