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This paper presents three acceptability experiments investigating German verb-final clauses in order to explore possible sources of sentence complexity during human parsing. The point of departure was De Vries et al.'s (2011) generalization that sentences with three or more crossed or nested dependencies are too complex for being processed by the human parsing mechanism without difficulties. This generalization is partially based on findings from Bach et al. (1986) concerning the acceptability of complex verb clusters in German and Dutch. The first experiment tests this generalization by comparing two sentence types: (i) sentences with three nested dependencies within a single clause that contains three verbs in a complex verb cluster; (ii) sentences with four nested dependencies distributed across two embedded clauses, one center-embedded within the other, each containing a two-verb cluster. The results show that sentences with four nested dependencies are judged as acceptable as control sentences with only two nested dependencies, whereas sentences with three nested dependencies are judged as only marginally acceptable. This argues against De Vries et al.'s (2011) claim that the human parser can process no more than two nested dependencies. The results are used to refine the Verb-Cluster Complexity Hypothesis of Bader and Schmid (2009a). The second and the third experiment investigate sentences with four nested dependencies in more detail in order to explore alternative sources of sentence complexity: the number of predicted heads to be held in working memory (storage cost in terms of the Dependency Locality Theory [DLT], Gibson, 2000) and the length of the involved dependencies (integration cost in terms of the DLT). Experiment 2 investigates sentences for which storage cost and integration cost make conflicting predictions. The results show that storage cost outweighs integration cost. Experiment 3 shows that increasing integration cost in sentences with two degrees of center embedding leads to decreased acceptability. Taken together, the results argue in favor of a multifactorial account of the limitations on center embedding in natural languages.
The present study aims at analyzing the role of nativeness, the amount of input in L1 acquisition and the multilingual competence in the performance of Italian–German bilingual speakers. We compare novel data from the performance of adult L2 learners (L1: Italian; late L2: German) and that of heritage speakers (heritage language: Italian; majority language: German) to previous data from monolingual speakers of Italian. The comparison deals with the produced word order at the syntax-discourse interface in sentences containing New Information Subjects in answers to questions that prompt the identification of the clausal subject. Overall, adult L2 speakers and heritage speakers perform alike but crucially differently from Italian monolinguals. These data reveal that multilingual proficiency determines an increased variety in the adopted answering strategies; in particular, the German-like strategy is active in Italian. Nativeness alone is thus no guarantee for a homogeneous performance across groups, nor do we find similar patterns of performance in speakers who grew up as monolinguals. Data also show heritage speakers’ sensitivity to verb classes, with answering strategies varying in accordance with the verb argument structure. Participants’ productions reveal an interesting relation in sentences with transitive verbs between subject position (pre-/postverbal) and object form (lexical DP/clitic pronoun).
This paper describes work on the morphological and syntactic annotation of Sumerian cuneiform as a model for low resource languages in general. Cuneiform texts are invaluable sources for the study of history, languages, economy, and cultures of Ancient Mesopotamia and its surrounding regions. Assyriology, the discipline dedicated to their study, has vast research potential, but lacks the modern means for computational processing and analysis. Our project, Machine Translation and Automated Analysis of Cuneiform Languages, aims to fill this gap by bringing together corpus data, lexical data, linguistic annotations and object metadata. The project’s main goal is to build a pipeline for machine translation and annotation of Sumerian Ur III administrative texts. The rich and structured data is then to be made accessible in the form of (Linguistic) Linked Open Data (LLOD), which should open them to a larger research community. Our contribution is two-fold: in terms of language technology, our work represents the first attempt to develop an integrative infrastructure for the annotation of morphology and syntax on the basis of RDF technologies and LLOD resources. With respect to Assyriology, we work towards producing the first syntactically annotated corpus of Sumerian.
Editorial
(2018)
»Under the pavement lies the beach« or »Power to the imagination« – these slogans characterise the movement of ’68, which publicised its social and political demands in a creative and programmatic fashion. The year 1968 not only marks a significant upheaval in what was then West Germany, it also has strong East and West European as well as international dimensions. ’68 can be understood as a cipher for protest movements which re-evaluated and challenged institutional structures, revolutionised gender and intergenerational relations and radiated into daily life, family life as well as individual lifestyles. Literature and the media, too, were subjected to critical revision, new formats and writing styles established, traditions either abandoned or continued within new paradigms.
Children’s literature and media were significantly shaped by these developments. Their contents were influenced by the anti-authoritarian discourse in education and by the demands of emancipation movements, their themes and aesthetics by politicised concerns and a new orientation towards sociopolitical reality. Children’s literature scholars have studied and identified ’68 as a paradigm shift. Recent studies, however, have also looked at developments in the late 1950s and early 1960s, pointing out that changes on the literary-aesthetic and content levels actually started much earlier.
