Topic and Focus in English and German Sentences. A Cross-Linguistic Analysis PDF Download
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Author: Patrick Wedekind
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668202427
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 15
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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: A, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, language: English, abstract: When semanticists examine the way speakers or writers code the knowledge they expect their listeners or readers to have in a sentence, one of the most important aspects to consider is the information structure of the sentence. Within this information structure, a subdivision is commonly made between already known or given information, which is usually referred to as the ‘topic’ of the sentence, and new information, normally called the ‘focus’. While some languages, for instance Somali, possess explicit focus markers to indicate the focalization of certain elements in a sentence, English has to rely mainly on the intonation of a sentence as the focus marker due to its rigid subject-verb-object (SVO) word order. German, on the other hand, provides a greater syntactic flexibility since it is a highly inflected language in which the grammatical function of words is less defined by their position within a sentence than their grammatical cases. Therefore, speakers of German do not have to rely solely on changing the intonation in order to mark a sentence’s focus, but may also use syntactic displacement as a focus marker. Nevertheless, syntactic changes to focalize certain elements in a sentence are also possible to a limited extent in English, but they require special constructions not necessary for focus marking in German. Since these differences in focus marking seem to be significant in light of the fact that both English and German are Germanic languages, they will constitute the main focus of this paper. I will begin my study of topic and focus in the two languages with an examination of the several strategies for focusing employed in spoken English and German and then continue with those strategies typically used in writing. In doing this, I take account of the limitation of some of these strategies to one of these two different forms of communication.
Author: Patrick Wedekind
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668202427
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 15
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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: A, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, language: English, abstract: When semanticists examine the way speakers or writers code the knowledge they expect their listeners or readers to have in a sentence, one of the most important aspects to consider is the information structure of the sentence. Within this information structure, a subdivision is commonly made between already known or given information, which is usually referred to as the ‘topic’ of the sentence, and new information, normally called the ‘focus’. While some languages, for instance Somali, possess explicit focus markers to indicate the focalization of certain elements in a sentence, English has to rely mainly on the intonation of a sentence as the focus marker due to its rigid subject-verb-object (SVO) word order. German, on the other hand, provides a greater syntactic flexibility since it is a highly inflected language in which the grammatical function of words is less defined by their position within a sentence than their grammatical cases. Therefore, speakers of German do not have to rely solely on changing the intonation in order to mark a sentence’s focus, but may also use syntactic displacement as a focus marker. Nevertheless, syntactic changes to focalize certain elements in a sentence are also possible to a limited extent in English, but they require special constructions not necessary for focus marking in German. Since these differences in focus marking seem to be significant in light of the fact that both English and German are Germanic languages, they will constitute the main focus of this paper. I will begin my study of topic and focus in the two languages with an examination of the several strategies for focusing employed in spoken English and German and then continue with those strategies typically used in writing. In doing this, I take account of the limitation of some of these strategies to one of these two different forms of communication.
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004334254
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 233
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Book Description
The present volume draws together contributions from a number of scholars with an interest in empirical, cross-linguistic description. Most of the papers were first presented at the symposium Information Structure in a Cross-linguistic Perspective held in Oslo in November/December 2000. The descriptions are functionally oriented, and their common focus is how information structure – in a broad sense – can be compared across languages. 'Information structure' has been approached in a variety of ways by the authors, so as to give a broad picture of this fundamental principle of text production, involving the way in which a speaker/writer chooses to present a message in terms of given/new information, focus, cohesion, and point of view. Central to much of the research is the problem of establishing criteria for isolating linguistic constraints on language use from cultural-linguistic conventions in text production. The linguistic comparison includes English, German and/or one of the Scandinavian languages, with sidelights to other languages. Most of the papers are text- or corpus-based, and the ongoing work on parallel corpora in Scandinavia is reflected in several contributions.
Author: Daniel Büring
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113470206X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
This study provides an illuminating and ground-breaking account of the complex interaction of intonational phenomena, semantics and pragmatics. Based on examples from German and English, and centred on an analysis of the fall-rise intonation contour, a semantic interpretation for two different pitch accents - Focus and Topic - is developed. The cross-sentence, as well as the sentence internal semantic effects of these accents, follow from the given treatment. The account is based on Montogovian possible world semantics and Chomskian generative syntax.
Author: Andreas Dufter
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027289522
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 376
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Book Description
Focus–background structure has taken center stage in much current theorizing about sentence prosody, syntax, and semantics. However, both the inventory of focus expressions found cross-linguistically and the interpretive consequences associated with each of these continue to be insufficiently described. This volume aims at providing new observations on the availability and the use of focus markings in Romance languages. In doing so, it documents the plurality of research on focus in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian. Topics covered include constituent fronting and clefting, the position of subjects and focus particles, clitic doubling of objects, and information packaging in complex sentences. In addition, some contributions explore focus–background structure from acquisitional and diachronic angles, while others adopt a comparative perspective, studying differences between individual Romance and Germanic languages. Therefore, this volume is of interest to a broad audience within linguistics, including syntacticians, semanticists, and historical linguists.
