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This study explores four German nominalization patterns (-ung; -erei; Ge- -X-e; nominalized infinitives) using corpus and web data. We conclude that they can be considered a word formation paradigm, as some functions depend on paradigmatic oppositions. Our case study supports gradual differences between inflectional and word formation paradigmaticity.
Besides some well-established forms like autoritär 'authoritarian'; humanitär 'humanitarian'; new coinages ending with -itär can be found in German. These adjectives are closely related to nouns ending with -ität. From an etymological point of view; these formations are morphologically transparent. Not only are the adjectives new; but -itär emerges as a new suffix.
Die hier zu besprechende Dissertation des schwedischen Germanisten Nicolaus Janos Raag ist an der Universität Uppsala (Schweden) unter der Betreuung von Dessislava Stoeva-Holm entstanden. Die Arbeit will zeigen, welche Rolle Substantivkomposita im Rahmen der Wissensvermittlung und des Kulturtransfers spielen, wie deutsche Komposita lateinisch vermittelte Inhalte in die eigene frühmittelalterliche klösterliche Kultur der Rezipienten integrieren und welche Veränderungen sie dabei erfahren. Für die Untersuchung wurden Substantivkomposita ausgewählt, da sie prädestiniert für die Benennung von bisher Unbekanntem sind und durch ihre binäre Struktur die Fähigkeit besitzen, zwei Größen zueinander in Beziehung zu setzen, wobei die semantische Relation zwischen den Konstituenten eines Kompositums prinzipiell offen und auf morphologischer Ebene nicht ausgedrückt ist.
Phrasal compounding is a phenomenon illustrated by slept all day look. Prototypical examples are determinative compounds with a nominal head and a phrasal non-head. They raise interesting questions about the interaction of syntax and morphology and have been discussed in this context by Botha (1981) for Afrikaans and Lieber (1992) for English. Also in German and Turkish, they have received ample attention. This volume has as its main purpose to extend the range of languages for which phrasal compounds are discussed. It consists of a brief introduction (chapter 1), six chapters devoted to individual languages, and a final chapter with a more general outlook. The use of further in the title is perhaps surprising, in particular because the volume under review is the first of a new series. It is motivated by the fact that the papers are from “the second workshop on phrasal compounding”, held in Mannheim in 2015. In this review, I will first present and discuss each chapter, then consider some general points about the volume.
The project WBLUX (Wortbildung des moselfränkisch-luxemburgischen Raumes) at the University of Luxembourg aims at the investigation of Luxembourgish word formation through different text sorts and genres. In order to achieve this goal the compilation of an annotated corpus is needed. This article gives an example for benefits of using a corpus with annotations like parts of speech, lemmata and word formation affixes in the analysis of productivity of some selected word formation affixes of Luxembourgish. Then it describes how one can achieve such a corpus from a technical point of view. This includes the choice of corpus format, of a database platform and the designing of programs needed for the annotation process of word formation itself. This article also suggests new corpus linguistic approaches for research of word formation like analyzing the usage of word formation bases in the entire corpus or performing context analysis in order to determine semantical functions of each suffix.
This paper provides an overview of the connection between word formation and text type linguistics. Following a brief outline of the current state of research, desiderata and weaknesses of previous research as well as perspectives of a text type oriented research on word formation will be introduced. Here, I advocate a stronger inclusion of oral (with regard to the medium) and conceptually spoken text types (cf. Koch/Oesterreicher 1985). The focus is on the analysis of word formations within the text type of battle rap, which can be classified as oral and conceptually spoken. The analysis gives an insight into my habilitation project outlined in the essay and shows how this project can be realized.
A typical characteristic of Central German dialects, especially of the Ripuarian dialect, is that it has collective nouns with ge- + -ze (cf. gesteinze) besides those with ge- + -e (cf. gesteine) corresponding to Dutch gesteente and gestene. A relationship between ge- + -ze and ge- + -te has been assumed for a long time. A corpus-based comparison is given in order to explain the genesis of these different formation types (ge- + -e, ge- + -ze, ge- + -te) and their relations. It seems likely that earlier Dutch formations influenced their Ripuarian counterparts. Rarely, the circumfix ge- + -te also occurs in Ripuarian texts and may be autochthone. One main result is that the suffic -ze in Ripuarian restores the collective formation in the circumfix ge- + -e when it was destroyed by the e-apokope. This is a rare instance where an element of word formation is replaced by another one in order to neutralize the isolation effect of sound change.
