Linguistik
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Doctoral Thesis (23) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (23) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (23) (remove)
Keywords
- Fokus (2)
- Semantik (2)
- Adjective (1)
- Adjektiv (1)
- Afroasiatisch (1)
- Alternative Questions (1)
- Alternativfragen (1)
- Armenian (1)
- Aussprache (1)
- Aussprache-Datenbank (1)
Institute
This dissertation investigates several aspects of nominal modification in Ògè, an understudied language of Benue-congo spoken in Àkókó Northwest in Nigeria. The study focuses on two areas of nominal modification namely, Nominal Attributive Modifiers (NAMs) and the strategies of number marking.
The discussion and analysis of NAMs in the language reveal that Ògè belongs to the group of languages which lacks adjectives as a lexical category. NAMs are nominal and they
are derived from an existing lexical category namely, verbs. Predicative modifiers and NAMs have forms that are similar to the long and short forms (LF & SF) of adjectives in languages in which adjectives form an open class, for example, Russian, SerBoCroatian (BCS) and German.
Based on the Minimalist program, the dissertation reveals that unlike Russian, BCS, and German in which the discrepancies between the two forms of adjectives are related to definiteness (as in the case of BCS) and Agree, the discrepancies in the two forms of modifiers in Ògè are related to the fact that Ògè lacks adjectives and resorts into the nominalization of stative verbs in order to derive attributive forms. Using the analyses of adjuncts according to Truswell (2004) and Zeijlstra (2020), the dissertation proposes that NAMs are adjuncts in a modification structure while they are heads in possessive and genitive constructions. In addition, I propose that NAMs are attributive-only modifiers which modify the NP rather than
the DP.
The dissertation also investigates the strategies of number marking in Ògè. Unlike languages in which number marking is obligatory in the nominal domain (Hebrew, German, English),
nouns in Ògè are not always marked for number. This means that nouns in Ògè have general number. The general number nature of nouns in Ògè is like that of the nouns in modifying plural marking languages namely, Halkomelem, Korean, Yucatec Maya and Yorùbá. However, I argue that unlike the modifying plural marking languages in which the Number Phrase (NumP) is not projected, NumP is projected in the nominal spine of Ògè, claiming that NumP bears an
interpretable number feature which values the uninterpretable number feature in D. Argument in support of this comes from the interpretation of the noun in the presence of òtúro (an element which translates to the plural definite interpretation of the noun). I analyze òtúro as a plural determiner which occupies the D-head in the syntax of Ògè. The dissertation argues following Alexiadou (2019) that the locus of the occurrence of the marker of plurality in the nominal spine does not depend on its interpretation as a plural morpheme, rather, the locus of the occurrence of the element that is sensitive to the plural interpretation of the noun depends on other parameters which are definiteness, specificity and animacy.
Die vorliegende Arbeit diente der Gewinnung neuer Erkenntnisse über die historische Entwicklung und Typisierung von Fragesätzen. Die Analyse basiert auf Materialien verschiedener indogermanischer Sprachen (Griechisch, Armenisch, Gotisch, Altkirchenslavisch, Altrussisch) sowie einer außerindogermanischen kaukasischen Sprache (Altgeorgisch). Primär wurden Bibeltexte aus dem Alten und Neuen Testament anhand von Faksimileausgaben und elektronischen Textcorpora untersucht. Die Arbeit demonstrierte anhand von über 540 Beispielen, welche Kriterien, graphische oder grammatische Mittel, Fragewortstellung oder Satzgliederfolge, in den überlieferten Texten für die Entschlüsselung von Fragesätzen hilfreich waren. Für jede betrachtete Sprache wurde eine möglichst ausführliche Klassifikation der Hauptfragesatztypen vorgelegt. Ferner gehörte zum Untersuchungsobjekt der Arbeit die in den Fragesätzen implizierte Antworterwartung. Für die weitere Analyse dieser Erscheinung wurden die Fragesätze aufgrund ihrer formalen Kennzeichen für Antworterwartung und Bedeutung eingeteilt. Anhand des übereinzelsprachlichen Vergleiches war es möglich, die spezifischen interrogativen Charakteristika aufzuzeigen, die in den einzelnen Sprachen für die jeweiligen schriftlich fixierten Perioden typisch waren. Wenn relevant, wurden auch Daten aus jüngeren Sprachstufen herangezogen. Die zum Schluss vorgestellte Gegenüberstellung von indogermanischen und kaukasischen Sprachen war erforderlich, um nicht nur genetisch bedingte sprachspezifische Charakteristika von Fragesätzen aufzuzeigen, sondern auch allgemeinsprachliche spezifische Merkmale zu eruieren.
Die vorliegende Arbeit stellt die Phonologie, Morphologie und Syntax des Nyam, einer westtschadischen Minoritätensprache Nordostnigerias, dar. Es handelt sich um eine Erstbeschreibung, die im Zuge eines von der DFG finanzierten Projekts mit dem Titel „Das Nyam – Dokumentation einer westtschadischen Minoritätensprache“ durchgeführt werden konnte.
Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, eine grammatische Beschreibung des Nyam – eine bis dato unbekannte Sprache – vorzulegen. Mit nur ca. 5000 Sprechern ist sie schon im Hinblick auf die geringe Zahl, vor allem aber durch die regionale Dominanz der mit ihr genetisch verwandten Verkehrssprache Hausa, akut in ihrer Existenz bedroht. Zudem befindet sich diese Sprache in einer geographisch exponierten Lage, d.h. sie ist weitgehend von Benue-Kongo-Sprachen umgeben. Vor diesem Hintergrund kann die Dokumentation des Nyam einerseits den Nyam-Sprechern selbst zur Erhaltung ihrer kulturellen Identität und der damit verbundenen Traditionen dienen. Andererseits ist dieser wissenschaftliche Beitrag als Ergänzung zu den noch fehlenden Grammatiken innerhalb der tschadischen Sprachfamilie und im Besonderen der Bole-Tangale-Sprachgruppe zu sehen und kann als Grundstein zukünftiger Forschungen für vergleichende Arbeiten mit den benachbarten Benue-Kongo-Sprachen betrachtet werden.
This dissertation provides an analysis of Finnish prosody, with a focus on the sentence or phrase level. The thesis analyses Finnish as a phrase language. Thus, it accounts for prosodic variation through prosodic phrasing and explains intonational differences in terms of phrase tones.
Finnish intonation has traditionally been described in terms of accents associated with stressed syllables, i.e. similarly as prototypical intonation languages like English or German. However, accents are usually described as uniform instead of forming an inventory of contrasting accent types. The present thesis confirms the uniformity of Finnish tonal contours and explains it as based on realisations of tones associated with prosodic phrases instead of accents. Two levels of phrasing are discussed: Prosodic phrases (p-phrases) and intonational phrases (i-phrases). Most prominently, the p-phrase is marked by a high tone associated with its beginning and a low tone associated with its end; realisations of these tones form the rise-fall contours traditionally analysed as accents. The i-phrase is associated with a final tone that is either low or high and additionally marked by voice quality and final lengthening. While the tonal specifications of these phrases are thus predominantly invariant, variation arises from different distributions of phrases.