Fifty years after this ›paradigmatic‹ caesura, the second volume of the Yearbook of the German Children’s Literature Research Society brings the cipher »’68« into focus to discuss historical and contemporary dimensions of this junction. Articles from a variety of European perspectives examine the manifold implications of this topic from theoretical and subject-oriented angles and in its different medial forms, and discuss these in the context of their significance for today’s children’s and young adult culture.
Beyond this focus theme, and in line with the concept of the Yearbook, two fundamental theoretical and historical articles on questions of children’s literature and media present current avenues and perspectives. And the ten articles are followed by book reviews. Thanks to the involvement of the members of the German Children’s Literature Research Society (GKJF), over 30 relevant publications from the past year are discussed in individual and collective book reviews.
This article examines three novels by the popular Flemish youth author Gie Laenen, written between 1975 and 1982, in which the theories and practices associated with progressive education in the 1970s are key elements of the narrative. It argues that Laenen, who was convicted in 1973 and again in 2008 of serial sexual abuse of teenage boys, used progressive education as a narrative trope both to suggest to his young readers that close attachments between young boys and adult men were harmless and to provide an exculpatory defence for his own acts. Through narratological analysis and a contextualisation of the novels within the educational culture of the time, the article shows how Laenen – by drawing upon the ideas of progressive education, using these ideas to shape his narratives, and suggesting parallels between himself (as author) and several main characters – effectively appropriated the ideals of progressive education for ulterior purposes to justify his own abusive behaviour.
In this article we present experimental findings on the acceptability of different argument orders in the German middle field. Our study pursues two goals: First, to evaluate a number of surface constraints on German argument order that have been proposed in the literature, and second, to shed new light on how gradient constraints jointly determine sentence acceptability. In four experiments, we investigated the impact of surface constraints relating to animacy, thematic roles, definiteness and case. While we are able to confirm an influence of most constraints under investigation, the resulting constraint hierarchy does not coincide with any hierarchy put forward so far in the literature, to the best of our knowledge. With regard to gradience, our results can be accounted for either by an OT variant incorporating a notion of markedness, or by a fully quantified model using constraint weights. For the latter, however, we provide evidence against uniform penalties associated with constraint violations.
Despite a large body of research, the linguistic nature of exhaustivity in single wh-questions is unresolved. Moreover, little empirical evidence exists as to which related structures pattern with bare wh-questions regarding exhaustivity. This paper explores the felicity of various exhaustivity violations in unembedded single bare wh-questions in German and compares them to related structures. In two novel felicity judgment experiments, a total of 441 participants rated exhaustive as well as non-exhaustive plural and non-exhaustive singleton answers to wh-questions or statements in a questionnaire. Answers were based on picture stimuli depicting individuals performing various actions. The felicity of non-exhaustive answers was compared across four main test conditions: bare wh-questions (wer ‘who’), wh-questions with a lexical exhaustivity marker (wer alles ‘who all’), plural definite descriptions contained in a restrictive relative clause (e.g., “the people who are fishing in the garden”), and the scalar quantifier “some” (e.g., “some people who are fishing in the garden”).
We employ a novel methodological approach to improve the interpretability of statistical differences between experimental conditions by using the statistical measure of Minimal Important Difference (MID). Our results from estimated MIDs reveal that adults’ felicity judgments of non-exhaustive plural answers to bare wh-questions pattern with those to wer alles-questions and to plural definite descriptions: exhaustivity violations in the bare wh, the wer alles and the plural definite conditions were rated as less felicitous than exhaustivity violations in the some-condition.
The years around May ’68 (c. 1965 – c. late-1970s) are widely understood to represent a watershed moment for children’s books in France. An important factor was the influence of a new fringe of avant-garde publishers that attracted attention across their trade in and beyond France. Using archives and interviews and accounts of some of the books produced and their reception, this article presents case studies of the most influential publishing houses as a series of three snapshots of the areas of movement in the field. At the same time, it evaluates the extent to which the social, cultural and political upheavals in France in the wake of May ’68 helped to alter the shape of book production for children and to bring about a ›radical revolution‹ in the children’s publishing trade.
This article, based on extensive source material from Denmark, Sweden and Norway, is about the changing norms for children’s media, childhood and art in Scandinavia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The analysis demonstrates how changes within welfare state institutions converged with the youth rebellion’s wider criticism of children’s low status in traditional power hierarchies, and contributed to new definitions of the role of media in children’s lives. After establishing a wider historical contextualisation, the article moves on to show how the criticism of existing norms in the realm of children’s literature in the mid-1960s grew into a critique of the prevailing ideologies and existing narratives in all children’s media (including film, theatre and television) at the end of the decade. A key figure in the redefinition of norms for children’s media was the Swede, Gunilla Ambjörnsson. Her 1968 book, Trash Culture for Children, led to discussions about the role of media in children’s lives all over Scandinavia. Her core belief in the innate social and political interests of children had a great impact on the ways in which the possibilities for an explicit political agenda in children’s media were conceptualised in Scandinavia at large.