Beiträge:
Semantik
Rita Finkbeiner: Zur Produktivität idiomatischer Konstruktionsmuster. Interpretierbarkeit und Produzierbarkeit idiomatischer Sätze im Test
Pragmatik
Stavros Skopeteas, Robin Hörnig und Thomas Weskott: Contextual versus Inherent Properties of Entities in Space
Syntax
Augustin Speyer: Doppelte Vorfeldbesetzung im heutigen Deutsch und im Frühneuhochdeutschen
Rezensionen:
Kleanthes K. Grohmann: Jutta M. Hartmann & László Molnárfi (Hg.), Comparative Studies in Germanic Syntax
Cynthia L. Allen: R.M.W. Dixon, A Semantic Approach to English Grammar
Alexander Werth: Oliver Niebuhr, Perzeption und kognitive Verarbeitung der Sprechmelodie. Theoretische Grundlagen und empirische Untersuchungen
Informationen und Hinweise:
LB-Info
Jahresinhaltsverzeichnis (Jahrgang 2008)
Abstracts
Semantik
Zur Produktivität idiomatischer Konstruktionsmuster. Interpretierbarkeit idiomatischer Sätze im Test
Rita Finkbeiner
This paper deals with German sentential idioms of the type "Da geht einem ja der Hut hoch!" (‚This makes one’s hat go up‘: "This is outrageous"), "Das kannst du den Hasen geben!" (‚Give it to the rabbits‘: "That is worthless"), "Du hast wohl nicht mehr alle Tassen im Schrank!" (‚Don’t you have all your cups in the cupboard any more?‘: "You are crazy") etc. It is argued that those sentences are instantiations of certain productive patterns of construction. As opposed to Kay (2002), the paper argues that the productivity of constructions should be accounted for by a morphological rather than a syntactic approach. That is, productivity is considered as a gradual phenomenon that has to be measured empirically. Furthermore, it is argued that productivity does not have to be contrary to idiomaticity. On the basis of a classification of German idiomatic patterns of construction, the paper examines in how far these turn out to be productive and whether there is any variation in profitability with regard to the different patterns. Two elicitation tests, one on the interpretation and one on the production of new idiomatic sentences, were carried out with 16 and 18 German native speakers as subjects respectively. As a result, the tests show that the idiomatic patterns are productive both with respect to interpretation and production.
Pragmatik
Contextual versus Inherent Properties of Entities in Space
Stavros Skopeteas, Robin Hörnig und Thomas Weskott
The relation between the locatum and the relatum of a spatial expression is asymmetric in two respects. The first asymmetry concerns the contextual properties of the two entities: it is assumed that the location of the locatum is less likely than the location of the relatum to be part of the common ground. The second asymmetry pertains to inherent properties: the relatum is more likely than the locatum to belong to a type of entities that occupy a fixed place in space. The aim of this paper is to inspect the interplay between contextual and inherent properties of entities with respect to their impact on the encoding of spatial relations. Based on elicited semi-spontaneous data from German, Greek, and Yucatec Maya, we argue that the inherent properties of entities that relate to their potential to occur in several locations have implications for the assumptions of the speaker about the common ground. As a consequence, the observable effects of these inherent properties and the effects of the context are reducible to a single concept of common-ground related assumptions.
Syntax
Doppelte Vorfeldbesetzung im heutigen Deutsch und im Frühneuhochdeutschen
Augustin Speyer
In Modern German (MG), only one phrase can stand in the prefield. There are very few exceptions to that rule. In Early New High German (ENHG), clauses with two phrases in the prefield are more common. The ENHG data is partly in discord with Müller’s (2005) hypothesis that double prefield-filling is due to movement of a partly emptied VP. In this paper I propose a new analysis in the framework of Optimality Theory that can apply both to MG and ENHG. Constraints are assigned to several information structural properties of phrases capable of vorfeld-movement. The interaction of constraints determines what is moving to the prefield in the end. The effect that in ENHG double vorfeld-filling was more common than in MG is explained by an increase in the value of the constraint that selects the candidate with only one phrase in the prefield.
