Franziska Günther - Constructions in Cognitive Contexts: Why Individuals Matter in Linguistic Relativity Research

Franziska Gnther

Constructions in Cognitive Contexts

Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs

Editor

Volker Gast

Editorial Board

Walter Bisang

Jan Terje Faarlund

Hans Henrich Hock

Natalia Levshina

Heiko Narrog

Matthias Schlesewsky

Amir Zeldes

Niina Ning Zhang

Editor Responsible for this volume

Natalia Levshina

Volume 299

ISBN 978-3-11-045978-4

e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-046134-3

e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-045986-9

ISSN 1861-4302

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;

detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.

2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

www.degruyter.com

For my family

This book presents the updated and revised version of my doctoral dissertation submitted to and accepted by Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitt Mnchen (LMU Munich) in 2014.

I am deeply grateful to all the people and institutions who supported me in realizing this project. Without them, it would never have been possible.

First of all, I would like to thank my main supervisor Hans-Jrg Schmid for his immense support and his valuable and constructive suggestions during the planning and realization of the research reported in this book.

My special thanks go to Thomas Geyer and Hermann Mller for making it possible for me to conduct the eye-tracking experiment and for providing me with the expertise and not least with the means and infrastructure I needed to collect and analyse my data.

I am also indebted to Helmut Kchenhoff and, in particular, Andr Klima from the Statistisches Beratungslabor ( StaBLab ) at LMU Munich for their advice and support with the statistical analysis of the data from Experiment 1.

I would furthermore like to extend my thanks to the following people for their support in realizing the two experiments at the core of this book: Sebastian Hoffmann for making it possible to test English native speakers at Lancaster University; Patrick Falb for technical support during the planning and running of Experiment 1; Susanne Grandmontagne for programming the online pre-test to Experiment 2; the IT-Gruppe Geisteswissenschaften for providing the required server space and the Infodienst of LMU Munich for the mailing; Gebhard Grelczak for technical support; Ahu Gcke and Dieter Drottleff for supporting me in using the labs and in recruiting participants; and, of course, all the many people who took the time and effort to participate in the experiments.

I am also very thankful to all those people who inspired the research reported here and/ or who provided me with feedback and ideas at different stages of its development: Kenny Coventry, Wolfgang Schindler, Beate Sodian, Thora Tenbrink, Dietmar Zaefferer, my colleagues at the English Department, as well as the members of the Modern Linguistics Colloquium . My special thanks go to my colleagues Kerstin Fuhrich, Judith Huber, Sylvia Jaki and Daphn Kerremans for their support and encouragement during the final stages of this project, to Paul Greenleaf for proofreading the manuscript and to my brother Sebastian for helping me with the layout of the final version.

I also want to express my thanks to the reviewers and series editors, in particular Natalia Levshina, for their comments on earlier versions of this book. Their suggestions have substantially contributed to improving the initial version.

I also gratefully acknowledge the support of the editorial team at de Gruyter Mouton, in particular Julie Miess, Birgit Sievert, Angelika Hermann and Nancy Christ.

I am very indebted to the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes for financial support in the form of a PhD scholarship, and for giving me the opportunity to meet many interesting and inspiring people.

Finally, my special and very personal thanks go to my family and, in particular, to Christoph, for their love, patience, encouragement and support throughout all stages of realizing this project.

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