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Außerhalb der indoeuropäischen Sprachen [erfreut sich] [d]ie Kategorie „Adjektiv“ […] einer geringeren Verbreitung als man als Laie vermuten würde, und es zeigen sich in nicht-indoeuropäischen Sprachen von den europäischen Sprachen stark verschiedene Aufteilungen der Welt in Nomina und Verba. Eine bisher nicht beschriebene Verteilung von Konzepten auf Wortarten in der Sprache Guarani, welche hauptsächlich in Paraguay gesprochen wird, ist das Thema dieser Arbeit.
Je nach regionaler Herkunft realisieren Sprecher des Deutschen die beiden Wörter "Verein" und "überall" unterschiedlich. [...] Der Grundgedanke dieser sprachtypologischen Unterscheidung, bei der wir uns hauptsächlich auf die Arbeiten von P. Auer (1993, 1994, 2001) sowie P. Auer / S. Uhmann (1988) beziehen, besteht darin, dass alle Sprachen eine Form von Isochronie anstreben.
Zeitnamen
(2004)
Der menschliche Alltag, das gesamte gesellschaftliche und individuelle Leben, unser Denken, Planen und Handeln basiert auf der Unterscheidung und Benennung von Zeitpunkten (im Sinne punktuell wahrgenommener Zeit) und Zeitabschnitten (im Sinne von sich über einen Zeitraum erstreckender Zeit). Damit ist eine von mindestens drei Bedingungen, onymisch bezeichnet zu werden, hochgradig erfülllt: die Relevanz des Objekts (beziehungsweise der Entität) in seiner Singularität und Individualität für den Menschen.
Vom Name-n-forscher zum Name-ns-forscher : unbefugte oder befugte ns-Fuge in Namen(s)-Komposita?
(2004)
Um die nun im Titel gestellte Frage zu beantworten: Es ist befugt, Komposita mit Name als Erstglied mit -ns- zu verfugen. Die Korpusbefimde weisen überdeutlich aus, daß "ns- hier hochproduktiv ist. Als Grund fiir diese starke Bevorzugung der ns-Fuge wurde der "Rückzug" der n-Fuge auf die Klasse der belebten, schwachen Maskulina und damit die Funktionalisierung ebendieser Fuge als Klassen- und Belebtheitszeichen ermittelt. Der Name als Simplex hat sich zwar bereits mit dem starken Genitiv Singular Namens aus der Klasse der schwachen Maskulina entfernt, doch verharrt er weiterhin in einer kleinen Mischklasse, deren Mitglieder zum größten Teil bereits in die starke (sog. "Balken-") Klasse abgewandert sind oder dabei sind, dies zu tun. Daß der Name sich diesem Wandel entzieht, geschieht jedoch unbefugter- und unerklärtermaßen. Die Beschäftigung mit den Namen/s-Schwankungen hat ferner erbracht, daß gerade die ältere Schicht an Namens-Komposita lexikalisiert ist (Namenstag, Namensvetter) und daß die n-Fuge nur noch in fachsprachlicher Verwendung dominiert (Namenaktie, Namenkunde, Namenforschung). Als förderlich für die ns-Verfugung haben sich gerade die (ansonsten fugenhemmend wrrkenden) deverbalen Zweitglieder erweisen (Namensgebung), als hinderlich dagegen die Komplexität der 1. Konstitutente (Familiennamenforschung) - wenngleich diese Tendenzen nur fiir die s-Fuge ermittelt wurden. Die ns-Fuge erweist sich ilrrerseits als bessere Binnengrenzmarkierung, da [s] positionsbeschränkt, d.h. im Wortanlaut blockiert ist. Sowohl bei -n- als auch bei -ns- handelt es sich um paradigmische Fugen. Der Zufall bzw. das Alphabet will es, daß der Eintrag Name zwischen Naivling und Nandu (< span.-südam. nandu [njan'du]), dem südamerikanischen Kollegen des afrikanischen Straußenvogels, angesiedelt ist. Was den Nandu betrifft, so hat sich dieser Beitrag zumindest darum bemüht, den Kopf nicht in den Sand zu stecken. Was jedoch den Naivling anbelangt, so befinden wir uns bei dem faszinierenden Thema der Fugenelemente immer noch in diesem Stadium, auch wenn mittlerweile bei der Frage nach Funktion und Grammatik dieser "Grenzfälle morphologischer Einheiten" (so der Titel von Fuhrhop 1998) große Durchbrüche erzielt worden sind. Wenn es aber, wie in diesem Beitrag, um Schwankungs- und damit um Grenzfälle solcher Grenzfälle geht, so tut sich, um die Sache positiv zu wenden, ein ganzer Strauß (oder Nandu) an Desideraten, Herausforderungen und Forschungsperspektiven auf.
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.
Als Jürgen Udolph am 1. Oktober 2003 das Symposion "Völkernamen, Ländernamen, Landschaftsnamen" in Leipzig eröffnete, sagte er unter anderem: "Ich freue mich, daß Sie alle den Weg in die neuen Bundesländer gefunden haben". Genau dieser Satz leitete unbeabsichtigt die Fragestellung meines damaligen Vortrags bzw. des hier vorliegenden Beitrags ein: Ist das Syntagma die neuen Bundesländer bereits ein Eigenname, ist es noch eine definite Beschreibung, oder ist es etwas dazwischen? Wäre es auch möglich gewesen, zu sagen: "Ich freue mich, daß Sie den Weg in ein neues Bundesland ... " oder" ... in das neue Bundesland Sachsen gefunden haben"? Die muttersprachliche Kompetenz verneint diese Alternativen eher, und dies deutet daraufhin, daß dieses Syntagma bereits stark proprialisiert (oder onymisiert) sein muß.
In unserem Beitrag gehen wir der Frage nach, wie Erwachsene neue Fähigkeiten und Fertigkeiten zum mündlichen Kommunizieren erwerben, d.h. aneignen. Ziel ist es, die beteiligten Prozesse für Analyse-, Beratungs- und Vermittlungszwecke zu systematisieren, um Antworten auf die folgenden Fragen zu finden: Welche Teilfähigkeiten werden zum mündlichen Kommunizieren überhaupt benötigt? Welche lassen sich leicht – welche nur schwer oder vielleicht gar nicht vermitteln bzw. aneignen? Welche Methoden eignen sich für die Vermittlung welcher Fähigkeiten? Ausgangspunkt unserer Überlegungen sind praktische Fragen des Kompetenzerwerbs, d.h. des Erwerbs der Fähigkeit, angemessen mündlich kommunizieren zu können. Wir gehen davon aus, dass es sich hierbei um eine spezifische Kompetenz handelt, die sich von anderen Kompetenzen unterscheidet (vgl. Fiehler/ Schmitt i.d.Bd.). Ihre Besonderheit liegt in den spezifischen Bedingungen der mündlichen Kommunikation begründet: Gespräche und Diskurse sind immer das Resultat aller daran Beteiligter, so dass die Anteile und beteiligten Kompetenzen des Einzelnen weniger offensichtlich sind als bei individuellen Tätigkeiten. Mündliche Kommunikation ist durch ihre Flüchtigkeit, Prozesshaftigkeit, Interaktivität und Musterhaftigkeit gekennzeichnet (vgl. Deppermann i.d.Bd., Abschn. 3). Die Bewältigung mündlicher Kommunikation erfordert ein spezifisches Ensemble von Wissen und Fertigkeiten, die sich zusammenfassend als Gesprächskompetenz beschreiben lassen. Auch wenn wir uns in diesem Beitrag auf die Gesprächskompetenz konzentrieren, sind wir nicht der Auffassung, dass der faktische Gesprächsverlauf ausschließlich eine Funktion dieser Kompetenz ist. Vielmehr spielen andere Faktoren wie Emotionen und Affekte, Beziehungs- und Rollenfragen ebenfalls eine Rolle.
