So-called ‘Rektionskomposita’ (synthetic compounds: compounds in which the first member fills an argument of the second member) are often viewed as syntactically determined structures, such that it is automatically the ‘first sister’, usually the complement, that can serve as first member of a synthetic compound. In this article it is shown that this view is not tenable. From a theoretic-syntactic perspective one would have to assume a basic argument order that is in contradiction to well-known binding facts. From an empirical perspective, it is demonstrated by means of a questionnaire experiment that complements are preferred as first members in synthetic compounds, but that this is only a side-effect from differences in the acceptability with respect to thematic role selection and, especially, animacy. So it is concluded that synthetic compounds are not different from ordinary determinative compounds in that it is only semantic and not syntactic principles that govern the interpretation

This paper is concerned with the serialization of argument clauses (AC) and relative clauses (RC) in the German Nachfeld. We discuss examples provided by Haider (1994) who claims that only RC>AC is grammatical. Our claim is that in most contexts, the serialization is optional; but in some contexts, there is a gradient preference for RC>AC. There are no constraints which rule out AC>RC categorically. An experiment obtaining grammaticality judgments on sentences with permuted syntactic functions of these clauses confirms that none of the two serializations is ruled out. The preference for RC>AC arises if in the base, one of the Cps c-commands the other. We propose an approach based on Stochastic Optimality Theory in order to analyze the data under discussion.

This paper investigates the use of images and emoticons as well as the relationship between images and text on German Twitter and Chinese Sina-Weibo within the framework of the cultural contrastive approach. The study shows that Chinese writers use not only more images, but also more diverse images. The distribution of emoticons is also different: In German, the top emoticons can largely be described as semantically positive images. By contrast, some popular Chinese emoticons are acting contradictory to the corresponding text by modalizing the linguistic message sarcastically. These differences can be related to differences in media conditions as well as the respective socio-cultural constellation. Overall, however, more commonalities than differences prevail in both countries: Cross-culturally, flat pictures and simple text-image relationships are preferred, which can be explained by the mechanisms of the microblog in mass media.

Meibauer, Jörg (2014): Lying at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.