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A central question in psycholinguistics is how the human brain processes language in real time. To answer this question, the differences between auditory and visual processing have to be considered. The present dissertation examines the extent to which event-related potentials (ERPs) in the human electroencephalogram (EEG) interact with different modes of presentation during sentence comprehension. Besides the two classical modalities, auditory and rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), the monitoring of readers’ eye movements was chosen as a new mode of presentation. Here, the temporal paradox between neuronal ERP effects and behavioral effects in the eye movement record were of particular interest. Specifically, by concurrently measuring ERPs and eye movements in natural reading, the dissertation aimed to shed light on the counterintuitive fact that difficulties in sentence comprehension arise earlier in eye movement measures than in the corresponding neuronal ERP effects. In contrast to RSVP and the auditory modality, reading offers a parafoveal preview of upcoming words (Rayner 1998), which enables the brain to process information of words before these are fixated for the first time (in foveal vision). When the word Gegenteil in example (1) below is fixated and processed, the brain concurrently processes some information of the upcoming parafoveal words von and weiß. (1) Schwarz ist das Gegenteil von weiß. (2) Schwarz […] blau. (3) Schwarz […] nett. The parafoveal preview mostly provides orthographic (word form) information, while semantic information is not conveyed (Inhoff & Starr 2004; White 2008). Whereas word form and lexical meaning are processed simultaneously with RSVP and auditory presentation, the parafoveal preview in natural reading allows for a temporal decoupling such that word forms are processed before meaning. This is one reason for the faster information uptake in reading. The present dissertation is the first to systematically investigate the influence of the parafoveal preview in sentence processing. Participants read sentences such as in (1)-(3), in which two adjectives were either antonyms (1), semantically related non-antonyms (2), or semantically unrelated non-antonyms (3). ERPs were computed for the last fixation before the target word (the sentence-final word in 1-3), which was assumed to capture parafoveal processing, and for the first fixation on the target, that should reflect foveal processing. The results were compared to two experiments using identical stimuli with auditory and RSVP presentation, and the parafoveal preview clearly led to different ERP results. While the RSVP and auditory presentations replicated the finding of a P300 to the second antonym in (1) (Kutas & Iragui 1998; Roehm et al. 2007), there was no P300 in response to antonyms at any fixation position in natural reading. However, the dissociation of parafoveal and foveal processing in reading also made it possible to disentangle different processes underlying the N400. There was a reduced parafoveal N400 for (1,2) compared with (3), which could be attributed to the preactivation of the word forms of the expected antonyms and of semantically related non-antonyms. In foveal vision, all non-antonyms (2,3) showed an enhanced N400 compared with (1) because they were unexpected and implausible in the sentence context. This dissociation between the preactivation of a word-form and the contextual fit of a word’s meaning is impossible with the other two modes of presentation, because orthographic and semantic information become available almost at the same time and are thus processed simultaneously. Furthermore, the parafoveal N400 effect was not accompanied by changes in the duration of the corresponding fixation, whereas the foveal N400 was. Similarly, with the concurrent measurement of ERPs and eye movements, the temporal paradox described above remained, as effects in the eye movement record preceded the neuronal ERP effects. Further support for these central findings came from two additional experiments that investigated different stimuli with concurrent ERP-eye tracking measures. Altogether, the experiments revealed that the previous findings on the language-related N400 can be replicated with natural reading, but they can also be differentiated qualitatively by virtue of the characteristics of natural reading. Although the behavioral and neuronal effects mirrored one another, not every neuronal effect necessarily translates into a behavioral output. Finally, even concurrent ERP-eye tracking measures cannot resolve the temporal paradox.
Die vorliegende Arbeit geht der Frage nach, wie bzw. mit welchen sprachlichen Mitteln der Islam im öffentlichen Diskurs konstituiert wird. Hierfür wurde ein Korpus aus überregionalen Medientexten erstellt und qualitativ analysiert. Die Auswertung des gesamten Korpus weist darauf hin, welche inhaltlichen Merkmale im Islamdiskurs sprachlich nachweisbar sind und sich im gesamten Diskurs stets wiederholen. Schlüsselwörter wie Islam, Islamismus, Islamisierung, Muslim, Dschihad, Scharia oder Koran wurden detailliert präsentiert. Außerdem wurden die aus dem untersuchten Korpus entstandenen Stereotype rekonstruiert. Weiterhin wurden Metaphern bzw. Metaphernkonzepte untersucht, die sich im Islamdiskurs abbilden lassen. Exemplarisch anhand der drei Weltereignisse Iranische Revolution 1978/79, 11. September 2001 und Arabischer Frühling 2011 hat die vorliegende Arbeit gezeigt, wie der Islam in unterschiedlichen Zeitabständen wahrgenommen wird und inwieweit gesellschaftspolitische Ereignisse und Auseinandersetzungen die Thematisierung des Islams beeinflussen können.
