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In the paper, German disintegrated verb-final 'obwohl' (‘although’) and 'weil' (‘because’) clauses are compared with constructions in which 'obwohl' and 'weil' precedes clauses with main clause word order. The former constructions constitute independent, yet subsidiary speech acts. Thus, the subordinating connectors and the positioning of the verb do not indicate syntactic but textual dependency. The latter constructions are of a very different kind. Here, 'obwohl' and 'weil' do not form a constituent with the following clause. Instead, they appear as syntactically independent discourse markers connecting two discourse units. As discourse markers, 'obwohl' and 'weil' obtain their special syntactic and semantic properties as elements of the derived, but independent module of Thetic Grammar.
We bring experimental considerations to bear on the structure of comparatives and on our understanding of how quantifiers are processed. At issue are mismatches between the standard view of quantifier processing cost and results from speeded verification experiments with comparative quantifiers. We build our case in several steps:
1. We show that the standard view, which attributes processing cost to the verification process, accounts for some aspects of the data, but fails to cover the main effect of monotonicity on measured behavior. We derive a prediction of this view for comparatives, and show that it is not borne out.
2. We consider potential reasons - experimental and theoretical - for this theory-data mismatch.
3. We describe a new processing experiment with comparative quantifiers, designed to address the experimental concerns. Its results still point to the inadequacy of the standard view.
4. We review the semantics of comparative constructions and their potential processing implications. 5. We revise the definition of quantifier processing cost and tie it to the number of Downward Entailing (DE) operators at Logical Form (LF). We show how this definition successfully reconciles the theory-data mismatch. 6. The emerging picture calls for a distinction between the complexity of verified representations and the complexity of the verification process itself.
Experimental studies investigating logical reasoning performance show very high error rates of up to 80% and more. Previous research identified scalar inferences of the sentences of logical arguments as a major error source. We present new analytical tools to quantify the impact of scalar inferences on syllogistic reasoning. Our proposal builds on a new classification of Aristotelian syllogisms and a closely linked classification of reasoning behaviors/strategies.
We argue that the variation in error rates across syllogistic reasoning tasks is in part due to individual variation: reasoners follow different reasoning strategies and these strategies play out differently for syllogisms of different classes.
Johanna Hartwig beschäftigt sich mit der Deklination entlehnter Farbadjektive wie lila, orange und rosa ("Gibt es denn jetzt lilane Kühe oder nicht? - Einflussfaktoren auf den Gebrauch indeklinabler Farbadjektive"). Diese Adjektive wurden ursprünglich nicht flektiert (das lila/rosa Haus). Hartwig führt ein Produktionsexperiment durch, um zu überprüfen, inwiefern die Frequenz und die Endung eines Adjektivs Einfluss auf dessen Flexion nehmen. Dabei stellt sie fest, dass frequente Adjektive zur Flexion neigen, jedoch auch die Endung eine Rolle spielt. So bleiben Adjektive auf [a] wie bspw. lila trotz hoher Frequenz unflektiert. Adjektive auf Frikativ weisen hingegen umso mehr Flexion auf, je frequenter sie sind. Für seltene Adjektive (creme) konnte Hartwig eine Vermeidungsstrategie feststellen: Creme wurde in ihrem Experiment am häufigsten in ein Derivat (cremefarben) umgewandelt, das eine Flexion des Adjektivs ermöglicht (das cremefarbene Haus).
Für den Wandel und die Variation der Präposition wegen interessieren sich Lea Heese und Fabiola Kaiser in ihrem Beitrag "Die menschliche Zunge ist faul. Assoziationen zu der Verwendungsweise der Präposition wegen mit dem Genitiv und dem Dativ". Wegen schwankt im Standard-deutschen zwischen Genitiv- und Dativrektion. Obwohl sie seit langem existiert, wird die Dativvariante von SprecherInnen oftmals als Zeichen für Sprachverfall gedeutet. Heese und Kaiser erhoben mithilfe einer Onlineumfrage Daten zum Gebrauch der Präposition in informellen und formellen Registern sowie Assoziationen zu den beiden Varianten. Wie bereits das Titelzitat des Beitrags zeigt, wird der Dativ unter anderem als Zeichen für Nachlässigkeit interpretiert.
