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Institute
Verb agreement and epistemic marking : a typological journey from the Himalayas to the Caucasus
(2008)
Studies of the epistemic categories expressed in Tibetan auxiliaries and copulas have mostly compared the phenomena with mirativity marking, and this is no doubt the correct comparandum in diachronic research. However, synchronic descriptions are also often tempted to compare the relevant categories with agreement systems or similar reference-related structures, at least for expository purposes when explaining how the system works (e. g. Denwood 1999, Tournadre 1996, Goldstein et al. 1991).
It is well-known that in many if not most Sino-Tibetan languages relative clause and attribute/genitive markers are identical with nominalization devices and that sentences bearing such markers can also function as independent utterances (cf. Matisoff 1972, Kölver 1977, DeLancey 1989, Genetti 1992, Ebert 1994, Bickel 1995, Noonan 1997, etc.). This morphological convergence of syntactic functions, which we may dub the ‘Standard Sino-Tibetan Nominalization’ (SSTN) pattern, is particularly prominent in some languages spoken in the eastern and southeastern part of the Kirant because these languages not only feature prenominal relative clauses, but also allow, albeit as a minor type, internally headed constructions.
This paper presents the first results of a comprehensive project on comparative Tibeto-Burman (TB) morpho-syntax. Data on morphological forms and typological patterns were collected from one hundred fifty-one languages and dialects in the TB family. For this paper the data were surveyed for nominal 'ergative' or agentive case marking (postpositions), in an attempt to determine if it would be possible to reconstruct an ergative case marker to Proto-Tibeto-Burman (PTB), and in so doing learn more about the nature of grammatical organization in PTB. Ablative, instrumental, genitive, locative, and other case forms were also surveyed for possible cognacy with ergative forms, as suggested in DeLancey 1984.
In attempting to understand the history of the morphology of a language or group of languages, we occasionally face a problem of isomorphy, where two or more semantic categories evince the same formal marking. We then must decide which use of that particular form of marking is the oldest, and also determine the possible source and path of development of the marking. In languages with written documents of great time depth this is often not a problem, but in unwritten languages it can be quite difficult. This paper discusses two tools that can be used for this purpose: the concepts of markedness and prototypes.
For this paper, 170 Tibeto-Burman languages were surveyed for nominal ease marking (adpositions), in an attempt to determine ifit would be possible to reeonstruet any ease markers to Proto· Tibeto-Burman, and in so doing leam more about the nature of the grammatieal organization of Proto-Tibeto-Burman. The data were also eross-cheeked for patterns of isomorphy/polysemy, to see ifwe can leam anything about the development ofthe forms we da find in the languages. The results of the survey indicate that although a11 Tibeto-Bunnan languages have developed some sort of relation marking, none of the markers ean be reconstrueted to the oldest stage of the family. Looking at the patterns of isomorphy or polysemy, we find there are regularities to the patterns we find, and on the basis of these regularities we can make assurne that the path of development most probably followed the markedness/prototypicality clines: the locative and ablative use would have arose first and then were extended to the more abstract cases.
A survey of 170 Tibeto-Burman languages showed 69 with a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person plural pronouns, 18 of which also show inclusive- exclusive in Idual. Only the Kiranti languages and some Chin languages have inclusive-exclusive in the person marking. Of the forms of the pronouns involved in the inclusive-exclusive opposition, usually the exclusive form is less marked and historically prior to the inclusive form, and we find the distinction cannot be reconstructed to Proto-Tibeto-Burman or to mid level groupings. Qnly the Kiranti group has marking of the distinction that can be reconstructed to the proto level, and this is also reflected in the person-marking system.
The Germanic perfect presents (Präteritopräsentien) form a past tense by adding the endings of the weak preterit to the stem of the past participle, e.g. Go. wissa ‘knew’. This is a recent formation (cf. Kortlandt 1989). We may therefore ask ourselves if we can reconstruct the earlier formation which was ousted by the weak preterit. We may also try to recover the motivation for the replacement.
In her discussion of the Japanese adversative passive, Anna Wierzbicka writes (1988: 260): “The problem is extremely interesting and important both for intrinsic reasons and because of its wider methodological implications. It can be formulated like this: if one form can be used in a number of different ways, are we entitled to postulate for it a number of different meanings or should we rather search for one semantic common denominator (regarded as the MEANING of the form in question) and attribute the variety of uses to the interaction between this meaning and the linguistic or extralinguistic context?” Though it “may seem obvious” that the second stand is “methodologically preferable” (261), she takes the first position and concludes that “the Japanese passive has to be recognized as multiply ambiguous” (286). In the following I intend to show that this view is both wrong and fruitful.
