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Der Konstruktionsbegriff hielt seinen Einzug in die Spracherwerbsforschung durch gebrauchsbasierte Lerntheorien, nach denen sprachliche Strukturen als Form-Funktionseinheiten aus dem Input abgeleitet werden, Sprache somit ein emergentes System ist (Tomasello 1998a und b; Behrens 2009a und b). Die Abstraktionseinheit für das Kind ist dabei die Äußerung in ihrer situativen Gebundenheit und ihrer Diskursfunktion, mithin die Konstruktion. Die Konstruktion wird gefasst als schematische Einheit mit mehr oder weniger offenen Slots: Teile der Konstruktion können lexikalisch fixiert oder aber produktiv und durch andere Ausdrücke ersetzbar sein. Der Kontrast zum Valenzbegriff bzw. dem der Argumentstruktur in seiner formaleren Definition liegt darin, dass die lexikalischen Eigenschaften der Wörter die Syntax nicht projizieren, sondern dass sowohl die Eigenschaften der Lemmas als auch die der Morphosyntax aus ihrem Vorkommen in konkreten Sätzen abgeleitet werden.
Empirisch konzentriert sich die Forschung auf die Ermittlung der Generalisierungsprozesse und auf deren Basis im Input, dem Sprachangebot. Erwerbsrelevant ist insbesondere der Input in seinen usualisierten Mustern in typischen Interaktionssituationen. Eher wird vor allem der Grad der Produktivität kindlicher Äußerungen analysiert. Bislang weniger untersucht, aber zunehmend im Fokus sind die Generalisierungsprozesse selbst und damit die generative Kraft des Konstruktionsbegriffs. Sobald Aspekte einer Konstruktion abstrahiert worden (= produktiv) sind, sollten sie auf neue Situationen übertragen werden können, und gilt es zu ermitteln, welche formalen, funktionalen und distributionellen Faktoren die Abstraktion sprachlichen Wissens fördern.
In dem Paradigma der gebrauchsbasierten Konstruktionsgrammatik wird die modulare Trennung zwischen Wörtern und Regeln aufgehoben. Somit kann innerhalb eines einheitlichen theoretischen Rahmens sowohl der Erwerb regelhafter als auch der stärker idiosynkratischer Strukturen erklärt werden.
The principal claim of this dissertation is that there is a unique structural core shared by Double Object, Dative Experiencer and Existential/Presentational constructions. This core is argued to take the form of a Cipient Predication structure, `cipient covering traditional notions like (affected) source/goal, recipient, indirect object or dative experiencer. Central questions arising in defining Cipient Predication are: How are cipients thematically licensed, and what is the role of there in argument-structural terms? What is the structural locus of cipients/there? What is the role and nature of dative case? How can the possessive interpretation, the blocking and definiteness effects associated with the above-mentioned constructions be explained? Cipients are presented as external arguments and logical subjects (location individuals) of predicates derived from a propositional meaning embedded in the VP, the predicate formed by a lower tense head `little t that is overtly realized as there. Little t is argued to encode a distinction at the reference time level, structural dative hinging on a tense property like structural nominative. The cipient relates as a whole to a part to a VP-internal location argument that together with the theme furnishes the propositional meaning (`possession ). As logical subjects, cipients anchor the predicate to the utterance context, forcing its interpretation in extralinguistic terms (`blocking effects ). It is proposed that lacking structurally encoded subjects, Existential/Presentational constructions are not saturated expressions in syntax, precluding the interpretation of certain quantifiers (most/every, vide `definiteness effects ). Cipient Predication, couched in terms of the Minimalist Program (in particular, Chomsky 1999) and a semantics relying on tense and the ontological distinction of locations as well as scalar and part-whole structure, should be of interest to scholars working on datives, argument structure, and the syntax/semantics/pragmatics interface more generally.
The effects of different forms of predication have been insightfully (and almost exclusively) studied for 'simple' cases of predication, of which the 'presentational sentence' is maybe the paradigm instantiation. It is the aim of this paper to show that thc same kind of effects as well as in fact the same kind of structures are present at embedded levels in thematically and otherwise more complex structures. Beyond presentational sentences, 'unaccusative' experiencing constructions involving a dative subject, 'double object constructions' and - to a lesser extent - spraylload constructions are discussed. For all of these, it is argued that they comprise a predication encoding the ascription of a transient temporal property to a location. On this basis, a proposal is made as to how the scope asymmetry between the two arguments involved in the colistructions can be explained. Furthermore, a proposal is made as to how what has been called 'argument shift' is motivated.
