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This paper presents two experimental studies investigating the processing of presupposed content. Both studies employ the German additive particle auch (too). In the first study, participants were given a questionnaire containing bi-clausal, ambiguous sentences with 'auch' in the second clause. The presupposition introduced by auch was only satisfied on one of the two readings of the sentence, and this reading corresponded to a syntactically dispreferred parse of the sentence. The prospect of having the auch-presupposition satisfied made participants choose this syntactically dispreferred reading more frequently than in a control condition. The second study used the self-paced-reading paradigm and compared the reading times on clauses containing auch, which differed in whether the presupposition of auch was satisfied or not. Participants read the clause more slowly when the presupposition was not satisfied. It is argued that the two studies show that presuppositions play an important role in online sentence comprehension and affect the choice of syntactic analysis. Some theoretical implications of these findings for semantic theory and dynamic accounts of presuppositions as well as for theories of semantic processing are discussed.
Multiple modals construction
(2006)
Modal items of different semantic types can only be combined in a specific order. Epistemic items, for instance, cannot be embedded under deontic ones. I'll argue that this fact cannot be explained by the current semantic theories of modality. A solution to this problem will be developed in an update semantics framework. On the semantic side, a distinction will be drawn between circumstantial information about the world and information about duties, whereas I'll use Nuyts' notion of m-performativity to account for certain use of the modal items.
The expressions few and a few are typically considered to be separate quantifiers. I challenge this assumption, showing that with the appropriate definition of few, a few can be derived compositionally as a + few. The core of the analysis is a proposal that few has a denotation as a one-place predicate which incorporates a negation operator. From this, argument interpretations can be derived for expressions such as few students and a few students, differing only in the scope of negation. I show that this approach adequately captures the interpretive differences between few and a few. I further show that other such pairs are blocked by a constraint against the vacuous application of a.
Kripke's "modal argument" uses consideration about scope within modal contexts to show that proper names and definite descriptions must be of two different semantic types. I reexamine the data that is used to motivate Kripke's argument, and suggest that it, in fact, indicates that proper names behave exactly like a certain type of definite description, which I call "particularized" descriptions.
Semantic and pragmatic properties of the Yorùbá focus construction have not been fully examined. This paper investigates presupposition, exhaustivity effects, and felicity conditions in some of its attested forms. Yorùbá focus does not trigger existence presuppositions, it does not have any obligatory exhaustivity effects, and argument focus and predicate focus behave differently with respect to question-answer congruence. These properties are compatible Déchaine’s analysis (2002) of Yorùbá focus as inverse predication, essentially a type of cleft.
This paper revisits the question of whether propositions in situation semantics must be persistent (Kratzer (1989)). It shows that ignoring persistence causes empirical problems to theories which use quantification over minimal situations as a solution for donkey anaphora (Elbourne (2005)), while at the same time modifying these theories to incorporate persistence makes them incompatible with the use of situations for contextual restriction (Kratzer (2004)).
Starting from the basic observation that, across languages, the anticausative variant of an alternating verb systematically involves morphological marking that is shared by passive verbs, the goal of this paper is to provide a uniform and formal account of these arguably two different construction types. The central claim that I put forward is that passives and anticausatives differ only with respect to the event-type features of the verb but both arise through the same operation, namely suppression by special morphology of a feature in v that encodes the ontological event type of the verb. Crucially, I argue for two syntactic primitives, namely act and cause, whereto I trace the passive/anticausative distinction. Passive constructions across languages are made compatible by relegating the differences to simple combinatorial properties of verb and prepositional types and their interactions with other event functors, which are in turn encoded differently morphologically across languages. New arguments are brought forward for a causative analysis of anticausatives. Agentive adverbials are examined, and doubt is cast on the usefulness of by-phrases as a diagnostic for argumenthood.
Die Hauptthese dieser Dissertation ist, dass Nord-Sotho keinen obligatorischen Gebrauch von grammatischen Mitteln zur Markierung von Fokus macht, weder in der Syntax noch in der Prosodie oder Morphologie. Trotzdem strukturiert diese Sprache eine Äußerung nach informationsstrukturellen Aspekten. Konstituenten, die im Diskurs gegeben sind, werden entweder getilgt, pronominalisiert oder an den rechten oder linken Satzrand versetzt. Diese (morpho-)syntaktischen Prozesse wirken so zusammen, dass die fokussierte Konstituente oft final in ihrem Teilsatz erscheint. Obwohl die finale Position keine designierte Fokusposition ist, ist das Wissen um diese Tendenz doch entscheidend für das Verständnis einer morphologischen Alternation, die in Nord-Sotho am Verb erscheint und die in der Literatur im Zusammenhang mit Fokus diskutiert wurde.
