Topic And Focus In English And German Sentences A Cross Linguistic Analysis
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Topic And Focus In English And German Sentences A Cross Linguistic Analysis
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Author : Patrick Wedekind
language : en
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Release Date : 2016-04-21
Topic And Focus In English And German Sentences A Cross Linguistic Analysis written by Patrick Wedekind and has been published by GRIN Verlag this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016-04-21 with Literary Collections categories.
Seminar paper from the year 2011 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: A, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, language: English, abstract: When semanticists examine the way speakers or writers code the knowledge they expect their listeners or readers to have in a sentence, one of the most important aspects to consider is the information structure of the sentence. Within this information structure, a subdivision is commonly made between already known or given information, which is usually referred to as the ‘topic’ of the sentence, and new information, normally called the ‘focus’. While some languages, for instance Somali, possess explicit focus markers to indicate the focalization of certain elements in a sentence, English has to rely mainly on the intonation of a sentence as the focus marker due to its rigid subject-verb-object (SVO) word order. German, on the other hand, provides a greater syntactic flexibility since it is a highly inflected language in which the grammatical function of words is less defined by their position within a sentence than their grammatical cases. Therefore, speakers of German do not have to rely solely on changing the intonation in order to mark a sentence’s focus, but may also use syntactic displacement as a focus marker. Nevertheless, syntactic changes to focalize certain elements in a sentence are also possible to a limited extent in English, but they require special constructions not necessary for focus marking in German. Since these differences in focus marking seem to be significant in light of the fact that both English and German are Germanic languages, they will constitute the main focus of this paper. I will begin my study of topic and focus in the two languages with an examination of the several strategies for focusing employed in spoken English and German and then continue with those strategies typically used in writing. In doing this, I take account of the limitation of some of these strategies to one of these two different forms of communication.
Information Structure In A Cross Linguistic Perspective
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Author :
language : en
Publisher: BRILL
Release Date : 2016-08-29
Information Structure In A Cross Linguistic Perspective written by and has been published by BRILL this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2016-08-29 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.
The present volume draws together contributions from a number of scholars with an interest in empirical, cross-linguistic description. Most of the papers were first presented at the symposium Information Structure in a Cross-linguistic Perspective held in Oslo in November/December 2000. The descriptions are functionally oriented, and their common focus is how information structure – in a broad sense – can be compared across languages. 'Information structure' has been approached in a variety of ways by the authors, so as to give a broad picture of this fundamental principle of text production, involving the way in which a speaker/writer chooses to present a message in terms of given/new information, focus, cohesion, and point of view. Central to much of the research is the problem of establishing criteria for isolating linguistic constraints on language use from cultural-linguistic conventions in text production. The linguistic comparison includes English, German and/or one of the Scandinavian languages, with sidelights to other languages. Most of the papers are text- or corpus-based, and the ongoing work on parallel corpora in Scandinavia is reflected in several contributions.
Comparative And Contrastive Studies Of Information Structure
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Author : Carsten Breul
language : en
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Release Date : 2010-09-09
Comparative And Contrastive Studies Of Information Structure written by Carsten Breul and has been published by John Benjamins Publishing this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2010-09-09 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.
This volume presents original comparative and contrastive research into various aspects of information structure (topic, focus, contrastivity, givenness, anaphoricity) as well as into forms and structures whose realisation depends on information-structural factors (clefts, dislocations, reflexives, null subjects, prosodic features, interrogatives) in a number of different languages (Catalan, English, French, Georgian, German, Hebrew, Hungarian). Each contribution emphasises differences or commonalities between the languages under investigation with respect to the realisation of information structural categories or with respect to the information structural implications of a given form or structure. The specific comparative-contrastive perspective of the volume makes a substantial contribution towards a better understanding of language specific and universal aspects of information structure. It raises significant questions and provides solutions for the formal representation and the functional properties of information structural categories.
The Meaning Of Topic And Focus
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Author : Daniel Büring
language : en
Publisher: Routledge
Release Date : 2012-08-21
The Meaning Of Topic And Focus written by Daniel Büring and has been published by Routledge this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2012-08-21 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.
