Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen

Elusive Connectives. A Case Study on the Explicitness Dimension of Discourse Coherence

Abstract 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.

Big events, small clauses : the grammar of elaboration

Non-finite clause-like structures such as converb and participial constructions, depictive adjectivals, absolute and comitative small clauses are important means of enriching the description of the event or situation conjured up by the main verb; but they have not been studied in depth from that perspective. The present book takes up that challenge. It throws new light on the interface between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and presents new empirical findings based on parallel corpora involving English, German, Norwegian, French, Russian, Latin, and Ancient Greek.

Dreimal (nicht) dasselbe: Sprachliche Perspektivierung im Deutschen, Norwegischen und Englischen

Languages, even when closely related in structure and history, such as German, Norvegian and English, often differ in salient ways when encoding the same content. This is partly due to certain normative traditions (»Avoid long sentences!«), but more importantly to parametric variation in the structural potential of these languages. This paper reports results from a large project on language contrasts (SPRIK, University of Oslo). It examines 13 typological contrasts between German, English and Norvegian, such as existence of a Progressive or a Subjunctive, verb position, richness of prenominal adjuncts, and others. Some of these are absolute, most however are gradual. It is then shown how these contrasts influence and sometimes determine the particular form of translations across the three languages: in their entirety, they lead to a language-specific perspectivation of the content to be expressed.

Understanding Coordinate Clauses: A Cross-Linguistic Experimental Approach

The present article provides evidence suggesting that general pragmatic accounts of orderliness in the temporal interpretation of VP coordination may be somewhat biased by the choice of typically script-based (con)sequential examples. Most of the discussion in the literature has been based on examples from a single language, mostly relying on the intuitions of the author(s) of the paper. On the basis of a cross-linguistic, empirical approach to language understanding, we have tested different language speakers’ preferred interpretation of the temporal relation holding in contextualized VP conjunctive sentences that are pragmatically not typically consequential or resultative. Under these conditions, our results show a preference for temporal overlap interpretations across languages. We also find that language-specific properties modify this general bias, thus supporting a competition-based account of relating form to meaning.

''Moody time''. Indikativ und Konjunktiv im deutschen Tempussystem

SummaryThe German tense-mood system encodes the location of situations with regard to three dimensions — time, world, and (speaker) perspective. It is shown that the system is not semantically compositional, in particular, the semantic contribution of a particular tense form varies with the mood it cooccurs with. Thus, the interpretation of the formal morphological category ‚Praeteritum‘ deviates from the default interpretation of the ‚Praesens‘ in general, but the precise nature of the deviation is only determined in combination with its mood. In indicative clauses it expresses deviation in the temporal dimension; in subjunctive clauses it expresses deviation from the speaker’s perspective, taking over the perspective of some other individual, or from the actual world. Perfect constructions, however, invariably express anteriority with respect to their corresponding simple tense forms. Hence, they provide the possibility to express anteriority in subjunctive clauses.

Referring Expressions in Speech Reports

When choosing among various referring expressions, speakers typically choose a form that reflects the audience’s mental representation of the intended referent. For instance, a speaker will most likely use a definite rather than indefinite description when introducing an entity that the addressee can uniquely identify. However, also considerations other than referent accessibility and the mental state of the addressee may affect the choice of nominal form. For instance, in a speech report such as Mary asked whether he had seen a dog, the choice of the expression a dog is influenced by the speaker’s intention to truthfully report on what was originally communicated as well as considerations about the representation of the referent in the mental model of the present addressee—and more than one nominal form may be valid. This paper reports on a pen-and-pencil experiment conducted to test how specific indefinites are reported on in direct and indirect speech in the four languages Czech, English, German, and Norwegian. The experiment supports the claim that indirect speech allows for a wider range of nominal forms than direct speech when the speaker reports on a speech event that originally contained a specific indefinite. Nevertheless, the study shows that the subjects prefer to use an indefinite description to report on a specific indefinite in indirect speech, even though also other forms are valid. This suggests that speaker’s effort, and not only hearer’s processing cost, may be crucial for the choice of nominal form. The comparison of the four languages reveals that general cognitive constraints related to reference assignment interact with language-specific conditions; examples are constraints on discourse type and considerations of processing economy following from the language’s lexical and morpho-syntactic inventory.

