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Theticity
(1996)
The subject matter of this chapter is the semantic, syntactic and discoursepragmatic background as well as the cross-linguistic behavior of types of utterance exemplified by the following English sentences […]: (1) My NECK hurts. […] (2) The PHONE's ringing. [...] Sentences such as […] are usually held to stand in opposition to sentences with a topical subject. The difference is said to be formally marked, for example, by VS order vs. topical SV order (as in Albanian po bie telefoni 'the PHONE is ringing' vs. telefoni po bie 'the PHONE is RINGING'), or by accent on the subject only vs. accent on both the subject and the verb (as in the English translations). The term theticity will be used in the following to label the specific phenomenological domain to which the sentences in (1) and (2) belong. It has long been commonplace that these and similar expressions occur at particular points in the discourse where "a new situation is presented as a whole". We will try to depict and classify the various discourse situations in which these expressions have been found in the different languages, and we will try to trace out areas of cross-linguistic comparability. Finally, we will raise the question whether or not there is a common denominator which would justify a unified treatment of all these expressions in functional/semantic terms.
[I]n its present form, the bibliography contains approximately 1100 entries. Bibliographical work is never complete, and the present one is still modest in a number of respects. It is not annotated, and it still contains a lot of mistakes and inconsistencies. It has nevertheless reached a stage which justifies considering the possibility of making it available to the public. The first step towards this is its pre-publication in the form of this working paper. […]
The bibliography is less complete for earlier years. For works before 1970, the bibliographies of Firbas and Golkova 1975 and Tyl 1970 may be consulted, which have not been included here.
The acquisition of Greek
(1995)
Studie zum Erwerb des Neugriechischen
A feature of the Northern Iroquoian languages is their especially rich inventory of particles. This paper is concerned with one particle in the Cayuga language which has a widespread distribution and performs a broad range of apparently unrelated functions. The particle ne:' is commonly .translated as 'it is/that is', 'this' or ' that'. In other instances it is translated as predominant stress, or is simply omitted in the translation. The particle can occur in almost any syntactic or semantic environment, but it is not obligatory in any context. The various functions that have been suggested in the literature include indication of declarative mood and assertion, marking of emphasis, focus or contrast, and expression of predicative and deictic force. I argue that the particle ne:' can be described successfully if its distribution is considered from a wider perspective, taking into account discourse structure and variation in scope. Its analysis as a focus marker can account for the variety of apparently unrelated functions. The analysis is based on a detailed study of the particle' s distribution in spoken language using a database of five Cayuga texts by four different speakers, including three narratives, one procedural text and a children 's version of a ceremonial text.
In the last two decades Philippine languages, and of these especially Tagalog, have acquired a prominent place in linguistic theory. A central role in this discussion was played by two papers written by Schachter (1976 and 1977), who was inspired by Keenan's artcle on the subject from 1976. The most recent contributions on this topic have been from de Wolff (1988) and Shibatani (1988), both of which were published in a collection of essays, edited by Shibatani, with the title Passive and Voice. These works, and several works in-between, deal with the focus system specific to Philippine languages. The main discussion centers around the fact that Philippine languages contain a basic set of 5 to 7 affix focus forms. Their exact number varies not only in the secondary literature, but in the primary sources, i.e. Tagalog grammars, as well, where considerable differences in the number of affix focus forms can be found. All of these works, however, do agree on one point: the Philippine focus system basica1ly consists of agent, patient (=goal or object), benefactive, locative, and instrumental affix forms. Schachter/Otanes (1972) list a number of further forms, and in Drossard (1983 and 1984) we tried to show (in an attempt similar to those of Sapir 1917 and Klimov 1977) that the main criterion for a systematization of the Philippine focus system consists in the difference between the active and stative domains, an attempt which in our opinion was largely misunderstood (cf. the brief remarks in Shibatani (1988) and de Wolff (1988). The present paper is thus, on the one hand, an attempt to repeat and clarify our earlier position, and on the other, a further step towards such a systematization. A first step in this direction was an article on resultativity in Tagalog from 1991. In the present paper this approach will be extended to reciprocity. In the process we will show that it is valid to make a distinction between an active (=controlled action) vs. a stative (=limited controlled action) domain. First, however, we will take a brief look at what makes up the active and stative voice systems.
