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"Wortabruf im Handumdrehen"?
(2017)
Some of the most frequent questions surrounding business negotiations address not only the nature of such negotiations, but also how they should be conducted. The answers given by business people from different cultural backgrounds to these questions are likely to differ from the standard answers found in business manuals.
In her book, Milene Mendes de Oliveira investigates how Brazilian and German business people conceptualize and act out business negotiations using English as a Lingua Franca. The frameworks of Cultural Linguistics, English as a Lingua Franca, World Englishes, and Business Discourse offer the theoretical and methodological grounding for the analysis of interviews with high-ranking Brazilian and German business people. Moreover, a side study on e-mail exchanges between Brazilian and German employees of a healthcare company serves as a test case for the results arising from the interviews, and helps understand other facets of authentic intercultural business communication.
Offering new insights on English as a Lingua Franca in international business contexts, Business Negotiations in ELF from a Cultural Linguistic Perspective simultaneously provides a detailed cultural-conceptual account of business negotiations from the viewpoint of Brazilian and German business people and a secondary analysis of their pragmatic aspects.
My thesis focused on the predictions of the activation-based model of Lewis and Vasishth (2005) to investigate the evidence for the use of the memory system in the formation of non-local dependencies in sentence comprehension.
The activation-based model, which follows the Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational framework (ACT-R; Anderson et al., 2004), has been used to explain locality effects and similarity-based interference by assuming that dependencies are resolved by a cue-based retrieval mechanism, and that the retrieval mechanism is affected by decay and interference.
Both locality effects and (inhibitory) similarity-based interference cause increased difficulty (e.g., longer reading times) at the site of the dependency completion where a retrieval is assumed: (I) Locality effects are attributed to the increased difficulty in the retrieval of a dependent when the distance from its retrieval site is increased. (II) Similarity-based interference is attributed to the retrieval being affected by the presence of items which have similar features as the dependent that needs to be retrieved.
In this dissertation, I investigated some findings problematic to the activation-based model, namely, facilitation where locality effects are expected (e.g., Levy, 2008), and the lack of similarity-based interference from the number feature in grammatical sentences (e.g., Wagers et al., 2009). In addition, I used individual differences in working memory capacity and reading fluency as a way to validate the theories investigated (Underwood, 1975), and computational modeling to achieve a more precise account of the phenomena.
Regarding locality effects, by using self-paced reading and eye-tracking-while reading methods with Spanish and German data, this dissertation yielded two main findings: (I) Locality effects seem to be modulated by working memory capacity, with high-capacity participants showing expectation-driven facilitation. (II) Once expectations and other potential confounds are controlled using baselines, with increased distance, high-capacity readers can show a slow-down (i.e., locality effects) and low-capacity readers can show a speedup. While the locality effects are compatible with the activation-based model, simulations show that the speedup of low-capacity readers can only be accounted for by changing some of the assumptions of the activation-based model.
Regarding similarity-based interference, two relatively high-powered self-paced reading experiments in German using grammatical sentences yielded a slowdown at the verb as predicted by the activation-based model. This provides evidence in favor of dependency creation via cue-based retrieval, and in contrast with the view that cue-based retrieval is a reanalysis mechanism (Wagers et al., 2009).
Finally, the same experimental results that showed inhibitory interference from the number feature are used for a finer grain evaluation of the retrieval process. Besides Lewis and Vasishth’s (2005) activation-based model, also McElree’s (2000) direct-access model can account for inhibitory interference. These two models assume a cue-based retrieval mechanism to build dependencies, but they are based on different assumptions. I present a computational evaluation of the predictions of these two theories of retrieval. The models were compared by implementing them in a Bayesian hierarchical framework. The evaluation of the models reveals that some aspects of the data fit better under the direct access model than under the activation-based model. However, a simple extension of the activation-based model provides a comparable fit to the direct access model. This serves as a proof of concept showing potential ways to improve the original activation-based model.
