Language, Context and Cognition

The mental organization of phonotactic knowledge and its role in language comprehension has not been adequately explained to date. Drawing on experimental physiological methods, the author offers evidence for the cognitive reality of phonotactic restrictions, thereby contributing to our understanding of how speech is processed. The book’s interdisciplinary approach will also be of interest to scholars in phonology and psycholinguistics.

Currently, there is a great number of approaches to the semantics-pragmatics distinction on the market. This book is unique in that it offers a comprehensive overview, comparison and critical evaluation of these approaches. Taking as a starting point the notorious difficulty of differentiating so-called literal from non-literal (or figurative) meaning, it covers a wide range of the key current topics in semantics and pragmatics, e.g., the saying/meaning distinction, minimalism vs. contextualism, unarticulated constituents, indexicalism, (generalised) conversational implicatures, speech acts, levels of meaning in interpretation, the role of context in interpretation, the nature of lexical meaning. Notably, rather than taking a solely theoretical perspective, the book integrates psycho- and neurolinguistic perspectives, considering experimental results concerning the (differences in) processing of the various types of meaning covered. In terms of topics covered and perspectives taken, it is equally well suited for undergraduate as well as postgraduate students of linguistics and/or philosophy of language.

The volume represents a state-of-the-art snapshot of the research on prosody for phoneticians, linguists and speech technologists. It covers well-known models and languages. How are prosodies linked to speech sounds? What are the relations between prosody and grammar? What does speech perception tell us about prosody, particularly about the constituting elements of intonation and rhythm? The papers of the volume address questions like these with a special focus on how the notion of context-based coding, the knowledge of prosodic functions and the communicative embedding of prosodic elements can advance our understanding of prosody.

This book investigates specific syntactic means of event elaboration
across seven Indo-European languages (English, German, Norwegian,
French, Russian, Latin and Ancient Greek): bare and comitative small
clauses (“absolutes”), participle constructions and related clause-like but
non-finite adjuncts that increase descriptive granularity with respect to
constitutive parts of the matrix event (elaboration in the narrowest
sense), or describe eventualities that are co-located and connected
with but not part of the matrix event. The book falls in two
parts. Part I addresses central theoretical issues: How is the co-eventive
interpretation of such adjuncts achieved? What is the internal syntax of
participial and converb constructions? How do these constructions
function at the discourse level, as compared to various finite structures
that are available for co-eventive elaboration? Part II takes an empirical
cross-linguistic perspective. It consists of five self-contained chapters that
are based on parallel corpora and study either the use of a specific
construction across at least two of the seven object languages, or how a
specific construction is rendered in other languages.

This book presents work on bridging inferences in discourse interpretation. It develops a formalization that permits integrating indirect anaphora in the construction of a structured discourse representation. From a broader perspective, it provides a suitable dynamic-logic framework which can account for underspecifications in cohesion and coherence of discourses by either inferentially resolving or contextually constraining them. Special attention is given to the resolution of bridging anaphora by means of integrating encyclopedic knowledge encoded in FrameNet into a formal theory of discourse structure as provided by Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. A second focus lies on the discourse effects of Clitic Left Dislocation in Spanish. In addition, the book provides a synopsis of the problems, methods, approaches, and desiderata of research on text, context, and discourse interpretation from formal, computational, cognitive, and psychological points of view. Central topics include pragmatic inferences and defeasible reasoning, the Common Ground, cohesion and anaphora resolution, coherence and discourse structure, and discourse interpretation. The volume may thus also serve as a reference book on text meaning and context.

In the last few years a lively discussion on information packaging has arisen, where traditional dichotomies Theme/Rheme, Topic/Comment and Focus/Background have been taken up again and partly reinterpreted. The discussion is mainly being held in syntax, but also in the fields of semantics and pragmatics. Some remarkable progress has been made especially in Focus phonology.
Even if the role of information conveying and information packaging in the Indoeuropean languages was hinted at as early as in the classical studies of the Neogrammarians, this field has remained neglected in today's historical linguistics. This volume tries to partly cover this lack with a sample of papers which offer a various range of new empirical data analyzed from the point of view of information structure. The novelty of the papers consists in the modern theoretical perspective from which the data are analyzed and in the various phenomena considered, which range from the rise of clitic elements to word order change and verb movement.

Editorial board

Dr. habil. Kai Alter (Newcastle University Medical School)

This study is the first to examine the prosodic structure of everyday sung language and its relevance for language acquisition. Using extensive authentic recordings in German, Russian and French, the author demonstrates how language and music interact with each other and how singing promotes small children’s acquisition of language. The book provides far-reaching insights into the interfaces of language and music, and is thus of interdisciplinary relevance. In addition, it offers entry-points into language acquisition research, speech therapy and language typology.

