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| My opponents Claudia Maienborn (Tübingen) and Stefan Engelberg (Mannheim) circumfixing me |
In my dissertation, I deal with ambiguity and the influence of context in interpretation. I have chosen to approach this matter by examining closely one highly ambiguous preposition in German, namely durch (Eng. through, by means of, by, due to, during) , which has spatial, temporal, instrumental, causal, agentive as well as other uses. I examine to what extent the context influences the interpretation of durch, but also in which ways durch itself may lead to reinterpretation in the contexts it occurs in.
The dissertation (written in German) may be downloaded from this location (PDF-format, 1,7 MB).
The dissertation offers a diverse picture of ambiguity, polysemy and the flexibility of interpretation by means of an in-depth study of the semantics of the German preposition durch ('through', 'by', 'by means of', 'due to'). Durch, which hasn't been studied intensively before, has spatial, temporal, causal, instrumental and agentive interpretations. The main focus is on the causal and instrumental variants.
Written in German, the dissertation consists of eight chapters, divided into two parts. After a short introduction, the general semantic properties of the interpretational variants of durch are discussed from a theoretical ambiguity and polysemy perspective in part I. In chapter two, central terminology related to polysemy and flexible interpretation processes is introduced, whereas chapter three is devoted to the development of a heuristics for the identification of the interpretations of a lexical item, providing an objective basis for studies of polysemy.
In part II, which consists of four chapters, the semantics of durch is analysed in detail with respect to semantic, syntactic and pragmatic properties. After a brief discussion of the causal interpretations of durch in chapter four, the context factors which influence the interpretation of durch are examined in chapters five and six. Both lexical as well as abstract-compositional factors are considered. Thus, for instance, the semantics of the lexical items in the context of durch, the interplay of the durch phrase with voice and the syntactic positions of the durch phrase are studied. An event-semantic perspective is common to all considerations. Chapter seven consists of a formal-semantic discourse-representation-theoretic analysis of selected results from chapters five and six. The formalisation is also discussed with respect to semantic composition and theories of presuppositions.
In the final chapter, the structure of the polysemy of durch is presented. A brief discussion of the role of competition in lexical organisation concludes the dissertation.
The dissertation may be downloaded here. NB! The file is rather large, at 1,7 MB.