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This paper develops the formal foundations of semantic theories dealing with various kinds of nominalisations. It introduces a combination of an event-calculus with a type-free theory which allows a compositional description to be given of such phenomena like Vendler's distinction between perfect and imperfect nominals, iteration of gerunds and Cresswell's notorious non-urrival of'the train examples. Moreover, the approach argued for in this paper allows a semantic explanation to be given for a wide range of grammatical observations such as the behaviour of certain tpes of nominals with respect to their verbal contexts or the distribution of negation in nominals.
"Je suis Charlie" was used over 619.000 times in the two days that have followed the attack of the editorial team of Charlie Hebdo (Le Progrès, The Huffington Post) and has regularly been taken up in both written and spoken form since. In this paper, we argue that the structure of this sentence actually clashes with its meaning. More specifically, whereas its word order and default rightmost sentence stress are compatible either with an all-focus reading or a narrow focusing of Charlie, the context of use of this sentence as well as the solidarity/empathy message it intends to communicate suggest that its subject is narrowly focused. We will propose that two strategies have emerged to solve this conflict: (i) various alternative forms have appeared that allow proper subject focusing and (ii) speakers have reinterpreted the structure so as to pragmatically retrieve the (additive) focused nature of the subject.
We show that wh-words are a tool to investigate the prosodic structure of Bàsàa. Our claim is that the end of an Intonation Phrase (IP) can be identified by the presence of a long vowel on the wh-word. We propose that wh-words, which sometimes surface as C´V and sometimes as C´V´V, are underlyingly of the C´V form and they introduce a floating H. Whenever the association of this floating H with the first tone bearing unit that follows the wh-word is prevented by the presence of an IP boundary, a mora is created on the wh-word in order to realize the floating H. We briefly discuss the interface approach of Immediately After the Verb (IAV) focus (Costa and Kula, 2008) and we show that Bàsàa wh-questions and answers do not support this hypothesis. Finally, Bàsàa fronted whphrases, just like Hausa’s fronted foci (Leben et al., 1989), seem to provide support to the idea that intonational effects are also at play in the present tone language.
Introduction
(2014)
Bantu languages have been at the heart of the research on the interaction between syntax, prosody and information structure. In these predominantly SVO languages, considerable attention has been devoted to postverbal phenomena. By addressing issues related to Subjects, Topics and Object-Verb word orders, the goal of the present papers is to deepen our understanding of the interaction of different grammatical components (syntax, phonology, semantics/pragmatics) both in individual languages and across the Bantu family. Each paper makes a valuable contribution to ongoing discussions on the preverbal domain.
In the present paper, we concentrate on (selected) Bantu and Nilotic bare-passive strategies and lay out the basis for a typology of transitive passive constructions in these languages. We argue that bare-passives constitute an optimal strategy to change prominence relations between arguments, in languages that strongly hold to the default mapping between the highest thematic role available and the grammatical subject (i.e. Spec,TP). The Nilotic and Bantu languages discussed here differ in their way of satisfying this default mapping. In particular, impersonal bare-passives satisfy it by resorting to an agentive place-holder (an indefinite subject marker) and realizing the logical agent as a lower thematic/semantic role (e.g. instrument or locative). Left-dislocation and so called 'subjectobject' reversal bare-passives realize the default matching between agent and subject in a more straightforward way, but locate the patient in a higher argument position within the inflectional domain (Spec,TopP). As argued in Hamlaoui and Makasso (2013) and Hamlaoui (2013), and in line with Noonan (1977), the present languages display a clauseinternal split between subjecthood (being the grammatical subject in Spec,TP) and topicality (being the subject of the predication, in an inflectional-domain internal Spec,TopP).
The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN), an assessment tool in the Language Impairment Testing in Multilingual Settings (LITMUS) battery, aims to improve the assessment of bilingual children. This paper describes the process of adapting MAIN to Urdu. Given the lack of language assessment tools for Urdu-speaking children, the Urdu MAIN is an important new instrument that is made widely and freely accessible to researchers and practitioners, allowing them to examine the narrative abilities of children acquiring Urdu as a first, heritage, second, or additional language.
This study reports on the results of an airflow experiment that measured the duration of airflow and the amount of air from release of a stop to the beginning of a following vowel in stop vowel-sequences of German. The sequences involved coronal, labial and velar voiced and voiceless stops followed by the vocoids /j, i:, ı, ɛ, ʊ, a/. The experiment tested the influence of the three factors voicing of stop, place of stop articulation, and the following vocoid context on the duration and amount of air as possible explanation for assibilation processes. The results show that the voiceless stops are related to a longer duration and more air in the release phase than voiced ones. For the influence of the vocoids, a significant difference could be established between /j/ and all other vocoids for the duration of the release phase. This difference could not be found for the amount of air over this duration. The place of articulation had only restricted influence. Velars resulted in significantly longer duration of the release phase compared to non-velars. A significant difference in amount of air between the places of articulation could not be found.
The present article is a follow-up study of the investigation of labiodentals in German and Dutch by Hamann & Sennema (2005), where we looked at the perception of the Dutch labiodental three-way contrast by German listeners without any knowledge of Dutch and German learners of Dutch. The results of this previous study suggested that the German voiced labiodental fricative /v/ is perceptually closer to the Dutch approximant /ʋ/ than to the corresponding Dutch voiced labiodental fricative /v/. These perceptual indications are attested by the acoustic findings in the present study. German /v/ has a similar harmonicity median and a similar centre of gravity to Dutch /ʋ/, but differs from Dutch /v/ in these parameters. With respect to the acoustic parameter of duration, German /v/ lies closer to the Dutch /v/ than to the Dutch /ʋ/.
The present article illustrates that the specific articulatory and aerodynamic requirements for voiced but not voiceless alveolar or dental stops can cause tongue tip retraction and tongue mid lowering and thus retroflexion of front coronals. This retroflexion is shown to have occurred diachronically in the three typologically unrelated languages Dhao (Malayo-Polynesian), Thulung (Sino-Tibetan), and Afar (East-Cushitic). In addition to the diachronic cases, we provide synchronic data for retroflexion from an articulatory study with four speakers of German, a language usually described as having alveolar stops. With these combined data we supply evidence that voiced retroflex stops (as the only retroflex segments in a language) did not necessarily emerge from implosives, as argued by Haudricourt (1950), Greenberg (1970), Bhat (1973), and Ohala (1983). Instead, we propose that the voiced front coronal plosive /d/ is generally articulated in a way that favours retroflexion, that is, with a smaller and more retracted place of articulation and a lower tongue and jaw position than /t/.
The present study argues that variation across listeners in the perception of a non-native contrast is due to two factors: the listener-specic weighting of auditory dimensions and the listener-specic construction of new segmental representations. The interaction of both factors is shown to take place in the perception grammar, which can be modelled within an OT framework. These points are illustrated with the acquisition of the Dutch three-member labiodental contrast [V v f] by German learners of Dutch, focussing on four types of learners from the perception study by Hamann and Sennema (2005a).
Arguing against Bhat’s (1974) claim that retroflexion cannot be correlated with retraction, the present article illustrates that retroflexes are always retracted, though retraction is not claimed to be a sufficient criterion for retroflexion. The cooccurrence of retraction with retroflexion is shown to make two further implications; first, that non-velarized retroflexes do not exist, and second, that secondary palatalization of retroflexes is phonetically impossible. The process of palatalization is shown to trigger a change in the primary place of articulation to non-retroflex. Phonologically, retraction has to be represented by the feature specification [+back] for all retroflex segments.
Glide formation, a process whereby an underlying high front vowel is realized as a palatal glide, is shown to occur only in unstressed prevocalic position in German, and to be blocked by specific surface restrictions such as *ji and *ʁj. Traditional descriptions of glide formation (including derivational as well as Optimality theoretic approaches) refer to the syllable in order to capture its conditions. The present study illustrates that glide formation (plus the distribution of long and short tense /i/) in German can better be captured in a Functional Phonology account (Boersma 1998) which makes reference to stress instead of the syllable and thus overcomes problems of former approaches.
This article examines the motivation for phonological stop assibilations, e.g. /t/ is realized as [ts], [s] or [tʃ] before /i/, from the phonetic perspective. Hall & Hamann (2003) posit the following two implications: (a) Assibilation cannot be triggered by /i/ unless it is also triggered by /j/, and (b) Voiced stops cannot undergo assibilations unless voiceless ones do. In the following study we present the results of three acoustic experiments with native speakers of German and Polish which support implications (a) and (b). In our experiments we measured the friction phase after the /t d/ release before the onset of the following high front vocoid for four speakers of German and Polish. We found that the friction phase for /tj/ was significantly longer than that of /ti/, and that the friction phase of /t/ in the assibilation context is significantly longer than that of /d/.
In this article we propose that there are two universal properties for phonological stop assibilations, namely (i) assibilations cannot be triggered by /i/ unless they are also triggered by /j/, and (ii) voiced stops cannot undergo assibilations unless voiceless ones do. The article presents typological evidence from assibilations in 45 languages supporting both (i) and (ii). It is argued that assibilations are to be captured in the Optimality Theoretic framework by ranking markedness constraints grounded in perception which penalize sequences like [ti] ahead of a faith constraint which militates against the change from /t/ to some sibilant sound. The occurring language types predicted by (i) and (ii) will be shown to involve permutations of the rankings between several different markedness constraints and the one faith constraint. The article demonstrates that there exist several logically possible assibilation types which are ruled out because they would involve illicit rankings.
The present study offers an Optimality-Theoretic analysis of the syllabification of intervocalic consonants and glides in Modern English. It will be argued that the proposed syllabifications fall out from universal markedness constraints – all of which derive motivation from other languages – and a language-specific ranking. The analysis offered below is therefore an alternative to the traditional rule-based analyses of English syllabification, e.g. Kahn (1976), Borowsky (1986), Giegerich (1992, 1999) and to the Optimality-Theoretic treatment proposed by Hammond (1999), whose analysis requires several language-specific constraints which apparently have no cross-linguistic motivation.
Since the advent of nonlinear phonology many linguists have either assumed or argued explicitly that many languages have words in which one or more segment does not belong structurally to the syllable. Three commonly employed adjectives used to describe such consonants are 'extrasyllabic', 'extrametrical' or 'stray'. Other authors refer to such segments as belonging to the 'appendix'. [...] Various non-linear representations have been proposed to express the 'extrasyllabicity' of segments [...]. The ones I am concerned with in the present article analyze [...] consonants [...] structurally as being outside of the syllable [...]. For transparency I ignore here both subsyllabic constituency as well as higher level prosodic constituents to which the stray consonants are sometimes assumed to attach. For reasons to be made clear below I refer to syllables [...] in which the stray consonant is situated outside of the syllable, as abstract syllables.
