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Breaking down complexity
(2015)
The unbounded expressive capacity of human language cannot boil down to an infinite list of sentences stored in a finite brain. Our linguistic knowledge is rather grounded around a rule-based universal syntactic computation—called Merge—which takes categorized units in input (e.g. this and ship), and generates structures by binding words recursively into more complex hierarchies of any length (e.g. this ship; this ship sinks…). Here we present data from different fMRI datasets probing the cortical implementation of this fundamental process. We first pushed complexity down to a three-word level, to explore how Merge creates minimally hierarchical phrases and sentences. We then moved to the most fundamental two-word level, to directly assess the universal invariant nature of Merge, when no additive mechanisms are involved. Our most general finding is that Merge as the basic syntactic operation is primarily performed by confined area, namely BA 44 in the IFG. Activity reduces to its most ventral-anterior portion at the most fundamental level, following fine-grained sub-anatomical parcellation proposed for the region. The deep frontal operculum/anterior-dorsal insula (FOP/adINS), a phylogenetically older and less specialized region, rather appears to support word-accumulation processing in which the categorical information of the word is first accessed based on its lexical status, and then maintained on hold before further processing takes place. The present data confirm the general notion of BA 44 being activated as a function of complex structural hierarchy, but they go beyond this view by proposing that structural sensitivity in BA 44 is already appreciated at the lowest levels of complexity during which minimal phrase-structures are build up, and syntactic Merge is assessed. Further, they call for a redefinition of BA 44 from multimodal area to a macro-region with internal localizable functional profiles
Purpose: The aims of this systematic review are to provide a critical overview of short-term memory (STM) and working memory (WM) treatments in stroke aphasia and to systematically evaluate the internal and external validity of STM/WM treatments. Method: A systematic search was conducted in February 2014 and then updated in December 2016 using 13 electronic databases. We provided descriptive characteristics of the included studies and assessed their methodological quality using the Risk of Bias in N-of-1 Trials quantitative scale (Tate et al., 2015), which was completed by 2 independent raters. Results: The systematic search and inclusion/exclusion procedure yielded 17 single-case or case-series studies with 37 participants for inclusion. Nine studies targeted auditory STM consisting of repetition and/or recognition tasks, whereas 8 targeted attention and WM, such as attention process training including n-back tasks with shapes and clock faces as well as mental math tasks. In terms of their methodological quality, quality scores on the Risk of Bias in N-of-1 Trials scale ranged from 4 to 17 (M = 9.5) on a 0-30 scale, indicating a high risk of bias in the reviewed studies. Effects of treatment were most frequently assessed on STM, WM, and spoken language comprehension. Transfer effects on communication and memory in activities of daily living were tested in only 5 studies. Conclusions: Methodological limitations of the reviewed studies make it difficult, at present, to draw firm conclusions about the effects of STM/WM treatments in poststroke aphasia. Further studies with more rigorous methodology and stronger experimental control are needed to determine the beneficial effects of this type of intervention. To understand the underlying mechanisms of STM/WM treatment effects and how they relate to language functioning, a careful choice of outcome measures and specific hypotheses about potential improvements on these measures are required. Future studies need to include outcome measures of memory functioning in everyday life and psychosocial functioning more generally to demonstrate the ecological validity of STM and WM treatments.
Recent treatment protocols have been successful in improving working memory (WM) in individuals with aphasia. However, the evidence to date is small and the extent to which improvements in trained tasks of WM transfer to untrained memory tasks, spoken sentence comprehension, and functional communication is yet poorly understood. To address these issues, we conducted a multiple baseline study with three German-speaking individuals with chronic post stroke aphasia. Participants practised two computerised WM tasks (n-back with pictures and aback with spoken words) four times a week for a month, targeting two WM processes: updating WM representations and resolving interference. All participants showed improvement on at least one measure of spoken sentence comprehension and everyday memory activities. Two of them showed improvement also on measures of WM and functional communication. Our results suggest that WM can be improved through computerised training in chronic aphasia and this can transfer to spoken sentence comprehension and functional communication in some individuals.
Background: Individuals with aphasia after stroke (IWA) often present with working memory (WM) deficits. Research investigating the relationship between WM and language abilities has led to the promising hypothesis that treatments of WM could lead to improvements in language, a phenomenon known as transfer. Although recent treatment protocols have been successful in improving WM, the evidence to date is scarce and the extent to which improvements in trained tasks of WM transfer to untrained memory tasks, spoken sentence comprehension, and functional communication is yet poorly understood.
Aims: We aimed at (a) investigating whether WM can be improved through an adaptive n-back training in IWA (Study 1–3); (b) testing whether WM training leads to near transfer to unpracticed WM tasks (Study 1–3), and far transfer to spoken sentence comprehension (Study 1–3), functional communication (Study 2–3), and memory in daily life in IWA (Study 2–3); and (c) evaluating the methodological quality of existing WM treatments in IWA (Study 3). To address these goals, we conducted two empirical studies – a case-controls study with Hungarian speaking IWA (Study 1) and a multiple baseline study with German speaking IWA (Study 2) – and a systematic review (Study 3).
