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In this paper, I shall discuss the semantic attachment of intersective modifiers in German coherent constructions. I shall show that a purely syntactic solution to the observable attachment ambiguity is undesirable for reasons of processing e ciency and/or massive spurious ambiguity. Instead, I shall follow Egg and Lebeth (1995) and propose an extension to Minimal Recursion Semantics, permitting the expression of underspecified semantic attachment. This rather trivial move, as we shall see, will not only be preferable for processing reasons, but it will also be more in line with the spirit of underspecified semantics, e ectively providing a compact representation of purely semantic distinctions, instead of unfolding these distinctions into a rain forest of tree representations and derivations. I will present an implementation of the underspecification approach integrated into the German HPSG developed at DFKI and compare its e ciency to an alternative implementation where semantic attachment is unfolded by means of retrieval rules.
This paper deals with a series of semantic contrasts between the copula "be" and the preposition "as", two functional elements that both head elementary predication structures. It will be argued that the meaning of "as" is a type lowering device shifting the meaning of its complement NP from generalized quantifier type to property type (where properties are conceived as relations between individuals and situations), while the copula "be" induces a type coercion from (partial) situations to (total) possible worlds. Paired with van der Sandt's 1992 theory of presupposition accommodation, these assumptions will account for the observed contrasts between "as" and "be".
This paper explores how refugee families in Germany draw on me-diational repertoires to accomplish a range of digital literacy prac-tices on their smartphones. We introduce the concept of ‘mediation-al repertoire’, i.e. a socially and individually structured configuration of semiotic and technological resources for communication, and use it in an ethnographic case study with participants from Syria and Af-ghanistan in a refugee residence in Hamburg in 2017/18. The collect-ed data includes nine semi-directed interviews, video demonstra-tions of smartphone usage, and ethnographic fieldnotes. Qualitative analysis draws on mediagrams, i.e. visualizations of mediational re-pertoires in two families. Findings suggest that individual mediation-al repertoires in these families differ especially by generation and other factors, such as literacy competence, type of social relation-ship and purpose of online use, including smartphone-based lang-uage-learning.
Questions and focus
(2003)
This volume presents working versions of presentations heard at and selected for the Workshop on Syntax of Predication, held at ZAS, Berlin, on November 2-3, 2001 (except the editor’s own paper).
Predication is a many-faceted topic which involves both syntax and semantics and the interface between them. This is reflected in the papers of the volume.
This volume presents working versions of presentations heard at and selected for the Workshop on Syntax of Predication, held at ZAS, Berlin, on November 2-3, 2001 (except the editor’s own paper).
Predication is a many-faceted topic which involves both syntax and semantics and the interface between them. This is reflected in the papers of the volume.
Papers on pragmasemantics
(2009)
Optimality theory as used in linguistics (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004; Smolensky & Legendre, 2006) and cognitive psychology (Gigerenzer & Selten, 2001) is a theoretical framework that aims to integrate constraint based knowledge representation systems, generative grammar, cognitive skills, and aspects of neural network processing. In the last years considerable progress was made to overcome the artificial separation between the disciplines of linguistic on the one hand which are mainly concerned with the description of natural language competences and the psychological disciplines on the other hand which are interested in real language performance.
The semantics and pragmatics of natural language is a research topic that is asking for an integration of philosophical, linguistic, psycholinguistic aspects, including its neural underpinning. Especially recent work on experimental pragmatics (e.g. Noveck & Sperber, 2005; Garrett & Harnish, 2007) has shown that real progress in the area of pragmatics isn’t possible without using data from all available domains including data from language acquisition and actual language generation and comprehension performance. It is a conceivable research programme to use the optimality theoretic framework in order to realize the integration.
Game theoretic pragmatics is a relatively young development in pragmatics. The idea to view communication as a strategic interaction between speaker and hearer is not new. It is already present in Grice' (1975) classical paper on conversational implicatures. What game theory offers is a mathematical framework in which strategic interaction can be precisely described. It is a leading paradigm in economics as witnessed by a series of Nobel prizes in the field. It is also of growing importance to other disciplines of the social sciences. In linguistics, its main applications have been so far pragmatics and theoretical typology. For pragmatics, game theory promises a firm foundation, and a rigor which hopefully will allow studying pragmatic phenomena with the same precision as that achieved in formal semantics.
The development of game theoretic pragmatics is closely connected to the development of bidirectional optimality theory (Blutner, 2000). It can be easily seen that the game theoretic notion of a Nash equilibrium and the optimality theoretic notion of a strongly optimal form-meaning pair are closely related to each other. The main impulse that bidirectional optimality theory gave to research on game theoretic pragmatics stemmed from serious empirical problems that resulted from interpreting the principle of weak optimality as a synchronic interpretation principle.
In this volume, we have collected papers that are concerned with several aspects of game and optimality theoretic approaches to pragmatics.