Martin Schäfer

• Dr. phil., M.A., habil.
• University of Tübingen

Processing differences between obligatory constituents like verbal complements and facultative ones like adjuncts are widely discussed in psycholinguistics. But the relative posi-tional and semantic variability of adjuncts makes analyzing these differences a daunting challenge. Focusing on the intricate problem of the default position of manner adv...

The versatility of modifiers makes their analysis a challenge. Their interpretation depends on their own lexical semantics, their syntactic position, and the semantics of the material they combine with. This paper explores what dis-tributional profiling reveals about four modifiers that are traditionally taken to correspond to different semantic cl...

We explore variation in the interpretation of attested novel compound nouns in English, especially the contribution of constituent polysemy to this diversity. Our results show that effects of polysemy are pervasive in compound interpretation, contributing both to interpretational diversity and to perceived difficulty of interpretation. The higher t...

Adjectives are paradigmatically versatile: they combine with many different items in the same syntactic configuration. They are also syntagmatically versatile: they occur in many different syntactic configurations. Given this versatility, how and to what extent can lexeme-specific preferences and features of the adjectives be identified? With the a...

Results from a crowdsourced audio questionnaire show that inflected infinitives in Galician are acceptable in a broad range of contexts, different from those described for European Portuguese. Crucially, inflected infinitives with referential subjects are widely accepted only inside strong islands in Galician (complements of nouns, adjunct clauses)...

Pius ten Hacken (Ed.), The Semantics of Compounding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. 264. ISBN 978-1-107-09970-8 - Volume 10 Issue 4 - MARTIN SCHAEFER

What is semantic transparency, why is it important, and which factors play a role in its assessment? This work approaches these questions by investigating English compound nouns. The first part of the book gives an overview of semantic transparency in the analysis of compound nouns, discussing its role in models of morphological processing and diff...

Organized by Sabine Schulte im Walde (University of Stuttgart) and Eva Smolka (University of Konstanz) as part of the 39 th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) held at the Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, the workshop aimed “to shed light on the interaction of constituent properties and compound transparency across...

We present models of semantic transparency in which the perceived transparency of English noun–noun compounds, and of their constituent words, is predicted on the basis of the expectedness of their semantic structure. We show that such compounds are perceived as more transparent when the first noun is more frequent, hence more expected, in the lang...

http://link.springer.com/journal/11525/26/2/

This chapter investigates the relationship between the semantic transparency of compounds and their status as anaphoric islands. After revisiting the most compelling evidence for a pragmatic account of the English data, it discusses German adjective-noun compounds and argues that semantic transparency plays a crucial role in accessing compound-inte...

The article offers an overview of the heterogeneous set of lexical and semantic classes and subclasses of adverbs and adverbials with their characteristic inferential and distributional properties. Furthermore, it sketches major theoretical approaches that have been developed to account for adverbial semantics and introduces some current issues of...

Mandarin Chinese has three A+N constructions with distinct formal properties. One construction is clearly phrasal, one clearly constitutes a compound. The status of the third construction is controversial, being analysed either as a compound or as a phrase. Frequently drawing on data from Germanic A+N constructions for comparison, I show in this ar...

of Leipzig. The central topic to be addressed was how conceptual information on event structure is encoded in linguistic expressions and how such informa-tion can be reconstructed from utterances. Answers to these questions essen-tially contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between lexical semantics, syntactic structure, pragmati...