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: Susann Fischer
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443898007
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 475
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Book Description
This volume explores in detail the empirical and conceptual content of the definiteness effect in grammar. It brings together a variety of relevant observations from a typological, diachronic and a bilingual/second language acquisition perspective, and provides a general overview of different approaches concerned with the syntactic, morphological, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the Definiteness Effect in a series of European and non-European languages.
Author: Daniel Büring
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1134702078
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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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: Anna-Maria De Cesare Greenwald
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027265259
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
The present volume is centered on the notional domain of additivity. Many linguistic phenomena are based on additivity (i.e. are incremental) and additive relations are a mechanism that underlies a wide array of text types. Specifically, the present volume is centered on the class of function words which have been labeled, among many others, Additive Focusing Modifiers (FMs). The chapters gathered in this volume deal with the syntactic, prosodic and pragmatic properties of Additive FMs and new lines of research on these items are pursued, including (i) the historical development of Additive FMs and the use of these forms in older stages of the European languages; (ii) the pragmatic and sociolinguistic properties of Additive FMs, in particular of the functions they play in discourse and their distribution in different language varieties; (iii) the processing of Additive FMs by adults, in particular by relying on reading experiments involving eye tracking and self-paced reading; (iv) the use of Additive FMs in language contact situations and (v) the acquisition of Additive FMs by different learner groups.
Author: Silvia Hansen-Schirra
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110260328
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
The book specifies a corpus architecture, including annotation and querying techniques, and its implementation. The corpus architecture is developed for empirical studies of translations, and beyond those for the study of texts which are inter-lingually comparable, particularly texts of similar registers. The compiled corpus, CroCo, is a resource for research and is, with some copyright restrictions, accessible to other research projects. Most of the research was undertaken as part of a DFG-Project into linguistic properties of translations. Fundamentally, this research project was a corpus-based investigation into the language pair English-German. The long-term goal is a contribution to the study of translation as a contact variety, and beyond this to language comparison and language contact more generally with the language pair English - German as our object languages. This goal implies a thorough interest in possible specific properties of translations, and beyond this in an empirical translation theory. The methodology developed is not restricted to the traditional exclusively system-based comparison of earlier days, where real-text excerpts or constructed examples are used as mere illustrations of assumptions and claims, but instead implements an empirical research strategy involving structured data (the sub-corpora and their relationships to each other, annotated and aligned on various theoretically motivated levels of representation), the formation of hypotheses and their operationalizations, statistics on the data, critical examinations of their significance, and interpretation against the background of system-based comparisons and other independent sources of explanation for the phenomena observed. Further applications of the resource developed in computational linguistics are outlined and evaluated.
Author: Patricia Cabredo Hofherr
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004261443
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 413
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Book Description
Crosslinguistic Studies on Noun Phrase Structure and Reference contains 11 studies on the grammar of noun phrases. Part One explores NP-structure and the impact of information structure, countability and number marking on interpretation, using data from Russian, Armenian, Hebrew, Brazilian Portuguese, Karitiana, Turkish, English, Catalan and Danish. Part Two examines language specific definiteness marking strategies in spoken and signed languages—differentiated definiteness marking in Germanic, double definiteness in Greek, adnominal demonstratives in Japanese, ‘weak’ definiteness in Martiniké and the special referring options made avilable by signing. Part Three examines the second-language acquisition of genericity in English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students in syntax, formal semantics, and language acquisition. Contributors include: Željko Bošković, Patricia Cabredo Hofherr, Edit Doron, Nomi Erteschik Shir, Brigitte Garcia, Elaine Grolla, Tania Ionin, Loïc Jean-Louis, Makoto Kaneko, Marika Lekakou, Silvina Montrul, Ana Müller, Asya Pereltsvaig, Marie-Anne Sallandre, Helade Santos, Serkan Şener, Rebekka Studler, Kriszta Szendröi, Anne Zribi-Hertz.