This analysis is based on three studies, two production experiments and one perception study. The first production study investigated systematic variation in information structure, first syllable vowel quantity and the target word's position in the sentence, while the second production experiment induced variation in information structure, first and second syllable type and number of syllables. In addition to fundamental frequency, the materials were analysed regarding duration, the occurrence of pauses and voice quality. The perception study investigated the interpretation of compound/noun phrase minimal pairs with manipulated fundamental frequency contours using a two-alternative forced-choice picture selection task. Additionally, a pilot perception study on variation in peak height and timing supported the assumption of uniform tonal contours.
This dissertation investigates a special class of anaphoric form, yè, in Ewe known as the logophoric pronoun. This research makes a number of novel observations.
In the first chapter, I introduce the reader to the phenomenon under investigation as well as provide information on Ewe and its dialects and, methodology. In Chapter 2, I present the pronominal system of Ewe which is categorised into strong and weak forms following Cardinaletti & Starke (1994) and Agbedor (1996). The distribution of pronouns is outlined which sets the tone for an overview of logophoric marking. In this respect, I present variations in logophoric marking strategies cross linguistically and show that Ewe differs significantly from other pronouns in this category. In an effort to explain the deviant case of yè, I entertain the idea that yè is a pure logophoric pronoun in the sense of Clements (1975) and thus, its additional de re and strict interpretation does not imply non-logophoricity.
Chapter 3 demonstrates that yè is sensitive to contexts which portray the intention of an individual. Following Sells (1987), the antecedent of yè must have an intention to communicate. I broadly categorize logophoric contexts into reportative (direct-indirect speech) or non-reportative (speaker’s mental attitude, reporter’s observation or background knowledge of a situation). Based on this categorization, indirect speech report (Clements 1975), dis- course units such as a paragraph or an episode (Clements 1975), and sentential adjuncts such as purpose, causal and consequence clauses (Culy 1994a) are reviewed. The logophoric pro- noun occurs in the complement of attitude verbs (Clements 1975), also termed logocentric (à la (Stirling 1994)) or logophoric predicates (à la (Culy 1994a)) as well as with non-attitudinal verbs (e.g. va ‘come’ or wO ‘do’ as in sentential adjuncts). I argue contra Clements (1975) and Culy (1994a) that yè can occur with perception predicates. I further provide three new instances of non-reportative contexts which are compatible with yè namely, as-if clauses, benefactive na clauses and alesi ‘how’ clauses. I show, corroborating previous studies that contexts which are necessary for the licensing of yè include all of the aforementioned except causal clauses. Among these contexts, the complementizer be or regarding cases where there is no be, an element in C (due to the Doubly-Filled-Comp Filter (DFCF) c.f. Chomsky & Lasnik (1977)), is sufficient to license yè. Following Bimpeh & Sode (2021), yè is licensed by feature checking (in the spirit of von Stechow (2004)): be bears the interpretatble [log] feature which checks the uninterpretable [log] feature of yè. I include a redefinition of logophoricity as pertaining to Ewe.
Given the disparity found in the literature concerning the interpretation of yè: Ewedome (pronounce EVedome) has only de se readings (Bimpeh 2019); while ‘pure’ Ewe, Mina (variety of Ewe spoken in Togo) Pearson (2015), Danyi (O’Neill 2015) and Anlo (pronounced ANlO) (Satık 2019) has de re readings; chapter 4 aims at lending empirical support to the ungoing discussion by verifying the interpretation of yè. Two acceptability judgment tasks were conducted namely, truth value judgment task and binary forced choice task. The results corroborates Pearson (2012, 2015) and others’ discovery that yè has a de re interpretation in the Ewedome (contra Bimpeh (2019); Bimpeh et al. (2022)), Anlo and Tonu (pronounced TONu) dialects of Ewe.
In chapter 5, I discuss the relation between logophoricity (yè, yè a) and Control (PRO). I show that yè may be restricted to a set of verbs which obligatorily require the morpheme a ‘potential marker’ (Essegbey 2008), in subject position. This set of verbs are those that are known as control verbs c.f. (Landau 1999) in English. As a result of this restriction, research such as Satık (2019) claims that yè a is the overt instantiation of PRO in English. According to the Ewe facts, it appears as though on one hand, yè and PRO share similar properties in logophoric contexts and on the other hand, yè in combination with the potential marker, a also share properties with PRO in subject control environments. Against this background, I discuss the relation between yè, yè a and PRO and show that neither yè in isolation nor yè in combination with a, contrary to Satık (2019), is the overt instantiation of PRO. I clarify that the potential morpheme a is not cliticised or combined with the logophoric yè. The two forms are seperate morphemes. The potential marker a only shows up in control environments because a sub-class of verbs require it for grammaticality purposes. As such, the property of de se-ness does not come from yè by itself, yè a or a but rather from the sub-class of verbs which require the potential marker a...
In literary translation 'correctness' is rarely ratified by linguistic rules; it is more often a question of what a sensitive translator feels to be correct. Intuition will therefore play a major part. This intuition is seen here neither as instinctive reaction prompted by experience, nor as native competence, but as an inquiring, self-moderating influence inspired by the language itself. It is treated in this respect as an informed intuition, that is, as having a linguistic base for sensitive judgement. This assumes that the literary translator is both a creative writer and his own critical reader as well as a fine judge of language potential. This line is applied to translating meaning and sense, transferring the very language, imitating the form and style, re-creating the features, and above all, to capturing those unique qualities of the original. After dealing with word-accuracy, the question of literary input demanded by form and style is examined. The treatment of language used for effect features in a section on Kafka. The merits and the problems of translating dialect as dialect for its own sake are looked at closely and in a positive way as are the possibilities of reproducing 'oddities' of language. The immense task of translating the language of Joyce ('Ulysses ') with all its vagaries and skilful manipulation of words is examined for the possibility of providing an accurate copy. The ultimate test of reproducing a uniqueness of artistic creation together with the profound thought which inspired it, is reserved for a section on Hopkins. While it is recognized that, owing to the constrictions imposed by the extreme and sensitive use of language, no translation can fully include all that there is in his poems, it might be possible to capture enough of their essence to give an impression of a 'German' Hopkins at work. A major objective throughout is the establishment of a linguistic base for the part played by intuition in literary translation.
