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German underwent a typological change from a syllable language in Old High German towards a word language today (Szczepaniak 2007). Proper names followed this development until the last century (cf. Christel, Gertrud, Klaus, Wolfgang). Some of the most popular German first names from 2010, however, such as Mia, Lea, Leon, Noah, show completely different structures compared to common nouns. In sharp contrast to common nouns, first names dispose of CV-structures, full vowels in unstressed syllables and different accent positions. Thus, there must have been a deep-rooted onomastic change. The most frequent baby names of 1945 were still in harmony with the usual word structures. This article shows that the decrease of transgenerational transmission of first names led to a departure fom native phonological structures. The following factors are analyzed: the number of syllables; accent position; and the number of consonant clusters, hiatuses, schwa and unstressed full vowels. It will be demonstrated that the phonological distance between first names (particularly female names) and common nouns has increased over time and that there is an increasing tendency for names to contain syllable language structures. Thus, a typological difference developed between these two nominal classes. The reason behind this change can be found in the individualizing function of proper names and social individualization over time.
In German, female and male first names are strictly segregated: there are two big inventories with the only purpose to separate women and men. Unisex names are extremely seldom. If they are chosen, they have to be followed by a sex-specific middle name (e.g. Kim Uwe, Kim Annette). If we look at the phonological components of first names, i.e. at their sounds, we can state that male and female names became more similar over the last decades. Whereas in the 1950's, typical first names such as Katharina and Rolf diverged considering their phonic inventory considerably, today, many girls are named Leah and Lara and many boys Noah and Luca. These names share nearly the same sounds, they consist of two syllables and are stressed on the first one. If we look behind the scenes, it becomes clear that the officially required onomastic separation of the two sexes is undermined. In this paper, I will present a socalled phonetic gender score for German first names for the first time (see also Schmidt-Jüngst in this volume). It allows for measuring a degree of femaleness and maleness of names. In a second step, it will be asked whether unofficial names such as pet names, which are not obliged to mark sex also tend to be gendered or if they disobey the gender barrier. It will be shown that the most intimate names are not interested in stressing the denoted person's sex. In contrast to first names, pet names tend to be maximally de-gendered.
Viele gegenwartssprachliche Grammatiken sprechen nicht mehr von starken Verben, sondern von unregelmäßigen. Diese Verben werden denn auch nicht mehr in Ablautreihen ("AR") oder, genauer, in Alternanzmuster eingeordnet, sondern alphabetisch aufgelistet. Types und Tokens kommen damit in Deckung, jedes Verb scheint ein eigener Type zu sein. Zumindest interessiert es nicht mehr, ob es hier übergreifende Muster gibt. Das hat gravierende Folgen: Die starken Verben werden als letzte erratische Brocken eines einstigen Gebirges begriffen, die ungeordnet in der Landschaft herumliegen und noch nicht von der Welle der (regelmäßigen) schwachen Verben erfasst wurden, dem aber entgegenblicken. Klassenstatus erlangen nur die schwachen Verben, allenfalls noch die Modalverben.
Die Studie "Beziehung überschreibt Geschlecht. Zum Genderindex von Ruf- und Kosenamen" betrifft zum Teil den Beziehungstyp der Liebesbeziehung. Sie fragt danach, ob und wie die Geschlechtszugehörigkeit in Kosenamen - Namen, die eine Beziehung kodieren und Nähe signalisieren - markiert wird. Mit einem Genderindex, der auf Basis der statistisch relevanten phonologischen Unterschiede zwischen den 100 häufigsten Frauen- und Männerrufnamen der deutschen Bevölkerung gebildet wurde, reanalysiert sie eine vorhandene Erhebung von Kosenamen und kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass Kosenamen auf der Basis von Rufnamen deutlich weniger geschlechtsmarkiert sind als die zugrunde liegenden Rufnamen. Dies interpretiert sie vorrangig als Zeichen einer besonders persönlichen, individualisierenden und dabei auch genderabstraktiven Wahrnehmung der benannten Person.
"Naming Gender" von Susanne Oelkers (2003) ist die erste Studie, die sich eingehend mit der Geschlechtskennzeichnung von Rufnamen befasst. Für die Herstellung und Darstellung von Geschlecht stellt nicht nur Sprache generell, sondern zuvörderst das Namensystem ein zentrales Zeichensystem zur Verfügung. Namen haben damit beträchtlichen Anteil an Ordnungsstiftung und Komplexitätsreduktion. Die deutsche Onomastik hat sich bis 2003 kaum für die soziale Differenz Gender interessiert, sie hat die linguistische und soziologische Genderforschung nicht rezipiert. Umgekehrt haben auch Genderlinguistik und Soziologie die Personennamen weitgehend übersehen (von Lindemann 1996 und Gerhards 2003 abgesehen). Dies steht der Relevanz entgegen, die Namen für die Etablierung und Prozessierung der Geschlechterordnung haben. Selbst Sprachen ohne jegliche grammatische Genus- oder Gendermarkierung können mit ihren Rufnamen Geschlecht indizieren (z.B. Finnisch und Estnisch, die nicht einmal bei den Personalpronomen der 3. Person Geschlecht markieren).
Marie Wrona präsentiert in ihrem Beitrag "Ist das ein Komma oder kann das weg? - Topologische Felder und Kommasetzung. Erste empirische Befunde" ein Experiment zur Kommadidaktik. Sie untersucht, inwiefern sich die Kommasetzungskompetenz von SchülerInnen verbessert, wenn diese mithilfe des topologischen Feldermodells vermittelt wird, das auf der Verbklammer im Deutschen aufbaut, anstatt wie bei traditionellen Ansätzen mithilfe von Signalwörtern wie Subjunktionen. Die SchülerInnen lernten, das finite Verb zu bestimmen und so zu entscheiden, ob ein Komma gesetzt werden muss oder nicht. Nach der Unterrichtseinheit setzten die SchülerInnen v.a. deutlich weniger falsche Kommata
Johanna Hartwig beschäftigt sich mit der Deklination entlehnter Farbadjektive wie lila, orange und rosa ("Gibt es denn jetzt lilane Kühe oder nicht? - Einflussfaktoren auf den Gebrauch indeklinabler Farbadjektive"). Diese Adjektive wurden ursprünglich nicht flektiert (das lila/rosa Haus). Hartwig führt ein Produktionsexperiment durch, um zu überprüfen, inwiefern die Frequenz und die Endung eines Adjektivs Einfluss auf dessen Flexion nehmen. Dabei stellt sie fest, dass frequente Adjektive zur Flexion neigen, jedoch auch die Endung eine Rolle spielt. So bleiben Adjektive auf [a] wie bspw. lila trotz hoher Frequenz unflektiert. Adjektive auf Frikativ weisen hingegen umso mehr Flexion auf, je frequenter sie sind. Für seltene Adjektive (creme) konnte Hartwig eine Vermeidungsstrategie feststellen: Creme wurde in ihrem Experiment am häufigsten in ein Derivat (cremefarben) umgewandelt, das eine Flexion des Adjektivs ermöglicht (das cremefarbene Haus).
Wie Hashtags bei Twitter als Teile von Komposita verwendet werden, zeigt Markus Majewski in seinem Beitrag #Erdogan-Diktatur - Hashtags als Elemente von Substantivkomposita in politischen Tweets. Als Grundlage dient ihm das Korpus aus Tweets von SpitzenpolitikerInnen der großen Parteien während des Wahlkampfs, in dem er alle Substantivkomposita mit einem Hashtag als Bestandteil wie #Energiewende auf funktionale, graphematische und strukturelle Aspekte untersucht. Insbesondere bei der Schreibung der Komposita zeigt sich eine große Kreativität. Zudem lassen sich Twitter-spezifische Kommunikationsfunktionen der Hashtag-Erstglieder beobachten.
Für den Wandel und die Variation der Präposition wegen interessieren sich Lea Heese und Fabiola Kaiser in ihrem Beitrag "Die menschliche Zunge ist faul. Assoziationen zu der Verwendungsweise der Präposition wegen mit dem Genitiv und dem Dativ". Wegen schwankt im Standard-deutschen zwischen Genitiv- und Dativrektion. Obwohl sie seit langem existiert, wird die Dativvariante von SprecherInnen oftmals als Zeichen für Sprachverfall gedeutet. Heese und Kaiser erhoben mithilfe einer Onlineumfrage Daten zum Gebrauch der Präposition in informellen und formellen Registern sowie Assoziationen zu den beiden Varianten. Wie bereits das Titelzitat des Beitrags zeigt, wird der Dativ unter anderem als Zeichen für Nachlässigkeit interpretiert.
