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The goal of the MULI (MUltiLingual Information structure) project is to empirically analyse information structure in German and English newspaper texts. In contrast to other projects in which information structure is annotated and investigated (e.g. in the Prague Dependency Treebank, which mirrors the basic information about the topic-focus articulation of the sentence), we do not annotate theory-biased categories like topic-focus or theme-rheme. Trying to be as theory-independent as possible, we annotate those features which are relevant to information structure and on the basis of which typical patterns, co-occurrences or correlations can be determined. We distinguish between three annotation levels: syntax, discourse and prosody. The data is based on the TIGER Corpus for German and the Penn Treebank for English, since the existing information on part-of-speech and syntactic structure can be re-used for our purposes. The actual annotation of an English example sequence illustrates our choice of categories on each level. Their combination offers the possibility to investigate how information structure is realised and can be interpreted.
CoMParS is a resource under construction in the context of the long-term project German Grammar in European Comparison (GDE) at the IDS Mannheim. The principal goal of GDE is to create a novel contrastive grammar of German against the background of other European languages. Alongside German, which is the central focus, the core languages for comparison are English, French, Hungarian and Polish, representing different typological classes. Unlike traditional contrastive grammars available for German, which usually cover language pairs and are based on formal grammatical categories, the new GDE grammar is developed in the spirit of functionalist typology. This implies that, instead of formal criteria, cognitively motivated functional domains in terms of Givón (1984) are used as tertia comparationis. The purpose of CoMParS is to document the empirical basis of the theoretical assumptions of GDE-V and to illustrate the otherwise rather abstract content of grammar books by as many as possible naturally occurring and adequately presented multilingual examples, including information on their use in specific contexts and registers. These examples come from existing parallel corpora, and our presentation will focus on the legal aspects and consequences of this choice of language data.
Whether verbs have to be marked as punctual vs. durative has been a controversial issue from the very beginnings of research on aktionsarten in the last century right on up to modern theories of aspectual classes and aspect composition. Debates about the linguistic necessity of this distinction have often been accompanied by the question of what it means for a verb to be temporally punctual. In this paper I will, firstly, sketch the history of research on the punctual-durative distinction and present several linguistic arguments in its favor. Secondly, I will show how this distinction is captured in an eventstructure- based approach to lexical semantics. Thirdly, I will discuss the extent to which a precise definition of the notions used in lexical
representations helps avoid circular argumentation in lexical semantics. Finally, I will demonstrate how this can be done for the notion of ‘punctuality’ by clarifying the logical type of this predicate and relating it to central cognitive time concepts.
The "imperfective-paradox" paradox and other problems with the semantics of the progressive aspect
(2000)
This paper is about the meaning of the progressive aspect, of which it has been notoriously difficult to give a satisfying account. 1 A number of intriguing properties of its meaning were first brought out in formal semantic treatments. An event semantics approach to the progressive that integrates concepts of nonnality and perspective as well as adequate lexical representations seems to be particularly promising. In section 1 I will present several problems connected with the semantics of the progressive that are crucial for shaping its truth conditions. Several solutions to these problems that have been suggested in the literature will be discussed. 2 In section 2 I will sketch a preliminary account of the meaning of the progressive aspect. In section 2.1 the basic components that underlie the truth conditions of the progressive will be described. In section 2.2 I will present underlying lexical assumptions and the truth conditions for the progressive. Finally, in section 2.3, I will evaluate the proposal by revisiting the problems discussed.
Lexical-semantic theories often suffer from the imprecision of the concepts they employ in their representations. This leads to a considerable decrease in empirical strength by inviting circular argumentation. A demonstration of how to go about overcoming such shortcomings will be carried out, using the lexical semantic concept of "punctuality" as an example. Firstly, I will argue that the distinction between punctuality and durativity plays a crucial role for the explanation of a wide range of syntactic and semantic phenomena. Secondly, I will discuss methodological issues involved in arriving at a more precise definition of punctuality and, finally, the notion of "punctuality" will be given an interpretation on the basis of extensive consultation of research on cognitive time concepts.
German loanwords are found in many languages in the South Pacific, in particular in those areas which were under German administration before WW I. The Austronesian languages in this area differ greatly with respect to the number of lexemes of German origin. The paper focuses on two languages of Micronesia, namely Palauan, with a comparatively high number of German loans, and Kosraean which had no German influence on its lexicon. The paperconsiders the balance of factors that contribute to the different loanword amounts. That German was taught in local schools for up to two decades did not, by itself, enhance borrowing from German. More weighty factors for the amount of borrowings from German are the length and strength of language contact with English and the use of German as a means of communication in particular settings in the years before WW I.