bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Agreement within early mixed DP
Authors: Pierantozzi Cristina
Published: March 2014

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether code-mixing can help us understand the architecture of the (Bilingual) Language Faculty, by comparing the predictions about mixed DPs made by the Bi-Lexical Model (MacSwan 1999) and the Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1994). The empirical basis consists of the naturalist data of two bilingual children acquiring Italian/German and Italian/Spanish¸ since birth. The data shows an interesting asymmetry in the frequency of the types of mixed agreement with the determiners of the two languages.
Gender marking in L2 learners and Italian-German bilinguals with German as the weaker language
Authors: Stöhr Antje , Akpınar Deniz , Bianchi Giulia , Kupisch Tanja
Published: March 2014

This paper explores mastery of grammatical gender in German as weaker and dominant language by Italian-German adult simultaneous bilingual speakers as well as highly proficient L2 learners of German with Italian as their L1. Data show that in both bilinguals and L2ers deviances from the target predominantly occur in gender assignment, whereas errors of agreement are infrequent in both groups, indicating that deficiency affects the lexical level rather than morpho-syntax. Ceiling performance of the bilingual speakers in German as dominant language suggests that native-like attainment is possible in simultaneous bilingual acquisition but only under the condition that early Age of Onset (AoO) coincides with sufficient input.
Subject-verb inversion in 13th century German and French
Authors: Elsig Martin
Published: March 2014

The present study examines whether subject-verb inversion in Old French is similarly conditioned to its counterpart in Middle High German. In the generative literature, inversion in Old French has often been ascribed to a verb second (V2) property, possibly as a result of language contact with Germanic. Using corpus data from the 13th century, this study compared the most and the least favorable contexts for inversion in Old French and Middle High German. A variable rule analysis of the data reveals some important differences between the two languages. This challenges the view that inversion in Old French is generated by the same grammatical system as inversion in V2 languages.
Becoming bilingual in a multilingual context
Authors: Vettori Chiara , Wisniewski Katrin , Abel Andrea
Published: March 2014

In this contribution we present the results of an extensive linguistic and psycho-social survey we conducted on a representative sample of Italian and German-speaking high school pupils in multilingual South Tyrol (Italy). The aim of the project was to describe their L2 competences (Italian/German) according to the CEFR levels and to find out extra-linguistic factors that exercise an influence on the L2 competence levels of the students. In this article, we focus in particular on L2 motivation and orientations, explaining the role they play in this peculiar context. Furthermore, we comment on the results of the language tests in the light of these extra-linguistic findings, trying to point out some key elements that might help to promote bilingualism in South Tyrol.
Pragmatic corpus analysis, exemplified by Turkish-German bilingual and monolingual data
Authors: Herkenrath Annette , Rehbein Jochen
Published: March 2014

The paper presents a methodology for empirical multilingual data analysis that combines quantitative and qualitative research. The data is a bilingual Turkish-German and a monolingual Turkish corpus of spoken child language. The methodology proceeds in several steps: (1) description of transcribed data (PartiturEditor) and of the concepts of ‘constellation’ and ‘Evocative Field Experiment’ (EFE), (2) the methodological role of the linguistic unit ‘utterance’, its marking as ‘segment’ in transcriptions and its importance for corpus formation (CoMa), (3) search procedures and frequency assignment of the findings (EXAKT), (4) classification according to constellative features of the data, (5) contextual interpretation of the items, (6) consultation of the transcript where needed, (7) contextually based categorisation of the items resulting in an empirical determination of their varieties. The objective of the methodological stages is an empirical foundation of discourse-based linguistic analysis of multilingual corpora, which we call ‘Pragmatic Corpus Analysis’ (PCA).
The Hamburg Corpus of Argentinean Spanish (HaCASpa)
Authors: Gabriel Christoph
Published: March 2014

The paper outlines and illustrates the design of the Hamburg Corpus of Argentinean Spanish (HaCASpa, compiled 2008−2009), which comprises oral data from two varieties of Argentinean Spanish (Buenos Aires and Neuquén, Northern Patagonia). Both varieties are characterized by prosodic features that can plausibly be traced back to the contact with Italian during the period of large streams of immigration between 1830 and 1950. After providing the reader with general information on the historical situation of Spanish-Italian bilingualism in Buenos Aires, the contribution focuses on the data types contained in the corpus and the speakers recorded. In addition, the main findings stemming from the analyses performed thus far based on the corpus are summarized.
Ad hoc contact phenomena or established features of a contact variety?
Authors: Kühl Karoline
Published: March 2014

