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Previous research on scalar implicature has primarily relied on metalinguistic judgment tasks and found varying rates of such inferences depending on the nature of the task and contextual manipulations. This paper introduces a novel interactive paradigm involving both a production and a comprehension component, thereby fixing a precise conversational context.
The main research question is what is reliably communicated by some in this communicative setting, when the quantifier occurs in unembedded positions as well as embedded positions. Our new paradigm involves an action-based task from which participants’ interpretation of utterances can be inferred. It incorporates a game–theoretic design, including a precise model to predict participants’ behaviour in the experimental context.
Our study shows that embedded and unembedded implicatures are reliably communicated by some. We propose two cognitive principles which describe what can be left unsaid. In our experimental context, a production strategy based on these principles is more efficient (with equal communicative success and shorter utterances) than a strategy based on literal descriptions.
In recent years, experimental research has demontrated great variability in the rates of scalar inferences across different triggering expressions (Doran et al. 2009, 2012, van Tiel et al. 2016). These studies have been taken as evidence against the so-called uniformity assumption, which posits that scalar implicature is triggered by a single mechanism and that the behaviour of one scale should generalize to the whole family of scales. In the following, we present an experimental study that tests negative strengthening for a variety of strong scalar terms, following up on van Tiel et al. (2016). For example, we tested whether the statement John is not brilliant is strengthened to mean that John is not intelligent (see especially Horn 1989). We show that endorsement rates of the scalar implicature (e.g., John is intelligent but not brilliant) are anti-correlated with endorsements of negative strengthening. Further, we demonstrate that a modified version of the uniformity hypothesis taking into account negative strengthening is consistent with van Tiel et al.’s data. Therefore, variation across scales may be more systematic than suggested by the van Tiel et al. study.
Alternative Questions with "or not" (NAQ) convey a cornering effect, which is not found with they polar counterparts (PQ). This effect has been claimed to consist of two parts (Biezma 2009): NAQs (i) cannot be used discourse-initially and (ii) they do not license followup questions/subquestions.
In this paper, we ask the following: Are both parts of cornering linked to the same property of NAQs? Or do they reflect distinct linguistic phenomena? We explore the issue by comparing the behavior of NAQs to Complement Alternative Questions (CAQ), a type of question that, like NAQs, presents logically opposite alternatives but, unlike NAQs, fully spells out the second one. Results from two experiments suggest that both parts of cornering can instead be explained in terms of independent semantic and pragmatic principles, which operate beyond the domain of alternative questions.
Sentences containing subjective predicates - e.g., "The movie was awesome"” - are intuitively anchored to a particular perspective; this makes them different from sentences describing objective facts - e.g., "The movie was set in 1995".
While authors have long debated on whether this intuition tracks a lexical distinction between subjective and factual predicates, much remains to be explored on whether, and how, the difference between these two assertions is reflected at the illocutionary level. Relying on evidence from two experiments, we show that assertions containing subjective predicates display different discourse behavior from objective assertions. We take these findings to support the idea that SAs should be assigned a special illocutionary profile, unveiling a genuine empirical difference between subjective and factual speech.
Analyses of scope reconstruction typically fall into two competing approaches: 'semantic reconstruction', which derives non-surface scope using semantic mechanisms, and 'syntactic reconstruction', which derives it by positing additional syntactic representations at the level of Logical Form. Grosu and Krifka (2007) proposed a semantic-reconstruction analysis for relative clauses like the gifted mathematician that Dan claims he is, in which the relative head NP can be interpreted in the scope of a lower intensional quantifier. Their analysis relies on type-shifting the relative head into a predicate of functions. We develop an alternative analysis for such relative clauses that replaces type-shifting with syntactic reconstruction. The competing analyses diverge in their predictions regarding scope possibilities in head-external relative clauses. We use Hebrew resumptive pronouns, which disambiguate a relative clause in favor of the head-external structure, to show that the prediction of syntactic reconstruction is correct. This result suggests that certain type-shifting operations are not made available by Universal Grammar.
According to Ogihara (1995), the usage of the embedded present in a speech report such as John said that Mary is in the room is restricted by the cause of John’s belief (the state that made John think that Mary is in the room): the present tense can be used only if this cause still holds at the time that John said that Mary is in the room is uttered.
This paper presents experimental evidence demonstrating that this is only one of the factors that licenses a felicitous usage of the embedded present tense. In particular, we show that the cause of belief still holding is not a necessary condition, and identify two additional, sufficient (but not necessary) factors: in cases of false belief, who is aware of the falsity of the belief and duration of the reported state. While these factors are independent, they collectively support the idea that the present tense encodes ‘current relevance’, even in embedded contexts (e.g. Costa 1972; McGilvray 1974). This gives rise to the question of how we can derive ‘current relevance’ and, in particular, whether previous analyses of the embedded present tense are adequately equipped to do so.
This paper presents a new account of the generalization that focused elements cannot be elided, framed within Unalternative Semantics, a framework that does away with syntactic F-marking. We propose the mirror image of the generalization: what is elided cannot introduce alternatives. We implement this as a focus restriction in UAS and then go on to show how to account for MAXELIDE effects using the same technique, without making reference to any transderivational constraints.
The semantics of adjectives related to nominals denoting societal roles, such as presidential (from president), have remained understudied. We examine the semantics of what we call role-denoting relational adjectives, providing a formal analysis using the notion of a frame, a unified representation for lexical knowledge, world knowledge, and context. The frames we propose are based on a constructivist philosophical understanding of social roles, leading us to posit a multi-tiered ontology of events and individuals. Using frames and our ontology, we provide a general semantics for role-denoting relational adjectives and roles
Discourses in the historical (or narrative) use of the simple present in English prohibit backshifting, though they allow forward sequencing. Unlike both reference time theories and discourse coherence theories of these temporal inferences, we propose that backshifting has a different source from narrative progression. In particular, we argue that backshifting arises through anaphora to a salient event in the preceding discourse.