This study provides an illuminating and ground-breaking account of the complex interaction of intonational phenomena, semantics and pragmatics. Based on examples from German and English, and centred on an analysis of the fall-rise intonation contour, a semantic interpretation for two different pitch accents - Focus and Topic - is developed. The cross-sentence, as well as the sentence internal semantic effects of these accents, follow from the given treatment. The account is based on Montogovian possible world semantics and Chomskian generative syntax.
Focus And Background In Romance Languages
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Author : Andreas Dufter
language : en
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Release Date : 2009-06-18
Focus And Background In Romance Languages written by Andreas Dufter and has been published by John Benjamins Publishing this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2009-06-18 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.
Focus–background structure has taken center stage in much current theorizing about sentence prosody, syntax, and semantics. However, both the inventory of focus expressions found cross-linguistically and the interpretive consequences associated with each of these continue to be insufficiently described. This volume aims at providing new observations on the availability and the use of focus markings in Romance languages. In doing so, it documents the plurality of research on focus in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian. Topics covered include constituent fronting and clefting, the position of subjects and focus particles, clitic doubling of objects, and information packaging in complex sentences. In addition, some contributions explore focus–background structure from acquisitional and diachronic angles, while others adopt a comparative perspective, studying differences between individual Romance and Germanic languages. Therefore, this volume is of interest to a broad audience within linguistics, including syntacticians, semanticists, and historical linguists.
Focus Strategies In English Sentences And Their Representation In Books For School Age German Learners Of English
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Author : Anja Dinter
language : en
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Release Date : 2007-06-08
Focus Strategies In English Sentences And Their Representation In Books For School Age German Learners Of English written by Anja Dinter and has been published by GRIN Verlag this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2007-06-08 with Literary Collections categories.
Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam (Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik), course: The Structures of English , language: English, abstract: The aim of the following work is mainly to present focus strategies in English sentences. The topic has been of great interest to me since such focus constructions are an important grammatical means of re-arranging the information within a sentence according to one’s intention. Being familiar with a wide variety of focus strategies is one possibility of improving one’s style, both in written and spoken English. Several university level grammar books provide a great number of different means to assign focus within a sentence. In the following course of this paper I’m first going to explain and discuss the term focus as well as its function in English grammar and then show the possible ways of organizing a message. Due to the above mentioned variety of focus strategies not all of them can be itemized here. I decided on presenting those focus constructions which, in my opinion, seem most relevant for the purposes of a foreign language student. The prescribed extent of this work makes a detailed description of each construction, as it can be found in scholarly grammar book, impossible. Therefore, only the most important attributes and particularities of each strategy are named. In most cases examples are added for visualization and a better understanding. In their publications linguists present different ways of classifying focus strategies which makes a clear division of the constructions relatively difficult. Furthermore different notions of which grammatical structure can be considered a focus strategy are existing. Under the respective headline these problems will be discussed in greater detail. Dealing with these focus strategies and the purpose they serve raised the question if these constructions can be found in school-books for German learner’s of English as well. As a future English teacher I’m especially interested in that and therefore decided to examine several books available. The results of this examination, reasons for a necessary integration of focus strategies into a classroom context and suitable literature are mentioned in the final part of this work. Since focus strategies aren’t (yet) generally represented in school books this part is rather short in comparison to the one dealing with the focus constructions itself.
English Inversion In Second Language Acquisition Of German Native Speakers
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Author : Theresa Schmidt
language : en
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Release Date : 2009-01-20
English Inversion In Second Language Acquisition Of German Native Speakers written by Theresa Schmidt and has been published by GRIN Verlag this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2009-01-20 with Literary Collections categories.
Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 3,0, http://www.uni-jena.de/, language: English, abstract: On the basis of questionnaire data, this study seeks to find a tendency for native language influence in the judgement of German-speaking learners of English. Seeing that the concept of language transfer has received diverse weight in the history of second language acquisition (SLA), the present account illuminates the issue anew, with a specific linguistic concern. Inversion structures, though not canonical, are very frequent in the German language, whereas the English language offers comparatively rare environments which trigger or allow for inversions. As previous studies found, language transfer, in regard to word order, emerged when the native language exhibited flexible word order, and the language to be learnt, in contrast, had a rather fixed one. This gave rise to the assumption that German natives would generally accept subject-verb inversion in declarative sentences in English, even if for a native speaker of English the structure would not be acceptable. Thus, the second language learners are expected to score high on the acceptability rate for the majority of instances of inversion in English, since the German equivalents of the test items are basically quite acceptable in German.
Crosslinguistic Studies On Noun Phrase Structure And Reference
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Author : Patricia Cabredo Hofherr
language : en
Publisher: BRILL
Release Date : 2013-11-29
Crosslinguistic Studies On Noun Phrase Structure And Reference written by Patricia Cabredo Hofherr and has been published by BRILL this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2013-11-29 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.
Crosslinguistic Studies on Noun Phrase Structure and Reference contains 11 studies on the grammar of noun phrases. Part One explores NP-structure and the impact of information structure, countability and number marking on interpretation, using data from Russian, Armenian, Hebrew, Brazilian Portuguese, Karitiana, Turkish, English, Catalan and Danish. Part Two examines language specific definiteness marking strategies in spoken and signed languages—differentiated definiteness marking in Germanic, double definiteness in Greek, adnominal demonstratives in Japanese, ‘weak’ definiteness in Martiniké and the special referring options made avilable by signing. Part Three examines the second-language acquisition of genericity in English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students in syntax, formal semantics, and language acquisition. Contributors include: Željko Bošković, Patricia Cabredo Hofherr, Edit Doron, Nomi Erteschik Shir, Brigitte Garcia, Elaine Grolla, Tania Ionin, Loïc Jean-Louis, Makoto Kaneko, Marika Lekakou, Silvina Montrul, Ana Müller, Asya Pereltsvaig, Marie-Anne Sallandre, Helade Santos, Serkan Şener, Rebekka Studler, Kriszta Szendröi, Anne Zribi-Hertz.
Third Language Acquisition
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Author : Wilhelm Griehaber, Jochen Rehbein, S Çiğdem Sağin Şimşek, S Cigdem
language : en
Publisher: Waxmann Verlag
Release Date :
Third Language Acquisition written by Wilhelm Griehaber, Jochen Rehbein, S Çiğdem Sağin Şimşek, S Cigdem and has been published by Waxmann Verlag this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on with English language categories.
Turkish-German Bilingual Students' Acquisition of English Word Order in a German Educational Setting investigates the syntactic influences of Turkish and German on the acquisition of English word order in a German educational setting.
New Approaches To Contrastive Linguistics
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Author : Renata Enghels
language : en
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Release Date : 2020-07-20
New Approaches To Contrastive Linguistics written by Renata Enghels and has been published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG this book supported file pdf, txt, epub, kindle and other format this book has been release on 2020-07-20 with Language Arts & Disciplines categories.
The practice of comparing languages has a long tradition characterized by a cyclic pattern of interest. Its meeting with corpus linguistics in the 1990s has led to a new sub-discipline of corpus-based contrastive studies. The present volume tackles two main challenges that had not yet been fully addressed in the literature, namely an empirical assessment of the nature of the data commonly used in cross-linguistic studies (e.g. translation data versus comparable data), and the development of advanced methods and statistical techniques suitably adapted to contrastive research settings. The papers collected in this volume endeavour to find out what (new) types of data are most useful for what kind of contrastive questions, and which advanced statistical techniques are most suited to deal with the multidimensionality of contrastive research questions. Answers to these questions are provided through the contrastive analysis of various language pairs or groups, and a wide variety of phenomena situated at almost all linguistic levels. In sum, this book provides an update on new methodological and theoretical insights in empirical contrastive linguistics and will stimulate further research within this field.