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This paper aims to work toward a proper understanding of the role of preverbal ge- in Old English (henceforth OE) and its disappearance in the course of Middle English. This prefix is reminiscent of its cognates in Modern German and Dutch (also written ge-) in its distribution, but even a cursory examination of the details reveals it to be quite distinct, as we will see. The proper characterization of that distribution, and of its diachronic development, has proven to be extremely difficult. I have thus carried out a large-scale corpus study using the York-Toronto-Helsinki parsed corpus of Old English prose (Taylor et al. 2003) and the Penn-Helsinki parsed corpus of Middle English, 2nd ed. (Kroch & Taylor 1999). This paper will report the results of the first phase of the project, involving patterns in the data that could be identified primarily on the basis of automatic searches in the corpora.
One of the most important insights of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993) is that phonological processes can be reduced to the interaction between faithfulness and universal markedness principles. In the most constrained version of the theory, all phonological processes should be thus reducible. This hypothesis is tested by alternations that appear to be phonological but in which universal markedness principles appear to play no role. If we are to pursue the claim that all phonological processes depend on the interaction of faithfulness and markedness, then processes that are not dependent on markedness must lie outside phonology. In this paper I will examine a group of such processes, the initial consonant mutations of the Celtic languages, and argue that they belong entirely to the morphology of the languages, not the phonology.
The purpose of this research was to trace the developmental steps in the acquisition of aspectual oppositions in Russian and to examine the validity of the 'aspect before tense' hypothesis for L1-speaking children. Imperfective/perfective verbs and their inflections, as well as aspectual pairs, were analysed in the first five months of verb production (and the respective months in the input) in three children. Additionally, the first four months of verb production were investigated in one boy with less data. Verb forms marked for the past and for the present occur simultaneously in all children. These early forms relate to 'here and now' situations: verbs marked for the past denote 'resultative' events that are perceived by the children as occurring during the speech time or immediately before it, while verbs marked for the present typically denote on-going events. Thus, with early tense oppositions (or tense morphology) children mark aspectual contrasts in the moment of speech: evidence in favour of the 'aspect before tense' hypothesis.
A strong preference in using the perfective aspect for the past and the imperfective aspect for the present events has been found in both adults and children. Further, only very few aspectual pairs were documented within the analysed period (from the onset of verb production to the period when children produce rule-driven inflectional forms). The productive use of the finite forms of perfective and imperfective verbs doesn't concord with the ability of the productive use of the contrastive forms of one lemma. Data suggest that children (start to) learn aspectual forms in an item-based manner. The acquisition of aspectual oppositions (aspectual pairs) is lexically dependent and is guided by the contextual 'thesaurus'. Aspectual pairs are learned in a peace-meal way during much longer, than observed for this article, period of time. Generally, aspect is not learned as a rule, also because there are no (uniform) rules of forming of aspectual pairs, but as the 'satellite' of the inherent lexical meaning of verbs of diverse Aktionsarten.
The issues addressed here are relevant for other Slavic languages, exhibiting the morphological category of aspect.
In this squib, I want to argue that the morphological structure of words is, at least to some extent, motivated. As an example I have choosen the partonomic (and for the less part taxonomic) nomenclature of the human body. While important work by Brown et alii (1973), Anderson (1978) and Schladt (1997) exists on this topic, these analyses focus on the conceptualization of body-parts and their semantics, but not on their morphological representation.