The goal of this paper is to evaluate two approaches to quantification in event semantics, namely the analysis of quantificational DPs in terms of generalized quantifiers and the analysis proposed in Schein (1993) according to which quantifiers over individuals contain an existential quantifier over sub-events in their scope. Both analyses capture the fact that the event quantifier always takes scope under quantifiers over individuals (the Event Type Principle in Landman (2000)), but the sub-events analysis has also been argued to be able to account for some further data, namely for adverbs qualifying ‘ensemble’ events and for mixed cumulative/ distributive readings. This paper shows that the sub-events analysis also provides a better account of the Event Type Principle if a broader range of data is considered, including cases with non-existential quantifiers over events: unlike the generalized quantifiers analysis, it can successfully account for the interpretation of indefinites in bare habituals and sentences that contain overt adverbs of quantification.
Korean is a generalized classifier language where classifiers are required for numerals to combine with nominals. This paper presents a number construction where the classifier is absent and the numeral appears prenominally. This construction, which I call the classifier-less number construction (Cl-less NC), results in a definite or a partitive reading where the referent must be familiar: ‘the two women’ or ‘two of the women’. In order to account for this, I argue that Korean postnominal number constructions are ambiguous between a plain number construction and a partitive construction. After motivating and proposing an analysis for the partitive structure, I argue that Cl-less NC is derived from the partitive construction, explaining its distributional restriction and the interpretation.
Counter to the often assumed division of labour between content and function words, we argue that both types of words have lexical content in addition to their logical content. We propose that the difference between the two types of words is a difference in degree. We conducted a preliminary study of quantificational determiners with methods from Distributional Semantics, a computational approach to natural language semantics. Our findings have implications both for distributional and formal semantics. For distributional semantics, they indicate a possible avenue that can be used to tap into the meaning of function words. For formal semantics, they bring into light the context-sensitive, lexical aspects of function words that can be recovered from the data even when these aspects are not overtly marked. Such pervasive context-sensitivity has profound implications for how we think about meaning in natural language.
In these volumes, we are very pleased to present a collection of papers based on talks and posters at Sinn und Bedeutung 22, which took place in Berlin and Potsdam on September 7-10, 2017, jointly organized by the Leibniz-Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) and the University of Potsdam.
SuB22 received 183 submitted abstracts. Out of these, the organizing committee selected 39 oral presentations in the main session, 4 oral presentations in the special session ‘Semantics and Natural Logic’, and 24 poster presentations. There were an additional 6 invited talks. In total, 58 of these contributions appear in paper form in the present volumes.
"You don’t mind my calling you Harry?" : Terms of address in John Updike’s "Rabbit" tetralogy
(2020)
This paper examines the use of address terms in John Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy (Updike 1995). The first part of the analysis provides a comprehensive overview of the great variety of terms used to address the protagonist, Harry Angstrom, in the decades covered by the novels. The second part focuses on two important side characters, Reverend Eccles and Harry’s mother-in-law. It demonstrates how address term usage with these two characters reflects ongoing changes in their relationship with Harry. The main aim of the paper is to demonstrate the potential of fictional data for the study of address terms and, in return, to capture the manifold functions of address terms as a literary device in fiction.
The shared communicative act of theatrical texts in performance: a relevance theoretic approach
(2020)
This article adopts a relevance theoretic approach to meaning making in theatrical texts and performances. Theatrical texts communicate immediately to multiple audiences: readers, actors, directors, producers, and designers. They communicate less directly to the writer’s ultimate audience – the playgoer or spectator – through the medium of performance. But playgoers are not passive receptacles for interpretations distilled in rehearsal, enacted through performance, or developed in study and reflection. Rather, in the framework of communication postulated by relevance theory, the audience is an active participant in making meaning. I will briefly review a range of approaches to meaning making in theatre, and then outline my view of a relevance theoretic account of the vital contributions of the audience in constructing the interpretation of performance, treating it as a communicative act.
The present paper aims at providing empirical evidence for dialectal variation concerning the perception of the central vowel [ɐ] in European Portuguese (EP). More concretely, this study compares the perception of the contrast between [a] and [ɐ] by native speakers of two varieties of EP: 23 speakers of a northern Portuguese dialect (from the city of Braga) and 23 speakers of the Littoral Center variety of EP (from the city of Lisbon, defined as Standard European Portuguese (SEP)). Based on a discrimination test, the results show that the two groups of speakers differ with respect to the perception of the contrast between the two central vowels under investigation. The speakers of the northern variety differentiate less between the two central vowels compared to the speakers from Lisbon.
This paper explores how refugee families in Germany draw on me-diational repertoires to accomplish a range of digital literacy prac-tices on their smartphones. We introduce the concept of ‘mediation-al repertoire’, i.e. a socially and individually structured configuration of semiotic and technological resources for communication, and use it in an ethnographic case study with participants from Syria and Af-ghanistan in a refugee residence in Hamburg in 2017/18. The collect-ed data includes nine semi-directed interviews, video demonstra-tions of smartphone usage, and ethnographic fieldnotes. Qualitative analysis draws on mediagrams, i.e. visualizations of mediational re-pertoires in two families. Findings suggest that individual mediation-al repertoires in these families differ especially by generation and other factors, such as literacy competence, type of social relation-ship and purpose of online use, including smartphone-based lang-uage-learning.
In this article, we build on research arguing that linguistic self-representation on social media can be viewed as a form of face-work and that the strategies employed by users are influenced by both a desire to connect with others and a need to preserve privacy. Drawing on our own analyses of usernames as well as that of others which were conducted as part of a large-scale project investigating usernames in 14 languages (Schlobinski/T. Siever 2018a), we argue that these conflicting goals of wanting to be recognised as an authentic member of an in-group while retaining a degree of anonymity are also observable in the choice of username. Online self-naming can thus be viewed as a key practice in the debate of face-work on social media platforms, because names and naming strategies can be studied more readily than broader and more complex aspects, such as stylistic variation or text-image interdependence, while at the same time forming part of these.