The Germanic weak preterit
(2007)
The main difficulty with the Germanic weak preterit is that one cannot endeavor an explanation of its origin without taking into account almost every aspect of the historical phonology and morphology of the Germanic languages. In the following I intend to show how a number of problems receive a natural explanation in a unified treatment on the basis of earlier studies. The theory presented here is not revolutionary, but aims at integrating earlier findings into a coherent whole. There is no reason to give a detailed account of the scholarly literature, which is easily accessible (cf. Tops 1974, Bammesberger 1986).
A correct interpretation of the genitive plural forms in Slavic and related languages requires a detailed chronological analysis of the material. At every stage of development we have to reckon with both phonetically regular and analogical forms. Analogy operates quite often along the same lines in different periods. Explaining an analogic change amounts to indicating a model, a motivation, and a stage of development for its effectuation. If one of these cannot be indicated, we must look for a phonetic explanation.
Unter “Kasussynkretismus” versteht man den Wegfall von morphologischen Unterscheidungen im Kasussystem einer Sprache. Hier will ich über den Synkretismus sprechen, der im Deutschen im Femininum stattgefunden hat. Im Gegensatz zum Maskulinum, aber ebenso wie im Neutrum, unterscheidet das Deutsche systematisch nicht zwischen der Nominativform und der Akkusativform.
Word formation in Distributed Morphology (see Arad 2005, Marantz 2001, Embick 2008): 1. Language has atomic, non-decomposable, elements = roots. 2. Roots combine with the functional vocabulary and build larger elements. 3. Roots are category neutral. They are then categorized by combining with category defining functional heads.
Das Paradigma des Relativ- und Interrogativpronomens wer ist in verschiedener Hinsicht defektiv. Es existieren keine Pluralformen und lediglich zwei Genera im Singular, nämlich die Formen von wer und von was. Hinsichtlich der Dativform von was besteht keine Einigkeit. In dem folgenden Paradigma sind daher alle in verschiedenen Grammatiken vertretenen Auffassungen angegeben.
Buli is an Oti-Volta tone language spoken in Northern Ghana. This paper outlines the basic features of its tonal system and explores whether and in which way pitch respectively phonemic tone is approached as a means to indicate the pragmatic category of focus. Pursued are cases with focus-related surface tone changes as well as cases where pitch could help to disambiguate between broad and narrow foci. It is argued that focus is not consistently encoded by pitch or tone. Parallel findings for the closely related languages Kopen o (phonetic symbol)nni and Dagbani suggest that the apparent lack of significant prosodic focus signals in Buli might pertain to a larger group of tonal languages of the Gur family.
The main tenet of the present paper is the thesis that nominalization – like other cases of derivational morphology – is an essentially lexical phenomenon with well defined syntactic (and semantic) conditions and consequences. More specifically, it will be argued that the relation between a verb and the noun derived from it is subject to both systematic and idiosyncratic conditions with respect to lexical as well as syntactic aspects.
In the following I will discuss grammatical structures of Inuktitut, an Eskimo language spoken in the Canadian Eastern Arctic. Inuktitut is a polysynthetic language exhibiting an exceedingly elaborate verbal inflectional system including polypersonal marking. Furthermore, Inuktitut features free word order and optionality of noun phrases crossreferenced with the predicate. But Inuktitut also exhibits a number of features which seem to contradict the possibility of its being a "pronominal argument language" -- or as I would prefer to express it, a morphological argument language.
Inuktitut : Affixliste
(2003)
"A team", definitely
(2004)
In meinem Vortrag möchte ich Ihnen einige Überlegungen zu Fragen der vergleichenden Flexionsmorphologie vortragen und dabei wiederum speziell zur Kasusmarkierung an Substantiven. Ich werde mich dabei besonders auf das Polnische beziehen – eine Sprache, deren Kasusbildungen teils Charakteristika des fusionierenden oder flektierenden Typus zeigen, teils aber eher dem agglutinierenden Typ nahe kommen. Diese Mischung stellt, wie ich zeigen möchte, eine besondere Herausforderung für die morphologische Kasusanalyse dar. Ich werde dies im ersten Abschnitt meines Beitrags erläutern. Im zweiten Abschnitt greife ich einige bekannte Beobachtungen zu Kasussynkretismen auf, die für eine Analyse des polnischen Systems nützlich sind. Im dritten Abschnitt gebe ich für einen Ausschnitt des polnischen Deklinationssystems eine detaillierte Analyse.