The present study examines a particular kind of rule blockage – referred to below as an 'antistructure-preservation effect'. An anti-structure-preservation effect occurs if some language has a process which is preempted from going into effect if some sequence of sounds [XY] would occur on the surface, even though other words in the language have [XY] sequences (which are underlyingly /XY/). It will be argued below that anti-structure-preservation effects can be captured in Optimality Theory in terms of a general ranking involving FAITH and MARKEDNESS constraints and that individual languages invoke a specific instantiation of this ranking. A significant point made below is that while anti-structure-preservation effects can be handled straightforwardly in terms of constraint rankings they typically require ad hoc rule-specific conditions in rule-based approaches.
The distribution of trimoraic syllables in German and English as evidence for the phonological word
(2000)
In the present article I discuss the distribution of trimoraic syllables in German and English. The reason I have chosen to analyze these two languages together is that the data in both languages are strikingly similar. However, although the basic generalization in (1) holds for both German and English, we will see below that trimoraic syllabIes do not have an identical distribution in both languages.
In the present study I make the following theoretical claims. First, I argue that the three environments in (1) have a property in common: they all describe the right edge of a phonological word (or prosodic word; henceforth pword). From a formal point of view, I argue that a constraint I dub the THIRD MORA RESTRICTION (henceforth TMR), which ensures that trimoraic syllables surface at the end of a pword, is active in German and English. According to my proposal trimoraic syllables cannot occur morpheme-internally because monomorphemic grammatical words like garden are parsed as single pwords. Second, I argue that the TMR refers crucially to moraic structure. In particular, underlined strings like the ones in (1) will be shown to be trimoraic; neither skeletal positions nor the subsyllabic constituent rhyme are necessary. Third, the TMR will be shown to be violated in certain (predictable) pword-internal cases, as in Monde and chamber; I account for such facts in an OptimalityTheoretic analysis (henceforth OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993) by ranking various markedness constraints among themselves or by ranking them ahead of the TMR. Fourth, I hold that the TMR describes a concrete level of grammar, which I refer to below as the 'surface' representation. In this respect, my treatment differs significantly from the one proposed for English by Borowsky (1986, 1989), in which the English facts are captured in a Lexical Phonology model by ordering the relevant constraint at level 1 in the lexicon.
On the syntax and pragmatics interface : Left-peripheral, medial and right-peripheral focus in greek
(2004)
The present paper explores the extent to which narrow syntax is responsible for the computation of discourse functions such as focus/topic. More specifically, it challenges the claim that language approximates ‘perfection’ with respect to economy, conceptual necessity and optimality in design by reconsidering the roles and interactions of the different modules of the grammar, in particular of syntax and phonology and the mapping between the two, in the representation of pragmatic notions. Empirical and theoretical considerations strongly indicate that narrow syntax is ‘blind’ to properties and operations involving the interpretive components — that is, PF and LF. As a result, syntax-phonology interface rules do not ‘see’ everything in the levels they connect. In essence, the architecture of grammar proposed here from the perspective of focus marking necessitates the autonomy of the different levels of grammar, presupposing that NS is minimally structured only when liberated from any non-syntactic/discourse implementations, i.e., movement operations to satisfy both interface needs. As a result, the model articulated here totally dispenses with discourse projections, i.e. FocusP.
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.
Starting from a consideration of the internal make-up of adverbial clauses this paper shows that the widespread assumption that fronted arguments in English and CLLD constituents in Romance occupy the same position leads to a number of problems. I will conclude that the position occupied by English topicalized arguments differs from that of the CLLD topics in Romance. In particular, English topics occupy a higher position in the left periphery. The final part of the paper compares three proposals for the lower topic position in Romance.
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.
Khoekhoe syntax exhibits an unusually flexible constituent structure. Any constituent with a lexical head can be preposed into the focal initial slot immediately before the PGN-marker that marks the subject position. Two strategies of focalisation by foregrounding need to be distinguished: inversion and fronting. Inversion amounts to an inversion of subject and predicate in their entirety. Such sentences have two readings, though, according to their underlying constituent structure: "predicative" or "copulative". Fronting amounts to the preposing of a lexical constituent into the focal initial slot, with subsequent dislocation of the lexical specification of the subject from that slot.
The present analysis has wider implications, particularly: The generally accepted view that Khoekhoe has coreferential/equational "copulative" sentences of the type NPsubject = NPcomplement is a fallacy. Such sentences actually are sentences with their predicate fronted into the focal initial slot. They amount to cleft constructions.
The fact that the primary focal position is immediately before the PGNmarker of the subject is further independent evidence for the "desentential hypothesis", according to which subject and object NPs in the underlying matrix sentence consist of only an enclitic PGN-marker, and for the claim that Khoekhoe underlyingly is a SVO language, not a SOV language as generally held. By implication these findings affect the analysis of other Central Khoesaan languages.
In der deutschen Gegenwartssprache sind die Funktionsverbgefüge (FVG) die über lange Zeit vor allem nur unter stilistischen Gesichtpunkten betrachtet und meist als schlechter Stil abgewertet wurden, mit dem Aufsatz Peter von Polenz (1963) in zunehmendem Maße in das Blickfeld der linguistischen Untersuchungen getreten. In den folgenden Jahren erschienen mehrere Arbeiten zu den FVG, in denen vor allem ihre semantischen, syntaktischen und kommunikativen Leistungen untersucht worden. Die als FVG in der Fachliteratur erfassten Konstruktionen bestehen bekanntlich aus einem Funktionsverb(FV) und einem deverbativen Substantiv, auch manchmal nomen actionis genannt. Funktionsverb und Verbalsubstantiv bilden zusammen sowohl strukturell als auch semantisch eine lexikalische Einheit, z. B. Kritik üben; in Verbindung treten. Kennzeichnend für diese Einheiten ist, dass die eigentliche Bedeutung der FVG im Substantiv liegt, während das Verb der ganzen Einheit nur eine grammatisch-syntaktische Funktion ausübt. Auch im Türkischen sind derartige aus Verben und Verbalsubstantiven bestehende Fügungen vorhanden. Sie stimmen im Hinblick auf ihre Konstruktionen mit den FVG im Deutschen überein […]. Die vorliegende Arbeit verfolgt das Ziel, die Fragen zu erörtern, wie die FVG und VF gebildet werden und welche syntaktischen Konstruktionen dieser FVG und VF ermöglicht werden. Das Hauptaugenmerk gilt den semantischen und syntaktischen Funktionen dieser sprachlichen Phänomene. Dabei geht es weniger darum, die Formen und Funktionen der FVG und VF bis ins kleinste Detail darzustellen. Hier werden vielmehr ihre Formen und Funktionen behandelt, die für eine kontrastive Betrachtung interessant. Die Arbeit hat vor allem theoretischen Charakter und sie ist nicht an einem Korpus orientiert. Die Beschreibung basiert auf der eigene Sprachkompetenz.
This paper deals with the development of discourse competence in German-, Russian- and Bulgarian-speaking children. In particular, it examines the use of anaphoric pronominal reference in elicited narrations of children between the ages of 2;6 and 6;0. As the pronominal (and nominal) systems of target German, Russian and Bulgarian differ in the repertoire and functions of anaphoric elements we will examine which kind of noun phrases children use to make reference to story participants. In a second step of the analysis, we will investigate how pronominal expressions relate to antecedents. In this respect the pronominal form of the anaphor, the syntactic function of the antecedent and the distance between antecedent and anaphor will be analyzed. The findings will be discussed with regard to predictions made by proposals such as the Complementary Hypothesis (Bosch, Rozario, and Zhao 2003) which assumes an asymmetry between the use of personal pro-nouns and demonstrative pronouns when referring back to subject or object antecedents.
In this paper the first results concerning the development of early verb morphology in an L1-English speaking child are presented. Adopting the framework of morphological development of Dressler (Dressler, this volume) the data of a girl from the CHILDES database, Nina of the Suppes corpus, is analysed with regard to the emergence of early verbal categories (e.g. number and person) and their appearance in a first mini-paradigm. In the sessions analysed so far the child Nina has reached an age of 2;2 when the first mini-paradigm emerges.
The ultimate goal of the study is to examine the acquisition of intensifiers in English and German. In this paper an overview of the first results regarding four L1 English-speaking children will be given. Contrary to previous claims in the literature (e.g. Thomas 1990), it will be argued that intensifiers are used by children in early phases of language acquisition. Intensifiers play an important role in early phases of language acquisition since they can be used to express the wish either to be included or excluded in a certain action and thus contribute to structuring a central aspect of the child's discourse.
Information structure
(2007)
This paper discusses a variant of German V2 declaratives sharing properties with both subordinate relative clauses and main clauses. I argue that modal subordination failure helps decide between two rivaling accounts for this construction. Thus, a hypotactic analysis involving syntactic variable sharing must be preferred over parataxis plus anaphora resolution. The scopal behavior of the construction will be derived from its 'proto-assertional force,' which it shares with similar 'embedded root' constructions.
This paper proposes a new strategy for accounting for the narrow scope readings of quantificational contrastive topics in Hungarian, which is based on a consideration of the types of questions that declaratives with such contrastive topics can be uttered as partial or complete congruent answers to. The meaning of the declaratives with contrastive topics will be represented with the help of the structured meaning approach to matching questions proposed in Krifka 2002.
Locative inversion in Cuwabo
(2014)
This paper proposes a detailed description of locative inversion (LI) constructions in Cuwabo, in terms of morphosyntactic properties and thematic restrictions. Of particular interest are the use of disjoint verb forms in LI, and the co-existence of formal and semantic LI, which challenges the widespread belief that the two constructions cannot be found in the same language.
Three dimensions can be distinguished in a cross-linguistic account of information structure. First, there is the definition of the focus constituent, the part of the linguistic expression which is subject to some focus meaning. Second and third, there are the focus meanings and the array of structural devices that encode them. In a given language, the expression of focus is facilitated as well as constrained by the grammar within which the focus devices operate. The prevalence of focus ambiguity, the structural inability to make focus distinctions, will thus vary across languages, and within a language, across focus meanings.