The title of this study is applying team teaching to improve student ability in understanding English narrative texts. The purposes of this study are to identify the advantages and to find out the strategies of applying team teaching to improve students ability in understanding English narrative texts. The population of this study is the first year students of SMAN 4 Banda Aceh, and the sample are an experimental class (X IA 2) and a control class (X IA 6). The total numbers of the samples are 66 students. This research was conducted on April, 2010. In collecting data, several techniques were used namely; observation, test, questionnaire and interview. According to data analysis, team teaching gave more advantages to improve students’ ability in understanding English narrative texts. Some advantages of team teaching to the first year students of SMAN 4 Banda Aceh; (1) Team teaching directed the students to focus on material, the method was not tedious and learning motivation had been increased by using it, so that their ability in understanding English narrative text had been increased. (2) The students who studied by using team teaching obtained higher score than the students who studied without using team teaching. It means the students who studied by using team teaching could improve their abilities in understanding English narrative text. (3) The students should focus on the study because the teachers observed what they do in the class comprehensively. The student also could receive knowledge not only from the main teacher, but also from the co-teacher and they could ask both teachers if they found some problems. Some advantages of team teaching to the teachers of SMAN 4 Banda Aceh are; team teaching could be effective while teaching and learning process was underway because the teachers could remind each other and they also could plan good materials. In applying team teaching to improve students’ ability in understanding English narrative texts, the teachers used many strategies. One of the general strategies to apply team teaching in SMAN 4 Banda Aceh was by excercising the so called semi team teaching. The special strategies that conducted by teachers were; (1) Presenting an interesting and understandable topic in every meeting for students. (2) Making group discussion, reading the legend and translating it, giving regularly the test and games. (3) Asking the students to comprehend the generic structure of the text before coming to the class.
Combining the methods of linguistics and literary criticism, this article takes a fresh look at two texts that have been analysed ad nauseam: Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady and Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. I use James’s late style as a touchstone to compare and contrast the two texts. Analysing syntax by means of close textual analysis of the novels’ opening paragraphs as well as their metaphorical language, and employing the corpus analysis programme AntConc to survey the entire texts, I aim to show that James’s 1880 text anticipates his late style and Wharton’s 1920 text appropriates it to suit her own agenda. However, in respectively anticipating and appropriating this style, James and Wharton create different effects. James intensifies his female protagonist’s ‘world of thought and feeling’ (Eliot 1963: 56), creating a fictional world with literary equality for both genders, while Wharton subverts gender roles in a scathing critique of Gilded Age society, which did not allow for this other ‘world of thought and feeling’. In addition to positioning both novels as feminist, this article compares Wharton’s writing to James’s, but without presupposing the latter’s influence on the former. Instead, acknowledging the fluidity of style, I aim to put forward a convincing case that there are subtle differences that make these authors’ styles Jamesian and Whartonian, respectively.
Language use before and after Stonewall: a corpus-based study of gay men’s pre-Stonewall narratives
(2019)
This study presents a contrastive corpus linguistic analysis of language use before and after Stonewall. It uses theoretical insights on normativity from the field of language and sexuality to investigate how the shifting normativities associated with the Stonewall Riots (1969) – widely considered the central event of gay liberation in the Western world – have shaped our conceptualization of sexuality as it surfaces in language use. Drawing on two corpora of gay men’s pre-Stonewall narratives dating from two time periods (before and after Stonewall, called PRE and POST), the analysis combines quantitative (keyword analysis, collocation analysis) and qualitative (concordance analysis) corpus linguistic methods to examine discursive shifts as evident from narrators’ language use. The study identifies the terms homosexual and normal as central contrastive labels in PRE, and gay and straight as corresponding terms in POST. Other discursive shifts detected are from sexual desire/practices to identity (and vice versa), from an individualistic to a community-based conceptualization of sexuality, and from unquestioned heteronormativity and gender binarism to a weakening of such dominant discourses. The findings are discussed in relation to the desire-identity shift, which is traditionally assumed to have taken place at the end of the 19th century, and shed new light on Stonewall as a central event for the development of an identity-based conceptualization of sexuality as we know it today.
This paper investigates multi-valuation, i.e. cases where one probe agrees with multiple goals thus obtaining multiple feature values. Focusing on number agreement, I look at the cross-linguistic patterns on multi-valued Ns in the nominal Right Node Raising construction (Nominal RNR) reported in Belyaev et al. (2015); Harizanov & Gribanova (2015); Shen (2016) as well as multi-valued Ts in TP RNR construction reported in Yatabe (2003); Grosz (2009; 2015); Kluck (2009). I show that three types of languages are attested: languages like Serbo-Croatian that show singular marking on both multi-valued Ns and Ts, languages like Russian that show plural marking on both multi-valued Ns and Ts, and languages like English that show singular marking on multi-valued Ns and plural marking on multi-valued Ts. No language is attested that shows plural marking on multi-valued Ns and singular marking on multi-valued Ts. I use this 3/4 pattern to argue that multi-valuation shows the effect of the Agreement Hierarchy discussed by Corbett (1979; 2006) among others.
German free relative constructions allow for case requirement mismatches under two types of circumstances. The first is when the case required in the embedded clause is more complex (NOM < ACC < GEN < DAT) than the case required in the main clause, and the relative pronoun takes the form of the embedded clause case. The second type of circumstance is when the form that corresponds to the two required cases is syncretic. I propose an analysis that combines Caha’s (2009) case hierarchy in Nanosyntax with Van Riemsdijk’s (2006a) concept of Grafting. By placing case features as separate heads in the syntax, a less complex case can be Grafted into a different clause, explaining the first type of circumstance. The second type makes reference to the fact that syncretic forms are inserted via the same lexical entry (Superset Principle). A cross-linguistic comparison shows that it is language-specific whether a more complex case requirement in the main or embedded clause causes non-matching non-syncretic free relatives to be grammatical. For all languages it holds that the relative pronoun appears in the most complex case required, which provides additional evidence for case being complex and more complex cases being able to license less complex cases.
