## Helle Dam-Jensen, Henning Nølke, Sten Vikner & Helle Vrønning Dam*

## How to Understand Understanding - a Tribute to Professor Torben Thrane

With this thematic section of Hermes , colleagues and friends wish to honour professor Torben Thrane for his important contribution to linguistics. The volume contains written versions of the talks presented at a conference held at the Department of Language and Business Communication, Aarhus University, on January 28, 2011, to celebrate Torben Thrane on the occasion of his retirement as a professor in modern English language and linguistics.

Professor Torben Thrane started his academic career at the University of Copenhagen, where he was fi  rst assistant professor and then associate professor in English language and literature at the Department of English between 1972 and 1985, after which he moved to the Institute of Informatics where he held a position as reader between 1985 and 1995. In 1995, Torben Thrane was appointed professor of modern English language and linguistics at the Department of English (which later became part of the Department of Language and Business Communication) at the Aarhus School of Business. After almost 16 highly productive years in Aarhus, Torben Thrane much to the regret of his colleagues - chose to retire in January 2011 in order to spend more time with his family, play more bridge and, not least, study and write at a more leisurely pace than is usually possible as a university professor.

In 1967, Torben Thrane was awarded a gold medal by the University of Copenhagen for his Master's dissertation on the infl  uence of Latin on Middle English syntax, and in 1976 he was awarded the degree of PhD from the University of Edinburgh for the dissertation A Study in the Referential Functions of the English Noun Phrase . The dissertation was published in 1980 under the title Referential-Semantic Analysis: Aspects of a theory of linguistic reference (Cambridge University Press). Later followed numerous articles and other publications, as evidenced in the bibliovita following these pages.

Torben Thrane's academic interests as a researcher and teacher are very broad. They include syntax, semantics, morphology, philosophy, cognitive science, theory of science, and historical linguistics. His work ranges from very detailed analyses, e.g. of the structure of nominals, refl  exive pronouns, or the Danish intensifying expression sikke , to his keen interest in the big picture, the fundamental questions of linguistics, i.e. the things that other linguists are normally more than happy to take for granted, such as:

- What is the role of linguistic meaning?
- What is information?
- Why is language so easy to understand when it is so diffi  cult to understand?
- Can natural language actually be represented symbolically?
- What does it mean to explain something in linguistics?

* Helle Dam-Jensen & Helle Vrønning Dam Department of Business Communication Aarhus University Business and Social Sciences DK-8210 Aarhus V hed@asb.dk - hd@asb.dk

Henning Nølke Section for French Department of Aesthetics & Communication Aarhus University DK-8000 Aarhus C nolke@hum.au.dk Sten Vikner Section for English Department of Aesthetics & Communication Aarhus University DK-8000 Aarhus C sten.vikner@hum.au.dk

7

- How can we explain the human ability to understand linguistic utterances as vehicles for the expression of thoughts and ideas?
- What is a mental fact?
- What is the difference between the mind and the brain, and would it be better for linguistics if they were kept apart rather than lumped together (as in Chomsky's neologism mind/ brain )?

Questions such as these are fundamental to Torben Thrane's research project, formed by a coherent series of books, articles and presentations. They all exhibit an interest in the fundamental nature of language, the way it is understood, and a wish to explain what it means to produce and understand linguistic expressions.

An essential preoccupation of Torben Thrane's research is what meaning does, rather than what it is. His interest lies in unravelling the functionality of language that facilitates understanding, rather than unravelling which functions we use language for. The inspiration from Noam Chomsky is very clear here, but just as strong, if not stronger, is the inspiration from the American philosopher Fred Dretske.

In Torben Thrane's framework, language is defi  ned as a representational system. Representational systems carry information about something different from themselves, and in the case of language, such information is an input to an interpretive process. This makes language understanding a higher-order cognitive process, based on information.

Torben Thrane's work is characterized not just by its level of linguistic scholarship but also by its unorthodox and creative theoretical approach. He is a very comprehensive scholar, with a solid knowledge both of the formal and of the functional frameworks, which, combined with his sharp eye for new and not yet discussed data, sets him in a position to be critical of both sides of the formal-functional debate, and allows him to be not just open-minded but also imaginative, something which unfortunately is not all that common among today's linguists.

