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Understanding a sentence and integrating it into the discourse depends upon the identification of its focus, which, in spoken German, is marked by accentuation. In the case of written language, which lacks explicit cues to accent, readers have to draw on other kinds of information to determine the focus. We study the joint or interactive effects of two kinds of information that have no direct representation in print but have each been shown to be influential in the reader's text comprehension: (i) the (low-level) rhythmic-prosodic structure that is based on the distribution of lexically stressed syllables, and (ii) the (high-level) discourse context that is grounded in the memory of previous linguistic content. Systematically manipulating these factors, we examine the way readers resolve a syntactic ambiguity involving the scopally ambiguous focus operator auch (engl. “too”) in both oral (Experiment 1) and silent reading (Experiment 2). The results of both experiments attest that discourse context and local linguistic rhythm conspire to guide the syntactic and, concomitantly, the focus-structural analysis of ambiguous sentences. We argue that reading comprehension requires the (implicit) assignment of accents according to the focus structure and that, by establishing a prominence profile, the implicit prosodic rhythm directly affects accent assignment.
This paper compares the production of different types of direct objects by Portuguese–German and Polish–German bilingual school-aged children in their heritage languages (HLs), Polish and European Portuguese (EP). Given that the two target languages display identical options of object realization, our main research question is whether the two HLs develop in a similar way in bilingual children. More precisely, we aim at investigating whether bilingual children acquiring Polish and EP are sensitive to accessibility and animacy when realizing a direct object in their HL. The results of a production experiment show that this is indeed the case and that the two groups of bilinguals do not differ from each other, although they may overgeneralize null objects or full noun phrases to some extent. We conclude that the bilingual acquisition of object realization is guided by the relevant properties in the target languages and is not influenced by the contact language, German.
This thesis revolves around the development of a new critical approach to contemporary anglophone postcolonial literature in the form of a concept of ‘corporate ingression.’ This term denotes a globally recurring process of biopolitical (re)structuring of a community by corporate power and its extended cultural influence on society.
Through an analysis of contemporary engagements with similarly explored events over time and space in the form of three novels (Helon Habila’s Oil on Water, Lauren Beukes’ Moxyland and David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet), this thesis explores the relevance of the concept of corporate ingression as a new approach to such imaginative works. By reading these texts closely, with and against the grain, I enter into dialogue with their discussion of corporate power as the major structural influence in the societies they explore. I also show that a comparative analysis of these texts reveals similarities between the exploration of the period of early colonialism as acted out by the various trade corporations in existence and contemporary forms of corporate dominance. This research thus concerns various contexts and explorations of corporate power and explores the concept of recurring forms of corporate ingression as a new perspective within literary postcolonial and globalisation studies.
Oil on Water (2010) as a political novel explores the complex intricacies of communities structured around corporate power and presents a full account of the stakeholders that are influenced by or connected to the Niger Delta’s oil industry. Moxyland (2008) as a futuristic cyberpunk novel nuances the destruction implied in Oil on Water as a major factor of corporate ingression by exploring corporate power’s potential for constructive influence over a community. The Thousand Autumns (2010) as a historical novel explores an instance of corporate ingression in which the Dutch East India Company in Japan, despite its significant cultural influence, is subordinate to the host state to its activity. Corporate power is explored as a fallible construction that can be controlled by a strong regime as well as benefited from.
Despite the geographic and temporal distance between the three cases, and despite their exploration of widely differing industries, circumstances and levels of success, the common factors remain recognisable. Critical analysis shows that the contrasts between especially the constructive and destructive corporate activity in the three texts is of great interest, as it highlights the potential of corporate power both for construction and destruction of value. This research also shows how each novel actively resists a binary ethical narrative, instead presenting a set of complex power dynamics within the respective communities.
With this research I show that reading corporate ingression both significantly informs the reading of various postcolonial texts, while also showing that the analysis of these texts reveals that a conventional postcolonial binary approach is insufficient to account for what these works describe and investigate. The concept of a process of corporate ingression as a new perspective on literary explorations of historical, contemporary or futuristic forms of corporate power is thus shown to be a relevant addition to current postcolonial literary scholarship.