Methods: In Study 1 and 2 participants with chronic, post-stroke aphasia performed an adaptive, computerized n-back training. ‘Adaptivity’ was implemented by adjusting the tasks’ difficulty level according to the participants’ performance, ensuring that they always practiced at an optimal level of difficulty. To assess the specificity of transfer effects and to better understand the underlying mechanisms of transfer on spoken sentence comprehension, we included an outcome measure testing specific syntactic structures that have been proposed to involve WM processes (e.g., non-canonical structures with varying complexity).
Results: We detected a mixed pattern of training and transfer effects across individuals: five participants out of six significantly improved in the n-back training. Our most important finding is that all six participants improved significantly in spoken sentence comprehension (i.e., far transfer effects). In addition, we also found far transfer to functional communication (in two participants out of three in Study 2) and everyday memory functioning (in all three participants in Study 2), and near transfer to unpracticed n-back tasks (in four participants out of six). Pooled data analysis of Study 1 and 2 showed a significant negative relationship between initial spoken sentence comprehension and the amount of improvement in this ability, suggesting that the more severe the participants’ spoken sentence comprehension deficit was at the beginning of training, the more they improved after training. Taken together, we detected both near far and transfer effects in our studies, but the effects varied across participants. The systematic review evaluating the methodological quality of existing WM treatments in stroke IWA (Study 3) showed poor internal and external validity across the included 17 studies. Poor internal validity was mainly due to use of inappropriate design, lack of randomization of study phases, lack of blinding of participants and/or assessors, and insufficient sampling. Low external validity was mainly related to incomplete information on the setting, lack of use of appropriate analysis or justification for the suitability of the analysis procedure used, and lack of replication across participants and/or behaviors. Results in terms of WM, spoken sentence comprehension, and reading are promising, but further studies with more rigorous methodology and stronger experimental control are needed to determine the beneficial effects of WM intervention.
Conclusions: Results of the empirical studies suggest that WM can be improved with a computerized and adaptive WM training, and improvements can lead to transfer effects to spoken sentence comprehension and functional communication in some individuals with chronic post-stroke aphasia. The fact that improvements were not specific to certain syntactic structures (i.e., non-canonical complex sentences) in spoken sentence comprehension suggest that WM is not involved in the online, automatic processing of syntactic information (i.e., parsing and interpretation), but plays a more general role in the later stage of spoken sentence comprehension (i.e., post-interpretive comprehension). The individual differences in treatment outcomes call for future research to clarify how far these results are generalizable to the population level of IWA. Future studies are needed to identify a few mechanisms that may generalize to at least a subpopulation of IWA as well as to investigate baseline non-linguistic cognitive and language abilities that may play a role in transfer effects and the maintenance of such effects. These may require larger yet homogenous samples.
Aphasia, the language disorder following brain damage, is frequently accompanied by deficits of working memory (WM) and executive functions (EFs). Recent studies suggest that WM, together with certain EFs, can play a role in sentence comprehension in individuals with aphasia (IWA), and that WM can be enhanced with intensive practice. Our aim was to investigate whether a combined WM and EF training improves the understanding of spoken sentences in IWA. We used a pre-post-test case control design. Three individuals with chronic aphasia practised an adaptive training task (a modified n-back task) three to four times a week for a month. Their performance was assessed before and after the training on outcome measures related to WM and spoken sentence comprehension. One participant showed significant improvement on the training task, another showed a tendency for improvement, and both of them improved significantly in spoken sentence comprehension. The third participant did not improve on the training task, however, she showed improvement on one measure of spoken sentence comprehension. Compared to controls, two individuals improved at least in one condition of the WM outcome measures. Thus, our results suggest that a combined WM and EF training can be beneficial for IWA.
Zero-shot learning in Language & Vision is the task of correctly labelling (or naming) objects of novel categories. Another strand of work in L&V aims at pragmatically informative rather than "correct" object descriptions, e.g. in reference games. We combine these lines of research and model zero-shot reference games, where a speaker needs to successfully refer to a novel object in an image. Inspired by models of "rational speech acts", we extend a neural generator to become a pragmatic speaker reasoning about uncertain object categories. As a result of this reasoning, the generator produces fewer nouns and names of distractor categories as compared to a literal speaker. We show that this conversational strategy for dealing with novel objects often improves communicative success, in terms of resolution accuracy of an automatic listener.
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.
This paper reports on an elicited production study which investigates prosodic marking of narrow focus in modified noun phrases in varieties of South African English. The acoustic analysis of fundamental frequency, intensity, and duration in narrow focus is presented and discussed. The results suggest that these three acoustic parameters are manipulated differently in narrow focus in the varieties of English as a Second Language as compared to General South African English. The article compares the results to what is known about prosodic marking of information structure in other varieties of English as a Second Language and underlines the necessity of carefully controlled data in the investigation of phonological and phonetic variation in varieties of English.