This paper presents results of corpus analytic investigations of children's use of referring expressions and considers possible implications of this work for questions relating to development of theory of mind. The study confirms previous findings that children use the full range of referring forms (definite and indefinite articles, demonstrative determiners, and demonstrative and personal pronouns) appropriately by age 3 or earlier. It also provides support for two distinct stages in mind-reading ability. The first, which is implicit and non-propositional, includes the ability to assess cognitive statuses such as familiarity and focus of attention in relation to the intended referent; the second, which is propositional and more conscious, includes the ability to assess epistemic states such as knowledge and belief. Distinguishing these two stages supports attempts to reconcile seemingly inconsistent results concerning the age at which children develop theory of mind. It also makes it possible to explain why children learn to use forms correctly be-fore they exhibit the pragmatic ability to consider and calculate quantity implicatures.
With the rise of minimalism, many concepts related to the geometrical relations of phrase structure held fast to in earlier approaches have been reconsidered. This article deals with distinguishing (relational and technical) properties of specifiers and adjuncts in a Bare Phrase Structure framework (X'-Theory). I extend specific aspects of X-structure relevant to the discussion of specifiers vs. adjuncts. I argue that unique specifiers can be derived from the system and that adjunction, possibly multiple, results from Direct Merge only. The final product is a series of relationships in line with recent thoughts and minimalist premises, but formally more similar to earlier conceptions of the X'-schema.
I address conceptual, empirical and theoretical arguments against multiple specifiers and related issues next, that is beyond the predictions immediately following from the tripartitional view of clause structure proposed in Grohmann (2000). After laying out my motivations to critically consider the issue, I present a set of data that casts serious doubt over the justifications offered to replace Agr with v as the accusative casemarker. Having conceptual and empirical back-up, I then tackle the theoretical validity of specifiers, and ways to distinguish unique specifiers from (multiple) adjuncts. I introduce a version of Bare Phrase Structure that does so, yet keeps the spirit of defining structural identification over relational rather than categorial properties.
This paper pursues the question what the implications of the Anti-Locality Hypothesis could be for the syntax of secondary predication. Focus of the discussion will be an investigation of what their internal structure of small clause complements must look like, how these small clause complements connect to their matrix environments, and what the relevance could be for the formulation of anti-locality presented here. Anti-locality is defined over a tripartite clause structure (split into three Prolific Domains) and a PF-condition on the computation (the Condition on Domain-Exclusivity). The investigation revolves around two leading questions: (i) does the syntax of small clauses involve more structure than simply [SC DP XP] and (ii) do small clauses constitute their own Prolific Domain (or maybe even more)? The results, affirmative answers to both questions, are also relevant for other types of secondary predication.
The left periphery has enjoyed extensive study over the past years, especially drawn against the framework of Rizzi (1997). It is argued that in this part of the clause, relations are licensed that have direct impact on discourse interpretation and information structure, such as topic, focus, clause type, and the like. I take this line of research up and argue in favour of a split CP on the basis of strictly left-peripheral phenomena across languages. But I also want to link the relation of articulated clause structure, syntactic derivations, and information structure. In particular, I outline the basics of a model of syntactic derivation that makes explicit reference to the interpretive interfaces in a cyclic, dynamic manner.
I suggest a return to older stages of generative grammar, at least in spirit, by proposing that clausal derivation stretches over three important areas which I call prolific domains: the part of the clause which licenses argument/thematic relations (V- or θ-domain), the part that licenses agreement/grammatica1 relations (T- or ϕ-domain), and the part that licenses discourse/information-relevant relations (C- or ω-domain). It is thus a rather broad and conceptual notion of "adding" and "omitting" that I am concerned with here, namely licensing of material to relate to information structure, and the desire to find an answer to the question which elements might be added or omitted across languages to establish such links.
We will see how it is reasonable to speak of a minimum distance that an element must cross in order to enter into a well-formed movement dependency. In the course of the discussion of this notion of anti-localiry, a theoretical framework unfolds which is compatible with recent thoughts on syntactic computation regarding local economy and phrase structure, as well as the view that certain pronouns are grammatical formatives, rather than fully lexical expressions. The upshot will be that if an element does not move a certain distance, the derivation crashes at PF, unless the lower copy is spelled out as a pronominal element. The framework presented has a number of implications for the study of clause-typing, of which some will be discussed towards the end.
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.
This paper employs empirical methods to examine verbs such as seem, for which the traditional raising to subject analysis relates pairs of sentences which differ by taking an infinitival or sentential complement. A corpus-driven investigation of the verbs seem and appear demonstrates that information structure and evidentiality both play a determinate role in the choice between infinitival or sentential complementation. The second half of the paper builds upon the corpus results and examines the implications for the standard claims concerning these constructions. First, pairs of sentences related by the subject-to-subject raising analysis of verbs are often viewed as equivalent. New evidence from indefinite generic subjects shows that whether an indefinite generic subject occurs in the infinitival or sentential complement construction leads to truth-conditional differences. Further implications are explored for the claim that subjects of the infinitival variant may take narrow-scope: once various confounds are controlled for, the subject of the infinitival construction is shown to most naturally take wide-scope.
Seit einem Jahrzehnt zählt Russisch zu den häufig gesprochenen Migrationssprachen an deutschen Schulen und rückt nun als weitere Lernersprache in den Fokus der linguistischen Migrationsforschung. Russischsprachige Schüler und Schülerinnen, die als Aussiedler vornehmlich aus Russland und Kasachstan immigrieren, bilden seit Beginn der 90er Jahre die bedeutendste Gruppe jugendlicher Einwanderer nach Deutschland. Aussiedlerjugendliche erhalten zwar in den meisten Fällen kurz nach ihrer Einreise die deutsche Staatsangehörigkeit, diese ist jedoch längst kein Garant mehr für eine reibungslose Integration. Neuere Befunde zeigen, dass eine wachsende Zahl junger AussiedlerInnen aus den GUS-Staaten Gefahr läuft, den Anschluss an eine adäquate schulische und berufliche Ausbildung zu verpassen (vgl. Dietz/Roll 1998, Strobl/Kühnel 2000). Ihre Bildungsbeteiligung hat sich der benachteiligten Bildungssituation anderer Immigrantenjugendlicher angenähert.
One of the most important insights of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993) is that phonological processes can be reduced to the interaction between faithfulness and universal markedness principles. In the most constrained version of the theory, all phonological processes should be thus reducible. This hypothesis is tested by alternations that appear to be phonological but in which universal markedness principles appear to play no role. If we are to pursue the claim that all phonological processes depend on the interaction of faithfulness and markedness, then processes that are not dependent on markedness must lie outside phonology. In this paper I will examine a group of such processes, the initial consonant mutations of the Celtic languages, and argue that they belong entirely to the morphology of the languages, not the phonology.
The phenomenon of phonological opacity has been the subject of much debate in recent years, with scholars opposed to the Optimality Theory (OT) research program arguing that opacity proves OT must be false, while the solutions proposed within OT, such as sympathy theory and stratal OT , have proved to be unsatisfying to many OT proponents, who have found these proposals to be inconsistent with the parallelist approach to phonological processes otherwise characteristic of OT. In this paper I reexamine one of the best known cases of opacity, that found in three processes of Tiberian Hebrew (TH), and argue that these processes only appear to be opaque, because previous analyses have treated them as pure phonology, rather than as an interaction between phonology and morphology. Once it is recognized that certain words of TH are lexically marked to end with a syllabic trochee, and that the goal of paradigm uniformity exerts grammatical pressure on phonology, the three processes no longer present a problem to parallelist OT. The results suggest the possibility that all crosslinguistic instances of apparent opacity can be explained in terms of the phonology-morphology interface and that purely phonological opacity does not exist. If this claim is true, then parallelist OT can be defended against its detractors without the need for additional mechanisms like sympathy theory and stratal OT.
The paper starts with a semantic differentiation between the notions of sentence topic and discourse topic. Sentence topic is conceived of as part of a semantic predication in the sense of Y. Kim's work. Discourse topic is defined, as in N. Asher's Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, as a discourse constituent that comprises the content of (part of) the larger discourse.
The main body of the paper serves to investigate the intricate connection between the two types of topic. For restricting the context of investigation, a specific relation between discourse constituents, Elaboration, is chosen. If Elaboration holds between two discourse constituents, one of them can be identified as the explicit discourse topic with respect to the other one. Whereas an elaborating sentence - with or without a sentence topic - is used to infer a 'dimension' for extending the discourse topic, the role of the sentence topic if it occurs is to mark an 'index' for predication along that dimension. The interaction of elaborating sentences and their topics is modelled by means of channel theoretic devices.'
Internals from elaboration
(2001)
Elaboration or Narration, as so-called discourse relations (or rhetorical relations), are modelled in Segmented Discourse Structure Theory (SDRT) as relations between discourse constituents (or constituents for short). These are either propositions that come into being by interpretation of sentences occurring in a text; the propositions then have the status of DRSes. Or, constituents are compounds of such DRSes, constructed from DRSes (or compounds of them) by discourse relations. Elaboration and Narration in that sense, rather than referring to text types, provide links between constituents that allow them to combine in ways that, for a recipient, a resulting text is coherent and has (some) elaborative or narrative properties.
Ida'an-Begak is a Western Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by approximately 6,000 people on the east coast of Sabah, Malaysia, Borneo and belongs to the Sabahan subgroup of the North Borneo subgroup (Blust 1998). Ida'an-Begak has three dialects, Ida'an, spoken in the villages of Segama to the west of Lahad Datu, Ida'an Sungai spoken in the Kinabatangan and Sandakan districts, and Begak spoken in Ulu Tungku, to the east of Lahad Datu (Banker 1984).1 Moody (1993) deals with Ida'an; this paper concentrates on the Begak dialect. In this paper I will present new data gathered in the field and provide an analysis of the allomorphy. The study is based on spontaneous data as well as examples elicited from my language informants.
When in 1934, Robert BLEICHSTEINER published the Caucasian language specimina contained in the "travel book" of the 17th century Turkish writer Evliya Çelebi , he was struck by the amount of reliability he found in Evliya’s notations: "(Die Sprachproben) sind, von einzelnen Mißverständnissen abgesehen, und wenn man die falschen Punktierungen und Irrtümer der Kopisten abrechnet, außerordentlich gut, ja zuweilen mit einem gewissen phonetischen Geschick wiedergegeben, was der Auffassungsgabe und dem Eifer Evliyas ein hohes Zeugnis ausstellt. Man muß bedenken, wie schwer das arabische Alphabet, ohne weitere Unterscheidungszeichen, wie sie die islamischen Kaukasusvölker anwenden, die verwickelten, oft über 70 verschiedene Phoneme umfassenden Lautsysteme wiederzugeben imstande ist. Wenn trotzdem die Entzifferung der Sprachproben zum größten Teil geglückt ist, so muß man der ungewöhnlichen Begabung des türkischen Reisenden und Gelehrten schrankenlose Bewunderung zollen" (85). ...
