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Foundation of Basic Linguistic Categories (LOEWE focus area)

The LOEWE focus area aims at clarifying basic questions of linguistic description and theory development: Categories that claim the status of a basic category in a central human science must be empirically grounded. For linguistics, this means that direct reflections of these categories can be observed in language processing and that these categories must exert a demonstrable influence in language change and variation. At the same time, basic categories must be part of a theoretically sound propositional framework.