GRK 2636:  Form-meaning mismatches

• Subject Area: Linguistics
• Term: since 2021
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 429844083

The central aim of the second funding phase of this RTG is to provide the second and third cohort of PhD students with an excellent training in linguistic research by jointly investigating one of the most pressing questions in linguistics, namely to what extent morphosyntactic structures are mapped onto semantic/pragmatic representations and vice versa. This research program will be carried out in an environment with a very strong, dynamic and well-organized linguistics community at large and will be guided by a qualification program that combines individual training by multiple supervisors with a wide range of courses, lectures, summer schools, and international visitors. This enables PhD students to obtain all necessary linguistic and other academic skills for becoming high-end researchers, ready to pursue a career inside or outside academia. It has been a standard assumption in linguistic theory, based on Frege’s principle of compositionality, that the meaning of a sentence is composed on the basis of the meaning of its parts and the way these parts are structured. This is a uni-directional mapping from form to meaning. Whether there exists a transparent, bi-directional mapping between (morphosyntactic) form and (semantic/pragmatic) meaning is still an open question, one that will be addressed in this RTG. Prima facie, many phenomena challenge the existence of such a bi-directional mapping, or the one-directional mapping originally attributed to Frege. Such challenges either exist in the form of morphosyntactic elements that do not seem to provide a semantic/pragmatic contribution, or in the form of meaning parts that lack a morphosyntactic realization. Hence, either the mapping between form and meaning (in its broadest sense) in natural language is less transparent than one might think, or morphosyntactic and/or semantic/pragmatic structures may be richer than they appear. Addressing the question as to what this mapping exactly amounts to is at the heart of contemporary linguistic theory, and requires an in-depth investigation of a wide range of case studies involving potential challenges for this mapping as well as an overarching perspective that integrates the various findings of individual research projects. All PhD students in the second phase of this RTG will carry out such a case study, and together with the participating researchers and other RTG-members, such as the currently associated postdocs and other junior faculty members, they will implement the outcomes of their studies in an overarching theoretical perspective that this RTG aims to develop. PhD students in this RTG will thus gain excellent individual linguistic research experience working on their own projects while collectively developing a much-needed contribution to the core of linguistic theory.

• DFG Programme: Research Training Groups
• Applicant Institution: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
• Spokesperson: Professor Hedde Zeijlstra, Ph.D.
• Participating Researchers: Professorin Dr. Lisa Beinborn; Professor Dr. Marco Coniglio; Professorin Dr. Anke Holler; Professor Dr. Uwe Junghanns; Professor Dr. Götz Keydana; Professorin Dr. Nivedita Mani; Dr. Nina-Kristin Meister; Professor Dr. Guido Mensching; Professor Dr. Stavros Skopeteas; Professor Dr. Markus Steinbach; Professor Dr. Clemens Steiner-Mayr; Dr. Thomas Weskott