Elena Karagjosova

Freie Universität Berlin | FUB · Institute of German and Dutch Languages and Literature

The goal of the paper is to propose a holistic analysis of the discourse properties and the interpretational effects of pronominal right-dislocation in Norwegian. Previous research has suggested that this is a topic construction, and it has been shown that the right-dislocated pronoun may affect reference assignment, is sometimes used in cases of d...

Denne artikkelen rapporterer om ein studie av geografiske og demografiske trekk ved 46 etterstilte uttrykk i norske talemål, mellom anna gitt, sant og kan du skjønne. I fyrste del av studien er spørjeskjema nytta som metode. Resultata frå denne undersøkinga viser i kva grad informantar frå ulike stader i Noreg rapporterer om bruk av dei etterstilte...

This paper provides an account of the Bulgarian admirative construction and its place within the Bulgarian evidential system based on (i) new observations on the morphological, temporal, and evidential properties of the admirative, (ii) a critical reexamination of existing approaches to the Bulgarian evidential system, and (iii) insights from a sim...

This chapter gives an introduction to the subject area of rhetorical relations by reconsidering the fundamental question of how many and which rhetorical relations exist and by what kinds of criteria they are defined. It then presents a case study on the distinction between subordinating and coordinating rhetorical relations, discusses the linguist...

The poster presents a diachronic semantic map showing how the structure of the semantic space synchronically shared by a group of discourse connectors (conjunctions, adverbs and particles) in German, Norwegian, English and Bulgarian may have evolved due to systematic semantic shifts from temporality to causality, conditionality, consecutivity, and...

We have investigated the geographical distribution of 46 Norwegian tags.

The paper presents a corpus-based information-structural analysis of the German discourse particles aber and auch in the so-called post-initial position, i.e. between the pre-field constituent and the finite verb in main clauses. Based on corpus data, I argue that aber and auch in this position mark the boundary between the focus and the background...

The paper contributes to the ongoing discussion on the relation between information structure and discourse structure. It presents an account of the German conjunct adverb doch (doch CA ) that is based on the observation that the interaction between the two structures determines the semantic and pragmatic properties of this conjunct adverb. The acc...

In this paper we study two realisation patterns shared be- tween elaboration and explanation relations: unmarked con nection, i.e. juxtaposition of sentences without any explicit marker, an d the Ger- man marker ‘n ämlich’ (namely), which must have emerged as a marker of specification but has spread in the direction of explanati on. We try to answe...

The paper presents an analysis of the meaning and discourse effects of the German discourse particle nämlich that unifies its different readings and explains its distributional properties. I suggest that nämlich is most adequately analysed in terms of it indicating a specificational relation between its host and the preceding sentence, which in a q...

The paper provides a first analysis of one use of the German discourse marker doch, namely doch as conjunct adverb (CA). As CA, doch has two properties, concessivity and anaphoricity, that distinguish it from the conjunction doch, which is the other clause connecting use of the word. As conjunction, doch is not anaphoric and it may mark a greater v...

The paper presents an exploratory DRT-based account of the adversative connec-tor doch. It is assumed that doch is weakly ambiguous between various relations of contrast, and an underspecified meaning is defined in the framework of UDRT Reyle et al. (2005). It is shown how in concrete discourse, a particular reading is selected from the underspecif...

The paper outlines a monotonic model of denial in dialogue that keeps a repre-sentation of the offensive material at the same time as it accounts for the tenta-tive status of utterances with respect to the common ground (CG). It is cast in the Information state based approach to dia-logue developed in the projects TRINDI and SIRIDUS (Cooper and Lar...

The paper investigates the origins of the German/Dutch particle toch/doch) in the hope of shedding light on a puzzle with respect to doch/toch and to shed some light on two theoretical issues. The puzzle is the nearly opposite meaning of the stressed and unstressed versions of the particle which cannot be accounted for in standard theories of the m...

The paper presents a unified DRT-based account of the meaning and function of two apparently dissimilar uses of the German particle doch, namely accented and unaccented doch in the middle field. It is claimed that both uses express the discourse relation Correction, and that unaccented doch additionally indicates that the doch-host is assumed by th...

