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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.
Modern Persian conjugation makes use of five periphrastic constructions. We contrast the properties of these five constructions and argue that they call for different analyses. We propose contrasting analyses relying on the combination of an HPSG approach to feature geometry and syntactic combination, and an approach to paradigm organization and morphological exponence based on Paradigm Function Morphology. This combination of analytic tools allows us to treat the whole array of periphrastic constructions as lexical in origin—no phrasal construction or multi-word lexical entry of any kind is required.
French and Romanian verbless relative adjuncts are incidental adjuncts which have been described as elliptical relative clauses. We show that this analysis is not empirically adequate and propose an alternative non-elliptical analysis. We analyze verbless relative adjuncts as sentential fragments whose head can be a cluster of phrases. They are marked by a functor phrase which displays selection properties with respect to the head phrase and makes an essential contribution to the semantics of the adjunct. The analysis relies on the interaction of grammatical constraints introduced by various linguistic objects, as well as on a constructional analysis of verbless relative adjuncts distinguishing several subtypes.
Previous HPSG accounts of extraction blur the distinction between valents and adjuncts by allowing verbs to lexically control the modifiers that combine with their phrasal projections. However, assuming that adjuncts are valents runs into various difficulties. This paper argues that the distinction between complements and adjuncts can be maintained, and that certain semantic phenomena that challenge traceless theories of extraction can be seen as an instance of a more general process. Finally, this paper also discusses a uniform mechanism for case assignment to valents and adverbial nominals.
In this paper, I discuss the case and agreement system of Nias, a language that has been described as a marked-absolutive system by various authors (Donohue and Brown, 1999; Corbett, 2006; Cysouw, 2005; Handschuh, 2008; Wichmann, 2005). I shall argue in particular that the ergativity of this language is highly superficial in nature, showing that hypothesised marked-absolutive arguments fail to display typical subject properties. Extending the linking theory of ergativity by Manning (1994) and Manning and Sag (1999), which assumes an inverse linking pattern for transitive, I shall suggest that Nias transitives are best analysed as a Nominative-Accusative system, attributing the ergative split in Nias to an inverse linking of intransitives instead. Under this perspective, case, agreement, and word order will receive a natural explanation.
The paper discusses the so-called adverbial use of the wh-pronoun was ('what'), which establishes a non-standard interrogative construction type in German. It argues that the adverbial use of was ('what') is based on the lexical properties of a categorically deficient pronoun was ('what'), which bears a causal meaning. In addition, adverbial was ('what') differs from canonical argument was ('what') as it is analyzed as a functor which is generated in clause-initial position.
By means of empirical facts mainly provided by d'Avis (2001) it is shown that was ('what') behaves ambivalently regarding the wh-property: On the one hand, was ('what') can introduce an interrogative clause, but on the other hand it cannot license wh-phrases in situ. While formally analyzing the data against the background of existing accounts on wh-interrogatives couched in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar, an analysis is developed that separates two pieces of information to keep track of the wh-information percolating in an interrogative clause. Whereas the WH-value models wh-fronting and pied-piping phenomena, the QUE value links syntactic and semantic information and thus keeps track of wh-phrases in-situ.
In this paper we develop an HPSG syntax-semantics of negative concord in Romanian. We show that n-words in Romanian can best be treated as negative quantifiers which may combine by resumption to form polyadic negative quantifiers. Optionality of resumption explains the existence of simple sentential negation readings alongside double negation readings. We solve the well-known problem of defining general semantic composition rules for translations of natural language expressions in a logical language with polyadic quantifiers by integrating our higher-order logic in Lexical Resource Semantics, whose constraint-based composition mechanisms directly support a systematic syntax-semantics for negative concord with polyadic quantification.