Open Access

Two eye movement/EEG co-registration experiments investigated effects of predictability, visual contrast, and parafoveal preview in normal reading. Replicating previous studies, in Experiment 1 contrast and predictability additively influenced fixation durations, and in Experiment 2 invalid preview eliminated the predictability effect on early eye movement measures. In both experiments, predictability influenced the amplitude of the N400 component of the fixation-related potential. In Experiment 1, visual contrast did not influence the N400, and in Experiment 2, the effect of predictability on the N400 was larger with invalid preview, in opposition to the eye movement pattern. The N400 may reflect a late process of accessing conceptual representations while the duration of the eyes’ fixation on a word is sensitive to the difficulty of perceptual encoding and early stages of word recognition. The effects of predictability on both fixation duration and the N400 suggest an influence of this variable at two distinct processing stages.

Der vorliegende Text unternimmt den Versuch, einen Beitrag zur grammatischen Analyse von Ellipsen zu leisten, indem kontextkontrollierte Ellipsen und Strukturellipsen konstruktionsgrammatisch verortet und interpretiert werden. In diesem Zusammenhang soll vor allem die Frage nach ihrem eventuellen Konstruktionsstatus im Mittelpunkt stehen. Wie sich zeigen wird, werden die beiden markanten Vertreter der Ellipsenwelt (Analepse und Strukturellipse) diesbezüglich unterschiedlich bewertet. Da der Phänomenbereich in beiden Hauptklassen eine Menge unterschiedlicher Formate und Typen umfasst (zu einem Überblick vgl. Hennig 2013: 447-448), kann die vorgelegte Analyse nur exemplarisch erfolgen und erhebt somit keinen Anspruch auf Vollständigkeit. Dennoch soll sie der Bedingung der Generalisierbarkeit theoretischer Annahmen insofern gerecht werden, als die beiden Hauptklassen (Analepse und Strukturellipse) genauer untersucht werden, die m. E. zwei entgegengesetzte Eckpunkte des Spektrums möglicher Ellipsen darstellen und somit in analytischer Perspektive, so auch in der konstruktionsgrammatischen Theoriebildung aus meiner Sicht besondere Aufmerksamkeit verdienen.

Tense, aspect, and mood are grammatical categories concerned with different notional facets of the event or situation conveyed by a given clause. They are prototypically expressed by the verbal system. Tense can be defined as a category that relates points or intervals in time to one another; in a most basic model, those include the time of the event or situation referred to and the speech time. The former may precede the latter (“past”), follow it (“future”), or be simultaneous with it (or at least overlap with it; “present”). Aspect is concerned with the internal temporal constituency of the event or situation, which may be viewed as a single whole (“perfective”) or with particular reference to its internal structure (“imperfective”), including its being ongoing at a certain point in time (“progressive”). Mood, in a narrow, morphological sense, refers to the inflectional realization of modality, with modality encompassing a large and varying set of sub-concepts such as possibility, necessity, probability, obligation, permission, ability, and volition. In the domain of tense, all Germanic languages make a distinction between non-past and past. In most languages, the opposition can be expressed inflectionally, namely, by the present and preterite (indicative). All modern languages also have a periphrastic perfect as well as periphrastic forms that can be used to refer to future events. Aspect is characteristically absent as a morphological category across the entire family, but most, if not all, modern languages have periphrastic forms for the expression of aspectual categories such as progressiveness. Regarding mood, Germanic languages are commonly described as distinguishing up to three such form paradigms, namely, indicative, imperative, and a third one referred to here as subjunctive. Morphologically distinct subjunctive forms are, however, more typical of earlier stages of Germanic than they are of most present-day languages.

This conference booklet provides information about 10th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (ICLC-10) that took place in Mannheim, Germany, from 18 to 21 July 2023. It contains – a description of the conference aims, – details on the conference venue, – information on committees, – the conference program, – the abstracts of the keynotes, oral and poster presentations, and – an author index.