Simon C. Dik

SC Dik (1970)

Simon Cornelis Dik (born September 6, 1940 in Delden ; † March 1, 1995 in Holysloot ) was a Dutch linguist specializing in theoretical linguistics .

life and work

Born in Delden in 1940, the Amsterdam- raised son of a painter and a teacher at the University of Amsterdam studied classical philology after graduating from high school and then linguistics after the candidate's exam. As a student of Prof. Anton Reichling, an editor of the magazine Lingua, he got to know Noam Chomsky's “Syntactic Structures” from 1957 early on . Also in 1965 he was one of the first in the Netherlands to critically receive Chomsky's fundamental follow-up work “Aspects of the Theory of Syntax”.

In his dissertation on coordination (Dik 1968) Dik criticized the generative theory and outlined his functional counter-model there. In 1969 he was appointed to the chair for general linguistics at the Universiteit van Amsterdam as the successor to his teacher Reichling . Apart from an introduction to linguistics written with JG Kooij, a first more detailed presentation of his theory appeared in 1978, which was followed in 1980 by “Studies in Functional Grammar ”. Regular lectures and discussion groups in Amsterdam as well as biennial international conferences made the theory known, also attracted participants with other language interests such as the Latin linguist A. Machtelt Bolkestein and led to a series of books on functional grammar. Among other honors, Dik was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences in 1987 .

In 1989 the first part of the “Theory of Functional Grammar” appeared, which was a revision and revision of the theory. Since Dik became seriously ill three years later, the publication of the second part was delayed. Although he worked tirelessly on it for as long as he could, this book was only published posthumously, edited by Kees Hengeveld, a student and Dik's successor. When Dik died on March 1, 1995, the Dutch and international experts were aware of the great importance of this linguist, his work and his theory. The theory is continued today by numerous students, not only in Amsterdam. The Functional Discourse Grammar by K. Hengeveld and JL Mackenzie is such a further development with greater consideration of pragmatics .

theory

Main features

It is essential to Diks functional grammar theory ( Functional Grammar ) is present (see Dik 1978th: 15-23) from the demolition of a first turning away from generative grammar . Above all, this includes the rejection of transformations as explanatory models (“FG does not allow transformational operations in the sense of structure-changing rules”, Dik 1980: 10), as well as the conviction already presented in the dissertation (Dik 1968) that the syntactic Explanation level alone is not sufficient and must be supplemented by semantics and pragmatics.

Dik's theory mainly describes the simple and extended sentence in its syntactic , semantic and pragmatic perspectives . For this he uses u. a. a modified valence concept : while the arguments are core components of a semantically defined sentence model, the satellites lie outside nuclear predication . Dik makes a strict distinction between syntactic ( subject , object ...), semantic ( agent , goal , recipient ...) and pragmatic functions ( topic , focus , theme , tail ) and understands the sentence according to a hierarchically structured model that is derived from his Student Kees Hengeveld was developed and further developed (Hengeveld 1989). This model ranges from nuclear predication to core predication , expanded predication and proposition to clause structure (Siewierska 1991: 21). The four semantically defined types of issues that are important for the parameters of tense , aspect and type of action are also fundamental . At the end of the day, expression rules determine the grammatical form, the configuration and the intonation of the linguistic expressions.

This theory is initially called functional because, as explained above, the arguments of a predication are provided with syntactic, semantic and pragmatic functions (Limburg 2009). This theory is called functional mainly because, as the inclusion of semantics and pragmatics shows, syntax, in contrast to Chomsky's formal syntax concept, is not an autonomous area, but remains bound to the semantics and the semantics in turn remains bound to the communication functions, which examines pragmatics (Dik 1978: 5). Pragmatics in particular, which has become an integral part of this syntax theory, deserves attention because it was a novelty in the generative era in the 1970s and today still has many tasks in store for research.

