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The paper presents a novel approach to explaining word order variation in the early Germanic languages. Initial observations about verb placement as a device marking types of rhetorical relations made on data from Old High German (cf. Hinterhölzl & Petrova 2005) are now reconsidered on a larger scale and compared with evidence from other early Germanic languages. The paper claims that the identification of information-structural domains in a sentence is best achieved by taking into account the interaction between the pragmatic features of discourse referents and properties of discourse organization.
The material reported on in this paper is part of a set of experiments in which the role of Information Structure on L2 processing of words is tested. Pitch and duration of 4 sets of experimental material in German and English are measured and analyzed in this paper. The well-known finding that accent boosts duration and pitch is confirmed. Syntactic and lexical means of marking focus, however, do not give the duration and the pitch of a word an extra boost.
Focus and tone
(2006)
Tone is a distinctive feature of the lexemes in tone languages. The information-structural category focus is usually marked by syntactic and morphological means in these languages, but sometimes also by intonation strategies. In intonation languages, focus is marked by pitch movements, which are also perceived as tone. The present article discusses prosodic focus marking in these two language types.
This article presents an analysis of German nicht...sondern... (contrastive not...but...) which departs from the commonly held view that this construction should be explained by appeal to its alleged corrective function. It will be demonstrated that in nicht A sondern B (not A but B), A and B just behave like stand-alone unmarked answers to a common question Q, and that this property of sondern is presuppositional in character. It is shown that from this general observation many interesting properties of nicht...sondern... follow, among them distributional differences between German "sondern" and German "aber" (contrastive but, concessive but), intonational requirements and exhaustivity effect sondern presupposition is furthermore argued to be the result of the conventionalization of conversational implicatures.
The paper presents an in-depth study of focus marking in Gùrùntùm, a West Ch adic language spoken in Bauchi Province of Northern Nigeria. Focus in Gùrùntùm is marked morphologically by means of a focus marker a, which typically precedes the focus constituent. Even though the morphological focus-marking system of Gùrùntùm allows for a lot of fine-grained distinctions in information structure (IS) in principle, the language is not entirely free of focus ambiguities that arise as the result of conflicting IS- and syntactic requirements that govern the placement of focus markers. We show that morphological focus marking with a applies across different types of focus, such as newinformation, contrastive, selective and corrective focus, and that a does not have a second function as a perfectivity marker, as is assumed in the literature. In contrast, we show at the end of the paper that a can also function as a foregrounding device at the level of discourse structure.
Der nachstehende Beitrag ist aus dem Arbeitszusammenhang des Sonderforschungsbereichs 538 'Mehrsprachigkeit' entstanden, an dessen Teilprojekt A7 die mittelalterlichen Übersetzungen der lateinischen Disticha Catonis ins Deutsche untersucht wurden. Einer der ersten Arbeitsschritte bestand in der seit Zarnckes Zusammenstellung von 1852 nicht mehr geleisteten Erfassung der Textzeugen: Auf der Basis systematischer Quellenheuristik und dann gebrauchsfunktionaler Handschriftenanalysen sollten die Übersetzungen rekontextualisiert werden, um von dieser Seite ergänzenden Aufschluss über historische Übersetzungsintentionen und -leistungen zu gewinnen. Da der deutsche Cato in den Handschriften oft vom Facetus "Cum nihil utilius" begleitet wird, lag es nahe, die Handschriften dieses deutschen Facetus in die Suche einzubeziehen.
Die folgenden Ausführungen knüpfen an eine These an, die an anderer Stelle eher von kodikologischen wie überlieferungs- und textgeschichtlichen Befunden ausgehend formuliert wurde. Danach kann die Gemerk-Interaktion der Meistersinger als ,Aufführung einer Aufführung' verstanden werden, d. h. als Folge einer sehr besonderen Rezeption von Wettstreit- und Fürwurfliedern, die anonyme Fremdtonverwender bereits in einer Spätphase der Sangspruchdichtung nach Frauenlob verfasst haben. In ihnen ist im Rahmen einer ausgiebig ausgebeuteten Turnier- und Wettkampfmetaphorik auf Schritt und Tritt von Dichten und Singen die Rede und so haben sich dann später die Meistersänger aus diesen Liedern ihre eigenen Vorstellungen von der Kunstpraxis der von ihnen geachteten alten Meister gebildet.
Schoolbooks
(2006)
According to UNESCO estimates, there are approximately one billion people in the world who can neither read nor write. One sixth of the world population has never seen a schoolbook. In contrast, reading and writing in the industrialized nations are such commonplace objects of everyday life that they are completely taken for granted. We are taught to read and write at school, where we gain access to the cultural tool ofwriting, and it is this that forms the basis for all our further leaming activities. The teaching aids used in schools to impart us the skills of literacy are themselves based on the medium of writing. We can all remember what it was like to write things down on paper and in exercise books, to organize our notes in files, and to read up new information in text books. By teaching literacy to the individual, the schools as an institution are laying the foundation stone of literacy skills for entire societies. Many important developmental stages of this process in Europe took place in the Middle Ages, and the schools functioned as a dual participating force in this process. First of all, they were the institution in which competence in literacy was acquired, and they were themselves involved in leaming how best to communicate this task with the aid of the instruments of literacy. These tools, as employed in the schools, have undergone transformation over the centuries. Schoolbooks themselves have also had to adapt, to cope with the demands of literacy.
This report explores the question of compatibility between annotation projects including translating annotation formalisms to each other or to common forms. Compatibility issues are crucial for systems that use the results of multiple annotation projects. We hope that this report will begin a concerted effort in the field to track the compatibility of annotation schemes for part of speech tagging, time annotation, treebanking, role labeling and other phenomena.
It has often been noticed that one syntactic argument position can be realized by elements which seem to realize different thematic roles. This is notably the case with the external argument position of verbs of change of state which licenses volitional agents, instruments or natural forces/causers, showing the generality and abstractness of the external argument relation. (1) a. John broke the window (Agent) b. The hammer broke the window (Instrument) c. The storm broke the window (Causer) In order to capture this generality, Van Valin & Wilkins (1996) and Ramchand (2003) among others have proposed that the thematic role of the external argument position is in fact underspecified. The relevant notion is that of an effector (in Van Valin & Wilkins) or of an abstract causer/initiator (in Ramchand). In this paper we argue against a total underspecification of the external argument relation. While we agree that (1b) does not instantiate an instrument theta role in subject position, we argue that a complete underspecification of the external theta-position is not feasible, but that two types of external theta roles have to be distinguished, Agents and Causers. Our arguments are based on languages where Agents and Causers show morpho-syntactic independence (section 2.1) and the behavior of instrument subjects in English, Dutch, German and Greek (section 2.2 and 3). We show that instrument subjects are either Agent or Causer like. In section (4) we give an analysis how arguments realizing these thematic notions are introduced into syntax.