Linguistik-Klassifikation
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Part of a Book (63)
- Article (62)
- Conference Proceeding (38)
- Working Paper (17)
- Preprint (3)
- Report (2)
- Part of Periodical (1)
Language
- English (186) (remove)
Has Fulltext
- yes (186)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (186)
Keywords
- Morphologie (25)
- Verb (21)
- Spracherwerb (17)
- Nominalisierung (13)
- Morphologie <Linguistik> (12)
- Morphosyntax (11)
- Aspekt (10)
- Deutsch (9)
- Syntax (9)
- Englisch (8)
- Russisch (8)
- Semantik (8)
- Flexion (7)
- Kindersprache (7)
- Aspekt <Linguistik> (6)
- Deklination (6)
- Phonologie (6)
- Thema-Rhema-Gliederung (6)
- Affix (5)
- Griechisch (5)
- Japanisch (5)
- Kompositum (5)
- Nomen (5)
- Sprachtypologie (5)
- Syntaktische Kongruenz (5)
- Verbalnomen (5)
- Wortbildung (5)
- Ableitung <Linguistik> (4)
- Bantusprachen (4)
- Intonation <Linguistik> (4)
- Konjugation (4)
- Kontrastive Linguistik (4)
- Morphem (4)
- Optimalitätstheorie (4)
- Sinotibetische Sprachen (4)
- Tempus (4)
- Französisch (3)
- Genitiv (3)
- Konversion <Linguistik> (3)
- Linguistik (3)
- Lokativ (3)
- Mittelenglisch (3)
- Morphonologie (3)
- Neugriechisch (3)
- Perfekt (3)
- Possessivität (3)
- Pronomen (3)
- Prosodie (3)
- Suffix (3)
- Tagalog (3)
- Tibetobirmanische Sprachen (3)
- Valenz <Linguistik> (3)
- Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft (3)
- Wortstellung (3)
- Allomorph (2)
- Argumentstruktur (2)
- Austronesische Sprachen (2)
- Baskisch (2)
- Denominativ (2)
- Deverbativ (2)
- Fremdsprachenlernen (2)
- Hypotaxe (2)
- Informationsstruktur (2)
- Interrogativsatz (2)
- Kanuri-Sprache (2)
- Kasus (2)
- Klitisierung (2)
- Konjunktiv (2)
- Kontamination <Wortbildung> (2)
- Kroatisch (2)
- Niederländisch (2)
- Niger-Kongo-Sprachen (2)
- Nominalkompositum (2)
- Parataxe (2)
- Partikelverb (2)
- Partizip (2)
- Phrasenkompositum (2)
- Polnisch (2)
- Possessivkonstruktion (2)
- Proto-Tibetobirmanisch (2)
- Prädikation (2)
- Romanische Sprachen (2)
- Rumänisch (2)
- Satz (2)
- Spanisch (2)
- Sprachstatistik (2)
- Swahili (2)
- Tibetobirmanische Sprachen ; Sinotibetische Sprachen (2)
- Tongaisch (2)
- Verben (2)
- Vergangenheitstempus (2)
- Verwandtschaftsbezeichnung (2)
- Zustandsverb (2)
- (Morpho)syntactic focus strategy (1)
- Affigierung (1)
- Akan-Sprache (1)
- Altenglisch (1)
- Amalgamierung <Linguistik> (1)
- Amerikanisches Englisch (1)
- Analogie (1)
- Anapher <Syntax> (1)
- Antikausativ (1)
- Antonym (1)
- Arabisch (1)
- Argument <Linguistik> (1)
- Aufsatzsammlung (1)
- Australische Sprachen (1)
- Bahasa Indonesia (1)
- Bantu (1)
- Baushi (1)
- Belharisch (1)
- Beschränkung <Linguistik> (1)
- Binarismus (1)
- Broad focus (1)
- Cahuilla-Sprache (1)
- Chinesisch (1)
- Choctaw-Sprache (1)
- Clitic-Doubling (1)
- Consecutio temporum (1)
- Deadjektiv (1)
- Deponens (1)
- Distribution <Linguistik> (1)
- Drung (1)
- Enklise (1)
- Epenthese (1)
- Ergativ (1)
- Ergänzungsfragesatz (1)
- Estnisch (1)
- Evidentialität (1)
- Finite Verbform (1)
- Finnisch (1)
- Focus ambiguity (1)
- Focus marker (1)
- Formale Semantik (1)
- Frühneuenglisch (1)
- Frühneuhochdeutsch (1)
- Generative Transformationsgrammatik (1)
- Genus verbi (1)
- Georgisch (1)
- Gerundium (1)
- Geschehensverb (1)
- Gradpartikel (1)
- Grammatiktheorie (1)
- Grammatische Kategorie (1)