We present findings of a multi-speaker production study that was undertaken to investigate the realisation of two adjacent high tones within the verb word in Northern Sotho, a Southern Bantu language. Experimental tokens are selected to ensure that the high tones originate from different combinations of morphosyntactic constituents. It is found that the morphosyntactic constituency determines how the adjacent high tones are realised. When both high tones originate within either the inflectional stem or the macrostem constituents, a single pitch peak is realised. Additionally, when the macrostem contains two high tones, the tone of the object concord is absorbed into the stem. Two adjacent high tones, of which one stems from the inflectional stem and the other from the macrostem, produce two pitch peaks, with the latter of the two delayed in order to satisfy the Obligatory Contour Principle. These generalisations are supported by acoustic data. A set of rules is formulated that describes the surface realisation of adjacent high tones in the verbal domain of Northern Sotho (with the exception of one unresolved issue).
Wird Schon Stimmen!
(2018)
The article puts forward a novel analysis of the German modal particle schon as a modal degree operator over propositional content. The proposed analysis offers a uniform perspective on the semantics of modal schon and its aspectual counterpart meaning ‘already’: Both particles are analyzed as denoting a degree operator, expressing a scale-based comparison over relevant alternatives. The alternatives are determined by focus in the case of aspectual schon (Krifka 2000), but are restricted to the polar alternatives p and ¬p in the case of modal schon. Semantically, modal schon introduces a presupposition to the effect that the circumstantial conversational background contains more factual evidence in favor of p than in favor of ¬p, thereby making modal schon the not at-issue counterpart of the overt comparative form eher ‘rather’ (Herburger & Rubinstein 2014). The analysis incorporates basic insights from earlier analyses of modal schon in a novel way, and it also offers new insights as to the underlying workings of modality in natural language as involving propositions rather than possible worlds (Kratzer 1977, 2012).
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.
On the functional architecture of DP and the feature content of pronominal quantifiers in Low German
(2011)
The article investigates the functional architecture of complex pronominal quantifying expressions (PQEs) in Low German, such as jeder-een 'everyone' and keen-een 'no-one', which provide overt evidence for a Num-projection, situated between the NP- and DP-layer. The feature specification of Num as [+lattice] or [-lattice] is responsible for whether the DP denotes into the domain of atomic or mass/plural entities, respectively. In the case of complex PQEs, the syntactic Num-head hosts the overt element een 'a, one', which carries a [-lattice] feature, thus ensuring that the PQE ranges exclusively over the domain of atomic entities, but not mass or plural entities. The Num-head een differs from its simplex counterpart wat 'something', which is analyzed as an NP-proform with an underspecified [lattice]-feature. As a result, wat can range over atomic and mass domains alike. In the final part of the article, it is argued that wat is also underspecified for the operator feature [rel/wh], for which reason it can also function as an interrogative expression (what) and as a relative pronoun (which), respectively, depending on the syntactic context. Throughout the article, the Low German data are compared with relevant data from other German dialects and Germanic and Romance languages, pointing out similarities and differences in the syntactic structure and feature content of PQEs across these languages and dialects.
The grammatical expression of focus in West Chadic variation and uniformity in and across languages
(2011)
The article provides an overview of the grammatical realization of focus in four West Chadic languages (Chadic, Afro-Asiatic). The languages discussed exhibit an intriguing crosslinguistic variation in the realization of focus, both among themselves as well as compared to European intonation languages. They also display language-internal variation in the formal realization of focus. The West Chadic languages differ widely in their ways of expressing focus, which range from syntactic over prosodic to morphological devices. In contrast to European intonation languages, the focus marking systems of the West Chadic languages are inconsistent in that focus is often not grammatically expressed, but these inconsistencies are shown to be systematic. Subject foci (contrastive or not) and contrastive nonsubject foci are always grammatically marked, whereas information focus on nonsubjects need not be marked as such. The absence of formal focus marking supports pragmatic theories of focus in terms of contextual resolution. The special status of focused subjects and contrastive foci is derived from the Contrastive Focus Hypothesis, which requires unexpected foci and unexpected focus contents to be marked as such, together with the assumption that canonical subjects in West Chadic receive a default interpretation as topics. Finally, I discuss certain focus ambiguities which are not attested in intonation languages, nor do they follow on standard accounts of focus marking, but which can be accounted for in terms of constraint interaction in the formal expression of focus.
Predicate focus
(2016)
The article provides an overview of the grammatical realization of focus in four West Chadic languages (Chadic, Afro-Asiatic). The languages discussed exhibit an intriguing crosslinguistic variation in the realization of focus, both among themselves as well as compared to European intonation languages. They also display language-internal variation in the formal realization of focus. The West Chadic languages differ widely in their ways of expressing focus, which range from syntactic over prosodic to morphological devices. In contrast to European intonation languages, the focus marking systems of the West Chadic languages are inconsistent in that focus is often not grammatically expressed, but these inconsistencies are shown to be systematic. Subject foci (contrastive or not) and contrastive nonsubject foci are always grammatically marked, whereas information focus on nonsubjects need not be marked as such. The absence of formal focus marking supports pragmatic theories of focus in terms of contextual resolution. The special status of focused subjects and contrastive foci is derived from the Contrastive Focus Hypothesis, which requires unexpected foci and unexpected focus contents to be marked as such, together with the assumption that canonical subjects in West Chadic receive a default interpretation as topics. Finally, I discuss certain focus ambiguities which are not attested in intonation languages, nor do they follow on standard accounts of focus marking, but which can be accounted for in terms of constraint interaction in the formal expression of focus.