Daemonica Irano-Caucasica
(1994)
Eine bedeutende, wenn auch bisher vielfach verkannte Nebenüberlieferung iranischen Sprachguts findet sich in den sog. südkaukasischen oder kartvelischen Sprachen, unter denen das Georgische mit seiner im 5. Jh. einsetzenden, umfangreichen literarischen Bezeugung eine vorrangige Stellung einnimmt. Zu den zahlreichen Iranismen, die im Georgischen fest verankert sind, wird seit geraumer Zeit auch das Wort dev- gerechnet. Bereits Davit Cˇ UBINAŠVILI kennzeichnete das Wort in seinem Georgisch-Russischen Wörterbuch von 1887 als "persisch" ("s˙pars[uli]"); er setzte das Substantiv ("s.") mit dem Wort gveleša˙pi "Drachen, Ungeheuer" gleich und führte weiter aus. ...
Nachdem die Domäne des Computers im universitären Einsatz noch bis vor wenigen Jahren im naturwissenschaftlichen Bereich lag, werden elektronische Verfahren heute mehr und mehr auch in den Geisteswissenschaften angewendet. Das primäre Einsatzgebiet liegt dabei zweifellos in der Textverarbeitung; der Computer erweist sich hier als ein universal einsetzbares Hilfsmittel, das die Gestaltung eines Textes von seiner Konzipierung bis zur Drucklegung in der Hand des Autors ermöglicht und herkömmlichen Verfahren somit überlegen ist. ...
Ihre frühesten Sprachzeugnisse hat uns die keltische Bevölkerung der britischen Inseln bekanntlich in einer Anzahl von Steininschriften hinterlassen, die in der sog. Ogamschrift gehalten sind. Der größte Teil dieser Inschriften, von denen rund 300 hauptsächlich aus Südirland und Wales bekannt sind, wird nach allgemeiner Ansicht in die Zeit zwischen dem 4. oder 5. Jh. und dem 8. Jh. n. Chr. datiert. Bis heute ist weder die Entstehung des eigentümlichen Ogamalphabets, das mit keinem anderen Schriftsystem des gegebenen Zeitraums vergleichbar ist, noch die Bedeutung aller Zeichen eindeutig geklärt. ...
Specifics
(2001)
In all these examples there appears to be mismatch between the position at which an indefinite appears and its preferred interpretation. Following many of the more recent contributions to the literature, I will assume that this is the hallmark of specificity (e.g. Ahusch 1994, Reinhart 1997, Winter 1997, van Geenhoven 1998). Such mismatches are not the norm: indefinites are often interpreted in situ, and there is some reason for taking this to be the default option. The reason is that comparatively 'neutral', i.e. semantically attenuate, indefinites have a preference for in situ readings [...].
This paper investigates the semantic underpinnings of the distinction between two syntactic types of "manner of movement" verbs in Levin (1993), namely the RUN and ROLL classes. According to Levin's (1993) and Levin & Rappaport's (1995) work on unaccusativity, a semantic factor of "internal causation" should be the trigger for the classification of a movement verb as intransitive (=not-unaccusative), and hence for its belonging to the RUN class. We point out empirical problems for this characterisation, mainly coming from the different readings of the German verb fliegen (fly). From a comparison with other semantically similar verbs, we conclude that the semantic description which underlies the class distinction should be refined: instead of "internal causation", the crucial semantic factor is described here as "inherent specification for a momentum of movement". This result indicates that forces, and relations between forces, have to be part of the semantic description of the manner component in movement verbs.
In a recent contribution to a long-standing discussion in semantics as to whether the neo-Davidsonian analysis should be extended to stative predicates or not, Maienborn (2004, 2005) proposes to distinguish two types of statives; one of them is said to have a referential argument of the Davidsonian type, the other not. As one of her arguments for making such a distinction, Maienborn observes that manner modification seems to be supported only by certain statives but to be excluded by others (thus linking the issue to the use of manner modification as one major argument in favour of event semantics, cf. Parsons 1990). In this paper, it is argued that the absence of manner modification with Maienborn's second group of statives is actually due to a failure of conceptual construal: modification of a predicate is ruled out whenever its internal conceptual structure is too poor to provide a construal for the modifier; hence, the effects observed by Maienborn reduce to the fact that eventive predicates have a more complex conceptual substructure than stative ones. Hence, the issue of manner modification with statives is shown to be orthogonal to questions of logical form and event semantics. The explanatory power of the conceptual approach is demonstrated with a case study on predicates of light emission, adapting the representation format of Barsalou's (1992) frame model.
The syntax and semantics of the resumptive dependency in hungarian focus-raising constructions
(2004)
Previous work (Gervain, forthcoming) has established that focus-raising may be derived by two strategies in Hungarian. One of them is the traditional movement derivation, the other a resumptive dependency created between the focus constituent base-generated in its matrix focus position and a phonologically null resumptive pronoun in the corresponding argument position in the embedded clause. However, the previous account (Gervain, forthcoming) does not give a detailed description of the nature of this resumptive dependency. The present work aims to address this question. More specifically, by providing a series of empirical tests, it attempts to determine whether the dependency is purely syntactic in nature, i.e. obligatory variable binding, or whether a semantic option is also available, i.e. coreference between the focus constituent and the resumptive pronoun. Thus, it provides new insights into the ongoing debate about the nature of resumptive pronouns.
The ultimate goal of this paper is to find a representation of modality compatible with some basic conditions on the syntax-semantic interface. Such conditions are anchored, for instance, in Chomsky's (1995) principle of full interpretation (FI). Abstract interpretation of modality is, however - be it "only" in semantic terms - already a hard nut to crack, way too vast to be dealt with in any comprehensive way here. What is pursued instead is a case-study-centered analysis. The case in point are the English modals (EM) viewed in their development through time - a locus classicus for a number of linguistic theories and frameworks. The idea will be to start out from two lines of research - continuous grammaticalization vs. cataclysmic change - and to explain some of their incongruities. The first non-trivial point here consists in deriving more fundamental questions from this research. The second, possibly even less trivial one consists in answering them. Specifically, I will argue that regardless of the actual numerical rate of change, there is an underlying and more structured way to account for the notions of change and continuity within the modal system, respectively.
This study examines the movement trajectories of the dorsal tongue movements during symmetrical /VCa/ -sequences, where /V/ was one of the Hungarian long or short vowels /i,a,u/ and C either the voiceless palatal or velar stop consonants. General aims of this study were to deliver a data-driven account for (a) the evidence of the division between dorsality and coronality and (b) for the potential role coarticulatory factors could play for the relative frequency of velar palatalization processes in genetically unrelated languages. Results suggest a clear-cut demarcation between the behaviour of purely dorsal velars and the coronal palatals. Moreover, factors arising from a general movement economy might contribute to the palatalization processes mentioned.
Low- dimensional and speaker-independent linear vocal tract parametrizations can be obtained using the 3-mode PARAFAC factor analysis procedure first introduced by Harshman et al. (1977) and discussed in a series of subsequent papers in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (Jackson (1988), Nix et al. (1996), Hoole (1999), Zheng et al. (2003)). Nevertheless, some questions of importance have been left unanswered, e.g. none of the papers using this method has provided a consistent interpretation of the terms usually referred to as "speaker weights". This study attempts an exploration of what influences their reliability as a first step towards their consistent interpretation. With this in mind, we undertook a systematic comparison of the classical PARAFAC1 algorithm with a relaxed version, of it, PARAFAC2. This comparison was carried out on two different corpora acquired by the articulograph, which varied in vowel qualities, consonantal contexts, and the paralinguistic features accent and speech rate. The difference between these statistical approaches can grossly be described as follows: In PARAFAC1, observation units pertain to the same set of variables and the observation units are comparable. In PARAFAC2, observations pertain to the same set of variables, but observation units are not comparable. Such a situation can be easily conceived in a situation such as we are describing: The operationalization we took relies on the comparability of fleshpoint data acquired from different speakers, which need not be a good assumption due to influences like sensor placement and morphological conditions.
In particular, the comparison between the two different approaches is carried out by means of so-called "leverages" on different component matrices originating in regression analysis, calculated as v = diag(A(A A)−1A ) and delivering information on how "influential" a particular loading matrix is for the model. This analysis could potentially be carried out component by component, but we confined ourselves to effects on the global factor structure. For vowels, the most influential loadings are those for the tense cognates of non-palatal vowels. For speakers, the most prominent result is the relative absence of effects of the paralinguistic variables. Results generally indicate that there is quite little influence of the model specification (i.e. PARAFAC1 or PARAFAC2) on vowel and subject components. The patterns for the articulators indicate that there are strong differences between speakers with respect to the most influential measurement as revealed by PARAFAC2: In particular, the most influential y-contribution is the tongue-back for some talkers and the tongue-dorsum for other speakers. With respect to the speaker weights, again, the leverage patterns are very similar for both PARAFAC-versions. These patterns converge with the results of the loading plots, where the articulator profiles seem to be most altered by the use of PARAFAC2. These findings, in general, are interpreted as evidence for the reliability of the PARAFAC1 speaker weights.
Four speakers repeated 8 times 15 sentences containing 'pVp' syllables (V being /a/, /i/ and /u/). The 'pVp' syllables were located in final, penultimate and antepenultimate position relatively to the Intonational Phrase (IP) boundary. They were embedded in lexical words of 1-3 syllables and were either word-initial or word-final. Results show that the closer the vowel in word-final position is to the IP boundary, the longer the duration and the higher the fundamental frequency of the vowel; it is also characterised by larger lip opening gestures. The potential reduction or coarticulation of vowels in wordinitial position compared to their counterparts in word-final position is discussed.
In this paper we investigate the structure of specificational sentences like [Raskol'nikov]NP 1 - ėto [ubìjca staruxi]NP2 'Raskolnikov - that is the murderer of the old lady' in Russian and Polish, which - depending on the type of NP1 and NP2 - correspond to English pseudo-cleft-constructions (What Raskolnikov is is the murderer of the old lady) and specificational sentences (The person I like most is my father), respectively. We propose that the Slavic constructions can be analysed similarly to their English counterparts: the first fragment contains a semantic variable, which is specified in the second fragment.
