Blackstrap molasses

SugarTexts, in its second phase (ST2, 2010?-?), has both theoretical, empirical, and applied linguistic dimensions.

The empirical issues concern i.a. the statistics of the text corpus.

As any linguistic text, a SugarText has the following two dimensions:

discourse (intentional and manifestational), especially the SugarStory, i.e. the conceptual content of a SugarText (here 'thinking for speaking' is relevant)

(text) grammatical, i.e. the language-specific, conventional structures, both on the level of semantico-pragmatic content and on the level of morphosyntactic-phonological/graphological expression

Furthermore, a SugarText represents a macro-speech act (discourse), which is potentially multimodally integrated with other sign acts, e.g. pictorial illustrations and process diagrams, or even small, accompanying video films of the SugarProcess, as is widespread in our corpus. Thus, the project is relevant for semiotics.

Within the textual-grammatical dimension, text structures will be investigated cross-linguistically, especially with respect to paragraph structure.

On the sentence level, the cross-linguistic differences will be investigated with respect to the use of grammatical operators, like i.a. tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality, as well as spatial particles, in the verbal domain; in the nominal domain: i.a. determination and genericity.

On the lexical level, the cross-linguistic differences will be investigated with respect to the use of the different major parts of speech, viz. verbs, nouns, adverbs, adjectives, and prepositions. Additionally, the use of the different grammatico-syntactic templates (valency patterns; verb framing, satellite framing; serial constructions) will be investigated.