Diasema Lectures : V. Gast (université Friedrich Schiller de Jena), Graph-based approaches to sentence semantics and language comparison

Abstract. In this talk I will discuss ways of fruitfully using graphs (in a mathematical sense) for the representation of meaning/distribution, and language comparison based on meaning/distribution. Starting with a brief review of theory-driven comparative work on function words (focus particles, impersonals) I will propose a way of using graphs for the exploratory analysis of adverbs of immediate posteriority such as ‘immediately’ in both contrastive linguistics and translation studies. At a more general level, I will address the relationship between graph-based and distance-based methods of representing meaning/distribution in the analysis of function words (cf. also Georgakopoulos & Polis 2018).