12 Sonderforschungs- und Transferbereiche

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Open Access
Bare and indefinite NPs in predicative position in French
(2008) Mari, Alda; Martin, Fabienne
This paper proposes a new analysis of the use of bare nouns vs. indefinite NPs in predicative position in French. We distinguish between predicational sentences (with the bare noun version) and equative sentences (with the indefinite version). We argue that bare nouns ascribe permanent properties to aspects of entities. As for the indefinites, we claim that they exhibit their specific reading and introduce an individual in a new situation, which is identified with the referent of the subject.
Open Access
A clustering approach to automatic verb classification incorporating selectional preferences: model, implementation, and user manual
(2010) Schulte im Walde, Sabine; Schmid, Helmut; Wagner, Wiebke; Hying, Christian; Scheible, Christian
This report presents two variations of an innovative, complex approach to semantic verb classes that relies on selectional preferences as verb properties. The underlying linguistic assumption for this verb class model is that verbs which agree on their selectional preferences belong to a common semantic class. The model is implemented as a soft-clustering approach, in order to capture the polysemy of the verbs. The training procedure uses the Expectation-Maximisation (EM) algorithm (Baum, 1972) to iteratively improve the probabilistic parameters of the model, and applies the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle (Rissanen, 1978) to induce WordNet-based selectional preferences for arguments within subcategorisation frames. One variation of the MDL principle replicates a standard MDL approach by Li and Abe (1998), the other variation presents an improved pruning strategy that outperforms the standard implementation considerably. Our model is potentially useful for lexical induction (e.g., verb senses, subcategorisation and selectional preferences, collocations, and verb alternations), and for NLP applications in sparse data situations. We demonstrate the usefulness of the model by a standard evaluation (pseudo-word disambiguation), and three applications (selectional preference induction, verb sense disambiguation, and semi-supervised sense labelling).
Open Access
Deriving the Properties of Structural Focus
(2009) Kiss, Katalin É.
This paper proposes a theory of structural focus derived via focus movement which can account for all the focus-related facts attested in Hungarian, among them facts which other current theories cannot explain. It will claim that focus movement serves the purpose of creating a predicate–subject structure, in which the focus-moved constituent functions as a specificational predicate. The properties of both the focus and the background follow from the independently established properties of specificational predication constructions.
Open Access
Descriptions and their domains : the patterns of definiteness marking in French-related creoles
(2008) Wespel, Johannes; von Heusinger, Klaus (Prof. Dr.)
This dissertation is about the interpretation of definite descriptions. Definite descriptions are nominal expressions with a predicative core and possibly a special article form in languages that have one. Examples in English would be the table, or the king of France. Their defining semantic characteristic is that they pick out an unambiguous referent from the ensemble of things to which the nominal content can apply. The theory proposed here assumes that unambiguity is the common semantic feature of all definite descriptions, but at the same time it is fine-grained enough to accommodate several sub-types of descriptions one may want to posit out of theoretical and empirical considerations. The central idea is that the contextual nature of reference is of prime importance in assigning representations to nominal expressions. In the realm of definite descriptions, this means that unambiguity of reference is recognized as a domain-relative phenomenon. The bulk of this study is about finding out what sub-types of domain-relative reference there are. Results gained from theoretical considerations are substantiated by investigating data from French-related creole languages, which are believed to have a particularly transparent syntax-semantics mapping. Thus the distribution of the creole definite marker has some importance in judging whether certain notional distinctions are justified on empirical grounds. A four-tiered schema of definite descriptions emerges, differentiated by the specific ways in which the context interacts with unambiguity requirements. The significance of this classification beyond the languages investigated in the study is also discussed.
Open Access
Deverbal nominals in context : meaning variation and copredication
(2011) Brandtner, Regine; von Heusinger, Klaus (Prof. Dr.)
