09 Philosophisch-historische Fakultät

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Institute: search.filters.UBSInstitut.Institut für LinguistikStart date: 2020

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    Alternation preferences affect focus marking in German and English differently
    (2023) Schauffler, Nadja
    This study investigates the interplay between alternation preferences and corrective focus marking in the production of German and English speakers. Both languages prefer an alternation of strong and weak, and both use pitch accenting to indicate focus structure. The objective of the study is to determine whether the preference for rhythmic alternation can account for variations in the prosodic marking of focus. Contrary to previous claims, the results obtained from three production experiments indicate that rhythmic adjustment strategies do occur during focus marking. However, despite the similarities between the two languages, they employ different strategies when alternation and focus marking work in opposite directions. German speakers often employ a melodic alternation of high and low by realizing the first of two adjacent focus accents with a rising pitch accent (L*H), while English speakers frequently omit the first focus accent in clash contexts. This finding is further supported by a second experiment that investigates pitch accent clashes in rhythm rule contexts under various focus environments. The findings suggest that the preference for alternation can influence the prosodic marking of focus and contributes to variation in the realization of information-structure categories.
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    Intonational features of spontaneous narrations in monolingual and heritage Russian in the U.S. : an exploration of the RUEG corpus
    (2023) Zerbian, Sabine; Zuban, Yulia; Klotz, Martin
    This article presents RuPro, a new corpus resource of prosodically annotated speech by Russian heritage speakers in the U.S. and monolingually raised Russian speakers. The corpus contains data elicited in formal and informal communicative situations, by male/female and adolescent/adult speakers. The resource is presented with its architecture and annotation, and it is shown how it is used for the analysis of intonational features of spontaneous mono- and bilingual Russian speech. The analyses investigate the length of intonation phrases, types and number of pitch accents, and boundary tones. It emerges that the speaker groups do not differ in the inventory of pitch accents and boundary tones or in the relative frequency of these tonal events. However, they do differ in the length of intonation phrases (IPs), with heritage speakers showing shorter IPs also in the informal communicative situation. Both groups also differ concerning the number of pitch accents used on content words, with heritage speakers using more pitch accents than monolingually raised speakers. The results are discussed with respect to register differentiation and differences in prosodic density across both speaker groups.
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    New insights into the typology of motion in the history of French: evidence from the manner verb lexicon
    (2024) Piccione, Mariapaola; Rainsford, Thomas
    Our study aims to investigate the Talmyan typology of motion encoding in the history of French focusing on testing Slobin’s (1997, 2004) hypothesis stating that the proportion of manner verbs is greater in s-framed languages and Schøsler’s (2008) hypothesis stating that the difference between s-framed and v-framed languages is to be found in the use of manner verbs and that the nature of the texts might play a role. Our study is methodologically innovative since it tests these hypotheses against a very large dataset using tailored measures. Our findings show an increase in manner saliency (as defined in Slobin 1997, 2004), contrary to what we would expect. This increase in the proportion of manner verbs might be explained by a more general increase in the overall lexical diversity of motion expression in French. Moreover, our results support Schøsler’s hypothesis, as textual factors affect the use of manner verbs.
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    Old Gallo-Romance (OGR) Corpus : annotation phonologique et métrique des plus anciens textes gallo-romans
    (2022) Rainsford, Thomas
    The goal of the Old Gallo-Romance (OGR) Corpus is to unite in a single corpus all Gallo-Romance texts copied before 1130 in a form as faithful as possible to the base manuscript and annotated in depth. In particular, the corpus contains both phonological and metrical layers of annotation. In this article, we present the main innovations implemented in the OGR corpus, with special focus on the creation of a technical infrastructure which assists in the creation of this annotation and exports it in an XML format.
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    The interpretation of implicit arguments in Paraguayan Guaraní
    (2022) Tonhauser, Judith
    Paraguayan Guaraní allows for implicit arguments, that is, arguments that are neither cross-referenced on the verb nor realized by an independent noun phrase. Building on prior description of the distribution of implicit arguments in the language, this paper describes the interpretations such arguments can receive. Specifically, the paper shows that implicit arguments in Paraguayan Guaraní can receive elided and existential interpretations, in addition to the anaphoric interpretation described in prior work.
