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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.
Event-related potential (ERP) data in monolingual German speakers have shown that sentential metric expectancy violations elicit a biphasic ERP pattern consisting of an anterior negativity and a posterior positivity (P600). This pattern is comparable to that elicited by syntactic violations. However, proficient French late learners of German do not detect violations of metric expectancy in German. They also show qualitatively and quantitatively different ERP responses to metric and syntactic violations. We followed up the questions whether (1) latter evidence results from a potential pitch cue insensitivity in speech segmentation in French speakers, or (2) if the result is founded in rhythmic language differences. Therefore, we tested Spanish late learners of German, as Spanish, contrary to French, uses pitch as a segmentation cue even though the basic segmentation unit is the same in French and Spanish (i.e., the syllable). We report ERP responses showing that Spanish L2 learners are sensitive to syntactic as well as metric violations in German sentences independent of attention to task in a P600 response. Overall, the behavioral performance resembles that of German native speakers. The current data suggest that Spanish L2 learners are able to extract metric units (trochee) in their L2 (German) even though their basic segmentation unit in Spanish is the syllable. In addition Spanish in contrast to French L2 learners of German are sensitive to syntactic violations indicating a tight link between syntactic and metric competence. This finding emphasizes the relevant role of metric cues not only in L2 prosodic but also in syntactic processing.
Whiteout: animal traces in Werner Herzog’s Grizzly man and encounters at the end of the world
(2017)
Literary animal studies are confronted with a systematic question: How can writing, as a human-made sign system, represent the nonhuman animal as an autonomous agent without falling back into the pitfalls of anthropomorphism? Against the backdrop of this problem, this paper asks how the medium of film allows for a different representation of the animal and analyzes two of Werner Herzog’s later documentary films. Although the depiction of animals and landscapes has always played a significant part in Herzog’s films, critical assessments of his work—including those of Herzog himself—tended to view the role of nature imagery as purely allegorical: it expresses the inner nature, the inner landscapes of the film’s human protagonists. This paper tries to open up a different view. It argues that both Grizzly Man and Encounters at the End of the World develop an aesthetic that depicts nonhuman nature as an autonomous and lively presence. In the close proximity amongst camera, human, and nonhuman agents, a clear distinction between nature and culture is increasingly blurred.
Theoretical accounts agree that German restrictive relative clauses (RCs) are integrated at the level of syntax as well as at the level of prosody (; , ; ; ; ) in both the default verb-final and the marked verb-second variant (referred to as iV2). Both variants are assumed to show the same prosodic pattern, i. e., prosodic integration into the main clause, and not unintegrated prosody, which would signal a sequence of two main clauses. To date strong empirical evidence for this close correspondence between prosody and syntax in RCs is missing. Findings regarding prosodic integration of verb-final RCs are not consistent, and research regarding the prosody of iV2 structures is very scarce. Using a delayed sentence-repetition task, our study investigated whether subordination is signaled by prosody in RCs in both the verb-final and the V2 variant in adults (n = 21). In addition, we asked whether young language learners (n = 23), who at the age of 3 have just started to produce embedded clauses, are already sensitive to this mapping. The adult responses showed significantly more patterns of prosodic integration than of prosodic non-integration in the V-final and the iV2 structures, with no difference between the two conditions. Notably, the child responses mirrored this adult behavior, showing significantly more patterns of prosodic integration than of prosodic non-integration in both V-final and iV2 structures. The findings regarding adults’ prosodic realizations provide novel empirical evidence for the claim that iV2 structures, just like verb-final RCs, show prosodic integration. Moreover, our study strongly suggests that subordination is signaled by prosody already by age 3 in both verb-final and V2 variants of RCs.
