Theticity

The subject matter of this chapter is the semantic, syntactic and discoursepragmatic background as well as the cross-linguistic behavior of types of utterance exemplified by the following English sentences […]: (1) My NECK hurts. […] (2) The PHONE's ringing. [...] Sentences such as […] are usually held to stand in opposition to sentences with a topical subject. The difference is said to be formally marked, for example, by VS order vs. topical SV order (as in Albanian po bie telefoni 'the PHONE is ringing' vs. telefoni po bie 'the PHONE is RINGING'), or by accent on the subject only vs. accent on both the subject and the verb (as in the English translations). The term theticity will be used in the following to label the specific phenomenological domain to which the sentences in (1) and (2) belong. It has long been commonplace that these and similar expressions occur at particular points in the discourse where "a new situation is presented as a whole". We will try to depict and classify the various discourse situations in which these expressions have been found in the different languages, and we will try to trace out areas of cross-linguistic comparability. Finally, we will raise the question whether or not there is a common denominator which would justify a unified treatment of all these expressions in functional/semantic terms

Focus marking in Kikuyu

Im Kikuyu, einer in Kenia gesprochenen Bantusprache, wird Fokus systematisch durch Wortstellung markiert. In dieser Arbeit werden die verschiedenen Varianten der Markierung von Fokus in Frage-Antwortsequenzen dargestellt. Nach einem Überblick über in der Literatur vorhandene Diskussionen des Phänomens wird auf der Grundlage von mit einem Muttersprachler erhobenen Daten eine syntaktische Analyse von Fokuskonstruktionen mit der Partikel ne vorgeschlagen. Ferner werden neue Daten zur Fokussierung verschiedener Satzteile, z.B. der VP, des ganzen Satzes und des Wahrheitswerts, präsentiert. Ziel der Arbeit ist somit, die deskriptive Datenbasis zu Fokuskonstruktionen im Kikuyu zu erweitern und einen theoretischen Beitrag zu ihrer Analyse im Rahmen der generativen Grammatik zu liefern. Die Arbeit wurde im Sommer 2003 als Magisterarbeit an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institut für deutsche Sprache und Linguistik, angenommen.In Kikuyu, a Bantu language spoken in Kenya, focus is marked systematically by means of word order. In this study, the different possibilities for marking focus in question answer sequences are presented. After an overview of the discussions of the phenomenon in the literature, a syntactic account for focus constructions with the particle ne is proposed. This account is based on original data that was gathered with a native speaker. In addition, new data on focusing different parts of the sentence, e.g. the VP, the entire sentence, or the truth-value, are presented. The aim of this study thus is to broaden the descriptive basis for focus constructions in Kikuyu and to provide a theoretical contribution to their analysis in the framework of generative grammar

Modelling the developmental patterning of finiteness marking in English, Dutch, German and Spanish using MOSAIC

In this paper we apply MOSAIC (Model of Syntax Acquisition in Children) to the simulation of the developmental patterning of children’s Optional Infinitive (OI) errors in four languages: English, Dutch, German and Spanish. MOSAIC, which has already simulated this phenomenon in Dutch and English, now implements a learning mechanism that better reflects the theoretical assumptions underlying it, as well as a chunking mechanism which results in frequent phrases being treated as one unit. Using one, identical model that learns from child-directed speech, we obtain a close quantitative fit to the data from all four languages, despite there being considerable cross-linguistic and developmental variation in the OI phenomenon. MOSAIC successfully simulates the difference between Spanish (a pro-drop language where OI errors are virtually absent), and Obligatory Subject languages that do display the OI phenomenon. It also highlights differences in the OI phenomenon across German and Dutch, two closely related languages whose grammar is virtually identical with respect to the relation between finiteness and verb placement. Taken together, these results suggest that (a) cross-linguistic differences in the rates at which children produce Optional Infinitives are graded, quantitative differences that closely reflect the statistical properties of the input they are exposed to and (b) theories of syntax acquisition need to consider more closely the role of input characteristics as determinants of quantitative differences in the cross-linguistic patterning of phenomena in language acquisition

What linguists always wanted to know about german and did not know how to estimate

