Edgar Onea
Biographic Data
| ID | 772606 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Edgar Onea |
| GIVEN NAMES | Edgar |
| FAMILY NAME | Onea |
| SIGNATURE | ONEA E |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Graz |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8217-4463 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 16 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 27 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 16 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
On the role of verbal semantics in question embedding: The case of to know
We propose a novel semantic analysis of the verb to know that takes the idea of question orientation of interrogative-embedding predicates to the limit. The new analysis conceptualizes knowledge as a judgment about an ability to answer questions and not as a sort of belief. This way the fact that the argument of to know is a question becomes crucial for the analysis of what knowledge is. The proposal naturally derives the different exhaustive int…
The linguistic basis of narrative suspense: Narrative Suspense Depends on Potentially Inquiry-Terminating Questions
Suspense is an important aspect of cognitive-emotional narrative text comprehension. We adopt a text-centered, linguistic approach, investigating how the information structure of a narrative text as modeled by its erotetic structure instigates suspense. We report on two studies that reveal a strong correlation between the presence of what we term ‘potentially inquiry-terminating questions’ (PITQs) and the level of experienced suspense. PITQs are …
What Is Narrative Suspense? Evidence from Production Studies
Suspense is an important aesthetic feature of narrative media across different genres. Literary theory is concerned with elucidating the concept of suspense as applied to narrative literature. If literary theory wants to keep in touch with ordinary usage of the term ›suspense‹, then it must rely on an audience’s ability to judge scenes in narratives as to their suspensefulness. But how do we find out how someone understands the very concept of su…
The nearly missed account of narrative suspense
In this paper, we specify features of a narrative that are responsible for its suspensefulness. Taking Noël Carroll’s account of erotetic narrative as our point of departure, we argue that a narrative is experienced as suspenseful because it gives rise to so-called potentially inquiry terminating questions. Such questions suggest to readers that they are just about to get the information they are reading for. Due to this highly specific erotetic …
Neurophysiological evidence for the first mention effect during pronominal reference resolution in German Sign Language
Anaphoric pronoun resolution in spoken language has been shown to be influenced by the first mention bias. While this bias has been well investigated in spoken languages, less is known about a similar bias in sign languages. In sign languages, pronominal pointing signs ( index ) are directed towards referential locations in the signing space typically associated with discourse referents. In German Sign Language (DGS), signers follow an ipsi-contr…
Virginia Hill and Alexandru Mardale: The diachrony of Differential Object Marking in Romanian
Article Virginia Hill and Alexandru Mardale. 2021. The diachrony of Differential Object Marking in Romanian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. xiii + 263. ISBN: 9780192898791 was published on February 10, 2023 in the journal Folia Linguistica (volume 0, issue 0)
Nominal appositives in grammar and discourse
In this article, we develop a theory of the form and interpretation of nonrestrictive nominal appositives (NAPs) by combining two recent syntactic and pragmatic approaches. Following Ott (2016), we assume that NAPs are independent elliptical speech acts, which are linearly interpolated into their host sentences in production. Building on insights in Onea 2016, we argue that NAPs make their pragmatic contribution as short answers to discourse-stru…
Focus affinity in Spanish. An experimental study
The notion focus affinity refers to the likelihood that a grammatical role (e.g., subject, object) is the narrow focus of a sentence. There is evidence that such differences exist at the level of distributional data. For example, subjects are less often focal and more often topical as compared to direct objects. However, it is not obvious whether focus affinity is genuinely related to grammatical roles. Focus affinity could be an epiphenomenon of…
An inquisitive stroll in commitment spaces
From topic to object: Grammaticalization of differential object marking in Romanian
In this paper, we provide new evidence for the hypothesis that in some languages, differential object marking (DOM) may have evolved from marking of the information structural category of topicality. While Iemmolo (2010) suggested that topic left-dislocation might have facilitated the evolution of DOM, and Dalrymple and Nikolaeva (2011) argued for systematic marking of secondary topics as the source of DOM, we suggest a third possible grammatical…
