Article published in:
Register Variation and Syntactic Theory
Edited by Diane Massam and Tim Stowell
[Linguistic Variation 17:2] 2017
► pp. 186–204

On the omission of articles and copulae in German newspaper headlines

| Universität des Saarlandes
This paper argues based on a corpus-linguistic study that both omitted articles and copulae in German headlines are to be treated as null elements NA and NC. Both items need to be licensed by a specific (parsing) strategy known as discourse orientation (Huang, 1984), which is also applicable in the special register of headlines. It is shown that distinguishing between discourse and sentence orientation and correlating these two strategies with λ-binding and existential quantification, respectively, naturally accounts for an asymmetry in article omission observed in Stowell (1991).
Keywords: syntax, formal semantics, formal pragmatics, register variation, headlines, ellipsis, article omission, copula omission, discourse orientation
Published online: 26 January 2018
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.14017.rei
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Cited by 3 other publications

Lemke, Robin, Ingo Reich, Lisa Schäfer & Heiner Drenhaus
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2020. Une recette pour des arguments nuls. Arborescences: Revue d'études françaises :10 ► pp. 113 ff. Crossref logo
Reich, Ingo
2018.  In Handbuch Pragmatik, ► pp. 240 ff. Crossref logo

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