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This paper investigates the interpretation of Japanese -toka and -tari, two nonexhaustive particles that receive conjunctive interpretations in upward-entailing environments, but disjunctive interpretations in downward-entailing and question contexts.
We analyze -toka and -tari as items that introduce unstructured sets of alternatives in a Hamblin-style alternative semantics (Hamblin, 1973; Kratzer and Shimoyama, 2002), and derive their conjunctive and disjunctive readings via an interaction between these sets and the semantics of the environment containing them.
Revising a proposal by Guerzoni (2003), we propose to derive universal projection of presuppositions in wh-questions, where attested, from a family of three felicity conditions on question use. Assuming that these felicity conditions can be violated under certain conditions, this proposal predicts a typology of contexts where universal projection can exceptionally be unattested. We propose that this prediction is correct, presenting a family of scenarios where the expected absence of universal projection is observed.
Bu araştırmada, 2016 yılında U. Ü. bilimsel araştırma projelerini destekleme birimi (BAP) desteğiyle başlatılan bir proje kapsamında yapılan yabancı dil öğretiminde dijital oyunlar ve oyunlaştırılmış uygulamalar geliştirme çalışmaları ele alınmıştır. Proje sürecinde yapılan alanyazın taraması ve öğretmenlerle yapılan anket çalışması sonucunda yabancı dil öğrenimi ve öğretimi süreçlerinde 3B dijital oyunların yeterince kullanılmadığı ve öğretmenlerin dijital oyun kullanma ve geliştirme konusunda yeterli kuramsal ve uygulamalı bilgiye sahip olmadıkları belirlenmiştir. Bu sonuç dikkate alınarak yapılan bu çalışmanın üçüncü bölümünde öğretmenlere ve materyal geliştiricilere yol göstermek amacıyla dijital oyun geliştirme süreci aşama aşama somut örneklerle ortaya konmuş, bu süreçte kullanılabilecek, materyal geliştirme araçları ayrıntılı olarak tanıtılmıştır. Söz konusu proje süreçlerinde elde edilen ve bu çalışmada ortaya konan bilgilerin yabancı dil öğretiminde dijital oyunların yaygınlaşmasına ve yabancı dil öğretmenlerinin kendi dersleri için dijital oyun materyallerini geliştirmelerine katkı sağlanması hedeflenmektedir.
Çeviri faaliyeti, 18. yüzyılda Osmanlı Devleti'nin batılılaşması ve modernleşmesinde önemli bir yere sahipti. Bu amaca yönelik olarak çeviri eylemi, Osmanlı döneminde aydınlanma çağındaki fikirlerin yayılması ile birlikte siyasal ve bilimsel fikirlerin yerleşmesinde de çok etkili olmuştur. Bu durum Türkiye Cumhuriyeti'nin kuruluş yıllarında da devam etmiştir. Bu çeviri faaliyetini gerçekleştiren "gizli kahramanlar", yani çevirmenler, Türk diline ve edebiyatına yaptıkları katkılara nazaran pek tanınmazlar ve bilinmezler. Peki, bu çevirmenler kimlerdi? Kimlerin eserleri hangi dilden ve ne zaman çevrilip, hangi yayınevleri tarafından yayımlanmıştır? Türkçe Çevirmenler Sözlüğü'nde Türk edebiyatına katkıda bulunan ve Türk edebiyatının çeviri yoluyla zenginleşmesinde katkı sağlayan çevirmenlerin listelerini oluşturmak amaçlanmıştır. Ege Üniversitesi ile Johannes Gutenberg Üniversitesi Germersheim-Mainz (Almanya) mütercim tercümanlık bölümlerinin ortak yürüttükleri GIP (Germanistische Institutspartnerschaft) projesi bağlamında Türkçe Çeviriler Bibliyografyası kitap çalışması fikri de ortaya çıkmıştır. Uzun bir yöntem arayışından sonra başta Ege Üniversitesi Kütüphanesi, Hacettepe Üniversitesi Kütüphanesi, İstanbul Üniversitesi Kütüphanesi, Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Kütüphanesi ve Milli Kütüphane kayıtlarını barındıran ve T.C. Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Kütüphaneler ve Yayımlar Genel Müdürlüğü ve TÜBİTAK ULAKBİM'in Ulusal Toplu Katalog veri tabanından yararlanılarak yabancı dilden Türkçeye aktarılan eserler ele alınmıştır. Çalışmada Cumhuriyetin ilk yıllarından 2016 yılına kadar Türkçeye aktarılan dil ve edebiyatların nesir, nazım ve tiyatro gibi edebi türlerine göre çevirileri incelenmiştir. Toplam 18.741 eser ve 6.006 çevirmen kaydına ulaşılmıştır.
Seit dem funktionalen Ansatz in der Übersetzungswissenschaft ist die Frage nach der Zielgruppe aus der Übersetzungskritik nicht mehr wegzudenken. Das ist unser Ausgangspunkt bei der Untersuchung der Spanisch-Deutsch und Spanisch-Englisch-Übersetzung von Los mayas en las rocas des Autors Javier Covo Torres. Dabei handelt es sich um ein für Touristen konzipiertes Buch, das eine didaktisierte Einführung in die Kultur der prähispanischen Maya geben möchte. Übergeordnetes Untersuchungsziel ist die Bewertung der Adäquatheit der Zieltexte, wobei wir uns methodisch auf einige Parameter der Übersetzungsbewertung von Silvia Parra Galiana stützen, die eine Überprüfung in zwei Phasen vorschlägt, welche unterschiedliche Kriterien abdecken. Unser besonderes Augenmerk gilt dabei dem Zusammenspiel von Text und Illustrationen, denn letztere stellen den Übersetzer vor besondere Herausforderungen. Die Ergebnisse stellen wir in Zusammenhang mit verlegerischen Entscheidungen, die fernab des Wissens- und Diskussionsstands der akademischen Disziplin getroffen werden
Die audiovisuelle Übersetzung von Wortspielen am Beispiel der ecuadorianischen Webserie Enchufe.tv
(2018)
Die voranschreitende Internationalisierung audiovisueller Medien zieht die Notwendigkeit der Überbrückung sprachlicher Barrieren nach sich. In Deutschland, traditionell ein Synchronisationsland, werden dazu immer häufiger Untertitel herangezogen. Der vorliegende Beitrag setzt sich mit den Anwendungsmöglichkeiten dieser Form des audiovisuellen Übersetzens in Bezug auf humoristische Elemente auseinander. Dabei werden zwei theoretische Ansätze zur Übertragung des Komischen vorgestellt, die anschließend anhand des praxisnahen Beispiels dreier Sketche der ecuadorianischen Webserie Enchufe.tv auf die Probe gestellt werden. Den drei Sketchen ist gemein, dass sie sich auf Wortspiele, also auf eine Erscheinungsform des Komischen stützen, die sich der Wiedergabe in einer anderen Sprache in außergewöhnlichem Maße widersetzt. Auf diese Weise werden einerseits die Stärken der vorgestellten Methoden aufgezeigt, andererseits wird aber auch die Notwendigkeit ihrer Ausweitung auf die besonderen Eigenschaften audiovisueller Texte deutlich
Der folgende Beitrag beschäftigt sich mit Sprechern des Hunsrückischen in Brasilien und deren Gebrauch des Schriftdeutschen im 20. Jahrhundert. Basis der Analyse ist ein Korpus von Privatbriefen, die während der ersten Diktatur geschrieben wurden. Der Fokus der Analyse ist die Frage nach einer uniformen Schriftnorm für diese Sprechergruppe, deren Muttersprache fast ausschließlich mündlich verwendet wurde. Es wird argumentiert, dass der Estado Novo nicht die einzige Ursache für den Dachsprachenwechsel vom Deutschen zum Portugiesischen war, jedoch entscheidend dazu beigetragen hat, dass die Etablierung einer brasilianischen Schriftnorm des Deutschen endgültig verhindert wurde.
