Latest documents http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/index/index/ Fri, 10 Dec 2010 16:00:53 +0200 Fri, 10 Dec 2010 16:00:53 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/19934 This article presents linguistic features of and educational approaches to a new variety of German that has emerged in multi-ethnic urban areas in Germany: Kiezdeutsch (‘Hood German’). From a linguistic point of view, Kiezdeutsch is very interesting, as it is a multi-ethnolect that combines features of a youth language with those of a contact language. We will present examples that illustrate the grammatical productivity and innovative potential of this variety. From an educational perspective, Kiezdeutsch has also a high potential in many respects: school projects can help enrich intercultural communication and weaken derogatory attitudes. In grammar lessons, Kiezdeutsch can be a means to enhance linguistic competence by having the adolescents analyse their own language. Keywords: German, Kiezdeutsch, multi-ethnolect, migrants’ language, language change, educational proposals Kerstin Paul; Ulrike Freywald; Eva Wittenberg preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/19934 Tue, 12 Oct 2010 16:00:53 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/15117 In the late seventies, Bernard Comrie was one of the first linguists to explore the effects of the referential hierarchy (RH) on the distribution of grammatical relations (GRs). The referential hierarchy is also known in the literature as the animacy, empathy or indexibability hierarchy and ranks speech act participants (i.e. first and second person) above third persons, animates above inanimates, or more topical referents above less topical referents. Depending on the language, the hierarchy is sometimes extended by analogy to rankings of possessors above possessees, singulars above plurals, or other notions. In his 1981 textbook, Comrie analyzed RH effects as explaining (a) differential case (or adposition) marking of transitive subject ("A") noun phrases in low RH positions (e.g. inanimate or third person) and of object ("P") noun phrases in high RH positions (e.g. animate or first or second person), and (b) hierarchical verb agreement coupled with a direct vs. inverse distinction, as in Algonquian (Comrie 1981: Chapter 6). Balthasar Bickel preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/15117 Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:01:55 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/15114 Sino-Tibetan is a prime example of how strongly a language family can typologically diversify under the pressure of areal spread features (Matisoff 1991, 1999). One of the manifestation of this is the average length of prosodic words. In Southeast Asia, prosodic words tend to average on one or one-and-a-half syllables. In the Himalayas, by contrast, it is not uncommon to encounter prosodic words containing five to ten syllables. The following pair of examples illustrates this. Balthasar Bickel preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/15114 Tue, 10 Aug 2010 11:34:43 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/15111 Balthasar Bickel preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/15111 Tue, 10 Aug 2010 10:27:41 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/15112 Language universals are statements that are true of all languages, for example: “all languages have stop consonants”. But beneath this simple definition lurks deep ambiguity, and this triggers misunderstanding in both interdisciplinary discourse and within linguistics itself. A core dimension of the ambiguity is captured by the opposition “absolute vs. statistical universal”, although the literature uses these terms in varied ways. Many textbooks draw the boundary between absolute and statistical according to whether a sample of languages contains exceptions to a universal. But the notion of an exception-free sample is not very revealing even if the sample contained all known languages: there is always a chance that an as yet undescribed language, or an unknown language from the past or future, will provide an exception. Balthasar Bickel preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/15112 Tue, 10 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14862 Dulong is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Gongshan Dulong and Nu Autonomous county in Yunnan, China, by members of the Dulong nationality (pop.: 6,000), and part of the Nu nationality (roughly 6,000 people). Randy J. LaPolla preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14862 Mon, 19 Jul 2010 11:13:07 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14402 The argument that I tried to elaborate on in this paper is that the conceptual problem behind the traditional competence/performance distinction does not go away, even if we abandon its original Chomskyan formulation. It returns as the question about the relation between the model of the grammar and the results of empirical investigations – the question of empirical verification The theoretical concept of markedness is argued to be an ideal correlate of gradience. Optimality Theory, being based on markedness, is a promising framework for the task of bridging the gap between model and empirical world. However, this task not only requires a model of grammar, but also a theory of the methods that are chosen in empirical investigations and how their results are