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This dissertation investigates several aspects of nominal modification in Ògè, an understudied language of Benue-congo spoken in Àkókó Northwest in Nigeria. The study focuses on two areas of nominal modification namely, Nominal Attributive Modifiers (NAMs) and the strategies of number marking.
The discussion and analysis of NAMs in the language reveal that Ògè belongs to the group of languages which lacks adjectives as a lexical category. NAMs are nominal and they
are derived from an existing lexical category namely, verbs. Predicative modifiers and NAMs have forms that are similar to the long and short forms (LF & SF) of adjectives in languages in which adjectives form an open class, for example, Russian, SerBoCroatian (BCS) and German.
Based on the Minimalist program, the dissertation reveals that unlike Russian, BCS, and German in which the discrepancies between the two forms of adjectives are related to definiteness (as in the case of BCS) and Agree, the discrepancies in the two forms of modifiers in Ògè are related to the fact that Ògè lacks adjectives and resorts into the nominalization of stative verbs in order to derive attributive forms. Using the analyses of adjuncts according to Truswell (2004) and Zeijlstra (2020), the dissertation proposes that NAMs are adjuncts in a modification structure while they are heads in possessive and genitive constructions. In addition, I propose that NAMs are attributive-only modifiers which modify the NP rather than
the DP.
The dissertation also investigates the strategies of number marking in Ògè. Unlike languages in which number marking is obligatory in the nominal domain (Hebrew, German, English),
nouns in Ògè are not always marked for number. This means that nouns in Ògè have general number. The general number nature of nouns in Ògè is like that of the nouns in modifying plural marking languages namely, Halkomelem, Korean, Yucatec Maya and Yorùbá. However, I argue that unlike the modifying plural marking languages in which the Number Phrase (NumP) is not projected, NumP is projected in the nominal spine of Ògè, claiming that NumP bears an
interpretable number feature which values the uninterpretable number feature in D. Argument in support of this comes from the interpretation of the noun in the presence of òtúro (an element which translates to the plural definite interpretation of the noun). I analyze òtúro as a plural determiner which occupies the D-head in the syntax of Ògè. The dissertation argues following Alexiadou (2019) that the locus of the occurrence of the marker of plurality in the nominal spine does not depend on its interpretation as a plural morpheme, rather, the locus of the occurrence of the element that is sensitive to the plural interpretation of the noun depends on other parameters which are definiteness, specificity and animacy.
This dissertation provides an analysis of Finnish prosody, with a focus on the sentence or phrase level. The thesis analyses Finnish as a phrase language. Thus, it accounts for prosodic variation through prosodic phrasing and explains intonational differences in terms of phrase tones.
Finnish intonation has traditionally been described in terms of accents associated with stressed syllables, i.e. similarly as prototypical intonation languages like English or German. However, accents are usually described as uniform instead of forming an inventory of contrasting accent types. The present thesis confirms the uniformity of Finnish tonal contours and explains it as based on realisations of tones associated with prosodic phrases instead of accents. Two levels of phrasing are discussed: Prosodic phrases (p-phrases) and intonational phrases (i-phrases). Most prominently, the p-phrase is marked by a high tone associated with its beginning and a low tone associated with its end; realisations of these tones form the rise-fall contours traditionally analysed as accents. The i-phrase is associated with a final tone that is either low or high and additionally marked by voice quality and final lengthening. While the tonal specifications of these phrases are thus predominantly invariant, variation arises from different distributions of phrases.
This analysis is based on three studies, two production experiments and one perception study. The first production study investigated systematic variation in information structure, first syllable vowel quantity and the target word's position in the sentence, while the second production experiment induced variation in information structure, first and second syllable type and number of syllables. In addition to fundamental frequency, the materials were analysed regarding duration, the occurrence of pauses and voice quality. The perception study investigated the interpretation of compound/noun phrase minimal pairs with manipulated fundamental frequency contours using a two-alternative forced-choice picture selection task. Additionally, a pilot perception study on variation in peak height and timing supported the assumption of uniform tonal contours.
This work is about resumptive and non-resumptive relative clauses (RCs) in the three big Ibero-Romance languages: Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan. In (1), the examined structures are exemplified for Spanish: (1a.) No conozco el hombre que viste _ ayer. “I don’t know the man that you saw yesterday.” (1b.) Es este el hombre que le enviaron el libro. “This is the man to whom they sent the book.” (1c.) Es este el hombre a quien le enviaron el libro. “This is the man to whom they sent the book.”
(1a.) displays a non-resumptive, or canonical, RC, which is characterized by the canonical use of a relativizing operator and a gap in the subordinate’s object position, a piece of evidence which has induced most of the generative literature to assume wh-movement of the relative operator in the sense of Chomsky (1977). The last two decades, however, have seen a big debate regarding the exact derivational analysis, starting with Kayne’s (1994) antisymmetry theory and the following focus on reconstruction and anti-reconstruction effects in RCs. This search for the correct starting site of the RC’s head noun has dismissed the original Head External Analysis (HEA) (Chomsky 1965, 1977) and led to the development of a Head Raising Analysis (RA) (Kayne 1994, Bianchi 1999, a.o.) and a Matching Analysis (MA) (Munn 1994, Sauerland 1998, a.o.). The discussion in this work argues that the data on reconstruction and anti-reconstruction effects are not sufficiently clear and reliable in order to adopt one of the head-internal analyses, i.e. a HEA or a MA. Instead, the work follows a variant of the HEA proposed for Portuguese by Rinke & Aßmann (2017), which adheres to standard assumptions about Romance syntax, and avoids the empirical problems that the other proposals have to face. Arguing that the HEA holds for all Ibero-Romance languages, this work also takes a stance in the debate around the categorical status of the relativizing element que and argues that it is always a D-element, and never of category C, i.e. there is no such thing as a relativizing complementizer (cf. also Kayne 2010, Kato & Nunes 2008, Poletto & Sanfelici 2018).
The work argues that wh-movement in a HEA fashion is the correct analysis also for resumptive relative clauses as in (1b., c.), which crucially lack a gap in argument position but show a resumptive pronominal element instead. Furthermore, it takes advantage of the fact that the choice of such genetically closely related languages like Spanish, Portuguese, and Catalan enables research to address the phenomenon under consideration from a microcomparative perspective, which is “the closest we can come … to a controlled experiment in comparative syntax” (Kayne 2005: 281-282). The descriptive literature suggests that, at least for Spanish and Catalan, there are two types of a resumptive RC structure available: a simple resumption as in (1b.), including mere que, and a complex resumption structure which displays a more complex relativizer like a quien in combination with a resumptive pronoun (1c.). However, a corpus study carried out for this work reveals that speakers of the three languages behave alike insofar as the only resumptive RC used in spontaneous speech is a simple-resumption structure, while complex resumption never occurs. Additionally, a multivariate analysis shows that in all three languages, grammatical case is the most important factor when it comes to the possibility of a resumptive structure in RCs: with a dative argument, simple resumption is obligatory, while for accusative and nominative arguments, resumption is optional. The discussion concludes that simple and complex resumption constitute different phenomena also on a structural level: the latter one is argued to be a subcase of clitic doubling, and therefore, receives an analysis along the lines of Pineda (2016), who argues against a dative alternation in Romance languages and locates the (non-)realisation of the dative clitic in a transitive clitic-doubling structure outside of syntax, it being a case of silent variation along the lines of Sigurðsson (2004) and Kayne (2005). From this perspective, it follows naturally that in Portuguese, complex resumption structures are ungrammatical. Simple resumption, on the other hand, which is a possible structure in all three languages, is argued to represent the phonological counterpart of “scattered deletion”, i.e. the preferred interpretation for an A’-chain according to Chomsky (2003): in the operator position SpecCP, every feature except for the operator feature is deleted, resulting in the phonological outcome que, while in the variable position, everything but the operator is interpreted, resulting in a pronominal element according to the argument’s phi-features.
This work takes a stance in the latest topics on generative analyses for relative clauses. Using not only theoretical considerations but conclusions drawn from empirical data on three languages, it offers a new perspective on pending questions and proposes to take a fresh look on supposedly outdated analyses.
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.
In German, the subject usually precedes the object (SO order), but, under certain discourse conditions, the object is allowed to precede the subject (OS order). This paper focuses on main clauses in which either the subject or a discourse-given object occurs in clause-initial position. Two acceptability experiments show that OS sentences with a given object are generally acceptable, but the precise degree of acceptability varies both with the object‘s referential form (demonstrative objects leading to higher acceptability than other types of objects) and with formal properties of the subject (pronominal subjects leading to higher acceptability than non-pronominal subjects). For SO sentences, acceptability was reduced when the object was a d-pronoun, which contrasts with the high acceptability of OS sentences with a d-pronoun object. This finding was explored in a third acceptability experiment comparing d-pronouns in subject and object function. This experiment provides evidence that a reduction in acceptability due to a prescriptive bias against d-pronouns is suspended when the d-pronoun occurs as object in the prefield. We discuss the experimental results with respect to theories of German clause structure that claim that OS sentences with different information-structural properties are derived by different types of movement.
Three experiments investigated the interpretation and production of pronouns in German. The first two experiments probed the preferred interpretation of a pronoun in contexts containing two potential antecedents by having participants complete a sentence fragment starting either with a personal pronoun or a d-pronoun. We systematically varied three properties of the potential antecedents: syntactic function, linear position, and topicality. The results confirm a subject preference for personal pronouns. The preferred interpretation of d-pronouns cannot be captured by any of the three factors alone. Although a d-pronoun preferentially refers to the non-topic in many cases, this preference can be overridden by the other two factors, linear position and syntactic function. In order to test whether interpretive preferences follow from production biases as proposed by the Bayesian theory of Kehler et al. (2008), a third experiment had participants freely produce a continuation sentence for the contexts of the first two experiments. The results show that personal pronouns are used more often to refer to a subject than to an object, recapitulating the subject preference found for interpretation and thereby confirming the account of Kehler et al. (2008). The interpretation results for the d-pronoun likewise follow from the corresponding production data.
Representations of the unknown and the foreign can be found in every culture. Paralleling the method of constructing identity in relation to the Other, all cultures create myths about the ‘foreign’ in order to discern what the ‘native’ is, and thus often essentialize them as either good or bad, ultimately to vindicate one’s own actions and values. The nature of myths has it as such that they lend themselves to images, which are easily transformed into representations. Representations of the foreign in the United States follow the same purpose; they are propagated to define the nation’s identity and set it into political and cultural relation to other nations and civilizations. In this thesis’ context, then, representations of Asian Americans in American culture strengthen the imaginative bonds of American national identity manifesto. However, the interdependency of the Self and the Other clarifies and further entangles the subjects that constitute American national identity and in turn legitimizes the belated claim of Asian Americans to be included into it. Asian American literature is primarily concerned with these myths and (mis)representations that are influenced by Orientalist images in Western culture. Thus, Orientalism – a constructed myth about the Orient, which exists in art, books, and armchair theories of all kinds in the Western world – becomes the main motif for Asian American literature. If we construe this theory a little further then Asian American identity is formed in relation to Orientalist representations that need to be deconstructed first. From the outset, if Orientalism is considered as a produce of imperialism, it seems that time is a defining factor in Orientalism, both as an agent of change and as a factor of perspective. In reality, however, Orientalism seems resilient to time and change; the creation of the Madame Butterfly myth exemplifies what was created in 1887 had been perfected by 1900 and since then enjoys frequent comebacks until today. Thus, for Asian American artists and writers to dismantle Orientalist stereotypes begins a literally archaeological process: excavating the leftovers of American Orientalism, evaluating those finds, and re-relating them with their own cultural and historical actuality. Rather than producing a neat line of argumentation, the approaches on defining Asian American identity within the American national identity manifesto fall into unwieldy clusters and even get tangled up into self-contradictions. The methods of dismantling Orientalist stereotypes are manifold and range from total rejection over evocation and appropriation to reflection. In order to wrestle such disparate issues Orientalism produces in Asian American Literature into an organic whole, it was important to focus consistently on the over arching theme of American national identity. As this thesis aims to show, Orientalist issues that are dealt with in Asian American literature all point toward the greater aim of national inclusion. This thesis is grouped into two parts. PART I provides historical and theoretical background information necessary to understand Orientalist issues in contemporary Asian American literature. Analogous to Asian American writers that feel the necessity to bed their work into the correct historical frame in order to prevent misunderstanding, chapters two and three serve to couch my argument into the correct frame. The theoretical base work is laid with Edward Said’s Orientalism and its implementation on the American and Asian American context. PART II examines literary examples, applying the theorems discussed in PART I. Chapter four is a close analysis of the submissive Butterfly stereotype that has, since its appearance in late nineteenth century, moved, inspired and even outraged writers. Beginning with the literary development of Madame Butterfly, D. H. Hwang’s deconstructivist M. Butterfly gives new perspectives on Orientalism by redefining gender and racial roles. To complement my analysis, in chapter five, I try to trace current Asian American reactions to Orientalism. Texts by comedian Margaret Cho and poet Beau Sia serve as examples of analysis. As a result of the disparate narrative forms of the analyzed works and the unevenness of scholarship on twenty-first century, the analyses vary greatly in scope and detail. In choosing fairly young narrative forms like stand-up comedy and spoken word poetry I want to emphasize how Orientalism pertains to the question of Asian American identity. To close the circle of my discourse I will go back to where I start my thesis: Asian Americans and their position within America’s national identity discourse. It is noteworthy that until today, Asian American identity remains a hostage of these Orientalist stereotypes that mark the boundaries of their American identity.
This dissertation deals with the lexical, morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of (VP )idioms and their behavior in combination with restrictive relative clauses, raising, constituent fronting, wh-movement, VP-ellipsis, pronominalization, the progressive form, verb placement, passivization, conjunction modification, and the N-after-N construction. It provides empirical evidence towards a combinatorial analysis of both semantically non-decomposable idioms (SNDIs) and semantically decomposable idioms (SDIs) and contributes to the (formal) formulation of such an account.
The Introduction (Chapter 1) first motivates why idioms are an exciting and challenging phenomenon and then gives a definition of the term idiom, a classification of idioms, and an overview of the wide spectrum of idiom analyses found in the linguistic literature.
Chapter 2, “Idioms as evidence for the proper analysis of relative clauses”, shows that the Modification Analysis beats the other two major analyses of restrictive relative clauses (RRCs), namely Raising and Matching, as (i) the latter two lead to a loss of numerous empirical generalizations in syntax and morphology, and (ii) contrary to the assumption in the literature, idioms in RRCs can, in fact, be licensed without literal syntactic movement of the RRC-head, which makes modification fully compatible with idiom reconstruction effects.
Chapter 3, “How frozen are frozen idioms?”, presents new empirical observations on the lexical, morphological, and syntactic flexibility of kick the bucket and displays that this idiom is not completely frozen with respect to its NP complement, the progressive form, and, in some contexts, even passivization. The chapter concludes that analyses of kick the bucket as a single lexical entry should be replaced by analyses of this and other SNDIs with a syntactically regular shape as consisting of individual word-level lexical entries that combine according to the standard rules of syntax.
