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This article takes stock of the basic notions of Information Structure (IS). It first provides a general characterization of IS — following Chafe (1976) — within a communicative model of Common Ground(CG), which distinguishes between CG content and CG management. IS is concerned with those features of language that concern the local CG. Second, this paper defines and discusses the notions of Focus (as indicating alternatives) and its various uses, Givenness (as indicating that a denotation is already present in the CG), and Topic (as specifying what a statement is about). It also proposes a new notion, Delimitation, which comprises contrastive topics and frame setters, and indicates that the current conversational move does not entirely satisfy the local communicative needs. It also points out that rhetorical structuring partly belongs to IS.
This article presents an analysis of German nicht...sondern... (contrastive not...but...) which departs from the commonly held view that this construction should be explained by appeal to its alleged corrective function. It will be demonstrated that in nicht A sondern B (not A but B), A and B just behave like stand-alone unmarked answers to a common question Q, and that this property of sondern is presuppositional in character. It is shown that from this general observation many interesting properties of nicht...sondern... follow, among them distributional differences between German 'sondern' and German 'aber' (contrastive but, concessive but), intonational requirements and exhaustivity effects. sondern's presupposition is furthermore argued to be the result of the conventionalization of conversational implicatures.
The material reported on in this paper is part of a set of experiments in which the role of Information Structure on L2 processing of words is tested. Pitch and duration of 4 sets of experimental material in German and English are measured and analyzed in this paper. The well-known finding that accent boosts duration and pitch is confirmed. Syntactic and lexical means of marking focus, however, do not give the duration and the pitch of a word an extra boost.
The recognition of the prosodic focus position in German-learning infants from 4 to 14 months
(2006)
The aim of the present study was to elucidate in a study with 4-, 6-, 8-, and 14-month-old German-learning children, when and how they may acquire the regularities which underlie Focus-to-Stress Alignment (FSA) in the target language, that is, how prosody is associated with specific communicative functions. Our findings suggest, that 14-month-olds have already found out that German allows for variable focus positions, after having gone through a development which goes from a predominantly prosodically driven processing of the input to a processing where prosody interacts more and more with the growing lexical and syntactic knowledge of the child.
The paper presents a novel approach to explaining word order variation in the early Germanic languages. Initial observations about verb placement as a device marking types of rhetorical relations made on data from Old High German (cf. Hinterhölzl & Petrova 2005) are now reconsidered on a larger scale and compared with evidence from other early Germanic languages. The paper claims that the identification of information-structural domains in a sentence is best achieved by taking into account the interaction between the pragmatic features of discourse referents and properties of discourse organization.
The paper presents an in-depth study of focus marking in Gùrùntùm, a West Chadic language spoken in Bauchi Province of Northern Nigeria. Focus in Gùrùntùm is marked morphologically by means of a focus marker a, which typically precedes the focus constituent. Even though the morphological focus-marking system of Gùrùntùm allows for a lot of fine-grained distinctions in information structure (IS) in principle, the language is not entirely free of focus ambiguities that arise as the result of conflicting IS- and syntactic requirements that govern the placement of focus markers. We show that morphological focus marking with a applies across different types of focus, such as newinformation, contrastive, selective and corrective focus, and that a does not have a second function as a perfectivity marker, as is assumed in the literature. In contrast, we show at the end of the paper that a can also function as a foregrounding device at the level of discourse structure.
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.
A series of production and perception experiments investigating the prosody and well-formedness of special sentences, called Wide Focus Partial Fronting (WFPF), which consist of only one prosodic phrase and a unique initial accented argument, are reported on here. The results help us to decide between different models of German prosody. The absence of pitch height difference on the accent of the sentence speaks in favor of a relative model of prosody, in which accents are scaled relative to each other, and against models in which pitch accents are scaled in an absolute way. The results also speak for a model in which syntax, but not information structure, influences the prosodic phrasing. Finally, perception experiments show that the prosodic structure of sentences with a marked word order needs to be presented for grammaticality judgments. Presentation of written material only is not enough, and falsifies the results.
Focus asymmetries in Bura
(2008)
(Chadic), which exhibits a number of asymmetries: Grammatical focus marking is obligatory only with focused subjects, where focus is marked by the particle án following the subject. Focused subjects remain in situ and the complement of án is a regular VP. With nonsubject foci, án appears in a cleft-structure between the fronted focus constituent and a relative clause. We present a semantically unified analysis of focus marking in Bura that treats the particle as a focusmarking copula in T that takes a property-denoting expression (the background) and an individual-denoting expression (the focus) as arguments. The article also investigates the realization of predicate and polarity focus, which are almost never marked. The upshot of the discussion is that Bura shares many characteristic traits of focus marking with other Chadic languages, but it crucially differs in exhibiting a structural difference in the marking of focus on subjects and non-subject constituents.
Intonation and discourse
(2007)
This paper surveys a range of constructions in which prosody affects discourse function and discourse structure.We discuss English tag questions, negative polar questions, and what we call “focus” questions. We postulate that these question types are complex speech acts and outline an analysis in Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) to account for the interactions between prosody and discourse.
This paper deals with the conditions under which singular definites, on the one hand, and universally quantified DPs, on the other hand, receive interpretations according to which the sets denoted by the NP-complements of the respective determiner vary with the situations quantified over by a Q-adverb. I show that in both cases such interpretations depend on the availability of situation predicates that are compatible with the presuppositions associated with the respective determiner, as co-variation in both cases comes about via the binding of a covert situation variable that is contained within the NP-complement of the respective determiner. Secondly, I offer an account for the observation 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, as far as word order is concerned. This is shown to follow from the fact that co-varying definites in contrast to universally quantified DPs are inherently focus-marked.
