Typological parameters of genericity

Different languages employ different morphosyntactic devices for expressing genericity. And, of course, they also make use of different morphosyntactic and semantic or pragmatic cues which may contribute to the interpretation of a sentence as generic rather than episodic. [...] We will advance the strong hypo thesis that it is a fundamental property of lexical elements in natural language that they are neutral with respect to different modes of reference or non-reference. That is, we reject the idea that a certain use of a lexical element, e.g. a use which allows reference to particular spatio-temporally bounded objects in the world, should be linguistically prior to all other possible uses, e.g. to generic and non-specific uses. From this it follows that we do not consider generic uses as derived from non-generic uses as it is occasionally assumed in the literature. Rather, we regard these two possibilities of use as equivalent alternative uses of lexical elements. The typological differences to be noted therefore concern the formal and semantic relationship of generic and non-generic uses to each other; they do not pertain to the question of whether lexical elements are predetermined for one of these two uses. Even supposing we found a language where generic uses are always zero-marked and identical to lexical sterns, we would still not assume that lexical elements in this language primarily have a generic use from which the non-generic uses are derived. (Incidentally, none of the languages examined, not even Vietnamese, meets this criterion.

Information structure and the referential status of linguistic expression : workshop as part of the 23th annual meetings of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft in Leipzig, Leipzig, February 28 - March 2, 2001

This volume comprises papers that were given at the workshop Information Structure and the Referential Status of Linguistic Expressions, which we organized during the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) Conference in Leipzig in February 2001. At this workshop we discussed the connection between information structure and the referential interpretation of linguistic expressions, a topic mostly neglected in current linguistics research. One common aim of the papers is to find out to what extent the focus-background as well as the topic-comment structuring determine the referential interpretation of simple arguments like definite and indefinite NPs on the one hand and sentences on the other

Experimental approaches to referential domains and the on-line processing of referring expressions in unscripted conversation

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

A generic architecture and dialogue model for multimodal interaction

This paper presents a generic architecture and a dialogue model for multimodal interaction. Architecture and model are transparent and have been used for different task domains. In this paper the emphasis is on their use for the navigation task in a virtual environment. The dialogue model is based on the information state approach and the recognition of dialogue acts. We explain how pairs of backward and forward looking tags and the preference rules of the dialogue act determiner together determine the structure of the dialogues that can be handled by the system. The system action selection mechanism and the problem of reference resolution are discussed in detail

Epistemic NP Modifiers

The paper considers participles such as "unknown", "identified" and "unspecified", which in sentences such as "Solange is staying in an unknown hotel" have readings equivalent to an indirect question "Solange is staying in a hotel, and it is not known which hotel it is." We discuss phenomena including disambiguation of quantifier scope and a restriction on the set of determiners which allow the reading in question. Epistemic modifiers are analyzed in a DRT framework with file (information state) discourse referents. The proposed semantics uses a predication on files and discourse referents which is related to recent developments in dynamic modal predicate calculus. It is argued that a compositional DRT semantics must employ a semantic type of discourse referents, as opposed to just a type of individuals. A connection is developed between the scope effects of epistemic modifiers and the scope-disambiguating effect of "a certain".Comment: Final pre-publication version, 27 pages, Postscript. Final version appears in the proceedings of SALT VI

Towards Generating Text from Discourse Representation Structures

International audienceWe argue that Discourse Representation Structures form a suitable level of language-neutral meaning representation for micro planning and surface realisation. DRSs can be viewed as the output of macro planning, and form the rough plan and structure for generating a text. We present the first ideas of building a large DRS corpus that enables the development of broad-coverage, robust text generators. A DRS-based generator imposes various challenges on micro-planning and surface realisation, including generating referring expressions , lexicalisation and aggregation

The linguistics of gender

This chapter explores grammatical gender as a linguistic phenomenon. First, I define gender in terms of agreement, and look at the parts of speech that can take gender agreement. Because it relates to assumptions underlying much psycholinguistic gender research, I also examine the reasons why gender systems are thought to emerge, change, and disappear. Then, I describe the gender system of Dutch. The frequent confusion about the number of genders in Dutch will be resolved by looking at the history of the system, and the role of pronominal reference therein. In addition, I report on three lexical- statistical analyses of the distribution of genders in the language. After having dealt with Dutch, I look at whether the genders of Dutch and other languages are more or less randomly assigned, or whether there is some system to it. In contrast to what many people think, regularities do indeed exist. Native speakers could in principle exploit such regularities to compute rather than memorize gender, at least in part. Although this should be taken into account as a possibility, I will also argue that it is by no means a necessary implication

The impact of animacy and speech rhythm on the word order of conjuncts in German preschoolers and adults

In this study, we investigated the impact of two constraints on the linear order of constituents in German preschool children’s and adults’ speech production: a rhythmic (*LAPSE, militating against sequences of unstressed syllables) and a semantic one (ANIM, requiring animate referents to be named before inanimate ones). Participants were asked to produce coordinated bare noun phrases in response to picture stimuli (e.g., Delfin und Planet, ‘dolphin and planet’) without any predefined word order. Overall, children and adults preferably produced animate items before inanimate ones, confirming findings of Prat-Sala, Shillcock, and Sorace (2000). In the group of preschoolers, the strength of the animacy effect correlated positively with age. Furthermore, the order of the conjuncts was affected by the rhythmic constraint, such that disrhythmic sequences, i.e., stress lapses, were avoided. In both groups, the latter result was significant when the two stimulus pictures did not vary with respect to animacy. In sum, our findings suggest a stronger influence of animacy compared to rhythmic well-formedness on conjunct ordering for German speaking children and adults, in line with findings by McDonald, Bock, and Kelly (1993) who investigated English speaking adults