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Lean syntax: how argument structure is adapted to its interactive, material, and temporal ecology
(2025)
It has often been argued that argument structure in spoken discourse is less complex than in written discourse. This paper argues that lean argument structure, in particular, argument omission, gives evidence of how the production and understanding of linguistic structures is adapted to the interactive, material, and temporal ecology of talk in interaction. It is shown how lean argument structure builds on participants’ ongoing bodily conduct, joint perceptual salience, joint attention, and their orientation to expectable next actions within a joint project. The phenomena discussed in this paper are verb derived discourse markers and tags, analepsis in responsive actions, and ellipsis in first actions, such as requests and instructions. The study draws from transcripts and audio and video recordings of naturally occurring interaction in German from the Research and Teaching Corpus of Spoken German (FOLK).
The present Special Issue features a selection of papers presented at the 10th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC-10), held from 18 to 21 July 2023 in Mannheim, Germany (https://iclc10.ids-mannheim.de). The aim of the ICLC conference series, running since 1998, is to promote fine-grained cross-linguistic research comprising two or more languages from a broad range of theoretical and methodological perspectives.
The collection of articles included in this Special Issue of Languages in Contrast addresses central questions in the contrastive study of selected linguistic constructions as objects of investigation, equivalents to other linguistic expressions, or as diagnostics. In particular, these constructions and the related issues include: future constructions and the role of syntactic complexity in their usage; classifier and quantifier constructions as environments for distinguishing mass versus count nouns; external possession constructions with their case features, grammatical functions, distribution and semantic properties; embedded exclamative constructions as structures whose conventional meaning is claimed to be projected by their matrix clause; existential and presentational constructions and the differences between them in negative contexts; as well as converbs and their range of uses (also including a diachronic perspective).
The studies of these constructions take a variety of language pairs into account, including typologically close as well as distant languages, and in some cases, the contrastive analysis is extended to further languages. The contrasted languages are English-Norwegian, English-French, Chinese-English, Korean-Spanish, German-Russian(-Italian) and French-Polish-Czech.
All of the contributions are corpus-based and use either monolingual corpora, such as the British National Corpus (BNC), the Open American National Corpus (OANC), the Norwegian Speech Corpus, the BigBrother corpus, Wordbanks Online, Frantext, the Czech National Corpus (CNC), the German Reference Corpus DeReKo, the Russian National Corpus (RNC), the National Corpus of Polish (NKJP) or multilingual corpora, in particular parallel corpora such as OPUS, InterCorp and a self-compiled Chinese-English parallel corpus. In most cases, the corpus data are analyzed using descriptive statistical methods.
The paper discusses some central distinguishing properties of the external and internal syntax of different types of adverbial and complement clauses in German, among them their different depths of the attachment sites in the hosts and their possibility or impossibility of hosting different high adverbials and other weak root phenomena (RPs), of hosting subject-oriented verb-first parentheticals and other semi-strong RPs and of hosting interjections and other strong RPs. It is discussed which kind of German complement clauses allow the positioning to the left of the matrix verb and a proposal is made for the categorical status of verb-second complement clauses. The paper argues that the framework developed in Krifka (in this volume) for the analysis of speech acts is well suited to addressing these characteristics. According to Krifka, one has to distinguish between the semantic levels of speech act, commitment, judgement and proposition. These levels are syntactically represented by the projections (i): ActP > ComP > JP > TP. The paper argues that the aforementioned properties correlate with which projection from (i) is the highest one contained in a given clause type. The clause type’s external syntax is determined by this node and its internal licensing capacities is determined by this node and the projections below: weak RPs are licensed by JP, semi-strong RPs are licensed by ComP and strong RPs are licensed by ActP.
Linguistic constructions
(2024)
Wissenschaftliche Grammatiken integrieren Erkenntnisse aus verschiedenen Forschungsfeldern. Dabei können zuvor übersehene Zusammenhänge oder auch Widersprüche aufgedeckt werden. Ob dies auch auf die Frage der Nominalität von Komplementsätzen zutrifft, ist Thema dieses Beitrags. Dazu werden neuere Referenzgrammatiken des Deutschen befragt. Befunde zur Morphologie von Substantiv und Verb, zum Vergleich zwischen Nominalphrasen und (Komplement-)Sätzen sowie zur Semantik der Konstruktionen zeichnen ein uneinheitliches, zum Teil widersprüchliches Bild, was den nominalen Charakter von Komplementsätzen angeht. Eine Nominalitätshierarchie für die verschiedenen Komplementsatztypen wird vorgeschlagen.
Can neural activity reveal syntactic structure building processes and their violations? To verify this, we recorded electroencephalographic and behavioral data as participants discriminated concatenated isochronous sentence chains containing only grammatical sentences (regular trials) from those containing ungrammatical sentences (irregular trials). We found that the repetition of abstract syntactic categories generates a harmonic structure of their period independently of stimulus rate, thereby separating endogenous from exogenous neural rhythms. Behavioral analyses confirmed this dissociation. Internal neural harmonics extracted from regular trials predicted participants’ grammatical sensitivity better than harmonics extracted from irregular trials, suggesting a direct reflection of grammatical sensitivity. Instead, entraining to external stimulus rate scaled with task sensitivity only when extracted from irregular trials, reflecting attention-capture processing. Neural harmonics to repeated syntactic categories constitute the first behaviorally relevant, purely internal index of syntactic competence.
Nach kurzen Begriffsklärungen werde ich in meinem Beitrag zeigen, dass nicht nur der Satztyp, sondern auch die Informationsstruktur einen Effekt auf die Argumentstruktur hat, der im Rahmen der dynamischen Valenz zu erfassen ist. Außerdem werde ich einige Überlegungen zum Verhältnis von Fokus, Prosodie und Kontrast anstellen und dabei kurz die Frage der projektiven Beschreibung von Konstruktionen mit engem Fokus ansprechen. Auch ungeachtet ihrer theoretischen Relevanz mag die ausführliche Diskussion einzelner Beispiele von Interesse sein. Schließlich werde ich z.B. Fokuskonstruktionen aus den Druckmedien einschließlich ihrer Diskurseinbettung besprechen.
Im folgenden Beitrag wird ein Ausschnitt aus dem im Rahmen des DICONALE-Projekts erarbeiteten konzeptuellen Feld der 'Autoritätsbeziehungen' präsentiert. Auf der Grundlage korpusgestützter Daten werden die Argumentstruktur und das Valenz- und Konstruktionspotenzial des Verbs 'befehlen' als repräsentativem Verballexem des Subfeldes: Autoritätsausübung [AUFFORDERUNG] beschrieben und mit möglichen Entsprechungen aus dem entsprechenden konzeptuellen Feld für das Spanische kontrastiert.