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Die Hauptthese dieser Dissertation ist, dass Nord-Sotho keinen obligatorischen Gebrauch von grammatischen Mitteln zur Markierung von Fokus macht, weder in der Syntax noch in der Prosodie oder Morphologie. Trotzdem strukturiert diese Sprache eine Äußerung nach informationsstrukturellen Aspekten. Konstituenten, die im Diskurs gegeben sind, werden entweder getilgt, pronominalisiert oder an den rechten oder linken Satzrand versetzt. Diese (morpho-)syntaktischen Prozesse wirken so zusammen, dass die fokussierte Konstituente oft final in ihrem Teilsatz erscheint. Obwohl die finale Position keine designierte Fokusposition ist, ist das Wissen um diese Tendenz doch entscheidend für das Verständnis einer morphologischen Alternation, die in Nord-Sotho am Verb erscheint und die in der Literatur im Zusammenhang mit Fokus diskutiert wurde.
Obwohl also ein direkter grammatischer Ausdruck von formaler F(okus)-Markierung im Nord-Sotho fehlt, ist F-Markierung trotzdem entscheidend für die Grammatik dieser Sprache: Fokussierte logische Subjekte können nicht in kanonischer präverbaler Position erscheinen. Sie erscheinen stattdessen entweder postverbal oder in einem Spaltsatz, abhängig von der Valenz des Verbs. Obwohl Nord-Sotho bei Objekten im Gebrauch von Spaltsätzen eine Korrespondenz von komplexer Form mit komplexer Bedeutung zeigt, gilt diese Korrespondenz nicht für logische Subjekte.
Die vorliegende Dissertation modelliert die oben genannten Ergebnisse im theoretischen Rahmen der Optimalitätstheorie (OT). Syntaktischer in situ Fokus und die Abwesenheit von prosodischer Fokusmarkierung können mit unkontroversen Beschränkungen erfasst werden. Für die Ungrammatikaliät fokussierter logischer Subjekte in präverbaler Position schlägt die vorliegende Arbeit die Modifizierung einer in der Literatur vorhandenen Beschränkung vor, die in Nord-Sotho von entscheidener Bedeutung ist. Die Form-Bedeutungs-Korrespondenz wird, wie andere Phänomene pragmatischer Arbeitsteilung auch, innerhalb der schwach bidirektionalen Optimalitätstheorie behandelt.
All of the papers in the volume except one (Kaji) take up some aspect of relative clause construction in some Bantu language. Kaji’s paper aims to account for how Tooro (J12; western Uganda) lost phonological tone through a comparative study of the tone systems of other western Uganda Bantu languages. The other papers examine a range of ways of forming relative clauses, often including non-restrictive relatives and clefts, in a wide range of languages representing a variety of prosodic systems.
This paper deals with spelling normalization of historical texts with regard to further processing with modern part-of-speech taggers. Different methods for this task are presented and evaluated on a set of historical German texts from the 15th–18th century, and specific problems inherent to the processing of historical data are discussed. A chain combination using word-based and character-based techniques is shown to be best for normalization, while POS tagging of normalized data is shown to benefit from ignoring punctuation marks. Using these techniques, when 500 manually normalized tokens are used as training data for the normalization, the tagging accuracy of a manuscript from the 15th century can be raised from 28.65% to 76.27%.
The papers in this volume were originally presented at the Workshop on Bantu Wh-questions, held at the Institut des Sciences de l’Homme, Université Lyon 2, on 25-26 March 2011, which was organized by the French-German cooperative project on the Phonology/Syntax Interface in Bantu Languages (BANTU PSYN). This project, which is funded by the ANR and the DFG, comprises three research teams, based in Berlin, Paris and Lyon. The Berlin team, at the ZAS, is: Laura Downing (project leader) and Kristina Riedel (post-doc). The Paris team, at the Laboratoire de phonétique et phonologie (LPP; UMR 7018), is: Annie Rialland (project leader), Cédric Patin (Maître de Conférences, STL, Université Lille 3), Jean-Marc Beltzung (post-doc), Martial Embanga Aborobongui (doctoral student), Fatima Hamlaoui (post-doc). The Lyon team, at the Dynamique du Langage (UMR 5596) is: Gérard Philippson (project leader) and Sophie Manus (Maître de Conférences, Université Lyon 2). These three research teams bring together the range of theoretical expertise necessary to investigate the phonology-syntax interface: intonation (Patin, Rialland), tonal phonology (Aborobongui, Downing, Manus, Patin, Philippson, Rialland), phonology-syntax interface (Downing, Patin) and formal syntax (Riedel, Hamlaoui). They also bring together a range of Bantu language expertise: Western Bantu (Aboronbongui, Rialland), Eastern Bantu (Manus, Patin, Philippson, Riedel), and Southern Bantu (Downing).
The comprehension and production of single words involve a variety of processing stages. Which stages need to be accessed differs depending on whether objects (pictures in an experimental environment) or words are supposed to be named. Naming tasks are often employed in psycholinguistic studies in order to provide an insight into the function of mental processes during word production. Differences in naming latencies and naming accuracy between words suggest that the retrieval of some lexical items is easier or more difficult in contrast to others. The relative ease of word retrieval has been found to be strongly influenced by properties of these words, such as familiarity and written or spoken frequency.
Exploring which variables affect naming speed and accuracy will allow gaining more information about the storage and processing of words in general. If a variable has a discernable effect on a specific experimental task, the localization of this effect is of interest for psycholinguistic research. This is because finding the locus of the effect can help specify models of speech production with respect to what processes occur at which stage of lexical retrieval. Additionally, identifying which variables influence language processing is inevitable in order to control for these variables when necessary. Otherwise variance in naming latencies could not be explained by the variable that was to be tested because other, uncontrolled variables could have altered the results.
