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Dictionaries contain lexicographic data whose occurrence is restricted to certain geo-graphical areas, subject fields, professions, etc. It is part of the duties of the lexicographer to give an account of such deviations to ensure a successful retrieval of the information on the part of the user. This contribution presents a discussion on labelling issues in the Dictionnaire Français–Mpongwé. Although the main focus is on the presentation of different types of labelling as well as problems in labelling, textual condensation procedures and mediostructural representations (to-gether with some aspects of the user perspective) are also critically evaluated. It is shown that these procedures reveal some inconsistencies which are not accounted for in the outer texts (front matter and back matter texts) of the dictionary. Finally suggestions are made for the improvement of the access structure of this dictionary.
The phenomenon discussed in this paper is the so-called expletive negation in negated yes/no questions in Serbo-Croatian. The term expletive negation seems, at this point to be a useful descriptive term for the phenomenon in question. One of the goals of this paper, however, is to show that it is not the correct one. Proposing the existence of semantically vacuous negation is the consequence of the assumption that sentential negation has a fixed position in the clausal hierarchy (Brown and Franks 1995). This approach cannot account for the relevant data in Serbo-Croatian. My claim is that the cases under consideration involve an alternative position of NegP in Serbo-Croatian, above TP. It is confined to the derivation of one semantic type of negated yes/no interrogatives, and it cannot trigger negative concord.
For this paper, 170 Tibeto-Burman languages were surveyed for nominal ease marking (adpositions), in an attempt to determine ifit would be possible to reeonstruet any ease markers to Proto· Tibeto-Burman, and in so doing leam more about the nature of the grammatieal organization of Proto-Tibeto-Burman. The data were also eross-cheeked for patterns of isomorphy/polysemy, to see ifwe can leam anything about the development ofthe forms we da find in the languages. The results of the survey indicate that although a11 Tibeto-Bunnan languages have developed some sort of relation marking, none of the markers ean be reconstrueted to the oldest stage of the family. Looking at the patterns of isomorphy or polysemy, we find there are regularities to the patterns we find, and on the basis of these regularities we can make assurne that the path of development most probably followed the markedness/prototypicality clines: the locative and ablative use would have arose first and then were extended to the more abstract cases.
The present paper investigates a certain subset of clause linkage phenomena and develops a constraint-based account to the empirical fact that clauses need to be distinguished with respect to their degree of integratedness into a potential matrix clause. Considering as example German, it is shown that the generally assumed twofold distinction between main and subordinate clauses (or root and embedded clauses) does not suffice to deal with the presented data. It is argued that the discussed linkage phenomena originate from syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of the clauses involved, and should hence be encoded in grammar.
This paper argues for non-primary c- and s-selectional restrictions of verbs in computing nonprimary predicatives such as resultatives, depictives, and manners. Our discussion is based both on the selection violations in the presence of nonprimary predicates and on the cross-linguistic and language-internal variations of categorial and semantic constraints on nonprimary predicates. We claim that all types of thematic predication are represented by an extended projection, and that the merger of lexical heads with another element, regardless of the type of the element, consistently has c- and s-selectional restrictions.
On object specificity
(2001)
[W]e have demonstrated that the object specificity follows from the same principle as the subject specificity under the EMH. Furthermore, the semantic discrepancy between the realis and irrealis object shift constructions turns out to be a subcase of the more general indicative-modal asymmetry. Although our analysis presented here is nothing but conclusive, it does suggest that the EMH is a potent candidate for explaining the indicative-modal asymmetry, as well as for building a general theory of the specificity effects in question.
In this paper I show that Clitic Climbing (CC) in Spanish and Long Scrambling (LS) in German (and Polish) are (im-)possible out of the same environments. For an explanation of this fact I propose a feature-oriented analysis of incorporation phenomena. The idea is that restructuring is a phenomenon of syntactic incorporation. In German and Polish, Agro incorporates covertly into the matrix clause and licenses LS out of the infinitival into the matrix clause. Similarily the clitic in Spanish, which is analysed as an Agro-head, incorporates into the matrix clause. I argue that this movement is necessary for reasons of feature-checking, i. e. for checking of an [+R]- or Restructuring-feature. In section 2 I discuss several differences between CC and LS. For example, the proposed analysis correctly predicts that clitics in contrast to scrambled phrases are subject to several serialization restrictions. Throughout the paper I use the term restructuring only in a descriptive sense, in order to describe the phenomenon in question.