In his academic career, Torben Thrane has been a source of inspiration and knowledge. Through creative, colourful and dedicated presentations and thorough, entertaining and convincing articles, he has shared with us his understanding of how to understand language, something that we are all very grateful for.

## Introduction to the thematic section

Torben Thrane's research constitutes the point of departure of the contributions to this thematic section of Hermes , either as the theoretical frame, shared interests or as a starting point for discussion.

The fi  rst article by John Anderson , Referentiality and the Noun , argues that nouns and names do not refer, and whenever they appear to refer, they have, in fact, been converted lexically to determiners. Thus nouns and names participate in reference by virtue of dependency on a determiner, either in the syntax, as part of a determiner phrase, or lexically, by conversion. This is illustrated by examples from English, French and Greek, which employ the lexical and the syntactic strategies to varying extent. The paper goes on to illustrate from the same three languages how predicative nouns are not dependent on a determiner.

In the contribution If Your Language Was a Car….The Object(s) of Linguistic Research, or: Towards a Shared Geography of Linguistics, Peter Harder suggests how the disagreement between formal and functional linguistics can be the object of fruitful discussion. The heart of the matter is which perspectives of language the two communities aim at capturing. Harder argues that a shared research interest of the two communities is the role of distributional regularities and their possible semantic motivation.

The following article, Trees and Fields and Negative Polarity , by Sten Vikner compares two kinds of approaches to clause structure, tree analyses such as the generative analysis and fi  eld analyses such as the sætningsskema analysis of Danish of Paul Diderichsen. It then goes on to discuss a particular difference between the two kinds of analyses, c-command , which is a relationship between different constituents in a clause. The article argues that c-command is not just helpful but actually essential in the account of negative polarity items in English, Danish and German.

Helle Dam-Jensen 's contribution, The Meaning of Mood - Embedded Clauses in Spanish as a Case in Point , discusses how the meaning of the much-debated grammatical category in Spanish, mood, can be used as a starting point for explaining the use of mood. It takes as a starting point that the modal morphemes, like any other grammatical category, have a general meaning which provides the input to an interpretive process. It is argued that the interpretive process can be made explicit in the framework of Mental spaces, developed by Gilles Fauconnier.

The last article in the thematic section, Sematics and Pragmatics of Bridge Language , is written by Henning Nølke , who shares not only Torben Thrane's passion for linguistics, but also his passion for the card game bridge . In his rather unorthodox and entertaining article, Nølke combines the academic with the personal, arguing that bridge has its own language, which may be described in terms of linguistic concepts and linguistic theory. The article fi  rst outlines the basic grammar of bridge and then it goes on to describe the language of bidding and playing by means of referential semantics, speech act theory, contextual analysis and interaction pragmatics. It is appropriate that the concluding article should refl  ect the colorful and unconventional style so characteristic of Torben Thrane's own work - a style which reveals his basic approach to the discipline to which he has devoted his life: linguistics is not only serious business - linguistics is fun!

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The theme editors

## Torben Thrane: Bibliovita

## Books and monographs

- Thrane, Torben 1967: De vigtigste træk af latinens indfl  ydelse på syntaksen i middelengelsk. University of Copenhagen, Department of English, 232 s.
- Thrane, Torben 1976: A Study in the Referential Functions of the English Noun Phrase. University of Edinburgh, Department of Linguistics, 432 s.
- Thrane, Torben 1980: Referential-Semantic Analysis: Aspects of a theory of linguistic reference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 256 s. [Cambridge studies in linguistics 28].

