Pub Date : 2019-11-05DOI: 10.1515/9783110623093-002
S. Döring, Sophie Repp
Introduction German modal particles have been in the centre of linguistic research for several years, the main focus lying on their semantic and pragmatic properties (e.g. Thurmair 1989; Lindner 1991; Jacobs 1991; Waltereit 2001; Karagjosova 2004; Zimmermann 2004, 2012; Gutzmann 2009; Egg 2013; Repp 2013; Rojas-Esponda 2014). Modal particles are usually thought to operate at the semantics-pragmatics interface. The meaning contributions that they have been claimed to make, roughly fall into three types. The first is a modification of the sentence type or the illocution(ary operator) of the utterance they occur in (e.g. Lindner 1991; Jacobs 1991; Waltereit 2001; Karagjosova 2004). For instance, in an assertion a particle may indicate that the speaker is uncertain about committing to the proposition that is asserted, i.e. the particle signals that the speaker modifies or cancels a felicity condition of the speech act assertion. The second is that modal particles relate the proposition they scope over to another proposition in the common ground CG (e.g. Karagjosova 2004; Egg 2013; Repp 2013). The other proposition can be a proposition that was at issue in the previous utterance, a felicity condition of the previous utterance, or it can be a proposition that was entailed or implicated by earlier discourse. The third type of meaning contribution is more generally interaction-directed: Modal particles serve as meta-pragmatic instructions (König & Recquart 1991) or as interaction-regulating instructions (Karagjosova 2004) to the hearer (also cf. Franck 1980). The purpose of such instructions is to integrate an utterance into the current discourse context (also cf. Thurmair 1989). What these meaning types have in common is that they essentially concern common ground management (cf. Repp 2013). Modal particles indicate how a proposition relates to the common ground, and how the common ground is to be developed – by pointing to common or individual knowledge, to epistemic states and to expectations of the interlocutors. Common ground management creates and/or enhances discourse coherence and thus serves smooth communication. For discourses to be coherent they must have a structure. Discourse structure is usually assumed to be hierarchical, and it is assumed that discourse units must be related to other discourse units by discourse relations in a meaningful way (Mann & Thompson 1988; Asher & Lascarides 2003; Hobbs 1985; Sanders, Spooren & Noordman 1992). If, and if so how, modal particles interact with, and contribute to, discourse structure is largely unknown.2 The goal of the present paper is to explore the interaction of modal particles and discourse structure by investigating the interplay of modal particles and discourse relations, and thus to contribute to a better understanding of the role that the particles fulfil in the creation of discourse coherence.
{"title":"The modal particles ja and doch and their interaction with discourse structure: Corpus and experimental evidence","authors":"S. Döring, Sophie Repp","doi":"10.1515/9783110623093-002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623093-002","url":null,"abstract":" Introduction German modal particles have been in the centre of linguistic research for several years, the main focus lying on their semantic and pragmatic properties (e.g. Thurmair 1989; Lindner 1991; Jacobs 1991; Waltereit 2001; Karagjosova 2004; Zimmermann 2004, 2012; Gutzmann 2009; Egg 2013; Repp 2013; Rojas-Esponda 2014). Modal particles are usually thought to operate at the semantics-pragmatics interface. The meaning contributions that they have been claimed to make, roughly fall into three types. The first is a modification of the sentence type or the illocution(ary operator) of the utterance they occur in (e.g. Lindner 1991; Jacobs 1991; Waltereit 2001; Karagjosova 2004). For instance, in an assertion a particle may indicate that the speaker is uncertain about committing to the proposition that is asserted, i.e. the particle signals that the speaker modifies or cancels a felicity condition of the speech act assertion. The second is that modal particles relate the proposition they scope over to another proposition in the common ground CG (e.g. Karagjosova 2004; Egg 2013; Repp 2013). The other proposition can be a proposition that was at issue in the previous utterance, a felicity condition of the previous utterance, or it can be a proposition that was entailed or implicated by earlier discourse. The third type of meaning contribution is more generally interaction-directed: Modal particles serve as meta-pragmatic instructions (König & Recquart 1991) or as interaction-regulating instructions (Karagjosova 2004) to the hearer (also cf. Franck 1980). The purpose of such instructions is to integrate an utterance into the current discourse context (also cf. Thurmair 1989). What these meaning types have in common is that they essentially concern common ground management (cf. Repp 2013). Modal particles indicate how a proposition relates to the common ground, and how the common ground is to be developed – by pointing to common or individual knowledge, to epistemic states and to expectations of the interlocutors. Common ground management creates and/or enhances discourse coherence and thus serves smooth communication. For discourses to be coherent they must have a structure. Discourse structure is usually assumed to be hierarchical, and it is assumed that discourse units must be related to other discourse units by discourse relations in a meaningful way (Mann & Thompson 1988; Asher & Lascarides 2003; Hobbs 1985; Sanders, Spooren & Noordman 1992). If, and if so how, modal particles interact with, and contribute to, discourse structure is largely unknown.2 The goal of the present paper is to explore the interaction of modal particles and discourse structure by investigating the interplay of modal particles and discourse relations, and thus to contribute to a better understanding of the role that the particles fulfil in the creation of discourse coherence.","PeriodicalId":256493,"journal":{"name":"Experiments in Focus","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115767614","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-05DOI: 10.1515/9783110623093-009
Alexander Dröge, Jürg Fleischer, Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky
{"title":"Scrambled Wackernagel! Neural responses to noncanonical pronoun serializations in German","authors":"Alexander Dröge, Jürg Fleischer, Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky","doi":"10.1515/9783110623093-009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623093-009","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":256493,"journal":{"name":"Experiments in Focus","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128714584","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-05DOI: 10.1515/9783110623093-003
K. Kuthy, Britta Stolterfoht
One of the important insights of the recent intensive study of information structure is that for intonation languages like English and German, there is a close relation between focus and prosodic prominence. More specifically, it is now widely accepted as a fact that in such languages focus is signaled by pitch accents. But one issue that is still much discussed is the nature of pitch accent placement in the focussed part of an utterance: is it determined by syntactic, pragmatic, or purely metrical factors or a combination of these? One line of research has established that there are syntactic rules that determine accent placement in focus structures, with the F-marking approach of Selkirk (1995) and the SAAR (Sentence Accent Assignment Rule) of Gussenhoven (1983) serving as prominent foundations. One prediction of these approaches is that certain accent patterns are ambiguous with respect to the possible focus domain: a pitch accent in a certain position can signal focus just on one word (narrow focus) or on a larger constituent (broad focus). The empirical question that arises from this claim is: is there any evidence that these accent patterns are really perceived as ambiguous between different focus interpretations by listeners? In this chapter, we report on a perception experiment for German in which we tested whether listeners judge certain accent patterns as equally acceptable in different focus structure contexts. The results of the study will give an indication whether listeners perceive pitch accents in certain positions as ambiguous with respect to the possible information structuring of an utterance.
