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Subject Area: Semantics

A COGNITIVE APPROACH TO THE SEMANTICS OF THE GERMAN PASSIVE
 Arnett, Carlee
2004 0-7734-6319-4 225 pages
Hopper & Thompson’s (1980) seminal article on transitivity brought forth renewed interest in the passive and other correlates of transitivity. Langacker (1982) and others working with the Cognitive Grammar (CG) framework argue that the passive voice is an independent construction and that it is not a reorganization of the active voice. Language specific problems for the German passive include the use of the dative case to mark certain passive participants, passives formed from verbs and preposition combinations and impersonal passives. This study provides a semantic analysis of all the types of passive constructions found in German and shows that these construction types are related. A corpus of written data is used and the focus is on radial categories of meaning in Modern German.

A New Theory of Music: Correspondences of Language, Emotion, and Sound
 Petty, Jonathan Christian
2021 1-4955-0859-5 744 pages
"This model has implications for music, language of emotions. For the psychological content reflected in the MNS and regulated by SES is emotion - primarily the feeling of personal safety in the presence of others, and secondarily, the eudaimonic or positive feelings made possible by such safety. The musical dimension of this maybe intuited when we consider the musical cadence - the 'descent to the tonic' - as a decisive feeling of arriving safely home, 'there's no place like home.' Music's ability to qualify feelings of mild apprehension - i.e. 'dissonance' - may well understood as maneuvers to heighten feelings of stability ('consonance') and homecoming ('tonic'), the essential feelings of personal belonging upon all other eudiamonic feelings are built."
From the Introduction



ANTON BRUCKNER'S LAST ADAGIO: THE DECOMPOSING SELF
 Petty, Jonathan Christian
2022 1-4955-0991-5 188 pages
This work employs tenets of Group Mental System theory in considering the musical syntax and affective semantics of Anton Bruckner's last adagio. "The main tenet of this theory is that the sole linguistic object of music, language of the emotions, is Self. Musical language qualifies Self by qualifying its affect (emotions, moods, dispositions). ...[I]t is of particular interest to consider those musical works in which alterations to the Self play a direct role." -Jonathan Christian Petty