German "-isch" and English "-ish" share a common Germanic origin, which is evidenced by striking similarities concerning the derivation of ethnic adjectives "(englisch/English)" or property-denoting adjectives "(kindisch/childish)". However, after an initial period of parallel characteristics, the two languages display drastic changes, with English developing an approximative sense when attached to adjectival bases (e.g. "greenish") and expanding to a wide range of other word categories, while German "-isch" develops multiple functions and also comes to firmly occupy a morphological niche with non-native bases. The paper sheds light on the evolving divergence between German and English by presenting results from two diachronic corpus-based studies. Additionally, explanations with respect to the typological parameter of 'Boundary Permeability' are provided.
This paper investigates the spelling of compound nouns in a corpus comprised of Early New High German protocols of witch trials from the 16th and 17th century. Previous studies on the spelling of compound nouns in printed texts have found that scribes increasingly write compound nouns as one word during the 16th century. However, this paper will show that there is still much variation in handwritten texts from that time. The study focusses on identifying factors that lead scribes to write compound nouns either as one word or two, such as linking elements and the use of upper case letters. I will argue that while there is more variation in the spelling of compound nouns in the handwritten corpus than in printed texts, there still is a strong tendency to line up the boundaries of the graphemic and syntactic words.
An inventory of the Middle High German word families is still missing wheras the Old High German and New High German word families are recorded by the dictionaries of J. Splett. In this paper a semi-automatic method is represented which can help to find and analyze the Middle High German word families. By several scripts a combined list of MHG and OHG lemmata is tranformed and expanded to a table containing among other things a column with a simplified variation of Splett's word formation formulas and a column with the common base of the word family the lemma probably belongs to. In a labour-intensive last step, these proposals have to be manually checked and corrected.
Department of British and American Studies in cooperation with SKASE (The Slovak Association for the Study of English) organized the Word-Formation Theories III & Typology and Universals in Word-Formation IV Conference. The Conference took place at P.J. Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, from 27 June to 30 June 2018. The event was organized by Slávka Tomaščíková, Lívia Körtvélyessy and Pavol Štekauer (P.J. Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia) and with the support of the APVV project No: APVV-16–0035 Research into extralinguistic factors of word-formation and word-interpretation. The program and the book of abstracts are available at the conference homepage http://kaa.ff.upjs.sk/en/alumni-club/33/word-formation-theories-iii-typology-and-universals-in-word-formation-iv.
Am 31. März 2017 und 01. April 2017 fand in Lyon unter Federführung des Forschungszentrums Centre d'Etudes Linguistiques (CEL – EA 1663) und unter Beteiligung des Labors Interactions, Corpus, Apprentissages, Représentations (ICAR – UMR 5191) der Universitäten Lumière Lyon 2 und der Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon ein internationaler Kongress zu Formen, Verfahren und Funktionen der Bildung lexematischer und polylexematischer Einheiten im Deutschen (Formation et préformation lexicale de l'allemand) statt. GermanistInnen aus Deutschland, Frankreich, Polen, Russland und Spanien nahmen an diesem Symposium teil.
Morphology Days is a (nearly) biennial international meeting which deals with morphology within different frameworks and in various perspectives Previous editions of this conference have taken place in Leuven (2015), Leeuwarden (2013), Leiden (2012), Nijmegen (2011), Luik (2009) and Amsterdam (2007) While the first editions of the conference were mainly addressed to researchers working on morphology in the Netherlands and in Belgium, the last editions – including this one – included international contributions The programme and the book of abstract is available at the conference’s homepage at https://morphologydays2017.wordpress.com/program/. Organized by Philippe Hiligsmann, Kristel Van Goethem, Nikos Koutsoukos and Isa Hendrikx from the Université Catholique de Louvain, and Laurent Raiser from the Université de Liège, this edition of Morphology Days hosted more than 30 researchers, among which 3 plenary speakers, coming not only from Belgium but also from France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Although both inflection and derivation (affixation) where dealt with in the talks, this conference report will only address the studies on derivation.
