TY - THES A1 - Atasoy, Atilla T1 - Production, perception, and processing of focus in Turkish N2 - The main goal of this dissertation is to experimentally investigate how focus is realised, perceived, and processed by native Turkish speakers, independent of preconceived notions of positional restrictions. Crucially, there are various issues and scientific debates surrounding focus in the Turkish language in the existing literature (chapter 1). It is argued in this dissertation that two factors led to the stagnant literature on focus in Turkish: the lack of clearly defined, modern understandings of information structure and its fundamental notion of focus, and the ongoing and ill-defined debate surrounding the question of whether there is an immediately preverbal focus position in Turkish. These issues gave rise to specific research questions addressed across this dissertation. Specifically, we were interested in how the focus dimensions such as focus size (comparing narrow constituent and broad sentence focus), focus target (comparing narrow subject and narrow object focus), and focus type (comparing new-information and contrastive focus) affect Turkish focus realisation and, in turn, focus comprehension when speakers are provided syntactic freedom to position focus as they see fit. To provide data on these core goals, we presented three behavioural experiments based on a systematic framework of information structure and its notions (chapter 2): (i) a production task with trigger wh-questions and contextual animations manipulated to elicit the focus dimensions of interest (chapter 3), (ii) a timed acceptability judgment task in listening to the recorded answers in our production task (chapter 4), and (iii) a self-paced reading task to gather on-line processing data (chapter 5). Based on the results of the conducted experiments, multiple conclusions are made in this dissertation (chapter 6). Firstly, this dissertation demonstrated empirically that there is no focus position in Turkish, neither in the sense of a strict focus position language nor as a focally loaded position facilitating focus perception and/or processing. While focus is, in fact, syntactically variable in the Turkish preverbal area, this is a consequence of movement triggered by other IS aspects like topicalisation and backgrounding, and the observational markedness of narrow subject focus compared to narrow object focus. As for focus type in Turkish, this dimension is not associated with word order in production, perception, or processing. Significant acoustic correlates of focus size (broad sentence focus vs narrow constituent focus) and focus target (narrow subject focus vs narrow object focus) were observed in fundamental frequency and intensity, representing focal boost, (postfocal) deaccentuation, and the presence or absence of a phrase-final rise in the prenucleus, while the perceivability of these effects remains to be investigated. In contrast, no acoustic correlates of focus type in simple, three-word transitive structures were observed, with focus types being interchangeable in mismatched question-answer pairs. Overall, the findings of this dissertation highlight the need for experimental investigations regarding focus in Turkish, as theoretical predictions do not necessarily align with experimental data. As such, the fallacy of implying causation from correlation should be strictly kept in mind, especially when constructions coincide with canonical structures, such as the immediately preverbal position in narrow object foci. Finally, numerous open questions remain to be explored, especially as focus and word order in Turkish are multifaceted. As shown, givenness is a confounding factor when investigating focus types, while thematic role assignment potentially confounds word order preferences. Further research based on established, modern information structure frameworks is needed, with chapter 5 concluding with specific recommendations for such future research. N2 - Das Hauptziel dieser Dissertation war die experimentelle Untersuchung, wie Muttersprachler des Türkischen Fokus realisieren, wahrnehmen und sprachlich verarbeiten, unabhängig von vorgefassten Meinungen betreffend Positionsbeschränkungen. Entscheidend ist, dass es in der vorhandenen Literatur verschiedene Probleme und wissenschaftliche Debatten zum Thema Fokus in der türkischen Sprache gibt (Kapitel 1). In dieser Dissertation wird argumentiert, dass zwei Faktoren zu der stagnierenden Forschung zum Thema Fokus im Türkischen beitrugen: Das Fehlen eines klar definierten modernen Verständnisses der Informationsstruktur und ihres grundlegenden Begriffs von Fokus und die anhaltende und unklare Debatte um die Frage, ob es im Türkischen eine unmittelbar präverbale Fokusposition gibt. Diese Probleme führten zu den jeweiligen