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In keinem anderen deutschen Dialektraum, nicht einmal in irgend einer anderen germanischen Sprache ist das Präteritum mit einer solchen Ausnahmslosigkeit geschwunden wie im Oberdeutschen und hier insbesondere im Alemannischen. Zwar haben (wie das Alemannische auch) alle diese Sprachen und Dialekte ein analytisches Perfekt ausgebildet; in einigen Sprachen (wie dem Englischen und Schwedischen) treten Präteritum und Perfekt in eine aspektuelle Opposition zueinander.
In diesem Beitrag geht es darum, Flexion primär über die Abgrenzung zu ihren beiden morphologischen Nachbardomänen, die Derivation und die Klise, zu bestimmen. Aus diesen beiden morphologischen Typen entwickelt sich auch neue Flexion. Mit dem Vergleich von Flexion, Derivation und Klise und mit der Frage nach der Entstehung von Flexion sollen die Ziele und Prinzipien von Flexion sichtbar gemacht werden. Der zweite Schwerpunkt dieses Artikels besteht in einer detaillierten Analyse einer sich anbahnenden Flexivierung via Klitisierung im Deutschen: Mit den Präposition-Artikel-Verschmelzungen (im, ins, zur, au/m, in'n) liegt ein Paradebeispiel derzeit beobachtbarer und sukzessive sich herausbildender Flexion vor. Diese Verbindungen sind zwar noch als Vorstufen der Flexion zu bewerten, doch läßt sich über die Untersuchung dieses komplexen Grammatisierungsprozesses diskutieren, was noch geschehen muß, damit im Deutschen Präpositionalflexion entsteht. Kapitel 1 befaßt sich kurz mit dem Begriff der Flexion, Kapitel 2 mit der Entstehung von Flexion aus Derivation und Klise. Kapitel 3 widmet sich dem Beispiel der deutschen Präposition-Artikel-Verschmelzungen.
This contribution concerns the interaction of morphology, syntax and semantics. It treats German past participles and concentrates on their function as heads in attributive and adverbial modifier phrases. It is argued that participles have the same argument structure as the underlying verbs and can undergo passivization, perfectivization and conversion to adjectives. Since these three operations involve changes in the morphosyntactic categorization they are considered as zero affixation. Two affixless templates – without any categorical changes – convert participle constructions to modifiers relating to participants or to situations. These phrases do not have a syntactic position for the grammatical subject, an operator or an adverbial relator. The pertinent components are present only in the semantic structure. Two further templates serve the composition of participle constructions as modifiers with the modificandum. It is necessary to differentiate between modifiers which function as predicates and those which have the status of a propositional operator. In syntax, these different semantic functions correspond to different adjunct positions of the respective participle phrases.
This paper deals with the emergence of verb morphology in one German child up to the time mini-paradigms occur in the data. I will focus on the role of protomorphology as a transitional stage between rote learning and the productive use of morphological distinctions.
In this paper the first results concerning the development of early verb morphology in an L1-English speaking child are presented. Adopting the framework of morphological development of Dressler (Dressler, this volume) the data of a girl from the CHILDES database, Nina of the Suppes corpus, is analysed with regard to the emergence of early verbal categories (e.g. number and person) and their appearance in a first mini-paradigm. In the sessions analysed so far the child Nina has reached an age of 2;2 when the first mini-paradigm emerges.
In these conclusions we can deal only with some of the tentative comparative results of the workshop papers on the early development of verb morphology. The main focus is on criteria of how the child detects morphology and how this emerging morphological competence develops in its earliest phases. In view of the purpose and tentative character of these conclusions, all references will be limited to the papers of the workshop and to earlier studies by workshop participants within the "Crosslinguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition". Much more will be given in the projected final publication.
