Last year, Katharina Turgay and I gave a talk on the acquisition of functional categories in German prepositional phrases at Generative Grammatik des NordenS (GGS) in Berlin. An article that is based on that talk but elaborates on it in many respects has now been accepted for publication in the Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft. In the paper, we describe and evaluate a study with 40 Turkish speaking primary school children in L2 acquisition (together with two control groups of children in L1 acquisition) in order to examine how the functional categories D, Path and Place are acquired. A manuscript version of the paper can be found here.

Together with Erik Stei (University of Bonn), I am working on the semantics and pragmatics of quotation for quite some time now. Now, our paper “How quotation marks what people do with works” has just been published by the Journal of Pragmatics. The picture links to the original paper. I you do not have access to the Journal of Pragmatics, you can find a preprint version of the paper on the work section or here.

Last weekend, I attended MOSS 2, where Malte Zimmermann gave a talk on the two German modal particles “doch” and “schon” (you can find the abstract here). He focussed on stressed variants of these particles and argued for two hypotheses.

(i) The stressed variants consist of the unstressed particle plus verum focus.
(ii) The meaning of the particle “schon” is based on its temporal adverbial counterpart.

While I have not much to say regarding hypothesis (ii), I already said something regarding (i). In a paper based on a talk I gave at a fest-conference for Harald Weydt in Bern in 2009, I defended basically the same claim for accented “JA”. The paper is titled “Betonte Modalpartikeln und Verumfokus” and appeared at the end of 2010 in the volume “40 Jahre Partikelforschung” edited by Elke Hentschel and Theo Harden. I uploaded a manuscript version of the article which you can find in the work section or here. The picture links to the official page for more information on the volume.