This paper studies the morphological productivity of German N+N compounding patterns from a diachronic perspective. It argues that the productivity of compounds increases due to syntactic influence from genitive constructions ("improper compounds") in Early New High German. Both quantitative and qualitative productivity measures are adapted from derivational morphology and tested on compound data from the Mainz Corpus of (Early) New High German (1500–1710).
Forschungen zu Linguistic Landscapes stellen ein relativ junges Feld der Soziolinguistik dar, das sich der Präsenz geschriebener Sprache im öffentlichen Raum widmet. Grundlegend für die Etablierung dieser Forschungsrichtung war der Aufsatz von Landry & Bourhis (1997), der sowohl die Bezeichnung Linguistic Landscapes einführte (LL) als auch den Forschungsgegenstand definierte [...] Ausgehend von Landry & Bourhis widmeten sich zahlreiche Studien der LL aus den verschiedensten thematischen Perspektiven, unter denen Mehrsprachigkeit, Minderheitensprachen, Sprachideologie, Kommodifizierung und Tourismus eine zentrale Rolle spielten. [...] Im Folgenden soll die Bedeutung der historischen sozio-ökonomischen Entwicklung für die LL ausführlicher beschrieben werden, um so zu zeigen, dass ohne die entsprechenden sozio-ökonomischen Prozesse eine LL im modernen Sinne nicht existieren würde, womit gleichzeitig auf die Kritik an den üblicherweise urbanen Erhebungsorten eingegangen wird. Im Anschluss daran soll eine kurze Darstellung der historischen Konfliktlagen der häufigsten Zielregionen von LL-Studien aufzeigen, in welcher Weise diese die LL-Perspektive möglicherweise einseitig geprägt haben. Die Präsenz vergleichbarer Strukturen in fast allen Forschungsregionen von LL-Studien wird ebenfalls aufgezeigt und die sich daraus ableitende Problematik für die Auswahl neuer Forschungsorte und -themen beschrieben.
Der vorliegende Beitrag möchte die Perspektiven einer solchen akteursorientierten Diskursanalyse aufzeigen. Die Akteure stellen nämlich diejenige "Kraft" dar, die den Diskurs ins Leben ruft, diesen formuliert und dynamisiert. Auf die Lexik ausgerichtete Untersuchungen fokussieren in erster Linie auf die sprachliche Oberfläche, d.h. etwa auf Fahnenwörter, Schlüsselwörter oder auf die Metaphorik. Diese können jedoch erst als Endprodukte der sprachlichen Tätigkeit der Akteure betrachtet werden, in denen sich deren Motivationen, Meinungen, Positionierungen und Einstellungen konstituieren. Akteursorientierte Analysen möchten hingegen auch den Hintergrund beleuchten: die Ebene der Argumentation, die Topoi, die im Diskurs in konkreten Sprachgebrauchsmustern sich materialisieren. Diese Muster sind als kollektive Denkmuster zu betrachten, die einer Gemeinschaft im kollektiven Gedächtnis zur Verfügung stehen. Als kollektiv gespeichertes und durch die Sprache zugänglich gemachtes Wissen prägen sie das Weltbild der jeweiligen Sprachgemeinschaft. Das bedeutet zugleich, dass der Sprache eine fundamentale Rolle als wissensstiftendes Medium zukommt. Sie bestimmt, wie die Welt wahrgenommen und daraus Faktizität hergestellt wird. Ferner heißt das auch, dass Diskurse zugleich als Orientierungsrahmen dienen. Sie stellen den Sprachbenutzern Wissensbestände zur Verfügung, die sowohl bei der Deutung von Ereignissen und Entitäten eine kognitive Basis bilden, als auch eine Struktur anbieten, in die neue Kenntnisse integriert werden können.