This study investigates supralaryngeal mechanisms of the two way voicing contrast among German velar stops and the three way contrast among Korean velar stops, both in intervocalic position. Articulatory data won via electromagnetic articulography of three Korean speakers and acoustic recordings of three Korean and three German speakers are analysed. It was found that in both languages the voicing contrast is created by more than one mechanism. However, one can say that for Korean velar stops in intervocalic position stop closure duration is the most important parameter. For German it is closure voicing. The results support the phonological description proposed by Kohler (1984).
Der vorliegende Band setzt im Anschluß an den Band ZAS Papers in Linguistics 14 (1999) die Vorpublikation von Arbeiten fort, die innerhalb oder im Umkreis des von der DFG geförderten Projekts "Schnittstellen der Semantik: Kopula-Prädikativ-Konstruktionen" am ZAS entstanden sind. Das Rahmenthema, wie es in ZASPiL 14 einleitend knapp umrissen wurde, wird derzeit im Projekt in drei Untersuchungssträngen bearbeitet. Sie beinhalten
(1) die Klärung der in der Literatur auch weiterhin häufig bemühten, aber keineswegs eindeutig verankerten, sondern auf mehrere Domänen zu verteilenden Distinktion von Stage Level Predicates vs. Individual Level Predicates (kurz: SLP/ILP-Problematik);
(2) die Klärung des Situationsbezugs von Kopula-Prädikativ-Konstruktionen (KPK) im Hinblick auf die ontologische Natur, die lexikalische Fundierung und die syntaktische Verwaltung des referentiellen Arguments von KPK (kurz: Argumentstruktur von KPK);
(3) die vertiefte Analyse der notorisch idiosynkratischen Kopulaverben in Prädikationsstrukturen, nicht zuletzt im Hinblick auf diejenigen Vorkommen solcher Verben, in denen sie gemeinhin als "Hilfsverben" gelten, was wiederum eine umfassende Analyse der infiniten Verbformen einschließt (kurz: lexical vs. functional category features).
Remarks on deixis
(1992)
The prevailing conception of deixis is oriented to the idea of 'concrete' physical and perceptual characteristics of the situation of speech. Signs standardly adduced as typical deictics are I, you, here, now, this, that. I and you are defined as meaning "the person producing the utterance in question" and "the person spoken to", here and now as meaning "where the speaker is at utterance time" and "at the moment the utterance is made" (also, "at the place/time of the speech exchange"); similarly, the meanings of this and that are as a rule defined via proximity to speaker's physical location. The elements used in such definitions form the conceptual framework of most of the general characterisations of deixis in the literature. [...] There is much in the literature, of course, that goes far beyond this framework . A great variety of elements, mostly with very abstract meanings, have been found to share deictic characteristics although they do not fit into the personnel-place-time-of-utterance schema. The adequacy of that schema is also called into question by many observations to the effect that the use of such standard deictics as here, now, this, that cannot really be accounted for on its basis, and by the far-reaching possibilities of orienting deictics to reference points in situations other than the situation of speech, to 'deictic centers' other than the speaker. [...] Analyses along the lines of the standard conception regularly acknowledge the existence of deviations from the assumed basic meanings. One traditional solution attributes them to speaker's "subjectivity", or to differences between "physical" and "psychological" space or time; in a similar vein, metaphorical extensions may be said to be at play, or a distinction between prototypical and non-prototypical meanings invoked. Quite apart from the question of the relative merits of these explanatory principles, which I do not wish to discuss here, the problem with all such accounts is that the definitions of the assumed basic meanings themselves are founded on axiom rather than analysis of situated use. The logical alternative, of course, is to set out for more abstract and comprehensive meaning definitions from the start. In fact, a number of recent, discourse-oriented, treatments of the demonstratives proceed this way; they view those elements as processing instructions rather than signs with inherently spatial denotation (Isard 1975, Hawkins 1978, Kirsner 1979, Linde 1979 , Ehlich 1982.)
Oppositeness, i.e. the relation between opposites or contraries or contradictories, has a fundamental role in human cognition. In the various domains of intellectual and psychological activity we find ordering schemas that are based, in one way or another, on the cognitive figure of oppositeness. It is therefore not surprising that the figure and its corresponding ordering schemas show their reflexes in the languages of the world. [...] We shall be dealing with oppositeness in the sense that a linguistically untrained native speaker, when asked what would be the opposite of 'long' can come up with some such answer as 'short', and likewise intuitively grasp the relation between 'man' and 'woman', 'corne' and 'go', 'up' and 'down', etc. Thinking that much of the vocabulary of a language is organized in such opposite pairs we must recognize that this is an important faculty, and we are curious to know how this is done, what are the underlying conceptual-cognitive structures and processes, and how they are encoded in the languages of the world. We shall leave out of consideration such oppositions as singular vs. plural. present vs. past, voiced vs. unvoiced, oppositions that the linguist states by means of a metalanguage which is itself derived from a concept of oppositeness as manifested by the examples which I gave earlier. Our approach will connect with earlier versions of the UNITYP framework. However, as a novel feature, and, hopefully, as an improvement, we shall apply some sort of a division of labor. We shall first try to reconstruct the conceptual-cognitive content of oppositeness and to keep it separate from the discussion of its reflexes in the individual languages. We shall find that a dimensional ordering of content in PARAMETERS and a continuum of TECHNIQUES is possible already on the conceptual-cognitive level. In order to keep it distinct from the level of linguistic encoding we shall use a separate terminology, graphically marked by capital 1etters.
Why should we engage in language universals research and language typology? What do we want to explain? It is a fact that, although languages differ significantly and considerably. indeed, no one would deny, that they have something in common; how else could they be labelled 'language'? - There is obviously unity among them, no matter how vaguely felt and for what reasons: Scientific, practical, moral, etc. Neither diversity per se nor unity per se is what we want to explain. There is no reason whatsoever to consider either one of them as primary, and the other as derived. What we do want to explain is "equivalence in difference" – cf. our motto – which manifests itself, among others, in the translatability from one language to another, the learnability of any language, language change – which all presuppose that speakers intuitively find their way from diversity to unity. This is a highly salient property which deserves to be brought into our consciousness. Generally then, our basic goal is to explain the way in which language-specific facts are connected with a unitarian concept of language – "die Sprache" – "le langage".
