@phdthesis{Ramelli2015,
  author    = {Ramelli, Christian},
  title     = {Die Rheinische Verlaufsform im rheinfr{\"a}nkischen Dialekt},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-102797},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {x, 260},
  year      = {2015},
  abstract  = {Diese Arbeit befasst sich mit der Rheinischen Verlaufsform (RV) im rheinfr{\"a}nkischen Dialekt. Nach dem DUDEN handelt es sich bei der RV um eine Konstruktion, die aus dem Kopulaverb sein und einer PP mit am und nominalisiertem Infinitiv besteht und dem Ausdruck von progressivem Aspekt dient. Die vorliegenden Arbeiten zur RV besch{\"a}ftigen sich im Wesentlichen entweder mit der Auspr{\"a}gung der Konstruktion im Standarddeutschen (z.B. Reimann (1999), Krause (2002), R{\"o}del (2003), R{\"o}del (2004a), R{\"o}del (2004b), van Pottelberge (2004)) oder im Ripuarischen (z.B. Andersson (1989), Bhatt \& Schmidt (1993)) und kommen zu unterschiedlichen Ergebnissen bez{\"u}glich der Verwendungsm{\"o}glichkeiten und des Aufbaus der Konstruktion, insbesondere des Status des Infinitivs in der Verlaufsform. Hauptziel dieser Arbeit ist es, zu zeigen, dass sich die Grammatikalisierung der Verlaufsform von der im DUDEN beschriebenen Konstruktion zu einer analytischen Verbform entlang eines festen Grammatikalisierungspfades vollzieht und die entsprechenden Teilschritte bei der Entwicklung zu einer analytischen Verbform herauszuarbeiten. Auf dieser Grundlage wird in der Arbeit dargestellt, wie sich mittels eines geeigneten Sets an Indikatoren der Grammatikalisierungsgrad der Verlaufsform in einem Dialektraum oder einem diatopischen Register konkret feststellen l{\"a}sst.},
  language  = {de}
}
@phdthesis{Mucha2015,
  author    = {Mucha, Anne},
  title     = {Temporal interpretation and cross-linguistic variation},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-85935},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  pages     = {x, 249},
  year      = {2015},
  abstract  = {This thesis investigates temporal and aspectual reference in the typologically unrelated African languages Hausa (Chadic, Afro-Asiatic) and Medumba (Grassfields Bantu). It argues that Hausa is a genuinely tenseless language and compares the interpretation of temporally unmarked sentences in Hausa to that of morphologically tenseless sentences in Medumba, where tense marking is optional and graded. The empirical behavior of the optional temporal morphemes in Medumba motivates an analysis as existential quantifiers over times and thus provides new evidence suggesting that languages vary in whether their (past) tense is pronominal or quantificational (see also Sharvit 2014). The thesis proposes for both Hausa and Medumba that the alleged future tense marker is a modal element that obligatorily combines with a prospective future shifter (which is covert in Medumba). Cross-linguistic variation in whether or not a future marker is compatible with non-future interpretation is proposed to be predictable from the aspectual architecture of the given language.},
  language  = {en}
}
@phdthesis{Kuehnast2010,
  author    = {Kuehnast, Milena},
  title     = {Processing negative imperatives in Bulgarian : evidence from normal, aphasic and child language},
  url       = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-45826},
  school      = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam},
  year      = {2010},
  abstract  = {The incremental nature of sentence processing raises questions about the way the information of incoming functional elements is accessed and subsequently employed in building the syntactic structure which sustains interpretation processes. The present work approaches these questions by investigating the negative particle ne used for sentential negation in Bulgarian and its impact on the overt realisation and the interpretation of imperative inflexion, bound aspectual morphemes and clitic pronouns in child, adult and aphasic language. In contrast to other Slavic languages, Bulgarian negative imperatives (NI) are grammatical only with imperfective verbs. We argue that NI are instantiations of overt aspectual coercion induced by the presence of negation as a temporally sensitive sentential operator. The scope relation between imperative mood, negation, and aspect yields the configuration of the imperfective present which in Bulgarian has to be overtly expressed and prompts the imperfective marking of the predicate. The regular and transparent application of the imperfectivising mechanism relates to the organisation of the TAM categories in Bulgarian which not only promotes the representation of fine perspective shifts but also provides for their distinct morphological expression. Using an elicitation task with NI, we investigated the way 3- and 4-year-old children represent negation in deontic contexts as reflected in their use of aspectually appropriate predicates. Our findings suggest that children are sensitive to the imperfectivity requirement in NI from early on. The imperfectivisation strategies reveal some differences from the target morphological realisation. The relatively low production of target imperfectivised prefixed verbs cannot be explained with morphological processing deficits, but rather indicates that up to the age of five children experience difficulties to apply a progressive view point to accomplishments. Two self-paced reading studies present evidence that neurologically unimpaired Bulgarian speakers profit from the syntactic and prosodic properties of negation during online sentence comprehension. The imperfectivity requirement negation imposes on the predicate speeds up lexical access to imperfective verbs. Similarly, clitic pronouns are more accessible after negation due to the phono-syntactic properties of clitic clusters. As the experimental stimuli do not provide external discourse referents, personal pronouns are parsed as object agreement markers. Without subsequent resolution, personal pronouns appear to be less resource demanding than reflexive clitics. This finding is indicative of the syntax-driven co-reference establishment processes triggered through the lexical specification of reflexive clitics. The results obtained from Bulgarian Broca's aphasics show that they exhibit processing patterns similar to those of the control group. Notwithstanding their slow processing speed, the agrammatic group showed no impairment of negation as reflected by their sensitivity to the aspectual requirements of NI, and to the prosodic constraints on clitic placement. The aphasics were able to parse the structural dependency between mood, negation and aspect as functional categories and to represent it morphologically. The prolonged reaction times (RT) elicited by prefixed verbs indicate increasing processing costs due to the semantic integration of prefixes as perfectivity markers into an overall imperfective construal. This inference is supported by the slower RT to reflexive clitics, which undergo a structurally triggered resolution. Evaluated against cross-linguistic findings, the obtained result strongly suggests that aphasic performance with pronouns depends on the interpretation efforts associated with co-reference establishment and varies due to availability of discourse referents. The investigation of normal and agrammatic processing of Bulgarian NI presents support for the hypothesis that the comprehension deficits in Broca's aphasia result from a slowed-down implementation of syntactic operations. The protracted structure building consumes processing resources and causes temporal mismatches with other processes sustaining sentence comprehension. The investigation of the way Bulgarian children and aphasic speakers process NI reveals that both groups are highly sensitive to the imperfective constraint on the aspectual construal imposed by the presence of negation. The imperfective interpretation requires access to morphologically complex verb forms which contain aspectual morphemes with conflicting semantic information - perfective prefixes and imperfective suffixes. Across modalities, both populations exhibit difficulties in processing prefixed imperfectivised verbs which as predicates of negative imperative sentences reflect the inner perspective the speaker and the addressee need to take towards a potentially bounded situation description.},
  language  = {en}
}