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

Notions and subnotions in information structure

Three dimensions can be distinguished in a cross-linguistic account of information structure. First, there is the definition of the focus constituent, the part of the linguistic expression which is subject to some focus meaning. Second and third, there are the focus meanings and the array of structural devices that encode them. In a given language, the expression of focus is facilitated as well as constrained by the grammar within which the focus devices operate. The prevalence of focus ambiguity, the structural inability to make focus distinctions, will thus vary across languages, and within a language, across focus meanings

Prosodic and structural variability in free word order language discourse

Independently of the modality of presentation (written or auditory), human processing of discourse obligatorily involves monitoring relative information prominence which reflects how important information is in discourse, and thereby determines the perceptual impact it makes on the speaker and the listener. In spoken language use, relative information prominence is expressed it by means of morphology, structural organization of information across an utterance, and by prosodic means (Morgan, Meier, & Newport 1987, Stolterfoht, Friederici, Alter, & Steube 2007, Watson 2010). To illustrate, Hindi speakers may use special morphological prominence markers, bound morphemes 'hii' and 'bhii', which attach to words that the listener is likely to identify as prominent (Luchkina, Puri, Jyothi, Cole 2015). In Hungarian and Hindi, speakers place the prominent word in the pre-verbal position in a sentence or phrase, which presents a designated location for prominent (focused) information in these languages (Genzel and Kügler 2010, Féry 2013). In English, it is the utterance-final or, else, the most prosodically prominent word in a sentence or phrase that is likely to be identified as prominent (Ladd, 2008, Watson 2010). This thesis examines the use of acoustic-prosodic cues and constituent ordering in the expression of relative information prominence and the way it affects perception (as perceived prominence) in Russian, a free word order language, by empirically testing the "dual route" model of expressing prominence in discourse. This model presupposes (1) structural "packaging" of information, evident from the linear ordering of words in an utterance such that words communicating relatively more accessible and therefore less salient information precede words communicating less accessible and therefore more salient information, and (2) varying magnitude of acoustic-prosodic parameters in a controlled way such that prominent information bears greater perceptual salience in speech. Speech production and comprehension experiments described below test whether these routes, structural and acoustic-prosodic, are used independently or together in the encoding of information prominence. Russian is chosen as the test case because it allows but does not require surface reordering of sentential constituents for information structural purposes and exhibits distinctions in prosodic prominence among the constituents of a sentence (Sekerina 2003, Slioussar 2011a, b, Svetozarova 1998). To examine how prosodic and structural cues are utilized during the off-line and the online processing of discourse in Russian, the following research objectives are pursued. In Study 1 (see Chapter 2 of the present version), the distribution of structural and acoustic-prosodic variability in read discourse is examined in association with two well-known prominence scales: distinctions in the information status of a discourse referent and animacy of a discourse referent (in conjunction with grammatical function of the corresponding lexical word). In Study 2 (see Chapter 3 of the present thesis), relative contribution and perceptual validity of linearization prominence cues and acoustic-prosodic prominence cues is examined using perceived prominence ratings solicited from linguistically-naïve native speakers of Russian. In Study 3 (see Chapter 4 of the present thesis), processing costs associated with these prominence cues are gauged using probe recognition response times obtained during online comprehension of discourse fragments with experimentally controlled variation in word order and acoustic-prosodic expression

Az adverbiumok mondattani és jelentéstani kérdései = The syntax and syntax-semantics interface of adverbial modification

