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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 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 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 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.
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.
This paper compares the production of different types of direct objects by Portuguese–German and Polish–German bilingual school-aged children in their heritage languages (HLs), Polish and European Portuguese (EP). Given that the two target languages display identical options of object realization, our main research question is whether the two HLs develop in a similar way in bilingual children. More precisely, we aim at investigating whether bilingual children acquiring Polish and EP are sensitive to accessibility and animacy when realizing a direct object in their HL. The results of a production experiment show that this is indeed the case and that the two groups of bilinguals do not differ from each other, although they may overgeneralize null objects or full noun phrases to some extent. We conclude that the bilingual acquisition of object realization is guided by the relevant properties in the target languages and is not influenced by the contact language, German.
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.
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 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.
Nominal modification in language production: Extraposition of prepositional phrases in german
(2019)
In my dissertation, I investigate the phenomenon of extraposition of PP out of NP in German in language production. Four production experiments, using the method of production of memory, and three experiments testing the acceptability of extraposition were conducted. In extraposition, a constituent is realized in a position to the right of what would be considered the canonical position. A special case is extraposition out of a nominal phrase (NP), in which a constituent is moved out of NP to the end of the utterance. The example in (1a) illustrates the canonical version, in which a prepositional phrase (PP) is adjacent to its head noun. In (1b) the PP is extraposed out of NP to the right edge of the sentence.
(1) a. Gestern hat eine Frau mit einer lauten, schrillen Stimme angerufen.
b. Gestern hat eine Frau angerufen mit einer lauten, schrillen Stimme.
There are two main aspects to consider: the length of the extraposed constituent (the PP), and the length of the intervening material. Experiment 1 investigated the influence of constituent length on extraposition. The hypothesis is that longer and more complex constituents are harder to produce and are therefore produced towards the end of the utterance. In the experiment, PPs of three different lengths (2-3, 5-6, 9-11 words) had to be reproduced in either adjacent or extraposed position. As to the length of the intervening material, the hypothesis is that sentences with more intervening material between head noun and extraposed PP will tend to be reproduced with the PP in adjacent position to the head noun. In order to test this hypothesis, the length of the intervening material (1, 2 and 4 words) was manipulated in Experiment 2. The same material was used in an acceptability experiment, using the method of magnitude estimation (Experiment 5).
Previous studies found that extraposition is preferred over verbal material only, thus Experiment 3 investigated the influence of different lengths of purely verbal intervening material. Experiment 4 was concerned with the differences between PP and RC extraposition in production.
Experiment 6 and 7 used Likert scales to assess the acceptability of extraposition. Experiment 6 investigated whether the acceptability of extraposition is influenced by the definiteness status of the NP out of which is extraposed and if a soft constraint for definiteness can be found for PP extraposition in German. Experiment 7 asked if the inner structure of the extraposed constituent (PP only vs. PP+RC) influences its acceptability. An extraposed PP that includes an RC should be "heavier" than a PP without an RC, since the number of phrasal nodes is higher. If indeed heavier constituents are realized at the end of an utterance, the acceptability of an extraposed PP that includes an RC should be higher than that of an extraposed PP without one.
The results of the production experiments show that sentences are mostly reproduced in their original linear sequence, which suggests that extraposed position seems to be just as canonical as adjacent position, especially when extraposition takes place over verbal material only. With regard to constituent length, in extraposed position long PPs are shortened less often, supporting the hypothesis that longer and more complex constituents tend to be produced at the end of the utterance. Recency effects were found for intervening material as participants dropped intervening material rather than change syntactic position of constituents. The length and type of the intervening material is important with respect to how much intervening material is acceptable. Verb clusters were not shortened in sentences with extraposed PPs, however, 1⁄3 of adverbs and 1⁄2 of PP adverbials including a lexical NP were shortened to „verb only“. Extraposed PPs are more often reproduced in adjacent position than adjacent PPs are reproduced in extraposed position. However, the position of RCs is more often changed from adjacent to extraposed than from extraposed to adjacent.
