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"Great technology, football and ..." : Malaysian language learners' stereotypes about Germany
(2014)
This study focuses on stereotypes about Germany, its culture and people, held by learners of German in a big public university in Malaysia. It examines not only the stereotypical representations of the target language country but also assesses its favourability and salience, which has not been done previously. The findings revealed that the students' stereotypes about Germany were varied and diverse. Also, they were overwhelmingly positive. The top three salient categories of images about Germany were related to technology, famous personalities – for the most part football players and scientists – and cars. The findings also indicated that very few references had been made to German culture and to its great cultural figures. The results of the present study suggest that students could benefit from a wider and deeper exposure to German culture in the language classroom.
In a similar way to dramatic performances and plays, song lyrics establish a complex discourse structure whereby listeners are placed in a position to overhear ‘the pretence of a conversation constructed to convey the performer’s meaning’ (Nahajec 2019: 25; see also Short 1996: 169). In Taylor Swift’s songwriting, listeners are positioned not only to eavesdrop on the narratives presented but are also invited to conceptualise and enact particular roles and scenarios in the discourse. This paper offers a stylistic analysis of songwriting and narrative structure across Swift’s oeuvre to identify how disnarration strategies are used to build stories in her two sister albums written and produced during the Covid-19 pandemic, folklore (2020) and evermore (2020). Specifically, this study examines how disnarration characterises the albums’ narrators, establishes narrator-narratee relationships and invites listeners to adopt a participatory role in the meaning-making process. Through close analysis of four songs across the two albums, this paper builds on developing studies of the stylistics of songwriting (see West 2019) and argues that disnarration strategies foreground particular themes within the discourse, such as nostalgia, wistfulness and regret, and contribute to the fictionalisation and self-aware storytelling characteristic of these albums’ storyworlds.
Unquestionably (or: undoubtedly), every competent speaker has already come to doubt with respect to the question of which form is correct or appropriate and should be used (in the standard language) when faced with two or more almost identical competing variants of words, word forms or sentence and phrase structure (e.g. German "Pizzas/Pizzen/Pizze" 'pizzas', Dutch "de drie mooiste/mooiste drie stranden" 'the three most beautiful/most beautiful three beaches', Swedish "större än jag/mig" 'taller than I/me'). Such linguistic uncertainties or "cases of doubt" (cf. i.a. Klein 2003, 2009, 2018; Müller & Szczepaniak 2017; Schmitt, Szczepaniak & Vieregge 2019; Stark 2019 as well as the useful collections of data of Duden vol. 9, Taaladvies.net, Språkriktighetsboken etc.) systematically occur also in native speakers and they do not necessarily coincide with the difficulties of second language learners. In present-day German, most grammatical uncertainties occur in the domains of inflection (nominal plural formation, genitive singular allomorphy of strong masc./neut. nouns, inflectional variation of weak masc. nouns, strong/weak adjectival inflection and comparison forms, strong/weak verb forms, perfect auxiliary selection) and word-formation (linking elements in compounds, separability of complex verbs). As for syntax, there are often doubts in connection with case choice (pseudo-partitive constructions, prepositional case government) and agreement (especially due to coordination or appositional structures). This contribution aims to present a contrastive approach to morphological and syntactic uncertainties in contemporary Germanic languages (mostly German, Dutch, and Swedish) in order to obtain a broader and more fine-grained typology of grammatical instabilities and their causes. As will be discussed, most doubts of competent speakers - a problem also for general linguistic theory - can be attributed to processes of language change in progress, to language or variety contact, to gaps and rule conflicts in the grammar of every language or to psycholinguistic conditions of language processing. Our main concerns will be the issues of which (kinds of) common or different critical areas there are within Germanic (and, on the other hand, in which areas there are no doubts), which of the established (cross-linguistically valid) explanatory approaches apply to which phenomena and, ultimately, the question whether the new data reveals further lines of explanation for the empirically observable (standard) variation.
This paper presents an overview of a proposed linearisation grammar, which relies solely upon information residing in lexical heads to constrain word order. Word order information, which encompasses discontinuity as well as linear precedence conditions, is explicitly encoded as part of the feature structure of lexical heads, thus dispensing with a separate LP specification or 'phenogrammatical' layer standardly posited for linearisation. Instead, such lexicon-originated word order constraints are enforced in projections, propagated upwards and accumulated in the compound PHON feature, which represents phonological yields in an underspecified manner. Though limited somewhat in generative capacity, this approach covers the key phenomena that motivated linearisation grammars and offers a simpler alternative to the standard DOM-oriented theory.
The Smurf comics series is, among others, famous for the so-called "smurf language", in which words or parts of words can be replaced by "smurf". We will argue that this "smurfing" has the properties of placeholding. Based on data from German translations of Smurf comics, we will provide a formalization of smurfing in German which can be generalized to a theory of placeholder expressions.
This article proposes a semantics of directional expressions in Norwegian and German, regarded as VP modifiers. The analysis uses Minimal Recursion Semantics, as an integrated part of Matrix-based HPSG grammars. Directional expressions are analyzed as modifying an individual, the 'mover'. Context dependent directionals like here receive a decomposed analysis. Telicity values reflecting various types of directional and locative expressions are computed.
The aim of this paper is to give a unified account of the way that German demonstrative pronouns (henceforth: D-pronouns) like der, die and das behave (a) in sentences where they receive a coreferential interpretation, and (b) in sentences where they receive a covarying interpretation because they are in some way dependent on a quantificational expression – either via direct binding or indirectly, because the value they receive varies with the value that is assigned to the variable bound by an indefinite determiner.
The paper characterizes three different domains in the German middle field which are relevant for the interpretation of an indefinite. It is argued that the so-called 'strong' reading of an indefinite is the basic one and that the 'weak' reading needs special licensing which is mirrored by certain syntactic requirements. Some popular claims about the relation between the position and the interpretation of indefinites as well as some claims about scrambling are discussed and rejected. From the findings also follows that the strong reading of an indefinite is independent of its information status.
The present article is a follow-up study of the investigation of labiodentals in German and Dutch by Hamann & Sennema (2005), where we looked at the perception of the Dutch labiodental three-way contrast by German listeners without any knowledge of Dutch and German learners of Dutch. The results of this previous study suggested that the German voiced labiodental fricative /v/ is perceptually closer to the Dutch approximant /ʋ/ than to the corresponding Dutch voiced labiodental fricative /v/. These perceptual indications are attested by the acoustic findings in the present study. German /v/ has a similar harmonicity median and a similar centre of gravity to Dutch /ʋ/, but differs from Dutch /v/ in these parameters. With respect to the acoustic parameter of duration, German /v/ lies closer to the Dutch /v/ than to the Dutch /ʋ/.
This thesis investigates the acquisition pace and the typical developmental path in eL2 acquisition of selected phenomena of German morphosyntax and semantics and compared them to monolingual acquisition. In addition, the influence of ‘Age of Onset’ and of external factors on eL2 acquisition is examined.
To date, the most studies on eL2 acquisition focused on language production. Based on mostly longitudinal spontaneous speech data of only small number of children, they indicate that eL2 learners acquire sentence structure and subject-verb-agreement faster than monolingual children, whereas the acquisition of case marking causes them more difficulties. Moreover, similar developmental paths to those of monolingual children are claimed. Only several studies examined comprehension abilities in eL2 learners, however overwhelmingly in cross-sectional design. The findings from comprehension studies on telic and atelic verbs, and on wh-questions indicate that eL2 children acquire their target-like interpretation faster than monolingual children. The same acquisition stages towards target-like interpretation like in monolingual acquisition are assumed as well. Taking together, to date, no study exists, that examines comprehension and production abilities in a large group of eL2 learners of German in a longitudinal design.
This thesis extends the previous results by investigating pace of acquisition, impact of factors, and individual developmental paths in a longitudinal design with large groups of participants. Language data of 29 eL2 learners of German (age at T1: 3;7 years, LoE: 10 months) and 45 monolingual German-speaking children (age at T1: 3;7) are examined. The eL2 learners were tested in six test rounds (age at T6: 6;9 years). The monolingual children were tested in five test rounds (are at T5: 5;7). The standardized test LiSe-DaZ (Schulz & Tracy, 2011) was employed to examine children’s language skills.
eL2 learners show a significantly greater rate of change, thus faster acquisition pace, than monolingual children in the following scales: comprehension of telicity, comprehension of wh-questions, production of prepositions, and production of conjunctions. These phenomena are acquired early in monolingual children. No differences regarding acquisition pace between eL2 children and monolingual children are found for comprehension of negation, production of case marking, and production of focus particles. These phenomena are acquired late in monolingual development and involve semantic and pragmatic knowledge. The findings of faster acquisition pace of several phenomena are in line with several studies that reported that eL2 children develop faster than monolingual children.
Independent on whether a phenomenon is acquired early or late, no effects of external factors on eL2 children’s performance are found. These findings indicate that acquisition of core, rule-based phenomena is not sensitive to external factors if the first exposure to L2 takes place around the age of three.