This article aims to recast the properties of topic-prominent languages and their differences from subject-prominent languages as documented in the functionalist literature into the framework of the Principle-and-Parameter approach. It provides a configurational definition of the topic construction called Topic Phrase (TP), with the topic marker as its head. The availablity of TP enables topic prominent languages to develop various topic structures with properties such as morphological marking; cross-categorial realization of topics and comments; and mutiple application of topicalization. The article elaborates the notion of topic prominence. A topic prominent language is characterized as one that tends to activate the TP and to make full use of the configuration. Typically, it has a larger number and variety of highly grammaticalized topic markers in the Lexicon and permits a variety of syntactic categories to occur in the specifier position and the complement position of TP.
The complexity of human languages has always inspired research for some human faculty that makes language learning possible. The system that generates the complexity of human languages, ideally, is simple and effective. Recent developments of the generative grammatical theory explore deeper into the issue of simplicity or economy. The Minimalist Program developed in Chomsky (1991, 1993, 1995) tries to provide contents to such notions. What does it mean to be more economic or least effort? An important instantiation of such notions is the proposal that movement is the last resort assuming that movement is more costly than non-movement. Processes occur only because they are necessary. The definition of necessity generally is cast in morphological terms. Moreover, the notion of "economy" or "least effort" is deterministic of the appropriate derivations for sentences: a shorter derivation is better than a longer one. In this work, we show that the notion of "least effort," - do minimally if possible - is manifested not only in derivations but also in other aspects of the grammar. We take Chinese as an example and show that this language exhibits the properties manifesting some "least effort" guidelines in the area of movement and reconstruction, and in the projection of syntactic positions: when there is a choice, non-application of moyement/reconstruction and non-projection of a position are adopted. These phenomena essentially are attested in topic structures. The question arises as to why topic structures exhibit such minimal effort effects. We suggest that this is due to the fact that topic structures can be derived by movement or base-generation. When there are morpho-syntactic clues that reconstruction is necessary, the structure is a movement structure. Otherwise, the less costly non-movement structure is assumed. Moreover, because of the possibility of assuming a topic NP to be base-generated, bearing a predication (or aboutness) relation with the comment clause, the argument position which otherwise would be related to the topic (conveniently termed the trace position) is not projected when there is a choice of projecting or not projecting it.
This paper draws a link between the typological phenomenon of the paradigmatically supported evidentiality evoked by perfect and/or perfectivity and the equally epistemic system of modal verbs in German. The assumption is that, if perfect(ivity) is at the bottom of evidentiality in a wide number of unrelated languages, then it will not be an arbitrary fact that systematic epistemic readings occur also for the modal verbs in German, which were preterite presents originally. It will be demonstrated, for one, how exactly modal verbs in Modem German still betray sensitivity to perfect and perfective contexts, and, second, how perfect(ivity) is prone to evincing epistemic meaning. Although the expectation cannot be satisfied due to a lack of respective data from the older stages of German, a research path is sketched narrowing down the linguistic questions to be asked and dating results to be reached.
Introduction
(2000)
In this squib, I want to argue that the morphological structure of words is, at least to some extent, motivated. As an example I have choosen the partonomic (and for the less part taxonomic) nomenclature of the human body. While important work by Brown et alii (1973), Anderson (1978) and Schladt (1997) exists on this topic, these analyses focus on the conceptualization of body-parts and their semantics, but not on their morphological representation.
In the following, I want to check two predictions about the morphological complexity of lexical items denoting parts of the human body. The first assumption is that the most canonical body-parts are always expressed by mono-lexematic items. The second one consists in the assumption that body-parts of the lowest levels in the hierarchy are always morphologically complex. A set of six body-parts has been analysed in 27 languages. The set consists of two canonical (HEAD and EAR) and of one from the lowest level of the hierarchy (TOENAIL). For this I have adopted a sample from Schladt (1997) and a small one compiled by myself
Die Idee, das Isländische - eine archaische, am Nordwestrand des germanischen Sprachgebiets gelegene skandinavische Inselsprache - auf die Möglichkeiten des Sexusausdrucks hin zu untersuchen, entstand imZusammenhang einer kontrastiven Arbeit zum Sexusausdruck im Deutschen und Schwedischen (siehe Nübling 2000). Das Schwedische verfügt nur noch über zwei Genera, das sog. Utrum (das aus dem Zusammenfall von Femininum und Maskulinum hervorgeht) und das Neutrum.