The Stanford Project on Language Universals began its activities in October 1967 and brought them to an end in August 1976. Its directors were Joseph H. Greenberg and Charles A. Ferguson. The Cologne Project on Language Universals and Typology [with particular reference to functional aspects], abbreviated UNITYP, had its early beginnings in 1972, but deployed its full activities from 1976 onwards and is still operating. This writer, who is the principal investigator, had the privilege of collaborating with the Stanford Project during spring of 1976. […] One of the leading Greenbergian ideas is that of implicational generalizations, has been integrated as a fundamental principle in the construction of continua and of universal dimensions as proposed by UNITYP. It is hoped that the following considerations on numeral systems will be apt to bear witness to this situation. They would be unthinkable without Greenberg’s pioneering work on "Generalizations about numeral systems" (Greenberg 1978: 249 ff., henceforth referred to as Greenberg, NS). Further work on this domain and on other comparable domains almost inevitably leads one to the view that generalizations of the Greenberg type have a functional significance and that a dimensional framework is apt to bring this to the fore. This is the view on linguistic behaviour as being purposeful, and on language as a problem- solving device. The problem consists in the linguistic representation of cognitive-conceptual ideas. The solution is represented by the corresponding linguistic structures in their diversity and the task of the linguist consists in reconstructing the program and subprograms underlying the process of problem-solving. It is claimed that the construct of continua and of universal dimensions makes these programs intelligible.
The human mind may produce prototypization within virtually any realm of cognition and behavior. A "comparative prototype-typology" might prove to be an interesting field of study – perhaps a new subfield of semiotics. This, however, would presuppose a clear view on the samenesses and differences of prototypization in these various fields. It seems realistic for the time being that the linguist first confine himself to describing prototypization within the realm of language proper. The literature on prototypes has steadily grown in the past ten years or so. I confine myself to mentioning the volume on Noun Classes and Categorization, edited by C. Craig (1986), which contains a wealth of factual information on the subject, along with some theoretical vistas. By and large, however, linguistic prototype research is still basically in a taxonomic stage - which, of course, represents the precondition for moving beyond. The procedure is largely per ostensionem, and by accumulating examples of prototypes. We still lack a comprehensive prototype theory. The following pages are intended, not to provide such, a theory, but to do the first steps in this direction. Section 2 will feature some elements of a functional theory of prototypes. They have been developed by this author within the frame of the UNITYP model of research on language universals and typology. Section 3 will bring a discussion of prototypization with regard to selected phenomena of a wide range of levels of analysis: Phonology, morphosyntax, speech acts, and the lexicon. Prototypization will finally be studied within one of the universal dimensions, that of APPREHENSION - the linguistic representation of the concepts of objects – as proposed by Seiler (1986).
This is a survey of the development of the model of PARTICIPATION (P'ATION) with reference to the postulated sequence of the techniques on the dimension of P'ATION. Along with a brief explanation of the techniques this article contains a discussion of the major claims with regard to the sequence of the techniques and the possibilities of subjecting the claims to empirical verification.
The present article is a crosslinguistic discussion of the distinction between a word class of nouns and a word class of verbs in the UNI TYP framework of the dimension of PARTICIPATION (for a first overall sketch of PARTICIPATION see Seiler 1984). According to this framework the noun/verb-distinction (henceforth N/V-D) must be regarded as a gradable, continuous phenomenon ranging from the stage of a clear-cut distinction with no overlap to almost a non-distinction. Although there is no question that most, if not all, languages do differentiate between nouns and verbs, it is also quite apparent that the languages do so to a different degree and by different means, and that it only makes sense to use the terms "noun" and "verb" in different languages when one actually has a common functional denominator in mind (see below). After a general introduction to the notion of a noun/verb-continuum (chapter 1) the reader will be presented with a survey of languages as diverse as German. English, Russian, Hebrew, Turkish, Salish. and Tongan (see chapter 2) in support of the continuum hypothesis. In chapter 3 the facts are coordinated in an overall pattern of regularities underlying the Increase or decrease of categorical restrictions between the respective word classes. Also, chapter 3 raises the issue to what degree a N/V-D can be considered a matter of certain lexemes or a matter of the morphosyntactic environment of certain lexical units. Lastly, we shall seek for an answer to the question why it is not a necessary requirement for languages to draw a sharp distinction between a word class of nouns and a word class of verbs.
The aim of this contribution is to embed the question of an antinomy between "integral" vs. "partial typology", inscribed as the topic of this plenary session, into the comprehensive framework of the dimensional model of the research group on language universals and typology (UNITYP). In this introductory section I shall evoke some cardinal points in the theory of linguistic typology, as viewed "from outside", viz. on the basis of striking parallelisms with psychological typology. Section 2 will permit a brief look on the dimensional model of UNITYP. In section 3 I shall present an illustration of a typological treatment on the basis of one particular dimension. In section 4 I shall draw some conclusions with special reference to the "integral vs. partial" antinomy.
As a traditional notion of fundamental importance in linguistics and philosophy (logic), "predication" is fraught with controversial issues. It is thus difficult to delimit the scope of this paper without becoming involved in some major issue. The following distinctions seem to me to be plausible on an intuitive basis. Evidence for why they are useful and legitimate will be found in the body of the paper. The discussion will focus on morphosyntactic predication […].
Ergativity in Samoan
(1985)
Most typological and language specific studies on so- called ergative languages are concerned with case marking patterns, particularly split ergativity, with the organization of syntactic relations as defined by syntactic operations such as coreferential deletion across coordinate conjunctions, Equi-NP-deletion and relativization , and with the notion of subject, but usually neglect the notion of valency, though the inherent relational properties of the verb , i. e. valency, play a fundamental role in the syntactic organization of sentences in ergative as well as in other languages . The following investigation of ergativity in Samoan aims to integrate the notion of valency into the description of semantic and syntactic relations and to outline the characteristic features of Samoan verbal clauses as far as they seem to be relevant to recent and still ongoing discussions on linguistic typology and syntactic theory. The main points of the definition of valency […] are: Valency is the property of the verb which determines the obligatory and optional number of its participants, their morphosyntactic form, their semantic class membership (e.g. ± animate, ± human) , and their semantic role (e.g. agent , patient , recipient). All semantic properties and morphosyntactic properties of participants not inherently given by the verb and therefore not predictable from the verb, are not a matter of valency. Valency is not a homogenous property of the verb, but consists of several exponents which show varying degress of relevance in different languages or different verb classes within a single language.