We show that the pronouns "ėto" <Rus.> / "to" <Pol.>, which are obligatory in Slavic specificational sentences, have two functions. 1. the deictic function: "ėto/to" take an open proposition available in the discourse or reconstructed from it, and assign this open proposition to another proposition, which provides the value for the variable of the open proposition. 2. the operative function: "ėto/to" link two syntactically independent fragments, the first of which can be semantically interpreted as an indirect question comparable to the wh-clause in the English pseudo-clefts, and the second as an answer to this question.
The present study offers an analysis of the Russian copular constructions with predicate nominals. In such copular sentences two cases may mark the predicate: the nominative and the instrumental as in 'Anna byla medsestra/medsestroj' - 'Anna was-3sg.fem.a nursenom/instr'. In the present tense the copula has a null-form and the predicate nominal can only be in the nominative. I argue that the case alternation corresponds to the distinction of Stage Level and Individual Level Predicates in the sense of Kratzer (1994) and Diesing (1992), but with some objections. The copula with Instrumental forms S-Predicates, which are analyzed as predicates applying to situations referring to time. The copula with nominative forms I-Predicates, which attribute properties to individuals without referring to time. I-Predicates have no situation argument. Data that show the (in-)compatibility of copular sentences with certain spatial or temporal modifiers provide a reason to assume a situation argument in byt' + Instr but not in byt' + Nom.
Byt' behaves differently in different grammatical contexts: in contexts of sentence negation, yes/no-questions and under focus byt' + Instr behaves like a lexical category, while byt' + Nom behaves like a functional category. As a functional category byt' + Nom is non-overt in the present and is always finite. The semantic distinction between nominative and instrumental predicate NPs is pegged to an opposition between a structure with a functional copula as the only tense and agreement marker with base position in TP and a lexical copula in VP (Franks 1995, Bailyn&Rubin 1991). To explain phenomena of the copula in Russian I propose an integrated syntactic model for two copulas. The two copulas may be conceived as distinct realizations of one verbal lexical entry which will be specified as a lexical or as functional category in the course of lexical insertion. The Model of Parallel Morphology might be used to explain this phenomenon.
Russian and Spanish each have two variants of the predicational copular sentence. In Russian, the variation concerns the case of the predicate phrase, which can be nominative or instrumental, while in Spanish, the variation involves the choice of the copular verb, either ser or estar. It is shown that the choice of the particular variant of copular sentence in both languages depends on the speaker’s perspective, i.e., on whether or not the predication is linked to a specific topic situation.
In order to understand the functional morphology of the human voice producing system, we are in need of data on the vocal tract anatomy of other mammalian species. The larynges and vocal tracts of four species of Artiodactyla were investigated in combination with acoustic analyses of their respective calls. Different evolutionary specializations of laryngeal characters may lead to similar effects on sound production. In the investigated species, such specializations are: the elongation and mass increase of the vocal folds, the volume increase of the laryngeal vestibulum by an enlarged thyroid cartilage and the formation of laryngeal ventricles. Both the elongation of the vocal folds and the increase of the oscillating masses lower the fundamental frequency. The influence of an increased volume of the laryngeal vestibulum on sound production remains unclear. The anatomical and acoustic results are presented together with considerations about the habitats and the mating systems of the respective species.
This article discusses some syntactic peculiarities of Chinese yes/no questions. Starting from the observation that Standard Mandarin shares significant typological features with prototypical SOV languages, Chinese is treated as an underlyingly verb-final language. Based on this heuristic principle, A-not-AB, AB-not-A and AB-not questions are uniformly derived by means of one simple raising rule that operates within the sentence constituent V'. This novel idea is elaborated on in great detail in the first part of the article. In contrast to the prevailing trend, it is argued that the question operator contained in A-not-A and A-not sentences CANNOT be raised to "Comp". In consequence, A-not-A and A-not questions are "typed" in the head position of a sentence-internal functional phrase that we call Force2 Phrase (F2P) in the present paper. This position is not to be confused with Drubig's (1994) Polarity 1 Phrase (PollP), in the head position of which assertive negations and an abstract affirmative element are located. The existence of a head position F2° other than Poll° is supported by the fact that F2° can be occupied by certain overt question operators, such as assertive shi-bu-shi, which are compatible with negations. In contrast to the assertive question operator shi-bu-shi which is obligatorily associated with information focus, non-assertive shi-bu-shi serves as a compound focus and question operator whose focus feature is complex insofar as it is composed of two subfeatures: a contrastivity and an exhaustivity subfeature. Non-assertive shi-bu-shi is obligatorily associated with identificational focus in the sense of Kiss (1998). In accordance with some basic ideas of Chomsky's checking theory, the two subfeatures of the complex focus feature carried by the non-assertive shi-bu-shi operator check a correlating subfeature in the head position of a corresponding functional phrase (Contrastive Phrase and Focus Phrase, respectively). The question feature contained in the non-assertive shi-bu-shi operator is attracted by the head of Force1 Phrase (F1') at the level of LF. Due to the fact that F1° is sentence-final, the question feature of non-assertive shi-bu-shi must be Chomsky-adjoined to F1'. Unlike identificational focus phrases which are inherently contrastive, topics are non-contrastive in the default case. As separate speech acts, they are located in a c-commanding position outside the sentence structure. Semantically, there is a difference between Frame-Setting Topics and Aboutness Topics. As shown in the article, both A-not-A and A-not questions on the one hand and yes/no questions ending with ma on the other can be used in neutral and non-neutral contexts. The decisive advantage of mu questions, however, is that their question operator has scope over the whole sentence.
In this article, I will present a survey of control structures in Korean. The survey is based on a sample of seventy SOA-argument-taking predicates, which are classified with respect to their complementation patterns and control properties. As a result, Korean is characterized as a language in which semantically determined control is predominant, whereas constructionally induced control is only marginal. In the discussion of the sample, I will show that there are two major classes of verbs exhibiting semantic control: the first class consists of matrix verbs such as hwuhoyhata 'regret' or kangyohata 'force', which require obligatory coreference between a matrix argument and the embedded subject due to their lexical meaning. The verbs of the second class are utterance verbs such as malhata 'tell', which select clauses headed by the quotative complementizer ko. With these verbs, subject, object, or split control arises if specific modal suffixes are attached to the verb heading the complement clause. In the second part of the paper, I will provide a lexical analysis of control in Korean, which adopts the Principle of Controller Choice proposed by Farkas (1988) as well as additional constraints which have to be assumed independently.
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.
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.
The study examines the hypotheses that the acquisition of the finite verb is an indispensable and linking constituent of the development of SVO utterances. Four apparently separate or at least separable processes are analysed over 6 months in one Russian and one German child: a) the emergence of verbs in the child’s utterances, b) the occurrence of correctly inflected (finite) verb forms, c) the development of multi-component utterances containing a verb, and c) the emergence of (potential) subjects and objects. Russian and German exhibit rich verb morphology, and in both languages finiteness is strongly correlated with inflectional categories like person, number and tense. With both children we find a correlation in the temporal order of these four processes and – what is more relevant for our study – a dependency of a certain development on the utterance level on the emergence of finite verbs. Further, our investigation shows that language-specific development comes in to play already when children start to acquire verb inflection and becomes more contrastive when we observe the onset of the production of the SVO utterances.
The purpose of this research was to trace the developmental steps in the acquisition of aspectual oppositions in Russian and to examine the validity of the 'aspect before tense' hypothesis for L1-speaking children. Imperfective/perfective verbs and their inflections, as well as aspectual pairs, were analysed in the first five months of verb production (and the respective months in the input) in three children. Additionally, the first four months of verb production were investigated in one boy with less data. Verb forms marked for the past and for the present occur simultaneously in all children. These early forms relate to 'here and now' situations: verbs marked for the past denote 'resultative' events that are perceived by the children as occurring during the speech time or immediately before it, while verbs marked for the present typically denote on-going events. Thus, with early tense oppositions (or tense morphology) children mark aspectual contrasts in the moment of speech: evidence in favour of the 'aspect before tense' hypothesis.
A strong preference in using the perfective aspect for the past and the imperfective aspect for the present events has been found in both adults and children. Further, only very few aspectual pairs were documented within the analysed period (from the onset of verb production to the period when children produce rule-driven inflectional forms). The productive use of the finite forms of perfective and imperfective verbs doesn't concord with the ability of the productive use of the contrastive forms of one lemma. Data suggest that children (start to) learn aspectual forms in an item-based manner. The acquisition of aspectual oppositions (aspectual pairs) is lexically dependent and is guided by the contextual 'thesaurus'. Aspectual pairs are learned in a peace-meal way during much longer, than observed for this article, period of time. Generally, aspect is not learned as a rule, also because there are no (uniform) rules of forming of aspectual pairs, but as the 'satellite' of the inherent lexical meaning of verbs of diverse Aktionsarten.
The issues addressed here are relevant for other Slavic languages, exhibiting the morphological category of aspect.
This paper investigates the production and comprehension of intrasentential anaphoric pronominal reference in Russian. In particular, it examines the elicited imitation and comprehension of three anaphoric pronouns in subject position – personal 3rd singular masculine, demonstrative and zero – in one hundred and eighty monolingual Russian-speaking children and twenty adults. The three types of pronouns were designed to have an antecedent in the preceding sentence containing a verb and two arguments. These antecedents differ in their syntactical role and animacy. The sentence position, agentivity and topicality remained constant. The sentences with (in)animate subjects and objects constituted the following four 'conditions': two sentences with a subject and an object being either animate or inanimate and two sentences with a subject and an object exhibiting a diverse (in)animacy. Regarding the resolution of the anaphoric pronouns the similarity principle (or feature-concord rule) and its possible violations were tested. This principle suggests that an anaphoric pronoun is most likely resolved to the antecedent with a maximum of similar characteristics or features and it primarily governs the assignment of an antecedent to anaphoric pronouns in subject position in the absence of the violating conditions. Results show the influence of this rule on the anaphora resolution process increasing with age, on the one hand, and the development of the impact of animacy, syntactic role and the type of anaphoric pronouns that violate the feature-concord rule, on the other.