interpreted, and a theory of how to derive predictions for these particular empirical investigations from the model. Stochastic Optimality Theory is one possible formulation of a proposal that derives empirical predictions from an OT model. However, I hope to have shown that it is not enough to take frequency distributions and relative acceptabilities at face value, and simply construe some Stochastic OT model that fits the facts. These facts first of all need to be interpreted, and those factors that the grammar has to account for must be sorted out from those about which grammar should have nothing to say. This task, to my mind, is more complicated than the picture that a simplistic application of (not only) Stochastic OT might draw. Ralf Vogel preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14402 Thu, 27 May 2010 08:22:50 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14401 The aim of this paper is the exploration of an optimality theoretic architecture for syntax that is guided by the concept of "correspondence": syntax is understood as the mechanism of “translating” underlying representations into a surface form. In minimalism, this surface form is called “Phonological Form” (PF). Both semantic and abstract syntactic information are reflected by the surface form. The empirical domain where this architecture is tested are minimal link effects, especially in the case of "wh"-movement. The OT constraints require the surface form to reflect the underlying semantic and syntactic representations as maximally as possible. The means by which underlying relations and properties are encoded are precedence, adjacency, surface morphology and prosodic structure. Information that is not encoded in one of these ways remains unexpressed, and gets lost unless it is recoverable via the context. Different kinds of information are often expressed by the same means. The resulting conflicts are resolved by the relative ranking of the relevant correspondence constraints. Ralf Vogel preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14401 Thu, 27 May 2010 08:21:24 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14400 This paper argues for a particular architecture of OT syntax. This architecture hasthree core features: i) it is bidirectional, the usual production-oriented optimisation (called ‘first optimisation’ here) is accompanied by a second step that checks the recoverability of an underlying form; ii) this underlying form already contains a full-fledged syntactic specification; iii) especially the procedure checking for recoverability makes crucial use of semantic and pragmatic factors. The first section motivates the basic architecture. The second section shows with two examples, how contextual factors are integrated. The third section examines its implications for learning theory, and the fourth section concludes with a broader discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed model. Ralf Vogel preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14400 Thu, 27 May 2010 08:19:24 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14399 The fact that object shift only affects weak pronouns in mainland Scandinavian is seen as an instance of a more general observation that can be made in all Germanic languages: weak function words tend to avoid the edges of larger prosodic domains. This generalisation has been formulated within Optimality Theory in terms of alignment constraints on prosodic structure by Selkirk (1996) in explaining thedistribution of prosodically strong and weak forms of English functionwords, especially modal verbs, prepositions and pronouns. But a purely phonological account fails to integrate the syntactic licensing conditions for object shift in an appropriate way. The standard semantico-syntactic accounts of object shift, onthe other hand, fail to explain why it is only weak pronouns that undergo object shift. This paper develops an Optimality theoretic model of the syntax-phonology interface which is based on the interaction of syntactic and prosodic factors. The account can successfully be applied to further related phenomena in English and German. Ralf Vogel preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14399 Thu, 27 May 2010 08:16:56 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14357 This paper is part of a research project on OT Syntax and the typology of the free relative (FR) construction. It concentrates on the details of an OT analysis and some of its consequences for OT syntax. I will not present a general discussion of the phenomenon and the many controversial issues it is famous for in generative syntax. Ralf Vogel preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14357 Tue, 25 May 2010 14:42:34 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14354 Sprachwahl und Sprachwahrnehmung sind im Deutschen unabdingbar geprägt durch das Wissen von einer Standardsprache. Dieses Wissen basiert für die meisten Sprecher auf der Erfahrung, dass in der Schule manche sprachliche Formen als korrekt, andere als falsch bewertet werden, außerdem auf der Tatsache, dass es Fixierungen der Regeln des Standards in Lexika und Grammatiken gibt. Wissen und Anerkennung dieses Standards sind unabhängig davon, dass keine dieser Kodifikationen unumstritten ist, dass viele Sprecher die Regeln nicht genau kennen und dass als Vorbilder anerkannte Personen (Nachrichtensprecher, Journalisten bestimmter Zeitschriften, Lehrer, Literaten u.a.) keineswegs