Carlotta J. Hübener diskutiert in ihrem Beitrag "Nicht/keinen/kein Fußball spielen? - Inkorporationsprozesse in Substantiv-Verb-Verbindungen" Inkorporationprozesse bei Substantiv-Verb-Verbindungen wie bspw. Fußball spielen. Hierbei fokussiert sie auf die Negation: Während kein(en) Fußball spielen einen Hinweis darauf gibt, dass Fußball noch als eigenständiges Substantiv interpretiert wird, ist nicht Fußball spielen ein Indiz dafür, dass Fußball und spielen als eine konzeptionelle Einheit wahrgenommen werden. Kein negiert nämlich Nomen (Ich mag keinen Spinat), während nicht Verben negiert (Ich hab‘ noch nicht gegessen). Hübener überprüft in ihrem Beitrag anhand des Deutschen Referenzkorpus, inwiefern Frequenz, Idiomatik und Individuiertheit Einfluss auf die Negation von Substativ-Verb-Verbindungen nehmen können.
Brit Schwerin nimmt sich in ihrem Artikel "die bisher jedermann unbekannt gewesen [ist/war/sei/wäre] -Zum Rückgang des ersparten Finitums in Nebensätzen des frühen Neuhochdeutsch" des Phänomens der afiniten Nebensätze an, die in der Frühen Neuzeit im deutschen Sprachraum weit verbreitet waren. Ihre Analyse von Nebensätzen mit und ohne finites Verb in Texten aus dem 17. und 18. Jh. ergibt, dass der Rückgang der afiniten Konstruktionen in Verbindung mit dem Bedürfnis nach eindeutiger Markierung grammatischer Kategorien wie Tempus und Modus steht. Die diachronen Studien decken somit Sprachwandel auf verschiedenen Ebenen ab.
Wie sich Konzessivkonnektoren im 18. und 19. Jh. entwickelt haben, untersuchen Lisa Bürgerhoff, Jana Giesenschlag, Linda Kunow und Alexandra Kern für ihren Beitrag "Von ob ich schon wanderte zu obschon ich wanderte?! - Eine Korpusuntersuchung zur Konzessivität von 1700-1900". Ihre Untersuchungen im Deutschen Textarchiv zeigen unter anderem einen Zusammenhang zwischen der Zusammenschreibung der Konnektoren und einer eindeutig konzessiven Lesart, der für obschon, obgleich, obwohl und obzwar allerdings unterschiedlich stark ist. Auch die Faktizität der Teilsätze und das Auftreten verstärkender Partikeln sind für die Entwicklung der ob-Gruppe von Bedeutung. Als eindeutigste und frequenteste Konzessivkonnektoren stellen sich insgesamt obwohl und vor allem obzwar heraus.
Mit der mittelhochdeutschen Nebensilbenabschwächung beschäftigt sich Tanja Stevanovićs Beitrag "Wo sind die vollen Vokale geblieben? Eine Untersuchung möglicher Einflussfaktoren auf die Nebensilbenabschwächung". Dafür hat sie in einer Korpusuntersuchung im Referenzkorpus Mittelhochdeutsch schwache Verben analysiert, die trotz der fortschreitenden Nebensilbenabschwächung noch im Mittelhochdeutschen Vollvokale in Endsilben aufweisen.
Lena Schnee analysiert in ihrem Beitrag "Eingenordet - Morphologische Assimilation mittelniederdeutscher Lehnwörter im Altnordischen" die Liste mittelniederdeutscher Entlehnungen im Altnordischen Etymologischen Wörterbuch und zeigt, wie die mittelniederdeutschen Wörter, die in der Hansezeit in die skandinavischen Sprachen entlehnt wurden, an das Altnordische angepasst wurden. Dabei wendet sie ein Transderivationsmodell an, um die morphologische Assimilation nicht nur von ganzen Lexemen, sondern auch von Affixen und Wortstämmen nachzuvollziehen. Schnees Untersuchung ergibt, dass bei der Entlehnung in das Altnordische hauptsächlich die Affixe adaptiert wurden. Die mittelniederdeutschen Affixe wurden überwiegend durch native oder entlehnte altnordische ersetzt, was darauf hinweist, dass die Morphemgrenzen und Wortbildungselemente bei der Entlehnung als solche erkannt wurden. Als Erklärung hierfür führt Schnee die typologische Ähnlichkeit der beiden Sprachen an.
This paper examines whether gender features (masculine, feminine, neuter) in German have to be interpreted semantically, along their specific gender, or whether they allow for a gender unrelated interpretation. As to this, two experiments with two different classes of nouns (gender marked and sex marked nouns vs. gender marked and sex neutral nouns) were conducted. The first experiment supports the view that in their function as nominal predicates masculine nouns, contrary to feminine (and neuter) nouns, have the widest extension – which confirms the existence of a ‘Generic Masculine’ (Generisches Maskulinum). On the other hand, the second experiment shows that in their function as subjects masculine nouns, contrary to feminine (and neuter) nouns, are the least flexible agreement controllers – hardly allowing for gender mismatches. Thus, masculine nouns behave differently depending on whether they appear as controllers/sources of agreement or as targets of agreement. The findings are supplemented by corpus data.
"Habt ihr schon mal davon gehört gehabt?" Fällt Ihnen bei diesem Satz etwas auf? Wie würden Sie den Satz interpretieren, insbesondere die Zeitform des Prädikates hören? Weist sie, Ihrer Meinung nach, eher auf Expressivität, seine Abgeschlossenheit, die (Vor-)Vorvergangenheit eines Geschehens oder eine einfache Vergangenheit hin? Im letzteren Fall würde der Satz die gleiche Semantik ausdrücken wie ohne das zweite Partizip II: Habt ihr schon mal davon gehört? Im Fokus dieser Arbeit stehen empirische Evidenzen zum Gebrauch des doppelten Perfekts und Plusquamperfekts in der deutschen Sprache. Im Rahmen dieser Untersuchung wurde ein Fragebogen mit 202 deutschen Muttersprachlern durchgeführt. Die Ergebnisse dieser Studie zeigen, dass das doppelte Plusquamperfekt bei der Interpretation von ca. 86% der untersuchten deutschen Muttersprachler akzeptiert wird. Weiterhin deuten die Ergebnisse dieser Studie auf viele Unterschiede bei der Akzeptanz der doppelten Konstruktionen zwischen Studierenden verschiedener Fachrichtungen hin.
In the paper, German disintegrated verb-final 'obwohl' (‘although’) and 'weil' (‘because’) clauses are compared with constructions in which 'obwohl' and 'weil' precedes clauses with main clause word order. The former constructions constitute independent, yet subsidiary speech acts. Thus, the subordinating connectors and the positioning of the verb do not indicate syntactic but textual dependency. The latter constructions are of a very different kind. Here, 'obwohl' and 'weil' do not form a constituent with the following clause. Instead, they appear as syntactically independent discourse markers connecting two discourse units. As discourse markers, 'obwohl' and 'weil' obtain their special syntactic and semantic properties as elements of the derived, but independent module of Thetic Grammar.
This paper deals with German 'wobei'-clauses and their Italian counterparts. Based on a corpus study of administrative texts, we identify the type and frequency of the Italian constructions that correspond to 'wobei'-clauses. In particular, we will assess to what extent the Italian converb construction gerundio correlates with 'wobei'-clauses. More specifically, we will focus on the thesis put forward by Haspelmath (1995) and Breindl (2014), according to which comitativity is expressed by converb constructions when it applies to state of affairs.
'Je-desto'-Sätze scheinen in struktureller Hinsicht Einzelgänger zu sein. Das Ungewöhnliche ist, dass sie wie eine obligatorische Verb-dritt-Konstruktion daherkommen: An erster Stelle steht scheinbar der durch je eingeleitete Nebensatz im linken Außenfeld bzw. Vor-vor-Feld, dann folgt die desto-Konstituente, die das Vorfeld einnimmt, und dann an dritter Stelle das finite Verb des Matrixsatzes. Angesichts der Semantik der involvierten Konstituenten ist diese Strukturbeschreibung ungewöhnlich und widerspricht plausiblen Erwartungen. Der Aufsatz bietet eine Analyse, nach der der 'je'-Satz und die 'desto'-Konstituente zusammen eine komplexe Konstituente bilden, die eine einzige, ganz reguläre Einheit konstituiert, was bedeutet, dass der Gesamtsatz eine ziemlich reguläre Verb-zweit-Struktur ist.
Das Hauptziel dieses Beitrags besteht darin, anhand einer tiefergehenden prosodisch-phonologischen Analyse der häufigsten Rufnamen von 1945-2008 der Frage nachzugehen, ob im Laufe der Zeit eine Androgynisierung unserer Rufnamen dahingehend stattgefunden hat, dass Strukturen, die bislang dominant für das eine Geschlecht galten, zunehmend auch für das andere Geschlecht gewählt werden bzw. geschlechtspräferente Strukturen nivelliert oder gar abgebaut werden. Ein weiteres Ziel besteht darin, auf onymischer Ebene der These nachzugehen, dass in verschiedenen gesellschaftlichen Bereichen eine sog. Informalisierung und Intimisierung stattgefunden habe, die sich möglicherweise in heutigen Namen wie Lilly oder Nico statt früher Elisabeth und Nikolaus niederschlagen.
