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The present paper is an attempt to describe a particular semantic domain in Thai, that of local relations, in terms of a gradual interconnection of what traditional descriptions usually regard as distinct and isolated categories. It is based on the well-known observation that isolating languages like Thai typically display a high degree of 'multifunctionality', or else of syntactic 'versatility' of very many lexical items. […] The semantic area studied in the following pages yields a clear systematic interconnection of three different categories, viz. that of nouns – as the focal instance of maximum syntactic independence –, that of verbs – as, conversely, the focal instance of maximally relational concepts –, and, as an intermediary category between these two, that of prepositions which the system lexically feeds from both these opposite ends. The examples given in the course of this paper have been obtained from published grammatical literature, from Thai texts, and from informants.
Grammatical relations, particularly the notions of transitivity, case marking, ergativity, passive and antipassive have been a favourite subject of typological research during the last decade, but surprisingly, the notion of valency has been of marginal interest in cross-linguistic studies, though the syntactic and semantic status of participants is, to a great extent, determined by the relational properties of the verb. Valency is the property of the verb which determines the obligatory and optional number of its participants, their morphosyntactic form, their semantic class membership (e.g. ± animate, ± human) ,and their semantic role (e.g. agent, patient, recipient). The valency inherently gives information on the nature of the semantic and syntactic relations that hold between the verb and its participants. If a verb is combined with more participants than allowed or less than required, or if the participants do not show the required morphosyntactic form or class membership, the clause is ungrammatical. In other words, it is not sufficient to consider only the number of actants as a matter of valency, but it is only acceptable if all semantic and morphosyntactic properties of the relation between a verb and its participants that are predictable from the verb are included. The predictability of these properties results from their inherent givenness, and it does not seem reasonable to count some inherently given relational properties as a matter of valency, but not others (compare Helbig (1971:38f) and Heidolph et ale (1981:479) who distinguish between the quantitative, syntactic and semantic aspect of valency).
Ergativity in Samoan
(1985)
Most typological and language specific studies on so- called ergative languages are concerned with case marking patterns, particularly split ergativity, with the organization of syntactic relations as defined by syntactic operations such as coreferential deletion across coordinate conjunctions, Equi-NP-deletion and relativization , and with the notion of subject, but usually neglect the notion of valency, though the inherent relational properties of the verb , i. e. valency, play a fundamental role in the syntactic organization of sentences in ergative as well as in other languages . The following investigation of ergativity in Samoan aims to integrate the notion of valency into the description of semantic and syntactic relations and to outline the characteristic features of Samoan verbal clauses as far as they seem to be relevant to recent and still ongoing discussions on linguistic typology and syntactic theory. The main points of the definition of valency […] are: Valency is the property of the verb which determines the obligatory and optional number of its participants, their morphosyntactic form, their semantic class membership (e.g. ± animate, ± human) , and their semantic role (e.g. agent , patient , recipient). All semantic properties and morphosyntactic properties of participants not inherently given by the verb and therefore not predictable from the verb, are not a matter of valency. Valency is not a homogenous property of the verb, but consists of several exponents which show varying degress of relevance in different languages or different verb classes within a single language.
As a traditional notion of fundamental importance in linguistics and philosophy (logic), "predication" is fraught with controversial issues. It is thus difficult to delimit the scope of this paper without becoming involved in some major issue. The following distinctions seem to me to be plausible on an intuitive basis. Evidence for why they are useful and legitimate will be found in the body of the paper. The discussion will focus on morphosyntactic predication […].
