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On doubling unconditionals
(2019)
Contrastive focus
(2007)
The article puts forward a discourse-pragmatic approach to the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. It is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of ‘contrastive focus’, ‘kontrast’ (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or ‘identificational focus’ (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms like introduction of alternatives or exhaustivity. Rather, an adequate analysis must take into account discourse-pragmatic notions like hearer expectation or discourse expectability of the focused content in a given discourse situation. The less expected a given content is judged to be for the hearer, relative to the Common Ground, the more likely a speaker is to mark this content by means of special grammatical devices, giving rise to emphasis.
In this paper I argue that both parametric variation and the alleged differences between languages in terms of their internal complexity straightforwardly follow from the Strongest Minimalist Thesis that takes the Faculty of Language (FL) to be an optimal solution to conditions that neighboring mental modules impose on it. In this paper I argue that hard conditions like legibility at the linguistic interfaces invoke simplicity metrices that, given that they stem from different mental modules, are not harmonious. I argue that widely attested expression strategies, such as agreement or movement, are a direct result of conflicting simplicity metrices, and that UG, perceived as a toolbox that shapes natural language, can be taken to consist of a limited number of markings strategies, all resulting from conflicting simplicity metrices. As such, the contents of UG follow from simplicity requirements, and therefore no longer necessitate linguistic principles, valued or unvalued, to be innately present. Finally, I show that the SMT does not require that languages themselves have to be optimal in connecting sound to meaning.
Aspect splits can affect agreement, Case, and even preposition insertion. This paper discusses the functional ‘why’ and the theoretical ‘how’ of aspect splits. Aspect splits are an economical way to mark aspect by preserving or suppressing some independent element in one aspect. In formal terms, they are produced in the same way as coda conditions in phonology, with positional/contextual faithfulness.This approach captures the additive effects of cross-cutting splits. Aspect splits are analyzed here from Hindi, Nepali, Yucatec Maya, Chontal, and Palauan.
Stop bashing givenness!
(2005)
Elke Kasimir’s paper (in this volume) argues against employing the notion of Givenness in the explanation of accent assignment. I will claim that the arguments against Givenness put forward by Kasimir are inconclusive because they beg the question of the role of Givenness. It is concluded that, more generally, arguments against Givenness as a diagnostic for information structural partitions should not be accepted offhand, since the notion of Givenness of discourse referents is (a) theoretically simple, (b) readily observable and quantifiable, and (c) bears cognitive significance.
Counting Markedness
(2003)
This paper reports the results of a corpus investigation on case conflicts in German argument free relative constructions. We investigate how corpus frequencies reflect the relative markedness of free relative and correlative constructions, the relative markedness of different case conflict configurations, and the relative markedness of different conflict resolution strategies. Section 1 introduces the conception of markedness as used in Optimality Theory. Section 2 introduces the facts about German free relative clauses, and section 3 presents the results of the corpus study. By and large, markedness and frequency go hand in hand. However, configurations at the highest end of the markedness scale rarely show up in corpus data, and for the configuration at the lowest end we found an unexpected outcome: the more marked structure is preferred.
The simple generator
(2006)
I argue that the shift of explanatory burden from the generator to the evaluator in OT syntax – together with the difficulties that arise when we try to formulate a working theory of the interfaces of syntax – leads to a number of assumptions about syntactic structures in OT which are quite different from those typical of minimalist syntax: formal features, as driving forces behind syntactic movement, are useless, and derivational and representational economy are problematic for both empirical and conceptual reasons. The notion of markedness, central in Optimality Theory, is not fully compatible with the idea of synactic economy. Even more so, seemingly obvious cases of blocking by structural economy do not seem to result from grammar proper, but reflect (economical) aspects of language use.
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
Holmberg (1997, 1999) assumes that Holmberg's generalisation (HG) is derivational, prohibiting Object Shift (OS) across an intervening non-adverbial element at any point in the derivation. Counterexamples to this hypothesis are given in Fox & Pesetsky (2005) which show that remnant VP-topicalisations are possible in Scandinavian as long as the VP-internal order relations are maintained. Extending the empirical basis concerning remnant VP-topicalisations, we argue that HG and the restrictions on object stranding result from the same, more general condition on order preservation. Considering this condition to be violable and to interact with various constraints on movement in an Optimality-theoretic fashion, we suggest an account for various asymmetries in the interaction between remnant VP-topicalisations and both OS and other movement operations (especially subject raising) as to their order preserving characteristics and stranding abilities.