Decomposing coordination
(2014)
Natural languages display a surprising diversity of expression of elementary logical operations. The study of this variation is emerging as an important topic of cross-linguistic semantics. In this paper, we address the expression of coordination from this perspective, especially coordination of individual denoting expressions such as "John and Mary". We argue that there is an underlying universal structure for individual coordination, and that the cross-linguistic variation can be explained by assuming that languages pronounce different morphemes of this universal structure. In particular, we argue that there two main types of system for the expression of individual coordination: the J-type and the μ-type. In μ-type languages the morpheme used for individual coordination also has uses a quantificational or focus particle, while in the J-type languages it doesn't. Instead at least in many J-type languages the same morpheme is used for individual and propositional coordination. The evidence we present for our model comes from two sources: new data from specific data of the J-type and μ-type languages, and from a study of the historical development of the expression of individual coordination in Indo-European which switched from a μ-type to a J-type system.
The claim of this paper is that embedded definites can, despite the appearances, be accounted for on the uniqueness approach. Far from being a surprise, we argue that the behavior of embedded definites is actually expected once two independent facts are taken into account: the ability of noun phrases to take scope, i.e., to be interpreted in a different place from their syntactic position, and the interaction of presuppositions and scope-taking elements. Specifically, we analyze embedded definites as a case of inverse linking (Gabbay and Moravscik, 1974; May, 1977): the embedded definite takes scope over the embedding one. The presupposition of the embedded definite is weakened as a result of the independently motivated process of intermediate accommodation (Kratzer, 1989; Berman, 1991). In our case, this process transfers the presupposition of the embedding definite into the restrictor of the embedded one.
Like other scope-taking processes, inverse linking is generally taken to be subject to locality constraints: if a syntactic island, such as a finite clause boundary, intervenes in the path of a scope-taking element, then the resulting reading is unavailable or degraded (Rodman, 1976). Since our account views embedded definites as cases of inverse linking, we predict that inserting an island into an embedded definite, all else being equal, should lead to a similar degradation. We report results from an online survey with 800 participants that confirm this prediction.
Proportional determiner quantifiers in German allow interpretations that violate the conservativity universal of Keenan and Stavi (1986). I argue for an analysis that distinguishes between surface syntax and the logical form of sentences. I show that in surface syntax, German non-conservative quantifiers are determiners that form a constituent with a noun phrase and share case and agreement properties with the noun phrase. But I propose that at logical form the non-conservative determiners undergo an adverbialization movement and are interpreted by a mechanism that generalizes focus-a ected quantification of Herburger (2000). This result refines the understanding of conservativity as a constraint on interpretation.
Irene Heim in unpublished work proposed a new syntax-semantics interface for propositional attitude reports based on an ontology without transworld individuals, but counterpart functions instead. We show that the approach can capture the 'de re'/'de dicto' distinction, but makes different predictions from accounts with transworld individuals. Specifically, the account uses a non-invertible counterpart functions: a single individual in an alternative world can be the counterpart of many individuals of the real world. The directionality of counterpart functions predicts that a 'de dicto' interpreted DP cannot be an argument of a 'de re' interpreted predicate. We show that the predicted restriction is corroborated by existing work on restrictions on 'de re' interpretation. The derivation of constraints on 'de re' interpretation argues empirically for the counterpart ontology and Heim’s implementation thereof.
In at least three environments—de se binding, distributive binding, and focus quantification—some presuppositions exhibit unexpectedly weak projection behavior. This holds for the presuppositions of bound pronouns, but also several other cases of presupposition. In this paper, I first describe a general approach to capture the interaction of presuppositions with quantificational operators within a multi-tiered evaluation procedure. Secondly I discuss data from Condition A, in particular non-bound occurrences of reflexives, that motivate a presuppositional account of Condition A and confirm the general approach.
In this paper, I revisit the arguments against the use of fuzzy logic in linguistics (or more generally, against a truth-functional account of vagueness). In part, this is an exercise to explain to fuzzy logicians why linguists have shown little interest in their research paradigm. But, the paper contains more than this interdisciplinary service effort that I started out on: In fact, this seems an opportune time for revisiting the arguments against fuzzy logic in linguistics since three recent developments affect the argument. First, the formal apparatus of fuzzy logic has been made more general since the 1970s, specifically by Hajek [6], and this may make it possible to define operators in a way to make fuzzy logic more suitable for linguistic purposes. Secondly, recent research in philosophy has examined variations of fuzzy logic ([18, 19]). Since the goals of linguistic semantics seem sometimes closer to those of some branches of philosophy of language than they are to the goals of mathematical logic, fuzzy logic work in philosophy may mark the right time to reexamine fuzzy logic from a linguistic perspective as well. Finally, the reasoning used to exclude fuzzy logic in linguistics has been tied to the intuition that p and not p is a contradiction. However, this intuition seems dubious especially when p contains a vague predicate. For instance, one can easily think of circumstances where 'What I did was smart and not smart.' or 'Bea is both tall and not tall.' don’t sound like senseless contradictions. In fact, some recent experimental work that I describe below has shown that contradictions of classical logic aren’t always felt to be contradictory by speakers. So, it is important to see to what extent the argument against fuzzy logic depends on a specific stance on the semantics of contradictions. In sum then, there are three good reasons to take another look at fuzzy logic for linguistic purposes.
The paper presents an additional argument for a specific account of semantic binding: the flat-binding analysis. The argument is based on observations concerning sloppy interpretations in verb phrase ellipsis when the binder is not the subject of the elided VP. In one such case, it is important that one of the binders belong to the domain of the other. This case can be derived from the flat-binding analysis as is shown in the paper, while it is unclear how to account for it within other analyses of semantic binding.
This paper discusses the typology of focus structure types (variation of information structuring in the clause) and how information structure can be used to explain all of the word order patterns in Chinese without reference to grammatical relations.
In der emotional geführten Sprachverfallsdebatte wird besonders die Apostrophsetzung vor dem Genitiv- und dem Plural-s, vulgo Deppen-Apostroph, kritisiert und als vermeintliche Entlehnung aus dem Englischen stigmatisiert. Erst seit kurzem liegen mit Scherer (2010, 2013) korpusbasierte Untersuchungen vor, die eine angemessene Interpretation dieses graphematischen Wandels erlauben, der weitaus älter ist als gemeinhin vermutet. Generell erweist sich, dass viele als neu und bedrohlich empfundene Sprachveränderungen bereits vor über hundert Jahren meist ebenso emotional gegeißelt wurden. Der Beitrag befasst sich hauptsächlich mit der diachronen Entwicklung des phonographischen Apostrophs zu einem morphographischen, dessen Funktion nun nicht mehr darin besteht, nicht-artikulierte Laute zu markieren, sondern morphologische Grenzen (Uschi's, Joseph K.'s, CD's ). Deutlich wird, dass der Apostroph der Gestaltschonung komplexer Basen dient, deren Gros aus Eigennamen besteht. Anschließend wird in einem kürzeren Teil nach der Entstehung und Beschaffenheit dieser s-Flexive selbst gefragt. Diese sind ihrerseits Ergebnis flexionsmorphologischer Umstrukturierungen und garantieren maximale Konstanthaltung des Wortkörpers. Abschließend wird noch die neueste Entwicklung gestreift, die in der Deflexion ebendieser s-Flexive besteht und die sich wieder am deutlichsten bei den Eigennamen manifestiert. Diese haben als Quelle all dieser Entwicklungen zu gelten (vgl. des Irak, des Helmut Kohl, auch des Perfekt, des LKW, des Gegenüber ). Insgesamt ist festzustellen: Nicht nur die Apostrophsetzung vor s-Flexiven, sondern auch die s-Flexive selbst sowie ihr derzeitiger Abbau dienen ein und derselben Funktion: Der Schonung durch Konstanthaltung markierter Wortkörper, worunter mehrheitlich Eigennamen fallen, daneben auch Fremdwörter, Kurzwörter und Konversionen. Damit sind es die Eigennamen, die Ausgangspunkt und Ursache tiefgreifenden flexionsmorphologischen und graphematischen Wandels bilden.
Alle germanischen Sprachen haben in den nachchristlichen Jahrhunderten eine phonologische Umlautphase durchlaufen, allerdings mit je unterschiedlichen Resultaten. Dieser Umgang mit den Umlautprodukten wurde bisher nie vergleichend in den Blick genommen; vielmehr bekommt man in jeder Einzelphilologie den Eindruck, als habe die Umlautentwicklung nur so und nicht anders verlaufen können. Erst die historisch-kontrastive Perspektive erweist, dass sich drei Pfade systematisieren lassen: Der Umlaut wird konserviert (Isländisch), er wird eliminiert (Englisch, Niederländisch) – Schwedisch nimmt hier eine Zwischenposition ein –, oder er wird funktionalisiert (grammatikalisiert) und damit morphologisch ausgedehnt (Deutsch, Luxemburgisch).
