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This thesis investigates temporal and aspectual reference in the typologically unrelated African languages Hausa (Chadic, Afro–Asiatic) and Medumba (Grassfields Bantu).
It argues that Hausa is a genuinely tenseless language and compares the interpretation of temporally unmarked sentences in Hausa to that of morphologically tenseless sentences in Medumba, where tense marking is optional and graded.
The empirical behavior of the optional temporal morphemes in Medumba motivates an analysis as existential quantifiers over times and thus provides new evidence suggesting that languages vary in whether their (past) tense is pronominal or quantificational (see also Sharvit 2014).
The thesis proposes for both Hausa and Medumba that the alleged future tense marker is a modal element that obligatorily combines with a prospective future shifter (which is covert in Medumba). Cross-linguistic variation in whether or not a future marker is compatible with non-future interpretation is proposed to be predictable from the aspectual architecture of the given language.
Kann man den Sprachgebrauch in einer Gruppe verändern? Und wenn ja, wie? In Politik und Wirtschaft sind schlüssige Antworten auf diese Fragen von großem Interesse. Karolina Suchowolec findet sie, indem sie den aktuellen Forschungsstand zu Sprachplanung, Plansprachen, Kontrollierten Sprachen und Terminologiearbeit analysiert, die Erkenntnisse auf ihre mögliche Verallgemeinerung hin prüft und daraus Sprachlenkung als einen übergreifenden linguistischen Forschungsgegenstand ableitet. Dessen praktische Umsetzung hat sie empirisch untersucht. Im Ergebnis formuliert sie eine Übersicht zu den Herausforderungen der Sprachlenkung sowie zu in der Literatur postulierten Lösungsansätzen – eine solide Grundlage für die weitere theoretische Forschung sowie Hilfestellung für die praktische Sprachlenkung.
When humans have a conversation with one-another, they generally take turns speaking one after the other without overlapping each others talk or leaving silence between turns for long stretches of time. Previous research has shown that conversation is a structured practice following rules that help interlocutors to manage the flow of conversation interactively. While at the beginning of a conversation it remains open who will speak when about what and for how long, interlocutors regulate the flow of conversation as it unfolds. One basic set of rules that interlocutors operate with governs the allocation of speaking turns, with the central rule stating that whoever starts speaking first at a point in time when speaker change becomes relevant has the rights and obligations to produce the next turn. The organization of turn allocation, therefore, is one reason for conversational turn taking to be so remarkably fast, with the beginnings of turns most often being quite accurately aligned with the ends of the previous turns. Observations of this outstanding speed of turn taking gave rise to a number of questions concerning language processing in conversational situations. The studies presented in this thesis investigate some of these questions from the perspective of the current listener preparing to be the next speaker who will respond to the current turn.
The study presented in Chapter 2 investigates when next speakers begin to plan their own turn with respect to two points in time, (i) the moment when the incoming turn’s message becomes clear enough to make response planning possible and (ii) the moment when the incoming turn terminates. Results of previous studies were inconclusive about the timing of language planning in conversation, with evidence in favour of both late and early response planning. Furthermore, previous studies presented both evidence as well as counter evidence indicating that response planning depends or does not depend on an accurate prediction of the timing of the incoming turn’s end. The study presented here makes use of a novel experimental paradigm which includes a dialogic task that participants need to fulfil in response to critical utterances by a confederate. These critical utterances were structured, on the one hand, so that their message became clear either only at the end of the turn or before the end of the turn, and, on the other hand, so that it was either predictable or not predictable when exactly the turn would end. Participant’s eye-movements as well as their response latencies indicated that they always planned their next turn as early as possible, irrespective of the predictability of the incoming turn’s end. The presented results provide evidence in favour of models of turn taking that predict speech planning to happen in overlap with the incoming turn.
Having established that next speakers begin to plan their turn in overlap, the study presented in Chapter 3 goes more into detail investigating to which depth language planning progresses while the incoming turn is still unfolding. To this end, a number of psycholinguistic paradigms were combined. In the study’s main experiment, participants had to fulfil a switch-task in which they switched from picture naming in response to an auditorily presented question to making a lexical decision. By manipulating the relatedness of the word for lexical decision with the picture that was prepared to be named before the task-switch it was possible to draw inferences on which processing stages were entered during the speech production process in overlap with the incoming turn. Participants’ behavioural responses in the lexical decision task revealed that they entered the stage of phonological encoding while the incoming turn was still unfolding, showing that planning in overlap is not limited to conceptual preparation but includes all sub-processes of formulation.
Given that speech production regularly enters the stages of formulation in overlap with the incoming turn, as shown in Chapters 2 and 3, the question arises whether planning the next turn in overlap is cognitively more demanding than during the gap between turns. This question is approached in the study presented in Chapter 4 by measuring pupillometric responses of participants in a dialogic task. An increase in pupil diameter during a cognitive task is indicative of increased processing load, and pupillometric responses to planning in overlap with the incoming turn were found to be greater than responses to planning in the gap between turns. These results show that planning in overlap is more demanding than planning during the gap, even though it is highly practiced by speakers.