Die vorliegende Studie setzt sich mit dem Adjektiv "neu" und seinem slowakischen Äquivalent "nový" systembezogen und pragmatisch auseinander. Wir befassen uns kontrastiv mit der Bedeutungsstruktur, mit der Kollokabilität und lexikographischen Auffassung dieser Adjektive. Um alle erwähnten Ebenen in ihrer Komplexität zu erfassen, darf man sie nicht voneinander getrennt untersuchen. Bei unserer Untersuchung gehen wir von der kodifizierten Bedeutung aus, die wir mit der realen Sprachverwendung vergleichen und ihre Anwendbarkeit an der aus den Korpora gewonnenen Daten überprüfen. Bei unserer kontrastiven Vorhegensweise ist der Ausgangspunkt die Auslegung der slowakischen Bedeutungsbeschreibung der lexikalischen Einheit "nový". Zunächst erweitert sich der Forschungsgegenstand um den Vergleich der jeweiligen Erläuterungen der deutschen lexikalischen Einheit "neu" in verschiedenen deutschen Wörterbüchern. Im Anschluss an die semantische Analyse der einzelnen Adjektive in den zwei von uns ausgewählten Sprachen überprüfen wir, ob und inwiefern bei der Bedeutungsbeschreibung der Übersetzungsäquivalente "nový" und "neu" eine analogische Auslegung verwendbar ist.
Das Ziel dieses Beitrags ist die Herausstellung von Geschlechterstereotypen der deutschen Jugendlichen, die in Form von semantischen Assoziationen zu Kategorien "Frau/Mann" auftreten, und der mit den Stereotypen verbundenen Asymmetrie. Dafür wurden die empirischen Daten, die infolge der Befragung mit dem Einsatz des psychoassoziativen Experimentes gewonnen wurden, analysiert. Die geschlechtsspezifische Asymmetrie wurde auch insubstantivischen Kollokationen, deren Basen als negativ gefärbte Substereotype eingeschätzt werden können, mit subordinierten Adjektiven verfolgt.
Im Fokus dieses Beitrags steht das Verhältnis von Sprache und Gewalt, die an sich selbst ausgeübt wird, insbesondere deren Versprachlichung und der damit einhergehende Gebrauch (fach)spezifischen Wortschatzes. Bei der Analyse wird der Frage nachgegangen, wie SVV in Online-Diskussionsforen für Betroffene und deren Angehörige dargestellt wird. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf den sprachlichen Mitteln bei der Beschreibung dieser psychischen Störung und der damit verbundenen Verhaltensweisen. Eine nicht zu vernachlässigende Rolle spielen dabei pragmatische Komponenten der Textgestaltung, insbesondere die der Emotionalität. Dies wird aus einer deutsch-tschechischen Perspektive betrachtet, um einen interlingualen Vergleich der Darstellung des Verhältnisses von Gewalt und Sprache zu ermöglichen
Manipulation durch Emotionen : am Beispiel der Berichterstattung aus dem medizinischen Bereich
(2018)
Die Berichterstattung in den heutigen Medien hat oft nicht nur eine informative, sondern auch eine persuasive Funktion: zusammen mit Informationen mit dem Ziel, eine bestimmte Wirkung auf den Rezipienten zu erreichen, ihn zu überzeugen und zu beeinflussen. Eine wirkungsvolle Persuasion geht mit Manipulationen einher. Wie die öffentliche Meinung manipuliert werden kann, wird im Folgenden am Beispiel der Berichterstattung aus dem medizinischen Bereich demonstriert. Ich habe dafür Artikel über das Zika-Virus gewählt, vor allem deshalb, weil besonders in den ersten Monaten des Jahres 2016 die Verbreitung dieses Virus enorm häufig thematisiert wurde und Emotionen dabei eine bedeutende Rolle gespielt haben.
Kultur - Sprache - Gewalt
(2018)
Zum Verständnis der Gewalt dürfte der Versuch beitragen, einen prointuitiven, in der Natur der Sache begründeten Begriff zu konstruieren, dessen Wert in seinem erhöhten Erklärungspotenzial liegt. Im vorliegenden Text wird der Versuch vorgenommen, den Begriff "Gewalt" aus drei fundamentalen menschenkonstitutiven Faktoren abzuleiten, der es ermöglicht, die Gewalt aus der Sicht des Betroffenen systematisch zu beschreiben und erklären. In die Erörterungen werden Kultur und Sprache involviert und innerhalb von drei Subthemen - Interpretation und Gewalt, sprachliche Ordnung und Gewalt, soziale Interaktion und Gewalt - wird ihre Einbeziehung in die "Welt der Gewalt" aus besonderen Perspektiven ins Visier genommen.
