Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Part of a Book (3967) (remove)
Language
- German (2842)
- English (1071)
- French (20)
- Italian (12)
- Turkish (12)
- Multiple languages (5)
- mis (2)
- Hungarian (1)
- Portuguese (1)
- Spanish (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (3967)
Keywords
- Literatur (201)
- Deutsch (180)
- Rilke, Rainer Maria (136)
- Rezeption (106)
- Syntax (101)
- Geschichte (91)
- Benjamin, Walter (72)
- Spracherwerb (72)
- Begriff (67)
- Lyrik (65)
Institute
- Extern (421)
- Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaften (59)
- Rechtswissenschaft (58)
- Universitätsbibliothek (53)
- Gesellschaftswissenschaften (51)
- Neuere Philologien (28)
- Erziehungswissenschaften (25)
- studiumdigitale (23)
- Geschichtswissenschaften (21)
- Kulturwissenschaften (18)
We argue that the standard focus theories reach their limits when confronted with the focus systems of the Chadic languages. The backbone of the standard focus theories consists of two assumptions, both called into question by the languages under consideration. Firstly, it is standardly assumed that focus is generally marked by stress. The Chadic languages, however, exhibit a variety of different devices for focus marking. Secondly, it is assumed that focus is always marked. In Tangale, at least, focus is not marked consistently on all types of constituents. The paper offers two possible solutions to this dilemma.
Focus expressions in Foodo
(2007)
This paper aims at presenting different ways of expressing focus in Foodo, a Guang language. We can differentiate between marked and unmarked focus strategies. The marked focus expressions are first syntactically characterized: the focused constituent is in sentence-initial position and is second always marked obligatorily by a focus marker, which is [...] for non-subjects and N for subjects. Complementary to these structures, Foodo knows an elliptic form consisting of the focused constituent and a predication marker [...]. It will be shown that the two focus markers can be analyzed as having developed out of the homophone conjunction n[...] and that the constraints on the use of the focus markers can be best explained by this fact.
Focus asymmetries in Bura
(2008)
This article presents the central aspects of the focus system of Bura (Chadic), which exhibits a number of asymmetries: Grammatical focus marking is obligatory only with focused subjects, where focus is marked by the particle án following the subject. Focused subjects remain in situ and the complement of án is a regular VP. With nonsubject foci, án appears in a cleft-structure between the fronted focus constituent and a relative clause. We present a semantically unified analysis of focus marking in Bura that treats the particle as a focusmarking copula in T that takes a property-denoting expression (the background) and an individual-denoting expression (the focus) as arguments. The article also investigates the realization of predicate and polarity focus, which are almost never marked. The upshot of the discussion is that Bura shares many characteristic traits of focus marking with other Chadic languages, but it crucially differs in exhibiting a structural difference in the marking of focus on subjects and non-subject constituents.
Focus and tone
(2006)
Tone is a distinctive feature of the lexemes in tone languages. The information-structural category focus is usually marked by syntactic and morphological means in these languages, but sometimes also by intonation strategies. In intonation languages, focus is marked by pitch movements, which are also perceived as tone. The present article discusses prosodic focus marking in these two language types.
This paper discusses how focus change s prosodic structure in Tokyo Japanese. It is generally believed that focus blocks the intonational process of downstep and causes a pitch reset. This paper presents experimental evidence against this traditional view by looking at the prosodic behavior of Wh words, which receive focus lexically in Japanese as in other languages. It is demonstrated, specifically, that the focused Wh element does not block downstep although it receives a much higher pitch than its preceding element. This suggests that presence of lexical focus does not trigger pitch reset in Japanese.
The present study examines native and nonnative perceptual processing of semantic information conveyed by prosodic prominence. Five groups of German learners of English each listened to one of 5 experimental conditions. Three conditions differed in place of focus accent in the sentence and two conditions were with spliced stimuli. The experiment condition was presented first in the learners’ L1 (German) and then in a similar set in the L2 (English). The effect of the accent condition and of the length and position of the target in the sentence was evaluated in a probe recognition task. In both the L1 and L2 tasks there was no significant effect in any of the five focus conditions. Target position and target word length had an effect in the L1 task. Word length did not affect accuracy rates in the L2 task. For probe recognition in the L2, word length and the position of the target interacted with the focus condition.
We present a system for the linguistic exploration and analysis of lexical cohesion in English texts. Using an electronic thesaurus-like resource, Princeton WordNet, and the Brown Corpus of English, we have implemented a process of annotating text with lexical chains and a graphical user interface for inspection of the annotated text. We describe the system and report on some sample linguistic analyses carried out using the combined thesaurus-corpus resource.
In diesem Aufsatz geht es um die Datenbank ‚Mehrsprachigkeit’ und das System EXMARaLDA, die am SFB 538 ‚Mehrsprachigkeit’ der Universität Hamburg entwickelt werden. Da deren konzeptuelle und technische Details bereits an anderer Stelle ausführlich dargestellt worden sind (z.B. Schmidt 2004), soll der Schwerpunkt hier einerseits auf solchen Aspekten liegen, die – gemäß dem Thema des Workshops – mit allgemeineren Fragen zum Umgang mit computerverwertbaren, heterogenen linguistischen Datenbeständen zu tun haben. Andererseits soll versucht werden, aus den praktischen Erfahrungen der nunmehr vierjährigen Projektarbeit einige Erkenntnisse abzuleiten, die über den konkreten Projektzusammenhang hinaus für die weitere Arbeit auf diesem Gebiet interessant sein könnten.
The aim of this paper is to outline the means for encoding information structure in Yucatec Maya. Yucatec Maya is a tone language, displaying a three-fold opposition in the tonal realization of syllables. From the morpho-syntactic point of view, the grammar of Yucatec Maya contains morphological (topic affixes, morphological marking of out-of-focus predicates) and syntactic (designated positions) means to uniquely specify syntactic constructions for their information structure. After a descriptive overview of these phenomena, we present experimental evidence which reveals the impact of the nonavailability of prosodic alternatives on the choice of syntactic constructions in language production.
Diskurspragmatische Faktoren für Topikalität und Verbstellung in der ahd. Tatianübersetzung (9. Jh.)
(2005)
The paper presents work in progress on the interaction between information structure and word order in Old High German based on data from the Tatian translation (9th century). The examination of the position of the finite verb in correspondence with the pragmatic status of discourse referents reveals an overall tendency for verb-initial order in thetic/all-focus sentences, whereas in categorical / topic-comment sentences verb-second placement with an initial topic constituent is preferred. This conclusion provides support for the hypothesis stated in Donhauser & Hinterhölzl (2003) that the finite verb form in Early Germanic serves to distinguish the information-structural domains of Topic and Focus. Finally, the investigation sheds light on the process of language change that led to the overall spread of verb-second in main clauses of modern German.