This paper pursues the question what the implications of the Anti-Locality Hypothesis could be for the syntax of secondary predication. Focus of the discussion will be an investigation of what their internal structure of small clause complements must look like, how these small clause complements connect to their matrix environments, and what the relevance could be for the formulation of anti-locality presented here. Anti-locality is defined over a tripartite clause structure (split into three Prolific Domains) and a PF-condition on the computation (the Condition on Domain-Exclusivity). The investigation revolves around two leading questions: (i) does the syntax of small clauses involve more structure than simply [SC DP XP] and (ii) do small clauses constitute their own Prolific Domain (or maybe even more)? The results, affirmative answers to both questions, are also relevant for other types of secondary predication.
The status of quantifier raising in German and other languages where scope is fairly rigid is debated. The first part of this paper argues that quantifiers in German can undergo covert extraction out of coordinations, and therefore that quantifier raising is available in German. The second part argues that quantifier raising in German is constrained to never move one DP across another. This result might provide part of an explanation of scope rigidity in German.
The interaction between Syntax and Phonology has been one area of interesting empirical research and theoretical debate in recent years, particularly the question of the extent to which syntactic structure influences phonological phrasing. It has generally been observed that the edges of the major syntactic constituents (XPs) tend to coincide with prosodic phrase boundaries thus resulting in XPs like subject NPs, object NPs, Topic NPs, VPs etc. forming separate phonological phrases. Within Optimality Theoretic (OT) accounts, this fact has been attributed to a number of well-motivated general alignment constraints. Studies on relative clauses in Bantu and other languages have significantly contributed to this area of research inquiry where a number of parametric variations have been observed with regard to prosodic phrasing. In some languages, XPs which are heads of relatives form separate phonological phrases while in others they phrase with the relative clauses. This paper makes a contribution to this topic by discussing the phrasing of relatives in Ciwandya (a Bantu language spoken in Malawi and Tanzania). It shows that XPs which are heads of restrictive relative clauses phrase with their relative verbs, regardless of whether they are subjects, objects or other adjuncts. A variety of syntactic constructions are used to illustrate this fact. The discussion also confirms what has been generally observed in other Bantu languages concerning restrictive relatives with clefts and non-restrictive relative clauses. In both cases, the heads of the relatives phrase separately. The paper adopts an OT analysis which has been well articulated and defended in Cheng & Downing (2007, 2010, to appear) Downing & Mtenje (2010, 2011) to account for these phenomena in Ciwandya.
On Russenorsk
(2002)
The concept of mixed language has recently gained some popularity, to my mind for no good reason. It is unclear how a mixed language can be distinguished from the product of extensive borrowing or relexification. I therefore think that the concept only serves to provoke muddled thinking about linguistic contact and language change. Note e.g. that Munske adduces German as an example "because the author is a professor of German linguistics and because the phenomenon of language mixing can be explained better in relation to a language on which a large amount of research has been done than, for example, in relation to pidgin and creole languages" (1986: 81).
The paper shows that shared indefinite expressions in coordinative constructions may differ with respect to their referential properties. This is due to their being either in a focused or in a nonfocused shared constituent. Their different information-structural status follows from Rooth's theory on focus interpretation. Thus it follows that focused shared constitutents must be beyond the actual coordination and that coordinative constructions with unfocused shared constituents can be represented as ellipsis. In a focused shared constituent indefinite expressions may have a specific and an non specific unique reading as well as an non specific distributive one. For the latter we outline the idea that subjects and objects in the actual coordination form a pair of sets to which a distributing operator is attached. The set formation is further supported by plural pronouns referring to the respective set and by plural verb agreement in subsequent expressions.
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 contribution is concerned with prefixed forms in western Austronesian languages which have been called a wide variety of names including 'stative', 'accidental', 'involuntary', 'potential', 'coincidence', 'momentary', and so on. Although widely neglected in the literature, these formations are of major import to the grammar of many western Austronesian languages, where for all event expressions there is an obligatory choice between a neutral form and a form marked for 'involuntariness', 'potentiality', 'coincidence', or the like. Furthermore, this distinction has implications for a wide range of theoretical issues, including the nature of unaccusativity and causativity, split-intransitivity, and the grammar of control and complementation.
