DOCSLIB.ORG

ZAS . Papers in Linguistics

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
ZAS . Papers in Linguistics Zentrum für Ailgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung ZAS .Papers in Linguistics Volume 20 December 2000 Edited by Ewald Lang Marzena Rochon Kerstin Schwabe Oliver Teuber ISSN 1435-9588 Issues on Topics Edited by Kerstin Schwabe Andre Meinunger Dieter Gasde ZAS Papers. in Linguistics 20, 2000 Issues on Topics Edited by Kerstin Schwabe, Andre Meinunger & Dieter Gasde Contents i ,\ Andre Meinunger (ZAS BerUn) I Editorial Preface v i .I I 1 j i Yen-Hui Audrey Li (Los Angeles) i 1 Topic Structures and Minimal Effort 1 Liejiong Xu (Hong Kong) I The Topic-Prominence Parameter 21 1 ~ ~ Da11.qing Liu (Shanghai) , Identical Topics in Mandarin Chinese and Shanghainese 43 Marie-Claude Paris (Paris) Where has the new information gone? The Chinese case 71 Kleanthes K. Grohmann (Maryland) Prolific Domains and the Left Periphery 85 , Artemis Alexiadou (Potsdam) Some Remarks on Word Order and Information Structure in Romance and Greek 119 Werner Frey (ZAS BerUn) Über die syntaktische Position derSatztopiks im Deutschen 137 Michael Grabski (ZAS Berlin) Satztopik und Diskurstopik in Elaboration-Kontexten 173 111 Editorial Preface The present issue grew out of two sources. The main one was the workshop on Adding and Omitting (A & 0')held during the DGfS Conference organized in Konstanz at the beginning of 1999 by our ZAS project on Syntax der Fokusbildung. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together people working on topicalization (addition of expressions, in a sense) and ellipsis (omission, i.e. deletion of linguistic material) and their relations and interaction. Since the workshop was very successful and met with a great deal of interest on the part of both participants and outsiders, we decided to collect and publish the papers that were presented. Towards the end of 1999, a follow-up workshop on Ellipsis and Information Structure was organized by Kerstin Schwabe and Susanne Winkler (Tiibingen). The papers given at this second meeting were supposed to be an integral part of the publication as well. More and more people got involved, further developing our common understanding of the topic phenomenon, so that there was too much material for a single volume. We therefore decided to split the enterprise into two volumes. The ellipsis papers are to be published by 'Benjamins' this year in Interpreting Omitted Structures. The present volume contains papers that bear mainly on issues concerning the topic concept. This concept is of course very broad and diverse. Also, different views are expressed in this volume. Some authors concentrate on the status of topics and non-topics in so-called topic prominent languages (i.e. Chinese), others focus on the syntactic behavior of topical constituents in specific European languages (German, Greek, Romance languages). The last contribution tries to bring together the concept of discourse topic (a non-syntactic notion) and the concept of sentence topic, i.e. that type of topic that all the preceding papers are concerned with. In Topic Structures and Minimal Effort, Yen-hui Audrey Li considers topic-comment constructions against the background of the Minimalist Program. Chinese topic structures can be derived by movement or base-generated. When there are two options for in- terpreting a structure, the one with less effort, i.e. the one without movement and re- construction, is adopted. In structures with resultative compound verbs, [Vl (action) + V2 (result)], the object position is not projected if this position is optionally subcatego- rized and the object does not occur overtly ('minimal projection'). Only if the object is re- quired is topicalization possible. Liejiong Xu's article The Topic-Prominence Parameter aims to recast the properties of topic-prominent languages and their differences from subject-prominent languages as documented in the functionalist literature into the framework of the Principle-and- Parameter approach. It provides a configurational definition of the topic construction called Topic Phrase (TP) with the topic marker as its head. The availability of TP enables topic prominent languages to develop various topic structures with properties such as morphological marking; cross-categorial realization of topics and comments; and multiple application of topicalization. The article elaborates on the notion of topic pro- minence. A topic prominent language is characterized as one that tends to activate the TP and to make full use