After Chapters 2 to 4 investigated the timing and mechanisms of speech planning in conversation, Chapter 5 turns towards the timing of articulation of a planned turn, asking the question what sources of information next speakers use to time the articulation of a planned utterance to start closely after the incoming turn comes to an end. In this Chapter’s study, participants taking turns with a confederate responded to utterances containing or not containing different cues to the location of the incoming turn’s end. Participants made use of lexical and turn-final intonational cues, but not of turn-initial intonational cues, responding faster when the relevant cues were present than when they were not present. These results show that the timing of turn initiation in next speakers depends on the recognition of the incoming turn’s point of completion and not merely on the progress in planning the next turn.
All evidence presented in Chapters 2 to 5 is summed up and bundled together in a cognitive model of turn taking, which is being presented in Chapter 6. This model assumes, centrally, that the planning of a turn and the timing of its articulation are separate cognitive processes that run in parallel in any next speaker during conversation. Planning generally starts as early as possible, often in overlap with the incoming turn, while the timing of articulation depends on the next speaker’s level of certainty that speaker change has become relevant at a particular moment, with a number of cues to the end of the incoming turn leading to an increase of certainty. Next turns are assumed to often be planned down to fully formulated utterance plans including their phonological form as early as possible on the basis of anticipations of the incoming turn’s message, which are created with the help of the general and situational knowledge about the world, the current speaker and her intentions, as well as the input that has been received so far. The level of certainty that speaker change becomes relevant rises or decreases as lexico-syntactic, prosodic, and pragmatic projections about the development of the current turn are fulfilled or not fulfilled. As the incoming turn progresses towards its end as was projected by the current listener, he becomes certain that speaker change becomes relevant and will initiate articulation of the prepared next turn. Viewing these two processes, planning a next turn and timing of its articulation, as separate makes it possible to explain the observable fast timing of turn taking while still modelling the allocation of turns as interactionally managed by interlocutors — a considerable advantage of the presented model compared to more traditional perspectives on turn taking and conversation.
This is a study of how aspects of information structure can be captured within a formal grammar of Spanish, couched in the framework of Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG, Pollard
and Sag 1994). While a large number of morphological, syntactic and semantic aspects in a variety of languages have been successfully analysed in this theory, information structure has not been paid the same attention in the HPSG literature. However, as a theory of signs, HPSG should include all
levels of description without which the structural descriptions offered by the grammar would ultimately remain incomplete. Languages often explicitly mark the information-structural partitioning of utterances. Depending on the particular language, linguistic resources used for this purpose include
prosody (stress/intonation), syntax (e. g. constituent order, special syntactic constructions) and morphology (e. g. special affixes). In HPSG, phonological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic information is represented in parallel, which would seem to be a well-suited architecture for modelling
the sort of interfaces called for.
Im Zentrum der Dissertation steht der Begriff Informationsmodellierung oder genauer der Begriff der "textuellen Informationsmodellierung", wobei auf einer bereits vorgeschlagenen Unterscheidung einer primären und einer sekundären Ebene der Informationsstrukturierung aufgebaut wird. Der Gegenstand der primären Ebene sind die textuellen Daten selbst sowie ihre Strukturierung, wohingegen die sekundäre Ebene beschreibt, wie die für die primären Ebenen verwendeten Regelwerke mit alternativen Regelwerken in Beziehung gesetzt werden können. Der Einteilung in eine primäre und eine sekundäre Informationsstrukturierung wird in der Dissertation das Konzept der multiplen Informationsstrukturierung nebengeordnet. Dieses Konzept ist so zu verstehen, dass die primäre Ebene bei Bedarf vervielfacht wird - jedoch bezieht sich jede dieser Ebenen auf dieselbe Datengrundlage. Hierbei ergeben sich auch Auswirkungen auf die sekundäre Informationsstrukturierung. Die Informationsmodellierung erfolgt mit Auszeichnungssprachen. Die Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) stellt hierfür einen Rahmen dar, jedoch wurde dieser Formalismus seit seiner 1986 erfolgten Standardisierung nicht nur weiterentwickelt, sondern es wurde mit der Extensible Markup Language (XML) im Jahr 1998 eine wesentlich einfachere Untermenge dieser Sprache definiert, die zudem das derzeitige Zentrum weiterer Entwicklungen auf dem Gebiet der Auszeichnungssprachen darstellt. Der entwickelte Ansatz zur Modellierung linguistischer Information basiert auf der Extensible Markup Language (XML), wobei die weitergehenden Möglichkeiten von SGML selbstverständlich ebenfalls dargestellt und diskutiert werden. Mittels XML können Informationen, die sich nicht in bestimmten Hierarchien (mittels mathematischer Bäume) strukturieren lassen, nicht in einer natürlichen Weise repräsentiert werden. Eine Lösung dieses Problems liegt in der Aufteilung der Strukturierung auf verschiedene Ebenen. Diese neue Lösung wird dargestellt, diskutiert und modelliert.