German And Dutch In Contrast

Designed as a contribution to contrastive linguistics, the present volume brings up-to-date the comparison of German with its closest neighbour, Dutch, and other Germanic relatives like English, Afrikaans, and the Scandinavian languages. It takes its inspiration from the idea of a "Germanic Sandwich", i.e. the hypothesis that sets of genetically related languages diverge in systematic ways in diverse domains of the linguistic system. Its contributions set out to test this approach against new phenomena or data from synchronic, diachronic and, for the first time in a Sandwich-related volume, psycholinguistic perspectives. With topics ranging from nickname formation to the IPP (aka 'Ersatzinfinitiv'), from the grammaticalisation of the definite article to /s/-retraction, and from the role of verb-second order in the acquisition of L2 English to the psycholinguistics of gender, the volume appeals to students and specialists in modern and historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, translation studies, language pedagogy and cognitive science, providing a wealth of fresh insights into the relationships of German with its closest relatives while highlighting the potential inherent in the integration of different methodological traditions.

The polarity of a sentence is crucial for its meaning. It is thus hardly surprising that languages have developed devices to highlight this meaning component and to contrast statements with negative and positive polarity in discourse. Research on this issue has started from languages like German and Dutch, where prosody and assertive particles are systematically associated with polarity contrast. Recently, the grammatical realization of polarity contrast has been at the center of investigations in a range of other languages as well. Core questions concern the formal repertoire and the exact meaning contribution of the relevant devices, the kind of contrast they evoke, and their relation to information structure and sentence mood. This volume brings together researchers from a theoretical, an empirical, and a typological orientation and enhances our understanding of polarity with the help of in-depth analyses and cross-linguistic comparisons dealing with the syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and/or prosodic aspects of the phenomenon.

This book provides an overview of current issues in variation and gradience in phonetics, phonology and sociolinguistics. It contributes to the growing interest in gradience and variation in theoretical phonology by combing research on the factors underlying variability and systematic quantitative results with theoretical phonological considerations. Variation is inherent to language, and one of the aims of phonological theory is to describe and explain the mechanisms underlying variation at every level of phonological representation. Variation below the segment concerns articulatory, acoustic and perceptual cues that contribute to the formation of natural classes of sounds. At the segmental level there are grammatical differences in the production and perception of contextual variation of segments and in the syntagmatic constraints on the combination of segments. At the suprasegmental level the mapping of tones to grammatical functions and vice versa is discussed. Further aspects addressed in this book are factors outside of language: Variation that arises as a result of a particular dialect or of belonging to a certain age group, or variation that is the consequence of language change. Gradience and variation have always been a central issue in phonetic and sociolinguistic research. Gradience introduces variation in phonology as well. If a phonetic entity can be pronounced in different ways, depending on the environment, prosodic factors or dialectal influences, this ‘gradience’ may introduce ‘variation’, which we understand as a stable state of grammar.

Provides a unique, up-to-date survey of twelve Germanic languages from English and German to Faroese and Yiddish.

