OPUS 4 | Linguistik-Klassifikation: Syntax

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

Selma Meireles Hardarik Blühdorn

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.

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).

Deutsches Präpositionalattribut und ungarisches Lokalkasus- und Postpositionalattribut (2007)

Susan Schlotthauer

Für das Präpositionalattribut des Deutschen existieren bei einer Übertragung ins Ungarische vielfältige Übersetzungsvarianten. Die den deutschen Präpositionalphrasen entsprechenden Postpositionalphrasen und kasussuffigierten Nominalphrasen gehen in Attributsfunktion dem Kopf der Nominalphrase in der Regel voran und sind dann in partizipiale oder adjektivische Strukturen einzubetten. Die der deutschen Konstruktion entsprechende Postponierung dieser Attribute gewinnt allerdings in der modernen Standardsprache immer mehr an Raum. Gleichfalls lässt sich in einigen Textsorten eine Ausbreitung des sog. postpositionalen Adjektivs konstatieren. Lassen sich beide Phänomene gegebenenfalls als Symptome eines Nominalstils im Ungarischen werten?

Information structure (2007)

Michael Götze Thomas Weskott Cornelia Endriss Ines Fiedler Stefan Hinterwimmer Svetlana Petrova Anne Schwarz Stavros Skopeteas Ruben Stoel

The guidelines for Information Structure include instructions for the annotation of Information Status (or ‘givenness’), Topic, and Focus, building upon a basic syntactic annotation of nominal phrases and sentences. A procedure for the annotation of these features is proposed.

Introduction (2007)

Stefanie Dipper Michael Götze Stavros Skopeteas

The annotation guidelines introduced in this chapter present an attempt to create a unique infrastructure for the encoding of data from very different languages. The ultimate target of these annotations is to allow for data retrieval for the study of information structure, and since information structure interacts with all levels of grammar, the present guidelines cover all levels of grammar too. After introducing the guidelines, the current chapter also presents an evaluation by means of measurements of the inter-annotator agreement.

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.

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.

Introduction (2007)

Caroline Féry Gisbert Fanselow Manfred Krifka

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.

Linguistik-Klassifikation: Syntax

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