Volume 11, Issue 2

Der Beitrag fragt im Kern nach dem Sprachsubjektverständnis bei Searle. Mit einer geistphilosophisch grundierten Lesart wird der These nachgegangen, dass in Searles Ansatz eigentlich zwei Sprachsubjektverständnisse enthalten sind. Das offizielle Sprachsubjekt lässt sich aus der analogen Geist-Sprechakt-Beziehung ableiten und als eine Art botenmäßiges Subjekt fassen. Das inoffizielle , von Searle selbst nicht ausbuchstabierte Sprachsubjekt wäre demgegenüber ein körperlicher Sprecher. Dieses erscheint dabei als das eigentlich konsequentere und folgerichtigere Subjekt, wenn man die Prämissen von Searles ‚biologischem Naturalismus‘ ernst nimmt.

This paper focuses on the phonetic, morphological and semantic principles determining the grammatical gender of nouns in German. Based on the experiments we established the main trends in determining the gender of the German equivalents and interlingual homonyms and the role of the interlingual and intralingual interference in this process. The results of two experiments show that Ukrainian students take into consideration suffixes of German nouns when choosing the correct gender. Phonetic or semantic gender allocation rules play a subordinate role. The interlingual interference determinates the gender choice in the target language: the gender of the mother tongue lemma interferes the selection of the gender in the foreign language equivalent. This effect appears more frequently in interlingual homonyms than in translation equivalents. A plausible interpretation of these results could be: the lemmas of two similar nouns or translation equivalents share the same concepts, the relationship between them is rather close, and the competition between the two lemmas and their genus nodes is strong and influences language production. This conclusion supports the hypothesis that both languages, the mother tongue and the foreign one, can be activated during language producing.

This paper is mainly about a unique case of syntactic epistemic weakening, i.e. the present subjunctive mood and its negation trigger in surface coordination. In contrast to modern colloquial German, which limits the use of the present subjunctive quite restrictively to root clauses, the older periods of German, Old and Middle High German, showed an extended use of the subjunctive beyond root, i.e. also in dependent structures. However, the semantically interpreted as well as the grammatical subjunctive got entirely lost in Modern colloquial, albeit not quite in Standard written German. The focus of this paper is the discussion of mood in early complex (subordinated or coordinated) negated sentences. Exploiting mainly the MHG text of the Lay of the Nibelungs , we focus on negated matrix structures, in superficially coordinated, but semantically dependent clauses. This suggests that the ne -particle in co-construction with the subjunctive on the predicate was used to code clausal dependence from the previous (negated) clause. In further course, in specific semantic constructions, the original Middle High German interpretability of paratactic negation and the consequent denotation of non-factual situations were lost and gave way to the pure syntactic coding of dependency. The triangle of triggers contributing to the complex phenomenon consists of 1. negation of different sorts and in various syntactic distributions, 2. dependency marking, and 3. indicative–subjunctive marking on the dependent predicate. The attempt is made to draw comparisons to other epistemicity triggers such as syntactic and lexical nonveridicals.