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Contrastive focus
(2007)
The article puts forward a discourse-pragmatic approach to the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. It is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of "contrastive focus", "kontrast" (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or "identificational focus" (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms like introduction of alternatives or exhaustivity. Rather, an adequate analysis must take into account discourse-pragmatic notions like hearer expectation or discourse expectability of the focused content in a given discourse situation. The less expected a given content is judged to be for the hearer, relative to the Common Ground, the more likely a speaker is to mark this content by means of special grammatical devices, giving rise to emphasis.
New evidence is provided for a grammatical principle that singles out contrastive focus (Rooth 1996; Truckenbrodt 1995) and distinguishes it from discourse-new “informational” focus. Since the prosody of discourse-given constituents may also be distinguished from discourse-new, a three-way distinction in representation is motivated. It is assumed that an F-feature marks just contrastive focus (Jackendoff 1972, Rooth 1992), and that a G-feature marks discoursegiven constituents (Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006), while discoursenew is unmarked. A crucial argument for G-marking comes from second occurrence focus (SOF) prosody, which arguably derives from a syntactic representation where SOF is both F-marked and G-marked. This analysis relies on a new G-Marking Condition specifying that a contrastive focus may be G-marked only if the focus semantic value of its scope is discourse-given, i.e. only if the contrast itself is given.
This article takes stock of the basic notions of Information Structure (IS). It first provides a general characterization of IS — following Chafe (1976) — within a communicative model of Common Ground (CG), which distinguishes between CG content and CG management. IS is concerned with those features of language that concern the local CG. Second, this paper defines and discusses the notions of Focus (as indicating alternatives) and its various uses, Givenness (as indicating that a denotation is already present in the CG), and Topic (as specifying what a statement is about). It also proposes a new notion, Delimitation, which comprises contrastive topics and frame setters, and indicates that the current conversational move does not entirely satisfy the local communicative needs. It also points out that rhetorical structuring partly belongs to IS.
Die Problematik des sprachkommunikativen Umgangs mit dem Kulturphänomen "Phraseologie" ist im Falle zwei- bzw. mehrsprachiger Diskursgemeinschaften bisher kaum ins Blickfeld der Forschung geraten. Daher konzentriert sich der vorliegende Aufsatz auf Aspekte phraseologischer Sprachverwendung in einem komplexen Konrakt-, Konvergenz- und Integrationsraum von mehreren Sprachen und Kulturen und möchte zur Modelierung bi- bzw. multilingualen Diskursverhaltens im Hinblick auf die Phraseologie beitragen, indem er ein breites Spektrum von enmpirischen Manifestationsklassen bzw. -typen kommunikativen Synkretismus und sprachlicher Hybridität erfasst, systematisiert, beschreibt und evaluiert. Diese Forschungsfrage erlangt auch insofern eine besondere Bedeutung, als sich die Mehrschichtigkeit bilingualer Variationsdimensionen gerade anhand der Phraseologieverwendung aspektreich eruieren Iässt.
Der vorliegende kurze Beitrag [hat] das Ziel, im diskutierten Problemrahmen konstitutive Aspekte der Horizonte, Konturen und Fluchtlinien einer dezidiert inter- bzw. transkulturellen Ausrichtung der Sprachwissenschaft anzudeuten und zu hinterfragen, ihre disziplinären Wege und Blickfelder anzulegen sowie über ein inter- bzw.transkulturelles ,,Paradigma" als "interkulturelle Linguistik" im Hinblick auf Profil, Tragfähigkeit und Reichweite zu reflektieren. All das soll dann zu einer extensionalen und intensionalen Bestimmung einer "interkulturellen Linguistik" hinführen.
Ein aktuelles Handbuch der empirischen Sozialforschung stellt fest: „Die meisten Theorien in den Sozialwissenschaften sind relativ ungenau formuliert und beziehen sich auf nicht exakt definierte Begriffe“ (SCHNELL/HILL/ESSER 2005: 11). Die Linguistik – so auch die Sprachgermanistik – sollte aus dieser Kritik produktive Konsequenzen ziehen und dezidierte Anstöße für eine theoretisch fundierte und empiriegestützte Begriffs- und Konzeptbildung von IKK erarbeiten. Nicht zuletzt mit der Intention, dass die IKK als Phänomentyp kein „weicher“ Forschungsgegenstand mehr bleiben darf und dementsprechend die IKK-Forschung nicht mehr als „weiche“ Wissenschaft gelten sollte.
This paper is concerned with the cultural reality characterised by the cmmunication within bi- or multilingual groups, in comparison to monolingual comniunication. In other words, such groups use their varieties of language differently. In this respect the paper deals with a culture of multilingualisrn, with a primary aim of highlighting subtly the characteristics end structure of the bi- or multilingual way of speaking. In particular, the predominant goal of this study is to emphasize respects of the "mixed" speech behaviour (the bilingual inode of discourse); and of innovations in speech and communication of transcultural bi- or multilingualism utilizing the example of the German as a minority language in Hungary. On the basis of the research it has become clear that linguistic variations and differentes should not be viewed automatically as individual mistakes but as a reaction to a new conununicative challenge. The conclusions for the discipline of "applird lingusitics" encompass that: all outcornes of communicative dynamic processes on the system of language concerning monolingual as well as bilingual language behaviour (inclusive of both "natural" and "artificial" bi- or multilingualism), should be considered more subtly both in theory and practice. In addition these outcomes must be analysed and heuristically described within an integrated frame.
