Linguistik
Refine
Year of publication
- 2003 (36) (remove)
Document Type
- Part of a Book (36) (remove)
Language
- English (36) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (36) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (36)
Keywords
- Morphologie (13)
- Aspekt (10)
- Phonologie (9)
- Kindersprache (7)
- Deutsch (4)
- Optimalitätstheorie (4)
- Englisch (3)
- Qiang-Sprache (3)
- Russisch (3)
- Semantik (3)
Institute
- Extern (1)
While both Japanese and English have a grammatic al form denoting the progressive, the two forms (te-iru & be+ing) interact differently with the inherent semantics of the verb to which they attach (Kindaichi, 1950; McClure, 1995; Shirai, 2000). Japanese change of state verbs are incompatible with a progressive interpretation, allowing only a resultative interpretation of V+ te-iru, while a progressive interpretation is preferred for activity predicates. English be+ing denotes a progressive interpretation regardless of the lexical semantics of the verb. The question that arises is how we can account for the fact that change of state verbs like dying can denote a progressive interpretation in English, but not in Japanese. While researchers such as Kageyama (1996) and Ogihara (1998, 1999) propose that the difference lies in the lexical semantics of the verbs themselves, others such as McClure (1995) have argued that the difference lies in the semantics of the grammatical forms, be+ing and te-iru. We present results from an experimental study of Japanese learners’ interpretation of the English progressive which provide support for McClure’s proposal. Results indicate that independent of verb type, learners had significantly more difficulty with the past progressive. We argue that knowledge of L2 semantics-syntax correspondences proceeds not on the basis of L1 lexical semantic knowledge, but on the basis of grammatical forms.
Sperber and Wilson (1996) and Wilson and Sperber (1993) have argued that communication involves two processes, ostension and inference, but they also assume there is a coding-decoding stage of communication and a functional distinction between lexical items and grammatical marking (what they call 'conceptual' vs. 'procedural' information). Sperber and Wilson have accepted a basically Chomskyan view of the innateness of language structure and Universal Grammar.
The current study investigates the relation between aspect and particle verbs in the acquisition of English. Its purpose is to determine whether children associate telicity, as argued in previous studies, or rather perfectivity, which entails completion of a telic situation, with their early particle verb use. The study analyzes naturalistic data of four monolingual children between 1;6 and 3;8 from CHILDES acquiring English as their first language. On the one hand, it finds that children use both –ed and irregular perfective morphology with simplex verbs before particle verbs. They further use imperfective before perfective morphology with particle verbs. These findings suggest that there is no correlation between telic particle verbs and perfective morphology, as would have been predicted on an account which claims that lexical aspect of predicates guides the acquisition of grammatical aspect (Olsen & Weinberg 1999). On the other hand, the study finds that the children’s particle verbs denote telic situations from early on, but not half of them were used to refer to situations that are also completed. This finding questions analyses which claim that, at an initial stage, children will only interpret predicates as telic if they refer to situations that are at the same time completed. Completion information is not necessary for children in order to use particle verbs correctly for telic situations, as would have been predicted on an extended account along the lines of Wagner (2001). As a conclusion, it is suggested that the divergent findings result from a difference in methodology. While restrictions of perfective and imperfective morphology to particular classes of lexical aspect pertain to the production of grammatical aspect morphology, perfective and imperfective viewpoints on situations pertain to the level of interpretation of telic and atelic situations.
In this article we propose that there are two universal properties for phonological stop assibilations, namely (i) assibilations cannot be triggered by /i/ unless they are also triggered by /j/, and (ii) voiced stops cannot undergo assibilations unless voiceless ones do. The article presents typological evidence from assibilations in 45 languages supporting both (i) and (ii). It is argued that assibilations are to be captured in the Optimality Theoretic framework by ranking markedness constraints grounded in perception which penalize sequences like [ti] ahead of a faith constraint which militates against the change from /t/ to some sibilant sound. The occurring language types predicted by (i) and (ii) will be shown to involve permutations of the rankings between several different markedness constraints and the one faith constraint. The article demonstrates that there exist several logically possible assibilation types which are ruled out because they would involve illicit rankings.
