TY - JOUR A1 - Wierzba, Marta A1 - Fanselow, Gisbert T1 - Factors influencing the acceptability of object fronting in German JF - The journal of comparative Germanic linguistics N2 - In this paper, we address some controversially debated empirical questions concerning object fronting in German by a series of acceptability rating studies. We investigated three kinds of factors: (i) properties of the subject (given/new, pronoun/full DP), (ii) emphasis, (iii) register. The first factor is predicted to play a crucial role by models in which object fronting possibilities are limited by prosodic properties. Two experiments provide converging evidence for a systematic effect of this factor: we find that the relative acceptability of object fronting across subjects that require an accent (new DPs) is lower than across deaccentable subjects (pronouns and given DPs). Other models predict object fronting across full phrases (but not across pronouns) to be limited to an emphatic interpretation. This prediction is also borne out, suggesting that both types of models capture an empirically valid generalization and can be seen as complementing each other rather than competing with each other. Finally, we find support for the view that informal register facilitates object fronting. In sum, our experiments contribute to clarifying the empirical basis concerning a phenomenon influenced by a range of interacting factors. This, in turn, informs theoretical approaches to the prefield position and helps to identify factors that need to be carefully controlled in this field of research. KW - German KW - Object fronting KW - Prefield KW - Givenness KW - Emphasis KW - Register KW - Experiments KW - Acceptability Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10828-020-09113-1 SN - 1383-4924 SN - 1572-8552 VL - 23 IS - 1 SP - 77 EP - 124 PB - Springer CY - New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Genzel, Susanne A1 - Ishihara, Shinichiro A1 - Suranyi, Balazs T1 - The prosodic expression of focus, contrast and givenness: A production study of Hungarian JF - Lingua : international review of general linguistics N2 - This paper reports the results of a production experiment that explores the prosodic realization of focus in Hungarian, a language that is characterized by obligatory syntactic focus marking. Our study investigates narrow focus in sentences in which focus is unambiguously marked by syntactic means, comparing it to broad focus sentences. Potential independent effects of the salience (textual givenness) of the background of the narrow focus and the contrastiveness of the focus are controlled for and are also examined. The results show that both continuous phonetic measures and categorical factors such as the distribution of contour types are affected by the focus-related factors, despite the presence of syntactic focus marking. The phonetic effects found are mostly parallel to those of typical prosodic focus marking languages like English. The prosodic prominence required of focus is realized through changes to the scaling and slope of F0 targets and contours. The asymmetric prominence relation between the focus and the background can be expressed not only by the phonetic marking of the prominence of the focused element, but also by the phonetic marking of the reduced prominence of the background. Furthermore, contrastiveness of focus and (textual) givenness of the background show independent phonetic effects, both of them affecting the realization of the background. These results are argued to shed light on alternative approaches to the information structural notion of contrastive focus and the relation between the notions of focus and givenness. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. KW - Hungarian KW - Prosody KW - Focus KW - Background KW - Givenness KW - Contrast Y1 - 2015 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2014.07.010 SN - 0024-3841 SN - 1872-6135 VL - 165 SP - 183 EP - 204 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Karvovskaya, Lena A1 - Kimmelman, Vadim A1 - Röhr, Christine Tanja A1 - Stavropoulou, Pepi A1 - Titov, Elena A1 - van Putten, Saskia ED - Balbach, Maria ED - Benz, Lena ED - Genzel, Susanne ED - Grubic, Mira ED - Renans, Agata ED - Schalowski, Sören ED - Stegenwallner, Maja ED - Zeldes, Amir T1 - Information structure : empirical perspectives on theory N2 - The papers collected in this volume were presented at a Graduate/Postgraduate Student Conference with the title Information Structure: Empirical Perspectives on Theory held on December 2 and 3, 2011 at Potsdam-Griebnitzsee. The main goal of the conference was to connect young researchers working on information structure (IS) related topics and to discuss various IS categories such as givenness, focus, topic, and contrast. The aim of the conference was to find at least partial answers to the following questions: What IS categories are necessary? Are they gradient/continuous? How can one deal with optionality or redundancy? How are IS categories encoded grammatically? How do different empirical methods contribute to distinguishing between the influence of different IS categories on language comprehension and production? To answer these questions, a range of languages (Avatime, Chinese, German, Ishkashimi, Modern Greek, Old Saxon, Russian, Russian Sign Language and Sign Language of the Netherlands) and a range of phenomena from phonology, semantics, and syntax were investigated. The presented theories and data were based on different kinds of linguistic evidence: syntactic and semantic fieldwork, corpus studies, and phonological experiments. The six papers presented in this volume discuss a variety of IS categories, such as emphasis and contrast (Stavropoulous, Titov), association with focus and topics (van Putten, Karvovskaya), and givenness and backgrounding (Kimmelmann, Röhr). T3 - Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632 - 17 KW - Fokus KW - Topik KW - Informationsstruktur KW - Fokussensitivität KW - Givenness KW - Backgrounding KW - Focus KW - Topic KW - Information Structure KW - Focus-sensitivity KW - Givenness KW - Backgrounding Y1 - 2013 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-64804 ER - TY - THES A1 - Meinhardt, Miriam