A határozószók és a határozók alaktani, mondattani és funkcionális kérdéseit vizsgáltuk a generatív nyelvelmélet keretében, főként magyar anyag alapján. Olyan leírásra törekedtünk, melyből a különféle határozófajták mondattani viselkedése, hatóköre, valamint hangsúlyozása egyaránt következik. A különféle határozótípusok PP-ként való elemzésének lehetőségét bizonyítottuk. A határozók mondatbeli elhelyezése tekintetében a specifikálói pozíció (Cinque 1999) ellen és az adjunkciós elemzés (Ernst 2002) mellett érveltünk. Megmutattuk, hogy a határozók szórendjének levezetéséhez bal- és jobboldali adjunkció feltételezése egyaránt szükséges. A különféle határozófajták szórendi helyét mondattani, jelentéstani és prozódiai tényezők összjátékával magyaráztuk. A jelentéstani tényezők között pl. a határozók inkorporálhatóságát korlátozó típusmegszorítást, a negatív határozók kötelező fókuszálását előidéző skaláris megszorítást, egyes határozófajták és igefajták komplex eseményszerkezetének inkompatibilitását vizsgáltuk. Az ige mögötti határozók szórendjét befolyásoló prozódiai tényező például a növekvő összetevők törvénye. Megfigyeltük az intonációskifejezés- újraelemzés kiváltódásának feltételeit és jelentéstani következményeit is. A helyhatározói igekötők egy típusát a mozgatási láncok sajátos fonológiai megvalósulásaként (a fonológiailag redukált kópia inkorporációjaként) elemeztük. A tárgykörben mintegy 60 tanulmányt publikáltunk. Adverbs and Adverbial Adjuncts at the Interfaces (489 old.) c. könyvünket kiadja a Mouton de Gruyter (Berlin). | This project has aimed to clarify (on the basis of mainly Hungarian data) basic issues concerning the category "adverb", the function "adverbial", and the grammar of adverbial modification. We have argued for the PP analysis of adverbials, and have claimed that they enter the derivation via left- and right-adjunction. Their merge-in position is determined by the interplay of syntactic, semantic, and prosodic factors. The semantically motivated constraints discussed also include a type restriction affecting adverbials semantically incorporated into the verbal predicate, an obligatory focus position for scalar adverbs representing negative values of bidirectional scales, cooccurrence restrictions between verbs and adverbials involving incompatible subevents, etc. The order and interpretation of adverbials in the postverbal domain is shown to be affected by such phonologically motivated constraints as the Law of Growing Constituents, and by intonation-phrase restructuring. The shape of the light-headed chain arising in the course of locative PP incorporation is determined by morpho-phonological requirements. The types of adverbs and adverbials analyzed include locatives, temporals, comitatives, epistemic adverbs, adverbs of degree, manner, counting, and frequency, quantificational adverbs, and adverbial participles. We have published about 60 studies; our book Adverbs and Adverbial Adjuncts at the Interfaces (pp. 489) is published in the series Interface Explorations of Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin

On the pragmatic and semantic functions of Estonian sentence prosody

The goal of the dissertation was to investigate intonational correlates of information structure in a free word order language, Estonian. Information-structural categories such as focus or givenness are expressed by different grammatical means (e.g. pronoun, presence of accent, word order etc.) in different languages of the world (Chafe, 1976; 1987; Prince, 1981; 1992; Lambrecht, 1994; Gundel, 1999). The main cue of focus in intonation languages (e.g. English and German) is pitch accent (Halliday, 1967a; Ladd, 2008). In free word order languages, information structure affects the position of words in a sentence (É. Kiss, 1995) and sometimes it is even implied that word order in a free word order language might function like pitch accent in an intonation language (Lambrecht 1994: 240). The study reports on perception and production experiments on the effects of focus and givenness on Estonian sentence intonation. The aim of the experiments was to establish whether information structure has tonal correlates in Estonian, and if so, whether information structure or word order interacts more strongly with sentence intonation. A perception experiment showed that L1-Estonian listeners perceive pitch prominence as focus and accent shift as a change of sentence focus. A speech production study showed congruently that L1-Estonian speakers do use accent shift, and mark sentence focus with pitch accent. Another speech production experiment demonstrated that there is no phonetic difference between new information focus (e.g. “What did Lena draw?” – “Lena drew a whale.”) and corrective focus (e.g. “Lena drew a lion.” – “No! She drew a whale”). The last experiment showed that given information is signalled with varying F0 range, if followed by focus, but without a pitch accent, if preceded by focus. All the experiments revealed that word order has a weak influence on sentence intonation. Sentence intonation interacts with focus and givenness in Estonian. As a conclusion, it is suggested that the pragmatic functions of word order, which apparently can be overridden by focus interpretation, are slightly different from the functions of pitch accent