Sprachwandel
(2004)
LTAG semantics for questions
(2004)
This papers presents a compositional semantic analysis of interrogatives clauses in LTAG (Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar) that captures the scopal properties of wh- and nonwh-quantificational elements. It is shown that the present approach derives the correct semantics for examples claimed to be problematic for LTAG semantic approaches based on the derivation tree. The paper further provides an LTAG semantics for embedded interrogatives.
0. Introduction 1. Observations concerning the structure of morphosyntactically marked focus constructions 1.1 First observation: SF vs. NSF asymmetry 1.2 Second observation: NSF-NAR parallelism 1.3 Affirmative ex-situ focus constructions (SF, NSF), and narrative clauses (NAR) 2. Grammaticalization 2.1 Cleft hypothesis 2.2 Movement hypothesis 2.3 Narrative hypothesis 2.3.1 Back- or Foregrounding? 2.3.2 Converse directionality of FM and conjunction 3. Language specific analysis 4. Conclusionary remarks References
Weak function word shift
(2004)
The fact that object shift only affects weak pronouns in mainland Scandinavian is seen as an instance of a more general observation that can be made in all Germanic languages: weak function words tend to avoid the edges of larger prosodic domains. This generalisation has been formulated within Optimality Theory in terms of alignment constraints on prosodic structure by Selkirk (1996) in explaining thedistribution of prosodically strong and weak forms of English functionwords, especially modal verbs, prepositions and pronouns. But a purely phonological account fails to integrate the syntactic licensing conditions for object shift in an appropriate way. The standard semantico-syntactic accounts of object shift, onthe other hand, fail to explain why it is only weak pronouns that undergo object shift. This paper develops an Optimality theoretic model of the syntax-phonology interface which is based on the interaction of syntactic and prosodic factors. The account can successfully be applied to further related phenomena in English and German.
Docherty et alii have "noted that several sociolinguistic accounts have shown a sharp distinction between the social trajectories for glottal replacement as opposed to glottal reinforcement, which have normally been treated by phonologists as aspects of 'the same thing'. It may therefore not always be appropriate to treat the two phenomena as manifestations of a single process or as points on a single continuum (presumably along which speakers move through time). From the speaker’s point of view (as manifested by different patterns of speaker behaviour) they appear as independent phenomena" (1997: 307).
Elsewhere I have argued that the three Old Prussian catechisms reflect consecutive stages in the development of a moribund language (1998a, 1998b, 2001a). After first eliminating the orthographical differences between the three versions of parallel texts while maintaining the distinction between linguistic variants and then assigning separate phonemic interpretations to the three versions on the basis of the historical evidence I listed the following phonological differences between the three catechisms.
Fluch- und Schimpfwortschätze sind aus kontrastiver Perspektive bisher kaum analysiert worden, sieht man von einer Vielzahl populärwissenschaftlicher Publikationen ab. Wissenschaftliche Publikationen beziehen sich meist auf eine Einzelsprache und greifen bei der Erklärung der Motive oft zu kurz, weil sie gerade benachbarte Kulturen und Sprachen (auch Dialektgebiete) zu wenig im Blick haben (Dundes 1983). Der vorliegende Beitrag leistet eine vergleichende Zusammenstellung der Fluch- und Schimpfwortschätze dreier mehr oder weniger benachbarter Sprachen, des (nördlichen) Niederländischen, des Deutschen und des Schwedischen, also zweier eng verwandter westgermanischer und einer nordgermanischen Sprache.
Prinzipien der Proprialitätsmarkierung : Familiennamenindikatoren in den nordeuropäischen Sprachen
(2004)
In dem grundlegenden Beitrag "Svenska släktnamn i gar, i dag - i morgon?" liefert Thorsten Andersson einen kompakten Überblick über ein bewegtes Jahrhundert schwedischer Familiennamengeschichte. Dabei handelt es sich zur Überraschung deutscher Leser/innen um das 20. Jahrhundert. In Deutschland wüsste man mit dem Titel ,,Deutsche Familiennamen gestern, heute -morgen?" nicht viel anzufangen, zumindest nicht mit der Frage nach dem Heute und dem Morgen: Die deutschen Familiennamen sind seit Jahrhunderten fixiert; von seltenen und wohlbegründeten Ausnahmen abgesehen kann niemand seinen Familiennamen wechseln geschweige denn frei kreieren. Und die Frage nach dem Morgen hat sich vermutlich noch nie jemand gestellt.
In der Schweizer Dialektologie ist die Sprache der Städte nie in dem Maße aus dem Blick gedrängt worden, wie das innerhalb der deutschen Dialektologie geschehen ist, da die Mundarten in der Schweiz auch in den Städten als Umgangssprache erhalten geblieben sind. Zudem finden sich am Rand der wissenschaftlichen Forschung seit dem Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts eine Vielzahl von Publikationen, welche die städtische Variation, meist in Form von (dialektalen) Sondersprachen, thematisieren. Diese dialektologische Kontinuität zeigt sich bis in heutige Arbeiten zu Stadtsprachen in der Schweiz. Diese enthalten noch immer zu einem Großteil areallinguistische Bezüge, während der Bezug zur Standardsprache oft nur einen relativ kleinen Teil ausmacht. Im Folgenden sollen Aspekte aus Arbeiten mit stadtsprachlichen Bezügen und explizit stadtsprachliche Arbeiten aus verschiedenen Regionen der deutschsprachigen Schweiz präsentiert werden. Einzelne dieser Arbeiten stellen deutliche Meilensteine in der Forschungslandschaft dar, während andere eher exemplarisch für eine Forschungsrichtung genannt werden.
Sprachvermögen und Zahlbegriff : zur Rolle der Sprache für die Entwicklung numerischer Kognition
(2004)
In welchem Zusammenhang stehen Sprache und Zahl als kognitive Domänen? Welche Rolle spielt das menschliche Sprachvermögen für die Entwicklung des Zahlbegriffs? In den letzten Jahrzehnten haben verschiedene Disziplinen aus dem Gebiet der Kognitionswissenschaft – darunter Psycholinguistik, Entwicklungspsychologie, Ethologie und kognitive Neurowissenschaft – wesentlich zu unserem Verständnis der Beziehung zwischen Sprache und numerischer Kognition beigetragen. Die unterschiedlichen Ergebnisse liefern Evidenz für eng verknüpfte ebenso wie für autonome Bereiche in den beiden Domänen.
Hier soll ein Blick auf eine wissenschaftliche Methode gegeben werden, deren Grundzüge erst erarbeitet werden müssen. Es geht darum, die Sprachsynthese nicht nur für ihren eigentlichen Zweck, Texte vorzulesen, zu verwenden, sondern auch als Instrument für die Dialektologie und generell für die Sprachwissenschaft. Nach einem Blick auf bestehende dialektologische Fragen und Methoden zeige ich Forschungslücken auf und biete Hinweise, wie die Synthese weiterführen kann. Dabei sollen Möglichkeiten aufgezeigt werden, ohne dass schon konkrete Ergebnisse vorliegen. Die erwähnten Tonbeispiele sind herunterzuladen von http://www.unil.ch/imm/docs/LAIP/wav.files/SiebMeth.zip.