Der Euphemismus ist eine rhetorische Figur, mit der man unangenehme Sachverhalten schonend und beschönigend darstellen will. Der Euphemismus kann aber auch zum Ausdruck einer sprachlichen Gewalt werden, wenn damit Formen der Verschleierung und Immunisierung einhergehen, die jede kritische Auseinandersetzung nicht nur erschweren, sondern nahezu unmöglich machen. Liegt die Absicht des Euphemismus darin, etwas als gut darzustellen, hat man es schwer, dieses Gute zu kritisieren, ohne in den Verdacht zu geraten, selbst böse zu sein. Im Kontext moderner Bildungsreformen ist der Euphemismus zu einer universellen Strategie geworden, die es überhaupt erst erlaubt, bestimmte Dinge, die ansonsten am Einspruch der Vernunft oder der Erfahrung scheitern müssten, dennoch durchzusetzen. Begriffe wie Kompetenz, Inklusion, Individualisierung, Evaluation, Effizienz, Praxisorientierung, Exzellenz oder Internationalisierung gehören zu diesen Euphemismen, die im Folgenden einer exemplarischen Betrachtung unterzogen werden sollen.
Etwa seit dem Jahre 2000 lässt sich eine Tendenz an vielen portugiesischen und anderen Hochschulen feststellen: Sprachkurse finden regen Zulauf, aber die damit verbundenen Philologien klagen über einen Rückgang der Studierenden. Die Gründe dafür sind vielschichtig und nicht verallgemeinerbar, werden doch die Studiengänge sogar in demselben Land oft sehr unterschiedlich strukturiert, und dass es nicht eine Germanistik, Romanistik oder Anglistik gibt, ist gewiss zutreffend. Die siebte Ausgabe der portugiesischen Germanistikzeitschrift REAL nimmt sich dieses Themas aus verschiedenen Blickwinkeln und Länderperspektiven an. Und auch wenn die Beiträge aus unterschiedlichen Ländern und Kontinenten stammen, wird doch deutlich, wie allgemein eine Reihe von Schwierigkeiten sind.
This paper addresses the question of how to account for the semantic variability of weak free adjuncts. Weak free adjuncts are non-clausal adjuncts that associate with an argument of the main predicate, contribute propositional content, and can interact with temporal or modal operators, which leads to different, adverbial-clause-like interpretations. I focus on a specific type of weak adjuncts, non-clausal as-phrases, and propose a unified semantic analysis for the full range of interpretational possibilities that takes into account the interpretational contingency on different syntactic positions. I show that this analysis improves on Stump’s (1985) original analysis of weak adjuncts. I then go on to discuss the limitations of both Stump’s account and the unified account. Both accounts fail to capture that the interaction of weak adjuncts with modal operators underlies certain restrictions on the properties of the modal operators—an observation that has not been discussed in the literature so far.
'Enough'-/'too'-constructions (E/T constructions) have an implicative reading: e.g., "Mary was clever enough to leave early yesterday" entails Mary left early yesterday. I argue that this implicative reading is not due to the lexical semantics proper of 'enough'/'too', but due to its bi-clausal structure (e.g., the above-mentioned example is analyzed as "Mary left early yesterday because she was clever enough"). I analyze 'enough' and 'too' simply as degree modifiers that involve a comparison: 'enough' means reaching the lower bound of an interval, while 'too' means exceeding the upper bound of an interval. Then inspired by Schulz (2011), Baglini and Francez (2015), and Nadathur (2016), I relate the semantics of E/T constructions to causal dependence: due to some sufficiency/excess, the infinitival complement clause in E/T constructions is episodically or generically (depending on its aspect being perfective or imperfective) true/false. I also argue that this infinitive has its tense and aspect marked on the main predicate of sentences, resulting in the seeming correlation between aspect and implication in languages that overtly make a distinction between perfective and imperfective aspects (e.g., French).