The study empirically examines the interpretation of focus accents in German. To this end, a methodology is developed, and it is discussed how experimental investigation can proceed at the current state of the focus theory. Methodologically, experiments directly measuring interpretation provide an alternative to the widespread practice of using only empirical preference and production data to investigate the interpretation of stimuli, and it is shown why such an alternative is necessary.
The empirical results show that one must extend and restrict theories assuming an association of free focus and scalar implicature (exhaustivity) or question–answer congruence as follows: On the one hand, situational factors in the interpretation must be taken into account to a greater extent than until now, especially their interaction with ‘physical’ properties of the speech signal (focus marking). On the other hand, a prototypical definition of Focus is called for which connects the major concepts of focus on the phonetic-phonological, semantic and information-structural levels and takes their prototypical coincidence to be the basis of focus interpretation and corresponding intuitions.
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.
Manual development of deep linguistic resources is time-consuming and costly and therefore often described as a bottleneck for traditional rule-based NLP. In my PhD thesis I present a treebank-based method for the automatic acquisition of LFG resources for German. The method automatically creates deep and rich linguistic presentations from labelled data (treebanks) and can be applied to large data sets. My research is based on and substantially extends previous work on automatically acquiring wide-coverage, deep, constraint-based grammatical resources from the English Penn-II treebank (Cahill et al.,2002; Burke et al., 2004; Cahill, 2004). Best results for English show a dependency f-score of 82.73% (Cahill et al., 2008) against the PARC 700 dependency bank, outperforming the best hand-crafted grammar of Kaplan et al. (2004). Preliminary work has been carried out to test the approach on languages other than English, providing proof of concept for the applicability of the method (Cahill et al., 2003; Cahill, 2004; Cahill et al., 2005). While first results have been promising, a number of important research questions have been raised. The original approach presented first in Cahill et al. (2002) is strongly tailored to English and the datastructures provided by the Penn-II treebank (Marcus et al., 1993). English is configurational and rather poor in inflectional forms. German, by contrast, features semi-free word order and a much richer morphology. Furthermore, treebanks for German differ considerably from the Penn-II treebank as regards data structures and encoding schemes underlying the grammar acquisition task. In my thesis I examine the impact of language-specific properties of German as well as linguistically motivated treebank design decisions on PCFG parsing and LFG grammar acquisition. I present experiments investigating the influence of treebank design on PCFG parsing and show which type of representations are useful for the PCFG and LFG grammar acquisition tasks. Furthermore, I present a novel approach to cross-treebank comparison, measuring the effect of controlled error insertion on treebank trees and parser output from different treebanks. I complement the cross-treebank comparison by providing a human evaluation using TePaCoC, a new testsuite for testing parser performance on complex grammatical constructions. Manual evaluation on TePaCoC data provides new insights on the impact of flat vs. hierarchical annotation schemes on data-driven parsing. I present treebank-based LFG acquisition methodologies for two German treebanks. An extensive evaluation along different dimensions complements the investigation and provides valuable insights for the future development of treebanks.
This dissertation offers a qualitative analysis of verbal interactions in German television talk shows between 1989 and 1994. It investigates how Speakers of German formulate their own and others’ affiliation to national identities and social spaces. In particular, it examines classifications of place, person, and time that include group and place names as well as grammatically complex expressions, deictic pronouns and adverbs, and certain motion verbs. In addition, repair is discussed as a resource in re-formulating identities.
Die vorliegende Dissertation reiht sich in die Diskussion um die Verwendungsweise der deutschen Konstruktion werden + Infinitiv ein und stellt dem so genannten Temporalisten/Modalisten-Dissens eine dritte Position abseits einer kategorialgrammatischen Klassifizierung bei. Untersucht wird die Ausprägung des epistemisch modalen und des temporalen Bedeutungselementes der Periphrase werden + Infinitiv und die Abhängigkeit dieser Ausprägung von bestimmenden Faktoren im Vergleich mit Präsens, Perfekt und Präsens pro Futuro. Zur Anwendung kommen hierbei vornehmlich webbasierte Experimentalparadigmen, welche nicht nur die Untersuchungen der Arbeit auf eine breite empirische Basis stellen, sondern auch eine systematische und kontrollierte Analyse ermöglichen. Überdies enthält die vorliegende Arbeit einen methodischen Teil, der auf etwaige Unterschiede zwischen webbasierten und laborgestützen Experimenten eingeht.