of the configuration. Typically, it has a larger number and variety of highly grammaticalized topic markers in the Lexicon and permits a variety of syntactic categories to occur in the specifier position and the complement position of TP. Based on Mandarin and Shanghainese data, Danqing Liu in Identical Topics and Topic-Prominent Languuges investigates a special type of topic-comment structures which is characterized by the fact that a topic is fully or partially copied by a corres- ponding element located in the following part of the clause. Liu points out that topic- copying seems are a better candidate for characterizing topic-prominent languages than the topic types treated by Chafe (1976). In Liu's system, 'identical topics', i.e. both a topic and its copy, can occur between the subject and the verb or in even lower positions. Marie-Claude Paris' paper Where has the new infornzation gone The Chinese case argues against the opinion that Chinese is more iconic, as far as the relationship of infor- mation structure and syntactic structure of sentences is concerned. She claims that the pairing of affirmative and interrogative sentences might be a better approach to locating where the new information lies in a Chinese utterance. Following Rizzi (1997), Kleanthes K. Grohmann's article Prolific Domains and the left Periphery presents a programmatic sketch of a clause structure in which clauses are split into three prolific domains: the V-, the T- and the C-Domain. Central to his notion of prolific domain is the condition that any given XP finds a unique address in each of these domains. Derivations are constructed over domains. Implementing Uriagereka's (1999) notion of 'multiple spell out', he suggests that the relevant pieces of information are shipped to LF and PF each time a domain is established. This implies a modification of the standard T-model where PF and LF are fed successive-cycllically. Artemis Alexiadou investigates the syntactic behavior of topical constituents in several null subject languages in her paper Clausal structure and information structure in Romance and Greek. She comes to the conclusion that Greek, Italian and Spanish differ considerably in the preverbal as well as in the postverbal domain. The reason lies in the fact that the variations follow from the different clausal structures of these languages that turn out to be not less important than the properties of pro-drop. Werner Frey's paper Uber die syntaktische Position des Satztopiks im Deutschen (About the sentence topic's syntactic position in German) argues for a specific topic domain within the German middle-field. German thus is shown to be discourse- configurational with respect to the notion of topic. This leads to a number of interesting insights concerning basic issues such as the potential number of topics, the availability of topics in embedded sentences, and the relation between scrambling and topicality. Furthermore the claim that the 'strong' interpretation of an indefinite implies its status as a topic is refuted. Also it is shown that topic preposing in the middle field has different syntactic and pragmatic properties compared to movement to the prefield. Some theoretical consequences of these differences are discussed. Michael Grabski's paper Satrtopik und Diskurstopik in Eluhorationskontexten (Sentence topic and discourse topic in elaboration contexts) starts with a semantic differentiation between the notions of 'sentence topic' and 'discourse topic'. Sentence topic is conceived of as part of a semantic predication in the sense of Kim's (1998) work, whereas discourse topic is defined, as in Asher's (1993) Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, as a discourse constituent that comprises the content of the larger discourse. The main body of his contribution serves to investigate the connection between the two types of topic. To restrict the context of investigation, a specific relation between discourse constituents, Elaboration, is chosen. If Elaboration holds between two discourse constituents, one of them can be identified as the explicit discourse topic with respect to the other one. Sentence topic and comment, within elaborating sentences, seem to interact with the discourse topic in a specific way: whereas comment information seems to be used to infer a 'dimension' for extending the discourse topic, the role of sentence topics is to mark 'indices' for predication along that dimension. The roles of sentence topic and comment are modelled by means of channel theoretic devices. Special thanks go to Mechthild Bernhard