In conclusion, this thesis adds to the body of evidence that argues for the use of the general memory system in dependency resolution, and in particular for a cue-based retrieval mechanism. However, it also shows that some of the default assumptions inherited from ACT-R in the activation-based model need to be revised.
Der Fokusmarker 'so'
(2021)
L’auteur conçoit la modalité comme une catégorie sémantico-fonctionnelle, indépendante des éléments qui l’expriment et du niveau de la structure grammaticale dont ils relèvent. Pour définir la modalité, il tient compte également de ses caractéristiques structurelles ainsi que de phénomènes relevant de niveaux cognitifs plus hauts et plus bas. Cela permet de porter un regard critique sur les recherches antérieures, de développer un cadre théorique conciliant les différentes approches et d’analyser systématiquement les expressions de la modalité en français (verbes et adverbes modaux, modes verbaux etc.). L’interaction entre plusieurs éléments modaux dans le même énoncé peut déclencher trois types d’interaction et produit des phénomènes modaux particulièrement complexes.
This thesis investigates the processing and representation of (ir-)regularity in inflectional verb morphology in German and English. The focus lies on the predictions from models of morphological processing about the production of subtypes of irregular verbs which are usually subsumed under the category `irregular verbs'. Thus, this dissertation presents three journal articles investigating the language production of healthy speakers and speakers with agrammatic aphasia in order to fill a gap both for the availability of language production data and systematically tested patterns of irregularity. The second Chapter set out to investigate whether regularity of a verb or its phonological complexity (measured in number of phonemes) better predict the production accuracies of German speakers with agrammatic aphasia. While regular verbs were significantly more often correct than mixed and irregular verbs, production accuracies of irregular and mixed verbs for impaired participants did not differ. Thus, no influence of phonological complexity was observed. Chapter 3 aimed at teasing apart the influence of stem changes and affix type on the production accuracies of English speaking individuals with agrammatic aphasia. The analyses revealed that the presence of stem changes but not the type of affix had a significant effect on the production accuracies. Moreover, as four different verb types were tested, results showed that production accuracies did not conform to a regular-irregular distinction but that accuracies differed by the degree of regularity. In Chapter 4, long-lag primed picture naming design was used to study if the differences found in the production accuracies of Chapter 3 were also associated with differences in production latencies of non-brain damaged speakers. A morphological priming effect was found, however, in neither experiment the effect differed of the three verb types tested. In addition to standard frequentist analysis, Bayesian analysis were performed. In this way the absence of a difference of the morphological priming effect between verb types was interpreted as actual evidence for the lack of such a difference. Hence, this thesis presents diverging results on the production of subtypes of irregular verbs in healthy and impaired adult speakers. However, at the same time these results provided evidence that the conventional regular-irregular distinction is not adequate for testing models of morphological processing.
Das vorliegende Werk stellt sich anhand einer longitudinal angelegten Fallstudie einem Forschungsdesiderat: der mehrsprachigen Erwerbskonstellation Kurmancî-Kurdisch und Deutsch. Über einen Zeitraum von etwa acht Monaten werden die Sprachentwicklung und Sprachkompetenz von sechs Kindern im Vorschulalter in Kurmancî-Kurdisch und in Deutsch mit diversen Instrumenten erfasst und analysiert, wobei auch die weiteren Sprachen der Studienkinder sorgfältig herausarbeitet und im Zusammenhang mit ihren ersten beiden Sprachen erläutert werden. Die Studie setzt sich auch mit dem Einfluss der Familiensprachpraxis auf die Sprachentwicklung und Sprachkompetenz auseinander. In diesem Zusammenhang wird außerdem die Rolle der bislang einmaligen bilingualen kurdisch-deutschen Kindertagesstätte Pîya mit in die Analyse einbezogen. Entsprechend vielfältig und vielsichtig sind die Ergebnisse dieser Studie.