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

Syntax and Discourse Factors in Early New High German: Evidence for Verb-Final Word Order

Several recent studies have taken the approach that the word order variation in Early New High German (1300-1600) is indicative of a change in the underlying syntax. In this thesis, I argue that Early New High German (ENHG) was solidly verb-final in structure throughout its history and that the evidence for the existence of structurally INFL-medial sentences in ENHG is not convincing. I find no evidence of competing grammars in ENHG, and it is therefore notable that the loss of NP postposition between ENHG and modern German appears to be an example of language change due to a change in frequency of usage. In addition, NP postposition is shown to have a particular discourse function: forcing the postposed NP to be interpreted with narrow focus. ENHG differs syntactically from modern German in allowing surface word orders that are ungrammatical or rare in later German. Three such syntactic constructions are investigated - - NP postposition, PP postposition and Verb (Projection) Raising. The postposition of clauses and prepositional phrases occurs in both ENHG and modern German. However, in ENHG, NP objects can move to a position after a structurally final verb, a movement that is not possible in modern German. Verb Raising and Verb Projection Raising, in which the relative order of verb forms is reversed from the standard order, are also much more common constructions in ENHG than in modern German. All of these constructions involve surface word orders which are not verb-last, and each occurs at an overall rate of 24-30% of possible cases in my corpus. The variation shows synchronic social, stylistic and discourse effects. I argue that in the absence of evidence for competing grammars, the observed variation in string verb-last word order in ENHG should be understood as syntactic variation in an underlyingly structurally verb-final language. The decline of these three unrelated syntactic constructions between ENHG and modern German may be due to the imposition of a standard surface verb-last template from above. Such a change from above forces unrelated structures, such as NP focus postposition, Verb (Projection) Raising and PP postposition, to change in the same direction, in this case toward surface verb-last word order

Is Finnish topic prominent?

Finnish finite clause exhibits topic prominence in the sense that the preverbal subject position is occupied by the topic (for example, by the direct object topic), not necessarily by the grammatical subject. Three currently unexplained facts concerning the Finnish free word order phenomenon and topicalization are noted in this paper: subject-verb agreement interacts with word order; the preverbal “topic” position is not reserved exclusively for topics; and noun phrase (DP) arguments are also able to dislocate to the right edge of a (potentially very long) finite clause. A generalized morphosyntactic agreement mechanism that requires the presence of nominal phi-features inside the highest finite projection of a clause is posited to explain the link between agreement and word order. The problem with topicality is accounted for by assuming that the topic-focus mechanism operates outside of narrow syntax. Free word order and non-configurationality are argued to result from argument adjunction, not from movement. Finally, it is concluded that the Finnish EPP is connected neither to morphosyntax nor to discourse

Dialectal variation in german 3-verb clusters : a surface-oriented optimality theoretic account

We present data from an empirical investigation on the dialectal variation in the syntax of German 3-verb clusters, consisting of a temporal auxiliary, a modal verb, and a predicative verb. The ordering possibilities vary greatly among the dialects. Some of the orders that we found occur only under particular stress assignments. We assume that these orders fulfil an information structural purpose and that the reordering processes are changes only in the linear order of the elements which is represented exclusively at the surface syntactic level, PF (Phonetic Form). Our Optimality theoretic account offers a multifactorial perspective on the phenomenon

German sentence accent revisited

Results of a production experiment on the placement of sentence accent in German are reported. The hypothesis that German fulfills some of the most widely accepted rules of accent assignment— predicting focus domain integration—was only partly confirmed. Adjacency between argument and verb induces a single accent on the argument, as recognized in the literature, but interruption of this sequence by a modifier often induces remodeling of the accent pattern with a single accent on the modifier. The verb is rarely stressed. All models based on linear alignment or adjacency between elements belonging to a single accent domain fail to account for this result. A cyclic analysis of prosodic domain formation is proposed in an optimality-theoretic framework that can explain the accent pattern

Dialectal variation in German 3-verb clusters : looking for the best analysis

German dialects vary in which of the possible orders of the verbs in a 3-verb cluster they allow. In a still ongoing empirical investigation that I am undertaking together with Tanja Schmid, University of Stuttgart (Schmid and Vogel (2004)) we already found that each of the six logically possible permutations of the 3-verb cluster in (1) can be found in German dialects

Cross-lingual Argumentation Mining: Machine Translation (and a bit of Projection) is All You Need!

Argumentation mining (AM) requires the identification of complex discourse structures and has lately been applied with success monolingually. In this work, we show that the existing resources are, however, not adequate for assessing cross-lingual AM, due to their heterogeneity or lack of complexity. We therefore create suitable parallel corpora by (human and machine) translating a popular AM dataset consisting of persuasive student essays into German, French, Spanish, and Chinese. We then compare (i) annotation projection and (ii) bilingual word embeddings based direct transfer strategies for cross-lingual AM, finding that the former performs considerably better and almost eliminates the loss from cross-lingual transfer. Moreover, we find that annotation projection works equally well when using either costly human or cheap machine translations. Our code and data are available at \url{http://github.com/UKPLab/coling2018-xling_argument_mining}.Comment: Accepted at Coling 201