Die Flexionsmorphologie befasst sich mit der "Beugung" von Wörtern, d. h. mit der systematischen Kombination von (meist) Lexemen mit bestimmten sog. grammatischen Informationen (auch: Flexionskategorien). So wird die Wortart der Substantive im Deutschen mit den Informationen Kasus und vor allem Numerus (Singular und Plural) versehen.
This paper argues for a scopal explanation of the readings of the adverb wieder (‘again’). It is the syntactic entity that wieder is related to which determines whether the repetitive or the restitutive reading obtains. If it is adjoined to the minimal verbal domain, it relates to a situation-internal state thus producing a restitutive interpretation, if adjoined to a higher verbal projection, it relates to an eventuality resulting in a repetitive interpretation. Proceeding from the assumption that adverbial adjuncts have base positions which reflect their semantic relations to the rest of the sentence, repetitive wieder is shown to belong to the class of eventuality adverbs that minimally c-command the base positions of all arguments, whereas restitutive wieder has many properties in common with process (manner) adjuncts that minimally c-command the verb in clause-final base position.
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.
On the early development of aspect in greek and russian child language, a comparative analysis
(2003)
The category of aspect is grammaticized in both Greek and Russian opposing perfective and imperfective verb forms in all inflectional categories except the nonpast (‘present’). Despite these similarities there are important differences in the way the aspectual systems function in the two languages. While in Greek nearly all verbs oppose a perfective to a given imperfective grammatical form, Russian aspect is more strongly lexicalized with pairs of imperfective and perfective lexemes not only differing aspectually, but also as far as their lexical meanings are concerned. This is especially true of perfective verbs formed by prefixes as compared to their imperfective bases. Thus, in pairs of prefixed and unprefixed dynamic verbs, the derived prefixed (perfective) member has a telic meaning while its unprefixed (imperfective) counterpart is atelic (e.g. sjest’ (PFV) ‘to eat up’ vs. jest’ (IPF) ‘to eat’). Such derived perfective verbs may in turn be “secondarily” imperfectivized by suffixation furnishing the only “true” perfective/imperfective pairs of verbs (e.g. sjest’ (PFV) ‘to eat up’ vs. sjedat’ (IPF) ‘to eat up’ (iterative)). “Secondary” imperfectives do not occur in our child data.
In this pilot study, we will analyze the tense-aspect-mood forms of the 20 most frequent verbs with equivalent meanings occurring in the longitudinal audiotaped data of a Greek and a Russian boy between 2;1 and 2;3 (their entire lexical inventories comprise approx. 100 verbs each).
We adopt a constructivist perspective on the development of aspect in Greek and Russian child language and will show that in spite of a broad inventory of imperfective and perfective verb forms to be found in the speech of both children aspect has not yet developed into a generalized grammatical category, but is strongly dependent on aktionsart (stative/dynamic, telic/atelic) in both languages. While this results in a strong preference for perfective verb forms of telic verbs and of imperfective forms of atelic ones in the speech of the Greek boy, the Russian child tends to use the unmarked members.
It has been previously reported that in languages demonstrating the Root Infinitive (RI) Stage the use of RIs is characterized by two properties: these forms are overwhelmingly eventive and have, in the majority of instances, a modal interpretation. Hoekstra and Hyams (1998, 1999) have proposed a theory stating that these two properties of RIs are co-dependent in that the application of the modal reference restriction limits the use of the aspectual verbal classes to eventive predicates. Furthermore, this theory assumed that the described mutual dependency of these constraints was valid cross-linguistically.