In this article, I discuss some important properties of wh-questions and wh-scrambling in Japanese. The questions I will address are (i) which instances of (wh-) scrambling involve reconstruction and (ii) how the undoing effects of scrambling can be derived. First I will discuss the claim that (wh-) scrambling is semantically vacuous and is therefore undone at LF (Saito 1989, 1992). Then I consider the data that led Takahashi (1993) to the conclusion that at least some instances of wh-scrambling have to be analyzed as instances of "full wh-movement" i.e., overt movement of the wh-phrase in its scopal position. It will be argued that these examples are not instances of full wh-movement in Japanese, but that they also represent semantically vacuous scrambling. Those instances of scrambling that apprently cannot be undone are best explained with recourse to parsing effects. I conclude that wh-scrambling in Japanese is always triggered by a ([-wh]-) scrambling feature. In addition, long distance scrambling (scrambling out of finite CPs) is analyzed as adjunction movement, whereas short distance scrambling is movement to a specifier position of IP. Turning to the mechanisms of undoing, I will argue that only long distance scrambling is undone. This is shown to follow from Chomsky's (1995) bare phrase structure analysis, according to which multi-segmental categories derived by adjunction movement are not licensed at LF. The article is organized as follows. In section 2, the wh-scrambling phenomenon is described. In section 3, I discuss the reconstruction properties of scrambling. In addition, this section provides some basic assumptions about my analysis of Japanese scrambling in general. In section 4, I turn to the analysis of wh-scrambling as an instance of full wh-movement in Japanese. Section 5 provides discussion of multiple wh-questions in Japanese, and section 6 gives the conclusion.
The languages of the world differ with respect to argument extraction possibilities. In languages such as English, wh-movement is possible from Spec IP and from the complement position, whereas in languages such as Malagasy only extraction from Spec IP is possible. This difference correlates with the fact that these language types obey different island constraints and behave differently with respect to wh-in situ and superiority effects. The goal of this paper is to outline an analysis for these differences. The basic idea is that in contrast to languages such as English, in Malagasy-type languages every argument can be merged in the complement position of the selecting head.
Virtuous democrats, liberal aristocrats : political discourse and the Pennsylvania Constitution
(2001)
Verb production in stroke induced aphasia and semantic dementia: similarities and dissociations
(2012)
We aim to understand whether Greek and Italian, two null subject languages, differ in the use and interpretation of null subjects, based on evidence from both a production and a comprehension experiment. The results of the two experiments show that the two languages differ in the extent to which they comply with the Position of Antecedent Strategy as formulated by Carminati (2002). In order to account for this difference, we introduce a principle which defines prominence of sentence constituents in terms of hierarchical height, elaborating on a recent proposal by Rizzi (2018). Then we show that the prominence of subject and object constituents in Greek and Italian reflects word-order differences between the two languages (Roussou & Tsimpli 2006). In more general terms, this paper argues in favour of a multi-factorial approach to reference interpretation, in that syntactic factors interact with discourse factors, leading to a gradient variety of reference possibilities.
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.
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
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.
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.
The relation between reality and language, the instability of language as a signification system, the representation crisis, and the borders of interpretation are the controversial issues that have engaged not only philosophers, but also many authors, translators, and literary critics. Some philosophers like Derrida accuse Western thinking of being obsessed with binary oppositions. In Derrida's view, Western tradition resorts to external references as God, truth, origin, center and reason to stabilize the signification system. Since these concepts lack an internal sense and there is no transcendental signified that can fix these signifiers, language turns to an instable system by means of which no fixed meaning can be created. Many authors like Beckett, Stoppard, and Caryl Churchill also noticed this impossibility of language. While Derrida's deconstructive approach to this crisis has an epistemological nature, these playwrights present an aesthetic solution by turning the deconstructive potential of language against itself in text and performance. This dissertation aims at exploring their performing methods and dramatic texts to demonstrate how their delogocentric strategies work. By analyzing their plays, I will examine if their use of signifiers that have no references in reality, intentional misconceptions, disintegrated subjectivities, decentered narratives, and experimental performances can help them undermine the prevailing logocentrism of Western thought. The examination of the change in aesthetic strategies from Beckett, who belongs to earlier stages of post modernism, to Caryl Churchill, who should perform in a globalized world with increasing dominance of speed and information, is another aim of this research. In my view,Beckett's obsession with unspeakable, absurdity, and disintegration of subjectivity develops to Stoppard's language games, metadrama, and anti-representation and culminates in Churchill's anti-narrative texts and pluralistic performances. The monophony of Beckett's dramatic texts is replaced by the polyphony of Churchill's performances, which are a mixture of theater, dance and music. However, all explored dramatic texts in this dissertation have something in common: they are language games, which have no claim on a faithful representation of reality or transcendental truth.