This paper offers a description and account of the patterns of 'ex-situ' focus in Dagbani. We show that there are two syntactic strategies for creating 'ex-situ' focus in the language, one involving A’-movement to the left periphery, and the second involving base generation in the left periphery combined with coreference to a resumptive pronoun. Furthermore, we argue that subjects are difficult to move from Spec,TP to Spec,CP in the left-periphery because of 'anti-locality', which creates a tension when trying to focus subjects, which are required to derivationally fill the specifier of both positions. We further show that what looks to be a two-way distinction between the behaviour of subjects and non-subjects in the language is in fact a three-way distinction between subjects that are focussed to a local left-periphery, subjects that are focussed to a non-local left-periphery, and non-subjects. These distinctions arise due to there being two methods for Dagbani to resolve the antilocality problem of subject movement, and so local subjects solve the problem differently to non-local subjects.
Linguistic research and linguistic activism have resulted in key changes to official language use. However, revisions remain contested and many English and German speakers continue to employ male generic terms. In this article I explore whether the encounter with sex-/gender-neutral terminology in June Arnold's novel 'The Cook and the Carpenter' can prompt readers to review their language use and consider alternatives. Based on narrative research, my premise is that fiction can create familiarity with new terms, which is the first step toward wider linguistic change. I frame my investigation with Wittgenstein's notion that "to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life", and put it to the test with a discourse analysis of English and German reader responses. The results of my study show that Arnold's novel stimulates fruitful debate around the issue of linguistic representation. Based on my findings, I propose to integrate literary texts which engage with the issue of sex/gender and language into educational settings to further promote neutral/inclusive language use.
This thesis investigates the acquisition of compositional and lexical semantic properties of adjectives in German-speaking children between the age of two and five years.
According to formal semantic approaches, there are intersective and non-intersective adjectives, subsective and non-subsective adjectives as well as gradable and non-gradable adjectives. These properties concern the compositional mechanisms involved in nominal modification, i.e., the combination of adjectives and nouns. In addition, adjectives differ regarding lexical semantic properties that contribute to the adjectives' meaning. Differences in the adjectives' scale structure have led to the theoretical assumption that gradable adjectives should be distinguished into relative and absolute gradable adjectives. In addition, meaning components such as multidimensionality or subjectivity have led to the distinction between dimensional and evaluative gradable adjectives. These properties have been mostly investigated independently of each other in both theory and acquisition research. I suggest a classification system for adjectives that combines different semantic properties. This system results in six adjective classes constituting a Semantic Complexity Hierarchy. Assuming that these adjective classes differ in semantic complexity, I propose an operationalization of semantic complexity that takes into account the adjectives' length of description, their type complexity, and lexical properties that contribute to the adjectives' meaning.
Regarding the question of how monolingual German-speaking children acquire the semantics of adjectives, I hypothesize that the order of acquisition of adjectives is determined by their semantic complexity. This hypothesis is tested in a spontaneous speech study and a comprehension experiment.
The spontaneous speech study is a longitudinal investigation of the production of adjectives from 2;00 to 2;11 years based on transcripts from a dense data corpus. The results provide evidence that the mean age of acquisition for the adjective classes in the Semantic Complexity Hierarchy follows the order predicted by semantic complexity. The same order was observed for the age at which the number of types for each class increased most. A preliminary analysis of the input indicates that the frequency of parental adjective use is related to the order of acquisition, but it is unlikely that frequency determines the order completely.
The comprehension experiment focuses on two specific adjective classes. I examine children's and adults' interpretation of relative (big, small) and absolute (clean, dirty) gradable dimensional adjectives with a picture-choice task. These two classes are of the same semantic complexity because they are both gradable, but they have different scale structures. As a result, they must be interpreted differently due to lexical semantic properties. I investigate whether children calculate different standards of comparison for relative and absolute gradable adjectives and whether they distinguish between relative and absolute gradable adjectives regarding the relevance of the explicit comparison class. The results indicate that as of age 3, children distinguish between relative and absolute gradable adjectives with regard to the standard of comparison. However, with respect to the relevance of the comparison class, for 3-year-old children, unlike for 4- and 5-year-olds, changes in the noun, i.e., in the explicit comparison class, led to non-adult-like responses regarding both relative and absolute gradable adjectives.
On the basis of the empirical findings, I propose an acquisition path stating that children enter the acquisition process with inherent linguistic knowledge, the Semantic Complexity Hierarchy, and cognitive abilities to categorize their environment. I suggest that initially, children apply the least complex interpretation available in the Semantic Complexity Hierarchy to all adjectives: all adjectives are interpreted as properties of individuals that are not gradable. To access other levels of the Semantic Complexity Hierarchy and to establish more complex adjective classes, positive evidence from the input and conceptual properties of adjectives, e.g., COLOR, MENTAL STATE, PHYSICAL PROPERTY etc., can operate as triggers.
This article presents an analysis of the police television series A Touch of Frost (Yorkshire Television, 1992) and the crime novels by Rodney Wingfield upon which it is based.
In order to analyse the way the protagonist, Inspector Jack Frost, is characterised in either version, data is drawn from the pilot episode of the series and Wingfield’s debut novel Frost at Christmas (1984). Wingfield was less than impressed with television’s version of Frost, stating, ‘He just isn’t my Frost’. The rationale for this article is to apply established models in stylistics to investigate the differences between the original and the adaptation. A core motivation for stylistics is to ‘support initial impressions in various extracts’ readings’ and to ‘describe the readers’ response with some precision’ (Gregoriou 2007: 19); this article therefore offers a close linguistic explanation for an author’s dissatisfaction with the adaptation of his own work. The famously reticent Wingfield did not elaborate in detail on why he disapproved of the television version of Frost, although several critics observed that Wingfield felt television had ‘softened’ his creation. This article contends that ‘softness’ is represented in language through politeness strategies adopted by speakers whilst impoliteness represents the ‘tougher’ speech of Wingfield’s original iteration of Jack Frost. In order to demonstrate this contention, this study will analyse pragmatic elements of the dialogue of both novel and television versions of Frost through the analytical framework for impoliteness developed by Culpeper (1996; 2010). This framework will be integrated into the model for analysing the elements of narrative outlined by Simpson and Montgomery (1995), in turn suggesting an elaboration of this model. In investigating whether television’s Jack Frost is ‘softer’ than the character envisaged by Wingfield, free direct speech and accompanying physical behaviour in novel and television adaptation are analysed, focussing on whether the perceived softness of the latter has been partly achieved by making the speech of Frost less impolite on television.