Obwohl also ein direkter grammatischer Ausdruck von formaler F(okus)-Markierung im Nord-Sotho fehlt, ist F-Markierung trotzdem entscheidend für die Grammatik dieser Sprache: Fokussierte logische Subjekte können nicht in kanonischer präverbaler Position erscheinen. Sie erscheinen stattdessen entweder postverbal oder in einem Spaltsatz, abhängig von der Valenz des Verbs. Obwohl Nord-Sotho bei Objekten im Gebrauch von Spaltsätzen eine Korrespondenz von komplexer Form mit komplexer Bedeutung zeigt, gilt diese Korrespondenz nicht für logische Subjekte.
Die vorliegende Dissertation modelliert die oben genannten Ergebnisse im theoretischen Rahmen der Optimalitätstheorie (OT). Syntaktischer in situ Fokus und die Abwesenheit von prosodischer Fokusmarkierung können mit unkontroversen Beschränkungen erfasst werden. Für die Ungrammatikaliät fokussierter logischer Subjekte in präverbaler Position schlägt die vorliegende Arbeit die Modifizierung einer in der Literatur vorhandenen Beschränkung vor, die in Nord-Sotho von entscheidener Bedeutung ist. Die Form-Bedeutungs-Korrespondenz wird, wie andere Phänomene pragmatischer Arbeitsteilung auch, innerhalb der schwach bidirektionalen Optimalitätstheorie behandelt.
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.
Languages cross-linguistically differ with respect to whether they accept or ban True Negative Imperatives (TNIs). In this paper I show that this ban follows from three generally accepted assumptions: (i) the fact that the operator that encodes the illocutionary force of an imperative universally takes scope from C°; (ii) the fact that this operator may not be operated on by a negative operator and (iii) the Head Movement Constraint (an instance of Relativized Minimality). In my paper I argue that languages differ too with respect to both the syntactic status (head/phrasal) and the semantic value (negative/non-negative) of their negative markers. Given these difference across languages and the analysis of TNIs based on the three above mentioned assumptions, two typological generalisations can be predicted: (i) every language with an overt negative marker X° that is semantically negative bans TNIs; and (ii) every language that bans TNIs exhibits an overt negative marker X°. I demonstrate in my paper that both typological predictions are born out.
In this paper I discuss four type of bare nominal, and note that, in some sense, all of them appear to imply stereotypicality. I consider an account in terms of Bidirectional Optimality Theory: unmarked (bare) forms give rise to unmarked (stereotypical) interpretations. However, it turns out that, while the form of bare numerals is unmarked, the interpretation sometimes is not. I suggest that the crucial notion is not unmarkedness, but optimal inference: unmarked forms give rise to interpretations that are best used for drawing inferences. I propose a revision of Bidirectional Optimality Theory to reflect this.
This paper discusses a semantic analysis of three syntactic types of English each, namely, floated each, binominal each, and prenominal each. It is argued that floated each consists of two parts, a quantifier and an inaudible element which functions as its restrictor, which together form a tripartite quantificational structure when they compose with the predicate. Binominal each and an associated NP such as two topics (which is generally called the 'distributive share') are syntactically analyzed as forming a subject-predicate relation within a DP in which the NP undergoes so-called 'predicate inversion'. Semantically, binominal each is analyzed as having the same semantic value as floated each, while prenominal each is shown to have a different logical type from floated and binominal each. As can be seen from analogous constructions in some Romance languages, it does not lexically contain its restrictor.
In this text, we describe the development of a broad coverage grammar for Japanese that has been built for and used in different application contexts. The grammar is based on work done in the Verbmobil project (Siegel 2000) on machine translation of spoken dialogues in the domain of travel planning. The second application for JACY was the automatic email response task. Grammar development was described in Oepen et al. (2002a). Third, it was applied to the task of understanding material on mobile phones available on the internet, while embedded in the project DeepThought (Callmeier et al. 2004, Uszkoreit et al. 2004). Currently, it is being used for treebanking and ontology extraction from dictionary definition sentences by the Japanese company NTT (Bond et al. 2004).
In this paper we describe SOBA, a sub-component of the SmartWeb multi-modal dialog system. SOBA is a component for ontologybased information extraction from soccer web pages for automatic population of a knowledge base that can be used for domainspecific question answering. SOBA realizes a tight connection between the ontology, knowledge base and the information extraction component. The originality of SOBA is in the fact that it extracts information from heterogeneous sources such as tabular structures, text and image captions in a semantically integrated way. In particular, it stores extracted information in a knowledge base, and in turn uses the knowledge base to interpret and link newly extracted information with respect to already existing entities.
This demo abstract describes the SmartWeb Ontology-based Information Extraction System (SOBIE). A key feature of SOBIE is that all information is extracted and stored with respect to the SmartWeb ontology. In this way, other components of the systems, which use the same ontology, can access this information in a straightforward way. We will show how information extracted by SOBIE is visualized within its original context, thus enhancing the browsing experience of the end user.
In this paper I present five alternations of the verb system of Modern Greek, which are recurrently mapped on the syntactic frame NPi__NP. The actual claim is that only the participation in alternations and/or the allocation to an alternation variant can reliably determine the relation between a verb derivative and its base. In the second part, the conceptual structures and semantic/situational fields of a large number of “-ízo” derivatives appearing inside alternation classes are presented. The restricted character of the conceptual and situational preferences inside alternations classes suggests the dominant character of the alternations component.