While the Information Structure (IS) is most naturally interpreted as 'structure of information', some may argue that it is structure of something else, and others may object to the use of the word 'structure'. This paper focuses on the question of whether the informational component can have structural properties such that it can be called 'structure'. The preliminary conclusion is that, although there are some vague indications of structurehood in it, it is perhaps better understood to be a representation that encodes a finite set of information-based partitions, rather than structure.
The most recent trend in the studies of LF intervention effects makes crucial reference to focusing effects on the interveners, and this paper critically examines the representative analyses of the focus-based approach. While each analysis has its own merits and shortcomings, I argue that a pragmatic analysis that does not make appeal to syntactic configurations is better equipped to deal with many of the complex and delicate facts surrounding intervention effects.
Accusative Unaccusatives
(2019)
We present a system for the linguistic exploration and analysis of lexical cohesion in English texts. Using an electronic thesaurus-like resource, Princeton WordNet, and the Brown Corpus of English, we have implemented a process of annotating text with lexical chains and a graphical user interface for inspection of the annotated text. We describe the system and report on some sample linguistic analyses carried out using the combined thesaurus-corpus resource.
Bienenfresserortungsversuch
(2019)
Natural law
(2006)
This work concentrates on the requirements of the computational system of HL, by developing the idea that Natural Law applies to universal syntactic principles. The systems of efficient growth are for the continuation of motion and maximal distance between the elements. The condition of maximization accounts for the properties of syntactic trees - binary branching, labeling, and the EPP. NL justifies the basic principle of organization in Merge: it provides a functional explanation of phase formation and thematic domains. In Optimality Theory, it accounts for the selection of a particular word order in languages. A comprehensive and definitive understanding of the principles underlying MP will eventually lead to a more advanced design of OT.
Splits and Birds
(2019)
The present study examines native and nonnative perceptual processing of semantic information conveyed by prosodic prominence. Five groups of German learners of English each listened to one of 5 experimental conditions. Three conditions differed in place of focus accent in the sentence and two conditions were with spliced stimuli. The experiment condition was presented first in the learners’ L1 (German) and then in a similar set in the L2 (English). The effect of the accent condition and of the length and position of the target in the sentence was evaluated in a probe recognition task. In both the L1 and L2 tasks there was no significant effect in any of the five focus conditions. Target position and target word length had an effect in the L1 task. Word length did not affect accuracy rates in the L2 task. For probe recognition in the L2, word length and the position of the target interacted with the focus condition.
New evidence is provided for a grammatical principle that singles out contrastive focus (Rooth 1996; Truckenbrodt 1995) and distinguishes it from discourse-new “informational” focus. Since the prosody of discourse-given constituents may also be distinguished from discourse-new, a three-way distinction in representation is motivated. It is assumed that an F-feature marks just contrastive focus (Jackendoff 1972, Rooth 1992), and that a G-feature marks discoursegiven constituents (Féry and Samek-Lodovici 2006), while discoursenew is unmarked. A crucial argument for G-marking comes from second occurrence focus (SOF) prosody, which arguably derives from a syntactic representation where SOF is both F-marked and G-marked. This analysis relies on a new G-Marking Condition specifying that a contrastive focus may be G-marked only if the focus semantic value of its scope is discourse-given, i.e. only if the contrast itself is given.
The paper investigates focus marking devices in the scarcely documented North-Ghanaian Gur language Konkomba. The two particles lé and lá occur under specific focus conditions and are therefore regarded as focus markers in the sparse literature. Comparing the distribution and obligatoriness of both alleged focus markers however, I show that one of the particles, lé, is better analyzed as a connective particle, i.e. as a syntactic rather than as a genuine pragmatic marker, and that comparable syntactic focus marking strategies for sentence-initial constituents are also known from related languages.