09 Philosophisch-historische Fakultät
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/handle/11682/10
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Item Open Access 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, MartinThis 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.Item Open Access Use of embedded clauses in heritage and monolingual Russian(2024) Martynova, Maria; Zuban, Yulia; Gagarina, Natalia; Szucsich, LukaThis 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.Item Open Access Research on rhetorical devices in German : the use of rhetorical questions in sales presentations(2022) Neitsch, Jana; Niebuhr, OliverPrevious 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.Item Open Access Locality, control, and non-adjoined islands(2018) Fischer, SilkeThe goal of this paper is twofold: empirically, it is shown that obligatory control (OC) into islands is not restricted to control into certain adjuncts, but can also involve non-adjoined islands. This poses a serious problem for the movement theory of control (MTC), whose analysis of OC into adjuncts crucially relies on the fact that adjunction is involved. Second, the paper seeks to explore to what extent control theory is compatible with phase theory based on a strict version of the Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC). In order to reconcile these locality considerations with the observed control patterns in the context of islands, the paper assumes a moderately local relationship between controller and controllee. The basic idea of the proposed theory is that the controllee starts out as an empty argument which needs to be referentially identi ed under Agree. To this end, it moves from phase edge to phase edge (in accordance with the PIC) until it can be licensed by the controller. In contrast to the MTC, the target position of controllee movement is not the controller position itself; thus, control into islands (including non-adjoined islands) can be derived more easily, since the control relation can already be established when the controller is at the edge of the highest phase inside the island and the controller is merged in the next higher phase. Hence, the theory is compatible with phase theory and can in particular account for the observed control patterns involving adjoined and non-adjoined islands.Item Open Access 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, TanjaThis 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.Item Open Access Cognitive mechanisms driving (contact-induced) language change : introduction to the special issue(2024) Percillier, Michael; Schauwecker, YelaThis special issue focuses on the interaction of the disciplines of historical linguistics and psycholinguistics to obtain new insights into which cognitive factors are potentially relevant for language change. The contributions address questions related to the cognitive mechanisms at play, their evidence in historical data, who the agents of change may be, which experimental methods can be implemented to investigate language change, and how language change can be theoretically modeled in terms of cognitive mechanisms. In this introductory article, we first outline our aims by describing the call for papers and the workshop which laid the foundation for this special issue. We then provide a state of the art on the integration of research on cognitive mechanisms and language change before introducing the contributions and listing which of the central questions they address.Item Open Access Adjunct control in German, Norwegian, and English(2022) Fischer, Silke; Høyem, Inghild FlaateThis paper presents an overview of adjunct control in German, Norwegian, and English, comprising adverbial infinitives, adverbial present and past participle constructions, as well as adverbial small clauses headed by the particle als in German, som in Norwegian, and as in English. We show that the height of the adjunction site (and thus, following scope-based adjunct theories, the underlying semantics of the adjuncts) determines the control possibilities. Based on a large set of data, we argue that event- and process-modifying adjuncts, i.e. adjuncts adjoined in the verbal domain (at the vP- or VP-level, respectively), display obligatory control (OC) properties, whereas sentence and speech act adverbials, which are adjoined at the TP- and CP-level, respectively, rather involve non-obligatory control (NOC). To capture these data theoretically, we propose a structural account that assumes that OC relations are syntactically licensed under upward Agree with PRO being the referentially defective probe that needs to be referentially identified in the course of the derivation by the controller, i.e. the goal. If the adjunct is adjoined in the verbal domain, such an Agree relation can be successfully established and OC is derived. If adjunction occurs in higher adjunction sites, i.e. outside of the verbal domain, feature valuation under Agree fails; as a last resort strategy, the control relation is then licensed on the basis of pragmatic factors, which yields NOC.Item Open Access Tolerating subject-experiencers? Yang’s Tolerance Principle applied to psych verbs under contact in Middle English(2022) Trips, Carola; Rainsford, ThomasThis article investigates the acquisition of psych verbs in diachrony by applying Yang’s (2016) Tolerance and Sufficiency principles. It has been observed that psych verbs change from expressing the EXPERIENCER as object to expressing it as subject cross-linguistically. According to van Gelderen (2018) and others, this development has also taken place in the history of English. What is much less well-known, however, is that a considerable number of Old French psych verbs were copied to Middle English. Using lexicon-based and corpus-based data, we will apply Yang’s (2016) Tolerance and Sufficiency Principles to evaluate historical “tipping points” in the development of the psych verb class, i.e. examine whether either amuse-type or admire-type argument structures were productive in Middle English. Since subject-EXPERIENCERS were commonly used with intransitive and reflexive constructions we will further investigate whether a more general rule that any psych verb may take a subject-EXPERIENCER passed the productivity threshold. We will show that this was indeed the case in Middle English and that the copying of Old French verbs accelerated this development.Item Open Access Givenness and stress rejection(2022) Schubö, FabianThis paper addresses the impact of givenness on phrasal stress assignment in German. It has been observed for English that nuclear stress is rejected on given elements that are part of the focused material if another focused word is available to bear nuclear stress. It is shown that the same effect applies to German. There are various proposals of constraints that militate against prosodic prominence on given elements. The present paper reviews these proposals and argues in favor of a constraint that is restricted to banning nuclear stress on given elements, but not phrasal stress in general. The argument is based on the observation for German that phrasal stress commonly occurs on pre-focal given constituents and may as well be present in post-focal position. The paper offers an analysis in the framework of Optimality Theory that captures the aforementioned stress rejection effect as well as the variability observed with regard to post-nuclear phrasal stress positions.Item Open Access The relationship between Chinese zhiyou ‘only’ and cai : a matter of morphosyntax(2023) Hole, DanielThis short article pursues two goals. First, it critically reviews some results arrived at by Sun (2021), an article that discusses the interplay of Chinese zhiyou ‘only’ with an empty exclusive operator while denying any interesting interaction between zhiyou and the scalar particle cai (against the view defended by Hole, 2004, 2017). Second, it develops a featural account to analyze the morphosyntactic interaction between zhiyou and cai . In sum, the gist of Sun’s and Hole’s views complement each other.