In this article we examine and "exapt" Wurzel's concept of superstable markers in an innovative manner. We develop an extended view of superstability through a critical discussion of Wurzel's original definition and the status of marker-superstability versus allomorphy in Natural Morphology: As we understand it, superstability is - above and beyond a step towards uniformity - mainly a symptom for the weakening of the category affected (cf. 1.,2. and 4.). This view is exemplified in four short case studies on superstability in different grammatical categories of four Germanic languages: genitive case in Mainland Scandinavian and English (3.1), plural formation in Dutch (3.2), second person singular ending -st in German (3.3), and ablaut generalisation in Luxembourgish (3.4).
In order to understand the specific structures and features of the German surnames the most important facts about their emergence and history should be outlined and, at the same time, be compared with the Swedish surnames because there are considerable differences (for further details cf. Nubling 1997 a, b). First of all, surnames in Germany emerged rather early, with the first instances occurring in the 11th century in southern Germany; by the 16th century surnames were common all over Germany. Differences are related to geography (from south to north), social class (from the upper to the lower classes) und urban versus rural areas.
Many Bantu languages have grammaticized one or both types of motion verb - COME and GO - as future markers. However, they may differ in the semantics of future temporal reference, in some cases referring to a "near" future, in others to a "remote" future. This paper explores how the underlying image-schemas of such verbs in several languages - Bamileke-Dschang, Bamun, and Larnnso' (Grassfields Bantu), Duala, Chimwera, Chindali, Kihunde, and Zulu (Narrow Bantu) - contribute to how the verbs become grammaticized in relation to the dual construals of linguistic time: ego-moving vs. moving-event.
It is well-known that in many if not most Sino-Tibetan languages relative clause and attribute/genitive markers are identical with nominalization devices and that sentences bearing such markers can also function as independent utterances (cf. Matisoff 1972, Kölver 1977, DeLancey 1989, Genetti 1992, Ebert 1994, Bickel 1995, Noonan 1997, etc.). This morphological convergence of syntactic functions, which we may dub the ‘Standard Sino-Tibetan Nominalization’ (SSTN) pattern, is particularly prominent in some languages spoken in the eastern and southeastern part of the Kirant because these languages not only feature prenominal relative clauses, but also allow, albeit as a minor type, internally headed constructions.
Human communication takes place when one person does something that when seen or heard by another person is taken to be done with the intention to communicate, and the other person, having seen the communicator show his or her intention to communicate, then uses inference to determine what the communicator intends to communicate. This is possible because the addressee assumes that the communicator is a rational person, that is, acts with goals in mind (see Grice 1975), and so must be doing the act for a reason, and it is worth the addressee’s effort to try to determine what that reason is, that is, determine the relevance of the act.
Wang Li (1900-1986)
(2006)
Li Fang-Kuei (1902-1987)
(2006)
Fang-Kuei Li was one of the foremost scholars of Thai and Sino-Tibetan studies and a major contributor to Amerind studies. Born in China, he was one of the early scholars sent to the United States to study. He had developed an interest in language while learning English, Latin, and German as part of his studies in China, and so he decided to study linguistics in the United States. In 1924, he went to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, receiving his B.A. 2 years later, then moved to the University of Chicago, where he received his M.A. and Ph.D., studying with Edward Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, and Carl Darling Buck.
Sino-Tibetan languages
(2006)
The Sino-Tibetan (ST) language family includes the Sinitic languages (what for political reasons are known as Chinese ‘dialects’) and the 200 to 300 Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages. Geographically it stretches from Northeast India, Burma, Bangladesh, and northern Thailand in the southeast, throughout the Tibetan plateau to the north, across most of China and up to the Korean border in the northeast, and down to Taiwan and Hainan Island in the southeast. The family has come to be the way it is because of multiple migrations, often into areas where other languages were spoken (LaPolla, 2001).
Based on a Relevance Theory-informed view of language development, this paper argues that grammatical relations are construction-specific conventionalizations (grammaticalizations) of implicatures which arise out of repeated patterns of reference to particular types of referents. Once conventionalized, these structures function to constrain the hearer's identification of referents in discourse. As they are construction-specific, and hence language-specific, there is no category "subject" across languages; different languages will either show this type of grammaticalization or not, and if they do, may show it or not in different constructions. Any cross-linguistic use of terms such as "subject" (and "S", as in "SOV") should then be avoided.
On describing word order
(2006)
One aspect that is always discussed in language descriptions, no matter how short they may be, is word order. Beginning with Greenberg 1963, it has been common to talk about word order using expressions such as "X is an SOV language", where "S" represents "subject", "0" represents "object", and "V" represents "verb". Statements such as this are based on an assumption of comparability, an assumption that all languages manifest the categories represented by "S", "0", and "V" (among others), and that word order in all languages can be described (and compared) using these categories.
