Linguistik-Klassifikation
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Preprint (23) (remove)
Language
- English (23) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (23)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (23)
Keywords
- Syntax (6)
- Optimalitätstheorie (5)
- syntax (4)
- Semantik (3)
- Chinesisch (2)
- Deutsch (2)
- Englisch (2)
- Griechisch (2)
- Kontrastive Linguistik (2)
- Phonologie (2)
Institute
- Extern (6)
The goal of this paper is to re-examine the status of the condition in (1) proposed in Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou (2001; henceforth A&A 2001), in view of recent developments in syntactic theory. (1) The subject-in-situ generalization (SSG) By Spell-Out, vP can contain only one argument with a structural Case feature. We argue that (1) is a more general condition than previously recognized, and that the domain of its application is parametrized. More specifically, based on a comparison between Indo-European (IE) and Khoisan languages, we argue that (1) supports an interpretation of the EPP as a general principle, and not as a property of T. Viewed this way, the SSG is a condition that forces dislocation of arguments as a consequence of a constraint on Case checking.
In this paper we investigate the distribution of PPs related to external arguments (agent, causer, instrument, causing event) in Greek. We argue that their distribution supports an analysis, according to which agentive/instrument and causer PPs are licensed by distinct functional heads, respectively. We argue against a conceivable alternative analysis, which links agentivity and causation to the prepositions themselves. We furthermore identify a particular type of Voice head in Greek anticausative realised by non-active Voice morphology.
In the recent literature there is growing interest in the morpho-syntactic encoding of hierarchical effects. The paper investigates one domain where such effects are attested: ergative splits conditioned by person. This type of splits is then compared to hierarchical effects in direct-inverse alternations. On the basis of two case studies (Lummi instantiating an ergative split person language and Passamaquoddy an inverse language) we offer an account that makes no use of hierarchies as a primitive. We propose that the two language types differ as far as the location of person features is concerned. In inverse systems person features are located exclusively in T, while in ergative systems, they are located in T and a particular type of v. A consequence of our analysis is that Case checking in split and inverse systems is guided by the presence/absence of specific phi-features. This in turn provides evidence for a close connection between Case and phi-features, reminiscent of Chomsky’s (2000, 2001) Agree.
The aim of this paper is to address two main counterarguments raised in Landau (2007) against the movement analysis of Control, and especially against the phenomenon of Backward Control. The paper shows that unlike the situation described in Tsez (Polinsky & Potsdam 2002), Landau's objections do not hold for Greek and Romanian, where all obligatory control verbs exhibit Backward Control. Our results thus provide stronger empirical support for a theoretical approach to Control in terms of Movement, as defended in Hornstein (1999 and subsequent work).
In the recent literature the phenomenon of long distance agreement has become the focus of several studies as it seems to violate certain locality conditions which require that agreeing elements in general stand in clause-mate relationships. In particular, it involves a verb agreeing with a constituent which is located in the verb's clausal complement and hence poses a challenge for theories that assume a strictly local relationship for agreement. In this paper we present empirical evidence from Greek and Romanian for the reality of long distance agreement. Specifically, we focus on raising constructions in these two languages and we show that they do not involve movement but rather instantiate long distance agreement. We further argue that subjunctives allowing long distance agreement lack both a CP layer and semantic Tense. However, since the embedded verb also bears phi-features, these constructions pose a further problem for assumptions that view the presence of phi-features as evidence for the presence of a C layer. Finally, we raise the question of the common properties that these languages have that lead to the presence of long distance agreement.
The causative/anticausative alternation has been the topic of much typological and theoretical discussion in the linguistic literature. This alternation is characterized by verbs with transitive and intransitive uses, such that the transitive use of a verb V means roughly "cause to Vintransitive" (see Levin 1993). The discussion revolves around two issues: the first one concerns the similarities and differences between the anticausative and the passive, and the second one concerns the derivational relationship, if any, between the transitive and intransitive variant. With respect to the second issue, a number of approaches have been developed. Judging the approach conceptually unsatisfactory, according to which each variant is assigned an independent lexical entry, it was concluded that the two variants have to be derivationally related. The question then is which one of the two is basic and where this derivation takes place in the grammar. Our contribution to this discussion is to argue against derivational approaches to the causative / anticausative alternation. We focus on the distribution of PPs related to external arguments (agent, causer, instrument, causing event) in passives and anticausatives of English, German and Greek and the set of verbs undergoing the causative/anticausative alternation in these languages. We argue that the crosslinguistic differences in these two domains provide evidence against both causativization and detransitivization analyses of the causative / anticausative alternation. We offer an approach to this alternation which builds on a syntactic decomposition of change of state verbs into a Voice and a CAUS component. Crosslinguistic variation in passives and anticausatives depends on properties of Voice and its combinations with CAUS and various types of roots.