The main goal of this contribution is to bring some basic order to the fairly broad and, on first sight at least, somewhat heterogeneous range of uses and meanings associated with these forms. I will argue that the different uses can be grouped into two semantically and morphosyntactically quite different construction types, which I will call STATIVE (proper) and POTENTIVE, respectively.
Section 2 presents the major uses of the 'stative' prefix ma- in Tagalog. In section 3, it is shown that despite superficial similarities the various examples with ma-marked predicates presented in section 2 involve two different constructions and that the prefix ma- belongs to two different morphological paradigms. Section 4, finally, provides a systematization of stative and potentive uses and discusses similarities and differences between the Tagalog system and superficially similar systems in so-called split-S languages.
This paper focuses on different subtypes of constructions involving temporally bounded quantification, e.g. sequences like David visited Rome three times followed by temporal phrases as different as (i) last year, which defines a time interval; (ii) in less that two months, which defines an amount of time; and (iii) per month, which refers to a time unit. As for the first two types of temporal phrases, data will be presented which shows that they have specific linguistic properties in these quantifying contexts, and do not behave exactly as the locating or duration adverbials they are superficially identical with. The third type of phrases will receive special attention. Structures with frequency adverbials like n times per month will be analysed compositionally, separating the quantified component n times from the temporally binding phrase per month (whose role is comparable to that of adverbials (i) and (ii) in the relevant constructions). The data presented is mainly from Portuguese, although the issues at stake – the linguistic properties of temporally bounded quantification – are obviously relevant to parallel constructions in other languages.
The article analyzes the accentuation of western South Slavic l-participles of verbal stems ending in an occlusive that are formed by adding the formant *-l- directly to the stem, e.g. *nes-lъ, Croatian nȅsao, Slovene nesel. Data from Slovene, Čakavian, Kajkavian and Štokavian dialects are compared and discussed against the background of late Proto-Slavic and early dialectal accentual and phonological changes. The operation of accentological changes such as Dybo’s law, Stang’s law and the rise of the neocircumflex, as well as the reduction of weak jers caused alternations in tone, vowel-length and position of the ictus. These alterations could be analogically eliminated or extended at different times and in different areas during the linguistic history of western South Slavic, thus causing the rise of some of the earliest isoglosses in the area in which western South Slavic is spoken.
In a recent article of major importance (2013), Tijmen Pronk has treated the accentuation of l-participles of the type neslъ in western South Slavic. Pronk points out correctly that Dybo’s law did not shift the accent onto final jers, e.g. in *kòņь, *bòbъ, and that the short vowel was preserved in Slovak osem < *òsmь, oheň < *ògņь, mohol < *mòglъ. Contrary to what Pronk claims, Slovene nę́sǝlis the phonetic reflex of *néslъ < *neslъ̀, Slovak niesol. The Slovene doublets (v)ǫ̑gǝl < *ǫ̀glь and (v)ózǝl < *ǫ̀zlъ suggest an earlier paradigm with vǫ̑- < ǫ̑- in the nom.sg. form and ó- < *ǫ̀- in the oblique cases. The vowel of ógǝnj < *ògņь also stems from the oblique cases. The expected neo-circumflex in the nom.sg. form is actually attested in rę̑bǝr < *rèbrь beside rę́bǝr with the reflex of Stang’s law from the oblique cases. There is no reason to assume that the accent was not retracted at an early stage in *neslъ̀, nor is there any reason to assume that Dybo’s law shifted the accent to the final jer in *dòbrъ and *sèdmь, as Pronk claims.
It has been previously reported that in languages demonstrating the Root Infinitive (RI) Stage the use of RIs is characterized by two properties: these forms are overwhelmingly eventive and have, in the majority of instances, a modal interpretation. Hoekstra and Hyams (1998, 1999) have proposed a theory stating that these two properties of RIs are co-dependent in that the application of the modal reference restriction limits the use of the aspectual verbal classes to eventive predicates. Furthermore, this theory assumed that the described mutual dependency of these constraints was valid cross-linguistically.
