https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/17699 2026-04-28T12:17:25Z 2026-04-28T12:17:25Z https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/51770 2026-03-13T14:54:15Z 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

Biased questions Trinh, Tue; Benz, Anton; Goodhue, Daniel; Yatsushiro, Kazuko; Krifka, Manfred Synopsis: Asking a question means, essentially, presenting the hearer with a set of propositions with the request that she choose from it those that are true. It is a well-known fact about natural language that questions can be "biased": the propositions presented are not all equal, so to speak. For example, the speaker's belief, or contextual evidence, might favor some against others. The formal means employed by grammar to express such biases have been of interest to linguists for a long time, and the investigation is still on-going. The contributions in this volume all pertain to biased questions. They grew out of talks presented at the workshop Biased Questions: Experimental Results and Theoretical Modelling, which took place at the Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft as part of the ERC project Speech Acts in Grammar and Discourse (SPAGAD). The papers are written by mostly senior researchers of different expertise who have previously published on the same topic, and explore this fascinating linguistic phenomenon from a variety of theoretical angles: pragmatics, semantics, syntax, phonology, psychology, and acquisition. The languages under discussion include Chinese, English, Hungarian, Russian, Turkish, and Vietnamese. The collection provides the reader with a rich set of data and several open issues for future research.

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z Parikh, Prashant https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/25954 2019-11-28T11:45:50Z 2019-01-01T00:00:00Z

Communication and content Parikh, Prashant Communication and content presents a comprehensive and foundational account of meaning based on new versions of situation theory and game theory. The literal and implied meanings of an utterance are derived from first principles assuming little more than the partial rationality of interacting agents. New analyses of a number of diverse phenomena – a wide notion of ambiguity and content encompassing phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and beyond, vagueness, convention and conventional meaning, indeterminacy, universality, the role of truth in communication, semantic change, translation, Frege’s puzzle of informative identities – are developed. Communication, speaker meaning, and reference are defined. Frege’s context and compositional principles are generalized and reconciled in a fixed-point principle, and a detailed critique of Grice, several aspects of Lewis, and some aspects of the Romantic conception of meaning are offered. Connections with other branches of linguistics, especially psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and natural language processing, are explored.

2019-01-01T00:00:00Z https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/28936 2020-11-24T02:10:45Z 2020-01-01T00:00:00Z

Demonstratives in discourse Åshild, Næss; Margetts, Anna; Treis, Yvonne This volume explores the use of demonstratives in the structuring and management of discourse, and their role as engagement expressions, from a crosslinguistic perspective. It seeks to establish which types of discourse-related functions are commonly encoded by demonstratives, beyond the well-established reference-tracking and deictic uses, and also investigates which members of demonstrative paradigms typically take on certain functions. Moreover, it looks at the roles of non-deictic demonstratives, that is, members of the paradigm which are dedicated e.g. to contrastive, recognitional, or anaphoric functions and do not express deictic distinctions. Several of the studies also focus on manner demonstratives, which have been little studied from a crosslinguistic perspective. The volume thus broadens the scope of investigation of demonstratives to look at how their core functions interact with a wider range of discourse functions in a number of different languages. The volume covers languages from a range of geographical locations and language families, including Cushitic and Mande languages in Africa, Oceanic and Papuan languages in the Pacific region, Algonquian and Guaykuruan in the Americas, and Germanic, Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages in the Eurasian region. It also includes two papers taking a broader typological approach to specific discourse functions of demonstratives.

2020-01-01T00:00:00Z Müller, Sonja https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/22010 2020-01-31T16:31:03Z 2018-01-01T00:00:00Z

Distribution und Interpretation von Modalpartikel-Kombinationen Müller, Sonja Gegenstand der Arbeit sind Modalpartikelkombinationen aus ja und doch, halt und eben sowie doch und auch. Basierend auf empirischen Untersuchungen (Akzeptabilitätsstudien, Korpusrecherchen) und einer formalen Modellierung der Bedeutung der Einzelpartikeln sowie ihrer Sequenzen im Rahmen des Diskursmodells nach Farkas & Bruce (2010) schlägt die Arbeit eine ikonische Erklärung der beobachteten Abfolgepräferenzen vor. Die Arbeit argumentiert, dass es sich hierbei um die unmarkierte Abfolge handelt, dass aber ebenfalls von einer markierten Sequenzierung auszugehen ist, die weniger akzeptabel bewertet wird, seltener und auf bestimmte Kontexte beschränkt ist. Diese Kontexte werden identifiziert und in die Ableitung der Präferenz integriert.; The subject of this piece of work is the combination of the modal particles ja and doch, halt and eben as well as doch and auch. Based on empirical investigation (acceptability studies, corpus searches) and a formal modelling of the meaning of the single particles as well as their sequences within the discourse model by Farkas & Bruce (2010), this work proposes an iconic explanation of the observed sequencing preferences. It is argued that the preferred sequences show the unmarked orders. However, one should act on the assumption that marked sequences exist as well. These are less acceptable, occur more infrequently and are restricted to certain contexts. These contexts are identified and integrated into the explanation of the preferences.

2018-01-01T00:00:00Z