{"title":"Focus projection revisited: Pitch accent perception in German","authors":"K. Kuthy, Britta Stolterfoht","doi":"10.1515/9783110623093-003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623093-003","url":null,"abstract":"One of the important insights of the recent intensive study of information structure is that for intonation languages like English and German, there is a close relation between focus and prosodic prominence. More specifically, it is now widely accepted as a fact that in such languages focus is signaled by pitch accents. But one issue that is still much discussed is the nature of pitch accent placement in the focussed part of an utterance: is it determined by syntactic, pragmatic, or purely metrical factors or a combination of these? One line of research has established that there are syntactic rules that determine accent placement in focus structures, with the F-marking approach of Selkirk (1995) and the SAAR (Sentence Accent Assignment Rule) of Gussenhoven (1983) serving as prominent foundations. One prediction of these approaches is that certain accent patterns are ambiguous with respect to the possible focus domain: a pitch accent in a certain position can signal focus just on one word (narrow focus) or on a larger constituent (broad focus). The empirical question that arises from this claim is: is there any evidence that these accent patterns are really perceived as ambiguous between different focus interpretations by listeners? In this chapter, we report on a perception experiment for German in which we tested whether listeners judge certain accent patterns as equally acceptable in different focus structure contexts. The results of the study will give an indication whether listeners perceive pitch accents in certain positions as ambiguous with respect to the possible information structuring of an utterance.","PeriodicalId":256493,"journal":{"name":"Experiments in Focus","volume":"24 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122080034","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-11-05DOI: 10.1515/9783110623093-012
Hannah Gerbrich, Vivian Schreier, S. Featherston
The use of experimental methods in grammar research has gone from strength to strength and has established itself as one of the key ways to investigate linguistic patterning among words, phrases, and clauses up to the sentence level. This is strongly to be welcomed: many linguists have a feeling of unease about the thin ice of weak validity that work in syntactic and semantic theory sometimes skates upon when it is done without reasonable attention to its evidential base. In particular, if linguists can radically disagree about the underlying architecture of the grammar that they are attempting to describe without it being clear who is wrong and who is right, then this is an unmistakable sign that the data basis used is insufficient (either in quantity or quality or both) to uniquely determine the system to be described. With Popper, we can doubt that unfalsifiable claims are any scientific claims at all. In this paper we take the view that both hypothesis building and hypothesis testing can be improved by the use of more fine-grained data and the use of multiple lexical variants of structures. If linguists employ data sets with proper control of potential confounding factors then the range of analyses they will propose will be more constrained. But it is especially important that the data set permits sufficiently sharp descriptions and predictions to allow clear falsification of hypotheses. Another issue which is perceived to be problematic is the non-independence of the data source. When linguists give their own judgements and base their theory
{"title":"Standard items for English judgment studies: Syntax and semantics","authors":"Hannah Gerbrich, Vivian Schreier, S. Featherston","doi":"10.1515/9783110623093-012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110623093-012","url":null,"abstract":"The use of experimental methods in grammar research has gone from strength to strength and has established itself as one of the key ways to investigate linguistic patterning among words, phrases, and clauses up to the sentence level. This is strongly to be welcomed: many linguists have a feeling of unease about the thin ice of weak validity that work in syntactic and semantic theory sometimes skates upon when it is done without reasonable attention to its evidential base. In particular, if linguists can radically disagree about the underlying architecture of the grammar that they are attempting to describe without it being clear who is wrong and who is right, then this is an unmistakable sign that the data basis used is insufficient (either in quantity or quality or both) to uniquely determine the system to be described. With Popper, we can doubt that unfalsifiable claims are any scientific claims at all. In this paper we take the view that both hypothesis building and hypothesis testing can be improved by the use of more fine-grained data and the use of multiple lexical variants of structures. If linguists employ data sets with proper control of potential confounding factors then the range of analyses they will propose will be more constrained. But it is especially important that the data set permits sufficiently sharp descriptions and predictions to allow clear falsification of hypotheses. Another issue which is perceived to be problematic is the non-independence of the data source. When linguists give their own judgements and base their theory","PeriodicalId":256493,"journal":{"name":"Experiments in Focus","volume":"28 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132670595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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