The influence of prosodic, syntactic and lexical aspects on referent tracking in German

This thesis investigates the influence of syntactic, semantic, prosodic and information structural factors on the referential bias in a highly controlled story continuation task in spoken German

Being Friendly is Difficult. Psycholinguistic Experiments on Agentivity in Copular Constructions

Agentivity in copular constructions such as Sophia is being friendly, compared to its non-agentive counterpart Sophia is friendly, is a phenomenon that has received some attention in the theoretical debate but has not been widely investigated in psycholinguistics. The implications of Sophia’s voluntary control over her deliberate actions, which arise in the former sentence, seem to stem from the interplay between the subject, the verb, and the adjective. Truthfully, there is not much more to the sentence itself. In comparison, Sophia is friendly can be interpreted both as a state and as an event. Neither the predicate nor the verb in isolation can explain how agentivity comes about. Furthermore, the restrictions on the utterance’s agent are vague and flexible. Two theoretical accounts explain the agentivity effect by means of either underspecification or coercion. According to the Underspecification Account, the copula is semantically undetermined and adapts to the requirements of its lexical context as they arise. The adjectival predicate dictates the availability of the agentive interpretation. The Coercion Account postulates that the copula is lexically stative. The state interpretation of the copula-predicate combination is constructed compositionally, but the agentive reading is the result of reinterpreting the utterance as an activity. Underspecification and coercion are reflected in differing ways during processing. The former is effortless, whereas the latter elicits an increase in processing effort and a decrease in naturalness or sensicality. In a series of offline and online experiments on German copular sentences, the predictions of the Underspecification Account and the Coercion Account are put to a test. The results point to the stative nature of the copula, in line with the Coercion Account’s hypothesis. The availability of an adjective’s agentive interpretations appears to hinge on the specific circumstances. However, some degree of uncertainty remains in relation to the subtle nature of agentive coercion effects

Die Interpretation kausaler Präpositionalphrasen mit "von": Spielräume und Konflikte

Gegenstand der Dissertation sind kausal interpretierte Präpositionalphrasen mit "von" in Modifikatorfunktion, z.B. in Sätzen wie (1) "Paul ist müde von der Reise" oder (2) "Der Platz ist rot von Blättern". Kausale "von"-Phrasen treten im Deutschen in zwei Lesarten auf: Eventiv-kausal, wobei die Kausalrelation zwischen zwei Ereignissen besteht, vgl. (1), und stativ-kausal, wobei die Kausalrelation zwischen zwei Eigenschaften bzw. Tropen besteht, vgl. (2). Auf Basis mehrerer umfangreicher Korpusstudien untersucht die Arbeit den Bedeutungsbeitrag der Präposition "von" im Spannungsfeld zwischen Semantik und Pragmatik

Some New Observations on ‘Because (of)’

Solstad T. Some New Observations on ‘Because (of)’. In: Aloni M, Bastiaanse H, de Jager T, Schulz K, eds. Logic, Language and Meaning. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol 6042. Berlin ; Heidelberg: Springer ; 2010: 436-445