torsdag 1 mars 2012

Me nerdy? Where did you get that from?

Can't stop thinking about illustrating abstract linguistics concepts again... I used to to that a long time ago (two-three years ago) and I'm still kinda into it.. I mean I have one of them tattooed to my wrist so... (->).. I never fully finished any drawings back then, it's all very sketchy. I've never been trained in drawing and I'm by no means confident about my skills at it. I just enjoy it very much. (If you wanna see the explanation of the tattoo the look at pictures below.)

Just for the record, the images posted here are by no means finished or anything like that, I know that they are not very good - please spare me comments on that. I just wanted to share my drafts and ideas. And tell my friends and family what I'm currently nerding out about.

Illustrating linguistics: gram and gram types
My current linguistic item that I wanna illustrate are the concepts of grams and gram types from the Bybee & Dahl-approach as defined by Dahl (2000). Very brief definition: Gram is the specific grammatical constructions in individual languages (English Perfect) and gram types being crosslinguistic categories of grammar (the perfect). These gram types do not cover all that which it's members represent but are rater identified by the common features that all grams in that category share. In the case of the perfect this is Current Relevance and non-narrativity (Lindstedt 2006)..  all literature on this is very exciting and brilliant


I wanna make small gram creatures that wonder about on a semantic map (Anderson 1982 & Haspelmath 2003) and a big gram creature. And maybe Monsters of Grammaticalization: Bleaching, Reduction (with claws and fangs) and Obligatorification (no idea yet what that'll look like) etc... getting a bit carried away perhaps.. :).
 There's this quote from Lindstedt 2000 that I have a hard time getting out of my head:

"One can reach the conclusion that current relevance is not only a function, but also a junction: grammaticalization paths from different sources, such as resultative and completive, converge here; and further paths lead from here to experiential (indefinite past), perfective past, general past, and also to in directive.[..] Every concrete gram is only a passer-by at this junction, still having its tail in the resultative, or pushing its head toward new aspectual, temporal or evidential meaning."

It's so beatiful, I love it!

So below are some drafts for ideas for drawings I'm doodling on. After the references are some old sketches for drawings of Saussurian semiotics (language consisting of form meaning pairs) and the idea that conversation is a collaboration rather than consisting of separate entries form each participant.


References for theoretical framework for the drawings I wanna make.

Anderson, L. (1982). The ’Perfect’ as a Universal and as a Language-Particular Cate- gory. In Hopper, P. J., editor, Tense-Aspect: between semantics & Pragmatics. John Benjamins, Amsterdam.

Dahl, Ö. (2000). The tense-aspect systems of European languages in a typological per- spective. In Dahl, Ö., editor, Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe, pages 3–25. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin.
 
Dahl, Ö. (1985). Tense and Aspect Systems. Blackwell, Oxford.   


Haspelmath, M. (2003). The Geometry of Grammatical Meaning: Semantic Maps and Cross-Linguistic Comparison. In Tomasello, M., editor, The New Ppsychology of Lan- guage: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure. Vol 2. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New Jersey.


Lindstedt, J. (2000). The perfect - aspectual, temporal and evidential. In Dahl, Ö., editor, Tense and Aspect in the Languages of Europe, pages 365–384. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin.

Lindstedt, J. (2006). Perfects, resultatives, and experientials. In Brown, K., editor, Ency- clopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd ed.), pages 270–273. Elsevier Ltd, Amsterdam.

Really old drawings I'm not proud of but that are a part of the illustrating linguistics-idea




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