In this paper, we investigate the application of this theory to the case of RIs in Russian, one of the languages exhibiting the RI Stage. Using new longitudinal data from two monolingual Russian-speaking children, we demonstrate that the predictions of Hoekstra and Hyams’ approach are not realized for Russian child speech. While the constraint requiring that Ris have a modal reference does not seem to apply in Russian since the infinitival forms do receive past and present tense interpretation, these predicates are still overwhelmingly eventive and stative predicates appear mostly as finite verbs. Having shown that a theory connecting the application of the two restrictions on RIs does not account for the Russian data, we examine several alternative analyses of Russian RIs. We arrive at a conclusion that an explanation based on the lack of the event variable in stative predicates (Kratzer 1989) necessary for the interpretation of RIs in discourse (Avrutin 1997) succeeds in handling the Russian data presented in this article.
The acquisition of spanish perfective aspect : A study on children's production and comprehension
(2003)
This paper presents the acquisition of Spanish perfective aspect in production and comprehension. It argues that, although young children use perfective aspect to talk about completed events, young children have difficulty in assessing perfective meaning from perfective morphology. This paper proposes that in the process of acquiring aspectual meaning, children use local strategies to decode aspectual meaning from form: when analyzing a completed situation, young children depend on certain learnability factors to correctly assess the entailment of completion of the perfective, namely, their ability to determine if the object of the event measures out the event as a whole or not, and their ability to read the agent’s intentions. When those factors are removed from the situation, young children had difficulty determining the entailment of completion of perfective aspect. This study also suggests that the manner in which aspectual information is conveyed in a language, may play a role on the readiness of the acquisition of the semantic morphology of the language (e.g., verb+object vs. verb+affixes). The results of this study indicate that successful performance on the semantics of Spanish perfective aspect develops around the age of 5-6.
The current study investigates the relation between aspect and particle verbs in the acquisition of English. Its purpose is to determine whether children associate telicity, as argued in previous studies, or rather perfectivity, which entails completion of a telic situation, with their early particle verb use. The study analyzes naturalistic data of four monolingual children between 1;6 and 3;8 from CHILDES acquiring English as their first language. On the one hand, it finds that children use both –ed and irregular perfective morphology with simplex verbs before particle verbs. They further use imperfective before perfective morphology with particle verbs. These findings suggest that there is no correlation between telic particle verbs and perfective morphology, as would have been predicted on an account which claims that lexical aspect of predicates guides the acquisition of grammatical aspect (Olsen & Weinberg 1999). On the other hand, the study finds that the children’s particle verbs denote telic situations from early on, but not half of them were used to refer to situations that are also completed. This finding questions analyses which claim that, at an initial stage, children will only interpret predicates as telic if they refer to situations that are at the same time completed. Completion information is not necessary for children in order to use particle verbs correctly for telic situations, as would have been predicted on an extended account along the lines of Wagner (2001). As a conclusion, it is suggested that the divergent findings result from a difference in methodology. While restrictions of perfective and imperfective morphology to particular classes of lexical aspect pertain to the production of grammatical aspect morphology, perfective and imperfective viewpoints on situations pertain to the level of interpretation of telic and atelic situations.
Crosslinguistic research on the production of tense morphology in child language has shown that young children use past or perfective forms mainly with telic predicates and present or imperfective forms mainly with atelic predicates. However, this pattern, which has come to be known as the Aspect First Hypothesis, has been challenged in a number of comprehension studies. These studies suggest that children do not rely on aspectual information for their interpretation of tense morphology. The present paper tests the validity of the Aspect First Hypothesis in child Greek by investigating Greek-speaking children’s early comprehension of present, past and future tense morphology as well as the role that lexical aspect plays in the early use of tense morphology. It is suggested that although Greek-speaking children have not yet fully mapped the tense concepts to the correct tense morphology, tense acquisition does not seem to be significantly affected by the aspectual characteristics (i.e. the telicity) of the verb.