In this paper, we investigate the application of this theory to the case of RIs in Russian, one of the languages exhibiting the RI Stage. Using new longitudinal data from two monolingual Russian-speaking children, we demonstrate that the predictions of Hoekstra and Hyams’ approach are not realized for Russian child speech. While the constraint requiring that Ris have a modal reference does not seem to apply in Russian since the infinitival forms do receive past and present tense interpretation, these predicates are still overwhelmingly eventive and stative predicates appear mostly as finite verbs. Having shown that a theory connecting the application of the two restrictions on RIs does not account for the Russian data, we examine several alternative analyses of Russian RIs. We arrive at a conclusion that an explanation based on the lack of the event variable in stative predicates (Kratzer 1989) necessary for the interpretation of RIs in discourse (Avrutin 1997) succeeds in handling the Russian data presented in this article.
In the following, we will discuss the acquisition of plural forms in German from the unified perspective of the two, in our opinion compatible, approaches, on the basis of a longitudinal data sample of eight children. There are at least six recordings of each child, all of whom are girls. Together, the data cover the acquisition period from 1;11 to 2;10. One may thus anticipate that the data sample under investigation reflects the transition from purely lexical memorization to the acquisition of regularities or patterns.
In this paper it is argued that several typologically unrelated languages share the tendency to avoid voiced sibilant affricates. This tendency is explained by appealing to the phonetic properties of the sounds, and in particular to their aerodynamic characteristics. On the basis of experimental evidence it is shown that conflicting air pressure requirements for maintaining voicing and frication are responsible for the avoidance of voiced affricates. In particular, the air pressure released from the stop phase of the affricate is too high to maintain voicing which in consequence leads to a devoicing of the frication part.
In this paper it is argued that several typologically unrelated languages share the tendency to avoid voiced sibilant affricates. This tendency is explained by appealing to the phonetic properties of the sounds, and in particular to their aerodynamic characteristics. On the basis of experimental evidence it is shown that conflicting air pressure requirements for maintaining voicing and frication are responsible for the avoidance of voiced affricates. In particular, the air pressure released from the stop phase of the affricate is too high to maintain voicing which in consequence leads to a devoicing of the frication part.
In attempting to reconstruct the morphosyntax of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, one of the most basic questions to be answered is what was the unmarked word order of the proto-language? Chinese, Bai, and Karen are verb-medial languages, while all of the Tibeto-Burman languages except for Bai and Karen have verb-final word order. lf these languages are all related, as we can assume from lexical correspondences, then either Chinese, Bai and Karen changed from verb-final to verb-medial word order, or the other Tibeto-Burman languages changed trom verb-medial to verb-final order. How we answer the question of which languages changed their word would then give us the answer to the question of word order in Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
Studying kinematic behavior in speech production is an indispensable and fruitful methodology in order to describe for instance phonemic contrasts, allophonic variations, prosodic effects in articulatory movements. More intriguingly, it is also interpreted with respect to its underlying control mechanisms. Several interpretations have been borrowed from motor control studies of arm, eye, and limb movements. They do either explain kinematics with respect to a fine tuned control by the Central Nervous System (CNS) or they take into account a combination of influences arising from motor control strategies at the CNS level and from the complex physical properties of the peripheral speech apparatus. We assume that the latter is more realistic and ecological. The aims of this article are: first, to show, via a literature review related to the so called '1/3 power law' in human arm motor control, that this debate is of first importance in human motor control research in general. Second, to study a number of speech specific examples offering a fruitful framework to address this issue. However, it is also suggested that speech motor control differs from general motor control principles in the sense that it uses specific physical properties such as vocal tract limitations, aerodynamics and biomechanics in order to produce the relevant sounds. Third, experimental and modelling results are described supporting the idea that the three properties are crucial in shaping speech kinematics for selected speech phenomena. Hence, caution should be taken when interpreting kinematic results based on experimental data alone.
