Volume 43, Issue 1

The present article is an explorative study concerned with the elusiveness of certain connectives (discourse particles), intralinguistically and across languages: the fact that one and the same connective may seem redundant in one context but indispensable in another context; and that a connective may tend to appear in one language under conditions where no explicit connective device is used in some other language. More specifically, the article deals with the German particles (adverbs) wieder ‘again’ and dabei , lit. ‘thereby’ and their glosses in English and Norwegian, which are studied across a corpus of text samples and sentence-aligned translations in German, English, and Norwegian (the Oslo Mulitlingual Corpus). The two first sections present a preliminary outline of the problem and the method to be used, along with some terminological clarification. Each of the following two main sections briefly outlines the semantics of one German particle, presents data from the corpus showing that it remarkably often has no explicit translational image in English or Norwegian, and ends by discussing characteristic cases and general tendencies to be derived from the data of comparison. The final section (Section 5) summarizes the findings and proposes provisional conclusions pointing towards bidirectional optimality theory as a fruitful theoretical background for further research in this area.

Five experiments were conducted on German topicalization sentences to explore their interpretation and the relation between the syntactic representation and the discourse representation of the sentence. It is proposed that a DP is rapidly instantiated as a discourse entity in the discourse representation whereas a NP is simply treated as a property. If the postulated discourse entity corresponding to the DP in SpecCP of a topicalized sentence must be retracted due to the occurrence of a later determiner (in split-topicalization) or due to the need to scope under a subsequent quantifier, the sentence should be difficult to process. These predictions were con-firmed in two difficulty judgment experiments and in an experiment where participants selected the first interpretation assigned to a scopally ambiguous sentence involving an adverbial quantifier. However, in a separate experiment, where scope ambiguities involving determiner quantifiers were tested, the preference for the discourse instantiated DP to take wide scope disappeared. Another difficulty judgment experiment revealed substantial difficulty for sentences containing “mixed chains” where a DP moves and then a NP moves out of the moved DP. This difficulty was not observed in corresponding sentences containing essentially the same lexical content in the same positions but without the movement responsible for creating the mixed chain.

The article discusses various left peripheral constructions in German and English, which are often considered to be topic constructions. The article demonstrates, however, that only one of the constructions under review obligatorily marks a topic in the “aboutness” sense. It also discusses how the constructions behave with respect to some discourse properties which are often related to topicality: referential linking to the preceding discourse, promotion of a nontopic to a topic, thematic continuity. The article describes which constructions exhibit which discourse properties and shows that quite similar constructions behave rather dierently with respect to these properties. The article's findings also cast serious doubt on certain common assumptions about how left peripheral constructions in the two languages correspond to each other.

In every sentence type describing a particular type of event, there is a designated argument functioning as the default information focus. In the case of sentences expressing a change of state, this argument is the theme undergoing the change of state. In the case of sentences describing a change of location, this argument is the terminus, denoting the end-location of the moving theme. In stative sentences indicating the existence or spatial configuration of an individual at a particular location, this argument is the location argument, whereas in sentences expressing a mental or physical state, this argument can be either the theme or the experiencer. In the case of unergative predicates, describing the activity of an agent, the default information focus is not an argument, but the verb. A designated argument can represent the information focus irrespective of whether its referent is newly introduced or given in the discourse. If the designated argument conveys known information, that is, if it is [+referential] and [+specific], it satisfies the criteria of topicalizability; nevertheless, it can only be topicalized if another constituent assumes the role of information focus. An argument other than the designated one can function as the information focus only if it introduces a new discourse referent (i.e. if it is indefinite), or if it identifies a referent from among a set of alternatives, while excluding the other members of the set (i.e. if it occupies the preverbal identificational focus position). A verb can assume the role of information focus in an indirect way, by the contrastive topicalization of an argument (which also implies the contrasting of the verb with its negated counterpart).

The study offers a discourse-based account of the Spanish copula forms ser and estar , which are generally considered to be lexical exponents of the stage-level/individual-level contrast. It argues against the popular view that the distinction between SLPs and ILPs rests on a fundamental cognitive division of the world that is reflected in the grammar. As it happens, conceptual oppositions like “temporary vs. permanent” or “arbitrary vs. essential” provide only a preference for the interpretation of estar and ser . In addition, the evidence for an SLP/ILP impact on the grammar turns out to be far less conclusive than is currently assumed. The study argues against event-based accounts of the ser/estar contrast in particular, showing that ser and estar pattern alike in failing all of the standard eventuality tests. The discourse-based account proposed instead assumes that ser and estar both display the same lexical semantics (which is identical to the semantics of English be , German sein , etc.); estar diers from ser only in presupposing a relation to a specific discourse situation. By using estar a speaker restricts his or her claim to a specific discourse situation, whereas by using ser , the speaker makes no such restriction. The preference for interpreting estar predications as denoting temporary properties and ser predications as denoting permanent properties follows from economy principles driving the pragmatic legitimation of estar 's discourse dependence. The analysis proposed in this article can also account for the observation that ser predications do not give rise to thetic judgments. The proposal is couched in terms of the framework of DRT.

Translations from English into German show that about every second sentence does not begin like the original, although discourse conditions are similar and analogous beginnings are seldom excluded for linguistic reasons. In many cases, the differences concern word order (as well as perspective and structural explicitness), in particular the preposing/topicalizing of arguments or adjuncts. To explain these findings, the strategy of discourse linking by the order given before new (for simple, binary information structures) is complemented by a strategy of balanced information distribution (for complex information structures with more than two values). Successful implementation of either strategy will be shown to be subject to different conditions in a language with a head final verb phrase and more or less free word order as opposed to a language with a head initial verb phrase and “rigid” word order.

This article presents a novel analysis of the contrastive connector but based on the observation that (i) the contrast induced by but relates to the information structure of the conjuncts, and (ii) the use of but requires a denial with respect to an implicit question. It is shown that but combines additivity, as in and/also , and exclusion, as in only . This analysis provides a uniform basis to explain the apparently different uses of but , including semantic opposition, denial-of-expectation, and topic change. Moreover, it sheds new light on the concessive use of but .