Grammatical relations – in particular the relation 'subject of' – and voice are of central concern to any theory of universal grammar. With respect to these phenomena the analysis of Tagalog (and the Philippine languages in general) has turned out to be particularly difficult and continues to be a matter of debate. What traditionally has been called passive voice in these languages […] appears to be so different from voice phenomena in the more familiar Indo-European languages that the term 'focus' was introduced in the late 1950s to underscore its 'exceptional' nature [...]. Furthermore, […] an inflationary use has been made of the term 'ergative' in the last decade; it can thus no longer be assumed that it has an unequivocal and specific meaning in typologizing languages, apart from the technical definition it might be given within a particular framework. But if the Philippine 'focus' constructions are neither passive nor ergative, how else can they be analysed? [...] In this paper a ease will be made for the claim that 'focus' marking should be analysed in terms of orientation, a concept used […] for capturing the difference between English (and, more generally, Indo-European) orientated nominalisations such as 'employ-er' or 'employ-ee', and unorientated nominalisations such as 'employ-ing'. This approach implies that 'focus' marking is derivational rather than inflectional as often presumed in the literature. This is to say that what is typologically conspicuous in Tagalog is not the 'focus' phenomenon per se, since this is very similar to orientated nominalisations in many other languages, but rather the very prominent use of orientated formations (i.e., derivational morphology) in basic clause structure.
In the last two decades Philippine languages, and of these especially Tagalog, have acquired a prominent place in linguistic theory. A central role in this discussion was played by two papers written by Schachter (1976 and 1977), who was inspired by Keenan's artcle on the subject from 1976. The most recent contributions on this topic have been from de Wolff (1988) and Shibatani (1988), both of which were published in a collection of essays, edited by Shibatani, with the title Passive and Voice. These works, and several works in-between, deal with the focus system specific to Philippine languages. The main discussion centers around the fact that Philippine languages contain a basic set of 5 to 7 affix focus forms. Their exact number varies not only in the secondary literature, but in the primary sources, i.e. Tagalog grammars, as well, where considerable differences in the number of affix focus forms can be found. All of these works, however, do agree on one point: the Philippine focus system basica1ly consists of agent, patient (=goal or object), benefactive, locative, and instrumental affix forms. Schachter/Otanes (1972) list a number of further forms, and in Drossard (1983 and 1984) we tried to show (in an attempt similar to those of Sapir 1917 and Klimov 1977) that the main criterion for a systematization of the Philippine focus system consists in the difference between the active and stative domains, an attempt which in our opinion was largely misunderstood (cf. the brief remarks in Shibatani (1988) and de Wolff (1988). The present paper is thus, on the one hand, an attempt to repeat and clarify our earlier position, and on the other, a further step towards such a systematization. A first step in this direction was an article on resultativity in Tagalog from 1991. In the present paper this approach will be extended to reciprocity. In the process we will show that it is valid to make a distinction between an active (=controlled action) vs. a stative (=limited controlled action) domain. First, however, we will take a brief look at what makes up the active and stative voice systems.
Relating propositions : subordination and coordination strategies in a polysynthetic language
(1998)
This paper discusses the relationship between the morphological structure of language and its syntactic structure. Although it is primarily a single language which is analysed in detail, namely, Inuktitut, an Eskimo language of the Canadian Eastern Arctic, the findings seem to be of general relevance.
Approaching the grammar of adjuncts : proceedings of the Oslo conference, September 22 - 25, 1999
(2000)
Issues on topics
(2000)
The present volume contains papers that bear mainly on issues concerning the topic concept. This concept is of course very broad and diverse. Also, different views are expressed in this volume. Some authors concentrate on the status of topics and non-topics in so-called topic prominent languages (i.e. Chinese), others focus on the syntactic behavior of topical constituents in specific European languages (German, Greek, Romance languages). The last contribution tries to bring together the concept of discourse topic (a non-syntactic notion) and the concept of sentence topic, i.e. that type of topic that all the preceding papers are concerned with.
This volume presents working versions of presentations heard at and selected for the Workshop on Syntax of Predication, held at ZAS, Berlin, on November 2-3, 2001 (except the editor’s own paper).
Predication is a many-faceted topic which involves both syntax and semantics and the interface between them. This is reflected in the papers of the volume.
This volume presents a collection of papers touching on various issues concerning the syntax and semantics of predicative constructions.
