A contrastive view on the cognitive motivation of linguistic patterns: Concord in English and German
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Juliana Goschler
Abstract
This paper reports the results of a quantitative contrastive study of English and German in the area of syntactic vs. semantic concord - the agreement of number of subject and verb if the subject is semantically plural but syntactically singular. Based on English and German newspaper corpora, I look at constructions with quantifying nouns of the form [a number/bunch/heap of NPL] and their German equivalents [ein(e) Reihe/Menge/Haufen von NPL]. I show that there is variation in both languages, and the influencing factors are the same in both languages. Semantic motivation could explain the variation in German, however, it does not hold for English. Based on these results, I argue for more careful propositions on semantic motivations even if cognitively plausible, and instead more contrastive work that can bring to light language specific differences in the construal of semantic categories such as number.
© 2018 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelei
- Contents
- Introduction
- Metapragmatic appositions in German talk-in-interaction
- How interactional needs shape information structure: An analysis of the discourse functions of topicalization in three L2 varieties of English
- The encoding of motion events in football and cycling live text commentary: A corpus linguistic analysis
- Can Macromania be explained linguistically? Beneath the morphological boundary: A sketch of subconscious manipulation strategies in Emmanuel Macron’s political discourses
- Nonmanual downtoning in German co-speech gesture and in German Sign Language
- Cognitive cultural models at work: The case of German-speaking Switzerland
- Cognitive descriptions in a corpus-based dictionary of German paronyms
- A contrastive view on the cognitive motivation of linguistic patterns: Concord in English and German
- Idiomatic singleton or prototype? A productivity analysis of be-adj-and-v
- Networks of meanings: Complementing collostructional analysis by cluster and network analyses
- A frame-analysis of the interplay of grammar and cognition in emission verbs
- Bridging the gap: Toward a cognitive semantic analysis of the Lithuanian superlexical prefix be-
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Titelei
- Contents
- Introduction
- Metapragmatic appositions in German talk-in-interaction
- How interactional needs shape information structure: An analysis of the discourse functions of topicalization in three L2 varieties of English
- The encoding of motion events in football and cycling live text commentary: A corpus linguistic analysis
- Can Macromania be explained linguistically? Beneath the morphological boundary: A sketch of subconscious manipulation strategies in Emmanuel Macron’s political discourses
- Nonmanual downtoning in German co-speech gesture and in German Sign Language
- Cognitive cultural models at work: The case of German-speaking Switzerland
- Cognitive descriptions in a corpus-based dictionary of German paronyms
- A contrastive view on the cognitive motivation of linguistic patterns: Concord in English and German
- Idiomatic singleton or prototype? A productivity analysis of be-adj-and-v
- Networks of meanings: Complementing collostructional analysis by cluster and network analyses
- A frame-analysis of the interplay of grammar and cognition in emission verbs
- Bridging the gap: Toward a cognitive semantic analysis of the Lithuanian superlexical prefix be-
