Ewald Lang

Ewald Lang (born May 6, 1942 in Würzburg , † October 14, 2013 in Berlin ) was a German linguist .

Life

Grave of Ewald Lang in the St-Hedwig-Friedhof II in Berlin-Weißensee

After attending the extended secondary school in Grimma and an interlude as a crane and electric cart driver at the VEB VTA Leipzig, Lang studied general linguistics and sinology at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig and the Humboldt University in Berlin. From 1966 to 1975 he was an assistant in the beginning of Wolfgang Steinitz led job Structural grammar of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin (from 1972 Academy of Sciences of the GDR , AdW), and after a forced displacement because of conscientious objection in the Institute of Philosophy of Academy of Sciences. He received his doctorate in 1974 on the subject of “semantics of coordination” (see Lang 1977). From 1975 to 1988 he worked at the Central Institute for Linguistics of the AdW, from 1980 in the Cognitive Linguistics research group headed by Manfred Bierwisch , where he completed his habilitation in 1987.

In 1988 Ewald Lang moved to the Federal Republic of Germany, worked on research projects at the universities in Düsseldorf, Hamburg and Wuppertal and the IBM Science Center in Stuttgart, a. a. in the nationwide project for text understanding LILOG. In the Collaborative Research Center 282 Lexicon Theory, he headed the “Dual Operators” project from 1991 to 1995. In 1993 he took over the professorship for semantics at the Institute for German Language at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

As the successor to the Central Institute for Linguistics of the AdW, the Research Focus General Linguistics, Typology and Universality Research (FAS) was founded in Berlin in February 1992 with significant participation by Ewald Lang, which was transferred to the Center for General Linguistics (ZAS) in 1996 . Ewald Lang was acting head of the FAS and founding director of the ZAS and was closely associated with the ZAS until his death in 2013 and was scientifically active in various projects.

Research topics

Ewald Lang's linguistic work encompasses a spectrum of topics that ranges from sentence mode and attitude expressions to the syntax and semantics of connectors and the conceptualization of spatial expressions to the linguistic analysis of literary style figures such as parallelism and metaphor. The entry into linguistics was the translation of Chomsky's aspects of syntax theory - a German version by Ewald Lang was published by Akademie-Verlag as early as 1965. Later he played an important role in the theory development of the research group Cognitive Linguistics of the AdW, in particular for the development of two-level semantics (see Bierwisch & Lang 1987, Lang & Maienborn 2011). In it, the meaning of natural language expressions is specified by the context of use and represented not only on a semantic level, but also on a conceptual - cognitively motivated - level. This conception of meaning forms the background for Ewald Lang's central work on the semantics of coordination and the dimensional labeling of spatial objects (see below), as well as for his work on lexical antonymy, e.g. B. Lang (1995).

Subsequent research on adverse connectors, contrast relations and parallelism effects builds on the results on coordination. In the research project "Contrast and Correction" led by Ewald Lang in the Leipzig research group Linguistic and Conceptual Knowledge , important work on the interpretation of adversative constructions emerged (e.g. Lang 2002, 2005). In his project “Parallelism in Grammar” at the Center for General Linguistics in Berlin, he investigated the phenomenon of parallelism as a universal mechanism of text constitution that is effective at all levels of grammar and for interpretation effects in everyday language use as well as in advertising and in the Folk poetry sets the tone. He took up earlier work on parallelism (Lang 1987, see also the collection of demo slogans in Lang 1990). Finally, in his analysis of audio book versions of Kafka's Auf der Galerie , Ewald Lang succeeded in building a convincing bridge between linguistics and literary studies, in which prosodic realizations of the text are examined for interpretation effects against the background of the morphosyntactic and lexical structure, see p. (Lang & Pheby 2011).

Semantics of coordination (Lang 1984)

Coordinative structures, for example coordinated sentences such as “Father is sick and mother goes to work.” Are known to be subject to syntactic well-formedness conditions, such as those in the Same Type Hypothesis by Chomsky (1957) or the Coordinate Structure Constraint by Ross (1967) or the Law of Coordination of Likes by Williams (1978). In his work on coordination, Ewald Lang showed that there are also semantic conditions that are responsible for the fact that the conjuncts in a coordination mutually restrict their interpretation: conjuncts must not subsume one another (semantic independence) and there must be a common one Give an instance that is elaborated by the conjuncts (common integrator). Thus, in the expression Leo in (a) the interpretation of the sexus is unspecific, while in (b) only the male examples are meant, in (c) either both conjuncts must be understood actively (musician) or both passively (listener), and in (d ) the - ambiguous - word lock is preferably interpreted as a door lock, because you hardly ever buy (building) locks and bolts at the same time.

(a) There are lions and rhinos.

(b) There are lions and lionesses.

