New paper on expressive intensifiers accepted by JCGL

This post comes a bit late, but a few weeks ago, Katharina Turgay’s and my paper Expressive intensifiers and external degree modification was accepted for publication in the The Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics. It started as an extended version of our 2012 EISS paper, but thanks to three really helpful reviews and great guidance by Editor-in-Chief Susi Wurmbrand we revised substantially and hence ended up with a different and – we think – much better analysis.

Abstract Varieties of colloquial German exhibit a special class of degree expression, including expressions like sau, voll or total, which we call expressive intensifiers(EIs) and which have received almost no attention in the literature. EIs are distinguished from ordinary degree intensifiers like very by several special syntactic properties. Most importantly, they can appear in what we call theexternal degree modification construction (EDC), a construction of the form [EI D (A) NP]. Despite preceding the determiner in these constructions, the EI still intensifies the adjective or noun inside the DP. The entire EDC behaves like a DP and, curiously, its interpretation must be indefinite, irrespective of the definite determiner that it involves. External EIs raise at least six questions for their analysis. (i) What is their relation to internal EIs? (ii) What position hosts them and why do they move at all? (iii) Why does the external position shift the interpretation of the determiner? (iv) Why are ordinary degree items excluded from that position? (v) Why are some EIs prevented from appearing adnominally in internal position, but all can be used adnominally in external position? (vi) Why do some constructions block external EIs? After presenting a detailed descrip- tion of the behavior of EIs both in internal and external position and in adjectival and adnominal use, we develop an analysis of EDCs to answer these questions which is based on the idea that the derivation of EDC involves head movement to D0 where the EI forms a complex quantifier with the determiner in order to express a syntactic expressivity feature.

The paper can be downloaded from the publication page.

Using descriptions – Manuscript submitted to EISS 10

Last fall, I went to CSSP in Paris to present some work I had done with Eric McCready on an expressive/use-conditional approach to referentially used descriptions. The ideas for this go back to an exchange Eric and I had at the Frankfurt main station in March 2013 (after my defense). Since then, we managed to developed those ideas first into a talk and now a paper which we submitted to the CSSP proceedings aka Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 10, which again are edited by Chris Piñon. 

Abstract   Referential uses of descriptions have been extensively studied from both semantic and pragmatic perspectives. This paper proposes a new treatment of this phenomenon which uses the multidimensional tools developed to account for what now goes under the label of expressive or use-conditional meaning. The basic idea is to treat the “descriptive content” of referential descriptions as use-conditional. We show that doing so allows a satisfying explanation of their meaning and use. From the semantic side, the theory brings out interesting parallels to appositive constructions and theories of proper names; from the pragmatic side, it allows an explanation of their use as reference vehicles and of the cooperative aspects of misdescriptions.

Any comments on the manuscript are very much welcome!

Download the manuscript on its publication page.

Expressives and beyond (manuscript version)

Continuing the post from yesterday, I post here the manuscript version of my contribution to our CRiSPI volume Beyond Expressives. Since it starts with expressives in the narrow sense and then goes on to discuss other use-conditional items found in natural languages, and since it functions as an introduction to the volume (and actually also in a slightly different form as the second chapter  of my dissertation), it is called Expressives and beyond. An introduction to varieties of use-conditional meaning. Note that Brill officially allows authors of edited volumes the post the post-print (i.e. the final-final-final version) on their personal websites. So once I get the final Pdf of the article, I will post it here as well and exchange the link at the work page.

CRiSPI volume to appear this summer

One of the things that kept me busy during the last months (as mentioned in the previous post) was finalizing the manuscript for the volume Beyond Expressives: Explorations in Use-Conditional Meaning, which I edited together with Hans-Mart Gärtner and which will be published  this summer with Brill as part of the Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface (CRiSPI) series. As a preview, here is the list of contributions.

Beyond Expressives

• Daniel Gutzmann – Expressives and beyond: An introduction to varieties of use-conditional meaning
• Sebastian Bücking and Jennifer Rau – German non-inflectional constructions as separate performatives
• Sophia Döring – Modal particles and context shift
• Markus Egg – Discourse particles, common ground, and felicity conditions
• Laurence R. Horn – I love me some datives: Expressive meaning, free datives, and F-implicature
• Eric McCready and Yohei Takahashi – Good reasons
• Sophie Repp – Common ground management: Modal particles, illocutionary negation and VERUM
• Yasutada Sudo – Biased polar questions in English and Japanese
• Henk Zeevat – Expressing surprise by particles

Volume on verum focus arrived

The volume on verum focus called "Wahrheit - Fokus - Negation" mentioned in the previous post has arrived. It contains six articles by Hardarik Blühdorn, Horst Lohnstein,Hildegard Stommel, Stefan Sudhof and myself, entirely on verum focus and its relation to truth and negation. Here is the publisher's info page. A manuscript version of my contribution can still be found here.