- Gur (1)
- Hausa-Sprache (1)
- Hebräisch (1)
- Herero-Sprache (1)
- Hilfsverb (1)
- Hindi (1)
- Inchoativ (1)
- Indirekte Rede (1)
- Indogermanische Sprachen (1)
- Indogermanistik (1)
- Infix (1)
- Information-based Morphology (1)
- Inkorporation <Linguistik> (1)
- Inuktitut (1)
- Inversion <Grammatik> (1)
- Irisch (1)
- Juxtaposition (1)
- Kasem (1)
- Katalanisch (1)
- Kausativ (1)
- Keltische Sprachen (1)
- Kiranti (1)
- Koartikulation (1)
- Komposition <Wortbildung> (1)
- Konditionalsatz (1)
- Kongruenz <Linguistik> (1)
- Konjunktion (1)
- Konstruktion <Linguistik> (1)
- Konstruktionsgrammatik (1)
- Kontrastive Morphologie (1)
- Kontrolle <Linguistik> (1)
- Koordination <Linguistik> (1)
- Kutenai (1)
- Kwa-Sprachen (1)
- KwaNdebele (1)
- Körperteil (1)
- Lettisch (1)
- Lexikalisierung (1)
- Litauisch (1)
- Logische Partikel (1)
- Makua-Sprache (1)
- Malagassi-Sprache (1)
- Malawi (1)
- Manx (1)
- Marker <Linguistik> (1)
- Markiertheit (1)
- Maya-Sprache (1)
- Mazateco (1)
- Mehrworteinheit (1)
- Modalverb (1)
- Modus (1)
- Mohawk (1)
- Morphotaktik (1)
- Move-alpha (1)
- Murinbata (1)
- Nama-Sprache (1)
- Natürliche Morphologie (1)
- Negation (1)
- Newari (1)
- Nilosaharanische Sprachen (1)
- Nomen actionis (1)
- Nominalklasse (1)
- Nullmorphem (1)
- Numerus (1)
- Nungisch (1)
- Oberflächenstruktur <Linguistik> (1)
- Oneida-Sprache (1)
- Palatalisierung (1)
- Palaung (1)
- Partikel (1)
- Passamaquoddy-Sprache (1)
- Persisch (1)
- Plural (1)
- Plusquamperfekt (1)
- Portugiesisch (1)
- Pro-Form (1)
- Produktivität <Linguistik> (1)
- Präfix (1)
- Raising (1)
- Reduplikation (1)
- Reihenfolge (1)
- Relativsatz (1)
- Resultativ (1)
- Selkupisch (1)
- Semantische Kongruenz (1)
- Semitische Sprachen (1)
- Slawische Sprachen (1)
- Slowenisch (1)
- Soranī (1)
- Spaltsatz (1)
- Stativ <Grammatik> (1)
- Substantiv (1)
- Suffixbildung (1)
- Suppire (1)
- Suppire-Sprache (1)
- Suppletivismus (1)
- Tharaka (1)
- Thematische Relation (1)
- Tiefenstruktur (1)
- Tone language (1)
- Tonologie (1)
- Topikalisierung (1)
- Tschechisch (1)
- Tswana (1)
- Tswana-Sprache (1)
- Tätigkeitsverb (1)
- Türkisch (1)
- Unregelmäßiges Verb (1)
- Verbalisierung (1)
- Verbalphrase (1)
- Wortart (1)
- Wortstamm (1)
- Wortverbindung (1)
- Yoruba-Sprache (1)
- Zusammenbildung (1)
- ge <Morphem> (1)
- Österreichisches Deutsch (1)
Institute
This study proposes a cross-linguistic, corpus-based, and constructionist analysis of denominal verbs (DNVs) in English, Dutch and German. DNV constructions include various morphological construction types, such as conversion (e.g. English bottle > to bottle), prefixation (e.g. Dutch arm 'arm' > omarmen 'to embrace') and suffixation (e.g. German Katapult 'catapult' > katapultieren 'to catapult'). We investigate the correlation between the distribution of DNV constructions and the typological properties of the languages, focusing on boundary permeability, inflectional complexity, syntactic configurationality and word-class assignment. The study shows that, although the three languages have the same repertoire of DNV constructions at their disposal, a Germanic cline can be detected in their preferences for non-overt vs overt marking of the word-class change. As such, the study highlights the impact of typological factors on the shape of language-specific constructional networks.
