Stefan Schnell
List of John Benjamins publications in which Stefan Schnell is involved.
2026 Chapter 19. High animacy does not favour zero over pronouns – especially for objects: Especially for objects The Documentarist Turn: From observable linguistic behaviour to typological generalizations, Riesberg, Sonja, Uta Reinöhl and Birgit Hellwig (eds.), pp. 488–517 | Chapter
Since Givón (1983) and Ariel (1990), a large body of research continues to assume that zero anaphors reflect a higher degree of accessibility than overt pronominal forms. However, when the features of animacy or person are taken as its metric, existing case studies do not consistently confirm a… read more
2025 Discourse ergativity and human reference in Basque Studies in Language 49:3, pp. 682–711 | Article
One possible usage-based motivation for ergative alignment in grammars is the reference-establishing function shared by the sole argument of intransitives and the patient argument of transitives. Here we test this hypothesis, known as Preferred Argument Structure, against discourse data from… read more
2023 Chapter 9. Are referent introductions sensitive to forward planning in discourse? Evidence from Multi-CAST Discourse Phenomena in Typological Perspective, Barotto, Alessandra and Simone Mattiola (eds.), pp. 231–268 | Chapter
It has been argued that speakers employ morphosyntactic structures such as presentationals and left-dislocations (Lambrecht 1994) to establish new entities in discourse due to considerations of referent accessibility vis-à-vis event processing (Du Bois 1987; Chafe 1987). We here investigate… read more
2022 Cross-linguistic patterns in the lexicalisation of bring and take Studies in Language 46:4, pp. 934–993 | Article
This study investigates the linguistic expression of bring and take events and more generally of the semantic domain of directed caused accompanied motion (‘directed CAM’) across a sample of eight languages of the Pacific and the Americas. Unlike English, the majority of languages in our sample… read more
2022 Caused accompanied motion constructions in Vera’a Caused Accompanied Motion: Bringing and taking events in a cross-linguistic perspective, Margetts, Anna, Sonja Riesberg and Birgit Hellwig (eds.), pp. 243–271 | Chapter
The expression of bring and take events (so-called ‘caused accompanied motion (CAM)’ events) in the Oceanic language Vera’a (North Vanuatu) is analysed in terms of lexical and constructional compositionality. The two lexical verbs centrally involved in CAM expressions have fairly general… read more
2019 Variable number marking in Vera’a: Animacy and beyond Asia-Pacific Language Variation 5:2, pp. 208–243 | Article
The number interpretation of Noun Phrase structures (NPs) with different animacy values and variable overt marking of number is investigated in a corpus from the Oceanic language Vera’a. It is found that number marking is optional for all nouns and that number marking is essentially semantic,… read more
A cross-linguistic computational study on one new idea per clause Functions of Language: Online-First Articles | Article
We investigate a notion related to Chafe’s One New Idea Constraint (ONICON), namely that clauses only contain one new idea at a time. We investigate both the nominal and the verbal domain in discourse production data from 16 diverse languages. We find no convincing evidence for a hard constraint… read more