Nicht zuletzt durch die Entwicklung und Verbreitung der sogenannten Neuen Medien ist das Thema 'Medialität' im gesamten Bereich der Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften virulent geworden. Im Rahmen der aktuellen Diskurse um den Begriff des Mediums ist zu beobachten, daß dieser Ausdruck häufig unterschiedslos auf so verschiedene Referenzobjekte wie Internet, Fernsehen, Printmedien, Computer, Schrift, Bilder, Schallwellen u. v. a. bezogen wird. Das Medium orale Sprache gerät dabei sonderbarerweise häufig aus dem Blickfeld. - Warum ist dies so?
In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of our first version of the database "ANNIS" (ANNotation of Information Structure). For research based on empirical data, ANNIS provides a uniform environment for storing this data together with its linguistic annotations. A central database promotes standardized annotation, which facilitates interpretation and comparison of the data. ANNIS is used through a standard web browser and offers tier-based visualization of data and annotations, as well as search facilities that allow for cross-level and cross-sentential queries. The paper motivates the design of the system, characterizes its user interface, and provides an initial technical evaluation of ANNIS with respect to data size and query processing.
In this paper we review the current state of research on the issue of discourse structure (DS) / information structure (IS) interface. This field has received a lot of attention from discourse semanticists and pragmatists, and has made substantial progress in recent years. In this paper we summarize the relevant studies. In addition, we look at the issue of DS/ISinteraction at a different level—that of phonetics. It is known that both information structure and discourse structure can be realized prosodically, but the issue of phonetic interaction between the prosodic devices they employ has hardly ever been discussed in this context. We think that a proper consideration of this aspect of DS/IS-interaction would enrich our understanding of the phenomenon, and hence we formulate some related research-programmatic positions.
Japanese wh-questions always exhibit focus intonation (FI). Furthermore, the domain of FI exhibits a correspondence to the wh-scope. I propose that this phonology-semantics correspondence is a result of the cyclic computation of FI, which is explained under the notion of Multiple Spell-Out in the recent Minimalist framework. The proposed analysis makes two predictions: (1) embedding of an FI into another is possible; (2) (overt) movement of a wh-phrase to a phase edge position causes a mismatch between FI and wh-scope. Both predictions are tested experimentally, and shown to be borne out.
Results of a production experiment on the placement of sentence accent in German are reported. The hypothesis that German fulfills some of the most widely accepted rules of accent assignment— predicting focus domain integration—was only partly confirmed. Adjacency between argument and verb induces a single accent on the argument, as recognized in the literature, but interruption of this sequence by a modifier often induces remodeling of the accent pattern with a single accent on the modifier. The verb is rarely stressed. All models based on linear alignment or adjacency between elements belonging to a single accent domain fail to account for this result. A cyclic analysis of prosodic domain formation is proposed in an optimality-theoretic framework that can explain the accent pattern.
The purpose of this paper is to describe the TüBa-D/Z treebank of written German and to compare it to the independently developed TIGER treebank (Brants et al., 2002). Both treebanks, TIGER and TüBa-D/Z, use an annotation framework that is based on phrase structure grammar and that is enhanced by a level of predicate-argument structure. The comparison between the annotation schemes of the two treebanks focuses on the different treatments of free word order and discontinuous constituents in German as well as on differences in phrase-internal annotation.
Tree-local MCTAG with shared nodes : an analysis of word order variation in German and Korean
(2004)
Tree Adjoining Grammars (TAG) are known not to be powerful enough to deal with scrambling in free word order languages. The TAG-variants proposed so far in order to account for scrambling are not entirely satisfying. Therefore, an alternative extension of TAG is introduced based on the notion of node sharing. Considering data from German and Korean, it is shown that this TAG-extension can adequately analyse scrambling data, also in combination with extraposition and topicalization.
Transforming constituent-based annotation into dependency-based annotation has been shown to work for different treebanks and annotation schemes (e.g. Lin (1995) has transformed the Penn treebank, and Kübler and Telljohann (2002) the Tübinger Baumbank des Deutschen (TüBa-D/Z)). These ventures are usually triggered by the conflict between theory-neutral annotation, that targets most needs of a wider audience, and theory-specific annotation, that provides more fine-grained information for a smaller audience. As a compromise, it has been pointed out that treebanks can be designed to support more than one theory from the start (Nivre, 2003). We argue that information can also be added to an existing annotation scheme so that it supports additional theory-specific annotations. We also argue that such a transformation is useful for improving and extending the original annotation scheme with respect to both ambiguous annotation and annotation errors. We show this by analysing problems that arise when generating dependency information from the constituent-based TüBa-D/Z.
This paper reports on the SYN-RA (SYNtax-based Reference Annotation) project, an on-going project of annotating German newspaper texts with referential relations. The project has developed an inventory of anaphoric and coreference relations for German in the context of a unified, XML-based annotation scheme for combining morphological, syntactic, semantic, and anaphoric information. The paper discusses how this unified annotation scheme relates to other formats currently discussed in the literature, in particular the annotation graph model of Bird and Liberman (2001) and the pie-in-thesky scheme for semantic annotation.
The purpose of this paper is to describe recent developments in the morphological, syntactic, and semantic annotation of the TüBa-D/Z treebank of German. The TüBa-D/Z annotation scheme is derived from the Verbmobil treebank of spoken German [4, 10], but has been extended along various dimensions to accommodate the characteristics of written texts. TüBa-D/Z uses as its data source the "die tageszeitung" (taz) newspaper corpus. The Verbmobil treebank annotation scheme distinguishes four levels of syntactic constituency: the lexical level, the phrasal level, the level of topological fields, and the clausal level. The primary ordering principle of a clause is the inventory of topological fields, which characterize the word order regularities among different clause types of German, and which are widely accepted among descriptive linguists of German [3, 6]. The TüBa-D/Z annotation relies on a context-free backbone (i.e. proper trees without crossing branches) of phrase structure combined with edge labels that specify the grammatical function of the phrase in question. The syntactic annotation scheme of the TüBa-D/Z is described in more detail in [12, 11]. TüBa-D/Z currently comprises approximately 15 000 sentences, with approximately 7 000 sentences being in the correction phase. The latter will be released along with an updated version of the existing treebank before the end of this year. The treebank is available in an XML format, in the NEGRA export format [1] and in the Penn treebank bracketing format. The XML format contains all types of information as described above, the NEGRA export format contains all sentenceinternal information while the Penn treebank format includes only those layers of information that can be expressed as pure tree structures. Over the course of the last year, more fine grained linguistic annotations have been added along the following dimensions: 1. the basic Stuttgart-Tübingen tagset, STTS, [9] labels have been enriched by relevant features of inflectional morphology, 2. named entity information has been encoded as part of the syntactic annotation, and 3. a set of anaphoric and coreference relations has been added to link referentially dependent noun phrases. In the following sections, we will describe each of these innovations in turn and will demonstrate how the additional annotations can be incorporated into one comprehensive annotation scheme.
A pragmatic explanation of the stage level/individual level contrast in combination with locatives
(2004)
One important difference between stage level predicates (SLPs) and individual level predicates (ILPs) is their behavior with respect to locative modifiers. It is commonly assumed that SLPs but not ILPs combine with locatives. The present study argues against a semantic account for this behavior (as advanced by e.g. Kratzer 1995, Chierchia 1995) and proposes a genuinely pragmatic explanation of the observed stage level/individual level contrast instead. The proposal is spelled out using Blutners (1998, 2000) optimality theoretic version of the Gricean maxims. Building on the observation that the respective locatives are not event-related but frame-setting modifiers, the preference for main predicates that express temporary properties is explained as a side-effect of “synchronizing” the main predicate with the locative frame in the course of finding an optimal interpretation. By emphasizing the division of labor between grammar and pragmatics, the proposed solution takes a considerable load off of semantics.