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The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) was designed in order to assess narrative skills in children who acquire one or more languages from birth or from early age. MAIN is suitable for children from 3 to 10 years and evaluates both comprehension and production of narratives. Its design allows for the assessment of several languages in the same child, as well as for different elicitation modes: Model Story, Retelling, and Telling. MAIN contains four parallel stories, each with a carefully designed six-picture sequence. The stories are controlled for cognitive and linguistic complexity, parallelism in macrostructure and microstructure, as well as for cultural appropriateness and robustness. The instrument has been developed on the basis of extensive piloting with more than 550 monolingual and bilingual children aged 3 to 10, for 15 different languages and language combinations. Even though MAIN has not been norm-referenced yet, its standardized procedures can be used for evaluation, intervention and research purposes. MAIN is currently available in the following languages: English, Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bulgarian, Croatian, Cypriot Greek, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Icelandic, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Standard Arabic, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Welsh.
This dissertation is an investigation of pitch accent, or lexical tone, in standard Croatian. The first chapter presents an in-depth overview of the history of the Croatian language, its relationship to Serbo-Croatian, its dialect groups and pronunciation variants, and general phonology. The second chapter explains the difference between various types of prosodic prominence and describes systems of pitch accent in various languages from different parts of the world: Yucatec Maya, Lithuanian and Limburgian. Following is a detailed account of the history of tone in Serbo-Croatian and Croatian, the specifics of its tonal system, intonational phonology and finally, a review of the most prominent phonetic investigations of tone in that language.
The focal point of this dissertation is a production experiment, in which ten native speakers of Croatian from the region of Slavonia were recorded. The material recorded included a diverse selection of monosyllabic, bisyllabic, trisyllabic and quadrisyllabic words, containing all four accents of standard Croatian: short falling, long falling, short rising and long rising. Each target word was spoken in initial, medial and final positions of natural Croatian sentences. This research fills several gaps in the existing literature. Namely, the production of tone was investigated in words with a syllabic /r̩/, in pretonal syllables and in non-initial context. Acoustic parameters measured included duration, F0 in every 10% of the nucleus duration, overall pitch, pitch range and pitch peak alignment.
Results showed that differences between falling and rising accents in Croatian are produced mainly with tonal parameters and that the most salient features were pitch peak alignment and overall pitch. The difference between long and short accents was primarily durational and optionally tonal. Words produced in initial and medial sentence positions had a rising contour in their accented syllable, while in the final, segments were usually falling.
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.
In this paper, we investigate whether timing in monolingual acquisition interacts with age of onset and input effects in child bilingualism. Six different morpho-syntactic and semantic phenomena acquired early, late or very late are considered, with their timing in L1 acquisition varying between age 3 (subject-verb agreement) and after age 6 (case marking). Data from simultaneous bilingual children (2L1) whose mean age of onset to German was 3 months are compared with data from early second language learners of German (eL2) whose mean age of onset to German was 35 months as well as with data from monolingual children. To explore change over time, children were tested twice at the ages of 4;4 and 5;8 years. The main findings were that 2L1 children had an advantage over their eL2 peers in early acquired phenomena, which disappeared with time, whereas in late acquired phenomena 2L1 and eL2 children did not differ. Moreover, 2L1 children performed like monolingual children in early acquired phenomena but had a disadvantage in the late acquired phenomena with the amount of delay decreasing with time. We conclude that age of onset effects are modulated by effects of timing in monolingual acquisition. Contrary to expectation, input in terms of language dominance, measured as the dominant language used at home, did not affect simultaneous bilingual children’s performance in any of the phenomena. We discuss the implications of our findings for the hypothesis that acquisition of late phenomena is determined by input alone and suggest an alternative concept: the learner’s internal need for time to master a phenomenon, which is determined by its complexity and cross-linguistic robustness.
This article analyzes the dynamics of fictional dialogue in three short stories by the Finnish author Rosa Liksom. These stories are constructed almost entirely of dialogue, with minimal involvement on the part of the narrator. We adopt two different approaches to dialogue. First, we analyze dialogue from a micro level, as interaction between the characters within the storyworlds, then from a more holistic perspective, paying attention to how dialogue contributes to the rhetorical structure and ethical interpretation of the stories. We show that resorting mainly to dialogue as a narrative mode works as a way of depicting tensions between Liksom’s characters, and between them and the surrounding fictional world. This, in turn, engages the reader in an interpretative process to understand the story’s logic both within the fictional worlds and on the level of communication between the implied author and the authorial audience.
This research investigated variation in the pronunciations of three RP vowels phonemes /e/, /ɜ:/ and /ə/, among Ewe speakers of English in Ghana. It focused on variation at both individual and societal levels, investigating how social relations within these structures influenced the use of the three vowels among the speakers. In this study, social structures were seen as a system where individual members depended on one another and were linked through multiple ties. The distribution of the vowels was in respect with the social variables: age, gender and education, including dialect and social network. The study used a corpus of word-list recorded in a face-to-face interview from 96 participants selected through stratification and networking across two dialect regions: Aŋlɔ and Eveme. Using both aural and acoustic analyses, coupled with ANOVA and t-test, the study has shown that the three RP vowels exist in Ghana Eve English as independent phonemes. Each of them however has allophonic variants; /e/ has variants [e̠], [ɪ] and [ɜ:]; /ɜ:/ has [eː] and [ɜ:], while /ə/ has [ə], [ɪ], [o] and [ʌ] as its variants. The choice of the variants of /ɜ:/ and /e/ have been found to depend on speaker age, gender, and social network. But the geographical location of the speaker will largely determine how these vowels are spoken. Phonological contexts as well as speaker idiosyncrasy are also likely to condition the choice of some of these variants, however, their effects seem less important as determinant of the differences observed than those of the social factors. It is evident that age, gender and class differentiations that have been widely reported cannot be universal, they can vary from one society to another. Also though social structures as well as social relations in a speech community can play significant roles in the individual’s linguistic repertoire, the attitude of the speaker and the phonological contexts of a segment can have a huge impact on the use of that variable.