Indo-Uralic and Altaic
(2006)
Elsewhere I have argued that the Indo-European verbal system can be understood in terms of its Indo-Uralic origins because the reconstructed Indo-European endings can be derived from combinations of Indo-Uralic morphemes by a series of well-motivated phonetic and analogic developments (2002). Moreover, I have claimed (2004b) that the Proto-Uralic consonant gradation accounts for the peculiar correlations between Indo-European root structure and accentuation discovered by Lubotsky (1988).
It is no secret that Gerhard Doerfer has argued strongly against a genetic relationship between the Mongolic and Tungusic languages. Ten years ago he presented a detailed analysis of the Mongolo-Tungusic vocabulary (1985). In the following I intend to show that his material allows of a quite different conclusion.
Eduard Hermann writes (1916: 147): "Darüber, daß Wills Übersetzung des Enchiridions ein ganz schauderhaftes Preußisch ist, herrscht eine Stimme. Nur darüber sind die Meinungen geteilt, ob Will ein Stümper war und nichts vom Preußischen verstand oder ob das Preußische seiner Zeit dermaßen entartet war, daß Kasus und Formen fast beliebig miteinander wechseln konnten." This is a splendid formulation of the problem. Hermann’s article should be compulsory reading for students of historical syntax. In search of a solution to this problem, I have applied the following procedure. First I have put together the minor catechisms with those parts of the Enchiridion which translate the same German text. Words which are missing in any of the three versions have been italicized. The result is shown below.
Temporal development of compensation strategies for perturbed palate shape in German /S/-production
(2006)
The palate shape of four speakers was changed by a prosthesis which either lowered the palate or retracted the alveoles. Subjects wore the prosthesis for two weeks and were recorded several times via EMA. Results of articulatory measurements show that speakers use different compensation methods at different stages of the adaptation. They lower the tongue immediately after the insertion of the prosthesis. Other compensation methods as for example lip protrusion are only acquired after longer practising periods. The results are interpreted as supporting the existence of different mappings between motor commands, vocal tract shape and auditory-acoustic target.
Focus expressions in Yom
(2006)
This paper deals with the means for expressing the pragmatic category of focus in Yom, which is an Oti-Volta language of the Yom-Nawdem group spoken by about 74,000 people (Gordon 2005, online version) in the department of Donga in Northern Benin. The study is based on results of my field research carried out in March/April 2005 in Djougou (Benin), within the framework of the project “Focus in Gur and Kwa languages”. Main aim of this fieldwork was to study the expression of focus in Yom. Regarding the basic grammatical structure of the language, I mainly rely on various publications by Beacham (1969, 1991, and 1997).
In our presentation we will outline the verb system of Lelemi and concentrate on certain “focal” aspects which are of primary interest to us. Lelemi has two TAMP paradigms: one constituting the so-called “simple tenses”, the other the so-called “relative tenses” (Allan 1973), although not every “simple tense” has a counterpart in the “relative tenses”. The simple paradigm is formed by subject prefixes (prefixed pronouns for 1st or 2nd person and noun class pronouns for 3rd persons) and the verb form whereas the relative paradigm is build up by the obligatory use of an external subject noun, an invariable verb prefix, and the verb form. While the simple paradigm is used in quite a lot of syntactic environments the relative paradigm only shows up in relative clauses with the subject being the head as well as in subject and sentence focus constructions including questions concerning the subject. We will show some interesting interactions between the grammatical expression of focus and the verb system and sketch the grammaticalisation path of the morpheme nà.
Research on adverbials in sentence-medial position in the North- Ghanaian Gur language Buli suggests that the language offers two divergent slots for adverbials between subject and verb. Special attention is paid to the group of sentence-medial deictic temporal adverbials. While they have the potential to develop into tense markers, this process seems to depend on special information structural conditions.
Focus in Gur and Kwa
(2006)
The project investigates focus phenomena in the two genetically relatedWest African Gur and Kwa language groups of the Niger-Congo phylum. Most of its members are tone languages, they are similar with respect to word order typology (all are SVO languages), but of divergent morphological type (agglutinating Gur versus isolating Kwa).
Focus expressions in Foodo
(2006)
Reflexive pronouns as central anaphoric elements are subject to general principles determined by Universal Grammar and shared by all languages that use reflexives as part of their grammatical structure. In addition to these general conditions, there are language particular properties, which different languages can exhibit on the basis of different regulations. One variation of this sort is the particular role of Reflexives in German, which can show up as improper Arguments, which are subject to standard syntactic and morphological conditions, but do not represent an argument of the head they belong to. Hence the particular property is the effect of syntactic, morphological and semantic conditions. A simple illustration of the phenomena I will explore in this contribution is based on the following observation.
Thematic Roles (or Theta-Roles) are theoretical constructs that account for a variety of well known empirical facts, which are more or less clearly delimited. In other words, Theta-Roles are not directly observable, but they do have empirical content that is open to empirical observation. The objective of the present paper is to sketch the nature and content of Theta-Roles, distinguishing their universal foundation as part of the language faculty, their language particular realization, which depends on the conditions of individual languages, and idiosyncratic properties, determined by specific information of individual lexical items.