This contribution deals with the possibilities of distinguishing features of an established contact variety from singly occurring, transient elements using a corpus-based approach. It emphasizes the potential that lies in including different language registers (informal spoken language and formal written language) in the analysis of language contact, and hypothesizes that the register-specific establishment of contact phenomena is possible. This is shown through the  example of Danish as it is used on the Faroe Islands, represented by the only two existing digitized and annotated corpora that reflect the bilingualism on the Faroe Islands.
Researching the intelligibility of a (German) dialect
Authors: Putz Magdalena
Published: March 2014

The presence of the commonly used German dialects in South Tyrol (Italy), in addition to the presence of three languages (Italian, standard German and Ladin), creates uneasy ground for someone not familiar with the dialects. This is especially true in the public workplace, where one would expect the use of standard language to be the norm. The presence of the dialect in such situations sometimes results in communication hurdles, for example, in the communication settings of health care institutions. Thus, the purpose of the project “SdaF” (Südtiroler Deutsch als Fremdsprache) was to study the intelligibility of the German dialect spoken in the region of South Tyrol. For this purpose, a corpus of medical interactions was compiled, annotated and analysed, in order to understand whether and how it is possible to identify those dialect passages used by the patients that render understanding in conversation difficult for non-dialect speaking physicians. This paper will present the annotation system elaborated for this project and discuss examples of the corpus.
Sharing community interpreting corpora
Authors: Angermeyer Philipp , Meyer Bernd , Schmidt Thomas
Published: March 2014

This article presents results of a project which looks into new ways of publishing and sharing community interpreting corpora. Section 2 introduces CoPilot, a pilot database containing material from two corpora of interpreted doctor-­patient communications and one corpus of interpreted court proceedings. Section 3 discusses the technical challenges involved in making such corpora from different sources available in a common environment. In Section 4, we sketch some of the properties such an environment should have in order to be usable and useful for the community. Section 5, finally, uses the annotation of the language of an utterance and the annotation of translation status as two examples illustrating the benefits and problems involved in annotating community interpreting corpora across language and corpus boundaries.
The GeWiss corpus
Authors: Fandrych Christian , Meißner Cordula , Slavcheva Adriana
Published: March 2014

Research on academic language has flourished in recent years, including academic German. The corpus resources available for larger, empirically based research projects remain, however, limited, even with regard to written academic language, and they are practically non-extant for spoken academic language. A detailed, empirical analysis of linguistic conventions and formulaic language used in (oral) academic communication is, however, all the more important in a day and age where our academic landscapes are becoming ever more internationalised. GeWiss aims to lay a foundation for such research: With GeWiss we are currently constructing a parallel corpus consisting of spoken academic language data from German, English, and Polish. Our contribution outlines the corpus design and the methodological procedures used for the construction of GeWiss. The project focuses, at least initially, on two key genres: Academic papers / student presentations and oral examinations. These are recorded, transcribed and stored in a searchable database. The corpus will comprise native speaker data from Polish, English, and German academics and students, as well as German as a Foreign Language (GFL) data of nonnative speakers of German. These are recorded at all three partner institutions. GeWiss will therefore be the first corpus comprising GFL learner data. The paper focuses on corpus design as well as data collection and transcription. It also discusses selected research questions for which GeWiss can serve as an empirical basis.
Korpus C4
Authors: Dittmann Henrik , Ďurčo Matej , Geyken Alexander , Roth Tobias , Zimmer Kai
Published: March 2014

The Korpus C4 is designed as a reference corpus, balanced over text genres and documenting four standard varieties of the written German language throughout the 20th century, for uses such as variant lexicography, intralingual contrastive corpus linguistic studies, language teaching and learning, or investigations on the possible influence of contact languages and dialects. Implemented as a distributed corpus, the Korpus C4 comprises data from the following sources: the DWDS core corpus for the variety of German used in Germany, the Swiss Text Corpus, the Austrian Academy Corpus, and the Korpus Südtirol for the variety used in South Tyrol, Italy. These sub-corpora share a common structure, metadata set, data format, and indexing solution and can be simultaneously accessed via a single interface.
Finding the balance between strict defaults and total openness
Authors: Wörner Kai
Published: March 2014

This paper presents the metadata model of the EXMARaLDA system and its implementations. It will first take a look on existing metadata schemes for transcriptions of spoken language as well as written texts and emphasize on their advantages and disadvantages. The paper will justify the decisions against existing models that led to a new data model that does not prescribe many metadata items and relies on XML files. It will conclude with a brief outlook on ongoing efforts to standardize metadata.
Sociolinguistics in New Zealand society
Authors: Holmes Janet
Published: March 2014

We make choices about what to study, and about how to use the information we gain from our research. Though we may often wish to just quietly get on with it, we have responsibilities both to our discipline and to the wider community (Holmes 1994: 24).
How to put art and brain together
Authors: Changizi Mark
Published: March 2014