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.
This publication's objective is to serve as the documentation of a graduate student symposium with the same name held in July 2017. The goal of the symposium was to discuss problems in current film culture with a focus on filmic heritage and innovative projects in the field of film education. Think Film! is a compilation of most of the talks given at the symposium. As quite often conferences or workshops are not documented, the goal of the publication is on the one hand to preserve the results for other scholars, as well as to make them accessible for the general public, and on the other hand to give the panelists a designated space to present their research.
The authors discuss questions of film heritage and digitization, funding, film festivals, film museums and local film culture with a focus on the conditions in Germany, Czech Republic and India as well as relate their findings to the changes film and media studies have undergone in recent years.
This commentary on Edwin Carels’ essay “Revisiting Tom Tom: Performative anamnesis and autonomous vision in Ken Jacobs’ appropriations of Tom Tom the Piper’s Son” broadens up the media-archaeological framework in which Carels places his text. Notions such as Huhtamo’s topos and Zielinski’s “deep time” are brought into the discussion in order to point out the difficulty to see what there is to see and to question the position of the viewer in front of experimental films like Tom Tom the Piper’s Son and its remakes.
This paper discusses the syntax of relative clauses in European Portuguese (EP) by focussing on the status of the relativizer que in restrictive and appositive relative clauses. We propose a unified account of que in terms of a D-element and discuss the syntactic implications of this assumption for an adequate analysis of relative clauses in EP. We assume that relative que has properties of demonstrative and interrogative determiners. In restrictive object and subject relative clauses, que occurs as a transitive determiner [DP que [NP e]], which selects for a nominal complement, whereas in prepositional and appositive relative clauses, [DP que] is an intransitive determiner parallel to an e-type pronoun. We discuss the position of restrictive relative clauses in the DP containing the modified noun, and propose that they are merged pre-nominally, in the same fashion as demonstratives.
This dissertation provides a comprehensive account of the grammar of relative clause extraposition in English. Based on a systematic review and evaluation of the empirical generalizations and theoretical approaches provided in the literature on generative grammar, it is shown that none of the previous theories is able to account for all the relevant facts. Among the most problematic data are the Principle C and scope effects of relative clause extraposition, cases with obligatory relative clauses, and relative clauses with elliptical NPs as antecedents.
I propose a new analysis of relative clause extraposition within the constraint-based, monostratal grammatical framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), enhanced with the semantic theory of Lexical Resource Semantics (LRS). Crucially, it is a general analysis of relative clause attachment, since both canonical and extraposed relative clauses are licensed by the same syntactic and semantic constraints. The basic assumption is that a relative clause can be adjoined to any phrase that contains a suitable antecedent of the relative pronoun. The semantic information that licenses the relative clause is introduced by the determiner of the antecedent NP. The techniques of underspecified semantics and the standard semantic representation language used by LRS make it possible to formulate constraints which yield the correct intersective interpretation of the relative clause (arbitrarily distant from its antecedent NP) and at the same time link the scope of the antecedent NP to the adjunction site of the relative clause.
In combination with the revised HPSG binding theory developed in this dissertation, the proposed analysis is able to capture the major properties of relative clause attachment within a unified and internally consistent monostratal constraint-based grammatical framework.
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.
The present study is concerned with the syntactic flexibility of English idioms. It is argued that two aspects must be considered when explaining the syntactic behavior of idioms. First, the idiom in question must decomposable, meaning that the individual parts must have some independent meaning. Secondly, pragmatic factors and speakers' motivations must be taken into account. This corpus-based study and its results support a speaker-based grammar model. Furthermore, some syntactic constructions can be generally ruled out for idioms.