The paper explores factors that influence the distribution of constituent words of compounds over the head and modifier position. The empirical basis for the study is a large database of German compounds, annotated with respect to the morphological structure of the compound and the semantic category of the constituents. The study shows that the polysemy of the constituent word, its constituent family size, and its semantic category account for tendencies of the constituent word to occur in either modifier or head position. Furthermore, the paper explores the degree to which the semantic category combination of head and modifier word, e.g., x=substance and y=artifact, indicates the semantic relation between the constituents, e.g., y_consists_of_x.
Nominalization in French can be done by means of conversion, which is characterized by the identity between the base and the derived lexeme. Since both noun→verb and verb→noun conversions exist, this property raises directionality issues, and sometimes leads to contradictory analyses of the same examples. The paper presents two approaches of conversion: derivational and non-derivational ones. Then it discusses various criteria used in derivational approaches to determine the direction of conversion: diachronic ones, such as dates of first attestation or etymology; and synchronic ones, such as semantic relations, noun gender or verb inflection. All criteria are evaluated on a corpus of 3,241 French noun~verb pairs. It is shown that none of them enables to identify the direction of conversion in French. Finally, the consequences for the theory of morphology are discussed.
This article examines French Verb-Noun compounds with Means value (couvre-pied 'blanket', lit. cover-feet), derived from stative bases. It shows that they are generally ambiguous between Means and Instrument reading. The regularity of this double value discards an analysis relying on verbal homonymy, in favor of Rothmayr's (2009) hypothesis of bi-eventive verbs. We assume that the presence of an agentive as well as a stative component in the verbal bases accounts for the double Means/Instrument value of the VNs studied here. We also examine "pure" Instrument VNs, available with similar verbal bases. We show that the distribution of the Instrument vs. Means/Instrument values relies on the state of the referent of the noun involved in the compound after the event described by the verbal base occurred. A permanent state entails a "pure" Instrument reading, whereas Means/Instrument reading obtains if the state of N is reversible (Fábregas & Marín 2012).
Simple Event nominals with Argument Structure? – Evidence from Irish deverbal nominalizations
(2020)
Deverbal nominals in Irish support Grimshaw's (1990) tripartite division into complex event (CE-), simple event (SE-) and result nominals (R-nominals). Irish nominals are ambiguous only between the SE- and R-status. There are no CE-nominals containing the AspP layer in their structure. SE-nominals (also found in Light Verb Constructions) are number-neutral and incapable of pluralizing and are represented as [nP[vP[Root]]]. R-nominals are devoid of the vP layer and behave like ordinary nouns. The Irish data point to v as the layer introducing event implications and the vP or PPs as the functional heads introducing the internal argument (Alexiadou and Schäfer 2011). Event denoting nominals in Irish can license the internal argument but aspectual modification and external argument licensing are not possible (cf. synthetic compounds in Greek (Alexiadou 2017)), which means that, counter to Borer (2013), the licensing of Argument Structure need not follow from the presence of the AspP layer.
We investigate deverbal zero-derived nominals in English (e.g., to walk > a walk) from the perspective of the lexical semantics of their base verbs and the interpretations they may receive (e.g., event, result state, product, agent). By acknowledging that, in the absence of an overt affix, the meaning of zero-nominals is highly dependent on that of the base, the ultimate goal of this study is to identify possible meaning regularities that these nominals may display in relation to the different semantic verb classes. We report on a newly created database of 1,000 zero-derived nominals, which have been collected for various semantic verb classes. We test previous generalizations made in the literature in comparison with suffix-based nominals and in relation to the ontological type of the base verb. While these generalizations may intuitively hold, we find intriguing challenges that bring zero-derived nominals closer to suffix-based nominals than previously claimed.
Multiple exponence in morphology has recently attracted a good deal of attention (see, among others, Harris 2017; Caballero & Inkelas 2018). In this paper, I examine Modern Greek verbs which take an extra verbalizer (implicit multiple exponence). The simple base (bare form) and the base with the verbalizer co-exist in the lexicon without any semantic or aspectual opposition and can be used in the same syntactic context. Thus, they raise important questions for morphological theory. I argue that the explanation of this pleonastic addition may be hidden in the relation between inflection and derivation and the polyfunctional character of verbalizers in synthetic languages. Since the two forms co-exist and one member of each pair features an idiomatic association of meaning and complex form, morphological theory is challenged. I argue that these formations find a natural account within the framework of Construction Morphology (Booij 2010; Jackendoff & Audring 2019).
