Career Portfolios

Müskens, Wolfgang; Müskens, Isabel

doi:10.1007/978-3-322-81837-9_10

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 10 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The formula in (106) will evidently only be defined in a framework that allows for lambda-abstraction over discourse referents; Muskens (1996) offers this possibility. Intuitively, the topical question in (106) is concerned with individuals that we already know in context, while (107) asks for customers in general without referring to any given group of customers.…”

Section: Appendix: Referential and Denotational Topicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Manner adverbs and information structure: Evidence from the adverbial modification of verbs of creation

Eckardt¹

2003

Modifying Adjuncts

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The paper investigates the pragmatic effects of word order variation in German, specifically concerning the ordering of adverb and nominal arguments. The behaviour of verbs of creation in combination with adverbs and indefinite object NPs proves that the allegedly neutral word order NP Adverb Verb is not really presupposition free. I claim that indefinite object NPs to the left of manner adverbs receive a special kind of partitive reading which presupposes that the referent of NP is already contextually present before the reported event takes place. This will offer an explanation for the fact that in a sentence like Bob hat ein Flugzeug stabil konstruiert ('Bob has a plane solidly constructed') the object NP cannot receive an existential (indefinite) reading while the sentence Bob hat ein Flugzeug kunstvoll bemalt ('Bob has a plane artistically painted') seems to be able to refer to a previously unmentioned plane.

show abstract

Section: Appendix: Referential and Denotational Topicsmentioning

confidence: 99%