This thesis investigates the acquisition of compositional and lexical semantic properties of adjectives in German-speaking children between the age of two and five years.
According to formal semantic approaches, there are intersective and non-intersective adjectives, subsective and non-subsective adjectives as well as gradable and non-gradable adjectives. These properties concern the compositional mechanisms involved in nominal modification, i.e., the combination of adjectives and nouns. In addition, adjectives differ regarding lexical semantic properties that contribute to the adjectives' meaning. Differences in the adjectives' scale structure have led to the theoretical assumption that gradable adjectives should be distinguished into relative and absolute gradable adjectives. In addition, meaning components such as multidimensionality or subjectivity have led to the distinction between dimensional and evaluative gradable adjectives. These properties have been mostly investigated independently of each other in both theory and acquisition research. I suggest a classification system for adjectives that combines different semantic properties. This system results in six adjective classes constituting a Semantic Complexity Hierarchy. Assuming that these adjective classes differ in semantic complexity, I propose an operationalization of semantic complexity that takes into account the adjectives' length of description, their type complexity, and lexical properties that contribute to the adjectives' meaning.
Regarding the question of how monolingual German-speaking children acquire the semantics of adjectives, I hypothesize that the order of acquisition of adjectives is determined by their semantic complexity. This hypothesis is tested in a spontaneous speech study and a comprehension experiment.
The spontaneous speech study is a longitudinal investigation of the production of adjectives from 2;00 to 2;11 years based on transcripts from a dense data corpus. The results provide evidence that the mean age of acquisition for the adjective classes in the Semantic Complexity Hierarchy follows the order predicted by semantic complexity. The same order was observed for the age at which the number of types for each class increased most. A preliminary analysis of the input indicates that the frequency of parental adjective use is related to the order of acquisition, but it is unlikely that frequency determines the order completely.
The comprehension experiment focuses on two specific adjective classes. I examine children's and adults' interpretation of relative (big, small) and absolute (clean, dirty) gradable dimensional adjectives with a picture-choice task. These two classes are of the same semantic complexity because they are both gradable, but they have different scale structures. As a result, they must be interpreted differently due to lexical semantic properties. I investigate whether children calculate different standards of comparison for relative and absolute gradable adjectives and whether they distinguish between relative and absolute gradable adjectives regarding the relevance of the explicit comparison class. The results indicate that as of age 3, children distinguish between relative and absolute gradable adjectives with regard to the standard of comparison. However, with respect to the relevance of the comparison class, for 3-year-old children, unlike for 4- and 5-year-olds, changes in the noun, i.e., in the explicit comparison class, led to non-adult-like responses regarding both relative and absolute gradable adjectives.
On the basis of the empirical findings, I propose an acquisition path stating that children enter the acquisition process with inherent linguistic knowledge, the Semantic Complexity Hierarchy, and cognitive abilities to categorize their environment. I suggest that initially, children apply the least complex interpretation available in the Semantic Complexity Hierarchy to all adjectives: all adjectives are interpreted as properties of individuals that are not gradable. To access other levels of the Semantic Complexity Hierarchy and to establish more complex adjective classes, positive evidence from the input and conceptual properties of adjectives, e.g., COLOR, MENTAL STATE, PHYSICAL PROPERTY etc., can operate as triggers.
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.
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 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.
Be it in the case of opening a website, sending an email, or high-frequency trading, bits and bytes of information have to cross numerous nodes at which micro-decisions are made. These decisions concern the most efficient path through the network, the processing speed, or the priority of incoming data packets.
Despite their multifaceted nature, micro-decisions are a dimension of control and surveillance in the twenty-first century that has received little critical attention. They represent the smallest unit and the technical precondition of a contemporary network politics – and of our potential opposition to it. The current debates regarding net neutrality and Edward Snowden’s revelation of NSA surveillance are only the tip of the iceberg. What is at stake is nothing less than the future of the Internet as we know it.