Books on the psychology of art tend to identify known principles of cognitive or brain science, and then show instances of art exemplifying the principles. This approach suffers from two deep problems, the first is that most of the supposed principles of psychology are suspect, and the second that art is so rich and varied that one can find examples of it to fit any principle. Here I suggest a new way forward for putting art and brain together, one within the general theoretical framework that I call “Nature Harnessing.” It is that the arts have been culturally selected over time to be a “good fit” for our brain, and our brain has been naturally selected over time to be a good fit to nature… so, perhaps the arts have come to be shaped like nature, exactly the shape our brain came to be highly efficient at processing. I provide examples from my research on the structure of writing, speech and music.
Non-iconic chronology in English narrative texts
Authors: Yevseyev Vyacheslav
Published: March 2014

This article presents the results of a corpus investigation into the phenomenon of non-iconic chronology, which is understood here as the reversal of natural order of events at the textual micro-level, e.g. ‘I conquered after I came and saw’ as opposed to the well-known example of iconic order ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’. Although the general implications of chronological, or temporal, iconicity were widely discussed as early as the 1980s, little is known so far about how frequently non-iconic chronology occurs in real (rather than constructed) narrative texts, what sorts of text tend to be more temporally iconic or less temporally iconic, and what syntactic structures (coordinate or subordinate with particular temporal conjunctions) are most typically used to depict sequential events in a reversed textual order. An answer to these questions is attempted here on the basis of some 150 English literary texts.
Aesthetic qualities as structural resemblance
Authors: Tsur Reuven
Published: March 2014

When we say “The music is sad”, we report that we have detected some resemblance between the structure of the music and the structure of an emotion. In this sense, “sad” refers to an aesthetic quality of the music. In poetry, “sad” may refer either to the mere contents of the poem, or to an aesthetic quality arising from an interplay of divergent structure, low energy level, slow motion, sad contents. The paper explores such questions as “How do systems of music-sounds and verbal signs assume perceptual qualities endemic to other systems, such as human emotions or animal calls?” “What may a critic mean when asserting that a certain metric configuration is ‘more dignified’ than some other; that is, what may ‘dignified’ mean in a context of metric configurations?” The paper is focused on two structural phenomena found in both poems and emotions: “divergence” and “perceptual forces”.
Thematized iconicity and iconic devices in the modern novel
Authors: White John J.
Published: March 2014

The following paper offers case studies of forms of thematized iconicity in the modern realist novel. Taking its cue from Eco and Sebeok’s The Sign of Three (1983), it explores some of the ingenious, yet plausible, ways in which acoustic and visual iconicity have played a substantial role in modern fiction. Examples of acoustic iconicity and indexicality are explored in David Lodge’s Deaf Sentence (2008), whereas visual iconicity is shown to be of overarching importance in Umberto Eco’s The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana (English translation: 2005). Emphasis is placed on the importance of a self-deprecating satirical perspective in Deaf Sentence and on the way in which copious intertextual material and visual images are used to defamiliarize the historical context of Eco’s novel. Reader-response is considered in the case of narrated iconicity in both works. The paper is predicated on the working hypothesis that thematized iconicity deserves serious consideration as a literary topos in its own right.
To draw a bow 引
Authors: Avila Mahe
Published: March 2014

This paper proposes a dimension of iconicity in metaphor variation at the level of linguistic instantiation, which would be novel in respect of Kövecses’s (2005) “kinds of variation in the linguistic expression of the same conceptual metaphor”. Such a criterion of iconicity is taken from Hiraga’s (2005) understanding of the mappings of the motor-sensory images evoked by linguistic expressions as “iconic moments in metaphor”. A review of cases of metaphor variation between English and Chinese studied by Ning Yu (1995; 2001; 2003) enlightens us about the interest of looking at this dimension. I discuss the pertinence of my proposal within Grady’s (1997) theoretical framework. Some cases of metaphor variation between Spanish and Chinese are briefly analysed, according to the prominence of the ‘imagic mapping’ (cf. Hiraga 2005).
From diagrams to poetry
Authors: Stjernfelt Frederik
Published: March 2014

The aim of this paper is double – to elaborate on the Peircean notion of iconicity, and to analyze, as an example, the diagram poetry of the Danish poet Klaus Høeck. The two purposes, then, are on very different levels of generality. Peirce’s notion of iconicity, so often misunderstood, is on a very general level where logic, cognition, and semiotics meet. Diagram poetry form only one, very specific, use of iconicity possibilities – here elucidated as a subtype of Peircean iconicity.
Iconicity, intermediality, and interpersonal meanings in a Social Semiotic Space
Authors: Don Alexanne
Published: March 2014