Recent work by Sudo (2012) and Klinedinst (2016) proposes a new perspective on differences between classes of presupposition triggers, with an empirical split roughly mirroring Abusch’s (2002) hard vs. soft distinction and related notions. These two authors propose that triggers differ in whether or not their presuppositional content simultaneously affects the calculation of the presuppositions and of the entailments of the sentences in which they appear.
Drawing on a proposal by Glanzberg (2005) we formulate the Removability/Independence Hypothesis: triggers that do not affect entailments are triggers that can be left out of sentences without affecting interpretability. We experimentally test the hypothesis by embedding 'return', '(go) again' and '(go) back' in non-monotonic environments, which Sudo argues to elicit differences in presuppositions and entailments. Our results provide clear evidence against the RI hypothesis: whereas only the trigger 'return' is crucial for the sake of interpretability, all three triggers produced similar results. At the same time, data for the triggers 'stop' and 'also', included as controls, lend further support in favor of Sudo’s entailment-contrast proposal.
Generics and typicality
(2018)
Cimpian et al. (2010) observed that we accept generic statements of the form 'Gs are f' on relatively weak evidence, but that if we are unfamiliar with group G and we learn a generic statement about it, we still interpret it in a much stronger way: (almost) all Gs are f .
This paper makes use of notions like 'representativeness' and 'contingency' from (associative learning) psychology to provide a semantics of generics that explains why people accept generics based on weak evidence. We make use of the Heuristics and Biases approach of Tversky and Kahneman (1974) and the Associative Theory of Probability Judgements to explain pragmatically why people interpret generic statements in a much stronger way. The spirit of the approach has much in common with Leslie's (2008) cognition-based ideas about generics, but the semantics is grounded on Cohen's (1999) relative readings of generic sentences. The basic intuition is that a generic of the form 'Gs are f' is true, not because most Gs are (or tend to have) f , but because f is typical for G, which means that f is valuably associated with G.
Shared mechanism underlying unembedded and embedded enrichments:
evidence from enrichment priming
(2018)
In this paper, we use a priming paradigm to explore the mechanisms underlying unembedded and embedded scalar enrichments. In particular, the aim is to see if local pragmatic enrichment could be a shared mechanism, involved in both. The two experiments presented adopt Bott & Chemla's (2016) enrichment priming paradigm and test whether unembedded and embedded enrichments could prime each other. The goal is to investigate whether local pragmatic enrichment is indeed being accessed for the interpretation of the unembedded scalar and whether local enrichments, like other lexical semantic phenomena, are susceptible to priming.
The paper proposes a new semantics for good-predications involving finite if -and that-clauses. The proposal combines a standard semantics for conditionals with a standard semantics for the positive form of gradable adjectives and a minimal semantics for modal good. The predicted truth-conditions and conditions of use solve the mood puzzle presented in the first part of the paper. The remainder of the paper defends the classical notion of comparative goodness in terms of a comparison between possible worlds against Lassiter (2017)’s challenge.
This paper investigates the interpretation of Japanese -toka and -tari, two nonexhaustive particles that receive conjunctive interpretations in upward-entailing environments, but disjunctive interpretations in downward-entailing and question contexts.
We analyze -toka and -tari as items that introduce unstructured sets of alternatives in a Hamblin-style alternative semantics (Hamblin, 1973; Kratzer and Shimoyama, 2002), and derive their conjunctive and disjunctive readings via an interaction between these sets and the semantics of the environment containing them.
Based on a sample of seven languages, I show that the so-called modal inferences in ever free relatives (ignorance and indifference) are not universally available. The primary reading of ever free relatives crosslinguistically turns out to be a “non-modal” one, which is available to all languages under investigation. The implication is that if there is a modal inference triggered by the use of the ever-morpheme in FRs, the inference is likely to have a source external to the ever free relative (Lauer, 2009; Condoravdi, 2015; Hirsch, 2016). In line with this conclusion, I propose to generalize Hirsch’s (2016) analysis of ignorance ever free relatives, suggesting that all ever free relatives, no matter how they are ultimately interpreted, are instances of (un)conditionals + donkey-anaphoric definite descriptions.