In the following, I want to check two predictions about the morphological complexity of lexical items denoting parts of the human body. The first assumption is that the most canonical body-parts are always expressed by mono-lexematic items. The second one consists in the assumption that body-parts of the lowest levels in the hierarchy are always morphologically complex. A set of six body-parts has been analysed in 27 languages. The set consists of two canonical (HEAD and EAR) and of one from the lowest level of the hierarchy (TOENAIL). For this I have adopted a sample from Schladt (1997) and a small one compiled by myself
In this paper, I discuss four different verb forms in Ndebele (a Nguni Bantu language spoken mainly in Zimbabwe) - the imperative, reduplicated, future and participial. I show that while all four are subject to minimality restrictions, minimality is satisfied differently in each of these morphological contexts. To account for this, I argue that in Ndebele (as in other Bantu languages) Word and RED are not the only constituents which must satisfy minimality: the Stem is also subject to minimality conditions in some morphological contexts. This paper, then, provides additional arguments for the proposal that Phonological Word is not the only sub-lexical morpho-prosodic constituent. Further, I argue that, although Word, RED and Stern are all subject to the same minimality constraint – they must all be minimally bisyllabic - this does not follow from a single 'generalized' constraint. Instead, I argue, contra recent work within Generalized Template Theory (see, e.g., McCarthy & Prince 1994, 1995a, 1999; Urbanezyk 1995, 1996; and Walker 2000; etc.) that a distinct minimality constraint must be formalized for each of these morpho-prosodic constituents.
This study is an electropalatographic investigation of clusters composed of /n/ or /l/ followed by the (alveolo)palatal consonants /ʎ, ɲ/ or by dental /t/ in three Catalan dialects, i.e., Majorcan, Valencian and Eastern. Data show that articulatory blending through superposition occurs in the palatalizing environment except when C1 is highly constrained (e.g., dark /l/) or C2 is purely palatal and therefore, produced at a distant articulatory location from C1. Contrary to previous descriptions in the literature, data for /nt, lt/ reveal that blending through superposition rather than assimilation is at work. The implications of these data for theories of speech production are discussed.
The Bantu language Makhuwa makes a distinction between cojoint and disjoint verb forms. Two hypotheses are made from generalisations on the distribution of the conjoint and disjoint verb forms in Makhuwa. 1) The verb appears in its conjoint form when a focal element occupies the Immediate After Verb (IAV) position; 2) the verb appears in its disjoint form when the IAV position is empty. A syntactic analysis is provided that accounts for these hypotheses if the IAV position is defined in terms of structural rather than linear adjacency between two heads in a direct c-command relation.
In the syntactic analysis two focus projections are proposed: one under TP (Ndayiragije 1999) hosting the disjoint morpheme and one under vP, to whose specifier focal elements move. Non-focal elements remain in-situ. This analysis accounts both for the strong adjacency requirement of a cojoint verb form and its focal object and for the empty IAV position that requires a verb to appear in its disjoint form.
This paper presents a sketch of the prosodic, syntactic and morphological means of expressing focus in Chitumbuka, an underdescribed Bantu language of Malawi. The chief prosodic correlate of focus is boundary narrowing – rephrasing conditioned by focus – which is used not only to signal in situ focus but also in syntactic and morphological focus constructions. Of theoretical importance is the fact that rephrasing does not lend culminative prominence to the focused constituent. Although Chitumbuka has culminative sentential stress, its position remains fixed at the right edge of the clause, independent of the position of focus. This makes Chitumbuka a challenge for theories of focus prosody which claim that the focused constituent must have culminative sentential prominence.
Although verb forms encoding focus were recorded in various Bantu languages during the twentieth century it was not until the late 1970's that they became the centre of serious attention, starting with the work of Hyman and Watters. In the last decade this attention has grown. While focus can be expressed variously, this paper concentrates largely on its morphological, partly on its tonal expression. On the basis of morphological and tonal behaviour, it identifies four blocks of languages, representing less than a third of all Bantu languages: those with metatony, those with a binary constituent contrast between verb ("disjunctive") and post-verbal ("conjunctive") focus, those with a three-way contrast, and those with verb initial /ni-/. Following Güldemann's lead, it is shown there is a fairly widespread grammaticalisation path whereby focus markers may come to encode progressive aspect, then present tense. Many Bantu languages today have a pre-stem morpheme /a/ 'non-past' and it is hypothesized that many of these /a/, which are otherwise hard to explain historically, may derive from an older focus marker.
