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This article analyses the German discourse particle wohl 'I suppose', 'presumably' as a syntactic and semantic modifier of the sentence types declarative and interrogative. It is shown that wohl does not contribute to the propositional, i.e. descriptive content of an utterance. Nor does it trigger an implicature. The proposed analysis captures the semantic behaviour of wohl by assuming that it moves to SpecForceP at LF, from where it can modify the sentence type operators in Force0 in compositional fashion. Semantically, a modification with wohl results in a weaker commitment to the proposition expressed in declaratives and in a request for a weaker commitment concerning the questioned proposition in interrogatives. Cross-linguistic evidence for a left-peripheral position of wohl (at LF) comes from languages in which the counterpart of wohl occurs in the clausal periphery overtly. Overall, the analysis sheds more light on the semantic properties of the left periphery, in particular of the functional projection ForceP.
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.
The paper investigates the origins of the German/Dutch particle toch/doch) in the hope of shedding light on a puzzle with respect to doch/toch and to shed some light on two theoretical issues. The puzzle is the nearly opposite meaning of the stressed and unstressed versions of the particle which cannot be accounted for in standard theories of the meaning of stress. One theoretical issue concerns the meaning of stress: whether it is possible to reduce the semantic contribution of a stressed item to the meaning of the item and the meaning of stress. The second issue is whether the complex use of a particle like doch/toch can be seen as an instance of spread or whether it has to be seen as having a core meaning which is differentiated by pragmatics operating in different contexts.
We use the etymology of doch and doch as to+u+h (that+ question marker+ emphatic marker) to argue for an origin as a question tag checking a hearer opinion. Stress on the tag indicates an opposite opinion (of the common ground or the speaker) and this sets apart two groups of uses spreading in different directions. This solves the puzzle, indicates that the assumption of spread is useful and offers a subtle correction of the interpretation of stress. While stress always means contrast with a contrasting item, if the particle use is due to spread, it is not guaranteed that the unstressed particle has a corresponding use (or inversely).
Pluralization strategies of monolingual German children aged 3-6, median 4;2 (N = 810), and adults aged 18-96, median 24;0 (N = 582), were compared on the basis of eight nonce nouns from the language test SETK 3-5. Differences between younger and older Germans resembled previously described differences between German and immigrant pre-schoolers for most aspects, e.g., use of fewer plural allomorphs (types), more errors in umlauting, and more avoidance strategies in the linguistically weaker groups. However, both German children and adults demonstrated the same universal frequency- and phonology-based pluralization patterns. Surprisingly, ungrammatical plural forms were equally frequent in both children’s and adults' answers.
This study examines articulatory and acoustic inter-speaker variability in the production of the German vowels /i/, /u/ and /a/. Our subjects are 3 monozygotic twin pairs (2 female and 1 male pair) and 2 dizygotic female twin pairs. All of them were born, raised and are still living in Berlin and see their twin brother or sister regularly. We assume that monozygotic twins that are genetically identical and share the same physiology should be more similar in their articulation than dizygotic twins but that the shared time and social environment of twins, regardless of their genetic similarity, also plays a crucial role in the acoustic similarity of twins. Articulatory measurements were made with EMA (Electromagnetic Articulography) and the target positions of the produced vowels were analyzed. Additionally, the formants F1-F4 of each vowel were measured and compared within the twin pairs. Our data seems to point out the importance of a shared environment and the strong influence of learning over the anatomical identity of the monozygotic twins regarding the production of vowels. But, additional results suggest (1) the impact of physiology on the production of a vowel following a velar consonant and (2) the interaction of physiology and stress in inter-speaker variability.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the development of narrative macrostructure and the impact of socio-economic status (SES) and home literacy environment (HLE) on the narrative macrostructure of monolingual preschoolers in Germany when retelling and telling a story. The analysis of narrative macrostructure includes three components: story structure, story complexity, and story comprehension. Oral narratives were elicited via Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). 198 monolingual children between age 4;6 and 5;11 participated (M=63 months, SD=5 months). The comparison of narrative macrostructure in three age groups (4;6 to 4;11 years, 5;0 to 5;5 years, 5;6 to 5;11 years) illustrate significant age effects in story structure, story complexity and story comprehension skills. There were weak significant positive correlations of some of these skills with aspects of socio-economic status and home literacy environment, for example between story comprehension skills and the educational background, the frequency and duration of the child’s exposure to books and the number of books in the household.
This paper reports the results of a corpus investigation on case conflicts in German argument free relative constructions. We investigate how corpus frequencies reflect the relative markedness of free relative and correlative constructions, the relative markedness of different case conflict configurations, and the relative markedness of different conflict resolution strategies. Section 1 introduces the conception of markedness as used in Optimality Theory. Section 2 introduces the facts about German free relative clauses, and section 3 presents the results of the corpus study. By and large, markedness and frequency go hand in hand. However, configurations at the highest end of the markedness scale rarely show up in corpus data, and for the configuration at the lowest end we found an unexpected outcome: the more marked structure is preferred.
German dialects vary in which of the possible orders of the verbs in a 3-verb cluster they allow. In a still ongoing empirical investigation that I am undertaking together with Tanja Schmid, University of Stuttgart (Schmid and Vogel (2004)) we already found that each of the six logically possible permutations of the 3-verb cluster in (1) can be found in German dialects.
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.