A Diachronic Perspective on Evaluative Adverbs in German: The Case of leider

Summary The concepts of structural vs. interpretive ambiguity were examined, and the measures of each were defined using the 45 blots of the Holtzman Inkblot Test (HIT). The ambiguity measures were taken from two distinct sets of four student samples with diverse cultural backgrounds. Structural ambiguity ratings were also made by a sample of professional psychologists. The nature and degree of relationship between the structural and interpretive ambiguity measures was determined for each of the four cultural groups, and the extent of agreement among the groups was obtained for both measures. Findings indicated that the nature of the relationship between the two measures is an inverse one, with blots rated low in structural ambiguity receiving high interpretive scores and vice versa. Results showed high agreement among the student samples, as well as with the sample of psychologists, regarding the structural measure, and substantial agreement was also found among the student samples on the interpretive me...

It has been known since Barbiers (2001) that genoeg ‘enough’ can turn predicate adverbs into sentence adverbs. When genoeg occurs in a sentence adverbial phrase, it is syntactically obligatory, but makes little to no semantic contribution: (1) Kees heeft gek *(genoeg) niet gek genoeg gedanst. Kees has weird *(enough) not weird enough danced ‘Weirdly, Kees didn’t dance weirdly enough.’ In this paper, I analyse the external and internal syntax of such enough support adverbs. Using Cinque’s (1999) adverbial hierarchy, I observe that enough support splits into subject-oriented and evaluative adverbs. Next, I nuance the accepted theory that genoeg in adverbial phrases is an affix: only enough support is a full-fledged affix; regular enough is an affixoid. Finally, I analyse the internal syntax of enough support. I suggest that a Sentence Predicate Projection is needed for the formation of sentence adverbials.

With the deepening research on syntactic structural ambiguity and prosodic phonetics, the role of prosodic focus in the resolution of syntactic ambiguity has become a key topic in phonetic studies. Using The Mother of Three Children as an example, this study analyzes the relationship between prosodic focus and syntactic ambiguity through acoustic and perceptual experiments. The research aims to bridge the gap in understanding how prosodic focus functions in the differentiation of syntactic ambiguity and to explore its influence on ambiguity interpretation in real-world contexts. The experimental results indicate that variations in prosodic focus can, to some extent, facilitate the resolution of syntactic ambiguity. In the syntactic structure of The Mother of Three Children, different prosodic foci significantly affect ambiguity interpretation. This study not only enriches the theoretical understanding of syntactic ambiguity and prosodic focus but also provides empirical evidence for ambiguity resolution in language processing. By examining the interaction between prosody and syntax, this research offers new perspectives and insights for studies in phonetics, syntax, and language comprehension.

We aimed to tackle the question about the time course of plausibility effect in on-line processing of Chinese nouns in temporarily ambiguous structures, and whether L2ers can immediately use the plausibility information generated from classifier-noun associations in analyzing ambiguous structures. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to explore how native Chinese speakers (Experiment 1) and high-proficiency Dutch-Chinese learners (Experiment 2) on-line process 4-character novel noun-noun combinations in Chinese. In each pair of nominal phrases (Numeral+Classifier+Noun1+Noun2), the plausibility of Classifier-Noun1 varied (plausible vs. implausible) while the whole nominal phrases were always plausible. Results showed that the plausibility of Classifier-Noun1 associations had an immediate effect on Noun1, and a reversed effect on Noun2 for both groups of participants. These findings indicated that plausibility plays an immediate role in incremental semantic integration during on-line processing of Chinese. Similar to native Chinese speakers, high-proficiency L2ers can also use the plausibility information of classifier-noun associations in syntactic reanalysis.

It is widely believed that syntactic and semantic ambiguities, such as the scope of negation and quantifiers, the association of focus sensitive operators, and the attachment of prepositional phrases, adverbials, and relative clauses can be disambiguated intonationally (Jackendoff, 1972;Bolinger, 1989;Renzi, 1988). While there has been some experimental investigation of the role prosody plays in influencing hearers’ interpretation of certain syntactic ambiguities in English (Altenberg, 1987;Beach, 1991;Price, Shattuck-Hufnagel & Fong, 1991, there has been little empirical study of these phenomena in other languages, and even less cross linguistic research. In this paper we present results of a study designed to compare the mechanisms speakers employ to disambiguate syntactically and semantically ambiguous utterances in English and Italian. We wanted to discover, first, whether phenomena believed to be intonationally disambiguable would be so disambiguated by naive subjects. Second, we wanted to see whether speakers of two languages in which prosodic features such as phrasing and pitch accent can be freely varied to convey differences in meaning would use those features similarly or not.