Sets of strategies labelled ‘markers’ were identified in email texts based on features which have not traditionally been considered conventional or desirable in written text due to its more ‘reflective’, more editable affordances. The analysis attended both to their interpersonal function as well as their use as iconic of the technologically mediated context in which they appear. In these contexts participants address an unseen audience, where both response and reduced potential misunderstandings are necessary. The iconicity of these textual markers is related to participants’ need to frame their contributions with recognised forms which make reference to the same types of hesitations, politeness markers, and acknowledgement of heteroglossic space common in synchronous contexts. Such markers then become not only iconic of those real-time cues, but also iconic of the context of interaction itself.
Iconically expressible meanings in Proto-Indo-European roots and their  reflexes in daughter branches
Authors: Kozlova Tetyana
Published: March 2014

The paper examines types of iconicity in Proto-Indo-European roots. The iconic functions, which are present in symmetrical and asymmetrical root patterns, qualitative and quantitative alternation, reduplication, and metathesis, turn out to be efficient at expressing intuitions and knowledge about fundamental properties of entities and basic discriminations – contrast and similarity, continuity and discontinuity, proximity and distance, openness and closure. The phonetic and morphological structures of basic forms, variants of PIE roots and stems, manipulated in order to mime structures in the external world, express particular meanings in the protolanguage, and motivate the semantic continuants of PIE etymons in daughter languages.
Emotional expressions as communicative signals
Authors: Xu Yi , Kelly Andrew , Smillie Cameron
Published: March 2014

It is widely assumed that emotions in speech are mainly expressed through prosody, particularly in terms of intonational contours. However, no theoretical models have been specifically developed to explain how exactly emotional meanings are conveyed by prosody. In this paper we explore the idea that emotional expressions are evolutionarily designed to elicit behaviours that are beneficial to the signaller. We show with experimental data that emotional meanings are encoded along a set of benefit-oriented bio-informational dimensions which involve both segmental and prosodic aspects of the vocal signal. We argue further that the proposed bio-informational dimensions allow emotional meanings to be encoded in parallel with non-emotional meanings, thus there is unlikely to be an autonomous affective prosody.
Peak alignment and surprise reading
Authors: Kellert Olga
Published: March 2014

This paper addresses the question of whether the expression of surprise or unexpectedness in spoken Italian (specifically the variety spoken in Florence) correlates with a late F0 peak alignment with the segmental string in prenuclear position, as has already been attested for some languages Kohler (2006) and colleagues for German; Chen, Gussenhoven and Rietveld (2004) for English and Dutch; Arvaniti and Garding (2007) for some variants of English). Corpus analysis of Italian spontaneous speech has shown a negative match between expressions that inherently express surprise, so called exclamatives, and a late peak alignment (i.e. realised after the onset of the following unaccented syllable) in the prenuclear position. Next, two experiments investigated the question of whether listeners systematically interpret surprise or unexpectedness by means of intonation alone. The results show that recognition effects due to intonation are significantly lower than the recognition effects due to context. The last section of this paper discusses the different uses of the term “surprise” and proposes a shift in the investigation from meaning to the psycho-physiological state of surprise and its correlation with some prosodic parameters (hyperarticulation, wider excursion of the pitch movement, voice quality, and so on) (cf. Scherer 1981; Bänziger & Scherer 2005).
Beyond the given
Authors: Schaefer Steven
Published: March 2014

This paper argues for the discursive pertinence of utterance elements receiving prosodic prominence, and against a one-to-one iconic relationship between “new” vs. “given” information on the one hand and presence/absence of pitch accent on the other. The prevalent “information flow” approach ignores the choices offered the speaker to structure the content of his discourse by prosodic means. We focus instead on the role prosody plays in the thematic construction of discourse (as outlined in Schaefer 2001) and the strategies employed by the utterer to win the adherence of the colocutor to his point of view. The Theory of Enunciative Operations accommodates such uses of prosody, where the melody affected to utterance elements is basic to the construction of meaning.
Automatic detection of emotion from real-life data
Authors: Devillers Laurence
Published: March 2014

Recognition of emotion in speech has recently matured to one of the key disciplines in speech analysis serving next generation human-machine communication. This paper provides the best practices in the automatic detection of real-life emotion from vocal expression. “Real-life” emotion is hard to collect, ambiguous to annotate, and tricky to distribute due to privacy preservation. Acting of emotions was often seen as a solution to the desperate need for data. In contrast with most previous studies, conducted on artificial data with archetypal emotions, this paper addresses some of the challenges faced when studying real-life non-basic emotions. What needs to be done in this field to improve emotion detection is also discussed.
Prosody and phonemes
Authors: Schuller Björn
Published: March 2014

