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  - Kasimir, Elke
T1  - Question-answer test and givenness
BT  - some question marks
JF  - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632
N2  - In order to investigate the empirical properties of focus, it is necessary to diagnose focus (or: "what is focused") in particular linguistic examples. It is often taken for granted that the application of one single diagnostic tool, the so-called question-answer test, which roughly says that whatever a question asks for is focused in the answer, is a fool-proof test for focus. This paper investigates one example class where such uncritical belief in the question-answer test has led to the assumption of rather complex focus projection rules: in these examples, pitch accent placement has been claimed to depend on certain parts of the focused constituents being given or not. It is demonstrated that such focus projection rules are unnecessarily complex and in turn require the assumption of unnecessarily complicated meaning rules, not to speak of the difficulties to give a precise semantic/pragmatic definition of the allegedly involved givenness property. For the sake of the argument, an alternative analysis is put forward which relies solely on alternative sets following Mats Rooth's work, and avoids any recourse to givenness. As it turns out, this alternative analysis is not only simpler but also makes in a critical case the better predictions.
KW  - focus
KW  - givenness
Y1  - 2005
U6  - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-8698
SN  - 1866-4725
SN  - 1614-4708
IS  - 3
SP  - 1
EP  - 52
ER  -