Adverbial reinforcement of demonstratives in dialectal German

A Cross-Lingual Induction Technique for German Adverbial Participles

We provide a detailed comparison of strategies for implementing medium-tolow frequency phenomena such as German adverbial participles in a broadcoverage, rule-based parsing system. We show that allowing for general adverb conversion of participles in the German LFG grammar seriously affects its overall performance, due to increased spurious ambiguity. As a solution, we present a corpus-based cr...

German Adverbial Adjectives: Syntactic Position and Semantic Interpretation

Towards an analysis of the adverbial use of German interrogative was (‘what’)

The paper discusses the so-called adverbial use of the wh-pronoun was (‘what’), which establishes a non-standard interrogative construction type in German. It argues that the adverbial use of was (‘what’) is based on the lexical properties of a categorically deficient pronoun was (‘what’), which bears a causal meaning. In addition, adverbial was (‘what’) differs from canonical argument was (‘wh...

A Corpus-Based Study of Demonstratives in German, Russian and English

The current article presents results from three quantitative corpus studies on the use of demonstrative expressions (demonstrative NPs, demonstrative pronouns) in German, English and Russian. It focuses on two prevalent hypotheses: 1) demonstratives correspond to the medium activation level; 2) demonstratives establish discourse topics. As for (1), it has been repeatedly claimed that referentia...

Dialectal Variation in Question Intonation: the Case of Swabian and Upper Saxon German

It is generally assumed that a question intonationally is accompanied with a certain question tune, usually characterized by a final rise in pitch (e.g. Bolinger 1978). If we consider German question intonation, the tonal characteristics of yes-no-questions seem to match the general pattern of a final rise in pitch. According to the intonational accounts of Standard German yes-no-questions endi...