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 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.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 On shi and de in Mandarin : clefts and beyond(2023) Chen, Jun; Hole, Daniel (Prof. Dr.)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 Word order choice, expression of information status and global intonation patterns in heritage Russian(2024) Zuban, Yulia; Zerbian, Sabine (Prof. Dr.)