HUMAN MISSION OF EDUCATION

The article examines the complex role and great responsibility of the education today in development of the moral strength and human values of the children and youth. At the beginning of the article the author reconsiders the pedagogical ideas of Maria Montessori and her concept of education for peace as an instrument for reconstruction of the society and for improvement of the human living. Than the analysis of the moral values in the contemporary society is made and several issues and dilemmas are discussed referring the value disorientation of the youth and the importance of the models of adult’s moral behavior in their search for personal identity. On the basis of this analysis, the human dimension of the education is elaborated enhancing the need for its understanding as support of development, which is based on several crucial elements: love, freedom and spirit of community.&nbsp

Japanese mimetics as prenominal modifiers: The distribution of accented and accentless mimetics

This thesis investigates the grammatical properties and functions of Japanese mimetics when they are used as prenominal modifiers. I focus on the cases where mimetics modify nouns with physical referents. I argue that mimetic-na (M-na) should be considered neither ungrammatical nor less acceptable than other modifiers, contrary to suggestions in the previous literature. Looking at different grammatical markers combined with a mimetic, I demonstrate that M-na gives rise to a situation-descriptive reading, that mimetic-sita (M-sita) denotes a characterizing property and that mimetic-no (M-no) denotes a defining property, in Roy’s (2013) terms. The thesis includes examples in French, Russian and Spanish to illustrate these three different interpretations. As for the syntactic structures of mimetic modifiers, I demonstrate that M-na is a tensed clausal modifier, while M-sita is a tenseless attributive modifier, following Hamano (1986, 1988, 1998). More specifically, I claim that M-sita is an AP. I provide evidence showing that M-na is tensed (allowing a temporally anchored interpretation), whereas M-sita disallows tensed interpretations. There is currently no consensus about the grammatical status of M-no. Based on the distributions of mimetic and non-mimetic words presented in this thesis, I suggest that M-no can be marked by either the genitive or the copula. Each of the modifiers enters into a stacking structure when they occur together. I show that semantics associate with structural positions, and argue that mimetic modifiers appear in the order of M-na, M-sita, M-no in a hierarchical structure. This thesis sheds light on the various grammatical properties of mimetics in relation to their prosody. In broad agreement with previous research, I claim that accentless mimetics, as in M-na and M-no, denote an abstract quality, while I argue that M-sita (which involves an accented mimetic) denotes a physical concrete property. I consider the bare accented mimetics to be somewhat verb-like

Right Dislocation and Afterthought in German - Investigations on Multiple Levels

When investigating the right sentence periphery in German, two constructions are encountered that appear to be rather similar at first glance: right dislocation and afterthought. Irrespective of this superficial similarity, right dislocation and afterthought can be distinguished at multiple levels of linguistic description. This thesis aims at providing a more nuanced understanding of right dislocation and afterthought by providing empirical investigations, both qualitative and quantitative in nature, employing analyses of experimentally acquired data as well as corpus analyses. It is shown that right dislocation and afterthought are best defined on the basis of the functions they take in discourse rather than on the basis of their prosodic realisations, and that their functional differences are reflected in a number of linguistic parameters, such as their morpho-syntactic con¬straints as well as their degree of syntactic integratedness, their prosodic features, and even their punctuation in written texts

Information structure and the accessibility of clausally introduced referents

This paper will examine the role of various factors in affecting the salience, and hence the accessibility to pronominal reference, of entities introduced into a discourse by a full clause. We begin with the premise that the possibility of pronominal reference with it versus that depends on the cognitive status of the referent, in the sense of Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski (1993). This formulation of the problem provides grounds for an explanation of the data presented above, and provides a framework within which we examine the role of various other factors in promoting the salience of a clausally introduced entity, including the information structure of the utterance in which the entity is introduced. For entities introduced by clausal complements to bridge verbs, we show that the information structure of the utterance introducing the entity has a partial, or one-sided, effect on the salience of the entity. When the complement clause is focal, the salience of the entity depends only on its referential givenness-newness (in the sense of Gundel 1988, 1999b), as we would expect. But when the complement clause is ground material, the salience of an entity introduced by the clause is enhanced. Other factors, including the presuppositionality of factive and interrogative complements, also serve to enhance the salience of entities introduced by complement clauses