for her helping hand in preparing the contributions for publication. Berlin, December 2000 AndrC Meinunger (on behalf of the editors) (andre0zas.g~~-berlin.de) vi Topic Structures and Minimal Effort Yen-Hui Audrey Li University of Southern California, Los Angeles audreyli @rcf.usc.edu The complexity of human languages has always inspired research for some human faculty that makes language learning possible. The system that generates the complexity of humb languages, ideally, is simple and effective. Recent developments of the generative gramma/i- cal theory explore deeper into the issue of simplicity or economy. The Minimalist Progrqm developed in Chomsky (1991, 1993, 1995) tries to provide contents to such notions. WYat does it mean to be more economic or least effort? An important instantiation of such noti+s is the proposal that movement is the last resort assuming that movement is more costly th n non-movement.' Processes occur only because they are necessary. The definition of necess 1ty generally is cast in morphological terms. Moreover, the notion of "economy" or "least effow is deterministic of the appropriate derivations for sentences: a shorter derivation is better than a longer one.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    UC Santa Cruz UC Santa Cruz Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Syntax & Information Structure: The Grammar of English Inversions Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sv7q1pm Author Samko, Bern Publication Date 2016 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 4.0 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA CRUZ SYNTAX & INFORMATION STRUCTURE: THE GRAMMAR OF ENGLISH INVERSIONS A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LINGUISTICS by Bern Samko June 2016 The Dissertation of Bern Samko is approved: Professor Jim McCloskey, chair Associate Professor Pranav Anand Associate Professor Line Mikkelsen Assistant Professor Maziar Toosarvandani Tyrus Miller Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Copyright © by Bern Samko 2016 Contents Acknowledgments x 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Thequestions ............................... 1 1.1.1 Summaryofresults ........................ 2 1.2 Syntax................................... 6 1.3 InformationStructure . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 7 1.3.1 Topic ............................... 8 1.3.2 Focus ............................... 11 1.3.3 Givenness............................. 13 1.3.4 The distinctness of information structural notions . ....... 14 1.3.5 TheQUD ............................. 17 1.4 The relationship between syntax and information structure ....... 19 1.5 Thephenomena .............................. 25 1.5.1
    [Show full text]
  • On the Question of Topics in Topic Prominent Interlanguage
    On the Question of Topics in Topic Prominent Interlanguage Marie Fellbaum Korpi Linguistics Program The Australian National University Canberra 2000 [email protected] Abstract For twenty-five years, interlanguage researchers have accepted an early period of topic prominence in the language of a native speaker of Hmong learning English (Huebner 1983). The study was based on Li and Thompson's Typology of Subject-Prominent and Topic Prominent language types. Since Huebner only examined properties of topic prominent languages without also looking for evidence of subject, I revisit the study and show evidence for subjecthood from grammatical relations, semantic functions, and properties of behavior and control. An investigation of one of the properties, namely that topics control co-referential constituent deletion, suggests instead evidence for subject in serial verb constructions. After finding evidence for at least three properties of subject as a basic subject-predicate construction in the interlanguage, I propose an alternative analysis that the learner’s early interlanguage must be re-classified as both subject and topic prominent. Keywords Interlanguage, SLA, Subject, Topic Prominence I would like to thank participants of an ANU/RSPAS 2005 seminar and ALS2005 and for their comments on an earlier version, Anthony Diller, Wayan Arka, and two anonymous ALS reviewers for their comments. 2/16 On the Question of Topics in Topic Prominent Interlanguage 1.0 Introduction The notion of an early stage of topic prominence in interlanguage, the language system of learners as they develop from their first/native language (L1) to the language they are attempting to acquire, the target language (TL), was first proposed by Huebner in 1983.
