Linguistische Berichte Heft 194

This paper argues that the Theta Criterion does not hold in Japanese and that theta roles are deterrnined contextually with argument NPs being optional rather than obligatory. The primary empirical evidence for this claim is derived from the fact that Japanese does not have either anaphoric or pronominal NPs nor are Japanese verbs inflected for person, number and/or gender. Anaphoric and pronominal relationships are expressed in this language at the level of lexical iterns, verbal compounding, verb-prefixes and the like. lt is thus suggested that theta theory is subject to language-specific parameterization in that languages may differ with respect to whether or not theta roles are required to surface syntactically as phrasal categories. Some of the general consequences that this claim may have for linguistic theory are discussed on the basis of the Japanese data presented.

The aim of this article is to show that the role of legal terminology in juridical discourse can adequately be determined in a framework of a "juridical textwork" model only. This implies to analyse their role under pragmatic and intertextual aspects. lt will be contended that neither semantics nor the wording of the law can be employed as a starting point for an adequate interpretation of legal language in public discourse. Of crucial importance is rather the question of how the legal text and social reality can combine to constitute the legal norm (which is more than just the legal text). This is illustrated with the example of German court decisions on the issue of sit-ins that were organised by the peace movement in the l970s and l980s to block the access to American army bases. lt will be demonstrated that in the process of putting the coercion law in concrete normative terms through different courts, specific legal terms are semanticly modified and adjusted to specific language use, hence constituting "semantic battles" and linguistic norm conflicts in the juridical discourse.

Translations from English into German show that about every second sentence does not begin like the original although discourse conditions are similar and analogous beginnings are seldom excluded for linguistic reasons. In many cases, the differences concern word order (as weil as perspective and structural explicitness), in particular the preposing/topicalizing of arguments or adjuncts. To explain the findings, the strategy of discourse linking by the order given before new (for simple, binary information structures) is complemented by a strategy of balanced information distribution (for complex information structures with more than two values). Successful implementation of either strategy will be shown tobe subject to different conditions in a "freely" variable language with a right peripheral verb phrase as opposed to a language with a left peripheral verb phrase and "rigid" word order.

Combinatory Categorial Grammar provides a high degree of flexibility for modelling both simple linguistic phenomena and discontinuities as weil as elliptic structures. However, the mechanisms required for these latter cases are problematic with respect to their efficiency. Unrestricted type raising enlarges the search space dramatically, while rules which enable incremental processing lead to spurious ambiguities. Moreover, to cope with German word order each verb form must be represented in several ways, which in turn increases the number oflocally ambiguous derivations. Slight modifications of the rule set and the representation of categories allows efficient and constituent-based incremental processing while avoiding the problems mentioned above. Explicit type raising is made obsolete by integrating it into specialized rules. Free word order is achieved by use of a constituent counter, rendering multiple categories unnecessary. Besides main clauses in the active and passive voice, this approach also processes subordinate clauses, questions and modal verbs. The approach has been successfully applied in a speech processing system for instructing a two-arm-robot system in assembly tasks.