The proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 2021 are now available online. They contain a contribution by Manfred Sailer on “Use-conditional licensing of strong negative polarity items.” In the paper, Manfred further develops the theory of his 2021 HPSG paper that strong NPIs can be licensed by a negation at the non-at-issue semantics. The new paper looks at strong NPIs in German in verum focus constructions and in raising declaratives. Continue reading Sailer in Sinn und Bedeutung 2021 proceedings→
Gert Webelhuth’s paper on “C-command constraints in German: A corpus-based investigation” has been published ahead of print in Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft.
In the paper, Gert addresses the role of c-command constraints in the grammar of three phenomena in German: relative quantifier scope, quantificational binding, and negative polarity. He presents the results of a large corpus study that demonstrate empirically that scope of one quantifier over another, quantificational binding, and Continue reading Webelhuth on c-command constraints in German→
Hiwa Asadpour (IEAS and JSPS International Fellow at University of Tokyo) has just published a paper in the journal Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory on “Parts of speech and the placement of Targets in the corpus of languages in northwestern Iran.”
This study applies a corpus-based quantitative approach to the word order typology and linguistic theories about word order in several genetically unrelated language varieties in northwestern Iran. Continue reading Asadpour publishes cross-linguistic corpus study→
Hiwa Asadpour, Shene Hassan & Manfred Sailer sketch an analysis of English and Sōrānī Kurdish non-wh relatives in their talk at HPSG 2022 (July 29-31, 2022) on “Non-wh relatives in English and Kurdish: Constraints on grammar and use.” In both languages, there is variation between bare relatives and relatives introduced by a function word, that and ka respectively. The authors discuss some aspects of social meaning that is attached to the choice between the bare and the non-bare variant. Continue reading Asadpour et al. at HPSG 2022→
The research project ‘Conversion in English: The interaction of generic knowledge, contextual information, and syntactic constructions’ headed by Prof. Dr. Gert Webelhuth (research assistant: Dr. Heike Baeskow) will be supported for a further year, till April 2023.
The aim of this project is to develop a usage-based model for English conversion which efficiently describes this highly dynamic yet non-arbitrary process. The focus of the analyses is on (1) the linguistic and extra-linguistic factors which determine the non-overt shift from one (conceptual) category to another, (2) the way non-derived denominal verbs acquire their argument structures, (3) the interaction of context-free and context-dependent interpretations, and (4) the identification of communicative-pragmatic functions of conversion. The main database comprises 507 innovative converted verbs from the Oxford English Dictionary.Continue reading Research project supported by the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung extended by one year→
DALC (Dynamics of Asymmetric Language Contact) is an open, informal, non-institutionalized special interest group, started by Hiwa Asadpour, Carolina Plaza-Pust, and Manfred Sailer, early 2022 at the Institute of English and American Studies, Goethe-University Frankfurt a.M.
