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Questions in Northern Sotho
(2006)
This article gives an overview of the marking of polar and constituent questions in Northern Sotho, a Bantu language of South Africa. It thereby provides a contribution to the typological investigation of sentence types in the world’s languages. As will be shown, Northern Sotho follows cross-linguistic tendencies in marking interrogative sentences: It uses intonation as main indicator in polar questions and question words as main indicator in constituent questions. Nevertheless, it also shows interesting language-specific variation, e.g. with respect to the location of raised intonation in polar questions, the presence of two pragmatically distinct question particles in polar questions, or a split in the formation of constituent questions based on the grammatical function of the questioned constituent.
„Ich mach dich Messer“ ist eine jugendsprachliche Wendung, die als ritualisierte Drohung im Sinne von „Ich greife dich mit einem Messer an.“ zu verstehen ist. Diese Wendung, bei der sowohl die semantische Bleichung („semantic bleaching“) des Verbs als auch das Fehlen des Determinierers in der NP auffällt, verweist auf Merkmale morpho-syntaktischer Reduktion, wie man sie häufig in Kontaktsprachen findet. Wie ich zeigen werde, handelt es sich hierbei jedoch nicht um eine bloße sprachliche Simplifizierung, sondern um ein komplexes und produktives grammatisches Phänomen: In „Ich mach dich Messer“ manifestiert sich ein spezifisches Zusammenwirken syntaktischer und semantischer Phänomene, das ich im folgenden als sprachliche Arbeitsteilung nach dem Muster von Funktionsverbgefügen beschreiben werde.
The Bantu language Makhuwa makes a distinction between cojoint and disjoint verb forms. Two hypotheses are made from generalisations on the distribution of the conjoint and disjoint verb forms in Makhuwa. 1) The verb appears in its conjoint form when a focal element occupies the Immediate After Verb (IAV) position; 2) the verb appears in its disjoint form when the IAV position is empty. A syntactic analysis is provided that accounts for these hypotheses if the IAV position is defined in terms of structural rather than linear adjacency between two heads in a direct c-command relation.
In the syntactic analysis two focus projections are proposed: one under TP (Ndayiragije 1999) hosting the disjoint morpheme and one under vP, to whose specifier focal elements move. Non-focal elements remain in-situ. This analysis accounts both for the strong adjacency requirement of a cojoint verb form and its focal object and for the empty IAV position that requires a verb to appear in its disjoint form.
In this paper I argue that the syntax of Eastern Bantu does not make reference to the notion 'syntactic object'. That is, there is no linguistic category of objects that is the target of syntactic rules in Eastern Bantu languages. Instead I propose that syntactic rules broadly distinguish complements and adjuncts as well as category type of complement or adjunct. I argue that Bantu languages are typologically special in that (a) the verb complement structure can be expanded by the valency increasing applicative suffix; and (b) that the class of adjuncts can be expanded through verb concord licensing. Because of these properties, Bantu languages have a much-expanded notion of 'complement' and 'adjunct'. Namely, complements consist of (a) inherent complements (subcategorised by the lexical verb), and (b) derived complements (licensed by the applicative suffix). Adjuncts consist of (a) non-subcategorised modifying constituents in the usual sense and (b) phrases that are licensed by verb concord (i.e. Topics in Bresnan and Mchombo (1987)). I propose that most the differences in the licensing of objects in Bantu are due to two causes: (a) the unusual split in the composition of complements and adjuncts and (b) a set of typological parameter settings.
Agreement is traditionally viewed as a cross-referencing device for core arguments such as subjects and (primary) objects.1 In this paper, I discuss data from Bantu languages that lead to a radical departure from this generally accepted position: agreement in a subset of Bantu languages cross-references a (sentential) topic rather than the subject. The crucial evidence for topic agreement comes from a construction known as subject-object (S-O) reversal, where the fronted patient agrees with what has uniformly been taken to be a `subject marker'. The correct analysis of S-O reversal as a topic construction with `topic agreement' explains a range of known facts in the languages in question. Furthermore, synchronic variation across Bantu in the presence/absence of S-O reversal and in the properties of the (topic/subject) agreement marker suggests a diachronic path from topic to subject marking. The systematic variation and covariation in the syntax of Bantu languages and the historical picture that it offers would be missed altogether if we continue to reject the idea that the notion of topic can be deeply grammaticized in the form of agreement.
This paper focuses on restrictions on the ordering of internal constituents of noun phrases in Chichewa, especially when those constituents are discontinuous. The motivation for discontinuity of the NP constituents will be given, together with discussion of constructions that can be subsumed under this rubric but that do not really involve discontinuity in the canonical sense. These are constructions where a topic NP in a left periphery position is either linked anaphorically with a modifier "remnant" or semantically with its hyponym in post-verbal position. According to Guthrie's classification of Bantu languages, Chichewa is placed in zone N unit N31. It is regarded as a dialect of Nyanja, classified as belonging to unit N30 (Guthrie 1967-71).
Human communication takes place when one person does something that when seen or heard by another person is taken to be done with the intention to communicate, and the other person, having seen the communicator show his or her intention to communicate, then uses inference to determine what the communicator intends to communicate. This is possible because the addressee assumes that the communicator is a rational person, that is, acts with goals in mind (see Grice 1975), and so must be doing the act for a reason, and it is worth the addressee’s effort to try to determine what that reason is, that is, determine the relevance of the act.
Relative quantifier scope in German depends, in contrast to English, very much on word order. The scope possibilities of a quantifier are determined by its surface position, its base position and the type of the quantifier. In this paper we propose a multicomponent analysis for German quantifiers computing the scope of the quantifier, in particular its minimal nuclear scope, depending on the syntactic configuration it occurs in.
This paper investigates what factors make a particular referent a good antecedent for subsequent pronominal reference. In particular, it explores two seemingly conflicting claims in the literature regarding the effects of topicality and focusing on referent salience. In light of new experimental results combined with a review of existing work, I conclude that neither topicality nor focusing alone can explain referent salience as indicated by patterns of pronoun reference. Rather, the data provide support for a multiple-factor model of salience (e.g. Arnold 1999). More specifically, the results show that grammatical role has a striking effect: being a subject makes a referent more salient than either pronominalization/givenness or focusing alone. Furthermore, the results of the experiment suggest that the likelihood of subsequent pronominal reference is also influenced by structural focusing and pronominalization, but not as strongly as by subjecthood. I argue that these data are best captured by a multiple-factor model in which factors differ in how influential they are relative to one another, i.e. how heavily weighted they are. A single-factor system does not seem adequate for these data.
Eine Reihe von nicht in Kodifikationen des Standards aufgenommenen sprachlichen Mustern wird im Blick auf ihre Karrieren in verschiedenen mündlichen und schriftlichen Texten in einer Flut von Veröffentlichungen thematisiert, meist in der Hoffnung hier grammatische Entwicklungen und die Basis für eine Orientierung der Grammatikschreibung an der Pragmatik zu entdecken. Im Folgenden soll Sprache nicht „konzeptuell schriftlich“ gedacht und „sozusagen literal idealisiert“ werden. Es soll argumentiert werden für eine einheitliche, mit Sprachgeschichte, ontogenetischem Spracherwerb und Variantenbildung verträgliche Erklärung nicht-standardisierter sprachlicher Muster im Rahmen einer Grammatikalisierungstheorie.