In this chapter, I will propose a new account for the question of why only some local syntactic ambiguities lead to strong garden-path effects whereas others do not. This account is based on the observation that readers do not only compute syntactic structures during reading but also prosodic structures. These prosodic structures are a product of the process of phonological coding which normally accompanies silent reading. Due to the lack of a one-to-one mapping between syntactic and prosodic structures, recovery from a syntactic misanalysis may be accompanied by the need to replace the original prosodic structure or not. According to the prosodic constraint on reanalysis, the need to revise the original prosodic structure makes recovery from a syntactic misanalysis difficult. Empirical evidence for this claim comes from a series of three self-paced reading experiments which investigated the German variant of the English her-ambiguity. These experiments manipulated the prosodic structure of sentences by inserting focus operators (focus particles, sentence adverbials) into locally ambiguous sentences. Thereby it became possible to independently determine the contributions of syntactic and prosodic factors to reanalysis. The results show that for the ambiguitiy examined, garden-path effects can be predicted on prosodic grounds but not on syntactic grounds. This finding supports the claim that for certain kinds of syntactic ambiguities reanalysis is prosodically constrained.

A central topic in sentence comprehension research is the kinds of information and mechanisms involved in resolving temporary ambiguity regarding the syntactic structure of a sentence. Gaze patterns in scenes during spoken sentence comprehension have provided strong evidence that visual scenes trigger rapid syntactic reanalysis. However, they have also been interpreted as reflecting nonlinguistic, visual processes. Furthermore, little is known as to whether similar processes of syntactic revision are triggered by linguistic versus scene cues. To better understand how scenes influence comprehension and its time course, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) during the comprehension of spoken sentences that relate to depicted events. Prior electrophysiological research has observed a P600 when structural disambiguation toward a noncanonical structure occurred during reading and in the absence of scenes. We observed an ERP component with a similar latency, polarity, and distribution when depicted events disambiguated toward a noncanonical structure. The distributional similarities further suggest that scenes are on a par with linguistic contexts in triggering syntactic revision. Our findings confirm the interpretation of previous eye movement studies and highlight the benefits of combining ERP and eye-tracking measures to ascertain the neuronal processes enabled by, and the locus of attention in, visual contexts.

This article addresses the semantic and morphosyntactic development of the German evidential adverbsoffensichtlich, offenbar, anscheinend, andscheinbar‘obviously’/‘apparently’/‘seemingly’ and their meaning contribution in present-day German. It will be argued that these expressions, most of which are historically derived from adjectives, innovated separate lexical entries as sentence adverbs in New High German resulting from a morphosyntactic reanalysis of an ambiguous surface structure. This reanalysis was accompanied by a profound semantic change, as a result of which the expressions acquired a wide-scope reading of the type ‘there is (clear) evidence that p’. The diachronic results are corroborated by experimental data from Present-Day German that show that these evidential sentence adverbs are underspecified with respect to evidence type (inference and report). The diachronic and synchronic findings are furthermore discussed in the light of grammaticalization and subjectification theory.

In a self-paced reading study on German sluicing, Paape (Paape, 2016) found that reading times were shorter at the ellipsis site when the antecedent was a temporarily ambiguous garden-path structure. As a post-hoc explanation of this finding, Paape assumed that the antecedent’s memory representation was reactivated during syntactic reanalysis, making it easier to retrieve. In two eye tracking experiments, we subjected the reactivation hypothesis to further empirical scrutiny. Experiment 1, carried out in French, showed no evidence in favor in the reactivation hypothesis. Instead, results for one out of the three types of garden-path sentences that were tested suggest that subjects sometimes failed to resolve the temporary ambiguity in the antecedent clause, and subsequently failed to resolve the ellipsis. The results of Experiment 2, a conceptual replication of Paape’s (Paape, 2016) original study carried out in German, are compatible with the reactivation hypothesis, but leave open the possibility that the observed speedup for ambiguous antecedents may be due to occasional retrievals of an incorrect structure.

The present paper deals, at the theoretical level, with the role of context in the interpretation of ambiguity in syntactically homonymous constructs in the Bosnian language, where two opposing opinions conflict: that syntactic ambiguity is only a theoretical construct, that it is annulled in the context and that it does not exist in practice as a result (which would make it irrelevant for studying); or, that the presence and knowledge of the context does not have to be relevant for the interpretation of ambiguity, because in that interpretation, then, the role of the context would be measured, not the syntactic or semantic features of the language that primarily affect the interpretation of the language expression. Here, the author comes to the conclusion that syntactic homonymy can be studied separately from the context and that the characteristic of homonymy is immanent to a sentence as such; therefore, homonymy is bound to the sentence structure, not the context.

