Agentivity as a key to prominence: Experimental approaches to argument alternations in German (B07)

• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2017 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 281511265

This project explores the question whether the privileged status of agentive and animate verbal arguments can be explained by the notion of prominence. The main challenge is to model agentivity-related prominence and its relation to animacy in a feature-based approach to agentivity. The empirical focus lies on experiments (acceptability ratings, event-related brain potentials) that test for ¿ne-grained agentivity and animacy prominence distinctions in passives and constructions with the pronoun man 'they, one'.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• Subproject of: SFB 1252: Prominence in Language
• Applicant Institution: Universität zu Köln
• Project Heads: Dr. Markus Philipp; Professorin Dr. Beatrice Primus (†)