## Articles

- Thrane, Torben 1978: Passion's Trance: A central theme in Shelley's poetry. In Occasional Papers: Publications of the Department of English. Vol. 5. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, Department of English, 106-154.
- Thrane, Torben 1979: Concerning the number and nature of word classes. In Essays presented to Knud Schibsbye: On his 75th birthday 29 November 1979 .  (eds.)  Chestnutt, Michael/Færch, Claus/ Thrane, Torben/Caie, Graham D. Copenhagen: Akademisk, 247-263 [Publications of the Department of English, University of Copenhagen].
- Thrane, Torben/Canger, Una/Ege, Niels/Mackenzie, Lachlan (eds.) 1980: Typology and Genetics of Language: Proceedings of the Rask-Hjelmslev Symposium to Commemorate the 500th Anniversary of the University of Copenhagen. Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 210 s. [Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Copenhague].
- Thrane, Torben 1983: On some principles and assumptions of contrastive grammar, illustrated from the area of refl  exivity in Danish and English. In Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 17, 5-15.
- Thrane, Torben 1986: On delimiting the senses of near-synonyms in historical semantics: A case-study of adjectives of 'moral suffi  ciency' in the Old English 'Andreas'. In Linguistics across Historical and Geographical Boundaries : Volume 1: Linguistic Theory and Historical Linguistics . (eds.) Fisiak, Jacek/Kastovsky, Dieter/Szwedek, Aleksander. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 671-692. [Trends in linguistics. Studies and monographs].
- Thrane, Torben 1987: Parserens rolle i datamatisk sprogbehandling. In Der var engang en mand. Han bo'de i en spand: Undersøgelse af anaforer på datamat . Data Humana, Vol. 4 . Copenhagen: Department of Informatics, University of Copenhagen, 93-116 [Data Humana 4].
- Thrane, Torben 1988: Symbolic representation and natural language. In Nordic Journal of Linguistics 11, 151-173.
- Thrane, Torben 1989:  PAKA: A program for automated knowledge acquisition. In Papers from the First Nordic Conference on Text Comprehension in Man and Machine. (eds.)  Dahl, Östen/Fraurud, Kari. University of Stockholm, Department of Linguistics, 195-208.
- Thrane, Torben 1992: The computations of text comprehension. In Papers from the Third Nordic Conference on Text Comprehension in Man and Machine. (ed.) Ahrenberg, Lars. University of Linköping, Department of Computer and Information Science, 173-182.
- Thrane, Torben 1992: Dynamic Text Comprehension . In Computational Approaches to Text Understanding. (eds.) Jansen, Steen/Olsen, Jørgen/Prebensen, Henrik/Thrane, Torben. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 173-90.
- Thrane, Torben 1992: The Fallacy of Descriptivism. In Issues in Semantic Representation. (eds.)  Hansen, Steffen Leo/ Sørensen, Finn. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur, 105-125.
- Thrane, Torben 1994: Tilegnelsen af førstesprogets syntaks. In To seminarer: EDB i sprogundervisningen og kilderne til dansk historie på EDB , 98-111 [Data Humana 10].
- Thrane, Torben 1994: Constituency and semantic interpretation.  In Proceedings of  9:e  Nordiska  Datalingvistikdagarna. University of Stockholm, Department of Linguistics, 277-289.
- Thrane, Torben 1994: NP-structure and computation. In Noun Phrase Structures. (ed.) Herslund, Michael. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur, 13-43 [Copenhagen Studies in Language].
- Thrane, Torben 1996: The grammars of 'seem'. In Hermes 16, 177-200.
- Thrane, Torben 1997: Understanding semantics. In Sounds, structures and senses. Essays presented to Niels DavidsenNielsen on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday . (eds.) Bache, Carl/Klinge, Alex. Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 235-250.
- Thrane, Torben 1998: Nominaler, nominaliseringer og semantisk kompleksitet. In Hermes 21, 39-66.
- Thrane, Torben 1999: Forklaringstyper i lingvistikken. In Formel sprogteori: Nogle udfordringer til den funktionelle tilgang. (ed.) Harder, Peter. København: Museum Tusculanum, 1-26.

- Thrane, Torben 1999: Hvorfor kan det transitive subjekt ikke indgå som førsteelement i et dansk sammensat substantiv med verbalafl  edt kerne? In Formel sprogteori: Nogle udfordringer til den funktionelle tilgang. (ed.) Harder, Peter. København: Museum Tusculanum, 66-81.

Thrane, Torben, 2001: Sikke et ord. In Hermes 27, 85-137.

Thrane, Torben 2001: Brudstrukturer i dansk. In MUDS 8. Aarhus Universitet, 289-299.

Thrane, Torben 2003: Breakstructures. In Journal of Linguistics 39 (2), 327-372.