In what follows, I first briefly review Perlmutter (1968, 1970), in which it is argued that aspectual verbs are ambiguous between control and raising. I suggest that while the argument for the raising analysis is solid, the arguments supporting the control analysis of aspectual verbs are less so. As an alternative hypothesis to consider, I introduce the structural ambiguity hypothesis. In Section 3, I review three recent analyses of control and raising. Although there are important differences among them, they all share the basic assumption that the control/raising distinction is due to differences in selectional restrictions that the lexical items impose. Under such an assumption, the lexical ambiguity hypothesis is the only available option. In Section 4, I present evidence for the structural ambiguity hypothesis from studies concerning aspectual verbs in languages from four distinct families, German (Wurmbrand 2001), Japanese (Fukuda 2006), Romance languages (Cinque 2003), and Basque (Arregi Molina-Azaola 2004). These data strongly suggest that across languages aspectual verbs can appear in two different syntactic positions, either below or above vP, or the projection with which an external argument is introduced (Kratzer 1994, 1996, Chomsky 1995). Given these findings, I argue that it is the aspectual verbs' position with respect to vP which creates the control/raising ambiguity. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is lower than vP, an external argument takes scope over the aspectual verb. Thus, it is interpreted as control. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is higher than vP, on the other hand, it is the aspectual verb that takes scope over an entire vP, including the external argument. Thus, it is interpreted as raising. In section 5, I extend the scope of this study to include a discussion of want-type verbs in Indonesian, as analyzed in Polinsky & Potsdam (2006). Polinsky & Potsdam argue that the Indonesian want-type verbs must be raising in at least certain cases where they allow a rather peculiar interpretation. Although they assume that there are also control counterparts of the want-type verbs, I argue that applying the proposed analysis to the want-type verbs does away with the need for stipulating two distinct lexical entries for these verbs. Section 6 concludes the paper.
This paper takes a close look at the properties of Hungarian relative clauses that occur in the left periphery of the main clause, preceding a (pro)nominal associate. It will be shown that these left-peripheral relative clauses differ in many ways from relative clauses dislocated on the right periphery, as well as from relative clauses embedded under a (pro)nominal head. To capture the precise syntax of these left-peripheral clauses, these will be compared to ordinary left-dislocated items, with which they have some properties in common. Despite the surface similarities between the two, however, there are a few decisive aspects of behaviour, most notably, distributional properties and connectivity effects, which argue against taking left-peripheral relatives as cases of clausal left-dislocates in Hungarian. Instead, one is led to consider these as correlative clauses, on the basis of the properties they share with well-established correlatives in languages like Hindi.
This paper is part of an ongoing investigation into the nature of grammatical relations in the Sino-Tibetan language family. The ultimate goal of this investigation is to develop a hypothesis on the typological nature of word order and grammatical relations in the mother language which gave rise to all of the many languages within the Sino Tibetan language family. As the verb agreement (pronominalization) systems of Tibeto-Burman have been said to be a type of ergative marking, and to have been a part of Proto-Tibeto-Burman grammatical relations, the questions of the dating and nature of the agreement systems in Tibeto-Burman are relevant to the discussion of the nature of grammatical relations in Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
This paper deals with the variable position of adjectives in the Romanian DP. As all other Romance languages, Romanian allows for adjectives to appear in both prenominal and post-nominal position. In addition, however, Romanian has a third pattern: the so-called cel construction, in which the adjective in the post-nominal position is preceded by a determiner-like element, cel. This pattern is superficially similar to Determiner Spreading in Greek. In this paper we contrast the cel construction to Greek DS and discuss the similarities and differences between the two. We then present an analysis of cel as involving an appositive specification clause, building on de Vries (2002). We argue that the same structure is also involved in the context of nominal ellipsis, the second environment in which cel is found.
On the early development of aspect in greek and russian child language, a comparative analysis
(2003)
The category of aspect is grammaticized in both Greek and Russian opposing perfective and imperfective verb forms in all inflectional categories except the nonpast (‘present’). Despite these similarities there are important differences in the way the aspectual systems function in the two languages. While in Greek nearly all verbs oppose a perfective to a given imperfective grammatical form, Russian aspect is more strongly lexicalized with pairs of imperfective and perfective lexemes not only differing aspectually, but also as far as their lexical meanings are concerned. This is especially true of perfective verbs formed by prefixes as compared to their imperfective bases. Thus, in pairs of prefixed and unprefixed dynamic verbs, the derived prefixed (perfective) member has a telic meaning while its unprefixed (imperfective) counterpart is atelic (e.g. sjest’ (PFV) ‘to eat up’ vs. jest’ (IPF) ‘to eat’). Such derived perfective verbs may in turn be “secondarily” imperfectivized by suffixation furnishing the only “true” perfective/imperfective pairs of verbs (e.g. sjest’ (PFV) ‘to eat up’ vs. sjedat’ (IPF) ‘to eat up’ (iterative)). “Secondary” imperfectives do not occur in our child data.
