TY - JOUR A1 - Haßler, Gerda T1 - Linguistic relativity and language as epiphenomenon: two contradictory positions JF - Confluência. Revista do Instituto de língua portuguesa N2 - The assumption of linguistics relativity and the definition of languages as epiphenomena are certainly known as two contradictory positions from the last century. But I will start my discussion of them in the period of their appearance and then use this as a basis to evaluate the heuristic value of these positions in present day linguistics. I will start with the definition of language as an epiphenomenon and then I will go on with the linguistic relativity. The notion of ʽepiphenomenon’ is usually used to exclude certain aspects of a scientific object because they are considered to be deduced from others. In linguistics, restrictions of the research object were made, invoking the notion of ʽepiphenomenonʼ, which was partially done with a polemical attitude, and was always responded to polemically. Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.18364/rc.v0i55 SN - 2317-4153 VL - 2018 IS - 55 SP - 82 EP - 98 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Haßler, Gerda ED - Aronoff, Mark ED - Abbi, Anvita T1 - History of european vernacular grammar writing T2 - Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics N2 - The grammatization of European vernacular languages began in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance and continued up until the end of the 18th century. Through this process, grammars were written for the vernaculars and, as a result, the vernaculars were able to establish themselves in important areas of communication. Vernacular grammars largely followed the example of those written for Latin, using Latin descriptive categories without fully adapting them to the vernaculars. In accord with the Greco-Latin tradition, the grammars typically contain sections on orthography, prosody, morphology, and syntax, with the most space devoted to the treatment of word classes in the section on “etymology.” The earliest grammars of vernaculars had two main goals: on the one hand, making the languages described accessible to non-native speakers, and on the other, supporting the learning of Latin grammar by teaching the grammar of speakers’ native languages. Initially, it was considered unnecessary to engage with the grammar of native languages for their own sake, since they were thought to be acquired spontaneously. Only gradually did a need for normative grammars develop which sought to codify languages. This development relied on an awareness of the value of vernaculars that attributed a certain degree of perfection to them. Grammars of indigenous languages in colonized areas were based on those of European languages and today offer information about the early state of those languages, and are indeed sometimes the only sources for now extinct languages. Grammars of vernaculars came into being in the contrasting contexts of general grammar and the grammars of individual languages, between grammar as science and as art and between description and standardization. In the standardization of languages, the guiding principle could either be that of anomaly, which took a particular variety of a language as the basis of the description, or that of analogy, which permitted interventions into a language aimed at making it more uniform. Y1 - 2018 PB - Oxford University CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Haßler, Gerda T1 - Evidential and epistemic sentence adverbs in Romance languages JF - Linguistik online N2 - In this paper evidential and modal adverbs will be studied, such as French apparemment, évidemment, visiblement, Italian apparentemente, evidentemente, ovviamente, and Spanish aparentemente, evidentemente and visiblemente. The development of their signification will be discussed, including German adverbs like offensichtlich. In these means of expression, the functional-semantic categories evidentiality and epistemic modality seem to overlap: on the one hand, they are used if the state of affairs talked about cannot be verified, that is, if there is still a moment of insecurity concerning the transmitted information. Then adverbials with a special structure (preposition + article + nominal form of a verb) will be analysed, and we will examine if they behave in the same way. Y1 - 2018 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-421822 SN - 1615-3014 VL - 92 IS - 5 SP - 82 EP - 98 ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Haßler, Gerda ED - Rico, Christophe ED - Kirtchuk, Pablo T1 - Arbitrariness, Motivation and Value of the Linguistic Sign: Saussurean and Post-Saussurean Perspectives T2 - The Cours de Linguistique Générale Revisited: 1916–2016. Saussure et le Cours de linguistique générale cent ans après N2 - In 1916, three years after the death of Ferdinand de Saussure, the Cours de linguistique générale (CLG) was published in Geneva. This foundational work marked the beginning of a discipline that has profoundly influenced the development of the humanities ever since. What sources influenced the CLG? Do the main concepts of this seminal work have the same validity today as they did in 1916? How has the recent development of language sciences influenced its reception? How does this text account for meaning and communication within the context of speech (parole)? In order to explore these questions, one hundred years after the publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's seminal work on General Linguistics, Polis--The Jerusalem Institute of Languages and Humanities held an interdisciplinary conference that gathered 14 international specialists from various disciplines: general linguistics, pragmatics, philology, dialectology, translation studies, terminology, and philosophy. The first section of this work reassesses the sources and further influence of the CLG on modern linguistics. The book's second part discusses some of the main concepts and dichotomies of the CLG (constitution of the linguistic method, arbitrariness of sign, main dichotomies), under the light of both the original manuscripts and recent linguistic developments (influence of dialectology or translation studies). The third and last part handles the pragmatic and semantic dimensions of language, suggesting new avenues of reflection that could not yet have been fully taken into account within the CLG itself. Uniting 14 scholarly articles, together with an introduction, an index locorum and a collective bibliography, this volume hopes to encourage readers with its reappraisal and reinterpretation of Saussure's ground-breaking work and thus contribute to the future development of linguistics and humanities. Y1 - 2018 SN - 978-9-65769-811-2 SP - 61 EP - 87 PB - Polis Institute Press CY - Jerusalem ER -