The article deals with the analysis of the development of aspectuality at the early stages of the acquisition of Russian. Data from seven children are investigated for this purpose. It is claimed that the category of aspectuality, being the property of the whole utterance, can be expressed at the early stages of language acquisition even before the verb itself occurs. During this period some children mark the basic aspectual opposition "process-result" by the linguistic devices at their disposal, namely by various uses of sound imitations or onomatopoetics. Onomatopoetics, when used once, can be said to be the predecessors of perfective verbs, while reduplicative use of onomatopoetics seems to correspond to the imperfective aspect. The paper presents an analysis of the early verb lexicons of six children. Among their 24 earliest verbs both aspects are represented. As revealed by the analysis, aspect (and Aktionsart) clusters with tense in a specific way: imperfective verbs are mainly used in the present while perfectives are used mostly in the past.
Preface: New language versions of MAIN: Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives - revised
(2020)
While both Japanese and English have a grammatic al form denoting the progressive, the two forms (te-iru & be+ing) interact differently with the inherent semantics of the verb to which they attach (Kindaichi, 1950; McClure, 1995; Shirai, 2000). Japanese change of state verbs are incompatible with a progressive interpretation, allowing only a resultative interpretation of V+ te-iru, while a progressive interpretation is preferred for activity predicates. English be+ing denotes a progressive interpretation regardless of the lexical semantics of the verb. The question that arises is how we can account for the fact that change of state verbs like dying can denote a progressive interpretation in English, but not in Japanese. While researchers such as Kageyama (1996) and Ogihara (1998, 1999) propose that the difference lies in the lexical semantics of the verbs themselves, others such as McClure (1995) have argued that the difference lies in the semantics of the grammatical forms, be+ing and te-iru. We present results from an experimental study of Japanese learners’ interpretation of the English progressive which provide support for McClure’s proposal. Results indicate that independent of verb type, learners had significantly more difficulty with the past progressive. We argue that knowledge of L2 semantics-syntax correspondences proceeds not on the basis of L1 lexical semantic knowledge, but on the basis of grammatical forms.
Die Erstellung eines Großwörterbuchs ist ein umfagreiches Vorhaben – nicht nur in quantitativem Sinne. So ist es mir eine Ehre, dass ich – als Mitherausgeber der kürzlich erschienenen Großwörterbücher Deutsch-Ungarisch und Ungarisch-Deutsch – im Rahmen dieser Tagung die derzeit laufende lexikographische Arbeit an einem deutsch-finnischen Großwörterbuch unter der Leitung von Professor Jarmo Korhonen näher kennen lernen kann. Über dieses Projekt schreibt Lenk (1998: 87) in einem Tagungsbericht: „Das [...] geplante neue Großwörterbuch begnügt sich mit einer voraussichtlichen Stichwortzahl von 100.000.“ Nun erhebt sich die Frage, was hier wohl mit der Formulierung „begnügt sich“ gemeint war: Wie „groß“ muss eigentlich ein „Großwörterbuch“ sein, um diesen Namen führen zu dürfen? Unter diesem Aspekt möchte sich der vorliegende Beitrag mit der Problematik der Größenklassen bzw. -bezeichnungen von Wörterbüchern auseinander setzen, da diese Fragestellung in mehrfacher Hinsicht aktuell ist, sowohl für die metalexikographische Theorie als auch für die Praxis der Wörterbucharbeit. Zur Verdeutlichung sei zunächst exemplarisch auf die ungarische Wörterbuchwirklichkeit hingewiesen: Es sind vor kurzem fast zeitgleich – allerdings für unterschiedliche Sprachenpaare – so genannte „Großwörterbücher“ einerseits mit lediglich 30.000 (z.B. Radácsy 1997) und andererseits mit mehr als 200.000 Lemmata (z.B. Halász/Földes/Uzonyi 1998a) herausgegeben worden. Ebenfalls in Ungarn erscheinen jetzt – sogar für dieselbe Sprachrichtung – zwei Wörterbücher mit im Wesentlichen gleicher Lemmaanzahl, wobei sich das eine „Kleinwörterbuch“ (Halász/Földes/Uzonyi 2000a), das andere aber schon „Handwörterbuch“ (Hessky 2000) nennt. Mit anderen Worten: Sprachlexika mit etwas über 30.000 Lemmata nennt man mal Klein-, mal Hand-, mal Großwörterbuch. Von dieser empirischen Beobachtung ausgehend soll im Weiteren an einer größeren Zahl zweisprachiger Wörterbücher, in denen eine der beteiligten Sprachen das Deutsche ist, untersucht werden, ob die Bezeichnungen als einigermaßen verlässliche Indikatoren für die Größe des lexikographisch erfassten Sprachmaterials angesehen werden können. Ebenfalls soll der Frage nachgegangen werden, ob die immer zahlreicher werdenden Attribuierungen und Bestimmungswörter wie großes Wörterbuch oder Global-, Universal-, Kompaktwörterbücher etc. mit dem tatsächlichen Umfang der Wörterbücher korrelieren und ob bzw. inwieweit die diesbezüglich verwendeten Terminologien der einzelnen lexikographischen Werkstätten bzw. der Verlage miteinander kompatibel sind. Hier besteht erheblicher Klärungsbedarf. Vor diesem Hintergrund sollen generell die Probleme der Größenbezeichnungen bzw. -klassen – oder wie der Heidelberger Metalexikograph Wiegand (1990: 2127) besonders fachkundig formuliert: „die Zahlen zur Mächtigkeit der Trägermenge der Makrostruktur“ – angesprochen werden. Dabei muss man sich natürlich klar vor Augen halten, dass die Lemmaanzahl nur eines der Kriterien zur Bestimmung des Volumens, d.h. der Größenklasse ist (vgl. Wiegand 1990: 2129). Bei der Lemmaselektion ergeben sich daher für die Lexikographen gleich zwei grundsätzliche Dilemmas: (a) in quantitativer Hinsicht wie viel und (b) in qualitativer Hinsicht welche Lemmata Aufnahme finden sollen. Denn nur bei einem geschlossenen Korpus – wie etwa bei einem historischen Wörterbuch – liegt eine idealtypische Lemmaselektion vor, indem die Quellen vollständig ausgewertet werden können: Beispielsweise war es Hannig (1995: VII) möglich, in seinem „Handwörterbuch Ägyptisch- Deutsch. Die Sprache der Pharaonen (2800-950 v.Chr.)“ relativ ruhigen Gewissens zu äußern: „Das Handwörterbuch ist eine möglichst vollständige Sammlung aller bekannten Wörter der zweiten/dritten bis inklusive einundzwanzigsten Dynastie“. Die Probleme der Größenklassen scheinen in den einschlägigen Fachdiskursen kaum eine Rolle zu spielen. In einer Monographie erwähnt zwar Schaeder (1987: 84) im Zusammenhang mit einsprachigen Spezialwörterbüchern am Rande: „Geteilt dürften die Ansichten darüber sein, was ein großes und was ein kleines Wörterbuch ist“. Gleichwohl finden sich in den sonst erschöpfenden HSK-Bänden „Wörterbücher“ von Hausmann/Reichmann/Wiegand/Zgusta (1990/1991) recht sporadisch und zugleich ziemlich rudimentäre Hinweise auf eine Phänomenologie der Größenordnung von Wörterbüchern.
Die vorliegende Arbeit setzt sich mit einer spezifischen Sprach- und Sprachensituation auseinander, die besondere Ausformungen sowie Strukturierungen des Deutschen aufweist und für die ein umfassender und durchdringender soziokultureller sowie sprachlicher Austausch – und als deren Folge Mehrsprachigkeit und Inter- bzw. Transkulturalität – den Bezugsrahmen darstellen. In dieser inter- bzw. transkulturellen „Fugen-Position“ ist das Deutsche weder Mutter- noch Fremdsprache im herkömmlichen Sinne des Wortes. Es handelt sich um Deutsch als Minderheitensprache (nach einer anderen Terminologie: Nationalitätensprache) in Ungarn. Die Sprach(en)verhältnisse der Ungarndeutschen werden seit über 250 Jahren grundlegend durch immer intensiver werdende „Außenkontakte“ mit dem Ungarischen und mit anderen Umgebungssprachen bzw. -varietäten gekennzeichnet: Ungarisch übt seit der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts einen sukzessiv erstarkenden Einfluss auf das kommunikative Handeln und dadurch auf das Sprachrepertoire der Ungarndeutschen aus, wohingegen nach 1945 die Einwirkung des Ungarischen besonders massiv wurde. Im Hinblick auf den sog. „geschlossenen“ (m.E. besser: zusammenhängenden) deutschen Sprachraum hat Mattheier (1980: 160) ausgeführt, dass Veränderungen in den Sprachgebrauchsstrukturen eng mit Veränderungen in den sprachlichen Strukturen verbunden sind und dass beide Prozesse gewöhnlich gleichzeitig vor sich gehen. Unter Bedingungen der Mehrsprachigkeit und der Inter- bzw. Transkulturalität gilt dies, wie mir scheint, verstärkt. Denn die Sprachgebrauchsstrukturen der Ungarndeutschen haben sich zugleich aus zweierlei Hauptgründen mehrfach geändert: (a) Zum einen haben die erwähnten lange andauernden und tief greifenden (alle sozialen Domänen erfassenden) sozio- bzw. interkulturellen und sprachlichen Kontakte und die sich aus ihnen ergebenden kommunikativen Muster erhebliche Konsequenzen für die Sprache. Denn Sprachenkontakte lösen „von Haus aus“ nicht unwichtige Veränderungen in den interagierenden Sprachvarietäten aus. Dies betrifft sowohl die sprachlichen Formen, Strukturen und Modelle als auch die Sprach- bzw. Diskursgewohnheiten und darüber hinaus – wie ich meine – sogar das Weltmodell der miteinander in Berührung befindlichen ethnischen Gruppen bzw. Kommunikationsgemeinschaften. (b) Zum anderen erfolgte die sprachliche Bewältigung der Umwelt – auch abgesehen von der Mehrsprachigkeitssituation – auf andere Art und Weise als im zusammenhängenden deutschen Sprachraum, unterscheidet sich doch der soziokulturelle Referenzrahmen für die deutsche Minderheit in Ungarn fundamental im auf dem deutschen Sprachgebiet. Diese beiden Aspekte (a und b) üben ihre sprachgestaltende Wirkung auf das Deutsche als Minderheitensprache im Kulturraum Ungarn auch heute aus. Somit werden im vorliegenden Beitrag Elemente, Strukturen, Modelle und Gesetzmäßigkeiten im Mikrokosmos einer spezifischen Kontaktvarietät des Deutschen beschrieben und exemplifiziert, die sich von der binnendeutschen Standardsprache, aber auch von den binnendeutschen regionalen Varietäten grundlegend unterscheidet. Anhand ausgewerteter oraler Sprachproben, die ich im Rahmen eines kontaktlinguistischen Feldforschungsprojekts in der ungarndeutschen („donauschwäbischen“) Ortschaft Hajosch (auf Ungarisch: Hajós) in der nördlichen Batschka erhoben habe, sollen Aspekte der Varianz und Kontaktlinguistik der Sprachinnovation ermittelt und dokumentiert werden.