We present novel experimental evidence on the availability and the status of exhaustivity inferences with focus partitioning in German, English, and Hungarian. Results suggest that German and English focus-background clefts and Hungarian focus share important properties, (É. Kiss 1998, 1999; Szabolcsi 1994; Percus 1997; Onea & Beaver 2009). Those constructions are anaphoric devices triggering an existence presupposition. EXH-inferences are not obligatory in such constructions in English, German, or Hungarian, against some previous literature (Percus 1997; Büring & Križ 2013; É. Kiss 1998), but in line with pragmatic analyses of EXH-inferences in clefts (Horn 1981, 2016; Pollard & Yasavul 2016). The cross-linguistic differences in the distribution of EXH-inferences are attributed to properties of the Hungarian number marking system.
We present novel experimental evidence on the availability and the status of exhaustivity inferences with focus partitioning in German, English, and Hungarian. Results suggest that German and English focus-background clefts and Hungarian focus share important properties, (É. Kiss 1998, 1999; Szabolcsi 1994; Percus 1997; Onea & Beaver 2009). Those constructions are anaphoric devices triggering an existence presupposition. EXH-inferences are not obligatory in such constructions in English, German, or Hungarian, against some previous literature (Percus 1997; Büring & Križ 2013; É. Kiss 1998), but in line with pragmatic analyses of EXH-inferences in clefts (Horn 1981, 2016; Pollard & Yasavul 2016). The cross-linguistic differences in the distribution of EXH-inferences are attributed to properties of the Hungarian number marking system.
Introduction
(2010)
This thesis aims to investigate the visualization approaches in the field of annotated discourse relations and to find a solution that meets the requirements best by comparing different programming tools. The subject of this research are coherence relations, which have several properties that can be challenging for many visualization methods. The thesis presents five different visualization options from both the application and the development perspective. The initially tested simple HTML approaches as well as the software package displaCy show the insufficient level for the visualization purposes of this work. The alternative implementation with D3 would optimally meet the requirements but goes beyond the scope of the project. The main method chosen in this thesis was implemented as a single web application and uses the brat annotation tool, which fulfills most of the defined requirements for the representation of the coherence relations. The application graphically displays the coherence relations annotated in the text and offers a filter function for different relation types.
This dissertation examines the integration of incongruent visual-scene and morphological-case information (“cues”) in building thematic-role representations of spoken relative clauses in German.
Addressing the mutual influence of visual and linguistic processing, the Coordinated Interplay Account (CIA) describes a mechanism in two steps supporting visuo-linguistic integration (Knoeferle & Crocker, 2006, Cog Sci). However, the outcomes and dynamics of integrating incongruent thematic-role representations from distinct sources have been investigated scarcely. Further, there is evidence that both second-language (L2) and older speakers may rely on non-syntactic cues relatively more than first-language (L1)/young speakers. Yet, the role of visual information for thematic-role comprehension has not been measured in L2 speakers, and only limitedly across the adult lifespan.
Thematically unambiguous canonically ordered (subject-extracted) and noncanonically ordered (object-extracted) spoken relative clauses in German (see 1a-b) were presented in isolation and alongside visual scenes conveying either the same (congruent) or the opposite (incongruent) thematic relations as the sentence did.
1 a Das ist der Koch, der die Braut verfolgt.
This is the.NOM cook who.NOM the.ACC bride follows
This is the cook who is following the bride.
b Das ist der Koch, den die Braut verfolgt.
This is the.NOM cook whom.ACC the.NOM bride follows
This is the cook whom the bride is following.
The relative contribution of each cue to thematic-role representations was assessed with agent identification. Accuracy and latency data were collected post-sentence from a sample of L1 and L2 speakers (Zona & Felser, 2023), and from a sample of L1 speakers from across the adult lifespan (Zona & Reifegerste, under review). In addition, the moment-by-moment dynamics of thematic-role assignment were investigated with mouse tracking in a young L1 sample (Zona, under review).
The following questions were addressed: (1) How do visual scenes influence thematic-role representations of canonical and noncanonical sentences? (2) How does reliance on visual-scene, case, and word-order cues vary in L1 and L2 speakers? (3) How does reliance on visual-scene, case, and word-order cues change across the lifespan?
The results showed reliable effects of incongruence of visually and linguistically conveyed thematic relations on thematic-role representations. Incongruent (vs. congruent) scenes yielded slower and less accurate responses to agent-identification probes presented post-sentence. The recently inspected agent was considered as the most likely agent ~300ms after trial onset, and the convergence of visual scenes and word order enabled comprehenders to assign thematic roles predictively.
L2 (vs. L1) participants relied more on word order overall. In response to noncanonical clauses presented with incongruent visual scenes, sensitivity to case predicted the size of incongruence effects better than L1-L2 grouping. These results suggest that the individual’s ability to exploit specific cues might predict their weighting.
Sensitivity to case was stable throughout the lifespan, while visual effects increased with increasing age and were modulated by individual interference-inhibition levels. Thus, age-related changes in comprehension may stem from stronger reliance on visually (vs. linguistically) conveyed meaning.