Our results indicate some differences in the use of aspect between French and Croatian speaking children. In Croatian language children always manage to keep the appropriate aspect, unlike French children. However, the imperfective aspect seems to be better acquired in French children than the perfective aspect. The perfective aspect, the marked form both in French as well as in Croatian, is related to the lexical meaning of the verbs. The acquisition of the Aktionsart in both languages seems to be more a matter of semantics than of morphology. Furthermore, our data suggest the existence of a specific developmental trend in the use of Aktionsart (intensive, iterative and inchoative), which is similar for children speaking Slavic and Romanic languages.
This paper reports results from a series of experiments that investigated whether semantic and/or syntactic complexity influences young Dutch children’s production of past tense forms. The constructions used in the three experiments were (i) simple sentences (the Simple Sentence Experiment), (ii) complex sentences with CP complements (the Complement Clause Experiment) and (iii) complex sentences with relative clauses (the Relative Clause Experiment). The stimuli involved both atelic and telic predicates. The goal of this paper is to address the following questions.
Q1. Does semantic complexity regarding temporal anchoring influence the types of errors that children make in the experiments? For example, do children make certain types of errors when a past tense has to be anchored to the Utterance Time (UT), as compared to when it has to be anchored to the matrix topic time (TT)?
Q2. Do different syntactic positions influence children’s performance on past-tense production? Do children perform better in the Simple Sentence Experiment compared to complex sentences involving two finite clauses (the Complement Clause Experiment and the Relative Clause Experiment)? In complex sentence trials, do children perform differently when the CPs are complements vs. when the CPs are adjunct clauses? (Lebeaux 1990, 2000)
Q3. Do Dutch children make more errors with certain types of predicate (such as atelic predicates)? Alternatively, do children produce a certain type of error with a certain type of predicates (such as producing a perfect aspect with punctual predicates)? Bronckart and Sinclair (1973), for example, found that until the age of 6, French children showed a tendency to use passé composé with perfective events and simple present with imperfective events; we will investigate whether or not the equivalent of this is observed in Dutch.
The focus of the present paper is on the difference between English and German learners‘ use of perfectivity and imperfectivity. The latter is expressed by means of suffixation (suffix -va-). In contrast, perfectivity is encoded either by suffixation (-nou-) or by prefixation (twenty different prefixes that mostly modify not only aspectual but also lexical properties of the verb).
In the native Czech data set, there is no significant difference between the number of imperfectively and perfectively marked verb forms. In the English data, imperfectively and perfectively marked verb forms are equally represented as well. However, German learners use significantly more perfective forms than English learners and Czech natives. When encoding perfectivity in Czech, German learners prefer to use prefixes to suffixes. Overall, English learners in comparison to German learners encode more perfectives by means of suffixation than prefixation.
These results suggest that German learners of Czech focus on prefixes expressing aspectual and lexical modification of the verb, while English learners rather pay attention to the aspectual opposition between perfective and imperfective. In a more abstract way, the German learner group focuses on the operations carried out on the left side from the verb stem while the English learner group concentrates on the operations performed on the right side qfrom the verb stem.
This sensitivity can be to certain degree motivated by the linguistic devices of the corresponding source languages: English learners of Czech use imperfectives mainly because English has marked fully grammatical form for the expression of imperfective aspect – the progressive -ing form. German learners, on the other hand, pay in Czech more attention to the prefixes, which like in German modify the lexical meaning of the verb. In this manner, Czech prefixes used for perfectivization function similar to the German verbal prefixes (such as ab-, ver-) modifying Aktionsart.
In this study explanations are sought for the often reported associations in child language between tense/aspect morphology and situation type. The study is done on the basis of adult-adult data, child language and input language to the children. First of all it is shown that the associations are natural, since they are strong in adult-adult English as well. Only in the early stages does child language differ from this distribution, in that the associations are either stronger or different. Input data appear to account to a large extent for these differing patterns. An additional explanation is found in the discourse topics: within the context of talking about the here-and-now, the combinations of morphology and situation type that can be seen as unmarked suffice. In the context of talking about past events and of giving general comments about the world, marked combinations are necessary. It is shown that children in and their parents at the early ages mainly talk about the here-and-now, whereas adults among themselves hardly ever do so. Later, describing past events and commenting on the world becomes more frequent in child language and input, and, as a consequence, marked combinations of tense/aspect morphology and situation types increase in use.
