Semantisches in der pronominalen Flexion des Deutschen
Year: 2002
Type: article
Abstract: This paper argues that distinctive features at the morpho-syntactic level are not syntactic features. If, following Jakobson, distinctive features are considered to be the smallest units of non-linguistic/communicative information, they reveal the extra-linguistic meaning of the linguistic sign. Therefore, in the domain of grammatical structure distinctive features have to have a semantic value. The present study focuses on the paradigm system of the definite article. It is shown that a) each of the 6 distinct forms bears its own complex of distinct (semantic) features, b) only a small hierarchically-ordered set of such features is underlying, c) the nominal categories are systematically related to each other by these features, which leads to the conclusion that gender (and number) make the same semantic distinctions at the word (or lexical) level that case does at the sentence (or syntactical) level. Finally, I will suggest that no homonymy exists in the pronominal systems of German at the morphological level.
Author: Dagmar Bittner,
Language: German
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2331145504