Moreover, eL2 children show the same developmental stages and error types in comprehension of telicity, comprehension of negation, production of matrix and subordinate clauses. This is also independent on how fast they acquire a structure under consideration. Thus, these findings provide a further support for similar developmental paths of eL2 and monolingual children towards target-like comprehension and production.
This study reports on the results of an airflow experiment that measured the duration of airflow and the amount of air from release of a stop to the beginning of a following vowel in stop vowel-sequences of German. The sequences involved coronal, labial and velar voiced and voiceless stops followed by the vocoids /j, i:, ı, ɛ, ʊ, a/. The experiment tested the influence of the three factors voicing of stop, place of stop articulation, and the following vocoid context on the duration and amount of air as possible explanation for assibilation processes. The results show that the voiceless stops are related to a longer duration and more air in the release phase than voiced ones. For the influence of the vocoids, a significant difference could be established between /j/ and all other vocoids for the duration of the release phase. This difference could not be found for the amount of air over this duration. The place of articulation had only restricted influence. Velars resulted in significantly longer duration of the release phase compared to non-velars. A significant difference in amount of air between the places of articulation could not be found.
In Müller, 2005 I provide evidence that suggests that linearization approaches that analyze German clause structure with discontinuous constituents cannot account for the German clause structure in an insightful way. In order to eliminate the very powerful concept of linearization domains and discontinuous constituents from the grammar, analyses of other phenomena which also rely on discontinuous constituents should therefore be revised.
In this paper, I develop an analysis of German depictive secondary predicates that differs from the one suggested in Müller, 2002 by assuming binary branching structures, verb movment, and continuous constituents instead of a linearization approach. Some shortcomings of previous analyses are pointed out and it is shown how linearization constraints regarding depictive predicate and antecedent can be modeled.
In this article, the so-called wh-relative clause construction is investigated. The German wh-relative clauses are syntactically relevant as they show both, root clause and subordinate clause properties. They matter semantically because they are introduced by a wh-anaphor that has to be resolved by an appropriate abstract entity of the matrix clause. Additionally, the wh-relative clause construction is discourse-functionally peculiar since it evokes coherence. Besides these interesting empirical characteristics, whrelatives raise important theoretical questions. It is argued that the standard HPSG theory has to be extended to account for non-restrictive relative clauses in general, and to cope with the particular properties of the wh-relative construction.
This paper presents an incremental approach to verb clusters in German which radically differs from standard HPSG accounts. While the common assumption is that the verbs in subordinate clauses form clusters and accumulate all their valence requirements on a SUBCAT list, the assumption in this paper is that the arguments in verb final clauses are encapsulated incrementally into syntactic and semantic structures before the verbs are attached. The proposed analysis is in line with psycholinguistic findings. A grammar fragment of German demonstrating an implementation of the analysis is presented.
The research reported in this thesis examines two main questions: firstly, which dictionary type, bilingual or monolingual, is most effective for intermediate learners of German for reading comprehension, and secondly, which features make monolingual dictionary definitions effective for these learners. These questions divide the thesis into two parts. The first part compares the effectiveness of the bilingual versus the monolingual dictionary, and the second part compares two different monolingual definition styles.
The research was originally motivated by the observation that Hong Kong Chinese intermediate learners of German prefer to use a German-English bilingual dictionary. Since the translations are presented in the learners' second language, the effectiveness of this bilingual dictionary is doubtful. On the other hand, the learners are reluctant to use the monolingual dictionary, recommended to them by their language teachers. Three investigations were conducted in order to gain more detailed knowledge about the learners' dictionary preference, and the effectiveness of the two dictionary types. The learners' dictionary preference was investigated by means of a survey of ninety-eight foreign language students. The effectiveness of the bilingual and monolingual dictionary for reading comprehension and incidental vocabulary learning was first measured experimentally. The think-aloud method was then used in order to discover factors which determine the effectiveness of the two dictionary types.
The results of the experiment revealed that the German-English bilingual dictionary was not significantly more effective for the learners than the monolingual dictionary. The only monolingual dictionary available for German at that time, however, is linguistically too difficult for this proficiency level. Because of these findings, the research turned to monolingual dictionary definitions with the aim of identifying features that make them accessible to intermediate learners. Based on findings from the first think-aloud study, and principles promoted as user-friendly in the lexicographic literature, new definitions were developed for the target words in the research. These new definitions were compared with those in the existing dictionary. A second think-aloud study was conducted in order to generate hypotheses about individual definition features. These hypotheses were then tested in the second experiment, which was conducted with eighty-six learners of German in Shanghai.
The investigations reveal several features that determine the effectiveness of monolingual definitions for intermediate learners. The findings have theoretical and pedagogical implications. In the theoretical field, some lexicographic principles were recommended that are, unlike previous principles, based on empirical insights into user needs. In the pedagogical field, the research findings provide an empirical basis for the evaluation and recommendation of suitable dictionaries to intermediate learners.
A model of dictionary effectiveness is proposed. This model could help to assess the effectiveness of different information categories in dictionaries for different proficiency levels and different activity contexts. It could also provide lexicographic principles for the design of dictionaries. This research contributes one component to the proposed model: criteria for the effectiveness of definition features for intermediate learners in the activity context of reading.
This paper discusses the behavior of picture NP reflexives in German and English. Taking the analysis of Pollard/Sag (1994) as a starting point, we show that their main conclusion for English, viz. that picture NP reflexives are exempt from Principle A, does not apply to German. As a first step, we present an alternative formulation of Principle A for German. But the principles proposed for German and English do not offer any explanation for the universal behavior of anaphors if they cannot be related to each other. We thusn propose a more general Principle A to hold universally. Individual, language-specific instantiations of this Principle A are derived from determining certain parameter settings.
This questionnaire focuses on control structures that are instantiated by predicates that take a state of affairs (SOA) argument. Noonan (1985) has called these predicates 'complement-taking predicates'; I will use the notion of SOAAtaking predicates (SOAA = state of affairs argument).
Prototypically, complement control is instantiated by certain classes of verbs; however, adjectives (be eager to) and nouns (e.g. nominalizations such as promise) may function as control predicates as well. 'Control' refers to the pattern of argument identification between an argument of the SOAA-taking predicate and an argument of the SOAA-head. In the literature the notion of 'equi deletion' or 'equi-NP deletion' has been used (following Rosenbaum 1967), which refers to structures in which an overt argument of the matrix predicate is identified with a covert argument of the embedded predicate. This questionnaire aims at a cross-linguistic application of the notion of control and thus uses a semantic definition of complement control. It extends the notion of control to other patterns of referential dependency between arguments of a SOAA-taking predicate and of the embedded predicate.
Licenser rules have originally been introduced in Müller (1999) as a part of a grammar based on discontinuous constituents. We propose licenser rules as a means to avoid underspecified empty elements in grammars with continuous constituents. We applied them to a verb movement analysis of the German main clause with right sentence bracket and to complement extraposition. To reduce the number of unnecessary hypotheses, we extended the licenser rule concept with a licenser binding technique. We compared the licenser rule approach to an approach based on underspecified traces with respect to processing performance. In our experiment, the use of licenser rules reduced the parse time by a factor of 13.5.
The study presents a first investigation of two different processes in the L1-acquisition of German: The acquisition of definite pronominal forms and the occurence of finite verbs. The aim of the study is to find out if there are inherent relations between both processes. Inherent relations are understood as developmental relations based on the structural properties which demand a correlated emergence of the finite verb and definite pronominal forms.
This study examines articulatory and acoustic inter-speaker variability in the production of the German vowels /i/, /u/ and /a/. Our subjects are 3 monozygotic twin pairs (2 female and 1 male pair) and 2 dizygotic female twin pairs. All of them were born, raised and are still living in Berlin and see their twin brother or sister regularly. We assume that monozygotic twins that are genetically identical and share the same physiology should be more similar in their articulation than dizygotic twins but that the shared time and social environment of twins, regardless of their genetic similarity, also plays a crucial role in the acoustic similarity of twins. Articulatory measurements were made with EMA (Electromagnetic Articulography) and the target positions of the produced vowels were analyzed. Additionally, the formants F1-F4 of each vowel were measured and compared within the twin pairs. Our data seems to point out the importance of a shared environment and the strong influence of learning over the anatomical identity of the monozygotic twins regarding the production of vowels. But, additional results suggest (1) the impact of physiology on the production of a vowel following a velar consonant and (2) the interaction of physiology and stress in inter-speaker variability.
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 the present paper, I will argue that even in a language like German, where the verb system does not contain a grammaticized aspect distinction, aspectual features do underlie the early form-function-mapping of verb forms in L1-acquisition. Furthermore, it will be argued that it is not only past tense forms that may receive an aspectual interpretation in early child language but also other forms of the verbal input. In the case of German, these are the forms of the present tense paradigm and the past participle. Showing and discussing various piecesof evidence for this assumption should strengthen the "aspect before tense" or "primacy of aspect" hypothesis. In general, the paper aims at a deeper understanding of the hierarchical relation between tense and aspect whereby aspect is the basic category and, therefore, aspectual features are the inevitable starting point of the acquisition of grammar.
