Abstracts

Andreas Blümel: Wieder in morphology

This paper gives a description of the structural behavior and semantic properties of wieder (‘again’) within German deverbal nominalizations (like Wiedervereinigung ‘reunification’) and discusses theoretical ramifications. Drawing on numerous novel observations and diagnostics, this paper argues that the semantic restriction on restitutive readings within such nominalizations follows from the singularity of the noun plus the definite determiner (their plural counterparts are discussed as well). Moreover, the result state in the verbs involved need not have a syntactic representation, in line with recent findings (cf. Weir 2017). All in all, then, this article is an exercise in structural downsizing.

Carsten Breul: A lexicalist and word-based approach to the semantic composition of German and English clauses in the perfect

The paper provides an account of the semantic composition of perfect aspect sentences in German and English based on the assumption that the relevant semantic information is encoded in the lexical entries for past participles and perfect auxiliaries. These lexical entries are conceived of as in word-based theories of morphology and the lexicon. This is a novel approach to the compositional semantics of tense and aspect. The basic ideas concerning the semantic ingredients of tense and aspect are adopted and partially adapted from work by Wolfgang Klein. It is shown that the central facts of the interpretation of perfect sentences in German and English, both interpretive similarities and differences, follow from the denotations proposed for past participles and perfect auxiliaries and their composition by standard semantic operations (functional application, -conversion). Moreover, the semantic derivations suggested in connection with an information-structural consideration provide an explanation for what has been referred to as the “present perfect puzzle” (Klein), that is, essentially, the compatibility in German and the incompatibility in English of a definite positional past time adverbial with the finite present perfect.

Katharina Turgay: Die expressive Nebensatzkonstruktion als Minimal-Narration

This article discusses a relatively new construction, called „expressive subordinate-clause construction“ (ENK), which is highly frequent in social media and consists of a DP anchor and an attributive clause like „The moment when you realize it’s a Monday tomorrow“. Besides sketching some of the particular syntactic properties of this expression, this paper examines the relation of the ENK to the conversational practice of narration (in the everyday sense). The ENK expresses some specific emotion, as triggered by the situation expressed by the subordinate clause, and thereby is tied to the experiences of the speaker to which the hearer is supposed to relate. The ENK hence instantiates the property of experiencialty (one of the crucial aspects of narrations) in a rather direct way. This will be connected to the observation that the ENK is expressive: it expresses its content in a non-truth-conditional way. As this gives an immediate impression of the speaker’s emotions, a close connection between expressivity and experiencialty can be drawn. Together with other features of narration, like genericity or tellability, the ENK thereby collects many of the important characteristics of narration in a very short form, which is why call it a minimal narration.

Rezensionen

Bidese, Ermenegildo, Federica Cognola & Manuela CaterinaMoroni (Hg.) (2016): Theoretical approaches to linguistic variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. (Irene Franco)

Reisigl, Martin & Constanze Spieß (Hg.) (2017): OBST 90: Sprache und Geschlecht. Band 1: Sprachpolitiken und Grammatik. Duisburg: Universitätsverlag Rhein-Ruhr. (Damaris Nübling)

Reisigl, Martin & Constanze Spieß (Hg.) (2017): OBST 91: Sprache und Geschlecht. Band 2: Empirische Analysen. Duisburg: Universitätsverlag Rhein-Ruhr. (Damaris Nübling)