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In Belhare (Sino-Tibetan, Nepal), consonant prothesis at morpheme boundaries and deletion of stem "augments" is found if either metrical or morphological parsing would violate the bimoraic trochee pattern that underlies the stress system of the language. This finding corroborates Dresher & Lahiri’s (1991) "Principle of Metrical Coherence" and provides new evidence for the cross-linguistic applicability of Crowhurst’s (1994) "Tautomorphemic Foot" constraint. The data also support a view of the Prosodic Hierarchy as weakly layered, allowing consonants to be directly dominated by the foot or word node if they are prothetic and do not therefore need feature licensing within the syllable canon.
In the following I will discuss grammatical structures of Inuktitut, an Eskimo language spoken in the Canadian Eastern Arctic. Inuktitut is a polysynthetic language exhibiting an exceedingly elaborate verbal inflectional system including polypersonal marking. Furthermore, Inuktitut features free word order and optionality of noun phrases crossreferenced with the predicate. But Inuktitut also exhibits a number of features which seem to contradict the possibility of its being a "pronominal argument language" -- or as I would prefer to express it, a morphological argument language.
Languages vary in whether or not primary grammatical relations (PGRs) are sensitive to information from clause-level case or phrase structures. This variation correlates with a difference between verb agreement systems based on feature unification and systems based on feature composition. The choice between different PGR and agreement principles is found to be highly stable genetically and to characterize Indo-European as systematically different from Sino-Tibetan. Although the choice is partially similar to the Configurationality Parameter, it is shown that Indo-European languages of South Asia are nonconfigurational due to areal pressure but follow their European relatives in PGR and agreement principles.
Ever since Wilhelm von Humboldt’s (1836) pioneering study of Nahuatl, linguists have recurrently recognized that languages differ fundamentally in the syntactic weight they attribute to noun-phrases as the arguments of a verb. Currently, the most prominent attempts to turn this intuition into a precise hypothesis revolve around the notion of ‘configurationality’.
It is often assumed that the goal of typology is to define the notion ‘possible human language’. This view, which I call the Universalist Typology view is shared, for example, by virtually all contributors to Bynon & Shibatani’s 1995 volume Approaches to Language Typology, and by Moravscik in her review of this volume in Linguistic Typology 1 (p.105). In the following I claim that this assumption is fundamentally mistaken. To clarify the theoretical status of what is meant by ‘possible human language’, I argue here for a distinction between typological theory (theoretical typology) and grammatical theory (theoretical syntax and theoretical morphology) as distinct subdisciplines of linguistics.
Cross-linguistically, numerals differ from other linguistic expressions in various aspects of their grammatical behavior and their acquisition. What is so special about them? I will show that a closer look at the status of numbers and numerals not only gives an answer to this question, but can also shed some light onto the syntax-semantics interface. Taking into account philosophical approaches from the foundations of mathematics, I will set forth a definition of number as a function that can be fulfilled by certain sequences. This will lead us (i) to dispense with abstract entities “numbers“ and (ii) to regard numeral sequences as sets that can function as numbers. I will show that this OCCAMiam view captures the peculiar features of numeral sequences as a reflex of their “number function”. On the other hand, the integration of number words into complex syntactic structures leads to a morpho-syntactic behavior of cardinals, ordinals and numerals in “#”-constructions that comes close to that of different word classes, depending on parallels in their semantic-conceptual structure.
The Indo-Uralic verb
(2002)
C.C. Uhlenbeck made a distinction between two components of Proto-Indo-European, which he called A and B (1935a: 133ff.). The first component comprises pronouns, verbal roots, and derivational suffixes, and may be compared with Uralic, whereas the second component contains isolated words, such as numerals and most underived nouns, which have a different source. The wide attestation of the Indo-European numerals must be attributed to the development of trade resulting from the increased mobility which was the primary cause of the Indo-European expansions. Numerals do not belong to the basic vocabulary of a neolithic culture, as is clear from their absence in Proto-Uralic (cf. also Collinder 1965: 112) and from the spread of Chinese numerals throughout East Asia. Though Uhlenbeck objects to the term “substratum” for his B complex, I think that it is a perfectly appropriate denomination.
Inuktitut : Affixliste
(2003)
Das System der lateinischen Nominalflexion wird als Beispiel eines komplexen morphologischen Systems untersucht, das alle Symptome des ‚flektierenden Syndroms’ zeigt (homonyme, synonyme und kumulative Exponenten, Genuseinteilung, unterschiedlich strukturierte Deklinationskassen, defektive Paradigmen, usw.; Plank 1991a). Im Mittelpunkt steht die Frage, wie die Form-Funktions-Beziehung in einem derartigen System ‚funktioniert’. Morphembasierte Analysen bieten kaum Einsichten in die ‚Logik’ fusionierender Flexionssysteme: Die Vielfalt der Oberflächenformen kann zwar auf verschiedene Weise reduziert werden (zugrundeliegende Formen, Allomorphie, Morphonologie; Householder 1947). Homonymien, Synonymien und Kumulationen und damit die Tatsache, daß sich das System nicht den Erwartungen einer morphemischen Perspektive fügt, bleiben jedoch bestehen: Der Gedanke, morphologische Marker als ‚Saussuresche Zeichen’ aufzufassen, erweist sich hier als nicht fruchtbar (Anderson 1992). Aber auch neuere regelbasierte Ansätze halten – trotz der Zulassung ‚indirekterer’ Beziehungen – an einer vergleichbaren Form-Inhalts-Janusköpfigkeit morphologischer Markierungen grundsätzlich fest, wenn sie morphologische Markierungen als ‚Ausbuchstabierungen’ von Merkmalen oder Merkmalsbündeln behandeln. Traditionelle Darstellungen im Rahmen einer Wort-und-Paradigma-Morphologie liefern zwar oft wenig mehr als eine Auflistung von Formen, weisen jedoch den Weg zu einer nicht-zeichenhaften Auffassung morphologischer Markierung, die Saussure (1976: 122) am Beispiel der deutschen Pluralbildung formuliert: „ce n’est pas ‘Gäste’ qui exprime le pluriel, mais l’opposition ‚Gast : Gäste’”. Danach läge die Funktion morphologischer Markierungen in derartigen Fällen nicht darin, als ‚Exponenten’ von ‚Inhalten’ zu fungieren, sondern darin Formen unterschiedlicher Funktion nur zu unterscheiden: Eine funktionale Distinktion wird zum Ausdruck gebracht, indem sie mit einer formalen Differenzierung korreliert wird. In Anwendung dieses Gedankens auf die lateinische Nominalflexion sollen (i) die auszudrückenden funktionalen Distinktionen, (ii) die zur formalen Differenzierung genutzten Ausdrucksmittel und (iii) die Art der Korrelation untersucht werden.