Das System der lateinischen Nominalflexion wird als Beispiel eines komplexen morphologischen Systems untersucht, das alle Symptome des ‚flektierenden Syndroms’ zeigt (homonyme, synonyme und kumulative Exponenten, Genuseinteilung, unterschiedlich strukturierte Deklinationskassen, defektive Paradigmen, usw.; Plank 1991a). Im Mittelpunkt steht die Frage, wie die Form-Funktions-Beziehung in einem derartigen System ‚funktioniert’. Morphembasierte Analysen bieten kaum Einsichten in die ‚Logik’ fusionierender Flexionssysteme: Die Vielfalt der Oberflächenformen kann zwar auf verschiedene Weise reduziert werden (zugrundeliegende Formen, Allomorphie, Morphonologie; Householder 1947). Homonymien, Synonymien und Kumulationen und damit die Tatsache, daß sich das System nicht den Erwartungen einer morphemischen Perspektive fügt, bleiben jedoch bestehen: Der Gedanke, morphologische Marker als ‚Saussuresche Zeichen’ aufzufassen, erweist sich hier als nicht fruchtbar (Anderson 1992). Aber auch neuere regelbasierte Ansätze halten – trotz der Zulassung ‚indirekterer’ Beziehungen – an einer vergleichbaren Form-Inhalts-Janusköpfigkeit morphologischer Markierungen grundsätzlich fest, wenn sie morphologische Markierungen als ‚Ausbuchstabierungen’ von Merkmalen oder Merkmalsbündeln behandeln. Traditionelle Darstellungen im Rahmen einer Wort-und-Paradigma-Morphologie liefern zwar oft wenig mehr als eine Auflistung von Formen, weisen jedoch den Weg zu einer nicht-zeichenhaften Auffassung morphologischer Markierung, die Saussure (1976: 122) am Beispiel der deutschen Pluralbildung formuliert: „ce n’est pas ‘Gäste’ qui exprime le pluriel, mais l’opposition ‚Gast : Gäste’”. Danach läge die Funktion morphologischer Markierungen in derartigen Fällen nicht darin, als ‚Exponenten’ von ‚Inhalten’ zu fungieren, sondern darin Formen unterschiedlicher Funktion nur zu unterscheiden: Eine funktionale Distinktion wird zum Ausdruck gebracht, indem sie mit einer formalen Differenzierung korreliert wird. In Anwendung dieses Gedankens auf die lateinische Nominalflexion sollen (i) die auszudrückenden funktionalen Distinktionen, (ii) die zur formalen Differenzierung genutzten Ausdrucksmittel und (iii) die Art der Korrelation untersucht werden.
Schwankungen zwischen starker und schwacher Flexion werden mit unterschiedlichen Graden von Determinativhaftigkeit verschiedener Pronominaladjektive korreliert, bezogen auf eine universelle Dimension der IDENTIFIKATION (nach Seiler), sowie mit unterschiedlichen Graden der Ausgeprägtheit determinativischer (starker) Flexion, bezogen auf eine Ordnung nach formaler Markanz verschiedener Wortformen. Es wird gezeigt, dass stärkere Determinativhaftigkeit der Lexeme schwache Flexion bei folgenden Adjektiven begünstigt. Bezüglich der Varianz bei verschiedenen paradigmatischen Formen wird die Vermutung gestützt, dass das Formengewicht der Endungen eine wesentliche Rolle spielt.
In morphological systems of the agglutinative type we sometimes encounter a nearly perfect one-to-one relation between form and function. Turkish inflectional morphology is, of course, the standard textbook example. Things seem to be quite different in systems of the flexive type. Declension in Contemporary Standard Russian (henceforth Russian, for short) may be cited as a typical example: We find, among other things, cumulative markers, “synonymous” endings (e.g., dative singular noun forms in -i, -e, or -u), and “homonymous” endings (e.g., -i, genitive, dative, and prepositional singular). True, some endings are more of an agglutinative nature, being bound to a specific case-number combination and applying across declensions, e.g., -am (dative plural, all nouns); and some cross the boundaries of word classes, e.g., -o, which serves as the nominative/accusative singular ending of neuter forms of pronouns (and adjectives) and as the nominative/accusative singular ending of (most) neuter nouns as well. Still, many observers have been struck by the impression that what we face here are rather uneconomic or even, so to speak, unnatural structures. But perhaps flexive systems are not as complicated as they seem. What seems to be uneconomic complexity may be, at least partially, an artifact of uneconomic descriptions.