Summary: This study investigated the role that the structure of a diagnostic instrument plays in the assessment of personality functioning. Empirical studies have shown that the cards of the Rorschach and Holtzman Inkblot Technique (HIT) vary significantly with regard to their structure. Thus, it was possible to investigate if cards of high vs. low structure tend to elicit specific diagnostically useful responses. For this purpose, samples of normals (n = 30), patients with neurotic disorders (n = 30), borderline patients (n = 30), acute schizophrenics (n = 25), and chronic schizophrenics (n = 25) were studied with the HIT. For each diagnostic group it was examined if cards of high vs. low structure tended to elicit more thought disordered responses, hostility, and anxiety according to the HIT scoring system. With regard to structure, two aspects were differentiated, structural vs. interpretative ambiguity of the HIT cards. In all nonschizophrenic groups, cards of high structural ambiguity elicited significantly less thought disordered responses. By contrast, cards of high interpretative ambiguity elicited more thought disordered responses, anxiety, and hostility in all groups except the chronic schizophrenics. The measures of structural vs. interpretative ambiguity of the HIT cards showed a negative correlation in all diagnostic groups. According to these results, both aspects of ambiguity and their interplay play an important role in the assessment of psychopathology, at least within the range of ambiguity represented by the inkblots of the HIT.

Translation debates have continued to be passionately argued. The study of the connection between philosophy and translation on the one hand and ambiguity in translation on the other hand have both been growing. The connection between philosophy and translation is unavoidable and inevitable. Notwithstanding, philosophers have not tackled the question of translation directly; translation in general has been tackled indirectly by some philosophers. Ambiguity in translation is a fertile field to investigate. Translation of some written sentences is problematic since they are translated from different contexts in culture. This paper aims to (1) study the connection between philosophy and translation on the one hand, and then (2) connect the philosophical interpretation of ambiguous sentences and their effect on the translation from English into Arabic. This paper also aims at (3) discussing the question that is hissing in the translator’s mind in order to translate an ambiguous sentence: whether to lean on syntactic or semantic dis-ambiguation. As a result, this paper hypothesizes that lexemes meaning, interpretation, and thus translation is not only sentence bound but clear cotext and context bound. Therefore, to test this hypothesis, in my research, the study selects some sentences from some research and dictionaries which are believed to be ambiguous. The examples I have selected may not cover all ambiguous English sentences, for ambiguous sentences are still turning up, however, I have tried to cover frequently used sentences. I will look at some common difficulties in the interpretation of lexical items. Then, the ambiguity of these sentences will be removed by using these sentences with the same ambiguous lexemes in clear cotext and context. After removing the ambiguity, the sentences will be translated into Arabic to show the impact of both cotext and context on translation.

Nominalizing reduplication in American Sign Language (ASL) is an ambiguous process that can derive both concrete object- and result-denoting nominals. The properties of this nominalization process, including this ambiguity, are accounted for here by appealing to the discrete and surface transparent morphology that the language uses to encode components of event (Wilbur 2003, 2010) and argument (Benedicto & Brentari 2004) structure. Nominalizing reduplication is shown to be a process that nominalizes (and reduplicates) only the low portion of verbal structure responsible for encoding the event result (VPres). Direct nominalization of this VPres constituent yields nominals with result-denoting interpretations. Concrete object-denoting interpretations may arise when the verbal structure contains an argument classifier, which is evident in the handshape of the verbal predicate. In such cases, the nominal argument introduced by the classifier serves as the input to (reduced) relative clause formation, yielding a concrete object-denoting interpretation. The interpretive ambiguity is thus reduced to ambiguity in the syntactic structure underlying the derived nominal. This approach falls in line with longstanding structural approaches to nominalization and more recent proposals regarding processes of reduplication (Inkelas & Zoll 2005).

In this chapter I discuss the close links between first-pass syntactic analysis and reanalysis. Throughout, the focus is on the role of structural factors in sentence comprehension. Following Gorrell (1995a), I argue that the parser incrementally applies an important principle of grammar, the principle of economy of representation. This yields a general preference for minimal structure. Further, I argue that structure building operations are constrained by Structural Determinism (SD) and Right-edge Availability (REA). A number of structural ambiguities in English and German are discussed. In addition, the proposal of Phillips (1995) that the preference for local attachment has priority over the preference for minimal structure is examined. I argue that the examples used to support this view do not, in fact, require the parser to prefer local to minimal attachments. The Diagnosis Model of Fodor and Inoue (1994) is also discussed and I argue that such a model does not obviate the need for structural constraints in reanalysis. Further, attention to the details of syntactic structure shows the important role played not only by SD and REA but also by specific properties of the phrase marker in the reanalysis process. For example, the insights of the Diagnosis Model, in conjunction with specific properties of the structure computed, leads to a detailed account of the parser’s inability to correctly resolve English reduced-relative ambiguities.

This study aims to investigate the role of rhythm and intonation in syntactic description in English, arguing for the influences of rhythm and intonation on the use or choice of syntactic structures. Rhythmic alternation between stressed and unstressed syllables has an important influence on determining syntactic word order, especially on the choice of genitives, binomials, a-adjectives, and double objective construction in which English speakers tend to prefer eurhythmic structures without stress clashes and lapses. Intonation can also significantly affect disambiguation of syntactic ambiguities in coordinated structures, relative clauses, reporting clauses, sentence adverbials, to-infinitive structures, vocatives, and appositions. It is necessary for English teachers to make students understand the role of rhythm and intonation that affect the interpretation of syntactic structures, by giving a wide range of examples of English phrases and sentences.