This idea is taken up in Chapter 4, “The syntactic flexibility of semantically non-decomposable idioms”, which – based on the differences between English and German with regard to verb placement, constituent fronting, and passivization as well as a short outlook on Estonian and French – spells out a combinatorial analysis of SNDIs and augments it with a semantic analysis formulated in Lexical Resource Semantics, according to which some idiom parts make identical semantic contributions to the overall meaning of the idiom. The analysis further suggests that the syntactic flexibility of idioms is due to the semantic and pragmatic constraints on the involved constructions, rather than the syntactic encoding of the idioms.
Chapter 5, “Modification of literal meanings in semantically non-decomposable idioms”, reviews Ernst’s (1981) classical three types of idiom modification (internal, external, and conjunction) to then closely investigate the most challenging type, namely conjunction modification, in SNDIs. Based on naturally occurring examples of four SNDIs (two English, two German), it sketches an analysis in terms of two or more conjoined independent propositions, each of which can be the result of figurative reinterpretation. One of the propositions contains the idiomatic meaning, in (one of) the other(s), the meaning of the modifier applies to the literal meaning of the idiom’s noun.
Chapter 6, “Semantically decomposable idioms in the N-after-N construction”, offers a formal syntactic and semantic account of SDIs like pull strings in the N-after-N construction, as in Kim pulled string after string to get Alex into a good college. While the idiom contributes the type of entity at stake (‘string’ in the case of pull strings), N-after-N contributes that there are several instantiations of that type of entity and that these are subject to temporal or spatial succession. The chapter first summarizes the empirical properties of N-after-N, then provides an account of N-after-N in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), presents an updated version of the account of SDIs suggested in Chapter 2 within HPSG, and combines it with the HPSG account of N-after-N.
German free relative constructions allow for case requirement mismatches under two types of circumstances. The first is when the case required in the embedded clause is more complex (NOM < ACC < GEN < DAT) than the case required in the main clause, and the relative pronoun takes the form of the embedded clause case. The second type of circumstance is when the form that corresponds to the two required cases is syncretic. I propose an analysis that combines Caha’s (2009) case hierarchy in Nanosyntax with Van Riemsdijk’s (2006a) concept of Grafting. By placing case features as separate heads in the syntax, a less complex case can be Grafted into a different clause, explaining the first type of circumstance. The second type makes reference to the fact that syncretic forms are inserted via the same lexical entry (Superset Principle). A cross-linguistic comparison shows that it is language-specific whether a more complex case requirement in the main or embedded clause causes non-matching non-syncretic free relatives to be grammatical. For all languages it holds that the relative pronoun appears in the most complex case required, which provides additional evidence for case being complex and more complex cases being able to license less complex cases.
This dissertation is about case competition in headless relatives. Case competition is a situation in which two cases are assigned but only one of them surfaces. One of the constructions in which case competition takes place is in headless relatives, i.e. relative clauses that lack a head. This dissertation has two goals: (i) to give an overview of the data, and (ii) to provide an account for the observed data.
The grammaticality of a headless relative is determined by two aspects. The first aspect concerns which case wins the case competition. In all languages with case competition that I am aware of, this is determined by the case scale in NOM < ACC < DAT. A case more to the right on the scale wins over a case more to the left on the scale. This scale is not specific to case competition in headless relatives, but it can also be observed in syncretism patterns and morphological case containment. I show that that the case scale can be derived from assuming the cumulative case decomposition (cf. Caha 2009). A case wins over another case when it contains all features that the other case contains.
The second aspect of case competition in headless relatives concerns whether the winner of the case competition is allowed to surface when it wins the case competition. The winning case can be either the internal case required by the predicate in the relative clause, or the external case required by the predicate in the main clause. It differs from language to language whether they allow the internal and the external case to surface.
All language types I discuss allow for a headless relative when the internal and the external case match. The unrestricted type of language allows both the internal case and the external case to surface when either of them wins the case competition. Examples of this language type are Old High German, Gothic and Ancient Greek. The internal-only type of language allows only the internal case to surface when it wins the case competition, and it does not allow the external case to do so. An example of this language type is Modern German. The external-only type of language allows only the external case to surface when it wins the case competition, and it does not allow the internal case to do so. To my knowledge, there is no language that behaves like this. The matching type of language allows neither the internal nor the external case to surface when either of them wins the case competition. An example of this language type is Polish.
To account for the data, I set up a proposal that generates the attested patterns and excludes the non-attested ones. I let the variation between languages follow from properties of languages that can be independently observed. By investigating the morphology of the languages, I suggest differences between the lexical entries in the different languages. These different lexical entries ultimately lead languages to be of different types. In my proposal, I assume that headless relatives are derived from light-headed relatives. Light-headed relatives contain a light head and a relative pronoun. In a headless relative either the light head or the relative pronoun is deleted. The necessary requirement for deletion is that the deleted element (either the light head or relative pronoun) is structurally or formally contained in the other element.
I motivate the analysis for the internal-only type of language for Modern German, for the matching type of language for Polish and for the unrestricted type of language for Old High German. I first identify the morphemes that the light heads and relative pronouns in the languages consist of, and then I show to which features each of the morphemes correspond. The crucial difference between the internal-only type of language Modern German and the matching type of language Polish is how the phi and case features are spelled out. In Modern German they are spelled out by a phi and case feature portmanteau, and, in Polish, the same features are spelled out by a phi feature morpheme and a case feature morpheme. Old High German differs from the other two languages in that it has light heads and relative pronouns that are syncretic. I show how these differences in the morphology of the languages ultimately leads to different grammaticality patterns in headless relatives.
Comparing my account to others shows that all proposals account for the case facts using some kind of case hierarchy. The proposals differ in how they model the variation, both in the technical details of the proposal, but more importantly, also in empirical scope and predictions they make.
This dissertation investigates a special class of anaphoric form, yè, in Ewe known as the logophoric pronoun. This research makes a number of novel observations.
In the first chapter, I introduce the reader to the phenomenon under investigation as well as provide information on Ewe and its dialects and, methodology. In Chapter 2, I present the pronominal system of Ewe which is categorised into strong and weak forms following Cardinaletti & Starke (1994) and Agbedor (1996). The distribution of pronouns is outlined which sets the tone for an overview of logophoric marking. In this respect, I present variations in logophoric marking strategies cross linguistically and show that Ewe differs significantly from other pronouns in this category. In an effort to explain the deviant case of yè, I entertain the idea that yè is a pure logophoric pronoun in the sense of Clements (1975) and thus, its additional de re and strict interpretation does not imply non-logophoricity.
Chapter 3 demonstrates that yè is sensitive to contexts which portray the intention of an individual. Following Sells (1987), the antecedent of yè must have an intention to communicate. I broadly categorize logophoric contexts into reportative (direct-indirect speech) or non-reportative (speaker’s mental attitude, reporter’s observation or background knowledge of a situation). Based on this categorization, indirect speech report (Clements 1975), dis- course units such as a paragraph or an episode (Clements 1975), and sentential adjuncts such as purpose, causal and consequence clauses (Culy 1994a) are reviewed. The logophoric pro- noun occurs in the complement of attitude verbs (Clements 1975), also termed logocentric (à la (Stirling 1994)) or logophoric predicates (à la (Culy 1994a)) as well as with non-attitudinal verbs (e.g. va ‘come’ or wO ‘do’ as in sentential adjuncts). I argue contra Clements (1975) and Culy (1994a) that yè can occur with perception predicates. I further provide three new instances of non-reportative contexts which are compatible with yè namely, as-if clauses, benefactive na clauses and alesi ‘how’ clauses. I show, corroborating previous studies that contexts which are necessary for the licensing of yè include all of the aforementioned except causal clauses. Among these contexts, the complementizer be or regarding cases where there is no be, an element in C (due to the Doubly-Filled-Comp Filter (DFCF) c.f. Chomsky & Lasnik (1977)), is sufficient to license yè. Following Bimpeh & Sode (2021), yè is licensed by feature checking (in the spirit of von Stechow (2004)): be bears the interpretatble [log] feature which checks the uninterpretable [log] feature of yè. I include a redefinition of logophoricity as pertaining to Ewe.
Given the disparity found in the literature concerning the interpretation of yè: Ewedome (pronounce EVedome) has only de se readings (Bimpeh 2019); while ‘pure’ Ewe, Mina (variety of Ewe spoken in Togo) Pearson (2015), Danyi (O’Neill 2015) and Anlo (pronounced ANlO) (Satık 2019) has de re readings; chapter 4 aims at lending empirical support to the ungoing discussion by verifying the interpretation of yè. Two acceptability judgment tasks were conducted namely, truth value judgment task and binary forced choice task. The results corroborates Pearson (2012, 2015) and others’ discovery that yè has a de re interpretation in the Ewedome (contra Bimpeh (2019); Bimpeh et al. (2022)), Anlo and Tonu (pronounced TONu) dialects of Ewe.
In chapter 5, I discuss the relation between logophoricity (yè, yè a) and Control (PRO). I show that yè may be restricted to a set of verbs which obligatorily require the morpheme a ‘potential marker’ (Essegbey 2008), in subject position. This set of verbs are those that are known as control verbs c.f. (Landau 1999) in English. As a result of this restriction, research such as Satık (2019) claims that yè a is the overt instantiation of PRO in English. According to the Ewe facts, it appears as though on one hand, yè and PRO share similar properties in logophoric contexts and on the other hand, yè in combination with the potential marker, a also share properties with PRO in subject control environments. Against this background, I discuss the relation between yè, yè a and PRO and show that neither yè in isolation nor yè in combination with a, contrary to Satık (2019), is the overt instantiation of PRO. I clarify that the potential morpheme a is not cliticised or combined with the logophoric yè. The two forms are seperate morphemes. The potential marker a only shows up in control environments because a sub-class of verbs require it for grammaticality purposes. As such, the property of de se-ness does not come from yè by itself, yè a or a but rather from the sub-class of verbs which require the potential marker a...
Anankastic relatives
(2016)
This dissertation investigates a semantic puzzle in German concerning certain sentences with an intensional transitive verb and a modalized relative clause modifying its indefinite object. In their unspecific reading, the modal inside the relative clause seems to lack a semantic contribution and the construal of the relative clause appears spuriously ambiguous between a restrictive and an appositive reading. However, as a thorough discussion of a wide range of data reveals, the embedded modal is actually anaphoric to the matrix attitude and does contribute to the sentence meaning. But then, precisely due to its anaphoricity, this semantic contribution is restricted and in some cases very subtle; in particular, the semantic phenomenon under scrutiny cannot be analyzed as an instance of modal concord. Rather, previous observations on related data involving epistmic anaphoric modals and anankastic conditionals turn out to indicate the direction for an adequate analysis of the relevant semantic observations. For the restrictive construal, a conservative account is developed containing a fine-grained Lewis-Kratzer-style modal semantics, but with a twist: the anaphoricity of the modal is taken care of by restricting the anaphoricity of the modal to the ordering source of the matrix verb; moreover, the embedded modal receives a historical modal base. In this way compositionality issues and problems of cross-identification are avoided. Finally, the non-restrictive construal is analyzed as an instance of modal subordination, exploiting the well-studied parallel between appositive relatives and discourse anaphora.
The micro–blogging service Twitter can be used to publicly share information about events that used to be limited to a defined number of participants only. How does this affect different types of formal or semi–formal events, from the university seminar to the council meeting? This paper uses Goffman’s notion of involvement and Lindroth and Bergquist’s notions of alignment and glancing to describe the potential for conflict that this use of Twitter causes, and suggests approaches that may help to avoid or to alleviate conflicts.
The linguistic deficit in patients with Alzheimer's Disease: is there a syntactic impairment?
(2017)
The linguistic impairment of patients affected by Alzheimer’s disease (PAD) is defined as a form of fluent aphasia, which is caused by major disruptions in the semantic and lexical domains. Consequently, their discourse is often described as empty, although their speech is fluent. This study aims at enlarging the comprehension of the linguistic deficit in PADs; in particular, it deals with their syntactic competence and it addresses the following questions: 1) Do PADs suffer from syntactic impairment? 2) How can the impairment in PADs be accounted for? 3) At which stage of the disease are PADs affected by syntactic impairment? The syntactic competence of Italian-speaking PADs is investigated under two different perspectives. On one hand, the study considers the syntactic information stored in the lexicon as part of the lexical entry. For this purpose, PADs complete a grammatical gender retrieval task on a list of 100 Italian nouns. On the other hand, the question deals with syntax intended as the capacity to complete the processing of syntactic structures in sentence comprehension and production. The present study focuses on sentence comprehension and includes two sentence-to-picture matching tasks: one on Wh-questions, and one on relative clauses. PADs complete the experiment on grammatical gender retrieval with high accuracy, except for few mistakes on irregular and opaque nouns, thus showing a spared capacity to retrieve the syntactic information, especially when they can rely on the form-driven procedural mechanism, as in the case of regular nouns. Data on the comprehension of Wh-questions and RC reveals that PADs are more sensitive than controls to locality effects. Patients with moderate dementia are impaired at computing dependencies that entail a crossing movement between two arguments whose features are in a relation of inclusion. In contrast, crossing movements are allowed when the involved feature arrays are in a relation of disjunction. In short, patients are spared at using procedural mechanisms for the retrieval of syntactic information, while they are impaired at processing sentences that entail argument extraction. The impairment manifests itself in moderately impaired PADs in the form of enhanced sensitivity to locality effects.
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 intends to provide some speculative remarks on how consistency and continuity in language use practices within and across contexts inform heritage language acquisition outcomes. We intend “consistency” as maintenance of similar patterns of home language use over the years. “Continuity” refers to the possibility for heritage language speakers to be exposed to formal education in the heritage language. By means of a questionnaire study, we analyze to what extent Italian heritage families in Germany are consistent in their use of the heritage language with their children. Furthermore, by analyzing the educational offer related to Italian as a heritage language across different areas in Germany, we reflect on children’s opportunities to experience continuity between home and school language practices. Finally, we interpret the results of previous studies on Italian heritage language acquisition through the lens of consistency and continuity of language experience. In particular, we show that under the appropriate language experience conditions (involving consistency and continuity), heritage speakers may be successful even in the acquisition of linguistic phenomena that have been shown to be acquired late in first language acquisition.
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.
Virtuous democrats, liberal aristocrats : political discourse and the Pennsylvania Constitution
(2001)
David Rothenberg, a philosophy professor and Jazz musician, has been improvising with nonhuman animals for years, among his playing partners are birds and whales, known to be territorial animals. As Deleuze and Guattari propose that the origin of art is precisely the territorialising animal and more a function of nature than a specifically human cultural achievement, their concept of territory and rhythm offers a non-anthropocentric way of looking at these encounters. Rothenberg’s sonic experiments in resonance and interspecies interaction do not rely on language, thus I argue that the human and the nonhuman animals form a temporary joint territory via sonic rhythms and engage in a mutual becoming by forming a rhizome. His sound thinking practice thus also helps in decentralising further anthropocentric models of music and art.