Die hier zu besprechende Dissertation des schwedischen Germanisten Nicolaus Janos Raag ist an der Universität Uppsala (Schweden) unter der Betreuung von Dessislava Stoeva-Holm entstanden. Die Arbeit will zeigen, welche Rolle Substantivkomposita im Rahmen der Wissensvermittlung und des Kulturtransfers spielen, wie deutsche Komposita lateinisch vermittelte Inhalte in die eigene frühmittelalterliche klösterliche Kultur der Rezipienten integrieren und welche Veränderungen sie dabei erfahren. Für die Untersuchung wurden Substantivkomposita ausgewählt, da sie prädestiniert für die Benennung von bisher Unbekanntem sind und durch ihre binäre Struktur die Fähigkeit besitzen, zwei Größen zueinander in Beziehung zu setzen, wobei die semantische Relation zwischen den Konstituenten eines Kompositums prinzipiell offen und auf morphologischer Ebene nicht ausgedrückt ist.
This paper provides an overview of the connection between word formation and text type linguistics. Following a brief outline of the current state of research, desiderata and weaknesses of previous research as well as perspectives of a text type oriented research on word formation will be introduced. Here, I advocate a stronger inclusion of oral (with regard to the medium) and conceptually spoken text types (cf. Koch/Oesterreicher 1985). The focus is on the analysis of word formations within the text type of battle rap, which can be classified as oral and conceptually spoken. The analysis gives an insight into my habilitation project outlined in the essay and shows how this project can be realized.
This study explores four German nominalization patterns (-ung; -erei; Ge- -X-e; nominalized infinitives) using corpus and web data. We conclude that they can be considered a word formation paradigm, as some functions depend on paradigmatic oppositions. Our case study supports gradual differences between inflectional and word formation paradigmaticity.
The project WBLUX (Wortbildung des moselfränkisch-luxemburgischen Raumes) at the University of Luxembourg aims at the investigation of Luxembourgish word formation through different text sorts and genres. In order to achieve this goal the compilation of an annotated corpus is needed. This article gives an example for benefits of using a corpus with annotations like parts of speech, lemmata and word formation affixes in the analysis of productivity of some selected word formation affixes of Luxembourgish. Then it describes how one can achieve such a corpus from a technical point of view. This includes the choice of corpus format, of a database platform and the designing of programs needed for the annotation process of word formation itself. This article also suggests new corpus linguistic approaches for research of word formation like analyzing the usage of word formation bases in the entire corpus or performing context analysis in order to determine semantical functions of each suffix.
Morphology Days is a (nearly) biennial international meeting which deals with morphology within different frameworks and in various perspectives Previous editions of this conference have taken place in Leuven (2015), Leeuwarden (2013), Leiden (2012), Nijmegen (2011), Luik (2009) and Amsterdam (2007) While the first editions of the conference were mainly addressed to researchers working on morphology in the Netherlands and in Belgium, the last editions – including this one – included international contributions The programme and the book of abstract is available at the conference’s homepage at https://morphologydays2017.wordpress.com/program/. Organized by Philippe Hiligsmann, Kristel Van Goethem, Nikos Koutsoukos and Isa Hendrikx from the Université Catholique de Louvain, and Laurent Raiser from the Université de Liège, this edition of Morphology Days hosted more than 30 researchers, among which 3 plenary speakers, coming not only from Belgium but also from France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Although both inflection and derivation (affixation) where dealt with in the talks, this conference report will only address the studies on derivation.
An inventory of the Middle High German word families is still missing wheras the Old High German and New High German word families are recorded by the dictionaries of J. Splett. In this paper a semi-automatic method is represented which can help to find and analyze the Middle High German word families. By several scripts a combined list of MHG and OHG lemmata is tranformed and expanded to a table containing among other things a column with a simplified variation of Splett's word formation formulas and a column with the common base of the word family the lemma probably belongs to. In a labour-intensive last step, these proposals have to be manually checked and corrected.
Department of British and American Studies in cooperation with SKASE (The Slovak Association for the Study of English) organized the Word-Formation Theories III & Typology and Universals in Word-Formation IV Conference. The Conference took place at P.J. Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, from 27 June to 30 June 2018. The event was organized by Slávka Tomaščíková, Lívia Körtvélyessy and Pavol Štekauer (P.J. Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia) and with the support of the APVV project No: APVV-16–0035 Research into extralinguistic factors of word-formation and word-interpretation. The program and the book of abstracts are available at the conference homepage http://kaa.ff.upjs.sk/en/alumni-club/33/word-formation-theories-iii-typology-and-universals-in-word-formation-iv.
Am 31. März 2017 und 01. April 2017 fand in Lyon unter Federführung des Forschungszentrums Centre d'Etudes Linguistiques (CEL – EA 1663) und unter Beteiligung des Labors Interactions, Corpus, Apprentissages, Représentations (ICAR – UMR 5191) der Universitäten Lumière Lyon 2 und der Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon ein internationaler Kongress zu Formen, Verfahren und Funktionen der Bildung lexematischer und polylexematischer Einheiten im Deutschen (Formation et préformation lexicale de l'allemand) statt. GermanistInnen aus Deutschland, Frankreich, Polen, Russland und Spanien nahmen an diesem Symposium teil.
This paper investigates the spelling of compound nouns in a corpus comprised of Early New High German protocols of witch trials from the 16th and 17th century. Previous studies on the spelling of compound nouns in printed texts have found that scribes increasingly write compound nouns as one word during the 16th century. However, this paper will show that there is still much variation in handwritten texts from that time. The study focusses on identifying factors that lead scribes to write compound nouns either as one word or two, such as linking elements and the use of upper case letters. I will argue that while there is more variation in the spelling of compound nouns in the handwritten corpus than in printed texts, there still is a strong tendency to line up the boundaries of the graphemic and syntactic words.
German "-isch" and English "-ish" share a common Germanic origin, which is evidenced by striking similarities concerning the derivation of ethnic adjectives "(englisch/English)" or property-denoting adjectives "(kindisch/childish)". However, after an initial period of parallel characteristics, the two languages display drastic changes, with English developing an approximative sense when attached to adjectival bases (e.g. "greenish") and expanding to a wide range of other word categories, while German "-isch" develops multiple functions and also comes to firmly occupy a morphological niche with non-native bases. The paper sheds light on the evolving divergence between German and English by presenting results from two diachronic corpus-based studies. Additionally, explanations with respect to the typological parameter of 'Boundary Permeability' are provided.
