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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 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.