Research on the music-language interface has extensively investigated similarities and differences of poetic and musical meter, but largely disregarded melody. Using a measure of melodic structure in music––autocorrelations of sound sequences consisting of discrete pitch and duration values––, we show that individual poems feature distinct and text-driven pitch and duration contours, just like songs and other pieces of music. We conceptualize these recurrent melodic contours as an additional, hitherto unnoticed dimension of parallelistic patterning. Poetic speech melodies are higher order units beyond the level of individual syntactic phrases, and also beyond the levels of individual sentences and verse lines. Importantly, auto-correlation scores for pitch and duration recurrences across stanzas are predictive of how melodious naive listeners perceive the respective poems to be, and how likely these poems were to be set to music by professional composers. Experimentally removing classical parallelistic features characteristic of prototypical poems (rhyme, meter, and others) led to decreased autocorrelation scores of pitches, independent of spoken renditions, along with reduced ratings for perceived melodiousness. This suggests that the higher order parallelistic feature of poetic melody strongly interacts with the other parallelistic patterns of poems. Our discovery of a genuine poetic speech melody has great potential for deepening the understanding of the music-language interface.
Exploring the ability of acoustic infant cry analysis for discriminating developmental pathologies
(2018)
This thesis aims at exploring the ability of acoustic infant cry analysis for discriminating developmental pathologies. Cries of healthy infants as well as cries of infants suffering from cleft lip and palate, hearing impairment, laryngomalacia, asphyxia and brain damage were recorded and acoustically analyzed. The acoustic properties of the infant cries were identified and tested on their suitability to predict the health state of the infants in an reliable, valid and objective way.
To test the reliability of infant cry analysis, Krippendorff’s Alpha coefficient was calculated to test how homogeneous cries of healthy infants as well as cries of infants suffering from various pathologies are.
To asses if valid methods exist for classifying infant cries, different approaches that can be used to differentiate between the groups and to predict the health state of the infants — e.g., analysis of variances, supervised-learning models and auditory discrimination by human listeners — were tested on their validity.
The objectivity of computer-based and human-based classification approaches was explored and techniques to enhance the objectivity for both approaches are proposed.
Computer-based approaches are more objective and reached higher sensitivity and specificity values in their classification to predict the health state of the infants. Especially C5.0 decision trees reached high and therefore promising classification results, even though infant cries have a great statistical spread and can be seen as very heterogeneous and are therefore not very reliable in general.
The linguistic deficit in patients with Alzheimer's Disease: is there a syntactic impairment?
(2017)
The linguistic impairment of patients affected by Alzheimer’s disease (PAD) is defined as a form of fluent aphasia, which is caused by major disruptions in the semantic and lexical domains. Consequently, their discourse is often described as empty, although their speech is fluent. This study aims at enlarging the comprehension of the linguistic deficit in PADs; in particular, it deals with their syntactic competence and it addresses the following questions: 1) Do PADs suffer from syntactic impairment? 2) How can the impairment in PADs be accounted for? 3) At which stage of the disease are PADs affected by syntactic impairment? The syntactic competence of Italian-speaking PADs is investigated under two different perspectives. On one hand, the study considers the syntactic information stored in the lexicon as part of the lexical entry. For this purpose, PADs complete a grammatical gender retrieval task on a list of 100 Italian nouns. On the other hand, the question deals with syntax intended as the capacity to complete the processing of syntactic structures in sentence comprehension and production. The present study focuses on sentence comprehension and includes two sentence-to-picture matching tasks: one on Wh-questions, and one on relative clauses. PADs complete the experiment on grammatical gender retrieval with high accuracy, except for few mistakes on irregular and opaque nouns, thus showing a spared capacity to retrieve the syntactic information, especially when they can rely on the form-driven procedural mechanism, as in the case of regular nouns. Data on the comprehension of Wh-questions and RC reveals that PADs are more sensitive than controls to locality effects. Patients with moderate dementia are impaired at computing dependencies that entail a crossing movement between two arguments whose features are in a relation of inclusion. In contrast, crossing movements are allowed when the involved feature arrays are in a relation of disjunction. In short, patients are spared at using procedural mechanisms for the retrieval of syntactic information, while they are impaired at processing sentences that entail argument extraction. The impairment manifests itself in moderately impaired PADs in the form of enhanced sensitivity to locality effects.
This dissertation explores the linguistic identity changes of Chinese international students in Germany, and the relationship between their identity reconstruction and their multilingual competence. With the social turn (Block, 2003) of applied linguistics, research on study abroad has shown that student sojourners abroad encounter challenges not only to their language abilities, but also to their identities, which explains the vast individual differences in the measurable outcomes of student sojourns abroad. However, the realm of learners’ linguistic identity development in the English as a lingua franca (ELF) and multilingual contexts remains to be further explored, since most existing studies examined learners in the target language community. Guided by poststructuralist views and sociocultural theories, this study is designed with a view towards investigating the lived experience of Chinese international students at German universities.
Employing a qualitative approach, my research tracked seventeen Chinese students’ experiences of language learning and use in both their social lives and academic settings over one year. The empirical work combined semi-structured, in-depth interviews and emails. Three rounds of one-to-one interviews were conducted every 6 months and each round focused on students’ respective past, present and future. The grounded theory approach (Corbin & Strauss, 2015) was used in this study to analyse the data, aiming at generating theoretical explanations for phenomena through constant comparison.
The results of the category-based analysis offer a new lens on the intricate linguistic identity development of Chinese students in the study abroad context. The construction of their new identity facets is related to various contextual elements in experiences of their language learning and use. More importantly, learners’ identity changes related to the use of ELF is conceived as within a framework of multilingualism (Jenkins, 2015). In any given social interaction, learners’ linguistic identities are influenced by a combination of factors: perceived linguistic proficiency gap, power distribution,preferred communication styles, sensitivity to second/third language self-images and openness to new cultures. It is these factors, instead of the lingua franca context or
target language context per se, that come into play in the reformation of learners’
linguistic identities. Learners’ linguistic identity changes, together with their priority setting in studying abroad, are in turn interconnected with their multilingual competence development.
