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Item 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.Item 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.