Contributions of the philosophy of science to juridical semantics

Chinese special languages and the notion of headedness

together with: David Cheng & Khurshid Ahmad

The languages of science and technology, and the languages of religion and politics, and of ideology, have been influenced by one single natural language during various times in recent history: Greek, Latin, Arabic, and now English. Terms from Greek, Latin, Arabic and English LSPs were and are borrowed into a huge variety of natural languages. Often, the target languages have a different lexicogrammatical basis than that of the source language.
How do the borrowers cope lexicogrammatically? In this context, we believe that studies in special language can benefit from developments in theoretical linguistics. As a good example of this, we present the case of specialist terms in Chinese which are analysable in Williams’ (1981) ‘heads’ framework. We draw from two specialist lexicons, that used for computing, e.g. operating system and that used for politics, e.g. central government.

Williams claimed that an important property of compound words is that they are headed. One of the elements serves as the semantic core of the compound, and determines its syntactic class; the other element(s) function to modify the head. In operating system the second element system is the head, determining that the expression is a noun. An additional claim is that all headed expressions are right-headed, as in the example. Chinese is interesting in this regard in that due to its limited morphology it has developed a highly productive compounding system for creating new words, including specialist terms. Williams Righthand Head Rule (RHR) can be invoked to determine the semantic core of such new terms. Evidence for the RHR in Chinese is particularly strong in noun compounds. In Chao’s (1968) typology of noun compounds, discussed in Starosta et al (1998) all the productive cases have nouns as the rightmost element functioning as heads. The three morpheme compound 帆船鞋is a typical example where the noun 鞋is the head. This corresponds directly with the head in the English compound shoe. The apparent application to Chinese of this universal (the RHR) has the consequence that new terms in Chinese which are based on English Special Language will not only match at the conceptual level, but to some extent at the surface level as well. The key concept lying behind the term will be located in the head, which will be the rightmost element, in Chinese as it is in English. Consider the following examples.

(1) 作業系統	‘operating system’	(1´) [N [V作業] [N系統] ]
(2) {程式設計語言	‘program design language’	(2´) [N [N{程式] [N設計] [N語言] ]
(3) 中央政府	‘central government’	(3´) [N [P中央] [N政府] ]

In (1) we have a four morpheme compound. However the first two characters作業can be treated synchronically as one constituent ‘operating’, and the second two系統 as the constituent ‘system’. The compound can then be viewed as a two constituent compound with the noun 系統 as the head, as in English, as shown in (1´). (2) is a more complex example, but again a synchronic interpretation simplifies matters. The first two characters {程式 denote ‘program’, the next two 設計 ‘design’, and the last two 語言 ‘language’, corresponding to the head in the English compound, as shown in (2´). Finally for ‘central government’ in (3), the characters 中央 together are interpreted as the preposition ‘in the middle(of)’, and 政府 as ‘government’ (literally ‘politics mansion’), as shown in (3´), where ‘government’ functions as the head in both languages.

The notion of head in word formation provides a good analytical tool for determining the core semantics of newly coined technical terms in Chinese.

References

Chao, Yuen Ren (1968). A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Starosta, Stanley et al. (1998). On defining the Chinese compound word: Headedness in Chinese compounding and Chinese VR compounds. In: Packard, Jerome L. (ed.) New Approaches to Chinese Word Formation: Morphology, Phonology and the Lexicon in Modern and Ancient Chinese. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 347 – 370.

Williams, Edwin (1981). On the notions ‘lexically related’ and ‘head of a word’. Linguistic Inquiry 12, 245-274.
Hobbs, Pamela
Tipping the scales of justice: deconstructing an expert’s testimony on cross-examination
American law is not a single discourse, but is the product of diverse and often discordant voices; nowhere is this more apparent than during the cross-examination of parties and witnesses at trial. The sequential organization of witness examinations has thus drawn the attention of conversation analysts, who have examined the effects of the turn-taking system governing such examinations on the organization of the interaction that occurs. This paper applies the theoretical framework thus developed to the analysis of an attorney's management of expert cross- examination in a medical malpractice case. The paper demonstrates that, rather than simply attempting to discredit an opposing witness' testimony, the cross-examining attorney actively exploits the question-answer sequence by using it as a platform for the construction of a competing and contrasting version of the facts, and that this construction occurs simultaneously with the deconstruction of the witness' direct testimony. It is shown thus that, by posing strategic questions, challenging evasive answers, building selected descriptions, and transforming hypothesis into fact, the cross-examining attorney seeks to substitute his reanalysis for the witness' testimony.
Keywords: legal language, cross-examination, conversation analysis

Horsella, Maria
Elements of synthesis in medical English
The aim of this study is to examine some synthetic constructions in the literature of medicine in English. These constructions comprise Nominalizations, Complex Nominals and Dense and Compex Nominal Groups.
Previous studies have dealt with the evolution of the Elements of Synthesis (ES) in the areas of Physics and Chemistry and with the difficulties they may pose to Spanish-speaking readers. In the present study they are investigated with a view to determining if they are more frequent in the literature read at the clinical level than at the basic level in the assumption that they are a shortened form of communication between specialists.
As a first approximation, 400 titles of 19 papers at each level in widely circulated, acknowledged, recent journals were examined to detect the ES mentioned above. In addition, the semantic role played by prepositions in the same corpus of study was analyzed to see if a set of semantic generalizations is possible.


Hänchen, Regina
«Alors même si le marketing n'est pas encore mort, vive la mercatique!»* –Bedeutungswandel, Wortbildungsprozesse und Kollokationen in der französischen Marketingsprache
Marketing gehört zu den Fächern, die erst seit der zweiten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts von den USA ausgehend weltweit Verbreitung finden. Die in Frankreich mit der Etablierung des Faches einhergehenden fach­sprachlichen Entwicklungsprozesse und Veränderungen wurden hier analysiert. Genauer gesagt, es wurden in dieser Untersuchung Antworten auf folgende Fragestellungen gesucht: Welche Termini werden wann in die französischen Marketingsprache eingeführt und wie etablieren sie sich? Welche Wortbildungsmuster werden gebraucht? Ändert sich der Gebrauch bzw. die Bedeutung der Termini? In welchen Kollokationen werden Termini verwendet? Wann treten diese erstmalig auf?
Die hauptsächlich auf korpuslinguistischen Analysen einer umfangreichen, diachronen Stichprobe der Revue Française du Marketing basierenden Befunde sind interessante fachlexikographische Informationen über die meistverwendeten französischen Marketingtermini und aktuelle Gebrauchs­regeln aber auch über diachrone semantische, syntaktische und morpho­syntaktische Veränderungen in der französischen Marketingsprache. Einige dieser Erkenntnisse sollen hier vorgeführt und diskutiert werden.

*in: Guilloton, No?lle 1977: Marketing, commercialisation, mercatique, marchéage, mise en marché. In: Meta 22: 211-217. Montréal 1977

Jernudd, Björn H.
Organized solutions to language problems: managing professional language in Hong Kong.
Abstract: The paper will deal with directed and systematically organized language management in Hong Kong. I aim to show the range of different kinds of behavior toward language that are reflected in the work of language management organizations. I want to show the diversity of motivations for their work, whether from responding to changing communicative demands or from acting on behalf of social and political interests. An important aspect of my paper is to show how and why the private sector engages in language management. I will also attend to governmentally authorized language planning agencies and attempt to show how public and private language management relate to each other.


Järvi, Outi