SLF-Coordination (SLFC) and Asymmetric Coordination (AC) in the sense of Höhle (1983, 1990) exhibit specific semantic (a 'fusing' interpretation) and syntactic properties (e.g., verb fronting in non-initial conjuncts). This paper ties together these characteristics by considering them an immediate consequence of the fact that in AC and SLFC properties typically attributed to 'coordinate' structures in discourse show up in 'grammaticalized' form. As far as the analysis of SLFC is concerned, it is furthermore argued that the dropping of the the subject (and only the subject) is in a sense parasitic on the special fusing semantics of the construction. That dropping the subject systematically results in an overt V1-structure is traced back to the way covert operators are licensed and identified in specifier positions in German (paralleling Topic Drop).

No abstract

No abstract

This paper is about the semantics of wh-phrases. It is argued that wh-phrases should not be analyzed as indefinites as, for example, Karttunen (1977) and many others have done, but as functional expressions with an indefinite core -their function being to restrict possible focus/background structures in direct or congruent answers. This will be argued for on the basis of observations made with respect to the distribution of term answers in well-formed question/answer sequences. This claim having been established, it will be integrated in a categorial variant of Schwarzschild's (1999) information-theoretic approach to F-marking and accent placement, and -second-its consequences with respect to the focus/ background structure of wh-questions will be outlined.

We describe a novel approach to estimating the predictability of utterances given extralinguistic context in psycholinguistic research. Predictability effects on language production and comprehension are widely attested, but so far predictability has mostly been manipulated through local linguistic context, which is captured with n-gram language models. However, this method does not allow to investigate predictability effects driven by extralinguistic context. Modeling effects of extralinguistic context is particularly relevant to discourse-initial expressions, which can be predictable even if they lack linguistic context at all. We propose to use script knowledge as an approximation to extralinguistic context. Since the application of script knowledge involves the generation of prediction about upcoming events, we expect that scrips can be used to manipulate the likelihood of linguistic expressions referring to these events. Previous research has shown that script-based discourse expectations modulate the likelihood of linguistic expressions, but script knowledge has often been operationalized with stimuli which were based on researchers’ intuitions and/or expensive production and norming studies. We propose to quantify the likelihood of an utterance based on the probability of the event to which it refers. This probability is calculated with event language models trained on a script knowledge corpus and modulated with probabilistic event chains extracted from the corpus. We use the DeScript corpus of script knowledge to obtain empirically founded estimates of the likelihood of an event to occur in context without having to resort to expensive pre-tests of the stimuli. We exemplify our method at a case study on the usage of nonsentential expressions (fragments), which shows that utterances that are predictable given script-based extralinguistic context are more likely to be reduced.