Discourse deixis and null anaphora in German
The main aim of this thesis is to provide insight into the interaction of the syntactic and pragmatic properties of German, particularly with respect to the issue of configurationality. This language is particularly difficult to classify as it displays both subject-object asymmetries (a feature of ~configurational~ languages), but also has a topic position (a feature of ~discourse-configurational~ languages). In order to avoid the difficulties with subtle acceptability judgements from informants, the study presented here is based on a frequency analysis of word order variation in spoken language corpora. In the first part, I concentrate on the initial problem in German main clauses, which is traditionally referred to as the topic position, and using a task-oriented corpus provide the statistics for the following: - The frequency of the different grammatical functions in initial position, in order to determine the relative frequency of the canonical SVO word order. - The frequency of the different NP-forms (null anaphora, pronouns, demonstratives, definite and indefinite NPs) in initial position, which are each associated with a particular cognitive status, thus giving insight into the precise nature of the
Eckert, Miriam
Discourse deixis and null anaphora in German. The main aim of this thesis is to provide insight into the interaction of the syntactic and pragmatic properties of German, particularly with respect to the issue of configurationality. This language is particularly difficult to classify as it displays both subject-object asymmetries (a feature of ~configurational~ languages), but also has a topic position (a feature of ~discourse-configurational~ languages). In order to avoid the difficulties with subtle acceptability judgements from informants, the study presented here is based on a frequency analysis of word order variation in spoken language corpora. In the first part, I concentrate on the initial problem in German main clauses, which is traditionally referred to as the topic position, and using a task-oriented corpus provide the statistics for the following: - The frequency of the different grammatical functions in initial position, in order to determine the relative frequency of the canonical SVO word order. - The frequency of the different NP-forms (null anaphora, pronouns, demonstratives, definite and indefinite NPs) in initial position, which are each associated with a particular cognitive status, thus giving insight into the precise nature of the
discourse deixis null anaphora german main_aim provide_insight interaction syntactic pragmatic property german particularly_respect issue language particularly difficult classify display subject_object asymmetry feature configurational languages also topic position feature discourse configurational language order_avoid difficulty subtle acceptability_judgement informant study present base frequency analysis word_order variation speak_language corpus first_part concentrate initial problem german main clause traditionally refer topic position use task_oriented corpus provide statistic follow frequency different grammatical_function initial_position order_determine relative frequency canonical svo word_order frequency different forms null anaphora pronoun demonstrative definite indefinite nps initial_position associate particular cognitive status thus give_insight precise_nature