Talking about emotion and sharing emotional experiences is a key component of human interaction. Specifically, individuals often consider the reactions of other people when evaluating the meaning and impact of an emotional stimulus. It has not yet been investigated, however, how emotional arousal ratings and physiological responses elicited by affective stimuli are influenced by the rating of an interaction partner. In the present study, pairs of participants were asked to rate and communicate the degree of their emotional arousal while viewing affective pictures. Strikingly, participants adjusted their arousal ratings to match up with their interaction partner. In anticipation of the affective picture, the interaction partner’s arousal ratings correlated positively with activity in anterior insula and prefrontal cortex. During picture presentation, social influence was reflected in the ventral striatum, that is, activity in the ventral striatum correlated negatively with the interaction partner’s ratings. Results of the study show that emotional alignment through the influence of another person’s communicated experience has to be considered as a complex phenomenon integrating different components including emotion anticipation and conformity.
Cellular mobile networks, in which devices constantly relay their location and their movements, are formed by the motion of end devices in relation to the position of radio towers. As a matter of principle, it is this motion that allows the location of devices to be identified within the network. The article argues that the emergence of mobile media based on cellular triangulation has introduced an ontology in which, by technical necessity, the position of every object is constantly registered and objects that do not have an address do not exist. The location and movement of all participants are, at all times, a known technical variable. With Xeros PARC’s “ubiquitous computing” as a reference case, the article scrutinizes how movement triggers the process that registers the locations of mobile phones or smartphones, a development it situates against the cybernetic imagination of determining the location and the movement of an object at the same time.
This paper investigates multi-valuation, i.e. cases where one probe agrees with multiple goals thus obtaining multiple feature values. Focusing on number agreement, I look at the cross-linguistic patterns on multi-valued Ns in the nominal Right Node Raising construction (Nominal RNR) reported in Belyaev et al. (2015); Harizanov & Gribanova (2015); Shen (2016) as well as multi-valued Ts in TP RNR construction reported in Yatabe (2003); Grosz (2009; 2015); Kluck (2009). I show that three types of languages are attested: languages like Serbo-Croatian that show singular marking on both multi-valued Ns and Ts, languages like Russian that show plural marking on both multi-valued Ns and Ts, and languages like English that show singular marking on multi-valued Ns and plural marking on multi-valued Ts. No language is attested that shows plural marking on multi-valued Ns and singular marking on multi-valued Ts. I use this 3/4 pattern to argue that multi-valuation shows the effect of the Agreement Hierarchy discussed by Corbett (1979; 2006) among others.
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.
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.
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.
The role of music in second-language (L2) learning has long been the object of various empirical and theoretical inquiries. However, research on whether the effect of background music (BM) on language-related task performance is facilitative or inhibitory has produced inconsistent findings. Hence, we investigated the effect of happy and sad BM on complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) of L2 speaking among intermediate learners of English. A between-groups design was used, in which 60 participants were randomly assigned to three groups with two experimental groups performing an oral L2 English retelling task while listening to either happy or sad BM, and a control group performing the task with no background music. The results demonstrated the happy BM group’s significant outperformance in fluency over the control group. In accuracy, the happy BM group also outdid the controls (error-free clauses, correct verb forms). Moreover, the sad BM group performed better in accuracy than the controls but in only one of its measures (correct verb forms). Furthermore, no significant difference between the groups in syntactic complexity was observed. The study, in line with the current literature on BM effects, suggests that it might have specific impacts on L2 oral production, explained by factors such as mood, arousal, neural mechanism, and the target task’s properties.
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.
The emergence of imaginative children’s music in the second half of the nineteenth century reframed the relationship between children and music in revolutionary ways. The dominant paradigm had been for children to repetitiously practice mechanistic exercises, a time-consuming occupation that the German composer Robert Schumann considered particularly wasteful and tasteless. In response he composed Album für die Jugend in 1848, a collection of children’s pieces that utilised a combination of text, picture and music to appeal to the interests of children, and to inspire their enthusiasm for musical play. Schumann envisioned his music as an extension of familial nurturance, which played a powerful role in directing children towards a musically and spiritually rich adulthood. As the tradition of imaginative children’s music developed during the nineteenth century, the dual themes of entertainment and education remained central to its generic identity, and continued to speak to the significance of piano music as a tool for the socialisation of children. The work of Jacqueline Rose offers a lens through which to explore this music’s manipulative influence upon children. The multimodal and performative characteristics of these musical pieces demonstrate the hidden influence of the adult’s guiding hand and the dire consequences that come to those who transgress musical and social boundaries.