In this pilot study, we will analyze the tense-aspect-mood forms of the 20 most frequent verbs with equivalent meanings occurring in the longitudinal audiotaped data of a Greek and a Russian boy between 2;1 and 2;3 (their entire lexical inventories comprise approx. 100 verbs each).
We adopt a constructivist perspective on the development of aspect in Greek and Russian child language and will show that in spite of a broad inventory of imperfective and perfective verb forms to be found in the speech of both children aspect has not yet developed into a generalized grammatical category, but is strongly dependent on aktionsart (stative/dynamic, telic/atelic) in both languages. While this results in a strong preference for perfective verb forms of telic verbs and of imperfective forms of atelic ones in the speech of the Greek boy, the Russian child tends to use the unmarked members.
This paper studies the acquisition process of Spanish verbal morphology in a monolingual child. The study focuses on the period of the first 50 verb lemmas. This covers the period from age 1;7 till 1;10.
The data shows that the verb acquisition process of this Spanish child follows three main stages:
1. A lexical stage in which verbs are only acquired as a lexical element.
2. A syntactic stage in which the verb, still contemplated as a non-split word, becomes the main element in the development of thematic and semantic relations.
3. A morphological stage in which verb suffixes begin to be analysed separately. At this stage, the relationship between form and meaning starts and the functional categories linked to the verb (tense, aspect, agreement, mood... ) begin to be acquired. Just at this moment, the first miniparadigms appear, which suggests that the acquisition process of verb morphology has started.
The first two stages are premorphological and cover in our child the period till 1;9. In the last stage, which begins at 1;10, the child enters the protomorphological stage.
This paper discusses a variant of German V2 declaratives sharing properties with both subordinate relative clauses and main clauses. I argue that modal subordination failure helps decide between two rivaling accounts for this construction. Thus, a hypotactic analysis involving syntactic variable sharing must be preferred over parataxis plus anaphora resolution. The scopal behavior of the construction will be derived from its 'proto-assertional force,' which it shares with similar 'embedded root' constructions.
A correct interpretation of the genitive plural forms in Slavic and related languages requires a detailed chronological analysis of the material. At every stage of development we have to reckon with both phonetically regular and analogical forms. Analogy operates quite often along the same lines in different periods. Explaining an analogic change amounts to indicating a model, a motivation, and a stage of development for its effectuation. If one of these cannot be indicated, we must look for a phonetic explanation.
On the Indo-European nature of non-Indo-European animals metaphor : the case of Chinese zoosemy
(2007)
In this paper, a class of sentences in German is discussed that are often called whexclamatives. […]
So called wh-exclamatives can be roughly characterized as wh-clauses that are embedded under exclamative predicates like erstaunt sein/to be amazed at [...] or that are used as the basis for an exclamation [...].
One can ask if wh-exclamatives are a clause-type of their own, in particular, whether they are different from wh-clauses in question environments, that is under question predicates like to ask or to wonder or used as questions. It is often assumed that wh-clauses in exclamative contexts, both embedded and unembedded, are indeed different from wh-clauses in interrogative or question environments [...], at least regarding their semantical type, see for example Elliot (1971, 1974), Grimshaw (1979, 1981), Zaefferer (1983, 1984), Altmann (1 987, 1993). […]
I assume with Grimshaw (1979) that so called wh-exclamatives and wh-interrogatives are alike with respect to their syntactical properties. In addition, I think that they are also alike semantically. So, what I like to do here is to evaluate the following hypothesis:
So-called wh-exclamatives are of the same semantical type as wh-interrogatives.
A fundamental question in the study of speech is about the invariance of the ultimate percepts, or features. The present paper gives an overview of the noninvariance problem and offers some hints towards a solution. Examination of various data on place and voicing perception suggests the following points. Features correspond to natural boundaries between sounds, which are included in the infant's predispositions for speech perception. Adult percepts arise from couplings and contextual interactions between features. Both couplings and interactions contribute to invariance. But this is at the expense of profound qualitative changes in perceptual boundaries implying that features are neither independently nor invariantly perceived. The question then is to understand the principles which guide feature couplings and interactions during perceptual development. The answer might reside in the fact that: (1) adult boundaries converge to a single point of the perceptual space, suggesting a context-free central reference; (2) this point corresponds to the neutral vocoïd, suggesting the reference is related to production; (3) at this point perceptual boundaries correspond to the natural ones, suggesting the reference is anchored in predispositions for feature perception. In sum, perceptual invariance seems to be grounded on a radial representation of the vocal tract around a singular point at which boundaries are context-fee, natural and coincide with the neutral vocoïd.
