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Modern theorists rarely agree on how to represent the categories of tense and aspect, making a consistent analysis for phenomena, such as the present perfect, more difficult to attain. It has been argued in previous analyses that the variable behavior of the present perfect between languages licenses independently motivated treatments, particularly of a morphosyntactic or semanticsyntactic nature (Giorgi & Pianesi 1997; Schmitt 2001; Ilari 2001). More specifically, the wellknown readings of the American English (AE) present perfect (resultative, experiential, persistent situation, recent past (Comrie 1976)), are at odds with the readings of the corresponding structure in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), the 'pretérito perfeito composto' (default iterativity and occasional duration (Ilari 1999)). Despite these variations, the present work, assuming a tense-aspect framework at the semantic-pragmatic interface, will provide a unified analysis for the present perfect in AE and BP, which have traditionally been treated as semantically divergent. The present perfect meaning, in conjunction with the aspectual class of the predicate, can account for the major differences between languages, particularly regarding iterativity and the "present perfect puzzle", regarding adverb compatibility.
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.
Focus on verbal operators such as aspect or tense ("predication focus", lucidly described by Hyman & Watters (1984) under the label "auxiliary focus") has been noticed to exist in African languages of Afroasiatic and Niger-Congo affiliation, but not so far in Saharan. The Saharan language Kanuri is assumed to have substantially reorganized its TAM system, particularly in the perfective aspect domain (Cyffer [2006] dates major changes between the years 1820 and 1900). The paper discusses, for the first time in Kanuri scholarship, the existence of a neat subsystem of predication focus marking by suffix in the perfective aspect which is made up of a total of six conjugational paradigms that uniformly encode predication focus by suffix {-ò}. Kanuri dialects differ in strategies and scope of focus marking encoded in verb morphology. In the light of data from the Yerwa (Nigeria) and Manga (Niger) dialects the paper discusses some "anomalies" with regard to general focus theory which we account for by describing the "Kanuri Focus Shift" as a diachronic process which is responsible for leftward displacement of scope of focus.
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.
Zulu shows an alternation of conjoint and disjoint (conjunctive/disjunctive, short/long) verb forms. Certain contexts suggest that the distribution of these forms is related to focus. For example, certain adverbial expressions receive a focal interpretation when preceded by a conjoint form but not when preceded by a disjoint form. Similarly, a wh-phrase must be preceded by a conjoint form. This has led some researchers to argue or suggest that the alternation encodes focus directly. This paper examines two different focal hypotheses, one in which a disjoint form encodes focus on the verb and another in which the conjoint form encodes focus on the element following the verb. It is shown that both of these hypotheses are inadequate because certain contexts requiring the conjoint form do not display the predicted focal interpretation. Relativization morphology is argued to also support an analysis independent of focus. It is proposed that the alternation is regulated entirely by the position of the verb within the surface constituencies first proposed in Van der Spuy (1993) and that the associated focal interpretations are the result of a range of interpretations permitted within the different constituencies. Elements remaining within the relevant constituent are nontopical, and focus is one of a range of interpretations they can receive.
Beria, a member of the Saharan language family, is one of the rare languages in Africa exhibiting both an ergative and an active/agentive alignment system of grammatical relations.1 While the active/agentive pattern is shown by the participant reference markers, the ergative pattern is attested both in the constituent order and in the focus markers on the core constituents. In the pragmatically unmarked constituent order, the Agent constituent precedes the Patient constituent. An unmarked single constituent immediately preceding the verb may represent a Patient or a Subject argument. In this position, the Agent constituent requires the clitic GU. The focused Patient and Subject constituents are both either marked by the clitic DI or by a cleft construction.
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.
Complex focus versus double focus : investigations on multiple focus interpretations in Hungarian
(2006)
The main aim of this paper is to point out several problems with the semantic analysis of Hungarian focus interpretation and 'only'. For current semantic analyses the interpretation of Hungarian identificational/exhaustive focus and 'only' is problematic, since in classical semantic analyses 'only' is identified with an exhaustivity operator. In this paper I will discuss multiple focus constructions and question-answer pairs in Hungarian to show that such a view cannot be applied to Hungarian exhaustive focus. Next to this I will discuss possible interpretations of Hungarian sentences containing multiple prosodic foci: complex focus versus double focus. My claim is that in order to interpret multiple focus (in Hungarian) we have to take into consideration the different intonation patterns, the occurrence of 'only', and the syntactic structure as well.
Many analyses of existential sentences have focused attention on determining which of its elements constitutes the logical subject and predicate, and this has proven to be a not uncontroversial topic of research. Some, from both syntactic and semantic points of view, have argued that there is a subject (cf. Williams 1994) others that it is a predicate (cf. Moro 1997). Similarly, some have argued that the associate NP is a logical subject, others that it is apredicate (Higginbotham 1987).
One logical possibility that has not (to my knowledge) been pursued in the linguistics literature is that these statements are not of the form subject-predicate, a possibility that has been taken up in the philosophical literature by P.F. Strawson (1959). He claims that there are such statements and that their form is simpler than that of subject-predicate statements because it does not, and cannot, involve an expression that makes reference to an individual. Not involving reference to an individual, these sentences are therefore are made true by different means than a subject-predicate statement whose truth, in the simplest cases, depends on the denotation of the subject being a member of the denotation of the predicate. Of interest from the point of view of the present discussion is his claim that existential statements are examples of this kind of statement, which he calls a feature-placing statement. The truth of a statement of the form feature-placer requires that something with the set of features denoted by the associate NP exist at the location or coordinates expressed by the placer. In an existential sentence we can take the associate NP as the feature-denoting expression and the coda-XP as the placer.
This paper focuses on different subtypes of constructions involving temporally bounded quantification, e.g. sequences like David visited Rome three times followed by temporal phrases as different as (i) last year, which defines a time interval; (ii) in less that two months, which defines an amount of time; and (iii) per month, which refers to a time unit. As for the first two types of temporal phrases, data will be presented which shows that they have specific linguistic properties in these quantifying contexts, and do not behave exactly as the locating or duration adverbials they are superficially identical with. The third type of phrases will receive special attention. Structures with frequency adverbials like n times per month will be analysed compositionally, separating the quantified component n times from the temporally binding phrase per month (whose role is comparable to that of adverbials (i) and (ii) in the relevant constructions). The data presented is mainly from Portuguese, although the issues at stake – the linguistic properties of temporally bounded quantification – are obviously relevant to parallel constructions in other languages.