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The early acquisition of Greek compounds by two monolingual Greek girls aged between 1;8 and 3;0 years is studied in a usage-based theoretical framework. Special importance is attached to the morphological structure of Greek compound types occurring in child speech and child-directed speech. Greek nominal compound formation does not consist in the mere juxtaposition of words or roots, but involves stems as well as a compound marker. Major questions addressed are the transparency of compounds and productive nominal compound formation. Evidence for productivity of nominal compound formation has been found with only one of the two girls. In contrast to other languages, neoclassical nominal compounds by far exceed endocentric subordinative ones tokenwise in Greek child speech and child-directed speech providing evidence of entrenchment rather than productivity.
In a cross-linguistic comparison it is shown that, in spite of the fact that both Standard Modern Greek and German are rich in nominal compounds, their number is much more limited in Greek than in German child speech. An explanation for this apparent paradox is provided by an onomasiological approach to lexical typology based on a sample list of nominal compounds occurring in German child language and their Greek translational equivalents. It has been found that while use of nominal compounds is common in colloquial German including child-centered situations, it is more typical of Greek formal than colloquial registers.
Children […] growing up with highly inflected languages such as Modern Greek will frequently hear different grammatical forms of a given lexeme used in different grammatical and semantic-pragmatic contexts. In spite of the fact that the Greek noun is not as highly inflected as the verb, acquisition of nominal inflection of this inflecting-fusional language is quite complex, comprising the three categories of case, number, and gender. As is usual in this type of language, the formation of case-number forms obeys different patterns that apply to largely arbitrary classes of nominal lexemes partially based on gender. Further, frequency of the occurrence of the three gender classes and case-number forms of nouns greatly differs in spoken Greek, regarding both the types and tokens. […] [A] child learning an inflecting-fusional language like Greek must construct different inflectional patterns depending not only on parts of speech but also on subclasses within a given part of speech, such as gender classes of nouns and inflectional classes within or (exceptionally) across genders. It is therefore to be expected that the early development of case and number distinctions will apply to specific nouns and subclasses of nouns rather than the totality of Greek nouns. The two main theoretical approaches of morphological development that will be discussed in the present paper are the usage-based approach and the pre- and protomorphology approach.
The two papers included in this volume have developed from work with the CHILDES tools and the Media Editor in the two research projects, "Second language acquisition of German by Russian learners", sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, from 1998 to 1999 (directed by Ursula Stephany, University of Cologne, and Wolfgang Klein, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen) and "The age factor in the acquisition of German as a second language", sponsored by the German Science Foundation (DFG), Bonn, since 2000 (directed by Ursula Stephany, University of Cologne, and Christine Dimroth, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen). The CHILDES Project has been developed and is being continuously improved at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, under the supervision of Brian MacWhinney. Having used the CHILDES tools for more than ten years for transcribing and analyzing Greek child data there it was no question that I would also use them for research into the acquisition of German as a second language and analyze the big amount of spontaneous speech gathered from two Russian girls with the help of the CLAN programs. When in the spring of 1997, Steven Gillis from the University of Antwerp (in collaboration with Gert Durieux) developed a lexicon-based automatic coding system based on the CLAN program MOR and suitable for coding languages with richer morphologies than English, such as Modern Greek. Coding huge amounts of data then became much quicker and more comfortable so that I decided to adopt this system for German as well. The paper "Working with the CHILDES Tools" is based on two earlier manuscripts which have grown out of my research on Greek child language and the many CHILDES workshops taught in Germany, Greece, Portugal, and Brazil over the years. Its contents have now been adapted to the requirements of research into the acquisition of German as a second language and for use on Windows.
This paper is concerned with the tagging of spatial expressions in German newspaper articles, assigning a meaning to the expression and classifying the usages of the spatial expression and linking the derived referent to an event description. In our system, we implemented the activation of concepts in a very simple fashion, a concept is activated once (with a cost depending on the item that activated it) and is left activated thereafter. As an example, a city also activates the nodes for the region and the country it is part of, so that cities from one country are chosen over cities from different countries. A test corpus of 12 German newspaper articles was tested regarding several disambiguation strategies. Disambiguation was carried out via a beam search to find an approximately cost-optimal solution for the conflict set of potential grounding candidates for the tagged spatial expression. Test showed that the disambiguation strategies improved accuracy significantly.
