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In this paper, we investigate two pairs of structures in German and English: German Weak Pronoun Left Dislocation and English Topicalization, on the one hand, and German and English Hanging Topic Left Dislocation, on the other. We review the prosodic, lexical, syntactic, and discourse evidence that places the former two structures into one class and the latter two into another, taking this evidence to show that dislocates in the former class are syntactically integrated into their 'host' sentences while those in the latter class are not. From there, we show that the most straightforward way to account for this difference in 'integration' is to take the dislocates in the latter structures to be 'orphans', phrases that are syntactically independent of the phrases with which they are associated, providing additional empirical and theoretical support for this analysis — which, we point out, has a number of antecedents in the literature.
As part of a major project on the syntactic organisation of written discourse in the recent history of the English language, this paper tackles the distribution of sentences comprising left-dislocated constituents in a corpus of texts from late Middle English onwards. Once the phenomenon of left dislocation has been properly defined, this investigation will concentrate on the analysis of the corpus in the following directions: (i) statistical evolution of left dislocation in the recent history of the English language; (ii) the influence of orality and genre on left dislocation; (iii) information conveyed by the left-dislocated material, that is, the discourse-based referentiality potential of the left-dislocated constituents in terms of recoverability, and its association with end-focus; and (iv) grammatical complexity of the left-dislocated material and its association with end-weight.
This paper evaluates trills [r] and their palatalized counterparts [rj] from the point of view of markedness. It is argued that [r]s are unmarked sounds in comparison to [r ]s which follows from the examination of the following parameters: (a) frequency of occurrence, (b) articulatory and aerodynamic characteristics, (c) perceptual features, (d) emergence in the process of language acquisition, (e) stability from a diachronic point of view, (f) phonotactic distribution, and (g) implications.
Several markedness aspects of [r]s and [rj] are analyzed on the basis of Slavic languages which offer excellent material for the evaluation of trills. Their phonetic characteristics incorporated into phonetically grounded constraints are employed for a phonological OT-analysis of r-palatalization in two selected languages: Polish and Czech.
This paper proposes a new strategy for accounting for the narrow scope readings of quantificational contrastive topics in Hungarian, which is based on a consideration of the types of questions that declaratives with such contrastive topics can be uttered as partial or complete congruent answers to. The meaning of the declaratives with contrastive topics will be represented with the help of the structured meaning approach to matching questions proposed in Krifka 2002.
The bulk of this paper deals with an analysis of the voice system of Tukang Besi, which, has both a complex verbal agreement system as well as the last fully developed (and obligatory) case marking system among Austronesian languages with an increasingly head-marking trend to the east (case marking of core constituents only becomes functional again in Vanuatu and the Solomons, and is well-developed in Polynesia). For that reason, as well as personal acquaintance with the language, it is a sensible starting point.
Adjectives in Qiang
(2004)
Qiang is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by 70,000-80,000 people in Northern Sichuan Province, China, classified as being in the Qiang or Tibetan nationality by the Chinese government. The language is verb final, agglutinative (prefixing and suffixing), and has both head-marking and dependent-marking morphology.
In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of our first version of the database "ANNIS" (ANNotation of Information Structure). For research based on empirical data, ANNIS provides a uniform environment for storing this data together with its linguistic annotations. A central database promotes standardized annotation, which facilitates interpretation and comparison of the data. ANNIS is used through a standard web browser and offers tier-based visualization of data and annotations, as well as search facilities that allow for cross-level and cross-sentential queries. The paper motivates the design of the system, characterizes its user interface, and provides an initial technical evaluation of ANNIS with respect to data size and query processing.
It is common knowledge in the field of Philippine linguistics that an ang-marked direct object in a non-actor focus clause must be definite or generic, while a ng-marked object in an actor focus clause typically receives a nonspecific interpretation. However, in contexts like wh-questions, the oblique object in an antipassive may be interpreted as specific, as noted by Schachter & Otanes (1972), Maclachlan & Nakamura (1997), Rackowski (2002), and others. […] In this paper, I propose to account for the specificity effects […] within the analysis of Tagalog syntax put forth by Aldridge (2004). I analyze Tagalog as an ergative language […]. Cross linguistically, antipassive oblique objects receive a nonspecific interpretation, while absolutives are definite or generic. I show in this paper how the Tagalog facts can be subsumed under a general account of ergativity.
In morphological systems of the agglutinative type we sometimes encounter a nearly perfect one-to-one relation between form and function. Turkish inflectional morphology is, of course, the standard textbook example. Things seem to be quite different in systems of the flexive type. Declension in Contemporary Standard Russian (henceforth Russian, for short) may be cited as a typical example: We find, among other things, cumulative markers, “synonymous” endings (e.g., dative singular noun forms in -i, -e, or -u), and “homonymous” endings (e.g., -i, genitive, dative, and prepositional singular). True, some endings are more of an agglutinative nature, being bound to a specific case-number combination and applying across declensions, e.g., -am (dative plural, all nouns); and some cross the boundaries of word classes, e.g., -o, which serves as the nominative/accusative singular ending of neuter forms of pronouns (and adjectives) and as the nominative/accusative singular ending of (most) neuter nouns as well. Still, many observers have been struck by the impression that what we face here are rather uneconomic or even, so to speak, unnatural structures. But perhaps flexive systems are not as complicated as they seem. What seems to be uneconomic complexity may be, at least partially, an artifact of uneconomic descriptions.
The filling of the 'Vorfeld' in German sentences is basically obligatory; which constituent, however, actually moves to the Vorfeld is underdetermined by syntax and thus governed presumably by discourse factors. Coming from English, there are certain competing expectations one could have: either the topic — more specifically, the backward-looking center — of a sentence is moved to the Vorfeld, or an element in a poset relationship to a set mentioned in the previous discourse, or elements with other functions, such as the exposition of brand-new information or the setting of a scene. A study of a corpus of texts of different stylistic levels showed that indeed all elements expected to appear in the Vorfeld are eligible for Vorfeld-movement, but that there is a strict ranking. Preferred Vorfeld-fillers are phrases containing brand-new information as well as scene-setting elements; only if no such elements are present can elements in a poset relationship with some previously mentioned set be moved to the Vorfeld. Finally, if such elements are not present either, backward-looking centers can move to the Vorfeld. Backward-looking centers have, for this reason, a relatively poor quota among Vorfeld-fillers, namely around 50%.