Author: Chungmin Lee
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402047967
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 295
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Book Description
During the 2001 Linguistic Summer Institute at University of California, Santa Barbara, a group of linguists gathered at a workshop to discuss the expression and role of topicalization and focus from a variety of perspectives: phonetic, phonological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. The workshop was designed to lay the groundwork for collaborative efforts between linguists devoted to the study of meaning and linguists engaged in the quantitative study of intonation. This volume contains papers emerging from the Santa Barbara Workshop on Topic and Focus. A wide variety of methodologies and research interests related to topic and focus are represented in the papers. Some works present results of phonetic studies, either acoustic or perceptual, on the expression of topic and/or focus; others examine semantic or pragmatic features of topic and/or focus, while others are concerned with the interface between intonation and meaning. Data from several different languages are represented in the papers, including several languages with relatively little documentation particularly in the venue of topic and focus, e. g. Basque, Chickasaw, Indonesian, Polish, Taiwanese. The broad sample of languages coupled with the wide variety of research topics addressed by the papers promise to enrich our typological understanding of topic and focus phenomena and provide an impetus for further research. The following paragraphs offer brief summaries of the papers contained in this volume: Gorka Elordieta’s paper describes prosodic conditions governing focus in a dialect of Basque with pitch accents.
Author: Dan Isaac Slobin
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1317785819
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 471
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Book Description
Continuing the tradition of this series, which has become a standard reference work in language acquisition, Volume 4 contains chapters on three additional languages/language groups--Finnish, Greek, and Korean. The chapters are selective, critical reviews rather than exhaustive summaries of the course of development of each language. Authors approach the language in question as a case study in a potential crosslinguistic typology of acquisitional problems, considering those data which contribute to issues of general theoretical concern in developmental psycholinguistics and linguistic theory. Each chapter, therefore, provides the following: * Grammatical Sketch of Language. Brief grammatical sketch of the language or language group, presenting those linguistic facts which are relevant to the developmental analysis. * Sources of Evidence. Summary of basic sources of evidence, characterizing methods of gathering data, and listing key references. * Overall Course of Development. Brief summary of the overall course of development in the language or language group, giving an idea of the general problems posed to the child in acquiring a language of this type, summarizing typical errors, domains of relatively error-free acquisition, and the timing of acquisition--areas of the grammar that show relatively precocious or delayed development in crosslinguistic perspective. * Data. Specific developmental aspects of the language examined in depth, depending on each individual language and available acquisition data. * Conclusions. An interpretive summary of theoretical points raised above, attending to general principles of language development and linguistic organization suggested by the study of a language of this type, plus comparisons with development of other languages.
Author: Peter Jake Robinson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415877512
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 782
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Book Description
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Second Language Acquisition offers a user-friendly, authoritative survey of terms and constructs that are important to understanding research in second language acquisition (SLA) and its applications. The Encyclopedia is designed for use as a reference tool by students, researchers, teachers and professionals with an interest in SLA. The Encyclopedia has the following features: * 252 alphabetized entries written in an accessible style, including cross references to other related entries in the Encyclopedia and suggestions for further reading * Among these, 9 survey entries that cover the foundational areas of SLA in detail: Development in SLA, Discourse and Pragmatics in SLA, Individual Differences in SLA, Instructed SLA, Language and the Lexicon in SLA, Measuring and Researching SLA, Psycholingustics of SLA, Social and Sociocultural Approaches to SLA, Theoretical Constructs in SLA. * The rest of the entries cover all the major subdisciplines, methodologies and concepts of SLA, from "Accommodation" to the "ZISA project." Written by an international team of specialists, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Second Language Acquisition is an invaluable resource for students and researchers with an academic interest in SLA.
Author: Sigrid Beck
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110373521
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 263
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Book Description
This book offers an introduction to the derivation of meaning that is accessible and worked out to facilite an understanding of key issues in compositional semantics. The syntactic background offered is generative, the major semantic tool used is set theory. These tools are applied step-by-step to develop essential interface topics and a selection of prominent contrastive topics with material from English and German.