Grammatical relations, particularly the notions of transitivity, case marking, ergativity, passive and antipassive have been a favourite subject of typological research during the last decade, but surprisingly, the notion of valency has been of marginal interest in cross-linguistic studies, though the syntactic and semantic status of participants is, to a great extent, determined by the relational properties of the verb. Valency is the property of the verb which determines the obligatory and optional number of its participants, their morphosyntactic form, their semantic class membership (e.g. ± animate, ± human) ,and their semantic role (e.g. agent, patient, recipient). The valency inherently gives information on the nature of the semantic and syntactic relations that hold between the verb and its participants. If a verb is combined with more participants than allowed or less than required, or if the participants do not show the required morphosyntactic form or class membership, the clause is ungrammatical. In other words, it is not sufficient to consider only the number of actants as a matter of valency, but it is only acceptable if all semantic and morphosyntactic properties of the relation between a verb and its participants that are predictable from the verb are included. The predictability of these properties results from their inherent givenness, and it does not seem reasonable to count some inherently given relational properties as a matter of valency, but not others (compare Helbig (1971:38f) and Heidolph et ale (1981:479) who distinguish between the quantitative, syntactic and semantic aspect of valency).
The present paper is an attempt to describe a particular semantic domain in Thai, that of local relations, in terms of a gradual interconnection of what traditional descriptions usually regard as distinct and isolated categories. It is based on the well-known observation that isolating languages like Thai typically display a high degree of 'multifunctionality', or else of syntactic 'versatility' of very many lexical items. […] The semantic area studied in the following pages yields a clear systematic interconnection of three different categories, viz. that of nouns – as the focal instance of maximum syntactic independence –, that of verbs – as, conversely, the focal instance of maximally relational concepts –, and, as an intermediary category between these two, that of prepositions which the system lexically feeds from both these opposite ends. The examples given in the course of this paper have been obtained from published grammatical literature, from Thai texts, and from informants.
According to the present state of research, there seems to be no language which shows possessive classifiers and possessive verbs corresponding to English "to have" at the same time. In classifier languages predicative possession is expressed by verbless clauses, i.e. by existential clauses ("there is my possessed item"), equative clauses ("the possessed item is mine" "that is my possessed item") or by locative expressions ("the possessed item is near me"), in which the classifier in the case of non-inherent possession marks the nature of the relationship. While most Melanesian languages, as for instance Fijian, Lenakel, Pala and Tolai are classifier languages, Nguna, a Melanesian language spoken in Vanuatu, only shows traces of the Melanesian possessive classifier system, but, in contrast to the other Melanesian languages, it has a possessive verb, namely 'peani' "to have". In order to show how the Nguna possessive constructions deviate from the common Melanesian type, we shall start with a brief description of the Melanesian possessive constructions in general, and that of Fijian in particular.
The approach outlined in the present paper is based on observations made with African languages. Although the 1000-odd African languages display a remarkable extent of structural variation, there are certain structures that do not seem to occur in Africa. Thus, to our knowledge, an African language having anything that could be called an ergative case or a numeral classifier system has not been discovered so far. It may turn out that our approach can, in a modified form, be made applicable to languages outside Africa. This , however, is a possibility that has not been considered here. The present approach is based essentially on diachronic findings in that it uses observations on language evolution in order to account for structural differences between languages. Thus, it has double potential: apart from describing and explaining typological diversity it can also be material to reconstructing language history.
At the end of last year, I designed an inquiry about the present state of linguistic typology in the form of a questionnaire. It was an attempt to cover the whole field by formulating the questions which seemed most relevant to it. This questionnaire is reproduced, without modifications, following this preface. In the first days of this year, it was sent to 33 linguists who I know are working in the field. The purpose was to form, on the basis of responses received, a picture of convergences and divergences among trends of present-day linguistic typology. The idea was also to get an objective basis for my report on "The present state of linguistic typology", to be delivered at the XIII. International Congress of Linguistics at Tokyo, 1982.
Possessive constructions are grammatical constructions which contain two nominals and express that the referent of one of these nominals belongs to the other. The kind of relationship denoted by possessive constructions is not only that of ownership (1), as the term "possessive" might suggest, but also that of kinship (2), bodypart relationship (3), part/whole relationship (4) and similar relationships [...]. The following investigation will start with possessive constructions on phrase level, i.e. possessive phrases, and then deal with possessive constructions on clause level.
The basic question is whether POSSESSOR and POSSESSUM are on the same level as the roles of VALENCE, two additional roles as it were. My research on POSSESSION has shown (Seiler 1981:7 ff.) that this is not the case, that there is a difference in principle between POSSESSION and VALENCE. However, there are multiple interactions between the two domains, and these interactions shall constitute the object of the following inquiry. It is hoped that this will contribute to a better understanding both of POSSESSION and of VALENCE.
In this study I want to show, above all, that the linguistic expression of POSSESSION is not a given but represents a problem to be solved by the human mind. We must recognize from the outset that linguistic POSSESSION presupposes conceptual or notional POSSESSION, and I shall say more about the latter in Chapter 3. Certain varieties of linguistic structures in the particular languages are united by the fact that they serve the common purpose of expressing notional POS SESSION. But this cannot be their sole common denominator. How would we otherwise be able to recognize, to understand, to learn and to translate a particular linguistic structure as representing POSSESSION? There must be a properly linguistic common denominator, an invariant, that makes this possible. The invariant must be present both within a particular language and in cross-language comparison. What is the nature of such an invariant? As I intend to show, it consists in operational programs and functional principles corresponding to the purpose of expressing notional POSSESSION. The structures of possessivity which we find in the languages of the world represent the traces of these operations, and from the traces it becomes possible to reconstruct stepwise the operations and functions.