This essay discusses the current Europeanization of national museums in different European countries and considers it against the background of media theories and feminist epistemologies. Taking the example of the European Solidarity Centre Gdansk, the Deutsches Historisches Museum Berlin and the Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée Marseille, it suggests two approaches to the dynamics of travel and locatedness in the museum. Firstly, using the concept of what I call “Europoeic media” this essay shows how “Europe” as a travelling memory is shaped by and in media. Secondly, I argue that the locatedness both of memories and the memory researcher are not detrimental but instead produce “situated knowledges”. Thus, in combining media-sensitivity and standpoint-reflexivity, the paper proposes new ways of taking into account the travels and locatedness of both memories and memory research.
This paper investigates how French signals prominence in prosody in the post-verbal domain of sentences with two objects or two adjuncts that vary in information status and prosodic length. The information status of particular interest here is dual focus, defined as the presence of two foci in a mono-clausal sentence, but other information states are investigated as well. The controlled production experiment we report on allows for a detailed examination of prosodic prominence. High boundary tones at the end of non-final prosodic phrases are pervasive, as has been documented in many studies before the present one. An important but less documented result is the variation in different prosodic curs, in particular in the number and position of high tones, as well as the particular scaling relationship between them, providing a powerful tool for the expression of (dual) focus. We also report on a perception experiment with our data, showing a clear tendency for French listeners to select the intended context question, recognizing dual focus better than other information states. Overall, this article provides elements of answers as to why French prosody is so difficult to pin down, and why contradictory results and analyses have been proposed for this language.
Editorial
(2017)
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.
Rebecca Walkowitz’s observation that contemporary novels tend to be “born translated” involves the notion that they equally tend to be “born in motion”; they are often already, conceptually, on the road to faraway readers during their moments of conception. A first, more narrowly defined objective of my essay is to examine the narrative strategies used in Dave Eggers’s What Is the What (2007) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2007) that facilitate and respond to this dimension of motion in particular travels of memory. In a broader scope, this analysis will be embedded into an appraisal of the potentials of recent theorizing both in narratology (i.e. the study of narrative) and in memory studies to understand the dynamics at play in the reception of far-travelled narrative memory media. It is a central proposition of this essay that the two research fields share an amplitude of common concerns with regard to questions of reception and should therefore be brought into a close dialogue. The present study explores how some of these intersections between narratology and memory studies can be approached through the notions of “distance” and “proximity.”
This introduction outlines new developments in the field of cultural and media memory studies in the wake of the transcultural turn. It pays specific attention to the twofold dynamics of memory’s travel and locatedness. While in recent memory studies discourse there has been a tendency to see travel as the inspiration for innovative research, locatedness has become associated with old-fashioned, bounded approaches. Rather than reproduce the positive charging of travel and negative charging of locatedness, this special issue aims to emphasise the complexity of memory dynamics resulting from the interaction of the two poles and to make visible that the production, (re)mediation, and reception of the past in the present is constituted by both travel and locatedness.
While for centuries Greek tragedies were performed only intermittently (Flashar 1991; Foley 1999; Macintosh et al. 2005; Hall and Macintosh 2005), the 1960s saw an enormous growth internationally in the staging of ancient dramas, and between 1960 and today, more Greek tragedies have been performed than in the entire period from antiquity to 1960.1 The new interest in ancient tragedy corresponded with a fundamental crisis in Western culture, issuing from the Shoah and gradually forcing its way into consciousness. After World War II, and especially since the 1960s, the question of history needed to be reconsidered. With the increasing dissolution of tradition, the interval between antiquity and the present became an unresolved problem. At the same time, a teleological understanding, which sees history as something that can be planned and calculated, had to be considered as failed, since fascism and communism "in the name of history" had erected totalitarian systems. What then appeared in this historical void?
Since Vietnamese is an isolating language, word order plays an important role in identifying the function of a particular word. Yet in some contexts word order may be flexible especially in the case of special information-structural settings. Discontinuous noun phrases constitute a specific case of non-canonical word order in Vietnamese.
I have conducted two read-speech experiments in order to find out whether there are prosodic or intonational effects in a comparison between continuous and discontinuous noun phrases in Vietnamese. In the first experiment, speakers from the Northern dialect were recorded and in the second experiment speakers from the Southern dialect. The results showed prosodic differences in the two word order conditions in both dialects. The duration of the classifier is significantly longer (p<0.001, ANOVA calculation) in the case of discontinuous noun phrases and the rising tone (sắc) is clearly articulated as rising. In the case of continuous noun phrases, the duration of the classifier is significantly shorter (p<0.001, ANOVA calculation) and a classifier with rising tone may lose its rising property. These prosodic effects are related to prosodic boundaries. In the case of discontinuous noun phrases, the classifier constitutes the prosodic boundary, whereas with continuous noun phrases, the (right) prosodic boundary occurs further to the right.
I assume that in Vietnamese there is generally a correspondence between syntactic and prosodic structure as in Selkirk (2011) and Féry (2017).
This means that for example the DP hai trái cam ‘two oranges’ (two CLF orange) is matched by a prosodic phrase, thus (hai trái cam)Φ. However, when the noun cam ‘orange’ is separated from the numeral-classifier complex, the noun and the classifier form a prosodic phrase on their own: (hai trái)Φ. It can thus be concluded that intonation effects in Vietnamese are not only present when expressing sentence modality and when changing the role of function words (Đỗ et al. 1998 and Hạ & Grice 2010), but they also play a role in word order change, as in discontinuous nominal phrases.
When it comes to syntactic aspects of discontinuous noun phrases, I discuss whether split constructions in Vietnamese involve movement as proposed by Trịnh (2011) or base-generation as put forward by Fanselow & Féry (2006). I argue for base-generation analysis since the second part of a discontinuous NP (remnant) may also occur outside of discontinuous noun phrases without its head noun and some discontinuous noun phrases do not have a continuous counterpart. My study confirms the connection between syntax and prosody.
The two parts of the discontinuous noun phrase form their own phrases syntactically as well as prosodically.
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.
This article presents new directions of literary and media memory studies. It distinguishes between (1) the study of "traumatic pasts", i.e. representations of war and violence in literature and other media, (2) diachronic and intermedial approaches to "literary afterlives" and (3) recent insights into the inherent transculturality of memory and their consequences for literary and media studies. Keywords: cultural memory studies, literature and memory, media and memory, transcultural memory
This afterword addresses the complex temporal and global dynamics of the coronavirus pandemic. After considering some of the new social rhythms that have emerged in the wake of Covid-19 around the world, it turns to the role of collective memory before, during and after corona. The aim is to provide a basic grid for how the Covid-19 pandemic could be addressed using memory studies expertise and concepts such as premediation, memorability, memory (ab)use, national memory, colonial memory, racial stereotypes, the digital archive, generational memory, or Anthropocene time.
Corrigendum zu: Memory studies 13.2020, issue: 5, S. 861-874, doi:10.1177/1750698020943014, ISSN 1750-6999
Variation in enclitic possessive constructions in Southern Italian dialects: a syntactic analysis
(2019)
This thesis investigates enclitic possessive constructions (EPCs) that are a widespread and frequently used construction among Southern Italian dialects (SIDs). In general, EPCs display the structure N-EP where the N is a (singular) kinship noun and the EP the enclitic possessive directly attached to the kinship noun. However, there is a huge variation among SIDs as well as within the system of a specific dialect. The aim of the present work is twofold. The empirical part contributes new data to this topic as well as a detailed and organized overview of (micro-) variational observations from data of different sources including for example the linguistic maps of the AIS (Atlante Italo-Svizzero). The main aspects of variation are (a) the presence or absence of an obligatory article (D – N-EP vs. N-EP), (b) the possibility of plural kinship noun-EPCs and (c) the compatibility of a specific person-EP with a specific kinship noun within a dialect. Based on the empirical findings, the syntactic part proposes a syntactic analysis for EPCs focusing on the following research questions: 1) In some dialects, singular kinship noun-EPCs display an obligatory article with the 3SG.EP. What is the reason for this article-based person split (1st and 2nd vs. 3rd)? And further, how are both structures, with and without an article, represented in the syntax, i.e. in DP and PossP? 2) In some dialects, plural kinship nouns are allowed to occur in EPCs, and in others, they are disallowed. With respect to this dichotomy, what is the role of NumP? 3) Kinship nouns are relational and express inalienability. How can this property be captured in the syntax? I argue that the article-based person split is due to the deictic properties of the possessor-persons, meaning that 1SG.EPs and 2SG.EPs need to be bound by the speaker’s coordinates in the left periphery of the clause, whereas 3SG.EPs do not. As a consequence, 1SG and 2SG EPCs move to the highest position, i.e. to D°, and 3SG EPCs can stay lower in the structure, i.e. in Poss°. Based on this dichotomy, I argue that both D° and Poss° can host EPCs. In order to capture the (im)possibility of plural kinship nouns-EPCs, I argue that NumP, as a parametrised position, can block or allow further movement of the kinship noun to Poss° (and to D°). With respect to the relational nature of kinship nouns I propose that they are base-generated within the complement position of a relator phrase (RP), and EPs in Poss°. In order to derive EPCs, the kinship nouns must move out of their position. The kinship noun lands in NumP, the position where further movement is probably blocked. If further movement is allowed, the kinship noun merges to the left of the EP, resulting in a complete EPC in Poss°. The last leg of the movement to D° depends on the presence of absence of an obligatory article. The phenomenon of EPCs displays a huge variation among SIDs and needs to be investigated from different perspectives and different linguistic areas. The present work contributes to the puzzle of EPCs new data and a syntactic analysis.
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.
This article investigates the L1 acquisition of different types of direct objects in European Portuguese (EP). Previous research has revealed that although children have early syntactic and pragmatic knowledge of objects across languages, the adequate use of pronouns and null objects is protracted in the acquisition of EP (Costa et al. 2012). The present study shows that children acquiring the distribution of direct objects are aware of universal pragmatic hierarchies but struggle with the interpretation and feature bundles of null objects. Assuming that arguments are linked to left-peripheral C/edge linkers (Sigurðsson 2011), we argue that children need more time to discover the adult-like feature composition of null objects in EP because they involve phi-silent features. Relative accessibility (Ariel 1991) is universal and available early, whereas the absolute accessibility of null objects, i.e. their feature content, is acquired relatively late.
Spain is a gateway to Europe and has long been a destination for migrants and refugees from Africa and Latin America. In the last decades, the country has received a significant number of people from the Saharawi tribe in the Western Sahara, a former Spanish colony today occupied by Morocco and Algeria. Like other European countries it has also received individuals and families fleeing from the conflicts in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring. Spain has a history of its people crossing the borders during and after the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). Despite these experiences, exiles and asylum seekers are seldom depicted in its children’s books. When they address such topics, most stories in recent books are about forced displacements of people during World War II or conflicts in regions far from Spain such as Nepal, the Middle East, or Afghanistan. A few Spanish books addressed to young adults, or recommended for readers between nine and eleven, deal with Saharawi refugees but they are usually set in African refugee camps. They seldom depict the refugee as a migrant who might come and establish a life in Europe. ...
Languages in general have various possibilities to express one and the same propositional content. One of these possibilities is grammatical variation. This thesis is concerned with the variation of the linear word order in a clause and the effects triggered by word order alternations. Although sharing the same propositional content, different word order variants can carry different functions; word order variation can be used to achieve certain stylistic effects. The dissertation looks at functional and stylistic preferences of English regarding variation from the canonical word order in (1).
(1) [Ernie]S [sits]V [on the table]O. (SVO)
The variation under consideration is locative inversion (LOCI), exemplified in (2).
(2) On the table sits Ernie.
As any variation from the canonical word order is said to strongly depend on the grammatical system of the language a sentence is realized in, the perspective is extended to the word order equivalent of the sentence above in German (3). The goal is to highlight possible differences/similarities between English and German with respect to one specific word order variant in a declarative main clause.
(3) Auf dem Tisch liegt ein Brief.
On the table lies a letter
‘On the table lies a letter’.
As the variation from the canonical word order is not expected to be coincidental in both languages, the features that favor the pattern under consideration are examined. This is done through a statistical analysis by employing two comparable corpora, the BNC for English and the TÜPP D/Z for German. The central questions for the thesis therefore are: What are the functions of the inverted constructions in English and German, what features favor their use in the respective languages, and how are they realized syntactically?
One finding is that German uses the syntactic pattern PP-V-NP for very similar reasons this pattern is used for in English. There seems to be a general tendency to order shorter before longer constituents. The syntactic pattern under consideration fulfills similar discourse functions in both languages. Both languages show similar preferences, they are driven by similar factors when having to decide on whether to stay with the canonical order or to prepose (respectively invert) the canonically postverbal PP.
Editorial [2021, english]
(2021)
Editorial [2019, english]
(2019)
Editorial [2020, english]
(2020)
This article discusses the interrelation between transculturality and transmediality with an emphasis on processes of translation. It focuses on two examples of transcultural and transmedial writing taken from contemporary Cuban literature in Paris: Miguel Sales's recontextualization of Cuban popular music in Paris and William Navarrete's ekphrastic reinscription of his island into the realm of French romantic painting. The case studies are significant in this context because they show how cultural borders are simultaneously set and transgressed at medial crossings—between music and poetry, text, and image. Thus, cultural translations go hand in hand with medial transpositions that include forms of rewriting, recomposition, and revisualization. The connection between moving cultures and moving media also points to the question of “travelling memory” in diaspora.
This paper argues that short (clause-internal) scrambling to a pre-subject position has A properties in Japanese but A'-properties in German, while long scrambling (scrambling across sentence boundaries) from finite clauses, which is possible in Japanese but not in German, has A'-properties throughout. It is shown that these differences between German and Japanese can be traced back to parametric variation of phrase structure and the parameterized properties of functional heads. Due to the properties of Agreement, sentences in Japanese may contain multiple (Agro- and Agrs-) specifiers whereas German does not allow for this. In Japanese, a scrambled element may be located in a Spec AgrP, i.e. an A- or L-related position, whereas scrambled NPs in German can only appear in an AgrP-adjoined (broadly-L-related) position, which only has A'-properties. Given our assumption that successive cyclic adjunction is generally impossible, elements in German may not be long scrambled because a scrambled element that is moved to an adjunction site inside an embedded clause may not move further. In Japanese, long distance scrambling out of finite CPs is possible since scrambling may proceed in a successive cyclic manner via embedded Spec- (AgrP) positions. Our analysis of the differences between German and Japanese scrambling provides us with an account of further contrasts between the two languages such as the existence of surprising asymmetries between German and Japanese remnant-movement phenomena, and the fact that unlike German, Japanese freely allows wh-scrambling. Investigation of the properties of Japanese wh-movement also leads us to the formulation of the "Wh-cluster Hypothesis", which implies that Japanese is an LF multiple wh-fronting language.