Exhaustivity in It -Clefts
This chapter provides an overview of the most important theoretical positions on the exhaustivity inference often associated with it-clefts in English and comparable structures in other languages alongside with a brief review of the results of a number of experimental studies. There is a surprising discrepancy between the predictions of the theoretical analyses and the empirical findings. While theoretical approaches tend to derive exhaustivity a…
That’s not quite it: An experimental investigation of (non‐)exhaustivity in clefts
We present a novel empirical study on German directly comparing the exhaustivity inference in es-clefts to exhaustivity inferences in definite pseudoclefts, exclusives, and plain intonational focus constructions. We employ mouse-driven verification/falsification tasks in an incremental information-retrieval paradigm across two experiments in order to assess the strength of exhaustivity in the four sentence types. The results are compatible with a…
A DRT Analysis of Discourse Referents and Anaphora Resolution in Sign Language
Sign languages use the horizontal plane of the signing space to introduce discourse referents at particular referential loci (R-loci). R-loci could be viewed as abstract referential indices also known from spoken language grammar. However, in sign languages the spatial relations between R-loci appear to be exploited in establishing anaphoric relations between discourse referents, thus reducing ambiguities. In this article, we propose a feature-dr…
Wenn -Sätze als propositionale Argumente
It is well known that in German (and many other languages) clauses headed by a conditional complementizer can appear as (apparent) arguments of some verbs, including preference predicates and factive verbs. In most of the recent literature, indirect analyses are advocated according to which in such cases the clauses headed by wenn ('if') are adverbial clauses with a conditional interpretation and not real argument-clauses of the embedding verb. I…
Between Specification and Explanation: About a German Discourse Particle
This paper provides a unified semantic and discourse pragmatic analysis of the German particle nämlich, traditionally described as having a specificational and an explanative reading. Our claim is that nämlich is a discourse marker which signals that the expression it is attached to is a short (elliptic) answer to a salient implicit question about the previous utterance. We show how both the explanative and the specificational reading can be deri…
Focus marking and focus interpretation
Between Specification and Explanation: About a German Discourse Particle
This paper provides a unified semantic and discourse pragmatic analysis of the German particle nämlich, traditionally described as having a specificational and an explanative reading. Our claim is that nämlich is a discourse marker which signals that the expression it is attached to is a short (elliptic) answer to a salient implicit question about the previous utterance. We show how both the explanative and the specificational reading can be deri…
Focus marking and focus interpretation
Wenn -Sätze als propositionale Argumente
It is well known that in German (and many other languages) clauses headed by a conditional complementizer can appear as (apparent) arguments of some verbs, including preference predicates and factive verbs. In most of the recent literature, indirect analyses are advocated according to which in such cases the clauses headed by wenn ('if') are adverbial clauses with a conditional interpretation and not real argument-clauses of the embedding verb. I…
A DRT Analysis of Discourse Referents and Anaphora Resolution in Sign Language
Sign languages use the horizontal plane of the signing space to introduce discourse referents at particular referential loci (R-loci). R-loci could be viewed as abstract referential indices also known from spoken language grammar. However, in sign languages the spatial relations between R-loci appear to be exploited in establishing anaphoric relations between discourse referents, thus reducing ambiguities. In this article, we propose a feature-dr…
That’s not quite it: An experimental investigation of (non‐)exhaustivity in clefts
We present a novel empirical study on German directly comparing the exhaustivity inference in es-clefts to exhaustivity inferences in definite pseudoclefts, exclusives, and plain intonational focus constructions. We employ mouse-driven verification/falsification tasks in an incremental information-retrieval paradigm across two experiments in order to assess the strength of exhaustivity in the four sentence types. The results are compatible with a…
Exhaustivity in It -Clefts
This chapter provides an overview of the most important theoretical positions on the exhaustivity inference often associated with it-clefts in English and comparable structures in other languages alongside with a brief review of the results of a number of experimental studies. There is a surprising discrepancy between the predictions of the theoretical analyses and the empirical findings. While theoretical approaches tend to derive exhaustivity a…