This paper compares the modal particle fei (Schlieben-Lange, 1979; Thoma, 2009) with the modal particle/sentence adverb aber (not to be confused with the conjunction aber, ‘but’). Intuitively, both items express some form of contrast and correction. We will show that both are special among discourse particles in the following sense: They make a contribution that is interpreted at a level distinct from the level where at-issue content (Potts, 2005) is interpreted, as is standard for modal particles (see Gutzmann, 2015 and the references therein). But more interestingly, they exclusively relate to propositions that have not entered the Common Ground via being the at-issue content of an assertion made by the addressee.
Carlotta J. Hübener diskutiert in ihrem Beitrag "Nicht/keinen/kein Fußball spielen? - Inkorporationsprozesse in Substantiv-Verb-Verbindungen" Inkorporationprozesse bei Substantiv-Verb-Verbindungen wie bspw. Fußball spielen. Hierbei fokussiert sie auf die Negation: Während kein(en) Fußball spielen einen Hinweis darauf gibt, dass Fußball noch als eigenständiges Substantiv interpretiert wird, ist nicht Fußball spielen ein Indiz dafür, dass Fußball und spielen als eine konzeptionelle Einheit wahrgenommen werden. Kein negiert nämlich Nomen (Ich mag keinen Spinat), während nicht Verben negiert (Ich hab‘ noch nicht gegessen). Hübener überprüft in ihrem Beitrag anhand des Deutschen Referenzkorpus, inwiefern Frequenz, Idiomatik und Individuiertheit Einfluss auf die Negation von Substativ-Verb-Verbindungen nehmen können.
Counteridenticals are counterfactual conditional sentences whose antecedent clauses contain an identity statement, e.g. "If I were you, I’d buy the blue dress". Here, we argue that counteridenticals are best analyzed along the lines of dream reports. After showing that counteridenticals and dream reports exhibit striking grammatical and perceptual parallels, we suggest an analysis of counteridenticals with Percus and Sauerland’s (2003) analysis of dream reports. Following their proposal, we propose to make use of concept generators, realized as centered worlds. To this end, we argue that the presence of 'if' licenses the presence of an 'imagine'-operator, which constitutes the attitude the antecedent clause "x be-PAST y" is taken under. The speaker predicates, in the imagine mode, the consequent property to his/her imagined self.
To capture the different degrees of identification between the subject and the predicate of the identity statement of counteridenticals’ antecedents observed in the literature, we incorporate Percus and Sharvit’s (2014) notion of asymmetric be into the analysis. This proposal has several advantages over existing analyses (Lakoff, 1996; Kocurek, 2016) of counteridentical meaning, as it both explains the different degrees of identification observed for counteridenticals and correctly predicts the parallels between counteridenticals and dream reports.
This paper argues that Double Access sentences in English (Smith, 1978) are a kind of loose talk. When the meaning of a Double Access sentence is computed literally, the result is infelicity. Double Access sentences can be used meaningfully only when rescued by pragmatics which intervenes to interpret the embedded clause loosely. A formal model for loose interpretation, building on Klecha (2018), is provided.
Schwager (2011) and Sudo (2014) argued that there are cases of the so-called third readings of attitude reports, initially discovered by Fodor (1970), that cannot be accounted for in terms of a theory of indexed world variables (Percus, 2000), which is often referred to as the Standard Solution. More complicated alternatives to the Standard Solution have been recently formulated in the literature in a number of papers. We argue that all the seemingly problematic cases can be naturally accounted for in terms of the Standard Solution, if we take into account the existence of previously unrecognized elided material in these reports.