Research on a variety of structurally different languages suggests that information is assigned to grammatical form in way of preferred representations of arguments. These preferences can be captured by four interacting constraints which are based on the analysis of spoken and written discourse. These constraints represent measurable discourse preferences: pragmatically unmarked utterances seem to follow them blindly and widely. Consequently, the preferences motivating these constraints seem to represent the default structuring of discourse in immediate relation to elementary grammatical form. Discourse is no longer viewed as acting upon grammatical form, but as being ‘grammatical’ itself.
The medium of (oral) language is mostly disregarded (or overlooked) in contemporary media theories. This "ignoring of language" in media studies is often accompanied by an inadequate transport model of communication, and it converges with an "ignoring of mediality" in mentalistic theories of language. In the present article it will be argued that this misleading opposition of language and media can only be overcome if one already regards oral language, not just written language, as a medium of the human mind. In my argumentation I fall back on Wittgenstein’s conception of language games to try to show how Wittgenstein’s ideas can help us to clear up the problem of the mediality of language and also to show to what extent the mentalistic conception of Chomskyan provenance cannot be adequate to the phenomenon of language.
Decomposing questions acts
(2006)
In this article, an account is given of the planning of a trilingual dictionary Yilumbu– French–English. The focus is on the target user, the purpose, nature and typology of the planned dictionary. Attention is also paid to some macro- and microstructural issues. For example, all types of lexical items, including multiword lexical items, are given lemma status. Moreover all items are included according to the word tradition and on account of their usage frequency in the corpus. Apart from these aspects, types of dialectal forms as well as the type of special-field lexical items are also discussed. From a microstructural point of view, this article investigates different kinds of data types to be considered for inclusion in complex articles in particular. User-friendliness parameters and innovative access structure procedures also come into play.
The phenomenon discussed in this paper is the so-called expletive negation in negated yes/no questions in Serbo-Croatian. The term expletive negation seems, at this point to be a useful descriptive term for the phenomenon in question. One of the goals of this paper, however, is to show that it is not the correct one. Proposing the existence of semantically vacuous negation is the consequence of the assumption that sentential negation has a fixed position in the clausal hierarchy (Brown and Franks 1995). This approach cannot account for the relevant data in Serbo-Croatian. My claim is that the cases under consideration involve an alternative position of NegP in Serbo-Croatian, above TP. It is confined to the derivation of one semantic type of negated yes/no interrogatives, and it cannot trigger negative concord.
In this paper I argue in favor of a Matching Analysis for German relative clauses. The Head Raising Analysis is shown to fail to account for parts of the reconstruction pattern in German, especially cases where only the external head is interpreted and the absence of Principle C effects. I propose a Matching Analysis with Vehicle Change and make consistent assumptions about possible deletion operations in relatives so that the entire pattern can be captured by one analysis which therefore proves superior to previous ones.
In this paper we compare the behaviour of adverbs of frequency (de Swart 1993) like usually with the behaviour of adverbs of quantity like for the most part in sentences that contain plural definites. We show that sentences containing the former type of Q-adverb evidence that Quantificational Variability Effects (Berman 1991) come about as an indirect effect of quantification over situations: in order for quantificational variability readings to arise, these sentences have to obey two newly observed constraints that clearly set them apart from sentences containing corresponding quantificational DPs, and that can plausibly be explained under the assumption that quantification over (the atomic parts of) complex situations is involved. Concerning sentences with the latter type of Q-adverb, on the other hand, such evidence is lacking: with respect to the constraints just mentioned, they behave like sentences that contain corresponding quantificational DPs. We take this as evidence that Q-adverbs like for the most part do not quantify over the atomic parts of sum eventualities in the cases under discussion (as claimed by Nakanishi and Romero (2004)), but rather over the atomic parts of the respective sum individuals.
This article presents an analysis of German nicht...sondern... (contrastive not...but...) which departs from the commonly held view that this construction should be explained by appeal to its alleged corrective function. It will be demonstrated that in nicht A sondern B (not A but B), A and B just behave like stand-alone unmarked answers to a common question Q, and that this property of sondern is presuppositional in character. It is shown that from this general observation many interesting properties of nicht...sondern... follow, among them distributional differences between German "sondern" and German "aber" (contrastive but, concessive but), intonational requirements and exhaustivity effect sondern presupposition is furthermore argued to be the result of the conventionalization of conversational implicatures.
The paper presents an in-depth study of focus marking in Gùrùntùm, a West Ch adic language spoken in Bauchi Province of Northern Nigeria. Focus in Gùrùntùm is marked morphologically by means of a focus marker a, which typically precedes the focus constituent. Even though the morphological focus-marking system of Gùrùntùm allows for a lot of fine-grained distinctions in information structure (IS) in principle, the language is not entirely free of focus ambiguities that arise as the result of conflicting IS- and syntactic requirements that govern the placement of focus markers. We show that morphological focus marking with a applies across different types of focus, such as newinformation, contrastive, selective and corrective focus, and that a does not have a second function as a perfectivity marker, as is assumed in the literature. In contrast, we show at the end of the paper that a can also function as a foregrounding device at the level of discourse structure.