Forschungsfragen, die in dieser Dissertation behandelt wurden. Ausdrücklich lag das Interesse darauf, wie die Fokusdimensionen Fokusgröße, der Vergleich von schmalem Fokus (narrow focus) auf der Konstituente und breitem, projiziertem Fokus (broad focus) auf dem Satz, Fokusziel, der Vergleich von schmalem Subjektfokus und Objektfokus, und Fokustyp, der Vergleich von Fokus auf neuer Information (new-inforamtion focus) und Kontrastfokus, die Fokusrealisierung und -wahrnehmung im Türkischen beeinflussen, wenn den Sprechern syntaktische Freiheit gegeben wird Fokus nach Belieben im Satz zu positionieren. Basierend auf einen systematischen theoretischen Rahmen der Informationsstruktur und ihrer Begriffe (Kapitel 2), wurden drei Verhaltensexperimente in dieser Dissertation präsentiert, um Daten zu diesen Kernzielen vorzulegen: (i) ein Produktionsexperiment mit Fragen und kontextbezogenen Animationen als Trigger manipuliert, um die obengenannten Fokusdimensionen zu untersuchen, (ii) ein zeitlich gemessenes Akzeptanzexperiment (timed acceptability judgment task) beim Anhören der Antworten aufgezeichnet in unserem Produktionsexperiment und (iii) ein selbstbestimmtes Leseexperiment (self-paced reading task) zur Untersuchung der sprachlichen Verarbeitung (on-line language processing). Auf der Grundlage der Ergebnisse der durchgeführten Experimente werden in dieser Dissertation mehrere Schlussfolgerungen gezogen (Kapitel 6). Diese Dissertation hat zum einen empirisch nachgewiesen, dass es im Türkischen keine Fokusposition gibt, weder im Sinne einer strikten Fokusposition noch als fokal geladene Position, die die Fokuswahrnehmung und/oder -verarbeitung erleichtert. Während Fokus im türkischen präverbalen Bereich tatsächlich syntaktisch variabel ist, ist dies eine Folge syntaktischer Strategien anderer IS-Aspekte, wie etwa Topikalisierung und Hintergrundbildung (backgrounding), wie auch die additive Kennzeichnung schmaler Subjektfokusse im Vergleich zum Objektfokus. Was Fokustyp im Türkischen betrifft, ist diese Fokusdimension nicht mit Wortstellung in Produktion, Wahrnehmung oder Verarbeitung assoziiert. Signifikante akustische Korrelate der Fokusgröße (breiter Satzfokus vs. schmalen Konstituentenfokus) und Fokusziel (schmaler Subjektfokus vs. schmalen Objektfokus) in Grundfrequenz und Intensität in Form von Fokusverstärkung (focal boost), (postfokaler) Deakzentuierung und dem Vorhandensein oder Fehlen eines phrasenfinalen Anstiegs im Pränukleus wurden beobachtet, während die Wahrnehmbarkeit dieser Effekte noch zu untersuchen ist. Im Gegensatz dazu wurden keine akustischen Korrelate für Fokustyp in simplen transitiven Dreiwortstrukturen beobachtet, wobei Fokustypen in nicht übereinstimmenden Frage-Antwort-Paaren austauschbar waren. Insgesamt unterstreichen die oben skizzierten Ergebnisse dieser Dissertation die Notwendigkeit experimenteller Untersuchungen zu Fokus im Türkischen, da theoretische Vorhersagen nicht immer mit experimentellen Daten übereinstimmen. Der Trugschluss, dass Korrelation Kausalität impliziert, sollte strikt im Auge behalten werden, insbesondere wenn Konstruktionen mit kanonischen Strukturen übereinstimmen, wie etwa die unmittelbar präverbale Position in schmalen Objektfokussen. Schließlich sind noch zahlreiche offene Fragen zu klären, zumal Fokus und Wortstellung im Türkischen vielfältig sind. Wie in dieser Dissertation gezeigt wurde, ist Gegebenheit ein Störfaktor in der Untersuchung von Fokustypen. Ebenfalls ist zu vermuten, dass thematische Rollenzuweisung im Türkischen Präferenzen in Wortstellung hervorrufen können, die als Fokuseffekte fehlinterpretiert werden könnten. Weitere Forschung auf der Grundlage etablierter theoretischer Informationsstrukturrahmen ist erforderlich. Kapitel 5 schließt mit konkreten Empfehlungen für solche zukünftigen Untersuchungen ab. T2 - Produktion, Wahrnehmung und Verarbeitung von Fokus im Türkischen KW - focus KW - information structure KW - Turkish KW - focus realisation KW - Türkisch KW - Fokus KW - Fokusrealisierung KW - Informationsstruktur Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-548156 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gotzner, Nicole A1 - Spalek, Katharina T1 - Expectations about upcoming discourse referents BT - Effects of pitch accents and focus particles in German language production JF - International review of pragmatics : IRP N2 - In the current study, we explore how different information-structural devices affect which referents conversational partners expect in the upcoming discourse. Our main research question is how pitch accents (H*, L+H*) and focus particles (German nur `only' and auch 'also') affect speakers' choices to mention focused referents, previously mentioned alternatives or new, inferable alternatives. Participants in our experiment were presented with