General Linguistics Colloquium (WiSe 2024-2025)

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This paper aims to contribute to the typological research on clause combining and in particular subordination and insubordination by addressing data from Ancient Greek (AG). It focuses on causal relations, taking into account finite causal clauses introduced by the conjunction epeí (meaning both ‘when’, ‘since’ and ‘because’). In addition to bi-clausal constructions (i.e., matrix and subordinate epeí-clause), AG reference grammars (among others, van Emde Boas et al. 2019: 549) account for instances of ‘independent’ epeí-clauses. In other words, epeí-clauses that do not show syntactic integration. The paper applies the broader categorization of adverbial clauses taken from language typology (among other, Thompson et al. 2007) and addresses issues of syntactic and pragmatic dependency by considering whether the instances of ‘independent’ epeí-clauses should be considered a case of insubordination. Furthermore, the paper discusses the category of conjunction in light of both ancient grammarian definitions and modern linguistic criteria. By means of examples from a corpus of texts from the Classical and the Postclassical periods, the paper shows that in several cases the traditional criteria adopted for defining subordination (i.e., dependency and clausal embedding, cf. Cristofaro 2003: 15–18) are often found lacking in order to describe the different realizations of clause linkage strategies covered by the use of Ancient Greek conjunctions.

Selected references
Cristofaro, S. (2003). Subordination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
van Emde Boas, E., Rijksbaron, A., Huitink, L. and de Bakker, M. (2019). The Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, S. A., Longacre, R. E. and S.J. Hwang (2007), Adverbial clauses, in T. Shopen (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description (Vol. II: Complex Constructions), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 237–300.

Recent research demonstrates that communication is an inherently multimodal phenomenon. This also applies to information structuring i.e marking information on utterance level for the sake of both serving immediate communicative goals and establishing coherence with previous and upcoming discourse. In German the resources for marking information are mostly prosodic and syntactical [1,3] and recent research has shown that we employ gestural and bodily resources as well to that end [2,6].

Research on information structure is mostly restricted to analyses of context-free single utterances. Utterances are produced within conversational contexts though and comply with the given communicative goals the interactive situation poses. One way to approach context analytically is through the concept of communicative genres i.e habitualized, pre-patterned speaking practices which generate expectations about mutual communicative goals and specific verbal packaging [4,5]. Information structure can be analyzed with regard to the specific affordances of the respective communicative genre where interactants mutually establish local and global coherence and the common communicative goals.

The present study focuses on the ways information is multimodally marked to establish local coherence within two communicative genres (game explanations and story retellings). Data stem from interactions between 45 German preschool children and their caregivers. Findings show that interactants employ prosodic and gestural resources to mark information, with gestures often providing additional referential information to the interaction. Interactants thereby jointly adjust and establish information multimodally to progress the discourse and achieve the goals of the communicative genre.

[1] Dipper, S., Goetze, M., & Skopeteas, S. (2007). Information structure in cross-linguistic corpora : annotation guidelines for phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and information structure (p. 210). Universitätsverlag Potsdam.
[2] Ebert, C., Evert, S., & Wilmes, K. (2011). Focus Marking via Gestures. Sinn & Bedeutung, 15, 1–15.
[3] Fanselow, G. (2016). Syntactic and Prosodic Reflexes of Information Structure in Germanic. In C. Féry & S. Ishihara (Hrsg.), The Oxford handbook of information structure (S. 621–641). Oxford University Press.
[4] Günthner, S. & Knoblauch, H. (1994). "Forms are the food of faith": Gattungen als Muster kommunikativen Handelns. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 46(4), 693–723
[5] Kern, F., Boden, U., Nemeth, A., Koutalidis, S., Abramov, O., Kopp, S., Rohlfing K. J., (in press). Pre-school children’s discourse competence in different genres and their relation to iconic gestures. Journal of Child Language.
[6] Rohrer, P. L., Florit-Pons, J., Vilà-Giménez, I., & Prieto, P. (2022). Children Use Non-referential Gestures in Narrative Speech to Mark Discourse Elements Which Update Common Ground. Frontiers in Psychology, 12.

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