Typology and Theory of Remotivation

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Rüdiger Harnisch
• Subject Area: Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 273128776

The linguistic sign is seen as being arbitrary. Phonological or morphological motivation is supposed to be confined to onomatopoetica or compositional structures resp. But remotivation is largely restricted to folk-etymology. Furthermore, representatives of grammaticalization theory focus on semantic bleaching (demotivation) and formal weakening (desegmentation) as the regular modes of language change. Others have attempted to point out reverse processes (remotivation, resegmentation), but have been rejected with reference to the principle of unidirectionality. - (A) We, meanwhile, assume, not that degrammaticalization and delexicalization are the direct inverse of grammaticalization and lexicalization, but that they are processes in their own right, raising the semantic as well as the formal status of linguistic units by remotivation and resegmentation. This we call reanalysis. We seek to classify diverse related phenomena by applying appropriate parameters and typological criteria. These phenomena reach from reanalysis of grammatical features (gender > sex) and secretion of suffixes (proper > prop-er, prop in child language) to folk-etymology (coward > cow-herd) and de-idiomatization (Germ. fragwürdig *dubious* > *worth to be asked*) etc. - (B) A second type of remotivation often neglected are pleonasms. They shall also be parametrized and typified. While in the case of degrammaticalization and delexicalization, constructional iconicity is achieved by morphological secretion (mine > sl. mi-ne, your-n), in the case of pleonastic constructions it is attained by semantic secretion, i.e. by copying semes of lexemes and adding them as proper morphemes (the best sold > the best sold-est). - The remotivation types (A) and (B) are all linked to the linguistic sign itself. But we intend also to include cases of remotivation caused by sign use. - (C) One form of this we call relocution. It occurs in utterances deprived of their context dependent meaning and reduced to their context independent meaning (SHE Could you pass it to me? *Please pass it to me* - HE responding for fun only: Yes). - (D) A further form is recontextualization. This occurs in utterances whose meaning is charged by knowledge about the world, so that the context independent meaning is enriched by a context dependent one (Germ. *Sonderbehandlung* lost its neutral sense *special treatment* since the Nazis used it in the sense of *genocide*). - All of these processes can be subsumed under the common theme of remotivation. We aim to confront the established paradigm of research into demotivation processes with this concept of remotivation, which until now has largely been neglected. Moreover we aim to answer the question of whether and - if so - how these disparate phenomena are governed by common principles. The aim is a typology and a theory of remotivation. In so doing, we further aim to emphasise the potential of motivation against the still predominant postulate of arbitrariness.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants