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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.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the development of narrative macrostructure and the impact of socio-economic status (SES) and home literacy environment (HLE) on the narrative macrostructure of monolingual preschoolers in Germany when retelling and telling a story. The analysis of narrative macrostructure includes three components: story structure, story complexity, and story comprehension. Oral narratives were elicited via Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). 198 monolingual children between age 4;6 and 5;11 participated (M=63 months, SD=5 months). The comparison of narrative macrostructure in three age groups (4;6 to 4;11 years, 5;0 to 5;5 years, 5;6 to 5;11 years) illustrate significant age effects in story structure, story complexity and story comprehension skills. There were weak significant positive correlations of some of these skills with aspects of socio-economic status and home literacy environment, for example between story comprehension skills and the educational background, the frequency and duration of the child’s exposure to books and the number of books in the household.
Nominal modification in language production: Extraposition of prepositional phrases in german
(2019)
In my dissertation, I investigate the phenomenon of extraposition of PP out of NP in German in language production. Four production experiments, using the method of production of memory, and three experiments testing the acceptability of extraposition were conducted. In extraposition, a constituent is realized in a position to the right of what would be considered the canonical position. A special case is extraposition out of a nominal phrase (NP), in which a constituent is moved out of NP to the end of the utterance. The example in (1a) illustrates the canonical version, in which a prepositional phrase (PP) is adjacent to its head noun. In (1b) the PP is extraposed out of NP to the right edge of the sentence.
(1) a. Gestern hat eine Frau mit einer lauten, schrillen Stimme angerufen.
b. Gestern hat eine Frau angerufen mit einer lauten, schrillen Stimme.
There are two main aspects to consider: the length of the extraposed constituent (the PP), and the length of the intervening material. Experiment 1 investigated the influence of constituent length on extraposition. The hypothesis is that longer and more complex constituents are harder to produce and are therefore produced towards the end of the utterance. In the experiment, PPs of three different lengths (2-3, 5-6, 9-11 words) had to be reproduced in either adjacent or extraposed position. As to the length of the intervening material, the hypothesis is that sentences with more intervening material between head noun and extraposed PP will tend to be reproduced with the PP in adjacent position to the head noun. In order to test this hypothesis, the length of the intervening material (1, 2 and 4 words) was manipulated in Experiment 2. The same material was used in an acceptability experiment, using the method of magnitude estimation (Experiment 5).
Previous studies found that extraposition is preferred over verbal material only, thus Experiment 3 investigated the influence of different lengths of purely verbal intervening material. Experiment 4 was concerned with the differences between PP and RC extraposition in production.
Experiment 6 and 7 used Likert scales to assess the acceptability of extraposition. Experiment 6 investigated whether the acceptability of extraposition is influenced by the definiteness status of the NP out of which is extraposed and if a soft constraint for definiteness can be found for PP extraposition in German. Experiment 7 asked if the inner structure of the extraposed constituent (PP only vs. PP+RC) influences its acceptability. An extraposed PP that includes an RC should be "heavier" than a PP without an RC, since the number of phrasal nodes is higher. If indeed heavier constituents are realized at the end of an utterance, the acceptability of an extraposed PP that includes an RC should be higher than that of an extraposed PP without one.
The results of the production experiments show that sentences are mostly reproduced in their original linear sequence, which suggests that extraposed position seems to be just as canonical as adjacent position, especially when extraposition takes place over verbal material only. With regard to constituent length, in extraposed position long PPs are shortened less often, supporting the hypothesis that longer and more complex constituents tend to be produced at the end of the utterance. Recency effects were found for intervening material as participants dropped intervening material rather than change syntactic position of constituents. The length and type of the intervening material is important with respect to how much intervening material is acceptable. Verb clusters were not shortened in sentences with extraposed PPs, however, 1⁄3 of adverbs and 1⁄2 of PP adverbials including a lexical NP were shortened to „verb only“. Extraposed PPs are more often reproduced in adjacent position than adjacent PPs are reproduced in extraposed position. However, the position of RCs is more often changed from adjacent to extraposed than from extraposed to adjacent.