The dissertation examines the meaning variation of deverbal nominalizations from a semantic-pragmatic point of view. The main focus is on nouns derived from verbs by means of the suffix -ung in German (e.g. Messung ‘measurement’, Absperrung ‘obstruction’, Lüftung ‘air-condition’), which cannot only refer to events but often also to their abstract and material results, to animate and inanimate causers of the event and to the locations of these events. It is shown that these nominalizations do not only appear in contexts in which they can be directly and unambiguously assigned one of those readings, but also in so-called copredication structures wherein modifiers and predicates indicate incompatible readings for the nominalization as, for example, in (i) Die fuenfminuetige Messung ist auf zwei Stellen genau. ‘The five-minute measurement is accurate to two decimal places.’ To solve such sortal mismatches, e.g. between an event (fuenfminuetig ‘five-minute’) and a result indicator (auf zwei Stellen genau ‘accurate to two decimal places’), a specific kind of meaning shift is suggested, which does not affect the meaning of the nominalization, but rather applies to the context. According to this approach, the first indicator determines the reading of the nominalization in the sentence, whereas the second indicator is adjusted to match this reading as well in terms of predicate transfer (cf. Nunberg 1995, 2004). The focus of this thesis is not only on the analysis of copredication examples, but more specifically on the identification of constraints for the kind of meaning shift involved there: these constraints allow explaining those cases neglected in the literature where copredication leads to unacceptable examples and they give, for example, new insights into the distribution of deverbal nominal readings and the construction of coherent contexts.
Open Access
Differential object marking in Mongolian
(2008) Guntsetseg, Dolgor
In this paper, I will deal with the phenomenon of Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Mongolian. In this language some direct objects are overtly case marked and others not. In other languages that also exhibit this phenomenon different semantic and pragmatic factors have been identified which trigger it. In this paper I will try to give answers to the following two questions: (i) how relevant are these factors for DOM in Mongolian and (ii) do other factors play a role as well. The discussion is primarily based on my own native speaker intuition. Some results of an empirical survey, which was constructed to clarify some unclear cases, will also be discussed.
Open Access
The division of the causative eventive chain by means of -ment and -age
(2008) Uth, Melanie
In this paper I will investigate process and result nominals in -age and –ment, which are derived from verbs participating in the causative/anti-causative-alternation (henceforth labelled “alternating verbs”). First of all, it will be empirically shown that –mentnominals have both the anti-causative reading and the resultant state reading, whereas process nominals in –age focus on the causing process and result nominals in –age only appear in applicative constructions. Ehrich & Rapp (2000) assume that the causative eventive chain consists of a causing process and a change-of-state event that takes the resultant state as its situational argument. Following that, I will conclude from the empirical evidence that –ment nominalizes the change-of-state event, while –age nominalizes the causing process. Furthermore, I will model the relevant –age- and –mentnominals in terms of Lieber’s (2004) conceptual structures and discuss the question whether we may assume that –ment and –age introduce different aspectual operators.
Open Access
Event denoting -er nominalizations in German
(2008) Schäfer, Florian
As in other Germanic or Romance languages, -er nominalizations in German typically denote the external argument of the verb they are derived from irrespectively of its specific thematic role. This type of -er nominalizations is totally productive across languages. As observed in the literature, -er nominalizations across languages sometimes denote what looks like the internal argument of the verb they are derived from and one can even find -er nominalizations derived from adjectives, prepositions or nouns. The latter types of -er nominalizations are, however, not fully productive but (to some extent) idiosyncratic. I will show that German has one further type of -er nominalizations which does not denote an entity but an event. It turns out that these event denoting –er nominalizations are restricted to one specific type of predicates, namely semelfactives. Within this class of semelfactives, the derivation of event denoting -er nominalizations turns out to be totally productive. I suggest that the restriction that event denoting –er nominalizations can only be derived from verbs expressing semelfactive events tells us something about the meaning or the selectional restrictions of the derivational morpheme -er.