In my Cahuilla Grammar (Seiler 1977:276-282) and in a subsequent paper (Seiler 1980:229-236) I have drawn attention to the fact that many kin terms in this language, especially those that have a corresponding reciprocal term in the ascending direction – like niece or nephew in relation to aunt – occur in two expressions of quite different morphological shape. The following remarks are intended to furnish an explanation of this apparent duplicity.
One of the striking features in modern Newari noun phrases is the wide usage of a set of affixes found in combination with the various elements that may expand a noun into an endocentric construction. At first sight such affixation would appear as a linking device by which the subordinate constituents of a noun phrase are tied to their head noun. Closer investigation, however, reveals a more complex picture which I have attempted to outline in the following paragraphs. The results of this inspection lead to the conclusion that the pattern of affixation displayed in Newari mirrors the close interaction of two converse functional principles: both the syntagmatic function of nominal determination on the one hand and a paradigmatic function – the formation of certain types of lexicalized expressions in Newari – formally tie in with each other by the application of one common technique.
The language of the Cahuillas shows two systems of expressions referring to kinship, which could be termed, respectively, as labeling-relational and as descriptive-establishing. […] Descriptive terms show two properties: 1. They are analysable into constituent elements so as to recognize the connection between the term and the proposition. 2. They are distinguishable from the proposition: a. by a special formal element […], in Cahuilla the absolutive suffix. b. by a narrowing or specialization in the meaning. A term which is not descriptive, i.e. which is not connected with a proposition, I shall call "label", "1abeling": It does not say anything about the object but is assigned to it just as a label is attached to a thing […].
Using Ultan's theory of descriptivity grading as a starting point, I will attempt to capture this differential utility in terms of [...] criteria of literalness, explicitness and syntactic complexity. I will first briefly present his System and investigate some generalizations which he has proposed on the basis of his study of body part terminologies in numerous languages. I will apply his theory to nouns in this and four other semantic domains, in three North American Indian languages. I will test his generalizations and propose some new ones. I will then present an alternative system of descriptivity grading and compare the results of its application with those of Ultan's system. In the final section I will suggest another methodology for quantification. An appendix at the end of the paper lists all of the descriptive lexical items mentioned, graded according to both systems.
The basic idea I want to develop and to substantiate in this paper consists in replacing – where necessary – the traditional concept of linguistic category or linguistic relation understood as 'things', as reified hypostases, by the more dynamic concept of dimension. A dimension of language structure is not coterminous with one single category or relation but, instead, accommodates several of them. It corresponds to certain well circumscribed purposive functions of linguistic activity as well as to certain definite principles and techniques for satisfying these functions. The true universals of language are represented by these dimensions, principles, and techniques which constitute the true basis for non-historical inter-language comparison. The categories and relations used in grammar are condensations – hypostases as it were – of such dimensions, principles, and techniques. Elsewhere I have outlined the theory which I want to test here in a case study.
In an earlier paper, I proposed a system for evaluating the relative descriptivity of lexical items in a consistent manner in terms of the interrelations of three metrics. The first of these, including five possible degrees of descriptivity, is based on the premise that the sum of the meaningful parts of a given form is or is not equal to the meaning of the whole. The second, also composed of five degrees, is based on paraphrase-term relations in which the logical quantifiers: all, some and no, are applied to the terms of the paraphrase in one test and to the meaningful parts of the term (linguistic form) in the reversibility test. Both tests are applied in the form of logical propositions. The third metric, with three degrees, deals with the relative explicitness of the meaningful parts of a given form: explicit, implicit or neither. […] This system was then tested in a pilot study involving the fairly limited and semantically homogeneous lexical domain of body-part terms in a specific language, Finnish. The purpose of the present paper is to subject comparable data from other languages to the same kind of analysis and compare the results in order to ascertain whether the generalizations arrived at with the Finnish data also hold for the other languages or, more specifically, which of these generalizations are more or less universal and which language or language-type specific? The additional languages to be examined here are: French, German, Ewe, Maasai and Swahili.
These notes grew out of my preoccupation with writing a grammar of a particular language, Cahuilla, which is spoken in Southern California and belongs to the Uto-Aztecan family. [...] The Introduction to the Grammar as a whole – of which two sections are reproduced here in a modified version – tries to integrate the synoptic views of the different chapters into a series of comprehensive statements. The statements cluster around two topics: 1. A presentation of Cahuilla as a type of language. 2. Remarks on writing a grammar.
Actually, the title should include intralinguistic variation along with the interlinguistic one. For variation within one and the same language is the thing which directly presents itself to the observation while it still remains to be demonstrated that phenomena in different languages can be regarded as variants to be assigned to one and the same invariant principle. There are two senses in which the terms of variant, variation are used in the following remarks: one, which has just been mentioned, concerns the assignment of variants to some definite invariant. The other implies the possibility of gradient transitions and opposes the notions of discreteness and of yes-or-no. I shall not try here to reconcile these two senses and I trust that what I intend to show will become intelligible nevertheless. Henri Delacroix (1924:126f) has reformulated an old hypothesis which seems worth exploring in connection with the search for language universals: "Une langue est une variation historique sur le grand thème humain du langage." It remains to be seen what "le grand thème" or rather "les grands thèmes" are about and what particular language-specific properties could be shown to be variants of one and the same theme. One such major theme which we shall now investigate is the interrelation between, on one side, a word or a sequence of words, and, on the other, a sentence. As this for us is not only a syntactic but also a semantic problem, we might rephrase the anti thesis as that between a term or sequence of terms and a proposition. Two alternative views on the nature of this interrelation seem conceivable: A. The interrelation is yes-or-no, i. e. an element or a string of elements either constitutes a term (sequence of terms) or a proposition. B. The interrelation is of gradient nature, i. e. we find intermediary stages. Both alternatives are appropriate, but under different circumstances.
