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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 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.
This dissertation investigates several aspects of nominal modification in Ògè, an understudied language of Benue-congo spoken in Àkókó Northwest in Nigeria. The study focuses on two areas of nominal modification namely, Nominal Attributive Modifiers (NAMs) and the strategies of number marking.
The discussion and analysis of NAMs in the language reveal that Ògè belongs to the group of languages which lacks adjectives as a lexical category. NAMs are nominal and they
are derived from an existing lexical category namely, verbs. Predicative modifiers and NAMs have forms that are similar to the long and short forms (LF & SF) of adjectives in languages in which adjectives form an open class, for example, Russian, SerBoCroatian (BCS) and German.
Based on the Minimalist program, the dissertation reveals that unlike Russian, BCS, and German in which the discrepancies between the two forms of adjectives are related to definiteness (as in the case of BCS) and Agree, the discrepancies in the two forms of modifiers in Ògè are related to the fact that Ògè lacks adjectives and resorts into the nominalization of stative verbs in order to derive attributive forms. Using the analyses of adjuncts according to Truswell (2004) and Zeijlstra (2020), the dissertation proposes that NAMs are adjuncts in a modification structure while they are heads in possessive and genitive constructions. In addition, I propose that NAMs are attributive-only modifiers which modify the NP rather than
the DP.
The dissertation also investigates the strategies of number marking in Ògè. Unlike languages in which number marking is obligatory in the nominal domain (Hebrew, German, English),
nouns in Ògè are not always marked for number. This means that nouns in Ògè have general number. The general number nature of nouns in Ògè is like that of the nouns in modifying plural marking languages namely, Halkomelem, Korean, Yucatec Maya and Yorùbá. However, I argue that unlike the modifying plural marking languages in which the Number Phrase (NumP) is not projected, NumP is projected in the nominal spine of Ògè, claiming that NumP bears an
interpretable number feature which values the uninterpretable number feature in D. Argument in support of this comes from the interpretation of the noun in the presence of òtúro (an element which translates to the plural definite interpretation of the noun). I analyze òtúro as a plural determiner which occupies the D-head in the syntax of Ògè. The dissertation argues following Alexiadou (2019) that the locus of the occurrence of the marker of plurality in the nominal spine does not depend on its interpretation as a plural morpheme, rather, the locus of the occurrence of the element that is sensitive to the plural interpretation of the noun depends on other parameters which are definiteness, specificity and animacy.
This dissertation provides 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.
Theater der Spur
(2014)
Der Weltfrieden hängt heute mehr denn je von der Kommunikation zwischen den Menschen unterschiedlichster Kulturen ab. Jenseits der Dialoge des Westens und Ostens, des Nordens und Südens liegt das Dynamit von interkulturellen Konflikten. Obgleich zumeist lokal begrenzt, zerreißen sie mit ihrer Sprengkraft Blöcke. Kriege, Entkolonialisierungskämpfe, ökologische und soziale Krisen können ab dem 20. Jahrhundert unversehens ein globales Ausmaß annehmen. ...
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.
Transformationen von Fankultur : organisatorische und ökonomische Konsequenzen globaler Vernetzung
(2014)
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.
In dieser Arbeit geht es um eine theaterwissenschaftliche Analyse ausgewählter Stücke des Theaterregisseurs und Autors René Pollesch. Bei den Stücken handelt es sich um die Heidi Hoh-Trilogie (1999-2001), Insourcing des Zuhause (2001), Der Leopard von Singapur (2003) und Cappuccetto Rosso (2005). Die Sujets und Stilmerkmale des Theaters von Pollesch werden dabei mittels der Theorien des Philosophen Jacques Rancière als Elemente eines politischen Theaters interpretiert, dem es wesentlich darum geht, alle Formen der Regelhaftigkeit, der symbolischen Ordnung oder der etablierten Sichtbarkeit durch Unterbrechung der Regel, Aufhebung der Ordnung, Sichtbarmachung des Unsichtbaren oder Verstimmlichen des Stimmlosen, aber auch durch Formen einer subversiven Wiederholung und Aneignung kritisierter Sicht- und Sprechweisen zu provozieren. Um das Politische bei Pollesch zu erkunden, werden Rancières Theorietexte „angewandt", indem sie während der analytischen Betrachtung der Pollesch-Abende in ästhetische Strategien umgewandelt werden. Dies geschieht auf drei Ebenen: 1: Darstellungsform, 2: Arbeitsweise, 3: Die auf der Bühne sichtbar agierenden Subjekte. Rancière erscheint mit seinem Konzept einer gegebenen gesellschaftlichen Ordnung als „Aufteilung des Sinnlichen" ideal geeignet, um das Politische auf eben diese drei genannten Ebenen aufzuspüren. Sein Modell von Politik, so zeigt diese Arbeit, erlaubt damit die ästhetische Praxis René Polleschs auf verschiedenen Ebenen als politisch zu kennzeichnen, aber es führt auch auf einige Aporien, denen diese Praxis gerade in ihrem politischen Anspruch ausgeliefert ist.