Besides some well-established forms like autoritär 'authoritarian'; humanitär 'humanitarian'; new coinages ending with -itär can be found in German. These adjectives are closely related to nouns ending with -ität. From an etymological point of view; these formations are morphologically transparent. Not only are the adjectives new; but -itär emerges as a new suffix.
A typical characteristic of Central German dialects, especially of the Ripuarian dialect, is that it has collective nouns with ge- + -ze (cf. gesteinze) besides those with ge- + -e (cf. gesteine) corresponding to Dutch gesteente and gestene. A relationship between ge- + -ze and ge- + -te has been assumed for a long time. A corpus-based comparison is given in order to explain the genesis of these different formation types (ge- + -e, ge- + -ze, ge- + -te) and their relations. It seems likely that earlier Dutch formations influenced their Ripuarian counterparts. Rarely, the circumfix ge- + -te also occurs in Ripuarian texts and may be autochthone. One main result is that the suffic -ze in Ripuarian restores the collective formation in the circumfix ge- + -e when it was destroyed by the e-apokope. This is a rare instance where an element of word formation is replaced by another one in order to neutralize the isolation effect of sound change.
This paper studies the morphological productivity of German N+N compounding patterns from a diachronic perspective. It argues that the productivity of compounds increases due to syntactic influence from genitive constructions ("improper compounds") in Early New High German. Both quantitative and qualitative productivity measures are adapted from derivational morphology and tested on compound data from the Mainz Corpus of (Early) New High German (1500–1710).
Phrasal compounding is a phenomenon illustrated by slept all day look. Prototypical examples are determinative compounds with a nominal head and a phrasal non-head. They raise interesting questions about the interaction of syntax and morphology and have been discussed in this context by Botha (1981) for Afrikaans and Lieber (1992) for English. Also in German and Turkish, they have received ample attention. This volume has as its main purpose to extend the range of languages for which phrasal compounds are discussed. It consists of a brief introduction (chapter 1), six chapters devoted to individual languages, and a final chapter with a more general outlook. The use of further in the title is perhaps surprising, in particular because the volume under review is the first of a new series. It is motivated by the fact that the papers are from “the second workshop on phrasal compounding”, held in Mannheim in 2015. In this review, I will first present and discuss each chapter, then consider some general points about the volume.
This paper presents the results of two experiments in German testing the acceptability of (non-)restrictive relative clauses (NRCs/RRCs) with split antecedents (SpAs). According to Moltmann (1992), SpAs are only grammatical if their parts occur within the conjuncts of a coordinate structure and if they have identical grammatical functions. Non-conjoined SpAs that form the subject and the object of a transitive verb are predicted to be ungrammatical. Our study shows that the acceptability of such examples improves significantly if the predicate that relates the parts of the SpA is symmetric. Moreover, it suggests that NRCs and RRCs behave differently in these cases with respect to the SpA-construal. We can make sense of this observation if we follow Winter (2016) in assuming that transitive symmetric predicates have to be analyzed as unary collective predicates and thus provide a collective antecedent for the RC at the semantic (not the syntactic) level. As we will argue, this accounts for some of the disagreement we found in the literature and gives us new insights into both the semantics of symmetric predicates and the semantics of NRCs.
Depiction verbs such as paint license i(mage)- and p(ortrait)-readings; for instance, Ben painted a cow can convey that Ben produced an image of an unspecific cow or a portrait of a specific cow. This paper takes issue with a property-based intensional analysis of depiction verbs (Zimmermann, 2006b, 2016) and instead argues for an extensional account. Accordingly, the i-reading is rooted in the introduction of worldly representations by the explicit noun cow as such, whereas the p-reading is rooted in the interpolation of an implicit representation via coercion. This take on the ambiguity captures the following key traits. On i-readings, only representations are accessible to quantifiers and anaphors; moreover, intensional effects such as substitution failure disappear once ordinary objects and representations are adequately distinguished. P-readings, by contrast, involve representations that depend on the portrayed ordinary objects as particulars; correspondingly, only ordinary objects are accessible to quantifiers and anaphors. The proposal is spelled out in Asher’s (2011) Type Composition Logic.
This study explores the relation between the development of narrative skills at the macrostructural level and the productive lexical abilities (verbs) of German-Russian children. The narratives are elicited using the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) and the lexical abilities are assessed using different tests. Twenty-one preschoolers (mean age: 3;9), forty-four 1st graders (mean age: 6;11) and twenty-two 3rd graders (mean age: 9;3) were included in the study. Correlation analyses were performed between verb lexicon and the following macrostructural components: Story Structure, Structural Complexity and Internal State Terms. The analysis also targets cross-language effects. In addition, the production of verbs within the elicited narratives was taken into account. Some positive correlations were found; however, no clear pattern across age groups and languages was observed. It is suggested that cognitive abilities might be a more decisive factor than lexical abilities and/or that the verbs assessed via the vocabulary tests are more specific than the ones required to achieve high scores for macrostructure.
This paper focuses on morphological verb errors in elicited narratives of Russian-German primary school bilinguals. The data was collected from 37 children who were separated into four groups according to the age and language acquisition type (simultaneous and successive). The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) (Gagarina et al. 2012) was used for data collection. The narratives produced in mode telling after listening to a model story were analysed and morphological verb errors in Russian and German were classified. Therefore, the error classification of Gagarina (2008) for Russian monolingual children was expanded and for the classification of German errors an own classification was suggested. Errors in Russian typically produced by monolinguals and unique bilingual errors as well were documented. The results show that the language of the environment (German) increases with age. Older children make fewer errors than younger ones. Nevertheless, a strong heterogeneity between children within each group can be observed.
This article investigates the influence of tense and aspect on the choice of verb forms in texts written by Russian-speaking learners of German. Through eight written narrations, each produced by advanced learners of German with L1-Russian and German native speakers, the use of verb forms and relevant linguistic means (perfect markers, temporal adverbs and temporal clauses) was compared and analysed.
The study shows that even very advanced Russian-speaking learners of German could not meet target language preferences in German. They tended to deploy a different temporal perspective than German native speakers (simple past instead of present tense) and they also showed an overuse of the perfect tense, especially when describing completed actions. These differences compared to the preferences of German native speakers can be explained as transfer effects from the L1 of Russian-speaking learners since – unlike in German – the grammatical aspect in Russian is obligatory and its perfective form offers an effective tool to express completeness.
The aim of the present study was to test the influence of picture composition on the narrative complexity of preschool children, and to compare the different procedures of the Cat Story of Hickmann (2002) and the Fox Story of Gülzow & Gagarina (2007) with the Baby Birds and Baby Goats Story of MAIN, by Gagarina et al. (2012). For this purpose, 27 children between the ages of 5;01 and 6;09 were tested with both variants to check whether a macro-structurally controlled picture structure would lead to more complex stories. The results show that narratives with a Goal-Attempt-Outcome structure, i.e. the Baby Birds and Baby Goats Stories, make children with increasing age tell more complex stories by means of a rise in story complexity than the narratives of Hickmann and Gülzow & Gagarina without that structure.