Davidsonian event semantics has an impressive track record as a framework for natural language analysis. In recent years it has become popular to assume that not only action verbs but predicates of all sorts have an additional event argument. Yet, this hypothesis is not without controversy in particular wrt the particularly challenging case of statives. Maienborn (2003a, 2004) argues that there is a need for distinguishing two kinds of states. While verbs such as sit, stand, sleep refer to eventualities in the sense of Davidson (= Davidsonian states), the states denoted by such stative verbs like know, weigh,and own, as well as any combination of copula plus predicate are of a different ontological type (= Kimian states). Against this background, the present study assesses the two main arguments that have been raised in favour of a Davidsonian approach for statives. These are the combination with certain manner adverbials and Parsons (2000) so-called time travel argument. It will be argued that the manner data which, at first sight, seem to provide evidence for a Davidsonian approach to statives are better analysed as non-compositional reinterpretations triggered by the lack of a regular Davidsonian event argument. As for Parsons´s time travel argument, it turns out that the original version does not supply the kind of support for the Davidsonian approach that Parsons supposed. However, properly adapted, the time travel argument may provide additional evidence for the need of reifying the denotatum of statives, as suggested by the assumption of Kimian states.
This paper is concerned with the tagging of spatial expressions in German newspaper articles, assigning a meaning to the expression and classifying the usages of the spatial expression and linking the derived referent to an event description. In our system, we implemented the activation of concepts in a very simple fashion, a concept is activated once (with a cost depending on the item that activated it) and is left activated thereafter. As an example, a city also activates the nodes for the region and the country it is part of, so that cities from one country are chosen over cities from different countries. A test corpus of 12 German newspaper articles was tested regarding several disambiguation strategies. Disambiguation was carried out via a beam search to find an approximately cost-optimal solution for the conflict set of potential grounding candidates for the tagged spatial expression. Test showed that the disambiguation strategies improved accuracy significantly.
This paper sets up a framework for LTAG (Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar) semantics that brings together ideas from different recent approaches addressing some shortcomings of TAG semantics based on the derivation tree. Within this framework, several sample analyses are proposed, and it is shown that the framework allows to analyze data that have been claimed to be problematic for derivation tree based LTAG semantics approaches.
Research on dialectal varieties was for a long time concentrated on phonetic aspects of language. While there was a lot of work done on segmental aspects, suprasegmentals remained unexploited until the last few years, despite the fact that prosody was remarked as a salient aspect of dialectal variants by linguists and by naive speakers. Actual research on dialectal prosody in the German speaking area often deals with discourse analytic methods, correlating intonations curves with communicative functions (P. Auer et al. 2000, P. Gilles & R. Schrambke 2000, R. Kehrein & S. Rabanus 2001). The project I present here has another focus. It looks at general prosodic aspects, abstracted from actual situations. These global structures are modelled and integrated in a speech synthesis system. Today, mostly intonation is being investigated. However, rhythm, the temporal organisation of speech, is not a core of actual research on prosody. But there is evidence that temporal organisation is one of the main structuring elements of speech (B. Zellner 1998, B. Zellner Keller 2002). Following this approach developed for speech synthesis, I will present the modelling of the timing of two Swiss German dialects (Bernese and Zurich dialect) that are considered quite different on the prosodic level. These models are part of the project on the "development of basic knowledge for research on Swiss German prosody by means of speech synthesis modelling" founded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
In hindsight, the debate about presupposition following Frege’s discovery that the referential function of names and definite descriptions depended on the fulfillment of an existence and a uniqueness condition was curiously limited for a very long time. On the one hand, it was only in the 1960s that linguists began to take an interest and showed that presupposition was an allpervasive phenomenon far beyond this philosophers’ pet definite descriptions. And on the other hand, and this is our real concern, it is now only too obvious that the uniqueness condition is too restrictive to be applicable to the general case. An utterance of “The cat is on the mat” should not imply that there is only one cat and one mat in the whole world. The obvious move is to limit the uniqueness condition to some notion of utterance context.
"A team", definitely
(2004)
Quantificational determiners in Japanese can be marked with genitive case. Current analyses (for example by Watanabe, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, to appear) treat the genetive case marker in these cases as semantically vacuous, but we show that it has semantic effects. We propose a new analysis as reverse partitives. Following Jackendoff (MIT-Press, 1977), we assume that partitives always contain two NPs one of which is phonologically deleted. We claim that, while in normal partitives the higher noun is deleted, in reverse partitives the lower noun is deleted.
Schwankungen zwischen starker und schwacher Flexion werden mit unterschiedlichen Graden von Determinativhaftigkeit verschiedener Pronominaladjektive korreliert, bezogen auf eine universelle Dimension der IDENTIFIKATION (nach Seiler), sowie mit unterschiedlichen Graden der Ausgeprägtheit determinativischer (starker) Flexion, bezogen auf eine Ordnung nach formaler Markanz verschiedener Wortformen. Es wird gezeigt, dass stärkere Determinativhaftigkeit der Lexeme schwache Flexion bei folgenden Adjektiven begünstigt. Bezüglich der Varianz bei verschiedenen paradigmatischen Formen wird die Vermutung gestützt, dass das Formengewicht der Endungen eine wesentliche Rolle spielt.
On embedded implicatures
(2004)
The Gricean approach explains implicatures by assumptions about the pragmatics of entire utterances. The phenomenon of embedded implicatures remains a challenge for this approach since in such cases apparently implicatures contribute to the truth-conditional content of constituents smaller than utterances. In this paper, I investigate three areas where embedded implicatures seem to differ from implicatures at the utterance level: optionality, epistemic status, and implicated presuppositions. I conclude that the differences between the two kinds of implicatures justify an approach that maintains Gricean assumptions at the utterance level, and assumes a special operator for embedded implicatures.
Die Ressource "Wissen" rückte in den letzten Jahrzehnten als Quelle wissenschaftlicher Innovation immer stärker ins Zentrum des Interesses. Diese Fokussierung mündete in eine Selbstreflexion der Wissenschaft und der wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen: Thematisiert werden vor allem die Art und Weise, wie Wissen gewonnen wird, sowie die damit zusammenhängende Frage nach der Konstruktion von Wissenschaftlichkeit, womit das Bewusstsein gleichzeitig auf die mehr und mehr sich auflösende Abgrenzung zwischen den Disziplinen beziehungsweise zwischen den drei hauptsächlichen Wissenschaftskulturen, von Natur-, Geistes- und Kultur- sowie Sozialwissenschaften gelenkt wird. Innerhalb und außerhalb der Universitäten bildeten und bilden sich nicht immer klar verortbare "trading zones" (Gallison 1997), in denen neue Formen und Techniken der Wissensproduktion und Wissensvermittlung geprüft, geübt und teilweise auch institutionalisiert werden. ...
In morphological systems of the agglutinative type we sometimes encounter a nearly perfect one-to-one relation between form and function. Turkish inflectional morphology is, of course, the standard textbook example. Things seem to be quite different in systems of the flexive type. Declension in Contemporary Standard Russian (henceforth Russian, for short) may be cited as a typical example: We find, among other things, cumulative markers, “synonymous” endings (e.g., dative singular noun forms in -i, -e, or -u), and “homonymous” endings (e.g., -i, genitive, dative, and prepositional singular). True, some endings are more of an agglutinative nature, being bound to a specific case-number combination and applying across declensions, e.g., -am (dative plural, all nouns); and some cross the boundaries of word classes, e.g., -o, which serves as the nominative/accusative singular ending of neuter forms of pronouns (and adjectives) and as the nominative/accusative singular ending of (most) neuter nouns as well. Still, many observers have been struck by the impression that what we face here are rather uneconomic or even, so to speak, unnatural structures. But perhaps flexive systems are not as complicated as they seem. What seems to be uneconomic complexity may be, at least partially, an artifact of uneconomic descriptions.