I argue for a new type of non-standard constituent in German; a modifier-collocational-cluster. This type of cluster combines (i) a modifier and (ii) a PP from a light-verb construction (or a Funktionsverbgefüge (FVG) as they are known in German) or a bare noun. Such strings are found in German in initial (prefield) position in certain cases of apparent multiple fronting. We are dealing with a syntax-semantics mismatch here since the modifier does not semantically modify the element with which it can first syntactically combine. I show that the modifier is a collocate of both its co-prefield element but also of the verb. I propose a schema which lexically licenses the building of such clusters and I show how we can encode information about what I refer to as collocational selection in the lexical entries of the type of lexemes involved in these multi-word strings. The analysis can be seen as lexical but does not require lexical storage of phrasal elements.
In this contribution we will argue that negative polarity is a collocational phenomenon that does not follow from other properties of the respective lexical elements. With German data as evidence, we will follow a proposal by van der Wouden and treat Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) as collocates which must be licensed by abstract semantic properties of their contexts. Using a collocation module for HPSG, which has been independently motivated for bound words and idioms, we will show how to restrict the occurrence of NPIs to legitimate environments, starting from the negativity hierarchy of licensing environments by Zwarts. Besides a more fine-grained semantic licenser hierarchy, we will establish syntactic licensing domains and general collocational restrictions of NPIs.
Case and event structure
(2001)
I argue in this paper for a novel analysis of case in Icelandic, with implications for case theory in general. I argue that structural case is the manifestation on the noun phrase of features which are semantically interpretable only on verbal projections; thus, Icelandic case does not encode features of noun phrase interpretation, but it is not uninterpretable either; case is properly seen as reflecting (interpretable) tense and aspect features. Accusative case in Icelandic is available when the two subevents introduced in a transitive verb phrase are identified with each other, and dative case is available when the two parts are distinct (thus Icelandic case manifests aktionsart or inner aspect, in partial contrast to Finnish). This analysis bears directly on the theory of feature checking in the Minimalist Program; specifically, it paves the way for a restrictive theory of feature checking in which no features are strictly uninterpretable: all formal features come in interpretable-uninterpretable pairs, and feature checking is the matching of such pairs, driven by legibility conditions at Spell-Out.
Case-matching effects in in German VP coordination and German free relatives have received a fair amount of attention in recent syntactic theorizing and have been cited by Ingria (1990) as a potential challenge to constraint-based and unification-based approaches to syntax such as HPSG and LFG.
This paper considers another construction in question: case-matching phenomena in Bavarian relative clauses, for which Bayer (1983) develops an inherently derivational account. The present paper offers a purely declarative account of Bavarian relative clauses in HPSG and shows that the analytical tools provided by unification-based or constraint-based grammar formalisms completely suffice to provide a fully adequate and comprehensive analysis of the data.
In the German-speaking regions of Switzerland, dialect is spoken by all social groups in most communicative situations, Standard German being used only when prescribed. Swiss dialects rarely appeared in written form before the 1980s, apart from the genre of dialect literature. Due to the growing acceptance of informal writing styles in many European languages, dialect is increasingly employed for written personal communication, in particular in computer-mediated communication (CMC). In Swiss Internet Relay Chat (IRC) rooms, varieties of German are used side by side as all chatters have a command of both standard and dialectal varieties. Depending on the channel, the proportion of dialectal contributions can be as high as 90 percent. The choice of a particular variety depends on both individual preference and on the predominant variety used within a specific thread. In this paper I take a quantitative approach to language variation in IRC and demonstrate how such an approach can help embed qualitative research on code-switching in CMC.
Coherence generally refers to a kind of predicate formation where a verb forms a complex predicate with the head of its infinitival complement. Adjectives taking infinitival complements have also been shown to allow coherence, but the exact conditions for coherence with adjectives appear not to have been addressed in the literature. Based on a corpus-study (supplemented with grammaticality judgements by native speakers) we show that adjectives fall into three semantically and syntactically defined classes correlating with their ability to construct coherently. Non-factive and non-gradable adjectives allow coherence, factive and gradable adjectives do not allow coherence and non-factive and gradable adjectives are tolerated with coherence. On the basis of previous work on coherence in German we argue that coherence allows the infinitival complement of a verb or an adjective to be "split-up", so that the head and a dependent of this head are associated with different information structural functions. In this respect coherence patterns with extraction structures where the extracted constituent has an information structural function different from the constituent from which it is extracted. Following literature on the information structural basis of extraction islands, we show how the lack of coherence with factive adjectives follows from their complements' being information structurally backgrounded, while the infinitival complements of non-factive adjectives tend to a higher fusion with the matrix clause. We also show that coherence is observed with attributive adjectives as well, arguing that coherence is not a distinct verbal property. Finally we provide an analysis of coherence with adjectives within HPSG.
The filling of the 'Vorfeld' in German sentences is basically obligatory; which constituent, however, actually moves to the Vorfeld is underdetermined by syntax and thus governed presumably by discourse factors. Coming from English, there are certain competing expectations one could have: either the topic — more specifically, the backward-looking center — of a sentence is moved to the Vorfeld, or an element in a poset relationship to a set mentioned in the previous discourse, or elements with other functions, such as the exposition of brand-new information or the setting of a scene. A study of a corpus of texts of different stylistic levels showed that indeed all elements expected to appear in the Vorfeld are eligible for Vorfeld-movement, but that there is a strict ranking. Preferred Vorfeld-fillers are phrases containing brand-new information as well as scene-setting elements; only if no such elements are present can elements in a poset relationship with some previously mentioned set be moved to the Vorfeld. Finally, if such elements are not present either, backward-looking centers can move to the Vorfeld. Backward-looking centers have, for this reason, a relatively poor quota among Vorfeld-fillers, namely around 50%.
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.
In this paper, I shall discuss a peculiar coordination construction in German, where the shared subject of the two conjuncts is not found peripheral, but is contained within the first conjunct. Following Höhle (1983), this construction is called "Subject Gaps in Finite/Fronted" clauses (SGF). I shall discuss previous accounts, both symmetric coordination approaches (Frank, 2002; Kathol, 1999), as well as asymmetric adjunction approaches (Büring & Hartmann, 1998). The analysis I shall propose will treat the construction as coordination semantically, yet assume a head complement structure that combines the licensing first conjunct with an incomplete (=slashed) coordinate structure complement. I shall show how this addresses the ATB condition, permits straightforward licensing of the subject gap, and provides better control over the second conjunct, thereby improving over the adjunct analysis.
In this article we present experimental findings on the acceptability of different argument orders in the German middle field. Our study pursues two goals: First, to evaluate a number of surface constraints on German argument order that have been proposed in the literature, and second, to shed new light on how gradient constraints jointly determine sentence acceptability. In four experiments, we investigated the impact of surface constraints relating to animacy, thematic roles, definiteness and case. While we are able to confirm an influence of most constraints under investigation, the resulting constraint hierarchy does not coincide with any hierarchy put forward so far in the literature, to the best of our knowledge. With regard to gradience, our results can be accounted for either by an OT variant incorporating a notion of markedness, or by a fully quantified model using constraint weights. For the latter, however, we provide evidence against uniform penalties associated with constraint violations.
Since Pollard and Sag (1994) it has been assumed that raising involves full structure sharing, whereas a control verb merely shares the content of one of the lower verb's arguments. This has been considered a property of the phenomena, despite the fact that Pollard and Sag (1994) present this syntactic difference as a hypothesis confirmed for Icelandic only. In this paper we discuss the difference between raising and control from the perspective of Dutch and German passives. It has already been shown by Van Noord and Kordoni (2005) that the secondary object passives in these languages are raising structures, in which the case of the raised argument changes. In this paper we provide additional evidence for the raising analysis, and we propose a new analysis, which allows for a uniform account of Dutch and German passives as raising structures. Przepiorkowski and Rosen (2004) show that control may exhibit case transmission; the data presented in this paper shows that raising may not. Therefore, we claim that the distinction between raising and control is found in theta-role assignment. Syntactically they tend to behave differently, but they may also behave in the exact same way.
This paper presents psycholinguistic evidence on the factors governing the resolution of German personal pronouns. To determine the relative influence of linear order versus grammatical function of potential antecedents, two interpretation-preference tasks were designed. Their specific aim was to disentangle salience factors conflated in previous research on pronoun interpretation, such as linear or-der, first mention and topicalization. Experiment 1 tested pronoun resolution to non-sentence-initial position (scrambling) and Experiment 2 tested pronoun resolution to sentence-initial position (topicalization). The results across different verb types and across different syntactic contexts in Experiments 1 and 2 show that grammatical function, yet neither linear order, first mention nor topicalization predicts pronoun resolution in German.
This paper reports the results of a corpus investigation on case conflicts in German argument free relative constructions. We investigate how corpus frequencies reflect the relative markedness of free relative and correlative constructions, the relative markedness of different case conflict configurations, and the relative markedness of different conflict resolution strategies. Section 1 introduces the conception of markedness as used in Optimality Theory. Section 2 introduces the facts about German free relative clauses, and section 3 presents the results of the corpus study. By and large, markedness and frequency go hand in hand. However, configurations at the highest end of the markedness scale rarely show up in corpus data, and for the configuration at the lowest end we found an unexpected outcome: the more marked structure is preferred.