Attributive participle constructions in German behave like adjectives in terms of inflection and position, but keep their verbal arguments. They can be extended by adjuncts or arguments and these extended attributive present participles mainly occur in written language (Weber, 1994). As the same content can also be expressed in a relative clause (RC), I compare both constructions in order to find out under which conditions a participle construction could lead to processing difficulties and how this relates to RC processing.
Based on previous assumptions for production (e.g. Weber, 1971; Fabricius-Hansen, 2016), three potential factors on the comprehension of prenominal modifiers and RCs are investigated: modifier length, the internal structure and multiple levels of embedding. The hypotheses for an effect on modifier length are mainly based on two processing accounts that make opposite predictions under specific circumstances: memory-based accounts such as the dependency locality theory (DLT) (e.g. Gibson, 2000) and expectation-based accounts such as surprisal (e.g. Levy, 2008). An increase in modifier length results in more intervening material between determiner and noun for the participle construction, contrary to RCs where these elements are adjacent. This separation of the DP could increase memory load. Therefore, longer participles would slow down processing of the noun, while there should be no difference for RCs. Two acceptability judgment experiments showed a tendency for longer participle phrases to receive lower ratings. The modifier length was further investigated in online processing. Contrary to the predicted locality effect, self-paced reading data reveals an anti-locality effect for participle phrases, with lower RTs on the noun when additional material was present inside the modifier. This experiment was followed up by an eye-tracking experiment which replicated the anti-locality effect, but at the participle instead at the noun.
The second factor that was investigated is the argument structure of the participle (or RC verb). My hypothesis is that more “prototypical” adjectives in terms of syntactic structure and semantics are more acceptable and easier to process. Attributive participles are considered hybrids between verbs and adjectives (e.g. Fuhrhop & Teuber, 2000; L¨ubbe & Rapp, 2011) due to their modifier internal verbal function, but adjectival position and agreement with the noun. This double role could lead to difficulties, in particular with a more complex verbal structure. Therefore, the prediction was that the presence of an accusative object inside a participle phrase would lead to lower acceptability ratings and higher reading times in online processing. In the first two acceptability experiments, this prediction was borne out. In addition, an SPR experiment was conducted which manipulated the presence of either an accusative object or adjunct for participles (of verbs that could be used intransitively and transitively) and the corresponding RCs. The experiment showed an effect of the presence of an accusative object on the participle, with higher reading times if an object was present, compared to an adjunct. No such difference was found for the RC verb, which indicates that only participles are processed more slowly when there is an accusative object. An alternative explanation for this finding is the inherent imperfective aspect of the present participle: a direct object could change the event structure in such a way that the aspect no longer matches.
The third factor I investigate is an effect of double embedding on the acceptability of participle phrases and RCs. While double embedded participles are rated lower than double embedded RCs, there is a smaller decrease from single to double embedding for participles than for RCs, contrary to the predictions calculated by the metric of the DLT.
Overall, the results provide evidence for experience-based processing, but they cannot be explained by either memory- or experience-based accounts alone. The effect concerning the presence of an accusative object suggest that properties of the participle distinguish the construction from RCs and affect its processing. The thesis suggests that the latter effect needs to be investigated further in future research. Furthermore, the findings have implications for the role of attributive present participles in German and for hypotheses about similar constructions in other languages.
The frequency of intensional and non-first-order definable operators in natural languages constitutes a challenge for automated reasoning with the kind of logical translations that are deemed adequate by formal semanticists. Whereas linguists employ expressive higher-order logics in their theories of meaning, the most successful logical reasoning strategies with natural language to date rely on sophisticated first-order theorem provers and model builders. In order to bridge the fundamental mathematical gap between linguistic theory and computational practice, we present a general translation from a higher-order logic frequently employed in the linguistics literature, two-sorted Type Theory, to first-order logic under Henkin semantics. We investigate alternative formulations of the translation, discuss their properties, and evaluate the availability of linguistically relevant inferences with standard theorem provers in a test suite of inference problems stated in English. The results of the experiment indicate that translation from higher-order logic to first-order logic under Henkin semantics is a promising strategy for automated reasoning with natural languages.
Syntactic and semantic aspects of supplementary relative clauses in English and Sōrānī Kurdish
(2020)
In this thesis, I examine and analyse supplementary relative clauses(SRCs), also known as non-restrictive relative clauses. SRCs have received considerably less attention in the study of relative clauses than integrated, or restrictive, relative clauses (IRCs). The (surface) syntactic structure of the two types of relative clauses (RCs) is largely identical. Therefore, it is not straightforward to determine where to locate the difference in the interpretation between IRCs and SRCs.To address this question, I focus on two types of English SRCs: determiner-which RCs, and SRCs introduced by that. Determiner-which RCs can only be interpreted as SRCs. Previous HPSG approaches built on the generalisation that that RCs cannot be SRCs. Hence there is no HPSG analysis for relative that in SRCs. In this thesis I show the acceptability of the two constructions by the American native speakers and provide both structures with an HPSG analysis.I extend my discussion beyond English by looking at relative clauses in Sorānī Kurdish. I argue that RCs in Sorānī Kurdish share essential properties withEnglish bare RCs and that RCs, though Sorānī Kurdish has no equivalent of wh-RCs. I also provide Sorānī Kurdish with an HPSG analysis.
This article traces the representation of love, gender and national identity in Shani Mootoo’s creative work in general and her most recent novel Valmiki’s Daughter (2008) in particular. In all her work, Mootoo describes the phenomenon of otherness as a part of the negotiating process of the protagonists' selves.Challenging xenophobia, homophobia and all forms of prejudices the author works with the concept of lesbian and bisexual love, cross-racial relationships in order to write identity and to create a home.
Concepts of "Female Inversion" and the "New Woman" in Rhoda Broughton’s "Dear Faustina" (1897)
(2012)
Published in 1897, Rhoda Broughton’s fin de siècle novel "Dear Faustina" took an active part in the discursive production of two cultural figures: the New Woman and the Female Invert. Employing those identity constructs to negotiate conservative anxieties about social change, while at the same time commenting on a range of alternatives to Victorian middle-class lifestyle, the novel is clearly rooted in the discourses of transition that characterised the fin de siècle....
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.
In this paper, we investigate the question of whether and how perspective taking at the linguistic level interacts with perspective taking at the level of co-speech gestures. In an experimental rating study, we compared test items clearly expressing the perspective of an individual participating in the event described by the sentence with test items which clearly express the speaker’s or narrator’s perspective. Each test item was videotaped in two different versions: In one version, the speaker performed a co-speech gesture in which she enacted the event described by the sentence from a participant’s point of view (i.e. with a character viewpoint gesture). In the other version, she performed a co-speech gesture depicting the event described by the sentence as if it was observed from a distance (i.e. with an observer viewpoint gesture). Both versions of each test item were shown to participants who then had to decide which of the two versions they find more natural. Based on the experimental results we argue that there is no general need for perspective taking on the linguistic level to be aligned with perspective taking on the gestural level. Rather, there is clear preference for the more informative gesture.
The present paper aims at providing empirical evidence for dialectal variation concerning the perception of the central vowel [ɐ] in European Portuguese (EP). More concretely, this study compares the perception of the contrast between [a] and [ɐ] by native speakers of two varieties of EP: 23 speakers of a northern Portuguese dialect (from the city of Braga) and 23 speakers of the Littoral Center variety of EP (from the city of Lisbon, defined as Standard European Portuguese (SEP)). Based on a discrimination test, the results show that the two groups of speakers differ with respect to the perception of the contrast between the two central vowels under investigation. The speakers of the northern variety differentiate less between the two central vowels compared to the speakers from Lisbon.
Ascribing to the premise that film festivals are crucial to the production of cultural memory, this article explores different parameters through which festivals shape our reception of films. In its focus on the Asian American film festival CAAMFest, the article reveals that festivals are part of a complex network of actors whose different agendas influence the narratives produced around the film, direct its role as memory object and encourage memories to travel. What is more, it shows that festival locations—from the city in which a festival takes place to the concrete venue in which a film is screened—play a significant role in shaping our experience and understanding of films. Finally, it establishes that festivals create frames for their films, constructed through and circulated by the various festival media and live performances at the festival events. Bringing together film festival studies and memory studies, the article makes use of an interdisciplinary approach with which to explore the film festival phenomenon, thus shedding light on the complex dynamics of acts of framing, locations and networks of actors shaping the festival’s memory production. It also draws attention to the understudied phenomenon of Asian American film festivals, showing how such a festival may actively engage in constructing and performing a minority group’s collective identity and memory.
Children’s interpretations of sentences containing focus particles do not seem adult-like until school age. This study investigates how German 4-year-old children comprehend sentences with the focus particle ‘nur’ (only) by using different tasks and controlling for the impact of general cognitive abilities on performance measures. Two sentence types with ‘only’ in either pre-subject or pre-object position were presented. Eye gaze data and verbal responses were collected via the visual world paradigm combined with a sentence-picture verification task. While the eye tracking data revealed an adult-like pattern of focus particle processing, the sentence-picture verification replicated previous findings of poor comprehension, especially for ‘only’ in pre-subject position. A second study focused on the impact of general cognitive abilities on the outcomes of the verification task. Working memory was related to children’s performance in both sentence types whereas inhibitory control was selectively related to the number of errors for sentences with ‘only’ in pre-subject position. These results suggest that children at the age of 4 years have the linguistic competence to correctly interpret sentences with focus particles, which–depending on specific task demands–may be masked by immature general cognitive abilities.
This paper offers a description and account of the patterns of 'ex-situ' focus in Dagbani. We show that there are two syntactic strategies for creating 'ex-situ' focus in the language, one involving A’-movement to the left periphery, and the second involving base generation in the left periphery combined with coreference to a resumptive pronoun. Furthermore, we argue that subjects are difficult to move from Spec,TP to Spec,CP in the left-periphery because of 'anti-locality', which creates a tension when trying to focus subjects, which are required to derivationally fill the specifier of both positions. We further show that what looks to be a two-way distinction between the behaviour of subjects and non-subjects in the language is in fact a three-way distinction between subjects that are focussed to a local left-periphery, subjects that are focussed to a non-local left-periphery, and non-subjects. These distinctions arise due to there being two methods for Dagbani to resolve the antilocality problem of subject movement, and so local subjects solve the problem differently to non-local subjects.
This thesis investigates the structure of research articles in the field of Computational Linguistics with the goal of establishing that a set of distinctive linguistic features is associated with each section type. The empirical results of the study are derived from the quantitative and qualitative evaluation of research articles from the ACL Anthology Corpus. More than 20,000 articles were analyzed for the purpose of retrieving the target section types and extracting the predefined set of linguistic features from them. Approximately 1,100 articles were found to contain all of the following five section types: abstract, introduction, related work, discussion, and conclusion. These were chosen for the purpose of comparing the frequency of occurrence of the linguistic features across the section types. Making use of frameworks for Natural Language Processing, the Stanford CoreNLP Module, and the Python library SpaCy, as well as scripts created by the author, the frequency scores of the features were retrieved and analyzed with state-of-the-art statistical techniques.
The results show that each section type possesses an individual profile of linguistic features which are associated with it more or less strongly. These section-feature associations are shown to be derivable from the hypothesized purpose of each section type.
Overall, the findings reported in this thesis provide insights into the writing strategies that authors employ so that the overall goal of the research paper is achieved.
The results of the thesis can find implementation in new state-of-the-art applications that assist academic writing and its evaluation in a way that provides the user with a more sophisticated, empirically based feedback on the relationship between linguistic mechanisms and text type. In addition, the potential of the identification of text-type specific linguistic characteristics (a text-feature mapping) can contribute to the development of more robust language-based models for disinformation detection.
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.
In narratology, a widely recognized method involves exploring the connection between implied authors and implied readers. It entails correlating abstract narrative components within a text to understand the conveyed message and the multitude of interpretations it can offer. The present study adopts an implied reader-oriented approach to analyze three selected novels from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—one Nigerian, one Caribbean, and one Kurdish. The aim is to explore the potential readings within these texts, considering the hermeneutic process of critical reading. The selected texts include Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, (1958), Same Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, (1956), and Karwan Kakesur’s The Channels of the Armed Monkeys, (2011). This approach closely examines the communication between the author and reader of the text, with a special focus on the varying levels of communication between the components of the narration, including fictional and implied fictional communication.
The implied fictional communication occurs between a narrative agent known as ‘the implied author’ and its fictional counterpart ‘the implied reader’ rather than between the real, flesh and blood authors and readers. I argue that this level of communication is coded, and the act of decoding it is part of the reading process performed by the reader. Certain texts can propose different and sometimes opposing readings which are initially and purposefully designed by the implied author and addressed to different implied readers. These readings are not necessarily the results of different real readers but rather incorporated ones predetermined by the implied author only to be acknowledged and uncovered by the readers. In other words, the latent meaning is and always was an integral part of the text and is not something created by the imaginative reader or critic. The core interest of my thesis lies in identifying prompts and suggestions within the narrative of the selected texts and ultimately understanding the readerships prestructured in them. Identifying the different readers within those texts will provide new reinterpretations that can add undetected values to the reading process and sometimes suggests opposing readings to how those texts have so far been read. Additionally, it is the objective of this thesis to propose new ways that readers can interact with reading literature that would result in a more aesthetic and entertaining reading experience besides providing ways to be more informed and aware of the cues certain narrative texts contain.
There have been numerous critical studies on both narratology and postcolonial or minority literatures; however, there has been little scholarly work that attempts to utilize narratology as a theoretical foundation for understanding postcolonial and minority fiction.
This study examines fictional texts from Nigerian, Caribbean, and Kurdish literature, employing the narratological concept known as ‘Multiple Implied Readers’. By incorporating concepts from Brian Richardson’s ‘Singular Text, Multiple Implied Readers’, and Peter J. Rabinowitz’s ‘authorial audiences’, I explore the various readerships that the texts could encompass. This exploitation may lead to the discovery of new readings, interpretations, and meanings that would otherwise remain undetected. These structures introduce provocative indeterminacies that challenge the reader’s synthesis of information into coherent configurations of meaning. Consequently, this approach not only enhances the reading experience but also opens doors to new interpretations of the text. In some cases, these interpretations could even dismantle prior understandings and propose entirely new readings.
The concepts of the implied author and implied reader have been studied before in relation to various disciplines of narratology. However, by applying them in conjunction with the relatively less researched subject of multiple implied readers, I aim to shed light on important aspects of these readings. This exploration could prove beneficial for literature students as well as critical readers of literary texts, revealing the potential of these texts to accommodate more than one implied reader within their narratives.
This dissertation is concerned with the role of prosody and, specifically, linguistic rhythm for the syntactic processing of written text. My aim is to put forward, provide evidence for, and defend the following claims:
1. While processing written sentences, readers make use of their phonological knowledge and generate a mental prosodic-phonological representation of the printed text.
2. The mental prosodic representation is constructed in accordance with a syntactic description of the written string. Constraints at the interface of syntax and phonology provide for the compatibility of the syntactic analysis and the (mental) prosodic rendition of the sentence.
3. The implicit prosodic structure readers impose on the written string entails phonological phrasing and accentuation, but also lower level prosodic features such as linguistic rhythm which emerges from the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.