The aim of this paper is to analyse the development of narrative macrostructure and the impact of socio-economic status (SES) and home literacy environment (HLE) on the narrative macrostructure of monolingual preschoolers in Germany when retelling and telling a story. The analysis of narrative macrostructure includes three components: story structure, story complexity, and story comprehension. Oral narratives were elicited via Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). 198 monolingual children between age 4;6 and 5;11 participated (M=63 months, SD=5 months). The comparison of narrative macrostructure in three age groups (4;6 to 4;11 years, 5;0 to 5;5 years, 5;6 to 5;11 years) illustrate significant age effects in story structure, story complexity and story comprehension skills. There were weak significant positive correlations of some of these skills with aspects of socio-economic status and home literacy environment, for example between story comprehension skills and the educational background, the frequency and duration of the child’s exposure to books and the number of books in the household.
The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) is part of LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings). LITMUS is a battery of tests that have been developed in connection with the COST Action IS0804 Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment (2009−2013).
updated version --
The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) was designed in order to assess narrative skills in children who acquire one or more languages from birth or from early age. MAIN is suitable for children from 3 to 10 years and evaluates both comprehension and production of narratives. Its design allows for the assessment of several languages in the same child, as well as for different elicitation modes: Model Story, Retelling, and Telling. MAIN contains four parallel stories, each with a carefully designed six-picture sequence. The stories are controlled for cognitive and linguistic complexity, parallelism in macrostructure and microstructure, as well as for cultural appropriateness and robustness. The instrument has been developed on the basis of extensive piloting with more than 550 monolingual and bilingual children aged 3 to 10, for 15 different languages and language combinations. Even though MAIN has not been norm-referenced yet, its standardized procedures can be used for evaluation, intervention and research purposes. MAIN is currently available in the following languages: English, Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bulgarian, Croatian, Cypriot Greek, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Icelandic, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Standard Arabic, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Welsh.
Gegenstand aller natürlichen Sprachen, die Menschen hervorgebracht haben, ist das Sprechen. Die Schrift einer solchen Sprache kann insofern als sekundäre Errungenschaft bezeichnet werden. Sorten und Gattungen der menschlichen Sprachen und Schriften sind historisch wie auch heute von großer Vielfalt und krassen Gegensätzen geprägt: z.B. die indoeuropäischen Sprachen mit flektierendem Grammatikbau versus der vielen sinotibetischen Sprachen mit analytischem Bau oder das lateinische Alphabet versus die logographische chinesische Schrift. In dieser Arbeit wird gezeigt, welche Faktoren die Korrespondenz der schriftlichen Repräsentation auf eine Sprache entscheiden und in welcher Art und Weise die Schrift die sprachlichen Entwicklungen beeinflussen kann.
Introduction
(2019)
For this study one hundred sixty-seven Russian-/Turkish-German preschool children were tested with a battery of language proficiency tests in both languages. On the basis of 1.5 SD below monolingual norm for L2 German and 1.25 SD below bilingual mean for either home language, 9 children at risk of developmental language disorders (DLD) (mean age of 4 years and 5 months) were identified and 16 age-matched TD children were selected out of the cohort. All these children were tested with the LITMUS-MAIN and –SR tests in German. The results across TD and at risk of DLD group were compared. TD clearly outperformed at risk of DLD in SR. In elicited narratives, macrostructure and microstructure were scrutinized across groups. Similar to the previous findings, our results show significant differences between at risk of DLD und TD in the microstructure, e.g. total number of word tokens and verb-based communication units and SR. For the macrostructure, TD outperformed at risk children only for story complexity. The study expands our knowledge on the cut-off criteria for the identification of bilinguals at risk of DLD, scrutinized very early narratives for bilinguals at risk of DLD features and questions the similarity of cognitive skills in TD and at risk of DLD children.
In this paper, data from a current study on bilingual language acquisition and language promotion of children is presented. 96 narratives from 32 Turkish-German and Russian-German bilingual children were examined with regard to the acquisition of narrative ability in three rounds of tests. The macrostructure of each narrative was evaluated based on the theories of Westby (2005), Stein and Glenn (1977) and Gagarina et al. (2012). In the quantitative analysis, the factor age of onset (AoO) was considered and therefore, two hypotheses were introduced: 1) There is an influence of AoO on the narrative ability of L2 German bilingual children. And 2) The narrative ability will converge over time and after three years there will be no difference between the groups. Neither of those hypotheses could be confirmed by the examined narrative data. Hence, other influences on narrative ability were discussed in the last chapter and prospects for further research were given. In sum, the article shows that more narrative data of these children should be collected to make a comprehensive conclusion about the influence of AoO on narrative ability.
This study investigates macrostructure in elicited narratives of 69 monolingual German-, Russian- and Swedish-speaking adults. Using the LITMUS-MAIN (Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives), and its Baby Goats and Baby Birds stories, story structure and story complexity, concerning episodic organization, were examined across the 3 languages. As theoretical underpinnings, a multidimensional model of macrostructure was used. This model includes analyses of story structure (SS), in which a narrative merits a maximum score of 17, based on the occurrence of five types of macrostructural components (Internal states as initiating event and as reaction, Goal, Attempt and Outcome), and of story complexity (SC), which measures combinations of Goals, Attempts and Outcomes within one episode. The highest attainable complexity is the GAO-sequence, when a Goal, Attempt and Outcome are produced within the same episode. The results for SS were similar for German, Russian and Swedish, where adults included 11-12 components per story. A more detailed analysis of the individual components revealed striking similarities across the 3 languages, both for frequently used and seldom occurring components. SC did not differ significantly across languages nor across stories, whilst for SS, a slight difference between the two stories was found. We interpret this finding as story complexity (a qualitative measure of macrostructure) being of a more universal nature. Furthermore, our results indicate that caution is warranted when conclusions about children’s narrative skills are to be drawn on the basis of the MAIN Baby Goats and Baby Birds stories.
With the demographic explosion of young people in major African cities, we are witnessing the emergence of youth languages and new speech forms. In search of well-being, these young people, plagued by poverty, social injustice, unemployment and idleness, invent linguistic codes that allow them to find themselves. The linguistic and sociolinguistic description of these youth languages is the object of this volume. The contributions inform on the statutes and functions of the youth languages of Africa, their forms and structures, their representations, and envisage perspectives and prospective didactics.
Transdisciplinary research is research not only on, but also for and, most of all, with practitioners. In the research framework of transdisciplinarity, scholars and practitioners collaborate throughout research projects with the aim of mutual learning. This paper shows the value transdisciplinarity can add to media linguistics. It does so by investigating the digital literacy shift in journalism: the change, in the last two decades, from the predominance of a writing mode that we have termed focused writing to a mode we have called writing-by-the-way. Large corpora of writing process data have been generated and analyzed with the multimethod approach of progression analysis in order to combine analytical depth with breadth. On the object level of doing writing in journalism, results show that the general trend towards writing-by-the-way opens up new niches for focused writing. On a meta level of doing research, findings explain under what conditions transdisciplinarity allows for deeper insights into the medialinguistic object of investigation.
This article presents an analysis of the police television series A Touch of Frost (Yorkshire Television, 1992) and the crime novels by Rodney Wingfield upon which it is based.
