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Institute
Questions on transitivity
(2008)
This handout (it isn’t a paper) presents phenomena and questions, rather than conclusions, related to the concept of transitivity. The idea is to return to these questions at the end of the Workshop to see if we can have a clearer consensus about the best general analysis of phenomena associated with transitivity. Section 2 presents alternative analyses of transitivity and questions about transitivity in three languages I have worked on. Section 3 discusses a few of the different conceptualisations of transitivity that might be relevant to our thinking about the questions related to these languages or that bring up further questions. Section 4 presents some general questions that might be asked of individual languages.
This paper is an inductive look at the constituents found in a randomly selected Tagalog text, Bob Ong’s Alamat ng Gubat (Makati City, MM: Visual Print Enterprises, 2004). The analysis is based on the full text, but we will only be able to go through the first few lines of the text here, which we will do one by one, and discuss the structures found in each line of the text in bullet format after the relevant line. At the end of the paper we will bring up some important questions about the structures found in Tagalog based on this text.
This paper is one argument for a theory of grammatical relations in Chinese in which there are no grammatical relations beyond semantic roles, and no lexical relation-changing rules. As the passive rule is one of the most common relation changing rules cross-linguistically, in this paper I will address the question of whether or not Mandarin Chinese has lexical passives, that is, passives defined as in Relational Grammar (see for example Perlmutter and Postal 1977) and the early Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) literature (e.g. Bresnan 1982), where a 2-arc (object) is promoted to a 1-arc (subject).
In attempting to reconstruct the morphosyntax of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, one of the most basic questions to be answered is what was the unmarked word order of the proto-language? Chinese, Bai, and Karen are verb-medial languages, while all of the Tibeto-Burman languages except for Bai and Karen have verb-final word order. lf these languages are all related, as we can assume from lexical correspondences, then either Chinese, Bai and Karen changed from verb-final to verb-medial word order, or the other Tibeto-Burman languages changed trom verb-medial to verb-final order. How we answer the question of which languages changed their word would then give us the answer to the question of word order in Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
Thirty-one years ago Tsu-lin Mei (1961) argued against the traditional doctrine that saw the subject-predicate distinction in grammar as parallel to the particular- universal distinction in logic, as he said it was a reflex of an Indo-European bias, and could not be valid, as ‘Chinese ... does not admit a distinction into subject and predicate’ (p. 153). This has not stopped linguists working on Chinese from attempting to define ‘subject’ (and ‘object’) in Chinese. Though a number of linguists have lamented the difficulties in trying to define these concepts for Chinese (see below), most work done on Chinese still assumes that Chinese must have the same grammatical features as Indo-European, such as having a subject and a direct object, though no attempt is made to justify that view. This paper challenges that view and argues that there has been no grammaticalization of syntactic functions in Chinese. The correct assignment of semantic roles to the constituents of a discourse is done by the listener on the basis of the discourse structure and pragmatics (information flow, inference, relevance, and real world knowledge) (cf. Li & Thompson 1978, 1979; LaPolla 1990).
Middle voice marking is very rarely recognized as such in the grammars written on Tibeto-Burman languages. It is often simply treated as a normal direct reflexive or as an intransitivizer. In order to draw the attention of scholars to the existence and function of middle voice marking in Tibeto-Burman languages, the present paper discusses the form and function of middle marking in several of these languages. We will first discuss key facts about middle marking in general, then discuss the individual Tibeto-Burman examples.
Ever since the publication of Greenberg 1963, word order typologists have attempted to formulate and refine implicational universals of word order so as to characterize the restricted distribution of certain word order patterns, and in some cases have also attempted to develop general principles to explain the existence of those universals.
Evidentiality in Qiang
(2003)
The Qiang language is spoken by about 70,000 (out of 200,000) Qiang people, plus 50,000 people classified as Tibetan by the Chinese government. Most Qiang speakers live in Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau in the mountainous northwest part of Sichuan Province, China. The Qiang language is a member of the Qiangic branch of the Tibeto-Burman family of the Sino-Tibetan stock. Within Tibeto-Burman, a number oflanguages show evidence of evidential systems, but these systems cannot be reconstructed to any great time depth. The data used in this chapter is from Ranghang Village, Chibusu District, Mao County in Aba Prefecture.
Adjectives in Qiang
(2004)
Qiang is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by 70,000-80,000 people in Northern Sichuan Province, China, classified as being in the Qiang or Tibetan nationality by the Chinese government. The language is verb final, agglutinative (prefixing and suffixing), and has both head-marking and dependent-marking morphology.
Based on a Relevance Theory-informed view of language development, this paper argues that grammatical relations are construction-specific conventionalizations (grammaticalizations) of implicatures which arise out of repeated patterns of reference to particular types of referents. Once conventionalized, these structures function to constrain the hearer's identification of referents in discourse. As they are construction-specific, and hence language-specific, there is no category "subject" across languages; different languages will either show this type of grammaticalization or not, and if they do, may show it or not in different constructions. Any cross-linguistic use of terms such as "subject" (and "S", as in "SOV") should then be avoided.
On describing word order
(2006)
One aspect that is always discussed in language descriptions, no matter how short they may be, is word order. Beginning with Greenberg 1963, it has been common to talk about word order using expressions such as "X is an SOV language", where "S" represents "subject", "0" represents "object", and "V" represents "verb". Statements such as this are based on an assumption of comparability, an assumption that all languages manifest the categories represented by "S", "0", and "V" (among others), and that word order in all languages can be described (and compared) using these categories.
Nominalization in Rawang
(2009)
This paper discusses the types of relative clause and noun complement structures found in the Rawang language, a Tibeto-Burman language of northern Myanmar, as well as their origin and uses, with data taken mainly from naturally occurring texts. Two types are preposed relative clauses, but in one the relative clause is nominalized, and in the other it is not. The non-nominalized form with a general head led to the development of nominalizing suffixes and one type of nominalized relative clause structure. As the nominalized form is a nominal itself, it can be postposed to the head in an appositional structure. There is also discussion of the Rawang structures in the context of Tibeto-Burman and the development of relative clause structures in the language family.
Many linguists in China and the West have talked about Chinese as a topic-comment language, that is, a language in which the structure of the clause takes the form of a topic, about which something is to be said, and a comment, which is what is said about the topic, rather than being a language with a subject-predicate structure like that of English. Y. R. Chao (1968), for example, said that all Chinese clauses have topic-comment structure and there are no exceptions.