The Discourse Potential of Underspecified Structures

✍ Scribed by Anita Steube (editor)

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 636
• Series: Language, Context and Cognition; 8
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The volume demonstrates the interdependence of man’s language capacity and his other conceptual capacities. This enables linguistic structures to be minimalised, and for extra-linguistic domains to provide much of the interpretations of sound and meaning. Underspecification is demonstrated in the word formation of Indo-European, Late Archaic Chinese and modern Khmer; on the word- and sentence levels by the event structures of German; and in the information structure predominantly of languages with the so-called free word order: German, Slavic languages, Arabic compared with English and the tone language Hausa.
The volume is noteworthy due to the close cooperation between theoretical and experimental research. Within grammar, it has especially strengthened prosodic research and the syntax-phonology interrelations and their interpretations, and it has helped to create data bases for the relations within texts and to evaluate the findings.

✦ Table of Contents

Frontmatter
Contents
Introduction
Underspecification in the Lexicon: The Indo-European Root Cconcept
Multiple suffixes and nominal word formation in Indo-European languages
The Structure of the Indo-European Lexicon: Nominal Word Formation and the Secondary Lexicon
Underspecification and the noun/verb distinction: Late Archaic Chinese and Khmer
Underspecification and Coercion: Nouns and Nominalizations in German
What Kind of Events Do Achievements Describe?
Right Boundary Achievements under Conative Negation
Negating Right Boundary Achievements (Comments on Malink)
Comparing Linguistic Judgments and Corpus Frequencies as Windows on Grammatical Competence: A Study of Argument Linearization in German Clauses
Effects of Local Context on Argument Number and Verb Type Expectations
Prosody in Speech Production and Perception: The Case of Right Node Raising in English
Russian Interrogatives and Intonational Categories
Prosody and Information Structure of Factive Embeddings in Russian
The Prosody of Adversative Constructions in West Slavic Languages
The Syntax of Contrast and Correction Readings of Polish Adversative Coordinate Structures
When the Negative Goes Missing: The Role of the Information Structure in Gapping Coordinations with but
Focus and Emphasis in Tone and Intonational Languages
Studies on the Acceptability of Object Movement to Spec,CP
Focus Particles in the German Middlefield
Word order, Clitics, and Agreement in Arabic Information Structure
Information Structure in Ancient Greek
Semantic Composition of German Information Structures with Operators
Semantic Contributions of the Left Periphery to Discourse Linking: The Case of Topics in the Prefield and Middlefield in German
Dimensions of Discourse: Presuppositions of (German) Connectors
Implicated Presuppositions
Backmatter