In this paper we compare the distribution of PPs introducing external arguments in nominalizations with PPs introducing external arguments in the verbal domain. We show that several mismatches exist between the behavior of PPs in nominalizations and PPs in the verbal domain. This leads us to suggest that while PPs in the verbal domain are licensed by functional structure alone, within the nominal domain, PPs can also be licensed via an interplay of the encyclopaedic meaning of the root involved and the properties of the preposition itself. This second mechanism kicks in in the absence of functional structure.
This paper deals with the variable position of adjectives in the Romanian DP. As all other Romance languages, Romanian allows for adjectives to appear in both prenominal and post-nominal position. In addition, however, Romanian has a third pattern: the so-called cel construction, in which the adjective in the post-nominal position is preceded by a determiner-like element, cel. This pattern is superficially similar to Determiner Spreading in Greek. In this paper we contrast the cel construction to Greek DS and discuss the similarities and differences between the two. We then present an analysis of cel as involving an appositive specification clause, building on de Vries (2002). We argue that the same structure is also involved in the context of nominal ellipsis, the second environment in which cel is found.
We present a CYK and an Earley-style algorithm for parsing Range Concatenation Grammar (RCG), using the deductive parsing framework. The characteristic property of the Earley parser is that we use a technique of range boundary constraint propagation to compute the yields of non-terminals as late as possible. Experiments show that, compared to previous approaches, the constraint propagation helps to considerably decrease the number of items in the chart.
Thirty-one years ago Tsu-lin Mei (1961) argued against the traditional doctrine that saw the subject-predicate distinction in grammar as parallel to the particular- universal distinction in logic, as he said it was a reflex of an Indo-European bias, and could not be valid, as ‘Chinese ... does not admit a distinction into subject and predicate’ (p. 153). This has not stopped linguists working on Chinese from attempting to define ‘subject’ (and ‘object’) in Chinese. Though a number of linguists have lamented the difficulties in trying to define these concepts for Chinese (see below), most work done on Chinese still assumes that Chinese must have the same grammatical features as Indo-European, such as having a subject and a direct object, though no attempt is made to justify that view. This paper challenges that view and argues that there has been no grammaticalization of syntactic functions in Chinese. The correct assignment of semantic roles to the constituents of a discourse is done by the listener on the basis of the discourse structure and pragmatics (information flow, inference, relevance, and real world knowledge) (cf. Li & Thompson 1978, 1979; LaPolla 1990).
This paper is one argument for a theory of grammatical relations in Chinese in which there are no grammatical relations beyond semantic roles, and no lexical relation-changing rules. As the passive rule is one of the most common relation changing rules cross-linguistically, in this paper I will address the question of whether or not Mandarin Chinese has lexical passives, that is, passives defined as in Relational Grammar (see for example Perlmutter and Postal 1977) and the early Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) literature (e.g. Bresnan 1982), where a 2-arc (object) is promoted to a 1-arc (subject).
Our paper aims at capturing the distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs) within lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG). The condition under which an NPI can occur in a sentence is for it to be in the scope of a negation with no quantifiers scopally intervening. We model this restriction within a recent framework for LTAG semantics based on semantic unification. The proposed analysis provides features that signal the presence of a negation in the semantics and that specify its scope. We extend our analysis to modelling the interaction of NPI licensing and neg raising constructions.
“Comments are very welcome!” This basic attitude and the many ways of implementing it contribute immensely to the fascination of engaging in scientific research. I am grateful to Theoretical Linguistics for providing a public platform for this kind of scholarly exchange and I thank all commentators for their thoughtful, stimulating, and often challenging contributions to my target article. My response will address two main issues that are raised by the commentaries. The first issue is shaped by a cluster of questions relating to ontology. The second issue concerns questions of methodology pertaining in particular to the problem of judging data.