Revising a proposal by Guerzoni (2003), we propose to derive universal projection of presuppositions in wh-questions, where attested, from a family of three felicity conditions on question use. Assuming that these felicity conditions can be violated under certain conditions, this proposal predicts a typology of contexts where universal projection can exceptionally be unattested. We propose that this prediction is correct, presenting a family of scenarios where the expected absence of universal projection is observed.
The meaning of counterfactual conditionals is standardly described using the similarity approach (Stalnaker, 1968; Lewis, 1973). This approach has recently been challenged by Ciardelli et al. (2018). They argue that the similarity approach is in principle unable to account for the meaning of counterfactuals with an antecedent consisting of a conjunction embedded under a negation (¬(p^q)). Ciardelli et al. (2018) dismiss the approach on these grounds and offer an alternative. The main goal of the present paper is to defend the similarity approach against this attack. I will argue that the problem that underlies the observations in Ciardelli et al. 2018 is more general and not solved by the solution they offer. I will furthermore argue, against Ciardelli et al. (2018), that the cause of the problem is not the similarity approach, but the interaction of negation with the meaning of counterfactual conditionals. The paper will conclude with a first outline of a solution for the problem, which still uses the similarity approach, but combines it with an alternative semantics for negation.
This paper deals with topic markers interacting with discourse information in imperatives. It compares two topic markers from Slovenian (‘pa’) and Japanese (‘-wa’) and shows that while they mostly match in terms of the foci they associate with, their functions differ in imperatives: only ‘pa’ may yield a concessive imperative reading. It is shown that this reading can be derived while keeping a single entry for ‘pa’ by making attitudes of discourse participants part of the focus ‘pa’ associates with. The split between Slovenian and Japanese can then be attributed to minor differences in terms of which foci ‘pa’ and ‘-wa’ may associate with.
This paper explores Turkish numeral constructions, which have typologically two interesting properties: (i) the existence of an optional classifier, (ii) the incompatibility of plurals with them. I argue that numerals are modifiers of type <<e,t>,<e,t>> defined only for atomic properties (Ionin and Matushansky 2006). The explanation rests on the semantics of bare singulars proposed to denote sets of atoms (contra Bale et al. 2010), and the semantics of the classifier claimed to be a partial identity function presupposing atomic properties.
Schlenker (2012) proposes that when framed within a modern Stalnakerian view of presupposition and common ground (Stalnaker, 1998, 2002), Maximize Presupposition! (Heim, 1991; Sauerland, 2008) can be viewed as a special case of the maxim of Quantity (Grice, 1975).
We provide data suggesting that in some cases, Maximize Presupposition! applies even when speakers are not expected to use a presupposition as vectors of new information. We argue that these data support the view that Maximize Presupposition! is an independent pragmatic principle, distinct from Quantity.
The proper semantic treatment of the complements of Responsive Predicates (ResPs), those predicates which may embed either declarative or interrogative clauses, is a longstanding puzzle, given standard assumptions about complement selection. In order to avoid positing systematic polysemy for ResPs, typical treatments of ResP complements treat their arguments either as uniformly declarative-like (propositional) or interrogative-like (question).
I shed new light on this question with novel data from Estonian, in which there are verbs think-like meanings with declarative complements and wonder-like meanings with interrogative complements. I argue that these verbs’ meaning is fundamentally incompatible with a proposition-taking semantics for ResPs, and therefore a question-taking semantics is to be preferred.
This paper presents the results of two experiments in German testing the acceptability of (non-)restrictive relative clauses (NRCs/RRCs) with split antecedents (SpAs). According to Moltmann (1992), SpAs are only grammatical if their parts occur within the conjuncts of a coordinate structure and if they have identical grammatical functions. Non-conjoined SpAs that form the subject and the object of a transitive verb are predicted to be ungrammatical. Our study shows that the acceptability of such examples improves significantly if the predicate that relates the parts of the SpA is symmetric. Moreover, it suggests that NRCs and RRCs behave differently in these cases with respect to the SpA-construal. We can make sense of this observation if we follow Winter (2016) in assuming that transitive symmetric predicates have to be analyzed as unary collective predicates and thus provide a collective antecedent for the RC at the semantic (not the syntactic) level. As we will argue, this accounts for some of the disagreement we found in the literature and gives us new insights into both the semantics of symmetric predicates and the semantics of NRCs.
