2022, Kaiser, Georg A.

2020-04-01, Kaiser, Georg A.

2020, Kaiser, Georg A.

Dieses speziell für Studierende konzipierte Buch bietet eine Einführung in Aufbau und Struktur des französischen Satzes. Es liefert zum einen eine umfassende Beschreibung aller zentralen Bereiche der Syntax des Französischen und trägt somit zur Erweiterung des Wissens über die französische Sprache bei. Zum anderen führt es in die sprachwissenschaftliche Beschäftigung mit der französischen Syntax ein, indem ausgewählte syntaktische Analysen vorgestellt und erläutert werden, und verhilft damit zu einem besseren Verständnis der komplexen Satzstruktur des Französischen.
Die dargestellten Fakten werden anhand von zahlreichen Beispielsätzen und Tabellen ausführlich illustriert und die Analysen werden mithilfe von Strukturbäumen detailliert erklärt. Viele Beispielsätze sind der (modernen) französischsprachigen Literatur entnommen. Dadurch wird die Lektüre aufgelockert und ein Bezug zum literaturwissenschaftlichen Anteil des Französischstudiums hergestellt.

2019, Kaiser, Georg A., von Heusinger, Klaus, Schmid, Svenja

This paper deals with some of the word order variation which can be found in Spanish and Italian wh-interrogatives. In particular, it investigates the variation between the whVS and whSV order in interrogatives introduced by ‘why’. We provide a brief overview of word order in Spanish and Italian wh-interrogatives and argue that there are various morphological, syntactic, and discourse pragmatic factors which influence the preference for a particular structure. We also argue, in section 2, that the word order variation depends on the type of the subject, namely on its DP-type (noun or pronoun), as well as on its heaviness or complexity. In section 3, we firstly present a comparative corpus study of Spanish and Italian Bible translations, showing that Spanish and Italian seem to have different word order preferences in ‘why’-interrogatives. Secondly, we present an acceptability task investigating different subjects of differing complexity, such as simple DPs, complex DPs, and pronouns. Both empirical studies provide original data showing word order variation in ‘why’-interrogatives in both Spanish and Italian. In section 4, we discuss the results and argue that the differences between the two languages can be best accounted for by assuming that the two languages have different preferences with respect to the information structure of such constructions and for their preferences for VS or SV order. We also discuss the effect of subject type for the word order in Spanish. Section 5 provides a short conclusion.

2022, Weingart, Anja, Kaiser, Georg A.

Der Beitrag stellt die FAIR-Prinzipien für Forschungssoftware nach Chue Hong et al. (2021) vor und diskutiert ihre Umsetzung am Beispiel des UV2-Annotationstools. Hierbei werden die umgesetzten Entwicklungsstrategien des Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery und des test-driven development, die komponentenbasierte Architektur und die thematische Strukturierung des Quellcodes sowie die Art des ausführbaren Artefakts (Docker Container) vorgestellt und bezüglich der FAIR-Prinzipien bewertet.

2020, Oliviéri, Michèle, Kaiser, Georg A., Palasis, Katerina, Zimmermann, Michael, Faure, Richard

The combined points of view of dialectology, diachrony and language acquisition shed new light on the statuses of subject pronouns in Gallo-Romance. We carry out proven tests on new data from these three domains, in order to describe the morpho-syntactic behavior of these pronouns in Occitan, Medieval French and Modern French, and compare their statuses synchronically and diachronically. Subject clitics seem to have emerged as syntactic arguments as early as Old French, and are still syntactic arguments in standard Modern French. Concomitantly, clitics in oral Modern French behave as preverbal agreement markers, possibly since the 17th century, which points to possible diglossia in France. Northern Occitan subject clitics form incomplete and broadly variable paradigms, which reveal successive stages of their diachronie evolution. They currently behave as syntactic arguments, similarly to subject clitics in Old French.

2020, Kaiser, Georg A., Zimmermann, Michael

This paper looks into the morpho-syntactic status of subject pronouns in the earliest documented period of the French language. By drawing on hitherto ignored insights as well as by reviewing on the basis of a diachronic parallel text corpus various pieces of evidence put forth in support of either prominent view, the paper fundamentally argues that Old French had two paradigms of, respectively, strong and weak subject pronouns. This state of affairs is eventually considered strongly suggestive of an alternative analysis of this stage of French in terms of a non-null-subject language.

2021, Schmid, Svenja, von Heusinger, Klaus, Kaiser, Georg A.

In this paper, we investigate the effect of information structure on word order in Italian and Peninsular Spanish ‘why’-interrogatives, and whether these two languages differ from each other. To this end, we conducted two empirical studies. In a parallel text corpus study, we compared the frequency of the word order patterns ‘why’SV and ‘why’VS, as well as the distribution of focal and non-focal subjects in the two languages. In order to get a deeper understanding of the impact of the information structural categories focus and givenness on word order in ‘why’-interrogatives, we conducted a forced-choice experiment. The results indicate that word order is affected by focus in Italian, while it is not determined by any information structural category in Peninsular Spanish. We show that Italian and Peninsular Spanish ‘why’-interrogatives differ from each other in two ways. First, non-focal subjects occur preverbally in Italian, while they occupy the postverbal position in Peninsular Spanish. Second, Italian reveals a lower level of optionality with respect to word order patterns. Even though we find a high preference for the postverbal position in Peninsular Spanish, we argue that this limitation is related to a higher flexibility regarding word order in Peninsular Spanish than in Italian which does not allows for ‘why’VSO in contrast to Peninsular Spanish.

2020, Kaiser, Georg A., Figueiredo de Alencar, Leonel

This article deals with some aspects of both the omission and use of subject pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese. It is shown that despite the relatively frequent use of these pronouns in comparison to European Portuguese or other Romance zero-subject languages, the omission of these pronouns (and also the resulting weak-toned forms) is generally possible and in some cases, e.g. in impersonal constructions, even obligatory. The only apparent exception is the expression a gente ‘the people’, which is used as a substitute for the pronoun of the 1st person plural. However, its status as a pronoun is by no means uncontroversial, so its obligatory use does not necessarily indicate the widely assumed loss of zero-subject status in Brazilian Portuguese.

2019, Widera, Carmen, Kaiser, Georg A.

The paper discusses the use of subject pronouns in European and Brazilian Portuguese. More precisely, the analysis presented here focuses on the hypothesis of PB being a partial null subject language. The methodology used consists in the investigation of a parallel text, concretely two translations of the Asterix comic into EP and BP, and in the comparison of the subject occurrences in the two varieties. The analysis reveals, generally speaking, a more frequent and less restricted use of subject pronouns in BP compared to EP, showing altogether that BP does not fulfil all the characteristics of a partial null subject language.