Author : Werner Abraham
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN 13 : 9027260877
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (272 download)
Book Synopsis Thetics and Categoricals by : Werner Abraham
Download or read book Thetics and Categoricals written by Werner Abraham and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2020-07-22 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thetics and Categoricals do not belong to the categories of German grammar. Thetics were introduced in logic as impersonal and broad focus constructions. They left profound and extensive traces in the logic of the late 19th century. For the class of thetic propositions, the criterion of textual exclusion plays the major role, i.e. the absence of any common grounds and of any anaphorism and background. In the foreground are sentences with subject inversion, subject suppression and detopicalization. These and only these are suitable for text beginnings, jokes, stage advertisements and solipsistic exclamatives, thus speech acts without communicative goals – free expressives in the true sense of the word. The contributions in this volume not only guide the reader through the history of philosophical logic and distributions of impersonals in contrast to Kantian categorical sentences, but also the correspondences in Japanese and Chinese which, in contrast to German and English, sport specific morphological markers for thetics as opposed to categoricals.