This study explores four German nominalization patterns (-ung; -erei; Ge- -X-e; nominalized infinitives) using corpus and web data. We conclude that they can be considered a word formation paradigm, as some functions depend on paradigmatic oppositions. Our case study supports gradual differences between inflectional and word formation paradigmaticity.
Phrasal compounding is a phenomenon illustrated by slept all day look. Prototypical examples are determinative compounds with a nominal head and a phrasal non-head. They raise interesting questions about the interaction of syntax and morphology and have been discussed in this context by Botha (1981) for Afrikaans and Lieber (1992) for English. Also in German and Turkish, they have received ample attention. This volume has as its main purpose to extend the range of languages for which phrasal compounds are discussed. It consists of a brief introduction (chapter 1), six chapters devoted to individual languages, and a final chapter with a more general outlook. The use of further in the title is perhaps surprising, in particular because the volume under review is the first of a new series. It is motivated by the fact that the papers are from “the second workshop on phrasal compounding”, held in Mannheim in 2015. In this review, I will first present and discuss each chapter, then consider some general points about the volume.
Organized by Sabine Schulte im Walde (University of Stuttgart) and Eva Smolka (University of Konstanz) as part of the 39th Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) held at the Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany, the workshop aimed “to shed light on the interaction of constituent properties and compound transparency across languages and disciplines integrating linguistic, psycholinguistic, corpus-based and computational studies”. The workshop brought together researchers from linguistics, psycholinguistics, and natural language processing and comprised 11 contributed talks, framed by two invited talks by Gary Libben and Marco Marelli. Most of the slides are available from the workshop’s homepage at “http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/events/dgfs-mwe-17/program.html”.
Lexical categories and processes of category change. Perspectives for a constructionist approach
(2017)
This paper revisits the notions of lexical category and category change from a constructionist perspective. I distinguish between four processes of category change (affixal derivation, conversion, transposition and reanalysis) and demonstrate how these category-changing processes can be analyzed in the framework of Construction Grammar. More particularly, it will be claimed that lexical categories can be understood as abstract instances of constructions (i.e., form-function pairings) and category change will be assumed to be closely connected to the process of constructionalization, i.e., the creation of new form-meaning pairings. Furthermore, it will be shown that the constructionist approach offers the advantage of accounting for the variety of input categories (ranging from morphemes to multi-word units) as well as for some problematic characteristics related to certain types of category change, such as context-sensitivity, counterdirectionality and gradualness of the changes.
French suffixations in -age, -ion and -ment are considered roughly equivalent, yet some differences have been pointed out regarding the semantics of the resulting nominalizations. In this study, we confirm the existence of a semantic distinction between them on the basis of a large scale distributional analysis. We show that the distinction is partially determined by the degree of technicality of the denoted action: -age nominals tend to be more technical than -ion ones. We examine this hypothesis through the statistical modeling of technicality. To this end, we propose a linguistic definition of technicality, which we implement using empirical, quantitative criteria estimated in corpora and lexical resources. We show to what extent the differences with respect to these criteria adequately approximate technicality. Our study indicates that this definition of technicality, while amendable, provides new perspectives for the characterization of action nouns.
The paper investigates the different productivity domains (Rainer 2005) of two Italian event denoting suffixes, -mento and -zione. These suffixes share the same eventive semantics, they are both productive and thus can be seen as rivals in the formation of event nominalizations. The aim is to obtain a better understanding of the constraints that play a role in the selection of one affix over the other. By means of a logistic regression model the contribution of different features of the base verb is investigated. The analysis is conducted on a dataset of 678 nominalizations extracted from a section of Midia, a diachronic balanced corpus explicitly built for morphological research (Gaeta 2017). Results show that the frequency, the inflectional class and the number of characters of the base verb as well as the presence of the prefix a- significantly contribute to the definition of the different domains, only partially confirming previous findings.