Three quantificational approaches to the measurement of lexical descriptivity are proposed, based on: the semantic sum of the parts of a lexeme is equal to the whole, paraphrase-term and term-paraphrase congruence, explicitness of semantic elements of a construction. Combination of all possible values into tripartite sets and then into equipollent groups results in a system composed of 12 grades. This system was tested with a semantic domain of the Finnish lexicon: body-part terms. The descriptivity indices for each lexical item were correlated with natural divisions of the body, construction-motivation types (form, function, location), grammatical construction types (endo- and exocentric compounds, derived forms, metaphors), and loanwords. These comparisons result in a number of grade profiles whereby specific descriptivity grades are characteristically associated with one or more types of body section, construction motivation, and grammatical construction. Diachronic and synchronic evidence points overwhelmingly to a process of semantic narrowing in the development of descriptive words and labels from phrases or sentences.
The two papers included in this volume have developed from work with the CHILDES tools and the Media Editor in the two research projects, "Second language acquisition of German by Russian learners", sponsored by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, from 1998 to 1999 (directed by Ursula Stephany, University of Cologne, and Wolfgang Klein, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen) and "The age factor in the acquisition of German as a second language", sponsored by the German Science Foundation (DFG), Bonn, since 2000 (directed by Ursula Stephany, University of Cologne, and Christine Dimroth, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen). The CHILDES Project has been developed and is being continuously improved at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, under the supervision of Brian MacWhinney. Having used the CHILDES tools for more than ten years for transcribing and analyzing Greek child data there it was no question that I would also use them for research into the acquisition of German as a second language and analyze the big amount of spontaneous speech gathered from two Russian girls with the help of the CLAN programs. When in the spring of 1997, Steven Gillis from the University of Antwerp (in collaboration with Gert Durieux) developed a lexicon-based automatic coding system based on the CLAN program MOR and suitable for coding languages with richer morphologies than English, such as Modern Greek. Coding huge amounts of data then became much quicker and more comfortable so that I decided to adopt this system for German as well. The paper "Working with the CHILDES Tools" is based on two earlier manuscripts which have grown out of my research on Greek child language and the many CHILDES workshops taught in Germany, Greece, Portugal, and Brazil over the years. Its contents have now been adapted to the requirements of research into the acquisition of German as a second language and for use on Windows.
Defined as a general inner-linguistic function, modality pervades language and there can thus be no strictly nonmodal predicative expressions. We shall, however, in what follows, keep to grammatical tradition and exclude declarative and interrogative sentences in the indicative mood from consideration. Although a thorough study of the development of modal negation should prove most rewarding, we must renounce such an attempt out of space limits. […] [W]e shall be concerned with the formal linguistic devices employed by the child for expressing modality in various languages and the functions these serve, i.e. how they are used. Only by the conjoint study of form and function can one hope to arrive at a fair understanding of how the modalizing function develops in the ontogenesis of language.
I shall use the precise term 'interlinear morphemic translation (IMT) to designate the object of this study. [...] An IMT is a translation of a text in a language L1 to a string of elements taken from L2 where, ideally, each morpheme of the L1 text is rendered by a morpheme of L2 or a configuration of symbols representing its meaning and where the sequence of the units of the translation corresponds to the sequence of the morphemes which they render. [...] An IMT is needed whenever it is essential that the reader grasp the grammatical structure of the L1 text but is presumed to be so unfamiliar with L1 that he will not be able to do so merely with the aid of a normal translation and the context in which the text is cited. [...] The primary aim of an IMT is to make the grammatical structure of the L1 text transparent. The textual fluency of the IMT by standards of the L2 grammar is a subordinate aim at best.
Studies of syntax in first language acquisition have so far concentrated on the propositional side of the sentence, i.e. on the occurrence and interplay of semantic roles like agent, benefactive, objective, etc. and their syntactic expression. The modality constituent, however, has received little attention in the study of child language. This may be due in part to the impetus more recent research in this field has received from studies of the acquisition of English, a language with poor verb morphology as compared to synthetic languages. The research to be presented in this paper is concerned with an early stage of the acquisition of Modern Greek as a first language, a language with a particularly rich verb morphology. Since modality, aspect, and tense are obligatorily marked on the main verb in Mod. Greek, this language offers an excellent opportunity for studying the development of these fundamental categories of verbal grammar at an earlier stage than in more analytic languages. [...] As this paper is concerned with the semantic categories of verbal grammar mentioned above as weIl as with their formal expression, only utterances containing a verb will be considered. For reasons of space we shall further limit ourselves to those utterances containing a main verb. Such utterances divide into two classes, modal and non-modal. [...] In spite of Calbert's claim (Calbert 1975) that there are no strictly non-modal expressions, affirmative and negative statements as well as questions not containing a modal verb will be considered as non-modal. As will be shown below, modal and non-modal expressions are formally differentiated at the stage of language acquisition studied.
In my paper "Thesen zum Universalienprojekt" (1976) I mention two complementary procedures for discovering language universals: 1. The investigation of the dimensions and principles whose existence is necessitated by the communicative function of language; 2. The development of a formal language in which all syntactic rules are explicitly formulated and in which all syntactic categories are defined by their relation to a minimally necessary number of syntactic categories. Since the first procedure is treated in many of the other papers of this volume, I wish to discuss the role of formal methods in the research of language universals. As an example I want to take the dimensions of determination and show how expressions denoting concepts are modified and turned into reference identifying expressions. There is a general end a specific motivation for the introduction of formal methods into linguistics. The general motivation is to make statements in linguistics as exact and verifiable as they are in the natural sciences. The specific motivation is to make the grammars of various languages comparable by describing them with the same form of rules. The form has to be flexible enough to describe the phenomena of any possible natural language. All natural languages have in common that they may potentially express any meaning. The flexibility of the form of grammatical rules may therefore be attained, if syntactic rules are not isolated from the semantic function they express and syntactic classes are not defined merely by the relative position of their elements in the sentence, but also by the communicative function their elements fulfill in their combination with elements of other classes.
