@article{ChiarcosFiedlerGrubicetal.2011, author = {Chiarcos, Christian and Fiedler, Ines and Grubic, Mira and Hartmann, Katharina and Ritz, Julia and Schwarz, Anne and Zeldes, Amir and Zimmermann, Malte}, title = {Information structure in African languages corpora and tools}, series = {Language resources and evaluation}, volume = {45}, journal = {Language resources and evaluation}, number = {3}, publisher = {Springer}, address = {Dordrecht}, issn = {1574-020X}, doi = {10.1007/s10579-011-9153-0}, pages = {361 -- 374}, year = {2011}, abstract = {In this paper, we describe tools and resources for the study of African languages developed at the Collaborative Research Centre 632 "Information Structure". These include deeply annotated data collections of 25 sub-Saharan languages that are described together with their annotation scheme, as well as the corpus tool ANNIS, which provides unified access to a broad variety of annotations created with a range of different tools. With the application of ANNIS to several African data collections, we illustrate its suitability for the purpose of language documentation, distributed access, and the creation of data archives.}, language = {en} } @article{ZimmermannOnea2011, author = {Zimmermann, Malte and Onea, Edgar}, title = {Focus marking and focus interpretation}, series = {LINGUA}, volume = {121}, journal = {LINGUA}, number = {11}, publisher = {ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV}, address = {AMSTERDAM}, issn = {0024-3841}, doi = {10.1016/j.lingua.2011.06.002}, pages = {1651 -- 1670}, year = {2011}, abstract = {The languages of the world exhibit a range of formal phenomena (e.g. accenting, syntactic reordering and morphological marking) that are commonly linked to the information-structural notion of focus. Crucially, there does not seem to be a one-to-one mapping between particular formal features (focus marking devices) and focus, neither from a cross-linguistic perspective, nor within individual languages. This raises the question of what is actually being expressed if we say that a constituent is focused in a particular language, and whether, or to what extent, the same semantic or pragmatic content is formally expressed by focus-marking across languages. This special issue addresses the question of focus and its grammatical realization from a number of theoretical and empirical perspectives. In this introductory article we elaborate on this question by making an explicit proposal about what we take to be the correct way of thinking about the information-structural category of focus and its formal realization. In the first part, we introduce a unified semantico-pragmatic perspective on focus in terms of alternatives and possible worlds. In the second part, we present a cursory cross-linguistic overview of focus marking strategies as found in the languages of the world. Finally, in the third part, we discuss the connection between the notion of focus, different pragmatic uses of focus and different focus marking strategies employed in the grammars of natural languages. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.}, language = {en} } @article{Zimmermann2011, author = {Zimmermann, Malte}, title = {On the functional architecture of DP and the feature content of pronominal quantifiers in Low German}, series = {The journal of comparative Germanic linguistics}, volume = {14}, journal = {The journal of comparative Germanic linguistics}, number = {3}, publisher = {Springer}, address = {New York}, issn = {1383-4924}, doi = {10.1007/s10828-011-9046-z}, pages = {203 -- 240}, year = {2011}, abstract = {The article investigates the functional architecture of complex pronominal quantifying expressions (PQEs) in Low German, such as jeder-een 'everyone' and keen-een 'no-one', which provide overt evidence for a Num-projection, situated between the NP- and DP-layer. The feature specification of Num as [+lattice] or [-lattice] is responsible for whether the DP denotes into the domain of atomic or mass/plural entities, respectively. In the case of complex PQEs, the syntactic Num-head hosts the overt element een 'a, one', which carries a [-lattice] feature, thus ensuring that the PQE ranges exclusively over the domain of atomic entities, but not mass or plural entities. The Num-head een differs from its simplex counterpart wat 'something', which is analyzed as an NP-proform with an underspecified [lattice]-feature. As a result, wat can range over atomic and mass domains alike. In the final part of the article, it is argued that wat is also underspecified for the operator feature [rel/wh], for which reason it can also function as an interrogative expression (what) and as a relative pronoun (which), respectively, depending on the syntactic context. Throughout the article, the Low German data are compared with relevant data from other German dialects and Germanic and Romance languages, pointing out similarities and differences in the syntactic structure and feature content of PQEs across these languages and dialects.}, language = {en} } @article{Zimmermann2011, author = {Zimmermann, Malte}, title = {The grammatical expression of focus in West Chadic variation and uniformity in and across languages}, series = {Linguistics : an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences}, volume = {49}, journal = {Linguistics : an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences}, number = {5}, publisher = {De Gruyter Mouton}, address = {Berlin}, issn = {0024-3949}, doi = {10.1515/LING.2011.032}, pages = {1163 -- 1213}, year = {2011}, abstract = {The article provides an overview of the grammatical realization of focus in four West Chadic languages (Chadic, Afro-Asiatic). The languages discussed exhibit an intriguing crosslinguistic variation in the realization of focus, both among themselves as well as compared to European intonation languages. They also display language-internal variation in the formal realization of focus. The West Chadic languages differ widely in their ways of expressing focus, which range from syntactic