800 Literatur und Rhetorik
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- Avantgarde (1)
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It is well established in language acquisition research that monolingual children and adult second language learners misinterpret sentences with the universal quantifier every and make quantifier-spreading errors that are attributed to a preference for a match in number between two sets of objects. The present Visual World eye-tracking study tested bilingual heritage Russian–English adults and investigated how they interpret of sentences like Every alligator lies in a bathtub in both languages. Participants performed a sentence–picture verification task while their eye movements were recorded. Pictures showed three pairs of alligators in bathtubs and two extra objects: elephants (Control condition), bathtubs (Overexhaustive condition), or alligators (Underexhaustive condition). Monolingual adults performed at ceiling in all conditions. Heritage language (HL) adults made 20% q-spreading errors, but only in the Overexhaustive condition, and when they made an error they spent more time looking at the two extra bathtubs during the Verb region. We attribute q-spreading in HL speakers to cognitive overload caused by the necessity to integrate conflicting sources of information, i.e. the spoken sentences in their weaker, heritage, language and attention-demanding visual context, that differed with respect to referential salience.
This contribution is organized as follows: in section 1, I propose a formulation of the Mirror Principle (MP) based on syntactic features; the examples will be taken from Causatives and Anti-Causatives that are derived by affixes (in Russian, Czech, Polish, German, English as compared to Japanese and Chichewa) by head-to-head movement. In section 2, I review some basic facts in support of a syntactic approach to Merge of Causatives and Anti-Causatives, proposing that theta roles are also syntactic Features that merge functional affixes with their stems in a well-defined way. I first try to give some external evidence in showing that Causatives and Anti-Causatives obey a principle of thematic hierarchy early postulated in generative literature by Jackendoff (1972; 43), and later reformulated in terms of argument-structure-ordering principle by Grimshaw (1990:chapter 2). Crucial for my paper is the working hypothesis that every syntactic theory which tries to capture the data not only descriptively but also explanatively should descend from three levels of syntactic representation: a-structure where the relation between predicate and its arguments (and adjuncts) takes place, thematic structure where the theta-roles are assigned to their arguments, and event structure, which decides about the aspectual distribution and division of events.
Wissenschaft, Technik und Medien im Werk Alfred Döblins im Kontext der europäischen Avantgarde
(2015)
Ziel dieser Studie ist es die bislang nur sporadisch untersuchten Wechselverhältnisse zwischen den Kulturbereichen Wissenschaft/Technik und Literatur am herausragenden Beispiel des Oeuvres des Schriftstellers und Arztes Alfred Döblin aufzuspüren. Hierbei scheint seine ärztlich-psychiatrische Laufbahn, die eine breite Grundlage wissenschaftlicher Diskurse anbietet, wie auch seine avantgardistische Literaturpraxis diese gegenseitige Befruchtung gefördert zu haben.
Im Hinblick auf den Forschungsgegenstand und -zweck ist ein kulturwissenschaftlicher Ansatz versucht worden. Dieser vielperspektivische Ansatz, der von der Prämisse eines Wechselspiels aller Kulturbereiche untereinander ausgeht, gestattet eine dem Gegenstand angepasste Verknüpfung von verschiedenen Arbeitsmethoden wie der philologisch-literarhistorischen mit der konstruktivistischen und der komparatistischen. Hierbei ist eine Einbeziehung wissenschafts- und technikphilosophischer Reflexion wie auch eine dementsprechend erweiterte kulturhistorische Kontextualisierung vorgenommen worden.
Die hier vorgelegte Analyse fokussiert auf wissenschaftlich-technische Bezüge sowohl in thematischer Hinsicht als auch in der Textgestaltung der schriftstellerischen Werke Döblins bis 1924. Gleichzeitig wird die diskursgeprägte, sprachliche und literarische Dimension seiner wissenschaftlichen Studien und technischer Texte - wie Krankenakte - hervorgehoben. Dieses erweiterte ‚Oeuvre‘-Konzept gestattet die Analyse der psychiatrischen, klinisch-ärztlichen und biochemischen Schriften Döblins sowie seiner Erzählwerke, seiner vielgestaltigen Publizistik und seiner intermedialen Anregungen aus den neuen audiovisuellen Medien. Dadurch wird eine diskurskritische kulturübergreifende Interdiskursivität wie auch eine ‚Hybridität‘ aller Texte aufgezeigt, die die Grundunterschiede zwischen Textsorten und Gattungsgrenzen relativiert.