Timișoara is considered the informal capital city of the historical region of Banat. It is the main social, economic and cultural centre in the western part of Romania. During the Industrial Revolution, numerous modern innovations were introduced. It was the first city with street lighting, and the first city in mainland Europe illuminated by electric light. The present investigation is a contribution to the problem of the Romanian technical vocabulary, which took along the time some German words with. A special emphasis is placed on the technical and scientific applications. During my study of the technical language and its terminology I became aware of Termini German origin. Many questions were raised and the interest to find answers grew. Thus came the impulse to bring together the words of German origin, set up a glossary and to analyze them in detail.
This thesis reports three experiments on structural choices during grammatical encoding in monolingual adult speakers of German. Conceptual accessibility, one of the most central notions in language production research, as well as the phenomena of structural and perceptual priming are investigated.
In the first two experiments, a manipulation in terms of inherent conceptual accessibility which has shown universal influences on language production - the factor animacy - is combined with a manipulation making the non-canonical passive structure itself more accessible via structural priming.
Results show that, in addition to a preference for animate entities preceding inanimate entities, speakers can be structurally primed. Structural priming of passive structures led to significantly more passive responses compared to (intransitive) baseline structures.
This holds for monologue settings (Experiment 1) as well as dialogue settings (Experiment 2).
The structural priming effect was stronger in the dialogue setting compared to the monologue setting.
The third experiment combines contexts manipulating the derived conceptual accessibility of one of two entities to be described with a visual cueing manipulation increasing the perceptual accessibility of one of the referents.
Whereas a comprehensive literature review as well as the experimental work conducted within this thesis suggest that animacy and topicalization may exert universal influences on structural choices during language production, perceptual accessibility does not seem to have this potential.
In line with previous cross-linguistic work, perceptual priming in form of an implicit visual cueing manipulation did not show significant effects on speakers' structural choices in German.
These findings contrast with findings obtained for English, suggesting that language-specific characteristics in terms of word order flexibility may influence effcts on grammatical encoding during language production.
Increasing the derived accessibility of one of two referents, however, once again showed significant influences on speakers' structural choices with the topicalization of a patient referent leading to an enhanced production of passive responses.
History films personalize, dramatize and emotionalize historical events and characters. They revive the past by exemplifying it in the present, engage ongoing discourses of history and as a result have proven to be the most influential medium in conveying history to large audiences. History films are regarded as an attractive, motivating and efficient (supplementary) teaching and learning medium in history as well as in foreign language classes. As part of the course "Historical Survey of Germany" (BA German-programme at University Putra Malaysia) history film projects on important periods and events in German history were conducted. The article introduces a film project on World War II and describes the pedagogical approach which aims to develop three core competencies of historical understanding – Content Knowledge, Historical Empathy/Perspective Recognition and Narrative Analysis. It discusses selected general findings provided as qualitative data in group and individual assignments. While the responses to questions related to Content Knowledge and Narrative Analysis show that students achieved higher competency levels, the participants showed shortcomings in the rational examination of historical characters, their perspectives and motivations for their actions. Time, practice and guidance can be identified as key factors in developing historical literacy competencies further.
Dialectal variation in german 3-verb clusters : a surface-oriented optimality theoretic account
(2004)
We present data from an empirical investigation on the dialectal variation in the syntax of German 3-verb clusters, consisting of a temporal auxiliary, a modal verb, and a predicative verb. The ordering possibilities vary greatly among the dialects. Some of the orders that we found occur only under particular stress assignments. We assume that these orders fulfil an information structural purpose and that the reordering processes are changes only in the linear order of the elements which is represented exclusively at the surface syntactic level, PF (Phonetic Form). Our Optimality theoretic account offers a multifactorial perspective on the phenomenon.
German dialects vary in which of the possible orders of the verbs in a 3-verb cluster they allow. In a still ongoing empirical investigation that I am undertaking together with Tanja Schmid, University of Stuttgart (Schmid and Vogel (2004)) we already found that each of the six logically possible permutations of the 3-verb cluster in (1) can be found in German dialects.
Pluralization strategies of monolingual German children aged 3-6, median 4;2 (N = 810), and adults aged 18-96, median 24;0 (N = 582), were compared on the basis of eight nonce nouns from the language test SETK 3-5. Differences between younger and older Germans resembled previously described differences between German and immigrant pre-schoolers for most aspects, e.g., use of fewer plural allomorphs (types), more errors in umlauting, and more avoidance strategies in the linguistically weaker groups. However, both German children and adults demonstrated the same universal frequency- and phonology-based pluralization patterns. Surprisingly, ungrammatical plural forms were equally frequent in both children’s and adults' answers.
In German, the subject usually precedes the object (SO order), but, under certain discourse conditions, the object is allowed to precede the subject (OS order). This paper focuses on main clauses in which either the subject or a discourse-given object occurs in clause-initial position. Two acceptability experiments show that OS sentences with a given object are generally acceptable, but the precise degree of acceptability varies both with the object‘s referential form (demonstrative objects leading to higher acceptability than other types of objects) and with formal properties of the subject (pronominal subjects leading to higher acceptability than non-pronominal subjects). For SO sentences, acceptability was reduced when the object was a d-pronoun, which contrasts with the high acceptability of OS sentences with a d-pronoun object. This finding was explored in a third acceptability experiment comparing d-pronouns in subject and object function. This experiment provides evidence that a reduction in acceptability due to a prescriptive bias against d-pronouns is suspended when the d-pronoun occurs as object in the prefield. We discuss the experimental results with respect to theories of German clause structure that claim that OS sentences with different information-structural properties are derived by different types of movement.
This article analyses the German discourse particle wohl 'I suppose', 'presumably' as a syntactic and semantic modifier of the sentence types declarative and interrogative. It is shown that wohl does not contribute to the propositional, i.e. descriptive content of an utterance. Nor does it trigger an implicature. The proposed analysis captures the semantic behaviour of wohl by assuming that it moves to SpecForceP at LF, from where it can modify the sentence type operators in Force0 in compositional fashion. Semantically, a modification with wohl results in a weaker commitment to the proposition expressed in declaratives and in a request for a weaker commitment concerning the questioned proposition in interrogatives. Cross-linguistic evidence for a left-peripheral position of wohl (at LF) comes from languages in which the counterpart of wohl occurs in the clausal periphery overtly. Overall, the analysis sheds more light on the semantic properties of the left periphery, in particular of the functional projection ForceP.
Reduction and deletion processes occur regularly in conversational speech. A segment that is affected by such reduction and deletion processes in many Germanic languages (e.g., Dutch, English, German) is /t/. There are similarities concerning the factors that influence the likelihood of final /t/ to get deleted, such as segmental context. However, speakers of different languages differ with respect to the acoustic cues they leave in the speech signal when they delete final /t/. German speakers usually lengthen a preceding /s/ when they delete final /t/. This article investigates to what extent German listeners are able to reconstruct /t/ when they are presented with fragments of words where final /t/ has been deleted. It aims also at investigating whether the strategies that are used by German depend on the length of /s/, and therefore whether listeners are using language-specific cues. Results of a forced-choice segment detection task suggest that listeners are able to reconstruct deleted final /t/ in about 45% of the times. The length of /s/ plays some role in the reconstruction, however, it does not explain the behavior of German listeners completely.
Dutch nominalised infinitives have been notoriously difficult to analyse, partly because they seem to show mixed verbal and nominal properties interspersed across the structure. In this paper, it is argued that at least two types of such infinitives should be distinguished, one which contains a high level of verbal functional structure, and one that differs at least in not projecting TP. On the basis of this distinction it is possible to show that Dutch nominalised infinitives have much more predictable properties than could previously be identified. They show evidence of conforming to a model of analysing mixed categories in terms of category switch within the constituent. In order to account for the seemingly interspersed nature of nominal and verbal properties in Dutch nominalised infinitives I propose that Dutch of-phrases (van-phrases) may merge inside the VP, provided they have access to nominal functional structure for feature checking. I will show that if D° is filled by a special type of non-deictic demonstratives van-phrases may even occur in SpecDP.
This paper deals with the emergence of verb morphology in one German child up to the time mini-paradigms occur in the data. I will focus on the role of protomorphology as a transitional stage between rote learning and the productive use of morphological distinctions.
This paper reports results from a series of experiments that investigated whether semantic and/or syntactic complexity influences young Dutch children’s production of past tense forms. The constructions used in the three experiments were (i) simple sentences (the Simple Sentence Experiment), (ii) complex sentences with CP complements (the Complement Clause Experiment) and (iii) complex sentences with relative clauses (the Relative Clause Experiment). The stimuli involved both atelic and telic predicates. The goal of this paper is to address the following questions.