Since Donald Davidson’s seminal work “The Logical Form of Action Sentences” (1967) event arguments have become an integral component of virtually every semantic theory. Over the past years Davidson´s proposal has been continuously extended such that nowadays event(uality) arguments are generally associated not only with action verbs but with predicates of all sorts. The reasons for such an extension are seldom explicitly justified. Most problematical in this respect is the case of stative expressions. By taking a closer look at copula sentences the present study assesses the legitimacy of stretching the Davidsonian notion of events and discusses its consequences. A careful application of some standard eventuality diagnostics (perception reports, combination with locative modifiers and manner adverbials) as well as some new diagnostics (behavior of certain degree adverbials) reveals that copular expressions do not behave as expected under a Davidsonian perspective: they fail all eventuality tests, regardless of whether they represent stage-level or individual-level predicates. In this respect, copular expressions pattern with stative verbs like know, hate, and resemble, which in turn differ sharply from state verbs like stand, sit, and sleep. The latter pass all of the eventuality tests and therefore qualify as true “Davidsonian state” expressions. On the basis of these empirical observations and taking up ideas of Kim (1969, 1976) and Asher (1993, 2000), an alternative account of copular expressions (and stative verbs) is provided, according to which the copula introduces a referential argument for a temporally bound property exemplification (= “Kimian state”). Considerations on some logical properties, viz. closure conditions and the latent infinite regress of eventualities, suggest that supplementing Davidsonian eventualities with Kimian states may yield not only a more adequate analysis of copula sentences but also a better understanding of eventualities in general.
Davidsonian event semantics has an impressive track record as a framework for natural language analysis. In recent years it has become popular to assume that not only action verbs but predicates of all sorts have an additional event argument. Yet, this hypothesis is not without controversy in particular wrt the particularly challenging case of statives. Maienborn (2003a, 2004) argues that there is a need for distinguishing two kinds of states. While verbs such as sit, stand, sleep refer to eventualities in the sense of Davidson (= Davidsonian states), the states denoted by such stative verbs like know, weigh,and own, as well as any combination of copula plus predicate are of a different ontological type (= Kimian states). Against this background, the present study assesses the two main arguments that have been raised in favour of a Davidsonian approach for statives. These are the combination with certain manner adverbials and Parsons (2000) so-called time travel argument. It will be argued that the manner data which, at first sight, seem to provide evidence for a Davidsonian approach to statives are better analysed as non-compositional reinterpretations triggered by the lack of a regular Davidsonian event argument. As for Parsons´s time travel argument, it turns out that the original version does not supply the kind of support for the Davidsonian approach that Parsons supposed. However, properly adapted, the time travel argument may provide additional evidence for the need of reifying the denotatum of statives, as suggested by the assumption of Kimian states.
The renowned Grimm Dictionary (1854-1961) makes the statement that the German copula sein (to be) is “the most general and colourless of all verbal concepts” (der allgemeinste und farbloseste aller verbalbegriffe). A more concise summary of the linguistic issues surrounding the copula is hardly possible. These two properties (and the latent tension between them!) make copulas a particularly interesting and vexing subject of linguistic research. Copulas appear to be almost colourless, i.e., devoid of any concrete meaning, thus leading to the question of why such expressions exist at all, not only in German but in the majority of the world’s languages. And at the same time copulas presumably provide the best window into the core of verbal concepts thereby telling us what it actually means to be a verb – at least in a language like German or English. While there is a rather rich body of research on copulas in philosophical and formal semantics including several in-depth studies on the copular systems of individual languages, copulas have received comparably little attention from a typological perspective. The monograph of Regina Pustet sets out to fill this gap. She presents an extensive cross-linguistic study of copula usage based on a sample of 154 languages drawn from the language families of the world. The analysis is embedded in the theoretical framework of functional typology. The study aims at uncovering universal principles that govern the distribution of copulas in nominal, adjectival, and verbal predications. Its major objective is the development of a “semantically-based model of copula distribution” (p.62) by means of which the presence vs. absence of copulas can be motivated through the inherent meaning of the lexical items they potentially combine with. Drawing mainly on the work by Givón (1979, 1984) and Croft (1991, 2001), who provide a functional foundation of the traditional parts of speech, Pustet identifies four semantic parameters which, if taken together, are claimed to support substantial generalisations on copula distribution – within a given language as well as crosslinguistically. These parameters are DYNAMICITY, TRANSIENCE, TRANSITIVITY, and DEPENDENCY. Pustet goes on to argue – and this is in fact the driving force behind the overall monograph – that the distributional behaviour of copulas, in turn, yields a useful methodology for developing a general approach to lexical categorization. Thus, in the long run Pustet aims at contributing to a better understanding of the traditional parts of speech, noun, adjective, and verb by defining them in terms of “semantic feature bundles, which can be arranged in [a] coherent semantic similarity space” (p.193).