A hot topic in the study of predicative copula constructions, with direct implications for the treatment of he (how many he's do we need?), and wider implications for the theories of predication, event-based semantics and aspect, is the nature and source of the situation argument. Closer examination of copula-less predications is becoming increasingly relevant to all these issues, as is clearly illustrated by the present collection.
The paper explains the absence of resultative secondary predication in Russian as arising from a conflict of inferential interpretations. It formalises the framework necessary to express this proposal in terms of abductive reasoning with Poole systems in Gricean contexts. The conflict is shown to arise for default rules regulating alternative realisation of verb-internally specified consequent states. The paper thus indicates that typological variation may be due not only to different parameter values but to general inferential properties of the syntax-semantics mapping. The proposed theory also contradicts some widespread proposals that the absence of resultative secondary predication is due to the absence of some particular language feature.
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The papers in this volume were presented at the eleventh meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA 11), held from April 23-25 at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany. The conference was organized by Hans-Martin Gärtner, Joachim Sabel, and myself, as part of the research project Clause Structure and Adjuncts in Austronesian Languages. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). We would like to thank Wayan Arka, Agibail Cohn, Laura Downing, Silke Hamann, S J Hannahs, Ray Harlow, Nikolaus Himmelmann, Yuchua E. Hsiao, Lillian Huang, Ed Keenan, Glyne Piggott, Charles Randriamasimanana, Joszef Szakos, Barbara Stiebels, Jane Tang, Lisa Travis, Noami Tsukido, Sam Wang, Elizabeth Zeitoun, Kie Ross Zuraw, and Marzena Zygis for reviewing the abstracts. We are thankful to Mechthild Bernhard, Jenny Ehrhardt, Fabienne Fritzsche, Theódóra Torfadóttir and Tue Trinh for their help during the conference. I would like to thank Theódóra for providing essential editorial assistance.
Table of Contents:
T. A. Hall (Indiana University): English syllabification as the interaction of markedness constraints
Antony D. Green: Opacity in Tiberian Hebrew: Morphology, not phonology
Sabine Zerbian (ZAS Berlin): Phonological Phrases in Xhosa (Southern Bantu)
Laura J. Downing (ZAS Berlin): What African Languages Tell Us About Accent Typology
Marzena Zygis (ZAS Berlin): (Un)markedness of trills: the case of Slavic r-palatalisation
Laura J. Downing (ZAS Berlin), Al Mtenje (University of Malawi), Bernd Pompino-Marschall (Humboldt-Universitat Berlin): Prosody and Information Structure in Chichewa
T. A. Hall (Indiana University). Silke Hamann (ZAS Berlin), Marzena Zygis (ZAS Berlin): The phonetics of stop assibilation
Christian Geng (ZAS Berlin), Christine Mooshammer (Universitat Kiel): The Hungarian palatal stop: phonological considerations and phonetic data
The purpose of this dissertation is to defend the idea that the empirical responsibilities of binding theory can be handled in a more psychologically and historically realistic way when assigned to the field of pragmatics. In particular, I wish to show that Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince & Smolensky, 1993), the stochastic OT and Gradual Learning Algorithm of Boersma (1998), the Recoverability of OT of Wilson (2001) and Buchwald et al. (2002), and the bidirectional OT of Blutner (2000b) and Bidirectional Gradual Learning Algorithm of Jäger (2003a) can all participate in a formal framework in which one can formally spell out and justify the idea that the distributional behavior of bound pronouns and reflexivs is a pragmatic phenomenon.
The collection of papers in this volume presents results of a collaborative project between the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, the Zentrum für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung (ZAS) in Berlin, and the University of Leiden. All three institutions have a strong interest in the linguistics of Bantu languages, and in 2003 decided to set up a network to compare results and to provide a platform for on-going discussion of different topics on which their research interests converged. The project received funding from the British Academy International Networks Programme, and from 2003 to 2006 seven meetings were held at the institutions involved under the title Bantu Grammar: Description and Theory, indicating the shared belief that current research in Bantu is best served by combining the description of new data with theoretically informed analysis. During the life-time of the network, and partly in conjunction with it, larger externally funded Bantu research projects have been set up at all institutions: projects on word-order and morphological marking and on phrasal phonology in Leiden, on pronominal reference, agreement and clitics in Romance and Bantu at SOAS, and on focus in Southern Bantu languages at ZAS. The papers in this volume provide a sampling of the work developed within the network and show, or so we think, how fruitful the sharing of ideas over the last three years has been. While the current British Academy-funded network is coming to an end in 2006, we hope that the cooperative structures we have established will continue to develop - and be expanded - in the future, providing many future opportunities to exchange findings and ideas about Bantu linguistics.