In order to analyse the way the protagonist, Inspector Jack Frost, is characterised in either version, data is drawn from the pilot episode of the series and Wingfield’s debut novel Frost at Christmas (1984). Wingfield was less than impressed with television’s version of Frost, stating, ‘He just isn’t my Frost’. The rationale for this article is to apply established models in stylistics to investigate the differences between the original and the adaptation. A core motivation for stylistics is to ‘support initial impressions in various extracts’ readings’ and to ‘describe the readers’ response with some precision’ (Gregoriou 2007: 19); this article therefore offers a close linguistic explanation for an author’s dissatisfaction with the adaptation of his own work. The famously reticent Wingfield did not elaborate in detail on why he disapproved of the television version of Frost, although several critics observed that Wingfield felt television had ‘softened’ his creation. This article contends that ‘softness’ is represented in language through politeness strategies adopted by speakers whilst impoliteness represents the ‘tougher’ speech of Wingfield’s original iteration of Jack Frost. In order to demonstrate this contention, this study will analyse pragmatic elements of the dialogue of both novel and television versions of Frost through the analytical framework for impoliteness developed by Culpeper (1996; 2010). This framework will be integrated into the model for analysing the elements of narrative outlined by Simpson and Montgomery (1995), in turn suggesting an elaboration of this model. In investigating whether television’s Jack Frost is ‘softer’ than the character envisaged by Wingfield, free direct speech and accompanying physical behaviour in novel and television adaptation are analysed, focussing on whether the perceived softness of the latter has been partly achieved by making the speech of Frost less impolite on television.
A growing body of evidence shows a positive relation between the language skills of a child and the socio-economic status (SES) of his/her parents. These studies have mainly been conducted in an American English monolingual context. The current paper addresses the question of whether SES has a comparable impact on the simultaneous bilingual language acquisition. In this study, noun and verb test scores of German simultaneous bilingual children with Turkish and Russian as heritage languages are related to the SES of their parents – to verify the existence and the nature of a common pattern. The results do not show common patterns across the two heritage language groups, suggesting the existence of other confounding factors.
Ziel dieses Beitrags ist der Vergleich von Formen und Diskursfunktionen der nominalen Anredeformen in verschiedenen Fernsehwahldebatten aus Brasilien, Portugal, Deutschland, Frankreich und Spanien.
Die sprachvergleichende Perspektive ist aus mehreren Gründen von besonderem Interesse. Zum einen liegt ein sprachstruktureller Unterschied zwischen dem Portugiesischen und den anderen Sprachen vor, der darin besteht, dass das Portugiesische eine große Zahl nominaler Anredeformen in sein Pronominalparadigma integrieren kann, wohingegen es diese Möglichkeit im Deutschen, Spanischen und Französischen nicht oder nur sehr begrenzt gibt.
Ein anderer Unterschied ist, dass es im Portugiesischen einen gewissen Spielraum dafür gibt, die interlokutive Distanz in der Interaktion durch Anredeformen auszuhandeln, was sich auch in den Wahldebatten zeigt. In den anderen drei Sprachen besteht diese Möglichkeit nur sehr eingeschränkt.
In allen fünf Debatten stehen die Anredeformen jedoch in engem Zusammenhang mit Fragen, wie z.B. der, wie Respekt oder Professionalität gezeigt wird, wodurch somit ein gewisser Zusammenhang zwischen der Wahl der Anredeformen und dem diskursiven Ethos manifest wird. Die Wahl der Anredeformen kann als strategisch betrachtet werden, wie auch der Wechsel von der Anrede zur delocutio in praesentia (Rede über den Gesprächspartner in seiner Gegenwart). Doch trotz dieser Parallelen zeigen sich deutliche Unterschiede in der Ausgestaltung, die die Frage nach interkulturellen Differenzen aufwerfen.
In ihrer neuesten Publikation befasst sich die ausgewiesene Wortbildungsexpertin Elke Donalies mit Fällen wie Wetterbeobachter, Dickhäuter, Vergissmeinnicht, zartfühlend und wieviel, deren linguistische Erfassung nach wie vor Probleme bereitet. Grund dafür dürfte zum einen sein, dass die Worthaftigkeit der untersuchten Einheiten vielfach fraglich ist (z. B. zart fühlend als syntaktische Fügung vs. zartfühlend als Wort bzw. Wortbildungsprodukt). Zum anderen ist die Analyse der Einheiten – bei Zuordnung zum Bereich Wortbildung – schwierig und im Resultat entsprechend vielfältig (z. B. Dickhäuter als Derivation, Zusammenbildung oder synthetic compound (vgl. S. 114)). Donalies hat sich also mit der Wahl derartiger "linguistischer Problemmacher" viel vorgenommen und insgesamt drei Jahre Projektzeit im Rahmen ihrer IDS-Tätigkeit dafür aufgewendet (Januar 2015–Januar 2018).
Multiple exponence in morphology has recently attracted a good deal of attention (see, among others, Harris 2017; Caballero & Inkelas 2018). In this paper, I examine Modern Greek verbs which take an extra verbalizer (implicit multiple exponence). The simple base (bare form) and the base with the verbalizer co-exist in the lexicon without any semantic or aspectual opposition and can be used in the same syntactic context. Thus, they raise important questions for morphological theory. I argue that the explanation of this pleonastic addition may be hidden in the relation between inflection and derivation and the polyfunctional character of verbalizers in synthetic languages. Since the two forms co-exist and one member of each pair features an idiomatic association of meaning and complex form, morphological theory is challenged. I argue that these formations find a natural account within the framework of Construction Morphology (Booij 2010; Jackendoff & Audring 2019).
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.
Deutsche Komposita haben einige forschungsrelevante Eigenarten, zum Beispiel die Fugenelemente. Kopf hatte deshalb befürchtet, das Thema Fugenelement sei längst "leergeforscht" (S. 1). Natürlich ist kein Thema wirklich leergeforscht. Weil wir verschiedene Ansichten und Einsichten haben. Weil niemand auf Forschungsfragen definitiv antworten kann. Weil sich unsere Sprache – wie alles in der Welt – ständig verändert.
This paper deals with complex prefix-particle structures like aberkennen in German. First, it presents a scheme to analyse these double complex words from a synchronic point of view. Second, it is shown for words with ab-, that this type of word formation is typical for Middle and Early Modern High German and reasons for the decrease are discussed.
The International Morphology Meeting is a biennial event held alternately in Vienna and Budapest. The eighteenth edition took place in Budapest in May 2018 and it was organised by the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with the Department of Theoretical Linguistics and the Department of English Linguistics of Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE). The meeting has invariably dealt with all aspects of morphology, with no preference for any particular framework or approach, albeit offering a leitmotif to orient authors who wish to give a presentation in the main session. This edition’s main theme was "Paradigms in inflection and word formation synchronically and diachronically", which provided potential presenters with the opportunity to submit abstracts in a wide range of topics. In addition to the main session, the conference hosted three workshops: (1) Models and methods in morphology; (2) The learnability of complex constructions from a cross-linguistic perspective; (3) Morphological aspects of Uralic and Turkic languages.
This paper approaches productivity by considering three case studies: compounds, blends and phrasal verbs. The aim of the paper is to encourage a discussion about the factors involved in the notion of productivity, and to show why so many of the established measures are not completely satisfactory or are interpreted in a way that is not.