This study identifies the language learning strategies associated with the achievement of higher levels o f oral proficiency in German for one hundred Irish third level students. It is one of the first studies of this kind to be conducted in Ireland and one of the very few, if any, conducted on third level learners of German. Furthermore, as well as identifying the strategies associated with higher levels of proficiency, the study also investigates how these strategies are used by learners displaying higher and lower levels of proficiency. It then explores the question of how the strategies associated with higher levels of proficiency contribute to the process of proficiency development, and how students perceive them as contributing to this process. Finally, the relationships between learner specific characteristics, strategic behaviour and proficiency levels are assessed. The experimental design combines a quantitative survey with in-depth interviews. The results indicate that orally more proficient students use more strategies more frequently. In particular, they use more cognitive, metacognitive and social strategies. Furthermore, they have a repertoire of approximately ten key strategies which they employ in a structured, purposeful manner and apply to a range of language learning situations. They are convinced that these strategies contribute to the development of proficiency, a view which is borne out by the quantitative findings. Finally, higher levels of motivation and more positive perceptions of personal proficiency levels are strongly associated with higher levels of both strategic behaviour and oral proficiency. These findings have significant theoretical and practical implications. Firstly, they demonstrate the importance of expanding the research framework in studies of this kind beyond the mere identification of the strategies associated with higher proficiency levels. Instead, as in this study, future research should incorporate questions relating to the process of strategy implementation by more and less successful learners and to relationships between the use of particular strategies and the process of foreign language acquisition. Secondly, the findings contribute to our understanding of the strategic behaviour of the orally more proficient student, and in particular the orally more proficient learner of German in an Irish third level context. This understanding relates primarily to the strategies these learners use, the way in which they use them and their attitudes towards their use. Such an understanding forms the basis of successful strategies based instruction in the language classroom.
Worum geht es in dieser Arbeit? Dies ist eine Arbeit über Websites. Darüber, wie sie gelesen und geschrieben werden und wie man das lernen kann. Da es in dieser Arbeit um Lesen, Schreiben und Lernen geht, fließen in sie sowohl Aspekte der Sprachwissenschaft als auch der Sprachdidaktik ein. Was will diese Arbeit? Diese Arbeit hat zwei Ziele, ein sprachwissenschaftliches und ein sprachdidaktisches. In sprachwissenschaftlicher Hinsicht sollen, auf der Grundlage einer gründlichen Analyse seiner Eigenschaften, die Besonderheiten des Lesens und Schreibens im World Wide Web herausgearbeitet werden. Aufbauend auf dieser Analyse sollen im sprachdidaktischen Teil der Arbeit die Kompetenzen ermittelt und in Beziehung zueinander gesetzt werden, die zur Erstellung von Websites notwendig sind. Das so entstehende Kompetenzmodell bildet die Basis für eine zielgerichtete, effektive und evaluierbare Umsetzung der Gestaltung von Websites in der Schule und die Grundlage für weiterführende empirische Arbeiten. Wie ist die Arbeit aufgebaut? Im ersten Kapitel der Arbeit wird die Entwicklung der technischen und strukturellen Formate geschildert, welche die Grundlage des Websiteformats bilden. Darauf aufbauend werden seine wichtigsten Eigenschaften beschrieben. Im zweiten Kapitel wird das Websiteformat von anderen kommunikativen Formaten abgegrenzt und mit Hilfe der besonderen Charakteristika, die es besitzt, sein überwältigender Erfolg erklärt. Im dritten Kapitel wird unter Rückgriff auf Ergebnisse der Leseforschung und empirische Untersuchungen zum Lesen im World Wide Web erarbeitet, welchen Einfluss das Websiteformat auf das Lesen von Texten hat und welche Unterschiede es zum Lesen von Texten in anderen kommunikativen Formaten gibt. Auf dieser Grundlage wird ein Bewertungs- und Analyseraster für die Lesbarkeit von Texten im Websiteformat entwickelt. Im vierten Kapitel wird auf der Grundlage verschiedener Modelle des Schreibprozesses dargestellt, was das Schreiben für das Websiteformat vom Schreiben für andere Formate unterscheidet, was dabei besonders beachtet werden muss und welche Entwicklungen für die Zukunft zu erwarten sind. Dabei werden, unter Berücksichtigung des in Kapitel drei erarbeiteten Bewertungs- und Analyserasters, Hinweise für eine sinnvolle Vorgehensweise bei der Gestaltung von Websites gegeben. Im fünften Kapitel wird vor dem Hintergrund der aktuellen bildungspolitischen Diskussion ein Kompetenzmodell für die Gestaltung von Websites entwickelt, das als Basis für die Festlegung von Bildungsstandards und die Beschreibung der Rahmenbedingungen dient, unter denen diese in der Schule verwirklicht werden können. In einer abschließenden Diskussion werden die wichtigsten Ergebnisse nochmals herausgearbeitet und es wird auf Perspektiven für zukünftige sprachwissenschaftliche und sprachdidaktische Forschungsvorhaben hingewiesen.
Statistical machine translation (SMT) should benefit from linguistic information to improve performance but current state-of-the-art models rely purely on data-driven models. There are several reasons why prior efforts to build linguistically annotated models have failed or not even been attempted. Firstly, the practical implementation often requires too much work to be cost effective. Where ad-hoc implementations have been created, they impose too strict constraints to be of general use. Lastly, many linguistically-motivated approaches are language dependent, tackling peculiarities in certain languages that do not apply to other languages. This thesis successfully integrates linguistic information about part-of-speech tags, lemmas and phrase structure to improve MT quality. The major contributions of this thesis are: 1. We enhance the phrase-based model to incorporate linguistic information as additional factors in the word representation. The factored phrase-based model allows us to make use of different types of linguistic information in a systematic way within the predefined framework. We show how this model improves translation by as much as 0.9 BLEU for small German-English training corpora, and 0.2 BLEU for larger corpora. 2. We extend the factored model to the factored template model to focus on improving reordering. We show that by generalising translation with part-of-speech tags, we can improve performance by as much as 1.1 BLEU on a small French- English system. 3. Finally, we switch from the phrase-based model to a syntax-based model with the mixed syntax model. This allows us to transition from the word-level approaches using factors to multiword linguistic information such as syntactic labels and shallow tags. The mixed syntax model uses source language syntactic information to inform translation. We show that the model is able to explain translation better, leading to a 0.8 BLEU improvement over the baseline hierarchical phrase-based model for a small German-English task. Also, the model requires only labels on continuous source spans, it is not dependent on a tree structure, therefore, other types of syntactic information can be integrated into the model. We experimented with a shallow parser and see a gain of 0.5 BLEU for the same dataset. Training with more training data, we improve translation by 0.6 BLEU (1.3 BLEU out-of-domain) over the hierarchical baseline. During the development of these three models, we discover that attempting to rigidly model translation as linguistic transfer process results in degraded performance. However, by combining the advantages of standard SMT models with linguistically-motivated models, we are able to achieve better translation performance. Our work shows the importance of balancing the specificity of linguistic information with the robustness of simpler models.