Im Folgenden werden diese drei Wege nicht nur beschrieben, sondern auch begründet. Der konsequente Sprachwandelvergleich ermöglicht dabei das Verständnis von Zusammenhängen und erlaubt es, aus den Einzelphilologien abgeleitete Annahmen zu revidieren.
Ich möchte […] drei Beispiele für den produktiven Dialog zwischen Historischer Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachtypologie liefern: 1. Den phonologisch-typologischen Wandel des Deutschen von einer Silben- zu einer Wortsprache, 2. die frühnhd. 'Justierung' der Abfolge grammatischer Kategorien am Verb gemäß der universellen Relevanzskala, und 3. die Entwicklung unseres Höflichkeitssystems am Beispiel der Anredepronomen. Weder liefere ich Neues noch kann ich ins Detail gehen. Es geht hier nur darum, für die gegenseitige Wahrnehmung und Zusammenarbeit linguistischer Disziplinen zu werben.
Auf dem Weg zu Nicht-Flektierbaren : die Deflexion der deutschen Eigennamen diachron und synchron
(2012)
Im heutigen Deutsch sorgt die Flexion von Eigennamen im Genitiv für einen echten Zweifelsfall, mehr noch bei geographischen Namen als bei Personennamen, vgl. des Orinoko(s), des Iran(s), des vereinigten Deutschland(s), ebenso im Plural: die beiden Deutschland(s). Personennamen werden, wenn ihnen ein Artikel (mit oder ohne Adjektiv) vorangeht, in aller Regel schon nicht mehr flektiert, vgl. die 1. Auflage (1774) von "Die Leiden des jungen Werthers" mit Genitivendung mit der 2. Auflage (1787), wo diese Endung schon fehlt. Heute dominiert die Nichtflexion: der Geburtstag des kleinen Julian, des Helmut Kohl. Aus diachroner Sicht stellt dieses Stadium nur einen weiteren Schritt in Richtung onymische Deflexion dar. Dieser Deflexion und ihren Gründen soll in diesem Beitrag nachgegangen werden. Flektierten Eigennamen im Althochdeutschen noch ausgiebig (in mehreren Flexionsklassen), so haben sie im Laufe der Zeit ihre Flexion in zweierlei Hinsicht stark eingeschränkt: a) paradigmatisch durch den Abbau an Allomorphie und die Durchsetzung sog. überstabiler Marker, die oft erstes Indiz für den Beginn von Deflexion sind; b) syntagmatisch durch den sukzessiven Abbau von Flexiven am Wortkörper. Neben Kasus und Numerus haben sich auch bei Genus tiefgreifende Veränderungen vollzogen: Genus wird zunehmend pragmatisch "von außen" fixiert, d.h. immer mehr von Eigenschaften des Referenzobjekts gesteuert.
Allein in der Morphologie (Flexion und Wortbildung) gibt es derzeit etwa ein Dutzend "Baustellen", die systematisch Zweifelsfälle generieren. Sie bilden für den universitären Unterricht – und zwar für den grammatisch-deskriptiven wie auch für den sprachhistorischen – ein ungemein ertragreiches und auch beliebtes Thema. wie die eigene Erfahrung mit mehreren entsprechenden Veranstaltungen lehrt: Die Studierenden – meist künftige Lehrerinnen – lernen, dass sprachliche Regeln variabel sein können, doch keineswegs beliebig. Diese Einsicht reicht jedoch nicht: Man kann gerade anhand von Zweifelstallen zeigen. dass Regeln nicht per se existieren (oder womöglich von der Linguistik oder der Grammatikografie am Schreibtisch erstellt werden), sondern dass sie entstehen und vergehen können, also veränderlich sind, auch. dass sie Funktionen haben, die uns – den Sprachbenutzern – zugute kommen. Zieht man sprachhistorisches Wissen hinzu. so wird in den meisten Fällen deutlich, dass Zweifel stalle Sprachwandel im Verlauf darstellen und dass sie der Optimierung von etwas dienen, also vermehrte Funktionalität herstellen. Damit kann man auch der öffentlichen Gleichsetzung von Sprachwandel mit Sprachverfall entgegenwirken. Das Bewusstsein dafür, dass sich Sprache auch heute wandelt, überrascht viele: Man begreift Sprache viel zu oft als statisch. Zweifelfälle lassen sich auch leicht in schriftlichen Korpora wie dem DWDS oder Cosmas vom IDS und per Google finden. In den Grammatiken werden sie sehr heterogen. oft widersprüchlich behandelt. Mit solchen Recherchen lässt sich eine Unterrichtseinheit gut beginnen. Auch zu Ende der Sekundarstufe lassen sich Zweifelsfälle in den Grammatikunterricht integrieren, wenngleich sprachhistorisches Wissen nicht vorausgesetzt werden kann. Es gilt jedoch ein Verständnis für die Veränderlichkeit von Sprache zu wecken, und zwar nicht bezüglich der viel stärker beachteten Lexik, sondern der Grammatik. Schüler wie Studierende entwickeln schnell Interesse an Zweifel stallen, wenn man sie statt zur Frage nach Richtig versus Falsch zur Frage nach dem Woher und Wohin und vor allem nach dem Warum leitet, also dazu, echtes Verständnis für Grammatik zu entwickeln. Dichotomisches, normatives Denken wird überführt in skalares, jenseits von starren Normen befindliches. In einem letzten Schritt wird der Schluss zu ziehen sein, dass echte Zweifelsfälle keine Fehler sind: Beide Varianten sind akzeptabel.
Im Folgenden soll der […] Zweifelsfall adjektivischer Parallel- vs. Wechselflexion von diesen Seiten beleuchtet werden. Dabei wird deutlich, dass er nicht nur für Schule und Universität. sondern auch für die Grammatikografie Anregungen und Fragen aufwirft: Statt fester Regeln ergeben sich nur mehr oder weniger deutliche Tendenzen.
Das im vorliegenden Artikel untersuchte Phänomen im Deutschen ist in der Literatur bisher quasi unentdeckt geblieben. Die einzige Ausnahme bildet der Beitrag von Berg (2008). Die Beobachtung ist folgende: Unter bestimmten Bedingungen, die mit Emphase zu tun haben, kann die lexikalisch festgelegte Betonung, also der Wortakzent, verschoben werden. Im Normalfall betrifft dieser Prozess nicht-native lexikalische Einheiten, denn die Akzentverschiebung passiert in der Regel von hinten nach vorn. Da deutsche Erbwörter initial-, also erstbetont, sind, ist das schwer möglich (jedoch s.u.). Fremdwörter, die auf den hinteren Silben betont sind, sind deshalb prädestiniert. Die meisten Beispiele kommen aus dem Bereich der Wortklasse Adjektiv: spektakulär, skandalös, sensationell, optimal, ideal, brutal, fulminant, perfekt, gigantisch. Im angedeuteten expressiven Gebrauch kann der Wortakzent von der letzten auf die erste Silbe wandern [...].
Der folgende Artikel soll einen Überblick über ein Phänomen geben, das unter verschiedenen Namen einen Einzug in deutsche Grammatiken und linguistische Fachtexte gehalten hat. Man begegnet ihm als "Attribuierungskomplikation", "schiefes Attribut", "grammatische Illusion" und Ähnlichem. Gemeint sind Daten wie der grüne Bohneneintopf, der vierstöckige Hausbesitzer oder das direkte Objektpronomen, sowie die Absturzursache des TWA-Jumbos und die Kritikpunkte an Lakoff. Im Folgenden soll aufgezeigt werden, wie die Diskussion um (scheinbar) fehlerhafte Attribuierungen von N+N-Komposita wieder zu einem virulenten Forschungsthema wurde (§1) und wie dessen Behandlung in Grammatiken (§2), (populären) Sprachkritiken (§3) und Fachtexten (§4) aussieht. In §5 wird eine abschließende Diskussion gegeben.
It has been claimed and widely assumed that caseless direct objects in Turkish exhibit a sort of syntactic incorporation, and only their cased counterparts are true syntactic arguments (Kornfilt 1997; Knecht 1986; Nilsson 1986; Öztürk 2005 among others). Cased and caseless objects are thus widely taken as derivationally related, crystallized in Kelepir's (2001) proposal that objects pick up overt accusative as they move out of the VP. In this paper, I would like to revisit both the empirical evidence and the interpretation leading to these claims and propose revisions.
I first show that not all caseless objects are the same. Mostly drawing on Aydemir (2004), I argue that bare caseless objects and those with indefinite expressions have differences that would be very unusual if they were both incorporated. However, adopting Öztürk (2005) and against Aydemir (2004), neither of the cases can be analyzed as head incorporation.
I then turn to the cased vs. caseless distinction and argue that cased and caseless objects are not that different after all. Based on data with strictly controlled information structure, I arrive at a different generalization than most of the earlier reports and claim that caseless objects are morphosyntactically as moveable as their cased counterparts.
