In the research of focus on intonation languages, it is generally assumed that the stress not only signals the focus but also contributes to the different truth condition in sentences containing focus particle only. This phenomenon is known as ¡¥association with focus¡¦ (Jackendoff, 1972; Rooth, 1985, 1992, among others). However, this phenomenon has not been comprehensively studied in tonal languages such as Chinese. To further investigate whether the stress signals the focus in triadic sentences with zhi ¡¥only¡¦ and whether there is a preferred default focus interpretation, the study probes into the issue with respect to younger participants, i.e., teenagers in junior high schools. The study contains triadic sentences such as dative construction, double object construction and ba construction. Participants were asked to choose the focus which zhi ¡¥only¡¦ is associated with in a multiple choice questionnaire after the stories and test sentences were shown by a powerpoint file in the computer. There were three experiments in this study. In Experiment 1, 116 participants in the regular classes judged a contrastive stress awareness task and a modified Truth Value Judgment (TVJ) Task. Experiment 2 (TVJ task only) followed Experiment 1 except for using unfamiliar Cartoon figures. Experiment 3 (the contrastive stress awareness task and the TVJ task) reduplicated Experiment 2 in English. The participants in Experiment 2 and 3 were the same 30 participants in the gifted class. The results, first, further confirmed that even though Chinese teenagers were aware of the contrastive stress, they did not use it for disambiguating sentences with zhi ¡¥only¡¦ in both Chinese and English. Second, the participants tended not to choose the default wide VP focus but narrow focus. However, contrary to the default narrow DO focus that Chinese adult speakers preferred, the teenager participants favored the narrow focus which usually falls on the neutral stress (sentence-final) position. The phenomenon is even more salient in ba construction. Third, in English, contrastive stress was not used for disambiguation although they were aware of the stress. The interpretation of English focus particle only was similar to that of Chinese, so it was ascribed to L1 transfer.

Avatime, a Kwa language of Ghana, has an additive particle tsyɛ that at first sight looks similar to additive particles such as too and also in English. However, on closer inspection, the Avatime particle behaves differently. Contrary to what is usually claimed about additive particles, tsyɛ does not only associate with focused elements. Moreover, unlike its English equivalents, tsyɛ does not come with a requirement of identity between the expressed proposition and an alternative. Instead, it indicates that the proposition it occurs in is similar to or compatible with a presupposed alternative proposition.

This paper deals with Kiezdeutsch, a way of speaking that emerged among adolescents in multiethnic urban neighbourhoods of Germany. We show that, in Kiezdeutsch, we find evidence for both grammatical reduction and new developments in the domain of information structure, and hypothesise that this points to a systematic interaction between grammar and information structure, between weakened grammatical constraints and a more liberal realisation of information-structural preferences. We show that Kiezdeutsch can serve as an interesting test case for such an interaction, that this youth language is a multiethnolect, that is, a new variety that is spoken by speakers from a multitude of ethnic backgrounds, including German, and forms a dynamic linguistic system of its own, thus allowing for systematic developments on grammatical levels and their interfaces with extragrammatical domains.

Im Zentrum der Arbeit steht die Frage, wie sechsjährige monolingual deutsche Kinder Sätze mit der Fokuspartikel nur interpretieren. In 5 Experimenten wurde untersucht, welchen Einfluss die Oberflächenposition der Fokuspartikel auf das Satzverständnis hat und ob die kontextuelle Einbettung der nur-Sätze zu einer zielsprachlichen Interpretation führt. Im Gegensatz zu den Ergebnissen bisheriger Studien (u.a. Crain, et al. 1994; Paterson et al. 2003) zeigen die Daten der Arbeit, dass die getesteten Kinder die präsentierten nur-Sätze zielsprachlich interpretierten, wenn diese in einen adäquaten Kontext eingebettet waren. Es zeigte sich weiterhin, dass die Kinder mehr Fehler bei der Interpretation von Sätzen mit nur vor dem Subjekt (Nur die Maus hat einen Ball.) als mit nur vor dem Objekt (Die Maus hat nur einen Ball.) machten. Entgegen dem syntaktisch basierten Ansatz von Crain et al. (1994) und dem semantisch-pragmatisch basierten Ansatz von Paterson et al. (2003) werden in der Arbeit informationsstrukturelle Eigenschaften bzw. Unterschiede der nur-Sätze für die beobachteten Leistungen verantwortlich gemacht. Der in der Arbeit postulierte Topik-Default Ansatz nimmt an, dass die Kinder das Subjekt eines Satzes immer als Topik analysieren. Dies führt im Fall der Sätze mit nur vor dem Subjekt zu einer falschen informationsstrukturellen Repräsentation des Satzes. Basierend auf den Ergebnissen der Arbeit und dem postulierten Topik-Default Ansatz wird in der Arbeit abschließend ein Erwerbsmodell für das Verstehen von Sätzen mit der Fokuspartikel nur entworfen und diskutiert. / Challenging previous accounts of children’s comprehension of focus particles, this study investigated how 6-year-old, German-speaking children interpret sentences with the focus particle nur(‘only’). Five experiments examined 1) whether the surface position of the focus particle has an impact on the sentence comprehension and 2) which role an adequate context plays for a target-like interpretation of a nur-sentence. It is known that in English, up to age 7, sentences with only are not interpreted adult-like. Crain et al. (1992) attributed errors to incorrect scope restrictions of the FP; Paterson et al. (2003) argued that children do not process the contrast information and instead ignore the FP. As oppose to previous research, the present data showed that German-speaking children interpret nur-sentences target-like if the sentences were contextually embedded. Furthermore, the results showed that children performed better on nur-object sentences like Die Maus hat nur einen Ball (‘The mouse has only a ball.’) than on nur-subject sentences like Nur die Maus hat einen Ball. (‘Only the mouse has a ball.’). This study argues that the asymmetry in the interpretation of nur-sentences stems from information-structural characteristics. In particular, I postulate the topic-default account which claims that children recognize the subject of the sentence as the topic by default. As a consequence, children assign an incorrect information structure to sentences with nur before the subject. Finally, based on the empirical findings of this study and on the topic-default account, an acquisition model for the comprehension of sentences with the focus particle nur is developed and discussed.