Anita Steube – författare

The first volume of the series is devoted to the subjects "information structure" and "contrast". The working hypothesis is that, apart from the use of lexical indication, the expression of contrast vs. correction is primarily carried by the intonation contour as a means for indicating scope and focus in negating constructions. The papers in this volume proceed from the premise that the information structure is preformed conceptually, and on articulation in the dynamic context is then portioned and linearized, mapped onto the syntactic representation via the semantic representation, and finally realized intonationally. The findings are partly based on neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic experiments.

The volume demonstrates the interdependence of man’s language capacity and his other conceptual capacities. This enables linguistic structures to be minimalised, and for extra-linguistic domains to provide much of the interpretations of sound and meaning. Underspecification is demonstrated in the word formation of Indo-European, Late Archaic Chinese and modern Khmer; on the word- and sentence levels by the event structures of German; and in the information structure predominantly of languages with the so-called free word order: German, Slavic languages, Arabic compared with English and the tone language Hausa. The volume is noteworthy due to the close cooperation between theoretical and experimental research. Within grammar, it has especially strengthened prosodic research and the syntax-phonology interrelations and their interpretations, and it has helped to create data bases for the relations within texts and to evaluate the findings.

The volume demonstrates the interdependence of man’s language capacity and his other conceptual capacities. This enables linguistic structures to be minimalised, and for extra-linguistic domains to provide much of the interpretations of sound and meaning. Underspecification is demonstrated in the word formation of Indo-European, Late Archaic Chinese and modern Khmer; on the word- and sentence levels by the event structures of German; and in the information structure predominantly of languages with the so-called free word order: German, Slavic languages, Arabic compared with English and the tone language Hausa. The volume is noteworthy due to the close cooperation between theoretical and experimental research. Within grammar, it has especially strengthened prosodic research and the syntax-phonology interrelations and their interpretations, and it has helped to create data bases for the relations within texts and to evaluate the findings.

Der Band behandelt die Schnittstelle zwischen Pragmatik, Grammatik und Psycholinguistik bzw. Neurolinguistik. Pragmatisch bedingt sind die Zurechnungen von Satzteilen zur bekannten oder zur Neuinformation im Text. Realisiert werden die pragmatischen Gliederungen aber in der Grammatik. Die theoretische Modellierung erfolgte in generativen Grammatiken, in optimalitätstheoretischen Modellen oder anhand der Alternativsemantik.Der Schwerpunkt der Untersuchung liegt auf Korrekturkonstruktionen und auf Hutkonturen. Erstere zeichnen sich durch Kontrastakzente aus und Letztere sind zweigipflig akzentuiert. Um die Prosodie weiterzuentwickeln, beschäftigt sich die Hälfte der Beiträge mit dem psycholinguistischen und neurophysiologischen Nachweis der Intonationsparameter und mit ihrer Auswertung im Kontext.Von der Kontrastintonation geht der Band dann über zur Typologie von Kontrastkonstruktionen, zu ihrem grammatischen Vergleich und ihrer textuellen Verwendung.