Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen - Böcker

Unlike the notion of "argument" that is central to modern linguistic theorizing, the phenomena that are commonly subsumed under the complementary notion "adjunct" so far have not attracted the attention they deserve. In this volume, leading experts in the field present current approaches to the grammar and pragmatics of adjuncts. The contributions scrutinize i.a. the argument-adjunct distinction, specify conditions of adjunct placement, discuss compositionality issues, and propose new analyses of event-related modification. They are meant to shed new light on an area of linguistic structure that is deemed to be notoriously overlooked.

This book investigates specific syntactic means of event elaborationacross seven Indo-European languages (English, German, Norwegian,French, Russian, Latin and Ancient Greek): bare and comitative smallclauses (“absolutes”), participle constructions and related clause-like butnon-finite adjuncts that increase descriptive granularity with respect toconstitutive parts of the matrix event (elaboration in the narrowestsense), or describe eventualities that are co-located and connectedwith but not part of the matrix event. The book falls in twoparts. Part I addresses central theoretical issues: How is the co-eventiveinterpretation of such adjuncts achieved? What is the internal syntax ofparticipial and converb constructions? How do these constructionsfunction at the discourse level, as compared to various finite structuresthat are available for co-eventive elaboration? Part II takes an empiricalcross-linguistic perspective. It consists of five self-contained chapters thatare based on parallel corpora and study either the use of a specificconstruction across at least two of the seven object languages, or how aspecific construction is rendered in other languages.

Der Sammelband zur typologisch und kontrastiv vergleichenden grammatischen Erforschung und Beschreibung des Satzanfangs des Deutschen und vier seiner Kontrastsprachen ist ein Ergebnis eines Forschungsnetzwerks, bestehend aus dem Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Mannheim) und Forschergruppen verschiedener europäischer Universitäten.Unter Berücksichtigung insbesondere morphosyntaktischer und informationsstruktureller Aspekte werden die satztopologischen Unterschiede der typologisch recht heterogenen Sprachen bzw. Sprachfamilien unter verschiedenen Gesichtspunkten beleuchtet. Die Untersuchungen werden korpusbasiert durchgeführt, wobei sich die Hälfte der Beiträge auf aufbereitete POS-getaggte Wikipedia-Korpora stützt. Die quantitativ ausgerichteten Korpusanalysen ermöglichen einen genauen Einblick in die unterschiedlichen Strukturmerkmale der betreffenden Sprachen sowie in sprachübergreifende Textmerkmale, und die qualitativen Untersuchungen zeigen Ähnlichkeiten und Abweichungen bei bestimmten Verfahren, die sich morphosyntaktisch niederschlagen und besonders am Satzanfang relevant sind.Insgesamt erlauben die Beiträge Hypothesen zu topologisch und informationsstrukturell markierten Satzanfängen und zu Präferenzen in den jeweiligen Sprachen, aber auch zu möglichen Konstanten und Gemeinsamkeiten, was – auf differenziertere Korpora erweitert – für die Bereiche Sprache und Kognition sowie computergestützte Übersetzung ein großer Gewinn sein dürfte.

Reports on joint work by researchers from different theoretical and linguistic backgrounds offer new insights on the interaction of linguistic code and context in language production and comprehension.

Reports on joint work by researchers from different theoretical and linguistic backgrounds offer new insights on the interaction of linguistic code and context in language production and comprehension. This volume takes a genuinely cross-linguistic approach integrating theoretically well-founded contrastive descriptions with thorough empirical investigations. Authors answer questions on the topic of how we ‘encode’ complex thoughts into linguistic signals and how we interpret such signals in appropriate ways. Chapters combine on- and off-line empirical methods varying from large-scale corpus analyses over acceptability judgements, sentence completion studies and reading time experiments. The authors shed new light on the central questions related to our everyday use of language, especially the problem of how we construe meaning in and through language in general as well as through the means provided by particular languages.