This paper discusses locative inversion constructions in Otjiherero against the background of previous work by Bresnan and Kanerva (1989) on the construction in Chichewa, and Demuth and Mmusi (1997) on Setswana and related languages. Locative inversion in Otjiherero is structurally similar to locative inversion in Chichewa and Setswana, but differs from these languages in that there are fewer thematic restrictions on predicates undergoing locative inversion. As Otjiherero has a three-way morphological distinction of locative subject markers, this shows that there is no relation between agreement morphology and thematic restrictions in locative inversion, confirming the result of Demuth and Mmusi. The availability of transitive predicates to participate in locative inversion in Otjiherero furthermore raises questions about the relation between locative inversion, valency, and applicative marking, and these are addressed in the paper, although further research is needed for a full analysis. In terms of function of the locative subject markers, Otjiherero presents, like Chishona, a split system where all markers support locative readings, but where one of them is also used in expletive contexts. In contrast to Chishona, though, this is the class 16, rather than the class 17 marker.
Genitive focus in Supyire
(2006)
Supyire has two distinct genitive constructions, one consisting of juxtaposed nouns, and the other marked with a particle. This study demonstrates that the marked genitive correlates significantly in natural discourse with contrastive focus as operationally defined in Myhill and Xing (1996). The method used avoids the vicious circularity of many discourse-based studies of focus. Contrastive focus, rather than being "coded", is a pragmatic construal which is dependent on other elements in the communicative context. This construal is only one of the possible construals of the marked genitive (contra Carlson 1994). In this it is not unlike other so-called "contrastive focus" constructions noted in the literature, such as contrastive stress in English.
The impact of the morphological alternation of subject markers on tense/aspect: the case of Swahili
(2006)
Subject markers for the first, second and third person singular in Southern Swahili dialects display morphological variation in that specific forms are chosen with different tense-aspect markers. This paper documents this variation in the different dialects and presents a distributional chart which reveals the symmetric patterns between these subject markers and their corresponding tense-aspect formatives. The study corroborates earlier work in the manifestation of variant morphological tense-aspect formatives of the regional dialects of Swahili by Mazrui (1983).
Setswana distinguishes between conjunctive and disjunctive verb forms in the present positive tense. Creissels (1996) shows that this is also true of a number of other tenses (present negative, future positive and perfect positive). This work is used as a starting point to investigate the conjunctive/disjunctive distinction in my own Setswana data. Further to those presented in Creissels, there is data on the past and past progressive tenses, and environments such as relatives and subordinates. Creissels' analysis is supported by different examples, including those that do not utilise a frame intended to limit boundary effects. There are also examples not within this frame that raise questions about how flexible the conjunctive/disjunctive system can be. This paper is a work in progress.
Introduction
(2006)
The papers in this volume reflect a number of broad themes which have emerged during the meetings of the project as particularly relevant for current Bantu linguistics. [...] The papers show that approaches to Bantu linguistics have also developed in new directions since this foundational work. For example, interaction of phonological phrasing with syntax and word order on the one hand, and with information structure on the other, is more prominent in the papers here than in earlier literature. Quite generally, the role of information structure for the understanding of Bantu syntax has become more important, in particular with respect to the expression of topic and focus, but also for the analysis of more central syntactic concerns such as questions and relative clauses. This, of course, relates to a wider development in linguistic theory to incorporate notions of topic and focus into core syntactic analysis, and it is not surprising that work on Bantu languages and on linguistic theory are closely related to each other in this respect. Another noteworthy development is the increasing interest in variation among Bantu languages which reflects the fact that more empirical evidence from more Bantu languages has become available over the last decade or so. The picture that emerges from this research is that morpho-syntactic variation in Bantu is rich and complex, and that there is strong potential to link this research to research on micro-variation in European (and other) languages, and to the study of morpho-syntactic variables, or parameters, more generally.