This dissertation is concerned with the phenomenon of intervention effects, observed in three different domains: wh-questions, alternative questions (AltQ) and Negative Polarity Item (NPI) licensing. I propose that these three domains share some common properties, namely, they all involve focus-sensitive licensing, and are thus sensitive to an intervening focus phrase. The overview of the dissertation is as follows. In chapter 2, I discuss the phenomenon of intervention effects in wh-questions, brought to light in the discussion of German in Beck (1996), and Korean in Beck and Kim (1997). The basic idea of their analysis is that quantifiers block LF wh-movement. I show that intervention effects are observed in many other languages, too, suggesting that the intervention effect has a universal character. I then point out some problems with the analysis proposed by Beck (1996) and Beck and Kim (1997). In chapter 3, I propose a new generalization of the wh-intervention effects, namely that the core set of interveners, which is crosslinguistically stable, consists of focus phrases (and not quantifiers in general). Furthermore, I argue that the wh-intervention effect is actually an instance of the more general intervention effect, the "Focus Intervention Effect", which says that in a focus-sensitive licensing construction, no independent focus phrase may intervene between the licensor Op and the licensee XP. The underlying idea is that the Q operator is a focus-sensitive operator and that wh-phrases in-situ are dependent (i.e., semantically deficient) focus elements, which must be associated with the Q operator in order to be interpreted. An intervening independent focus operator precisely blocks that association. I further propose that the domain of focus-sensitive licensing includes not only wh-licensing, but also AltQ-licensing and NPI-licensing. In chapter 4, I show that alternative questions are also subject to the focus intervention effect, just like wh-questions. I provide evidence that the intervention effect in wh-questions and in alternative questions should receive a parallel analysis, in terms of focus-sensitivity. In chapter 5, I discuss a third construction which is sensitive to the focus intervention effect: the licensing of Negative Polarity Items (NPIs). I show that focus consistently blocks NPI licensing, with data from German and Korean. I propose that NPIs are also semantically deficient focus elements, which need to be associated with a NEG operator. Finally, chapter 6 summarizes the intervention effects and suggests some topics for future research into the precise nature of the intervention effect.
This thesis primarily investigates an (hitherto unnoticed) agreement alternation between Romance and Germanic in D>N>&>N constructions (e.g. “these walls and ceiling”). While Romance exhibits left conjunct agreement, Germanic shows morphologically resolved agreement on the determiner, i.e. the phi-feature mismatching conjuncts can only be licensed if a syncretic form is available. To handle these data the author suggests a theory in which coordination is syntactically and morphologically unspecified and multiple agree is a general option. Infelicitous derivations are ruled out by interface conditions on the semantic and the phonological well formedness. The complete results of the corpus research conducted to deliver a sound empirical basis for the phenomena investigated in this thesis can be found in the appendix.
The bulk of this dissertation is an analysis of grammatical relations (including syntactic, pragmatic, and semantic relations) in Modern Mandarin Chinese. In Chapter I the background, functional framework, and concepts used in the dissertation are introduced. In Chapter II it is shown that Chinese has not grammaticalized the syntactic functions 'subject' and 'object', and has no syntactic function-changing passive construction. In Chapter III the nature of word order and its relationship to information structure in Chinese is examined. It is argued that word order in Chinese does not mark 'definite' and 'indefinite' NPs, as is commonly assumed, but marks information structure. A number of marked focus structure constructions are also discussed. In Chapter IV the discussion is of the structure of Chinese discourse, developed from an analysis of the nature of discourse referent tracking. It is shown that recovery of anaphora is not based on syntactic functions, but is based on real world knowledge (semantics and pragmatics) and discourse structure. Chapter V gives the conclusions, followed by a discussion of some of the diachronic considerations that arose in the course of this investigation. It is suggested that within Sino-Tibetan, Chinese should be seen as an innovator in terms of word order, and that grammatical relations in Proto-Sino-Tibetan should be seen to be pragmatically based rather than syntactically based.
Die Aussprache fremdländischer Orts- und Eigennamen kann deutschsprachige Rundfunksprecher vor größere Probleme stellen. Denn es gibt in anderen Sprachen Laute, die im Deutschen nicht vorkommen. Auch die Graphem-Phonem-Verbindungen entsprechen oft nicht den deutschen Regeln. Beim Hessischen Rundfunk existiert für die gesamte ARD die so genannte „Aussprache-Datenbank“, bei der Sprecher (in der Regel Nachrichtensprecher) die Aussprache solcher Orts- und Eigennamen erfragen können. In der vorliegenden Dissertation werden phonetisch begründete Regeln erarbeitet, wie – ausgehend von einer Transkription nach IPA in der Originalsprache – Orts- und Eigennamen des Dänischen, Schwedischen und Norwegischen durch deutschsprachige Rundfunksprecher ausgesprochen werden sollten. Dabei werden auch die Graphem-Phonem-Relation sowie die Phonotaktik der Ausgangssprache im Vergleich zum Deutschen berücksichtigt. Damit liegt erstmals ein standardisiertes Verfahren vor, das eine einheitliche und phonetisch begründete Vorgehensweise bei der Erarbeitung eines Aussprachevorschlags für dänische, schwedische und norwegische Orts- und Eigennamen ermöglicht.
This dissertation explores the language of three German grammar books and accompanying exercise books which are produced in Germany for international students of German. It examines how the examples and exercises presented in these books constitute ‘colony texts’ which convey different representations of human activity to the reader. Analysis of the language used in the German grammar books centres on the Linguistics of Representation and borrows techniques used normally in Corpus Linguistics. By using WordSmith Tools this study shows how particular terms (nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives) occur with greater frequency than others in the books under analysis thereby representing certain human activities more strongly than others. The activity of ‘work*, in particular, emerges in the grammar books as a key human activity and consequently provides the main focus for analysis in this study. Concordances relating to ‘work’ are grouped and analysed in terms of what they reveal about popular professions, workplace hierarchy and attitudes and approaches to work. Findings are considered from three perspectives: what they reveal to the researcher and learners of German about the representation of ‘work’ in the chosen context, how they compare to findings from comparative analyses of German textbooks and how they can contribute to our overall understanding of ‘text*. Grammar book examples and exercises emerge as ‘texts’ which have significant potential to reflect cultural norms and attitudes despite being considered generally as a source of innocuous and unremarkable language.
