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This study describes ME, a patient in the chronic stage after a traumatic brain injury. During an extensive training programme ME tried to regain automaticity in the retrieval of simple multiplication facts. He succeeded in substantially decreasing response latencies in multiplication, reducing the handicap at his job. This improvement generalised to a non-trained operand order, to non-trained problems, and to a non-trained output modality. Moreover, these effects were maintained over at least four months. Interestingly, however, ME's training effects were operation specific: No significant improvement occurred in addition, subtraction, or division. As coloured presentation of multiplication problems proved to be a valuable cue in facilitating the patient's performance, this might turn out to be a useful tool in the rehabilitation of fact retrieval in general
Adverb positioning is guided by syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic considerations and is subject to cross-linguistic as well as language-specific variation. The goal of the thesis is to identify the factors that determine adverb placement in general (Part I) as well as in constructions in which the adverb's sister constituent is deprived of its phonetic material by movement or ellipsis (gap constructions, Part II) and to provide an Optimality Theoretic approach to the contrasts in the effects of these factors on the distribution of adverbs in English, French, and German. In Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993), grammaticality is defined as optimal satisfaction of a hierarchy of violable constraints: for a given input, a set of output candidates are produced out of which that candidate is selected as grammatical output which optimally satisfies the constraint hierarchy. Since grammaticality crucially relies on the hierarchic relations of the constraints, cross-linguistic variation can be traced back to differences in the language-specific constraint rankings. Part I shows how diverse phenomena of adverb placement can be captured by corresponding constraints and their relative rankings: - contrasts in the linearization of adverbs and verbs/auxiliaries in English and French - verb placement in German and the filling of the prefield position - placement of focus-sensitive adverbs - fronting of topical arguments and adverbs Part II extends the analysis to a particular phenomenon of adverb positioning: the avoidance of adverb attachment to a phonetically empty constituent (gap). English and French are similar in that the acceptability of pre-gap adverb placement depends on the type of adverb, its scope, and the syntactic construction (English: wh-movement vs. topicalization / VP Fronting / VP Ellipsis, inverted vs. non-inverted clauses; French: CLLD vs. Cleft, simple vs. periphrastic tense). Yet, the two languages differ in which strategies a specific type of adverb may pursue to escape placement in front of a certain type of gap. In contrast to English and French, placement of an adverb in front of a gap never gives rise to ungrammaticality in German. Rather, word ordering has to obey the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic principles discussed in Part I; whether or not it results in adverb attachment to a phonetically empty constituent seems to be irrelevant: though constraints are active in every language, the emergence of a visible effect of their requirements in a given language depends on their relative ranking. The complex interaction of the diverse factors as well as their divergent effects on adverb placement in the various languages are accounted for by the universal constraints and their language-specific hierarchic relations in the OT framework.
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.
This paper investigates the nature of the attraction of XPs to clauseinitial position in German (and other languages). It argues that there are two different types of preposing. First, an XP can move when it is attracted by an EPP-like feature of Comp. Comp can, however, also attract elements that bear the formal marker of some semantic or pragmatic (information theoretic) function. This second type of movement is driven by the attraction of a formal property of the moved element. It has often been misanalysed as “operator” movement in the past. Japanese wh-questions always exhibit focus intonation (FI). Furthermore, the domain of FI exhibits a correspondence to the wh-scope. I propose that this phonology-semantics correspondence is a result of the cyclic computation of FI, which is explained under the notion of Multiple Spell-Out in the recent Minimalist framework. The proposed analysis makes two predictions: (1) embedding of an FI into another is possible; (2) (overt) movement of a wh-phrase to a phase edge position causes a mismatch between FI and wh-scope. Both predictions are tested experimentally, and shown to be borne out.
Content: 1 The Typology 1.1 Object Placement 2 Treatment of StG in terms of LF Movement – with and without Head Movement 3 An OT-solution in terms of linearisation (‘LF-to-PF-Mapping’) 3.1 The trigger for additional orders: Focus 3.2 Competitions 3.3 Summary 4 RP 4.1 LF Movement – with and without Head Movement 4.2 The OT-account for RP 4.3 Competitions 5 Summary
In einer multiplen Einzelfallstudie mit zehn aphasischen Patienten wurde die Wirksamkeit eines semantischen und eines phonologischen Therapieansatzes zur Behandlung von Wortabrufstörungen verglichen. Detaillierte Einzelfalluntersuchungen ermöglichten die Diagnose der zugrundeliegenden funktionalen Störungen bei jedem Patienten. Auf diese Weise konnten die erzielten Therapieeffekte auf die individuellen kognitiv-neurolinguistischen Störungsmuster bezogen werden. Im Vordergrund der Therapie stand in beiden Ansätzen das mündliche Benennen von Objektabbildungen mit unterschiedlichen Arten von Hilfen. Während in der semantischen Therapie Teilaspekte des semantischen Zielkonzepts als Benennhilfen eingesetzt wurden, handelte es sich bei den phonologischen Hilfen um Teilinformationen der Zielwortform. Bei der Erhebung von spezifischen Therapieeffekten wurde zwischen itemspezifischen und itemübergreifenden Verbesserungen sowie kurz- und langfristigen Effekten auf die mündlichen Benennleistungen unterschieden. Dabei wurden neben den quantitativen Verbesserungen (% korrekt) auch die qualitativen Effekte (Fehlertypen) der beiden Ansätze berücksichtigt, und es wurden Transfereffekte in die Spontansprache der Patienten untersucht. Zusätzlich wurden auch die Soforteffekte der verschiedenen Benennhilfen in den Therapiesitzungen erhoben. Im Methodenvergleich zeigte sich, dass die phonologische Therapiephase kurzfristig bei der Mehrzahl der Patienten signifikante Verbesserungen beim Bildbenennen bewirkte, diese Effekte haben sich jedoch überwiegend als nicht stabil erwiesen. Im Gegensatz dazu erwies sich die semantische Therapiephase auch als langfristig effektiv. Im Unterschied dazu erwiesen sich die phonologischen Benennhilfen bei fast allen Patienten als unmittelbar effektiver als die semantischen Benennhilfen. Somit waren die Soforteffekte der Hilfetypen in den Therapiesitzungen kein sicherer Indikator für die Dauer der Gesamteffekte einer Therapiephase. Außerdem zeigte sich nicht bei allen Patienten ein direkter Zusammenhang zwischen der Art ihrer zugrundeliegenden funktionalen Störung und den erzielten Therapieeffekten. Einerseits profitierten Patienten mit erhaltenen semantischen Verarbeitungsleistungen von der semantischen Therapie, andererseits zeigten sich signifikante phonologische Therapieeffekte bei Patienten mit zentral-semantischen Störungen. Die Wirkmechanismen der beiden Therapieansätze werden unter Berücksichtigung unterschiedlicher kognitiv-neurolinguistischer Theorien zum mündlichen Wortabrufprozess beim Bildbenennen interpretiert.
In this paper we review the current state of research on the issue of discourse structure (DS)/information structure (IS) interface. This field has received a lot of attention from discourse semanticists and pragmatists, and has made substantial progress in recent years. In this paper we summarize the relevant studies. In addition, we look at the issue of DS/ISinteraction at a different level - that of phonetics. It is known that both information structure and discourse structure can be realized prosodically, but the issue of phonetic interaction between the prosodic devices they employ has hardly ever been discussed in this context. We think that a proper consideration of this aspect of DS/IS-interaction would enrich our understanding of the phenomenon, and hence we formulate some related research-programmatic positions.