Broca's region has been in the news ever since scientists realized that particular cognitive functions could be localized to parts of the cerebral cortex. Its discoverer, Paul Broca, was one of the first researchers to argue for a direct connection between a concrete behavior--in this case, the use of language--and a specific cortical region. Today, Broca's region is perhaps the most famous part of the human brain, and for over a century, has persisted as the focus of intense research and numerous debates. The name has even penetrated mainstream culture through popular science and the theater. Broca's region is famous for a good reason: As language is one of the most distinctive human traits, the cognitive mechanisms that support it and the tissues in which these mechanisms are housed are also quite complex, and so have the potential to reveal a lot not only about how words, phrases, sentences, and grammatical rules are instantiated in neural tissue, but also, and more broadly, about how brain function relates to behavior. Paul Broca's discoveries were an important, driving force behind the more general effort to relate complex behavior to particular parts of the cerebral cortex, which, significantly, produced the first brain maps. These early studies also, however, suffered from the use of crude techniques, definitions, and distinctions, as well as from ill founded and misdirected assumptions. Although much has been discovered since Broca's work, even today, these problems have not been completely solved. Nonetheless, particularly as a result of important advances made in neuroimaging during the past two decades, Broca's region and all language areas are currently being investigated from every angle. Indeed, as the volume of research into the relations between brain and language has created several communities, each with its own concepts, methods, and considerations, it seemed that it was time to stop, get together, and reflect on the state of the art. This book is the result of that collective reflection, which took place primarily at the Broca's Region Workshop, held in Jülich and Aachen, Germany, in June 2004. In it, Yosef Grodzinsky and Katrin Amunts tried to accomplish a nearly impossible task: to mix intellectual traditions and cultures, and juxtapose rather disparate bodies of knowledge, styles of reasoning, and forms of argumentation. Participants were scientists with diverse backgrounds; each invited to contribute his/her particular take, with the hope that a coherent, perhaps even novel, picture would emerge. All of the participants have a special interest in Broca's Region, and represent the myriad angles from which we currently approach it: neuroanatomy, physiology, evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, clinical neurology, functional imaging, speech and language research, computational biology, and psycho-, neuro-, and theoretical linguistics. The book's main chapters are the contributions of the Workshop's participants and their research teams. Parts of the discussion during the Workshop are included to underscore the richness of viewpoints, and to give readers an idea of the level of interaction that took place. As Broca's region is such a historically significant concept and rich area, this book contains a collection of classic and recent-yet-classic papers. Along with cutting-edge science, Grodzinsky and Amunts want to remind readers of the celebrated past from which much can be learned. The historical chapters include the first two papers written by Paul Broca, as well some work by two of the most important neurologists of the nineteenth century, Ludwig Lichtheim and John Hughlings-Jackson. Also included are parts of twentieth century papers by Korbinian Brodmann, Roman Jakobson, Norman Geschwind, Harold Goodglass, and Jay Mohr. Because this book both reflects the state of the art in Broca's-region research and contains a tribute to its celebrated past, it will be a valuable resource for student and professional researchers. It will also stimulate further interdisciplinary research, which is a significant contribution, as the project called "Broca's region," encompassing the study of brain/language relations, is far from finished.

This volume focuses on the phonology, phonetics and psycholinguistics of voicing-related phenomena in Dutch. Dutch phonology has played a touchstone role in the past few decades where competing phonological theories regarding laryngeal representation have been concerned. Debates have focused on the phonetic facts (Is final neutralization complete or incomplete? Are the assimilation rules phonetic or phonological?) and the most adequate phonological analyses (Is [voice] a binary feature? What constraints are necessary? What is the best way of implementing the role of morphology?). This volume summarises and adds fuel to these debates on several fronts, by providing an overview of analyses so far (rule-based as well as constraint-based) and proposing a new one, by drawing attention to new facts, such as exceptions to final devoicing in certain dialects and the behaviour of loanwords, and by re-examining the phonetic state of affairs and the behaviour of voiced, voiceless and partially devoiced segments in psycholinguistic experiments.

The alternation between the auxiliaries BE and HAVE, which this collection examines, is often discussed in connection with generative analyses of split intransitivity. But this book's purpose is to place the phenomenon in a broader context. Well-known facts in the Romance and Germanic language families are extended with data from lesser studied languages and dialects (Romanian, Paduan), and also with experimental and historical data. Moreover, the book goes beyond the usual language families in which the phenomenon has been studied, with the inclusion of two chapters on Chinese and Korean. The theoretical background of the contributors is also broad, ranging from current Generative approaches to Cognitive and Optimality-Theoretical frameworks. Readers interested in the structural, historical, developmental, or experimental aspects of auxiliary selection should profit from this book's comprehensive empirical coverage and from the plurality of contemporary linguistic analyses it contains.