    [Show full text]
  • Chapter 12 Expletive Pronouns
    Hardegree, Compositional Semantics, Chapter 12: Expletive Pronouns 1 of 36 Chapter 12 Expletive Pronouns 1. Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 2 2. Overview ........................................................................................................................... 2 3. Expletive-There .................................................................................................................. 2 4. Fundamental Proposal: Expletive-There is an Anaphoric Pronoun ..................................... 3 5. How do we Read ‘be’ in ‘There be’? ................................................................................. 3 6. What is the Point of There? ................................................................................................ 6 7. Looney Examples of Topic-Comment ............................................................................... 7 8. Junction-Simplification Revisited ...................................................................................... 7 9. Other Anaphoric Uses of There.......................................................................................... 8 10. Relative-There ................................................................................................................... 9 11. Expletive-it ......................................................................................................................... 9 12. "It" is Raining .................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Pragmatics and Grammar: Motivation and Control Robert A
    Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session Volume 32 Article 3 1988 Pragmatics and grammar: Motivation and control Robert A. Dooley SIL-UND Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.und.edu/sil-work-papers Recommended Citation Dooley, Robert A. (1988) "Pragmatics and grammar: Motivation and control," Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session: Vol. 32 , Article 3. DOI: 10.31356/silwp.vol32.03 Available at: https://commons.und.edu/sil-work-papers/vol32/iss1/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by UND Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session by an authorized editor of UND Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. PRAGMATICS AND GRAIUIAR.: HOTIVATIOII AND OOIITROL Robert A. Dooley 1 Introduction 2 Pragmatics in relation to semantics and syntax 2.1 Early definitions of pragmatics 2.2 The interface between pragmatics and semantics 2.3 The interface between pragmatics and syntax 2.4 Externally motivated phenomena encoded by grammar 2.5 Types of interaction between grammar and pragmatics 3 Pragmatic phenomena with little or no grammaticalization 3.1 Mbya hearsay particle 3.2 Wayampi main clause word order 4 Pragmatic phenomena with partial grammaticalization 4.1 Mbya future marker 4.2 Hixkaryana hearsay particle 4.3 Hixkaryana afterthought elements 5 Pragmatic phenomena with more or less complete grammaticalization 5.1 English WR-clefts 5.2 Dutch auxiliary placement 6 Concluding remarks I Introduction Much of what has been done as "pragmatics" has dealt with utterance interpretation, that is, with the influence of context on meaning.
    [Show full text]
  • Appendix 1 Type-Shifting
    Appendix 1 Type-Shifting Since a formal exposition of type-shifting theory is beyond the scope of this dissertation, I offer here only a brief sketch of the principle components, as presented in Partee 1987.1 The general motivation is roughly that Montague's ‘one category: one type’ restriction can be loosened to allow a single syntactic category to correspond to a family of semantic types. Partee suggests that the traditional distinction between referential, predicative, and quantificational noun phrases can be captured formally by allowing noun phrases to be interpreted, respectively, as individuals (type e), predicates (type <e,t>), or generalized quantifiers (type <<e,t>,t>). She suggests specifically that particular types of referring expression can receive the translations shown in (i): (i) NP TRANSLATION TYPE a. John MG: λP[P(j)] <<e,t>,t> je b. hen MG: λP[P(xn)] <<e,t>,t> xn e c. every man MG: λP[∀x[man'(x) → P(x)]] <<e,t>,t> d. the man MG: λP[∃x[∀y[man'(y) ↔ y = x] & <<e,t>,t> P(x)]] i. ιx[man'(x)] e ii. λx[man'(x) & ∀y[man'(y) ↔ y = x] <e,t> e. a man MG: λP[∃x[man'(x) & P(x)]] <<e,t>,t> i. man' <e,t> ii. Kamp-Heim: xi e cond: man'(xi), xi “new” f. dogs2 i. Chierchia: ∧dog' e ii. Carlson, in effect: λP[P ∧dog')] <<e,t>,t> iii. dog' <e,t> 1See especially Partee and Rooth 1983 on type-shifting and the semantics of noun phrase coordination, and Partee 1986 on type-shifting and the semantics of pseudoclefts.
    [Show full text]
  • Contrastive Topic, Contrastive Focus, Alternatives, and Scalar Implicatures
    Contrastive Topic, Contrastive Focus, Alternatives, and Scalar Implicatures Chungmin Lee Abstract This chapter attempts to establish Contrastive Topic (CT) and Con- trastive Focus (CF) in relation to how their alternatives are evoked via their focal components involved and Question under Discussion (QUD) in discourse. CT, as part of Potential Topic, is claimed to generate conventional scalar implicature, not cancellable. CT but not ‘list CT’ has unresolved sub-questions. CF is shown to occur via alternative question (ALT-Q), which has the exhaustivity condition that exactly one disjunct holds. CT and CF constructions are cross-linguistically wit- nessed. CF, in parallelism with ALT-Q, may shed some light on the problematic exceptions to suspension of scalar implicatures in DE contexts such as antecedents of conditionals, and similar problems as well. Keywords Contrastive topic ⋅ Contrastive focus ⋅ Potential topic ⋅ QUD ⋅ Conventional scalar implicature ⋅ Alternative question (ALT-Q) ⋅ Exhaustivity 1 Contrastive Topic Sentential utterances in discourse are structured to optimize the exchange of information. Several dimensions of information structure have been identified by various authors: Topic and Focus, Topic and Comment, Topic (=Link), Tail and Focus, and finally Contrastive Topic and Contrastive Focus. As for topic-comment, the speaker of a sentence identifies something to talk about as a topic, and then I would like to express my gratitude to Manfred Krifka for his comments on and improvement of style of part of an earlier version and an anonymous reviewer at ESSLLI 2013 for his/her comments on the workshop abstract. I also thank the series editor’s (Marcel den Dikken) comments on style.