The paper investigates the origins of the German/Dutch particle toch/doch) in the hope of shedding light on a puzzle with respect to doch/toch and to shed some light on two theoretical issues. The puzzle is the nearly opposite meaning of the stressed and unstressed versions of the particle which cannot be accounted for in standard theories of the m...

An account is presented of the focus prop- erties, common ground effect and dialogue behaviour of the accented German dis- course marker doch and the accented sen- tence negation nicht. It is argued that doch and nicht evoke as a focus alternative the logical complement of the proposition ex- pressed by the sentence in which they oc- cur, and that...

This paper investigates two uses of the German discourse particle doch, namely the cases in which it occurs in the Middle filed either ac-cented or deaccented. We argue that none of these uses marks given information or common knowledge per se. More closely, we suggest that deaccented doch does not mark given information per se but as a result of t...

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität des Saarlandes, 2004. Includes bibliographical references (p. 250-260).

Our goal is to improve the contextual appropriateness of spoken output in a dialogue system. We explore the use of the information state to determine the information structure of system utterances.

We demonstrate the production of spoken output with contextually appropriate intonation in the information-state based dialogue system GoDiS. We exploit the context representation in the information state to determine the information structure of system utterances, which we use to control the intonation of synthesized spoken output. 1

Our goal is to improve the contextual appropriateness of spoken output in a dialogue system. We explore the use of the information state to determine the information structure of system utter-ances. We concentrate on the realiza-tion of information structure by into-nation. We present the results of eval-uating the contextual appropriateness of var...

We demonstrate the production of spo- ken output with contextually appropri- ate intonation in the information-state based dialogue system GoDiS. We ex- ploit the context representation in the in- formation state to determine the infor- mation structure of system utterances, which we use to control the intonation of synthesized spoken output.

The paper presents a preliminary corpus study of marked Informationally Redundant Utterances (IRUs) in tutorial dialogues. The study suggests that marked IRUs have the function to make non salient propositions salient or to maintain the saliency of propositions in dialogue. This is in-terpreted as an indication that marked IRUs may have a greater l...

We aim at improving the collaborative character of the responses in the GoDiS dialogue system participating in information-seeking dialogues. In this paper we describe how the system currently deals with successful and unsuccessful database search and show the need for generating more collaborative responses. We consider conditional yes/no response...

We analyze naturally occurring collaborative responses of the form "Not (if) /Yes if ". We distinguish two cases: when is established in the con- text, the conditional response indicates a possible need to revise , and thus opens negotiation; otherwise, the conditional response raises the question whether . We discuss the contexts where such respon...

The paper deals with conditional responses of the form "Not if c/Yes if c" in reply to a question "?q" in the context of information-seeking dialogues. A conditional response is triggered if the obtainability of q depends on whether c holds: The response indicates a possible need to find alternative solutions, opening a negotiation in the dialogue....

Zusammenfassung In this paper, an overall abstract meaning is assumed to cover all syntactic instan-tiations of German doch (i.e., as a coordinating conjunction, modal particle, sentence adverb and response particle). It is claimed that the overall meaning is a contrastive coherence relation. Three kinds of contrast relations are considered and it...

Introduction Utterances in dialogue are interpreted on the basis of their context, which includes the mental states of the interlocutors, e.g. their beliefs and intentions. A speaker can express his beliefs explicitly (using attitude verbs) or implicitly (using attitude adverbs, modal particles, presupposing expressions, syntactic mood). In both ca...

Modal particles operate on various levels of linguistic description and are involved in belief change processes. An analysis of the contribution of the German modal particle doch to sentence and utterance meaning is suggested which is claimed to account for its full meaning and function in dialogue. 1 Introduction German modal particles (MPs) are a...

University Microfilms order no. UMI00489080. Text in German; includes abstracts in English and German. Thesis (M.A.)--University of New Brunswick, 1993. Includes bibliographical references.

I present an unitary analysis of the German adversative connectors aber and doch, based on Sæbø (2003), where the semantics of these connectors is defined in terms of a presupposition involving negation and topic alternatives. I argue that the meaning of aber and doch is underspecified between various types of contrast and that the type of contrast...