Ekkehard König Knihy

"Our book aims at readers who want to learn more about how language works both in everyday ordinary verbal communication and in memorable works of verbal art and how the principles of ordinary communication interact with artistic creativity. The two interests are interdependent. After all, poems, though made of ideas, sensations or emotions, are first and foremost made of words and sentences, objects of fascination for linguists as well as poets and their readers. And it is only against the background of an awareness of the rules governing ordinary language that we will be able to appreciate and describe the pleasurable liberties poetic language takes with them. This book thus aims at providing pleasurable insights into verbal art in its rich diversity of periods and genres, ranging from Shakespearean plays to modern and postmodern narratives, from lyrical poetry to pop-songs and commercials. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. And the proof of linguistic theories for literary studies in our hands-on analyses is in the reading, in the heuristic surplus value these theories generate when confronted with great literature, with language taken to the limits of its complexity and density, suggestive power and memorable beauty.

Our book aims at readers who want to learn more about how language works both in everyday ordinary verbal communication and in memorable works of verbal art and how the principles of ordinary communication interact with artistic creativity. The two interests are interdependent. After all, poems, though made of ideas, sensations or emotions, are first and foremost made of words and sentences, objects of fascination for linguists as well as poets and their readers. And it is only against the background of an awareness of the rules governing ordinary language that we will be able to appreciate and describe the pleasurable liberties poetic language takes with them. This book thus aims at providing pleasurable insights into verbal art in its rich diversity of periods and genres, ranging from Shakespearean plays to modern and postmodern narratives, from lyrical poetry to pop-songs and commercials. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. And the proof of linguistic theories for literary studies in our hands-on analyses is in the reading, in the heuristic surplus value these theories generate when confronted with great literature, with language taken to the limits of its complexity and density, suggestive power and memorable beauty.

This collection of original papers is a representative survey of recent theoretical and cross-linguistic work on reciprocity and reflexivity. Its most remarkable feature is its combination of formal approaches, case studies on individual languages and broad typological surveys in one volume, showing that the interaction of formal approaches to grammar and typology may lead to new insights and results for both fields. Among the major issues addressed in this volume are the following: How can our current knowledge about the space and limits of variation in the relevant domain be captured in a structural typology of reciprocity? What light can such a typology shed on the facts of particular languages or groups of languages (e. g. Austronesian)? How can recent descriptive and typological insights be incorporated into a revised and more adequate version of the Binding Theory? How do verbal semantics, argument structure and reciprocal markers interact? How can we explain the pervasive patterns of ambiguity observable in these two domains, especially the use of the same forms both as reflexive and reciprocal markers? What are the major sources in the historical development of reciprocal markers? This combination of large-scale typological surveys with in-depth studies of particular languages provides new answers to old questions and raises important new questions for future research.