Die vorliegende Arbeit zur Theorie, Praxis und fremdsprachlichen Didaktik der Fachsprache der Chemie geht auf meine unterrichtspraktische Tätigkeit auf dem Gebiet Deutsch als Fremdsprache in fachsprachlich ausgerichteten Kursen der Dublin City University zurück, In der täglichen Praxis des Unterrichtens wurde mir zunehmend deutlich, dass neben den vielen Aspekten, die in der Fachsprachenforschung und in der Erforschung der fremdsprachlichen Fachsprachenvermittlung wohl dokumentiert sind, andere, wie Eva Hund es formuliert, in einen toten Winkel der Fachsprachenbetrachtung geraten sind, Dies betrifft sowohl den philosophischen Hintergrund, als auch semiotische und linguistische Fragen. Der erste, theoretische Teil der Arbeit dient dazu, diese Fragestellungen, soweit dies im Rahmen einer Arbeit wie der vorliegenden möglich und nötig ist, aufzuspannen und auf pragmatische Weise, also wiederum im Rahmen der Möglichkeiten und Notwendigkeiten, zu lösen. Im zweiten Teil der Arbeit werden vier Grundbegriffe der Chemie als Anhaltspunkte verwendet, um anhand von Texten, die im vorgegebenen Rahmen für die fremdsprachliche Ausbildung von Chemikern von größter Relevanz sind, sprachliche, textuelle, diskursive und kulturelle Strukturen in deutschsprachigen Chemietexten offen zu legen, die für Studierende mit der Ausgangssprache Englisch Unerwartetes, Überraschendes, Schwieriges, gerade deshalb aber auch Herausforderndes, Aufregendes, Neues bergen. Dies ist der Ausgangspunkt für den dritten Teil der Arbeit, in dem der Versuch unternommen wird, die Tiefenschichtungen eines an der Entwicklung der Gesamtpersönlichkeit der Studierenden orientierten und interessierten Unterrichtens in der Fremdsprache zu zeigen, wo es nicht nur um den Erwerb eines möglichst funktionalen und utilitären Fachsprachenwissens geht, sondern darum, die durch die Fremdsprachlichkeit eröffneten Möglichkeiten der Distanzierung und Perspektivierung zu nutzen. Im Folgenden werden die Inhalte der drei Teile ein wenig genauer erläutert. Der erste Teil der Arbeit nimmt sich des philosophischen, semiotischen und linguistischen Hintergrunds für die Beschäftigung mit der Chemie in ihrer Erscheinungsform als zu erlernende fremdsprachliche Fachsprache an. Zunächst werden die Positionen des wissenschaftlichen Realismus und Relativismus betrachtet. Dies ist insofern wichtig, als hier der Grund für das Verhältnis von Sprache und Welt oder, anders ausgedrückt, für das Verhältnis von Inhalt und Sprache gelegt wird, oder, in einer weiteren Ausformung, für das Verhältnis zwischen dem Denken und der Wirklichkeit. Die Intensität, mit der etwa in der (muttersprachlichen) Chemiedidaktik die Debatte darum geführt wird, wann, wie und unter welchen Umständen die Modellvorstellung in den Unterricht eingeführt werden soll, vermittelt einen Geschmack von der Bedeutsamkeit diesen Themenfeldes. Für diese Arbeit wird die Spannung zwischen Realismus und Relativismus insofern aufgelöst, als Elemente von beiden verwendet und dem Konzept der Lehrbarkeit untergeordnet werden. In einem zweiten Schritt wird in diesem Teil der Arbeit mit Hilfe des Bühlerschen Zeichenmodells (und einer Erweiterung durch Roman Jakobson) demonstriert, dass, im Gegensatz zu häufig wiederholten Vorstellungen von der Fachsprache als ausschließlich in Sachzusammenhängen verharrender Ausdrucksweise, was der Bühlerschen Referenzfunktion des Zeichens entspräche, auch das Verhältnis zwischen Sender und Zeichen (Ausdrucks- bzw. emotive Funktion) und zwischen Zeichen und Empfänger (appellative Funktion) nicht nur zwangsläufig in der Fachsprache verankert sind, sondern auch eine wichtige Rolle in ihr spielen. Diese Zusammenhänge haben sich u.a. auch deshalb im toten Winkel der Forschung verloren, weil die Forschungstätigkeit sich bisher vor allem auf die sogenannte Theoriesprache der Chemie ausgerichtet hat, während die Textsorten der Wissensvermittlung auf der tertiären Bildungsebene (Lehrbuch, Laborhandbuch, Vorlesungsskripten) weitgehend unerforscht geblieben sind. Dies wird in diesem Teil der Arbeit insbesondere anhand der Unsicherheit der Kategorisierung der Lehrtexte in gängigen fachsprachlichen Textsortenanlysen verdeutlicht. Ein weiteres Ergebnis der Beschäftigung mit Texten der Wissensvermittlung ist die Tatsache, dass die wissenschaftliche Allgemeinsprache (Terminologie in einemweiteren Sinne, im Gegensatz zur chemischen Nomenklatur) ins Zentrum der Aufmerksamkeit rückt. Damit rücken auch in der Fachsprachenforschung, insbesondere auf dem Feld der Naturwissenschaften, ansonsten weniger beachtete Elemente (wie die Verben), Ausdrucks weisen (wie Metaphern), Sichtweisen (Zweisprachigkeit der deutschen Chemieterminologie) und Verhaltensweisen (im kulturellen Zusammenhang) in den Vordergrund. Der erste Teil der Arbeit schließt mit einem Vergleich der englischen und der deutschen Fachsprache der Chemie ab, welcher der Tatsache, dass sich der hier zu Grund gelegte Unterricht der deutschen Fachsprache der Chemie in einer homogen englischsprachigen Umgebung abspielt, Rechnung trägt. Im zweiten Teil der Arbeit wird zunächst der Grundlagentext für die ihn ihm erfolgenden Analysen eingeführt. Es ist das zweibändige Praktikum in Allgemeiner Chemie, herausgegeben von Hanns Fischer, das für die Zwecke dieser Arbeit aus mehreren Gründen besonders gut geeignet scheint. Im weiteren Verlauf des zweiten Kapitels werden vier Grundbegriffe der Chemie besprochen, mit deren Hilfe weite Gebiete der Chemie erfasst werden können, ohne die Übersichtlichkeit zu verlieren. Bei der Besprechung dieser Begriffe werden anhand gelegentlicher Fallstudien aus studentischen Arbeiten die Schwierigkeiten verdeutlicht, mit denen sich nichtmuttersprachliche Leser von wissensvermittelnden Texten konfrontiert sehen. In diesen Fallstudien werden studentischen Annotationen (zu einem Universitätsskript) und studentische Übersetzungen als Fenster zum Fremdsprachenverständnis benutzt.1 Der erste der Begriffe ist Stoff (in Verbindung damit die Aggregatzustände), an dem verdeutlicht wird, wie unterschiedlich auch grundlegendste Begriffe der Chemie definiert werden können. Dies mündet in eine Diskussion des Definitionsbegriffs in der fremdsprachlichen Fachsprachendidaktik ein, und erfasst auch kulturelle Aspekte, insofern hier die