Institut für Linguistik / Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft
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Institute
Focus presuppositions
(2007)
This paper reviews notions related to focus and presupposition and addresses the hypothesis that focus triggers an existential presupposition. Presupposition projection behavior in certain examples appears to favor a presuppositional analysis of focus. It is argued that these examples are open to a different analysis using givenness theory. Overall, the analysis favors a weak semantics for focus not including an existential presupposition.
Phase synchronization analysis, including our recently introduced multivariate approach, is applied to event-related EEG data from an experiment on language processing, following a classic psycholinguistic paradigm. For the two types of experimental manipulation distinct effects in overall synchronization are found; for one of them they can also be localized. The synchronization effects occur earlier than those found by the conventional analysis method, indicating that the new approach provides additional information on the underlying neuronal process.
Intonation and discourse
(2007)
This paper surveys a range of constructions in which prosody affects discourse function and discourse structure.We discuss English tag questions, negative polar questions, and what we call “focus” questions. We postulate that these question types are complex speech acts and outline an analysis in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) to account for the interactions between prosody and discourse.
Syntax
(2007)
Morphology
(2007)
Recent work in semantics has shown that languages can vary in whether or not they include degrees (that is, elements of type < d >) in their semantic ontology. Several authors have argued that their languages of study lack degrees, including Bochnak (2013) for Washo (isolate, USA), Pearson (2009) for Fijian (Austronesian, Fiji), and Beck, et al. (2009) for Motu (Austronesian, Papua New Guinea). In this paper, I follow the tests proposed in Beck, et al. (2009) to assess the status of degrees in Warlpiri (Pama-Nyungan, Australia).
I use Warlpiri data collected following the Beck, et al. survey to argue that Warlpiri gradable predicates do not combine with a degree argument. (Like many other Australian languages, adjectival concepts like big and small are expressed using nouns in Warlpiri (Dixon 1982, Bittner & Hale 1995, among others). I refer to these lexical items as “gradable predicates” in this paper.) This paper represents a first pass at assessing the status of degrees in an Australian language, which have otherwise been unexamined from the point of view of degree semantics.
The main claim of this paper is that the minimalist framework and optimality theory adopt more or less the same architecture of grammar: both assume that a generator defines a set S of potentially well-formed expressions that can be generated on the basis of a given input, and that there is an evaluator that selects the expressions from S that are actually grammatical in a given language L. The paper therefore proposes a model of grammar in which the strengths of the two frameworks are combined: more specifically, it is argued that the computational system of human language CHL from MP creates a set S of potentially well-formed expressions, and that these are subsequently evaluated in an optimality theoretic fashion.
The annotation guidelines introduced in this chapter present an attempt to create a unique infrastructure for the encoding of data from very different languages. The ultimate target of these annotations is to allow for data retrieval for the study of information structure, and since information structure interacts with all levels of grammar, the present guidelines cover all levels of grammar too. After introducing the guidelines, the current chapter also presents an evaluation by means of measurements of the inter-annotator agreement.
ANNIS
(2004)
In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of our first version of the database "ANNIS" ("ANNotation of Information Structure"). For research based on empirical data, ANNIS provides a uniform environment for storing this data together with its linguistic annotations. A central database promotes standardized annotation, which facilitates interpretation and comparison of the data. ANNIS is used through a standard web browser and offers tier-based visualization of data and annotations, as well as search facilities that allow for cross-level and cross-sentential queries. The paper motivates the design of the system, characterizes its user interface, and provides an initial technical evaluation of ANNIS with respect to data size and query processing.
We argue that there is a crucial difference between determiner and adverbial quantification. Following Herburger [2000] and von Fintel [1994], we assume that determiner quantifiers quantify over individuals and adverbial quantifiers over eventualities. While it is usually assumed that the semantics of sentences with determiner quantifiers and those with adverbial quantifiers basically come out the same, we will show by way of new data that quantification over events is more restricted than quantification over individuals. This is because eventualities in contrast to individuals have to be located in time which is done using contextual information according to a pragmatic resolution strategy. If the contextual information and the tense information given in the respective sentence contradict each other, the sentence is uninterpretable. We conclude that this is the reason why in these cases adverbial quantification, i.e. quantification over eventualities, is impossible whereas quantification over individuals is fine.