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Two main types of sentences are traditionally distinguished in the context of semantic theories of questions and answers: declarative sentences, corresponding to statements, and interrogative sentences, corresponding to questions. The interrogative forms can be further subdivided into dialectical ones (yes-no-questions) and non-dialectical ones (constituent questions). These distinctions are made for both root and embedded sentences. The predicates that select sentential complements fall into three classes: predicates that license only declaratives, those that allow only for interrogatives, and those that embed both types of sentences. In this connection, verbs of doubt are interesting in that they allow for declaratives as well as dialectical interrogatives, while non-dialectical interrogatives do not seem to be appropriate complements.
In what follows, our main concern will be with the German verb of doubt zweifeln and its possible sentential complements. Speaker intuitions as to which constructions are grammatical or acceptable vary, particularily with respect to rare expressions like zweifeln. Therefore, interviews and corpus analysis were applied as a means to acquire reliable linguistic data. These as well as data from historical sources and from some languages other than German (esp. English and Italian) are presented and analysed. In the last section, based on the notion of ‘subjective probability’, an attempt is made at explaining the observations.
The present article analyzes the development of the system of spatial prepositions in the acquisition of German as a foreign language by Brazilian learners. The study is based on a corpus of written language data produced by students in the undergraduate course in Letras, collected from 1996 to 1998. The theoretical bases of the study are theories of second language acquisition, cognitive processing of space, and the linguistic encoding of spatial relations through prepositions. The main section of the analysis begins with the quantitative evaluation of the occurrences of spatial prepositions found in the data. Subsequently, each preposition found in the corpus is individually discussed in relation to its correct and incorrect uses. The main results are a steady increase in the number of spatial prepositions used by the subjects from the first year to the fourth year of the course, an increase in the variation of the use of these prepositions, and a constant reduction of the percentage of incorrect uses. In the first phase, acquisition can be seen in the increasing specificity of the semantic oppositions involved in neutralizations, whereas in the second phase, a quantitative reduction of errors can be found.