Project B2:
Universal and typological aspects of polarity
(discontinued since 2002)

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Head of the project

Prof. Dr. Hans Bernhard Drubig
Seminar für Englische Philologie
Lehrstuhl Linguistik II
Universität Tübingen
Wilhelmstraße 50
72074 Tübingen
Phone +49/7071/29-74969; Fax +49/7071/29-5760
Email: Hans-Bernhard.Drubig@uni-tuebingen.de

Staff

Edward Göbbel
Email: edward.goebbel@uni-tuebingen.de

Konstantin Kazenin

Aim of the project

Research in this project mainly concentrates on universal and typological aspects of sentential polarity and a range of phenomena which are licensed by polarity. Semantic, syntactic and prosodic investigation will be accompanied by systematic collection and analysis of typological data. The research carried out aims at a better foundation of grammatical theory by systematically analysing typological data from the following areas:

1. Polarity sensitivity and indefiniteness
2. Negation, focus and scope inversion
3. Ellipsis and descriptive anaphora as polarity-sensitive phenomena

Areas 2. and 3. will be accompanied by experimental prosodic studies in a selection of languages which aim at a better understanding of the functions of the prosody-syntax interface in the grammatical model.


Laura Kallmeyer. Last modified 22 October 1999.