For example word order

Dik's approach is probably most evident in the area of word order . Typologists and other linguists mostly use syntactic models, describe the word order with sentence constituent terms and characterize languages ​​as SOV types . In contrast, Dik sees word order as a multifunctional phenomenon that is described in nine general and twelve specific principles (Dik 1989: 340-355). Among other things, the pragmatic functions of topic and focus are important for the arrangement of the constituents . 'Topic' is that constituent of a predication about which the predication says something (cf. Dik 1978: 141), 'Focus' is the constituent with the comparatively most important or most conspicuous information in relation to the pragmatic level of knowledge of the speaker and addressee (ibid .: 149).

This model is particularly convincing in languages ​​with 'free' word order such as Latin and ancient Greek (Spevak 2006; 2010; H. Dik 1995; 2007). However - in contrast to traditional conceptions - according to Dik there are no languages ​​with free word order, because (a) there are hardly any languages ​​that allow all possible sequences and because (b) different serializations are an expression of meaning differences: “for example a difference in the pragmatic functions of the constituents ”(Dik 1989: 336).

A generalizable pragmatic formula for the position of the constituents in the sentence is: "P2, P1 (V) S (V) O (V), P3" (Dik 1978: 21.175), where S, O, V, subject, object, verb mean and the Abbreviations P1, P2, P3 stand for different special items. In concrete texts and sentences, it is examined how the decisive pragmatic functions topic and focus are distributed over this model , whether, for example, the focus often coincides with P1 and whether a verb in the top position is just another form of P1. In any case, this model avoids the distinction between marked vs. unmarked, is not limited to sentences with subject, verb and object, which, as is well known, only make up part of the concrete language material, and thus includes a much larger set of sentences.

scope

Finally, an important feature of Dik's functional grammar is typological adequacy, which states that a linguistic theory should be applicable to as many typologically different languages ​​as possible (Dik 1989: 14). Here, too, there is great potential in this theory, which could form the Basic Linguistic Theory required by RMW Dixon and thus become a standard theory for typological language descriptions.

literature

• H. Dik: Word order in ancient Greek. A pragmatic account of word order variation in Herodotus . Amsterdam 1995.
• H. Dik: Word Order in Greek Tragic Dialogue . Oxford 2007.
• SC Dik: Coordination. Its implications for the theory of general linguistics . Amsterdam 1968.
• SC Dik: Functional Grammar . Dordrecht 1978 (Publications in Language Sciences; 7)
• SC Dik: Studies in Functional Grammar . London and New York 1980.
• SC Dik: The Theory of Functional Grammar. Part I: The Structure of the Clause. Dordrecht 1989; Part II: Complex and Derived Constructions, ed. By Kees Hengeveld. Berlin 1997.
• K. Hengeveld: Layers and operators: Journal of Linguistics 25, 1989, 127-157.
• K. Hengeveld et al. JL Mackenzie: Functional Discourse Grammar: A typologically-based theory of language structure . Oxford (Oxford University Press) 2008, also partially available in an online version: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/linguistics/9780199278107/toc.html
• JG Kooij: Simon Cornelis Dik . In: Jaarboek van de Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde. 2000-2001 . Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde, Leiden 2002 [a biographical summary, in Dutch].
• MJ Limburg, "Dik, Simon Cornelis". In: H. Stammerjohann (ed.): Lexicon grammaticorum: Who's Who in the History of Worlds Linguistics , 2nd edition, Tübingen 2009.
• Harm Pinkster & I. Grenee (eds.): Unity in diversity: Papers presented to Simon C. Dik on his 50th birthday . Dordrecht 1990.
• A. Siewierska: Functional grammar . London and New York 1991 (Linguistic theory guides).
• O. Spevak: L'ordre des constituants en Latin: aspects pragmatiques, sémantiques et syntaxiques . Habilitation thesis Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne 2006. s. http://www.olgaspevak.nl/index_bestanden/Page949.htm
• O. Spevak: Constituent Order in Latin Classical Prose . Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamin 2010.
• O. Spevak: The Noun Phrase in Classical Latin Prose . Leiden: Brill 2014.

Web links

• Literature by and about Simon C. Dik in the catalog of the German National Library
• Functional grammar website