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Coreference in dialogue
(1997)
Since the early days of discourse analysis coreference has always been considered a major factor in the formation of texts and dialogues. The repetition of nominal elements and the anaphoric use of pronouns in successive sentences is a fundamental cohesive pattern which ties sentences together and contributes to the coherence of sequences. "La coherence transphrastique trouve dans la pronominalisation un des procedes les plus efficaces" (Stati 1990, 160). The basic structural pattern on which linguists focused their interest in the early 1970s is captured by the following examples: (1) A man entered the house. After closing the door, the man sat down. He was tired. (2) Peter The man entered the house. He was tired. He ...
In a recent contribution to a long-standing discussion in semantics as to whether the neo-Davidsonian analysis should be extended to stative predicates or not, Maienborn (2004, 2005) proposes to distinguish two types of statives; one of them is said to have a referential argument of the Davidsonian type, the other not. As one of her arguments for making such a distinction, Maienborn observes that manner modification seems to be supported only by certain statives but to be excluded by others (thus linking the issue to the use of manner modification as one major argument in favour of event semantics, cf. Parsons 1990). In this paper, it is argued that the absence of manner modification with Maienborn's second group of statives is actually due to a failure of conceptual construal: modification of a predicate is ruled out whenever its internal conceptual structure is too poor to provide a construal for the modifier; hence, the effects observed by Maienborn reduce to the fact that eventive predicates have a more complex conceptual substructure than stative ones. Hence, the issue of manner modification with statives is shown to be orthogonal to questions of logical form and event semantics. The explanatory power of the conceptual approach is demonstrated with a case study on predicates of light emission, adapting the representation format of Barsalou's (1992) frame model.
The present article is a follow-up study of the investigation of labiodentals in German and Dutch by Hamann & Sennema (2005), where we looked at the perception of the Dutch labiodental three-way contrast by German listeners without any knowledge of Dutch and German learners of Dutch. The results of this previous study suggested that the German voiced labiodental fricative /v/ is perceptually closer to the Dutch approximant /ʋ/ than to the corresponding Dutch voiced labiodental fricative /v/. These perceptual indications are attested by the acoustic findings in the present study. German /v/ has a similar harmonicity median and a similar centre of gravity to Dutch /ʋ/, but differs from Dutch /v/ in these parameters. With respect to the acoustic parameter of duration, German /v/ lies closer to the Dutch /v/ than to the Dutch /ʋ/.
This study reports on the results of an airflow experiment that measured the duration of airflow and the amount of air from release of a stop to the beginning of a following vowel in stop vowel-sequences of German. The sequences involved coronal, labial and velar voiced and voiceless stops followed by the vocoids /j, i:, ı, ɛ, ʊ, a/. The experiment tested the influence of the three factors voicing of stop, place of stop articulation, and the following vocoid context on the duration and amount of air as possible explanation for assibilation processes. The results show that the voiceless stops are related to a longer duration and more air in the release phase than voiced ones. For the influence of the vocoids, a significant difference could be established between /j/ and all other vocoids for the duration of the release phase. This difference could not be found for the amount of air over this duration. The place of articulation had only restricted influence. Velars resulted in significantly longer duration of the release phase compared to non-velars. A significant difference in amount of air between the places of articulation could not be found.
We present the results of an experimental study which targets prosodic correlates of subclausal quotation marks. We found that written sentences containing passages enclosed by quotation marks were read aloud in a manner that significantly differs in prosody from spoken realizations of corresponding disquoted counterparts. However, we also observed that such prosodic marking of subclausal quotation wasn't strong enough to survive subsequent back-translation into written language: there was no correlation between the presence/absence of quotation marks in the original written examples, and the presence/absence of quotation marks in corresponding back-translations from oral renditions. We investigated three different kinds of uses of quotation marks and found no systematic difference between them with respect to prosodic marking.