The benefit of prosodic and additional spectral over exclusively cepstral feature information is investigated for the recognition of phonemes in eight different speaking styles reaching from informal to formal. As prosodic information is best analyzed on a supra-segmental level, the whole temporal context of a phoneme is exploited by application of statistical functionals. 521 acoustic features are likewise obtained and evaluated per descriptor and functional by either de-correlating floating search feature evaluation or classification performance: The classifier of choice are Support Vector Machines lately found highly suitable for this task. As database serves the open IFA corpus of 178 k hand-segmented and hand-labeled 47 Dutch phonemes. In the result, a significant gain is observed for segment-based over frame-based processing, and by inclusion of pitch and formant information for the informal styles. Overall, phonemes are recognized at 76.58% accuracy. The analysis of feature influence provides useful insight for artificial speech production in the considered speaking styles.
Iconicity and naming in E. E. Cummings’s poetry
Authors: Terblanche Etienne
Published: March 2014

Moving on from a visual-iconic emphasis in the study of the i-o dance in E. E. Cummings’s poetry (Terblanche and Webster 2007), this chapter shifts the focus to a sound-symbolizing element of that dance, in tandem with its iconic features. Reading Cummings’s poems “anyone lived in a pretty how town” and “my father moved through dooms of love” among others, the chapter shows how Cummings uses sounds such as [ʌɪ] and [eʊ] to intimate a movement from isolation, individuality, and “lightness” into a movement of integration, deeper selfhood, and greater resonance and reverberation in the natural world. This is a complex poetic example of what Brent Berlin terms size-sound symbolism. Based on this finding, the chapter finds further that arbitrariness in Cummings (such as isolating the lower case “i”) serves to enhance motivation (such as miming dynamic integration within a larger “o”-world of being). Evidently, this further involves a certain inseparability of what Max Nänny terms imagic and diagrammatic forms of iconicity: “i” mimes smallness, uprightness, and the joy of a dot jumping out imagically, while this goes on to indicate entrance into a sense of movement, growth, and being (as embodied not only in “O” but also in the semiotic movement “into” it) — a movement which is in the nature of diagrammatic iconicity. The chapter concludes that arbitrariness and motivation end up in loops of enhancement in the case of Cummings, contrary to the current stock response that language is only or nearly only arbitrary.
Metrical inversion and enjambment in the context of syntactic and morphological structures
Authors: Müller Wolfgang G.
Published: March 2014

This paper looks at the interdependence of metrical and linguistic units, focussing on metrical inversion and enjambment. While metrical texts favour (diagrammatic) iconicity as a result of equivalence (repetition) on the level of stress, foot, verse, stanza, etc., another source for iconicity is to be found in non-equivalent phenomena such as metrical inversion and enjambment. An example for inversion is the beginning of the first line of one of Keats’ sonnets — “Much have I travelled in the realms of gold” — where metrical inversion coincides with syntactic inversion. The basis for enjambment is a discrepancy between metrical and syntactic structures, a discrepancy which may even affect morphology, as is the case at the beginning of Hopkins’ The Windhover, where the change of the lines results in cutting asunder a word: “king- / dom”. Having demonstrated, at the level of meter, the interaction of the principles of equivalence and non-equivalence — according to Jakobson a fundamental quality of poetic texts in general — the paper points the way towards a poetics of verse.
Scope ambiguities through the mirror
Authors: Bernardi Raffaella
Published: March 2014

In this paper we look at the interpretation of Quantifier Phrases from the perspective of Symmetric Categorial Grammar. We show how the apparent mismatch between the syntactic and semantic behaviour of these expressions can be resolved in a typelogical system equipped with two Merge relations: one for syntactic units, and one for the evaluation contexts of the semantic values associated with these syntactic units.
Restructuring head and argument in West-Germanic
Authors: Evers Arnold Ernest
Published: March 2014

The West-Germanic, c.q. Dutch, complex predicate appears as a series of verbs in predicate-final position. They were considered as a kind of separate unit (a field) in structuralist grammar (Bech 1955; Paardekooper 1955). A direct generative phrasing of that view follows from a head-to-head raising applied to a left- branching VP-stack consisting of the separate head-final predicates. This headraising accounts easily for the strict adjacency of the verbs and for dialectical variations in their linear order. However, beyond its descriptive efficiency, the rule has little to recommend itself in present-day syntax, due to its properties of rightward movement, extracting heads and tugging heads in. Yet, suppose there are SOV languages due to lexical frames with a predicate- final position of the V0. VPs stacked for a complex predicate in such environment would lack separately PF identifiable left edges to define their hierarchy and their subjects. Suppose this disqualifies the preservation of VP-stacks in SOV languages despite the hierarchy of predicates to be PF present given a predicate-final headcluster of verbs. In this paper it is argued that V-to-V Raising is aimed at just that outcome and represents a general and obligatory variant of the V-to-I raising in SVO languages.
The learnability of A-bar chains
Authors: van Kampen Jacqueline
Published: March 2014

