231183 Fuzzy Grammar (S) (WiSe 2013/2014)

The course will focus on phenomena in grammar that involve a notion of

a) gradience in terms of category membership and
b) vagueness in terms of semantic interpretation.

While a large number of categories seem well-entrenched in their respective scopes, a significant part of morphosyntax relies on items that are defined relatively vaguely. In other areas of study, fuzzy sets or continua are used to describe these phenomena but in linguistics, the study of fuzziness proper is relatively new even though the investigation into fuzzy set grammar started in the philosophy of language with Wittgenstein’s observation of family resemblances. In modern linguistics, the identification of semantic prototypes can be considered a landmark. This approach has been extended into the morphosyntactic field with the phonological and semantic polarity of all grammatical items in Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar and compatible approaches. In this class we will

a)systematically look at diverse levels of linguistic description,
b) identify phenomena of fuzziness and
c) investigate, where these notions lead us theoretically and practically.