The focus of the present paper is on the difference between English and German learners‘ use of perfectivity and imperfectivity. The latter is expressed by means of suffixation (suffix -va-). In contrast, perfectivity is encoded either by suffixation (-nou-) or by prefixation (twenty different prefixes that mostly modify not only aspectual but also lexical properties of the verb).
In the native Czech data set, there is no significant difference between the number of imperfectively and perfectively marked verb forms. In the English data, imperfectively and perfectively marked verb forms are equally represented as well. However, German learners use significantly more perfective forms than English learners and Czech natives. When encoding perfectivity in Czech, German learners prefer to use prefixes to suffixes. Overall, English learners in comparison to German learners encode more perfectives by means of suffixation than prefixation.
These results suggest that German learners of Czech focus on prefixes expressing aspectual and lexical modification of the verb, while English learners rather pay attention to the aspectual opposition between perfective and imperfective. In a more abstract way, the German learner group focuses on the operations carried out on the left side from the verb stem while the English learner group concentrates on the operations performed on the right side qfrom the verb stem.
This sensitivity can be to certain degree motivated by the linguistic devices of the corresponding source languages: English learners of Czech use imperfectives mainly because English has marked fully grammatical form for the expression of imperfective aspect – the progressive -ing form. German learners, on the other hand, pay in Czech more attention to the prefixes, which like in German modify the lexical meaning of the verb. In this manner, Czech prefixes used for perfectivization function similar to the German verbal prefixes (such as ab-, ver-) modifying Aktionsart.
In this paper we focus on the similarities tying together the second segment of an onset cluster and a singleton coda segment. We offer a proposal based on Baertsch (2002) accounting for this similarity and show how it captures a number of observations which have defied previous explanation. In accounting for the similarity of patterning between the second member of an onset and a coda consonant, we propose to augment Prince & Smolensky's (P&S, 1993/2002) Margin Hierarchy so as to distinguish between structural positions that prefer low sonority and those that prefer high sonority. P&S's Margin Hierarchy, which gives preference to segments of low sonority, applies to singleton onsets; this is our M1 hierarchy. Our proposed M2 hierarchy applies both to the second member of an onset and to a singleton coda. The M2 hierarchy differs from the M1 hierarchy in giving preference to consonants of high sonority. Splitting the Margin Hierarchy into the M1 and M2 hierarchies allows us to explain typological, phonotactic, and acquisitional observations that have defied previous explanation. In Section 2 of this paper, we briefly provide background on the links that tie together the second member of an onset and a singleton coda. In Section 3, we review P&S's Margin Hierarchy, showing that it becomes problematic when extended to coda consonants. We then offer our proposal for a split margin hierarchy. Section 4 extends the split margin approach to complex onsets. We then show how it is able to account for various typological, phonotactic, and acquisitional observations. In Section 5, we will conclude the paper by briefly sketching how the split margin approach enables us to analyze syllable contact phenomena without requiring a specific syllable contact constraint (or additional hierarchy) or reference to an external sonority scale.
1. The functionalist’s view: linguistic forms are instruments used to convey meaningful elements. This is the basis of European structuralism. 2. The formalist’s view: linguistic forms are abstract structures which can be filled with meaningful elements. This is the basis of generative grammar. 3. The parasitologist’s view: linguistic forms are vehicles for the reproduction of meaningful elements. This is the view which I advocated twenty years ago in the Festschrift for Werner Winter’s 60th birthday (1985). Here I intend to discuss the evolutionary origin and the physiological nature of the linguistic parasite. My theory of language is wholly consistent with Gerald Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection.
One of the most important insights of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993) is that phonological processes can be reduced to the interaction between faithfulness and universal markedness principles. In the most constrained version of the theory, all phonological processes should be thus reducible. This hypothesis is tested by alternations that appear to be phonological but in which universal markedness principles appear to play no role. If we are to pursue the claim that all phonological processes depend on the interaction of faithfulness and markedness, then processes that are not dependent on markedness must lie outside phonology. In this paper I will examine a group of such processes, the initial consonant mutations of the Celtic languages, and argue that they belong entirely to the morphology of the languages, not the phonology.