Open Access
Exhaustiveness of Hungarian focus : experimental evidence from Hungarian and German
(2009) Onea, Edgar
Preverbal focus in Hungarian has been argued to be more exhaustive or exhaustive in a distinguished way as compared to what has been generally called prosodic focus in languages like English or German. In virtually all analysis it has been assumed that the reason for this property of Hungarian focus is related to its immediately preverbal syntactic position. This effect has thus been derived compositionally at the syntax-semantics interface as part of the truth conditional content of the respective sentences. In this paper I present new data from a pilot experiment that suggests that exhaustiveness is not part of the truth conditional content of sentences containing preverbal focus in Hungarian. The data also shows, however, that Hungarian focus is indeed somewhat more exhaustive than prosodic focus in German. Hence there is definitely something to say about exhaustiveness in Hungarian. Finally I present a new empirical puzzle emerging from the experimental data.
Open Access
External argument PPs in Romanian nominalizations
(2008) Iordachioaia, Gianina
In this paper, I investigate the properties of Romanian complex event nominals (CENs, after Grimshaw 1990) with respect to the realization of the external argument. The goal of such an attempt is two-fold. On the one hand, in view of the claim in Grimshaw that the process of nominalization is similar to that of passivization – to the extent that both suppress the external argument – a comparison between the verbal and the nominal domain will provide us with a better understanding of the conditions under which external argument PPs are licensed. On the other hand, on the assumption that external arguments are licensed by a Voice projection (Kratzer 1994), we can establish whether CENs in Romanian do project Voice. From the behavior of the infinitive and that of the supine, the two most productive CENs in Romanian, I conclude that the latter obligatorily projects a VoiceP, which licenses the external argument PP. The behavior of the former is ambiguous, so the licensing conditions for the external argument PP are dependent on the nature of the verbal root within the nominalization.
Open Access
Flinke Prototypen : der SFB 374 stellt sich vor
(1997) Kunz, Christoph; Rantzau, Dirk; Sigel, Julian; Eschl, Johannes; Keller, Bernd
Seit dem 1. Oktober 1994 existiert der Sonderforschungsbereich 374 Entwicklung und Erprobung innovativer Produkte - Rapid Prototyping - an der Universität Stuttgart. Der SFB beschäftigt sich ganz allgemein mit der Entwicklung von Methoden zur einheitlichen Darstellung von Prototypwissen, der Entwicklung von Verfahren zur schnellen Erzeugung virtueller und physischer Prototypen sowie der Kopplung beider Bereiche durch neu zu entwickelnde Kooperations- und Kommunikationsmodelle. Am RUS ist das Teilprojekt D2, das sich mit der Simulation und Visualisierung technisch-physikalischer Vorgänge beschäftigt, entstanden.
Open Access
Focus at the syntax-semantics interface
(2009) Riester, Arndt; Onea, Edgar (eds.)
This volume contains a significant part of the talks presented at the Workshop on "Focus at the Syntax-Semantics Interface", which took place on April 6th-7th, 2008 at the University of Stuttgart. The aim of the workshop was to address some major semantic and syntactic issues of focus theory: focus representation, compositionality, focus interpretation, syntactic marking, presuppositions, focus sensitivity as well as focus movement. In addition, related phenomena such as the semantics of discourse particles and the relation between discourse prominence and case marking were raised.
Open Access
Focus, sensitivity, and the currency of the question
(2009) Sæbø, Kjell Johan
According to Beaver and Clark (2008), a closed class of items, primarily particles like even or only, are systematically sensitive to focus, encoding a dependency on the Current Question (the CQ). This theory appears to give wrong predictions for exclusive particles like only in some cases where intuitively, what the particle associates with is not the (only) constituent in focus, – something else can be in focus instead or as well, even it itself. I conclude that while both focus itself and exclusive particles always address a Question, they do not always address the same.