While producing extraposed PPs seems not to be any more difficult than producing adjacent ones, adjacent constituents are consistently rated higher than extraposed constituents in grammaticality judgment tasks. This is in line with findings of Konieczny (2000) on German RC extraposition. The number of phrasal nodes, as suggested by Rickford et al. (1995), did not have an influence on the acceptability of extraposition, while the length of the constituent, measured in words, seems to play a role. Definiteness had no effect on adjacent PPs, but when the PP was extraposed, sentences with an indefinite antecedent were rated higher than sentences with a definite antecedent. This suggests that there is a "soft constraint" for definiteness with regard to PP extraposition out of NP in German.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
The years around May ’68 (c. 1965 – c. late-1970s) are widely understood to represent a watershed moment for children’s books in France. An important factor was the influence of a new fringe of avant-garde publishers that attracted attention across their trade in and beyond France. Using archives and interviews and accounts of some of the books produced and their reception, this article presents case studies of the most influential publishing houses as a series of three snapshots of the areas of movement in the field. At the same time, it evaluates the extent to which the social, cultural and political upheavals in France in the wake of May ’68 helped to alter the shape of book production for children and to bring about a ›radical revolution‹ in the children’s publishing trade.
This article, based on extensive source material from Denmark, Sweden and Norway, is about the changing norms for children’s media, childhood and art in Scandinavia in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The analysis demonstrates how changes within welfare state institutions converged with the youth rebellion’s wider criticism of children’s low status in traditional power hierarchies, and contributed to new definitions of the role of media in children’s lives. After establishing a wider historical contextualisation, the article moves on to show how the criticism of existing norms in the realm of children’s literature in the mid-1960s grew into a critique of the prevailing ideologies and existing narratives in all children’s media (including film, theatre and television) at the end of the decade. A key figure in the redefinition of norms for children’s media was the Swede, Gunilla Ambjörnsson. Her 1968 book, Trash Culture for Children, led to discussions about the role of media in children’s lives all over Scandinavia. Her core belief in the innate social and political interests of children had a great impact on the ways in which the possibilities for an explicit political agenda in children’s media were conceptualised in Scandinavia at large.
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.
More than 100 years after Henry James’s death, criticism is still working through unresolved gender issues in his fiction. This study proposes a new interdisciplinary approach to the gendered power relations in James’s novels that fills a crucial vacancy in the literature. Reading James’s intricately woven narrative form through the lens of relational sociology, specifically Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic domination, reconciles some of the most fiercely disputed positions in James studies of the past decades. With its focus on gender-related symbolic domination, this study demonstrates this approach’s potential to probe the depths of James’s fictional social worlds while developing the narratological tools to do so.
Many critics have paid attention to the relational nature of James’s social fictions as well as his talent for capturing unspoken, invisible, hidden social constraints. Blatantly missing from the literature is a systematic relational analysis into the specifically Jamesian method of narrating the socio-psychological, embodied responses to power and oppression. The present study closes this research gap. It reveals how James persistently narrates his characters as social agents whose perception, affects, and bodily practices are products of the social structures that they in turn continue to shape and reproduce. Moreover, it traces a development throughout James’s career that reflects his growing sensitivity for the stubbornness of some seemingly insurmountable social constraints. James’s fictional social worlds are relational ones through and through. This study is the first sustained effort to investigate the way in which his narratives capture this interrelatedness.
With reference to Shakespeare's play "The Winter's Tale" and its adaptation "The Gap of Time" by Jeanette Winterson the following master thesis seeks to explore literature’s ability to update and rework a given text in a sense that the new text reflects the condition humana in relation to current social and cultural milieus thereby demonstrating the actuality of the original text and constituting a genuinely new work of art in its own right at the same time.
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).
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.
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.
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. ...
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) ...
Editorial
(2017)
This paper presents three acceptability experiments investigating German verb-final clauses in order to explore possible sources of sentence complexity during human parsing. The point of departure was De Vries et al.'s (2011) generalization that sentences with three or more crossed or nested dependencies are too complex for being processed by the human parsing mechanism without difficulties. This generalization is partially based on findings from Bach et al. (1986) concerning the acceptability of complex verb clusters in German and Dutch. The first experiment tests this generalization by comparing two sentence types: (i) sentences with three nested dependencies within a single clause that contains three verbs in a complex verb cluster; (ii) sentences with four nested dependencies distributed across two embedded clauses, one center-embedded within the other, each containing a two-verb cluster. The results show that sentences with four nested dependencies are judged as acceptable as control sentences with only two nested dependencies, whereas sentences with three nested dependencies are judged as only marginally acceptable. This argues against De Vries et al.'s (2011) claim that the human parser can process no more than two nested dependencies. The results are used to refine the Verb-Cluster Complexity Hypothesis of Bader and Schmid (2009a). The second and the third experiment investigate sentences with four nested dependencies in more detail in order to explore alternative sources of sentence complexity: the number of predicted heads to be held in working memory (storage cost in terms of the Dependency Locality Theory [DLT], Gibson, 2000) and the length of the involved dependencies (integration cost in terms of the DLT). Experiment 2 investigates sentences for which storage cost and integration cost make conflicting predictions. The results show that storage cost outweighs integration cost. Experiment 3 shows that increasing integration cost in sentences with two degrees of center embedding leads to decreased acceptability. Taken together, the results argue in favor of a multifactorial account of the limitations on center embedding in natural languages.