Paper on verum focus will be published soon

Back in December, 2010, Hardarik Blühdorn and Horst Lohnstein organized a workshop on Wahrheit – Fokus – Negation at the IDS in Mannheim. Based on the talks given in Mannheim, they edited a volume on verum focus which just went to print and which will soon appear as a special issue of Linguistische Berichte. My contribution is titled “Verum – Fokus – Verum-Fokus?” and addresses the question of whether verum focus really is just ordinary focus or whether it is only superficially similar to it. I present (non-conclusive) evidence and arguments for both positions. A manuscript of the paper can be downloaded here. And here is the abstract:

The accent pattern known as verum focus is, as the term coined by Höhle (1992) suggests, commonly understood as a focus accent on a covert operator VERUM that resides in the C-domain of the clause and whose function is to mark a proposition as true. This widespread analysis, which I call the focus accent thesis or FAT, is however not explicitly spelled out. The FAT can be contrasted with the lexical operator thesis or LAT, which gets support from languages in which the marking of verum differs crucially from other focus marking and according to which the verum accent is not related to focus, but the accent itself is the realization of a lexical verum operator. To compare these two competing views on verum marking, I will first work out the FAT in more detail and present a specific version of the LAT. The comparison shows that for simple contexts, both theories make the same predictions. When it comes to verum accents in embedded contexts, to association with focus, and to non-declarative sentence moods, they show different strength and weaknesses. In its current versions, the FAT seems to fare better with respect to the first two cases, while the LAT has fewer problems with the latter and with typological variation.

New article on expressive intensifiers previewed

Thanks to Christopher Piñón, the editor of Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics 9 (aka Proceedings of CSSP 2011), the volume got a preview section in which completed articles are being previewed. One of those articles is a paper on expressive intensifiers in German, coauthored by Katharina Turgay and me. In that paper, we are dealing with expressions like German sau which can be used to expressively intensify a gradable adjective. Most curiously, such expressive intensifiers can occur in an "external" position, preceding the article of a definite DP but still modifying the adjective inside the DP (cf. the second example in the picture). However, despite the fact that this construction is only possible with definite DPs, the entire construction is interpreted as indefinite. In the paper, we try to address some of these syntax-semantics mismatches.

Article on the acquisition of functional categories in PPs accepted for publication

Last year, Katharina Turgay and I gave a talk on the acquisition of functional categories in German prepositional phrases at Generative Grammatik des NordenS (GGS)in Berlin. An article that is based on that talk but elaborates on it in many respects has now been accepted for publication in the Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft. In the paper, we describe and evaluate a study with 40 Turkish speaking primary school children in L2 acquisition (together with two control groups of children in L1 acquisition) in order to examine how the functional categories D, Path and Place are acquired. A manuscript version of the paper can be found here.

Paper on quotation published

Together with Erik Stei (University of Bonn), I am working on the semantics and pragmatics of quotation for quite some time now. Now, our paper "How quotation marks what people do with works" has just been published by the Journal of Pragmatics. The picture links to the original paper. I you do not have access to the Journal of Pragmatics, you can find a preprint version of the paper  here.

Stressed particles and verum focus

Last weekend, I attended MOSS 2, where Malte Zimmermann gave a talk on the two German modal particles “doch” and “schon” (you can find the abstract here). He focussed on stressed variants of these particles and argued for two hypotheses. (i) The stressed variants consist of the unstressed particle plus verum focus. (ii) The meaning of the particle “schon” is based on its temporal adverbial counterpart.

While I have not much to say regarding hypothesis (ii), I already said something regarding (i). In a paper based on a talk I gave at a fest-conference for Harald Weydt in Bern in 2009, I defended basically the same claim for accented “JA”. The paper is titled “Betonte Modalpartikeln und Verumfokus” and appeared at the end of 2010 in the volume “40 Jahre Partikelforschung” edited by Elke Hentschel and Theo Harden. I uploaded a manuscript version of the article which you can find here. The picture links to the official page for more information on the volume.