These proceedings, also online available as No. 46 in the ZAS Papers in Linguistics series under http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/index.html?publications_zaspil have resulted from the International Conference "Focus in African languages" held October 6-8, 2005 at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin. The conference was cooperatively organized by the latter, together with the Collaborative Research Center (Sonderforschungsforschungsbereich) 632, generously funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). It was the first conference bringing together colleagues working on this topic from all over the world in such scale.
Even though this volume contains only ten contributions out of the 35 papers presented at the conference, it displays the wide range of approaches, subjects and languages studied in the field of information structure in African languages. The collection thus reflects the synergetic atmosphere of the conference.
In the name of all organizers (Laura Downing, Ines Fiedler, Katharina Hartmann, Brigitte Reineke, Anne Schwarz, Sabine Zerbian, Malte Zimmermann) we would like to take this opportunity to thank the participant reviewers and student assistants for their contributions by which the conference became such a fruitful forum for inspiring and seminal studies in this field. Also special thanks for their effort in copy editing to our research assistants Lars Marstaller and Paul Starzmann.
Die Hauptthese dieser Dissertation ist, dass Nord-Sotho keinen obligatorischen Gebrauch von grammatischen Mitteln zur Markierung von Fokus macht, weder in der Syntax noch in der Prosodie oder Morphologie. Trotzdem strukturiert diese Sprache eine Äußerung nach informationsstrukturellen Aspekten. Konstituenten, die im Diskurs gegeben sind, werden entweder getilgt, pronominalisiert oder an den rechten oder linken Satzrand versetzt. Diese (morpho-)syntaktischen Prozesse wirken so zusammen, dass die fokussierte Konstituente oft final in ihrem Teilsatz erscheint. Obwohl die finale Position keine designierte Fokusposition ist, ist das Wissen um diese Tendenz doch entscheidend für das Verständnis einer morphologischen Alternation, die in Nord-Sotho am Verb erscheint und die in der Literatur im Zusammenhang mit Fokus diskutiert wurde.
Obwohl also ein direkter grammatischer Ausdruck von formaler F(okus)-Markierung im Nord-Sotho fehlt, ist F-Markierung trotzdem entscheidend für die Grammatik dieser Sprache: Fokussierte logische Subjekte können nicht in kanonischer präverbaler Position erscheinen. Sie erscheinen stattdessen entweder postverbal oder in einem Spaltsatz, abhängig von der Valenz des Verbs. Obwohl Nord-Sotho bei Objekten im Gebrauch von Spaltsätzen eine Korrespondenz von komplexer Form mit komplexer Bedeutung zeigt, gilt diese Korrespondenz nicht für logische Subjekte.
Die vorliegende Dissertation modelliert die oben genannten Ergebnisse im theoretischen Rahmen der Optimalitätstheorie (OT). Syntaktischer in situ Fokus und die Abwesenheit von prosodischer Fokusmarkierung können mit unkontroversen Beschränkungen erfasst werden. Für die Ungrammatikaliät fokussierter logischer Subjekte in präverbaler Position schlägt die vorliegende Arbeit die Modifizierung einer in der Literatur vorhandenen Beschränkung vor, die in Nord-Sotho von entscheidener Bedeutung ist. Die Form-Bedeutungs-Korrespondenz wird, wie andere Phänomene pragmatischer Arbeitsteilung auch, innerhalb der schwach bidirektionalen Optimalitätstheorie behandelt.