Schlenker (2010) recently provided data from English and French suggesting that, contrary to standard assumptions (McCawley, 1982; Potts, 2005; Arnold, 2007; AnderBois et al., 2011), non-restrictive relative clauses (NRCs) can take narrow scope under operators of the sentence within which they are embedded. This paper presents three experiments in German confirming this claim. The results show that embedded readings are available with NRCs in German and give first insights into the puzzle under which conditions these embedded readings do or do not show up.
This paper argues that traces only range over individual semantic types and cannot be type shifted into higher types to circumvent this restriction. The evidence comes from movement targeting positions where DPs must denote properties and the behavior of definite descriptions in these positions. These constraints on possible traces demonstrate that syntactic operations impose active restrictions on permissible semantic types in natural language.
This paper presents an exploratory production study of Bharatanatyam, a figurative (narrative) dance. We investigate the encoding of coreference vs. disjoint reference in this dance and argue that a formal semantics of narrative dance can be modeled in line with Abusch’s (2013, 2014, 2015) semantics of visual narrative (drawing also on Schlenker’s, 2017a, approach to music semantics). A main finding of our investigation is that larger-level group-boundaries (Charnavel, 2016) can be seen as triggers for discontinuity inferences (possibly involving the dynamic shift from one salient entity to another).
The verb ‘rise’ can be used both with property-denoting nouns like ‘temperature’ but also with NPs like ‘a Titan’ or ‘China’. Whereas in the former case the change triggered by a rising event is directly related to the subject (its current value increases), this does not hold for ‘a titan’ or ‘China’. In this case it is a property of these objects, say their height or their political power, which increases in value. Furthermore, ‘rise’ does not target a particular property as the examples above show. This data has led Cooper (2010) to the conclusion that it is presumably not possible (i) “to extract a single general meaning of words which covers all the particular meanings of the word in context”, and (ii) “to determine once and for all the set of particular contextually determined meanings of a word”. In this article we present a solution to the two problems raised by ‘rise’ in a frame theory. ‘Rise’ is analyzed as a scalar verb which does not lexicalize a complete scale in its meaning. Rather, it shows underspecification relative to the dimension (property) parameter of a scale. The set of admissible properties is determined by a constraint on the value ranges of properties. If the property is not uniquely determined by the subject, the comprehender uses probabilistic reasoning based on world knowledge and discourse information to defeasibly infer the most likely candidates from this set (2nd problem).
The first problem is solved not by simply introducing objects into the representation of a discourse but instead by pairs consisting of an object and an associated frame component which collects the object information contributed by the discourse. Changes triggered by events like the one denoted by ‘rise’ are modelled as update operations on the frame component while the object component is left unchanged.
Some kind of relative clause
(2018)
Amount Relatives (ARs) differ from restrictive relative clauses in that they do not refer to a particular object denoted by the head of the relative clause, but to an amount of such objects (Carlson, 1977a; Heim, 1987). Traditionally, ARs have been regarded as degree expressions.
In this paper I argue against this view and propose instead that amount interpretations of relative clauses are in fact a special case of kind interpretation.
Extreme nouns and maximizers
(2018)
Maximizers (completamente ‘completely’, totalmente ‘totally’) are degree modifiers restricted to maximum standard adjectives. Spanish adjectives of completeness [ACs] (completo ‘complete’, total ‘total’) display a behavior similar to that of their adverbial counterparts when they combine with nouns like idiot. This paper argues that ACs are maximality modifiers of idiot-like nouns, which are defended to be gradable and denote extreme degrees of properties.
Establishing a parallelism between adverbs and adjectives of completeness allows us to explore scalarity across categories and the relevance of scale structure in the nominal domain.