(c) I enjoy an evening at the opera and reciting a song.

(d) Peter bought a lock and a bolt.

Dimensions of spatial objects (Lang 1987, 1990)

Spatial dimension expressions refer to certain shape and / or position properties of spatial objects and quantify their extent. The dimensions they designate can be determined in various ways, either by inherent design properties of the object or by the positioning of the object in space or by the perspective of the viewer. For example, the expression long refers to one dimension of shape, namely the maximum, regardless of the position of the object and the perspective of the viewer. The term broad, on the other hand, can refer to a shape dimension, but also to a dimension determined by positioning or the perspective of the observer. In the first case it is the one orthogonal to the maximum dimension, in the latter two it is the maximum dimension itself. The example shows inherent shape dimensions in (I), in (II) dimensions from positioning and in (III) dimensions from the observer's perspective.

(I) The board is long and wide enough, but too thin.

(II) The board is wide and high enough, but too thin.

(III) The board is wide and deep enough, but too thin.

Publications (selection)

• Ewald Lang & Claudia Maienborn. 2011. Two-level Semantics: Semantic Form and Conceptual Structure. In Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger & Paul Portner (eds.) Semantics (HSK 33.1). Berlin: de Gruyter, 709 -740.
• Ewald Lang & Barbara Pheby. 2011. Intonation and interpretation of sentence links in literary audio book texts. In Eva Breindel, Gisella Ferraresi & Anna Volodina (eds.) Multi-dimensional sentence linking. Berlin: de Gruyter, 297-326.
• Ewald Lang & Marcela Adamíková. 2005. The lexical content of connectors and its interplay with intonation. An interim balance on sentential connection in discourse. In Andreas Späth (Ed.) Interfaces and Interface Conditions. Berlin: de Gruyter.
• Ewald Lang. 2002. The part of speech "conjunction". In DA Cruse (Ed.) Lexicology. Lexicology. An international handbook on the nature and structure of words and vocabulary. 634-641. Berlin: de Gruyter.
• Ewald Lang. 2001. Spatial Dimension Terms. In Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher & Wolfgang Raible (eds.) Language Typology and Language Universals. An International Handbook. 1251-1275. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
• Ewald Lang. 1995. The spectrum of antonymy. Semantic and conceptual structures in the lexicon and their representation in the dictionary. In Gisela Harras (ed.) The order of words. IdS yearbook. 30-98. Berlin: de Gruyter.
• Ewald Lang. 1991. Coordinating conjunctions. In Arnim v. Stechow & Dieter Wunderlich (Eds.) Semantics. Semantics. HSK 6.597-623. Berlin: de Gruyter.
• Ewald Lang. 1990. Turn neck and Stasi louse. Demo sayings from the GDR. Edited and compiled by Ewald Lang. Heyne Verlag, Munich.
• Ewald Lang. 1990. Primary perceptual space and inherent proportion schema: Two interacting categorization grids underlying the conceptualization of spatial objects. Journal of Semantics 7 February 121-141.
• Ewald Lang & Manfred Bierwisch. 1987. A little longer - much deeper - ever further: Epilogue to the dimensional adjectives project. In M. Bierwisch & E. Lang (eds.) Grammatical and conceptual aspects of dimensional adjectives. Studia grammatica 26 + 27. 649-699. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.
• Ewald Lang. 1987. Semantics of the dimensional labeling of spatial objects. In M. Bierwisch & E. Lang (eds.) Grammatical and conceptual aspects of dimensional adjectives. Studia grammatica 26 + 27. 287-458. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag.
• Ewald Lang. 1987. Parallelism as a universal principle of secondary structure formation. In E. Lang & G. Sauer (eds.) Parallelism and Etymology. Studies in honor of Wolfgang Steinitz on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Berlin: LS / ZISW / A 161.1. 1-54.
• Ewald Lang. 1984. The Semantics of Coordination. Studies in Language Companion Series 9. Amsterdam: John Benjamin.
• Ewald Lang (1982/1986): Victor Klemperer's LTI. In: Osnabrück Contributions to Language Theory 33: 69-79. (First under the title: Victor Klemperer's LTI in the German studies seminar, or: “LTI - an anti-fascist people's book?” In: Forum 1982, 1: 14-15).

literature

• Chomsky, N. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton.
• Noam Chomsky. 1965. Aspects of Syntax Theory. Frankfurt (Main): Suhrkamp / Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Collection Language 11. [Translated and edited under the direction of E. Lang.]
• Ross, JR 1967/1986. Infinite syntax! Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
• Williams, E. 1978. Across-the-Board Rule Application. Linguistic Inquiry 9: 31-43.

Web links

• www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/lang.html
• Prof. Dr. Ewald Lang, obituary on the homepage of the Institute for German Language and Linguistics at the Humboldt University in Berlin