Zweisprachigkeit der deutschen Chemiesprache ein Synonymenpaar zur Verfügung stellt, das jedoch bei genauerem Hinsehen Zwischentöne ermöglicht, die im englischen Gegenstück nichtverwirklicht werden können. Der zweite der Begriffe ist Atom (mit den verwandten Begriffen Ion und Molekül). Anhand dieser Begriffe werden die Teilchen vor Stellungen der Chemie aufgerollt und zugleich die mit ihnen assoziierten Modelle. Hier wird an Beispielen aus der Praxis der Chemiesprache deutlich, wie sehr die Sprache, mit welcher der Modellcharakter der Teilchenvorstellungen vermittelt wird, mit metaphemhaften Ausdrucksweisen durchsetzt ist. Der nächste Begriff ist Reaktion, in dem vom objekthaften Stoff und Atom zum Prozesshaften übergeleitet wird. In diesem Abschnitt wird die beim Stoffbegriff schon angesprochene Zweisprachigkeit der deutschen Chemiesprache anhand des Begriffspaars Reaktion - Umsetzung nocheinmal aufgegriffen, diesmal aber mit den damit verbundenen Lemschwierigkeiten für Studierende verbunden, Im Zusammenhang mit dem Grundbegriff Reaktion wird die chemietypische Komplementarität von Formel und Text genauer betrachtet. Der vierte und letzte Grundbegriff im praktischen Teil der Arbeit ist der Begriff Labor, in dem eine deutliche Zweiteilung unterschiedliche Aspekte der Fachsprachenvermittlung unterstreicht. Einerseits wird in einer ausführlichen Fallstudie zu studentischen Annotationen in einem typischen deutschen Universitätsskript gezeigt, auf welche Art eine solcher für das Studium essentieller Text (fremdsprachlich erfasst wird. Hier wird anhand einer einfachen statistischen Übersicht deutlich, welch eine wichtige Rolle im Verständnis dieser Textsorte die Verben spielen. Dieser Punkt erfährt anhand einer Analyse zu den Verben, die im Zusammenhang mit der Manipulation von Flüssigkeiten (offensichtlich eine der häufigsten mit dem Labor assoziierten Tätigkeiten) verwendet werden, aus einer anderen Perspektive Bestärkung. Insgesamt zeigt sich im Verlauf des zweiten Teils der Arbeit ein Fortschreiten von der theoretisch ausgerichteten Chemie (über den allumfassenden Stoffbegriff) hin zum praktischen, handwerklichen Aspekt des Chemie-Treibens (im Labor). Der dritte, didaktische Teil der Arbeit beginnt mit einer ausführlichen Begründung für die Zweckmäßigkeit aber auch bildungsmäßigen Sinnhafltigkeit eines fremdsprachlichen Fachsprachenunterrichts auf der tertiären Bildungsebene gegen eine Ansicht, dass für einen solchen Unterricht weder ein Bedarf noch ein Bedürfnis bestehe. Nach einer kurzen Einführung in die Rahmenbedingungen des fachsprachlichen Unterrichts im hier vorliegenden Zusammenhang wird die Brücke zum ersten Teil der Arbeit geschlagen, und es werden, anhand dreier Kompetenzen, die auf das Bühlersche Zeichenmodell zurückreflektieren, Vorschläge für den fachsprachlichen Fremdsprachenunterricht unterbreitet. Diese drei Kompetenzen sind namentlich die Fachkompetenz, die Sozialkompetenz und die Ich-Kompetenz, Ziel dieses dritten Teils ist es, die an der Dublin City University von Françoise Blin, Christine Appel und mir selbst entwickelten Module unter dem Titel German (French/Spanish) for Science and Technology, die für alle vier Studienjahre vorliegen, inhaltlich und fachlich zu unterfüttem.
This dissertation explores the linguistic identity changes of Chinese international students in Germany, and the relationship between their identity reconstruction and their multilingual competence. With the social turn (Block, 2003) of applied linguistics, research on study abroad has shown that student sojourners abroad encounter challenges not only to their language abilities, but also to their identities, which explains the vast individual differences in the measurable outcomes of student sojourns abroad. However, the realm of learners’ linguistic identity development in the English as a lingua franca (ELF) and multilingual contexts remains to be further explored, since most existing studies examined learners in the target language community. Guided by poststructuralist views and sociocultural theories, this study is designed with a view towards investigating the lived experience of Chinese international students at German universities.
Employing a qualitative approach, my research tracked seventeen Chinese students’ experiences of language learning and use in both their social lives and academic settings over one year. The empirical work combined semi-structured, in-depth interviews and emails. Three rounds of one-to-one interviews were conducted every 6 months and each round focused on students’ respective past, present and future. The grounded theory approach (Corbin & Strauss, 2015) was used in this study to analyse the data, aiming at generating theoretical explanations for phenomena through constant comparison.
The results of the category-based analysis offer a new lens on the intricate linguistic identity development of Chinese students in the study abroad context. The construction of their new identity facets is related to various contextual elements in experiences of their language learning and use. More importantly, learners’ identity changes related to the use of ELF is conceived as within a framework of multilingualism (Jenkins, 2015). In any given social interaction, learners’ linguistic identities are influenced by a combination of factors: perceived linguistic proficiency gap, power distribution,preferred communication styles, sensitivity to second/third language self-images and openness to new cultures. It is these factors, instead of the lingua franca context or
target language context per se, that come into play in the reformation of learners’
linguistic identities. Learners’ linguistic identity changes, together with their priority setting in studying abroad, are in turn interconnected with their multilingual competence development.
The findings of my study suggest theories for understanding learners’ linguistic identity development and the outcomes of their language learning in the study abroad context in the face of the complexity of individual experiences. My study also demonstrates the importance to foster learners’ “self-presentational competence” (Pellegrino Aveni, 2005: 145-146) so that they could successfully negotiate new subject positions when crossing the borders.