Montague (1974) has shown that this flexibility may be attained by using the language of algebra combined with categorial grammar. Algebraic systems have been developed by mathematicians to model any systems whose operations are definable. Montague does not merely use the tools of mathematics for describing the features of language, but regards syntax, semantics and pragmatics as branches of mathematics. One of the advantages of this approach is that we may apply the laws developed by mathematicians to the systems constructed by linguists for the description and explanation of natural language.
Bestimmte seit den sechziger Jahren zur Analyse früher kindlicher Äußerungen benutzte Beschreibungsmodelle unterschätzen die sprachliche Kompetenz des Kindes, indem sie die Struktur seiner Äußerungen auf Distributionsphänomene der Oberflächenstruktur reduzieren, andere Modelle überschätzen diese Kompetenz, indem sie kindlichen Äußerungen mehr sprachliche Information zuschreiben, als sie enthalten. Wenn außersprachliche Information auf systematische Art und Weise in die Untersuchung der sprachlichen Kommunikation zwischen Kind und Erwachsenem einbezogen wird, findet einerseits die Tatsache eine Erklärung, daß diese Kommunikation in so erstaunlichem Maße erfolgreich ist, andererseits erlaubt diese Beschreibungsweise es aber, frühe kindliche Äußerungen als sprachlich so undeterminiert darzustellen, wie sie sind.
The speakers of the Paraná dialect of Kaingáng, from whom the data of this study were gathered, have lived in close contact with the Brazilians since before the turn of the century. Although many members of this group are still monolingual and Kaingáng is spoken in all the homes, the influence of Portuguese is making an impact on the language. This can be seen not only in isolated loan words, but it is slowly changing the time dimension of the language and the thinking of the Indians. The change seems to have come about first through loan words, but it is now also affecting the semantic structure of the language and is beginning to affect the grammatical structure as well. The study here presented deals with this change as it can be seen in relation to time expressions such as yesterday – today – tomorrow; units of time such as day – month – year; kinship terms; and finally aspect particles. In considering the time expressions the meaning of various paradigms will be discussed. The paradigms are related to the time when events took place, to sequence of events, and to the point of the action. No Brazilian influence can be observed here. In the discussion of the units of time the semantic area of these units before and after Brazilian influence will be explored. Through Brazilian influence vocabulary has been developed with which it is possible to accurately pinpoint events in time which was not possible before this. The time distinctions within the kinship system will be discussed, and how they change with the influence of Brazilian terms. A whole new generation distinction is added in the modified kinship system. Similary several new aspect particles are being created through contractions, which now contain a time element. The whole development shows an emphasis on fine distinctions in time depth which came about through the contact with Portuguese and which can be observed in several points of the structure of Kaingáng.
The aim of any Automatic Translation project is to give a mechanical procedure for finding an equivalent expression in the target language to any sentence in the source language. The aim of my linguistic translation project is to find the corresponding structures of the languages dealt with. The two main problems that have to be solved by such a project are the difference of word order between the source language and the target language and the ambiguous words of the source language for which the appropriate word in the target language has to be chosen. The first problem is of major linguistic interest: once the project has been worked out, it will give us the parallel sentence structures for the two languages in question. Since there is no complete analysis of any language that could be used for the purpose of automatic translation, we decided to build up our project sentence by sentence. The rules which are needed for translating each sentence will have to be included in the complete program anyway, and the translation may be checked and corrected immediately. The program is split up into subroutines for each word-class, so that a correction of the program in case of an unsatisfactory translation does not complicate the program unnecessarily.
It is my intention to make two major points in this paper: 1. The first has to do with finding a frame within which the modal expressions of one particular Ancient IE [Indoeuropean] language – I have chosen Classical Greek – can be best described. I shall try to point out that the regularities which we find in these expressions must depend on an underlying principle, represented by abstract structures. These structures are semanto-syntactic, which means that the semantic properties or bundles of properties are arranged not in a linear order but in a hierarchical order, analogous to a bracketing in a PS structure. The abstract structures we propose have, of course, a very tentative character. They can only be accepted as far as evidence for them can be furnished. 2. My second point has to do with the modal verb forms that were the object of the studies of most Indo-Europeanists. If in the innermost bracket of a semanto-syntactic structure two semantic properties or bundles of properties can be exchanged without any further change in the total structure, and if this change is correlated with a change in verbal mood forms and nothing else, then I think we are faced with a case where these forms can be said to have a meaning of their own. I shall also try to show how these meanings are to be understood as bundles of features rather than as unanalyzed terms. In my final remarks: I shall try to outline the bearing these views have on comparative IE linguistics.
The aim of this paper is to give the semantic profile of the Greek verb-deriving suffixes -íz(o), -én(o), -év(o), -ón(o), -(i)áz(o), and -ín(o), with a special account of the ending -áo/-ó. The patterns presented are the result of an empirical analysis of data extracted from extended interviews conducted with 28 native Greek speakers in Athens, Greece in February 2009. In the first interview task the test persons were asked to force(=create) verbs by using the suffixes -ízo, -évo, -óno, -(i)ázo, and -íno and a variety of bases which conformed to the ontological distinctions made in Lieber (2004). In the second task the test persons were asked to evaluate three groups of forced verbs with a noun, an adjective, and an adverb, respectively, by using one (best/highly acceptable verb) to six (worst/unacceptable verb) points. In the third task nineteen established verb pairs with different suffixes and the ending -áo/-ó were presented. The test persons were asked to report whether there was some difference between them and what exactly this difference was. The differences reported were transformed into 16 alternations. In the fourth task 21 established verbs with different suffixes were presented. The test persons were asked to give the "opposite" or "near opposite" expression for each verb. The rationale behind this task was to arrive at the meaning of the suffixes through the semantics of the opposites. In the analysis Rochelle's Lieber's (2004) theoretical framework is used. The results of the analysis suggest (i) a sign-based treatment of affixes, (ii) a vertical preference structure in the semantic structure of the head suffixes which takes into account the semantic make-up of the bases, and (iii) the integration of socioexpressive meaning into verb structures.
