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Among the many peculiarities of the German tense system which make its description or reconstruction such a difficult task to perform, there is one outstanding stumbling-block, viz. the relation between the - morphologically simple - Preterite and the - compound - (Present-)Perfect. Disregarding problems of variety - in spoken German in the South, the Preterite either doesn't exist or is restricted to modal verbs, e.g.
In the first part of this contribution, we will present, as a starting point for the following discussions, a simple formal language P containing one stative predicate. We will then discuss, on an intuitive level, how a treatment of predicates of change could be conceived, and how the progressive could be rendered in a formal language.
We will then give a formal definition of a language, TP1, based on P, and we will construct a semantics for TP1, which incorporates the ideas discussed.
We present a method for detecting and reconstructing separated particle verbs in a corpus of spoken German by following an approach suggested for written language. Our study shows that the method can be applied successfully to spoken language, compares different ways of dealing with structures that are specific to spoken language corpora, analyses some remaining problems, and discusses ways of optimising precision or recall for the method. The outlook sketches some possibilities for further work in related areas.
Conversation is usually considered to be grammatically simple, while academic writing is often claimed to be structurally complex, associated primarily with a greater use of dependent clauses. Our goal in the present paper is to challenge these stereotypes, based on the results of large-scale corpus investigations. We argue that both conversation and professional academic writing are grammatically complex but that their complexities are dramatically different. Surprisingly, the traditional view that complexity is realized through extensive clausal embedding leads to the conclusion that conversation is more complex than academic writing. In contrast, written academic discourse is actually much more ‘compressed’ than elaborated, and the complexities of academic writing are realized mostly as phrasal embedding rather than embedded clauses.
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.
Connectives are conjunctions, prepositions, adverbs and other particles which share the function of encoding semantic relations between sentences, or rather, between semantic objects some of which can be meanings of sentences. The relata linked by any such relation will fall into one of four distinct categories: they will be physical objects, states of affairs, propositions, or pragmatic options (the atoms of human interaction). Physical objects constitute the conceptual domain of space, states of affairs the domain of time, propositions the epistemic domain, and pragmatic options the deontic domain. The relations encodable in any of these domains can be divided into four basic types: similarity relations, situating relations, conditional relations, and causal relations. Conceptual domains and types of relations define the universe of possible connections between semantic objects.
Connectives differ as to the interpretations they permit in terms of conceptual domains and types of relations. Very few connectives are specialized on relata of one certain category and relations of one certain type. Possible examples in German are später (‘later on’) and zwischenzeitlich (‘in the meantime’), which encode situating relations between states of affairs. Other connectives are specialized on relata of one certain category, but are underspecified with respect to the type of relation. An example is German sobald (‘as soon as’), which can only connect states of affairs, but accepts situating, conditional and causal readings. Connectives of a third group are specialized on relations of a certain type, but are underspecified with respect to the category of the relata. Examples of this kind are German weil (‘because’) and trotzdem (‘nevertheless’), which encode causal relations, but accept states of affairs, propositions and pragmatic options as their relata. Connectives of a fourth group are underspecified both for the category of relata and the type of relation. An example is German da (‘there’), which accepts relata of any category and allows for situating, conditional and causal readings. Connectives like und (‘and’) and oder (‘or’) exhibit an even higher degree of under specification, in that they allow for all kinds of relations and relata.
In this paper, we investigate the temporal interpretation of propositional attitude complement clauses in four typologically unrelated languages: Washo (language isolate), Medumba (Niger-Congo), Hausa (Afro-Asiatic), and Samoan (Austronesian). Of these languages, Washo and Medumba are optional-tense languages, while Hausa and Samoan are tenseless. Just like in obligatory-tense languages, we observe variation among these languages when it comes to the availability of so-called simultaneous and backward-shifted readings of complement clauses. For our optional-tense languages, we argue that a Sequence of Tense parameter is active in these languages, just as in obligatory-tense languages. However, for completely tenseless clauses, we need something more. We argue that there is variation in the degree to which languages make recourse to res-movement, or a similar mechanism that manipulates LF structures to derive backward-shifted readings in tenseless complement clauses. We additionally appeal to cross-linguistic variation in the lexical semantics of perfective aspect to derive or block certain readings. The result is that the typological classification of a language as tensed, optionally tensed, or tenseless, does not alone determine the temporal interpretation possibilities for complement clauses. Rather, structural parameters of variation cross-cut these broad classes of languages to deliver the observed cross-linguistic picture.
This paper first argues that the distinction between Propositions and States-of-Affairs is significant for understanding a number of linguistic contrasts, including contrasts between nominalizations, complement clauses, readings of modal infinitives, raising constructions, illocutions and moods, relative clauses, and nouns. Subsequently, the paper outlines a cognitive linguistic model of the distinction, according to which Propositions and States-of-Affairs differ in terms of construal. Both prompt Langackerian “processes”, but only Propositions prompt a construal of these processes as referential. The paper argues that this model has a number of advantages over a traditional, denotational understanding of the distinction.
Should events be conceived of as primitive or should they be decomposed into more basic elements with certain syntax? This talk presents new evidence for the latter view: If events are represented as contradictory propositional meanings representing their pre- and post states, a uniform analysis of certain eventive and certain too- comparative constructions is possible; this is wanted given striking parallels between the two types of structure. The analysis goes some way, among other, toward explaining ‘repetetive/restitutive’ asymmetries familiar from eventive constructions (von Stechow 1996) but similarly arising in too- comparative constructions.