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Welterleben/Weiterleben
(2017)
Welterleben and Weiterleben are what determine the second globalization (of four previously explored) whose constantly accelerating dynamic, vectorization, this essay explores. On the basis of selected writings of Georg Forster, Alexander von Humboldt, and Adelbert von Chamisso, the author highlights the increasing speed with which knowledge, especially in the experiential sciences, is produced and disseminated following the routes of ever-widening trade speeded along by globalization. The notion of ‘vectopia’ stands for the connection of utopia and uchronia in space and time in such a way that the experience of the world, expanded worldwide, contains within it a Weiter-Leben, a ‘living-further’ that is to be understood first in a spatial, and not yet temporal, sense, of what Forster called Erfahrungswissen, or ‘experiential knowledge.’ Vectopia, as elaborated here, has a material dimension that relates to the physical person, the body, the experience of the world that cannot occur without the constant changing of place, without a journeying that is again and again recommenced. Vectopia develops the projection of a life not from space or from time alone, but by their combination. Vectopia is more than a concept, it is a thought-figure: it is vitally connected to life, and thus a life-figure. It opens itself to a type of knowledge that stands almost at the threshold of a further life, indeed, of a Weiterleben that, opening itself to a ‘living-onward,’ resides beyond space, time, and movement.
Meaning and Function
(2022)
The use of the word functional in the most diverse theories and approaches has contributed in no small measure to the confusion in linguistics today. This article does not claim to give an overview of the different directions of functionalism in linguistics. Rather, the aim is to present what Coseriu‘s view characterised as functional in his time and to what extent his theory outlined a path that still makes sense in functional-cognitive linguistics today. This will involve an examination of Coseriu‘s difficult-to-identify concept of function. Furthermore, the article will also show that functional thinking is relevant for current grammatography.
TransArea Tangier
(2018)
Introduction
(2018)
A few months before his death, A. v. Humboldt attended the celebration in honor of the 127th birthday of George Washington at the US legation in Berlin. A letter to the American Envoy, Joseph A. Wright (1810 – 1867), underlines Humboldt’s admiration for the fi rst president of the United States. At the same time Humboldt asked the diplomat to mail a letter to the German-American Bernard Moses (1832 – 1897) in Clinton, Louisiana, who had named his son Alexander Humboldt Moses (grave on the Hebrew Rest Cemetery #2 in New Orleans, burial plot A, 12, 5). It appears to be possible that the Moses family still owns Humboldt’s letter.
When it comes to autobiographical narratives, the most spontaneous and natural manner is preferable. But neither individually told narratives nor those grounded in the communicative repertoire of a social group are easily comparable. A clearly identifiable tertium comparationis is mandatory. We present the results of an experimental ‘Narrative Priming’ setting with French students. A potentially underlying model of narrating from personal experience was activated via a narrative prime, and in a second step, the participants were asked to tell a narrative of their own. The analysis focuses on similarities and differences between the primes and the students’ narratives. The results give evidence for the possibility to elicit a set of comparable narratives via a prime, and to activate an underlying narrative template. Meaningful differences are discussed as generational and age related styles. The transcriptions from the participants that authorized the publication are available online.
The name Ideologues refers to a group of philosophers, psychologists, grammarians, educational theorists and medical specialists who for a short period from 1795 to 1805 determined the intellectual climate in France and sought to develop a science of ideas (idéologie). The Ideologues had a rather reserved attitude to Condillac’s (1714–1780) ideas and his sensualist sign theory. They strove for the perfection of language for the needs of thought and of scientific knowledge. The connections with the Ideologues can also be discerned in Russia. In the educational theory, Jean-Baptiste Maudru (1740–1808) was close to the Ideologues and, despite his insufficient knowledge of the Russian language, made some interesting remarks on the connection between the language and the national character. According to Maudru and in agreement with the Ideologues, different typologies of word order are not just an indication of greater or lesser closeness to the natural order. Rather, they indicate differences in national character, which manifest themselves in the specific character of individual languages. Maudru taught at the military academy in Saint Petersburg and published the first Russian grammar in France (Maudru 1802). In his grammar, he sought to link mechanically the specific features of languages and of national characters with the climatic influences. His attempt to revive the theory of climatic influences was criticized by Karamzin. Karamzin also treated the discussion of the metaphoric extension of word meanings as an absurd undertaking, which had no place in grammar.
This book is concerned with the diachronic development of selected topic and focus markers in Spanish, Portuguese and French. On the one hand, it focuses on the development of these structures from their relational meaning to their topic-/ focus-marking meaning, and on the other hand, it is concerned with their current form und use. Thus, Romance topic and focus markers – such as sp. en cuanto a, pt. a propósito de, fr. au niveau de or sentence-initial sp. Lo que as well as clefts and pseudo-clefts – are investigated from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. The author argues that topic markers have procedural meaning and that their function is bound to their syntactic position. An important contribution of this study is the fact that real linguistic evidence (in the form of data from various corpora) is analyzed instead of operating with constructed examples.