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Humboldtian science aims at an empirically supported transdisciplinary and at the same time transareal development of a world consciousness. In the development of this world consciousness, not only Europe and the Americas, but also Central Asia and especially China play an important role. The Humboldt Center for Transdisciplinary Studies (HCTS) in Changsha, is attempting to address the fact that China has been largely left out of international Humboldt studies and that Alexander von Humboldt was intensively engaged with Central Asia and China for decades. Therefore, the Humboldt Center in Changsha sets itself the goal of expanding Humboldt Studies to include this important aspect, to stimulate and coordinate special research work, and to build scientific and cultural bridges between Germany and China, Europe and Asia.
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.
The starting point of this article is the occurrence of determiner-less and bare que relative complementizers like (en) que, ‘(in) that’, instead of (en) el que, ‘(in) which’, in Yucatecan Spanish (southeast Mexico). While reference grammars treat complementizers with a determiner as the standard option, previous diachronic research has shown that determiner-less complementizers actually predate relative complementizers with a determiner. Additionally, Yucatecan Spanish has been in long-standing contact with Yucatec Maya. Relative complementation in Yucatec Maya differs from that in Spanish (at least) in that the non-complex complementizer tu’ux (‘where’) is generally the only option for locative complementation. The paper explores monolingual and bilingual data from Yucatecan Spanish to discuss the question whether the determiner-less and bare que relative complementizers in our data constitute a historic remnant or a dialectal recast, possibly (but not necessarily) due to language contact. Although our pilot study may not answer these far-reaching questions, it does reveal two separate, but intertwined developments: (i) a generally increased rate of bare que relative complementation, across both monolingual speakers of Spanish and Spanish Maya bilinguals, compared to other Spanish varieties, and (ii) a preference for donde at the cost of other locative complementizer constructions in the bilingual group. Our analysis thus reveals intriguing differences between the complementizer preferences of monolingual and bilingual speakers, suggesting that different variational patterns caused by different (socio-)linguistic factors can co-develop in parallel in one and the [same] region.
During his trip to New Spain in 1803, Alexander von Humboldt visited large tracts of New Spanish territory, which includes modern Mexico and part of the United States. This trip provided the data for his geographical Atlas of the region, as well as information about the ancient Mexican cultures that he would later include in the general Atlas and in other major works, such as Vues des Cordillères. Likewise, Humboldt’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain displayed a comprehensive physical, natural, economic, and social description of Mexico in the colonial period, which will also be analysed. With these works, Humboldt presented a new geographical and cultural image of New Spain to the European audiences. In addition to this, his work made important contributions to cartographic knowledge.
Meaning and Function
(2021)
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.
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.
A grammar of authority?
(2021)
Directive Speech Acts (dsas) are a major feature of historical pragmatics, specifically in research on historical (im)politeness. However, for Classical French, there is a lack of research on related phenomena. In our contribution, we present two recently constructed corpora covering the period of Classical French, sermo and apwcf. We present these corpora in terms of their genre characteristics on a communicative-functional and socio-pragmatic level. Based on the observation that, both in sermo and apwcf, dsas frequently occur together with terms of address, we analyse and manually code a sample based on this co-occurrence, and we compare the results with regard to special features in the individual corpora. The emerging patterns show a clear correspondence between socio-pragmatic factors and the linguistic means used to realise dsas. We propose that these results can be interpreted as signs of an underlying "grammar of authority".
The present paper is concerned with the phenomenon of reporting on the speakers’ thinking when both the reporting and the reported clauses originate in one and the same speaker, i.e. the performative uses of the verbs sp. creer and pt. achar (‘think’). The data are retrieved from the CdE-NOW and CdP-NOW. Adopting both a quantitative and a qualitative perspective, I concentrate on reporting on thinking with and without the overt expression of the subject pronouns sp. yo and pt. eu. In doing so, the constructions (yo) creo (que) and (eu) acho (que) as well as parenthetic and right-peripheral creo yo and acho eu are studied. According to the corpus data and compared to other possible constructions with creo and acho, creo que and acho que represent the most frequent constructions if searching for the ‘node’ creo or acho, that is, if the non-use of the subject pronoun exceeds its explicit expression.