Modality in Kakataibo
(2015)
This paper explores the semantic space of modality in Kakataibo
(Panoan). It is found that Kakataibo makes a distinction in the modal
space based on the modality type. Circumstantial modality is encoded
by a construction while the epistemic space is conveyed by the second
position enclitics =dapi ‘inferential’, =id ‘second-hand information’
and =kuni ‘contrastive assertion’. However, none of these strategies to
encode modality restricts the quantificational force, leaving it
underspecified. These facts are consistent with the predictions of
current typologies of modal systems.
It has been observed for many African languages that focussed subjects
have to appear outside of their syntactic base position, as opposed to
focussed objects, which can remain in-situ. This is known as subjectobject
asymmetry of focus marking, which Fiedler et al. (2010) claim
to hold also for Akan. Genzel (2013), on the other hand, argues that
Akan does not exhibit a subject-object focus asymmetry. A questionnaire
study and a production experiment were carried out to investigate
whether focussed subjects may indeed be realized in-situ in Akan. The
results suggest that (i) focussed subjects do not have to be obligatorily
realized ex-situ, and that (ii) the syntactic preference for the realization
of a focussed subject highly depends on exhaustivity.
Sentence type marking is realized by two suffixes in Aymara, one marks
declaratives and the other polar sentences (polar questions and negated
sentences) by picking out one or two propositions, respectively. A third
suffix, initially associated with wh-questions, turns out to be a (scalar)
additive and unrelated to sentence type. The sentence-type-related suffixes
associate with focus and the additive can associate with focus by
attaching to the focused constituent.
According to Aikhenvald (2007:5), descriptive linguistics or linguistic
fieldwork “ideally involves observing the language as it is used,
becoming a member of the community, and often being adopted into
the kinship system”. Descriptive linguistics therefore differs from
theoretical linguistics in that while the former seeks to describe natural
languages as they are used, the latter, other than describing, attempts
to give explanations on how or why language phenomena behave in
certain ways. Thus, I will abstract away from any preconceived ideas
on how sentences ought to be in Awing and take the linguist/reader
through focus and interrogative constructions to get a feeling of how
the Awing people interact verbally.
This paper reopens the discussion on focus marking in Akan (Kwa,
Niger-Congo) by examining the semantics of the so-called focus marker
in the language. It is shown that the so-called focus marker expresses
exhaustivity when it occurs in a sentence with narrow focus. The study
employs four standard tests for exhaustivity proposed in the literature
to examine the semantics of Akan focus constructions (Szabolsci 1981,
1994; É. Kiss 1998; Hartmann and Zimmermann 2007). It is shown that
although a focused entity with the so-called focus marker nà is
interpreted to mean ‘only X and nothing/nobody else,’ this meaning
appears to be pragmatic.
Mit Kinderschuhen im Gepäck
(2015)
Zu kleine Kinderschuhe zwängen ein, zu große geben keinen Halt. Liebe, Fürsorge und Mitgefühl helfen, die jeweils passenden Kinderschuhe zu finden. In ihnen lernt das Kind am besten, seine individuellen Fähigkeiten zu entfalten, sie in die Gemeinschaft einzubringen und seinen eigenen Weg zu finden.
Der Band spannt einen Bogen von neurowissenschaftlichen Erkenntnissen und Grundfragen des Biografierens über Porträts von Persönlichkeiten bis hin zu gelebten menschenrechtlichen Werten.
Die Autoren und Autorinnen, Studierende der Universität Potsdam, gehen auf Spurensuche und fragen, wie die von ihnen vorgestellten Menschen zu denen wurden, die sie waren oder sind, ob und wie sie sich selbst fanden, ihre persönlichen Fähigkeiten entfalteten und anderen halfen. Sie stoßen auf kraftschenkende Kindheiten und erlebtes Glück, auf Authentizität, Verantwortung und Gleichwürdigkeit ebenso wie auf Schicksalsschläge, Ablehnung und Unrecht, auf Wünsche und Sehnsüchte, innere Zerrissenheit und Schmerz, vor allem aber auf die individuellen und sozialen Stärken dieser Persönlichkeiten.