Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Part of a Book (6)
- Article (4)
- Working Paper (4)
- Book (1)
Language
- English (12)
- German (1)
- French (1)
- Multiple languages (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (15)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (15)
Keywords
- Morphosyntax (15) (remove)
Institute
- Extern (1)
The morpho-syntax of relative clauses in Sotho-Tswana is relatively well-described in the literature. Prosodic characteristics, such as tone, have received far less attention in the existing descriptions. After reviewing the basic morpho-syntactic and semantic features of relative clauses in Tswana, the current paper sets out to present and discuss prosodic aspects. These comprise tone specifications of relative clause markers such as the demonstrative pronoun that acts as the relative pronoun, relative agreement concords and the relative suffix. Further prosodic aspects dealt with in the current article are tone alternations at the juncture of relative pronoun and head noun, and finally the tone patterns of the finite verbs in the relative clause. The article aims at providing the descriptive basis from which to arrive at generalizations concerning the prosodic phrasing of relative clauses in Tswana.
Dutch nominalised infinitives have been notoriously difficult to analyse, partly because they seem to show mixed verbal and nominal properties interspersed across the structure. In this paper, it is argued that at least two types of such infinitives should be distinguished, one which contains a high level of verbal functional structure, and one that differs at least in not projecting TP. On the basis of this distinction it is possible to show that Dutch nominalised infinitives have much more predictable properties than could previously be identified. They show evidence of conforming to a model of analysing mixed categories in terms of category switch within the constituent. In order to account for the seemingly interspersed nature of nominal and verbal properties in Dutch nominalised infinitives I propose that Dutch of-phrases (van-phrases) may merge inside the VP, provided they have access to nominal functional structure for feature checking. I will show that if D° is filled by a special type of non-deictic demonstratives van-phrases may even occur in SpecDP.
This paper sketches the morphosyntactic and prosodic properties of questions in Fipa, discussing three varieties: Milanzi, Nkansi and Kwa. The general word order and morphological patterns relevant to question structures are outlined and different types of wh-question constructions are described and tentatively linked to the prosodic features of Fipa questions.
This article examines changes to street names in the city of Oppeln before the transformation to Polish names in 1945. The research is based on a corpus comprising a complete official register of streets and squares in Oppeln/Opole from the beginnings of the town's history to 2010. The author focuses on the changes in the use of language over the centuries, the form of the hodonyms (on the morphosyntactic level), and the motives for the changes in individual street names.
[V]oice in Malagasy is less like voice in English and more like wh-agreement, of the sort which Chung (1998) documents for Chamorro. In A' -extraction contexts in Chamorro, regular subject agreement […] is replaced by special morphology indicating whether the extracted element is a subject, object, or oblique […]. In Pearson (to appear) I suggested that Malagasy voice marking is a 'generalized' version of this type of marking: While in Chamorro wh-agreement is confined to questions, relative clauses, and the like, in Malagasy it appears in all clause types due to a requirement that the specifier of WhP be filled in every clause. [...]
In this paper I focus on the voice affixes themselves and propose an account of their distribution. Specifically, I argue that they are realizations of light verbs and Case-checking heads, which combine with the root through head-to-head movement. The distribution of the affixes is determined by the positions from which, and through which, the null operator […] moves on its way to the specifier of WhP. For example, the actor-topic prefix m- is treated as a nominative Casechecking head, which gets spelled out just in case the operator raises through its specifier. (My analysis is thus in the spirit of Guilfoyle, Hung, & Travis (1992), who also associate voice morphemes with Case licensing.)
The goal of this paper is to investigate cases of apparent noun-incorporation in Malagasy, a western Austronesian language spoken in Madagascar. Looking at examples [...], one may ask whether or not Malagasy has nounincorporation. [...] The organization of this paper is as follows: I begin with a general discussion of the distribution of nominals in Malagasy - with and without determiners. In section 3 I turn to […] two constructions […] and compare and contrast them. Section 4 details the analyses of the two constructions and I conclude the paper in section 5.
Cet article propose une réflexion sur la manière dont la langue bàsàa (Bantu A 43 parlée au Cameroun) exprime la relativisation. En l’absence d’une classe grammaticale de pronoms relatifs la langue utilise la classe des démonstratifs. La stratégie démonstrative mise en place peut selon les cas, associer la classe des locatifs pour déterminer les degrés de définitude. La langue distingue également les relatives restrictives des relatives non-restrictives qui sont soit descriptives, soit emphatiques. Du point de vue prosodique, la fin de la relative en bàsàa coïncide avec une finale de Groupe Intonatif.
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.
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.