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This paper addresses semantic/pragmatic variability of tag questions in German and makes three main contributions. First, we document the prevalence and variety of question tags in German across three different types of conversational corpora. Second, by annotating question tags according to their syntactic and semantic context, discourse function, and pragmatic effect, we demonstrate the existing overlap and differences between the individual tag variants. Finally, we distinguish several groups of question tags by identifying the factors that influence the speakers’ choices of tags in the conversational context, such as clause type, function, speaker/hearer knowledge, as well as conversation type and medium. These factors provide the limits of variability by constraining certain question tags in German against occurring in specific contexts or with individual functions.
Rechtschreibung von Konsonantenclustern und morphologische Bewusstheit bei Grundschüler_innen
(2018)
Die vorliegenden Studien untersuchen die Entwicklung der Rechtschreibfähigkeit für finale Konsonantencluster im Deutschen und die ihr zugrundeliegenden Strategien bei Erst- bis Drittklässler_innen (N = 209). Dazu wurde der Einfluss der morphologischen Komplexität (poly- vs. monomorphematische Cluster) auf die Rechtschreibung qualitativ und quantitativ analysiert, sowie mit einer Messung zur morphologischen Bewusstheit korreliert. Von der ersten Klasse an zeigt sich eine hohe Korrektheit in der Schreibung und somit eine sprachspezifisch schnelle Entwicklung der alphabetischen Rechtschreibstrategie für finale Konsonantencluster. Der Einfluss morphologischer Verarbeitungsprozesse wurde allerdings erst für die Drittklässler_innen gefunden. Obwohl bereits die Erstklässler_innen gut entwickelte morphologische Bewusstheit zeigten, scheinen sie noch nicht in der Lage zu sein, diese bei der Rechtschreibung anzuwenden. Die Ergebnisse werden im Kontrast zu den umfangreicher vorliegenden Befunden für die englische Sprache diskutiert.
SOPARSE predicts so-called local coherence effects: locally plausible but globally impossible parses of substrings can exert a distracting influence during sentence processing. Additionally, it predicts digging-in effects: the longer the parser stays committed to a particular analysis, the harder it becomes to inhibit that analysis. We investigated the interaction of these two predictions using German sentences. Results from a self-paced reading study show that the processing difficulty caused by a local coherence can be reduced by first allowing the globally correct parse to become entrenched, which supports SOPARSE’s assumptions.
We elicited the production of various types of relative clauses in a group of German-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typically developing controls in order to test the movement optionality account of grammatical difficulty in SLI. The results show that German-speaking children with SLI are impaired in relative clause production compared to typically developing children. The alternative structures that they produce consist of simple main clauses, as well as nominal and prepositional phrases produced in isolation, sometimes contextually appropriate, and sometimes not. Crucially for evaluating the movement optionality account, children with SLI produce very few instances of embedded clauses where the relative clause head noun is pronounced in situ; in fact, such responses are more common among the typically developing child controls. These results underscore the difficulty German-speaking children with SLI have with structures involving movement, but provide no specific support for the movement optionality account.
Left peripheral focus
(2010)
In Czech, German, and many other languages, part of the semantic focus
of the utterance can be moved to the left periphery of the clause. The main generalization is that only the leftmost accented part of the semantic focus can be moved. We propose that movement to the left periphery is generally triggered by an unspecific edge feature of C (Chomsky 2008) and its restrictions can be attributed to requirements of cyclic linearization, modifying the theory of cyclic linearization developed by Fox and Pesetsky (2005). The crucial assumption is that structural accent is a direct consequence of being linearized at merge, thus it is indirectly relevant for (locality restrictions on) movement. The absence of structural accent correlates with given-ness. Given elements may later receive (topic or contrastive) accents, which accounts for fronting in multiple focus/contrastive topic constructions. Without any additional assumptions, the model can account for movement of pragmatically unmarked elements to the left periphery (‘formal fronting’, Frey 2005). Crucially, the analysis makes no reference at all to concepts of information structure in the syntax, in line with the claim of Chomsky (2008) that UG specifies no direct link between syntax and information structure.