    [Show full text]
  • Topic Structures in Chinese Author(S): Xu Liejiong and D
    Linguistic Society of America Topic Structures in Chinese Author(s): Xu Liejiong and D. Terence Langendoen Source: Language, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Mar., 1985), pp. 1-27 Published by: Linguistic Society of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/413419 Accessed: 11/05/2009 22:37 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=lsa. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Linguistic Society of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Language. http://www.jstor.org TOPIC STRUCTURES IN CHINESE Xu LIEJIONG D.
    [Show full text]
  • Aarons, Debra. 1994. Aspects of the Syntax of American Sign Language. Phd Dissertation, Boston University. Aboh, Enoch O./Pfau, Roland/Zeshan, Ulrike. 2005. When a Wh-Word Is
    References Aarons, Debra. 1994. Aspects of the syntax of American Sign Language. PhD dissertation, Boston University. Aboh, Enoch O./Pfau, Roland/Zeshan, Ulrike. 2005. When a Wh-Word is Not aWh-Word: The Case of Indian Sign Language. In: Bhattacharya, T. (ed.) The Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 11–43. Adam, Meike/Iversen,Wiebke/Wilkinson, Erin/Morford, Jill P. 2007. Meaning on the one and on the other hand. Iconicity in native vs. foreign sign languages. In: Tabakowska, Elizabieta/Ljungberg, Christina/Fischer, Olga (eds.) Insistent Images. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 209–225. Adone, Dany/Bauer, Anastasia/Mohr, Susanne. 2009. Mouthing and mouth gestures in a young sign language. Paper presented at the Nonmanuals in Sign Languages Workshop, Frankfurt a. M. Aikhenvald, Alexandra. 2006. Serial verb constructions in a typological perspective. In: Aikhenvald, Alexandra/Dixon, Robert M. W. (eds.) Serial verb constructions: A cross-linguistic typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–87. Anward, Jan. 2000. A dynamic model of part-of-speech differentiation. In: Comrie, Bernard/Vogel, Petra M. (eds.) Approaches to the typology of word classes. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 3–45. Aronoff, Mark/Meir, Irit/Padden, Carol/Sandler, Wendy. 2003. Classifier Constructions and Morphology in Two Sign Languages. In: Emmorey, Karen (ed.) Perspectives on Classifier Constructions in Sign Languages. London: Psychology Press, 53–84. Aronoff, Mark/Meir, Irit/Padden, Carol/Sandler, Wendy. 2005. Morphological universals and the sign language type. In: Booij, Geert/Marle, Jan van (eds.) Yearbook of Morhology 2004. Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 19–39. Baker, Mark C. 1988. Incorporation. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.
    [Show full text]
  • Information to Users
    INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type ofcomputer printer. The quality ofthis reproduction is dependent upon the quality ofthe copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back ofthe book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. UMI A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor MI 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521~600 PRAGMATIC COMPREHENSION: A DEVELOPMENTAL STUDY OF MANDARIN-SPEAKING CHllDREN'S STRATEGIES FOR INTERPRETATION OF GIVEN AND NEW INFORMATION A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DMSION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAn IN PARTIAL FULFllLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN LINGUISTICS MAY 19% By Shu-hui Eileen Chen Dissertation Committee: Ann M.