Focus and tone
(2006)
Tone is a distinctive feature of the lexemes in tone languages. The information-structural category focus is usually marked by syntactic and morphological means in these languages, but sometimes also by intonation strategies. In intonation languages, focus is marked by pitch movements, which are also perceived as tone. The present article discusses prosodic focus marking in these two language types.
The material reported on in this paper is part of a set of experiments in which the role of Information Structure on L2 processing of words is tested. Pitch and duration of 4 sets of experimental material in German and English are measured and analyzed in this paper. The well-known finding that accent boosts duration and pitch is confirmed. Syntactic and lexical means of marking focus, however, do not give the duration and the pitch of a word an extra boost.
The paper presents a novel approach to explaining word order variation in the early Germanic languages. Initial observations about verb placement as a device marking types of rhetorical relations made on data from Old High German (cf. Hinterhölzl & Petrova 2005) are now reconsidered on a larger scale and compared with evidence from other early Germanic languages. The paper claims that the identification of information-structural domains in a sentence is best achieved by taking into account the interaction between the pragmatic features of discourse referents and properties of discourse organization.
In the past, a divide could be seen between ’deep’ parsers on the one hand, which construct a semantic representation out of their input, but usually have significant coverage problems, and more robust parsers on the other hand, which are usually based on a (statistical) model derived from a treebank and have larger coverage, but leave the problem of semantic interpretation to the user. More recently, approaches have emerged that combine the robustness of datadriven (statistical) models with more detailed linguistic interpretation such that the output could be used for deeper semantic analysis. Cahill et al. (2002) use a PCFG-based parsing model in combination with a set of principles and heuristics to derive functional (f-)structures of Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). They show that the derived functional structures have a better quality than those generated by a parser based on a state-of-the-art hand-crafted LFG grammar. Advocates of Dependency Grammar usually point out that dependencies already are a semantically meaningful representation (cf. Menzel, 2003). However, parsers based on dependency grammar normally create underspecified representations with respect to certain phenomena such as coordination, apposition and control structures. In these areas they are too "shallow" to be directly used for semantic interpretation. In this paper, we adopt a similar approach to Cahill et al. (2002) using a dependency-based analysis to derive functional structure, and demonstrate the feasibility of this approach using German data. A major focus of our discussion is on the treatment of coordination and other potentially underspecified structures of the dependency data input. F-structure is one of the two core levels of syntactic representation in LFG (Bresnan, 2001). Independently of surface order, it encodes abstract syntactic functions that constitute predicate argument structure and other dependency relations such as subject, predicate, adjunct, but also further semantic information such as the semantic type of an adjunct (e.g. directional). Normally f-structure is captured as a recursive attribute value matrix, which is isomorphic to a directed graph representation. Figure 5 depicts an example target f-structure. As mentioned earlier, these deeper-level dependency relations can be used to construct logical forms as in the approaches of van Genabith and Crouch (1996), who construct underspecified discourse representations (UDRSs), and Spreyer and Frank (2005), who have robust minimal recursion semantics (RMRS) as their target representation. We therefore think that f-structures are a suitable target representation for automatic syntactic analysis in a larger pipeline of mapping text to interpretation. In this paper, we report on the conversion from dependency structures to fstructure. Firstly, we evaluate the f-structure conversion in isolation, starting from hand-corrected dependencies based on the TüBa-D/Z treebank and Versley (2005)´s conversion. Secondly, we start from tokenized text to evaluate the combined process of automatic parsing (using Foth and Menzel (2006)´s parser) and f-structure conversion. As a test set, we randomly selected 100 sentences from TüBa-D/Z which we annotated using a scheme very close to that of the TiGer Dependency Bank (Forst et al., 2004). In the next section, we sketch dependency analysis, the underlying theory of our input representations, and introduce four different representations of coordination. We also describe Weighted Constraint Dependency Grammar (WCDG), the dependency parsing formalism that we use in our experiments. Section 3 characterises the conversion of dependencies to f-structures. Our evaluation is presented in section 4, and finally, section 5 summarises our results and gives an overview of problems remaining to be solved.
Using a qualitative analysis of disagreements from a referentially annotated newspaper corpus, we show that, in coreference annotation, vague referents are prone to greater disagreement. We show how potentially problematic cases can be dealt with in a way that is practical even for larger-scale annotation, considering a real-world example from newspaper text.
In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of a wide range of features for their usefulness in the resolution of nominal coreference, both as hard constraints (i.e. completely removing elements from the list of possible candidates) as well as soft constraints (where a cumulation of violations of soft constraints will make it less likely that a candidate is chosen as the antecedent). We present a state of the art system based on such constraints and weights estimated with a maximum entropy model, using lexical information to resolve cases of coreferent bridging.
