Thetics and categoricals

John Benjamins

2020

vi, 390 p.

Linguistik aktuell. Linguistics today ; 262

9789027207401

Contents: What this volume is about / Werner Abraham; Categorical versus thetic sentences in the universal grammar of realism / Elisabeth Leiss; Are theticity and sentence-focus encoded grammatical categories of Dutch? / Thomas Belligh; Presentational and related constructions in Norwegian with reference to German / Lars Hellan and Dorothee Beermann; Copulas and information structure in Tanti Dargwa / Nina Sumbatova; Infinitive constructions and theticity in German / Yukari Isaka; Strong and weak nominal reference in thetic and categorical sentences : sampling German and Chinese / Meng-Chen Lee; Adjectives and mode of expression : psych-adjectives in attributive and predicative usage and implications for the thetic/categorical discussion / Yoshiyuki Muroi; Unaccusativity and theticity / Patricia Irwin; From philosophical logic to linguistics : the architecture of information autonomy : categoricals vs. thetics revisited / Werner Abraham; Pseudocategorical or purely thetic? A contrastive case study of how thetic statements are expressed in Japanese, English, and German / Yasuhiro Fujinawa; The thetic/categorical distinction as difference in common ground update : with application to Biblical Hebrew / Daniel J. Wilson; B-grade subjects and theticity / Shin Tanaka; Perception description, report and thetic statements : roles of sentence-final particles in Japanese and modal particles in German / Junji Okamoto.

Thetics and Categoricals do not belong to the categories of German grammar. Thetics were introduced in logic as impersonal and broad focus constructions. They left profound and extensive traces in the logic of the late 19th century. For the class of thetic propositions, the criterion of textual exclusion plays the major role, i.e. the absence of any common grounds and of any anaphorism and background. In the foreground are sentences with sub ject inversion, subject suppression and detopicalization. These and only these are suitable for text begin nings, jokes, stage advertisements and solipsistic exclamatives, thus speech acts without com mu nicative goals - free expressives in the true sense of the word. The contribu tions in this volume not only guide the reader through the history of philosophical logic and distributions of impersonals in contrast to Kantian categorical sentences, but also the correspondences in Japanese and Chinese which, in contrast to German and English, sport specific morphological markers for thetics as opposed to categoricals.

Английский