Die Untersuchung von Eigennamen (EN) im Kontext der Kontaktlinguistik stellt ein besonders aktuelles und informatives Forschungsfeld dar: Beispielsweise hat Eichler (1976: 128) bereits vor zweieinhalb Jahrzehnten erkannt, dass "gerade Sprachkontaktforschung heute ohne die onomastische Komponente nicht mehr gut denkbar ist". Beim gegenwärtigen Wissensstand kann auch von der anderen Seite her festgestellt werden, dass – insbesondere in Kulturräumen, in denen mehrere Sprachen miteinander in Berührung kommen – die Namenforschung eines kontaktlinguistischen Blickwinkels bedarf. Denn die EN verkörpern wohl den deutlichsten Nachweis für langfristige Vorgänge und Ergebnisse von Sprachenkontakten. So können diesbezüglich etwa hinsichtlich des "Namenstransfers" (Terminus nach Eichhoff 1991: 264) in mehr oder weniger multilinguale Regionen vor allem die Familien- und Ortsnamen lehrreiche linguistische wie auch interkulturelle Aufschlüsse liefern. Die onomastische Forschung verhält sich in diesem Problembereich unterschiedlich. Die kontaktlinguistischen Implikationen des direkten Transfers von Personennamen (mit phonematischer Anpassung) wurden in angelsächsischer Relation (norwegische, jiddische und ungarische Namen in den USA) bereits von einer Reihe bekannter Linguisten wie Kimmerle (1941: 1ff.; 1942: 158ff.), Haugen (1953: 201ff.), Mencken (1949: 474ff. sowie Supplement II, 1952: 396ff.), Weinreich (1968: 53), Bartha (1993: 41 ff.) und Kontra (1988: 58ff.) angesprochen. Hingegen würdigen nicht wenige Veröffentlichungen mit germanistischer Ausrichtung, auch wenn sie deutsche Nachnamen am Rande oder außerhalb des sog. "geschlossenen deutschen Sprachraums" ausführlich behandeln, diese Sprachenkontaktphänomene keines Hinweises (z. B. Breza 1986, Grünspanová 1975). Einige Arbeiten schneiden zwar die Einwirkung der Kontaktsprache(n) auf die deutschen Familiennamen (FaN) an, machen dies allerdings nicht zu ihrem primären Untersuchungsobjekt (z. B. Čučka/Melika 1979, Hellfritzsch 1990, Matejčík 1993[3] und Mori 1993). Lediglich in deutsch-tschechischer (Knappová 1990) und stärker in deutsch-angloamerikanischer sowie deutsch-costaricanischer Relation liegen einschlägig ertragreiche Beiträge vor, die verschiedene Integrationserscheinungen am Beispiel deutscher FaN in der englischsprachigen Umwelt der USA bzw. dem spanischsprachigen Milieu von Costa Rica thematisieren (Jones 1991 und besonders Eichhoff 1991 bzw. Boving 1986). Vor diesem Hintergrund zielt die vorliegende Studie darauf ab, deutschsprachige FaN in Südungarn einer kontaktlinguistischen Analyse zu unterziehen. Dies verspricht insofern ein besonders reizvolles Untersuchungsfeld, als in den Anthroponymen – dank lang anhaltender intensiver und mannigfacher Sprachen- und Kulturenkontakte trotz ihrer amtlich festgelegten Schreibformen – deutsche und ungarische Sprachelemente miteinander verschmelzen und in enger Symbiose existieren. Die Wechselwirkungen der flektierenden, indogermanischen deutschen Sprache und der agglutinierenden, finnisch-ugrischen ungarischen Sprache sind auch im Hinblick auf die Sprachtypologie besonders interessant.
Mit dem vorliegenden Beitrag sollte gezeigt werden, dass Untersuchungen zur Sprache von Minderheitenblättern nicht nur die Forschungen zur Pressesprache bereichern können, sondern gleichermaßen den Erkenntnisstand über verschiedene andere Sondersprachen. Infolge des besonderen sprachlich-kommunikativen Kontextes der lebensweltlichen Mehrsprachigkeit und des spezifischen soziokulturellen Umfelds der erlebten Interkulturalität vermögen solche Forschungen - die künftig in größerer Zahl und auf breiterer Basis wünschenswert wären - Blickwinkel, Instrumentarien und Ergebnisse der traditionellen Forschungsaktivitäten im binnendeutschen Sprachraum durch qualitativ neue Aspekte zu ergänzen und dadurch auch in vielerlei Hinsicht zu relativieren.
Die moderne Gesellschaft ist von Veränderungen epistemischer und institutioneller Strukturmerkmale der Wissenschaft geprägt, die ihrerseits einen Wandel in anderen Bereichen der Gesellschaft auslösen. In diesem Zusammenhang – wie auch in der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaftsentwicklung überhaupt – kommt der Sprachlichkeit, dem Kulturphänomen "Wissenschaftssprache", eine eminente Rolle zu, etablierte sich doch in den letzten Jahrzehnten eine „linguistische Teildisziplin der Wissenschaftssprachforschung“ (vgl. KRETZENBACHER 1992: 1; HESS-LÜTTICH 1998). "Wissenschaft" scheint mir jedoch ein (interkultureller) Problembegriff zu sein, beispielsweise auch schon deswegen, da dieses Wort (samt seinen Ableitungen wie Wissenschaftler, wissenschaftlich, Wissenschaftlichkeit) stark kulturbedingt ist (vgl. CLYNE/KREUTZ 2003: 60); so korreliert etwa der deutsche Terminus Wissenschaft nicht mit dem englischen science etc. Das Englische kann zweifellos auf eine konkurrenzlose Karriere als wissenschaftliche Universalsprache zurückblicken: Wissenschaftler – auch deutschsprachige – bedienen sich bei der Veröffentlichung wichtiger Forschungsergebnisse zunehmend der englischen Sprache. Der Anteil der wissenschaftlichen Publikationen auf Englisch beträgt heute weltweit über 90 Prozent, während nur noch wenige Prozent des wissenschaftlichen Publikationsaufkommens deutschsprachig sind. Auch die Zahl der wissenschaftlichen Tagungen (selbst im deutschen Sprach- und Kulturraum), die ausschließlich Englisch als Konferenzsprache zulassen, nimmt stetig zu. Außerdem werden immer mehr Vorlesungen bzw. ganze Studiengänge an sonst deutschsprachigen Universitäten in Englisch angeboten. „Die Spitzenforschung spricht englisch“ – stellte der spätere Präsident der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Hubert Markl, bereits vor zwanzig Jahren lapidar fest (Quelle: DUZ, 22/2002, S. 12). Gleichwohl wird immer wieder – oft etwas euphorisch – auf Ostmittel-, Ost- und Südosteuropa verwiesen, die traditionell als ein Refugium des Deutschen u.a. auch als Wissenschaftssprache galten bzw. auf weiten Strecken nach wie vor gelten. So kann exemplarisch die „Physikalische Zeitschrift der Sowjetunion“ erwähnt werden, die von 1932 bis 1937 auf Deutsch erschien. In diesem interessanten und zugleich äußerst komplexen Spannungsfeld soll es sich im vorliegenden Beitrag um das Thema ‘Sprachen in den Wissenschaften’ als Denk- und Darstellungsmedia handeln. Dabei soll zum einen die Problematik der Mehrsprachigkeit der Wissenschaften (mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Deutschen) im mehrsprachigen, multikulturellen und kultursensiblen Kontaktraum Mittel- und Osteuropa angesprochen werden, zum anderen – weil ja auf unserer Tagung auch andere Teilareale, wie z.B. Rumänien, vertreten sind – soll der besondere Schwerpunkt auf Ungarn liegen. Hauptziel der Erörterungen besteht darin, die Entwicklung der in dieser Region wirksamen Wissenschaftssprachen diachron herauszuarbeiten, den derzeitigen Stand für die Bereiche Sprachen in der akademischen Lehre, Forschungssprachen (d.h. Sprachen der Forschungskommunikation) und Publikationssprachen – auch mit Hilfe empirischer Daten – mehrperspektivisch zu dokumentieren und aktuelle Tendenzen reflektorisch aufzuzeigen.
Der Beitrag geht davon aus, dass Phraseologismen zum einen als prototypische Verkörperung des ,,kulturellen Gedächtnisses" einer Diskursgemeinschaft, zum anderen als ein universelles, jeder Sprachkultur immanentes Kulturphänomen angesehen werden können. In diesem Zusammenhang setzt er sieh zum Ziel, das Spannungsfeld der Verflochtenheit von ,Kultur" und "Sprache" mit ihren Ausprägungen und Konsequenzen am Material der Phraseologie im Hinblick auf das Deutsche und das Ungarische analytisch herauszuarbeiten und mehrperspektivisch zu hinterfragen. Denn die - im Titel der Tagung hervorgehobene - Kulturgeschichte und die Phraseologie stellen eine äußerst facettenreiche Thematik dar, die eine Reihe kulturphilosophischer, kultursemiotischer, interkultureller, kognitiv-linguistischer u. a. Fragen aufwirft und sowohl einen synchronen als auch einen diachronen Betrachtungsrahmen effordert. Der vorliegende Aufsatz kann sich jedoch auf lediglich einige aktuelle theoretische, methodologische und empirische Aspekte konzentrieren und möchte in disziplinärer Hinsicht kontrastiv und kontaktlinguistisch - dabei methodologisch phänomen- bzw. belegorientiert und problernbezogen - vorgehen.
Results of a production experiment on the placement of sentence accent in German are reported. The hypothesis that German fulfills some of the most widely accepted rules of accent assignment— predicting focus domain integration—was only partly confirmed. Adjacency between argument and verb induces a single accent on the argument, as recognized in the literature, but interruption of this sequence by a modifier often induces remodeling of the accent pattern with a single accent on the modifier. The verb is rarely stressed. All models based on linear alignment or adjacency between elements belonging to a single accent domain fail to account for this result. A cyclic analysis of prosodic domain formation is proposed in an optimality-theoretic framework that can explain the accent pattern.