On the early development of aspect in greek and russian child language, a comparative analysis
(2003)
The category of aspect is grammaticized in both Greek and Russian opposing perfective and imperfective verb forms in all inflectional categories except the nonpast (‘present’). Despite these similarities there are important differences in the way the aspectual systems function in the two languages. While in Greek nearly all verbs oppose a perfective to a given imperfective grammatical form, Russian aspect is more strongly lexicalized with pairs of imperfective and perfective lexemes not only differing aspectually, but also as far as their lexical meanings are concerned. This is especially true of perfective verbs formed by prefixes as compared to their imperfective bases. Thus, in pairs of prefixed and unprefixed dynamic verbs, the derived prefixed (perfective) member has a telic meaning while its unprefixed (imperfective) counterpart is atelic (e.g. sjest’ (PFV) ‘to eat up’ vs. jest’ (IPF) ‘to eat’). Such derived perfective verbs may in turn be “secondarily” imperfectivized by suffixation furnishing the only “true” perfective/imperfective pairs of verbs (e.g. sjest’ (PFV) ‘to eat up’ vs. sjedat’ (IPF) ‘to eat up’ (iterative)). “Secondary” imperfectives do not occur in our child data.
In this pilot study, we will analyze the tense-aspect-mood forms of the 20 most frequent verbs with equivalent meanings occurring in the longitudinal audiotaped data of a Greek and a Russian boy between 2;1 and 2;3 (their entire lexical inventories comprise approx. 100 verbs each).
We adopt a constructivist perspective on the development of aspect in Greek and Russian child language and will show that in spite of a broad inventory of imperfective and perfective verb forms to be found in the speech of both children aspect has not yet developed into a generalized grammatical category, but is strongly dependent on aktionsart (stative/dynamic, telic/atelic) in both languages. While this results in a strong preference for perfective verb forms of telic verbs and of imperfective forms of atelic ones in the speech of the Greek boy, the Russian child tends to use the unmarked members.
It has been previously reported that in languages demonstrating the Root Infinitive (RI) Stage the use of RIs is characterized by two properties: these forms are overwhelmingly eventive and have, in the majority of instances, a modal interpretation. Hoekstra and Hyams (1998, 1999) have proposed a theory stating that these two properties of RIs are co-dependent in that the application of the modal reference restriction limits the use of the aspectual verbal classes to eventive predicates. Furthermore, this theory assumed that the described mutual dependency of these constraints was valid cross-linguistically.
In this paper, we investigate the application of this theory to the case of RIs in Russian, one of the languages exhibiting the RI Stage. Using new longitudinal data from two monolingual Russian-speaking children, we demonstrate that the predictions of Hoekstra and Hyams’ approach are not realized for Russian child speech. While the constraint requiring that Ris have a modal reference does not seem to apply in Russian since the infinitival forms do receive past and present tense interpretation, these predicates are still overwhelmingly eventive and stative predicates appear mostly as finite verbs. Having shown that a theory connecting the application of the two restrictions on RIs does not account for the Russian data, we examine several alternative analyses of Russian RIs. We arrive at a conclusion that an explanation based on the lack of the event variable in stative predicates (Kratzer 1989) necessary for the interpretation of RIs in discourse (Avrutin 1997) succeeds in handling the Russian data presented in this article.
The acquisition of spanish perfective aspect : A study on children's production and comprehension
(2003)
This paper presents the acquisition of Spanish perfective aspect in production and comprehension. It argues that, although young children use perfective aspect to talk about completed events, young children have difficulty in assessing perfective meaning from perfective morphology. This paper proposes that in the process of acquiring aspectual meaning, children use local strategies to decode aspectual meaning from form: when analyzing a completed situation, young children depend on certain learnability factors to correctly assess the entailment of completion of the perfective, namely, their ability to determine if the object of the event measures out the event as a whole or not, and their ability to read the agent’s intentions. When those factors are removed from the situation, young children had difficulty determining the entailment of completion of perfective aspect. This study also suggests that the manner in which aspectual information is conveyed in a language, may play a role on the readiness of the acquisition of the semantic morphology of the language (e.g., verb+object vs. verb+affixes). The results of this study indicate that successful performance on the semantics of Spanish perfective aspect develops around the age of 5-6.