Thrane, Torben 2003: Gradsudtryk. In Ikke angivet , Aarhus Universitet, 285-297.

- Thrane, Torben 2004: Control in Danish and English. In Papers from NAES 2004 . University of Aarhus, Department of English.
- Thrane, Torben 2004: Hvorfor er sproget så svært at forstå, når det er så let at forstå? In Tidsskrift for Sprogforskning 2 (2), 37-70
- Thrane, Torben 2004: Constituents . In Words in their place. (eds.) Aertsen, Henk/Hannay, Mike/ Lyall, Rod. Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit, 367-379.
- Thrane, Torben 2005: Representing Interpreters' Knowledge: Why, What, and How? In Knowledge Systems and Translation. (eds.) Dam, Helle V./Engberg, Jan/Gerzymisch-Arbogast Heidrun. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 31-60 [Text, Translation, Computer Processing].
- Thrane, Torben 2005: Grammatisk kontrol og kontrolmarkører i dansk. In MUDS 10. Aarhus Universitet, 359-369.
- Thrane, Torben 2005: The Explanatory Range of Movement. In When and why do constituents move? University of Aarhus.
- Thrane, Torben 2007: Hvad ligner det? Repræsentation i billede og sprog . In Det bedre argument: Festskrift til Ole Togeby 7. marts 2007. (eds.) Jørgensen, Henrik/Widell, Peter. Århus: Wessel og Huitfeldt, 407-431.
- Thrane, Torben 2008: Towards an Information-Based Theory of Language. In L'énonciation dans tous ses états : Mélanges offerts à Henning Nølke à l'occasion de ses soixante ans . (eds.) Birkelund, Merete/Hansen, Mai-Britt Mosegaard/Norén, Coco. Berlin: Peter Lang, 703-728.

Thrane, Torben 2008: Hvis funktionalisme er svaret - hvad er så spørgsmålet? In NyS 36, 120-150.

Thrane, Torben 2009: The Language Faculty - mind or brain? In Tidsskrift for Sprogforskning 7, 1-42.

## Reviews

Thrane, Torben 1980: Review of Bauer, Nominal Compunding. In Studies in Language 4, 80-86.

Thrane, Torben 1982: Review of Greenbaum et al. (eds.) Studies in English Linguistics for Randolph Quirk. In Studies in Language 6 (2), 253-261.

Thrane, Torben 1982: Review of Young, The Structure of English Clauses. In Studies in Language 6 (1), 157-166.

Thrane, Torben 1986: Review of Allerton, Valency and the English Verb. In Studies in Language 10, 485-491.

## Scientifi  c reports

Trane, Torben 1995: Den parallelle virkelighed: Bidrag til en humanistisk-sociologisk kritik af Dybkjær-rapporten. Copenhagen: Københavns Universitet, Institut for Humanistisk Informatik, 57 s. [Data Humana].

## Text books and teaching material

- Thrane, Torben et al. 1978: Almene sproglige begreber. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, Department of English, 312 s.
- Thrane, Torben 1982: Engelsk syntaks i hovedtræk. København: University of Copenhagen, Department of English, 167 s.
- Thrane, Torben 1989: Blaise ikke på Pascal: Indføring i Pascal programmering. København: Museum Tusculanum, 220 s. [Data Humana 5].
- Thrane, Torben 1998: Syntactic Analysis: Terminology and Method . Århus: Handelshøjskolen i Århus, Engelsk Institut, 70 s. (Internt Undervisningsmateriale O, nr. 69).

## Dissemination

Thrane,  Torben/Olsen,  Jørgen/Prebensen,  Henrik  1986:  Tekstforståelse  og  datamater.  In Sproget  og  datamaterne. København: C. A. Reitzel, 51-75.

Thrane, Torben 1991: Datamaskinen - slave eller medarbejder? In Uddannelse & Udvikling , 703-707.

- Thrane, Torben 1989: Hvad er humanistisk informatik egentlig? In Binære Horisonter: meddelelser fra Humanistisk EDB-Center 2 (2), 11-13.
- Thrane, Torben 1978: Om kasusgrammatik. In Meddelelser for gymnasieskolernes engelsklærerforening 83, oktober, 4-20.