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

Intonation, word order and focus projection in Serbo-Croatian

LoC Class: PG1224.7, LoC Subject Headings: Serbo-Croatian language--Intonation, Serbo-Croatian language--Word orde

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

Discourse deixis and null anaphora in German

The main aim of this thesis is to provide insight into the interaction of the syntactic and pragmatic properties of German, particularly with respect to the issue of configurationality. This language is particularly difficult to classify as it displays both subject-object asymmetries (a feature of "configurational" languages), but also has a topic position (a feature of "discourse-configurational" languages). In order to avoid the difficulties associated with subtle acceptability judgements from informants, the study presented here is based on a frequency analysis of word order variation in spoken language corpora. In the first part, I concentrate on the initial position in German main clauses, which is traditionally referred to as the topic position, and using a task-oriented corpus provide the statistics for the following: ffl The frequency of the different grammatical functions in initial position, in order to determine the relative frequency of the canonical SVO word order. ffl ..

Information Packaging: From Cards To Boxes

In his work on information packaging-i.e., the structuring of propositional content in function of the speaker's assumptions about the hearer's information state­ Vallduví (1992, 1993, 1994) identifies the informational primitives focus, link and tail, which are adapted from the traditional focus/ground and topic/comment ap­proaches, and argues that the exploitation of information states of hearers by the information-packaging strategies of speakers reveals that these states have at least the internal structure of a system of Heimian file cards: links, which correspond to what are traditionally known as topics, say where -- on what file card -- the focal information goes, and tails indicate how it fits there. Since there are various reasons for not believing this, the present paper proposes to model information states as Kampian discourse representation structures, without locations. This requires and leads to a different perspective on the function of links. They signal non-monotone anaphora. This idea will be shown to subsume 'non-identity' anaphora, contrastive stress, pronoun referent resolution, and restrictiveness of relatives and adjectives

Intonation and second language acquisition : a study of the acquisition of English intonation by speakers of other languages

In the field of second language acquisition (SLA) research, the study of intonation, and prosodic systems generally, suffers from a considerable under-representation.This has far-reaching consequences. From the large body of empirical work on various aspects of SLA over the last three decades, a great deal has been turned to pedagogical use. Indeed, the field of SLA is closely linked to that of language pedagogy, as the dual acquisition theoretical and pedagogical character of many current journals and conferences shows.However, the mutually nourishing relationship between SLA research and language teaching suffers if either component is inadequate.In the case of intonation, this is exactly the case. At a time when the processes of SLA are under analysis from a wide range of linguistic, psychological and sociolinguistic perspectives, relatively little is known, even on a simple descriptive level, about the acquisition of intonation. There is no body of studies of L2 intonational form comparable, for example, to the 'morpheme studies' or to studies of 'developmental sequences' which informed much thinking in the field in the 1970s and 1980s (see Ellis 1994, Ch.3); no substantial body of work, that is, which might form the basis of further research.The present study aims to contribute to current knowledge on the acquisition of intonational form in second languages. It seeks to provide a detailed account of how certain aspects of L2 English intonation develop, both in terms of their phonetics, and also in terms of the linguistic and discoursal ends to which they are put. The study is divided into two parts:Part One: in which the theoretical and descriptive bases of the study are established. It deals first with aspects of intonational form in English, describing in detail the prosodic systems which are employed to mark various aspects of informational structure within the spoken language, and also considers briefly the current state of language teaching in these areas (Chapter One). Then a review of research into the acquisition of sound systems in second languages is presented, looking particularly at intonational form and other aspects of prosodic production and perception (Chapter Two).Part Two: in which the experiments which have been undertaken as part of this study are presented. Firstly, the procedural and analytical aspects of these experiments will be described (Chapter Three). The findings will then be presented and discussed (Chapters Four to Seven). Finally, findings will be summarised and some general conclusions drawn (Chapter Eight)