‘Iconicity of Distance’ and nouns: when syntactic proximity to the noun mirrors semantic closeness

Activity: Presentations, memberships, employment, ownership and other activities › Lecture and oral contribution

Description

Almost a century ago, the German linguist Otto Behaghel already noted that what belongs together mentally is also placed close together in an utterance (Das oberste Gesetz ist dieses, daß das geistig eng Zusammengehörige auch eng zusammengestellt wird).
Iconicity of Distance (when the distance between linguistic forms & expressions corresponds to the conceptual distance between them; Haiman 1980, 1983) is now widely recognized as a universal principle underlying language structure.
In this talk I will argue that Iconicity of Distance offers a coherent and convincing explanation for minimally three global ordering phenomena (all involving nouns) in natural human language.
Period18 Nov 2022
Held atSchool of Communication and Culture - Linguistics
Degree of RecognitionLocal