Syllable cut is said to be a phonologically distinctive feature in some languages where the difference in vowel quantity is accompanied by a difference in vowel quality like in German. There have been several attempts to find the corresponding phonetic correlates for syllable cut, from which the energy measurements of vowels by Spiekermann (2000) proved appropriate for explaining the difference between long, i.e. smoothly, and short, i.e. abruptly cut, vowels: in smoothly cut vowels, a larger number of peaks was counted in the energy contour which were located further back than in abruptly cut segments, and the overall energy was more constant throughout the entire nucleus. On this basis, we intended to compare German as a syllable cut language and Hungarian where the feature was not expected to be relevant. However, the phonetic correlates of syllable cut found in this study do not entirely confirm Spiekermann's results. It seems that the energy features of vowels are more strongly connected to their duration than to their quality.
In German, female and male first names are strictly segregated: there are two big inventories with the only purpose to separate women and men. Unisex names are extremely seldom. If they are chosen, they have to be followed by a sex-specific middle name (e.g. Kim Uwe, Kim Annette). If we look at the phonological components of first names, i.e. at their sounds, we can state that male and female names became more similar over the last decades. Whereas in the 1950's, typical first names such as Katharina and Rolf diverged considering their phonic inventory considerably, today, many girls are named Leah and Lara and many boys Noah and Luca. These names share nearly the same sounds, they consist of two syllables and are stressed on the first one. If we look behind the scenes, it becomes clear that the officially required onomastic separation of the two sexes is undermined. In this paper, I will present a socalled phonetic gender score for German first names for the first time (see also Schmidt-Jüngst in this volume). It allows for measuring a degree of femaleness and maleness of names. In a second step, it will be asked whether unofficial names such as pet names, which are not obliged to mark sex also tend to be gendered or if they disobey the gender barrier. It will be shown that the most intimate names are not interested in stressing the denoted person's sex. In contrast to first names, pet names tend to be maximally de-gendered.
Glottal marking of vowel-initial German words by glottalization and glottal stop insertion were investigated in dependence on speech rate, word type (content vs. function words), word accent, phrasal position and the following vowel. The analysed material consisted of speeches of Konrad Adenauer, Thomas Mann and Richard von Weizsäcker. The investigation shows that not only the left boundary of accented syllables (including phrasal stress boundary) and lexical words favour glottal stops/glottalization, but also that the segmental level appears to have a strong impact on these insertion processes. Specifically, the results show that low vowels in contrast to non-low ones favour glottal stops/glottalization even before non-accented syllables and functional words.
Proportional determiner quantifiers in German allow interpretations that violate the conservativity universal of Keenan and Stavi (1986). I argue for an analysis that distinguishes between surface syntax and the logical form of sentences. I show that in surface syntax, German non-conservative quantifiers are determiners that form a constituent with a noun phrase and share case and agreement properties with the noun phrase. But I propose that at logical form the non-conservative determiners undergo an adverbialization movement and are interpreted by a mechanism that generalizes focus-a ected quantification of Herburger (2000). This result refines the understanding of conservativity as a constraint on interpretation.
This paper presents two experimental studies investigating the processing of presupposed content. Both studies employ the German additive particle auch (too). In the first study, participants were given a questionnaire containing bi-clausal, ambiguous sentences with 'auch' in the second clause. The presupposition introduced by auch was only satisfied on one of the two readings of the sentence, and this reading corresponded to a syntactically dispreferred parse of the sentence. The prospect of having the auch-presupposition satisfied made participants choose this syntactically dispreferred reading more frequently than in a control condition. The second study used the self-paced-reading paradigm and compared the reading times on clauses containing auch, which differed in whether the presupposition of auch was satisfied or not. Participants read the clause more slowly when the presupposition was not satisfied. It is argued that the two studies show that presuppositions play an important role in online sentence comprehension and affect the choice of syntactic analysis. Some theoretical implications of these findings for semantic theory and dynamic accounts of presuppositions as well as for theories of semantic processing are discussed.