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Institute: search.filters.UBSInstitut.Sonderforschungsbereich 732, Incremental specification in contextAuthor: search.filters.author.Brandtner, Regine

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    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.
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    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.