Linguistik
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Conference Proceeding (29)
- Part of a Book (23)
- Article (5)
- Working Paper (2)
Has Fulltext
- yes (59)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (59)
Keywords
- Informationsstruktur (59) (remove)
Institute
- Extern (1)
This paper discusses the typology of focus structure types (variation of information structuring in the clause) and how information structure can be used to explain all of the word order patterns in Chinese without reference to grammatical relations.
Im folgenden Beitrag werden die Möglichkeiten der Bildung des Progressivs im Aja dargestellt sowie die zur Bildung des Progressivs verwendeten Formen in ihrer Grammatikalisierungskette vorgestellt. Das Aja gehört zu einer Gruppe von Sprachen/Dialekten, die lange Zeit unter dem Begriff "Ewe" zusammengefaßt wurden, in jüngster Zeit aber auch als Gbe(-Kontinuum) bezeichnet werden. Dabei ist "Gbe" ein in allen sprachlichen Einheiten des Kontinuums anzutreffendes Lexem mit der Bedeutung "Sprache".
This paper hypothesizes that transfer-based machine translation systems can be improved by encoding information structure in both the source and target grammars, and preserving information structure in the transfer stage. We explore how information structure can be represented within the HPSG/MRS formalism (Pollard and Sag, 1994; Copestake et al., 2005) and how it can help refine multilingual MT. Building upon that framework, we provide a sample translation between English and Japanese and check the feasibility of the proposals in small-scale translation systems built with the HPSG/MRS-based LOGON MT infrastructure (Oepen et al., 2007). Our experiment shows the information structure-based MT system that we propose in this paper reduces the number of translations 75.71% for Japanese and 80.23% for Korean. The dramatic reductions in the number of translations is expected to make a contribution to our HPSG/MRS-based MT in terms of latency as well as accuracy.
In this paper I argue that there are three distinct constructions in Modern German in which a 'topic constituent' is detached to the left: (left-)dislocated topic ('left dislocation'), (left-)attached topic ('mixed left dislocation'), and (left-)hanging topic ('hanging topic'). Presupposing the framework of Integrational Linguistics, I provide syntactic and semantic analyses for them. In particular, I propose that these constructions involve the syntactic function (syntactic) topic, which relates the topic constituent to the remaining part of the sentence. Dislocated and attached topic constituents function in addition as a strong or weak (syntactic) antecedent of some resumptive 'd-pronoun' form.
Dislocated topic, attached topic, and hanging topic are in turn contrasted with 'free topics'. Being sentential units of their own, the latter are syntactically unconnected to the following sentence. In particular, they are not topic constituents.
Current analyses of specificity are unable to provide an explanatory account for why specific and nonspecific uses of indefinites are available. While Abusch (1994), Reinhart (1997), and Kratzer (1998) provide successful mechanisms for deriving specific readings, they do not provide a fundamental explanation for the availability of this mechanism. This is due to the fact that specific indefinites are treated as involving an interpretive component or procedure unique to themselves: storage (Abusch) or choice function (Reinhart and Kratzer), for example. It would be preferable if specific indefinites could be understood as deriving from the use of independently motivated meaning components and interpretive mechanisms.
Here I will pursue the idea, building on Portner & Yabushita (1998), that specificity has to do with the indefinite's interaction with a topical domain (note similarities with the proposals of Enç 1991, Cresti 1995, and Schwarzschild 2000). In this conception, specificity is a matter of degree: the narrower the topical domain, the more specific the indefinite. More precisely, sentences containing specific indefinites will be understood as involving ordinary existential quantification in combination with a topical domain function.
In this paper topic and focus effects at both left and right periphery are argued to be epiphenomena of general properties of tree growth. We incorporate Korean into this account as a prototypical verb-final language, and show how long- and short-distance scrambling form part of this general picture. Multiple long-distance scrambling effects emerge as a consequence of the feeding relationship between different forms of structural under-specification. We also show how the array of effects at the right periphery, in both verb-final and other language-types, can also be explained with the same concepts of tree growth. In particular the Right Roof Constraint, a well-known but little understood constraint, is an immediate consequence of compositionality constraints as articulated in this system.
Buli is an Oti-Volta tone language spoken in Northern Ghana. This paper outlines the basic features of its tonal system and explores whether and in which way pitch respectively phonemic tone is approached as a means to indicate the pragmatic category of focus. Pursued are cases with focus-related surface tone changes as well as cases where pitch could help to disambiguate between broad and narrow foci. It is argued that focus is not consistently encoded by pitch or tone. Parallel findings for the closely related languages Kopen o (phonetic symbol)nni and Dagbani suggest that the apparent lack of significant prosodic focus signals in Buli might pertain to a larger group of tonal languages of the Gur family.