These patterns represent evidence for a recent-role preference – i.e., a tendency to re-assign visually conveyed thematic roles to the same referents in temporally coordinated utterances. The findings (i) extend the generalizability of CIA predictions across stimuli, tasks, populations, and measures of interest, (ii) contribute to specifying the outcomes and mechanisms of detecting and indexing incongruent representations within the CIA, and (iii) speak to current efforts to understand the sources of variability in sentence comprehension.
On doubling unconditionals
(2019)
Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; working papers of the SFB 632. - Vol. 1
(2004)
Contents: A1: Phonology and syntax of focussing and topicalisation: Gisbert Fanselow: Cyclic Phonology–Syntax-Interaction: Movement to First Position in German Caroline Féry and Laura Herbst: German Sentence Accent Revisited Shinichiro Ishihara: Prosody by Phase: Evidence from Focus Intonation–Wh-scope Correspondence in Japanese A2: Quantification and information structure: Cornelia Endriss and Stefan Hinterwimmer: The Influence of Tense in Adverbial Quantification A3: Rhetorical Structure in Spoken Language: Modeling of Global Prosodic Parameters: Ekaterina Jasinskaja, Jörg Mayer and David Schlangen: Discourse Structure and Information Structure: Interfaces and Prosodic Realization B2: Focussing in African Tchadic languages: Katharina Hartmann and Malte Zimmermann: Focus Strategies in Chadic: The Case of Tangale Revisited D1: Linguistic database for information structure: Annotation and retrieval: Stefanie Dipper, Michael Götze, Manfred Stede and Tillmann Wegst: ANNIS: A Linguistic Database for Exploring Information Structure
The papers in this volume were presented at the workshop Heterogeneity in Linguistic Databases', which took place on July 9, 2004 at the University of Potsdam. The workshop was organized by project D1: Linguistic Database for Information Structure: Annotation and Retrieval', a member project of the SFB 632, a collaborative research center entitled Information Structure: the Linguistic Means for Structuring Utterances, Sentences and Texts'. The workshop brought together both developers and users of linguistic databases from a number of research projects which work on an empirical basis, all of which have to cope with different sorts of heterogeneity: primary linguistic data and annotated information may be heterogeneous, as well as the data structures representing them. The first four papers (by Wagner, Schmidt, Lüdeling, and Witt) address aspects of heterogeneous data from the point of view of database developers; the remaining three papers (by Meyer, Smith, and Teich/Fankhauser) focus on data exploitation by the users.
Der vorliegende dritte Band der Serie "Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure" enthält sieben Beiträge aus verschiedenen Projekten des Sonderforschungsbereiches "Informationsstruktur: Die sprachlichen Mittel der Gliederung von Äußerung, Satz und Text" (SFB 632). Der Titel "Approaches and Findings in Oral, Written and Gestural Language" reflektiert die Bandbreite der Untersuchungen zum Thema Informationsstruktur. In ihrem Artikel hinterfragt Elke Kasimir die Zuverlässigkeit des sog. Frage-Antwort-Tests zur Bestimmung des fokussierten Elementes in Sätzen. Ihr alternativer Lösungsvorschlag wird in dem Kommentar von Thomas Weskott kritisch diskutiert. Der Artikel von Paul Elbourne befasst sich mit Phänomenen der Ellipse und bietet eine neue semantische Analyse an. Spezielle morphologisch stark markierte Fokuskonstruktionen aus fünf verschiedenen afrikanischen Sprachen der Gur- und Kwa-Sprachgruppe werden von Ines Fiedler und Anne Schwarz analysiert und diachronisch interpretiert. Ebenfalls sprachhistorisch ausgerichtet ist der Artikel von Roland Hinterhölzl, Svetlana Petrova und Michael Solf, die Belege für die Interaktion von Wortstellung und Informationsstruktur bereits in der althochdeutschen Tatian-Übersetzung fanden. Anke Sennema, Ruben van de Vijver, Susanne E. Carroll und Anne Zimmer-Stahl diskutieren anhand einer Serie von Experimenten die Nutzung von Prosodie, Wortlänge und –Stellung für die semantischen Interpretation in der Erst- und Zweitsprache. Die besondere Rolle von Gestik in Verbindung mit Intonation für die Strukturierung des sprachlichen Diskurses wird von Stefanie Jannedy und Norma Mendoza-Denton hervorgehoben.
Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; Working papers of the SFB 632. - Vol. 8
(2007)
The 8th volume of the working paper series Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure (ISIS) of the SFB 632 contains a collection of eight papers contributed by guest authors and SFB-members. The first paper on “Biased Questions” is an invited contribution by Nicholas Asher (CNRS, Laboratoire IRIT) & Brian Reese (University of Texas at Austin). Surveying English tag questions, negative polar questions, and what they term “focus” questions, they investigate the effects of prosody on discourse function and discourse structure and analyze the interaction between prosody and discourse in SDRT (Segmented Discourse Representation Theory). Stefan Hinterwimmer (A2) explores the interpretation of singular definites and universally quantified DPs in adverbially quantified English sentences. He suggests that the availability of a co-varying interpretation is more constrained in the case of universally quantified DPs than in the case of singular definites, because different from universally quantified DPs, co-varying definites are inherently focus-marked. The existence of striking similarities between topic/comment structure and bimanual coordination is pointed out and investigated by Manfred Krifka (A2). Showing how principles of bimanual coordination influence the expression of topic/comment structure beyond spoken language, he suggests that bimanual coordination might have been a preadaptation of the development of Information Structure in human communication. Among the different ways of expressing focus in Foodo, an underdescribed African Guang language of the Kwa family, the marked focus constructions are the central topic of the paper by Ines Fiedler (B1 & D2). Exploring the morphosyntactic facilities that Foodo has for focalization, she suggests that the two focus markers N and n have developed out of a homophone conjunction. Focus marking in another scarcely documented African tone language, the Gur language Konkomba, is treated by Anne Schwarz (B1 & D2). Comparing the two alleged focus markers lé and lá of the language, she argues that lé is better interpreted as a syntactic device rather than as a focus marker and shows that this analysis is corroborated by parallels in related languages. The reflexes of Information Structure in four different European languages (French, German, Greek and Hungarian) are compared and validated by Sam Hellmuth & Stavros Skopeteas (D2). The production data was collected with selected materials of the Questionnaire on Information Structure (QUIS) developed at the SFB. The results not only allow for an evaluation of the current elicitation paradigms, but also help to identify potentially fruitful venues of future research. Frank Kügler, Stavros Skopeteas (D2) & Elisabeth Verhoeven (University of Bremen) give an account of the encoding of Information Structure in Yucatec Maya, a Mayan tone language spoken on the Yucatecan peninsula in Mexico. The results of a production experiment lead them to the conclusion that focus is mainly expressed by syntax in this language. Stefanie Jannedy (D3) undertakes an instrumental investigation on the expressions and interpretation of focus in Vietnamese, a language of the Mon-Khmer family contrasting six lexical tones. The data strongly suggests that focus in Vietnamese is exclusively marked by prosody (intonational emphasis expressed via duration, f0 and amplitude) and that different focus conditions can reliably be recovered. This volume offers insights into current work conducted at the SFB 632, comprising empirical and theoretical aspects of Information Structure in a multitude of languages. Several of the papers mine field work data collected during the first phase of the SFB and explore the expression of Information Structure in tone and non-tone languages from various regions of the world.
This volume offers new arguments and perspectives in the ongoing debate about the optimal analysis of verb movement, mainly, but not exclusively, in German. Fanselow and Meinunger deal with verb second (V2) movement in German main clauses. Fanselow argues that head movement of the substitution type follows the standard minimalist conceptions of Merge and Move and is therefore not subject to the same objections as head movement as head adjunction which violates Chomsky's minimalist extension condition, operates countercyclically, and fails to let the moved head c-command its trace. Fanselow argues for V2 movement as head movement of the substitution type. Meinunger discusses a restriction on V2 movement imposed by phrases like "mehr als" ('more than'), as in "Der Wert hat sich weit mehr als verdreifacht" ('the value has far more than tripled') where V2 movement is ruled out (cf. *"Der Wert verdreifachte sich mehr als"). Meinunger claims that this restriction is best analysed in phonological terms: the preposition/complementiser "als" acts as a prefixal clitic to its host, the finite verb, which therefore may not move without it. With respect to the V2 debate, Meinunger argues for an interface perspective. He shows that V2 is restricted from both the conceptual and the phonological interface. Vogel, finally, discusses the syntax of clause-final verbal complexes and their dialectal variation in German. He compares three different syntactic analyses, a minimalist head movement analysis, a minimalist XP movement analysis, and an Optimality theoretic PF movement analysis. The three accounts are evaluated relative to the additional assumptions they have to make, the complications they face and how they fit the observations. Vogel argues in favour of the phonologically oriented OT analysis because of its ability to create a direct link between the coming about of a particular word order pattern and its basically phonological trigger. Each of the three papers recognises the relevance of surface forms in the analysis of German verb movement. They differ, however in the extent to which phonological aspects take part in the explanations they offer.
Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; Working papers of the SFB 632 - Vol. 5
(2006)
In this paper we compare the behaviour of adverbs of frequency (de Swart 1993) like usually with the behaviour of adverbs of quantity like for the most part in sentences that contain plural definites. We show that sentences containing the former type of Q-adverb evidence that Quantificational Variability Effects (Berman 1991) come about as an indirect effect of quantification over situations: in order for quantificational variability readings to arise, these sentences have to obey two newly observed constraints that clearly set them apart from sentences containing corresponding quantificational DPs, and that can plausibly be explained under the assumption that quantification over (the atomic parts of) complex situations is involved. Concerning sentences with the latter type of Q-adverb, on the other hand, such evidence is lacking: with respect to the constraints just mentioned, they behave like sentences that contain corresponding quantificational DPs. We take this as evidence that Q-adverbs like for the most part do not quantify over the atomic parts of sum eventualities in the cases under discussion (as claimed by Nakanishi and Romero (2004)), but rather over the atomic parts of the respective sum individuals.