Hence, I propose to replace the notion of incorporation in the literature of Turkish syntax with the notion of weak case (de Hoop 1992) and conclude by a discussion of the domain of syntactic analysis in this primarily semantic phenomenon.
In this article, I provide a description and analysis of the morphemes čiɫ 'do to', ḥta 'do towards' and cḥin 'do for' in the Southern Wakashan language Nuuchahnulth (nuučaan̓uɫ). I argue that these morphemes are verbal applicatives that add a non-core argument to the thematic structure of a verb.
Verbal applicatives in Nuuchahnulth are interesting to investigate because they exhibit typologically unique behaviour that has never been studied before. Applicatives are traditionally considered functional elements whose only purpose is to add an indirect object to the argument structure of the verb (Pylkkanen 2002:17). Nuuchahnulth is the only known language that productively uses independent verbs for this purpose.
Nuuchahnulth is an indigenous language of Canada spoken in the province of British Columbia. It consists of 14 major dialects, most of which have never been studied. All of these dialects are now highly endangered and urgently need to be documented.
The present investigation steps back to the claims of the 1990s by assuming that there is a functional opposition in the use of P- and D-PRO which affects the status of the pronoun's referent in the mental model of the discourse. We interpret the earlier findings as an indication of an information structural difference which is specifically relevant on the discourse level. The question we address here is twofold. Firstly, we ask whether the assumed opposition in the information status of P- and D-PRO referents has consequences on referent continuation in the ongoing discourse. So far, the effects of P- vs. D-PRO use were determined concerning the status of the pronoun referent in the actual sequence of discourse, i.e. they were determined by a judgement on the salience or the topic/focus status of the pronominal DP. As far as we can see, this determination has not been operationalized further. Since there are contexts in which both P- and D-PRO would fit in with only a feeling of a difference but without clear-cut exclusiveness, the opposition is empirically not well validated. If we could show that there are effects of type of pronoun on the ongoing discourse this would, in our view, provide the lacking empirical validation. Secondly, we ask whether there are effects of the narrator's point of view on P- and D-PRO use. The idea behind this question is that the way of information unfolding in discourse depends on the speaker. S/he decides which pieces of information come next, what is foreground and what is background information. If type of pronoun choice is related to the processes of discourse organization by the speaker – via fore- and backgrounding of information – and if internal or external location of the narrator's point of view influences the organization strategies of the speaker/narrator this might have an ffect on the use of P- and D-PRO.
This paper aims to work toward a proper understanding of the role of preverbal ge- in Old English (henceforth OE) and its disappearance in the course of Middle English. This prefix is reminiscent of its cognates in Modern German and Dutch (also written ge-) in its distribution, but even a cursory examination of the details reveals it to be quite distinct, as we will see. The proper characterization of that distribution, and of its diachronic development, has proven to be extremely difficult. I have thus carried out a large-scale corpus study using the York-Toronto-Helsinki parsed corpus of Old English prose (Taylor et al. 2003) and the Penn-Helsinki parsed corpus of Middle English, 2nd ed. (Kroch & Taylor 1999). This paper will report the results of the first phase of the project, involving patterns in the data that could be identified primarily on the basis of automatic searches in the corpora.
"Je suis Charlie" was used over 619.000 times in the two days that have followed the attack of the editorial team of Charlie Hebdo (Le Progrès, The Huffington Post) and has regularly been taken up in both written and spoken form since. In this paper, we argue that the structure of this sentence actually clashes with its meaning. More specifically, whereas its word order and default rightmost sentence stress are compatible either with an all-focus reading or a narrow focusing of Charlie, the context of use of this sentence as well as the solidarity/empathy message it intends to communicate suggest that its subject is narrowly focused. We will propose that two strategies have emerged to solve this conflict: (i) various alternative forms have appeared that allow proper subject focusing and (ii) speakers have reinterpreted the structure so as to pragmatically retrieve the (additive) focused nature of the subject.
Recorded by Randy J. LaPolla from Mr. Chen Yonglin of Qugu Village, Chibusu District, Mao County, Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province, China.
Note on the transcription: The recording here is phonetic rather than phonemic, and so, for example, glottal stops are recorded, even though they are not phonemic.
This paper argues that long-standing problems in the analysis of Chinese, such as the question of word classes and grammatical relations, can be resolved, or actually done away with completely, if we take a constructionist approach in the analysis. This means the constructions are taken as basic, so we only need to look at the propositional functions of elements in the construction (referential, modifying, or predicative), and do not need to posit global categories such as word classes and grammatical relations.
The Sino-Tibetan language family enshrines the migratory histories of many East Asian populations, including the Chinese, Tibetans, and Burmese. Its history is intimately associated with Neolithic and Bronze Age developments in China itself, and today it is one of the major world language families in terms of population numbers.
Qiang
(2003)
Qiang is spoken in Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in northwest Sichuan Province. China; it belongs to the Qiangic branch of Tibeto-Burman. There are two major Qiang dialects. Northern Qiang (spoken in Heishui County, and the Chibusu district of Mao County; roughly 70,000 speakers) and Southern Qiang (spoken in Li County, Wenchuun County, Mao County, and Songpan County; about 60,000) (Sun 1981a: 177-78), The dialect presented here is the Northern Qiang variety spoken in Ronghong Village, Yadu Township, Chibusu District, Mao County.
Dulong
(2003)
Dulong [...] is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in China, closely related to the Rawang language of Myanmar (Burma). The Dulong speakers mainly live in Gongshan Dulong and Nu Autonomous County in Yunnan, China, and belong to either what is known as the Dulong nationality (pop. 5816 according to the 1990 census), or to one part (roughly 6000 people) of the Nu nationality (those who live along the upper reaches of the Nu River). The exonym 'Dulong' (or 'Taron', or 'Trung') was given to this nationality because they mostly live in the valley of the Dulong (Taron/Trung) River. In the past, the Dulong River was known as the Kiu (Qiu) river, and the Dulong people were known as the Kiu (Qiu), Kiutze (Qiuzi), Kiupa, or Kiao. Dulong is usually talked about as having four dialects, based on areas where it is spoken: First Township, Third Township, Fourth Township, and Nujiang. In this chapter, we will be using data of the First Township dialect spoken in Gongshan county.
Dulong/Rawang is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken on both sides of the China/Myanmar (Burma) border just south and cast of Tibet. [...] In this chapter, I will be using data of the Mvtwang (Mvt River) dialect, which is considered the most central of those dialects in Myanmar and so has become something of a standard for writing and intergroup communication, though most of the phenomena we will be discussing are general to dialects in both China and Myanrnar. I will use the short form 'Rawang' in referring to this dialect.
In LaPolla 1990, I presented arguments to show that Chinese is a language in which there has been no grammaticalizalion of the syntactic relations "subject" and "object". This being the case, then syntactic relations cannot be what determines word order in Chinese. In this paper I will argue that, aside from a semantic rule that the actor of a verb, if expressed, must precede that verb, it is pragmatic relations (information structure) that are the main determinants of word order in Chinese.
This paper is the second in a series arguing for a discourse·based analysis of grammatical relations in Chinese in which there is a direct mapping between semantic role and grammatical function, and there are no relation-changing lexical rules such as passivization that can change that mapping. The correct assignment of semantic roles to the constituents of a discourse is done by the listener purely on the basis of the discourse structure and pragmatics (real world knowledge). Though grammatical analyses of certain constructions can be done on the sentence level, the sentence is generally not the central unit for understanding anaphora and grammatical relations in Chinese. Two related arguments are presented here: the question of 'subject' and the structure of discourse developed from an analysis of the nature of discourse referent tracking.
In the present paper, we concentrate on (selected) Bantu and Nilotic bare-passive strategies and lay out the basis for a typology of transitive passive constructions in these languages. We argue that bare-passives constitute an optimal strategy to change prominence relations between arguments, in languages that strongly hold to the default mapping between the highest thematic role available and the grammatical subject (i.e. Spec,TP). The Nilotic and Bantu languages discussed here differ in their way of satisfying this default mapping. In particular, impersonal bare-passives satisfy it by resorting to an agentive place-holder (an indefinite subject marker) and realizing the logical agent as a lower thematic/semantic role (e.g. instrument or locative). Left-dislocation and so called 'subjectobject' reversal bare-passives realize the default matching between agent and subject in a more straightforward way, but locate the patient in a higher argument position within the inflectional domain (Spec,TopP). As argued in Hamlaoui and Makasso (2013) and Hamlaoui (2013), and in line with Noonan (1977), the present languages display a clauseinternal split between subjecthood (being the grammatical subject in Spec,TP) and topicality (being the subject of the predication, in an inflectional-domain internal Spec,TopP).