Phonology and intonation
(2007)
The encoding standards for phonology and intonation are designed to facilitate consistent annotation of the phonological and intonational aspects of information structure, in languages across a range ofprosodic types. The guidelines are designed with the aim that a nonspecialist in phonology can both implement and interpret the resulting annotation.
Introduction
(2007)
A series of production and perception experiments investigating the prosody and well-formedness of special sentences, called Wide Focus Partial Fronting (WFPF), which consist of only one prosodic phrase and a unique initial accented argument, are reported on here. The results help us to decide between different models of German prosody. The absence of pitch height difference on the accent of the sentence speaks in favor of a relative model of prosody, in which accents are scaled relative to each other, and against models in which pitch accents are scaled in an absolute way. The results also speak for a model in which syntax, but not information structure, influences the prosodic phrasing. Finally, perception experiments show that the prosodic structure of sentences with a marked word order needs to be presented for grammaticality judgments. Presentation of written material only is not enough, and falsifies the results.
In a first step, definitions of the irreducible information structural categories are given, and in a second step, it is shown that there are no invariant phonological or otherwise grammatical correlates of these categories. In other words, the phonology, syntax or morphology are unable to define information structure. It is a common mistake that information structural categories are expressed by invariant grammatical correlates, be they syntactic, morphological or phonological. It is rather the case that grammatical cues help speaker and hearer to sort out which element carries which information structural role, and only in this sense are the grammatical correlates of information structure important. Languages display variation as to the role of grammar in enhancing categories of information structure, and this variation reflects the variation found in the ‘normal’ syntax and phonology of languages.
In what follows, I first briefly review Perlmutter (1968, 1970), in which it is argued that aspectual verbs are ambiguous between control and raising. I suggest that while the argument for the raising analysis is solid, the arguments supporting the control analysis of aspectual verbs are less so. As an alternative hypothesis to consider, I introduce the structural ambiguity hypothesis. In Section 3, I review three recent analyses of control and raising. Although there are important differences among them, they all share the basic assumption that the control/raising distinction is due to differences in selectional restrictions that the lexical items impose. Under such an assumption, the lexical ambiguity hypothesis is the only available option. In Section 4, I present evidence for the structural ambiguity hypothesis from studies concerning aspectual verbs in languages from four distinct families, German (Wurmbrand 2001), Japanese (Fukuda 2006), Romance languages (Cinque 2003), and Basque (Arregi Molina-Azaola 2004). These data strongly suggest that across languages aspectual verbs can appear in two different syntactic positions, either below or above vP, or the projection with which an external argument is introduced (Kratzer 1994, 1996, Chomsky 1995). Given these findings, I argue that it is the aspectual verbs' position with respect to vP which creates the control/raising ambiguity. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is lower than vP, an external argument takes scope over the aspectual verb. Thus, it is interpreted as control. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is higher than vP, on the other hand, it is the aspectual verb that takes scope over an entire vP, including the external argument. Thus, it is interpreted as raising. In section 5, I extend the scope of this study to include a discussion of want-type verbs in Indonesian, as analyzed in Polinsky & Potsdam (2006). Polinsky & Potsdam argue that the Indonesian want-type verbs must be raising in at least certain cases where they allow a rather peculiar interpretation. Although they assume that there are also control counterparts of the want-type verbs, I argue that applying the proposed analysis to the want-type verbs does away with the need for stipulating two distinct lexical entries for these verbs. Section 6 concludes the paper.
Das Partizip 1 im Deutschen
(2000)
It is controversial in the literature whether the First Participle in German ('Present Participle'; henceforth: Part I) is an adjective or a verbal form. Syntactically, it occurs exclusively in adjectival positions but it does not behave like an adjective in other respects. This paper provides an analysis of Part I starting from a diachronic perspective and arriving at a synchronic interpretation of its position in the field of 'finite verb + nonfinite verb constructions' in New High German. Against such positions as Paul's (1920), which regard Part I as an adjective only, it will be argued that, for an adequate description of its structural properties, its verbal character must be taken into account both diachronically and synchronically. It will be shown that Part I fits into and completes a paradigmatic structure together with other nonfinite verbal forms.
Wortformen wie Berliner und Potsdamer treten in pränominaler attributiver Funktion auf: eine Position, in der sowohl Adjektive als auch Substantive stehen können. Substantive kommen in der Position vor als sächsische Genitive (Leos Auto), als vorangestellte Genitivattribute (des Vaters Pflicht) oder als Bestandteile einer engen Apposition (Bundeskanzler Schröder). Adjektive stehen an dieser Stelle als adjektivische Attribute (rotes Auto). Gegen jede dieser Interpretationen von Berliner sprechen jeweils formale Argumente, die im wesentlichen darauf hinauslaufen, daß Berliner in Berliner Ballen niemals flektiert wird - weder wie ein Substantiv noch wie ein Adjektiv.
Welcher Wortart sind Wortformen wie Berliner in Berliner Ballen also zuzuordnen? Zur Beantwortung dieser Frage folgen zunächst einige (kommentierte) Literaturstellen, anschließend werde ich die Bezeichnung 'Stadtadjektive' einführen, ich nehme also zum Zwecke der Benennung eine Entscheidung vorweg. Darauf folgt die Untersuchung: das Verhalten der Stadtadjektive in Bezug auf Flexion, Derivation, Komposition und Syntax.
An verschiedenen Stellen meiner Arbeit (Fuhrhop 1998/1999) bin ich auf den besonderen Einfluß von morphologischer Komplexität auf weitere morphologische Prozesse gestoßen. Insbesondere verhalten sich suffigierte Stämme anders als einfache, sowohl in der Komposition als auch in der Derivation. Im folgenden möchte ich die Fakten zusammenstellen, Überlegungen zur theoretischen Interpretation und Relevanz anstellen und das ganze mit dieser Vorveröffentlichung zur Diskussion stellen.
Studying kinematic behavior in speech production is an indispensable and fruitful methodology in order to describe for instance phonemic contrasts, allophonic variations, prosodic effects in articulatory movements. More intriguingly, it is also interpreted with respect to its underlying control mechanisms. Several interpretations have been borrowed from motor control studies of arm, eye, and limb movements. They do either explain kinematics with respect to a fine tuned control by the Central Nervous System (CNS) or they take into account a combination of influences arising from motor control strategies at the CNS level and from the complex physical properties of the peripheral speech apparatus. We assume that the latter is more realistic and ecological. The aims of this article are: first, to show, via a literature review related to the so called '1/3 power law' in human arm motor control, that this debate is of first importance in human motor control research in general. Second, to study a number of speech specific examples offering a fruitful framework to address this issue. However, it is also suggested that speech motor control differs from general motor control principles in the sense that it uses specific physical properties such as vocal tract limitations, aerodynamics and biomechanics in order to produce the relevant sounds. Third, experimental and modelling results are described supporting the idea that the three properties are crucial in shaping speech kinematics for selected speech phenomena. Hence, caution should be taken when interpreting kinematic results based on experimental data alone.
The study of what makes utterances difficult or easy to understand is one of the central topics of research in comprehension. It is both theoretically attractive and useful in practice. The more we know about difficulties in understanding the more we know about understanding. And the better we grasp typical problems of understanding in certain types of discourse and for certain recipients the better we can overcome these problems and the better we can advise people whose job it is to overcome such problems. It is therefore not surprising that comprehensibility has been the object of much reflection as far back as the days of classical rhetoric and that it is a center of lively interest in several present-day scientific disciplines, ranging from artificial intelligence and educational psychology to linguistics.
Geschichte von Dialogformen
(1994)
Die Forschungslage zur Geschichte von Dialogformen muß differenziert beurteilt werden. Einerseits gibt es vielfältig verstreute Arbeiten zu einzelnen historischen Dialogen und Dialogformen, vor allem aus den Bereichen der Literaturgeschichte, der Rhetorikgeschichte und der Philosophiegeschichte. Diese sind aber kaum systematisch erfaßt, so daß es schwierig ist, einen allgemeinen Überblick über den Stand der Forschung in diesem Sektor zu gewinnen.
Speakers of various Southern german dialects may be heard to use two syntactic variants of subordinate clauses which are represented by the following Swabian examples: (1) daß er den net will komme lasse (2) daß er den net komme lasse will Of these two variants of the three-element verbal complex, only the non-dialect counterpart of (2) is accepted as standard modern written German: (3) daß er ihn nicht kommen lassen will In earlier periods of the German language, however, both variants were used by authors of written texts.
This article is a contribution to historical dialogue analysis, a field of research which has gained momentum in recent years (Fritz 1995, 1997, Gloning 1999, and other articles in Jucker/Fritz/Lebsanft 1999). In the present paper, I report some results of ongoing research from a project on the history of controversies from 1600 to 1800, which Marcelo Dascal and I are conducting at the Universities of Tel Aviv, Israel and Gießen, Germany.
Wie hängen die verschiedenen Verwendungsweisen eines sprachlichen Ausdrucks miteinander zusammen? Diese Kernfrage der lexikalischen Semantik war schon immer ein praktisches Problem der Lexikographie und ein theoretisches Zentralthema der traditionellen Semasiologie (vgl. Paul 1894, 68ff.). In der neueren Semantik stand dieses theoretische Problem längere Zeit nicht im Vordergrund der Diskussion. Eine gewisse Stagnation in dieser Frage mag auf linguistischer Seite bedingt gewesen sein durch methodische Vorgaben strukturalistischer Bedeutungsauffassungen (vgl. Lyons 1977, 553; Heringer 1981, 109ff.) und auf philosophischer Seite u.a. durch das notorische Desinteresse der wahrheitsfunktionalen Semantik an lexikalischen Fragen.
Hundsnurscher (1996) hat mit einer umfangreichen Liste von Beispielen für Verwendungsmöglichkeiten des Verbs ziehen auf das bemerkenswerte Bedeutungsspektrum dieses Verbs aufmerksam gemacht und auch schon wichtige Hinweise auf Zusammenhänge zwischen diesen Verwendungsweisen gegeben. Der vorliegende Beitrag ist ein Gegenstück zu meiner Untersuchung des Verwendungsspektrums von schar/in Fritz (1995). Dort bin ich näher auf den bedeutungstheoretischen Status des Begriffs der Verwendungsweise und auf Probleme und Methoden der Unterscheidung von Verwendungsweisen eingegangen, so dass ich im vorliegenden Beitrag die dort explizierten theoretischen und methodischen Annahmen nur andeuten will (vgl. auch Fritz 1998, Ilff.).