Most scholars nowadays reconstruct a static root present with an alternation between lengthened grade in the active singular and full grade in the active plural and in the middle. I am unhappy about this traditional methodology of loosely postulating long vowels for the proto-language. What we need is a powerful theory which explains why clear instances of original lengthened grade are so very few and restrains our reconstructions accordingly. Such a theory has been available for over a hundred years now: it was put forward by Wackernagel in his Old Indic grammar (1896: 66-68). The crucial element of his theory which is relevant in the present context is that he assumed lengthening in monosyllabic word forms, such as the 2nd and 3rd sg. active forms of the sigmatic aorist injunctive.
The origin of the Goths
(2004)
Witold Ma´nczak has argued that Gothic is closer to Upper German than to Middle German, closer to High German than to Low German, closer to German than to Scandinavian, closer to Danish than to Swedish, and that the original homeland of the Goths must therefore be located in the southernmost part of the Germanic territories, not in Scandinavia (1982, 1984, 1987a, 1987b, 1992). I think that his argument is correct and that it is time to abandon Iordanes’ classic view that the Goths came from Scandinavia. We must therefore reconsider the grounds for adopting the latter position and the reasons why it always has remained popular.
In the following study we present the results of three acoustic experiments with native speakers of German and Polish which support implications (a) and (b). In our experiments we measured the friction phase after the /t d/ release before the onset of the following high front vocoid for four speakers of German and Polish. We found that the friction phase for /tj/ was significantly longer than that of /ti/, and that the friction phase of /t/ in the assibilation context is significantly longer than that of /d/.
This paper evaluates trills [r] and their palatalized counterparts [rj] from the point of view of markedness. It is argued that [r]s are unmarked sounds in comparison to [rj]s which follows from the examination of the following parameters: (a) frequency of occurrence, (b) articulatory and aerodynamic characteristics, (c) perceptual features, (d) emergence in the process of language acquisition, (e) stability from a diachronic point of view, (f) phonotactic distribution, and (g) implications. Several markedness aspects of [r]s and [rj] are analyzed on the basis of Slavic languages which offer excellent material for the evaluation of trills. Their phonetic characteristics incorporated into phonetically grounded constraints are employed for a phonological OT-analysis of r-palatalization in two selected languages: Polish and Czech.
This article develops a Gricean account for the computation of scalar implicatures in cases where one scalar term is in the scope of another. It shows that a cross-product of two quantitative scales yields the appropriate scale for many such cases. One exception is cases involving disjunction. For these, I propose an analysis that makes use of a novel, partially ordered quantitative scale for disjunction and capitalizes on the idea that implicatures may have different epistemic status.
Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit dem muttersprachlich Erwerb (L1) des Genus im Deutschen. Im Zentrum der Untersuchung steht die Frage, wie ein Kind aus dem ihm angebotenen Sprachinformationen das komplexe System der Genusmarkierung erwirbt. Sie wird anhand von Daten aus einer Langzeitstudie eines monolingual aufwachsenden deutschen Kindes erörtert. Der Rahmen dieser Arbeit erforderte bei ihrem Aufbau gewisse Einschränkungen. So habe ich mich in der Auswertung der Erwerbsdaten auf den bestimmten Artikel als Genusanzeiger konzentriert. Als Artikel zeichnet er sich gegenüber den ebenfalls genusabhängigen Adjektiven dadurch aus, dass er eine meist obligatorische Konstituente einer Nominalphrase (NP) mit einem Substantiv darstellt. Der bestimmte Artikel wiederum ist einerseits der frequenteste unter den Artikelwörtern und weist andererseits das differenzierteste Formeninventar auf, wobei er als einziger Artikel im Nominativ alle drei Genera differenziert. Auch habe ich mich entschlossen, auf eine Gegenüberstellung und Diskussion verschiedener Spracherwerbstheorien zu verzichten und stattdessen ausführlicher auf die Aspekte, die im Erwerbsprozess selbst und somit für die Datenanalyse relevant sind, einzugehen. Dabei sollen unterschiedliche Ansätze berücksichtigt sowie die aktuelle Forschungslage dargestellt werden.
Ziel der Untersuchung ist der Erwerb von aspektuellen Markierungen im Bulgarischen. Da Bulgarisch über ein nominales Artikelsystem und über eine verbale Aspektkategorie verfügt, liefert es eine ausgezeichnete Gelegenheit, die Verwendung von nominalen und verbalen Aspektmarkierungen im frühen Spracherwerb aufzuzeigen. Der Artikel präsentiert die Daten aus einer Langzeitstudie und einer experimentellen Testreihe. Die Ergebnisse belegen, dass die bulgarischen Kinder am Anfang vom Prinzip der Aspektkomposition Gebrauch machen. Aspektuell unmarkierte Verben werden durch definite Objekte ergänzt, um begrenzte Handlungen auszudrücken. Der schnelle Erwerb der Aspektmorphologie verschiebt die Gewichtung im Satz von den nominalen zu den verbalen Aspektmarkern. Im Alter von zweieinhalb Jahren beherrschen die bulgarischen Kinder die sprachspezifische syntaktische Anforderung, dass perfektiv markierte Prädikate quantitativ definite Argumente verlangen.
Since 1973 I have been advocating the view that the Balto-Slavic acute tone was in fact glottalic and has been preserved unchanged in originally stressed and unstressed syllables in Žemaitian and Latvian, respectively (e.g. 1975, 1977, 1985, 1998). Jay Jasanoff has now (2004) adopted the gist of my view, but with-out mentioning my name. It may therefore be useful to sketch the background of our differences and to point out the remaining discrepancies.
The paper explains the absence of resultative secondary predication in Russian as arising from a conflict of inferential interpretations. It formalises the framework necessary to express this proposal in terms of abductive reasoning with Poole systems in Gricean contexts. The conflict is shown to arise for default rules regulating alternative realisation of verb-internally specified consequent states. The paper thus indicates that typological variation may be due not only to different parameter values but to general inferential properties of the syntax-semantics mapping. The proposed theory also contradicts some widespread proposals that the absence of resultative secondary predication is due to the absence of some particular language feature.
The interpretation of traces
(2004)
This paper argues that parts of the lexical content of an A-bar moved phrase must be interpreted in the base position of movement. The argument is based on a study of deletion of a phrase that contains the base position of movement. I show that deletion licensing is sensitive to the content of the moved phrase. In this way, I corroborate and extend conclusions based on Condition C reconstruction by N. Chomsky and D. Fox. My result provides semantic evidence for the existence of traces and gives semantic content to the A/A-bar distinction.
On the syntax and pragmatics interface : Left-peripheral, medial and right-peripheral focus in greek
(2004)
The present paper explores the extent to which narrow syntax is responsible for the computation of discourse functions such as focus/topic. More specifically, it challenges the claim that language approximates ‘perfection’ with respect to economy, conceptual necessity and optimality in design by reconsidering the roles and interactions of the different modules of the grammar, in particular of syntax and phonology and the mapping between the two, in the representation of pragmatic notions. Empirical and theoretical considerations strongly indicate that narrow syntax is ‘blind’ to properties and operations involving the interpretive components — that is, PF and LF. As a result, syntax-phonology interface rules do not ‘see’ everything in the levels they connect. In essence, the architecture of grammar proposed here from the perspective of focus marking necessitates the autonomy of the different levels of grammar, presupposing that NS is minimally structured only when liberated from any non-syntactic/discourse implementations, i.e., movement operations to satisfy both interface needs. As a result, the model articulated here totally dispenses with discourse projections, i.e. FocusP.