This paper reviews research on English past-tense acquisition to test the validity of the single mechanism model and the dual mechanism model, focusing on regular-irregular dissociation and semantic bias. Based on the review, it is suggested that in L1 acquisition, both regular and irregular verbs are governed by semantics; that is, early use of past tense forms are restricted to achievement verbs—regular or irregular. In contrast, some L2 acquisition studies show stronger semantic bias for regular past tense forms (e.g., Housen, 2002, Rohde, 1996). It is argued that L1 acquisition of the past-tense morphology can be accounted for more adequately by the single-mechanism model.
While both Japanese and English have a grammatic al form denoting the progressive, the two forms (te-iru & be+ing) interact differently with the inherent semantics of the verb to which they attach (Kindaichi, 1950; McClure, 1995; Shirai, 2000). Japanese change of state verbs are incompatible with a progressive interpretation, allowing only a resultative interpretation of V+ te-iru, while a progressive interpretation is preferred for activity predicates. English be+ing denotes a progressive interpretation regardless of the lexical semantics of the verb. The question that arises is how we can account for the fact that change of state verbs like dying can denote a progressive interpretation in English, but not in Japanese. While researchers such as Kageyama (1996) and Ogihara (1998, 1999) propose that the difference lies in the lexical semantics of the verbs themselves, others such as McClure (1995) have argued that the difference lies in the semantics of the grammatical forms, be+ing and te-iru. We present results from an experimental study of Japanese learners’ interpretation of the English progressive which provide support for McClure’s proposal. Results indicate that independent of verb type, learners had significantly more difficulty with the past progressive. We argue that knowledge of L2 semantics-syntax correspondences proceeds not on the basis of L1 lexical semantic knowledge, but on the basis of grammatical forms.
Namenskunde
(2004)
Eigennamen (auch Propria, Onyme) werden unter die Substantive subsumiert und erfüllen spezifische referentielle Funktionen. Im Gegensatz zu den Appellativen (Gattungsbezeichnungen) wie z. B. Mensch oder Stadt, die eine ganze Klasse von Gegenständen bezeichnen, referieren Eigennamen prototypischerweise nur auf ein einziges Denotat (Monoreferentialität), z. B. Goethe oder Frankfurt.
Those principles of Naturalness as postulated by Mayerthaler (1981) claim to make predtictions about the direction of language change possible. It is true that the majority of morphological changes can be accounted for by these principles. However, systematic violations of these rules can be found in of all things, some of most frequent, elementary verbs such as HAVE, BE, BECOME, COME, GO, GIVE, TAKE, etc. Their irregularities cannot be accounted for solely - as Naturalness Theory would have it - by conflicts between phonological and morphological Naturalness. Rather, they have been systematically built up through other efficient strategies. This "regularity of irregularity" is the focus of this paper, which demonstrates several particularly well-beaten paths to irregularization through contrastive diachronic investigations of frequent verbs in different Germanic languages. lrregularity, a term laden with negative connotations, is substituted by the term differentiation, which names the actual function directly. Because differentiation typically correlates with word brevity, this constellation should be considered an ideal compromise between hearer and speaker interests. A further question to be addressed is which individual categories are expressed through irregularization. It is concluded that this process is guided by token frequency and degree of relevance.