Q1. Does semantic complexity regarding temporal anchoring influence the types of errors that children make in the experiments? For example, do children make certain types of errors when a past tense has to be anchored to the Utterance Time (UT), as compared to when it has to be anchored to the matrix topic time (TT)?
Q2. Do different syntactic positions influence children’s performance on past-tense production? Do children perform better in the Simple Sentence Experiment compared to complex sentences involving two finite clauses (the Complement Clause Experiment and the Relative Clause Experiment)? In complex sentence trials, do children perform differently when the CPs are complements vs. when the CPs are adjunct clauses? (Lebeaux 1990, 2000)
Q3. Do Dutch children make more errors with certain types of predicate (such as atelic predicates)? Alternatively, do children produce a certain type of error with a certain type of predicates (such as producing a perfect aspect with punctual predicates)? Bronckart and Sinclair (1973), for example, found that until the age of 6, French children showed a tendency to use passé composé with perfective events and simple present with imperfective events; we will investigate whether or not the equivalent of this is observed in Dutch.
This paper discusses recent LFG proposals on resultative and benefactive constructions. I show that neither resultative nor benefactive constructions are fully fixed and that this flexibility requires traces or a stipulation of constructional templates at several unrelated places in the grammar, something that is not necessary in lexical approaches. A second part of the paper deals with the active/passive alternation and shows that language-internal generalizations are missed if constraints are assumed to be contributed by phrase structure rules. A third part examines the parallel constructions in German and shows that cross-linguistic generalizations are not captured by phrasal approaches.
This article examines the expression of natural gender in Icelandic nouns denoting human beings. Particular attention will be paid to the system's symmetry with regards to nouns denoting women and men. Our society consists more or less exactly of half women and half men. One would therefore assume that systems for terms denoting persons would also be symmetrically organised. Yet this assumption could not be further from the truth, and not just in single isolated cases, but in many languages: I will attempt to show that Icelandic has numerous methods for referring to women, but also many barriers and idiosyncrasies.
Glide formation, a process whereby an underlying high front vowel is realized as a palatal glide, is shown to occur only in unstressed prevocalic position in German, and to be blocked by specific surface restrictions such as *ji and *“j. Traditional descriptions of glide formation (including derivational as well as Optimality theoretic approaches) refer to the syllable in order to capture its conditions. The present study illustrates that glide formation (plus the distribution of long and short tense /i/) in German can better be captured in a Functional Phonology account (Boersma 1998) which makes reference to stress instead of the syllable and thus overcomes problems of former approaches.
Glide formation, a process whereby an underlying high front vowel is realized as a palatal glide, is shown to occur only in unstressed prevocalic position in German, and to be blocked by specific surface restrictions such as *ji and *ʁj. Traditional descriptions of glide formation (including derivational as well as Optimality theoretic approaches) refer to the syllable in order to capture its conditions. The present study illustrates that glide formation (plus the distribution of long and short tense /i/) in German can better be captured in a Functional Phonology account (Boersma 1998) which makes reference to stress instead of the syllable and thus overcomes problems of former approaches.
This papers addresses information-structural restrictions on the occurrence of what is known as "multiple fronting" in German. Multiple fronting involves the realization of (what appears to be) more than one constituent in the first position of main clause declaratives, a clause type that otherwise respects the verb-second constraint of German. Relying on a large body of naturally occurring instances of multiple fronting with the surrounding discourse context, we show that in certain contexts, multiple fronting is fully grammatical in German, in contrast to what has sometimes been claimed previously. Examination of this data reveals two different patterns, which we analyze in terms of two distinct constructions, each instantiating a specific pairing of form, meaning and contextual appropriateness.
The present investigation is concerned with German participles II (past participles) as lexical heads of adjuncts.
Within a minimalist framework of sound-meaning correlation, the analysis presupposes a lexicalist conception of morphology and the differentiation of Semantic Form and Conceptual Structure. It is argued that participles II have the same argument structure as the underlying verbs and can undergo passivization, perfectivization and conversion to adjectives. As for the potential of participles to function as modifiers, it is shown that attributive and adverbial participle constructions involve further operations of conversion. Participle constructions are considered as reduced sentences. They do not have a syntactic position for the subject, for an operator (comparable to the relative pronoun in relative clauses) or for an adverbial relator (as in adverbial clauses). The pertinent components are present only in the semantic structure.
Two templates serve the composition of modifiers - including participle constructions - with the modificandum. It is necessary to differentiate between modification which unifies two predicates relating to participants or to situations and frame setting modification where the modifier is given the status of a propositional operator.
The proposed analysis shows that the high degree of semantic underspecification and interpretative flexibility of German participle II constructions resides in the indeterminacy of participles II with respect to voice and perfect, in the absence of certain constituents in the syntactic structure and in the presence of corresponding parameters in the Semantic Form of the participle phrases.
Glottal marking of vowel-initial German words by glottalization and glottal stop insertion were investigated in dependence on speech rate, word type (content vs. function words), word accent, phrasal position and the following vowel. The analysed material consisted of speeches of Konrad Adenauer, Thomas Mann and Richard von Weizsäcker. The investigation shows that not only the left boundary of accented syllables (including phrasal stress boundary) and lexical words favour glottal stops/glottalization, but also that the segmental level appears to have a strong impact on these insertion processes. Specifically, the results show that low vowels in contrast to non-low ones favour glottal stops/glottalization even before non-accented syllables and functional words.
This paper compares the production of different types of direct objects by Portuguese–German and Polish–German bilingual school-aged children in their heritage languages (HLs), Polish and European Portuguese (EP). Given that the two target languages display identical options of object realization, our main research question is whether the two HLs develop in a similar way in bilingual children. More precisely, we aim at investigating whether bilingual children acquiring Polish and EP are sensitive to accessibility and animacy when realizing a direct object in their HL. The results of a production experiment show that this is indeed the case and that the two groups of bilinguals do not differ from each other, although they may overgeneralize null objects or full noun phrases to some extent. We conclude that the bilingual acquisition of object realization is guided by the relevant properties in the target languages and is not influenced by the contact language, German.
The present study aims to investigate how foreign language learners at the German for Academic Purposes (GAP) program at a Brazilian federal university interact in their mother tongue about their motivations to learn a foreign language as well as their motivations to participate in study abroad programs. Data were collected using focus group methodology with three focus groups of six students each (A1, A2 and B1 levels). We chose to analyze the A1 group. We conducted metaphor-led discourse analysis of the data in order to examine metaphors and metonymies, which emerged in the focus group interactions. We were able to identify the presence of systematic metaphors such as learning is hard work and learning is jumping hurdles, intertwined with conceptual metaphors such as education is a journey and difficulties are weights, which point at the motivation for learning verbalized by Brazilian foreign language learners who took part in the study.
How the left-periphery of a wh-relative clause determines its syntactic and semantic relationships
(2004)
This paper discusses a certain class of German relative clauses which are characterized by a wh-expression overtly realized at the left periphery of the clause. While investigating empirical and theoretical issues regarding this class of relatives, it argues that a wh-relative clause relates syntactically to a functionally complete sentential projection and semantically to entities of various kinds that are abstracted from the matrix clause. What is shown is that this grammatical behaviour clearly can be attributed to the properties of the elements positioned at the left of a wh-relative clause. Finally, a lexically-based analysis couched in the framework of HPSG is given that accounts for the data presented.
This study proposes a cross-linguistic, corpus-based, and constructionist analysis of denominal verbs (DNVs) in English, Dutch and German. DNV constructions include various morphological construction types, such as conversion (e.g. English bottle > to bottle), prefixation (e.g. Dutch arm 'arm' > omarmen 'to embrace') and suffixation (e.g. German Katapult 'catapult' > katapultieren 'to catapult'). We investigate the correlation between the distribution of DNV constructions and the typological properties of the languages, focusing on boundary permeability, inflectional complexity, syntactic configurationality and word-class assignment. The study shows that, although the three languages have the same repertoire of DNV constructions at their disposal, a Germanic cline can be detected in their preferences for non-overt vs overt marking of the word-class change. As such, the study highlights the impact of typological factors on the shape of language-specific constructional networks.
In anaphora resolution theory, it has been assumed that anaphora resolution is based on a reversed mapping of antecedent salience and anaphora complexity: minimal complex anaphora refer to maximal salient antecedents. In order to ex-amine whether and by which developmental steps German children gain command of this mapping maxim we conducted an experiment on production and comprehension of intersentential pronouns including the three pronoun types zero, personal, and demonstrative pronoun. With respect to antecedent salience, the experiment varied syntactic role (subject/object) and in/animacy. Six age groups of children (age range from 2;0 to 6;0) and an adult control group has been tested. The hypothesis arising from the mapping maxim is that zero pronoun correlates with more salient antecedents than personal and demonstrative pronoun, the latter correlating with the least salient antecedents. The results are: In production, children first establish the opposition of zero pronoun with animate antecedents vs. demonstrative pronoun with inanimate antecedents. In a next step, syntactic role comes into play and a more complex system opposing the three presented pronoun types is established. In comprehension, however, the effect of pronoun type re-mains weak and antecedent features remain a strong factor in reference choice. However, also adults employ pronoun type and antecedent features. The oldest children and the adults show variation in personal pronoun resolution according to the animacy pattern of the potential antecedents. In case of identical animacy features, the subject is the preferred candidate; in case of distinct animacy features, there is a tendency to choose the object antecedent.