Inversion constructions in Bantu have been discussed from a variety of perspectives over the last decades. Well-known construction types include locative inversion and subject-object reversal, while more recently semantic locative inversion and instrument inversion have been described. Theoretical studies of Bantu inversion constructions have focused on different aspects of the construction, including the licensing and grammatical function, information structure properties and the formal characteristics of pre- and postverbal NPs. With respect to the status of preverbal NPs in inversion constructions, different analyses have probed the status of the NP as subject or topic, or, more recently, as the subject of a Predication relation. The present paper summarises and compares different analyses of the preverbal domain in inversion constructions and brings out empirical and conceptual similarities and differences. In addition, different analyses are related to comparative studies of Bantu inversion constructions, so as to probe how attested variation across Bantu relates to findings of different formal accounts. The paper aims to summarise current research on the preverbal domain in inversion constructions and to indicate directions for future work.
Nsong is a western Bantu language spoken in the neighbourhood of Kikwit (5°2'28"S 18°48'58"E, Kwilu District, Bandundu Province, DRC) and encoded as B85d in the New Updated Guthrie List (Maho 2009). To this B80 or Tiene-Yanzi group also belongs Mbuun, encoded as B87 by Guthrie (1971: 39) and spoken in the wider vicinity of Idiofa (4°57'35"S 19°35'40", Kwilu District, Bandundu Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo). Both languages are closely related. They share a high percentage of fundamental and other vocabulary as well as several rather atypical phonological innovations (Bostoen & Koni Muluwa 2014; Koni Muluwa 2014; Koni Muluwa & Bostoen 2012). Preliminary elicitation-based research on Mbuun has pointed out that the pre-verbal domain plays a crucial role in the marking of argument focus in Mbuun (Bostoen & Mundeke 2011, 2012). In this paper, we assess whether this is also the case in Nsong on the basis of a text corpus which the first author has been collecting, transcribing and annotating in 2013 and 2014 as part of an endangered language documentation project funded by the DoBeS program of the Volkswagen Foundation through a 3-year grant (2012-2015). More information on the project can be found on http://www.kwilubantu.ugent.be/. This Nsong text corpus exclusively consists of oral discourse and currently counts 48.022 tokens and 11.973 types. The team’s 2013 fieldwork aimed at documenting Nsong speech events in as many different cultural settings as possible. As a result, the corpus comprises different text genres, such as political speeches, historical traditions, folk music, tales, proverbs, hunting language, ceremonial language used during circumcision and twin rites, and popular biological knowledge. In line with previous research on Mbuun, we concentrate here on mono-clausal argument focus constructions, even if preliminary research has pointed out that bi-clausal focus structures are more common in the Nsong corpus.
The present paper aims at describing different pre-verbal focus strategies in Kisikongo (H16a), spoken in the vicinity of Mbanza Kongo, northern Angola. This western Bantu language is part of the Kikongo Language Cluster (KLC), stretching from southern Gabon to northern Angola, including Cabinda and parts of Congo-Brazzaville and Congo-Kinshasa. Kikongo exhibits a clause-internal pre-verbal argument focus position, which has rarely been reported in Bantu languages, except in Mbuun (B87) (Bostoen and Mundeke 2012) and Nsong (B85d) (Koni Muluwa and Bostoen, this volume), both spoken in the neighboring Kwilu region of the DRC. The more extensively studied eastern and southern Bantu languages generally have a post-verbal argument focus position (cf. Watters 1979, Morimoto 2000, Creissels 2004, Güldemann 2007, Buell 2009, van der Wal 2009, among others). In addition to this mono-clausal argument focus strategy, Kisikongo also relies on different bi-clausal constructions to focus arguments, i.e. cleft-constructions.
Nen and Nyokon are unique among the Bantu languages in allowing full nominal objects between the tense/aspect marker and the verb. Despite the fact that the two languages are neighbours and related they make different use of this positional option. In Nen the position is the default one for objects and the post-verbal position renders an object discrete and suitable for quantified objects and for contrast. In Nyokon the position before the verb is functionally equivalent to the one after the verb. The difference is related to the fact that Nyokon allows the preverbal object only in certain tenses whereas in Nen it is not restricted. But contrasted objects in Nyokon too appear after the verb. There is a construction in which both positions are filled with a constituent. This construction is modelled on a secondary predication construction.
Locative inversion in Cuwabo
(2014)
This paper proposes a detailed description of locative inversion (LI) constructions in Cuwabo, in terms of morphosyntactic properties and thematic restrictions. Of particular interest are the use of disjoint verb forms in LI, and the co-existence of formal and semantic LI, which challenges the widespread belief that the two constructions cannot be found in the same language.
This paper deals with left and right dislocation in Embɔsi, a Bantu language (C25) spoken in Congo-Brazzaville. The prosody of dislocation has gathered considerable attention, as it is particularly informative for the theories of the syntax-prosody mapping of Intonation Phrases (a.o. Selkirk, 2009, 2011; Downing, 2011). Concentrating on selected Bantu languages, Downing (2011) identifies two main phrasing patterns. She primarily distinguishes languages in which only right dislocated phrases display a lack of prosodic integration ("asymmetric" languages), from languages in which both left and right dislocations phrase separately ("symmetric" languages). Hiatus avoidance processes, boundary tones and register expansion/reduction indicate that Embɔsi displays a somewhat more intricate phrasing pattern. In this language, both left and right dislocated items sit outside of the Intonation Phrase formed by the core-clause, but only the latter form their own Intonation Phrase. We also discuss the prosody of multiple dislocations (i.e. with two dislocated arguments), which have not so far received all the attention they deserve. What we observe in Embɔsi is that either the two dislocated items phrase together and are not integrated to the core Intonation Phrase, or only the outermost dislocated element phrases separately.
Introduction
(2014)
Bantu languages have been at the heart of the research on the interaction between syntax, prosody and information structure. In these predominantly SVO languages, considerable attention has been devoted to postverbal phenomena. By addressing issues related to Subjects, Topics and Object-Verb word orders, the goal of the present papers is to deepen our understanding of the interaction of different grammatical components (syntax, phonology, semantics/pragmatics) both in individual languages and across the Bantu family. Each paper makes a valuable contribution to ongoing discussions on the preverbal domain.
As work like McCarthy (2002: 128) notes, pre-Optimality Theory (OT) phonology was primarily concerned with representations and theories of subsegmental structure. In contrast, the role of representations and choice of structural models has received little attention in OT. Some central representational issues of the pre-OT era have, in fact, become moot in OT (McCarthy 2002: 128). Further, as work like Baković (2007) notes, even for assimilatory processes where representation played a central role in the pre-OT era, constraint interaction now carries the main explanatory burden. Indeed, relatively few studies in OT (e.g., Rose 2000; Hargus & Beavert 2006; Huffmann 2005, 2007; Morén 2006) have argued for the importance of phonological representations. This paper intends to contribute to this work by reanalyzing a set of processes related to vowel harmony in Shimakonde, a Bantu language spoken in Mozambique and Tanzania. These processes are of particular interest, as Liphola’s (2001) study argues that they are derivationally opaque and so not amenable to an OT analysis. I show that the opacity disappears given the proper choice of representations for vowel features and a metrical harmony domain.
Low- dimensional and speaker-independent linear vocal tract parametrizations can be obtained using the 3-mode PARAFAC factor analysis procedure first introduced by Harshman et al. (1977) and discussed in a series of subsequent papers in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (Jackson (1988), Nix et al. (1996), Hoole (1999), Zheng et al. (2003)). Nevertheless, some questions of importance have been left unanswered, e.g. none of the papers using this method has provided a consistent interpretation of the terms usually referred to as "speaker weights". This study attempts an exploration of what influences their reliability as a first step towards their consistent interpretation. With this in mind, we undertook a systematic comparison of the classical PARAFAC1 algorithm with a relaxed version, of it, PARAFAC2. This comparison was carried out on two different corpora acquired by the articulograph, which varied in vowel qualities, consonantal contexts, and the paralinguistic features accent and speech rate. The difference between these statistical approaches can grossly be described as follows: In PARAFAC1, observation units pertain to the same set of variables and the observation units are comparable. In PARAFAC2, observations pertain to the same set of variables, but observation units are not comparable. Such a situation can be easily conceived in a situation such as we are describing: The operationalization we took relies on the comparability of fleshpoint data acquired from different speakers, which need not be a good assumption due to influences like sensor placement and morphological conditions.
In particular, the comparison between the two different approaches is carried out by means of so-called "leverages" on different component matrices originating in regression analysis, calculated as v = diag(A(A A)−1A ) and delivering information on how "influential" a particular loading matrix is for the model. This analysis could potentially be carried out component by component, but we confined ourselves to effects on the global factor structure. For vowels, the most influential loadings are those for the tense cognates of non-palatal vowels. For speakers, the most prominent result is the relative absence of effects of the paralinguistic variables. Results generally indicate that there is quite little influence of the model specification (i.e. PARAFAC1 or PARAFAC2) on vowel and subject components. The patterns for the articulators indicate that there are strong differences between speakers with respect to the most influential measurement as revealed by PARAFAC2: In particular, the most influential y-contribution is the tongue-back for some talkers and the tongue-dorsum for other speakers. With respect to the speaker weights, again, the leverage patterns are very similar for both PARAFAC-versions. These patterns converge with the results of the loading plots, where the articulator profiles seem to be most altered by the use of PARAFAC2. These findings, in general, are interpreted as evidence for the reliability of the PARAFAC1 speaker weights.
