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.The projection of roles intosyntactic functions determines the perspective of a sentence.Scope domain of quantifying or modifying elements, determines whichelements are affected by the quantifier or modifier and thus, to someextent, the basic order of these elements.Scrambling deviating from basic word order by swapping positions.InGerman quite freely, in the interest of discourse linking; much moreconstrained in configurational English.Selection restrictions semantic constraints on the combination of words. Glossary 177Violations of these constraints may be intentional, as in the literary useof language or in translations extending the expressive potential of thetarget language, but in most cases they will be unintentional, resulting insemantic mismatches of a more or less distorting nature.Semantics the meaning of linguistic structures.Although we have givenpriority to pragmatic concepts like optimal relevance and contextualappropriateness, semantic aspects are highly relevant for translationssince translations are by definition characterized by (a certain degree of)equivalence between the meanings of the original and the translation,and a large part of equivalence is determined semantically.There are various layers of semantic meaning to be distinguished.Theinner core of the various layers is the referential meaning of all, at leastpotentially, referring elements.It consists of two basic types: individualsor events (called eventualities to cover states, too) and predicates, whichtake us from individuals to eventualities.On the side of the semanticform we speak of arguments and predicates forming propositions, whichcan, in turn, be used as arguments to form more complex propositions.The basic semantic types are subjected to all sorts of additional specifi-cations and modifications, determining among other things the quantityof the reference and the modality of the predication in terms of truthor likelihood.On the layer of quantified and modified propositionalmeaning is superimposed the layer of propositional attitudes, expressingthe speaker s opinions, often relative to other opinions; the attitudinalmeaning includes emotional evaluations of the eventualities referred to.The layer of evaluated propositional meanings is overlain by the layer ofillocutionary, performative meaning, determining the type of speech act(like question, order, assertion etc) performed by the utterance of thelinguistic forms carrying all these meanings.Some of the linguistically carried meaning is expressed explicitly,some implicitly through implications or presuppositions.But the mean-ings of sentences are not only determined linguistically by the semanticsof the words and their syntactic relations to each other, but also by ourcommon knowledge about the individuals and eventualities talkedabout and the discursive context, situational or textual, to which thesentence belongs.This includes all the inferences we can draw on thebasis of our knowledge, presuppositions, implications and implicatures(the weak type of implications, based only on likelihood).In translations,we can compensate for the differences between the linguistically deter-mined meanings not only by composing meaning through differentcombinations of the means of the target language, but also by redistri-buting meaning between the explicit and implicit, linguistic and non-linguistic components of knowledge.(For a theoretically comprehensiveand hard approach to the vast area of semantics cf.Wunderlich andStechow 1991.)Speech acts acts performed by uttering sentences; determined by the 178 Glossaryillocutionary meaning of a sentence and the context.Thus, for example:Can you tell me the time?can be a real question to a child, asking about its cognitive capacities,but a request to someone whom we can expect to have these capacities.Style conventionalized or individual variety of language use.Lexical orgrammatical options are either neutral or marked for special stylisticlevels (casual, substandard, etc) and registers (literary, academic, etc),including regional, social or aesthetic variants.The Principle of OptimalRelevance, together with the parametrized grammatical conditions of alanguage, determines the general stylistic profile that distinguishes alanguage from other languages (as for example the greater positionalfreedom or discourse sensitivity of German word order versus thegreater lexical and prosodic freedom of English subjects, as discussed inChapter 4).Synchronic at one and the same stage of development.Syntax grammatical component determining the combination of words inword groups, clauses and sentences.There is a universal inventory ofcategories (word classes), and universal principles for the extension ofthese categories into phrases and their completion into clauses orindependent sentences.Languages differ in the basic direction of thestructural extensions, requiring the categorial head at the left or rightperiphery of its phrase.According to the position of the verb thedominant category in sentence structure English can be said to be aleft-peripheral language, extending its verb phrase to the right, whileGerman extends its verb phrase to the left, whether the verb is in its basicright-peripheral position as in the subclause, or in the left-peripheralposition of the main clause.The latter has to be seen as derived frombasic structures.There are universal and language-specific constraints inthe derivation of sentence structures, concerning, for example, the par-ticularities of what can move where.Moving elements to the beginningof sentences, for example, is much more constrained in English than inGerman.But the greatest difference in the syntactic options of languagesare the particular constraints laid down in the syntactic properties of theindividual lexical element.There is the set of major categories, such asverbs, nouns, adjective, adverbs and prepositions, which determine thetypes of arguments they are used with, their number, case and order.Then there is the set of grammatical word forms, inflections, carryingthe grammaticalized meanings of tense, mood, voice, gender, numberand person, which differ greatly from language to language.Text linguistically formed unit of discourse; written or oral whole ofvarying length unified under one major topic.Textual relevance relevance of individual elements beyond the immediate,local context; determines the importance relative to each other of Glossary 179elements participating in discourse relations, structuring the text intolarger segments.Topic (of sentence or discourse) the element the sentence or discourse isabout, which need not be the same.Topic in the sentence is the element that the sentence comments upon.Together, topic and comment constitute one layer of informationstructure.Although topics may have their own focus, the main focus of asentence will mostly reside in the comment, so that topic is often simplyjuxtaposed to focus.Topicalization moving an element into structural topic position, whichamounts to the initial position of a sentence
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