TY - JOUR A1 - van de Vijver, Ruben A1 - Sennema, Anke A1 - Zimmer–Stahl, Anne T1 - An analysis of pitch and duration in material used to test L2 processing of words N2 - The material reported on in this paper is part of a set of experiments in which the role of Information Structure on L2 processing of words is tested. Pitch and duration of 4 sets of experimental material in German and English are measured and analyzed in this paper. The well-known finding that accent boosts duration and pitch is confirmed. Syntactic and lexical means of marking focus, however, do not give the duration and the pitch of a word an extra boost. KW - Duration KW - Pitch Y1 - 2006 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19583 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Schmitz, Michaela A1 - Höhle, Barbara A1 - Müller, Anja A1 - Weissenborn, Jürgen T1 - The recognition of the prosodic focus position in German-learning infants from 4 to 14 months N2 - The aim of the present study was to elucidate in a study with 4-, 6-, 8-, and 14-month-old German-learning children, when and how they may acquire the regularities which underlie Focus-to-Stress Alignment (FSA) in the target language, that is, how prosody is associated with specific communicative functions. Our findings suggest, that 14-month-olds have already found out that German allows for variable focus positions, after having gone through a development which goes from a predominantly prosodically driven processing of the input to a processing where prosody interacts more and more with the growing lexical and syntactic knowledge of the child. KW - prosodic focus KW - HTP KW - infants Y1 - 2006 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19566 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Endriss, Cornelia A1 - Hinterwimmer, Stefan T1 - Quantificational Variability Effects with plural definites BT - quantification over individuals or situations? N2 - In this paper we compare the behaviour of adverbs of frequency (de Swart 1993) like usually with the behaviour of adverbs of quantity like for the most part in sentences that contain plural definites. We show that sentences containing the former type of Q-adverb evidence that Quantificational Variability Effects (Berman 1991) come about as an indirect effect of quantification over situations: in order for quantificational variability readings to arise, these sentences have to obey two newly observed constraints that clearly set them apart from sentences containing corresponding quantificational DPs, and that can plausibly be explained under the assumption that quantification over (the atomic parts of) complex situations is involved. Concerning sentences with the latter type of Q-adverb, on the other hand, such evidence is lacking: with respect to the constraints just mentioned, they behave like sentences that contain corresponding quantificational DPs. We take this as evidence that Q-adverbs like for the most part do not quantify over the atomic parts of sum eventualities in the cases under discussion (as claimed by Nakanishi and Romero (2004)), but rather over the atomic parts of the respective sum individuals. KW - Adverbial Quantification KW - Situations KW - Tense Semantics KW - Adverbs of Frequency KW - Adverbs of Quantity Y1 - 2006 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19512 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hellmuth, Sam A1 - Skopeteas, Stavros T1 - Information structure in linguistic theory and in speech production : validation of a Cross-Linguistic data set N2 - The aim of this paper is to validate a dataset collected by means of production experiments which are part of the Questionnaire on Information Structure. The experiments generate a range of information structure contexts that have been observed in the literature to induce specific constructions. This paper compares the speech production results from a subset of these experiments with specific claims about the reflexes of information structure in four different languages. The results allow us to evaluate and in most cases validate the efficacy of our elicitation paradigms, to identify potentially fruitful avenues of future research, and to highlight issues involved in interpreting speech production data of this kind. KW - cleft constructions KW - clitic doubling KW - de-accenting KW - focus position KW - presentational constructions KW - scrambling KW - topicalization Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19450 SN - 978-3-939469-72-8 SN - 1866-4725 SN - 1614-4708 SP - 141 EP - 186 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kügler, Frank A1 - Skopeteas, Stavros A1 - Verhoeven, Elisabeth T1 - Encoding information structure in Yucatec Maya BT - on the interplay of prosody and syntax N2 - The aim of this paper is to outline the means for encoding information structure in Yucatec Maya. Yucatec Maya is a tone language, displaying a three-fold opposition in the tonal realization of syllables. From the morpho-syntactic point of view, the grammar of Yucatec Maya contains morphological (topic affixes, morphological marking of out-of-focus predicates) and syntactic (designated positions) means to uniquely specify syntactic constructions for their information structure. After a descriptive overview of these phenomena, we present experimental evidence which reveals the impact of the nonavailability of prosodic alternatives on the choice of syntactic constructions in language production. KW - cleft constructions KW - lexical tone KW - topic affixes KW - verb-initial cleft constructions KW - verb-initial Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19469 ER -