In this paper we provide an account of the historical development of Polish and Russian sibilants. The arguments provided here are of theoretical interest because they show that (i) certain allophonic rules are driven by the need to keep contrasts perceptually distinct, (ii) (unconditioned) sound changes result from needs of perceptual distinctiveness, and (iii) perceptual distinctiveness can be extended to a class of consonants, i.e. the sibilants. The analysis is cast within Dispersion Theory by providing phonetic and typological data supporting the perceptual distinctiveness claims we make.
This paper reviews research on English past-tense acquisition to test the validity of the single mechanism model and the dual mechanism model, focusing on regular-irregular dissociation and semantic bias. Based on the review, it is suggested that in L1 acquisition, both regular and irregular verbs are governed by semantics; that is, early use of past tense forms are restricted to achievement verbs—regular or irregular. In contrast, some L2 acquisition studies show stronger semantic bias for regular past tense forms (e.g., Housen, 2002, Rohde, 1996). It is argued that L1 acquisition of the past-tense morphology can be accounted for more adequately by the single-mechanism model.
The acquisition of spanish perfective aspect : A study on children's production and comprehension
(2003)
This paper presents the acquisition of Spanish perfective aspect in production and comprehension. It argues that, although young children use perfective aspect to talk about completed events, young children have difficulty in assessing perfective meaning from perfective morphology. This paper proposes that in the process of acquiring aspectual meaning, children use local strategies to decode aspectual meaning from form: when analyzing a completed situation, young children depend on certain learnability factors to correctly assess the entailment of completion of the perfective, namely, their ability to determine if the object of the event measures out the event as a whole or not, and their ability to read the agent’s intentions. When those factors are removed from the situation, young children had difficulty determining the entailment of completion of perfective aspect. This study also suggests that the manner in which aspectual information is conveyed in a language, may play a role on the readiness of the acquisition of the semantic morphology of the language (e.g., verb+object vs. verb+affixes). The results of this study indicate that successful performance on the semantics of Spanish perfective aspect develops around the age of 5-6.
Crosslinguistic research on the production of tense morphology in child language has shown that young children use past or perfective forms mainly with telic predicates and present or imperfective forms mainly with atelic predicates. However, this pattern, which has come to be known as the Aspect First Hypothesis, has been challenged in a number of comprehension studies. These studies suggest that children do not rely on aspectual information for their interpretation of tense morphology. The present paper tests the validity of the Aspect First Hypothesis in child Greek by investigating Greek-speaking children’s early comprehension of present, past and future tense morphology as well as the role that lexical aspect plays in the early use of tense morphology. It is suggested that although Greek-speaking children have not yet fully mapped the tense concepts to the correct tense morphology, tense acquisition does not seem to be significantly affected by the aspectual characteristics (i.e. the telicity) of the verb.
This paper presents an account of semantics as a system that integrates conceptual representations into language. I define the semantic system as an interface level of the conceptual system CS that translates conceptual representations into a format that is accessible by language. The analysis I put forward does not treat the make up of this level as idiosyncratic, but subsumes it under a unified notion of linguistic interfaces. This allows us to understand core aspects of the linguistic-conceptual interface as an instance of a general pattern underlying the correlation of linguistic and non-linguistic structures. By doing so, the model aims to provide a broader perspective onto the distinction between and interaction of conceptual and linguistic processes and the correlation of semantic and syntactic structures.
Qiang
(2003)
Qiang is spoken in Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in northwest Sichuan Province. China; it belongs to the Qiangic branch of Tibeto-Burman. There are two major Qiang dialects. Northern Qiang (spoken in Heishui County, and the Chibusu district of Mao County; roughly 70,000 speakers) and Southern Qiang (spoken in Li County, Wenchuun County, Mao County, and Songpan County; about 60,000) (Sun 1981a: 177-78), The dialect presented here is the Northern Qiang variety spoken in Ronghong Village, Yadu Township, Chibusu District, Mao County.
