Swantje Tönnis

Universität Stuttgart · Institute of Linguistics

In this paper, we provide empirical evidence for Tönnis' (2021) hypothesis that German cleft sentences address relatively unexpected questions in discourse while their canonical variants address relatively expected questions. We present an experiment that measures the relative preference between the German cleft and its canonical variant in context...

I take a new perspective on es-clefts in German, that focuses on how an es-cleft contributes to the discourse structure and how it does this differently than its canonical counterpart. My analysis is inspired by naturally occurring examples from German novels. It combines an adapted version of Roberts’ (2012) QUD stack and Velleman et al.’s (2012)...

We present novel experimental evidence on the availability and the status of exhaustivity inferences with focus partitioning in German, English, and Hungarian. Results suggest that German and English focus-background clefts and Hungarian focus share important properties, (É. Kiss 1998, 1999; Szabolcsi 1994; Percus 1997; Onea & Beaver 2009). Those c...

We present a corpus study on a hitherto unstudied use of the Ger-man prefield-es in combination with a demonstrative subject dies and a copula verb ist, which we call Es ist dies-sentences. In such constructions, the prefield-es appears redundant as they contain a suitable and mostly preferred candidate to fill the prefield, the demonstrative prono...

We present a novel empirical study on German directly comparing the exhaustivity inference in es-clefts to exhaustivity inferences in definite pseudoclefts, exclusives, and plain intonational focus constructions. We employ mouse-driven verification/falsification tasks in an incremental information-retrieval paradigm across two experiments in order...

We present an empirical study on exhaustivity inferences in German es-clefts compared to definite descriptions (pseudoclefts with an identity statement), exclusives, and focus constructions. Our study uses a novel mouse-driven picture-verification task in which the in-cremental updating of the context allows one to determine at which point particip...

We present a corpus study on German it-clefts, that tests whether subject clefts are more frequent than other clefts in German. This observation has been made for several other languages. However, we used a more complex method than earlier studies by not only providing the frequencies of (non-)subject clefts, but by additionally comparing those fre...

We present a corpus study with the aim of contributing to a better understanding of the factors that facilitate the use of it-clefts in German. We analyzed crucial properties of clefts and their contexts. In this poster presentation, we focus mainly on one aspect, namely the grammatical role of the pivot. Depending on the grammatical role of the pi...