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In German oral discourse, previous research has shown that okay can be used both as a response token (e.g., for agreeing with the previous turn or for claiming a certain degree of understanding) and as a discourse marker (e.g., for closing conversational topics or sequences and/or indicating transitions). This contribution focuses on the use of okay as a response token and how it is connected with the speakers’ interactional state of knowledge (their understanding, their assumptions etc.). The analysis is based on video recorded everyday conversations in German and a sequential, micro-analytic approach (multimodal conversation analysis). The main function of conversational okay in the selected data set is related to indicating the acceptance of prior information. By okay, speakers however claim acceptance of a piece of information that they can’t verify or check. The analysis contrasts different sequences containing okay only with sequences in which change-of-state tokens such as ah and achso co-occur with okay. This illustrates that okay itself does not index prior information as new, and that it is not used for agreeing with or for confirming prior information. Instead it enables the speaker to adopt a kind of neutral, “non-agreeing” position towards a given piece of information.
The purpose of this paper is to describe the functions of ‘where’-based relative elements' in six Balkan languages, paying particular attention to non-standard varieties.2 Relative elements based on an originally interrogative pronoun meaning ‘where’ are attested in all Balkan languages and, more generally, in all European languages. In accordance with the locative meaning of the original pronoun, ‘where’-based relative elements are primarily used to relativize locatives. However, it will be shown that in some Balkan languages, and especially in non-standard varieties, these elements have extended their functional domain. This process does not appear to be random, but rather to pattern with the following hierarchy: locative > unspecific connector > other syntactic positions (indirect/direct object, subject).3 Additionally, ‘where’-based relative elements will be compared with ‘what’-based ones in order to highlight common patterns of development.
Concurrent standardization as a necessity: The genesis of the new official orthographic guidelines
(2009)
The new official orthographic guidelines were brought into force by the official state authorities on August 1st, 1998 and its principle goals were a standardized representation of the guidelines and a «gentle simplification in respect of content». This regulation was not supported by the public and in fact it was the starting point for a struggle for conceptual solutions and a quest for the achievement of' a consensus between different possible norms. Since orthography is an officially codified standard taking up a prominent position among linguistic standards, it is of particular socio-political importance. It was the foremost task of the Council for German Orthography (Rat für deutsche Rechtschreibung), instituted in December 2004, to elaborate a compromise in order to bring the «Orthographical war» (Die Zeit) to an end, which was led enthusiastically for more than a decade. - The concern of this article is to classify historically the agreement reached in 2006. Against this background, it can be stated that official guidelines will only be accepted, if they are based upon the usage in writing and if they take into account the interests of the reader. Both principles are characterizing the proposal made by the Council for German Orthography. An outlook on the Council's activities concerning orthographic standardization expected in the future will conclude this article.
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.
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.
This paper is concerned with relative constructions in non-standard varieties of European languages, which will be analyzed on the basis of three typological parameters (word order, relative element, syntactic role of the relativized item). The validity of claims raised in studies on the areal distribution of relative constructions in Europe will be checked against the results of the analysis, so as to ascertain whether they still hold when non-standard varieties are examined.
This paper deals with different views of lexical semantics. The focus is on the relationship between lexical expressions and conceptual components. First the assumptions about lexicalization and decompositionality of concepts shared by the most semanticists are presented, followed by a discussion of the differences between two-level-semantics and one-level-semantics. The final part is concentrated on the interpretation of conceptual components in situations of communication.
In order to determine priorities for the improvement of timing in synthetic speech this study looks at the role of segmental duration prediction and the role of phonological symbolic representation in the perceptual quality of a text-to-speech system. In perception experiments using German speech synthesis, two standard duration models (Klatt rules and CART) were tested. The input to these models consisted of a symbolic representation which was either derived from a database or a text-to-speech system. Results of the perception experiments show that different duration models can only be distinguished when the symbolic representation is appropriate. Considering the relative importance of the symbolic representation, post-lexical segmental rules were investigated with the outcome that listeners differ in their preferences regarding the degree of segmental reduction. As a conclusion, before fine-tuning the duration prediction, it is important to derive an appropriate phonological symbolic representation in order to improve timing in synthetic speech.