This paper argues for a scopal explanation of the readings of the adverb wieder (‘again’). It is the syntactic entity that wieder is related to which determines whether the repetitive or the restitutive reading obtains. If it is adjoined to the minimal verbal domain, it relates to a situation-internal state thus producing a restitutive interpretation, if adjoined to a higher verbal projection, it relates to an eventuality resulting in a repetitive interpretation. Proceeding from the assumption that adverbial adjuncts have base positions which reflect their semantic relations to the rest of the sentence, repetitive wieder is shown to belong to the class of eventuality adverbs that minimally c-command the base positions of all arguments, whereas restitutive wieder has many properties in common with process (manner) adjuncts that minimally c-command the verb in clause-final base position.
In this artiele I reanalyze sibilant inventories of Slavic languages by taking into consideration acoustic. perceptive and phonological evidence. The main goal of this study is to show that perception is an important factor which determines the shape of sibilant inventories. The improvement of perceptual contrast essentially contributes to creating new sibilant inventories by (i) changing the place of articulation of the existing phonemes (ii) merging sibilants that are perceptually very close or (iii) deleting them.
It has also been shown that the symbol s traditionally used in Slavic linguistics corresponds to two sounds in the IP A system: it stands for a postalveolar sibilant (ʃ) in some Slavic languages, as e.g. Bulagarian, Czech, Slovak, some Serbian and Croatian dialects, whereas in others like Polish, Russian, Lower Sorbian it functions as a retroflex (ʂ). This discrepancy is motivated by the fact that ʃ is not optimal in terms of maintaining sufficient perceptual contrast to other sibilants such as s and ɕ. If ʃ occurs together with s (and sʲ) there is a considerable perceptual distance between them but if it occurs with ɕ in an inventory, the distance is much smaller. Therefore, the strategy most languages follow is the change from a postalveolar to a retroflex sibilant.
On the early development of aspect in greek and russian child language, a comparative analysis
(2003)
The category of aspect is grammaticized in both Greek and Russian opposing perfective and imperfective verb forms in all inflectional categories except the nonpast (‘present’). Despite these similarities there are important differences in the way the aspectual systems function in the two languages. While in Greek nearly all verbs oppose a perfective to a given imperfective grammatical form, Russian aspect is more strongly lexicalized with pairs of imperfective and perfective lexemes not only differing aspectually, but also as far as their lexical meanings are concerned. This is especially true of perfective verbs formed by prefixes as compared to their imperfective bases. Thus, in pairs of prefixed and unprefixed dynamic verbs, the derived prefixed (perfective) member has a telic meaning while its unprefixed (imperfective) counterpart is atelic (e.g. sjest’ (PFV) ‘to eat up’ vs. jest’ (IPF) ‘to eat’). Such derived perfective verbs may in turn be “secondarily” imperfectivized by suffixation furnishing the only “true” perfective/imperfective pairs of verbs (e.g. sjest’ (PFV) ‘to eat up’ vs. sjedat’ (IPF) ‘to eat up’ (iterative)). “Secondary” imperfectives do not occur in our child data.
In this pilot study, we will analyze the tense-aspect-mood forms of the 20 most frequent verbs with equivalent meanings occurring in the longitudinal audiotaped data of a Greek and a Russian boy between 2;1 and 2;3 (their entire lexical inventories comprise approx. 100 verbs each).
We adopt a constructivist perspective on the development of aspect in Greek and Russian child language and will show that in spite of a broad inventory of imperfective and perfective verb forms to be found in the speech of both children aspect has not yet developed into a generalized grammatical category, but is strongly dependent on aktionsart (stative/dynamic, telic/atelic) in both languages. While this results in a strong preference for perfective verb forms of telic verbs and of imperfective forms of atelic ones in the speech of the Greek boy, the Russian child tends to use the unmarked members.