This paper examines the development of periphrastic constructions involving auxiliary "have" and "be" with a past participle in the history of English, on the basis of parsed electronic corpora. It is argued that the two constructions represented distinct syntactic and semantic structures: while the one with have developed into a true perfect in the course of Middle English, the one with be remained a stative resultative throughout its history. In this way, it is explained why the be construction was rarely or never used in a number of contexts, including past counterfactuals, iteratives, duratives, certain kinds of infinitives and various other utterance types that cannot be characterized as perfects of result. When the construction with have became a true perfect, it was used in such contexts, regardless of the identity of the main verb, leading to the appearance of have with verbs like come which had previously only taken be. Crucially, however, have was not spreading at the expense of be, as the be perfect had never been used in such contexts, but rather at the expense of the old simple past. At least until the end of the Early Modern English period, the shift in the relative frequency of have and be perfects is to be explained in terms of the expansion of the former into new contexts, while the latter remained stable. A formal analysis is proposed, taking as its starting point a comparison with German which shows that the older English be perfect indeed behaves more like the German stative passive than its haben and sein perfects.
Verbs, nouns and affixation
(2008)
What explains the rich patterns of deverbal nominalization? Why do some nouns have argument structure, while others do not? We seek a solution in which properties of deverbal nouns are composed from properties of verbs, properties of nouns, and properties of the morphemes that relate them. The theory of each plus the theory of howthey combine, should give the explanation. In exploring this, we investigate properties of two theories of nominalization. In one, the verb-like properties of deverbal nouns result from verbal syntactic structure (a “structural model”). See, for example, van Hout & Roeper 1998, Fu, Roeper and Borer 1993, 2001, to appear, Alexiadou 2001, to appear). According to the structural hypothesis, some nouns contain VPs and/or verbal functional layers. In the other theory, the verbal properties of deverbal nouns result from the event structure and argument structure of the DPs that they head. By “event structure” we mean a representation of the elements and structure of a linguistic event, not a representation of the world. We refer to this view as the “event model”. According to the event model hypothesis, all derived nouns are represented with the same syntactic structure, the difference lying in argument structure – which in turn is critically related to event structure, in the way sketched in Grimshaw (1990), Siloni (1997) among others. In pursuing these lines of analysis, and at least to some extent disentangling their properties, we reach the conclusion that, with respect to a core set of phenomena, the two theories are remarkably similar – specifically, they achieve success with the same problems, and must resort to the same stipulations to address the remaining issues that we discuss (although the stipulations are couched in different forms).
In this paper we investigate Greek, an optional clitic doubling language not subject to Kaynes generalization (Jaeggli 1982), and we argue that in this language, doubled DPs are in A-positions. We propose that Greek clitics are formal features that move, permitting DPs in argument positions. This leads to a typology according to which there are two types of clitic/agreement languages -configurational and nonconfigurational ones-, depending upon whether clitics are instantiations of formal features or not.
Class features as probes
(2008)
In this article, we adress (i) the form and (ii) the function on inflection class features in minimalist grammar. The empirical evidence comes from noun inflection systems involving fusional markers in German, Greek, and Russian. As for (i), we argue (based on instances of transparadigmatic syncretism) that class features are not privative; rather, class information must be decomposed into more abstract, binary features. Concerning (ii), we propose that class features qualify as the very device that brings about fusional infection: They are uninterpretable in syntax and actas probes on stems, with matching inflection markers as goels, and thus trigger morphological Agree operations that merge stem and inflection marker before syntax is reached.
Structuring participles
(2008)
In this paper we discuss three types of adjectival participles in Greek, ending in -tos and –menos, and provide a further argument for the view that finer distinctions are necessary in the domain of participles (Kratzer 2001, Embick 2004). We further compare Greek stative participles to their German (and English) counterparts. We propose that a number of semantic as well as syntactic differences shown by these derive from differences in their respective morpho-syntactic composition.