The meaning of German 'wie' in equative comparison
Final Report Abstract
In Cognitive Science, similarity has long been recognized as fundamental in explaining cognitive skills like perception, classification and learning. This leads to the expectation that similarity plays prominent role in language, too. Surprisingly, however, the notion of similarity is near to ignored in linguistics and semantics, which suggests that something might have been overlooked. The similarity project started from the German expressions so ('such', 'like this') and wie ('like', 'how'). A semantic analysis is provided such that wie denotes the relation of similarity and that so is a demonstrative expressing similarity (instead of identity) between the thing pointed to and the referent of the linguistic phrase. The relation of similarity was spelt out in a feature-based framework that can be seen as an extension of the well-established degree semantic framework. This account represents a major advance in making the concept of similarity available in semantics for the first time. It allows for a uniform analysis for the various uses of the demonstrative so and for the uses of wie in equative constructions as well as in expressing manner. And it turned out that these expressions do exactly what one would expect from a cognitive science point of view: sort things into kinds – Anna hat so ein Auto wie Berta ('Anna has a car like Berta's') means that Anna's car is of the same kind though not identical to Berta's car. There are two results that were unforeseen in the application phase. First, there is a link from the notion of similarity to findings in the area of genericity and of manner modification. It strengthens the idea of so / wie as a means of (ad-hoc) kind formation and opens a window into constraints on concept formation as discussed in cognitive science. Secondly, while the generalized similarity analysis of equative comparison sketched in the proposal is straightforward for German, there are data from Turkish showing that such a generalization would not be adequate. Turkish is evidence that there are in fact two different strategies of equatives, a degree-based and a similaritybased one, independent of the grammatical category of the parameter. This led to an important theoretical insight: the established degree-based approaches and the similarity approach should not be seen as competing semantic theories. Instead, a successful analysis of equative comparison has to provide access to degrees as well as similarity, which is allowed in the framework developed in the project.
Publications
- (2014) Expressing similarity: On some differences between adjectives and demonstratives. Proceedings of IATL 2013, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics
Umbach, Carla
- (2014) Similarity Demonstratives. Lingua 149, 74-93
Umbach, Carla, & Helmar Gust
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2014.05.003) - (2018) Demonstratives of Manner, of Quality and of Degree: A Neglected Subclass. In M. Coniglio, A. Murphy, E. Schlachter & T. Veenstra (eds.). Atypical demonstratives: syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Berlin, de Gruyter Mouton
König, Ekkehard & Carla Umbach
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110560299-010) - (2019) Dasselbe oder das gleiche? - warum wir dann doch dieselbe Pizza bestellen können wie der Gast nebenan. ZAS Jahrbuch 2018
Umbach, Carla
- (2019) Scalar and non-scalar comparison across categories: The case of Turkish equatives. Extended abstract, TbiLLC 2019 Symposium on Language, Logic and Computation, Batumi
Umbach, Carla & Umut Özge
- (2021) A qualitative similarity framework for the interpretation of natural language similarity expressions. In Lucas Bechberger, Kai-Uwe Kühnberger and Mingya Liu (eds). Concepts in Action - Representation, Learning and Application. Language, Cognition, and Mind. Springer
Gust, Helmar & Carla Umbach
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69823-2) - (2021) German 'wie'-complements: Manners, methods and events in progress. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory
Umbach, Carla, Stefan Hinterwimmer & Helmar Gust
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11049-021-09508-z) - (2021) Grading similarity. In Löbner, S., Gamerschlag, T., Kalenscher, T., Schrenk, M., Zeevat, H. (Eds.) Concepts, Frames and Cascades in Semantics, Cognition and Ontology. Springer
Umbach, Carla & Helmar Gust
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50200-3_17)
