Linguistic congruency of nominal concept types in German texts
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Christian Horn
Abstract
This paper presents an empirical investigation of Löbner’s (2011) theory of concept types and determination (CTD). The theory is based on the assumption of four basic types of nouns (sortal, relational, individual, functional) and their congruency with certain modes of determination. Löbner predicts that incongruent uses are less frequent than congruent uses. Horn and Kimm (2014) present a first text-based pilot study on this topic. They investigated two German fictional texts and found results that support Löbner’s prediction. However, the restricted text basis and the preliminary annotation procedure employed in their pilot study call for an improvement of the method and an extension of the texts investigated. The study presented here provides an enhanced annotation procedure and amends the text collection with a choice of German newspaper texts. This text type is expected to contain less subsequent mentions than fictional texts and a greater variety of individual nouns, e.g. proper names, and, thus, contribute to a wider picture. The results of the investigation corroborate these expectations and provide further evidence for the noun type distinction. The paper is structured as follows: Section 1 provides a brief summary of the theoretical background of the study, i.e., primarily the theory of concept types and determination. In Section 2, I report the method and results of the pilot study by Horn and Kimm (2014). The improved method and the case study are presented in Section 3, followed by the conclusion in Section 4.
© 2015 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Preface
- A blueprint of the Entrenchment-and- Conventionalization Model
- Metonymies don’t bomb people, people bomb people
- “Oft in my face he doth his banner rest”
- The historical development of saburafu
- Loanword adaptation: Phonological and cognitive issues
- Framing the difference between sources and goals in Change of Possession events
- Usage-based linguistics and conversational interaction
- Intelligent design
- The constructional patterns of L2 German meteorological events by native French-, Dutch- and Italian-speaking L1 learners
- Linguistic congruency of nominal concept types in German texts
- How bizarre!
- Let’s go look at usage
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Masthead
- Preface
- A blueprint of the Entrenchment-and- Conventionalization Model
- Metonymies don’t bomb people, people bomb people
- “Oft in my face he doth his banner rest”
- The historical development of saburafu
- Loanword adaptation: Phonological and cognitive issues
- Framing the difference between sources and goals in Change of Possession events
- Usage-based linguistics and conversational interaction
- Intelligent design
- The constructional patterns of L2 German meteorological events by native French-, Dutch- and Italian-speaking L1 learners
- Linguistic congruency of nominal concept types in German texts
- How bizarre!
- Let’s go look at usage