    [Show full text]
  • Information Structure in Linguistics Dejan MatiC, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
    Information Structure in Linguistics Dejan Matic, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Abstract Information structure is a subfield of linguistic research dealing with the ways speakers encode instructions to the hearer on how to process the message relative to their temporary mental states. To this end, sentences are segmented into parts conveying known and yet-unknown information, usually labeled ‘topic’ and ‘focus.’ Many languages have developed specialized grammatical and lexical means of indicating this segmentation. Theoretical Background context compatibilities of (1a) and (1b): the former is a felicitous answer to the question “What did Jonathan The term information structure refers to the ways linguistically open?”, while the latter answers the question “Who opened encoded information is presented relative to the speaker’s the door?”. The carrier of sentence stress in English thus estimate of the temporary mental state of the receiver of the seems to indicate what element(s) of the clause carry the message (cf Chafe, 1976). Utterances transmit both the desired information update, as it is this part of the sentence information contained in the message and the implicit or that is regularly used to fill the gap in the hearer’sknowl- explicit instructions on how this information is to be processed edge marked by the question word. This kind of element, and integrated into the hearer’s knowledge stock. In order to which brings about information update, is usually achieve this, the speaker has to decide which parts of the called focus. Sentences (2a) and (2b) illustrate how ‘given’ sentence are ‘old’ or ‘given’ and which are ‘new’ for the hearer.
    [Show full text]
  • The Influence of Animacy and Context on Word Order Processing: Neurophysiological Evidence from Mandarin Chinese
    Impressum Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, 2011 Diese Arbeit ist unter folgender Creative Commons-Lizenz lizenziert: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0 Druck: Sächsisches Druck- und Verlagshaus Direct World, Dresden ISBN 978-3-941504-13-4 The Influence of Animacy and Context on Word Order Processing: Neurophysiological Evidence from Mandarin Chinese Von der Philologischen Fakultät der Universität Leipzig genehmigte DISSERTATION Zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades doctor philosophiae Dr. Phil. vorgelegt von Luming Wang geboren am 16. Februar 1981 in Zhoushan, China Dekan: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Lörscher Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Balthasar Bickel Prof. Dr. Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky Prof. Dr. Kaoru Horie For my mother tongue, one of the many languages in this world. Acknowledgements This thesis could not have been written without the support and friendship of many people. If life is like online sentence processing in the sense that one must make a decision even without being sure of where it will lead, those people are definitely “prominent” characters that have greatly influenced my decisions, especially when I was experiencing “ambiguities” during different periods. I would like to thank them in chronological order. I thank my parents for giving me the initial processing preference, which has driven me to become closer to those things and people that I like, but unexpectedly lead me farther from them. I thank them from the bottom of my heart for their continuing selfless love. I am lucky for having been a student of Prof. Kaoru Horie and Prashant Pardesh during my MA studies at Tohoku University in Japan.
    [Show full text]
  • 5.2 Clause and Noun Host Type (CNH-Type) Constructions
    UC Berkeley Dissertations, Department of Linguistics Title Grammar and Semantics of Adnominal Clauses in Japanese Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/81h604rt Author Matsumoto, Yoshiko Publication Date 1989 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Grammar and Semantics of Adnominal Clauses in Japanese By Yoshiko Matsumoto MA. (University of Tsukuba, Japan) 1979 M A (University of California) 1982 CJPhil. (University of California) 1987 DISSERTATION Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in LINGUISTICS in the GRADUATE DIVISION of the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA at BERKELEY Approved: DOCTORAL DEGREE CONFERRED ********* illfii **6at**bi»etM*********** Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Grammar and Semantics of Adnominal Clauses in Japanese Copyright ©1988 Yoshiko Matsumoto Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Grammar and Semantics of Adnominal Clauses in Japanese by Yoshiko Matsumoto A bstract One crucial but rarely emphasized characteristic of Japanese noun modification by adnominal clause (e.g. relative clauses, noun complement clauses) is that the semantic function of the head noun with respect to the predicate in the modifying clause is not explicitly indicated. Despite the difficulties that this creates for any purely syntactic or structural analysis, the role of semantics and pragmatics has received little attention. This study focuses on the construal of Japanese adnominal clauses, and has as purpose (1) to demonstrate that a purely syntactic analysis modelled on analyses of English relative clauses cannot account for Japanese Noun-Modifying Construc­ tions (NMCs), (2) to show that semantics and pragmatics play a crucial role in the construal of clausal NMCs in Japanese, and (3) to suggest a framework that can account for a wide range of naturally-occurring NMCs.
    [Show full text]