Sprachwissenschaften
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (53) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (53)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (53) (remove)
Keywords
- German (2)
- Alter (1)
- Alzheimer (1)
- Arbeitskreis Linguistische Pragmatik (1)
- Arbeitstagung (1)
- Comic (1)
- Deutsch (1)
- Emotions (1)
- Freud (1)
- Fulani (1)
Institute
In this study, we investigated the impact of two constraints on the linear order of constituents in German preschool children’s and adults’ speech production: a rhythmic (*LAPSE, militating against sequences of unstressed syllables) and a semantic one (ANIM, requiring animate referents to be named before inanimate ones). Participants were asked to produce coordinated bare noun phrases in response to picture stimuli (e.g., Delfin und Planet, ‘dolphin and planet’) without any predefined word order. Overall, children and adults preferably produced animate items before inanimate ones, confirming findings of Prat-Sala, Shillcock, and Sorace (2000). In the group of preschoolers, the strength of the animacy effect correlated positively with age. Furthermore, the order of the conjuncts was affected by the rhythmic constraint, such that disrhythmic sequences, i.e., stress lapses, were avoided. In both groups, the latter result was significant when the two stimulus pictures did not vary with respect to animacy. In sum, our findings suggest a stronger influence of animacy compared to rhythmic well-formedness on conjunct ordering for German speaking children and adults, in line with findings by McDonald, Bock, and Kelly (1993) who investigated English speaking adults.
We tested the hypothesis that phonosemantic iconicity––i.e., a motivated resonance of sound and meaning––might not only be found on the level of individual words or entire texts, but also in word combinations such that the meaning of a target word is iconically expressed, or highlighted, in the phonetic properties of its immediate verbal context. To this end, we extracted single lines from German poems that all include a word designating high or low dominance, such as large or small, strong or weak, etc. Based on insights from previous studies, we expected to find more vowels with a relatively short distance between the first two formants (low formant dispersion) in the immediate context of words expressing high physical or social dominance than in the context of words expressing low dominance. Our findings support this hypothesis, suggesting that neighboring words can form iconic dyads in which the meaning of one word is sound-iconically reflected in the phonetic properties of adjacent words. The construct of a contiguity-based phono-semantic iconicity opens many venues for future research well beyond lines extracted from poems.
Der Aufsatz sieht in Freuds Begriff des Unheimlichen einen Schlüssel zu seiner Poetik. Den Ausgangspunkt der Untersuchung bietet allerdings nicht seine bekannte Interpretation des Textes von E.T.A. Hoffmann, sondern die narrativen Elemente des Textes, in denen er auf indirekte Weise Aufschluss über seinen Begriff der Psychoanalyse gibt. Als Theorie und Praxis der Dichtung ist Freuds Aufsatz über Das Unheimliche nicht nur eine Theorie ein wichtiger Bestandteil seiner Poetik.
Gender in Fulani proverbs
(2018)
Presented paper deals with Fulani people of West Africa and with the influence of their way of life on their language. One part of the Fulani people lives nomadic pastoral live, meanwhile another part is sedentary, living in the towns. The authors of the paper pay their attention to the the gender of Fulani proverbs which reflects the way of life of Fulani people.
Auf nur 25 Seiten schuf Tacitus gegen Ende des 1. Jahrhunderts »Germania« und damit auch das Volk der Germanen, das so gar nicht existierte. In der Antike lebten auf diesem Territorium völlig unabhängig voneinander vielerlei Stämme. Warum zeichnete Tacitus das positive Bild eines unverdorbenen, kampfeslustigen Naturvolks? Wollte er damit den dekadenten Römern einen Spiegel vorhalten? Wollte er vor den starken Gegnern im fremden Norden warnen, gegen die die Römer nicht wieder zu Felde ziehen sollten?
Sentences with doubly center-embedded relative clauses in which a verb phrase (VP) is missing are sometimes perceived as grammatical, thus giving rise to an illusion of grammaticality. In this paper, we provide a new account of why missing-VP sentences, which are both complex and ungrammatical, lead to an illusion of grammaticality, the so-called missing-VP effect. We propose that the missing-VP effect in particular, and processing difficulties with multiply center-embedded clauses more generally, are best understood as resulting from interference during cue-based retrieval. When processing a sentence with double center-embedding, a retrieval error due to interference can cause the verb of an embedded clause to be erroneously attached into a higher clause. This can lead to an illusion of grammaticality in the case of missing-VP sentences and to processing complexity in the case of complete sentences with double center-embedding. Evidence for an interference account of the missing-VP effect comes from experiments that have investigated the missing-VP effect in German using a speeded grammaticality judgments procedure. We review this evidence and then present two new experiments that show that the missing-VP effect can be found in German also with less restricting procedures. One experiment was a questionnaire study which required grammaticality judgments from participants without imposing any time constraints. The second experiment used a self-paced reading procedure and did not require any judgments. Both experiments confirm the prior findings of missing-VP effects in German and also show that the missing-VP effect is subject to a primacy effect as known from the memory literature. Based on this evidence, we argue that an account of missing-VP effects in terms of interference during cue-based retrieval is superior to accounts in terms of limited memory resources or in terms of experience with embedded structures.
Reduction and deletion processes occur regularly in conversational speech. A segment that is affected by such reduction and deletion processes in many Germanic languages (e.g., Dutch, English, German) is /t/. There are similarities concerning the factors that influence the likelihood of final /t/ to get deleted, such as segmental context. However, speakers of different languages differ with respect to the acoustic cues they leave in the speech signal when they delete final /t/. German speakers usually lengthen a preceding /s/ when they delete final /t/. This article investigates to what extent German listeners are able to reconstruct /t/ when they are presented with fragments of words where final /t/ has been deleted. It aims also at investigating whether the strategies that are used by German depend on the length of /s/, and therefore whether listeners are using language-specific cues. Results of a forced-choice segment detection task suggest that listeners are able to reconstruct deleted final /t/ in about 45% of the times. The length of /s/ plays some role in the reconstruction, however, it does not explain the behavior of German listeners completely.
The aim of the present paper is to show how, and to what extent, the standards of critical genetic editions as applied to Goethe's Faust can be attained within a TEI framework. It proposes and argues for the introduction of two separate transcripts: documentary and textual. Despite the apparent disadvantages of multiple encoding, this approach recommends itself for practical reasons (e.g., avoidance of overlapping hierarchies), and it conveniently reflects the idea that any written document must be considered a material object on the one hand and a medium of textual transmission on the other. In the course of the paper, some aspects and problems of chapter 11 of version 2.0.0 of TEI P5 (the definition and use of the elements <line> and <mod> and related issues) will be discussed.
Die jährlich im Vorfeld der DGfS-Tagung veranstaltete Arbeitstagung Linguistische Pragmatik fand 2012 vor besonderem Hintergrund statt: Es war zugleich die erste Jahrestagung des neu gegründeten, seit 01.01.2012 bestehenden Vereins Arbeitskreis Linguistische Pragmatik. Zu diesem Anlass haben die Organisatoren (Constanze Spieß, Elke Diedrichsen und Jörg Bücker) ein Rahmenthema gewählt, das pragmatisch orientierte Linguistinnen und Linguisten der verschiedensten Forschungsrichtungen zusammenbringt: Sprachkritik und Sprachwandel. ...