Editorial board

Dr. habil. Kai Alter (Newcastle University Medical School)

Prof. Dr. Thomas Pechmann (Universität Leipzig)

Prof. em. Dr. Anita Steube (Universität Leipzig)

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.

The study presented here is concerned with the speech melody of (Standard) German and examines three central units of speech melody which occur with stressed words. They convey attitudinal meanings which indicate whether what is being said in the speaker’s argument should be interpreted as given, new or unexpected.

The volume contains articles that focus on the interface between linguistic and conceptual knowledge. The issues addressed in the volume include the preconditions of every level of the language system that are required for the transformation of linguistic information into conceptual representations. In accordance with Chomsky’s Minimalist language model, the language system is embedded into the performative systems where language is a part of the cognitive competence of human beings, i.e. system of articulation and perception (A/P) and the conceptual-intentional system (C/I). During the formation of linguistic structures, every performative system obtains well-formed representations as its input information. The articles of the volume show how interface conditions determine the linguistic representations on each level of the linguistic system. Interface conditions result in requirements for the ordering of linguistic elements. The syntactic transformation achieves a point, where the linguistic structure formation branches to two distinct representational levels. Both levels deliver instructions for the systems of performance A/P and C/I. Linearization takes place on the syntactic surface of a sentence. The linearization of linguistic elements is manifest at the derivational point of Spell-out and also on the level of the phonological form (PF). This means that on the one hand, linearization is relevant to the phonetic aspect of linguistic expressions, and on the other hand, the interpretation of linguistic utterances is based on hierarchical structures. On the level of Logical Form (LF) all operations apply which don’t have any influence on the linear order in overt syntax. In addition they affect the generation of hierarchical structures. The structure obtained on LF is the representational format of the semantic form of a sentence.

This volume addresses the problem of how language expresses conceptual information on event structures and how such information can be reconstructed in the interpretation process. The papers present important new insights into recent semantic and syntactic research on the topic. The volume deals with the following problems in detail: event structure and syntactic construction, event structure and modification, event structure and plurality, event structure and temporal relation, event structure and situation aspect, and event structure and language ontology. Importantly, the topic is discussed not only on the basis of English and German but on the basis of other languages including Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, and Igbo as well. This volume thus provides solid evidence towards clarifying the empirical use of event based analyses.

The monograph explains how the lack of a ‘nominal article’ category in some Slavic languages influences nominal reference and textual coherence. The book demonstrates that the missing category cannot be represented by the absence of the functional category D⁰, but that a phonologically empty category with the meaning of the semantic default determiner must be assumed. Otherwise, syntactically and semantically well-formed sentences could not be generated. The semantic default determiner is only specified contextually when the DP with a fixed function in a sentence combines the aspect of the verb and a defined position within the information structure of the sentence. These factors establish the reference of the DPs as well as their discourse-pragmatic potential.
The book follows the two-level semantic system of the modular grammars of the Slavic languages. The syntactic structures are mapped onto compositionally constructed semantic structures that are interpreted conceptually. This means that grammatical knowledge is strictly separated from extra-linguistic knowledge, which helps to interpret the utterance meanings in coherent texts.

This book contains a collection of cutting-edge papers on methodological aspects of prosody research. Current approaches to the gathering, treatment, and interpretation of prosodic data are discussed by experts in the field, illustrated by their own empirical research. Contributions focus on the choice and measurement of prosodic parameters, the establishment of prosodic categories, annotation structures for spoken-language data, and experimental methods for production and perception studies (including the construction of materials, modes of presentation, online vs. offline tasks, judgement scales, data processing, and statistical evaluation). The volume will serve as a handbook linking data collection and interpretation, allowing researchers in linguistics and related fields to make more informed decisions concerning their empirical work in prosody.

Focusing on English and German examples, the study deals with the temporal interpretation of texts in non-aspect languages. The author presumes that a coherent interpretation of a text results from a complex interaction between linguistic and extra-linguistic information. The study presents a unified account of the semantics of temporality which treats the varying grammatical factors (aspectual classes, tense, and discourse structure) in a systematic way.

The first volume of the series is devoted to the subjects "information structure" and "contrast". The working hypothesis is that, apart from the use of lexical indication, the expression of contrast vs. correction is primarily carried by the intonation contour as a means for indicating scope and focus in negating constructions. The papers in this volume proceed from the premise that the information structure is preformed conceptually, and on articulation in the dynamic context is then portioned and linearized, mapped onto the syntactic representation via the semantic representation, and finally realized intonationally. The findings are partly based on neurolinguistic and psycholinguistic experiments.

This volume looks at the information-structural factors of topic, focus and information status as well as their morphosyntactical realisations in five north-west Siberian languages, bridging the divide between theoretical modelling in a generative framework on the one hand and the analysis and description of phenomena from individual languages on the other.