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Chinese is often taken as a prime example of an isolating language. Most relation marking takes the form of particles rather than affixes or inflections. Possibly relevant to the facts that are presented below, Chinese has been argued to not have grammaticalized the sort of pivot constructions normally associated with grammatical relations. That is, it has been argued to not have any particular alignment, as there are no grammatical relations, and the clause pattern is simply topic-comment (Chao 1968, Lü 1979, LaPolla 1993, 1995, 2009; LaPolla & Poa 2005, 2006). We will first talk more generally about structures found in Sino-Tibetan languages, and then focus on Modern Mandarin Chinese.
This paper focuses on restrictions on the ordering of internal constituents of noun phrases in Chichewa, especially when those constituents are discontinuous. The motivation for discontinuity of the NP constituents will be given, together with discussion of constructions that can be subsumed under this rubric but that do not really involve discontinuity in the canonical sense. These are constructions where a topic NP in a left periphery position is either linked anaphorically with a modifier "remnant" or semantically with its hyponym in post-verbal position. According to Guthrie's classification of Bantu languages, Chichewa is placed in zone N unit N31. It is regarded as a dialect of Nyanja, classified as belonging to unit N30 (Guthrie 1967-71).
In his 1995 monograph, Apresyan suggests that it would be extremely interesting to investigate the means of expressing the definiteness/indefiniteness opposition in languages that do not have articles. In this paper, I will attempt to find possible correlations between the organization of discourse and the positions in which the (in)definite nominals may appear within a sentence of Russian. I will examine the information structure of Russian sentences and, based on the previous analyses, provide a new account of their organization with respect to information packaging. I will then look at various nominal elements contained in certain parts of a sentence and arrive at a system describing the distribution of NPs in Russian with respect to the information structure. The ultimate goal of this paper is to establish and motivate a system of correlations between various types of NPs and functions of information structure. This goal will be achieved by determining which characteristic of a NP may serve as a criterion allowing to provide a one-to-one mapping.
The goal of this paper is to study the influence of information structure in the referential status of linguistic expressions such as bare plurals and indefinite NPs in Spanish. In particular, we will argue for the following claims: (a) Spanish bare plurals can receive a generic interpretation in object position and (b) Spanish bare plurals in object position can be topics in siru. We will focus on object position because of the well known semantic and syntactic constraints that affect preverbal subject bare plurals in Spanish.
The purpose of this paper is to provide a unified (i.e. independent of lexical categories) account of Persian stress. I show that by differentiating word- and phrase-level stress rules, one can account for the superficial differences exemplified in (1) above and many of the stipulations suggested by previous scholars. The paper is organized as follows. In section 1, I look at nouns and adjectives and propose a rule that would account for their stress pattern. In section 2, I extend the stress rule to verbs and show the problem this category poses to our generalization. The main proposal of this paper is discussed in section 3. I introduce the phrasal stress rule in Persian and show that by differentiating word-level and phrase-level stress rules, one can come to a unified account of Persian stress. Section 4 deals with some problematic eases for the proposed generalization and discusses some tentative solutions and their theoretical consequences. Section 5 concludes the paper.
The left periphery has enjoyed extensive study over the past years, especially drawn against the framework of Rizzi (1997). It is argued that in this part of the clause, relations are licensed that have direct impact on discourse interpretation and information structure, such as topic, focus, clause type, and the like. I take this line of research up and argue in favour of a split CP on the basis of strictly left-peripheral phenomena across languages. But I also want to link the relation of articulated clause structure, syntactic derivations, and information structure. In particular, I outline the basics of a model of syntactic derivation that makes explicit reference to the interpretive interfaces in a cyclic, dynamic manner.
I suggest a return to older stages of generative grammar, at least in spirit, by proposing that clausal derivation stretches over three important areas which I call prolific domains: the part of the clause which licenses argument/thematic relations (V- or θ-domain), the part that licenses agreement/grammatica1 relations (T- or ϕ-domain), and the part that licenses discourse/information-relevant relations (C- or ω-domain). It is thus a rather broad and conceptual notion of "adding" and "omitting" that I am concerned with here, namely licensing of material to relate to information structure, and the desire to find an answer to the question which elements might be added or omitted across languages to establish such links.
The present paper deals with selected morphological, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics of nominal totalizers in German and in Brazilian Portuguese. In particular, it analyzes the elements 'todo', 'cada', 'ambos' and 'os dois', as well as 'alle', 'jeder', 'der ganze' and 'beide'. In terms of morphology, it describes the formation of gender, number and case forms. In the field of syntax, it focuses on the position of totalizers in the nominal phrase, their relations to determiners and quantifiers, and the functional distribution of declension types. In terms of semantics and pragmatics, it investigates the codification of referential and quantificational information, definiteness and cumulative v distributive totalization. The epistemological interest is defined by the objectives of linguistic comparison between German and Brazilian Portuguese, including the analysis of typical errors committed by language learners in both directions.
Ausgangspunkt dieses Beitrags ist die Beobachtung (cf. Seiler 1984), daß komplexe Sätze, insbesondere Komplementsätze, einerseits die Dimension PARTIZIPATION 'abschließen', andererseits aber auch über sie hinausgehen. Hier treffen offensichtlich zwei Dimensionen (im Sinne von UNITYP) aufeinander: die Dimension der PARTIZIPATION einerseits und die Dimension der NEKTION andererseits, deren generelle Funktion etwa bestimmt werden könnte als die sprachliche Darstellung von Relationen zwischen Sachverhalten bzw. Propositionen (bzw. den entsprechenden Konzeptualisierungen der Relationen zwischen Sachverhalten). Die 'Nahtstelle' zwischen den beiden Dimensionen soll hier anhand von einigen Beispielen aus dem Baskischen diskutiert werden.
Im folgenden sollen Nominalphrasen im Zentralthai auf die ihnen eigentümliche Erscheinung der Numeralklassifikatoren untersucht werden. Der inzwischen allgemein üblich gewordene Terminus Klassifikator bezeichnet eine im Thai relativ umfangreiche Gruppe von Lexemen, die als Exponenten von nach inhaltlichen Merkmalen geschiedenen Nominalklassen figurieren. Doch ist es unverkennbar, daß diesen Lexemen abgesehen von ihrer lexikalischen Funktion vor allem eine wesentliche syntaktische Funktion zukommt: denn ihr Auftreten ist an ganz bestimmte Konstruktionen gebunden. Mit dieser syntaktischen Funktion wollen wir uns im folgenden befassen.