Dislocation without movement
(2004)
This paper argues that French Left-Dislocation is a unified phenomenon whether it is resumed by a clitic or a non-clitic element. The syntactic component is shown to play a minimal role in its derivation: all that is required is that the dislocated element be merged by adjunction to a Discourse Projection (generally a finite TP with root properties). No agreement or checking of a topic feature is necessary, hence no syntactic movement of any sort need be postulated. The so-called resumptive element is argued to be a full-fledged pronoun rather than a true syntactic resumptive.
In this paper topic and focus effects at both left and right periphery are argued to be epiphenomena of general properties of tree growth. We incorporate Korean into this account as a prototypical verb-final language, and show how long- and short-distance scrambling form part of this general picture. Multiple long-distance scrambling effects emerge as a consequence of the feeding relationship between different forms of structural under-specification. We also show how the array of effects at the right periphery, in both verb-final and other language-types, can also be explained with the same concepts of tree growth. In particular the Right Roof Constraint, a well-known but little understood constraint, is an immediate consequence of compositionality constraints as articulated in this system.
Chicheŵa, a Bantu language of East Central Africa, displays mixed properties of configurationality such as the existence of VP, on the one hand, and discontinuous constituents (DCs), on the other. In the present work we examine the discourse and syntactic properties of DCs, and show that DCs in Chicheŵa arise naturally from the discourse-configurational nature of the language. We argue that the fronted DCs in Chicheŵa are contrastive topics that appear in a leftdislocated external topic position, with the remnant part of the split NP in the right-dislocated topic position. Once the precise discourse functions of DCs are properly integrated into the syntactic analysis, all the facts and restrictions observed in Chicheŵa DCs can be explained in a straightforward fashion.
The bulk of this paper deals with an analysis of the voice system of Tukang Besi, which, has both a complex verbal agreement system as well as the last fully developed (and obligatory) case marking system among Austronesian languages with an increasingly head-marking trend to the east (case marking of core constituents only becomes functional again in Vanuatu and the Solomons, and is well-developed in Polynesia). For that reason, as well as personal acquaintance with the language, it is a sensible starting point.
We argue that Malagasy (and related W. Austronesian languages!) has a positive setting for a macro-parameter RICH VOICE MORPHOLOGY which builds complex predicates that code the theta role of their argument: S = [[PreN(6) + (X)] + DP]. Manifestations of this parameter are: (1) Case and theta role are assigned in situ in nuclear clauses with no movement or co-indexing to a topic position. (2) Relative Clauses (and other "extraction" structures) satisfy the "Subjects Only" constraint, again with no movement or indexing. (3) UTAH is freely violated, as theta role assignment derives from compositional semantic interpretation. Predicates resemble lexical Ns in assigning case directly to arguments without using Prepositions and in combining directly with Dets to form DPs that include tense and negation (Keenan 1995, 2000). The major Predicate-Argument type is modeled on the Noun+Possessor one, not the Verb+Object one.
The purpose of this research was to trace the developmental steps in the acquisition of aspectual oppositions in Russian and to examine the validity of the 'aspect before tense' hypothesis for L1-speaking children. Imperfective/perfective verbs and their inflections, as well as aspectual pairs, were analysed in the first five months of verb production (and the respective months in the input) in three children. Additionally, the first four months of verb production were investigated in one boy with less data. Verb forms marked for the past and for the present occur simultaneously in all children. These early forms relate to 'here and now' situations: verbs marked for the past denote 'resultative' events that are perceived by the children as occurring during the speech time or immediately before it, while verbs marked for the present typically denote on-going events. Thus, with early tense oppositions (or tense morphology) children mark aspectual contrasts in the moment of speech: evidence in favour of the 'aspect before tense' hypothesis.
A strong preference in using the perfective aspect for the past and the imperfective aspect for the present events has been found in both adults and children. Further, only very few aspectual pairs were documented within the analysed period (from the onset of verb production to the period when children produce rule-driven inflectional forms). The productive use of the finite forms of perfective and imperfective verbs doesn't concord with the ability of the productive use of the contrastive forms of one lemma. Data suggest that children (start to) learn aspectual forms in an item-based manner. The acquisition of aspectual oppositions (aspectual pairs) is lexically dependent and is guided by the contextual 'thesaurus'. Aspectual pairs are learned in a peace-meal way during much longer, than observed for this article, period of time. Generally, aspect is not learned as a rule, also because there are no (uniform) rules of forming of aspectual pairs, but as the 'satellite' of the inherent lexical meaning of verbs of diverse Aktionsarten.
The issues addressed here are relevant for other Slavic languages, exhibiting the morphological category of aspect.
This paper discusses critically a number of developments at the heart of current syntactic theory. These include the postulation of a rich sequence of projections at the left periphery of the sentence; the idea that movement is tied to the need to eliminate uninterpretable features; and the conception put forward by Chomsky and others that advances in the past decade have made it reasonable to raise the question about whether language might be in some sense ‘perfect’. However, I will argue that there is little motivation for a highly-articulated left-periphery, that there is no connection between movement and uninterpretable features, and that there is no support for the idea that language might be perfect.
This article analyses the German discourse particle wohl 'I suppose', 'presumably' as a syntactic and semantic modifier of the sentence types declarative and interrogative. It is shown that wohl does not contribute to the propositional, i.e. descriptive content of an utterance. Nor does it trigger an implicature. The proposed analysis captures the semantic behaviour of wohl by assuming that it moves to SpecForceP at LF, from where it can modify the sentence type operators in Force0 in compositional fashion. Semantically, a modification with wohl results in a weaker commitment to the proposition expressed in declaratives and in a request for a weaker commitment concerning the questioned proposition in interrogatives. Cross-linguistic evidence for a left-peripheral position of wohl (at LF) comes from languages in which the counterpart of wohl occurs in the clausal periphery overtly. Overall, the analysis sheds more light on the semantic properties of the left periphery, in particular of the functional projection ForceP.
[W]hy are not all Malagasy adverbs postverbal with reverse Cinque order? The predicate raising mechanism […] operates around heads, and this leads Rackowski & Travis (2000: 122) to suggest that preverbal adverbs are not heads, but are phrasal, and are located in the Specifier positions themselves. The crucial consequence of this is that the specifier position is blocked, thus effectively preventing further predicate raising. Given that the entire analysis crucially rests on the assumption that certain elements are heads and others are phrases, it would be an advantage if some independent evidence for the X I XP status of the elements could be unearthed. Unfortunately, such evidence is hard to come by in Malagasy. However, other Austronesian languages with similar word order patterns do display rather robust evidence for the head status of certain elements. One such language in the Formosan language Seediq.
This work examines English echo questions (EQs) against the background of Rizzi's (1997) analysis of split CP. It argues that EQs do not behave as the split CP analysis predicts that they should, and that their behavior can instead be straightforwardly explained within the classic CP analysis. Further, what are termed here 'echo negations' of negative inversion constructions are shown not to parallel EQs, a surprising result if negative inversion architecture parallels question architecture, as claimed by split CP proponents. In general, classic CP architecture is more appropriate for analysing this range of phenomena.