The findings of my study suggest theories for understanding learners’ linguistic identity development and the outcomes of their language learning in the study abroad context in the face of the complexity of individual experiences. My study also demonstrates the importance to foster learners’ “self-presentational competence” (Pellegrino Aveni, 2005: 145-146) so that they could successfully negotiate new subject positions when crossing the borders.
Languages in general have various possibilities to express one and the same propositional content. One of these possibilities is grammatical variation. This thesis is concerned with the variation of the linear word order in a clause and the effects triggered by word order alternations. Although sharing the same propositional content, different word order variants can carry different functions; word order variation can be used to achieve certain stylistic effects. The dissertation looks at functional and stylistic preferences of English regarding variation from the canonical word order in (1).
(1) [Ernie]S [sits]V [on the table]O. (SVO)
The variation under consideration is locative inversion (LOCI), exemplified in (2).
(2) On the table sits Ernie.
As any variation from the canonical word order is said to strongly depend on the grammatical system of the language a sentence is realized in, the perspective is extended to the word order equivalent of the sentence above in German (3). The goal is to highlight possible differences/similarities between English and German with respect to one specific word order variant in a declarative main clause.
(3) Auf dem Tisch liegt ein Brief.
On the table lies a letter
‘On the table lies a letter’.
As the variation from the canonical word order is not expected to be coincidental in both languages, the features that favor the pattern under consideration are examined. This is done through a statistical analysis by employing two comparable corpora, the BNC for English and the TÜPP D/Z for German. The central questions for the thesis therefore are: What are the functions of the inverted constructions in English and German, what features favor their use in the respective languages, and how are they realized syntactically?
One finding is that German uses the syntactic pattern PP-V-NP for very similar reasons this pattern is used for in English. There seems to be a general tendency to order shorter before longer constituents. The syntactic pattern under consideration fulfills similar discourse functions in both languages. Both languages show similar preferences, they are driven by similar factors when having to decide on whether to stay with the canonical order or to prepose (respectively invert) the canonically postverbal PP.
Mistakes in translation of messenger RNA into protein are clearly a detriment to the recombinant production of pure proteins for biophysical study or the biopharmaceutical market. However, they may also provide insight into mechanistic details of the translation process. Mistakes often involve the substitution of an amino acid having an abundant codon for one having a rare codon, differing by substitution of a G base by an A base, as in the case of substitution of a lysine (AAA) for arginine (AGA). In these cases one expects the substitution frequency to depend on the relative abundances of the respective tRNAs, and thus, one might expect frequencies to be similar for all sites having the same rare codon. Here we demonstrate that, for the ADP-ribosylation factor from yeast expressed in E. coli, lysine for arginine substitutions frequencies are not the same at the 9 sites containing a rare arginine codon; mis-incorporation frequencies instead vary from less than 1 to 16%. We suggest that the context in which the codons occur (clustering of rare sites) may be responsible for the variation. The method employed to determine the frequency of mis-incorporation involves a novel mass spectrometric analysis of the products from the parallel expression of wild type and codon-optimized genes in 15N and 14N enriched media, respectively. The high sensitivity and low material requirements of the method make this a promising technology for the collection of data relevant to other mis-incorporations. The additional data could be of value in refining models for the ribosomal translation elongation process.
The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) was designed in order to assess narrative skills in children who acquire one or more languages from birth or from early age. MAIN is suitable for children from 3 to 10 years and evaluates both comprehension and production of narratives. Its design allows for the assessment of several languages in the same child, as well as for different elicitation modes: Model Story, Retelling, and Telling. MAIN contains four parallel stories, each with a carefully designed six-picture sequence. The stories are controlled for cognitive and linguistic complexity, parallelism in macrostructure and microstructure, as well as for cultural appropriateness and robustness. The instrument has been developed on the basis of extensive piloting with more than 550 monolingual and bilingual children aged 3 to 10, for 15 different languages and language combinations. Even though MAIN has not been norm-referenced yet, its standardized procedures can be used for evaluation, intervention and research purposes. MAIN is currently available in the following languages: English, Afrikaans, Albanian, Basque, Bulgarian, Croatian, Cypriot Greek, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Icelandic, Italian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Standard Arabic, Swedish, Turkish, Vietnamese, and Welsh.
The early acquisition of Greek compounds by two monolingual Greek girls aged between 1;8 and 3;0 years is studied in a usage-based theoretical framework. Special importance is attached to the morphological structure of Greek compound types occurring in child speech and child-directed speech. Greek nominal compound formation does not consist in the mere juxtaposition of words or roots, but involves stems as well as a compound marker. Major questions addressed are the transparency of compounds and productive nominal compound formation. Evidence for productivity of nominal compound formation has been found with only one of the two girls. In contrast to other languages, neoclassical nominal compounds by far exceed endocentric subordinative ones tokenwise in Greek child speech and child-directed speech providing evidence of entrenchment rather than productivity.
In a cross-linguistic comparison it is shown that, in spite of the fact that both Standard Modern Greek and German are rich in nominal compounds, their number is much more limited in Greek than in German child speech. An explanation for this apparent paradox is provided by an onomasiological approach to lexical typology based on a sample list of nominal compounds occurring in German child language and their Greek translational equivalents. It has been found that while use of nominal compounds is common in colloquial German including child-centered situations, it is more typical of Greek formal than colloquial registers.