While producing extraposed PPs seems not to be any more difficult than producing adjacent ones, adjacent constituents are consistently rated higher than extraposed constituents in grammaticality judgment tasks. This is in line with findings of Konieczny (2000) on German RC extraposition. The number of phrasal nodes, as suggested by Rickford et al. (1995), did not have an influence on the acceptability of extraposition, while the length of the constituent, measured in words, seems to play a role. Definiteness had no effect on adjacent PPs, but when the PP was extraposed, sentences with an indefinite antecedent were rated higher than sentences with a definite antecedent. This suggests that there is a "soft constraint" for definiteness with regard to PP extraposition out of NP in German.
Introduction
(2019)
The aim of the present study was to test the influence of picture composition on the narrative complexity of preschool children, and to compare the different procedures of the Cat Story of Hickmann (2002) and the Fox Story of Gülzow & Gagarina (2007) with the Baby Birds and Baby Goats Story of MAIN, by Gagarina et al. (2012). For this purpose, 27 children between the ages of 5;01 and 6;09 were tested with both variants to check whether a macro-structurally controlled picture structure would lead to more complex stories. The results show that narratives with a Goal-Attempt-Outcome structure, i.e. the Baby Birds and Baby Goats Stories, make children with increasing age tell more complex stories by means of a rise in story complexity than the narratives of Hickmann and Gülzow & Gagarina without that structure.
Gegenstand aller natürlichen Sprachen, die Menschen hervorgebracht haben, ist das Sprechen. Die Schrift einer solchen Sprache kann insofern als sekundäre Errungenschaft bezeichnet werden. Sorten und Gattungen der menschlichen Sprachen und Schriften sind historisch wie auch heute von großer Vielfalt und krassen Gegensätzen geprägt: z.B. die indoeuropäischen Sprachen mit flektierendem Grammatikbau versus der vielen sinotibetischen Sprachen mit analytischem Bau oder das lateinische Alphabet versus die logographische chinesische Schrift. In dieser Arbeit wird gezeigt, welche Faktoren die Korrespondenz der schriftlichen Repräsentation auf eine Sprache entscheiden und in welcher Art und Weise die Schrift die sprachlichen Entwicklungen beeinflussen kann.
This paper focuses on morphological verb errors in elicited narratives of Russian-German primary school bilinguals. The data was collected from 37 children who were separated into four groups according to the age and language acquisition type (simultaneous and successive). The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) (Gagarina et al. 2012) was used for data collection. The narratives produced in mode telling after listening to a model story were analysed and morphological verb errors in Russian and German were classified. Therefore, the error classification of Gagarina (2008) for Russian monolingual children was expanded and for the classification of German errors an own classification was suggested. Errors in Russian typically produced by monolinguals and unique bilingual errors as well were documented. The results show that the language of the environment (German) increases with age. Older children make fewer errors than younger ones. Nevertheless, a strong heterogeneity between children within each group can be observed.
Der Beitrag behandelt Aspekte ausgewählter aktueller DaF-Lehrbücher, die ander Grenze zwischen Sprachwissenschaft und Didaktik liegen, auf zweierlei Art. Einerseits geht es um eine methodologische Frage: Inwieweit sind die pragmatischen Elemente von Kommunikation in einem Fremdsprachenlehrbuch überprüfbar? Die andere Perspektive des Textes widmet sich wiederum den Ergebnissen einer Untersuchung, die sich mit Sprechakten in DaF-Lehrbüchern beschäftigt. In diesem Sinne stehen im Fokus des Artikels nicht nur methodologisch-theoretisch geprägte Fragen, die mit der Sprechakttheorie zusammenhängen, sondern auch die Ergebnisse einer Untersuchung, die den Makrosprechakt Instruktion und die Sprechakte in Gesprächen in DaF-Kursbüchern zum Gegenstand hat. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass das Spektrum der Sprechakte ziemlich komplex ist, auch wenn es im Zusammenhang mit der zu erzielenden Entwicklung der pragmatischen Kompetenz der Deutschlerner wünschenswert wäre, wenn diese noch breiter vertreten wären.