This paper discusses the learnability of long wh-questions. Taking longitudinal data from child Dutch an example, I will show that the acquisition of long wh-movement has been thoroughly prepared in previous acquisition steps. Each step defines a local relation that is preserved in the next acquisition step. The long wh-questions appear first with an intermediate pronoun in the speech of the child. My data show that the intermediate pronoun relies on the (previously acquired) relative paradigm which appears in Dutch as an apparently irregular mixture of d-pronouns and w-pronouns. The present view on the learnability of A-bar chains will lead to the following conclusions: (i) Long wh-movement can (hence must) be successive cyclic; (ii) Pied-piping follows from the preservation of licensing contexts only; (iii) Syntactic islands need not to be “learned”. They follow from a non-overlap of local movement domains.
What’s in a quantifier?
Authors: Nouwen Rick
Published: March 2014

In this article, I discuss several inquiries into the meaning of expressions of quantity. It is to some extent received wisdom that quantifiers are not expressions that stand proxy for amounts, quantities, frequencies, etc. In cognitive psychology, a common observation is that quantifiers express perspectives on quantity. I will argue that while this result bears some relation to notions known from formal semantics, the dominant theoretical framework, generalised quantifier theory, nevertheless falls short of providing a unifying approach to logical, linguistic and psychological aspects of quantity expressions. The upshot is that the many diverse ways in which quantity information may be worded should be reflected in a variety of analyses. In other words, quantifiers need to be approached on a case by case basis.
Minimal versus not so minimal pronouns
Authors: Reuland Eric J.
Published: March 2014

In this article I start out from Kratzer’s (2006) observation that a bound variable interpretation of German 1st and 2nd person (possessive) pronouns shows locality effects. I show how the approach based on syntactic chain formation developed in Reuland (2001, 2005a) resolves a general empirical problem in Kratzer’s theory, while retaining the essence of her insight. I further show that the special interface condition on pronominal feature specification proposed by Kratzer is unnecessary. A general economy approach governing the division of labour between components of the language system is presented, which also subsumes Rule I as modified in Reinhart (2000, 2006).
Comparisons of similarity and difference
Authors: Alrenga Peter
Published: March 2014

The present paper proposes an analysis of comparisons of similarity and difference in English involving different, same and like. First, I examine the relationship between comparisons involving different, same and like and scalar comparisons exemplified by I am taller now than I used to be. Since both constructions differ only on a few points, I conclude that comparisons of similarity and difference should be analyzed as a subclass of comparative constructions. The second part of the paper analyzes the scope of comparisons of similarity and difference: I argue that these comparisons are best analyzed as comparisons between sets of properties.
Evidentials as generalized functional heads
Authors: Speas Peggy
Published: March 2014

This paper proposes that grammaticized evidential morphemes do not simply encode evidence type (as it has been stipulated so far); rather, they encode relations among three situations: the situation of which a proposition is true, a Reference Situation and the Discourse Situation. Evidentials encode the same relations as do Tense and Aspect morphemes, but they relate situations rather than times. Thus, “evidence” is not a primitive but a relation between the situation S about which one makes an assertion and a situation that either contains or is accessible to S. The restrictions on evidence type are predicted by the fact that containment and accessibility are the only possible relations. The common homophony between Evidential morphemes and Tense/Aspect morphemes is explained because the systems encode the same relations. These parallels motivate the suggestion that all Functional heads encode basically the same relations, which may be seen as fundamentally configurational.
Variation, continuity and contact in Middle Norwegian and Middle Low German
Authors: Sundquist John D.
Published: March 2014

This study focuses on the period of language contact between Middle Norwegian (MNw) and Middle Low German (MLG) in Norway between 1300 and 1525. Using corpora of MLG and MNw diplomatic letters written during this time, we examine the possibility that syntactic continuity in the form of retention of archaic forms may take place when two typologically similar languages are in prolonged contact with each other. Data on the variation between Object–Verb (OV) and Verb–Object (VO) order in both MNw and MLG indicate that the frequency of OV word order in MNw is not affected by the influx of variational patterns from MLG. We explore possible reasons for this lack of change and focus on the role of syntactic variation in both continuity and change. Drawing our conclusions from evidence on OV/VO variation, we argue that the syntactic variation in the MNw data disrupts continuity rather than helping to maintain it.
The rise of OV word order in Irish verbal-noun clauses
Authors: Lash Elliott
Published: March 2014

In this paper, I propose a new diachronic analysis of Old Irish OV word order in verbal noun phrases, which replaces an earlier synchronic approach to this OV word order found in Disterheft (1982). The analysis proposed here relies on bracketing ambiguity and morphological underspecification as motivations for change. I argue that these prerequisites contributed to the increased verbal nature of verbal nouns in Old Irish, starting from the 9th century. This is formalized as the introduction of verbal functional material projected above the verbal noun. Specifically, I claim that this verbal functional material licensed OV word order as a focalization strategy. This claim is based on a corpus of texts spanning the 8th to the 12 centuries.
Contrastive topics and distributed foci as instances of sub-informativity
Authors: Gast Volker
Published: March 2014

