Laura ReimerUniversity of Münster | WWU · Department of Linguistics
Laura Reimer
Ph.D.
About
15
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26
Citations
Citations since 2017
Publications
Publications (15)
The German additive particle auch associates with a constituent (the associated constituent, AC) which is related to contextually relevant discourse alternative(s). There are two versions of auch in German: a stressed and an unstressed version. Although in most of the cases, speakers have the choice of using the unstressed or stressed version, ther...
This paper is part of a series of experimental studies that try to empirically chart the landscape of non-canonical uses of the particle nur 'only' in German, aiming at a comprehensive picture of how those uses can affect the interpretation of utterances in different clausal environments. While previous studies have focused on modal particle uses o...
German modal particles (MPs) show semantic, pragmatic, and syntactic peculiarities which make them specifically interesting for research on language processing. However, so far, there are no tests available that reliably elicit MPs in order to study their production in different groups of speakers. This paper presents the Modal Particle Elicitation...
Particles such as German auch (‘also’) establish an additive relation between expressions in their scope (added constituent, AC) and context alternatives against the background of shared information (common denominator). In spoken interaction, however, explicit alternatives are not necessarily present and expressions can be construed as alternative...
We explore under what circurmstances syntactically transformed idioms keep their figurative meaning. In this study we examined the effects of verb argument structure and argument adjacency on the processing of idiomatic and literal sentences in German.
In two sentence-completion experiments, participants listened to idiomatic and literal sentences...
We present experimental work on the processing of secondary meaning as conveyed by the German modal particles nur and bloß in wh-questions. We compare the processing of these particles with the processing of the polysemous focus particles. We argue that nur and bloß as modal and focus particles have a common semantic denominator, namely domain rest...
Idioms like ‘to pull someone’s leg‘ differ from literal language in both their semantic and syntactic fixedness(e.g., Gibbs et al., 1989). They contradict the compositional principal according to which the meaning of a complex phrase can be constructed from the meaning of ist individual parts and their syntactic combination. For example, the meanin...
In progressive Case attraction, the Case of a head nominal overwrites the Case of a following coindexed relative pronoun. The reverse process is called ‘inverse’ Case attraction. There, the morphologically overt Case of a relative pronoun overwrites the Case of a preceding head nominal. Inverse Case attraction has been attested in languages like An...
Modal particles (MPs) like German bloß form a heterogeneous lexical category. One common property is that they do not contribute to the propositional meaning of a sentence, but rather display a Not-At-Issue (NAI) meaning. All of these words are ambiguous between the NAI meaning of the MP and an At-Issue (AI) meaning of a counterpart (e.g., focus pa...
Can the bucket be kicked by him? – The Processing of Passivized Idiomatic and Literal Sentences
Laura Dörre & Eva Smolka (University of Konstanz)
Idioms like “kick the bucket” hold a special status in sentence processing. Their meaning cannot be constructed from the meaning of the individual parts. In addition, idioms are both semantically fixed,...
Idioms like ‘to pull someone’s leg‘ differ from literal language in both their semantic and syntactic fixedness(e.g., Gibbs et al., 1989). They contradict the compositional principal according to which the meaning of a complex phrase can be constructed from the meaning of ist individual parts and their syntactic combination. For example, the meanin...
Projects
Project (1)
Idioms like 'buy a pig in a poke' are special word formations, given that the figurative meaning cannot be assembled from the meaning of the single words ('pig', 'buy', 'poke', etc.). They are further considered semantically and syntactically fixed, as the figurative meaning does not allow the replacement of any of the word constituents (e.g., *buy a cat in a poke) and because there are restrictions regarding the syntactic transformations that idioms may undergo (e.g., *the pig was bought in a poke; *she bought a big pig in an old poke).
The project investigates how idioms are lexically represented and processed - in healthy adults and in patients with partial language loss (aphasia).