Human manual action exhibits a differential use of a non-dominant (typically, left) and a dominant (typically, right) hand. Human communication exhibits a pervasive structuring of utterances into topic and comment. I will point out striking similarities between the coordination of hands in bimanual actions, and the structuring of utterances in topics and comments. I will also show how principles of bimanual coordination influence the expression of topic/comment structure in sign languages and in gestures accompanying spoken language, and suggest that bimanual coordination might have been a preadaptation of the development of information structure in human communication.
Focus expressions in Foodo
(2007)
This paper aims at presenting different ways of expressing focus in Foodo, a Guang language. We can differentiate between marked and unmarked focus strategies. The marked focus expressions are first syntactically characterized: the focused constituent is in sentence-initial position and is second always marked obligatorily by a focus marker, which is nɩ for non-subjects and N for subjects. Complementary to these structures, Foodo knows an elliptic form consisting of the focused constituent and a predication marker gɛ́. It will be shown that the two focus markers can be analyzed as having developed out of the homophone conjunction nɩ and that the constraints on the use of the focus markers can be best explained by this fact.
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.
The aim of this paper is to validate a dataset collected by means of production experiments which are part of the Questionnaire on Information Structure. The experiments generate a range of information structure contexts that have been observed in the literature to induce specific constructions. This paper compares the speech production results from a subset of these experiments with specific claims about the reflexes of information structure in four different languages. The results allow us to evaluate and in most cases validate the efficacy of our elicitation paradigms, to identify potentially fruitful avenues of future research, and to highlight issues involved in interpreting speech production data of this kind.
The aim of this paper is to outline the means for encoding information structure in Yucatec Maya. Yucatec Maya is a tone language, displaying a three-fold opposition in the tonal realization of syllables. From the morpho-syntactic point of view, the grammar of Yucatec Maya contains morphological (topic affixes, morphological marking of out-of-focus predicates) and syntactic (designated positions) means to uniquely specify syntactic constructions for their information structure. After a descriptive overview of these phenomena, we present experimental evidence which reveals the impact of the nonavailability of prosodic alternatives on the choice of syntactic constructions in language production.
Prosodic focus in Vietnamese
(2007)
This paper reports on pilot work on the expression of Information Structure in Vietnamese and argues that Focus in Vietnamese is exclusively expressed prosodically: there are no specific focus markers, and the language uses phonology to express intonational emphasis in similar ways to languages like English or German. The exploratory data indicates that (i) focus is prosodically expressed while word order remains constant, (ii) listeners show good recoverability of the intended focus structure, and (iii) that there is a trading relationship between several phonetic parameters (duration, f0, amplitude) involved to signal prosodic (acoustic) emphasis.
Extract: [...]Of all the print-media newspapers are the most commonly used. They are not literature in the sense of belles letters, but they should not be underestimated in their political, social and personal importance. No other printed product is as closely linked with everyday life as the newspapers. The day begins under their influence, and their contents mirror the events of the day with varying accuracy. Newspapers are strongly reader-oriented. They want to inform, but they also want to instil opinions. Specific choices of information shape the content level. Specific choices of language are resorted to in order to spread opinions and viewpoints. Language creates solidarity between the producers and the consumers of newspapers and thereby supports ideologies by specifically targeted linguistic means. Other strategies are employed for the same purpose, too. Visual aspects are of great importance, such as the typographical layout, the use of pictures, drawings, colours, fonts, etc.[...]
Conventional wisdom since the earliest studies of Irish English has attributed much of what is distinctive about this variety to the influence of the Irish language. From the early philologists (Joyce 1910, van Hamel 1912) through the classic works of Henry (1957, 1958) and Bliss (1979) down to present-day linguistic orientations (e.g. Corrigan 2000 a, Filppula 1999, Fiess 2000, Hickey 2000, Todd 1999, and others), the question of Irish-language influence may be disputed on points of detail, but remains a central focus for most studies in the field. It is not our intention to argue with this consensus, nor to examine specific points of grammar in detail, but, rather, to suggest an approach to this question which (a) takes for its empirical base a sample of the standard language, rather than dialectal material or the sample sentences so beloved of many papers on the subject, and (b) understands Celticity not just in terms of the formal transfer of grammatical features, but as an indexical feature of language use, i.e. one in which English in Ireland is used in such a way as to point to the Irish language as a linguistic and cultural reference point. In this sense, our understanding of Celticity is not entirely grammatical, but relies as well on Pierce’s notion of indexicality (see Greenlee 1973), by which semiotic signs ‘point to’ other signs. Our focus in assessing Celticity, then, derives in the first instance from an examination of the International Corpus of English (ICE). We have recently completed the publication of the Irish component of ICE (ICE-Ireland), a machinereadable corpus of over 1 million words of speech and writing gathered from a range of contexts determined by the protocols of the global International Corpus of English project. The international nature of this corpus project makes for ready comparisons with other varieties of English, and in this paper we will focus on comparisons with the British corpus, ICE-GB. For references on ICE generally, see Greenbaum 1996; for ICE-GB, see especially Nelson, Wallis and Aarts 2002; and for ICE-Ireland, see papers such as Kirk, Kallen, Lowry & Rooney (2003), Kirk & Kallen (2005), and Kallen & Kirk (2007). Our first approach will be to look for signs of overt Celticity in those grammatical features of Irish English which have been put forward as evidence of Celtic transfer (or of the reinforcement between Celtic and non-Celtic historical sources); our second approach will be to look at non-grammatical ways in which texts in ICEIreland become indexical of Celticity by less structural means such as loanwords, code-switching, and covert reference using ‘standard’ English in ways that are specific to Irish usage. We argue that, at least within the standard language as we have observed it, Celticity is at once less obvious than a reading of the dialectal literature might suggest and, at the same time, more pervasive than a purely grammatical approach would imply.