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Alle germanischen Sprachen haben in den nachchristlichen Jahrhunderten eine phonologische Umlautphase durchlaufen, allerdings mit je unterschiedlichen Resultaten. Dieser Umgang mit den Umlautprodukten wurde bisher nie vergleichend in den Blick genommen; vielmehr bekommt man in jeder Einzelphilologie den Eindruck, als habe die Umlautentwicklung nur so und nicht anders verlaufen können. Erst die historisch-kontrastive Perspektive erweist, dass sich drei Pfade systematisieren lassen: Der Umlaut wird konserviert (Isländisch), er wird eliminiert (Englisch, Niederländisch) – Schwedisch nimmt hier eine Zwischenposition ein –, oder er wird funktionalisiert (grammatikalisiert) und damit morphologisch ausgedehnt (Deutsch, Luxemburgisch).
Im Folgenden werden diese drei Wege nicht nur beschrieben, sondern auch begründet. Der konsequente Sprachwandelvergleich ermöglicht dabei das Verständnis von Zusammenhängen und erlaubt es, aus den Einzelphilologien abgeleitete Annahmen zu revidieren.
In Dutch V-final clauses the verbs tend to form a cluster in which the main verb is separated from its syntactic arguments by one or more other verbs. In HPSG the link between the main verb and its arguments is canonically modeled in terms of argument inheritance, also known as argument composition or generalized raising. When applied to Dutch, this treatment yields a number of problems, making incorrect predictions about the interaction with the binding principles and the passive lexical rule. To repair them this paper proposes an alternative, in which subject raising and complement raising are modeled in terms of different devices. More specifically, while subject raising is modeled in terms of lexical constraints, as for English, complement raising is modeled in terms of a more general constraint on headed phrases. This new constraint not only accounts for complement raising out of verbal complements, it also deals with complement raising out of adjectival and adpositional complements, as well as with complement raising out of PP adjuncts and subject NPs. It is, hence, a rather powerful device. To prevent overgeneration we add a number of constraints. For Dutch, the relevant constraints block complement raising out of CPs, V-initial VPs and P-initial PPs. For English, the Empty COMPS Constraint is sufficient to block complement raising entirely.
Dutch has four pronouns "er" which show an intriguing pattern of syntactic haplology when a finite verb has more than one "er" dependent. We present a theory that captures this pattern by relying on two central aspects of HPSG: (i) the distinction between ARG-ST and COMPS and (ii) the distinction between canonical and non-canonical synsem objects. No deletion rules of the kind used in transformational analyses of "er" are necessary.
It is well known that English children between the age of 4 and 6 display a so-called Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) in that they allow pronouns to refer to a local c-commanding antecedent. Their guessing pattern with pronouns contrasts with their adult-like interpretation of reflexives. The DPBE has been explained as resulting from a lack of pragmatic knowledge or insufficient cognitive resources. However, such extra-grammatical accounts cannot explain why the DPBE only shows up in particular languages and in particular syntactic environments. Moreover, such accounts fail to explain why the DPBE only emerges in comprehension and not in production. This paper hypothesizes that the presence or absence of the DPBE can be explained from the properties of the grammar. Fischer's (2004) optimality-theoretic analysis of binding, explaining cross-linguistic variation, and Hendriks and Spenader's (2005/6) optimality-theoretic account of the acquisition of pronouns and reflexives are combined into a single model. This model yields testable predictions with respect to the presence or absence of the DPBE in particular languages, in particular syntactic environments, and in comprehension and/or production.
Prenominals in Dutch
(2003)
For modeling the internal structure of noun phrases (Pollard and Sag, 1994, 385) treats the noun as the head and classi£es its dependents in terms of a three-fold distinction, £rst proposed in Chomsky (1970), between complements, adjuncts and speci£ers. For a phrase like the expensive picture of Sandy the structure looks as follows.
Since the introduction of the X-bar principles it is commonly assumed that prepositions are heads of PPs, in the same way as nouns and pronouns are heads of NPs. However, while this is well motivated for a large majority of the pronouns and the prepositions in many languages, there are also exceptions. More specifically, Van Eynde (1999) argues that the reduced or minor pronouns of Dutch — as opposed to their full or tonic counterparts — cannot head an NP, and the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that there are also prepositions which cannot head a PP. The first section introduces the distinction between major and minor categories. The second shows how it can be applied to the prepositions and presents a way of treating minor prepositions in HPSG. The third singles out the Dutch te(to) as a plausible candidate for a minor preposition treatment, and the fourth provides criteria for the identification of other minor prepositions. The concluding section points out the wider significance of these findings.
This paper provides an analysis of an alternative strategy to A´-movement in both German and Dutch where the extracted constituent is preceded by a preposition and a coreferential pronoun appears in the extraction site. The construction has properties of both binding and movement: Whereas reconstruction effects suggest movement out of the embedded clause, there is strong evidence that the operator constituent is linked to an A-position in the matrix clause; this paradox is resolved by assuming a Control-like approach that involves movement from the embedded clause into a theta-position in the matrix clause with subsequent short A´- movement. The coreferential pronoun is interpreted as a resumptive heading a Big-DP which hosts the antecedent in its specifier.
This contribution provides an overview of the current state of affairs with respect to the Dutch version of the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN). We describe properties of the Dutch MAIN, the creation of the Dutch MAIN, and the results of recent research with this new instrument to measure narrative competence.
It has often been noticed that one syntactic argument position can be realized by elements which seem to realize different thematic roles. This is notably the case with the external argument position of verbs of change of state which licenses volitional agents, instruments or natural forces/causers, showing the generality and abstractness of the external argument relation. (1) a. John broke the window (Agent) b. The hammer broke the window (Instrument) c. The storm broke the window (Causer) In order to capture this generality, Van Valin & Wilkins (1996) and Ramchand (2003) among others have proposed that the thematic role of the external argument position is in fact underspecified. The relevant notion is that of an effector (in Van Valin & Wilkins) or of an abstract causer/initiator (in Ramchand). In this paper we argue against a total underspecification of the external argument relation. While we agree that (1b) does not instantiate an instrument theta role in subject position, we argue that a complete underspecification of the external theta-position is not feasible, but that two types of external theta roles have to be distinguished, Agents and Causers. Our arguments are based on languages where Agents and Causers show morpho-syntactic independence (section 2.1) and the behavior of instrument subjects in English, Dutch, German and Greek (section 2.2 and 3). We show that instrument subjects are either Agent or Causer like. In section (4) we give an analysis how arguments realizing these thematic notions are introduced into syntax.
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.