In the study of language, as in any other systematic study, there is no neutral terminology. Every technical term is an expression of the assumptions and theoretical presuppositions of its users; and in this introduction, we want to clarify some of the issues that have surrounded the assumptions behind the use of the two terms "speech acts" and "pragmatics." The notion of a speech act is fairly well understood. The theory of speech acts starts with the assumption that the minimal unit of human communica tion is not a sentence or other expression, but rather the performance of certain kinds of...

In the study of language, as in any other systematic study, there is no neutral terminology. Every technical term is an expression of the assumptions and theoretical presuppositions of its users; and in this introduction, we want to clarify some of the issues that have surrounded the assumptions behind the use of the two terms "speech acts" and "pragmatics." The notion of a speech act is fairly well understood. The theory of speech acts starts with the assumption that the minimal unit of human communica tion is not a sentence or other expression, but rather the performance of certain kinds of...

The present volume is the result of a project which concentrated on a selected subset of linguistic knowledge with the aim of giving a systematic account of the various aspects of structure and process in this subset and the interpretation of these. The subset that for a number of reasons appeared appropriate to this undertaking centres around the dimensional adjectives of German. That the en terprise ultimately produced a less integrated and complete result than expected is due to several reasons. Some of these are of an intrinsic nature, ever present, and not particularly surprising. Some,...

Dieser Band zu Ehren von Klaus Baumgartners 65. Geburtstag versammelt 15 Beitrage zu aktuellen Problemen der (lexikalischen) Semantik: dem Zusammenhang zwischen Syntax und Semantik, zum Problem einer reprasentationalen versus einer dynamischen Bedeutungskonzeption sowie zur Frage der konzeptuellen Basis der Semantik. Der Gegenstand der Untersuchungen ist breit gefachert: von Prapositionen uber temporale Konjunktionen, Verben und ihrer Argumentstruktur bis hin zu textuellen Zusammenhangen.