Search results for "Phrase structure rules"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
More Support for More-Support
2009
This book provides the most comprehensive account so far of novel and hitherto unexplained factors operative in the choice between synthetic ( prouder ) and analytic ( more proud ) comparatives. It argues that the underlying motivation in using the analytic variant is to mitigate processing demands – a compensatory strategy referred to as more -support. The analytic variant is claimed to be better suited to environments of increased processing complexity – presumably owing to its ability to facilitate early phrase structure recognition, the more transparent one-to-one relation between form and function and possibly because the degree marker more can serve as a structural signal foreshadowin…
Categorization in Discourse and Grammar
2016
This collection of papers addresses new trends in Cognitive Linguistics. Three parts of the book focus on Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Integration Network Analysis. Both the theoretical contributions and the empirical case studies stress the importance of contextual factors in the meaning making processes. They employ qualitative methods to analyze the use of metaphor in political discourse and in the conceptualization of emotions. The data sets include multimodal data, sign languages and co-speech gestures. The fourth part of the book contains two corpus-based studies. The fifth part concentrates on the grammatical categories of passive voice and aspect. One contribution discusses the pr…
Positional influences on information packaging: Insights from topological fields in German
2012
Abstract We present three event-related potential studies that investigated the contribution of givenness and position-induced topicality (what a sentence is about) to information processing. The studies compared two types of referential expressions (given and inferred noun phrases (NPs)) in distinct sentential positions. The data revealed position-specific effects, reflected by an interaction of topicality and givenness: inferred NPs registered a more pronounced Late Positivity than given NPs in the canonical sentence-medial position, but not sentence-initially (Experiment 1). Additionally, there was a stable effect of givenness across positions, reflected by an N400 for inferred over give…