Linguistik-Klassifikation
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Part of a Book (101)
- Article (38)
- Conference Proceeding (23)
- Working Paper (23)
- Report (7)
- Preprint (6)
- Book (3)
- Review (2)
- Doctoral Thesis (1)
Language
- English (155)
- German (40)
- Croatian (5)
- Portuguese (3)
- Turkish (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (204)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (204)
Keywords
- Informationsstruktur (37)
- Syntax (37)
- Deutsch (34)
- Generative Transformationsgrammatik (31)
- Grammatik (17)
- Semantik (17)
- Englisch (11)
- Grammatiktheorie (11)
- Russisch (11)
- Linguistik (10)
Institute
The complexity of human languages has always inspired research for some human faculty that makes language learning possible. The system that generates the complexity of human languages, ideally, is simple and effective. Recent developments of the generative grammatical theory explore deeper into the issue of simplicity or economy. The Minimalist Program developed in Chomsky (1991, 1993, 1995) tries to provide contents to such notions. What does it mean to be more economic or least effort? An important instantiation of such notions is the proposal that movement is the last resort assuming that movement is more costly than non-movement. Processes occur only because they are necessary. The definition of necessity generally is cast in morphological terms. Moreover, the notion of "economy" or "least effort" is deterministic of the appropriate derivations for sentences: a shorter derivation is better than a longer one. In this work, we show that the notion of "least effort," - do minimally if possible - is manifested not only in derivations but also in other aspects of the grammar. We take Chinese as an example and show that this language exhibits the properties manifesting some "least effort" guidelines in the area of movement and reconstruction, and in the projection of syntactic positions: when there is a choice, non-application of moyement/reconstruction and non-projection of a position are adopted. These phenomena essentially are attested in topic structures. The question arises as to why topic structures exhibit such minimal effort effects. We suggest that this is due to the fact that topic structures can be derived by movement or base-generation. When there are morpho-syntactic clues that reconstruction is necessary, the structure is a movement structure. Otherwise, the less costly non-movement structure is assumed. Moreover, because of the possibility of assuming a topic NP to be base-generated, bearing a predication (or aboutness) relation with the comment clause, the argument position which otherwise would be related to the topic (conveniently termed the trace position) is not projected when there is a choice of projecting or not projecting it.
Current analyses of specificity are unable to provide an explanatory account for why specific and nonspecific uses of indefinites are available. While Abusch (1994), Reinhart (1997), and Kratzer (1998) provide successful mechanisms for deriving specific readings, they do not provide a fundamental explanation for the availability of this mechanism. This is due to the fact that specific indefinites are treated as involving an interpretive component or procedure unique to themselves: storage (Abusch) or choice function (Reinhart and Kratzer), for example. It would be preferable if specific indefinites could be understood as deriving from the use of independently motivated meaning components and interpretive mechanisms.
Here I will pursue the idea, building on Portner & Yabushita (1998), that specificity has to do with the indefinite's interaction with a topical domain (note similarities with the proposals of Enç 1991, Cresti 1995, and Schwarzschild 2000). In this conception, specificity is a matter of degree: the narrower the topical domain, the more specific the indefinite. More precisely, sentences containing specific indefinites will be understood as involving ordinary existential quantification in combination with a topical domain function.
Starting from a consideration of the internal make-up of adverbial clauses this paper shows that the widespread assumption that fronted arguments in English and CLLD constituents in Romance occupy the same position leads to a number of problems. I will conclude that the position occupied by English topicalized arguments differs from that of the CLLD topics in Romance. In particular, English topics occupy a higher position in the left periphery. The final part of the paper compares three proposals for the lower topic position in Romance.
This paper is concerned with anticausative verbs (or verb-forms), or shortly, anticausatives. [...] [C]ausative/non-causative pairs with a marked non-causative are quite frequent in the languages of the world. However, so far they have not received sufficient attention in general and typological linguistics, a fact which is also manifested in the absence of a generally recognized term for this phenomenon […]. This paper therefore deals with the most important properties of anticausatives (particularly semantic conditions on them), their relationship to other areas of grammar as well as their historical development in different languages. The grammatical domain of transitivity, valence and voice, where the anticausative belongs, takes up a central position in grammar and consequently the present discussion should be of considerable interest to general comparative (or typological) linguists.
In the wake of Kayne's Antisymmetry Hypothesis and Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA), there has been much fruitful research attempting to adjust syntactic analyses to those permitted by Kayne's restrictive system. In doing so, analyses which at first seem counter-intuitive may tum out to provide solutions to old problems. Two cases in point are the analysis of Malagasy involving extensive Remnant Movement [henceforth RM1 described in Rackowski & Travis (2000), Pearson (2001), and elsewhere; on the one hand, and the analysis of Hungarian and Dutch verbal clusters in Koopman & Szabolcsi (2000) [henceforth R&T, Pearson, and K&Sz].
The original motivation (in part) for examining L&Sz and subsequently R&T was that it is the extensive use of iterated RM which increases the computational complexity of languages generatable in Stabler's "Strict Minimalist Grammar" formalism over that of context-free grammars. It has also been noted that allowing extraction from complex specifiers created by Merge (as opposed to Move) increases the level of complexity even further (lens Michaelis, p.e.). Both R&T and K&Sz make extensive use of RM; R&T allow extraction from complex specifiers, while K&Sz do not. Although the specifiers in both cases are created by Move, not Merge, we nevertheless feel that there is enough intrinsic linguistic interest in trying to limit extraction possibilities to pursue the comparison of these two systems with regard to this point.
U radu se opisuju primjeri češće uporabe akuzativa bez prijedloga u suvremenim hrvatskim medijima i razgovornom jeziku. Primjeri se takve uporabe razvrstavaju u nekoliko skupina: 1. sintagme s nepunoznačnim glagolom i besprijedložnim akuzativom, 2. glagol + *imenska riječ (A) + imenska riječ (A) < glagol + od + imenska riječ (G) + imenska riječ (A), 3. neprijelazni glagol → prijelazni glagol. Među sintagmama s akuzativom promjene se primjećuju i u sljedećoj, 4. skupini: glagol + unutrašnji objekt → glagol + hiponimni objekt (rubni izravni objekt?). Pri opisu se potvrđuje da se akuzativ kao puni, središnji padež, kojim se predmet obuhvaća u potpunosti, nameće rubnosti ostalih perifernih padeža, pr. instrumentala (kod glagola kontaktirati). Pokazuje se da su, usprkos normi koja uz glagole traženja ne preporuča uporabu dvaju akuzativa bez prijedloga, nego jednoga besprijedložnoga akuzativa (ili dijelnoga genitiva) te drugoga genitiva s prijedlogom od, uz glagol tražiti u jeziku suvremenih medija česte potvrde dvaju besprijedložnih akuzativa.