We adopt Markert and Nissim (2005)’s approach of using the World Wide Web to resolve cases of coreferent bridging for German and discuss the strength and weaknesses of this approach. As the general approach of using surface patterns to get information on ontological relations between lexical items has only been tried on English, it is also interesting to see whether the approach works for German as well as it does for English and what differences between these languages need to be accounted for. We also present a novel approach for combining several patterns that yields an ensemble that outperforms the best-performing single patterns in terms of both precision and recall.
We investigate methods to improve the recall in coreference resolution by also trying to resolve those definite descriptions where no earlier mention of the referent shares the same lexical head (coreferent bridging). The problem, which is notably harder than identifying coreference relations among mentions which have the same lexical head, has been tackled with several rather different approaches, and we attempt to provide a meaningful classification along with a quantitative comparison. Based on the different merits of the methods, we discuss possibilities to improve them and show how they can be effectively combined.
The renowned Grimm Dictionary (1854-1961) makes the statement that the German copula sein (to be) is “the most general and colourless of all verbal concepts” (der allgemeinste und farbloseste aller verbalbegriffe). A more concise summary of the linguistic issues surrounding the copula is hardly possible. These two properties (and the latent tension between them!) make copulas a particularly interesting and vexing subject of linguistic research. Copulas appear to be almost colourless, i.e., devoid of any concrete meaning, thus leading to the question of why such expressions exist at all, not only in German but in the majority of the world’s languages. And at the same time copulas presumably provide the best window into the core of verbal concepts thereby telling us what it actually means to be a verb – at least in a language like German or English. While there is a rather rich body of research on copulas in philosophical and formal semantics including several in-depth studies on the copular systems of individual languages, copulas have received comparably little attention from a typological perspective. The monograph of Regina Pustet sets out to fill this gap. She presents an extensive cross-linguistic study of copula usage based on a sample of 154 languages drawn from the language families of the world. The analysis is embedded in the theoretical framework of functional typology. The study aims at uncovering universal principles that govern the distribution of copulas in nominal, adjectival, and verbal predications. Its major objective is the development of a “semantically-based model of copula distribution” (p.62) by means of which the presence vs. absence of copulas can be motivated through the inherent meaning of the lexical items they potentially combine with. Drawing mainly on the work by Givón (1979, 1984) and Croft (1991, 2001), who provide a functional foundation of the traditional parts of speech, Pustet identifies four semantic parameters which, if taken together, are claimed to support substantial generalisations on copula distribution – within a given language as well as crosslinguistically. These parameters are DYNAMICITY, TRANSIENCE, TRANSITIVITY, and DEPENDENCY. Pustet goes on to argue – and this is in fact the driving force behind the overall monograph – that the distributional behaviour of copulas, in turn, yields a useful methodology for developing a general approach to lexical categorization. Thus, in the long run Pustet aims at contributing to a better understanding of the traditional parts of speech, noun, adjective, and verb by defining them in terms of “semantic feature bundles, which can be arranged in [a] coherent semantic similarity space” (p.193).
The Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning features a shared task, in which participants train and test their learning systems on the same data sets. In 2007, as in 2006, the shared task has been devoted to dependency parsing, this year with both a multilingual track and a domain adaptation track. In this paper, we define the tasks of the different tracks and describe how the data sets were created from existing treebanks for ten languages. In addition, we characterize the different approaches of the participating systems, report the test results, and provide a first analysis of these results.
Recent approaches to Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) generally fall into two classes: (1) information-intensive approaches and (2) information-poor approaches. Our hypothesis is that for memory-based learning (MBL), a reduced amount of data is more beneficial than the full range of features used in the past. Our experiments show that MBL combined with a restricted set of features and a feature selection method that minimizes the feature set leads to competitive results, outperforming all systems that participated in the SENSEVAL-3 competition on the Romanian data. Thus, with this specific method, a tightly controlled feature set improves the accuracy of the classifier, reaching 74.0% in the fine-grained and 78.7% in the coarse-grained evaluation.