einheitliche Regeln verfolgen. Der Standard ist fest assoziiert mit der Erfahrung einer legitimen Regelhaftigkeit, also mit Ordnung. Verwendung von Nonstandard wird mit Bezug auf diese Ordnung und von ihr unterschieden wahrgenommen. Diese relationale Sicht der Dinge ist sowohl subjektiv als auch intersubjektiv. Beate Henn-Memmesheimer; Manfred Hofer preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14354 Tue, 25 May 2010 13:20:35 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14183 Bern, bis ins 18. Jh. Zentrum der regionalen Großmacht, heute mit nicht ganz 130.000 Einwohnern die viertgrößte Stadt der Schweiz und seit 1848 die Hauptstadt der Schweiz. Auf Grund dieser Ausgangslage würde man erwarten, dass Bern wie andere Städte eine sprachliche Strahlungskraft in die unmittelbare Umgebung aufweist. Entgegen der allgemeinen Vorstellung zeigt sich jedoch in den Karten des Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz (SDS) kaum eine der für die Umgebung von Städten typischen sprachgeographische Verbreitungsbilder. So finden sich viele Isoglossen in unmittelbarer Nähe der Stadt Bern: trichter-, keil- oder gar kreisförmige Bündelungen von Isoglossen, die auf eine sprachliche Wirkung der Stadt hindeuten würde, lassen sich kaum nachweisen. Beat Siebenhaar preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14183 Tue, 04 May 2010 09:01:43 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14174 Die frühen Sprachkarten, für die Georg Wenker Ende des 19. Jh. in über 40.000 Schulorten des deutschen Reiches schriftliche Übersetzungen in die Mundart gesammelt hatte, dokumentieren die Sonderstellung vieler Städte im sprachlichen Raum. Zum Beispiel zeigen Berlin und die nähere Umgebung sprachliche Formen, die sonst erst weiter südlich oder in der Schriftsprache gelten. Beat Siebenhaar preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14174 Mon, 03 May 2010 13:53:30 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14172 Wenn Deutsch geschrieben wird, wird im Allgemeinen die standardsprachliche Form gewählt. King: nei nei nöd eso Häx ..... verschtasch mi wieder falsch :-( *sniff (bluewin.ch, #flirt60plus, 1.10.2004) Elle: HeinEr: öhm jez versteh ich gar nix mehr (Antenne Bayern #flirten40, 16.9.2005) Big: Mu auch niemand verstehen (IRCnet, #mannheim,9.2.2003) Tezo: verstehe (IRCnet, #linux, 7.1.2003) In Büchern, Zeitungen, Zeitschriften und auch im Internet ist die deutsche Standardsprache Standard. Sie ist die für die Schriftlichkeit normierte Varietät, die überregional verständlich sein soll. Diese Standardsprache ist zwar überall ähnlich, aber nicht gleich. So zeigen sich Besonderheiten im Lexikon, in der Wortbildung und vereinzelt in der Grammatik, welche in einer Region üblich sind, in der anderen jedoch nicht, oder die da eine andere Bedeutung tragen. Diese Besonderheiten sind aber nicht an einem Ort einfach falsch, sondern sie stellen regionale Ausprägungen des Standards dar (vgl. dazu das Variantenwörterbuch; Ammon u. a. 2004). ... Beat Siebenhaar preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14172 Mon, 03 May 2010 13:45:02 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14122 Is language the key to number? This article argues that the human language faculty provides the cognitive equipment that enables humans to develop a systematic number concept. Crucially, this concept is based on non-iconic representations that involve relations between relations: relations between numbers are linked with relations between objects. In contrast to this, language-independent numerosity concepts provide only iconic representations. The pattern of forming relations between relations lies at the heart of our language faculty, suggesting that it is language that enables humans to make the step from these iconic representations, which we share with other species, to a generalised concept of number. Heike Wiese preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/14122 Mon, 26 Apr 2010 12:13:57 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/12620 Multicomponent Tree Adjoining Grammars (MCTAGs) are a formalism that has been shown to be useful for many natural language applications. The definition of non-local MCTAG however is problematic since it refers to the process of the derivation itself: a simultaneity constraint must be respected concerning the way the members of the elementary tree sets are added. Looking only at the result of a derivation (i.e., the derived tree and the derivation tree), this simultaneity is no longer visible and therefore cannot be checked. I.e., this way of characterizing MCTAG does not allow to abstract away from the concrete order of derivation. In this paper, we propose an alternative definition of MCTAG that characterizes the trees in the tree language of an MCTAG via the properties of the derivation trees (in the underlying TAG) the MCTAG licences. We provide similar characterizations for various types of MCTAG. These characterizations give a better understanding of the formalisms, they allow a more systematic comparison of different types of MCTAG, and, furthermore, they can be exploited for parsing. Laura Kallmeyer preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/12620 Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:32:19 +0100 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/12538 Die drei Bereiche, die hier verglichen werden sollen, entsprechen in etwa der überkommenen Trias von Literatur, Musik und bildender