This study explores how demonstratives (e.g. this and that in English) are used spatially and temporally in the sample languages. In English, for example, this and that are used for spatial reference as in this room or that room, and they are also used for temporal reference as in this day or that day. This study also investigates how the equivalents of English here, there, now and then (demonstrative adverbs) are morphologically formed, syntactically constructed and semantically contrasted in various languages. / The three research questions addressed are: (i) What formal types of demonstratives are identifiable in my sample of languages?, (ii) Are temporal demonstratives found in all three syntactic positions (adnominal, pronominal and adverbial) in every language of the sample?; (iii) Are the semantic contrasts of temporal demonstratives the same as those of the spatial demonstratives? / English and another fifteen languages from diverse language families and linguistic areas were selected as the sample. I describe the demonstratives of these languages in terms of morphological, syntactic and semantic features. The dissertation also includes a general discussion on the relationship between space and time through the specific example of the spatial and temporal uses of the demonstratives. / The main results are as follows. All the sample language have spatial demonstratives; the temporal use of the demonstratives is also identifiable in at least one syntactic construction in each language; and the distance contrasts of spatial demonstratives are preserved in the temporal use in at least one of these constructions and in several languages in all three. These results are explained metaphorization -- i.e., by understanding a more abstract domain (time) through a more concrete one (space). / By way of exploring the specific referential range of the demonstrative 'this', an experiment was conducted examining the use of 'this' in Korean and English. The results show that the semantic range of 'this' depends on the differential concept of the week in the two calendric systems.

This thesis studies the variable placement of the prepositional dative construction (PDC) in varieties of Mandarin Chinese. In Mandarin, the PDC can appear either in the pre- or postverbal preposition. However, the postverbal PDC is an apparent violation of the Postverbal Constraint in Chinese syntax. I therefore propose that the postverbal PDC is in fact a representation of verb duplication---a phonetically empty verb is duplicated between the direct object and the postverbal PDC. I also argue that the placement of the PDC is influenced by the speaker's home vernacular, other local varieties of Mandarin, and social factors, including gender, age of first contact, social network, and subjective language attitude. / In support of the claim, empirical data were collected through a survey, which consisted of and was conducted in the order of the following sections: elicitation task, grammatical judgment test, and demographic questions. The data suggests that at the production level, substrate influence of speakers' home vernacular is crucial in deciding the placement of PDC---Northerners showed significantly higher preference for the preverbal PDC than their Southern counterparts. However, social factors have a stronger influence at the perception level. Regular exposure to Taiwanese television programs may account for the high level of acceptance for the postverbal PDC across dialect areas in Mainland China. In conclusion, regional varieties of Mandarin are not only influenced by local vernaculars but also other social factors, including the competing region-wide influences of Mainland Standard Mandarin and Taiwanese Mandarin.

Auszug: Lange Zeit hat die Spracherwerbsforschung den Erwerb des syntaktischen Wissens in den Mittelpunkt gestellt, da Syntax als humanspezifisch angesehen und somit als der zentrale Bereich von Sprache verstanden wurde. Auch ein aktueller Aufsatz von Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch (2002) setzt die Sprachfähigkeit im engeren Sinne („language faculty narrow“) mit dem in der Syntax gegebenen Rekursionsmechanismus gleich. Syntax, so die Autoren weiter, konnte bislang noch keinem subhumanen Primaten beigebracht werden, wohingegen ein Erwerb von Wörtern bereits belegt wurde. So lernte beispielsweise der Bonobo Kanzi knapp 600 Begriffe (Savage-Rumbaughh & Lewin 1994). Lässt sich daraus ableiten, dass Wörter im Rahmen der menschlichen Sprachfähigkeit weniger wichtig sind als das syntaktische Wissen? Sind Wörter letztendlich nur „Zierrat“ an einem rein syntaktischen Sprachgebäude? [...]