It has become commonplace to introduce works on aspect with the remark that there is hardly another field in linguistics so much plagued by terminological and notional confusion. [..] About 20 major books claiming a comprehensive treatment have come to my attention during little more than the past half decade […]. Among these books are five that form the subject of this paper in a narrower sense, given that the present article originally started out as a combined review of these five works: […] Even if one is not at all keen on monocultures, it is clear that the obvious disunity in fundamental points of view makes the situation increasingly difficult for the "ordinary working linguist". It is getting impossible to keep up with the many different issues raised in the theoretical literature when, for instance, writing a chapter on aspect for a descriptive grammar of a language. As a result, a tremendous gap between descriptive and theoretical work has arisen. This has not gone unnoticed in the literature. There are several recent publications in which explicit attempts are made to bridge this gap […], all of them trying to add a typological perspective to aspect theory and to free it from its purely truth-conditional embedding, which was the dominant paradigm in the 70ies and 80ies. But again, these works are often themselves cast into specific theoretical frameworks, more often than not ignoring other approaches to the field if they do not fit their persuasions. I will therefore avail myself of the opportunity of this review article by briefly sorting out the differences in the fundamental assumptions and theoretical primitives of the various approaches, in order to come to grips with the aspectological landscape. A general, chiefly historically oriented assessment is presented in the first part of this paper (see section 1). The second part is then devoted to a detailed discussion of the books under review against the background etablished in this survey (see section 2). At the end, I will try to draw some conclusions and hint at some directions for future work with aspect in a descriptive and/or typological context (see section 3).
Different languages employ different morphosyntactic devices for expressing genericity. And, of course, they also make use of different morphosyntactic and semantic or pragmatic cues which may contribute to the interpretation of a sentence as generic rather than episodic. [...] We will advance the strong hypo thesis that it is a fundamental property of lexical elements in natural language that they are neutral with respect to different modes of reference or non-reference. That is, we reject the idea that a certain use of a lexical element, e.g. a use which allows reference to particular spatio-temporally bounded objects in the world, should be linguistically prior to all other possible uses, e.g. to generic and non-specific uses. From this it follows that we do not consider generic uses as derived from non-generic uses as it is occasionally assumed in the literature. Rather, we regard these two possibilities of use as equivalent alternative uses of lexical elements. The typological differences to be noted therefore concern the formal and semantic relationship of generic and non-generic uses to each other; they do not pertain to the question of whether lexical elements are predetermined for one of these two uses. Even supposing we found a language where generic uses are always zero-marked and identical to lexical sterns, we would still not assume that lexical elements in this language primarily have a generic use from which the non-generic uses are derived. (Incidentally, none of the languages examined, not even Vietnamese, meets this criterion.)
In the present monograph, we will deal with questions of lexical typology in the nominal domain. By the term "lexical typology in the nominal domain", we refer to crosslinguistic regularities in the interaction between (a) those areas of the lexicon whose elements are capable of being used in the construction of "referring phrases" or "terms" and (b) the grammatical patterns in which these elements are involved. In the traditional analyses of a language such as English, such phrases are called "nominal phrases". In the study of the lexical aspects of the relevant domain, however, we will not confine ourselves to the investigation of "nouns" and "pronouns" but intend to take into consideration all those parts of speech which systematically alternate with nouns, either as heads or as modifiers of nominal phrases. In particular, this holds true for adjectives both in English and in other Standard European Languages. It is well known that adjectives are often difficult to distinguish from nouns, or that elements with an overt adjectival marker are used interchangeably with nouns, especially in particular semantic fields such as those denoting MATERIALS or NATlONALlTIES. That is, throughout this work the expression "lexical typology in the nominal domain" should not be interpreted as "a typology of nouns", but, rather, as the cross-linguistic investigation of lexical areas constitutive for "referring phrases" irrespective of how the parts-of-speech system in a specific language is defined.
This study examines the particularities of multilingual discourse, based on the example of recorded conversations in a trilingual family in Canada. It combines two different fields of linguistic research: multilingualism and conversation analysis. The study of multilingualism has developed into a popular field of linguistic research over the past two decades. In general, it focuses on bilingualism as a social and individual phenomenon, and in particular on the alternation between two languages in the speech of bilinguals. For this alternation, the term code-switching is widely used. Usually, the term refers to language alternation both between sentences and within sentence boundaries. From a sociolinguistic perspective code-switching is often interpreted as a means of signaling group membership in bilingual communities, whereas grammatical analyses examine how morphosyntactic units from different languages are combined (and can be combined) within one sentence. Auer (1998: 3) suggests the study of the conversational structure of code-switching as a third perspective on bilingual language usage, one that he claims has been widely neglected by linguistic research in the past. In particular, those cases of language alternation between utterances (sentences) but within the same conversation cannot be described adequately from either a macro-sociolinguistic or a morphosyntactic perspective.
In this paper we test previous claims concerning the universality of patterns of polysemy and semantic change in perception verbs. Implicit in such claims are two elements: firstly, that the sharing of two related senses A and B by a given form is cross-linguistically widespread, and matched by a complementary lack of some rival polysemy, and secondly that the explanation for the ubiquity of a given pattern of polysemy is ultimately rooted in our shared human cognitive make-up. However, in comparison to the vigorous testing of claimed universals that has occurred in phonology, syntax and even basic lexical meaning, there has been little attempt to test proposed universals of semantic extension against a detailed areal study of non-European languages. To address this problem we examine a broad range of Australian languages to evaluate two hypothesized universals: one by Viberg (1984), concerning patterns of semantic extension across sensory modalities within the domain of perception verbs (i .e. intra-field extensions), and the other by Sweetser (1990), concerning the mapping of perception to cognition (i.e. trans-field extensions). Testing against the Australian data allows one claimed universal to survive, but demolishes the other, even though both assign primacy to vision among the senses.