In this paper I present five alternations of the verb system of Modern Greek, which are recurrently mapped on the syntactic frame NPi__NP. The actual claim is that only the participation in alternations and/or the allocation to an alternation variant can reliably determine the relation between a verb derivative and its base. In the second part, the conceptual structures and semantic/situational fields of a large number of “-ízo” derivatives appearing inside alternation classes are presented. The restricted character of the conceptual and situational preferences inside alternations classes suggests the dominant character of the alternations component.
This volume represents a collection of papers that present some of the results of two projects on control: on the one hand, the project Typology of complement control directed by Barbara Stiebels and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG STI 151/2-2), and on the other hand the project Variation in control structures directed by Maria Polinsky and Eric Potsdam and funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF grants BCS-0131946, BCS-0131993; website http://accent.ucsd.edu/). Whereas the first project pursued a lexical approach to control with a semantic definition of obligatory control, the second project has mainly pursued a syntactic approach to control – with special emphasis on less studied control structures (such as adjunct control, backward control, finite control, etc.). Both projects have aimed at extending the research on complement control to structures that differ from the prototypical cases of infinitival complements with empty subjects found in many Indo-European languages; their common interest was to bring in new empirical data, both primary and experimental.
The 48th volume of the ZAS Papers in Linguistics presents selected papers from the conference on Intersentential pronominal reference in child and adult language held at the ZAS in December, 2006. The conference, organized by the project Acquisition and disambiguation of intersentential pronominal reference, brought together leading researchers dealing with anaphora resolution in diverse theoretical approaches and the acquisition perspective on pronominal reference taken by the ZAS project.
All of the papers in the volume except one (Kaji) take up some aspect of relative clause construction in some Bantu language. Kaji’s paper aims to account for how Tooro (J12; western Uganda) lost phonological tone through a comparative study of the tone systems of other western Uganda Bantu languages. The other papers examine a range of ways of forming relative clauses, often including non-restrictive relatives and clefts, in a wide range of languages representing a variety of prosodic systems.
The papers in this volume were originally presented at the Workshop on Bantu Wh-questions, held at the Institut des Sciences de l’Homme, Université Lyon 2, on 25-26 March 2011, which was organized by the French-German cooperative project on the Phonology/Syntax Interface in Bantu Languages (BANTU PSYN). This project, which is funded by the ANR and the DFG, comprises three research teams, based in Berlin, Paris and Lyon. The Berlin team, at the ZAS, is: Laura Downing (project leader) and Kristina Riedel (post-doc). The Paris team, at the Laboratoire de phonétique et phonologie (LPP; UMR 7018), is: Annie Rialland (project leader), Cédric Patin (Maître de Conférences, STL, Université Lille 3), Jean-Marc Beltzung (post-doc), Martial Embanga Aborobongui (doctoral student), Fatima Hamlaoui (post-doc). The Lyon team, at the Dynamique du Langage (UMR 5596) is: Gérard Philippson (project leader) and Sophie Manus (Maître de Conférences, Université Lyon 2). These three research teams bring together the range of theoretical expertise necessary to investigate the phonology-syntax interface: intonation (Patin, Rialland), tonal phonology (Aborobongui, Downing, Manus, Patin, Philippson, Rialland), phonology-syntax interface (Downing, Patin) and formal syntax (Riedel, Hamlaoui). They also bring together a range of Bantu language expertise: Western Bantu (Aboronbongui, Rialland), Eastern Bantu (Manus, Patin, Philippson, Riedel), and Southern Bantu (Downing).
The papers in this volume take up some aspects of the preverbal domain(s) in Bantu languages. They were originally presented at the Workshop BantuSynPhonIS: Preverbal Domain(s), held at the Center for General Linguistics (ZAS), in Berlin, on 14-15 November 2014. This workshop was coorganized by ZAS (Fatima Hamlaoui & Tonjes Veenstra) and the Humboldt University (Tom Güldemann, Yukiko Morimoto and Ines Fiedler).