Kunst, einer Gliederung, die im Medienzeitalters mit Videos, CDs, Installationen oder Happenings eigentlich obsolet ist. Allerdings geht es hier nur um die Eigenart der Zeichensysteme, auf denen die verschiedenen Bereiche beruhen, nicht um die Werke, die dadurch möglich werden, obgleich natürlich auch die Kunstwerke im emphatischen Sinn, die bedeutenden und die banalen, die großen und die misslungenen Gestaltungen nur möglich und verstehbar sind aufgrund der Zeichen, auf denen sie beruhen. Manfred Bierwisch preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/12538 Tue, 13 Oct 2009 11:45:47 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/12453 We show that loanword adaptation can be understood entirely in terms of phonological and phonetic comprehension and production mechanisms in the first language. We provide explicit accounts of several loanword adaptation phenomena (in Korean) in terms of an Optimality-Theoretic grammar model with the same three levels of representation that are needed to describe L1 phonology: the underlying form, the phonological surface form, and the auditory-phonetic form. The model is bidirectional, i.e., the same constraints and rankings are used by the listener and by the speaker. These constraints and rankings are the same for L1 processing and loanword adaptation. Silke Hamann; Paul Boersma preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/12453 Thu, 01 Oct 2009 10:54:32 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/11890 In this paper, we argue that difficulties in the definition of coreference itself contribute to lower inter-annotator agreement in certain cases. Data from a large referentially annotated corpus serves to corroborate this point, using a quantitative investigation to assess which effects or problems are likely to be the most prominent. Several examples where such problems occur are discussed in more detail, and we then propose a generalisation of Poesio, Reyle and Stevenson’s Justified Sloppiness Hypothesis to provide a unified model for these cases of disagreement and argue that a deeper understanding of the phenomena involved allows to tackle problematic cases in a more principled fashion than would be possible using only pre-theoretic intuitions. Yannick Versley preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/11890 Tue, 05 May 2009 16:00:28 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/11888 Nous présentons ici différents algorithmes d’analyse pour grammaires à concaténation d’intervalles (Range Concatenation Grammar, RCG), dont un nouvel algorithme de type Earley, dans le paradigme de l’analyse déductive. Notre travail est motivé par l’intérêt porté récemment à ce type de grammaire, et comble un manque dans la littérature existante Laura Kallmeyer; Yannick Parmentier; Wolfgang Maier preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/11888 Tue, 05 May 2009 15:50:20 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/11886 In the recent literature the phenomenon of long distance agreement has become the focus of several studies as it seems to violate certain locality conditions which require that agreeing elements in general stand in clause-mate relationships. In particular, it involves a verb agreeing with a constituent which is located in the verb's clausal complement and hence poses a challenge for theories that assume a strictly local relationship for agreement. In this paper we present empirical evidence from Greek and Romanian for the reality of long distance agreement. Specifically, we focus on raising constructions in these two languages and we show that they do not involve movement but rather instantiate long distance agreement. We further argue that subjunctives allowing long distance agreement lack both a CP layer and semantic Tense. However, since the embedded verb also bears phi-features, these constructions pose a further problem for assumptions that view the presence of phi-features as evidence for the presence of a C layer. Finally, we raise the question of the common properties that these languages have that lead to the presence of long distance agreement. Artemis Alexiadou; Elena Anagnostopoulou; Gianina Nicoleta Iordăchioaia; Mihaela Adriana Marchis preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/11886 Tue, 05 May 2009 15:38:28 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/11882 The aim of this paper is to address two main counterarguments raised in Landau (2007) against the movement analysis of Control, and especially against the phenomenon of Backward Control. The paper shows that unlike the situation described in Tsez (Polinsky & Potsdam 2002), Landau's objections do not hold for Greek and Romanian, where all obligatory control verbs exhibit Backward Control. Our results thus provide stronger empirical support for a theoretical approach to Control in terms of Movement, as defended in Hornstein (1999 and subsequent work). Artemis Alexiadou; Elena Anagnostopoulou; Gianina Nicoleta Iordăchioaia; Mihaela Adriana Marchis preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/11882 Tue, 05 May 2009 15:24:53 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/11881 Artemis Alexiadou preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/11881 Tue, 05 May 2009 15:20:45 +0200 http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/11866 Uli Sauerland preprint http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/11866 Tue, 05 May 2009 13:17:19 +0200