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Der Titel dieses Beitrags variiert den berühmten Titel eines der Hauptwerke Nietzsches "Also sprach Zarathrustra". In seiner englischen Übersetzung lautet der Titel meist wie folgt: "Thus spoke (spake) Zarathrustra". Thus kennzeichnet Konklusivität, eine Schlussfolgerung aus einem zuvor genannten Umstand oder Sachverhalt. Das englische also, in seiner Schreibung dem deutschen also identisch, beinhaltet semantisch keine Konklusivität, sondern drückt Additivität aus. Der formgleiche Konnektor ist also (!) semantisch unterschiedlich im Deutschen und Englischen. Um diesen Unterschied und seine Bedeutung für türkische DaF-Lerner soll es im folgenden Artikel gehen.
"Je suis Charlie" was used over 619.000 times in the two days that have followed the attack of the editorial team of Charlie Hebdo (Le Progrès, The Huffington Post) and has regularly been taken up in both written and spoken form since. In this paper, we argue that the structure of this sentence actually clashes with its meaning. More specifically, whereas its word order and default rightmost sentence stress are compatible either with an all-focus reading or a narrow focusing of Charlie, the context of use of this sentence as well as the solidarity/empathy message it intends to communicate suggest that its subject is narrowly focused. We will propose that two strategies have emerged to solve this conflict: (i) various alternative forms have appeared that allow proper subject focusing and (ii) speakers have reinterpreted the structure so as to pragmatically retrieve the (additive) focused nature of the subject.
The paper characterizes three different domains in the German middle field which are relevant for the interpretation of an indefinite. It is argued that the so-called 'strong' reading of an indefinite is the basic one and that the 'weak' reading needs special licensing which is mirrored by certain syntactic requirements. Some popular claims about the relation between the position and the interpretation of indefinites as well as some claims about scrambling are discussed and rejected. From the findings also follows that the strong reading of an indefinite is independent of its information status.
Irene Heim in unpublished work proposed a new syntax-semantics interface for propositional attitude reports based on an ontology without transworld individuals, but counterpart functions instead. We show that the approach can capture the 'de re'/'de dicto' distinction, but makes different predictions from accounts with transworld individuals. Specifically, the account uses a non-invertible counterpart functions: a single individual in an alternative world can be the counterpart of many individuals of the real world. The directionality of counterpart functions predicts that a 'de dicto' interpreted DP cannot be an argument of a 'de re' interpreted predicate. We show that the predicted restriction is corroborated by existing work on restrictions on 'de re' interpretation. The derivation of constraints on 'de re' interpretation argues empirically for the counterpart ontology and Heim’s implementation thereof.
Decomposing coordination
(2014)
Natural languages display a surprising diversity of expression of elementary logical operations. The study of this variation is emerging as an important topic of cross-linguistic semantics. In this paper, we address the expression of coordination from this perspective, especially coordination of individual denoting expressions such as "John and Mary". We argue that there is an underlying universal structure for individual coordination, and that the cross-linguistic variation can be explained by assuming that languages pronounce different morphemes of this universal structure. In particular, we argue that there two main types of system for the expression of individual coordination: the J-type and the μ-type. In μ-type languages the morpheme used for individual coordination also has uses a quantificational or focus particle, while in the J-type languages it doesn't. Instead at least in many J-type languages the same morpheme is used for individual and propositional coordination. The evidence we present for our model comes from two sources: new data from specific data of the J-type and μ-type languages, and from a study of the historical development of the expression of individual coordination in Indo-European which switched from a μ-type to a J-type system.
In contradistinction to main verbs copula verbs like 'sein', 'werden' or 'bleiben' ('be', 'become' or 'remain') can, though with some restrictions, take projections of all lexical categories as complements. Semantically 'werden' and 'bleiben' are considered to be dual operators, related to each other by inner and outer (= dual) negation. But there are contexts where 'bleiben' seems to assume the meaning of its dual 'werden'. What at first glance appears to be an idiosyncracy of German turns out to hold for Swedish, Brazil-Portuguese and other unrelated languages as well.
'Werden' is more restricted than 'sein' and 'bleiben', it cannot have a locative complement. 'Bleiben' has the widest distribution, it can also take infinitives of verbs of position as complement. But in this case 'stehen bleiben' is ambiguous between a "remain" -reading and a "become" -reading.
In 15th century the Swedish verb 'bliva' - a borrowing from German - has undergone a change from the "remain"-reading to the "become"-reading. The "become"-reading of 'bliva' (later form 'bli') is only blocked (as is the German verb 'werden') in the case of a locative complement, where the "remain"-reading has survived. The two readings of 'bli' do not produce any ambiguity, except when taking a verb of position as complement - much the same as in German.