4. Phonological well-formedness conditions accompany and influence the process of syntactic parsing in reading from the very beginning, i.e. already at the level of recognizing lexical categories. At points of underspecified syntactic structure, syntactic parsing decisions may be made on the basis of phonological constraints alone.
5. In reading, the implicit local lexical-prosodic information may be more readily available to the processing mechanism than higher-level discourse structural representations and consequently may have more immediate influence on sentence processing.
6. The process of sentence comprehension in reading is conditioned by factors that are geared towards sentence production.
7. The interplay of syntactic and phonological processes in reading can be explained with recourse to a performance-compatible competence grammar.
The evidence from three reading experiments supports these points and suggests a model of grammatical competence in which constraints from various domains (syntax, semantics, pragmatics, discourse structure, and phonology) interact in providing the possible structural, i.e. grammatical descriptions.
Does linguistic rhythm matter to syntax, and if so, what kinds of syntactic decisions are susceptible to rhythm? By means of two recall-based sentence production experiments and two corpus studies – one on spoken and one on written language – we investigated whether linguistic rhythm affects the choice between introduced and un-introduced complement clauses in German. Apart from the presence or absence of the complementiser dass (‘that’), these two sentence types differ with respect to the position of the tensed verb (verb-final/verb-second). Against our predictions, that were based on previously reported rhythmic effects on the use of the optional complementiser that in English, the experiments fail to obtain compelling evidence for rhythmic/prosodic influences on the structure of complement clauses in German. An overview of pertinent studies showing rhythmic influences on syntactic encoding suggests these effects to be generally restricted to syntactic domains smaller than a clause. We assume that, in the course of language production, initially, clause level syntactic projections are specified; their specification is in fact the prerequisite for phonological encoding to start. Consequently, prosodic effects may only touch upon the lower level categories that are to be integrated into the clausal projection, but not upon the syntactic makeup of the higher order projection itself.
Understanding a sentence and integrating it into the discourse depends upon the identification of its focus, which, in spoken German, is marked by accentuation. In the case of written language, which lacks explicit cues to accent, readers have to draw on other kinds of information to determine the focus. We study the joint or interactive effects of two kinds of information that have no direct representation in print but have each been shown to be influential in the reader's text comprehension: (i) the (low-level) rhythmic-prosodic structure that is based on the distribution of lexically stressed syllables, and (ii) the (high-level) discourse context that is grounded in the memory of previous linguistic content. Systematically manipulating these factors, we examine the way readers resolve a syntactic ambiguity involving the scopally ambiguous focus operator auch (engl. “too”) in both oral (Experiment 1) and silent reading (Experiment 2). The results of both experiments attest that discourse context and local linguistic rhythm conspire to guide the syntactic and, concomitantly, the focus-structural analysis of ambiguous sentences. We argue that reading comprehension requires the (implicit) assignment of accents according to the focus structure and that, by establishing a prominence profile, the implicit prosodic rhythm directly affects accent assignment.
Combining cultural history with the insights of psychoanalytic theory, this article examines Maurice Sendak's Caldecott-winning and controversial Where the Wild Things Are (1963), arguing that Sendak’s book represents picturebook psychology as it stood in the early 1960s but also radically recasts it, paving the way for a groundswell in applied picturebook psychology. The book can be understood as rewriting classical Freudian analysis, retaining some of its rigor and edge while making it more palatably American. Where the Wild Things Are has been embraced as a psychological primer, a story about anger and its management through fantasy; it is also a text in which echoes of Freud remain audible. It is read it here as a bedtime-story version of Freud’s Wolf Man case history of 1918, an updated and upbeat dream of the wolf boy. It is to Sendak what the Wolf Man case was to Freud, a career-making feral tale. Standing at the crossroads of Freudian tradition, child analysis, humanistic psychology, and bibliotherapy, the article reveals how the book both clarified and expanded the uses of picturebook enchantment.
This dissertation is concerned with the phenomenon of intervention effects, observed in three different domains: wh-questions, alternative questions (AltQ) and Negative Polarity Item (NPI) licensing. I propose that these three domains share some common properties, namely, they all involve focus-sensitive licensing, and are thus sensitive to an intervening focus phrase. The overview of the dissertation is as follows. In chapter 2, I discuss the phenomenon of intervention effects in wh-questions, brought to light in the discussion of German in Beck (1996), and Korean in Beck and Kim (1997). The basic idea of their analysis is that quantifiers block LF wh-movement. I show that intervention effects are observed in many other languages, too, suggesting that the intervention effect has a universal character. I then point out some problems with the analysis proposed by Beck (1996) and Beck and Kim (1997). In chapter 3, I propose a new generalization of the wh-intervention effects, namely that the core set of interveners, which is crosslinguistically stable, consists of focus phrases (and not quantifiers in general). Furthermore, I argue that the wh-intervention effect is actually an instance of the more general intervention effect, the "Focus Intervention Effect", which says that in a focus-sensitive licensing construction, no independent focus phrase may intervene between the licensor Op and the licensee XP. The underlying idea is that the Q operator is a focus-sensitive operator and that wh-phrases in-situ are dependent (i.e., semantically deficient) focus elements, which must be associated with the Q operator in order to be interpreted. An intervening independent focus operator precisely blocks that association. I further propose that the domain of focus-sensitive licensing includes not only wh-licensing, but also AltQ-licensing and NPI-licensing. In chapter 4, I show that alternative questions are also subject to the focus intervention effect, just like wh-questions. I provide evidence that the intervention effect in wh-questions and in alternative questions should receive a parallel analysis, in terms of focus-sensitivity. In chapter 5, I discuss a third construction which is sensitive to the focus intervention effect: the licensing of Negative Polarity Items (NPIs). I show that focus consistently blocks NPI licensing, with data from German and Korean. I propose that NPIs are also semantically deficient focus elements, which need to be associated with a NEG operator. Finally, chapter 6 summarizes the intervention effects and suggests some topics for future research into the precise nature of the intervention effect.
"Eurocomprehension" is the term used to describe European intercomprehension in Europe’s three major language families, the Romance, the Slavic and the Germanic. The aim of eurocomprehension is to achieve multilingualism conforming to EU language policy goals through the entry-point of receptive competence in a modular structure. Linguistic intercomprehension research forms the transfer bases for the cognitive use of relations between the language groups which didactics of multilingualism implement. ...
This special issue explores how finance deploys time, structures the future, and interacts with actors and institutions that sometimes function according to very different temporal regimes. Finance capitalism’s logic of recurrence, repetitive cycles, and successive ruptures has long been with us, but the essays in this special issue are particularly interested in how recent decades of intensified financialization have restructured temporal experience. They interrogate the production and dissemination of agency in an age of acceleration, risk, and uncertainty, asking how the temporality inscribed in financial transactions emerges from and simultaneously shapes individual and social practice. Topics covered range from the logic of finance and foundational concepts of financial theory to the intersection between objective structures and social practice, the role of literature, and finally questions of social insecurity, political action, and the possibility of resistance within a context of competing temporalities. In this introduction, the editors delineate some fundamental concepts and questions for our financial times.
Impairment in past tense production as well as interaction between tense and aspect have been found in both fluent and non-fluent aphasia (e.g. Dragoy & Bastiaanse, 2013). Inflection has been found to be relatively preserved in semantic dementia (SD) (Thompson et al., 2012). The aims of the present study are a) to compare the morphosyntactic abilities of patients with aphasia and SD in tense and aspect marking and b) to explore the interaction of lexical (+/- telic) and grammatical (perfective/imperfective) aspect in aphasia and SD. A sentence completion task was administered to 30 native speakers of Greek: 10 patients with aphasia (6 anomic, 2 Wernicke and 2 agrammatic), 10 age and education-matched controls, 5 patients with SD and 5 controls. The material consisted of unergative, unaccusative and transitive verbs (12 of each verb class) and the participants had to apply present (imperfective) and past (perfective) tense. Unergative and unaccusative verbs differ in terms of their aspectual properties with the unergative being [-telic], and unaccusative [+telic]. Transitive verbs vary. A principal distinction between the tested conditions was the standard ummarked combination ([+telic] verbs in past perfective and [–telic] verbs in present imperfective) vs. the marked one ([+telic] verbs in present imperfective and [–telic] in past perfective). Both control groups performed at ceiling in all conditions. Aphasic participants were significantly more impaired than the control group in all conditions. SD participants were significantly more impaired than the controls only in the production of present tense (M-W U= 1.5, p= 0.024). There was no difference between past perfective and present imperfective for neither group, but there was an interaction between verb class and tense for the aphasic participants, as performance in unaccusative verbs in past perfective (unmarked condition) was significantly better than in unergatives in past perfective (marked condition) (Z=2.512, p=0.012) but performance in unaccusatives in present imperfective (marked condition) was significantly worse than performance in unergatives in present imperfective (unmarked condition) (Z=2.680, p=0.004). In sum, aphasic participants performed significantly better in the unmarked than in the marked conditions. Such an interaction was not found for the SD group. Aphasic participants performed significantly worse than the SD subjects in past perfective tense (M-W U= 7.5, p=0.029) in total, and the difference was significant only for unaccusative verbs (M-W U= 6.5, p=0.021), although both groups performed very well in this condition. There was no difference in present, neither for each verb class separately nor for the total score. A general past tense deficit cannot be upheld for either group. Rather, SD participants appear relatively impaired in producing present tense. We argue for slight morphosyntactic impairment in SD, although with a different underlying cause than in aphasia. Moreover, our data suggest an effect of aspectual markedness in aphasia but not in SD. We discuss this finding in the light of the different neuropathology of the two populations.
Verb production in stroke induced aphasia and semantic dementia: similarities and dissociations
(2012)
This thesis revolves around the development of a new critical approach to contemporary anglophone postcolonial literature in the form of a concept of ‘corporate ingression.’ This term denotes a globally recurring process of biopolitical (re)structuring of a community by corporate power and its extended cultural influence on society.
Through an analysis of contemporary engagements with similarly explored events over time and space in the form of three novels (Helon Habila’s Oil on Water, Lauren Beukes’ Moxyland and David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), this thesis explores the relevance of the concept of corporate ingression as a new approach to such imaginative works. By reading these texts closely, with and against the grain, I enter into dialogue with their discussion of corporate power as the major structural influence in the societies they explore. I also show that a comparative analysis of these texts reveals similarities between the exploration of the period of early colonialism as acted out by the various trade corporations in existence and contemporary forms of corporate dominance. This research thus concerns various contexts and explorations of corporate power and explores the concept of recurring forms of corporate ingression as a new perspective within literary postcolonial and globalisation studies.
Oil on Water (2010) as a political novel explores the complex intricacies of communities structured around corporate power and presents a full account of the stakeholders that are influenced by or connected to the Niger Delta’s oil industry. Moxyland (2008) as a futuristic cyberpunk novel nuances the destruction implied in Oil on Water as a major factor of corporate ingression by exploring corporate power’s potential for constructive influence over a community. The Thousand Autumns (2010) as a historical novel explores an instance of corporate ingression in which the Dutch East India Company in Japan, despite its significant cultural influence, is subordinate to the host state to its activity. Corporate power is explored as a fallible construction that can be controlled by a strong regime as well as benefited from.
Despite the geographic and temporal distance between the three cases, and despite their exploration of widely differing industries, circumstances and levels of success, the common factors remain recognisable. Critical analysis shows that the contrasts between especially the constructive and destructive corporate activity in the three texts is of great interest, as it highlights the potential of corporate power both for construction and destruction of value. This research also shows how each novel actively resists a binary ethical narrative, instead presenting a set of complex power dynamics within the respective communities.
With this research I show that reading corporate ingression both significantly informs the reading of various postcolonial texts, while also showing that the analysis of these texts reveals that a conventional postcolonial binary approach is insufficient to account for what these works describe and investigate. The concept of a process of corporate ingression as a new perspective on literary explorations of historical, contemporary or futuristic forms of corporate power is thus shown to be a relevant addition to current postcolonial literary scholarship.
This work deals with so-called wh-determination. The notion of D-linking (Discourse-linking) is used to uncover and explain properties of constructions involving wh-determiners. The central claim is that there are two types of wh-determination: Token-whs and Kind-whs. These two forms of wh-determination trigger different syntactic effects. Three structural triggers for the syntactic effects exhibited by D-linked wh-phrases (DWH) are discussed. DWH are argued to be instances of Token-whs since triggers for the syntactic effects of D-linking are identical to the once for the token-reading of a wh-phrase.
In chapter 2, which-phrases are shown to be canonical DWH with a special syntax labelled DL-S(yntax). The five most prominent and frequent DL-S effects are the absence of superiority-effects with DWH, the ability of DWH to be extracted out of weak islands, the fact that DWH licence resumptive elements, the obviation of WCO effects by DWH, and the possibility for DWH to stay in-situ. The syntax of Token-whs and Kind-whs are compared. It is demonstrated that regardless of the actual form of the wh-determiner, there are only these two types of wh-determination. These data support the idea that the DL-S effects observable with DWH are triggered by structural properties of the wh-determiners heading DWH.
In chapter 3, it is demonstrated that although presuppositions projected by the Nominal Restrictor are important for triggering DL-I(nterpretation), they do not directly influence DL-S. The ambiguity of Amount-whs is also examined and the conclusion reached is that there are two #P projections: A NumP and a CardP. The dissertation proceeds with the structurally represented notions of definiteness and specificity and examines how these can help capturing the wh-determiner typology proposed. The idea that D-linking can be explained by recourse to topicality is discussed in detail. Empirical evidence is provided for the existence of wh-topics in general and for the claim that many DWH can be construed as wh-topics.
In chapter 4, the general pattern on which wh-pronouns are built are examined, and it is argued that the results bear directly on the topic of this thesis since wh-determiners are universally derived from pronouns. Wh-pronouns are diachronically built out of an element indicating the function of the proform (wh-morpheme), and an element denoting the range of the proform (Range Restrictor). Among other things, it is argued that the wh-morpheme does not mark interrogativity, leading to the adoption of a version of Q-theory. It is also briefly discussed whether the results are compatible with the hypothesis that wh-determiner phrases are Small Clauses. One claim is that all wh-pronouns are fossilized interrogative sentences, lending further support to the parallelism between sentential and nominal structures. It is then argued that Morphological Restrictors can be subdivided into Formal Features and Functional Nouns (and that elements which can become Functional Nouns are taken from the pool of Basic Ontological Categories). The question answered is how these elements synchronically contribute to the meaning of the wh-determiners. After examining the role of the Nominal Restrictor to the syntax of wh-determiners, the thesis continues investigating how Nominal Restrictor are related to Functional Nouns. Finally, the discussion expands to the structural correlates for DL-S effects. It is demonstrated how the results can formally be applied to wh-split constructions in order to explain differences between empty categories. Then, the results of the section on partitivity support the idea that the occurrences of most of the DL-S effects seem to strongly depend on the presence of a second nominal constituent in the structure of wh-phrases. This second nominal can be either a Functional Noun inside the wh-item used as wh-pronoun or an overt second noun as in wh-partitive phrases.
