TY - JOUR A1 - Stede, Manfred T1 - From connectives to coherence relations BT - a case study of German contrastrive connectives JF - Revue roumaine de linguistique : RRL = Romanian review of linguistics N2 - The notion of coherence relations is quite widely accepted in general, but concrete proposals differ considerably on the questions of how they should be motivated, which relations are to be assumed, and how they should be defined. This paper takes a "bottom-up" perspective by assessing the contribution made by linguistic signals (connectives), using insights from the relevant literature as well as verification by practical text annotation. We work primarily with the German language here and focus on the realm of contrast. Thus, we suggest a new inventory of contrastive connective functions and discuss their relationship to contrastive coherence relations that have been proposed in earlier work. KW - coherence relation KW - connective KW - contrast KW - concession KW - corpus analysis Y1 - 2020 SN - 0035-3957 VL - 65 IS - 3 SP - 213 EP - 233 PB - Ed. Academiei Române CY - Bucureşti ER - 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 - Gueldemann, Tom A1 - Zerbian, Sabine A1 - Zimmermann, Malte ED - Liberman, M ED - Partee, BH T1 - Variation in information structure with special reference to Africa JF - Annual review of linguistics JF - Annual Review of Linguistics N2 - Information structure has been one of the central topics of recent linguistic research. This review discusses a wide range of current approaches with particular reference to African languages, as these have been playing a crucial role in advancing our knowledge about the diversity of and recurring patterns in both meaning and form of information structural notions. We focus on cross-linguistic functional frameworks, the investigation of prosody, formal syntactic theories, and relevant effects of semantic interpretation. Information structure is a thriving research domain that promises to yield important advances in our general understanding of human language. KW - contrast KW - focus KW - formal syntax KW - prosody KW - theticity KW - topic KW - semantics KW - focus sensitivity Y1 - 2015 SN - 978-0-8243-4201-2 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguist-030514-125134 SN - 2333-9691 VL - 1 SP - 155 EP - 178 PB - Annual Reviews CY - Palo Alto ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Grubic, Mira A1 - Renans, Agata A1 - Duah, Reginald Akuoko T1 - Focus, exhaustivity and existence in Akan, Ga and Ngamo JF - Linguistics : an interdisciplinary journal of the language sciences N2 - This paper discusses the relation between focus marking and focus interpretation in Akan (Kwa), Ga (Kwa), and Ngamo (West Chadic). In all three languages, there is a special morphosyntactically marked focus/background construction, as well as morphosyntactically unmarked focus. We present data stemming from original fieldwork investigatingwhether marked focus/background constructions in these three languages also have additional interpretative effects apart from standard focus interpretation. Crosslinguistically, different additional inferences have been found for marked focus constructions, e.g. contrast (e.g. Vallduvi, Enric & Maria Vilkuna. 1997. On rheme and kontrast. In Peter Culicover & Louise McNally (eds.), The limits of syntax (Syntax and semantics 29), 79-108. New York: Academic Press; Hartmann, Katharina & Malte Zimmermann. 2007b. In place -Out of place: Focus in Hausa. In Kerstin Schwabe & Susanne Winkler (eds.), On information structure, meaning and form, 365-403. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.; Destruel, Emilie & Leah Velleman. 2014. Refining contrast: Empirical evidence from the English it-cleft. In Christopher Pinon (ed.), Empirical issues in syntax and semantics 10, 197-214. Paris: Colloque de syntaxe et semantique a Paris (CSSP). http://www.cssp.cnrs.fr/eiss10/), exhaustivity (e.g. E. Kiss, Katalin. 1998. Identificational focus versus information focus. Language 74(2). 245-273.; Hartmann, Katharina & Malte Zimmermann. 2007a. Exhaustivity marking in Hausa: A re-evaluation of the particle nee/cee. In Enoch O. Aboh, Katharina Hartmann & Malte Zimmermann (eds.), Focus strategies in African languages: The interaction of focus and grammar in Niger-Congo and AfroAsiatic (Trends in Linguistics 191), 241-263. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.), and existence (e.g. Rooth, Mats. 1999. Association with focus or association with presupposition? In Peter Bosch & Rob van der Sandt (eds.), Focus: Linguistic, cognitive, and computational perspectives, 232-244. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.; von Fintel, Kai & Lisa Matthewson. 2008. Universals in semantics. The Linguistic Review 25(1-2). 139-201). This paper investigates these three inferences. In Akan and Ga, the marked focus constructions are found to be contrastive, while in Ngamo, no effect of contrast was found. We also show that marked focus constructions in Ga and Akan trigger exhaustivity and existence presuppositions, while the marked construction in Ngamo merely gives rise to an exhaustive conversational implicature and does not trigger an existence presupposition. Instead, the marked construction in Ngamo merely indicates salience of the backgrounded part via a morphological background marker related to the definite determiner (Schuh, Russell G. 2005. Yobe state, Nigeria as a linguistic area. Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 31(2). 77-94; Guldemann, Tom. 2016. Maximal backgrounding = focus without (necessary) focus encoding. Studies in Language 40(3). 551590). The paper thus contributes to the understanding of the semantics of marked focus constructions across languages and points to the crosslinguistic variation in expressing and interpreting marked focus/background constructions. KW - focus KW - cleft KW - contrast KW - exhaustivity KW - existence presupposition KW - salience Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2018-0035 SN - 0024-3949 SN - 1613-396X VL - 57 IS - 1 SP - 221 EP - 268 PB - De Gruyter Mouton CY - Berlin ER -