This paper describes work on the morphological and syntactic annotation of Sumerian cuneiform as a model for low resource languages in general. Cuneiform texts are invaluable sources for the study of history, languages, economy, and cultures of Ancient Mesopotamia and its surrounding regions. Assyriology, the discipline dedicated to their study, has vast research potential, but lacks the modern means for computational processing and analysis. Our project, Machine Translation and Automated Analysis of Cuneiform Languages, aims to fill this gap by bringing together corpus data, lexical data, linguistic annotations and object metadata. The project’s main goal is to build a pipeline for machine translation and annotation of Sumerian Ur III administrative texts. The rich and structured data is then to be made accessible in the form of (Linguistic) Linked Open Data (LLOD), which should open them to a larger research community. Our contribution is two-fold: in terms of language technology, our work represents the first attempt to develop an integrative infrastructure for the annotation of morphology and syntax on the basis of RDF technologies and LLOD resources. With respect to Assyriology, we work towards producing the first syntactically annotated corpus of Sumerian.
Nominal modification in language production: Extraposition of prepositional phrases in german
(2019)
In my dissertation, I investigate the phenomenon of extraposition of PP out of NP in German in language production. Four production experiments, using the method of production of memory, and three experiments testing the acceptability of extraposition were conducted. In extraposition, a constituent is realized in a position to the right of what would be considered the canonical position. A special case is extraposition out of a nominal phrase (NP), in which a constituent is moved out of NP to the end of the utterance. The example in (1a) illustrates the canonical version, in which a prepositional phrase (PP) is adjacent to its head noun. In (1b) the PP is extraposed out of NP to the right edge of the sentence.
(1) a. Gestern hat eine Frau mit einer lauten, schrillen Stimme angerufen.
b. Gestern hat eine Frau angerufen mit einer lauten, schrillen Stimme.
There are two main aspects to consider: the length of the extraposed constituent (the PP), and the length of the intervening material. Experiment 1 investigated the influence of constituent length on extraposition. The hypothesis is that longer and more complex constituents are harder to produce and are therefore produced towards the end of the utterance. In the experiment, PPs of three different lengths (2-3, 5-6, 9-11 words) had to be reproduced in either adjacent or extraposed position. As to the length of the intervening material, the hypothesis is that sentences with more intervening material between head noun and extraposed PP will tend to be reproduced with the PP in adjacent position to the head noun. In order to test this hypothesis, the length of the intervening material (1, 2 and 4 words) was manipulated in Experiment 2. The same material was used in an acceptability experiment, using the method of magnitude estimation (Experiment 5).
Previous studies found that extraposition is preferred over verbal material only, thus Experiment 3 investigated the influence of different lengths of purely verbal intervening material. Experiment 4 was concerned with the differences between PP and RC extraposition in production.
Experiment 6 and 7 used Likert scales to assess the acceptability of extraposition. Experiment 6 investigated whether the acceptability of extraposition is influenced by the definiteness status of the NP out of which is extraposed and if a soft constraint for definiteness can be found for PP extraposition in German. Experiment 7 asked if the inner structure of the extraposed constituent (PP only vs. PP+RC) influences its acceptability. An extraposed PP that includes an RC should be "heavier" than a PP without an RC, since the number of phrasal nodes is higher. If indeed heavier constituents are realized at the end of an utterance, the acceptability of an extraposed PP that includes an RC should be higher than that of an extraposed PP without one.
The results of the production experiments show that sentences are mostly reproduced in their original linear sequence, which suggests that extraposed position seems to be just as canonical as adjacent position, especially when extraposition takes place over verbal material only. With regard to constituent length, in extraposed position long PPs are shortened less often, supporting the hypothesis that longer and more complex constituents tend to be produced at the end of the utterance. Recency effects were found for intervening material as participants dropped intervening material rather than change syntactic position of constituents. The length and type of the intervening material is important with respect to how much intervening material is acceptable. Verb clusters were not shortened in sentences with extraposed PPs, however, 1⁄3 of adverbs and 1⁄2 of PP adverbials including a lexical NP were shortened to „verb only“. Extraposed PPs are more often reproduced in adjacent position than adjacent PPs are reproduced in extraposed position. However, the position of RCs is more often changed from adjacent to extraposed than from extraposed to adjacent.
While producing extraposed PPs seems not to be any more difficult than producing adjacent ones, adjacent constituents are consistently rated higher than extraposed constituents in grammaticality judgment tasks. This is in line with findings of Konieczny (2000) on German RC extraposition. The number of phrasal nodes, as suggested by Rickford et al. (1995), did not have an influence on the acceptability of extraposition, while the length of the constituent, measured in words, seems to play a role. Definiteness had no effect on adjacent PPs, but when the PP was extraposed, sentences with an indefinite antecedent were rated higher than sentences with a definite antecedent. This suggests that there is a "soft constraint" for definiteness with regard to PP extraposition out of NP in German.