In two eye-tracking experiments, we investigated the relationship between the subject preference in the resolution of subject-object ambiguities in German embedded clauses and semantic word order constraints (i.e., prominence hierarchies relating to the specificity/referentiality of noun phrases, case assignment and thematic role assignment). Our central research question concerned the timecourse with which prominence information is used and particularly whether it modulates the subject preference. In both experiments, we replicated previous findings of reanalysis effects for object-initial structures. Our findings further suggest that noun phrase prominence does not alter initial parsing strategies (viz., the subject preference), but rather modulates the ease of later reanalysis processes. In Experiment 1, the object case assigned by the verb did not affect the ease of reanalysis. However, the syntactic reanalysis was rendered more difficult when the order of the two arguments violated the specificity/referentiality hierarchy. Experiment 2 revealed that the initial subject preference also holds for verbs favoring an object-initial base order (i.e., dative object-experiencer verbs). However, the advantage for subject-initial sentences is neutralized in relatively late processing stages when the thematic role hierarchy and the specificity hierarchy converge to promote scrambling.
Despite the importance of the agent role for language grammar and processing, its definition and features are still controversially discussed in the literature on semantic roles. Moreover, diagnostic tests to dissociate agentive from non-agentive roles are typically applied with qualitative introspection data. We investigated whether quantitative acceptability ratings obtained with a well-established agentivity test, the DO-cleft, provide evidence for the feature-based prototype account of (Dowty, David R. 1991. Thematic protoroles and argument selction. Language 67(3). 547-619) postulating that agentivity increases with the number of agentive features that a role subsumes. We used four different intransitive verb classes in German and collected acceptability judgements from non-expert native speakers of German. Our results show that sentence acceptability increases linearly with the number of agentive features and, hence, agentivity. Moreover, our findings confirm that sentience belongs to the group of proto-agent features. In summary, this suggests that a multidimensional account including a specific mechanism for role prototypicality (feature accumulation) successfully captures gradient acceptability clines. Quantitative acceptability estimates are a meaningful addition to linguistic theorizing.
We investigate whether prototypicality or prominence of semantic roles can account for role-related effects in sentence interpretation. We present two acceptability-rating experiments testing three different constructions: active, personal passive and DO-clefts involving the same type of transitive verbs that differ with respect to the agentive role features they select. Our results reveal that there is no cross-constructional advantage for prototypical roles (e.g., agents), hence disconfirming a central tenet of role prototypicality. Rather, acceptability clines depend on the construction under investigation, thereby highlighting different role features. This finding is in line with one core assumption of the prominence account stating that role features are flexibly highlighted depending on the discourse function of the respective construction.
What is a sentient agent?
(2018)
We present an event-related potentials (ERP) study that addresses the question of how pieces of information pertaining to semantic roles and event structure interact with each other and with the verb’s meaning. Specifically, our study investigates German verb-final clauses with verbs of motion such as fliegen ‘fly’ and schweben ‘float, hover,’ which are indeterminate with respect to agentivity and event structure. Agentivity was tested by manipulating the animacy of the subject noun phrase and event structure by selecting a goal adverbial, which makes the event telic, or a locative adverbial, which leads to an atelic reading. On the clause-initial subject, inanimates evoked an N400 effect vis-à-vis animates. On the adverbial phrase in the atelic (locative) condition, inanimates showed an N400 in comparison to animates. The telic (goal) condition exhibited a similar amplitude like the inanimate-atelic condition. Finally, at the verbal lexeme, the inanimate condition elicited an N400 effect against the animate condition in the telic (goal) contexts. In the atelic (locative) condition, items with animates evoked an N400 effect compared to inanimates. The combined set of findings suggest that clause-initial animacy is not sufficient for agent identification in German, which seems to be completed only at the verbal lexeme in our experiment. Here non-agents (inanimates) changing their location in a goal-directed way and agents (animates) lacking this property are dispreferred and this challenges the assumption that change of (locational) state is generally a defining characteristic of the patient role. Besides this main finding that sheds new light on role prototypicality, our data seem to indicate effects that, in our view, are related to complexity, i.e., minimality. Inanimate subjects or goal arguments increase processing costs since they have role or event structure restrictions that animate subjects or locative modifiers lack.
The article investigates the hypothesis that prominence phenomena on different levels of linguistic structure are systematically related to each other. More specifically, it is hypothesized that prominence relations in morphosyntax reflect, and contribute to, prominence management in discourse. This hypothesis is empirically based on the phenomenon of agentivity clines, i.e. the observation that the relevance of agentivity features such as volition or sentience is variable across different constructions. While some constructions, including German DO-clefts, show a strong preference for highly agentive verbs, other constructions, including German basic active constructions, have no particular requirements regarding the agentivity of the verb, except that at least one agentivity feature should be present. Our hypothesis predicts that this variable relevance of agentivity features is related to the discourse constraints on the felicitous use of a given construction, which in turn, of course, requires an explicit statement of such constraints. We propose an original account of the discourse constraints on DO-clefts in German using the ‘Question Under Discussion’ framework. Here, we hypothesize that DO-clefts render prominent one implicit question from a set of alternative questions available at a particular point in the developing discourse. This then yields a prominent question-answer pair that changes the thematic structure of the discourse. We conclude with some observations on the possibility of relating morphosyntactic prominence (high agentivity) to discourse prominence (making a Question Under Discussion prominent by way of clefting).