This paper presents an overview on deverbal nominalizations from Ktunaxa, a language isolate spoken in eastern British Columbia, Canada. Deverbal nominalizations are formed uniformly with a left-peripheral nominalizing particle k (Morgan 1991). However, they do not form a single homogenous class with respect to various syntactic properties. These properties are illustrated with novel data, showing that deverbal nominalizations fall into at least two classes, which are analyzed here as nominalization taking place at either vP or VP, where vP-nominalizations include the external argument and VP-nominalizations do not. Evidence for this division comes from how possession is expressed, the interpretation of the passive (and passive-like constructions), and the licensing of verbal modifiers. As both classes of deverbal nominalizations are constructed uniformly with the nominalizing particle, these properties are derived syntactically from the size of the verbal constituent being nominalized.
In the typology of West African languages, tone has been noted to play crucial grammatical and lexical roles, but its function in word formation has been less systematically explored and remains to be fully understood. Against this backdrop, the present study seeks to examine the form and function of tonal morphology in the formation of action nominals in four Kwa languages spoken in Ghana, namely Akan, Gã, Lεtε, and Esahie, a relatively unexplored language of the Central Tano subgroup. Relying on data from both secondary and primary sources, we argue that tone raising is an important component of Kwa action nominalization, as it is found across different languages and derivational strategies. Specifically, while across the Kwa languages considered, tone raising tends to be an epiphenomenon of phonological conditioning, sometimes tone is the sole component of the nominalization operation or, as in Esahie, it concurs with the affix to the derivation, hence playing a morphological function.
In Japanese, direct combination of verbs or adjectives by coordination (with to 'and') or juxtaposition (with its empty counterpart) can form a NP, if the conjuncts are antonymous to each other; the coordinator to 'and' can combine only NPs elsewhere. We claim that this is because there is a phonetically empty nominalizer that can nominalize each conjunct, and that the new nominal construction has been gradually developing in the history of Japanese. An acceptability-rating experiment targeting 400 participants shows that the younger speakers were likely to judge this construction more acceptable than the older ones, that this tendency is slightly weaker in the Nominative condition than in the Genitive condition, and that the coordination condition was significantly worse than the juxtaposition condition.
Nominalization has been at the forefront of linguistic research since the early days of generative grammar (Lees 1960, Vendler 1968, Lakoff 1970). The theoretical debate as to how a theory of grammar should be envisaged in order to capture the morphosyntactic and semantic complexity of nominalization, initiated by Chomsky's (1970) Remarks on nominalization, is just as lively today, after five decades during which both the empirical scope and the methodology of linguistic research have seen enormous progress. We are delighted to be able to mark this occasion through our collection, next to the anniversary volume Nominalization: 50 Years on from Chomsky's Remarks, edited by Artemis Alexiadou and Hagit Borer, soon to appear with Oxford University Press.
DeriMo is an international meeting dealing with derivational morphology from the perspective of data analysis. Its second edition DeriMo 2019 was held at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University in Prague. The local organizers are researchers of the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (ÚFAL = Ústav Formální a Aplikované Linguistiky) at the Computer Science School of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics. Chairs of the program committee were Magda Ševčíková (ÚFAL), Zdeněk Žabokrtský (ÚFAL), Eleonora Litta Modignani Picozzi (CIRCSE, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan), and Marco Passarotti (CIRCSE, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan).
The relation between word-formation and syntax and whether they form distinct domains of grammar or not has been discussed controversially in different theoretical frameworks. The answer to this question is closely connected to the languages under discussion, among other things, because languages seem to differ considerably in this regard. The discussion in this paper focuses on nominal compounds and phrases. On the basis of a great variety of data from a total of 14 European languages, it is argued that the relation between compounds and phrases, and, more generally, between word formation and syntax, should be characterized not in terms of a categorical but instead in terms of a gradient distinction.
The International Morphology Meeting is a biennial event held alternately in Vienna and Budapest. The eighteenth edition took place in Budapest in May 2018 and it was organised by the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with the Department of Theoretical Linguistics and the Department of English Linguistics of Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE). The meeting has invariably dealt with all aspects of morphology, with no preference for any particular framework or approach, albeit offering a leitmotif to orient authors who wish to give a presentation in the main session. This edition’s main theme was "Paradigms in inflection and word formation synchronically and diachronically", which provided potential presenters with the opportunity to submit abstracts in a wide range of topics. In addition to the main session, the conference hosted three workshops: (1) Models and methods in morphology; (2) The learnability of complex constructions from a cross-linguistic perspective; (3) Morphological aspects of Uralic and Turkic languages.
This paper approaches productivity by considering three case studies: compounds, blends and phrasal verbs. The aim of the paper is to encourage a discussion about the factors involved in the notion of productivity, and to show why so many of the established measures are not completely satisfactory or are interpreted in a way that is not.