This paper is concerned with developing Joan Bybee's proposals regarding the nature of grammatical meaning and synthesizing them with Paul Hopper's concept of grammar as emergent. The basic question is this: How much of grammar may be modeled in terms of grammaticalization? In contradistinction to Heine, Claudi & Hünnemeyer (1991), who propose a fairly broad and unconstrained framework for grammaticalization, we try to present a fairly specific and constrained theory of grammaticalization in order to get a more precise idea of the potential and the problems of this approach. Thus, while Heine et al. (1991:25) expand – without discussion – the traditional notion of grammaticalization to the clause level, and even include non-segmental structure (such as word order), we will here adhere to a strictly 'element-bound' view of grammaticalization: where no grammaticalized element exists, there is no grammaticalization. Despite this fairly restricted concept of grammaticalization, we will attempt to corroborate the claim that essential aspects of grammar may be understood and modeled in terms of grammaticalization. The approach is essentially theoretical (practical applications will, hopefully, follow soon) and many issues are just mentioned and not discussed in detail. The paper presupposes a familiarity with the basic facts of grammaticalization and it does not present any new facts.
Grammatical relations – in particular the relation 'subject of' – and voice are of central concern to any theory of universal grammar. With respect to these phenomena the analysis of Tagalog (and the Philippine languages in general) has turned out to be particularly difficult and continues to be a matter of debate. What traditionally has been called passive voice in these languages […] appears to be so different from voice phenomena in the more familiar Indo-European languages that the term 'focus' was introduced in the late 1950s to underscore its 'exceptional' nature [...]. Furthermore, […] an inflationary use has been made of the term 'ergative' in the last decade; it can thus no longer be assumed that it has an unequivocal and specific meaning in typologizing languages, apart from the technical definition it might be given within a particular framework. But if the Philippine 'focus' constructions are neither passive nor ergative, how else can they be analysed? [...] In this paper a ease will be made for the claim that 'focus' marking should be analysed in terms of orientation, a concept used […] for capturing the difference between English (and, more generally, Indo-European) orientated nominalisations such as 'employ-er' or 'employ-ee', and unorientated nominalisations such as 'employ-ing'. This approach implies that 'focus' marking is derivational rather than inflectional as often presumed in the literature. This is to say that what is typologically conspicuous in Tagalog is not the 'focus' phenomenon per se, since this is very similar to orientated nominalisations in many other languages, but rather the very prominent use of orientated formations (i.e., derivational morphology) in basic clause structure.
The most macabre of the numerous anthropomorphic metaphors linguists provide for their subject matter is that of language death. The extinction of a language is in fact a distressing matter, because the cultural tradition connected to it and the sociocultural or even ethnic independence of the group that speaks it very often perish together with it. Yet it is a very common phenomenon. [...] It would seem strange that such a frequent and well-known phenomenon has not been studied much earlier; nevertheless it is a fact that the investigation of language death is a new and developing field, which emerged as something like an independent subdiscipline of linguistics towards the end of the seventies. This comparatively embryonic stage of the field should be kept in mind throughout the following discussion.
This paper is concerned with anticausative verbs (or verb-forms), or shortly, anticausatives. [...] [C]ausative/non-causative pairs with a marked non-causative are quite frequent in the languages of the world. However, so far they have not received sufficient attention in general and typological linguistics, a fact which is also manifested in the absence of a generally recognized term for this phenomenon […]. This paper therefore deals with the most important properties of anticausatives (particularly semantic conditions on them), their relationship to other areas of grammar as well as their historical development in different languages. The grammatical domain of transitivity, valence and voice, where the anticausative belongs, takes up a central position in grammar and consequently the present discussion should be of considerable interest to general comparative (or typological) linguists.
