The lemna access to German temporal conjunctions

This monograph studies the mental representations and processes which underlie the verbalization of temporal knowledge about situations by German subordinate temporal conjunctions. The cognitive approach presented here combines issues of theoretical linguistics (temporal semantics) and psycholinguistics (lemma access). It comprises an extensive specification of the kinds of conceptually encoded temporal knowledge as well as a detailed analysis of the linguistic meanings (lemmas) of temporal conjunctions. Both kinds of knowledge are required to model lemma access in speech production. The basic hypothesis advanced here is that the access to temporal conjunctions requires specific kinds of speaker-generated focusings of the situations.