Publications

Publication details [#9810]

Schulze, Wolfgang M. 1998. Person, Klasse, Kongruenz: Fragmente einer Kategorialtypologie des einfachen Satzes in den ostkaukasischen Sprachen. Band 1 (in zwei Teilen): Die Grundlagen. München: LINCOM. xxix, 685 pp.
Publication type
Book – monograph
Publication language
German
ISBN
3895861847 (1998); 3895865524 (2002)

Abstract

The volume is devoted to a Cognitive Typology of the morphosyntax, morphosemantics, and pragmatics of the 'simple sentence' in the about 30 autochthonous East Caucasian languages. Based on a comprehensive description of the relevant paradigmatic architectures (characterized in technical terms by modest to strong, mainly suffixing agglutination with tendencies towards fusional and polysynthetic procedures) the explanation of these architectures together with their co-paradigmatization is approached with the help of a language and grammar theoretical frame work that is labeled "Grammar of Scenes and Scenarios" (GSS). GSS hypothesizes that 'simple sentence' structures - themselves the most basic type of linguistic-communicatively oriented processing of event images - represent the kernel of prototypically organized language systems and that they reflect (in parts) cognitive strategies to process outer world experience. Because of this hypothesis the description and explanation of those structures gain specific importance. GSS tries to explain the grammar of a language on the basis of the cognitive and (cognition based) communicative behavior of an individual integrated in a collective ('Cognitive Typology'). This behavior is dominated by massive hypotheses about the self-attachment to a collective; it represents a strongly ritualized but construing interaction of the individual and environmental stimuli which corresponds to the habitus of a collective and which takes place in form of the tacit (poiematic) and/or articulate (pragmatic) activation of an acquired (and traditional) knowledge system as a communicative reaction to event images. Linguistic behavior represents the individual reaction to a collective communicative and cognitive standard which itself is predominantly historical in nature. Hence GSS argues that language as a 'metaphysical' phenomenon owns strong anachronistic features; it follows that functional and semantic aspects of language architecture are mainly to be explained with the help of a diachronic perspective (though the potential to adopt newly established communicative and cognitive routines plays an important role in this respect, too). The theoretical frame work underlying GSS (Rr ) can be described as a strong diachronic model that owes much to holistic cognitivism, constructivism, and pragmatism. Modularity is only accepted as a secondary 'construction' of users about their language. Rather it is the structural coupling of adequate network components that has to be described as primary: This coupling results in language as a complex 'cognitive event' - as an emergent activity of this polycentric complex. According to GSS the linguistic reaction to event images heavily depends on the cognitive and communicative defaults of such events. It is assumed that there is a (in parts strongly metaphorized) correlation between the cognitive and communicative architecture of linguistically oriented event imaging (Scenes - or (textually coupled) Scenarios) and their grammaticalization that is based on the Operating System of a given language. The architectures of scenes (and scenarios) represent strongly ritualized systems that are metaphorized from space and time experience and the embodiment of environmental experience. These systems are characterized by parameters of figure-ground relations and their location in the deictic, communicative, and pragmatic space and time and by further strategies of modality. Their linguistic instantiation as operating systems that control the dynamic organization of linguistic paradigms establishes the typological parameters relevant for the explanation of the architecture of 'simple sentences'. Their diversification in terms of different and prototypically organized grammatical systems is mainly explained as the particularization of universal techniques of categorization within the organization of scenes and scenarios that is conditioned by history and transmitted by collective experience. The volume "Person, Klasse, Kongruenz" (PKK) aims at the explanation of East Caucasian techniques to grammaticalize scenes and scenarios with the help of a 'Categorial Typology' (or: Cognitive Typology). The volume PKK is designed as a sketch of a 'constructive' model of language. (Wolfgang Schulze)