This paper examines the applicability of the combination of data types in a study of German idioms of life with the tools of cognitive metaphor theory. The data sources for conceptual metaphors were mainly metaphors found in the relevant literature. These metaphors are of introspective nature to a great extent. The primary data sources for metaphorical expressions were dictionaries that represent introspective data, too. These data have been complemented by corpus data. The paper discusses the problems of introspective and corpus data raised by the study of German idioms of life. Two case studies demonstrate the advantages of the combination of data and methods.
This study identifies the language learning strategies associated with the achievement of higher levels o f oral proficiency in German for one hundred Irish third level students. It is one of the first studies of this kind to be conducted in Ireland and one of the very few, if any, conducted on third level learners of German. Furthermore, as well as identifying the strategies associated with higher levels of proficiency, the study also investigates how these strategies are used by learners displaying higher and lower levels of proficiency. It then explores the question of how the strategies associated with higher levels of proficiency contribute to the process of proficiency development, and how students perceive them as contributing to this process. Finally, the relationships between learner specific characteristics, strategic behaviour and proficiency levels are assessed. The experimental design combines a quantitative survey with in-depth interviews. The results indicate that orally more proficient students use more strategies more frequently. In particular, they use more cognitive, metacognitive and social strategies. Furthermore, they have a repertoire of approximately ten key strategies which they employ in a structured, purposeful manner and apply to a range of language learning situations. They are convinced that these strategies contribute to the development of proficiency, a view which is borne out by the quantitative findings. Finally, higher levels of motivation and more positive perceptions of personal proficiency levels are strongly associated with higher levels of both strategic behaviour and oral proficiency. These findings have significant theoretical and practical implications. Firstly, they demonstrate the importance of expanding the research framework in studies of this kind beyond the mere identification of the strategies associated with higher proficiency levels. Instead, as in this study, future research should incorporate questions relating to the process of strategy implementation by more and less successful learners and to relationships between the use of particular strategies and the process of foreign language acquisition. Secondly, the findings contribute to our understanding of the strategic behaviour of the orally more proficient student, and in particular the orally more proficient learner of German in an Irish third level context. This understanding relates primarily to the strategies these learners use, the way in which they use them and their attitudes towards their use. Such an understanding forms the basis of successful strategies based instruction in the language classroom.
This thesis investigates the linguistic effects of language contact between French and German in Alsace due to the German annexation of this region during World War II. The turbulent, tug-of-war history of Alsace has constantly challenged the Alsatian people to secure a stable cultural and national identity. This study focuses on understanding the development of the linguistic aspect of this Alsatian identity. My hypothesis is that there was a greater French influence on Alsatian speech after World War II due to the anti-German sentiment provoked by the harsh Nazi policies during the war. To test this hypothesis, this study analyzes and compares the type and regularity of lexical borrowings from French into German and from German into French in Alsatian newspapers in 1945.
In a recent contribution to a long-standing discussion in semantics as to whether the neo-Davidsonian analysis should be extended to stative predicates or not, Maienborn (2004, 2005) proposes to distinguish two types of statives; one of them is said to have a referential argument of the Davidsonian type, the other not. As one of her arguments for making such a distinction, Maienborn observes that manner modification seems to be supported only by certain statives but to be excluded by others (thus linking the issue to the use of manner modification as one major argument in favour of event semantics, cf. Parsons 1990). In this paper, it is argued that the absence of manner modification with Maienborn's second group of statives is actually due to a failure of conceptual construal: modification of a predicate is ruled out whenever its internal conceptual structure is too poor to provide a construal for the modifier; hence, the effects observed by Maienborn reduce to the fact that eventive predicates have a more complex conceptual substructure than stative ones. Hence, the issue of manner modification with statives is shown to be orthogonal to questions of logical form and event semantics. The explanatory power of the conceptual approach is demonstrated with a case study on predicates of light emission, adapting the representation format of Barsalou's (1992) frame model.
The collaborative context of language learning in Teletandem (TELLES; VASSALLO 2006) involves the principles of autonomy, reciprocity and separation of languages, as well as the mediation of the partnerships (in Vygotskian terms). This article aims to discuss the formats of teletandem mediation, by focusing on the strategies used to reconcile the management of interactions (SALOMÃO 2008) through reflective journals in our specific educational context This qualitative investigation is based on the analysis of a corpus of reflective journals produced after teletandem sessions by Brazilian students and the feedback offered by the mediators. The Brazilian participants wrote journal entries after practicing teletandem with speakers of the following foreign languages: English, German, Italian, and Spanish. They address a wide range of topics, covering aspects of technology, foreign language learning, methodological issues, as well as comments on the relationship with their partners. The data suggest great potential of the journals and the feedback for participants, mediators and coordinators to evaluate specific issues of collaborative language learning in the teletandem, as well as other relevant aspects for the pedagogical supervision of the project.
We will provide an analysis of negative concord in sentential negation in three languages, French, Polish and German. The focus of the paper is (1) the typological variation with respect to the realization of negative concord in the three languages under investigation and (2) the treatment of lexical exceptions within the different typological classes. We will propose a unified theory of negative concord which identifies a common core system and adds language-specific constraints which can handle typological variation between languages and lexical exceptions within a given language.
The aim of the present paper is to show how, and to what extent, the standards of critical genetic editions as applied to Goethe's Faust can be attained within a TEI framework. It proposes and argues for the introduction of two separate transcripts: documentary and textual. Despite the apparent disadvantages of multiple encoding, this approach recommends itself for practical reasons (e.g., avoidance of overlapping hierarchies), and it conveniently reflects the idea that any written document must be considered a material object on the one hand and a medium of textual transmission on the other. In the course of the paper, some aspects and problems of chapter 11 of version 2.0.0 of TEI P5 (the definition and use of the elements <line> and <mod> and related issues) will be discussed.
In order to understand the specific structures and features of the German surnames the most important facts about their emergence and history should be outlined and, at the same time, be compared with the Swedish surnames because there are considerable differences (for further details cf. Nubling 1997 a, b). First of all, surnames in Germany emerged rather early, with the first instances occurring in the 11th century in southern Germany; by the 16th century surnames were common all over Germany. Differences are related to geography (from south to north), social class (from the upper to the lower classes) und urban versus rural areas.
Does linguistic rhythm matter to syntax, and if so, what kinds of syntactic decisions are susceptible to rhythm? By means of two recall-based sentence production experiments and two corpus studies – one on spoken and one on written language – we investigated whether linguistic rhythm affects the choice between introduced and un-introduced complement clauses in German. Apart from the presence or absence of the complementiser dass (‘that’), these two sentence types differ with respect to the position of the tensed verb (verb-final/verb-second). Against our predictions, that were based on previously reported rhythmic effects on the use of the optional complementiser that in English, the experiments fail to obtain compelling evidence for rhythmic/prosodic influences on the structure of complement clauses in German. An overview of pertinent studies showing rhythmic influences on syntactic encoding suggests these effects to be generally restricted to syntactic domains smaller than a clause. We assume that, in the course of language production, initially, clause level syntactic projections are specified; their specification is in fact the prerequisite for phonological encoding to start. Consequently, prosodic effects may only touch upon the lower level categories that are to be integrated into the clausal projection, but not upon the syntactic makeup of the higher order projection itself.
Recent work on argument selection couched in a lexical decomposition approach (Ehrich & Rapp 2000) postulates different linking properties for verbs and nouns, challenging current views on argument inheritance. In this paper, I show that the different behavior with respect to verbal and nominal linking observed for Present-Day German does not carry over to ung-nominals in Early New High German. Deverbal nouns and corresponding verbs rather behave alike with respect to argument linking. I shall argue that this change is motivated by the growing rift between ung-nominals and their verbal bases both focussing on different parts oftheir lexicosemantic structure in Present-Day German. Evidence for the verb-like behavior of ung-nominals in Early New High German comes from the regular meaning relation between verbs and corresponding derived nouns, the actional properties of event-denoting nouns, and the patterning of ung-nominals with nominalized infinitives. Even their syntactic behavior reflects the verbal character of ung-nominals during that period of the German language. The diachronic facts can be accounted for in a straightforward way once we adopt a lexical decomposition approach to argument selection.
In this paper, we deal with the semantic interaction between ung-nominalizations of different event types and temporal prepositions like wiihrend 'during', vor 'before', nach 'after', bis 'until' and seit 'since'. According to the two-level-approach to selnantics (Bierwisch 1983, Bierwisch / Lang 1989), we will argue that the meaning of ten~poral prepositions is determined on the level of semantic form (SF). When combined with an event nominal, the period in time required by the preposition has to be inferred on the level of conceptual structure (CS). Very often, the exact nature of the period in time is determined by pragmatic factors. There are, however, some important restrictions to this inference procedure which rely on the event noun's Aktionsart. In Ehrich/Rapp (2000), it was claimed that eventive ungnominals inherit the Aktionsart of their base verb. This assumption receives strong support by the data presented in this paper.
