Issue 79/2015
Dependenzanalyse interlingual – Zur Beschreibung der Struktur von komplexen Sätzen mithilfe der Dependenzgrammatik
(Cross-linguistic dependency analysis – On the description of complex sentences with the help of Dependency Grammar)
Irschara, Karoline/Huber, Barbara/Ilic, Suzana/Prossliner, Linda/Kienpointner, Manfred
In this article, modern dependency grammar is applied to the analysis of a series of complex sentences in nine languages: German, English, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, French, Italian, Turkish and Chinese. The sentences which are analysed are all authentic instances of everyday communication, that is, they are taken from online press texts and homepages. The challenges they pose for the syntactic analysis (e.g. the description of determiners, copula verbs, predicative constituents, coordinated constituents and sentences) are met by a consistent and reasonably justified version of modern dependency grammar, taking up suggestions made by Tesnière, Helbig, Heringer, Engel, Eroms, Ágel, Mel’čuk and Hudson. In this way, many problems of dependency analysis can be solved in a satisfactory way, although there remain open questions (e.g. the analysis of appositions and relative clauses). This also shows the typological adequacy of modern dependency grammar. However, it is not claimed that dependency grammar is simply the best model of syntactic analysis. Rather, we maintain the more modest claim that dependency grammar can make a substantial contribution to a more comprehensive analysis, which, however, needs to integrate several theories of grammar into a coherent framework. The question remains to be answered how such an integrated framework could be developed.
Double intensionality: The interaction of opacity and modality across clause boundaries
Busch, Jerra Lui
Opaque verbs like to seek and to owe are intensional with respect to their object argument. In this paper, I will focus on new data in German where two types of intensionality - opacity and modality - interact in a way that is not predicted by traditional semantic theory. The data involves opaque verbs in matrix position and modalized relative clauses that are attached to the intensional object argument in the matrix clause. The discussion will show that the phenomenon is very restricted and seems to appear only in certain contextual surroundings. Focussing on the evidence the data suggests, I will argue towards an analysis of modal subordination in the lines with Roberts (1989) that can capture the unexpected behavior of double intensionality in the sentences in question by analysing the involved relative clause as a non-restrictive.