An inquisitive stroll in commitment spaces
From topic to object: Grammaticalization of differential object marking in Romanian
In this paper, we provide new evidence for the hypothesis that in some languages, differential object marking (DOM) may have evolved from marking of the information structural category of topicality. While Iemmolo (2010) suggested that topic left-dislocation might have facilitated the evolution of DOM, and Dalrymple and Nikolaeva (2011) argued for systematic marking of secondary topics as the source of DOM, we suggest a third possible grammatical…
Focus affinity in Spanish. An experimental study
The notion focus affinity refers to the likelihood that a grammatical role (e.g., subject, object) is the narrow focus of a sentence. There is evidence that such differences exist at the level of distributional data. For example, subjects are less often focal and more often topical as compared to direct objects. However, it is not obvious whether focus affinity is genuinely related to grammatical roles. Focus affinity could be an epiphenomenon of…
Nominal appositives in grammar and discourse
In this article, we develop a theory of the form and interpretation of nonrestrictive nominal appositives (NAPs) by combining two recent syntactic and pragmatic approaches. Following Ott (2016), we assume that NAPs are independent elliptical speech acts, which are linearly interpolated into their host sentences in production. Building on insights in Onea 2016, we argue that NAPs make their pragmatic contribution as short answers to discourse-stru…
Neurophysiological evidence for the first mention effect during pronominal reference resolution in German Sign Language
Anaphoric pronoun resolution in spoken language has been shown to be influenced by the first mention bias. While this bias has been well investigated in spoken languages, less is known about a similar bias in sign languages. In sign languages, pronominal pointing signs ( index ) are directed towards referential locations in the signing space typically associated with discourse referents. In German Sign Language (DGS), signers follow an ipsi-contr…
Virginia Hill and Alexandru Mardale: The diachrony of Differential Object Marking in Romanian
Article Virginia Hill and Alexandru Mardale. 2021. The diachrony of Differential Object Marking in Romanian. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. xiii + 263. ISBN: 9780192898791 was published on February 10, 2023 in the journal Folia Linguistica (volume 0, issue 0)
The nearly missed account of narrative suspense
In this paper, we specify features of a narrative that are responsible for its suspensefulness. Taking Noël Carroll’s account of erotetic narrative as our point of departure, we argue that a narrative is experienced as suspenseful because it gives rise to so-called potentially inquiry terminating questions. Such questions suggest to readers that they are just about to get the information they are reading for. Due to this highly specific erotetic …
What Is Narrative Suspense? Evidence from Production Studies
Suspense is an important aesthetic feature of narrative media across different genres. Literary theory is concerned with elucidating the concept of suspense as applied to narrative literature. If literary theory wants to keep in touch with ordinary usage of the term ›suspense‹, then it must rely on an audience’s ability to judge scenes in narratives as to their suspensefulness. But how do we find out how someone understands the very concept of su…
On the role of verbal semantics in question embedding: The case of to know
We propose a novel semantic analysis of the verb to know that takes the idea of question orientation of interrogative-embedding predicates to the limit. The new analysis conceptualizes knowledge as a judgment about an ability to answer questions and not as a sort of belief. This way the fact that the argument of to know is a question becomes crucial for the analysis of what knowledge is. The proposal naturally derives the different exhaustive int…
The linguistic basis of narrative suspense: Narrative Suspense Depends on Potentially Inquiry-Terminating Questions
Suspense is an important aspect of cognitive-emotional narrative text comprehension. We adopt a text-centered, linguistic approach, investigating how the information structure of a narrative text as modeled by its erotetic structure instigates suspense. We report on two studies that reveal a strong correlation between the presence of what we term ‘potentially inquiry-terminating questions’ (PITQs) and the level of experienced suspense. PITQs are …
Linguistics (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (8 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (6 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (5 works) · Psychology (5 works) · Artificial Intelligence (4 works) · Artificial Intelligence (4 works) · Mathematics (4 works)