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Preferences and defaults for definiteness and number in japanese to german machine translation
(1996)
A significant problem when translating Japanese dialogues into German is the missing information on number and definiteness in the Japanese analysis output. The integration of the search for such information into the transfer process provides an efficient solution. General transfer includes conditions to make it possible to consider external knowledge. Thereby, grammatical and lexical knowledge of the source language, knowledge of lexical restrictions on the target language, domain knowledge and discourse knowledge are accessible.
A commonly held view in the literature on Scrambling and Clitic Doubling is that both constructions are sensitive to Specificity. For this reason Sportiche (1992) proposes to unify the two, an approach which has become quite standard in the relevant literature ever since. However, the claim that clitic doubling is the counterpart of Germanic scrambling has never been substantiated. In this paper we present extensive evidence from Greek that Clitic Doubling has common formal properties with Germanic Scrambling/Object Shift. Our evidence consists mainly of binding facts observed when doubling takes place, which seem, at first sight, to be completely unexpected. On closer inspection, however, it turns out that these facts are strongly reminiscent of the effects showing up in Germanic scrambling. We propose that these properties can be derived under a theory of clitic constructions along the lines of Sportiche (1992) implemented into the framework of Chomsky (1995). Finally we suggest the that the crosslinguistic distribution of Scrambling as opposed to Clitic Doubling should be linked to a parameter relating to properties of Agr: Move/Merge XP vs. Move/Merge X° to Agr. We show that this parameter unifies the behaviour of subjects and objects within a language and across languages. The paper is organised as follows. In section 2 we present evidence from binding, interpretational and prosodic effects that doubling and scrambling display very similar properties. In section 3 we present Sportiches account and point out some problems for it. In section 4 we present our proposal.
This essay considers the present state of U.S. scholarship on German exile Literature, focusing on the recent move from a purely literary toward a social and cultural perspective. This move becomes evident in research projects on refugee children as well as in the growing interest for women in exile. The article presents the abundant research opportunities in the U.S., but mentions also voices of frustration and fatigue. Perhaps the generational replacement among North-American Germanists contributes to bring forth a different attitude toward the subject of literary exile. In view of political shifts and technological changes, some reorientation in literary exile studies may be inevitable.
This paper corroborates the interpretability proposal of Chomsky (1995) with evidence from scrambling in Japanese and German. First it is shown that scrambling in Japanese is semantically vacuous, whereas scrambling in German is semantically contentful. Chomsky’s proposal then predicts that the feature driving Japanese scrambling is erased after checking, while the corresponding feature in German remains visible, specifically for the Shortest Attract condition. Looking at patterns of movement that result in overlapping paths, this prediction is seen to be correct.
Existing analyses of German scrambling phenomena within TAG-related formalisms all use non-local variants of TAG. However, there are good reasons to prefer local grammars, in particular with respect to the use of the derivation structure for semantics. Therefore this paper proposes to use local TDGs, a TAG-variant generating tree descriptions that shows a local derivation structure. However the construction of minimal trees for the derived tree descriptions is not subject to any locality constraint. This provides just the amount of non-locality needed for an adequate analysis of scrambling. To illustrate this a local TDG for some German scrambling data is presented.
The present investigation is concerned with German participles II (past participles) as lexical heads of adjuncts.
Within a minimalist framework of sound-meaning correlation, the analysis presupposes a lexicalist conception of morphology and the differentiation of Semantic Form and Conceptual Structure. It is argued that participles II have the same argument structure as the underlying verbs and can undergo passivization, perfectivization and conversion to adjectives. As for the potential of participles to function as modifiers, it is shown that attributive and adverbial participle constructions involve further operations of conversion. Participle constructions are considered as reduced sentences. They do not have a syntactic position for the subject, for an operator (comparable to the relative pronoun in relative clauses) or for an adverbial relator (as in adverbial clauses). The pertinent components are present only in the semantic structure.
Two templates serve the composition of modifiers - including participle constructions - with the modificandum. It is necessary to differentiate between modification which unifies two predicates relating to participants or to situations and frame setting modification where the modifier is given the status of a propositional operator.
The proposed analysis shows that the high degree of semantic underspecification and interpretative flexibility of German participle II constructions resides in the indeterminacy of participles II with respect to voice and perfect, in the absence of certain constituents in the syntactic structure and in the presence of corresponding parameters in the Semantic Form of the participle phrases.
This paper deals with the emergence of verb morphology in one German child up to the time mini-paradigms occur in the data. I will focus on the role of protomorphology as a transitional stage between rote learning and the productive use of morphological distinctions.
The study presents a first investigation of two different processes in the L1-acquisition of German: The acquisition of definite pronominal forms and the occurence of finite verbs. The aim of the study is to find out if there are inherent relations between both processes. Inherent relations are understood as developmental relations based on the structural properties which demand a correlated emergence of the finite verb and definite pronominal forms.
The distribution of trimoraic syllables in German and English as evidence for the phonological word
(2000)
In the present article I discuss the distribution of trimoraic syllables in German and English. The reason I have chosen to analyze these two languages together is that the data in both languages are strikingly similar. However, although the basic generalization in (1) holds for both German and English, we will see below that trimoraic syllabIes do not have an identical distribution in both languages.
In the present study I make the following theoretical claims. First, I argue that the three environments in (1) have a property in common: they all describe the right edge of a phonological word (or prosodic word; henceforth pword). From a formal point of view, I argue that a constraint I dub the THIRD MORA RESTRICTION (henceforth TMR), which ensures that trimoraic syllables surface at the end of a pword, is active in German and English. According to my proposal trimoraic syllables cannot occur morpheme-internally because monomorphemic grammatical words like garden are parsed as single pwords. Second, I argue that the TMR refers crucially to moraic structure. In particular, underlined strings like the ones in (1) will be shown to be trimoraic; neither skeletal positions nor the subsyllabic constituent rhyme are necessary. Third, the TMR will be shown to be violated in certain (predictable) pword-internal cases, as in Monde and chamber; I account for such facts in an OptimalityTheoretic analysis (henceforth OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993) by ranking various markedness constraints among themselves or by ranking them ahead of the TMR. Fourth, I hold that the TMR describes a concrete level of grammar, which I refer to below as the 'surface' representation. In this respect, my treatment differs significantly from the one proposed for English by Borowsky (1986, 1989), in which the English facts are captured in a Lexical Phonology model by ordering the relevant constraint at level 1 in the lexicon.