Open Access
The internal structure of the -or nominalization in Romanian
(2008) Marchis, Mihaela
In this paper I argue that the –or affix embeds different morpho-syntactical contexts, triggering distinct semantic effects: the (+ event) nominalization vs. (- event) derivation. I illustrate that both (+ event) and (- event) nouns have a vP, basing my claim on the two arguments (see Alexiadou & Schäfer (2007)): the morphology of –or nouns and adjectival modification. However, vP is bound by different operators: episodic vs. dispositional. According to Alexiadou & Schäfer (2007) event nominals are episodic while non-event nominals are dispositional. I propose that these aspectual specifications are triggered by the participial stem -t present in –or formation. Following the classification of Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou (2004, 2008), the structure of resultant participles is involved in the –or nominalization while –or derivation is built on the base of target participles. Like resultant participles (+event) nouns contain not only a vP but also the functional projections such as vP, AsP and VoiceP. (- event) derivates like target participles lack argument structure and therefore also VoiceP. To conclude, (+event) nominals involve nominalization since –or affix is base-generated as the Agent in the Specifier of VoiceP while the -or affix involved in derivation is base-generated in the head position where the verb moves up and cliticizes.
Open Access
Light-driven microswimmers and their applications
(2021) Sridhar, Varun; Sitti, Metin (Prof. Dr.)
Open Access
Local dislocation in the distribution of french adjectives
(2008) Gengel, Kirsten
In the recent literature on the cross-linguistic placement of adjectives it has been observed (Cinque 2005, among others) that the Germanic languages and the Romance adjectives display a mirror pattern with respect to the placement of adjectives. In this paper I show that while the corresponding generalizations put forward in Cinque (2005) may hold for the majority of the Romance languages, French seems to be much freer in the distribution of adjectives than would be predicted on the basis of these generalizations. To account for the observed differences, I pursue the claim made by Lamarche (1991) and others that the placement of adjectives in prenominal or postnominal position in French is sensitive to information-structural and morphosyntactic restrictions that are not found in the other Romance languages. I show that in the cases where French exhibits unexpected adjectivenoun combinations these restrictions are relevant, and can be captured with the Local Dislocation Hypothesis (cf. Embick & Noyer 2001) in the framework of Distributed Morphology.
Open Access
Meaning transfer and the compositional semantics of nominalizations
(2008) Brandtner, Regine
Deverbal nominalizations derived with –ung in German display different sortal readings (e.g. event, result, object) depending on the context that they occur in. However, there are cases that show conflicting evidence and hence pose problems for the compositional process. This paper provides a new explanation for the constructions in which one nominalization is understood as expressing two different readings simultaneously in order to match different semantic restrictions by modifiers or governing predicates. As these cases cannot be explained sufficiently by conventional strategies of interpreting nominalizations in context, I apply Nunberg’s notion of predicate transfer to shift the context rather than the noun: It is claimed that the nominalization expresses just one reading that fits the semantic restriction of the first modifier or predicate, while the second modifier or predicate changes its meaning through meaning enrichment. This analysis allows for the preserving of compositionality and releases other theories of these special cases.
Open Access
Morphological, syntactic and semantic aspects of dispositions
(Stuttgart : Universität Stuttgart, SFB, 2016) Martin, Fabienne; Pitteroff, Marcel; Pross, Tillmann
This volume gathers a subset of the papers presented at the Workshop on the Morphological, Syntactic and Semantic Aspects of Dispositions held at the University of Stuttgart from June 25 to June 27 2015. The invited speakers were Artemis Alexiadou, Nora Boneh, Elena Castroviejo, Ariel Cohen, Bridget Copley, Hans Kamp, Marika Lekakou, John Maier, Christopher Piñón, Károly Varasdi and Barbara Vetter. Other contributions have been presented by Simona Aimar, Saveria Colonna, Marta Donazzan, Berit Gehrke, Daniel Kodaj, Nick Kroll, Isabelle Roy and Lucia Tovena. While appeals to dispositions have been made in just about every area of linguistics and philosophy, the syntax, semantics and ontology of dispositions is still subject to debate. A first obvious reason why dispositions are hard to deal with in linguistics is that the predominant Neo-Davidsonian account of logical forms is based on the isolated analysis of actual relations between causes and effects, whereas