In recent years, research in parsing has extended in several new directions. One of these directions is concerned with parsing languages other than English. Treebanks have become available for many European languages, but also for Arabic, Chinese, or Japanese. However, it was shown that parsing results on these treebanks depend on the types of treebank annotations used. Another direction in parsing research is the development of dependency parsers. Dependency parsing profits from the non-hierarchical nature of dependency relations, thus lexical information can be included in the parsing process in a much more natural way. Especially machine learning based approaches are very successful (cf. e.g.). The results achieved by these dependency parsers are very competitive although comparisons are difficult because of the differences in annotation. For English, the Penn Treebank has been converted to dependencies. For this version, Nivre et al. report an accuracy rate of 86.3%, as compared to an F-score of 92.1 for Charniaks parser. The Penn Chinese Treebank is also available in a constituent and a dependency representations. The best results reported for parsing experiments with this treebank give an F-score of 81.8 for the constituent version and 79.8% accuracy for the dependency version. The general trend in comparisons between constituent and dependency parsers is that the dependency parser performs slightly worse than the constituent parser. The only exception occurs for German, where F-scores for constituent plus grammatical function parses range between 51.4 and 75.3, depending on the treebank, NEGRA or TüBa-D/Z. The dependency parser based on a converted version of Tüba-D/Z, in contrast, reached an accuracy of 83.4%, i.e. 12 percent points better than the best constituent analysis including grammatical functions.
This paper profiles significant differences in syntactic distribution and differences in word class frequencies for two treebanks of spoken and written German: the TüBa-D/S, a treebank of transliterated spontaneous dialogues, and the TüBa-D/Z treebank of newspaper articles published in the German daily newspaper die tageszeitung´(taz). The approach can be used more generally as a means of distinguishing and classifying language corpora of different genres.
This paper presents an approach to the question whether it is possible to construct a parser based on ideas from case-based reasoning. Such a parser would employ a partial analysis of the input sentence to select a (nearly) complete syntax tree and then adapt this tree to the input sentence. The experiments performed on German data from the Tüba-D/Z treebank and the KaRoPars partial parser show that a wide range of levels of generality can be reached, depending on which types of information are used to determine the similarity between input sentence and training sentences. The results are such that it is possible to construct a case-based parser. The optimal setting out of those presented here need to be determined empirically.
This paper presents a comparative study of probabilistic treebank parsing of German, using the Negra and TüBa-D/Z treebanks. Experiments with the Stanford parser, which uses a factored PCFG and dependency model, show that, contrary to previous claims for other parsers, lexicalization of PCFG models boosts parsing performance for both treebanks. The experiments also show that there is a big difference in parsing performance, when trained on the Negra and on the TüBa-D/Z treebanks. Parser performance for the models trained on TüBa-D/Z are comparable to parsing results for English with the Stanford parser, when trained on the Penn treebank. This comparison at least suggests that German is not harder to parse than its West-Germanic neighbor language English.
This report explores the question of compatibility between annotation projects including translating annotation formalisms to each other or to common forms. Compatibility issues are crucial for systems that use the results of multiple annotation projects. We hope that this report will begin a concerted effort in the field to track the compatibility of annotation schemes for part of speech tagging, time annotation, treebanking, role labeling and other phenomena.
Relative quantifier scope in German depends, in contrast to English, very much on word order. The scope possibilities of a quantifier are determined by its surface position, its base position and the type of the quantifier. In this paper we propose a multicomponent analysis for German quantifiers computing the scope of the quantifier, in particular its minimal nuclear scope, depending on the syntactic configuration it occurs in.
Our paper aims at capturing the distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs) within lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG). The condition under which an NPI can occur in a sentence is for it to be in the scope of a negation with no quantifiers scopally intervening. We model this restriction within a recent framework for LTAG semantics based on semantic unification. The proposed analysis provides features that signal the presence of a negation in the semantics and that specify its scope. We extend our analysis to modelling the interaction of NPI licensing and neg raising constructions.
This paper compares two approaches to computational semantics, namely semantic unification in Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars (LTAG) and Lexical Resource Semantics (LRS) in HPSG. There are striking similarities between the frameworks that make them comparable in many respects. We will exemplify the differences and similarities by looking at several phenomena. We will show, first of all, that many intuitions about the mechanisms of semantic computations can be implemented in similar ways in both frameworks. Secondly, we will identify some aspects in which the frameworks intrinsically differ due to more general differences between the approaches to formal grammar adopted by LTAG and HPSG.
The work presented here addresses the question of how to determine whether a grammar formalism is powerful enough to describe natural languages. The expressive power of a formalism can be characterized in terms of i) the string languages it generates (weak generative capacity (WGC)) or ii) the tree languages it generates (strong generative capacity (SGC)). The notion of WGC is not enough to determine whether a formalism is adequate for natural languages. We argue that even SGC is problematic since the sets of trees a grammar formalism for natural languages should be able to generate is difficult to determine. The concrete syntactic structures assumed for natural languages depend very much on theoretical stipulations and empirical evidence for syntactic structures is rather hard to obtain. Therefore, for lexicalized formalisms, we propose to consider the ability to generate certain strings together with specific predicate argument dependencies as a criterion for adequacy for natural languages.
