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This dissertation examines the "free" word order or scrambling phenomena in German and Korean from the perspective of constraint interaction in Optimality Theory. To overcome the problems raised in single-component analyses in explaining word order variation, I propose an `interface' approach in which the constraints from several different components of grammar participate, compete, and interact with one another. That is, various word orders are considered to be motivated and constrained by interactions among syntactic, semantic, and discourse principles of these languages. As the constraints from different modules of grammar are highly conflicting, I utilize Optimality Theory to demonstrate how the constraints interact and resolve conflicts among one another. In this approach, each scrambled variant, i.e. a sentence with a particular word order, is conceived of as the "optimal" output, which instantiates the syntactic, semantic, and discourse-contextual information given in the input....

Abstract. In this paper an approach to the exhaustive interpretation of answers is developed. It builds on a proposal brought forward by Groenendijk & Stokhof (1984). We will use the close connection between their approach and McCarthy’s (1980, 1986) predicate circumscription and describe exhaustive interpretation as an instance of interpretation in minimal models, well-known from work on counterfactuals (see for instance Lewis (1973)). It is shown that by combining this approach with independent developments in semantics/pragmatics one can overcome certain limitations of Groenenedijk & Stokhof’s (1984) proposal. In the last part of the paper we will provide a Gricean motivation for exhaustive interpretation building on work of Schulz (to appear) and van Rooij & Schulz (2004).

There is increasing awareness of the large degree of crosslinguistic diversity involved in the structural realisation of information packaging (or information structure). Whereas English and many Germanic languages primarily exploit intonation for informational purposes, in other languages, like Catalan, syntax plays the primary role in the realisation of information packaging and intonation is reduced to a secondary role. In yet another group of languages the primary structural correlate is morphology. This paper provides a contrastive analysis of the structural properties of information packaging in a number of languages. It also contains a discussion of some basic issues concerning information packaging and identifies a set of information-packaging primitives that are applied to the crosslinguistic facts. 1 Introduction Alternative sentential structures, differing in string order, in intonational structure, or in both, may be used to express the same propositional content. Neverthe...

The compositional semantics of sentences like Only mammals give live birth and The flag flies only if the Queen is home is a tough problem. Evidence is presented to show that only here is modifying an underlying proposition (its "prejacent"). After discussing the semantics of only, the question of the proper interpretation of the prejacent is explored. It would be nice if the prejacent could be analyzed as having existential quantificational force. But that is difficult to maintain, since the prejacent structures when encountered on their own are naturally read as having a lawlike flavor, which in many analyses is attributed to the semantics of implicit operators alleged to be present in them. In the end, an analysis is presented which attributes some very particular properties to these operators and thereby succeeds in providing the target sentences with intuitively adequate interpretations. These complex constructions can therefore be used as a probe into the nature of implicit quantification in natural language.

This paper is a revision of parts of my dissertation (von Fintel 1994). For helpful discussion and comments, I am particularly indebted to Angelika Kratzer, Barbara Partee, Irene Heim, Roger Schwarzschild, Arnim von Stechow, Susanne Tunstall, the members of the Spring 1994 semantics seminar at MIT, the audience at SALT 4 (University of Rochester, May 6, 1994), and the audiences at a colloquium and a workshop at the University of Rochester, February 3, 1995. I also thank Henritte de Swart for her critique of my dissertation (de Swart 1995)

this report.

This thesis concerns the notion of `information structure': informally, organization of information in an utterance with respect to the context. Information structure has been recognized as a critical element in a number of computer applications: e.g., selection of contextually appropriate forms in machine translation and speech generation, and analysis of text readability in computer-assisted writing systems. One of the problems involved in these applications is how to identify information structure in extended texts. This problem is often ignored, assumed to be trivial, or reduced to a sub-problem that does not correspond to the complexity of realistic texts. A handful of computational proposals face the problem directly, but they are generally limited in coverage and all suffer from lack of evaluation. To fully demonstrate ...

This paper questions what the relationship is of exhaustification to notions of maximality, minimality and uniqueness, what the assertional content is of a sentence with exhaustification, and what the role and required complexity is of the models/contexts needed to evaluate such sentences.

The main aim of this thesis is to provide insight into the interaction of the syntactic and pragmatic properties of German, particularly with respect to the issue of configurationality. This language is particularly difficult to classify as it displays both subject-object asymmetries (a feature of "configurational" languages), but also has a topic position (a feature of "discourse-configurational" languages). In order to avoid the difficulties associated with subtle acceptability judgements from informants, the study presented here is based on a frequency analysis of word order variation in spoken language corpora. In the first part, I concentrate on the initial position in German main clauses, which is traditionally referred to as the topic position, and using a task-oriented corpus provide the statistics for the following: ffl The frequency of the different grammatical functions in initial position, in order to determine the relative frequency of the canonical SVO word order. ffl ...