This work investigates laryngeal and supralaryngeal correlates of the voicing contrast in alveolar obstruent production in German. It further studies laryngealoral co-ordination observed for such productions. Three different positions of the obstruents are taken into account: the stressed, syllable initial position, the post-stressed intervocalic position, and the post-stressed word final position. For the latter the phonological rule of final devoicing applies in German. The different positions are chosen in order to study the following hypotheses:
1. The presence/absence of glottal opening is not a consistent correlate of the voicing contrast in German.
2. Supralaryngeal correlates are also involved in the contrast.
3. Supralaryngeal correlates can compensate for the lack of distinction in laryngeal adjustment.
Including the word final position is motivated by the question whether neutralization in word final position would be complete or whether some articulatory residue of the contrast can be found.
Two experiments are carried out. The first experiment investigates glottal abduction in co-ordination with tongue-palate contact patterns by means of simultaneous recordings of transillumination, fiberoptic films and Electropalatography (EPG). The second experiment focuses on supralaryngeal correlates of alveolar stops studied by means of Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) simultaneously with EPG. Three German native speakers participated in both recordings. Results of this study provide evidence that the first hypothesis holds true for alveolar stops when different positions are taken into account. In fricative production it is also confirmed since voiceless and voiced fricatives are most of the time realised with glottal abduction. Additionally, supralaryngeal correlates are involved in the voicing contrast under two perspectives. First, laryngeal and supralaryngeal movements are well synchronised in voiceless obstruent production, particularly in the stressed position. Second, supralaryngeal correlates occur especially in the post-stressed intervocalic position. Results are discussed with respect to the phonetics-phonology interface, to the role of timing and its possible control, to the interarticulatory co-ordination, and to stress as 'localised hyperarticulation'.
In this paper I argue that the set of formal features that can head a functional projection is not given by UG but derived through L1 acquisition. I formulate a hypothesis that says that initially every functional category F is realised as a semantic feature [F]; whenever there is an overt doubling effect in the L1 input with respect to F, this semantic feature [F] is reanalysed as a formal feature [i/uF]. In the first part of the paper I provide a theoretical motivation for this hypothesis, in the second part I test this proposal for a case-study, namely the cross-linguistic distribution of Negative Concord (NC). I demonstrate that in NC languages negation has been reanalysed as a formal feature [i/uNEG], whereas in Double Negation languages this feature remains a semantic feature [NEG] (always interpreted as a negative operator), thus paving the way for an explanation of NC in terms of syntactic agreement. In the third part I discuss that the application of the hypothesis to the phenomenon of negation yields two predictions that can be tested empirically. First I demonstrate that negative markers X° can be available only in NC languages; second, independent change of the syntactic status of negative markers, can invoke a change with respect to the exhibition of NC in a particular language. Both predictions are proven to be correct. I finally argue what the consequences of the proposal presented in this paper are for both the syntactic structure of the clause and second for the way parameters are associated to lexical items.
Band II von II
Band I von II
Modern theorists rarely agree on how to represent the categories of tense and aspect, making a consistent analysis for phenomena, such as the present perfect, more difficult to attain. It has been argued in previous analyses that the variable behavior of the present perfect between languages licenses independently motivated treatments, particularly of a morphosyntactic or semanticsyntactic nature (Giorgi & Pianesi 1997; Schmitt 2001; Ilari 2001). More specifically, the wellknown readings of the American English (AE) present perfect (resultative, experiential, persistent situation, recent past (Comrie 1976)), are at odds with the readings of the corresponding structure in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), the 'pretérito perfeito composto' (default iterativity and occasional duration (Ilari 1999)). Despite these variations, the present work, assuming a tense-aspect framework at the semantic-pragmatic interface, will provide a unified analysis for the present perfect in AE and BP, which have traditionally been treated as semantically divergent. The present perfect meaning, in conjunction with the aspectual class of the predicate, can account for the major differences between languages, particularly regarding iterativity and the "present perfect puzzle", regarding adverb compatibility.
In this paper we will develop a formal conceptual model of how the path in a motion situation interacts with the semantic analysis of so called 'motion shape verbs' like 'wackeln' ('wobble'), a subclass of the so called 'manner of motion verbs'. Central to this model will be the distinction between two concepts of motion: translational motion and nontranslational motion, which has no inherent translational component but puts emphasis on describing specific Motion Shape Patterns. We will define and algorithmically describe a theory of Path Shape Decomposition that aims at algorithmically deriving the translational vs. nontranslational distinction from the shape of the path. To account for object internal motion, we additionally introduce Bounding Box encapsulation, which yields a topological division of inner and outer movement. Finally we demonstrate how the outcome of such a technical decomposition can be used in modelling a Path Superimposition scenario like 'Peter wackelt über die Straße'.
The paper investigates the interaction of focus and adverbial quantification in Hausa, a Chadic tone language spoken in West Africa. The discussion focuses on similarities and differences between intonation and tone languages concerning the way in which adverbial quantifiers (AQs) and focus particles (FPs) associate with focus constituents. It is shown that the association of AQs with focused elements does not differ fundamentally in intonation and tone languages such as Hausa, despite the fact that focus marking in Hausa works quite differently. This may hint at the existence of a universal mechanism behind the interpretation of adverbial quantifiers across languages. From a theoretical perspective, the Hausa data can be taken as evidence in favour of pragmatic approaches to the focus-sensitivity of AQs, such as e.g. Beaver & Clark (2003).
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.
Focus theories distinguish different types of focus according to the pragmatic conditions or communicative point on the one side and different scopes of focus on the other side. The assertion in term focus constructions (Dik 1989), called by others argument focus constructions or identificational sentences (Lambrecht 1994), has the purpose of establishing a relation between an argument and an open proposition. Kar, a north-eastern Senufo language of Burkina Faso, which has the basic word order S-Aux-O-V-other, has at its disposal different strategies to mark argument focus, among them fronting of the focused item. In many West African languages the displacement of the focused argument involves other devices, such as the use of special verb forms. In Kar fronting of a focused argument requires the use of special pronouns in the out-of-focus part of the sentence, called background subject pronouns. They are used in other backgrounded contexts, too, for example in relative clauses, adverbial clauses and constituent questions. Their inconsistent use is attributed to a particular sociolinguistic situation in which the data has been collected. The use of the same focus strategies for completive and contrastive focus suggests that Kar does not distinguish pragmatic conditions on the level of sentence grammar.