The phenomenon of phonological opacity has been the subject of much debate in recent years, with scholars opposed to the Optimality Theory (OT) research program arguing that opacity proves OT must be false, while the solutions proposed within OT, such as sympathy theory and stratal OT , have proved to be unsatisfying to many OT proponents, who have found these proposals to be inconsistent with the parallelist approach to phonological processes otherwise characteristic of OT. In this paper I reexamine one of the best known cases of opacity, that found in three processes of Tiberian Hebrew (TH), and argue that these processes only appear to be opaque, because previous analyses have treated them as pure phonology, rather than as an interaction between phonology and morphology. Once it is recognized that certain words of TH are lexically marked to end with a syllabic trochee, and that the goal of paradigm uniformity exerts grammatical pressure on phonology, the three processes no longer present a problem to parallelist OT. The results suggest the possibility that all crosslinguistic instances of apparent opacity can be explained in terms of the phonology-morphology interface and that purely phonological opacity does not exist. If this claim is true, then parallelist OT can be defended against its detractors without the need for additional mechanisms like sympathy theory and stratal OT.
Bis heute bildet die Morphologie keinen Schwerpunkt der Dialektlinguistik. Dies wird immer wieder moniert. H. Tatzreiter (1994) kommt nach seinem Streifzug durch die "Bibliographie zur Grammatik der deutschen Dialekte" von P. Wiesinger / E. Raffin (1982) zu dem Ergebnis, "daß die Leistungskurve im grammatischen Bereich ,von der Lautlehre über die Formen- und Wortbildungslehre bis zur Satzlehre' steil abfällt" (S. 30 bzw. P. Wiesinger / E. Raffin 1982, S. XXIX). Ein weiteres Problem sieht er in der besonders durch die angelsächsische Tradition motivierten Vernachlässigung der Morphologie die zwischen der phonologischen, lexikalischen und syntaktischen Ebene ein gefährdetes Dasein fristet" (S. 30): "So lange die Morphologie sich nicht aus der 'Umklammerung' der Phonologie und Syntax lösen kann, um eigenständig als Forschungsobjekt zu gelten, wird es um die umfassende Erforschung und Darstellung schlecht bestellt sein" (S. 34).
Although verb forms encoding focus were recorded in various Bantu languages during the twentieth century it was not until the late 1970's that they became the centre of serious attention, starting with the work of Hyman and Watters. In the last decade this attention has grown. While focus can be expressed variously, this paper concentrates largely on its morphological, partly on its tonal expression. On the basis of morphological and tonal behaviour, it identifies four blocks of languages, representing less than a third of all Bantu languages: those with metatony, those with a binary constituent contrast between verb ("disjunctive") and post-verbal ("conjunctive") focus, those with a three-way contrast, and those with verb initial /ni-/. Following Güldemann's lead, it is shown there is a fairly widespread grammaticalisation path whereby focus markers may come to encode progressive aspect, then present tense. Many Bantu languages today have a pre-stem morpheme /a/ 'non-past' and it is hypothesized that many of these /a/, which are otherwise hard to explain historically, may derive from an older focus marker.
Zur Entstehung und Struktur ungebändigter Allomorphie : Pluralbildungsverfahren im Luxemburgischen
(2006)