If we want to develop a semantic analysis for explicit performatives such as I promise you to free Willy, we are faced with the following puzzle: In order to account for the speech act expressed by the performative verb, one can assume that the so-called performative clause is purely performative and provides the illocutionary force of the speech act whose content is given by the semantic object denoted by the complement clause. Yet under this perspective, the performative clause that is, next to the performative verb, the indexicals I and you that refer to the speaker and to the addressee of the utterance context is semantically invisible and does not contribute compositionally its meaning to the meaning of the entire explicit performative sentence. Conversely, if we account for the truth conditional contribution of the performative clause and deny that the meaning of the performative verb is purely performative, then we have to find a way to account for the speech act expressed by the performative verb. Of course, there is already the widely accepted and very appealing indirectness account for explicit performative utterances developed by Bach & Harnish (1979). Roughly, Bach and Harnish solve this puzzle in deriving the performativity by means of a pragmatic inference process. According to them, the important speech act performed by means of the utterance of the explicit performative sentence is a kind of the conventionalized indirect speech act. However, the boundary between semantics and pragmatics can be drawn in many various ways. Therefore, I think there could be other perspectives regarding the interface between the truth-functional treatment of the declarative explicit performative sentences and the speech acts performed with their utterances and which are expressed by the performative verbs. Hence, this thesis consists in the experiment to develop a further analysis and to check out its consequences with respect to the semantics and pragmatics of explicit performative utterances and the new interface emerged. Briefly, the experiment runs as follows: First, I develop an analysis for explicit performative sentences framed by parenthetical structures such as in (1)(a). In a second step, this parenthetical analysis is applied to the proper Austinian explicit performative sentences in (1)(b). (1) a. Tomorrow, I promise you this, I will teach them Tyrolean songs. b. I promise you that I will teach them Tyrolean songs. To analyze at first explicit performatives framed by parenthetical structures bears the convenience that we are faced with two utterances of two main clauses. In (1)(a) there is the utterance of the host sentence Tomorrow I will teach them Tyrolean songs, and the utterance of the explicit parenthetical I promise you this, where the demonstrative this refers to the utterance of Tomorrow I will teach them Tyrolean songs. Since speakers perform speech acts with utterances of main clauses, I assume that the meaning of the explicit parenthetical I promise you this specifies that the actual illocutionary force of the utterance of Tomorrow I will teach them Tyrolean songs is the illocutionary force of a promise. Hence, instead of deriving an indirect illocutionary force by means of a pragmatic inference schema, we can deal with an ordinary direct speech act that is performed with the utterance of the host sentence. This kind of analysis stresses the particular discourse function of explicit performative utterances. Performative verbs are used whenever the contextual information is not sufficient to determine the illocutionary force of the corresponding implicit speech act. The resulting consequences of the parenthetical analysis are interesting since they cast a different light on performative verbs. Surprisingly, the performative verbs are not performative at all. They do not constitute the execution of a speech act, but are execution supporting. Instead of constituting the particular illocutionary force, they merely specify the illocutionary force of the utterance of the host sentence. For instance, the speaker utters the explicit parenthetical I promise you this for specifying what he is simultaneously doing. Hence the speaker does not succeed in performing the promise simply because he is uttering I promise you this. Rather, by means of the information conveyed by the utterance of I promise you this, the potential illocutionary forces of the utterance of the host sentence are disambiguated. Thus, it is not the case that explicit parentheticals are trivially true when uttered. Their function is more complex. Their self-verifying property (‘saying so makes it so’) is explained by means of disambiguation. Furthermore, according to the parenthetical analysis, instead of being purely performative, the performative verbs contribute compositionally their meanings to the truth conditions of the entire explicit performative sentence. Together with its consequences, this analysis is applied to the proper Austinian performatives, which display subordination. I assume that regardless of their structure, explicit performatives always semantically and pragmatically behave as the parenthetical analysis predicts.
Die hier vorgelegte empirische Untersuchung der Fokuspartikeln im Georgischen zeichnet sich u.a. durch die sprach¬immanente Tatsache aus, dass die Fokusstrukturen im Georgischen mit expliziten Partikeln markiert werden können. Die in dieser Arbeit untersuchten Fokuspartikelgruppen ( ġa, c und c+ḳi) sind entsprechend den semantischen Implikationen der Restriktion, Addition und der Skalierung gegliedert worden.
Trotz gewisser Unterschiede im Einzelnen ergab sich folgendes gemeinsames Modell für die Stellungseinschränkungen in Relation zum Prädikatsverb:
• Durch Fokuspartikeln fokussierte Wörter stehen im Georgischen in der Regel unmittelbar vor dem Prädikatsverb.
• Die Skopi der Fokuspartikeln (wenn die fokusmarkierten Worte grammatische Köpfe der NPs sind) stehen im Georgischen in der Regel vor dem Prädikatsverb.
• Die nächstmögliche optimale Interpretationsposition für fokusmarkierte Wörter ist in der Regel die unmittelbare Verbnachstellung.
• Die nächstmögliche optimale Interpretationsposition der
Fokusgruppe ist in der Regel die unmittelbare Verbnachstellung.
Aufgrund der herausgearbeiteten Stellungseinschränkungen entwerfe ich das pragmatische Modell der informationsgliedernden Verbfinalität als Basisabfolge im georgischen Satz.
Manual development of deep linguistic resources is time-consuming and costly and therefore often described as a bottleneck for traditional rule-based NLP. In my PhD thesis I present a treebank-based method for the automatic acquisition of LFG resources for German. The method automatically creates deep and rich linguistic presentations from labelled data (treebanks) and can be applied to large data sets. My research is based on and substantially extends previous work on automatically acquiring wide-coverage, deep, constraint-based grammatical resources from the English Penn-II treebank (Cahill et al.,2002; Burke et al., 2004; Cahill, 2004). Best results for English show a dependency f-score of 82.73% (Cahill et al., 2008) against the PARC 700 dependency bank, outperforming the best hand-crafted grammar of Kaplan et al. (2004). Preliminary work has been carried out to test the approach on languages other than English, providing proof of concept for the applicability of the method (Cahill et al., 2003; Cahill, 2004; Cahill et al., 2005). While first results have been promising, a number of important research questions have been raised. The original approach presented first in Cahill et al. (2002) is strongly tailored to English and the datastructures provided by the Penn-II treebank (Marcus et al., 1993). English is configurational and rather poor in inflectional forms. German, by contrast, features semi-free word order and a much richer morphology. Furthermore, treebanks for German differ considerably from the Penn-II treebank as regards data structures and encoding schemes underlying the grammar acquisition task. In my thesis I examine the impact of language-specific properties of German as well as linguistically motivated treebank design decisions on PCFG parsing and LFG grammar acquisition. I present experiments investigating the influence of treebank design on PCFG parsing and show which type of representations are useful for the PCFG and LFG grammar acquisition tasks. Furthermore, I present a novel approach to cross-treebank comparison, measuring the effect of controlled error insertion on treebank trees and parser output from different treebanks. I complement the cross-treebank comparison by providing a human evaluation using TePaCoC, a new testsuite for testing parser performance on complex grammatical constructions. Manual evaluation on TePaCoC data provides new insights on the impact of flat vs. hierarchical annotation schemes on data-driven parsing. I present treebank-based LFG acquisition methodologies for two German treebanks. An extensive evaluation along different dimensions complements the investigation and provides valuable insights for the future development of treebanks.
Previous studies suggest that the application of Controlled Language (CL) rules can significantly improve the readability, consistency, and machine-translatability of source text. One of the justifications for the application of CL rules is that they can have a similar impact on several target languages by reducing the post-editing effort required to bring Machine Translation (Ml’) output to acceptable quality. In certain situations, however, post-editing services may not always be a viable solution. Web-based information is often expected to be made available in real-time to ensure that its access is not restricted to certain users based on their locale. Uncertainties remain with regard to the actual usefulness of MT output for such users, as no empirical study has examined the impact of CL rules on the usefulness, comprehensibility, and acceptability of MT technical documents from a Web user's perspective. In this study, a two-phase approach is used to determine whether Controlled English rules can have a significant impact on these three variables. First, individual CL rules are evaluated within an experimental environment, which is loosely based on a test suite.Two documents are then published and subject to a randomised evaluation within the framework of an online experiment using a customer satisfaction questionnaire. The findings indicate that a limited number of CL rules have a similar impact on the comprehensibility of French and German output at the segment level. The results of the online experiment show that the application of certain CL rules has the potential to significantly improve the comprehensibility of German MT technical documentation. Our findings also show that the introduction of CL rules did not lead to any significant improvement of the comprehensibility, usefulness, and acceptability of French MT technical documentation.