This programmatic study offers a comparison of the lexical, syntactic and prosodic devices used in English and German to encode the information structural category of ‘sub-informativity’, which subsumes occurrences of contrastive topics and of distributed (multiple) foci. Sentences are called ‘sub-informative’ if they answer the current ‘question under discussion’ only partially. Two major types of sub-informativity are distinguished, (i) focus-related sub-informativity (distributed foci) and (ii) topic-related sub-informativity. Topic-related sub-informativity is further sub-categorized according to the parameter ‘context-changing’ vs. ‘context-preserving’. While no major differences between English and German can be identified in the lexical or syntactic marking of sub-informativity, there seems to be a relatively clear contrast in the domain of prosodic marking: While German has a contour specialized for ‘context-changing (topic-related) sub-informativity’ (the ‘root contour’), English has no such specialized tune and uses the functionally very general fall-rise contour in most of the contexts under discussion. In addition to providing a comparative survey of the domain under investigation, the chapter is intended as a case study dealing with central challenges of contrastive information structure analysis, e.g. the question of how comparability can be established and what type of generalization should be aimed at.
Transitivity of deverbal nominals and aspectual modifiers of the verbal stem (evidence from Russian)
Authors: Pazelskaya Anna
Published: March 2014

This paper deals with transitivity in the domain of deverbal nouns in Russian and discusses possible correlations among transitivity and morphosyntactic properties of the verbal stems the nominals can be derived from. It presents another answer to the question of how various deverbal noun suffixes in a language may differ from one another, and what the reasons for these differences are. The two classes of differences discussed in this paper, namely, transitivity preferences and the ability to attach to only prefixed stems vs. to suffixed as well as prefixed stems are claimed to be manifestations of one and the same parameter that determines the place of attachment and thus makes a clear-cut distinction between early-attaching and late-attaching deverbal noun suffixes.
Individuation and semantic role interpretation in the adpositional domain
Authors: Lestrade Sander , de Swart Peter
Published: March 2014

In this chapter we discuss the role of Individuation on semantic role interpretation in the adpositional domain. Taking the findings of Aristar (1996, 1997) for the case domain as our starting point we examine whether similar observations can be made for the adpositional domain. On the basis of a corpus study in Dutch we determine whether adpositions show restrictions on the animacy and semantic roles of their complements and whether there is a correlation between the two. Our results suggest that only low-frequency adpositions show typing restrictions whereas we observe much variation with high-frequency ones.
Discontiguous reduplication in a local variety of Malay
Authors: Nuger Justin
Published: March 2014

Discontiguous partial reduplication patterns, in which a string of segments in the reduplicant corresponds with a discontiguous string of segments in the base, have been observed in various languages in the Austronesian and Austro-Asiatic families. Several such patterns show a preference for the anchoring of the segments at both edges of the base. I propose that edge-anchoring reduplication, though typologically rare, is the result of natural interaction between fundamental phonological constraints, specifically when CONTIG-BR is ranked below constraints on reduplicant size. Support for my proposal is offered from Ulu Muar Malay, whose edge-anchoring reduplication pattern is, I argue, the result of prosodic correspondence requirements, and not the result of segmental prominence at both edges (contra Nelson 2003).
Genitive relative constructions and agent incorporation in Tongan
Authors: Otsuka Yuko
Published: March 2014

Polynesian languages commonly use the genitive relative construction (GRC) for non-subject relatives, in which the thematic subject of the relative clause is realized as a genitive that seemingly modifies the head noun. In Tongan, the GRC shows additional idiosyncratic properties: (a) The relative clause must contain a transitive verb; (b) the thematic subject of a relative clause must be pronominal; and (c) the genitive must be preposed. This study argues that these facts can be accounted for by assuming that (a) the relative clause of a GRC is an agentless transitive construction; (b) the genitive is base generated; and (c) the genitive is interpreted as the thematic subject of the relative clause through pragmatic rather than syntactic means.
On the syntax of Formosan adverbial verb constructions
Authors: Chang Henry Y.
Published: March 2014

This paper deals with the adverbial verb construction (AVC) in Formosan languages. Three major issues concerning the AVC are addressed: (i) What syntactic relationship is involved in the AVC: Adjunction or complementation? (ii) What syntactic operation is taking place in the AVC: Control or raising? (iii) What is the syntactic status of adverbial verbs: Do they occur as functional heads, lexical heads, or something in between? Our findings suggest that (a) the AVC involves complementation rather than adjunction; (b) the AVC typically involves raising rather than control; (c) adverbial verbs are semi-lexical or quasi-functional rather than simply functional or lexical in nature.
VSO word order in Malagasy imperatives
Authors: Potsdam Eric
Published: March 2014