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The papers in this volume were presented at the eleventh meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA 11), held from April 23-25 at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany. The conference was organized by Hans-Martin Gärtner, Joachim Sabel, and myself, as part of the research project Clause Structure and Adjuncts in Austronesian Languages. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). We would like to thank Wayan Arka, Agibail Cohn, Laura Downing, Silke Hamann, S J Hannahs, Ray Harlow, Nikolaus Himmelmann, Yuchua E. Hsiao, Lillian Huang, Ed Keenan, Glyne Piggott, Charles Randriamasimanana, Joszef Szakos, Barbara Stiebels, Jane Tang, Lisa Travis, Noami Tsukido, Sam Wang, Elizabeth Zeitoun, Kie Ross Zuraw, and Marzena Zygis for reviewing the abstracts. We are thankful to Mechthild Bernhard, Jenny Ehrhardt, Fabienne Fritzsche, Theódóra Torfadóttir and Tue Trinh for their help during the conference. I would like to thank Theódóra for providing essential editorial assistance.
Table of Contents:
T. A. Hall (Indiana University): English syllabification as the interaction of markedness constraints
Antony D. Green: Opacity in Tiberian Hebrew: Morphology, not phonology
Sabine Zerbian (ZAS Berlin): Phonological Phrases in Xhosa (Southern Bantu)
Laura J. Downing (ZAS Berlin): What African Languages Tell Us About Accent Typology
Marzena Zygis (ZAS Berlin): (Un)markedness of trills: the case of Slavic r-palatalisation
Laura J. Downing (ZAS Berlin), Al Mtenje (University of Malawi), Bernd Pompino-Marschall (Humboldt-Universitat Berlin): Prosody and Information Structure in Chichewa
T. A. Hall (Indiana University). Silke Hamann (ZAS Berlin), Marzena Zygis (ZAS Berlin): The phonetics of stop assibilation
Christian Geng (ZAS Berlin), Christine Mooshammer (Universitat Kiel): The Hungarian palatal stop: phonological considerations and phonetic data
This paper takes a close look at the properties of Hungarian relative clauses that occur in the left periphery of the main clause, preceding a (pro)nominal associate. It will be shown that these left-peripheral relative clauses differ in many ways from relative clauses dislocated on the right periphery, as well as from relative clauses embedded under a (pro)nominal head. To capture the precise syntax of these left-peripheral clauses, these will be compared to ordinary left-dislocated items, with which they have some properties in common. Despite the surface similarities between the two, however, there are a few decisive aspects of behaviour, most notably, distributional properties and connectivity effects, which argue against taking left-peripheral relatives as cases of clausal left-dislocates in Hungarian. Instead, one is led to consider these as correlative clauses, on the basis of the properties they share with well-established correlatives in languages like Hindi.
The volume is a collection of papers given at the conference “sub8 -- Sinn und Bedeutung”, the eighth annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Semantik, held at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt (Germany) in September 2003. During this conference, experts presented and discussed various aspects of semantics. The very different topics included in this book provide insight into fields of ongoing Semantics research.
As part of a major project on the syntactic organisation of written discourse in the recent history of the English language, this paper tackles the distribution of sentences comprising left-dislocated constituents in a corpus of texts from late Middle English onwards. Once the phenomenon of left dislocation has been properly defined, this investigation will concentrate on the analysis of the corpus in the following directions: (i) statistical evolution of left dislocation in the recent history of the English language; (ii) the influence of orality and genre on left dislocation; (iii) information conveyed by the left-dislocated material, that is, the discourse-based referentiality potential of the left-dislocated constituents in terms of recoverability, and its association with end-focus; and (iv) grammatical complexity of the left-dislocated material and its association with end-weight.
[V]oice in Malagasy is less like voice in English and more like wh-agreement, of the sort which Chung (1998) documents for Chamorro. In A' -extraction contexts in Chamorro, regular subject agreement […] is replaced by special morphology indicating whether the extracted element is a subject, object, or oblique […]. In Pearson (to appear) I suggested that Malagasy voice marking is a 'generalized' version of this type of marking: While in Chamorro wh-agreement is confined to questions, relative clauses, and the like, in Malagasy it appears in all clause types due to a requirement that the specifier of WhP be filled in every clause. [...]
In this paper I focus on the voice affixes themselves and propose an account of their distribution. Specifically, I argue that they are realizations of light verbs and Case-checking heads, which combine with the root through head-to-head movement. The distribution of the affixes is determined by the positions from which, and through which, the null operator […] moves on its way to the specifier of WhP. For example, the actor-topic prefix m- is treated as a nominative Casechecking head, which gets spelled out just in case the operator raises through its specifier. (My analysis is thus in the spirit of Guilfoyle, Hung, & Travis (1992), who also associate voice morphemes with Case licensing.)
The filling of the 'Vorfeld' in German sentences is basically obligatory; which constituent, however, actually moves to the Vorfeld is underdetermined by syntax and thus governed presumably by discourse factors. Coming from English, there are certain competing expectations one could have: either the topic — more specifically, the backward-looking center — of a sentence is moved to the Vorfeld, or an element in a poset relationship to a set mentioned in the previous discourse, or elements with other functions, such as the exposition of brand-new information or the setting of a scene. A study of a corpus of texts of different stylistic levels showed that indeed all elements expected to appear in the Vorfeld are eligible for Vorfeld-movement, but that there is a strict ranking. Preferred Vorfeld-fillers are phrases containing brand-new information as well as scene-setting elements; only if no such elements are present can elements in a poset relationship with some previously mentioned set be moved to the Vorfeld. Finally, if such elements are not present either, backward-looking centers can move to the Vorfeld. Backward-looking centers have, for this reason, a relatively poor quota among Vorfeld-fillers, namely around 50%.
In this paper, we investigate two pairs of structures in German and English: German Weak Pronoun Left Dislocation and English Topicalization, on the one hand, and German and English Hanging Topic Left Dislocation, on the other. We review the prosodic, lexical, syntactic, and discourse evidence that places the former two structures into one class and the latter two into another, taking this evidence to show that dislocates in the former class are syntactically integrated into their 'host' sentences while those in the latter class are not. From there, we show that the most straightforward way to account for this difference in 'integration' is to take the dislocates in the latter structures to be 'orphans', phrases that are syntactically independent of the phrases with which they are associated, providing additional empirical and theoretical support for this analysis — which, we point out, has a number of antecedents in the literature.
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.
This study examines the movement trajectories of the dorsal tongue movements during symmetrical /VCa/ -sequences, where /V/ was one of the Hungarian long or short vowels /i,a,u/ and C either the voiceless palatal or velar stop consonants. General aims of this study were to deliver a data-driven account for (a) the evidence of the division between dorsality and coronality and (b) for the potential role coarticulatory factors could play for the relative frequency of velar palatalization processes in genetically unrelated languages. Results suggest a clear-cut demarcation between the behaviour of purely dorsal velars and the coronal palatals. Moreover, factors arising from a general movement economy might contribute to the palatalization processes mentioned.
The present study offers an Optimality-Theoretic analysis of the syllabification of intervocalic consonants and glides in Modern English. It will be argued that the proposed syllabifications fall out from universal markedness constraints – all of which derive motivation from other languages – and a language-specific ranking. The analysis offered below is therefore an alternative to the traditional rule-based analyses of English syllabification, e.g. Kahn (1976), Borowsky (1986), Giegerich (1992, 1999) and to the Optimality-Theoretic treatment proposed by Hammond (1999), whose analysis requires several language-specific constraints which apparently have no cross-linguistic motivation.