This dissertation investigated the development of the complementiser that from the demonstrative pronoun in the Germanic languages; each chapter dealt with a different aspect. In the introduction, the terms ‘reanalysis’ and ‘analogy’ and their relevance for grammaticalisation were explained, and the issues of the chapters were presented. The second chapter introduced some information about the Germanic language family and the languages which were relevant for this investigation, namely Gothic, Old English, Old Icelandic, Old Saxon and Old High German. Previous assumptions about the diachrony of that were presented and discussed. One of these proposals which mainly draws on evidence from West Germanic involves the idea that the source construction contained two independent main clauses with a demonstrative pronoun (that) at the end of the first clause (cf. e.g. Paul 1962, § 248). In contrast to this, the Gothic evidence showed that the source construction of the reanalysis of ϸatei was not a proper paratactic construction (at least in Gothic) but already a complex construction which contained a complementiser (ei) in the appositional subordinate clause (cf. also e.g. Longobardi 1994 for the diachrony of ϸatei). This contradiction raised the question whether the analysis of the Gothic that-complementiser also applies to the diachrony of that in West Germanic. This issue was taken up in the third chapter which presented an overview of subordination and complementisers in Northwest Germanic. The aim was to show that the Northwest Germanic languages also show a subordinating particle, which functions like the Gothic ei, namely ϸe (OE), er/es (OI), the (OHG, OS). As a result, the subordinating particle could be observed in relative and adverbial clauses in all Northwest Germanic languages. In complement clauses, which are most crucial for the argumentation, the subordinating particle is found in Old English and Old Icelandic but not in Old Saxon. In Old High German, there are only combinations of the with a following pronoun, theih and theiz, in ‘Otfrids Evangelienbuch’ (see Wunder 1965). Consequently, the presence of a subordinating particle is confirmed in North and West Germanic. The fact that the patterns of subordination are quite similar in all Germanic languages suggested a unitary analysis of the development of that in Germanic was appropriate. In chapter four, the similarities and differences between the Germanic languages with respect to the development of that were explained. It was argued that the preconditions of the reanalysis were the same, whereas the consequences of the reanalysis are realised differently in each language. The most important precondition was that the appositional source construction (explained in more detail below) was generally available in Germanic. Since the demonstrative pronoun at the end of the matrix clause and the subordinating particle of the subordinate clause were adjacent, phonological combination might have been crucial for the subsequent reanalysis to take place. After reanalysis, however, different changes can be observed in the different languages. For instance, it appears that during the Old English period the final syllable of the form ϸætte was deleted (see chapter 4 for references), whereas the final –ei is still present in the Gothic ϸatei, and completely absent in Old High German and Old Saxon. The source structure of the reanalysis was discussed in detail in a separate subsection. The appositional source construction, which was already assumed for the reanalysis of Gothic ϸatei, was compared with analyses of clitic left dislocation which propose that two constituents with the same theta-role derive from a Big DP (see e.g. Grewendorf 2009, Belletti 2005). Based on the Big DP analysis of Grewendorf (2009), it was claimed that the appositional clause, introduced by the subordinating particle, is generated in the Spec of a DP, and adjoined to this DP on the surface. It was argued that this whole complement DP-node occurred in an extraposed position in OV-languages so that the verb, when it stays in-situ, does not appear between the demonstrative pronoun and the subordinating particle. The structure in (1) illustrates the syntactic source structure which is assumed to apply to the development of the complementiser that in Germanic. ...
This thesis investigates the acquisition of compositional and lexical semantic properties of adjectives in German-speaking children between the age of two and five years.
According to formal semantic approaches, there are intersective and non-intersective adjectives, subsective and non-subsective adjectives as well as gradable and non-gradable adjectives. These properties concern the compositional mechanisms involved in nominal modification, i.e., the combination of adjectives and nouns. In addition, adjectives differ regarding lexical semantic properties that contribute to the adjectives' meaning. Differences in the adjectives' scale structure have led to the theoretical assumption that gradable adjectives should be distinguished into relative and absolute gradable adjectives. In addition, meaning components such as multidimensionality or subjectivity have led to the distinction between dimensional and evaluative gradable adjectives. These properties have been mostly investigated independently of each other in both theory and acquisition research. I suggest a classification system for adjectives that combines different semantic properties. This system results in six adjective classes constituting a Semantic Complexity Hierarchy. Assuming that these adjective classes differ in semantic complexity, I propose an operationalization of semantic complexity that takes into account the adjectives' length of description, their type complexity, and lexical properties that contribute to the adjectives' meaning.
Regarding the question of how monolingual German-speaking children acquire the semantics of adjectives, I hypothesize that the order of acquisition of adjectives is determined by their semantic complexity. This hypothesis is tested in a spontaneous speech study and a comprehension experiment.
The spontaneous speech study is a longitudinal investigation of the production of adjectives from 2;00 to 2;11 years based on transcripts from a dense data corpus. The results provide evidence that the mean age of acquisition for the adjective classes in the Semantic Complexity Hierarchy follows the order predicted by semantic complexity. The same order was observed for the age at which the number of types for each class increased most. A preliminary analysis of the input indicates that the frequency of parental adjective use is related to the order of acquisition, but it is unlikely that frequency determines the order completely.
The comprehension experiment focuses on two specific adjective classes. I examine children's and adults' interpretation of relative (big, small) and absolute (clean, dirty) gradable dimensional adjectives with a picture-choice task. These two classes are of the same semantic complexity because they are both gradable, but they have different scale structures. As a result, they must be interpreted differently due to lexical semantic properties. I investigate whether children calculate different standards of comparison for relative and absolute gradable adjectives and whether they distinguish between relative and absolute gradable adjectives regarding the relevance of the explicit comparison class. The results indicate that as of age 3, children distinguish between relative and absolute gradable adjectives with regard to the standard of comparison. However, with respect to the relevance of the comparison class, for 3-year-old children, unlike for 4- and 5-year-olds, changes in the noun, i.e., in the explicit comparison class, led to non-adult-like responses regarding both relative and absolute gradable adjectives.
On the basis of the empirical findings, I propose an acquisition path stating that children enter the acquisition process with inherent linguistic knowledge, the Semantic Complexity Hierarchy, and cognitive abilities to categorize their environment. I suggest that initially, children apply the least complex interpretation available in the Semantic Complexity Hierarchy to all adjectives: all adjectives are interpreted as properties of individuals that are not gradable. To access other levels of the Semantic Complexity Hierarchy and to establish more complex adjective classes, positive evidence from the input and conceptual properties of adjectives, e.g., COLOR, MENTAL STATE, PHYSICAL PROPERTY etc., can operate as triggers.