This contribution aims to describe privacy, publicness and anonymity as essential analytic dimensions for media linguistic research. The dimensions are not inherent in and predetermined by the technical features and forms of communication provided by mobile devices, but are used by the participants as an orientation grid for shaping their online and offline practices in and with mobile media. Considering both mobile device use in the public realm and the dissemination of increasingly private content in social media (which is said to lead to ‘blurred boundaries’ between the private and the public), the paper provides a brief overview of the main developments in mobile media research: Studies adopting various approaches – e. g. sociological-ethnographic, linguistic and media studies – illustrate how publicness, privacy and anonymity are actively shaped and brought about by mobile media users in face-to-face and remote social encounters. As this shows that publicness, privacy and anonymity are still relevant concepts for users, future media linguistics studies should focus on the dynamic multimodal practices by which they are contextualized and accomplished.
Narratives 2.0 : a multi-dimensional approach to semi-public storytelling in WhatsApp voice messages
(2019)
Based on a corpus of voice message narratives in German WhatsApp group chats, the present study contributes to research on social media storytelling in that it focusses on stories of personal experience which are embedded in a communication platform which favours a continuous dialogic exchange, narrated to well-defined non-anonymous publics and multimodal (comprised of visual and audible posting types). To capture the characteristics of this type of social media storytelling, the paper argues that Ochs and Capps’ (2001) dimensional model originally developed for conversational narratives (including the dimensions of tellability, tellership, embeddedness, linearity, moral stance) should be expanded by the dimensions of publicness, multimodality and sequencing. The prototype of storytelling in WhatsApp group chats is based on recent personal experiences; it is related by a single teller as an initial, sequentially non-embedded and linearly organised “big package” story (in a single voice message sometimes introduced by a text message containing an abstract); other group members routinely document their evaluative stances in rather conventionalised text message responses in the semi-public group space.
Combining the methods of linguistics and literary criticism, this article takes a fresh look at two texts that have been analysed ad nauseam: Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. I use James’s late style as a touchstone to compare and contrast the two texts. Analysing syntax by means of close textual analysis of the novels’ opening paragraphs as well as their metaphorical language, and employing the corpus analysis programme AntConc to survey the entire texts, I aim to show that James’s 1880 text anticipates his late style and Wharton’s 1920 text appropriates it to suit her own agenda. However, in respectively anticipating and appropriating this style, James and Wharton create different effects. James intensifies his female protagonist’s ‘world of thought and feeling’ (Eliot 1963: 56), creating a fictional world with literary equality for both genders, while Wharton subverts gender roles in a scathing critique of Gilded Age society, which did not allow for this other ‘world of thought and feeling’. In addition to positioning both novels as feminist, this article compares Wharton’s writing to James’s, but without presupposing the latter’s influence on the former. Instead, acknowledging the fluidity of style, I aim to put forward a convincing case that there are subtle differences that make these authors’ styles Jamesian and Whartonian, respectively.
The shared communicative act of theatrical texts in performance: a relevance theoretic approach
(2020)
This article adopts a relevance theoretic approach to meaning making in theatrical texts and performances. Theatrical texts communicate immediately to multiple audiences: readers, actors, directors, producers, and designers. They communicate less directly to the writer’s ultimate audience – the playgoer or spectator – through the medium of performance. But playgoers are not passive receptacles for interpretations distilled in rehearsal, enacted through performance, or developed in study and reflection. Rather, in the framework of communication postulated by relevance theory, the audience is an active participant in making meaning. I will briefly review a range of approaches to meaning making in theatre, and then outline my view of a relevance theoretic account of the vital contributions of the audience in constructing the interpretation of performance, treating it as a communicative act.
"You don’t mind my calling you Harry?" : Terms of address in John Updike’s "Rabbit" tetralogy
(2020)
This paper examines the use of address terms in John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy (Updike 1995). The first part of the analysis provides a comprehensive overview of the great variety of terms used to address the protagonist, Harry Angstrom, in the decades covered by the novels. The second part focuses on two important side characters, Reverend Eccles and Harry’s mother-in-law. It demonstrates how address term usage with these two characters reflects ongoing changes in their relationship with Harry. The main aim of the paper is to demonstrate the potential of fictional data for the study of address terms and, in return, to capture the manifold functions of address terms as a literary device in fiction.
Four main informational elements have been suggested and studied as central aspects of narrative discourse: causality, character, location, time. The research that scholars have previously undertaken on these aspects has been primarily on Indo-European languages, and more specifically on the European side of that language family. The linguistic limitations have indicated that character is the aspect of narrative that readers/listeners attend to most closely. However, in examining narrative discourses from non-Indo-European languages, challenges to the presumed primacy of character emerge. In a partial report on field work conducted in Borneo in 2012-2015, I compare and contrast patterns in the rankings of the four main aspects of narrative in three languages, English, Hobongan and Daqan. I also note the strategies by which the languages make their respective rankings clear, including focus particles (Hobongan), specificity of description (each), and amount of information provided about the aspects (each). I suggest that analyses of the patterns and rankings of information in narrative be included in typological categorizations and linguistic descriptions of languages.
This paper explores how refugee families in Germany draw on me-diational repertoires to accomplish a range of digital literacy prac-tices on their smartphones. We introduce the concept of ‘mediation-al repertoire’, i.e. a socially and individually structured configuration of semiotic and technological resources for communication, and use it in an ethnographic case study with participants from Syria and Af-ghanistan in a refugee residence in Hamburg in 2017/18. The collect-ed data includes nine semi-directed interviews, video demonstra-tions of smartphone usage, and ethnographic fieldnotes. Qualitative analysis draws on mediagrams, i.e. visualizations of mediational re-pertoires in two families. Findings suggest that individual mediation-al repertoires in these families differ especially by generation and other factors, such as literacy competence, type of social relation-ship and purpose of online use, including smartphone-based lang-uage-learning.
Linguistic research and linguistic activism have resulted in key changes to official language use. However, revisions remain contested and many English and German speakers continue to employ male generic terms. In this article I explore whether the encounter with sex-/gender-neutral terminology in June Arnold's novel 'The Cook and the Carpenter' can prompt readers to review their language use and consider alternatives. Based on narrative research, my premise is that fiction can create familiarity with new terms, which is the first step toward wider linguistic change. I frame my investigation with Wittgenstein's notion that "to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life", and put it to the test with a discourse analysis of English and German reader responses. The results of my study show that Arnold's novel stimulates fruitful debate around the issue of linguistic representation. Based on my findings, I propose to integrate literary texts which engage with the issue of sex/gender and language into educational settings to further promote neutral/inclusive language use.
Adapting MAIN to Arabic
(2020)
Counter to the often assumed division of labour between content and function words, we argue that both types of words have lexical content in addition to their logical content. We propose that the difference between the two types of words is a difference in degree. We conducted a preliminary study of quantificational determiners with methods from Distributional Semantics, a computational approach to natural language semantics. Our findings have implications both for distributional and formal semantics. For distributional semantics, they indicate a possible avenue that can be used to tap into the meaning of function words. For formal semantics, they bring into light the context-sensitive, lexical aspects of function words that can be recovered from the data even when these aspects are not overtly marked. Such pervasive context-sensitivity has profound implications for how we think about meaning in natural language.
