Category Archives: Publications

Tilman Höhle’s Gesammelte Schriften

Earlier this week the open access publisher Language Science Press published a complete collection of papers by Tilman Höhle, edited by Stefan Müller, Marga Reis and Frank Richter. Tilman Höhle wrote a significant number of highly influential papers on German grammar (and on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar) from the early 80s until the beginning of the millenium. Among the topics covered are Continue reading Tilman Höhle’s Gesammelte Schriften

Sailer on “Doing the Devil”

Manfred Sailer’s paper on Doing the devil. Deriving the PPI-hood of a negation-expressing multi-dimensional idiom has  appeared in the recent number of Linguistics. The paper is an elaboration of a presentation at the workshop on Positive Polarity Items organized by Mingya Liu and Gianina Iordăchioaia at DGfS 2015 and has now been integrated into a special issue on Positive Polarity Items, edited by Mingya and Gianina. Continue reading Sailer on “Doing the Devil”

Walker’s dissertation!

Heike Walker’s dissertation on “The syntax and semantics of relative clause attachment” is available online through the university library!
Heike’s dissertation not only gives a great overview over the existing literature and approaches on relative clause extraposition, it also contains a concise introduction into HPSG and Lexical Resource Semantics and provides a new analysis of challenging data.

The dissertation abstract as it appears on the UB page: Continue reading Walker’s dissertation!

LangSci Series: Phraseology and Multiword Expressions

The open access publisher Language Science Press has just announced a new series, Phraseology and Multiword Expressions (PMWE). This series grew out of the activities of the COST Action Parseme, in which several members of our IEAS group have participated.

The series will publish monographs and edited volumes relating to  computational, formal, and/or grammar-theoretical approaches to all types of phraseological units/multiword expressions. 

If you have questions relating to this series, please contact Manfred or pmwe@langsci-press.org.

Links

 

Paper on Automatic Reasoning

Many tests of semantic properties that linguists use in their everyday life rely on reasoning. For example, if you know that all space aliens love chocolate, and you learn that Mary is a space alien, then you also know that Mary loves chocolate. This does not only tell you something important about space aliens, on closer inspection and after some serious linguistic analyzing it also reveals certain properties of the meaning of the determiner all. Continue reading Paper on Automatic Reasoning

Spenader, Richter and Radó on English NPIs

In a recent paper, Jennifer Spenader, Frank Richter and Janina Radó extend previous experimental work by Frank and Janina on negative polarity items in  German to parallel data in English. In two experiments they investigated the ability of native speakers to distinguish different groups of NPIs:

J.  Spenader, F. Richter & J. Radó (2014): Experimental Investigations of Licensing Environments for NPIs in English. In: Jack Hoeksema & Dicky Gilbers (eds.): Black Book. A Festschrift in Honor of Frans Zwarts. University of Groningen, pp. 301-310

Am-David: “A Semantic Typology of Definiteness”

Assif Am-David published a monograph based on his dissertation “A semantic typology of definiteness”. This book explores the crosslinguistic distributional patterns of definiteness markers. A distinction is drawn between semantic definiteness and morpho-syntactic definiteness marking. The semantic components of definiteness are arranged, similar to semantic maps, and language-specifically assigned to definiteness markers. This model is based on the results of an empirical study of Q’ekchi’, Otomi, Maori and Basque. The choice of a suitable sample for a typological study is also discussed.

Bibliographic information:

Am-David, Assif (2014): A Semantic Typology of Definiteness. Lampert Academic Publishing.

The book can be purchased at:
www.lap-publishing.com/catalog/details//store/gb/book/978-3-659-56612-7/a-semantic-typology-of-definiteness