This paper investigates how syntax and focus interact in deriving the phonological phrasing of utterances in Xhosa, a Bantu language spoken in South Africa. Although the influence of syntax on phrasing is uncontroversial, a purely syntactic analysis cannot account for all the data reported for Xhosa by Jokweni (1995). Focus influences the phrasing in that it inserts a phonological phrase-boundary after the focused constituent. This generalization can account for the variation found in the phrasing of adverbials.
The findings are dealt with in an OT-based framework following Truckenbrodt's work on Chichewa (1995, 1999) which is extended to the phrasing of adjuncts.
In this paper, I argue that this apparent problem is accounted for by the interaction of constraints. For the fixed segment [ɛ] in Cɛ-reduplication, I argue that [ɛ] is the second least marked vowel in Palauan, which appears when the default vowel [ǝ] cannot appear. I show that the Palauan facts are not only consistent with the proposals of Urbanczyk (1999) and Alderete et. al (1999), but they actually provide support of their claims. In the following section, I discuss Urbanczyk's (1999) arguments concerning ROOT faithfulness in reduplication and possible asymmetries between affix reduplicants and root reduplicants. In Section 3, I introduce Palauan reduplication and discuss Finer's (1986) observations on the resulting state verb (RSV) form. I show that the RSV forms support the classification that Cɛ-reduplicants are affixes, and CVCV -reduplicants are roots. In Section 4, I discuss the shape and vowel quality of the two reduplicants. The CVCV-reduplicant has three variants: CǝCǝ, CǝC and CV. I explain this variation, illustrating why [ǝ] appears in the first two variations. Then, I discuss the shape and vowel quality of the Cɛ-reduplicant, arguing that the fixed segment [ɛ] in Cɛ-reduplication is a special case of TETU. I show that root faithfulness constraints are crucial in determining the shape and vowel quality of the reduplicants. Section 5 is the conclusion.
Ida'an-Begak is a Western Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by approximately 6,000 people on the east coast of Sabah, Malaysia, Borneo and belongs to the Sabahan subgroup of the North Borneo subgroup (Blust 1998). Ida'an-Begak has three dialects, Ida'an, spoken in the villages of Segama to the west of Lahad Datu, Ida'an Sungai spoken in the Kinabatangan and Sandakan districts, and Begak spoken in Ulu Tungku, to the east of Lahad Datu (Banker 1984).1 Moody (1993) deals with Ida'an; this paper concentrates on the Begak dialect. In this paper I will present new data gathered in the field and provide an analysis of the allomorphy. The study is based on spontaneous data as well as examples elicited from my language informants.
The goal of this paper is to survey the accent systems of the indigenous languages of Africa. Although roughly one third of the world’s languages are spoken in Africa, this continent has tended to be underrepresented in earlier stress and accent typology surveys, like Hyman (1977). This one aims to fill that gap. Two main contributions to the typology of accent are made by this study of African languages. First, it confirms Hyman's (1977) earlier finding that (stem-)initial and penult are the most common positions, cross-linguistically, to be assigned main stress. Further, it shows that not only stress but also tone and segment distribution can define prominence asymmetries which are best analyzed in terms of accent.
This paper evaluates trills [r] and their palatalized counterparts [rj] from the point of view of markedness. It is argued that [r]s are unmarked sounds in comparison to [r ]s which follows from the examination of the following parameters: (a) frequency of occurrence, (b) articulatory and aerodynamic characteristics, (c) perceptual features, (d) emergence in the process of language acquisition, (e) stability from a diachronic point of view, (f) phonotactic distribution, and (g) implications.
Several markedness aspects of [r]s and [rj] are analyzed on the basis of Slavic languages which offer excellent material for the evaluation of trills. Their phonetic characteristics incorporated into phonetically grounded constraints are employed for a phonological OT-analysis of r-palatalization in two selected languages: Polish and Czech.
This article examines the motivation for phonological stop assibilations, e.g. /t/ is realized as [ts], [s] or [tʃ] before /i/, from the phonetic perspective. Hall & Hamann (2003) posit the following two implications: (a) Assibilation cannot be triggered by /i/ unless it is also triggered by /j/, and (b) Voiced stops cannot undergo assibilations unless voiceless ones do. In the following study we present the results of three acoustic experiments with native speakers of German and Polish which support implications (a) and (b). In our experiments we measured the friction phase after the /t d/ release before the onset of the following high front vocoid for four speakers of German and Polish. We found that the friction phase for /tj/ was significantly longer than that of /ti/, and that the friction phase of /t/ in the assibilation context is significantly longer than that of /d/.
Vowel dispersion in Truku
(2004)
This study investigates the dispersion of vowel space in Truku, an endangered Austronesian language in Taiwan. Adaptive Dispersion (Liljencrants and Lindblom, 1972; Lindblom, 1986, 1990) proposes that the distinctive sounds of a language tend to be positioned in phonetic space in a way that maximizes perceptual contrast. For example, languages with large vowel inventories tend to expand the overall acoustic vowel space. Adaptive Dispersion predicts that the distance between the point vowels will increase with the size of a language's vowel inventory. Thus, the available acoustic vowel space is utilized in a way that maintains maximal auditory contrast.
This paper presents preliminary results of a phonetic and phonological study of the Ntcheu dialect of Chichewa spoken by Al Mtenje (one of the co-authors). This study confirms Kanerva's (1990) work on Nkhotakota Chichewa showing that phonological re-phrasing is the primary cue to information structure in this language. It expands on Kanerva's work in several ways. First, we show that focus phrasing has intonational correlates, namely, the manipulation of downdrift and pause. Further, we show that there is a correlation between pitch prominence and discourse prominence at the left and right periphery which conditions dislocation to these positions. Finally, we show that focus and syntax are not the only factors which condition phonological phrasing in Chichewa.
The current study focuses on the prosodic realization of negators in Saisiyat, an endangered aboriginal language of Taiwan, and compares its prosodic realization of negation with that of English. The results of this study indicate that sentential subjects are the most acoustically prominent items in the Saisiyat negative sentences measured. This contrasts sharply with the English experimental sentences, in which the negator itself was the most acoustically prominent item. These findings suggest that Saisiyat is a pitch-accent language; thus, the presence of negators does not significantly change the prosodic parameters of surrounding words. English, in contrast, is an intonation language, so the presence of negation results in substantial prosodic modification. This suggests that the phenomenon of negation is universally prominent; however, languages with different prosodic systems will adopt different strategies for realizing prominence.
This study focuses upon a detailed description and analysis of the phonetic structures of Paiwan, an aboriginal language spoken in Taiwan, with around 53,000 speakers, Paiwan, a member of the Austronesian language family, is not typologically related to the other languages such as Mandarin and Taiwanese spoken in its geographically contiguous districts, Earlier work on phonological features of Paiwan (Chang, 1999; Tseng, 2003) sought an account in terms of segments and isolated facts about reduplication and stress, without accounting for the possible roles of phrase-level and sentence-Ievel prosodic structures, Government Teaching Material (1993) listed 25 consonants and 4 vowels, without any description of phonetic features and phonological rules, Chang's (2000) reference grammar included 22 consonants and 4 vowels, with a very brief description of 5 phonological rules on single words, Regional diversity and 25 consonants have been mentioned in Pulaluyan's (2002) teaching material; however, no description of phonological rules was found in his material.
This paper examines substantive noun phrases in Niuean, a Polynesian language of the Tongic subgroup with VSO word order, isolating morphology, and an ergative case system. We describe the allowable orderings of elements in the Niuean noun phrase, which include certain variations in the placement of numerals and the genitive possessor, then we provide a phrasal movement analysis for these variations, treating first the possessor variation, then the numeral variation. Parallels will be drawn between the derivation of nominal and sentential word order.