Preface: New language versions of MAIN: Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives - revised
(2020)
This paper is about what Ninan (2014) (following Wollheim 1980) calls the Acquaintance Inference (AI): a firsthand experience requirement imposed by several subjective expressions such as Predicates of Personal Taste (PPTs) (delicious). In general, one is entitled to calling something delicious only upon having tried it. This requirement can be lifted, disappearing in scope of elements that we will call obviators. The paper investigates the patterns of AI obviation for PPTs and similar constructions (e.g., psych predicates and subjective attitudes). We show that the cross-constructional variation in when acquaintance requirements can be obviated presents challenges for previous accounts of the AI (Pearson 2013, Ninan 2014). In place of these, we argue for the existence of two kinds of acquaintance content: (i) that of bare PPTs; and (ii) that of psych predicates, subjective attitudes and overt experiencer PPTs.
For (i), we propose that the AI arises from an evidential restriction that is dependent on a parameter of interpretation which obviators update. For (ii), we argue that the AI is a classic presupposition. We model both (i) and (ii) using von Fintel and Gillies’s (2010) framework for directness and thus connect two strands of research: that on PPTs and that on epistemic modals. Both phenomena are sensitive to a broad direct-indirect distinction, and analyzing them along similar lines can help shed light on how natural language conceptualizes evidence in general.
The goal of this paper is to evaluate two approaches to quantification in event semantics, namely the analysis of quantificational DPs in terms of generalized quantifiers and the analysis proposed in Schein (1993) according to which quantifiers over individuals contain an existential quantifier over sub-events in their scope. Both analyses capture the fact that the event quantifier always takes scope under quantifiers over individuals (the Event Type Principle in Landman (2000)), but the sub-events analysis has also been argued to be able to account for some further data, namely for adverbs qualifying ‘ensemble’ events and for mixed cumulative/ distributive readings. This paper shows that the sub-events analysis also provides a better account of the Event Type Principle if a broader range of data is considered, including cases with non-existential quantifiers over events: unlike the generalized quantifiers analysis, it can successfully account for the interpretation of indefinites in bare habituals and sentences that contain overt adverbs of quantification.
Korean is a generalized classifier language where classifiers are required for numerals to combine with nominals. This paper presents a number construction where the classifier is absent and the numeral appears prenominally. This construction, which I call the classifier-less number construction (Cl-less NC), results in a definite or a partitive reading where the referent must be familiar: ‘the two women’ or ‘two of the women’. In order to account for this, I argue that Korean postnominal number constructions are ambiguous between a plain number construction and a partitive construction. After motivating and proposing an analysis for the partitive structure, I argue that Cl-less NC is derived from the partitive construction, explaining its distributional restriction and the interpretation.
This paper describes the interplay of lexical and grammatical aspect with other grammatical phenomena in the interpretation of the aspectual suffix ‑ile (which we analyse as Perfective) in isiNdebele, a Nguni Bantu language spoken in South Africa. Crucial other phenomena include constituency-related factors such as the conjoint-disjoint distinction and (related) penultimate lengthening, along with morphophonological conditions that trigger different forms of ‑ile. These factors appear to interact differently in isiNdebele than they do in closely related Zulu, suggesting two different paths of grammaticalization, which we argue can change the interpretation of markers of grammatical aspect as they interact with lexical aspectual classes.
Bulgarian belongs to the South Slavic language group but exhibits specific linguistic features shared with the non-Slavic languages of the Balkan Sprachbund. In this paper, we discuss linguistic and cultural aspects relevant for the Bulgarian adaptation of the revised English version of The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). We address typological properties of the verbal system pertaining to a differentiated aspectual system and to a paradigm of verbal forms for narratives grammaticalized as renarrative mood in Bulgarian. Further, we consider lexical, derivational and discourse cohesive means in contrast to the English markers of involvement and perspective taking in the MAIN stories.
This paper adds to the growing field of conversation analytical re-search on smartphone-use in face-to-face interactions. Whenever smartphones are used in mobile-supported sharing activities - e. g. to show a picture to co-present others - the smartphone user needs to search for and find the “searchable object” in the World Wide Web, an App or on the device’s local memory. Analyzing audio-recordings of naturally-occurring conversations, this paper iden-tifies two types of practices of speech that explicitly orient to on-going smartphone-supported searches: Collaborative search (cf. Brown/McGregor/McMillan 2015) and search-accompanying com-mentary by the smartphone-user. Both practices verbally provide for the accountability of the otherwise opaque device use. They differ in the way they produce opportunities for co-present others to substantively contribute to the progression of the search as well as the degree to which they produce the search as an interactionally public event.
This paper gives an introduction to the Cantonese adaptation of Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), which is part of the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery. We here discuss the motivation for adapting this assessment instrument into Cantonese, the adaptation process itself and potential contexts for use of the Cantonese MAIN.
The adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN; Gagarina, et al., 2019) to Catalan contributes to advancing our knowledge of the development of children’s narrative skills in a diversity of languages using the same protocol, making it possible to evaluate narratives also in Catalan-speakers. The adaptation of MAIN will be very useful in Catalonia, because it is a region where two official languages (Catalan and Spanish) coexist, Catalan being the language of schooling, so that most of the population is bilingual. However, currently there is no instrument for assessing narrative skills that allows for parallel assessment of Catalan in bilingual children. For these reasons, this adaptation will be of great value to promote the study of narratives in the bilingual population considering Catalan within the possible language combinations. The present paper describes the process of adapting MAIN to Catalan and reports results from the first pilot study using the Catalan MAIN.
This paper describes the process of adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) to Danish and the use of MAIN in a Danish context. First, there is a brief description of the Danish language followed by details of the process of translating and adapting the MAIN manual to Danish. Finally, we briefly describe some of the research contexts in which the current and previous MAIN materials have been piloted and applied.
This contribution provides an overview of the current state of affairs with respect to the Dutch version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). We describe properties of the Dutch MAIN, the creation of the Dutch MAIN, and the results of recent research with this new instrument to measure narrative competence.
The Epistemic Containment Principle (ECP) requires that epistemic modals take wider scope than strong quantifiers such as every or most (von Fintel and Iatridou, 2003). Although fairly robust in its realization, a few systemic classes of counterexamples to the ECP have been noted. Based on these, previous work has argued for two claims: subjective modals obey the ECP, whereas objective ones don’t (Tancredi, 2007; Anand and Hacquard, 2008); and every respects the ECP, whereas each violates it (Tancredi, 2007). This paper argues that explicit Questions Under Discussion (QUDs; Roberts, 1996; Ginzburg, 1996) also systematically influence the ECP: scopal orderings that provide relevant answers to the given QUDs are preferred, and this tendency can override the ECP. To support this claim, the paper presents an experimental study. The results corroborate the existence of systematic QUD effects on the ECP, and support the view that the ECP is derived from a confluence of various pragmatic and lexical biases.