It is a much-debated issue whether one should assume separate lexical entries for participles used in passive and perfect constructions or whether there is just one lexical entry that is used in different ways depending on whether a passive or perfect auxiliary is present in the clause.
In previous work I criticized approaches trying to analyze the passive with one lexical entry for making empirically wrong predictions and suggested a lexical-rule based approach were two different lexical items for the participle are licensed.
In this paper I show how Heinz and Matiasek's (1994) formalizations of Haider's (1986) ideas can be extended and modified in a way that both modal infinitives and control constructions can be captured correctly. The suggested analysis needs only one lexical item for participles, base form infinitives, and zu infinitives irrespective of their usage in active or passive like structures.
(Ingria 1990)'s claims that both feature neutrality, where a sign acts in a sentence as though it simultaneously had multiple values for a single feature, and the coordination of unlike categories, where the features of two or more conjuncts differ from each other, pose fundamental problems for unification-based theories of grammar do not apply to constraint-based theories like HPSG.
New types can be introduced into the hierarchy of appropriate values for any given feature that directly represent neutralizations and coordinations. In this manner, feature neutralization and the coordination of unlikes are seen to be different aspects of the same problem: how to determine the values of a coordinate mother's features from those of its conjuncts.
The present paper investigates a certain subset of clause linkage phenomena and develops a constraint-based account to the empirical fact that clauses need to be distinguished with respect to their degree of integratedness into a potential matrix clause. Considering as example German, it is shown that the generally assumed twofold distinction between main and subordinate clauses (or root and embedded clauses) does not suffice to deal with the presented data. It is argued that the discussed linkage phenomena originate from syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of the clauses involved, and should hence be encoded in grammar.
On predication
(2009)
This paper discusses copula constructions in English, German, and Danish and argues that a uniform analysis of all copula constructions is inappropriate. I provide evidence from German that there should be a raising variant of the copula in addition to an identificational copula. A unary schema is provided that maps referential NPs that can be used as arguments onto predicational NPs. Data from Danish shows that predicational NPs can be subjects in specificational structures. An account for such specificational structures is provided and the different behaviour of predicational and specificational structures with regard to question tags is explained. A similar contrast can be found in German left dislocation structures, which follows from the assumptions made in this paper.
A modified treatment of complex predicate formation allows for a reduction of selectional features (that is abolishing of xcomp or vcomp) and for a uniform treatment of predicational phrases in copula constructions and resultative secondary predicates. This yields an account for constituent order variants that remained unexplained by earlier analyses.
In the following, we will discuss the acquisition of plural forms in German from the unified perspective of the two, in our opinion compatible, approaches, on the basis of a longitudinal data sample of eight children. There are at least six recordings of each child, all of whom are girls. Together, the data cover the acquisition period from 1;11 to 2;10. One may thus anticipate that the data sample under investigation reflects the transition from purely lexical memorization to the acquisition of regularities or patterns.
This paper discusses a variant of German V2 declaratives sharing properties with both subordinate relative clauses and main clauses. I argue that modal subordination failure helps decide between two rivaling accounts for this construction. Thus, a hypotactic analysis involving syntactic variable sharing must be preferred over parataxis plus anaphora resolution. The scopal behavior of the construction will be derived from its 'proto-assertional force,' which it shares with similar 'embedded root' constructions.
In this paper, a class of sentences in German is discussed that are often called whexclamatives. […]
So called wh-exclamatives can be roughly characterized as wh-clauses that are embedded under exclamative predicates like erstaunt sein/to be amazed at [...] or that are used as the basis for an exclamation [...].
One can ask if wh-exclamatives are a clause-type of their own, in particular, whether they are different from wh-clauses in question environments, that is under question predicates like to ask or to wonder or used as questions. It is often assumed that wh-clauses in exclamative contexts, both embedded and unembedded, are indeed different from wh-clauses in interrogative or question environments [...], at least regarding their semantical type, see for example Elliot (1971, 1974), Grimshaw (1979, 1981), Zaefferer (1983, 1984), Altmann (1 987, 1993). […]
I assume with Grimshaw (1979) that so called wh-exclamatives and wh-interrogatives are alike with respect to their syntactical properties. In addition, I think that they are also alike semantically. So, what I like to do here is to evaluate the following hypothesis:
So-called wh-exclamatives are of the same semantical type as wh-interrogatives.
The focus of this paper is the perspectivization of thematic roles generally and the recipient role specifically. Whereas perspective is defined here as the representation of something for someone from a given position (Sandig 1996: 37), perspectivization refers to the verbalization of a situation in the speech generation process (Storrer 1996: 233). In a prototypical act of giving, for example, the focus of perception (the attention of the external observer) may be on the person who gives (agent), the transferred object (patient) or the person who receives the transferred object (recipient). The languages of the world provide differing linguistic means to perspectivize such an act of giving, or better: to perspectivize the participants of such an action. In this article, the linguistic means of three selected continental West Germanic languages –German, Dutch and Luxembourgish– will be taken into consideration, with an emphasis on the perspectivization of the recipient role.
German linking elements are sometimes classified as inflectional affixes, sometimes as derivational affixes, and in any case as morphological units with at least seven realisations (e.g. -s-, -es-, -(e)n-, -e-). This article seeks to show that linking elements are hybrid elements situated between morphology and phonology. On the one hand, they have a clear morphological status since they occur only within compounds (and before a very small set of suffixes) and support the listener in decoding them. On the other hand, they also have to be analysed on the phonological level, as will be shown in this article. Thus, they are marginal morphological units on the pathway to phonology (including prosodics). Although some alloforms can sometimes be considered former inflectional endings and in some cases even continue to demonstrate some inflectional behaviour (such as relatedness to gender and inflection class), they are on their way to becoming markers of ill-formed phonological words. In fact, linking elements, above all the linking -s-, which is extremely productive, help the listener decode compounds containing a bad phonological word as their first constituent, such as Geburt+s+tag ‘birthday’ or Religion+s+unterricht ‘religious education’. By marking the end of a first constituent that differs from an unmarked monopedal phonological word, the linking element aids the listener in correctly decoding and analysing the compound. German compounds are known for their length and complexity, both of which have increased over time—along with the occurrence of linking elements, especially -s-. Thus, a profound instance of language change can be observed in contemporary German, one indicating its typological shift from syllable language to word language.
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.
We show how the variation in the passive in Danish, English, and German can be accounted for. The dimensions in which the three languages differ are
- the existence of a morphological passive in Danish
- a subject requirement in Danish and English resulting in expletive insertion in impersonal
- constructions in Danish and absence of impersonal passives in English the possibility to promote the secondary object to subject in Danish
The differences are accounted for by differences in the structural/lexical case distinction and by mapping processes that insert expletives in Danish. The passive in general is accounted for by a lexical rule that is uniform across languages and hence captures the generalization regarding passive.
This paper is a follow up on Müller, 2006. It contains some comments on suggestions about the interaction of phrasal Constructions with constituent order that Adele Goldberg made at various occasions. In addition the paper discusses various HPSG analyses of particle verbs that assume lexical representations including phonologically specified parts of particle verb lexical entries. A recent phrasal analysis of resultatives (Haugereid, 2007) is discussed as well and it is pointed out that control constructions pose problems for phrasal analyses that do not assume empty elements but require that the subject is realized in a phrasal configuration.
Ever since Chomsky's "On Wh-Movement" (Chomsky 1977) it has been assumed that topicalization and wh-question formation can be analyzed as instances of the same operation. Leaving certain features aside, this proposal carries over to the analysis of unbounded dependency constructions in HPSG since structurally, topicalization does not differ from wh-question formation in the analysis suggested in Pollard & Sag (1994: 157-163). In the present paper, we challenge this assumption and suggest an alternative analysis of unbounded dependency constructions. Here, topicalization and wh-question formation are considered as structurally different at least in certain languages. They may, however, be structurally identical in other languages. This difference is empirically reflected in patterns of relative clause extraposition. As has been pointed out by Culicover & Rochemont (1990: 28), an extraposed relative clause must not take an antecedent contained in a VP if the VP is topicalized but the relative clause is not.
In this paper we investigate German idioms which contain phraseologically fixed clauses (PCl). To provide a comprehensive HPSG theory of PCls we extend the idiom theory of Soehn 2006 in such a way that it can distinguish different degrees of regularity in idiomatic expressions. An in-depth analysis of two characteristic PCls shows how our two-dimensional theory of idiomatic expressions can be applied and illustrates the scope of the theory.
This paper deals with restitutive and repetitive 'wieder'. Proceeding from the assumption that adverbial adjuncts have base positions which reflect their semantic relations to the rest of the sentence, it is shown that repetitive 'wieder' belongs to the class of event adverbs minimally c-commanding the base positions of all arguments whereas restitutive 'wieder' has many properties in common with process adjuncts, minimally c-commanding the final verb.