Aus gesamtgermanistischer Perspektive verfügt das Luxemburgische über ein außergewöhnliches Maß an Pluralallomorphie bzw., nach H. GIRNTH (2000), an Heterograffimie. Oberstes Prinzip dabei scheint die deutliche Markierung der Kategorie 'Plural' direkt ani bzw. im Substantiv zu sein. Die morphologische Komplexität betrifft mehrere Dimensionen: Zum einen ist es die Vielzahl an Pluralisierungsprinzipien, die von additiven über modulatorische und Nullprozesse bis hin zu subtraktiven Techniken reichen, zum zweiten die Vielzahl an konkret sich manifestierender Allomorphie. Schließlich ist der maximale . Ausbau des reinen Umlauttyps auch bei Einsilblern hervorzuheben. Selbst Fremdwörter können noch heute ihren Plural mit reinem Vokalwechsel bilden, und dies auch auf nebenbetonten Silben. Aus diachroner Perspektive bildet. der reine Vokalwechsel einen wichtigen Endpunkt einer sich seit Jahrhunderten in diese Richtung vollziehenden Entwicklung. Aus synchroner Perspektive ist es mittlerweile verfehlt, noch - wie etwa beim deutschen Pluralsystem - von Umlaut zu sprechen, da längst eine Arbitrarisierung .des Vokalwechsels stattgefunden hat, die fast ablautähnliche Züge erreicht hat. Zusammenfassend gelangt man zu dem Eindruck, dass sich das Luxemburgische - etwa im Hinblick auf die subtraktive Pluralbildung - fast jedweden phonologischen Wandel zu Nutze macht bzw. - im Hinblick auf den Umlaut über die Morphologisierung sogar produktiv werden lässt. Aus der vorliegenden Untersuchung ergeben sich mehrere Fragestellungen, die Gegenstand weiterer Untersuchungen sein sollten. Zuerst wären genaue quantitative Erhebungen vorzunehmen, um die Nutzung und Verteilung der einzelnen Verfahren zu ermitteln. Auch die Produktivität der Regeln müsste untersucht werden. Des Weiteren ist noch ungeklärt, welche Regeln es genau sind, die die Distribution der Allomorphe steuern. Nimmt man z.B. das Englische mit seinen drei Pluralallomorphen [IZ], [z] und [s], so ist deren Verteilung rein phonologisch - nach dem Auslaut des Substantivs - gesteuert: Endet es auf einen Sibilanten, folgt silbisches [IZ] (horse-s ['horsIz]), endet es auf einen stimmhaften Laut, folgt stimmhaftes [z] (dog-s), und auf einen stimmlosen folgt stimmloses [s] (cat-s). Das Deutsche, das insgesamt neun konkrete Pluralallomorphe "besitzt, erlaubt auf grund der Singularform kaum Erschließbarkeit des Plurals, wie die folgenden drei einsilbigen Reimwörter gleichen Genus demonstrieren: der Hund - die Hunde, der Grund - die Gründe, der Mund - die Münder. Prosodische Kriterien wie die AkzentsteIle, syllabische (Silbenzahl), phonologische (Auslaut) und morphologische Kriterien " einschließlich der Genuszugehörigkeit fuhren nicht immer zum Ziel: Bei vielen Substantiven muss der Plural - siehe oben - mitgelernt werden, d.h. er ist Bestandteil des Lexikons. Was das Luxemburgische betrifft, so scheint das Steuerungsinstrumentarium komplexer zu sein, doch ist dies nur eine durch Stichproben gewonnene Vermutung, die zu fundieren wäre.
Die deutschen Präteritoprasentia sind, indem alte Perfektformen das heutige Präsens stellen, aus mehreren Griinden als hochgradig irregular zu betrachten; hinzu kommt ein bisher nicht geklärter Umlaut bei vier (von heute sieben) dieser Verben: müssen, dürfen, können und mögen. Bisherige Erklärungsversuche werden diesem Problem nicht gerecht: Zwar versuchen sie durchaus, den Umlaut im Präsens zu motivieren, doch vermögen sie es nicht, sein ausschließliches Vorkommen im Plural des Präsens zu erklären. Hier wird für die These argumentiert, dass es sich um einen (verbalen) Pluralumlaut handelt, der insbesondere auch im Nominalbereich gang und gäbe ist und dort zur gleichen Zeit einen massiven Ausbau (Morphologisierung) erfährt. Damit handelt es sich um einen sog. transkategorialen Marker.
Ich möchte […] drei Beispiele für den produktiven Dialog zwischen Historischer Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachtypologie liefern: 1. Den phonologisch-typologischen Wandel des Deutschen von einer Silben- zu einer Wortsprache, 2. die frühnhd. 'Justierung' der Abfolge grammatischer Kategorien am Verb gemäß der universellen Relevanzskala, und 3. die Entwicklung unseres Höflichkeitssystems am Beispiel der Anredepronomen. Weder liefere ich Neues noch kann ich ins Detail gehen. Es geht hier nur darum, für die gegenseitige Wahrnehmung und Zusammenarbeit linguistischer Disziplinen zu werben.