The contribution of this thesis to linguistic theorizing is not a full-fledged technical analysis of every single DL-S effect, but rather the systemisation proposed. Although a lot of terminology is introduced, the outcome of this proliferation of terms is a sharper picture of the intricate relations between the constituents of the wh-items used as wh-determiners and the Nominal Restrictor. Another main conclusion is that the concept of D-linking is not a basic notion. It is comprised of four components (of which DL-Syntax and Morphological-DL have been scrutinized in this thesis). This assumption explains why DWH do not constitute a homogeneous class. The gradual character of D-linking (i.e. the fact that certain wh-determiner constructions show only a subset of DL-S effects even if they are headed by what could faithfully be classified as a/the Token-wh determiner of the respective language) is argued to be related to the fact that the Token-reading itself can have several triggers.
This article focuses on the opportunities and challenges of implementing an extensive reading project in an English as a foreign language classroom in Germany. Studies such as PISA have shown that comparatively poor German and foreign language reading skills are still a prevalent issue in German society today. Consequently, the question of how these poor results can be improved is of utmost importance. Reading motivation is often described as the ‘driving force of reading’. Research has shown that if reading motivation and reading for pleasure are supported, interest in reading in a foreign language can be created, which may in turn have a positive impact on the other influential factors in reading and related skills. Dörnyei’s framework of L2 motivation sums up the current thinking on reading motivation. With its constituents ‘language’, ‘learner’, and ‘learning situation’, it shows the aspects to be taken into consideration when it comes to the improvement of motivation. Within this theoretical framework, an ER project was conducted at a grammar school (Gymnasium) in Frankfurt/Main, Germany. On the basis of the gathered data, gained from questionnaires, worksheets and the transcript of a focus group discussion, six main categories could be identified. They point to the development of a positive attitude towards reading among the students and the potential of graphic novels as a motivating factor. It was also confirmed that a successful application of reading strategies led to increased motivation. Generally, the project showed that reading is still an issue amongst many teenagers and that an ER project can affect learners, their motivation and related language skills in a positive way.
In this article I explore the construction of singing child characters in Isaac Watts’ Divine and Moral Songs for Children (1715) and Christopher Smart’s Hymns for the Amusement of Children (1771). The first part focusses on the nature of the lyrical persona within the lexical fields »voice and vocal sound« and »religion« and also looks at the possible addressees. The second part examines stylistic, phonetic, and formal elements, and explores their role in constructing the ›singing I.‹ To show the potential of Watts’ »Against Quarrelling and Fighting« to function as an invitation to playfully adopt behaviour opposed to Christian norms, the article examines a performance of Let Dogs Delight to Bark and Bite, a chorale by Matthew J. Zimnoch, whose text is taken from Watts’ hymn. Combining approaches from research on children’s poetry with ones from the interface of children’s literature and hymnody, the article also integrates a digitally supported close reading. The hymn texts were inputted into f4analyse, a software used in text linguistics and the social sciences, which allows for the assignment of categories, such as positive self-connotation of the ›singing I‹ or rhyme patterns. In conclusion, the article evaluates the potential of such a digitally supported research methodology for future research at the intersection of children’s literature and digital humanities.
The individual parameter
(2018)
The present thesis tackles the unification of two-dimensional semantic systems, which are designed to deal with context-dependency of a certain kind i.e. indexicality, with dynamic theories of meaning, designed to capture facts about anaphoricity and the distribution of definite and indefinite articles. The need for a more principled look at this unification is twofold. Firstly, there is an overlap of these two families of theories in terms of empirical data, namely third person personal pronouns, as well as definite descriptions. Both kinds of expressions have anaphoric as well as non-anaphoric usages, whereas some of the latter ones can be captured in terms of indexicality. But, on the other hand, no language, especially not German and English, the main sources of data in this thesis, seems to distinguish these two usages formally, i.e. by employing different expressions. Hence the need for a unified framework in which this sort of ambiguity can be treated. Secondly, the theoretical state is dissatisfactory in the sense that the families of theories take very disparate forms that are not easy to relate conceptually.
The overlap in empirical area of application strongly suggests that this dichotomy is an artifact of the way these theories traditionally are developed and justified. This thesis seeks to overcome this state of the field. It proceeds as follows.
The first chapter discusses the way in which theories indexicality are designed. After taking a closer look some hallmarks of these theories such as the notions of index- and context-dependency themselves, double indexing, etc., it develops a notion of index dependency that makes use of a more complex individual parameter than the one that is usually assumed in the literature. Apart from agents and addressees, the two standard components of indices that represent contexts, additional objects are assumed. This leads to a variant of the semantics of deictically used third person expression that is called ‘indexical theory of demonstratives’, which is then investigated further.
The second chapter discusses the classics of dynamic semantics: DRT, DPL, and FCS. It arrives at the common core of all of these theories that consists in the assumption of a novel sort of variable namely active variables as opposed to free and bound ones that are intended to model the behavior of (in)definite descriptions and pronouns. The projection behavior of these variables or discourse referents is described either in (discourse-)syntactic or semantic terms. The chapter also arrives at a new formulation of the uniqueness condition that is thought to be part of the semantics of definite descriptions and sketches an account of transparent negation.
The third chapter then combines the insights of the previous ones by developing the notion of representation that connects the entities of evaluation of the first chapter i.e. indices with those of the second namely sets of assignments, a.k.a. files. The formal language that emerged in the second chapter is endowed with two kinds of variables for situations to allow for double indexing within a dynamic setting. A novel interpretation mechanism for the so designed language is proposed, which is shown to capture not only those aspects that are known to exist in two-dimensional frameworks, but also certain other index-index interactions that are described in yet another body of literature.
The final chapter discusses potential flaws of the theory and sketches an account of allegedly bound indexicals that is compatible with Kaplan’s infamous ban on monsters.
George Orwells Roman 1984 aus dem Jahre 1949 gilt gemeinhin als einer der Klassiker dystopischer Literatur. Auch wenn das tatsächliche Jahr 1984 inzwischen Vergangenheit ist, hat Orwell’s Entwurf einer repressiven, totalitären Gesellschaft bis heute nichts an Aktualität eingebüßt. Konzepte wie „Big Brother“ oder „doublethink“ sind in unseren alltäglichen Wortschatz übergegangen, und Orwells Roman bildet auch weiterhin das Vorbild für viele aktuelle Dystopien. Doch nicht nur Orwells Darstellung eines düsteren, futuristischen Überwachungsstaates, in dem eine Gruppe von Machtinhabern versucht, sowohl die Vergangenheit als auch die Gedanken der Bevölkerung zu steuern, verkörpert wichtige Leitmotive dystopischer Literatur. Auch die Rolle und Anwendung von Sprache in dieser Zukunftsvision hat nachhaltig seine Spuren in dystopischer Literatur hinterlassen, auch wenn diese Rolle in der Forschungsliteratur häufig übersehen wird. Zwar befassen sich regelmäßig Kritiker mit dem Aspekt von Sprache in Romanen wie 1984 oder Aldous Huxleys Brave New World, allerdings gibt es kaum komparative Studien, die Sprache als ein eigenes, zentrales dystopisches Motiv sehen, sondern Sprache in der Regel in andere Aspekte subsumieren.
George Orwells Roman 1984 aus dem Jahre 1949 gilt gemeinhin als einer der Klassiker dystopischer Literatur. Auch wenn das tatsächliche Jahr 1984 inzwischen Vergangenheit ist, hat Orwell’s Entwurf einer repressiven, totalitären Gesellschaft bis heute nichts an Aktualität eingebüßt. Konzepte wie „Big Brother“ oder „doublethink“ sind in unseren alltäglichen Wortschatz übergegangen, und Orwells Roman bildet auch weiterhin das Vorbild für viele aktuelle Dystopien. Doch nicht nur Orwells Darstellung eines düsteren, futuristischen Überwachungsstaates, in dem eine Gruppe von Machtinhabern versucht, sowohl die Vergangenheit als auch die Gedanken der Bevölkerung zu steuern, verkörpert wichtige Leitmotive dystopischer Literatur. Auch die Rolle und Anwendung von Sprache in dieser Zukunftsvision hat nachhaltig seine Spuren in dystopischer Literatur hinterlassen, auch wenn diese Rolle in der Forschungsliteratur häufig übersehen wird. Zwar befassen sich regelmäßig Kritiker mit dem Aspekt von Sprache in Romanen wie 1984 oder Aldous Huxleys Brave New World, allerdings gibt es kaum komparative Studien, die Sprache als ein eigenes, zentrales dystopisches Motiv sehen, sondern Sprache in der Regel in andere Aspekte subsumieren.
Die vorliegende Arbeit, befasst sich mit genau dieser Unzulänglichkeit. Anhand von acht dystopischen Romanen in Englischer Sprache, die allesamt in den letzten 80 Jahren erschienen sind, wird die Rolle von Sprache herausgearbeitet, und ihre Relevanz für das Genre der Dystopie deutlich gemacht. Die verwendeten Werke sind, in chronologischer Reihenfolge: Aldous Huxleys Brave New World (1932), George Orwells 1984 (1949), Anthony Burgess‘ Clockwork Orange (1960), Russell Hobans Riddley Walker (1980), Suzette Haden Elgins Native Tongue (1984) und The Judas Rose (1987), Margaret Atwoods The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), sowie Will Selfs The Book of Dave (2006). Die Romane sind bewusst gewählt, um einen größtmöglichen Rahmen und Zeitraum abzudecken, der zudem unterschiedliche Strömungen und Traditionen innerhalb des Genres der dystopischen Literatur aufgreift.
Bevor die eigentliche Textanalyse beginnt, werden zunächst Entstehung und Charakteristika des dystopischen Konzeptes erläutert. Die Studie blickt kurz auf die Entwicklung der Utopie, dem Gegenkonzept von Dystopie, von der Klassik zur Moderne und verfolgt anschließend die Entstehung anti-utopischer Tendenzen bis hin zum Auftreten der Dystopie, einer speziellen Unterkategorie anti-utopischer Literatur, im späten 19. Jahrhundert. Darauf basierend werden einige der wichtigsten Leitmotive vorgestellt, die im weiteren Verlauf auch in Verbindung mit Sprache eine maßgebliche Rolle spielen. Zu guter Letzt wird auch auf die Problematik der Organisation und Klassifikation von Sprache in der folgenden Analyse eingegangen. Nicht nur ist Sprache an sich ein weitreichender Begriff; auch die Verwendung von Sprache in den einzelnen Romanen ist sehr unterschiedlich geprägt. So sind beispielsweise Romane wie Riddley Walker, Clockwork Orange und Book of Dave komplett oder zu weiten Teilen in einer eigenen, fiktiven Sprache verfasst, die verfügt, dass der Leser seinen Interpretationsrahmen anpassen muss. In anderen Romane dagegen, wie in Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale oder 1984, spielt Sprache dagegen fast ausschließlich auf der Handlungsebene eine Rolle. Eine umfangreiche Analyse erfordert es, alle Aspekte des Sprachgebrauchs abzudecken, auch wenn der begrenzte Rahmen dieser Arbeit es nur zulässt, die wichtigsten Aspekte in dieser Hinsicht abzudecken.
Aus den unterschiedlichen Formen des Sprachgebrauch, in dem sich auf Sprache sowohl als Schrift- wie Sprechmedium bezogen wird, geht auch der Aufbau der Hauptanalyse hervor: Im ersten Teil wird auf die Rolle von Sprache auf der Handlungsebene eingegangen. Es wird, unter Zuhilfenahme von Michel Foucaults Diskurstheorie, gezeigt, wie Sprache auf der einen Seite von einer autoritären Macht oder Institution verwendet wird, um bestimmte Diskurse durchzusetzen, die Stabilität der dystopischen Gesellschaft zu garantieren und das Äußern von kritischen Gedanken abzuwenden. Auf der anderen Seite, analog zu Foucaults Diskurs-Begriff, wonach ein Diskurs immer auch seinen Widerstand produziert, wird Sprache in einigen Romanen jedoch als gegenteiliges Medium eingesetzt; als ein Medium zur Befreiung und Wahrung der Individualität. Die wechselseitige Beziehung wird ausgiebig analysiert. Im dritten Analysepunkt wird die Beziehung zwischen sozialer Klasse und Status aufgedeckt.
Die zweite Hälfte der Studie wendet sich von der Handlungsebene ab und konzentriert sich auf stilistische und strukturelle Aspekte. Es wird gezeigt, wie Sprache von den Autoren benutzt wird, um die dystopische Erfahrung zu verstärken, wie die Einbindung von fiktiven Sprachen, Para- und Intertextualität sowie Namensgebung als stilistisches Mittel verwendet wird, das im Gegenzug zwei der wichtigsten Charakteristika dystopischer Literatur hervorhebt: Zum einen die didaktische Absicht, mit der Dystopien vor einer möglichen (und unweigerlich schlechteren) Zukunft warnen, falls keine Gegenmaßnahmen ergriffen werden, und zum anderen, wie Dystopien gezielt Aspekte aus der Zeit der Autoren aufgreifen, und diese in den Rahmen der Handlungsstruktur extrapolieren. Basierend auf dieser Annahme werden zum Abschluss einige Sprach- und kulturtheoretische Ideen aufgegriffen, die ihren Weg in die einzelnen Werke gefunden haben, und somit einen eigenen Diskurs von Sprache im dystopischen Roman ermöglichen.
Zum Abschluss der Arbeit werden die Ergebnisse aufgegriffen und im Hinblick auf eine mögliche Repositionierung von Sprache in der Forschung des dystopischen Romanes evaluiert. Es werden drei bestimmte Funktionen von Sprachgebrauch anhand der Analyse erschlossen und abschließend vorgeschlagen, Sprache zukünftig als eigenes Motiv innerhalb dystopischer Literatur zu sehen, da der Aspekt von Sprache in den hier diskutierten Texten unweigerlich mit der Absicht und Form der Dystopie in Einklang steht.
Multilingual research could offer a unique perspective on how the languages already acquired by a person affect the online processing of a new language. But it is currently difficult to assess this issue because theoretical accounts of multilingualism have focused on acquisition rather than processing and most empirical research to date has gathered untimed (offline) evidence. To help bridge this gap, we formulate hypotheses that can help derive processing predictions from existing accounts of multilingualism. But crucially, and based on previous findings in second language processing, we identify ways in which assumptions about crosslinguistic influence may need to be revised to allow the separate treatment of lexical and syntactic processing, and to consider the role of variables such as language dominance and proficiency. In our view, the question of what's special about multilingualism is worth studying, but more research is needed before we can begin answering it.
This thesis primarily investigates an (hitherto unnoticed) agreement alternation between Romance and Germanic in D>N>&>N constructions (e.g. “these walls and ceiling”). While Romance exhibits left conjunct agreement, Germanic shows morphologically resolved agreement on the determiner, i.e. the phi-feature mismatching conjuncts can only be licensed if a syncretic form is available. To handle these data the author suggests a theory in which coordination is syntactically and morphologically unspecified and multiple agree is a general option. Infelicitous derivations are ruled out by interface conditions on the semantic and the phonological well formedness. The complete results of the corpus research conducted to deliver a sound empirical basis for the phenomena investigated in this thesis can be found in the appendix.