It is the aim of this paper to present and elaborate a new solution to the old syntactic problems connected with the Latin gerundive and gerund, two verbal categories which have been interpreted variously either as adjective (or participle) or noun (or infinitive). These questions have been much discussed for quite a number of years […] but for the most part from a philological or purely diachronic point of view. All these linguists try to explain the peculiarities of these categories and their syntax by showing that the gerund is historically prior to the gerundive. [...] It is our thesis […] that in order to arrive at a unified account of gerundive and gerund we do not have to go back to prehistoric times. Even for the classical language gerund and gerundive represent the same category, in the sense that the gerund can be shown to be a special case of the gerundive. Additional evidence from a parallel construction in Hindi is adduced to make the Latin facts more plausible. It is only in the post-classical language that certain tendencies which had shown up already in Old Latin poetry become stronger and finally lead to a reanalysis of the gerundive and a split into two distinct syntactic constructions. The propositional meaning of the gerundive in its attributive use is explained with reference to a conflict between syntactic and cognitive principles. Special constructions which are the effects of such conflicts can be found in other parts of grammar. Languages differ with respect to the degree of syntacticization (or conventionalization) of these special constructions.
Children […] growing up with highly inflected languages such as Modern Greek will frequently hear different grammatical forms of a given lexeme used in different grammatical and semantic-pragmatic contexts. In spite of the fact that the Greek noun is not as highly inflected as the verb, acquisition of nominal inflection of this inflecting-fusional language is quite complex, comprising the three categories of case, number, and gender. As is usual in this type of language, the formation of case-number forms obeys different patterns that apply to largely arbitrary classes of nominal lexemes partially based on gender. Further, frequency of the occurrence of the three gender classes and case-number forms of nouns greatly differs in spoken Greek, regarding both the types and tokens. […] [A] child learning an inflecting-fusional language like Greek must construct different inflectional patterns depending not only on parts of speech but also on subclasses within a given part of speech, such as gender classes of nouns and inflectional classes within or (exceptionally) across genders. It is therefore to be expected that the early development of case and number distinctions will apply to specific nouns and subclasses of nouns rather than the totality of Greek nouns. The two main theoretical approaches of morphological development that will be discussed in the present paper are the usage-based approach and the pre- and protomorphology approach.
In this paper I present five alternations of the verb system of Modern Greek, which are recurrently mapped on the syntactic frame NPi__NP. The actual claim is that only the participation in alternations and/or the allocation to an alternation variant can reliably determine the relation between a verb derivative and its base. In the second part, the conceptual structures and semantic/situational fields of a large number of “-ízo” derivatives appearing inside alternation classes are presented. The restricted character of the conceptual and situational preferences inside alternations classes suggests the dominant character of the alternations component.
Most systematic discussion of dyad morphemes has focussed on Australian languages, owing to a combination of their relative prevalence there, and the development of a descriptive tradition that investigates them in some depth. In the course of researching this paper, however, I became aware of functionally and semantically similar morphemes in many other parts of the world, almost invariably described in isolation from any typological reference point. I have incorporated such data as far as I am aware of it, in the hope that a systematic study will encourage other investigators to identify, and investigate in detail, similar constructions in a range of languages. The current state of our research, however, as well as some interesting geographical skewings that I discuss below, such that outside Australia dyad constructions almost exclusively employ reciprocal morphology, means that most of this paper will focus on Australian languages.
Relating propositions : subordination and coordination strategies in a polysynthetic language
(1998)
This paper discusses the relationship between the morphological structure of language and its syntactic structure. Although it is primarily a single language which is analysed in detail, namely, Inuktitut, an Eskimo language of the Canadian Eastern Arctic, the findings seem to be of general relevance.
The Inuit inhabit a vast area of--from a European point of view--most inhospitable land, stretching from the northeastern tip of Asia to the east coast of Greenland. Inuit peoples have never been numerous, their settlements being scattered over enormous distances. But nevertheless, from an ethnological point of view, all Inuit peoples shared a distinct culture, featuring sea mammal and caribou hunting, sophisticated survival skills, technical and social devices, including the sharing of essential goods and strategies for minimizing and controlling aggression.
This paper is concerned with the tagging of spatial expressions in German newspaper articles, assigning a meaning to the expression and classifying the usages of the spatial expression and linking the derived referent to an event description. In our system, we implemented the activation of concepts in a very simple fashion, a concept is activated once (with a cost depending on the item that activated it) and is left activated thereafter. As an example, a city also activates the nodes for the region and the country it is part of, so that cities from one country are chosen over cities from different countries. A test corpus of 12 German newspaper articles was tested regarding several disambiguation strategies. Disambiguation was carried out via a beam search to find an approximately cost-optimal solution for the conflict set of potential grounding candidates for the tagged spatial expression. Test showed that the disambiguation strategies improved accuracy significantly.