Introduction: Meaning Across Languages

In this chapter, we will introduce the basic research questions spanning all chapters in this volume: How do we ‘encode’ complex thoughts into linguistic signals, how do we interpret such signals in appropriate ways, and to what extent is what we encode constrained at the outset by the particular language we grow up with? We will introduce recent developments of an experimental approach to linguistics and argue for the necessity of cross-linguistic experimental paradigms for linguistic research at the interface of syntax, semantics and pragmatics.

Psycholinguistic approaches to meaning and understanding across languages

Foreword by Bart Geurts.- Chapter 1: Introduction: Meaning across Languages By Barbara Hemforth, Barbara Mertins, Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen.- Chapter 2: Understanding Coordinate Clauses: A Cross-Linguistic Experimental Approach By Bergljot Behrens, Barbara Mertins, Barbara Hemforth, and Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen.- Chapter 3: Pairing Form and Meaning in English and Norwegian: Conjoined VPs or Conjoined Clauses? By Bergljot Behrens, Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen, Lyn Frazier.- Chapter 4: Cross-linguistic Variation in the Processing of Aspect By Oliver Bott, Fritz Hamm.- Chapter 5: Referring Expressions in Speech Reports By Kaja Borthen, Barbara Hemforth, Barbara Mertins, Bergljot Behrens, Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen.- Chapter 6: The Role of Grammaticality Judgments Within an Integral Approach to Brazilian Portuguese Bare Nominals By Albert Wall.- Chapter 7: Information Structure and Pronoun Resolution in German and French: Evidence from the Visual-world Paradigm By Saveria Colonna, Sarah Schimke, Barbara Hemforth.- Chapter 8: Conversational Implicatures in Anaphora Resolution: Alternative Constructions and Referring Expressions By Peter Baumann, Lars Konieczny, Barbara Hemforth.- Chapter 9: From Verbs to Discourse: A Novel Account of Implicit Causality By Oliver Bott, Torgrim Solstad.

Pairing Form and Meaning in English and Norwegian: Conjoined VPs or Conjoined Clauses?

Conjoined VPs and conjoined clauses with co-referential subjects often seem interchangeable. Two comprehension studies, each conducted in both English and Norwegian, investigated which conjoined structure is preferred under given conditions. With adversative, or concessive, relations, conjoined clauses were preferred in both languages; with simple cause-result relations, conjoined VPs were preferred in both languages. These effects were more pronounced in Norwegian, where an overt or empty frame-setting adverbial must be taken to scope over both conjuncts of a conjoined VP but not over both conjuncts of a conjoined clause (whereas in English an overt or a covert frame-setting adverbial ambiguously scopes over either both clauses or just the first clause). A separate experiment investigated the preferred temporal interpretation for conjoined structures in English and Norwegian.

Ein Parallelkorpus im Einsatz: grammatische Variation im Bereich der Satzverbindung und Informationsverteilung (Deutsch – Norwegisch – Englisch/Französisch)

Am Beispiel des an der Universitat Oslo entwickelten Oslo Multilingual Corpus (OMC) wird illustriert, wie ein Parallelkorpus aus Originaltexten und deren Ubersetzungen zur sprachvergleichenden Erforschung von Phanomenen der Satzverbindung und der Informationsverteilung auf Satz- und Textebene eingesetzt werden kann. Nach einer Skizze der OMC-Architektur wird eine Untersuchung von Satzverknupfungen mit dem komitativen Konnektor „wobei“ und deren Entsprechungen in norwegischen Ubersetzungen und Originaltexten vorgestellt, die dazu beitragt, Bedeutungsfacetten dieses Konnektors aufzuzeigen, die in rein intralingualen Studien nicht so einfach zu erkennen sind, und dadurch einen besseren und systematischeren Einblick in die angewandten Ubersetzungsstrategien gibt. Als zweites Einsatzbeispiel wird eine explorative Untersuchung zur Elaborierung von Ereignisbeschreibungen vorgestellt, die deutsche, norwegische, englische und franzosische Entsprechungen von „mit“-Konstruktionen (sog. „Satzchen“) als Ausgangspunkt nimmt. Beide Studien illustrieren, dass ein Parallelkorpus auch ohne komplexe Annotierungen nicht nur fur wort-basierte quantitative Untersuchungen verwertet werden, sondern auch im Zuge weniger zielgerichteter, eher qualitativ angelegter Studien als „Augenoffner“ fur komplexe linguistische Phanomene dienen kann.