The paper attempts to pinpoint the conditions that lead to this surprising shift of meaning between duals.
The copula "sein" "be" in German, together with its complements, refers to a stative situation. Besides offering argument positions in its Semantic Form SF, it has no other function. Stative verbs are not specified with respect to the beginning or the end of a described situation or with respect to the state before or after. I will take the verb "werden" "become, get" to be a copular verb as well. The only difference to "sein" is that "werden" refers to a nonstative or changing situation. I argue that "werden" is underspecified in two respects. Like motion verbs and successive patient verbs (SUK verbs in Krifka (1989)) "werden" switches between an unlimited and a limited process (accomplishment) dependent on its complement (cf. "älter werden" "get older" / "vorwärts gehen" "go forward" / "Tee trinken" "drink tea" vs. "alt werden" "get old" / "in das Zimmer gehen" "go into the room"/ "eine Tasse Tee trinken" "drink a cup of tea"). But "werden" is even more underspecified than these verbs; it is the only verb which covers all nonstative situations, not only processes and accomplishments but also punctual transitions (achievements), cf. "schwanger werden" "get pregnant". "Werden" is anything but stative. Whether there is a target state implied or not, or whether the transition to this target state is extensible or atomic, is the result of the composition of the meaning of "werden" and its intimal argument added by special meaning postulates. Hierarchically marked subtypes of situational arguments result as a side effect.
This paper reports results from a series of experiments that investigated whether semantic and/or syntactic complexity influences young Dutch children’s production of past tense forms. The constructions used in the three experiments were (i) simple sentences (the Simple Sentence Experiment), (ii) complex sentences with CP complements (the Complement Clause Experiment) and (iii) complex sentences with relative clauses (the Relative Clause Experiment). The stimuli involved both atelic and telic predicates. The goal of this paper is to address the following questions.
Q1. Does semantic complexity regarding temporal anchoring influence the types of errors that children make in the experiments? For example, do children make certain types of errors when a past tense has to be anchored to the Utterance Time (UT), as compared to when it has to be anchored to the matrix topic time (TT)?
Q2. Do different syntactic positions influence children’s performance on past-tense production? Do children perform better in the Simple Sentence Experiment compared to complex sentences involving two finite clauses (the Complement Clause Experiment and the Relative Clause Experiment)? In complex sentence trials, do children perform differently when the CPs are complements vs. when the CPs are adjunct clauses? (Lebeaux 1990, 2000)
Q3. Do Dutch children make more errors with certain types of predicate (such as atelic predicates)? Alternatively, do children produce a certain type of error with a certain type of predicates (such as producing a perfect aspect with punctual predicates)? Bronckart and Sinclair (1973), for example, found that until the age of 6, French children showed a tendency to use passé composé with perfective events and simple present with imperfective events; we will investigate whether or not the equivalent of this is observed in Dutch.
Einführung
(2000)
Der vorliegende Band setzt im Anschluss an den Band ZAS Papers in Linguistics 14 (1999) die Vorpublikation von Arbeiten fort, die innerhalb oder im Umkreis des von der DFG geförderten Projekts "Schnittstellen der Semantik: Kopula-Prädikativ-Konstruktionen" am ZAS entstanden sind. Das Rahmenthema, wie es in ZAS PIL 14 einleitend knapp umrissen wurde, wird derzeit im Projekt in drei Untersuchungssträngen bearbeitet.
Einführung
(1999)
[...] Was macht Kopula-Prädikativ-Konstruktionen unter dem Blickwinkel ihrer grammatischen Schnittstellen so attraktiv? Die kurze Einführung will darauf eine partielle Antwort geben, aber nicht indem sie versucht, unter Beachtung ausgewogener Erwähnungsfrequenz die einzelnen Aufsätze zusammenzufassen (was sich durch die jeweils vorangestellten Abstracts eh erübrigt), sondern indem sie – a field is defined by certain questions ! – die aus Titeln und Abstracts nicht sofort ersichtlichen theoretischen Koordinaten des hier gewählten Ausschnitts der Kopula-Forschungslandschaft skizziert, um darin einige in den Beiträgen vorgeschlagene Antworten zu orten. So kommen die Relativität des Erreichten, aber auch das Potential, das in z.T. kontrovers geführten Argumentationen und konkurrierenden Analysen steckt, gleichermaßen zur Geltung.