Nature's non-material contributions to people are difficult to quantify and one aspect in particular, nature's contributions to communication (NCC), has so far been neglected. Recent advances in automated language processing tools enable us to quantify diversity patterns underlying the distribution of plant and animal taxon labels in creative literature, which we term BiL (biodiversity in literature). We assume BiL to provide a proxy for people's openness to nature's non-material contributions enhancing our understanding of NCC. We assembled a comprehensive list of 240,000 English biological taxon labels. We pre-processed and searched a subcorpus of digitised literature on Project Gutenberg for these labels. We quantified changes in biodiversity indices commonly used in ecological studies for 16,000 books, encompassing 4,000 authors, as proxies for BiL between 1705 and 1969. We observed hump-shape patterns for taxon label richness, abundance and Shannon diversity indicating a peak of BiL in the middle of the 19th century. This is also true for the ratio of biological to general lexical richness. The variation in label use between different sections within books, quantified as β-diversity, declined until the 1830s and recovered little, indicating a less specialised use of taxon labels over time. This pattern corroborates our hypothesis that before the onset of industrialisation BiL may have increased, reflecting several concomitant influences such as the general broadening of literary content, improved education and possibly an intensified awareness of the starting loss of biodiversity during the period of romanticism. Given that these positive trends continued and that we do not find support for alternative processes reducing BiL, such as language streamlining, we suggest that this pronounced trend reversal and subsequent decline of BiL over more than 100 years may be the consequence of humans’ increasing alienation from nature owing to major societal changes in the wake of industrialisation. We conclude that our computational approach of analysing literary communication using biodiversity indices has a high potential for understanding aspects of non-material contributions of biodiversity to people. Our approach can be applied to other corpora and would benefit from additional metadata on taxa, works and authors.
The rebellious spirit of 1968 was characterised, among other things, by a strong aversion to authority of any form. In Dutch children’s literature, this spirit is personified by the author Miep Diekmann. From the end of the 1950s until the end of the 1980s, Diekmann contested all kinds of social injustice, both in her children’s books and in her critical work. This article discusses how she challenged the status quo in Dutch children’s literature, firstly through her efforts to improve the cultural status of children’s literature, and secondly through writing books with a different view of the world than the one with which children were then familiar. In interviews, reviews, and discussions with politicians, she successfully appealed for more academic and critical attention for books for young readers. With her children’s books she wanted to make her readers think independently about all kinds of social injustice. Whereas in her first books a tension can be observed between her ambition to make children aware of forms of inequality and her intention to let her reading audience judge for themselves, in her later novels, in particular in De dagen van olim, [The Days of Yore] (1971), she presents social injustice in a way that leaves more to the imagination of her readers.
Background: Task switch protocols are frequently used in the assessment of cognitive control, both in clinical and non-clinical populations. These protocols frequently confound task switch and attentional set shift. The current study investigated the ability of adult ADHD patients to shift attentional set in the context of switching tasks.
Method: We tested 38 adults with ADHD and 39 control adults with an extensive diagnostic battery and a task switch protocol without proactive interference. The experiment combined orthogonally task-switch vs. repetition, and attentional set shift vs. no shift. Each experimental stimulus had global and local features (Hierarchical/"Navon" stimuli), associated with corresponding attentional sets.
Results: ADHD patients were slower than controls in task switch trials with a simultaneous shift of attention between global/local attentional sets. This also correlated significantly with diagnostic scales for ADHD symptoms. The patients had more variable reaction times, but when the attentional set was kept constant neither were they significantly slower nor showed higher task switch costs.
Conclusion: ADHD is associated with a deficit in flexible deployment of attention to varying sources of stimulus information.
This dissertation explores the linguistic identity changes of Chinese international students in Germany, and the relationship between their identity reconstruction and their multilingual competence. With the social turn (Block, 2003) of applied linguistics, research on study abroad has shown that student sojourners abroad encounter challenges not only to their language abilities, but also to their identities, which explains the vast individual differences in the measurable outcomes of student sojourns abroad. However, the realm of learners’ linguistic identity development in the English as a lingua franca (ELF) and multilingual contexts remains to be further explored, since most existing studies examined learners in the target language community. Guided by poststructuralist views and sociocultural theories, this study is designed with a view towards investigating the lived experience of Chinese international students at German universities.
Employing a qualitative approach, my research tracked seventeen Chinese students’ experiences of language learning and use in both their social lives and academic settings over one year. The empirical work combined semi-structured, in-depth interviews and emails. Three rounds of one-to-one interviews were conducted every 6 months and each round focused on students’ respective past, present and future. The grounded theory approach (Corbin & Strauss, 2015) was used in this study to analyse the data, aiming at generating theoretical explanations for phenomena through constant comparison.
The results of the category-based analysis offer a new lens on the intricate linguistic identity development of Chinese students in the study abroad context. The construction of their new identity facets is related to various contextual elements in experiences of their language learning and use. More importantly, learners’ identity changes related to the use of ELF is conceived as within a framework of multilingualism (Jenkins, 2015). In any given social interaction, learners’ linguistic identities are influenced by a combination of factors: perceived linguistic proficiency gap, power distribution,preferred communication styles, sensitivity to second/third language self-images and openness to new cultures. It is these factors, instead of the lingua franca context or
target language context per se, that come into play in the reformation of learners’
linguistic identities. Learners’ linguistic identity changes, together with their priority setting in studying abroad, are in turn interconnected with their multilingual competence development.
The findings of my study suggest theories for understanding learners’ linguistic identity development and the outcomes of their language learning in the study abroad context in the face of the complexity of individual experiences. My study also demonstrates the importance to foster learners’ “self-presentational competence” (Pellegrino Aveni, 2005: 145-146) so that they could successfully negotiate new subject positions when crossing the borders.
Recent proposals suggest that timing in acquisition, i.e., the age at which a phenomenon is mastered by monolingual children, influences acquisition of the L2, interacting with age of onset of bilingualism and amount of L2 input. Here, we examine whether timing affects acquisition of the bilingual child’s heritage language, possibly modulating the effects of environmental and child-internal factors. The performance of 6- to 12-year-old Greek heritage children residing in Germany (age of onset of German: 0–4 years) was assessed across a range of nine syntactic structures via the Greek LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) Sentence Repetition Task. Based on previous studies on monolingual Greek, the structures were classified as “early” (main clauses (SVO), coordination, clitics, complement clauses, sentential negation, non-referential wh-questions) or as “late” (referential wh-questions, relatives, adverbial clauses). Current family use of Greek and formal instruction in Greek (environmental), chronological age, and age of onset of German (child-internal) were assessed via the Questionnaire for Parents of Bilingual Children (PABIQ); short-term memory (child-internal) was measured via forward digit recall. Children’s scores were generally higher for early than for late acquired structures. Performance on the three early structures with the highest scores was predicted by the amount of current family use of Greek. Performance on the three late structures was additionally predicted by forward digit recall, indicating that higher short-term memory capacity is beneficial for correctly reconstructing structurally complex sentences. We suggest that the understanding of heritage language development and the role of child-internal and environmental factors will benefit from a consideration of timing in the acquisition of the different structures.
There are two main approaches to change of state verbs. One adopts an approach in terms of a total change (becomeP, for base predicate P), i.e., a change from not being in the extension of the base predicate to being in it. The other adopts an approach in terms of a relative change (becomemore P, for base predicate P), i.e., a change for a theme in which it increases in the extent to which it holds the property denoted by the base predicate. Different languages have been analyzed using one or the other approach. I argue that both proposals are actually appropriate for analyzing related but not (completely) overlapping phenomena in the domain of derived change of state verbs in the very same language. This proposal is based on the discussion of change of state verbs in Southern Aymara that are derived with the suffixes -pta and -ra. I show that verbs with -pta convey the meaning of total change and that verbs with -ra convey the meaning of relative change. I further discuss how expressions with -pta and -ra interact: expressions with -ra implicate that the theme does not change from not being in the extension of the base to being in it. I propose an account in terms of scalar implicatures in which -pta and -ra are lexical alternatives, thus extending the domain of linguistic phenomena for which the computation of scalar implicatures is relevant.
If we want to develop a semantic analysis for explicit performatives such as I promise you to free Willy, we are faced with the following puzzle: In order to account for the speech act expressed by the performative verb, one can assume that the so-called performative clause is purely performative and provides the illocutionary force of the speech act whose content is given by the semantic object denoted by the complement clause. Yet under this perspective, the performative clause that is, next to the performative verb, the indexicals I and you that refer to the speaker and to the addressee of the utterance context is semantically invisible and does not contribute compositionally its meaning to the meaning of the entire explicit performative sentence. Conversely, if we account for the truth conditional contribution of the performative clause and deny that the meaning of the performative verb is purely performative, then we have to find a way to account for the speech act expressed by the performative verb. Of course, there is already the widely accepted and very appealing indirectness account for explicit performative utterances developed by Bach & Harnish (1979). Roughly, Bach and Harnish solve this puzzle in deriving the performativity by means of a pragmatic inference process. According to them, the important speech act performed by means of the utterance of the explicit performative sentence is a kind of the conventionalized indirect speech act. However, the boundary between semantics and pragmatics can be drawn in many various ways. Therefore, I think there could be other perspectives regarding the interface between the truth-functional treatment of the declarative explicit performative sentences and the speech acts performed with their utterances and which are expressed by the performative verbs. Hence, this thesis consists in the experiment to develop a further analysis and to check out its consequences with respect to the semantics and pragmatics of explicit performative utterances and the new interface emerged. Briefly, the experiment runs as follows: First, I develop an analysis for explicit performative sentences framed by parenthetical structures such as in (1)(a). In a second step, this parenthetical analysis is applied to the proper Austinian explicit performative sentences in (1)(b). (1) a. Tomorrow, I promise you this, I will teach them Tyrolean songs. b. I promise you that I will teach them Tyrolean songs. To analyze at first explicit performatives framed by parenthetical structures bears the convenience that we are faced with two utterances of two main clauses. In (1)(a) there is the utterance of the host sentence Tomorrow I will teach them Tyrolean songs, and the utterance of the explicit parenthetical I promise you this, where the demonstrative this refers to the utterance of Tomorrow I will teach them Tyrolean songs. Since speakers perform speech acts with utterances of main clauses, I assume that the meaning of the explicit parenthetical I promise you this specifies that the actual illocutionary force of the utterance of Tomorrow I will teach them Tyrolean songs is the illocutionary force of a promise. Hence, instead of deriving an indirect illocutionary force by means of a pragmatic inference schema, we can deal with an ordinary direct speech act that is performed with the utterance of the host sentence. This kind of analysis stresses the particular discourse function of explicit performative utterances. Performative verbs are used whenever the contextual information is not sufficient to determine the illocutionary force of the corresponding implicit speech act. The resulting consequences of the parenthetical analysis are interesting since they cast a different light on performative verbs. Surprisingly, the performative verbs are not performative at all. They do not constitute the execution of a speech act, but are execution supporting. Instead of constituting the particular illocutionary force, they merely specify the illocutionary force of the utterance of the host sentence. For instance, the speaker utters the explicit parenthetical I promise you this for specifying what he is simultaneously doing. Hence the speaker does not succeed in performing the promise simply because he is uttering I promise you this. Rather, by means of the information conveyed by the utterance of I promise you this, the potential illocutionary forces of the utterance of the host sentence are disambiguated. Thus, it is not the case that explicit parentheticals are trivially true when uttered. Their function is more complex. Their self-verifying property (‘saying so makes it so’) is explained by means of disambiguation. Furthermore, according to the parenthetical analysis, instead of being purely performative, the performative verbs contribute compositionally their meanings to the truth conditions of the entire explicit performative sentence. Together with its consequences, this analysis is applied to the proper Austinian performatives, which display subordination. I assume that regardless of their structure, explicit performatives always semantically and pragmatically behave as the parenthetical analysis predicts.
Beauty is the single most frequently and most broadly used aesthetic virtue term. The present study aimed at providing higher conceptual resolution to the broader notion of beauty by comparing it with three closely related aesthetically evaluative concepts which are likewise lexicalized across many languages: elegance, grace(fulness), and sexiness. We administered a variety of questionnaires that targeted perceptual qualia, cognitive and affective evaluations, as well as specific object properties that are associated with beauty, elegance, grace, and sexiness in personal looks, movements, objects of design, and other domains. This allowed us to reveal distinct and highly nuanced profiles of how a beautiful, elegant, graceful, and sexy appearance is subjectively perceived. As aesthetics is all about nuances, the fine-grained conceptual analysis of the four target concepts of our study provides crucial distinctions for future research.
Research on the music-language interface has extensively investigated similarities and differences of poetic and musical meter, but largely disregarded melody. Using a measure of melodic structure in music––autocorrelations of sound sequences consisting of discrete pitch and duration values––, we show that individual poems feature distinct and text-driven pitch and duration contours, just like songs and other pieces of music. We conceptualize these recurrent melodic contours as an additional, hitherto unnoticed dimension of parallelistic patterning. Poetic speech melodies are higher order units beyond the level of individual syntactic phrases, and also beyond the levels of individual sentences and verse lines. Importantly, auto-correlation scores for pitch and duration recurrences across stanzas are predictive of how melodious naive listeners perceive the respective poems to be, and how likely these poems were to be set to music by professional composers. Experimentally removing classical parallelistic features characteristic of prototypical poems (rhyme, meter, and others) led to decreased autocorrelation scores of pitches, independent of spoken renditions, along with reduced ratings for perceived melodiousness. This suggests that the higher order parallelistic feature of poetic melody strongly interacts with the other parallelistic patterns of poems. Our discovery of a genuine poetic speech melody has great potential for deepening the understanding of the music-language interface.