This paper examines the development of periphrastic constructions involving auxiliary "have" and "be" with a past participle in the history of English, on the basis of parsed electronic corpora. It is argued that the two constructions represented distinct syntactic and semantic structures: while the one with have developed into a true perfect in the course of Middle English, the one with be remained a stative resultative throughout its history. In this way, it is explained why the be construction was rarely or never used in a number of contexts, including past counterfactuals, iteratives, duratives, certain kinds of infinitives and various other utterance types that cannot be characterized as perfects of result. When the construction with have became a true perfect, it was used in such contexts, regardless of the identity of the main verb, leading to the appearance of have with verbs like come which had previously only taken be. Crucially, however, have was not spreading at the expense of be, as the be perfect had never been used in such contexts, but rather at the expense of the old simple past. At least until the end of the Early Modern English period, the shift in the relative frequency of have and be perfects is to be explained in terms of the expansion of the former into new contexts, while the latter remained stable. A formal analysis is proposed, taking as its starting point a comparison with German which shows that the older English be perfect indeed behaves more like the German stative passive than its haben and sein perfects.
The retreat of BE as perfect auxiliary in the history of English is examined. Corpus data are presented showing that the initial advance of HAVE was most closely connected to a restriction against BE in past counterfactuals. Other factors which have been reported to favor the spread of HAVE are either dependent on the counterfactual effect, or significantly weaker in comparison. It is argued that the effect can be traced to the semantics of the BE perfect, which denoted resultativity rather than anteriority proper. Related data from other older Germanic and Romance languages are presented, and finally implications for existing theories of auxiliary selection stemming from the findings presented are discussed.
It has often been noticed that one syntactic argument position can be realized by elements which seem to realize different thematic roles. This is notably the case with the external argument position of verbs of change of state which licenses volitional agents, instruments or natural forces/causers, showing the generality and abstractness of the external argument relation. (1) a. John broke the window (Agent) b. The hammer broke the window (Instrument) c. The storm broke the window (Causer) In order to capture this generality, Van Valin & Wilkins (1996) and Ramchand (2003) among others have proposed that the thematic role of the external argument position is in fact underspecified. The relevant notion is that of an effector (in Van Valin & Wilkins) or of an abstract causer/initiator (in Ramchand). In this paper we argue against a total underspecification of the external argument relation. While we agree that (1b) does not instantiate an instrument theta role in subject position, we argue that a complete underspecification of the external theta-position is not feasible, but that two types of external theta roles have to be distinguished, Agents and Causers. Our arguments are based on languages where Agents and Causers show morpho-syntactic independence (section 2.1) and the behavior of instrument subjects in English, Dutch, German and Greek (section 2.2 and 3). We show that instrument subjects are either Agent or Causer like. In section (4) we give an analysis how arguments realizing these thematic notions are introduced into syntax.
In the recent literature there is growing interest in the morpho-syntactic encoding of hierarchical effects. The paper investigates one domain where such effects are attested: ergative splits conditioned by person. This type of splits is then compared to hierarchical effects in direct-inverse alternations. On the basis of two case studies (Lummi instantiating an ergative split person language and Passamaquoddy an inverse language) we offer an account that makes no use of hierarchies as a primitive. We propose that the two language types differ as far as the location of person features is concerned. In inverse systems person features are located exclusively in T, while in ergative systems, they are located in T and a particular type of v. A consequence of our analysis is that Case checking in split and inverse systems is guided by the presence/absence of specific phi-features. This in turn provides evidence for a close connection between Case and phi-features, reminiscent of Chomsky’s (2000, 2001) Agree.
The causative/anticausative alternation has been the topic of much typological and theoretical discussion in the linguistic literature. This alternation is characterized by verbs with transitive and intransitive uses, such that the transitive use of a verb V means roughly "cause to Vintransitive" (see Levin 1993). The discussion revolves around two issues: the first one concerns the similarities and differences between the anticausative and the passive, and the second one concerns the derivational relationship, if any, between the transitive and intransitive variant. With respect to the second issue, a number of approaches have been developed. Judging the approach conceptually unsatisfactory, according to which each variant is assigned an independent lexical entry, it was concluded that the two variants have to be derivationally related. The question then is which one of the two is basic and where this derivation takes place in the grammar. Our contribution to this discussion is to argue against derivational approaches to the causative / anticausative alternation. We focus on the distribution of PPs related to external arguments (agent, causer, instrument, causing event) in passives and anticausatives of English, German and Greek and the set of verbs undergoing the causative/anticausative alternation in these languages. We argue that the crosslinguistic differences in these two domains provide evidence against both causativization and detransitivization analyses of the causative / anticausative alternation. We offer an approach to this alternation which builds on a syntactic decomposition of change of state verbs into a Voice and a CAUS component. Crosslinguistic variation in passives and anticausatives depends on properties of Voice and its combinations with CAUS and various types of roots.