Author: Vincent Torrens
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027253013
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 436
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Book Description
This volume includes a selection of papers that address a wide range of acquisition phenomena from different Romance languages and all share a common theoretical approach based on the Principles and Parameters theory. They favour, discuss and sometimes challenge traditional explanations of first and second language acquisition in terms of maturation of general principles universal to all languages. They all depart from the view that language acquisition can be explained in terms of learning language specific rules, constraints or structures. The different parts into which this volume is organized reflect different approaches that current research has offered, which deal with issues of development of reflexive pronouns, determiners, clitics, verbs, auxiliaries, Inflection, wh-movement, rssumptive pronouns, topic and focus, mood, the syntax/discourse interface, topic and focus, and null arguments.
Author: Jenny Streb
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3668730741
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 20
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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2017 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Mannheim, language: English, abstract: This paper is going to provide an insight into contrasts between the English and German language. Due to a shared origin from the Indo-European languages, the two languages are perceived to be similar enough to have sufficient things in common in order to establish comparability but are at the same time also distinctive enough to show significant contrasts. The essential theme of this paper argues that English and German may exhibit formal parallels on the surface, however, accommodate very different underlying usages and internal structures. Due to a limited length of this paper the discussion of contrasts is restricted to the resultative and narrative usage of the Present Perfect tense as well as to declarative main clauses in the syntax.
Author: Anja Dinter
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656206953
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 53
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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam (Institut f r Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: The Structures of English, 23 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The aim of the following work is mainly to present focus strategies in English sentences. The topic has been of great interest to me since such focus constructions are an important grammatical means of re-arranging the information within a sentence according to one's intention. Being familiar with a wide variety of focus strategies is one possibility of improving one's style, both in written and spoken English. Several university level grammar books provide a great number of different means to assign focus within a sentence. In the following course of this paper I'm first going to explain and discuss the term focus as well as its function in English grammar and then show the possible ways of organizing a message. Due to the above mentioned variety of focus strategies not all of them can be itemized here. I decided on presenting those focus constructions which, in my opinion, seem most relevant for the purposes of a foreign language student. The prescribed extent of this work makes a detailed description of each construction, as it can be found in scholarly grammar book, impossible. Therefore, only the most important attributes and particularities of each strategy are named. In most cases examples are added for visualization and a better understanding. In their publications linguists present different ways of classifying focus strategies which makes a clear division of the constructions relatively difficult. Furthermore different notions of which grammatical structure can be considered a focus strategy are existing. Under the respective headline these problems will be discussed in greater detail. Dealing with these focus strategies and the purpose they serve raised the question if these constructions can be found in
Author: Charles V. J. Russ
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Contrastive linguistics
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
Author: Carsten Breul
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027287848
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
This volume presents original comparative and contrastive research into various aspects of information structure (topic, focus, contrastivity, givenness, anaphoricity) as well as into forms and structures whose realisation depends on information-structural factors (clefts, dislocations, reflexives, null subjects, prosodic features, interrogatives) in a number of different languages (Catalan, English, French, Georgian, German, Hebrew, Hungarian). Each contribution emphasises differences or commonalities between the languages under investigation with respect to the realisation of information structural categories or with respect to the information structural implications of a given form or structure. The specific comparative-contrastive perspective of the volume makes a substantial contribution towards a better understanding of language specific and universal aspects of information structure. It raises significant questions and provides solutions for the formal representation and the functional properties of information structural categories.
Author: Theresa Schmidt
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3640249356
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 112
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Book Description
Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 3,0, http://www.uni-jena.de/, language: English, abstract: On the basis of questionnaire data, this study seeks to find a tendency for native language influence in the judgement of German-speaking learners of English. Seeing that the concept of language transfer has received diverse weight in the history of second language acquisition (SLA), the present account illuminates the issue anew, with a specific linguistic concern. Inversion structures, though not canonical, are very frequent in the German language, whereas the English language offers comparatively rare environments which trigger or allow for inversions. As previous studies found, language transfer, in regard to word order, emerged when the native language exhibited flexible word order, and the language to be learnt, in contrast, had a rather fixed one. This gave rise to the assumption that German natives would generally accept subject-verb inversion in declarative sentences in English, even if for a native speaker of English the structure would not be acceptable. Thus, the second language learners are expected to score high on the acceptability rate for the majority of instances of inversion in English, since the German equivalents of the test items are basically quite acceptable in German.
