TY - BOOK A1 - Olsen, Susan A1 - Stiebels, Barbara A1 - Bierwisch, Manfred A1 - Zimmermann, Ilse A1 - Cavar, Damir A1 - Georgi, Doreen A1 - Bacskai-Atkari, Julia A1 - Alexiadou, Artemis A1 - Błaszczak, Joanna A1 - Müller, Gereon A1 - Šimík, Radek A1 - Meinunger, André A1 - Thiersch, Craig A1 - Arnhold, Anja A1 - Féry, Caroline A1 - Bayer, Josef A1 - Titov, Elena A1 - Fominyam, Henry A1 - Tran, Thuan A1 - Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina D. A1 - Schlesewsky, Matthias A1 - Zimmermann, Malte A1 - Häussler, Jana A1 - Mucha, Anne A1 - Schmidt, Andreas A1 - Weskott, Thomas A1 - Wierzba, Marta A1 - Stede, Manfred A1 - Skopeteas, Stavros A1 - Gafos, Adamantios I. A1 - Haider, Hubert A1 - Wunderlich, Dieter A1 - Staudacher, Peter A1 - Rauh, Gisa ED - Brown, Jessica M. M. ED - Schmidt, Andreas ED - Wierzba, Marta T1 - Of Trees and Birds BT - A Festschrift for Gisbert Fanselow N2 - Gisbert Fanselow’s work has been invaluable and inspiring to many ­researchers working on syntax, morphology, and information ­structure, both from a ­theoretical and from an experimental perspective. This ­volume comprises a collection of articles dedicated to Gisbert on the occasion of his 60th birthday, covering a range of topics from these areas and beyond. The contributions have in ­common that in a broad sense they have to do with language structures (and thus trees), and that in a more specific sense they have to do with birds. They thus cover two of Gisbert’s major interests in- and outside of the linguistic world (and ­perhaps even at the interface). KW - Festschrift KW - Linguistik KW - Syntax KW - Morphologie KW - Informationsstruktur KW - festschrift KW - linguistics KW - syntax KW - morphology KW - information structure Y1 - 2019 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-426542 SN - 978-3-86956-457-9 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Zimmermann, Malte T1 - Wird Schon Stimmen! BT - A Degree Operator Analysis of Schon JF - Journal of semantics N2 - The article puts forward a novel analysis of the German modal particle schon as a modal degree operator over propositional content. The proposed analysis offers a uniform perspective on the semantics of modal schon and its aspectual counterpart meaning ‘already’: Both particles are analyzed as denoting a degree operator, expressing a scale-based comparison over relevant alternatives. The alternatives are determined by focus in the case of aspectual schon (Krifka 2000), but are restricted to the polar alternatives p and ¬p in the case of modal schon. Semantically, modal schon introduces a presupposition to the effect that the circumstantial conversational background contains more factual evidence in favor of p than in favor of ¬p⁠, thereby making modal schon the not at-issue counterpart of the overt comparative form eher ‘rather’ (Herburger & Rubinstein 2014). The analysis incorporates basic insights from earlier analyses of modal schon in a novel way, and it also offers new insights as to the underlying workings of modality in natural language as involving propositions rather than possible worlds (Kratzer 1977, 2012). Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffy010 SN - 0167-5133 SN - 1477-4593 VL - 35 IS - 4 SP - 687 EP - 739 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Oxford ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Zimmermann, Malte A1 - De Veaugh-Geiss, Joseph P. A1 - Tönnis, Swantje A1 - Onea, Edgar T1 - (Non-)exhaustivity in focus partitioning across languages JF - Approaches to Hungarian N2 - We present novel experimental evidence on the availability and the status of exhaustivity inferences with focus partitioning in German, English, and Hungarian. Results suggest that German and English focus-background clefts and Hungarian focus share important properties, (É. Kiss 1998, 1999; Szabolcsi 1994; Percus 1997; Onea & Beaver 2009). Those constructions are anaphoric devices triggering an existence presupposition. EXH-inferences are not obligatory in such constructions in English, German, or Hungarian, against some previous literature (Percus 1997; Büring & Križ 2013; É. Kiss 1998), but in line with pragmatic analyses of EXH-inferences in clefts (Horn 1981, 2016; Pollard & Yasavul 2016). The cross-linguistic differences in the distribution of EXH-inferences are attributed to properties of the Hungarian number marking system. KW - clefts KW - definite pseudoclefts KW - Hungarian focus KW - exhaustivity KW - experimental evidence KW - semantics-pragmatics interface Y1 - 2020 VL - 16 PB - John Benjamins CY - Amsterdam ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Hartmann, Katharina A1 - Zimmermann, Malte T1 - Morphological focus marking in Gùrùntùm (West Chadic) N2 - The paper presents an in-depth study of focus marking in Gùrùntùm, a West Chadic language spoken in Bauchi Province of Northern Nigeria. Focus in Gùrùntùm is marked morphologically by means of a focus marker a, which typically precedes the focus constituent. Even though the morphological focus-marking system of Gùrùntùm allows for a lot of fine-grained distinctions in information structure (IS) in principle, the language is not entirely free of focus ambiguities that arise as the result of conflicting IS- and syntactic requirements that govern the placement of focus markers. We show that morphological focus marking with a applies across different types of focus, such as newinformation, contrastive, selective and corrective focus, and that a does not have a second function as a perfectivity marker, as is assumed in the literature. In contrast, we show at the end of the paper that a can also function as a foregrounding device at the level of discourse structure. KW - morphological focus marking KW - focus ambiguity KW - focus types KW - foregrounding Y1 - 2006 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19525 