The paper starts with a semantic differentiation between the notions of sentence topic and discourse topic. Sentence topic is conceived of as part of a semantic predication in the sense of Y. Kim's work. Discourse topic is defined, as in N. Asher's Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, as a discourse constituent that comprises the content of (part of) the larger discourse.
The main body of the paper serves to investigate the intricate connection between the two types of topic. For restricting the context of investigation, a specific relation between discourse constituents, Elaboration, is chosen. If Elaboration holds between two discourse constituents, one of them can be identified as the explicit discourse topic with respect to the other one. Whereas an elaborating sentence - with or without a sentence topic - is used to infer a 'dimension' for extending the discourse topic, the role of the sentence topic if it occurs is to mark an 'index' for predication along that dimension. The interaction of elaborating sentences and their topics is modelled by means of channel theoretic devices.'
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.
It has been established since Kanerva’s work that focus conditions phrasing – directly or indirectly – in several other Bantu languages, e.g. Chimwiini (Kisseberth 2007, Downing 2002, Kisseberth & Abasheikh 2004), Xhosa (Jokweni 1995, Zerbian 2004), Chitumbuka (Downing 2006, 2007), Zulu (Cheng & Downing 2006, Downing 2007), Bemba (Kula 2007), etc.
In this paper, I will argue that focus also conditions phrasing in Shingazidja, a Bantu language3 spoken on Grande Comore (or Ngazidja, the largest island of the Comoros).
Many works have been dedicated to the tonology of Shingazidja. The bases of the system were firstly identified by Tucker & Bryan (1970) and reanalyzed by Philippson (1988). Later, Cassimjee & Kisseberth (1989, 1992, 1993, 1998) provide a very convincing analysis of the whole system of the language, and my own research (Patin 2007a) shows a great correspondence with their results. However, little attention has been paid by these authors or others (Jouannet 1989, Rey 1990, Philippson 2005) to the phonology-pragmatics interface, especially on the relation between focus and phrasing. This paper thus proposes to explore this question. It will be claimed that focus, beside syntax, has an influence on phrasing in Shingazidja.
Agreement is traditionally viewed as a cross-referencing device for core arguments such as subjects and (primary) objects.1 In this paper, I discuss data from Bantu languages that lead to a radical departure from this generally accepted position: agreement in a subset of Bantu languages cross-references a (sentential) topic rather than the subject. The crucial evidence for topic agreement comes from a construction known as subject-object (S-O) reversal, where the fronted patient agrees with what has uniformly been taken to be a `subject marker'. The correct analysis of S-O reversal as a topic construction with `topic agreement' explains a range of known facts in the languages in question. Furthermore, synchronic variation across Bantu in the presence/absence of S-O reversal and in the properties of the (topic/subject) agreement marker suggests a diachronic path from topic to subject marking. The systematic variation and covariation in the syntax of Bantu languages and the historical picture that it offers would be missed altogether if we continue to reject the idea that the notion of topic can be deeply grammaticized in the form of agreement.
This paper investigates what factors make a particular referent a good antecedent for subsequent pronominal reference. In particular, it explores two seemingly conflicting claims in the literature regarding the effects of topicality and focusing on referent salience. In light of new experimental results combined with a review of existing work, I conclude that neither topicality nor focusing alone can explain referent salience as indicated by patterns of pronoun reference. Rather, the data provide support for a multiple-factor model of salience (e.g. Arnold 1999). More specifically, the results show that grammatical role has a striking effect: being a subject makes a referent more salient than either pronominalization/givenness or focusing alone. Furthermore, the results of the experiment suggest that the likelihood of subsequent pronominal reference is also influenced by structural focusing and pronominalization, but not as strongly as by subjecthood. I argue that these data are best captured by a multiple-factor model in which factors differ in how influential they are relative to one another, i.e. how heavily weighted they are. A single-factor system does not seem adequate for these data.
In this paper I argue that the set of formal features that can head a functional projection is not given by UG but derived through L1 acquisition. I formulate a hypothesis that says that initially every functional category F is realised as a semantic feature [F]; whenever there is an overt doubling effect in the L1 input with respect to F, this semantic feature [F] is reanalysed as a formal feature [i/uF]. In the first part of the paper I provide a theoretical motivation for this hypothesis, in the second part I test this proposal for a case-study, namely the cross-linguistic distribution of Negative Concord (NC). I demonstrate that in NC languages negation has been reanalysed as a formal feature [i/uNEG], whereas in Double Negation languages this feature remains a semantic feature [NEG] (always interpreted as a negative operator), thus paving the way for an explanation of NC in terms of syntactic agreement. In the third part I discuss that the application of the hypothesis to the phenomenon of negation yields two predictions that can be tested empirically. First I demonstrate that negative markers X° can be available only in NC languages; second, independent change of the syntactic status of negative markers, can invoke a change with respect to the exhibition of NC in a particular language. Both predictions are proven to be correct. I finally argue what the consequences of the proposal presented in this paper are for both the syntactic structure of the clause and second for the way parameters are associated to lexical items.
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).
Russian predicate cleft constructions have the surprising property of being associated with adversative clauses of the opposite polarity. I argue that clefts are associated with adversative clauses because they have the semantics of S-Topics in Büring's (1997, 2000) sense of the term. It is shown that the polarity of the adversative clause is obligatorily opposed to that of the cleft because the use of a cleft gives rise to a relevance-based pragmatic scale. The ordering principle according to which these scale
This paper concerns the distribution of wh-words in Asante Twi, which has both a focus fronting strategy and an in-situ strategy. We show that the focusing and the in-situ constructions are not simply equally available options. On the contrary, there are several cases where the focusing strategy must be used and the in-situ strategy is ungrammatical. We show that the cases in Asante Twi are "intervention effects", which are attested in other languages, like German, Korean, and French. We identify a core set of intervening elements that all of these languages have and discuss their properties.
Dog after dog revisited
(2006)
This paper presents a compositional semantic analysis of pluractional adverbial modifiers like 'dog after dog' and 'one dog after the other'. We propose a division of labour according to which much of the semantics is carried by a family of plural operators. The adverbial itself contributes a semantics that we call pseudoreciprocal.
Since Haiman (1978), a general assumption concerning the information structure of conditional sentences is that "conditionals are topics". However, in Chadic South Bauchi West languages spoken in Northern Nigeria, as well as in Banda Linda, an Adamawa language spoken in the République Centre-Africaine, conditionals share their structure with focus, not topic. This seriously questions Haiman’s claim and forces us to reconsider the facts and characterizations of conditionals, topic and focus in general.
In order to do this, we will first examine the facts of conditionals in some Chadic languages, then their information structure. We will see how both data and theory invalidate Haiman's claim. Then we will see that if they are not topics, they are different from focus as well. We will argue that if the elements which make a topic or a focus can appear in conditionals, these must be separated from what constitutes the identity of conditions. Then, we will see if these can be characterized in the same way as Lambrecht characterizes temporal clauses, viz. as "activated propositions" (Lambrecht 1994). We will finally conclude that they should rather be defined as "fictitious assertions" (Culioli 2000).
Tone as a distinctive feature used to differentiate not only words but also clause types, is a characteristic feature of Bantu languages. In this paper we show that Bemba relatives can be marked with a low tone in place of a segmental relative marker. This low tone strategy of relativization, which imposes a restrictive reading of relatives, manifests a specific phonological phrasing that can be differentiated from that of non-restrictives. The paper shows that the resultant phonological phrasing favours a head-raising analysis of relativization. In this sense, phonology can be shown to inform syntactic analyses.
In my paper, I show that the so-called German right dislocation actually comprises two distinct constructions, which I label 'right dislocation proper' and 'afterthought'. These differ in their prosodic and syntactic properties, as well as in their discourse functions. The paper is primarily concerned with the right dislocation proper (RD). I present a semantic analysis of RD based on the 'separate performative' account of Potts (2004, 2005) and Portner (forthc.). This analysis allows a description of the semantic contribution of RD to its host sentence, as well as explaining certain semantic constraints on the kind of NP in the RD construction.
In a recent contribution to a long-standing discussion in semantics as to whether the neo-Davidsonian analysis should be extended to stative predicates or not, Maienborn (2004, 2005) proposes to distinguish two types of statives; one of them is said to have a referential argument of the Davidsonian type, the other not. As one of her arguments for making such a distinction, Maienborn observes that manner modification seems to be supported only by certain statives but to be excluded by others (thus linking the issue to the use of manner modification as one major argument in favour of event semantics, cf. Parsons 1990). In this paper, it is argued that the absence of manner modification with Maienborn's second group of statives is actually due to a failure of conceptual construal: modification of a predicate is ruled out whenever its internal conceptual structure is too poor to provide a construal for the modifier; hence, the effects observed by Maienborn reduce to the fact that eventive predicates have a more complex conceptual substructure than stative ones. Hence, the issue of manner modification with statives is shown to be orthogonal to questions of logical form and event semantics. The explanatory power of the conceptual approach is demonstrated with a case study on predicates of light emission, adapting the representation format of Barsalou's (1992) frame model.