dispositions pertain to potential cause-effect relations, difficult to grasp in traditional syntax/semantic frameworks. Besides, whereas for actual causations, the binary distinction between the roles Agent/Causer and Theme/Patient makes perfect sense, possible cause-effect relations partly escape these distinctions. The instantiation of a disposition in an object is not related to being an Agent or to being a Theme of the disposition. A second obvious difficulty raised by dispositions is due to the versatility of dispositional predicates. Those are commonly used to describe either permanent or temporary properties of individuals, or manifestations of these properties through events, not to mention their other (e.g. epistemic) readings. The goal of the workshop was to subject to critical scrutiny the Neo-Davidsonian foundation of syntax and semantics in the light of the linguistic expression of dispositional causal powers. We aimed to bring together linguists and philosophers interested in contributing to a common point of departure in the analysis of dispositions beyond the Neo-Davidsonian framework. Three central questions emerged as central issues of the workshop: 1. Uncontroversially, dispositions are properties - but what kind of properties are dispositions? 2. What are dispositions properties of? 3. Do the different expressions we find in natural languages differentiate between different types of dispositions? The papers collected in this volume represent the variety of answers that have been provided by the workshop participants to one or more of these questions. Concerning the first question, centered on the nature of dispositions, the paper by Vetter argues that dispositions are irreducible modal properties, and proposes a modal semantics which uses the resources of an ‘anti-Humean’ metaphysics instead of possible worlds. The papers by Boneh and Cohen approach in more detail the specificity of the modal properties that correspond to dispositions. Boneh examines the relation between dispositional and habitual readings. She argues that in bare generic sentences, there is no sound linguistic criteria to set apart dispositional readings from habitual readings. Cohen proposes a classification of dispositions according to whether their argument is a causer or not, and whether they are always, or only sometimes realized. He demonstrates that each such type of disposition is expressed by a distinct linguistic expression. The bearer of dispositions is the subject of the papers of Kroll, Donazzan & Tovena and Cohen. Kroll analyzes events in progress as being the bearers of dispositions. Donazzan and Tovena, like Cohen, highlight the fact that bearers of dispositions are often systems consisting of one or more protagonists situated in an environment. With respect to the linguistic expression of dispositions, Castroviejo & Oltra-Massuet present a case study on the semantics of the Spanish expression ser capaz ‘be capable’, which is carefully compared to its English counterpart. The paper by Alexiadou examines the restrictions on the formation of -able adjectives from object experiencer verbs. She argues that their availability depends not only on their aspectual properties, but also on the Voice system of a language - i.e. dispositional -able formation takes as input a structure involving passive resp. middle Voice. Finally, Roy et. al. consider how grammatical and conceptual knowledge affect children’s and adults’ interpretation of derived -er nominals such as cutter of branches (a phrasal -er nominal) and branch cutter (a compound -er nominal) in English.
Open Access
On the structure of the Scandinavian DP
(2008) Lohrmann, Susanne
Adjectives in definite Scandinavian DPs trigger an additional lexical determiner (‘double definiteness’). In a number of cases, one of the determiners is obsolete, and in some of these cases, different readings are obtained. The following questions arise: what is the function of this doubling pattern of determiners? Is there a semantic correlate? And what does this tell us about the structure of the DP? The presence or absence of weak adjectival inflection can also yield different readings, i.e. inflection interacts with interpretation. In the following I will show that multiple exponence in Scandinavian DPs contributes to interpretation. Furthermore I suggest that the notion of definiteness in Scandinavian DPs is made up of three aspects: discourse reference, specific reference, and identity. These aspects are expressed by three distinct morphemes: the preadjectival article, the suffixed article, and the adjectival inflection respectively.
Open Access
"Only" as a Mirative Particle
(2009) Zeevat, Henk
The concept of mirativity was introduced in typology by DeLancey (1997) for certain "tenses". DeLancey refers to earlier traditions in "Balkan Linguistics". Malchukov (2003) uses it in a typological overview of constrastive markers for the origin of certain contrastive markers. A mirative marker indicates that whatever it marks is surprising.