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Zimmermann, Malte T1 - Contrastive focus N2 - The article puts forward a discourse-pragmatic approach to the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. It is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of ‘contrastive focus’, ‘kontrast’ (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or ‘identificational focus’ (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms like introduction of alternatives or exhaustivity. Rather, an adequate analysis must take into account discourse-pragmatic notions like hearer expectation or discourse expectability of the focused content in a given discourse situation. The less expected a given content is judged to be for the hearer, relative to the Common Ground, the more likely a speaker is to mark this content by means of special grammatical devices, giving rise to emphasis. KW - contrastive focus KW - emphasis KW - discourse expectability Y1 - 2007 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-19688 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ronasi, Golnoush A1 - Fischer, Martin H. A1 - Zimmermann, Malte T1 - Language and Arithmetic BT - a failure to find cross cognitive domain semantic priming between exception phrases and subtraction or addition JF - Frontiers in psychology N2 - We examined cross-domain semantic priming effects between arithmetic and language. We paired subtractions with their linguistic equivalent, exception phrases (EPs) with positive quantifiers (e.g., "everybody except John") while pairing additions with their own linguistic equivalent, EPs with negative quantifiers (e.g., "nobody except John"; Moltmann, 1995). We hypothesized that EPs with positive quantifiers prime subtractions and inhibit additions while EPs with negative quantifiers prime additions and inhibit subtractions. Furthermore, we expected similar priming and inhibition effects from arithmetic into semantics. Our design allowed for a bidirectional analysis by using one trial's target as the prime for the next trial. Two experiments failed to show significant priming effects in either direction. Implications and possible shortcomings are explored in the general discussion. KW - cross-domain priming KW - language KW - arithmetic KW - information integration KW - cognitive module Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01524 SN - 1664-1078 VL - 9 PB - Frontiers Research Foundation CY - Lausanne ER - TY - JOUR A1 - De Veaugh-Geiss, Joseph P. A1 - Toennis, Swantje A1 - Onea, Edgar A1 - Zimmermann, Malte T1 - That’s not quite it BT - an experimental investigation of (non‑)exhaustivity in clefts JF - Semantics and pragmatics N2 - We present a novel empirical study on German directly comparing the exhaustivity inference in es-clefts to exhaustivity inferences in definite pseudoclefts, exclusives, and plain intonational focus constructions. We employ mouse-driven verification/falsification tasks in an incremental information-retrieval paradigm across two experiments in order to assess the strength of exhaustivity in the four sentence types. The results are compatible with a parallel analysis of clefts and definite pseudoclefts, in line with previous claims in the literature (Percus 1997, Buring & Kriz 2013). In striking contrast with such proposals, in which the exhaustivity inference is conventionally coded in the cleft-structure in terms of maximality/homogeneity, our study found that the exhaustivity inference is not systematic or robust in es-clefts nor in definite pseudoclefts: Whereas some speakers treat both constructions as exhaustive, others treat both constructions as non-exhaustive. In order to account for this unexpected finding, we argue that the exhaustivity inference in both clefts and definite pseudoclefts-specifically those with the compound definite derjenige - is pragmatically derived from the anaphoric existence presupposition that is common to both constructions. KW - experimental study KW - exhaustivity KW - es-clefts KW - definite pseudoclefts KW - anaphoric existence presupposition Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.3765/sp.11.3 SN - 1937-8912 VL - 11 PB - Linguistic Society of America CY - Washington ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Hartmann, Katharina A1 - Zimmermann, Malte T1 - Morphological focus marking in Gùrùntùm (West Chadic) N2 - The paper presents an in-depth study of focus marking in Guruntum, a West Chadic language spoken in Bauchi State in Nigeria. Focus in Guruntum is marked morphologically by means of a focus marker a, which typically precedes the focused constituent. Even though the morphological focus-marking system of Guruntum allows for a lot of fine-grained distinctions in information structure (IS), the language is not entirely free of focus ambiguities that are the result of conflicting IS- and syntactic requirements governing the placement of focus markers. We show that morphological focus marking with a applies across different types of focus, such as new-information, contrastive, selective and corrective focus, and that a does not have a second function as a perfective marker, as is assumed in the literature. In contrast, we argue that sentence-final occurrences of a in perfective sentences are markers of sentential focus and have additional functions at the level of discourse structure. Y1 - 2009 UR - http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00243841 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2009.02.002 SN - 0024-3841 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Zimmermann, Malte A1 - Féry, Caroline T1 - Introduction Y1 - 2010 SN - 978-0-19-957095-9 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Fiedler, Ines A1 - Hartmann, Katharina A1 - Reineke, Brigitte A1 - Schwarz, Anne A1 - Zimmermann, Malte T1 - Subject focus in West African languages Y1 - 2010 SN - 978-0-19-957095-9 ER -