T1 - Der Einfluss der Informationsstruktur auf das Verständnis von Aktiv- und Passivsätzen im ungestörten Spracherwerb T1 - The influcene of information structure on German-speaking children's comprehension of active and passive sentences N2 - Kinder erwerben Passivstrukturen später als die meisten anderen syntaktischen Strukturen. Die vorliegende Studie beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, ob dies auf informationsstrukturelle Faktoren zurückzuführen sein könnte. Probleme beim Erwerb von Passivsätzen wurden in vorhergehenden Studien unter anderem auf ihre geringe Inputfrequenz oder bestimmte syntaktische Charakteristika von Passivsätzen zurückgeführt. Jedoch konnte bisher keiner dieser Ansätze ihr spätes Erwerbsalter umfassend erklären. Während Aktivsätze, die kanonische, unmarkierte Satzstruktur im Deutschen, in jeglichem Diskurskontext verwendet werden können, werden Passivsätze fast ausschließlich dann verwendet, wenn der Patiens der beschriebenen Handlung schon vorerwähnt war und/ oder als Topik eines Satzes fungieren soll. Passivsätze sind also nicht in jedem Kontext informationsstrukturell adäquat. Kinder haben im Gegensatz zu Erwachsenen aufgrund ihrer geringeren syntaktischen Fähigkeiten Probleme, Sätze zu verarbeiten, die nicht in einem adäquaten Kontext stehen. Der Einfluss dieser Kontextbedingungen auf das Satzverständnis wurde in der vorliegenden Studie bei deutschsprachigen Kindern untersucht. Kindern zwischen 3;0 und 4;11 Jahren wurden Aktiv- oder Passivsätze präsentiert, denen informationsstrukturell adäquate, inadäquate oder neutrale Kontextsätze vorangingen. Wie erwartet verstanden die Kinder Aktivsätze besser als Passivsätze und 4-jährige Kinder zeigten bessere Leistungen als 3-jährige. Es gab Tendenzen, dass die 3-jährigen Kinder Passivsätze besser, aber Aktivsätze schlechter verstanden, wenn ihr Subjekt vorerwähnt wurde. Statistisch signifikante Kontexteffekte fanden sich jedoch im Gegensatz zu einer vergleichbaren Studie mit englischsprachigen Kindern (Gourley und Catlin, 1978) in keiner Testbedingung. Außerdem zeigte sich, dass die Kinder Passivsätze insgesamt besser und Aktivsätze insgesamt schlechter verstanden als englischsprachige Kinder in anderen Studien. Die Ergebnisse werden mit dem Competition Modell (Mac Whinney und Bates, 1987) und einer Sprachverarbeitungstheorie von Stromswold (2002) erklärt. Außerdem wird diskutiert, warum die deutschsprachigen Kinder in der vorliegenden Studie andere Sprachverständnisleistungen zeigten als englischsprachige Kinder. N2 - Children acquire passive constructions later than most other syntactic structures. The purpose of the present study was to investigate whether this phenomenon can be explained with an information-structural account. In former studies problems in the acquisition of the passive voice have often been attributed to its low input frequency or to its specific syntactic characteristics. However, none of these theories could sufficiently explain the late age of acquisition of passive structures. Sentences in the active voice, the canonical, unmarked, structure in German can be used in any discourse context while passive sentences are almost always used if the patient of the described action is GIVEN in the context and/ or serves as the TOPIC of the sentence. Therefore passive sentences cannot be used in any context without violating information structural constraints. It is more difficult for children – due to their less developed syntactic abilities – than for adults to process sentences which do not occur in an information structurally appropriate context. The present study examines the influence of the context on sentence comprehension abilities of German speaking children. Children at the age of 3;0 – 4;11 years were presented active or passive sentences in an information structurally appropriate, inappropriate or neutral context. As expected, children comprehended active sentences better than passive sentences, and 4-year olds performed better than 3-year olds. There was a tendency that 3-year olds comprehended passive sentences better but active sentences worse if the subject of the sentence was GIVEN in the context. However, there were no statistically significant context effects, in contrast to a similar study with English-speaking children (Gourley and Catlin, 1978). In addition, it could be shown that German-speaking children comprehended passive sentences better than English-speaking children in other studies. The results are explained with the Competition Model (Mac Whinney and Bates, 1987) and Stromswold’s (2002) theory of language processing. It is also discussed why German-speaking children showed different language comprehension abilities than English-speaking children. KW - Passiv KW - Spracherwerb KW - Informationsstruktur KW - Vorerwähntheit KW - Grammatikerwerb KW - Passive voice KW - Language Acquisition KW - Information Structure KW - Givenness KW - Grammar Acqiuisition Y1 - 2010 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-59563 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Krifka, Manfred T1 - Basic notions of information structure N2 - This article takes stock of the basic notions of Information Structure (IS). It first provides a general characterization of IS — following Chafe (1976) — within a communicative model of Common Ground(CG), which distinguishes between CG content and CG management. IS is concerned with those features of language that concern the local CG. Second, this paper defines and discusses the notions of Focus (as indicating alternatives) and its various uses, Givenness (as indicating that a denotation is already present in the CG), and Topic (as specifying what a statement is about). It also proposes a new notion, Delimitation, which comprises contrastive topics and frame setters, and indicates that the current conversational move does not entirely satisfy the local communicative needs. It also points out that rhetorical structuring partly belongs to IS. KW - Information Structure KW - Focus KW - Topic KW - Givenness KW - Contrast Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19603 SN - 978-3-939469-88-9 SN - 1614-4708 SN - 1866-4725 SP - 13 EP - 55 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER -