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This paper explores how refugee families in Germany draw on me-diational repertoires to accomplish a range of digital literacy prac-tices on their smartphones. We introduce the concept of ‘mediation-al repertoire’, i.e. a socially and individually structured configuration of semiotic and technological resources for communication, and use it in an ethnographic case study with participants from Syria and Af-ghanistan in a refugee residence in Hamburg in 2017/18. The collect-ed data includes nine semi-directed interviews, video demonstra-tions of smartphone usage, and ethnographic fieldnotes. Qualitative analysis draws on mediagrams, i.e. visualizations of mediational re-pertoires in two families. Findings suggest that individual mediation-al repertoires in these families differ especially by generation and other factors, such as literacy competence, type of social relation-ship and purpose of online use, including smartphone-based lang-uage-learning.
Introduction
(2000)
In this paper, I shall discuss the semantic attachment of intersective modifiers in German coherent constructions. I shall show that a purely syntactic solution to the observable attachment ambiguity is undesirable for reasons of processing e ciency and/or massive spurious ambiguity. Instead, I shall follow Egg and Lebeth (1995) and propose an extension to Minimal Recursion Semantics, permitting the expression of underspecified semantic attachment. This rather trivial move, as we shall see, will not only be preferable for processing reasons, but it will also be more in line with the spirit of underspecified semantics, e ectively providing a compact representation of purely semantic distinctions, instead of unfolding these distinctions into a rain forest of tree representations and derivations. I will present an implementation of the underspecification approach integrated into the German HPSG developed at DFKI and compare its e ciency to an alternative implementation where semantic attachment is unfolded by means of retrieval rules.
This paper deals with a series of semantic contrasts between the copula "be" and the preposition "as", two functional elements that both head elementary predication structures. It will be argued that the meaning of "as" is a type lowering device shifting the meaning of its complement NP from generalized quantifier type to property type (where properties are conceived as relations between individuals and situations), while the copula "be" induces a type coercion from (partial) situations to (total) possible worlds. Paired with van der Sandt's 1992 theory of presupposition accommodation, these assumptions will account for the observed contrasts between "as" and "be".
Editorial preface
(2000)
The present issue grew out of two sources. The main one was the workshop on Adding and Omitting (A & 0) held during the DGfS Conference organized in Konstanz at the beginning of 1999 by our ZAS project on Syntax der Fokusbildung. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together people working on topicalization (addition of expressions, in a sense) and ellipsis (omission, i.e. deletion of linguistic material) and their relations and interaction. Since the workshop was very successful and met with a great deal of interest on the part of both participants and outsiders, we decided to collect and publish the papers that were presented. Towards the end of 1999, a follow-up workshop on Ellipsis and Information Structure was organized by Kerstin Schwabe and Susanne Winkler (Tübingen). The papers given at this second meeting were supposed to be an integral part of the publication as well. More and more people got involved, further developing our common understanding of the topic phenomenon, so that there was too much material for a single volume. We therefore decided to split the enterprise into two volumes. The ellipsis papers are to be published by 'Benjamins' this year in Interpreting Omitted Structures.
Why should we engage in language universals research and language typology? What do we want to explain? It is a fact that, although languages differ significantly and considerably. indeed, no one would deny, that they have something in common; how else could they be labelled 'language'? - There is obviously unity among them, no matter how vaguely felt and for what reasons: Scientific, practical, moral, etc. Neither diversity per se nor unity per se is what we want to explain. There is no reason whatsoever to consider either one of them as primary, and the other as derived. What we do want to explain is "equivalence in difference" – cf. our motto – which manifests itself, among others, in the translatability from one language to another, the learnability of any language, language change – which all presuppose that speakers intuitively find their way from diversity to unity. This is a highly salient property which deserves to be brought into our consciousness. Generally then, our basic goal is to explain the way in which language-specific facts are connected with a unitarian concept of language – "die Sprache" – "le langage".
The papers in this volume were presented at the eleventh meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA 11), held from April 23-25 at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany. The conference was organized by Hans-Martin Gärtner, Joachim Sabel, and myself, as part of the research project Clause Structure and Adjuncts in Austronesian Languages. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). We would like to thank Wayan Arka, Agibail Cohn, Laura Downing, Silke Hamann, S J Hannahs, Ray Harlow, Nikolaus Himmelmann, Yuchua E. Hsiao, Lillian Huang, Ed Keenan, Glyne Piggott, Charles Randriamasimanana, Joszef Szakos, Barbara Stiebels, Jane Tang, Lisa Travis, Noami Tsukido, Sam Wang, Elizabeth Zeitoun, Kie Ross Zuraw, and Marzena Zygis for reviewing the abstracts. We are thankful to Mechthild Bernhard, Jenny Ehrhardt, Fabienne Fritzsche, Theódóra Torfadóttir and Tue Trinh for their help during the conference. I would like to thank Theódóra for providing essential editorial assistance.
This volume presents working versions of presentations heard at and selected for the Workshop on Syntax of Predication, held at ZAS, Berlin, on November 2-3, 2001 (except the editor’s own paper).
Predication is a many-faceted topic which involves both syntax and semantics and the interface between them. This is reflected in the papers of the volume.