Weak function word shift
(2004)
The fact that object shift only affects weak pronouns in mainland Scandinavian is seen as an instance of a more general observation that can be made in all Germanic languages: weak function words tend to avoid the edges of larger prosodic domains. This generalisation has been formulated within Optimality Theory in terms of alignment constraints on prosodic structure by Selkirk (1996) in explaining thedistribution of prosodically strong and weak forms of English functionwords, especially modal verbs, prepositions and pronouns. But a purely phonological account fails to integrate the syntactic licensing conditions for object shift in an appropriate way. The standard semantico-syntactic accounts of object shift, onthe other hand, fail to explain why it is only weak pronouns that undergo object shift. This paper develops an Optimality theoretic model of the syntax-phonology interface which is based on the interaction of syntactic and prosodic factors. The account can successfully be applied to further related phenomena in English and German.
This paper argues for a particular architecture of OT syntax. This architecture hasthree core features: i) it is bidirectional, the usual production-oriented optimisation (called ‘first optimisation’ here) is accompanied by a second step that checks the recoverability of an underlying form; ii) this underlying form already contains a full-fledged syntactic specification; iii) especially the procedure checking for recoverability makes crucial use of semantic and pragmatic factors. The first section motivates the basic architecture. The second section shows with two examples, how contextual factors are integrated. The third section examines its implications for learning theory, and the fourth section concludes with a broader discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed model.
This paper is part of a research project on OT Syntax and the typology of the free relative (FR) construction. It concentrates on the details of an OT analysis and some of its consequences for OT syntax. I will not present a general discussion of the phenomenon and the many controversial issues it is famous for in generative syntax.
The aim of this paper is the exploration of an optimality theoretic architecture for syntax that is guided by the concept of "correspondence": syntax is understood as the mechanism of "translating" underlying representations into a surface form. In minimalism, this surface form is called "Phonological Form" (PF). Both semantic and abstract syntactic information are reflected by the surface form. The empirical domain where this architecture is tested are minimal link effects, especially in the case of "wh"-movement. The OT constraints require the surface form to reflect the underlying semantic and syntactic representations as maximally as possible. The means by which underlying relations and properties are encoded are precedence, adjacency, surface morphology and prosodic structure. Information that is not encoded in one of these ways remains unexpressed, and gets lost unless it is recoverable via the context. Different kinds of information are often expressed by the same means. The resulting conflicts are resolved by the relative ranking of the relevant correspondence constraints.
The argument that I tried to elaborate on in this paper is that the conceptual problem behind the traditional competence/performance distinction does not go away, even if we abandon its original Chomskyan formulation. It returns as the question about the relation between the model of the grammar and the results of empirical investigations – the question of empirical verification The theoretical concept of markedness is argued to be an ideal correlate of gradience. Optimality Theory, being based on markedness, is a promising framework for the task of bridging the gap between model and empirical world. However, this task not only requires a model of grammar, but also a theory of the methods that are chosen in empirical investigations and how their results are interpreted, and a theory of how to derive predictions for these particular empirical investigations from the model. Stochastic Optimality Theory is one possible formulation of a proposal that derives empirical predictions from an OT model. However, I hope to have shown that it is not enough to take frequency distributions and relative acceptabilities at face value, and simply construe some Stochastic OT model that fits the facts. These facts first of all need to be interpreted, and those factors that the grammar has to account for must be sorted out from those about which grammar should have nothing to say. This task, to my mind, is more complicated than the picture that a simplistic application of (not only) Stochastic OT might draw.