Refine
Year of publication
- 2004 (68) (remove)
Document Type
- Part of a Book (68) (remove)
Language
- English (68) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (68)
Keywords
- Generative Transformationsgrammatik (19)
- Syntax (19)
- Wortstellung (17)
- Deutsch (11)
- Optimalitätstheorie (8)
- Informationsstruktur (7)
- Intonation <Linguistik> (7)
- Phonologie (7)
- Englisch (6)
- Extraposition (6)
Institute
- Extern (5)
- Mathematik (1)
- Universitätsbibliothek (1)
Starting from a consideration of the internal make-up of adverbial clauses this paper shows that the widespread assumption that fronted arguments in English and CLLD constituents in Romance occupy the same position leads to a number of problems. I will conclude that the position occupied by English topicalized arguments differs from that of the CLLD topics in Romance. In particular, English topics occupy a higher position in the left periphery. The final part of the paper compares three proposals for the lower topic position in Romance.
In this paper topic and focus effects at both left and right periphery are argued to be epiphenomena of general properties of tree growth. We incorporate Korean into this account as a prototypical verb-final language, and show how long- and short-distance scrambling form part of this general picture. Multiple long-distance scrambling effects emerge as a consequence of the feeding relationship between different forms of structural under-specification. We also show how the array of effects at the right periphery, in both verb-final and other language-types, can also be explained with the same concepts of tree growth. In particular the Right Roof Constraint, a well-known but little understood constraint, is an immediate consequence of compositionality constraints as articulated in this system.
The syntax and semantics of the resumptive dependency in hungarian focus-raising constructions
(2004)
Previous work (Gervain, forthcoming) has established that focus-raising may be derived by two strategies in Hungarian. One of them is the traditional movement derivation, the other a resumptive dependency created between the focus constituent base-generated in its matrix focus position and a phonologically null resumptive pronoun in the corresponding argument position in the embedded clause. However, the previous account (Gervain, forthcoming) does not give a detailed description of the nature of this resumptive dependency. The present work aims to address this question. More specifically, by providing a series of empirical tests, it attempts to determine whether the dependency is purely syntactic in nature, i.e. obligatory variable binding, or whether a semantic option is also available, i.e. coreference between the focus constituent and the resumptive pronoun. Thus, it provides new insights into the ongoing debate about the nature of resumptive pronouns.
This article examines the motivation for phonological stop assibilations, e.g. /t/ is realized as [ts], [s] or [tʃ] before /i/, from the phonetic perspective. Hall & Hamann (2003) posit the following two implications: (a) Assibilation cannot be triggered by /i/ unless it is also triggered by /j/, and (b) Voiced stops cannot undergo assibilations unless voiceless ones do. In the following study we present the results of three acoustic experiments with native speakers of German and Polish which support implications (a) and (b). In our experiments we measured the friction phase after the /t d/ release before the onset of the following high front vocoid for four speakers of German and Polish. We found that the friction phase for /tj/ was significantly longer than that of /ti/, and that the friction phase of /t/ in the assibilation context is significantly longer than that of /d/.
When the concept of the auteur was coined in the 1950s and 1960s, it was an initiative to clarify the obscure matters of authorship in cinema. Because a film must necessarily be a collective work, understood as the result of a large number of creative contributions, it was often unclear who the decisive power behind a certain film was, who contributed the "distinctive quality". The control will usually belong to the director, the producer or the star (or all three in combination), but what singles out a given film could also come from the cinematographer, the scriptwriter, from the author of an adapted literary work, or from traditions in the studio or in the genre. Nothing can be taken for granted about a film's authorship, it can only be decided through a thorough analysis of each film's production process, an analysis that, in most cases, will be impossible to make. ...
We argue that there is a crucial difference between determiner and adverbial quantification. Following Herburger [2000] and von Fintel [1994], we assume that determiner quantifiers quantify over individuals and adverbial quantifiers over eventualities. While it is usually assumed that the semantics of sentences with determiner quantifiers and those with adverbial quantifiers basically come out the same, we will show by way of new data that quantification over events is more restricted than quantification over individuals. This is because eventualities in contrast to individuals have to be located in time which is done using contextual information according to a pragmatic resolution strategy. If the contextual information and the tense information given in the respective sentence contradict each other, the sentence is uninterpretable. We conclude that this is the reason why in these cases adverbial quantification, i.e. quantification over eventualities, is impossible whereas quantification over individuals is fine.
This study examines the movement trajectories of the dorsal tongue movements during symmetrical /VCa/ -sequences, where /V/ was one of the Hungarian long or short vowels /i,a,u/ and C either the voiceless palatal or velar stop consonants. General aims of this study were to deliver a data-driven account for (a) the evidence of the division between dorsality and coronality and (b) for the potential role coarticulatory factors could play for the relative frequency of velar palatalization processes in genetically unrelated languages. Results suggest a clear-cut demarcation between the behaviour of purely dorsal velars and the coronal palatals. Moreover, factors arising from a general movement economy might contribute to the palatalization processes mentioned.
The German word also, similar to English so, is traditionally considered to be a sentence adverb with a consecutive meaning, i.e. it indicates that the propositional content of the clause containing it is some kind of consequence of what has previously been said. As a sentence adverb, also has its place within the core of the German sentence, since this is the proper place for an adverb to occur in German. The sentence core offers two proper positions for adverbs: the so-called front field and the middle field. In spoken German, however, also often occurs in sentence-initial position, outside the sentence itself. In this paper, I will use excerpts of German conversations to discuss and illustrate the importance of the sentence positions and the discourse positions for the functions of also on the basis of some German conversations.