We present the results of an experimental study which targets prosodic correlates of subclausal quotation marks. We found that written sentences containing passages enclosed by quotation marks were read aloud in a manner that significantly differs in prosody from spoken realizations of corresponding disquoted counterparts. However, we also observed that such prosodic marking of subclausal quotation wasn't strong enough to survive subsequent back-translation into written language: there was no correlation between the presence/absence of quotation marks in the original written examples, and the presence/absence of quotation marks in corresponding back-translations from oral renditions. We investigated three different kinds of uses of quotation marks and found no systematic difference between them with respect to prosodic marking.
Rate effects on aerodynamics of intervocalic stops : evidence from real speech data and model data
(2008)
This paper is a first attempt towards a better understanding of the aerodynamic properties during speech production and their potential control. In recent years, studies on intraoral pressure in speech have been rather rare, and more studies concern the air flow development. However, the intraoral pressure is a crucial factor for analysing the production of various sounds.
In this paper, we focus on the intraoral pressure development during the production of intervocalic stops.
Two experimental methodologies are presented and confronted with each other: real speech data recorded for four German native speakers, and model data, obtained by a mechanical replica which allows reproducing the main physical mechanisms occurring during phonation. The two methods are presented and applied to a study on the influence of speech rate on aerodynamic properties.
The unfolding discussion will focus on the internal representation of turbulent sounds in the phonology of German as well as pinpoint the special status of the prime defining the quality of turbulence. It will also be argued that this prime is capable of entering into special types of licensing relations, which results in specific phonetic manifestations of forms. We shall compare the effects of two processes attested in German: consonant degemination and spirantisation with a view to revealing the role of the turbulence-defining element in the two operations. Furthermore, our attention will be focused on the workings of the Obligatory Contour Principle which, as will be shown below, exerts decisive impact on prime interplay and consequently the phonetic realization of sounds and words. We shall see that segmental identity is contingent on the languagespecific interpretation of inter-element bonds.
Aware of the importance of prime autonomy in determining the manifestation of sounds, let us start with a brief outline of the fundamental segment structure principles offered by the theory of Phonological Government.
The main concern of this article is to discuss some recent findings concerning the psychological reality of optimality-theoretic pragmatics and its central part – bidirectional optimization. A present challenge is to close the gap between experimental pragmatics and neo-Gricean theories of pragmatics. I claim that OT pragmatics helps to overcome this gap, in particular in connection with the discussion of asymmetries between natural language comprehension and production. The theoretical debate will be concentrated on two different ways of interpreting bidirection: first, bidirectional optimization as a psychologically realistic online mechanism; second, bidirectional optimization as an offline phenomenon of fossilizing optimal form-meaning pairs. It will be argued that neither of these extreme views fits completely with the empirical data when taken per se.
This paper deals with the development of discourse competence in German-, Russian- and Bulgarian-speaking children. In particular, it examines the use of anaphoric pronominal reference in elicited narrations of children between the ages of 2;6 and 6;0. As the pronominal (and nominal) systems of target German, Russian and Bulgarian differ in the repertoire and functions of anaphoric elements we will examine which kind of noun phrases children use to make reference to story participants. In a second step of the analysis, we will investigate how pronominal expressions relate to antecedents. In this respect the pronominal form of the anaphor, the syntactic function of the antecedent and the distance between antecedent and anaphor will be analyzed. The findings will be discussed with regard to predictions made by proposals such as the Complementary Hypothesis (Bosch, Rozario, and Zhao 2003) which assumes an asymmetry between the use of personal pro-nouns and demonstrative pronouns when referring back to subject or object antecedents.
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.
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.
One of the most important insights of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993) is that phonological processes can be reduced to the interaction between faithfulness and universal markedness principles. In the most constrained version of the theory, all phonological processes should be thus reducible. This hypothesis is tested by alternations that appear to be phonological but in which universal markedness principles appear to play no role. If we are to pursue the claim that all phonological processes depend on the interaction of faithfulness and markedness, then processes that are not dependent on markedness must lie outside phonology. In this paper I will examine a group of such processes, the initial consonant mutations of the Celtic languages, and argue that they belong entirely to the morphology of the languages, not the phonology.
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.
Sentence mood in German is a complex category that is determined by various components of the grammatical system. In particular, verbal mood, the position of the finite verb and the wh-characteristics of the so called 'Vorfeld'-phrase are responsible for the constitution of sentence mood in German. This article proposes a theory of sentence mood constitution in German and investigates the interaction between the pronominal binding of indefinite noun phrases which are semantically analyzed as choice functions. It is shown that the semantic objects determined by sentence mood define different kinds of domains which have to be uniquely accessible as the range of the choice function. The various properties of the pronominal binding of indefinites can be derived by the interplay of the proposed theoretical notions.
[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.
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.
Although the linear order of arguments (and adverbials) in German is relatively free, it underlies certain restrictions; these don’t apply to the so-called unmarked order for arguments (Lenerz 1977) and adverbials (Frey/Pittner 1998). It is a common assumption to take the unmarked order as basic and derive all other orders from it by scrambling, whatever its specific characteristics may be (cf., amongst others, Haider/Rosengren 1998). The observable restrictions obtaining for some linear ordering may then be considered as constraints on a movement operation (scrambling). [...] In the following, I will try to present the outlines of a possible explanation for the restriction, based on a proposal governing the proper referential interpretation of indefinite NPs.
Current analyses of specificity are unable to provide an explanatory account for why specific and nonspecific uses of indefinites are available. While Abusch (1994), Reinhart (1997), and Kratzer (1998) provide successful mechanisms for deriving specific readings, they do not provide a fundamental explanation for the availability of this mechanism. This is due to the fact that specific indefinites are treated as involving an interpretive component or procedure unique to themselves: storage (Abusch) or choice function (Reinhart and Kratzer), for example. It would be preferable if specific indefinites could be understood as deriving from the use of independently motivated meaning components and interpretive mechanisms.
Here I will pursue the idea, building on Portner & Yabushita (1998), that specificity has to do with the indefinite's interaction with a topical domain (note similarities with the proposals of Enç 1991, Cresti 1995, and Schwarzschild 2000). In this conception, specificity is a matter of degree: the narrower the topical domain, the more specific the indefinite. More precisely, sentences containing specific indefinites will be understood as involving ordinary existential quantification in combination with a topical domain function.
It is well known that English children between the age of 4 and 6 display a so-called Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) in that they allow pronouns to refer to a local c-commanding antecedent. Their guessing pattern with pronouns contrasts with their adult-like interpretation of reflexives. The DPBE has been explained as resulting from a lack of pragmatic knowledge or insufficient cognitive resources. However, such extra-grammatical accounts cannot explain why the DPBE only shows up in particular languages and in particular syntactic environments. Moreover, such accounts fail to explain why the DPBE only emerges in comprehension and not in production. This paper hypothesizes that the presence or absence of the DPBE can be explained from the properties of the grammar. Fischer's (2004) optimality-theoretic analysis of binding, explaining cross-linguistic variation, and Hendriks and Spenader's (2005/6) optimality-theoretic account of the acquisition of pronouns and reflexives are combined into a single model. This model yields testable predictions with respect to the presence or absence of the DPBE in particular languages, in particular syntactic environments, and in comprehension and/or production.
It has been shown that visual cues play a crucial role in the perception of vowels and consonants. Conflicting consonantal stimuli presented in the visual and auditory modalities can even result in the emergence of a third perceptual unit (McGurk effect). From a developmental point of view, several studies report that newborns can associate the image of a face uttering a given vowel to the auditory signal corresponding to this vowel; visual cues are thus used by the newborns. Despite the large number of studies carried out with adult speakers and newborns, very little work has been conducted with preschool-aged children. This contribution is aimed at describing the use of auditory and visual cues by 4 and 5-year-old French Canadian speakers, compared to adult speakers, in the identification of voiced consonants. Audiovisual recordings of a French Canadian speaker uttering the sequences [aba], [ada], [aga], [ava], [ibi], [idi], [igi], [ivi] have been carried out. The acoustic and visual signals have been extracted and analysed so that conflicting and non-conflicting stimuli, between the two modalities, were obtained. The resulting stimuli were presented as a perceptual test to eight 4 and 5-year-old French Canadian speakers and ten adults in three conditions: visual-only, auditory-only, and audiovisual. Results show that, even though the visual cues have a significant effect on the identification of the stimuli for adults and children, children are less sensitive to visual cues in the audiovisual condition. Such results shed light on the role of multimodal perception in the emergence and the refinement of the phonological system in children.