TY  - JOUR
A1  - Pan, Hui-Yu
A1  - Schimke, Sarah
A1  - Felser, Claudia
T1  - Referential context effects in non-native relative clause ambiguity resolution
JF  - International journal of bilingualism : cross-disciplinary, cross-linguistic studies of language behavior
N2  - We report the results from two experiments investigating how referential context information affects native and non-native readers' interpretation of ambiguous relative clauses in sentences such as The journalist interviewed the assistant of the inspector who was looking very serious. The preceding discourse context was manipulated such that it provided two potential referents for either the first (the assistant) or the second (the inspector) of the two noun phrases that could potentially host the relative clause, thus biasing towards either an NP1 or an NP2 modification reading. The results from an offline comprehension task indicate that both native English speakers' and German and Chinese-speaking ESL learners' ultimate interpretation preferences were reliably influenced by the type of referential context. In contrast, in a corresponding self-paced-reading task we found that referential context information modulated only the non-native participants' disambiguation preferences but not the native speakers'. Our results corroborate and extend previous findings suggesting that non-native comprehenders' initial analysis of structurally ambiguous input is strongly influenced by biasing discourse information.
KW  - Second language
KW  - sentence processing
KW  - ambiguity resolution
KW  - referential context
KW  - relative clause
KW  - self-paced reading
Y1  - 2015
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006913515769
SN  - 1367-0069
SN  - 1756-6878
VL  - 19
IS  - 3
SP  - 298
EP  - 313
PB  - Sage Publ.
CY  - London
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Fiedler, Ines
A1  - Schwarz, Anne
T1  - Out-of-focus encoding in Gur and Kwa
JF  - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632
N2  - This paper investigates the structural properties of morphosyntactically marked focus constructions, focussing on the often neglected non-focal sentence part in African tone languages. Based on new empirical evidence from five Gur and Kwa languages, we claim that these focus expressions have to be analysed as biclausal constructions even though they do not represent clefts containing restrictive relative clauses. First, we relativize the partly overgeneralized assumptions about structural correspondences between the out-of-focus part and relative clauses, and second, we show that our data do in fact support the hypothesis of a clause coordinating pattern as present in clause sequences in narration. It is argued that we deal with a non-accidental, systematic feature and that grammaticalization may conceal such basic narrative structures.
KW  - ex-situ focus
KW  - focus marker
KW  - relative clause
KW  - conjunction
KW  - grammaticalization
Y1  - 2005
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-8739
SN  - 1866-4725
SN  - 1614-4708
IS  - 3
SP  - 111
EP  - 142
ER  -