This paper profiles significant differences in syntactic distribution and differences in word class frequencies for two treebanks of spoken and written German: the TüBa-D/S, a treebank of transliterated spontaneous dialogues, and the TüBa-D/Z treebank of newspaper articles published in the German daily newspaper die tageszeitung´(taz). The approach can be used more generally as a means of distinguishing and classifying language corpora of different genres

Presentational/Existential Structures in Spoken versus Written German: Es Gibt and SEIN

This article presents a synchronic, corpus-based examination of spoken German with regard to the distribution and function of presentational/ existential es gibt NP and a range of SEIN NP structures such as da SEIN , locative SEIN , es SEIN , and zero-locative SEIN . In particular, the use of da SEIN has been neglected in previous research. While es gibt is equally frequent in the spoken and written data, SEIN structures are typical of spoken German only, with da SEIN being the most frequent. The article concentrates on clauses with indefinite NPs, while the presentation of events with da and wider da-usage in spoken German are also considered

Out-of-focus encoding in Gur and Kwa

This paper investigates the structural properties of morphosyntactically marked focus constructions, focussing on the often neglected non-focal sentence part in African tone languages. Based on new empirical evidence from five Gur and Kwa languages, we claim that these focus expressions have to be analysed as biclausal constructions even though they do not represent clefts containing restrictive relative clauses. First, we relativize the partly overgeneralized assumptions about structural correspondences between the out-of-focus part and relative clauses, and second, we show that our data do in fact support the hypothesis of a clause coordinating pattern as present in clause sequences in narration. It is argued that we deal with a non-accidental, systematic feature and that grammaticalization may conceal such basic narrative structures

Simulating optional infinitive errors in child speech through the omission of sentence-internal elements.

A new version of the MOSAIC model of syntax acquisition is presented. The modifications to the model aim to address two weaknesses in its earlier simulations of the Optional Infinitive phenomenon: an over-reliance on questions in the input as the source for Optional Infinitive errors, and the use of an utterance-final bias in learning (recency effect), without a corresponding utterance-initial bias (primacy effect). Where the old version only produced utterance-final phrases, the new version of MOSAIC learns from both the left and right edge of the utterance, and associates utterance-initial and utterancefinal phrases. The new model produces both utterance-final phrases and concatenations of utterance-final and utteranceinitial phrases. MOSAIC now also differentiates between phrases learned from declarative and interrogative input. It will be shown that the new version is capable of simulating the Optional Infinitive phenomenon in English and Dutch without relying on interrogative input. Unlike the previous version of MOSAIC, the new version is also capable of simulating cross-linguistic variation in the occurrence of Optional Infinitive errors in Wh-questions

Emergence phenomena in German W-immer/auch-subordinators

The present study is concerned with the distributional patterns of the irrelevance particles immer ‘ever’ and auch ‘also’ in German universal concessive conditionals and free relatives (e.g. was immer er auch sagt ‘whatever he says’). Whereas irrelevance is conveyed by a single element in a fixed position in languages like English (-ever), immer and auch occur in multiple positions and combinations. Following the example of Leuschner (2000), the distribution of particles and their combinations is documented and explained using functional motivations. Compared with Leuschner (2000), however, the present study is based on a much larger sample of 23,299 clauses with the W-words was and wer (incl. their inflected forms) from the DeReKo-corpus, allowing for a far more detailed statistical analysis. Special attention is devoted to the distribution of immer and auch (including their combinations) in full subordinate clauses vs. elliptically reduced forms, and to the nature of the resulting patterns as a case of emergent grammar

Punctuation in Quoted Speech

Quoted speech is often set off by punctuation marks, in particular quotation marks. Thus, it might seem that the quotation marks would be extremely useful in identifying these structures in texts. Unfortunately, the situation is not quite so clear. In this work, I will argue that quotation marks are not adequate for either identifying or constraining the syntax of quoted speech. More useful information comes from the presence of a quoting verb, which is either a verb of saying or a punctual verb, and the presence of other punctuation marks, usually commas. Using a lexicalized grammar, we can license most quoting clauses as text adjuncts. A distinction will be made not between direct and indirect quoted speech, but rather between adjunct and non-adjunct quoting clauses.Comment: 11 pages, 11 ps figures, Proceedings of SIGPARSE 96 - Punctuation in Computational Linguistic