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 dissertation investigated the development of the complementiser that from the demonstrative pronoun in the Germanic languages; each chapter dealt with a different aspect. In the introduction, the terms ‘reanalysis’ and ‘analogy’ and their relevance for grammaticalisation were explained, and the issues of the chapters were presented. The second chapter introduced some information about the Germanic language family and the languages which were relevant for this investigation, namely Gothic, Old English, Old Icelandic, Old Saxon and Old High German. Previous assumptions about the diachrony of that were presented and discussed. One of these proposals which mainly draws on evidence from West Germanic involves the idea that the source construction contained two independent main clauses with a demonstrative pronoun (that) at the end of the first clause (cf. e.g. Paul 1962, § 248). In contrast to this, the Gothic evidence showed that the source construction of the reanalysis of ϸatei was not a proper paratactic construction (at least in Gothic) but already a complex construction which contained a complementiser (ei) in the appositional subordinate clause (cf. also e.g. Longobardi 1994 for the diachrony of ϸatei). This contradiction raised the question whether the analysis of the Gothic that-complementiser also applies to the diachrony of that in West Germanic. This issue was taken up in the third chapter which presented an overview of subordination and complementisers in Northwest Germanic. The aim was to show that the Northwest Germanic languages also show a subordinating particle, which functions like the Gothic ei, namely ϸe (OE), er/es (OI), the (OHG, OS). As a result, the subordinating particle could be observed in relative and adverbial clauses in all Northwest Germanic languages. In complement clauses, which are most crucial for the argumentation, the subordinating particle is found in Old English and Old Icelandic but not in Old Saxon. In Old High German, there are only combinations of the with a following pronoun, theih and theiz, in ‘Otfrids Evangelienbuch’ (see Wunder 1965). Consequently, the presence of a subordinating particle is confirmed in North and West Germanic. The fact that the patterns of subordination are quite similar in all Germanic languages suggested a unitary analysis of the development of that in Germanic was appropriate. In chapter four, the similarities and differences between the Germanic languages with respect to the development of that were explained. It was argued that the preconditions of the reanalysis were the same, whereas the consequences of the reanalysis are realised differently in each language. The most important precondition was that the appositional source construction (explained in more detail below) was generally available in Germanic. Since the demonstrative pronoun at the end of the matrix clause and the subordinating particle of the subordinate clause were adjacent, phonological combination might have been crucial for the subsequent reanalysis to take place. After reanalysis, however, different changes can be observed in the different languages. For instance, it appears that during the Old English period the final syllable of the form ϸætte was deleted (see chapter 4 for references), whereas the final –ei is still present in the Gothic ϸatei, and completely absent in Old High German and Old Saxon. The source structure of the reanalysis was discussed in detail in a separate subsection. The appositional source construction, which was already assumed for the reanalysis of Gothic ϸatei, was compared with analyses of clitic left dislocation which propose that two constituents with the same theta-role derive from a Big DP (see e.g. Grewendorf 2009, Belletti 2005). Based on the Big DP analysis of Grewendorf (2009), it was claimed that the appositional clause, introduced by the subordinating particle, is generated in the Spec of a DP, and adjoined to this DP on the surface. It was argued that this whole complement DP-node occurred in an extraposed position in OV-languages so that the verb, when it stays in-situ, does not appear between the demonstrative pronoun and the subordinating particle. The structure in (1) illustrates the syntactic source structure which is assumed to apply to the development of the complementiser that in Germanic. ...
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.