The most macabre of the numerous anthropomorphic metaphors linguists provide for their subject matter is that of language death. The extinction of a language is in fact a distressing matter, because the cultural tradition connected to it and the sociocultural or even ethnic independence of the group that speaks it very often perish together with it. Yet it is a very common phenomenon. [...] It would seem strange that such a frequent and well-known phenomenon has not been studied much earlier; nevertheless it is a fact that the investigation of language death is a new and developing field, which emerged as something like an independent subdiscipline of linguistics towards the end of the seventies. This comparatively embryonic stage of the field should be kept in mind throughout the following discussion.
In 1983, Brian Henderson published an article that examined various types of narrative structure in film, including flashbacks and flashforwards. After analyzing a whole spectrum of techniques capable of effecting a transition between past and present – blurs, fades, dissolves, and so on – he concluded: "Our discussions indicate that cinema has not (yet) developed the complexity of tense structures found in literary works". His "yet" (in parentheses) was an instance of laudable caution, as very soon – in some ten–fifteen years – the situation would change drastically, and temporal twists would become a trademark of a new genre that has not (yet) acquired a standardized name: "modular narratives", "puzzle films", and "complex films" are among the labels used.
Grammatical relations – in particular the relation 'subject of' – and voice are of central concern to any theory of universal grammar. With respect to these phenomena the analysis of Tagalog (and the Philippine languages in general) has turned out to be particularly difficult and continues to be a matter of debate. What traditionally has been called passive voice in these languages […] appears to be so different from voice phenomena in the more familiar Indo-European languages that the term 'focus' was introduced in the late 1950s to underscore its 'exceptional' nature [...]. Furthermore, […] an inflationary use has been made of the term 'ergative' in the last decade; it can thus no longer be assumed that it has an unequivocal and specific meaning in typologizing languages, apart from the technical definition it might be given within a particular framework. But if the Philippine 'focus' constructions are neither passive nor ergative, how else can they be analysed? [...] In this paper a ease will be made for the claim that 'focus' marking should be analysed in terms of orientation, a concept used […] for capturing the difference between English (and, more generally, Indo-European) orientated nominalisations such as 'employ-er' or 'employ-ee', and unorientated nominalisations such as 'employ-ing'. This approach implies that 'focus' marking is derivational rather than inflectional as often presumed in the literature. This is to say that what is typologically conspicuous in Tagalog is not the 'focus' phenomenon per se, since this is very similar to orientated nominalisations in many other languages, but rather the very prominent use of orientated formations (i.e., derivational morphology) in basic clause structure.
This paper is concerned with developing Joan Bybee's proposals regarding the nature of grammatical meaning and synthesizing them with Paul Hopper's concept of grammar as emergent. The basic question is this: How much of grammar may be modeled in terms of grammaticalization? In contradistinction to Heine, Claudi & Hünnemeyer (1991), who propose a fairly broad and unconstrained framework for grammaticalization, we try to present a fairly specific and constrained theory of grammaticalization in order to get a more precise idea of the potential and the problems of this approach. Thus, while Heine et al. (1991:25) expand – without discussion – the traditional notion of grammaticalization to the clause level, and even include non-segmental structure (such as word order), we will here adhere to a strictly 'element-bound' view of grammaticalization: where no grammaticalized element exists, there is no grammaticalization. Despite this fairly restricted concept of grammaticalization, we will attempt to corroborate the claim that essential aspects of grammar may be understood and modeled in terms of grammaticalization. The approach is essentially theoretical (practical applications will, hopefully, follow soon) and many issues are just mentioned and not discussed in detail. The paper presupposes a familiarity with the basic facts of grammaticalization and it does not present any new facts.
This paper is concerned with anticausative verbs (or verb-forms), or shortly, anticausatives. [...] [C]ausative/non-causative pairs with a marked non-causative are quite frequent in the languages of the world. However, so far they have not received sufficient attention in general and typological linguistics, a fact which is also manifested in the absence of a generally recognized term for this phenomenon […]. This paper therefore deals with the most important properties of anticausatives (particularly semantic conditions on them), their relationship to other areas of grammar as well as their historical development in different languages. The grammatical domain of transitivity, valence and voice, where the anticausative belongs, takes up a central position in grammar and consequently the present discussion should be of considerable interest to general comparative (or typological) linguists.