Auszug: Seit langem ist bekannt, dass Kinder mit Sprachentwicklungsstörungen meist schon in einem frühen Stadium ihrer Sprachentwicklung auffallen: die ersten Wörter werden verspätet produziert, der Wortschatz wächst langsamer an, der Vokabularspurt setzt verzögert ein oder bleibt aus, so dass das produktive Vokabular mit zwei Jahren weniger als 50 Wörter umfasst. Außerdem treten keine Wortkombinationen auf. Obwohl bei nahezu jeder Sprachentwicklungs-störung retrospektiv derartige frühe Anzeichen auszumachen sind, mündet andererseits nicht jede frühe Verzögerung in eine anhaltende Störung. Diese Beobachtung hat Anlass zu einer regen Forschungstätigkeit gegeben. Im Zentrum steht die Frage, anhand welcher Kriterien sich der weitere Entwicklungsverlauf eines sprachlich verzögerten Kindes prognostizieren lässt. Der Forschungsstand zu diesem Bereich wurde an anderer Stelle bereits ausführlich beschrieben (z. B. in Kauschke 2000, 2003, 2006a). In diesem Beitrag möchte ich die Entwicklungswege dieser Population anhand aktueller Studien skizzieren, die Problematik der Prädiktion ansprechen und eine Studie über Sprachentwicklungsverläufe im dritten Lebensjahr vorstellen, in der ungestörte Kinder und sprachlich verzögerte längsschnittlich beobachtet wurden. Es folgen Überlegungen zur Therapienotwendigkeit und Therapiekonzeption, die durch die Darstellung eines exemplarischen Therapieverlaufs bei einem Einzelfall illustriert werden. [...]

In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of our first version of the database "ANNIS" ("ANNotation of Information Structure"). For research based on empirical data, ANNIS provides a uniform environment for storing this data together with its linguistic annotations. A central database promotes standardized annotation, which facilitates interpretation and comparison of the data. ANNIS is used through a standard web browser and offers tier-based visualization of data and annotations, as well as search facilities that allow for cross-level and cross-sentential queries. The paper motivates the design of the system, characterizes its user interface, and provides an initial technical evaluation of ANNIS with respect to data size and query processing.

This paper describes the creation and preparation of TUSNELDA, a collection of corpus data built for linguistic research. <br>This collection contains a number of linguistically annotated corpora which differ in various aspects such as language, text sorts / data types, encoded annotation levels, and linguistic theories underlying the annotation. <br>The paper focuses on this variation on the one hand and the way how these heterogeneous data are integrated into one resource on the other hand.

This paper describes the standardization problems that come up in a diachronic corpus: it has to cope with differing standards with regard to diplomaticity, annotation, and header information. <br> Such highly het-erogeneous texts must be standardized to allow for comparative re-search without (too much) loss of information.

In this paper, we present the Multiple Annotation approach, which solves two problems: the problem of annotating overlapping structures, and the problem that occurs when documents should be annotated according to different, possibly heterogeneous tag sets. <br>This approach has many advantages: it is based on XML, the modeling of alternative annotations is possible, each level can be viewed separately, and new levels can be added at any time. The files can be regarded as an interrelated unit, with the text serving as the implicit link. Two representations of the information contained in the multiple files (one in Prolog and one in XML) are described. These representations serve as a base for several applications.

Fronting of an infinite VP across a finite main verb-akin to German "VP-topicalization"-can be found also in Czech and Polish. <br>The paper discusses evidence from large corpora for this process and some of its properties, both syntactic and information-structural. <br>Based on this case, criteria for more user-friedly searching and retrieval of corpus data in syntactic research are being developed.

This paper discusses the use of XSLT stylesheets as a filtering mechanism for refining the results of user queries on treebanks. <br>The discussion is within the context of the TIGER treebank, the associated search engine and query language, but the general ideas can apply to any search engine for XML-encoded treebanks. <br>It will be shown that important classes of linguistic phenomena can be accessed by applying relatively simple XSLT templates to the output of a query, effectively simulating the universal quantifier for a subset of the query language. uni-potsdam.de/cgi-bin/publika/view.pl?id=206">