There is a curious gap in the scholarship on texts for young people: while series fiction has been an important stream of publishing for children and adolescents at least since the last decades of the nineteenth century, the scholarship on these texts has not been central to the development of theories on and criticism of texts for young people. The focus of scholarship is much more likely to be on stand-alone, high-quality texts of literary fiction. Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), for example, has occupied critics in the field far more often and more significantly than all of the 46 popular novels about schoolgirls with similar plots that were published by Grahame’s contemporary, Angela Brazil (beginning in 1904 with A Terrible Tomboy). Literary fiction such as Grahame’s tends to be defined in terms of its singularity – the unique voice of the narrator, unusual resolutions to narrative dilemmas, intricate formal designs, and complicated themes – often specifically as distinct from the formulaic patterns of series fiction. Yet, curiously, scholars typically use examples from literary fiction to illustrate the common characteristics of books directed to young readers: it was Grahame’s book, and not Brazil’s books, that appeared in the Children’s Literature Association’s list Touchstones as one of the "distinguished children’s books" the study of which "will allow us to better understand children’s literature in general," according to Perry Nodelman, who chaired the committee that produced the list. (Nodelman 1985, p. 2) ...
James Joyce's Ulysses is treated as one of the most influential, paradigmatic texts of high modernism. Novels like Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 Gravity’s Rainbow and David Foster Wallace’s 1996 Infinite Jest, which equally raise claims to being the paradigms of their respective time, are perpetually compared to and measured against Joyce’s epic novel. However, novels like Ulysses, Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest are usually either grouped together due to their length, complexity and importance, to examine direct allusions in the texts or analyse a rather general “style” or to conversely stress the novels’ singularity and autonomy. I argue that not only can Joyce’s Ulysses, Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Wallace’s Infinite Jest be meaningfully put in relation to one another but that their singularity and paradigmatic status in 20th century literature should be understood through the relationality of a Ulyssean Tradition. Novels like Gravity’s Rainbow and Infinite Jest can be fruitfully read in a Ulyssean Tradition. Their singular, paradigmatic aesthetic projects emerge from a reciprocal dialogue with Ulysses in their self-inscription into a Ulyssean Tradition. The intertextual connection of this Ulyssean Tradition is integrally constitutive of the autonomy through which these novels claim the status of singular representations of their respective human condition and thus epic paradigms of a new way of writing the world. By positioning themselves in the literary field alongside Ulysses as the received paradigm of modernism, Wallace in Infinite Jest and Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow legitimize their own, independent project and their own claims to paradigmaticness. The Ulyssean Tradition thereby becomes not only a way of writing,a nd this study not merely a study of literary influence, but also a way of reading that can generate new, independent readings through the relationality of a Ulyssean Tradition
In this paper, we investigate whether timing in monolingual acquisition interacts with age of onset and input effects in child bilingualism. Six different morpho-syntactic and semantic phenomena acquired early, late or very late are considered, with their timing in L1 acquisition varying between age 3 (subject-verb agreement) and after age 6 (case marking). Data from simultaneous bilingual children (2L1) whose mean age of onset to German was 3 months are compared with data from early second language learners of German (eL2) whose mean age of onset to German was 35 months as well as with data from monolingual children. To explore change over time, children were tested twice at the ages of 4;4 and 5;8 years. The main findings were that 2L1 children had an advantage over their eL2 peers in early acquired phenomena, which disappeared with time, whereas in late acquired phenomena 2L1 and eL2 children did not differ. Moreover, 2L1 children performed like monolingual children in early acquired phenomena but had a disadvantage in the late acquired phenomena with the amount of delay decreasing with time. We conclude that age of onset effects are modulated by effects of timing in monolingual acquisition. Contrary to expectation, input in terms of language dominance, measured as the dominant language used at home, did not affect simultaneous bilingual children’s performance in any of the phenomena. We discuss the implications of our findings for the hypothesis that acquisition of late phenomena is determined by input alone and suggest an alternative concept: the learner’s internal need for time to master a phenomenon, which is determined by its complexity and cross-linguistic robustness.
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.
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.
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.