This paper deals with expletives that are inserted into clauses for structural reasons. We will focus on the Germanic languages Danish, German, and Yiddish. In Danish and Yiddish expletives are inserted in preverbal position in certain wh-clauses: In Danish such an insertion is observed when the subject is locally extracted from an SVO configuration in non-assertive clauses. In Yiddish wh-clauses are formed from a wh-phrase and a V2 clause. If no element would be fronted in the embedded V2 clause, an expletive is inserted in non-assertive clauses in order to meet the V3 requirement for embedded clauses. In addition to embedded wh-clauses, declarative V2 clauses also allow the insertion of an expletive. In Danish the expletive fills the subject position and is not necessarily fronted. In German and Yiddish the expletive has to occur in fronted position. In contrast to Danish and Yiddish, German does not insert expletives into embedded wh-clauses. They are inserted only into declarative V2 clauses in order to fulfill the V2 requirement without having to front another constituent. In this paper we try to provide an account that captures the commonalities between the three languages while being able to account for the differences.
This paper presents two experimental studies investigating the processing of presupposed content. Both studies employ the German additive particle auch (too). In the first study, participants were given a questionnaire containing bi-clausal, ambiguous sentences with 'auch' in the second clause. The presupposition introduced by auch was only satisfied on one of the two readings of the sentence, and this reading corresponded to a syntactically dispreferred parse of the sentence. The prospect of having the auch-presupposition satisfied made participants choose this syntactically dispreferred reading more frequently than in a control condition. The second study used the self-paced-reading paradigm and compared the reading times on clauses containing auch, which differed in whether the presupposition of auch was satisfied or not. Participants read the clause more slowly when the presupposition was not satisfied. It is argued that the two studies show that presuppositions play an important role in online sentence comprehension and affect the choice of syntactic analysis. Some theoretical implications of these findings for semantic theory and dynamic accounts of presuppositions as well as for theories of semantic processing are discussed.
Attributive participle constructions in German behave like adjectives in terms of inflection and position, but keep their verbal arguments. They can be extended by adjuncts or arguments and these extended attributive present participles mainly occur in written language (Weber, 1994). As the same content can also be expressed in a relative clause (RC), I compare both constructions in order to find out under which conditions a participle construction could lead to processing difficulties and how this relates to RC processing.
Based on previous assumptions for production (e.g. Weber, 1971; Fabricius-Hansen, 2016), three potential factors on the comprehension of prenominal modifiers and RCs are investigated: modifier length, the internal structure and multiple levels of embedding. The hypotheses for an effect on modifier length are mainly based on two processing accounts that make opposite predictions under specific circumstances: memory-based accounts such as the dependency locality theory (DLT) (e.g. Gibson, 2000) and expectation-based accounts such as surprisal (e.g. Levy, 2008). An increase in modifier length results in more intervening material between determiner and noun for the participle construction, contrary to RCs where these elements are adjacent. This separation of the DP could increase memory load. Therefore, longer participles would slow down processing of the noun, while there should be no difference for RCs. Two acceptability judgment experiments showed a tendency for longer participle phrases to receive lower ratings. The modifier length was further investigated in online processing. Contrary to the predicted locality effect, self-paced reading data reveals an anti-locality effect for participle phrases, with lower RTs on the noun when additional material was present inside the modifier. This experiment was followed up by an eye-tracking experiment which replicated the anti-locality effect, but at the participle instead at the noun.
The second factor that was investigated is the argument structure of the participle (or RC verb). My hypothesis is that more “prototypical” adjectives in terms of syntactic structure and semantics are more acceptable and easier to process. Attributive participles are considered hybrids between verbs and adjectives (e.g. Fuhrhop & Teuber, 2000; L¨ubbe & Rapp, 2011) due to their modifier internal verbal function, but adjectival position and agreement with the noun. This double role could lead to difficulties, in particular with a more complex verbal structure. Therefore, the prediction was that the presence of an accusative object inside a participle phrase would lead to lower acceptability ratings and higher reading times in online processing. In the first two acceptability experiments, this prediction was borne out. In addition, an SPR experiment was conducted which manipulated the presence of either an accusative object or adjunct for participles (of verbs that could be used intransitively and transitively) and the corresponding RCs. The experiment showed an effect of the presence of an accusative object on the participle, with higher reading times if an object was present, compared to an adjunct. No such difference was found for the RC verb, which indicates that only participles are processed more slowly when there is an accusative object. An alternative explanation for this finding is the inherent imperfective aspect of the present participle: a direct object could change the event structure in such a way that the aspect no longer matches.
The third factor I investigate is an effect of double embedding on the acceptability of participle phrases and RCs. While double embedded participles are rated lower than double embedded RCs, there is a smaller decrease from single to double embedding for participles than for RCs, contrary to the predictions calculated by the metric of the DLT.
Overall, the results provide evidence for experience-based processing, but they cannot be explained by either memory- or experience-based accounts alone. The effect concerning the presence of an accusative object suggest that properties of the participle distinguish the construction from RCs and affect its processing. The thesis suggests that the latter effect needs to be investigated further in future research. Furthermore, the findings have implications for the role of attributive present participles in German and for hypotheses about similar constructions in other languages.
We present a method for automatic RMRS semantics construction from dependency structures, following the semantic algebra of Copestake et al. (2001). We have applied this method to a subset of the TIGER Dependency Bank for German (Forst et al., 2004) to obtain a semantic treebank for (HPSG) parser evaluation. We describe the semantics construction mechanism and give evaluation figures from manual validation of the treebank. These indicate high precision of the automatic RMRS construction process.
This paper discusses a special kind of syntax-semantics mismatch: a noun with a relative clause is interpreted as if it were a complement clause. An analysis in terms of Lexical Resource Semantics is developed which provides a uniform account for ''normal'' relative clauses and for the discussed type of relative clause.
We present the results of an experimental study which targets prosodic correlates of subclausal quotation marks. We found that written sentences containing passages enclosed by quotation marks were read aloud in a manner that significantly differs in prosody from spoken realizations of corresponding disquoted counterparts. However, we also observed that such prosodic marking of subclausal quotation wasn't strong enough to survive subsequent back-translation into written language: there was no correlation between the presence/absence of quotation marks in the original written examples, and the presence/absence of quotation marks in corresponding back-translations from oral renditions. We investigated three different kinds of uses of quotation marks and found no systematic difference between them with respect to prosodic marking.
Identity effects in phonology are deviations from regular phonological form (i.e. canonical patterns) which are due to the relatedness between words. More specifically, identity effects are those deviations which have the function to enhance similarity in the surface phonological form of morphologically related words. In rule-based generative phonology the effects in question are described by means of the cycle. For example, the stress on the second syllable in cond[ɛ]nsation as opposed to the stresslessness of the second syllable in comp[ǝ]nsation is described by applying the stress rules initially to the sterns thereby yielding condénse and cómpensàte. Subsequently the stress rules are reapplied to the affixed words with the initial stress assignment (i.e. stress on the second syllable in condense, but not in compensate) leaving its mark in the output form (cf. Chomsky and Halle 1968). A second example are words like lie[p]los 'unloving' in German, which shows the effects of neutralization in coda position (i.e. only voiceless obstruents may occur in coda position) even though the obstruent should 'regularly' be syllabified in head position (i.e. bl is a wellformed syllable head in German). Here the stern is syllabified on an initial cycle, obstruent devoicing applies (i.e. lie[p]) and this structure is left intact when affixation applies (i.e. lie[p ]Ios ) (cf. Hall 1992). As a result the stern of lie[p]los is identical to the base lie[p].
Quantitative approaches to linguistic variation in IRC : implications for qualitative research
(2008)
Qualitative analysis of code choice, code switching, and language style in Internet Relay Chat (IRC) can shed light on functional-pragmatic aspects of the use of different linguistic varieties. However, in a qualitative analysis, the status of varieties within a channel or for a single chatter can only be guessed at. Moreover, qualitative research on linguistic variation in IRC often fails to generalize its findings due to a restricted database or a restricted view of a database. This article introduces an approach that allows for embedding of qualitative research within a quantitative research design. The quantitative method presented here enables general statements to be made about the use of varieties or the usage of certain chatters in a chat channel. The approach is exemplified with data from Swiss IRC channels, in which Swiss German dialects and standard German are used side by side. A large corpus is analyzed for static and dynamic aspects of dialect share. It is argued that this quantitative approach can provide a background for qualitative analysis and facilitate the selection process of relevant data required for qualitative analysis.
This paper presents a new analysis of quirky subjects according to which quirky subjects bear multiple grammatical relations and hence differ syntactically from regular subjects. This contrasts with the standard analysis of quirky subjects according to which quirky subjects are regular subjects bearing lexical case and therefore differ only morphologically from regular subjects. Based on the behavior of quirky subjects in Faroese and German, I argue that the syntactic account is superior. Faroese shows that the case borne by a quirky subject is not lexical, whereas German shows that quirky subjects are not regular subjects to begin with. The behavior of quirky subjects in Icelandic, on which the standard analysis is based, is argued to be the result of a morphosyntactic peculiarity of Icelandic.