The 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 thesis investigated the acquisition of restrictive and appositive interpretations of relative clauses in German-speaking children between the age of 3 and 6 in three experiments.
The theoretical background shows that restrictive relative clauses are semantically less complex than appositive ones. This assumption is supported by observations from a typological overview on the semantic functions attested across languages. It is shown that the existence of appositive relative clauses implies the availability of restrictive readings in a given language. Furthermore, restrictive readings may be favored due to the functioning of general processing principles. Previous research on the acquisition of relative clauses demonstrates that the acquisition of the semantic functions of relative clauses is an understudied area. In contrast, the acquisition of syntactic aspects of relative clauses is well documented. Relative clauses start to be produced in the third year of life and can be interpreted target-like between the age of 4 and 8 depending on their structure. Which semantic interpretation children assign to relative clauses at this age, however, is still an open question.
Based on the formal background and insights from previous studies, three experiments were designed: two picture selection tasks and one acceptability task. The crucial aspect of the experimental design constitutes the interaction of an ordinal number word and the interpretation of the relative clause in sentences like “Take the third car(,) that/which is red”. The scope of the ordinal number reveals whether the relative clause had been attached restrictively at the NP-level or whether it had been attached higher up at the DP shell resulting in an appositive interpretation.
The results of the experiments demonstrate that 4- to 6-year-old German-speaking children and adults prefer restrictive readings over appositive ones. This preference is found within the group data and is mirrored by the results of an individual analysis. In addition, while the majority of children has acquired restrictive readings at the age of 4, appositive interpretations are mastered only by about half of the children between age 4 and 6. Interestingly, 3-year-old children show a different pattern than their older peers. Appositive but not restrictive interpretations seem to be available to these children. Although the results may be taken as evidence that appositivity is acquired before restrictivity in relative clauses by German-speaking children, I propose the contrary. Based on assumptions about the complexity of restrictive and appositive derivations, I argue that the appositive interpretations observed at the age of 3 do not result from a target-like syntactic and semantic representation. I propose that 3-year-old children do not yet identify relative clauses as nominal modifiers. Instead, they are derived from an incorrect attachment of the relative clause higher up in the syntactic tree.
The results of the three experiments are the first to show that neither a prototypical unintegrated prosodic contour nor the presence of a lexical marker, the discourse particle “ja”, or a visual context biasing for appositivity led to an increase of appositive interpretations in the children’s groups. Adults, in contrast, were sensitive to the presence of the discourse particle and the cues from the visual context. As for children, the prosodic format of the relative clauses did not systematically change the interpretation preferences of adults.
The proposed acquisition path may not be specific to German. Instead, it is predicted to hold cross-linguistically and may also be transferred to the interpretation of adjectives. Moreover, the assumptions on how children integrate relative clauses during comprehension may be generalized to other types of subordinate clauses.
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.
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.
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 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.
The outset of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man presents a stage of life and language that is commonly evoked and, at the same time, systematically avoided in autobiographies as well as theoretical approaches to language: infancy. This textual strategy refers back to Augustine’s Confessiones, one of the most canonical autobiographies, reading it as a mainstay for an unconventional hypothesis: Rather that understanding infancy as an early stage of, or even before, language, Joyce expounds that the condition called infancy – the openness for receiving language while being unable to master it – accompanies all speech, be it childlike or eloquent. The article analyses Joyce’s text as one instance of a general paradox of autobiographical writing: initial aphasia. Setting out with birth or infancy, autobiographical texts precede articulate discourse. In Joyce, this paradox appears as starting point for a poetical – rather than theoretical – thinking about language, and language acquisition.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Introduction
(2014)
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.
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.
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 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.