The monograph explains how the lack of a 'nominal article' category in some Slavic languages influences nominal reference and textual coherence. The book demonstrates that the missing category cannot be represented by the absence of the functional category D⁰, but that a phonologically empty category with the meaning of the semantic default determiner must be assumed. Otherwise, syntactically and semantically well-formed sentences could not be generated. The semantic default determiner is only specified contextually when the DP with a fixed function in a sentence combines the...

Der Sammelband vereinigt eine Reihe aktueller Beitrage zu methodologischen Aspekten der empirischen Prosodieforschung. Experten des Fachs diskutieren eine Vielzahl unterschiedlicher Ansatze zur Gewinnung, Analyse und Interpretation prosodischer Daten und illustrieren diese anhand ihrer eigenen Forschungsfragen und -ergebnisse. Die einzelnen Arbeiten behandeln die Auswahl und Messung prosodischer Parameter, die Etablierung prosodischer Kategorien, die Annotation gesprochener Sprache sowie experimentelle Methoden fur Produktions- und Perzeptionsexperimente (u.a. die Konstruktion des...

In the last few years a lively discussion on information packaging has arisen, where traditional dichotomies Theme/Rheme, Topic/Comment and Focus/Background have been taken up again and partly reinterpreted. The discussion is mainly being held in syntax, but also in the fields of semantics and pragmatics. Some remarkable progress has been made especially in Focus phonology.
Even if the role of information conveying and information packaging in the Indoeuropean languages was hinted at as early as in the classical studies of the Neogrammarians, this field has remained neglected in...