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    Use of embedded clauses in heritage and monolingual Russian
    (2024) Martynova, Maria; Zuban, Yulia; Gagarina, Natalia; Szucsich, Luka
    This study investigates the production of clausal embeddings by 195 Russian speakers (67 monolingually raised speakers, 68 heritage speakers in the US, and 60 heritage speakers in Germany) in different communicative situations varying by formality (formal vs. informal) and mode (spoken vs. written). Semi-spontaneous data were manually annotated for clause type and analyzed using a binomial generalized mixed-effects model. Our results show that heritage speakers of both groups and monolingually raised speakers behave alike regarding their use of embedded clauses. Specifically, all speaker groups produce embedded clauses more frequently in formal situations compared to informal situations. Mode was not found to influence the production of embedded clauses. This behavior suggests an underlying register awareness in heritage speakers of Russian. Such register awareness might be a result of the high involvement of heritage speakers with Russian. This study contributes to our understanding of linguistic outcomes of heritage speakers and highlights the influence of communicative situations on language production.
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    Research on rhetorical devices in German : the use of rhetorical questions in sales presentations
    (2022) Neitsch, Jana; Niebuhr, Oliver
    Previous literature recommends using stylistic (or rhetorical) devices in presentations such as rhetorical questions (RQs: Does anyone want bad teeth? ) to make them more professional, to appear more charismatic, and to convince an audience. However, in oral presentations, it is not only the what that matters in using stylistic devices like RQs, but also the how , i.e., the RQs’ prosodic realization. To date, however, virtually no handbook on the way of giving a good presentation scrutinizes this prosodic how . Therefore, our investigation focuses on the prosodic realization of German RQs in sales pitches. Specifically, we carry out a perception experiment in which 72 listeners rated both the sales pitch and its speaker based on presentations that contained questions that were lexically biased towards a rhetorical interpretation. They were realized with either the prosody of RQs or information-seeking questions (ISQs: What time is it? ). An additional baseline condition was constituted by regular declarative statements with the corresponding prosody. More precisely, we investigate whether particular identified prosodic realizations-previously found for German RQs and ISQs-meet the listeners’ expectation in the context of a presentation situation. We found that listeners prefer lexically marked RQs that are produced with a prosody that is characteristic of German ISQs. We therefore suggest that handbooks should provide their readers not only with clear definitions of RQs as a stylistic device in presentations (i.e., the what ), but also with the respective prosodic realization (i.e., the how ) to make them a properly implemented stylistic device.
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    Alternation preferences and focus marking
    (2021) Schauffler, Nadja; Zerbian, Sabine (Prof. Dr.)
    This thesis presents a crosslinguistic investigation on the interplay between alternation preferences and the prosodic marking of focus in German, English and German learners of English. It does so by means of five production experiments investigating the realisation of double-focus sentences with two directly adjacent foci eliciting pitch accent clashes. The general aim of this thesis is to investigate whether alternation preferences are found at the sentence accent level, and whether they interfere with the prosodic marking of focus. Contrary to what has been claimed before, results obtained from my experiments suggest that rhythmic adjustment strategies do take place under focus marking. The thesis shows, however, that despite their similarity, the two languages rely on different strategies when alternation and focus marking are working in opposite directions. While English speakers often omit the first focus accent in clash contexts, German speakers often create a melodic alternation of high and low by realising the first of two adjacent focus accents with a rising pitch accent (L*H). Evidence obtained from a production experiment with L2 English speakers suggests that these differences matter in language acquisition. German strategies in clash contexts are transferred but used to a lesser extent than found with the L1 German group. Unlike in the L1 English group, however, focus accents are rarely omitted. L2 speakers seem less guided by alternation preferences than native speakers of both languages. This finding is corroborated by a second experiment investigating pitch accent clashes in rhythm rule contexts under different focus environments. In view of the results obtained from this thesis, I conclude that: (i) the preference for alternation can influence the prosodic marking of focus and is a source for variation in the realisation of information-structure categories. The rhythmic context should therefore be taken into account when assigning semantic to phonological categories. (ii) even though German and English share the preference for alternation, it affects prosodic focus marking differently in the two languages. (iii) strategies emanating from alternation preferences are transferred and can cause misproductions in a second language. L2 speech itself is, however, less driven by rhythmic factors.
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    On the role of informal vs. formal context of language experience in Italian-German primary school children
    (2024) Piccione, Mariapaola; Ferin, Maria Francesca; Furlani, Noemi; Geiß, Miriam; Marinis, Theodoros; Kupisch, Tanja
    This study focuses on the contexts of language experience in relation to language dominance in eighty-seven Italian-German primary school children in Germany using the MAIN narrative task. We compare current language experience in the heritage language (Italian) and the majority language (German) in both formal and informal settings, and we examine the respective impact on micro- and macrostructure measures, including different language domains. Some previous findings emphasized the importance of language experience in formal contexts. By contrast, our results suggest that, in particular, language experience in informal contexts determines vocabulary and fluency in the heritage and majority language, while there are no effects of exposure on syntactic complexity. Furthermore, while the younger children are relatively balanced, the older children are more dominant in the societal language. Our findings imply that the use of the minority language in informal contexts should be encouraged to promote its development and maintenance.