Prepositional phrase (PP) attachment is one of the major sources for errors in traditional statistical parsers. The reason for that lies in the type of information necessary for resolving structural ambiguities. For parsing, it is assumed that distributional information of parts-of-speech and phrases is sufficient for disambiguation. For PP attachment, in contrast, lexical information is needed. The problem of PP attachment has sparked much interest ever since Hindle and Rooth (1993) formulated the problem in a way that can be easily handled by machine learning approaches: In their approach, PP attachment is reduced to the decision between noun and verb attachment; and the relevant information is reduced to the two possible attachment sites (the noun and the verb) and the preposition of the PP. Brill and Resnik (1994) extended the feature set to the now standard 4-tupel also containing the noun inside the PP. Among many publications on the problem of PP attachment, Volk (2001; 2002) describes the only system for German. He uses a combination of supervised and unsupervised methods. The supervised method is based on the back-off model by Collins and Brooks (1995), the unsupervised part consists of heuristics such as ”If there is a support verb construction present, choose verb attachment”. Volk trains his back-off model on the Negra treebank (Skut et al., 1998) and extracts frequencies for the heuristics from the ”Computerzeitung”. The latter also serves as test data set. Consequently, it is difficult to compare Volk’s results to other results for German, including the results presented here, since not only he uses a combination of supervised and unsupervised learning, but he also performs domain adaptation. Most of the researchers working on PP attachment seem to be satisfied with a PP attachment system; we have found hardly any work on integrating the results of such approaches into actual parsers. The only exceptions are Mehl et al. (1998) and Foth and Menzel (2006), both working with German data. Mehl et al. report a slight improvement of PP attachment from 475 correct PPs out of 681 PPs for the original parser to 481 PPs. Foth and Menzel report an improvement of overall accuracy from 90.7% to 92.2%. Both integrate statistical attachment preferences into a parser. First, we will investigate whether dependency parsing, which generally uses lexical information, shows the same performance on PP attachment as an independent PP attachment classifier does. Then we will investigate an approach that allows the integration of PP attachment information into the output of a parser without having to modify the parser: The results of an independent PP attachment classifier are integrated into the parse of a dependency parser for German in a postprocessing step.
This paper presents an LTAG analysis of reflexives like himself and reciprocals like each other. These items need to find a c-commanding antecedent from which they retrieve (part of) their own denotation and with which they syntactically agree. The relation between anaphoric item and antecendent must satisfy the following important locality conditions (Chomsky (1981)).
In this paper we will explore the similarities and differences between two feature logic-based approaches to the composition of semantic representations. The first approach is formulated for Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG, Joshi and Schabes 1997), the second is Lexical Ressource Semantics (LRS, Richter and Sailer 2004) and was first defined in Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. The two frameworks have several common characteristics that make them easy to compare: 1 They use languages of two sorted type theory for semantic representations. 2. They allow underspecification. LTAG uses scope constraints while LRS provides component-of contraints. 3 They use feature logics for computing semantic representations. 4. they are designed for computational applications. By comparing the two frameworks we will also point outsome characteristics and advantages of feature logic-based semantic computation in genereal.
In this paper, we introduce an extension of the XMG system (eXtensibleMeta-Grammar) in order to allow for the description of Multi-Component Tree Adjoining Grammars. In particular, we introduce the XMG formalism and its implementation, and show how the latter makes it possible to extend the system relatively easily to different target formalisms, thus opening the way towards multi-formalism.
Multicomponent Tree Adjoining Grammars (MCTAG) is a formalism that has been shown to be useful for many natural language applications. The definition of MCTAG however is problematic since it refers to the process of the derivation itself: a simultaneity constraint must be respected concerning the way the members of the elementary tree sets are added. This way of characterizing MCTAG does not allow to abstract away from the concrete order of derivation. In this paper, we propose an alternative definition of MCTAG that characterizes the trees in the tree language of an MCTAG via the properties of the derivation trees (in the underlying TAG) the MCTAG licences. This definition gives a better understanding of the formalism, it allows a more systematic comparison of different types of MCTAG, and, furthermore, it can be exploited for parsing.
In this paper, we will argue for a novel analysis of the auxiliary alternation in Early English, its development and subsequent loss which has broader consequences for the way that auxiliary selection is looked at cross-linguistically. We will present evidence that the choice of auxiliaries accompanying past participles in Early English differed in several significant respects from that in the familiar modern European languages. Specifically, while the construction with have became a full-fledged perfect by some time in the ME period, that with be was actually a stative resultative, which it remained until it was lost. We will show that this accounts for some otherwise surprising restrictions on the distribution of BE in Early English and allows a better understanding of the spread of HAVE through late ME and EModE. Perhaps more importantly, the Early English facts also provide insight into the genesis of the kind of auxiliary selection found in German, Dutch and Italian. Our analysis of them furthermore suggests a promising strategy for explaining cross-linguistic variation in auxiliary selection in terms of variation in the syntactico-semantic structure of the perfect. In this introductory section, we will first provide some background on the historical situation we will be discussing, then we will lay out the main claims for which we will be arguing in the paper.
The goal of this paper is to re-examine the status of the condition in (1) proposed in Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou (2001; henceforth A&A 2001), in view of recent developments in syntactic theory. (1) The subject-in-situ generalization (SSG) By Spell-Out, vP can contain only one argument with a structural Case feature. We argue that (1) is a more general condition than previously recognized, and that the domain of its application is parametrized. More specifically, based on a comparison between Indo-European (IE) and Khoisan languages, we argue that (1) supports an interpretation of the EPP as a general principle, and not as a property of T. Viewed this way, the SSG is a condition that forces dislocation of arguments as a consequence of a constraint on Case checking.