This issue of Linguistics in Potsdam contains a number of papers that grew out of the workshop Descriptive and Empirical Adequacy in Linguistics held in Berlin on December 17-19 December, 2005. One of the goals of this meeting was to bring together scholars working in various frameworks (with emphasis on the Minimalist Program and Optimality Theory) and to discuss matters concerning descriptive and empirical adequacy. Another explicit goal was to discuss the question whether Minimalism and Optimality Theory should be considered incompatible and, hence, competing theories, or whether the two frameworks should rather be considered complementary in certain respects (see http://let.uvt.nl/deal05/call.html for the call for papers). Five of the seven papers in this volume directly grew out of the oral presentations given at the workshop. Although Vieri Samek-Lodovici’s paper was not part of the workshop, it can also be considered a result of the workshop since it pulls together some of his many comments during the discussion time. The paper by Eva Engels and Sten Vikner discusses a phenomenon that received much interest from both minimalist and optimality theoretic syntax in the recent years, Scandinavian object shift. The paper may serve as a practical example for a claim that is repeatedly made in this volume: minimalist and OT analyses, even where they might be competing, can fruitfully inform each other in a constructive manner, leading to a deeper understanding of syntactic phenomena.
This is the first issue of a series in which affiliates of the Institute of Linguistics report the results of their experimental work. Generative linguistics usually rely on the method of native speaker judgements in order to test their hypotheses. If a hypothesis rules out a set of sentences, linguistics can ask native speakers whether they feel these sentences are indeed ungrammatical in their language. There are, however, circumstances where this method is unreliable. In such cases a more elaborate method to test a hypothesis is called. All papes in this series, and hence, all papers in this volume deal with issues that cannot be reliably tested with native speaker judgements. This volume contains 7 papers, all using different methods and finding answers to very different questions. This heterogenity, by the way, reflects the various interests and research programs of the institute. The paper, by Trutkowski, Zugck, Blaszczak, Fanselow, Fischer and Vogel deals with superiority in 10 Indo-European languages. The paper by Schlesewsky, Fanselow and Frisch and by Schlesewsky and Frisch, deal with the role of case in processing German sentences. The paper by Vogel and Frisch deals with resolving case conflicts, as does the paper by Vogel and Zugck. The nature of partitive case is the topic of the paper by Fischer. The paper by K?gler deals with the realization of question intonation in two German dialects. We hope that you enjoy reading the papers!
This volume presents annotation guidelines that have been developed in the context of the SFB 632, a collaborative research center entitled "Information Structure: the Linguistic Means for Structuring Utterances, Sentences and Texts". An important result of the SFB 632 are the SFB corpora from more than 20 typologically different languages, which have been annotated according to the guidelines presented here. The ultimate target of the data and its annotations is to support the study of Information Structure. Information Structure involves all levels of grammar and, hence, the present guidelines cover relevant aspects of all these levels: - Phonology - Morphology - Syntax - Semantics - Information Structure These levels are dealt with in individual chapters, containing tagset declarations with obligatory and optional tags, detailed annotation instructions, and illustrative examples. The volume also presents an evaluation of inter-annotator agreement of Syntax and Information Structural annotation.
This book offers a clear, critical, and comprehensive overview of theoretical and experimental work on information structure. Different chapters examine the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields. Following the editors’ introduction the book is divided into four parts. The first, on theories of and theoretical perspectives on information structure, includes chapters on topic, prosody, and implicature. Part II covers a range of current issues in the field, including focus, quantification, and sign languages, while Part III is concerned with experimental approaches to information structure, including processes involved in its acquisition and comprehension. The final part contains a series of linguistic case studies drawn from a wide variety of the world’s language families
Contents: Introduction (The Editors) Basic Notions of Information Structure (Manfred Krifka) Notions of Focus Anaphoricity (Mats Rooth) Topic and Focus: Two Structural Positions Associated with Logical Functions in the Left Periphery of the Hungarian Sentence (Katalin É. Kiss) Direct and Indirect Aboutness Topics (Cornelia Endriss & Stefan Hinterwimmer) Information Structure as Information-based Partition (Satoshi Tomioka) Focus Presuppositions (Dorit Abush) Contrastive Focus, Givenness and the Unmarked Status of “Discourse-new”(Elisabeth O. Selkirk) Contrastive Focus (Malte Zimmermann) The Fallacy of Invariant Phonological Correlates of Information Structural Notions (Caroline Féry) Notions and Subnotions of Information Structure (Carlos Gussenhoven) The Restricted Access of Information Structure to Syntax – A Minority Report (Gisbert Fanselow) Focus and Tone (Katharina Hartmann)
Interdisciplinary studies on information structure : ISIS ; Working papers of the SFB 632. - Vol. 10
(2008)
The 10th volume of the working paper series contains two papers contributed by SFB-members. The first paper “Single prosodic phrase sentences” by Caroline Féry (A1) and Heiner Drenhaus (C6, University of Potsdam) investigates the prosody of Wide Focus Partial Fronting in a series of production and perception experiments. The second paper “Focus Asymmetries in Bura” by Katharina Hartmann, Peggy Jacob (B2, Humboldt University Berlin) and Malte Zimmermann (A5, University of Potsdam) explores the strategies of marking focus in Bura (Chadic).