Since Donald Davidson’s seminal work “The Logical Form of Action Sentences” (1967) event arguments have become an integral component of virtually every semantic theory. Over the past years Davidson´s proposal has been continuously extended such that nowadays event(uality) arguments are generally associated not only with action verbs but with predicates of all sorts. The reasons for such an extension are seldom explicitly justified. Most problematical in this respect is the case of stative expressions. By taking a closer look at copula sentences the present study assesses the legitimacy of stretching the Davidsonian notion of events and discusses its consequences. A careful application of some standard eventuality diagnostics (perception reports, combination with locative modifiers and manner adverbials) as well as some new diagnostics (behavior of certain degree adverbials) reveals that copular expressions do not behave as expected under a Davidsonian perspective: they fail all eventuality tests, regardless of whether they represent stage-level or individual-level predicates. In this respect, copular expressions pattern with stative verbs like know, hate, and resemble, which in turn differ sharply from state verbs like stand, sit, and sleep. The latter pass all of the eventuality tests and therefore qualify as true “Davidsonian state” expressions. On the basis of these empirical observations and taking up ideas of Kim (1969, 1976) and Asher (1993, 2000), an alternative account of copular expressions (and stative verbs) is provided, according to which the copula introduces a referential argument for a temporally bound property exemplification (= “Kimian state”). Considerations on some logical properties, viz. closure conditions and the latent infinite regress of eventualities, suggest that supplementing Davidsonian eventualities with Kimian states may yield not only a more adequate analysis of copula sentences but also a better understanding of eventualities in general.
In her discussion of the Japanese adversative passive, Anna Wierzbicka writes (1988: 260): “The problem is extremely interesting and important both for intrinsic reasons and because of its wider methodological implications. It can be formulated like this: if one form can be used in a number of different ways, are we entitled to postulate for it a number of different meanings or should we rather search for one semantic common denominator (regarded as the MEANING of the form in question) and attribute the variety of uses to the interaction between this meaning and the linguistic or extralinguistic context?” Though it “may seem obvious” that the second stand is “methodologically preferable” (261), she takes the first position and concludes that “the Japanese passive has to be recognized as multiply ambiguous” (286). In the following I intend to show that this view is both wrong and fruitful.
On the notion 'determiner'
(2003)
Following a common practice in generative grammar, HPSG treats the determiners as members of a separate functional part of speech (Det). The status of the functional parts of speech is a matter of debate and controversy. The auxiliaries, for instance, are commonly treated as members of a separate functional category (Aux or Infl) in many variants of generative grammar, including GB, MP and LFG, but in GPSG and HPSG, it is a matter of equally common practice to treat them as members of V and to reject the postulation of a separate functional category, see Pullum & Wilson (1977) and Gazdar, Pullum & Sag (1982). This text makes a similar case for the determiners; more specifically, it argues that the determiners are categorially heterogeneous, in the sense that some are members of A, whereas others are members of N. The argumentation is mainly based on inflectional morphology and morpho-syntactic agreement data. The consequences of the categorial heterogeneity are hard to reconcile with the specifier treatment of the determiners in Pollard & Sag (1994) and with the Det-as-head treatment in Netter (1994), but it can smoothly be integrated in the functor treatment of the prenominals in Allegranza (1998) and Van Eynde (2002).
Since the introduction of the X-bar principles it is commonly assumed that prepositions are heads of PPs, in the same way as nouns and pronouns are heads of NPs. However, while this is well motivated for a large majority of the pronouns and the prepositions in many languages, there are also exceptions. More specifically, Van Eynde (1999) argues that the reduced or minor pronouns of Dutch — as opposed to their full or tonic counterparts — cannot head an NP, and the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that there are also prepositions which cannot head a PP. The first section introduces the distinction between major and minor categories. The second shows how it can be applied to the prepositions and presents a way of treating minor prepositions in HPSG. The third singles out the Dutch te(to) as a plausible candidate for a minor preposition treatment, and the fourth provides criteria for the identification of other minor prepositions. The concluding section points out the wider significance of these findings.