Modern theorists rarely agree on how to represent the categories of tense and aspect, making a consistent analysis for phenomena, such as the present perfect, more difficult to attain. It has been argued in previous analyses that the variable behavior of the present perfect between languages licenses independently motivated treatments, particularly of a morphosyntactic or semanticsyntactic nature (Giorgi & Pianesi 1997; Schmitt 2001; Ilari 2001). More specifically, the wellknown readings of the American English (AE) present perfect (resultative, experiential, persistent situation, recent past (Comrie 1976)), are at odds with the readings of the corresponding structure in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), the 'pretérito perfeito composto' (default iterativity and occasional duration (Ilari 1999)). Despite these variations, the present work, assuming a tense-aspect framework at the semantic-pragmatic interface, will provide a unified analysis for the present perfect in AE and BP, which have traditionally been treated as semantically divergent. The present perfect meaning, in conjunction with the aspectual class of the predicate, can account for the major differences between languages, particularly regarding iterativity and the "present perfect puzzle", regarding adverb compatibility.
The current study investigates the relation between aspect and particle verbs in the acquisition of English. Its purpose is to determine whether children associate telicity, as argued in previous studies, or rather perfectivity, which entails completion of a telic situation, with their early particle verb use. The study analyzes naturalistic data of four monolingual children between 1;6 and 3;8 from CHILDES acquiring English as their first language. On the one hand, it finds that children use both –ed and irregular perfective morphology with simplex verbs before particle verbs. They further use imperfective before perfective morphology with particle verbs. These findings suggest that there is no correlation between telic particle verbs and perfective morphology, as would have been predicted on an account which claims that lexical aspect of predicates guides the acquisition of grammatical aspect (Olsen & Weinberg 1999). On the other hand, the study finds that the children’s particle verbs denote telic situations from early on, but not half of them were used to refer to situations that are also completed. This finding questions analyses which claim that, at an initial stage, children will only interpret predicates as telic if they refer to situations that are at the same time completed. Completion information is not necessary for children in order to use particle verbs correctly for telic situations, as would have been predicted on an extended account along the lines of Wagner (2001). As a conclusion, it is suggested that the divergent findings result from a difference in methodology. While restrictions of perfective and imperfective morphology to particular classes of lexical aspect pertain to the production of grammatical aspect morphology, perfective and imperfective viewpoints on situations pertain to the level of interpretation of telic and atelic situations.
The phenomenon of phonological opacity has been the subject of much debate in recent years, with scholars opposed to the Optimality Theory (OT) research program arguing that opacity proves OT must be false, while the solutions proposed within OT, such as sympathy theory and stratal OT , have proved to be unsatisfying to many OT proponents, who have found these proposals to be inconsistent with the parallelist approach to phonological processes otherwise characteristic of OT. In this paper I reexamine one of the best known cases of opacity, that found in three processes of Tiberian Hebrew (TH), and argue that these processes only appear to be opaque, because previous analyses have treated them as pure phonology, rather than as an interaction between phonology and morphology. Once it is recognized that certain words of TH are lexically marked to end with a syllabic trochee, and that the goal of paradigm uniformity exerts grammatical pressure on phonology, the three processes no longer present a problem to parallelist OT. The results suggest the possibility that all crosslinguistic instances of apparent opacity can be explained in terms of the phonology-morphology interface and that purely phonological opacity does not exist. If this claim is true, then parallelist OT can be defended against its detractors without the need for additional mechanisms like sympathy theory and stratal OT.