Imposters are grammatically third-person expressions used to refer to the firstperson speaker or second-person addressee (e.g. ‘the present authors’ when used to refer to the first-person writer, ‘Mommy’ or ‘Daddy’ when used by parents for self-reference in child-directed speech). Current analyses of imposters differ in whether they derive the unusual referential properties of imposters using syntactic means or attribute them to semantic and pragmatics. We aim to shed light on these competing approaches by means of a psycholinguistic experiment focusing on first-person imposters that investigates the kinds of pronouns (first-person vs. third-person) used to refer to imposter antecedents. Our results show that manipulating the prominence of the first-person speaker does not significantly boost the acceptability of first-person pronouns in imposter-referring contexts. However, our results suggest that a purely syntactic approach may not be sufficient either, as psycholinguistic processing factors also appear to be relevant.
The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) is a theoretically grounded toolkit that employs parallel pictorial stimuli to explore and assess narrative skills in children in many different languages. It is part of the LITMUS (Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings) battery of tests that were developed in connection with the COST Action IS0804 Language Impairment in a Multilingual Society: Linguistic Patterns and the Road to Assessment (2009−2013). MAIN has been designed to assess both narrative production and comprehension in children who acquire one or more languages from birth or from early age. Its design allows for the comparable assessment of narrative skills in several languages in the same child and in different elicitation modes: Telling, Retelling and Model Story. MAIN contains four parallel stories, each with a carefully designed six-picture sequence based on a theoretical model of multidimensional story organization. The stories are controlled for cognitive and linguistic complexity, parallelism in macrostructure and microstructure, as well as for cultural appropriateness and robustness. As a tool MAIN had been used to compare children’s narrative skills across languages, and also to help differentiate between children with and without developmental language disorders, both monolinguals and bilinguals.
This volume consists of two parts. The main content of Part I consists of 33 papers describing the process of adapting and translating MAIN to a large number of languages from different parts of the world. Part II contains materials for use for about 80 languages, including pictorial stimuli, which are accessible after registration.
MAIN was first published in 2012/2013 (ZASPiL 56). Several years of theory development and material construction preceded this launch. In 2019 (ZASPiL 63), the revised English version (revised on the basis of over 2,500 transcribed MAIN narratives as well as ca 24,000 responses to MAIN comprehension questions, collected from around 700 monolingual and bilingual children in Germany, Russia and Sweden between 2013-2019) was published together with revised versions in German, Russian, Swedish, and Turkish for the bilingual Turkish-Swedish population in Sweden. The present 2020 (ZASPiL 64) volume contains new and revised language versions of MAIN.
This paper presents the Croatian version of the Multilingual Assessment tool for Narratives (MAIN), outlines its development and describes the research that has used it to assess narrative skills in monolingual and bilingual speakers. The Croatian version of MAIN has so far been used in three research projects and results have been presented in five peer-reviewed articles (published or in press) covering a total of 175 children in the age range from 5;0 to 9;0 (20 with developmental language disorder) and 60 adults, age range from 22 to 76. The accumulated results indicate that MAIN can differentiate narrative skills of speakers in distinct age groups and can distinguish children with language disorders form children with typical language development.
This paper describes in detail the development of the Polish version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). We first describe its two earlier versions, the unpublished version and the published version, developed in 2012, as well as the revised version. We also justify the differences between the unpublished Polish version developed in 2012 and the original MAIN. Then we summarize the results from studies that used the unpublished version of the Polish MAIN. We end with outlining a study that could be conducted to compare the two slightly different procedures in order to examine whether the results obtained with MAIN are resistant to changes in the procedure details.
This paper provides the background to the process of translation and piloting of the Serbian version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN), Multilingvalni Test za Procenu Narativa (MTPN). Our review of the sparse research literature on Serbian children’s narrative abilities reveals a need for a well-designed narrative instrument, which will enable researchers and practitioners to assess the production and comprehension of narratives in children of a wide age range, typically and atypically developing, monolingual and bilingual, crucially allowing for cross-linguistic comparisons. We encountered two kinds of challenges during the process of translation and adaptation of the instrument from English into Serbian. The first concerned the lack of established Serbian technical terminology needed to describe test administration to the future users of the test: researchers and practitioners working in different disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, Speech and Language Therapy. The second challenge concerned the translation of linguistic structures required to produce a successful rendition of the narrative: in contrast to English, but in line with other Slavic languages, Serbian relies heavily on verbs marked for perfective aspect in story-telling. Our discussion of preliminary data from four Serbian monolingual children, aged 5;5-10, demonstrates that MTPN is a successful tool in assessing narrative abilities in children acquiring Serbian.
The adaptation of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) for use with Slovak speaking children is a vital step in the process of creating a transparent evaluation of children’s narrative abilities. Since its first translation and adaptation in 2012, new pilot data from different groups of children has been collected in Slovakia. This paper describes the process of adapting the instrument to fit the Slovak language and reports on analyses of narrative production in monolingual (103 Slovak-speaking children) and bilingual (37 Slovak-English speaking) pre-school children. Within a pilot study, the story elicitation method was also compared (telling vs. retelling) within a small sample of 10 monolingual Slovak-speaking children. All results show transparent and detailed possibilities in terms of finding a meaningful evaluation that can evaluate a child’s complex narrative abilities.
This paper presents the Italian version of the Multilingual Assessment tool for Narratives (MAIN), describes how it was developed and reports on some recent uses of MAIN within the Italian context. The Italian MAIN has been used in different research projects and for clinical purposes; results have been presented at conferences and in peer reviewed papers. The results indicate that MAIN is an appropriate assessment tool for evaluating children’s narrative competence, in production and comprehension from preschool age (5 years) to school age (8 years) in typical language development, bilingual development and language delay/disorders.
This paper describes the experience of using the Norwegian and Russian versions of LITMUS-MAIN to elicit narrative data from bilingual Norwegian-Russian children as well as from Norwegian- and Russian-speaking monolinguals (Rodina 2017, 2018). The paper reports on the slight adaptations to the standardized design, procedure and analysis that were done to make the tasks more suitable for this specific population. It highlights the advantages, challenges, and potential associated with the task against a backdrop of the research conducted with Norwegian-Russian bilinguals in Norway.
This paper introduces the Kam version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN). Kam is a minority language in southern China which belongs to the Kam-Tai language family and is spoken by the Kam ethnic minority people. Adding Kam to MAIN not only enriches the typological diversity of MAIN but also allows researchers to study children’s narrative development in a sociocultural context vastly distinctly different from the frequently examined WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies. Moreover, many Kam-speaking children are bilingual ethnic minority children who are “left-behind” children living in Mainland China, growing up in a unique socio-communicative environment
A translation process is often seen as only a simple code exchange, but, in fact, it always requires an adaptation of terms, expressions, and structures, which is not exactly straightforward. This paper describes the process of translating and adapting the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) to Brazilian Portuguese. A brief description of the project, concerning both historic and linguistic aspects, was done in order to emphasize the cultural and linguistic challenges faced during the process.
This paper introduces the Mandarin version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) and describes the adaptation process. The Mandarin MAIN not only extends the empirical coverage of MAIN by including one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, but also offers an important tool to assess the narrative abilities of monolingual and bi-/ multi- lingual children acquiring Mandarin as a first, heritage, second, or additional language across the globe.