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A form-function mismatch?
(2019)
Clause typing in Germanic
(2018)
The questionnaire investigates the functional left periphery of various finite clauses in Germanic languages, with particular attention paid to clause-typing elements and the combinations thereof. The questionnaire is mostly concerned with clause typing in embedded clauses, but main clause counterparts are also considered for comparative purposes. The chief aim was to achieve comparable results across Germanic languages, though the standardised questionnaire may also be helpful in the study of other languages, too. Most questions examine the availability of various complementisers and clause-typing operators, and in some cases the movement of verbs to the left periphery is also taken into account. The questionnaire is split into seven major parts according to the types of clauses under scrutiny.
All instructions were given in English and the individual questions either concern translations of given sentences from English into the target language, and/or they ask for specific details about the constructions in the target language.
The present document contains the questionnaire itself (together with the instructions given at the beginning of the questionnaire and at the beginning of the individual sections, as well as the questions asking for personal data), the sociolinguistic data of the speakers, and the actual results for the individual languages. Five Germanic languages are included: Dutch, Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish. For each language, two informants were recruited. Given the small number of informants, the present study serves as a qualitative investigation and as a basis for further, quantitative and experimental studies.
Pivots revisited
(2021)
The term "pivot" usually refers to two overlapping syntactic units such that the completion of the first unit simultaneously launches the second. In addition, pivots are generally said to be characterized by the smooth prosodic integration of their syntactic parts. This prosodic integration is typically achieved by prosodic-phonetic matching of the pivot components. As research on such turns in a range of languages has illustrated, speakers routinely deploy pivots so as to be able to continue past a point of possible turn completion, in the service of implementing some additional or revised action. This article seeks to build on, and complement, earlier research by exploring two issues in more detail as follows: (1) what exactly do pivotal turn extensions accomplish on the action dimension, and (2) what role does prosodic-phonetic packaging play in this? We will show that pivot constructions not only exhibit various degrees of prosodic-phonetic (non-)integration, i.e., differently strong cesuras, but that they can be ordered on a continuum, and that this cline maps onto the relationship of the actions accomplished by the components of the pivot construction. While tighter prosodic-phonetic integration, i.e., weak(er) cesuring, co-occurs with post-pivot actions whose relationship to that of the pre-pivot tends to be rather retrospective in character, looser prosodic-phonetic integration, i.e., strong(er) cesuring, is associated with a more prospective orientation of the post-pivot's action. These observations also raise more general questions with regard to the analysis of action.
“Chunking” spoken language
(2021)
In this introductory paper to the special issue on “Weak cesuras in talk-in-interaction”, we aim to guide the reader into current work on the “chunking” of naturally occurring talk. It is conducted in the methodological frameworks of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics – two approaches that consider the interactional aspect of humans talking with each other to be a crucial starting point for its analysis. In doing so, we will (1) lay out the background of this special issue (what is problematic about “chunking” talk-in-interaction, the characteristics of the methodological approach chosen by the contributors, the cesura model), (2) highlight what can be gained from such a revised understanding of “chunking” in talk-in-interaction by referring to previous work with this model as well as the findings of the contributions to this special issue, and (3) indicate further directions such work could take starting from papers in this special issue. We hope to induce a fruitful exchange on the phenomena discussed, across methodological divides.
“Chunking” spoken language
(2021)
In this introductory paper to the special issue on “Weak cesuras in talk-in-interaction”, we aim to guide the reader into current work on the “chunking” of naturally occurring talk. It is conducted in the methodological frameworks of Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics – two approaches that consider the interactional aspect of humans talking with each other to be a crucial starting point for its analysis. In doing so, we will (1) lay out the background of this special issue (what is problematic about “chunking” talk-in-interaction, the characteristics of the methodological approach chosen by the contributors, the cesura model), (2) highlight what can be gained from such a revised understanding of “chunking” in talk-in-interaction by referring to previous work with this model as well as the findings of the contributions to this special issue, and (3) indicate further directions such work could take starting from papers in this special issue. We hope to induce a fruitful exchange on the phenomena discussed, across methodological divides.
On uninterpretable features
(2019)
Preface
(2019)
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.
Verum focus and negation
(2019)
This article presents a situation description production experiment investigating the interaction between syntax and information structure in Akan, a tone language that belongs to the Kwa branch of the Niger- Congo family spoken in Ghana. Information structure was elicited via context questions that put the object in narrow informational focus or narrow corrective focus while controlling for the tonal structure of the target word. Contrary to the prediction that corrective focus is marked by fronting and morphological marking of the focused constituent the data suggest that the in-situ strategy is the preferred one.
This dissertation addresses the question of how linguistic structures can be represented in working memory. We propose a memory-based computational model that derives offline and online complexity profiles in terms of a top-down parser for minimalist grammars (Stabler, 2011). The complexity metric reflects the amount of time an item is stored in memory. The presented architecture links grammatical representations stored in memory directly to the cognitive behavior by deriving predictions about sentence processing difficulty.
Results from five different sentence comprehension experiments were used to evaluate the model's assumptions about memory limitations. The predictions of the complexity metric were compared to the locality (integration and storage) cost metric of Dependency Locality Theory (Gibson, 2000). Both metrics make comparable offline and online predictions for four of the five phenomena. The key difference between the two metrics is that the proposed complexity metric accounts for the structural complexity of intervening material. In contrast, DLT's integration cost metric considers the number of discourse referents, not the syntactic structural complexity.
We conclude that the syntactic analysis plays a significant role in memory requirements of parsing. An incremental top-down parser based on a grammar formalism easily computes offline and online complexity profiles, which can be used to derive predictions about sentence processing difficulty.
This is the 13th issue of the working paper series Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) of the Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 632. It is the first part of a series of Linguistic Fieldnote issues which present data collected by members of different projects of the SFB during fieldwork on various languages or dialects spoken worldwide. This part of the Fieldnote Series is dedicated to data from African languages. It contains contributions by Mira Grubic (A5) on Ngizim, and Susanne Genzel & Frank Kügler (D5) on Akan. The papers allow insights into various aspects of the elicitation of formal correlates of focus and related phenomena in different African languages investigated by the SFB in the second funding phase, especially in the period between 2007 and 2010.