The Impact of Grammar on the Construal of Discourse Alternatives in German and English

• Published in: Languages (Basel) Vol. 7; no. 3; p. 240
• Main Authors: Dimroth, Christine, Starren, Marianne
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.09.2022
• Subjects: additive particles; Adults; Analysis; Contrastive analysis; dialogue; discourse alternatives; English; English language; Function words; German; German language; Grammar, Comparative and general; Grammatical subject; Information structure; Native speakers; Polarity; Syntactic analysis; Syntactic structures; syntax; Topic and comment; Word order; Germany

This paper investigates additive links to discourse alternatives in picture comparison dialogues produced by adult native speakers of English and German. Additive relations are established across turns when participants are confirming the presence of matching objects on both pictures (A: “I have X”....