Linguistik-Klassifikation
Refine
Year of publication
- 2006 (3) (remove)
Document Type
- Part of a Book (3) (remove)
Language
- English (3)
Has Fulltext
- yes (3)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (3)
Keywords
- Deutsch (3) (remove)
This paper investigates the semantic underpinnings of the distinction between two syntactic types of "manner of movement" verbs in Levin (1993), namely the RUN and ROLL classes. According to Levin's (1993) and Levin & Rappaport's (1995) work on unaccusativity, a semantic factor of "internal causation" should be the trigger for the classification of a movement verb as intransitive (=not-unaccusative), and hence for its belonging to the RUN class. We point out empirical problems for this characterisation, mainly coming from the different readings of the German verb fliegen (fly). From a comparison with other semantically similar verbs, we conclude that the semantic description which underlies the class distinction should be refined: instead of "internal causation", the crucial semantic factor is described here as "inherent specification for a momentum of movement". This result indicates that forces, and relations between forces, have to be part of the semantic description of the manner component in movement verbs.
The German causal preposition durch ('by', 'through') poses a challenge to formal-semantic analyses applying strict compositionality. To deal with this challenge, a formalism which builds on recent important developments in Discourse Representation Theory is developed, including a more elaborate analysis of presuppositional phenomena as well as the integration into the theory of unification as a mode of composition. It is argued that that the observed unificational phenomena belong in the realm of pragmatics, providing an argument for presuppositional phenomena at a sentence- and word-internal level.
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.