TY - JOUR A1 - Endriss, Cornelia A1 - Hinterwimmer, Stefan T1 - Direct and indirect aboutness topics N2 - We propose a definition of aboutness topicality that not only encompasses individual denoting DPs, but also indefinites. We concentrate on the interpretative effects of marking indefinites as topics: they either receive widest scope in their clause, or they are interpreted in the restrictor of an overt or covert Q-adverb. We show that in the first case they are direct aboutness topics insofar as they are the subject of a predication expressed by the comment, while in the second case they are indirect aboutness topics: they define the subject of a higher-order predication – namely the set of situations that the respective Q-adverb quantifies over. KW - Aboutness Topics KW - Indefinites KW - Wide Scope KW - Left-Dislocation KW - Quantificational Variability Effects Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19640 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Kasimir, Elke T1 - On 'nicht...sondern...' (contrastive 'not...but...') N2 - This article presents an analysis of German nicht...sondern... (contrastive not...but...) which departs from the commonly held view that this construction should be explained by appeal to its alleged corrective function. It will be demonstrated that in nicht A sondern B (not A but B), A and B just behave like stand-alone unmarked answers to a common question Q, and that this property of sondern is presuppositional in character. It is shown that from this general observation many interesting properties of nicht...sondern... follow, among them distributional differences between German 'sondern' and German 'aber' (contrastive but, concessive but), intonational requirements and exhaustivity effects. sondern's presupposition is furthermore argued to be the result of the conventionalization of conversational implicatures. KW - negation KW - contrast KW - correction KW - presupposition KW - metalinguistic Y1 - 2006 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19537 ER - 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 - TY - BOOK ED - Féry, Caroline ED - Fanselow, Gisbert ED - Krifka, Manfred T1 - The notions of information structure N2 - Contents: Introduction (The Editors) Basic Notions of Information Structure (Manfred Krifka) Notions of Focus Anaphoricity (Mats Rooth) Topic and Focus: Two Structural Positions Associated with Logical Functions in the Left Periphery of the Hungarian Sentence (Katalin É. Kiss) Direct and Indirect Aboutness Topics (Cornelia Endriss & Stefan Hinterwimmer) Information Structure as Information-based Partition (Satoshi Tomioka) Focus Presuppositions (Dorit Abush) Contrastive Focus, Givenness and the Unmarked Status of “Discourse-new”(Elisabeth O. Selkirk) Contrastive Focus (Malte Zimmermann) The Fallacy of Invariant Phonological Correlates of Information Structural Notions (Caroline Féry) Notions and Subnotions of Information Structure (Carlos Gussenhoven) The Restricted Access of Information Structure to Syntax – A Minority Report (Gisbert Fanselow) Focus and Tone (Katharina Hartmann) T3 - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 - 6 Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-15472 SN - 978-3-939469-88-9 SN - 1614-4708 SN - 1866-4725 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER - TY - BOOK ED - Dipper, Stefanie ED - Goetze, Michael ED - Skopeteas, Stavros T1 - Information structure in cross-linguistic corpora : annotation guidelines for phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and information structure N2 - This volume presents annotation guidelines that have been developed in the context of the SFB 632, a collaborative research center entitled "Information Structure: the Linguistic Means for Structuring Utterances, Sentences and Texts". An important result of the SFB 632 are the SFB corpora from more than 20 typologically different languages, which have been annotated according to the guidelines presented here. The ultimate target of the data and its annotations is to support the study of Information Structure. Information Structure involves all levels of grammar and, hence, the present guidelines cover relevant aspects of all these levels: - Phonology - Morphology - Syntax - Semantics - Information Structure These levels are dealt with in individual chapters, containing tagset declarations with obligatory and optional tags, detailed annotation instructions, and illustrative examples. The volume also presents an evaluation of inter-annotator agreement of Syntax and Information Structural annotation. T3 - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 - 7 Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-14199 SN - 978-3-939469-66-7 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER - TY - BOOK A1 - Skopeteas, Stavros A1 - Fiedler, Ines A1 - Hellmuth, Sam A1 - Schwarz, Anne A1 - Stoel, Ruben A1 - Fanselow, Gisbert A1 - Féry, Caroline A1 - Krifka, Manfred T1 - Questionnaire on information structure (OUIS): reference manual N2 - Contents: Chapter 1. Introduction 1 Information Structure 2 Grammatical Correlates of Information Structure 3 Structure of the Questionnaire 4 Experimental Tasks 5 Technicalities 6 Archiving 7 Acknowledgments Chapter 2. General Questions 1 General Information 2 Phonology 3 Morphology and Syntax Chapter 3. Experimental tasks 1 Changes (Given/New in Intransitives and Transitives) 2 Giving (Given/New in Ditransitives) 3 Visibility (Given/New, Animacy and Type/Token Reference) 4 Locations (Given/New in Locative Expressions) 5 Sequences (Given/New/Contrast in Transitives) 6 Dynamic Localization (Given/New in Dynamic Loc. Descriptions) 7 Birthday Party (Weight and Discourse Status) 8 Static Localization (Macro-Planning and Given/New in Locatives) 9 Guiding (Presentational Utterances) 10 Event Cards (All New) 11 Anima (Focus types and Animacy) 12 Contrast (Contrast in pairing events) 13 Animal Game (Broad/Narrow Focus in NP) 14 Properties (Focus on Property and Possessor) 15 Eventives (Thetic and Categorical Utterances) 16 Tell a Story (Contrast in Text) 17 Focus Cards (Selective, Restrictive, Additive, Rejective Focus) 18 Who does What (Answers to Multiple Constituent Questions) 19 Fairy Tale (Topic and Focus in Coherent Discourse) 20 Map Task (Contrastive and Selective Focus in Spontaneous Dialogue) 21 Drama (Contrastive Focus in Argumentation) 22 Events in Places (Spatial, Temporal and Complex Topics) 23 Path Descriptions (Topic Change in Narrative) 24 Groups (Partial Topic) 25 Connections (Bridging Topic) 26 Indirect (Implicational Topic) 27 Surprises (Subject-Topic Interrelation) 28 Doing (Action Given, Action Topic) 29 Influences (Question Priming) Chapter 4. Translation tasks 1 Basic Intonational Properties 2 Focus Translation 3 Topic Translation 4 Quantifiers Chapter 5. Information structure summary survey 1 Preliminaries 2 Syntax 3 Morphology 4 Prosody 5 Summary: Information structure Chapter 6. Performance of Experimental Tasks in the Field 1 Field sessions 2 Field Session Metadata 3 Informants’ Agreement T3 - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 - 4 Y1 - 2006 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-12413 SN - 978-3-939469-14-8 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER -