Betydning og grammatik – i et semiotisk perspektiv

Grammar is directly rooted in human phenomenology, in the sense that we all immediately experience the salient and meaningful compositional events in the syntactic structure of currently heard or read texts. Since we have this introspective access to syntax and can grasp the grammatical properties, grammatical analysis can be based on experiential phenomenal composition. I intend to show some basic principles of such an analysis and of a possible graphic form of representation that can work in a pedagogical settting. The structure that appears through long term use of phenomenological and ‘stemmatic’ analysis of sentence syntax points to the existence of a generic and canonical grammar underlying specific construction grammars; this canonical format is, I suggest to think, rooted in human cognition and its semantic conceptual formats. The article finally presents a text sample from a German newspaper, transcribed according to the stemmatic principles.