Este volumen se ha propuesto incluir no solamente los debates teóricos y metodológicos con respecto a la posible definición del microrrelato como "cuarto género" y los diversos análisis sobre el desarrollo y la historia del mismo, sino también relacionar la minificción literaria con otras prácticas simbólicas (como las minificciones cinematográficas, etc.), y considerar las nuevas posibilidades de difusión de la minificción en los medios masivos de comunicación y, sobre todo, en las redes sociales (Facebook, Twitter) y en el Internet en general. En los cuatro apartados del volumen, sus autores se ocupan de la teoría del género y la historia del micorrelato literario; analizan la intertextualidad del nuevo género; interpretan una serie de minificciones literarias de autoras y autores hispanoamericanos y españoles; y consideran otras formas de lo micromediático, los litblogs, la producción de microrrelatos en las redes sociales, y las minificciones cinematográficas.
This volume contains the proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Prosody, Syntax, and Information Structure (WPSI2), held at University of Potsdam on March 18, 2005. WPSI 2 was aimed to discuss issues on the interaction of prosody, syntax, and information structure, from interdisciplinary points of view. The contributors (Haruo Kubozono, Shinichiro Ishihara, Yoshihisa Kitagawa, and Satoshi Tomioka) have been recently working on relevant issues, especially looking at the phenomena related to the intonation of focus and (wh-)questions in Japanese.
The papers contained in this issue share the insight that the different components of the grammar sometimes impose conflicting requirements on the grammar’s output, and that, in order to handle such conflicts, it seems advantageous to combine aspects from minimalist and OT modelling. The papers show that this can be undertaken in a multiplicity of ways, by using varying proportions of each framework, and offer a broad range of perspectives for future research.
brandial06 was the tenth in a series of workshops that aims to bring together researchers working on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogues in fields such as artificial intelligence, formal semantics and pragmatics, computational linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. This volume collects all presented papers and posters and gives abstracts of the invited talks.
Proceedings of HILP 5
(2001)
Two Papers on Clitics
(2000)
Adverbs and Adjunction
(2000)
The papers collected in this volume were all presented at the workshop on Adverbs and Adjunction, held at the University of Tromsoe, in April 17-18, 1999. The presentations by Kristin M. Eide &Inghild Flaate, Henriette de Swart, Artemis Alexiadou and Adam Wyner could not be included here.
The articles deal with the syntax, semantics and morpbology of adverbs and their interaction with other syntactic phenomena. A number of tbe contributions is concerned with an evaluation of the hypothesis that adverbs are specifiers of functional heads, which are universally ordered. Specifically, Adger &Tsoulas argue that locative adverbials are licensed by an aspectual head that encodes telicity, while manner adverbials are licensed by a light verb that encodes agentivity, both being situated low in the VP structure. According to the authors, the prime function of these heads is to license aspects of the featural composition of the object, and the licensing of these low adverbials is a by-product of the way that the EPP features of these heads functions. Costa presents data from European Portuguese in support of the traditional analysis of adverbs as adjuncts. Ernst shows that manner, measure, and domain adverbs, and more generally, adverbs and other adjuncts such as participant PPs and adjunct secondary predicates (depictives), are not rigidly ordered. Hence the paper supports theories where linear order is largely a function of the interaction of compositional rules for the various adjuncts, plus their lexico-semantic requirements.
For Haider, adverbials are adjoined or embedded, depending on the relation to the head of the containing phrase: they are adjoined if they precede the head of the containing phrase. They are embedded if they follow the head of tbe containing phrase. But the relative order of adverbials is a reflex of an interface condition. Moreover, the order pattern of adverbials in the extraposition domain is a function of linear incrementality in a non-compositional subdomain. Laenzlinger, on the other hand, claims that adverbs occupy the A'-specifier of their semantically related functional projection. They are formally licensed via the mechanism of feature checking, which links their distribution to their interpretation. He also considers adverb placement and its interaction with Verb/Argument Movement, fronting and extraposition. The interaction between A-scrambling and adverb placement crosslinguistically is also investigated by Hoffman in a minimalist framework. He claims that adverbs can be pronounced in any set of syntactic positions, but the choice among the various positions is made on non syntactic grounds.
Two papers are concerned with adverbial case. Pereltsvaig examines nominal adverbials marked with Accusative Case, with particular focus on Russian and Finnish. She shows that Accusative adverbials exhibit object-like behavior. She argues that Accusative Case is related to aspectual properties of the VP, and it is thus argued that Structural Accusative Case is checked in [Spec, AspP]. But not all occurrences of morphological accusative case derive from Structural Accusative Case. Thus, the contrasts between Russian and Finnish are explained by the claim that Russian uses accusative case marking for NPs in default objective Case position, whereas Finnish uses partitive in the same position. Manninen shows that in Finnish- adverbs can be analyzed as a sub-category of adjectives and nouns, as they are really case-inflected adjectives and nouns. Manninen proposes that these bear lexical 'adverb' case, i. e. that is they have the form of K(asus;Kase)Ps.
Finally, Vegnaduzzo investigates the polysemy of the ltalian adverb ancora showing that this is only apperent. She argues that all the different readings depend upon the context where it is inserted: each reading is derived by compositionality of ancora basic meaning and the semantic properties of the argument structure of the verb.