This paper accounts for an unusual VSO word order found in Malagasy imperative clauses to the exclusion of indicative clauses. It proposes that, what appears to be a subject in immediately post-verbal position is not a subject at all; rather, it is a vocative. Semantic and morphological characteristics of Malagasy vocatives support this claim. The paper argues against two alternative analyses: a scrambling analysis that derives VSO order from the canonical VOS via rightward scrambling, and a predicate-internal subject analysis that derives the VSO order by leaving the subject in its base position. I show that both alternatives are empirically and conceptually inferior to the vocative account proposed in the present work.
What all happens when a universal quantifier combines with an interrogative DP
Authors: Cirillo Robert
Published: March 2014

Universal quantifiers such as all select a DP as their complement and can be ‘floated’ or ‘stranded’ by that DP, and in certain Germanic languages they can also co-occur with an interrogative DP. The purpose of this article is to investigate whether interrogative and non-interrogative DPs that co-occur with a universal quantifier in the Germanic languages have the same relationship to that quantifier and have gone through the same selection process. I begin with evidence from German that universal quantifiers can select and be stranded by interrogative as well as non-interrogative DPs, but I ultimately argue, going back to an analysis in Giusti (1990b), that a universal quantifier co-occurring with an interrogative is base-generated to the right of that interrogative, not to its left. I also propose that the formation of interrogative expressions involving universal quantifiers may take place in the syntax or in the lexicon, depending on the language.
Noun phrase structure and movement
Authors: Wood Johanna L. , Vikner Sten
Published: March 2014

We investigate the etymologically related words so and such (English); så and sådan (Danish); and so and solch (German). Similarities and differences that have to be accounted for cross-linguistically are i. position (pre- or post- indefinite article), ii. agreement morphology (in Danish and German), and iii. semantics (whether an AdjP or a DP/NP is modified). English and Danish so/så may only modify an AdjP, while German so may also modify the DP/NP. English such may only modify the DP/NP (Bolinger 1972, Wood 2002) and may only precede the indefinite article. Danish and German allow inflected sådan/solch to follow the article. We discuss two possible syntactic derivations, predicate raising (e.g. Corver 1998, Bennis, Corver & den Dikken 1998) and XP movement from an attributive adjective position within the nominal (e.g. Matushansky 2002). The analysis links up with the morphological agreement facts of predicate and of attributive adjectives in Danish and German (Vikner 2001).
A semantic approach to noun phrase structure and the definite – indefinite distinction in Germanic and Romance
Authors: Stroh-Wollin Ulla
Published: March 2014

This article deals with the relation between the structure and the semantics of noun phrases. Two complexes of meaning are taken to be grammatically derived in noun phrases. One complex concerns the conceptualization of the entity denoted by the noun phrase, whereas the other concerns the restriction of the set of referents. The latter complex is related to the distinction between definite and indefinite noun phrases.The article also deals with the variation within and between Germanic and Romance noun phrases, showing how this variation may be explained on the basis of the preceding analysis. In particular, the different uses of definite and indefinite noun phrases are highlighted.
Coexisting structures and competing functions in genitive word order
Authors: Magni Elisabetta
Published: March 2014

This paper examines the correlations between word order at the clause level and word order at the noun phrase level in languages with no dominant genitive order. In this perspective, the comparison between Latin and English is a revealing domain for investigating both synchronic variation and diachronic evolution. The analysis uses a functional-typological approach; the assumption is that coexisting and competing patterns, as well as regularities and irregularities in word order, can be analyzed through diachrony. Results show that (1) in both languages, structures developing from different sources are assigned different functions according to multiple processing factors; (2) the mechanisms of word order flexibility observed in Latin, mutatis mutandis, can provide some useful insights for English as well.
Introduction
Authors: Meibauer Jörg , Steinbach Markus
Published: March 2014

Focusing on the semantics/pragmatics divide, the contribution of experimental pragmatics to pragmatic theory is discussed from a number of angles, ranging from implicature theory and theories of pragmatic enrichment to pragmatic acquisition, pragmatic impairment, and pragmatic processing. In addition, methodological issues are touched upon, and finally, the single contributions to this volume are introduced.
Discourse under control in ambiguous sentences
Authors: Moscati Vincenzo
Published: March 2014

Sentences with more than one logic operator may be ambiguous between different interpretations and a recent research question is whether children have access to all the possible readings available to adults. Early studies focused on the interpretation of nominal quantifiers and negation, suggesting that children may have only a subset of the possible meanings of a logically ambiguous sentence. In this paper, we extend the inquiry to the interactions between modals and negation. We report on two experiments. In the first, we tested children’s interpretation of the Italian modal potere followed by clausal negation, a construction which results unambiguous in the adult language and not compatible with a reading expressing impossibility. In a second experiment, we manipulated the context in order to evaluate the effects of the Question Answer Requirement (Husley et al. 2004) on children’s scope assignment.