over prosodic to morphological devices. In contrast to European intonation languages, the focus marking systems of the West Chadic languages are inconsistent in that focus is often not grammatically expressed, but these inconsistencies are shown to be systematic. Subject foci (contrastive or not) and contrastive nonsubject foci are always grammatically marked, whereas information focus on nonsubjects need not be marked as such. The absence of formal focus marking supports pragmatic theories of focus in terms of contextual resolution. The special status of focused subjects and contrastive foci is derived from the Contrastive Focus Hypothesis, which requires unexpected foci and unexpected focus contents to be marked as such, together with the assumption that canonical subjects in West Chadic receive a default interpretation as topics. Finally, I discuss certain focus ambiguities which are not attested in intonation languages, nor do they follow on standard accounts of focus marking, but which can be accounted for in terms of constraint interaction in the formal expression of focus.}, language = {en} } @article{DrenhausZimmermannVasishth2011, author = {Drenhaus, Heiner and Zimmermann, Malte and Vasishth, Shravan}, title = {Exhaustiveness effects in clefts are not truth-functional}, series = {Journal of neurolinguistics : an international journal for the study of brain function in language behavior and experience}, volume = {24}, journal = {Journal of neurolinguistics : an international journal for the study of brain function in language behavior and experience}, number = {3}, publisher = {Elsevier}, address = {Oxford}, issn = {0911-6044}, doi = {10.1016/j.jneuroling.2010.10.004}, pages = {320 -- 337}, year = {2011}, abstract = {While it is widely acknowledged in the formal semantic literature that both the truth-functional focus particle only and it-clefts convey exhaustiveness, the nature and source of exhaustiveness effects with it-clefts remain contested. We describe a questionnaire study (n = 80) and an event-related brain potentials (ERP) study (n = 16) that investigated the violation of exhaustiveness in German only-foci versus it-clefts. The offline study showed that a violation of exhaustivity with only is less acceptable than the violation with it-clefts, suggesting a difference in the nature of exhaustivity interpretation in the two environments. The ERP-results confirm that this difference can be seen in online processing as well: a violation of exhaustiveness in only-foci elicited a centro-posterior positivity (600-800ms), whereas a violation in it-clefts induced a globally distributed N400 pattern (400-600ms). The positivity can be interpreted as a reanalysis process and more generally as a process of context updating. The N400 effect in it-clefts is interpreted as indexing a cancelation process that is functionally distinct from the only case. The ERP study is, to our knowledge, the first evidence from an online experimental paradigm which shows that the violation of exhaustiveness involves different underlying processes in the two structural environments.}, language = {en} } @misc{Zimmermann2011, author = {Zimmermann, Malte}, title = {The grammatical expression of focus in West Chadic}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-93617}, pages = {1163 -- 1213}, year = {2011}, abstract = {The article provides an overview of the grammatical realization of focus in four West Chadic languages (Chadic, Afro-Asiatic). The languages discussed exhibit an intriguing crosslinguistic variation in the realization of focus, both among themselves as well as compared to European intonation languages. They also display language-internal variation in the formal realization of focus. The West Chadic languages differ widely in their ways of expressing focus, which range from syntactic over prosodic to morphological devices. In contrast to European intonation languages, the focus marking systems of the West Chadic languages are inconsistent in that focus is often not grammatically expressed, but these inconsistencies are shown to be systematic. Subject foci (contrastive or not) and contrastive nonsubject foci are always grammatically marked, whereas information focus on nonsubjects need not be marked as such. The absence of formal focus marking supports pragmatic theories of focus in terms of contextual resolution. The special status of focused subjects and contrastive foci is derived from the Contrastive Focus Hypothesis, which requires unexpected foci and unexpected focus contents to be marked as such, together with the assumption that canonical subjects in West Chadic receive a default interpretation as topics. Finally, I discuss certain focus ambiguities which are not attested in intonation languages, nor do they follow on standard accounts of focus marking, but which can be accounted for in terms of constraint interaction in the formal expression of focus.}, language = {en} } @book{RenansZimmermannGreif2011, author = {Renans, Agata and Zimmermann, Malte and Greif, Markus}, title = {Questionnaire on focus semantics. - 2nd edition}, url = {http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus-50359}, publisher = {Universit{\"a}t Potsdam}, year = {2011}, abstract = {This is the 15th issue of the working paper series Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) of the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 632. This online version contains the Questionnaire on Focus Semantics contributed by Agata Renans, Malte Zimmermann and Markus Greif, members of Project D2 investigating information structural phenomena from a typological perspective. The present issue provides a tool for collecting and analyzing natural data with respect to relevant linguistic questions concerning focus types, focus sensitive particles, and the effects of quantificational adverbs and presupposition on focus semantics. This volume is a supplementation to the Reference manual of the Questionnaire on Information Structure, issued by Project D2 in ISIS 4 (2006).}, language = {en} }