Andreas Trotzke - Böcker

This book is the first to present a comprehensive theory of non-canonical questions, those question types that do not (only) request information from the addressee, but rather (additionally) tell us something about the speaker's epistemic and/or emotional state, such as can't-find-the-value questions, echo questions, rhetorical questions, and surprise questions. While much recent research has explored the formal semantics and the phonetics and phonology of both canonical and non-canonical questions, the literature is still lacking a comprehensive account from a syntax-pragmatics perspective that brings together the multiple findings and strands of research from the last twenty years.The standard view in the syntax-pragmatics literature is that most special interpretations of non-canonical questions involve syntactic projections at or even above the level of illocutionary force. In this work, Andreas Trotzke argues that this approach is a mistake, and proposes a new alternative theory of non-canonical questions in which both their special pragmatics and their syntax, as well as in many cases their emotive component, can be derived solely from propositional-level operators that do not affect the illocutionary level of utterances and can be found across illocutionary forces. This account dramatically simplifies the syntactic analysis of non-canonical questions and is also able to capture some previously unobserved data in the discourse behavior of those question types.

This volume is the first to explore the formal linguistic expressions of emotions at different levels of linguistic complexity. Research on the language-emotion interface has to date concentrated primarily on the conceptual dimension of emotions as expressed via language, with semantic and pragmatic studies dominating the field. The chapters in this book, in contrast, bring together work from different linguistic frameworks: generative syntax, functional and usage-based linguistics, formal semantics and pragmatics, and experimental phonology. The volume contributes to the growing field of research that explores the interaction between linguistic expressions and the 'expressive dimension' of language, and will be of interest to linguists from a range of theoretical backgrounds who are interested in the language-emotion interface.

This book reconsiders the linguistic notion of emphasis. For many, the concept of emphasis is confined to information structure. However, our understanding of the grammatical reflexes of emphasis is only partial as long as the expressive side of utterances is not taken into account. The book explores similarities, differences, and interactions between information structure and the expressive dimension of language in the domain of natural language grammar. Specifically, this monograph demonstrates that specific word order options, sometimes in combination with discourse particles, yield meaning effects that are typical for the expressive side of utterances and endow them with an exclamative flavor. Approaching this issue from a syntactic point of view, the book shows that there are syntactic categories (e.g., a certain class of particle verbs) and word orders (e.g., certain fronting patterns involving discourse particles) that directly connect to expressive meaning components. The work presented in this monograph combines theoretical analysis with experimental evidence from both perception and production studies.

Syntactic complexity has always been a matter of intense investigation in formal linguistics. Since complex syntax is clearly evidenced by sentential embedding and since embedding of one clause/phrase in another is taken to signal recursivity of the grammar, the capacity of computing syntactic complexity is of central interest to the recent hypothesis that syntactic recursion is the defining property of natural language. In the light of more recent claims according to which complex syntax is not a universal property of all living languages, the issue of how to detect and define syntactic complexity has been revived with a combination of classical and new arguments. This volume contains contributions about the formal complexity of natural language, about specific issues of clausal embedding, and about syntactic complexity in terms of grammar-external interfaces in the domain of language acquisition.

This volume focuses on work that has its origin and motivation in formal linguistics and theory-driven research on the acquisition of grammar, and on this basis tries to establish links to language pedagogy, including students’ and teachers’ beliefs about what ‘grammar’ actually is.

This volume focuses on work that has its origin and motivation in formal linguistics and theory-driven research on the acquisition of grammar, and on this basis tries to establish links to language pedagogy, including students’ and teachers’ beliefs about what ‘grammar’ actually is.

Ein grundlegendes Erkenntnisinteresse der Sprachwissenschaft bestand schon immer darin, den evolutionären Ursprung der menschlichen Sprache zu erforschen. Dieses Studienbuch bietet eine Einführung in dieses neu auflebende Forschungsfeld, indem es die vielfältigen Forschungsansätze einordnet, gegenüberstellt sowie kritisch abwägt. Hierbei wird besonderer Wert auf die Darstellung der wachsenden Zusammenarbeit zwischen der Linguistik und der Verhaltens- sowie Neurobiologie gelegt. Das Buch bietet eine Orientierung, indem es die zahlreichen Ansätze zwei grundlegenden Positionen zuordnet. Zum einen formulieren Forscher die Hypothese, die Sprachfähigkeit stelle einen Unterscheid qualitativer Art dar. Zum anderen wird betont, die menschliche Sprachfähigkeit zeichne sich gerade dadurch aus, dass sie in ihrer Komplexität in sehr kleinen graduellen Schritten entstanden sei und es daher keinen abrupten Bruch zu anderen Spezies gebe. Das Studienbuch diskutiert die sprachtheoretischen Grundlagen beider Positionen, zeigt Möglichkeiten der experimentellen Überprüfung auf und gibt kommentierte Bibliografien an die Hand. Obwohl sich das Thema der Sprachevolution großer Beliebtheit erfreut, fehlt bislang eine deutschsprachige Einführung.