short discourses involving two referents and were asked to orally produce two sentences that continue the story. An analysis of speakers' continuations showed that participants were most likely to mention a contextual alternative in the condition with only and the L+H* conditions, followed by H* conditions. In the condition with also, in turn, participants mentioned both the focused/accented referent and the contextual alternative. Our findings highlight the importance of information structure for discourse management and suggest that speakers take activated alternatives to be relevant for an unfolding discourse. KW - information structure KW - linguistics focus KW - pitch accents KW - focus KW - alternatives KW - discourse expectations Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1163/18773109-01401003 SN - 1877-3095 SN - 1877-3109 VL - 14 IS - 1 SP - 77 EP - 94 PB - Brill CY - Leiden ER - TY - THES A1 - Chen, Hui Ching T1 - Acquisition of focus - in a cross-linguistic perspective T1 - Spracherwerb im Fokus - eine sprachübergreifende Perspektive N2 - In dieser Dissertation untersuchen wir, wie chinesischen Muttersprachler und deutschen Muttersprachler, sowohl die Erwachsenen als auch die Kinder, verschiedene linguistische Mittel, wie z. B. Wortstellungsinformationen, prosodische und lexikalische Mittel im Sprachverständnis korrekt interpretieren. N2 - Successful communication is often explored by people throughout their life courses. To effectively transfer one’s own information to others, people employ various linguistic tools, such as word order information, prosodic cues, and lexical choices. The exploration of these linguistic cues is known as the study of information structure (IS). Moreover, an important issue in the language acquisition of children is the investigation of how they acquire IS. This thesis seeks to improve our understanding of how children acquire different tools (i.e., prosodical cues, syntactical cues, and the focus particle only) of focus marking in a cross linguistic perspective. In the first study, following Szendrői and her colleagues (2017)- the sentence-picture verification task- was performed to investigate whether three- to five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children as well as Mandarin-speaking adults could apply prosodic information to recognize focus in sentences. More, in the second study, not only Mandarin-speaking adults and Mandarin-speaking children but also German-speaking adults and German-speaking children were included to confirm the assumption that children could have adult-like performance in understanding sentence focus by identifying language specific cues in their mother tongue from early onwards. In this study, the same paradigm- the sentence-picture verification task- as in the first study was employed together with the eye-tracking method. Finally, in the last study, an issue of whether five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children could understand the pre-subject only sentence was carried out and again whether prosodic information would help them to better understand this kind of sentences. The overall results seem to suggest that Mandarin-speaking children from early onwards could make use of the specific linguistic cues in their ambient language. That is, in Mandarin, a Topic-prominent and tone language, the word order information plays a more important rule than the prosodic information and even three-year-old Mandarin-speaking children could follow the word order information. More, although it seems that German-speaking children could follow the prosodic information, they did not have the adult-like performance in the object-accented condition. A feasible reason for this result is that there are more possibilities of marking focus in German, such as flexible word order, prosodic information, focus particles, and thus it would take longer time for German-speaking children to manage these linguistic tools. Another important empirical finding regarding the syntactically-marked focus in German is that it seems that the cleft construction is not a valid focus construction and this result corroborates with the previous observations (Dufter, 2009). Further, eye-tracking method did help to uncover how the parser direct their attention for recognizing focus. In the final study, it is showed that with explicit verbal context Mandarin-speaking children could understand the pre-subject only sentence and the study brought a better understanding of the acquisition of the focus particle- only with the Mandarin-speaking children. KW - information structure KW - language acquisition KW - Mandarin KW - German KW - Prosody KW - Informationsstruktur KW - Spracherwerb KW - Deutsch KW - Mandarin KW - Prosodie Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-553458 ER -