Writing against the odds : the south’s cultural and literary struggle against progress and modernity
(2008)
Die Literatur und Kultur der Südstaaten ist entscheidend geprägt von ihrer Orientierung an der eigenen Geschichte und Vergangenheit. Die düstere Vergangenheit, die die Gegenwart überschatten und die Zukunft determiniert ist ein Südstaatenthema par exellence und allgegenwärtig in ihrer Kultur und Literatur. Nach dem Bürgerkrieg und der Reconstruction Era ist der Süden kulturell und ökonomisch ausgeblutet, am Boden und isoliert. Nach dem Krieg weitet sich die Kluft zwischen Nord- und Südstaaten immer weiter aus, ein Prozess, der jedoch schon so alt ist wie die Vereinigten Staaten selbst und bereits im beginnenden 18. Jahrhundert seinen Anfang nimmt. Die Isolation ist gleichzeitig gewollt und ungewollt, bewusst und unbewusst. Die Scham des verlorenen Krieges und die Marginalisierung sind die Katalysatoren für die Kultivierung und das Bestreben nach Erhalt der Besonderheiten der Südstaaten, mit ihrer vermeintlich überlegenen Kultur und Moral. Es beginnt die kommerzialisierte, hoch ideologisierte Konstruktion der Geschichte und Identität der Südstaaten, die in alle Lebensbereiche strahlt. Der melancholische Blick in die Vergangenheit als wichtigste Referenz und kulturellen Fluchtpunkt ersetzt den Eintritt in die Moderne und Modernität mit ihrer Schnelllebigkeit, Austauschbarkeit und die Aufgabe der Tradition für eine rasante Gegenwart. Das Individuum der Südstaaten sieht sich statt mit einer Flut an Wahlmöglichkeiten und Optionen, mit einer einengenden Gesellschaft konfrontiert, die wenig Spielraum für Abweichungen übriglässt und ein harsches Kontrollsystem hat. Es ist eine einzigartige Mischung aus Stolz, Scham und einem Gefühl der gleichzeitigen Unter- und Überlegenheit, die einen besonders guten literarischen Nährboden hervorbringt. In dieser Arbeit wird den historischen, kulturellen, und literarischen Wurzeln der Südstaatenliteratur seit der Southern Renaissance nachgegegangen, um dann die ständig perpetuierten formalen und inhaltlichen Strukturen darzustellen, die wenig Veränderungen erfahren haben. Diese Perpetuierung resultiert aus der einzigartigen Situation der Südstaaten, aus der historischen Last, die unvermindert aktuell bleibt und längst nicht verarbeitet ist. Südstaatenautoren konnten und können nicht die traditionellen Formen und Themen ablegen, solange diese konstituierende Bestandteile der Kultur und Identität der Südstaaten bleiben. Die Südstaaten verweigern sich der Modernität und empfinden Fortschritt und die moderne Massengesellschaft nicht nur als Bedrohung, sondern als Einfluss aus den Nordstaaten, der die eigene Kultur bedroht und eine Einmischung von außen ist, die es abzuwenden gilt. Traditionsbewusste, reaktionäre Tendenzen und Elemente ziehen sich selbst durch vermeintlich progressive, moderne Entwicklungen und Phänomene. Ich kombiniere identitätskonstituierende, isolierende und melancholische Elemente und beleuchte sie historisch, kulturell und literarisch, um eine mehrschichtige Perspektive zu erlangen. Das Verständnis dieser historischen Last und deren unverminderte Bedeutung und Auswirkung auf die Literatur und Kultur der Südstaaten ist essentiell für eine tiefere Einsicht in deren Strukturen und Bedeutung.
Professionalization of service-learning in higher education – an academic development approach
(2018)
In an attempt to professionalize service-learning in higher education, teachers and their teaching skills are considered a determining factor and require particular attention. To promote the teaching skills necessary for service-learning courses, an academic development approach addressing these specific requirements has been implemented at Goethe University Frankfurt as part of the academic development program for teaching staff. This article presents the particularities of this approach and illustrates one of its central elements, i.e., the concept of a workshop on planning service-learning courses. Both practical and research implications are discussed.
In this paper, I investigate the suppletion patterns that are found in languages that make a clusivity distinction. I will show that in the triple 1SG-1EXCL-1INCL, ABA patterns do not arise, consonant with other work on suppletion patterns (Bobaljik 2012, Smith et al. 2016). That is, it is not possible for the exclusive pronoun to supplete on its own whilst the singular and inclusive share a common base. All other patterns are attested. I will argue that the lack of ABA patterns supports the view that the inclusive is the most marked category in this set (Noyer 1992, Siewierska 2004, Cysouw 2003, a.o.), and propose that there is a containment relation such that the feature set that makes up the inclusive properly contains the features that form the exclusive, following the reasoning laid out in Bobaljik (2012). I further consider the makeup of person features, and argue that the lack of ABA patterns in clusivity suggest that clusivity features are privative, rather than binary ('cf'. Harbour 2016).
Language use before and after Stonewall: a corpus-based study of gay men’s pre-Stonewall narratives
(2019)
This study presents a contrastive corpus linguistic analysis of language use before and after Stonewall. It uses theoretical insights on normativity from the field of language and sexuality to investigate how the shifting normativities associated with the Stonewall Riots (1969) – widely considered the central event of gay liberation in the Western world – have shaped our conceptualization of sexuality as it surfaces in language use. Drawing on two corpora of gay men’s pre-Stonewall narratives dating from two time periods (before and after Stonewall, called PRE and POST), the analysis combines quantitative (keyword analysis, collocation analysis) and qualitative (concordance analysis) corpus linguistic methods to examine discursive shifts as evident from narrators’ language use. The study identifies the terms homosexual and normal as central contrastive labels in PRE, and gay and straight as corresponding terms in POST. Other discursive shifts detected are from sexual desire/practices to identity (and vice versa), from an individualistic to a community-based conceptualization of sexuality, and from unquestioned heteronormativity and gender binarism to a weakening of such dominant discourses. The findings are discussed in relation to the desire-identity shift, which is traditionally assumed to have taken place at the end of the 19th century, and shed new light on Stonewall as a central event for the development of an identity-based conceptualization of sexuality as we know it today.
Whether minorities such as the Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand, the San across Southern Africa and the Métis in Canada, or native majority peoples such as the Aymara and Quechua in South America: indigenous peoples" lifeworlds have been transfigured by the difficulties originating from a history of conquest, settlement and suppression. The imperialist strife of European empires and the atrocities committed by their gang of "explorers" – including "this person Cook" in the South Pacific, Columbus in North America, Cortéz in Mexico, Gomes in West Africa, or van Riebeeck in South Africa – was aimed at enforcing European values and institutions, destroying, silencing or marginalizing indigenous cultures and societies as inferior "others." Unsurprisingly, the disruption of formal colonialism in the second half of the 20th century held no inherent improvement for the concerns of formerly colonized peoples. ...
This paper is intended to show how Latinos in general and Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, and Puerto Ricans in particular, engage politically in the United States. Latinos execute their influence by voting or in non-electoral activities like campaign work or financial contributions. As an individual, one participates as a member of society and possibly as a member of an interest group, i.e. a party. Thus, to be successful, it is necessary to combine one’s personal interest with that of others in order to form an alliance that, due to its size, may have an impact on the political stage. This study will show which factors are necessary and which steps were taken to gain and enhance Latino political influence. In doing so, it will become clear that Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, and Puerto Ricans all started their struggle from diverse backgrounds and possess significantly different goals. Although common language unites these three national-origin groups, they do not have the same political and economic resources at their disposal. Decisive differences in immigration politics, naturalization, and economic opportunities become visible and will prove a distinct heterogeneity of Latinos concerning political behavior and goals. Political activities of Mexican Americans, Cuban Americans, and Puerto Ricans will be outlined as well as how they differ from each other. In doing so, it is necessary to take notice of their specific histories and legal experiences upon arrival in the United States. Furthermore, different demographic factors of the three national-origin groups additionally affect political participation. An understanding of Latino political participation should be in the interest of the U.S. public as well as scholars engaging in American Studies. This biggest minority increasingly makes its presence felt in the electoral arena, especially at the state level. In states such as California, Texas, Florida and New Mexico Latinos constitute decisive voting blocs. But also, Latinos nationwide enlarge their political clout, due to cumulative numbers and a more developed political consciousness. With this national and state level significance of the Latino electorate, examining their policy preferences and goals has become progressively more important to the understanding of the U.S. political scene. The approach here is twofold. First, political participation of the Latino population as a whole will be researched; using numbers and results from the presidential election 2004. In this part of the paper, the concept of pan-ethnicity using the label Latino will be used to sum up Spanish-speaking nationalities and their political efforts. In order to be eligible to vote, certain legal requirements are to be met, so factors that account for voting will be outlined first. In accordance with the large share of non-citizens among the Latino population, it is also necessary to examine their non-electoral political activities. The second part will portray Latinos in more detail, examining the three largest national-origin groups. By demonstrating their specific histories and varied experiences and opportunities in U.S. politics, it will become clear that when talking about Latino Politics, it is indispensable to bear in mind the heterogeneity of America’s biggest minority and the side effects this has.
The work of the artist and writer Gerald Nestler explores finance and its social implications since the mid-1990s. Based on his professional experience as a trader as well as on post-disciplinary research, he has developed a unique approach that brings together theory and conversation with installation, video, performance, text, and other art forms. Probing into the narrative structures of contemporary capitalism, Nestler offers a techno-political critique directly from the core of the financial markets. This interview addresses his reading of the derivative as a world-producing apparatus that shapes the experience of the present by preconfiguring the future, and that provokes a shift from representational to performative speech in the actualization of biopower based on the exploitation of volatility and leverage. In conversation with Christian Kloeckner and Stefanie Mueller, he argues for the formation of specific human/non-human alliances that directly attack algorithmic as well as socio- economic black-boxing (schemes that monopolize inherently non-scarce resources), so as to open our imagination to skills and tactics that would allow us to navigate the rich but volatile flows of social, political, and economic abundance.
This monograph contributes to research in content and language integrated learning (CLIL). Amidst the absence of any educational standards as well as other research deficits, Chapter II sketches a conceptual framework with a competence model for multilingual CLIL classes in the social sciences. It develops a line of argument for the promotion of global discourse competence for democratic participation within a transnational civil society. The subsequent four chapters, comprising one conceptual, one methodological and two empirical contributions, look at different aspects of the conceptual framework. Chapter III defends the developed competence model and further specifies its idea of thought in proposing the construction of multilingual 'cosmopolitan classroom glocalities' for the genesis of 21st century skills. The example of #climonomics, a multilingual EU parliamentary debate about climate change, illustrates its practical realization within school education and exemplifies the contribution to education for sustainable development (ESD) and the value of democratic and participatory learning arrangements. Chapter IV introduces design-based action research (DBAR), the method used in Chapters V & VI. DBAR is a hybrid of action and design-based research and is thereby ideally suited for bridging the gap of theory and practice in educational research. Chapter IV argues for closer cooperation between academics and practitioners, along with pragmatic stakeholder participation by involving students and teachers into research, in a quest for inductively making practical knowledge scientific. Chapter V, more language-biased, draws on the notion of translanguaging and presents the concept of 'trans-foreign-languaging' as a multilingual approach to CLIL with first language (L1) use. During six weeks DBAR, a comprehensive CLIL teaching model with judicious and principled L1 use was designed together with the study group. The model offers affordance-based and differentiated methods for different learner types. Its genesis is reconstructed by a thick description of the natural classroom dynamics. Chapter VI, rather subjectbased, asks about the influence of such bilingual language use on emotions, in particular on the formation of political judgments. It suggests different ways to measure emotions during various natural classroom settings. The chapter concludes that CLIL with L1 use has the potential to engender a perfect equilibrium of emotional and rational learning, integrating emotions into learning and valuing its positive contribution towards appropriate and multilayered political judgments. The concluding Chapter VII binds the previous chapters together and discusses the results. Criteria for the generalization of the results are assessed, and limits demarcated. It highlights the contribution to CLIL research and looks into the future, suggesting further direct classroom interventions, also with the goal to prepare the research field for larger undertakings.
Metrical patterning and rhyme are frequently employed in poetry but also in infant-directed speech, play, rites, and festive events. Drawing on four line-stanzas from nineteenth and twentieth German poetry that feature end rhyme and regular meter, the present study tested the hypothesis that meter and rhyme have an impact on aesthetic liking, emotional involvement, and affective valence attributions. Hypotheses that postulate such effects have been advocated ever since ancient rhetoric and poetics, yet they have barely been empirically tested. More recently, in the field of cognitive poetics, these traditional assumptions have been readopted into a general cognitive framework. In the present experiment, we tested the influence of meter and rhyme as well as their interaction with lexicality in the aesthetic and emotional perception of poetry. Participants listened to stanzas that were systematically modified with regard to meter and rhyme and rated them. Both rhyme and regular meter led to enhanced aesthetic appreciation, higher intensity in processing, and more positively perceived and felt emotions, with the latter finding being mediated by lexicality. Together these findings clearly show that both features significantly contribute to the aesthetic and emotional perception of poetry and thus confirm assumptions about their impact put forward by cognitive poetics. The present results are explained within the theoretical framework of cognitive fluency, which links structural features of poetry with aesthetic and emotional appraisal.
The subject of this dissertation is the aesthetic and political significance of photography for Bertolt Brecht's theatrical work and writing. Since the investigation of the gestus concept from the perspective of the politics of images—which draws attention to the fact that every image has a memory, mostly a political one—photography stands out and reveals the precise moment of the interruption of the dramatic action and, thereby, holds a significant gestus. The dissertation highlights the importance of photography’s examination for Brecht, besides featuring the extent to which his theatre responded to and dealt with the technical condition of its own time. If a gestus is recognisable as an interruption, through the observation of the detail, two different gestus appear: the gestus of the scene and the gestus of the photograph. In other words, the actor and photographer produce a double gestus with different levels of interpretation. The comparison between such a static photo and the notion of interruption in Bertolt Brecht’s works opens new grounds in Brechtian studies, and even in more general theatre studies.
Pitch peaks tend to be higher at the beginning of longer than shorter sentences (e.g., ‘A farmer is pulling donkeys’ vs ‘A farmer is pulling a donkey and goat’), whereas pitch valleys at the ends of sentences are rather constant for a given speaker. These data seem to imply that speakers avoid dropping their voice pitch too low by planning the height of sentence-initial pitch peaks prior to speaking. However, the length effect on sentence-initial pitch peaks appears to vary across different types of sentences, speakers and languages. Therefore, the notion that speakers plan sentence intonation in advance due to the limitations in low voice pitch leaves part of the data unexplained. Consequently, this study suggests a complementary cognitive account of length-dependent pitch scaling. In particular, it proposes that the sentence-initial pitch raise in long sentences is related to high demands on mental resources during the early stages of sentence planning. To tap into the cognitive underpinnings of planning sentence intonation, this study adopts the methodology of recording eye movements during a picture description task, as the eye movements are the established approximation of the real-time planning processes. Measures of voice pitch (Fundamental Frequency) and incrementality (eye movements) are used to examine the relationship between (verbal) working memory (WM), incrementality of sentence planning and the height of sentence-initial pitch peaks.
Two studies investigate the production and perception of speech chunks in Estonian. A corpus study examines to what degree the boundaries of syntactic constituents and frequent collocations influence the distribution of prosodic information in spontaneously spoken utterances. A perception experiment tests to what degree prosodic information, constituent structure, and collocation frequencies interact in the perception of speech chunks. Two groups of native Estonian speakers rated spontaneously spoken utterances for the presence of disjunctures, whilst listening to these utterances (N = 47) or reading them (N = 40). The results of the corpus study reveal a rather weak correspondence between the distribution of prosodic information and boundaries of the syntactic constituents and collocations. The results of the perception experiments demonstrate a strong influence of clause boundaries on the perception of prosodic discontinuities as prosodic breaks. Thus, the results indicate that there is no direct relationship between the semantico-syntactic characteristics of utterances and the distribution of prosodic information. The percept of a prosodic break relies on the rapid recognition of constituent structure, i.e. structural information.