[WS101] Additive and restrictive quantification in discourse

 

Authors : Anna-Maria De Cesare, Cecilia Andorno

Title : Additive and restrictive quantification in discourse. Comparative perspectives

All the languages of the world probably have special linguistic strategies to perform two basic semantic / cognitive operations: additive and restrictive quantification of a piece of information (referent, temporal span, event etc.) in relation to a set of alternatives, as in I also / only like to read (König 1991, Gast & van der Auwera 2011). These two operations can be expressed through lexical forms (adverbs or particles, such as E. also / only, G. auch / nur, I. anche / solo, solamente, soltanto, Fr. aussi / seulement etc.; adjectives, such as It. solo, unico, Fr. seul, unique), through prosody (i.e. verum focus), as well as through morphological and syntactic means (cleft sentences and other syntactic structures, such as It. non … che..., non … se non). Unlike other linguistic quantifiers, such as numerals or indefinites, these forms always interact with the sentence information structure (at different levels) and play a crucial role in discourse organization (in discourse cohesion, in the thematic and/or rhetorical structure, in delimiting the boundaries of information units and in determining the nature of these units etc.; cf. Schwenter 2001, De Cesare 2004, Benazzo et al. 2004).

The goal of the Workshop is to better understand additive and restrictive quantification, in particular their role in discourse organization, by comparing the linguistic means available intra- and cross-linguistically, as well as discussing their path of acquisition in L1 and L2. Comparative / contrastive analyses of semantically similar forms in the same language and/or in different languages or language varieties have been proven to be a very fruitful method for achieving a fine-grained understanding of general, and potentially universal semantic and discourse related phenomena (cf., among many others related to additive and restrictive linguistic strategies, Horn 1981, Manzotti 1984, van der Auwera 1984, Blumenthal 1985, Foolen 1989, Andorno 2000, Lauwers 2006, Gast 2006, Dimroth et al. 2010, Borreguero Zuloaga in press).

The Workshop will be composed of individual papers and rounded up by a general assessment of our knowledge of the research questions outlined below. Invited speakers to the Workshop include: Christine Dimroth (Osnabrück), Sandra Benazzo (Lille 3), Margarita Borreguero Zuloaga (Complutense Madrid and Heidelberg) and Volker Gast (Jena).

The Workshop organizers invite contributions that will tackle the following questions, preferably discussed on the basis of a solid empirical foundation (written / spoken; natural / elicited; native / learner varieties) and related to the Romance and the Germanic language groups:

  1. What semantic and pragmatic instructional meaning(s) do additive and restrictive quantification forms convey? How is their semantic content to be related to their discourse functions? How do we measure what meaning is hard-wired in the linguistic form itself and what meaning component is conveyed by contextual factors?
  2. What important quantitative (frequency use, discourse distribution) and qualitative (formal, semantic, functional) intra- and cross-linguistic similarities and differences are there between the linguistic strategies available to express additive / restrictive quantification in one, or more than one Romance / Germanic language(s)? How do we account for intra- and cross-linguistic differences in types and tokens?
  3. What do the acquisition paths of additive and restrictive quantification strategies in L1 and/or L2 tell us about similar forms in different languages? How do we account for potential cross-linguistic influence in L2 acquisition and, conversely, for general, cross-linguistically valid acquisition paths?
  4. More generally, what does the linguistic data available to date tell us about the underlying mental operations connected to addition and restriction? Is there a basic operation of addition / restriction as well as more complex forms of the same operations? Are there cognitive differences (for instance in terms of processing effort) between addition and restriction? And how do we account for them? 

References

Andorno, Cecilia 2000, Focalizzatori fra connessione e messa a fuoco. Il punto di vista delle varietà di apprendimento, Milano, Franco Angeli.

Benazzo, Sandra, Dimroth, Christine, Perdue, Clive & Watorek, Marzena  2004, “Le rôle des particules additives dans la construction de la cohésion discursive en langue maternelle et en langue étrangère”, Langages 155, pp. 76-105.

Blumenthal, Peter 1985, “Aussi et auch : deux faux amis ?”, Französisch heute 2, pp. 144-150.

Borreguero Zuloaga, Margarita (in press): “Focalizzatori a confronto: anche vs. también”, Studi italiani di linguistica teorica ed applicata, XL/3.

De Cesare, Anna-Maria 2004, «L’avverbio anche e il rilievo informativo del testo», in Ferrari, Angela (ed.), La lingua nel testo, il testo nella lingua, Torino, Istituto dell’Atlante Linguistico Italiano, pp. 191-218.

Dimroth, Christine 2002, “Topics, assertions and additive words. How L2 learners get from information structure to target language syntax”, Linguistics 40/4, pp. 891-923.