Department of British and American Studies in cooperation with SKASE (The Slovak Association for the Study of English) organized the Word-Formation Theories III & Typology and Universals in Word-Formation IV Conference. The Conference took place at P.J. Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia, from 27 June to 30 June 2018. The event was organized by Slávka Tomaščíková, Lívia Körtvélyessy and Pavol Štekauer (P.J. Šafárik University in Košice, Slovakia) and with the support of the APVV project No: APVV-16–0035 Research into extralinguistic factors of word-formation and word-interpretation. The program and the book of abstracts are available at the conference homepage http://kaa.ff.upjs.sk/en/alumni-club/33/word-formation-theories-iii-typology-and-universals-in-word-formation-iv.
Morphology Days is a (nearly) biennial international meeting which deals with morphology within different frameworks and in various perspectives Previous editions of this conference have taken place in Leuven (2015), Leeuwarden (2013), Leiden (2012), Nijmegen (2011), Luik (2009) and Amsterdam (2007) While the first editions of the conference were mainly addressed to researchers working on morphology in the Netherlands and in Belgium, the last editions – including this one – included international contributions The programme and the book of abstract is available at the conference’s homepage at https://morphologydays2017.wordpress.com/program/. Organized by Philippe Hiligsmann, Kristel Van Goethem, Nikos Koutsoukos and Isa Hendrikx from the Université Catholique de Louvain, and Laurent Raiser from the Université de Liège, this edition of Morphology Days hosted more than 30 researchers, among which 3 plenary speakers, coming not only from Belgium but also from France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Although both inflection and derivation (affixation) where dealt with in the talks, this conference report will only address the studies on derivation.
This paper studies the morphological productivity of German N+N compounding patterns from a diachronic perspective. It argues that the productivity of compounds increases due to syntactic influence from genitive constructions ("improper compounds") in Early New High German. Both quantitative and qualitative productivity measures are adapted from derivational morphology and tested on compound data from the Mainz Corpus of (Early) New High German (1500–1710).
We analyze English and Greek nominal synthetic compounds like truck driver and truck driving from a syntactic perspective couched within Distributed Morphology. We derive the main differences between the two languages from the different morphosyntactic status of the non-head nouns, which are roots in Greek but categorized words in English.
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.
In terms of the direction of development, I referred to Johanna Nichols' work on head-marking vs. dependant marking. Nichols did not make reference to any languages in Tibeto-Burman, but all of the Tibeto-Burman languages that do not have verb agreement systems are solidly dependent-marking (i.e., they have marking on the nouns for case or pragmatic function); those languages with verb agreement systems, a type of head marking, also have many dependent-marking features (of the same types as the non-pronominalized languages). The question, then, is which is older, the dependent-marking type or the headmarking (actually mixed) type?
This paper is part of an ongoing investigation into the nature of grammatical relations in the Sino-Tibetan language family. The ultimate goal of this investigation is to develop a hypothesis on the typological nature of word order and grammatical relations in the mother language which gave rise to all of the many languages within the Sino Tibetan language family. As the verb agreement (pronominalization) systems of Tibeto-Burman have been said to be a type of ergative marking, and to have been a part of Proto-Tibeto-Burman grammatical relations, the questions of the dating and nature of the agreement systems in Tibeto-Burman are relevant to the discussion of the nature of grammatical relations in Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
Since the mid-1970's, the question of whether or not a verb agreement system1 (VAS) should be reconstructed for Proto-Tibeto-Bunnan (PTB) has been a controversial topic, but because of the large amount of work published arguing in favor of reconstructing a VAS for PTB, especially by James J. Bauman (1974, 1975a, 1975b, 1979) and Scott DeLancey (1980, 1983, 1988, 1989, to appear), many people have begun to accept the existence of a VAS in PTB as received knowledge. In a recent paper on verb agreement systems in Tibeto-Burman, Scott DeLancey states that 'There can no longer be any serious doubt that a system of verb agreement must be attributed to Proto-Tibeto-Bunnan (PTB)' (DeLancey 1988: 1). Though the number of papers supporting this position is quite large, I would like to raise several serious doubts about the theoretical and methodological basis for reconstructing a VAS for PTB' and at the same time argue for the use of functionally and typologically based theories of grammar, as exemplified by the head-marking/dependent-marking distinction developed in Nichols 1986, in diachronic syntax and syntactic reconstruction.
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.
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.
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.