Andreas Trotzke

This article provides an overview of recent work in linguistics that has its origin and motivation in formal linguistics and theoretical acquisition research, and on this basis indicates potential connections and contributions to language pedagogy. The article suggests the term Pedagogical Linguistics to not only refer to work that tries to translate linguistic findings for a pedagogic audience, but to also convey the idea that linguistics itself is fundamentally pedagogical.

Modal particles (MPs) like German bloß form a heterogeneous lexical category. One common property is that they do not contribute to the propositional meaning of a sentence, but rather display a Not-At-Issue (NAI) meaning. All of these words are ambiguous between the NAI meaning of the MP and an At-Issue (AI) meaning of a counterpart (e.g., focus particles, adverbs, and conjunctions). Unlike MPs, the counterpart typically affects truth conditions, like bloß as a focus particle with the translation ‘only’. So far, there has been little psycholinguistic research on the processing of MPs, the counterparts and their differing contributions to sentence meaning. We present the results of a corpus study where we measured the relative frequencies of both MP and counterpart readings (i.e., whether a specific word occurs more often as an MP or a counterpart) and a self-paced reading experiment on the processing of both meaning types. In our experiment, we varied MP and counterpart readings, and the position of the disambiguating region. We also examined the influence of the relative frequencies of both meaning types on the processing. The results point to processing differences between the NAI and the AI meaning of German MPs and their counterparts, suggesting that the two meanings are represented in different dimensions of meaning.

In this paper, we investigate topicalization patterns of German particle verbs by comparing the syntactic behavior of semantically transparent and non-transparent particle verb constructions. We propose a classification that allows us to cover the whole transparency spectrum and to distinguish between fully transparent and fully non-transparent particle verbs. Given this classification, we report on a questionnaire study that provides empirical evidence for the claim that information structural constraints in combination with the degree of semantic transparency govern topicalization patterns in particle verb configurations. We conclude by pointing out potential additional constraints on topicalization in particle verb constructions that go beyond information structure.