Dimroth, Christine, Andorno, Cecilia, Benazzo, Sandra & Verhagen, Josie 2010, “Given claims about new topics. How Romance and Germanic speakers link changed and maintained information in narrative discourse”, Journal of Pragmatics 42, pp. 3328-3344.

Foolen, Ad 1989, “Zur Semantik und Pragmatik der restriktiven Gradpartikeln: only / nur und maar / alleen”, in H. Weydt (ed.), Partikeln und Interaktion, Tübingen, Niemeyer, pp. 188-199.

Gast, Volker 2006, “The distribution of also and too – a preliminary corpus study”, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 54/2, pp. 163-176.

Gast, Volker & van der Auwera, Johan 2011, “Scalar additive operators in the languages of Europe”, Language 87/1, pp. 2-54.

Horn, L. R. 1981, “Exhaustiveness and the semantics of clefts”. In V. Burke, & J. Pustejovsky (Eds.), Papers from the 11th Annual Meeting of NELS, pp. 124–142.

König, Ekkehard 1991, The Meaning of Focus Particles: A Comparative Perspective, London-New York, Routledge.

Lauwers, Peter 2006, “Aussi vs ook. Une analyse contrastive de deux adverbes polyfonctionnels”, in Studies in Contrastive Linguistics. Proceedings of the 4th International Contrastive Linguistics Conference (Santiago de Compostela, September 2005), pp. 479-491.

Manzotti, Emilio 1984, “Costrutti esclusivi e restrittivi in italiano”, Vox Romanica 43, pp. 50-80.

Reis, Marga & Rosengren, Inger 1997, “A modular approach to the grammar of additive particles: The case of German auch”, Journal of Semantics 14, pp. 237-309.

Rideout, Douglas 1995, “The notion of inclusion in the adverbs too and also”, Dialangue 6.

Schwenter, Scott 2001, “Additive particles and the construction of context”, in Ferrer, Hang & Salvador Pons (eds), La pragmática de los conectores y particulas modales, Valencia, Universidad de Valencia, pp. 245-262.

van der Auwera, Johan 1984, “Maar en alleen als graadpartikels”, in J. van der Auwera & W. Vandewenghe (eds.), Studies over nederlandse partikels, pp. 103-18.

25.07.2013   14:00-16:00

Title: LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE
Chair: Anna-Maria De Cesare

14:00 - 15:00 Sandra BENAZZO et al.
Additive particles in Romance and Germanic languages: Are they really similar?
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15:00 - 15:30 Patrizia GIULIANO
Additive and restrictive particles in children and adults: Italian L1 data and comparative perspectives
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15:30 - 16:00 Cecilia ANDORNO et al.
Embedding additive particles in the sentence information structure: what L2 learners of Italian and German do (not) learn
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25.07.2013   16:30-18:30

Title: PSYCHOLINGUISTIC AND COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVES
Chair: Cecilia Andorno

16:30 - 17:30 Margarita BORREGUERO ZULOAGA et al.
Informative focus and marked focus: An experimental study on Spanish focus particles incluso and German sogar
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17:30 - 18:00 Frauke BERGER et al.
2;6-year-olds’ understanding of the presupposition-triggering particles auch (‘too’) and nochmal (‘again’)
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18:00 - 18:30 Tom FRITZSCHE et al.
What eyetracking can reveal about the comprehension of the restrictive focus particle 'only': Data from children and adults
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26.07.2013   10:30-12:30

Title: SEMANTIC, INFORMATION AND DISCOURSE STRUCTURES
Chair: Cecilia Andorno

10:30 - 11:30 Volker GAST
Dialogue games and the constitution of scales: A corpus-based approach
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11:30 - 12:00 John DU BOIS
The Additive Stance: Speaker positioning and intersubjective alignment in discourse
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12:00 - 12:30 Anna-Maria DE CESARE
Focus adverbs in noncanonical word order: information patterns and discourse functions in Italian and in a contrastive perspective
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26.07.2013   14:00-16:00

Title: LANGUAGE VARIATION AND LANGUAGE CHANGE
Chair: Anna-Maria De Cesare

14:00 - 14:30 Sabine DIAO-KLAEGER
"même" in Burkina Faso: scalar focus marker and discourse marker. Similarities and differences with its use in spoken Hexagonal French
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14:30 - 15:00 Martina NICKLAUS
French and Italian translations of German nur/allein in literary texts
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15:00 - 15:30 Martha RUDKA et al.
Experimental notes about information structure: focus particles in Spanish and German
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15:30 - 16:00 Anna-Maria DE CESARE et al.
Round table: workshop organizers and invited spearkers