OPUS 4 | Linguistik-Klassifikation: Syntax

Word-class-changing derivations in Rawang (2007)

Randy J. LaPolla

Rawang [...] is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by people who live in the far north of Kachin State in Myanmar (Burma), particularly along the Mae Hka ('Nmai Hka) and Maeli Hka (Mali Hka) river valleys (see map on back page); population unknown, although Ethnologue gives 100,000. In the past they had been called ‘Nung’, or (mistakenly) ‘Hkanung’, and are considered to be a sub-group of the Kachin by the Myanmar government. Until government policies put a stop to the clearing of new land in 1994, the Rawang speakers still practiced slash and burn farming on the mountainsides (they still do a bit, but only on already claimed land), in conjunction with planting paddy rice near the river. They are closely related to people on the other side of the Chinese border in Yunnan classified as either Dulong or Nu(ng) (see LaPolla 2001, 2003 on the Dulong language). In this paper, I will be discussing the word-class-changing constructions found in Rawang, using data of the Mvtwang (Mvt River) dialect of Rawang, which is considered the most central of those dialects in Myanmar and so has become something of a standard for writing and inter-group communication.

The subject-in-situ generalization revisited (2007)

Artemis Alexiadou Elena Anagnostopoulou

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.

The copula and existential verbs in Qiang (2007)

Randy J. LaPolla Chenglong Huang

This paper discusses the copula and existential verb constructions in Qiang, a Tibeto-Burman language of northern Sichuan, China.

Syntactic annotation of non-canonical linguistic structures (2007)

Hagen Hirschmann Seanna Doolittle Anke Lüdeling

This paper deals with the syntactic annotation of corpora that contain both ‘canonical’ and ‘non-canonical’ sentences.

Sintaktička funkcija participa u hrvatskom jeziku 15./16. stoljeća (2007)

Kristina Štrkalj Despot

U radu se analizira sintaktička funkcija participa u hrvatskome jeziku 15./16. st. jer su se otprilike u to vrijeme u sintaktičkom ustrojstvu (staro)hrvatskoga jezika događale vrlo krupne jezične promjene, koje su posljedica “departicipijalizacije” participa, tj. preobrazbe naslijeđenih participnih oblika u glagolske priloge.

Semantics (2007)

Cornelia Endriss Stefan Hinterwimmer Stavros Skopeteas

The guidelines for semantics comprise a number of layers related to quantificational structures as well as some crucial semantic properties of NPs with respect to information structure: definiteness, countability, and animacy.

Review of Regina Pustet : Copulas: universals in the categorization of the lexicon: (Oxford University Press 2003; 262pp) (2007)

Claudia Maienborn

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).

Negação, prosódia e foco em diálogos do alemão (2007)

Selma Meireles Hardarik Blühdorn

Morphology (2007)

Joanna Blaszczak Stefanie Dipper Gisbert Fanselow Shinishiro Ishihara Svetlana Petrova Stavros Skopeteas Thomas Weskott Malte Zimmermann

The guidelines for morphological annotation contain the layers that are necessary for understanding the structure of the words in the object language: morphological segmentation, glossing, and annotation of part-of-speech.

Leksikografski status brojevnih riječi u "Rječniku hrvatskoga kajkavskoga književnog jezika" (2007)

Ivana Franić

U radu se prikazuje i analizira leksikografski status brojevnih riječi u Rječniku hrvatskoga kajkavskoga književnog jezika. Prilaže se popis brojevnih riječi obrađenih u rječniku, utvrđuje se u kojoj su mjeri u rječničkome članku zastupljeni elementi gramatičkoga opisa i navode li se oni dosljedno. Analiziraju se elementi definicije brojevnih riječi i njezina koherentnost.

Linguistik-Klassifikation: Syntax

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