The purpose of this dissertation is to defend the idea that the empirical responsibilities of binding theory can be handled in a more psychologically and historically realistic way when assigned to the field of pragmatics. In particular, I wish to show that Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince & Smolensky, 1993), the stochastic OT and Gradual Learning Algorithm of Boersma (1998), the Recoverability of OT of Wilson (2001) and Buchwald et al. (2002), and the bidirectional OT of Blutner (2000b) and Bidirectional Gradual Learning Algorithm of Jäger (2003a) can all participate in a formal framework in which one can formally spell out and justify the idea that the distributional behavior of bound pronouns and reflexivs is a pragmatic phenomenon.
The focus of this paper is the perspectivization of thematic roles generally and the recipient role specifically. Whereas perspective is defined here as the representation of something for someone from a given position (Sandig 1996: 37), perspectivization refers to the verbalization of a situation in the speech generation process (Storrer 1996: 233). In a prototypical act of giving, for example, the focus of perception (the attention of the external observer) may be on the person who gives (agent), the transferred object (patient) or the person who receives the transferred object (recipient). The languages of the world provide differing linguistic means to perspectivize such an act of giving, or better: to perspectivize the participants of such an action. In this article, the linguistic means of three selected continental West Germanic languages –German, Dutch and Luxembourgish– will be taken into consideration, with an emphasis on the perspectivization of the recipient role.
This paper investigates the relation between TT-MCTAG, a formalism used in computational linguistics, and RCG. RCGs are known to describe exactly the class PTIME; simple RCG even have been shown to be equivalent to linear context-free rewriting systems, i.e., to be mildly context-sensitive. TT-MCTAG has been proposed to model free word order languages. In general, it is NP-complete. In this paper, we will put an additional limitation on the derivations licensed in TT-MCTAG. We show that TT-MCTAG with this additional limitation can be transformed into equivalent simple RCGs. This result is interesting for theoretical reasons (since it shows that TT-MCTAG in this limited form is mildly context-sensitive) and, furthermore, even for practical reasons: We use the proposed transformation from TT-MCTAG to RCG in an actual parser that we have implemented.
Last year Georg Holzer proposed a relative chronology of accentual developments in Slavic (2005). Here I shall compare his chronology with the one I put forward earlier (1975, 1989a, 2003) and discuss the differences. For the sake of convenience, I first reproduce the relevant parts of my chronology, omitting asterisks before pre-historic Slavic forms. 1. Proto-Indo-European. 2. Dialectal Indo-European. 3. Early Balto-Slavic. During this period the characteristic lateral mobility of Balto-Slavic accent patterns came into existence. 4. Late Balto-Slavic. During this period the Balto-Slavic accent patterns obtained their final shape.
On the role of syntactic locality in morphological processes : the case of (Greek) derived nominals
(2008)
The paper is structured as follows. In section 2, I briefly summarize the facts on English and Greek nominalizations. In section 3, I discuss English nominal derivation in some detail. In section 4, I turn to the question of licensing of AS in nominals. In section 5, I turn to the issue of the optionality of licensing of AS in the nominal system.
In the late seventies, Bernard Comrie was one of the first linguists to explore the effects of the referential hierarchy (RH) on the distribution of grammatical relations (GRs). The referential hierarchy is also known in the literature as the animacy, empathy or indexibability hierarchy and ranks speech act participants (i.e. first and second person) above third persons, animates above inanimates, or more topical referents above less topical referents. Depending on the language, the hierarchy is sometimes extended by analogy to rankings of possessors above possessees, singulars above plurals, or other notions. In his 1981 textbook, Comrie analyzed RH effects as explaining (a) differential case (or adposition) marking of transitive subject ("A") noun phrases in low RH positions (e.g. inanimate or third person) and of object ("P") noun phrases in high RH positions (e.g. animate or first or second person), and (b) hierarchical verb agreement coupled with a direct vs. inverse distinction, as in Algonquian (Comrie 1981: Chapter 6).
If we want to develop a semantic analysis for explicit performatives such as I promise you to free Willy, we are faced with the following puzzle: In order to account for the speech act expressed by the performative verb, one can assume that the so-called performative clause is purely performative and provides the illocutionary force of the speech act whose content is given by the semantic object denoted by the complement clause. Yet under this perspective, the performative clause that is, next to the performative verb, the indexicals I and you that refer to the speaker and to the addressee of the utterance context is semantically invisible and does not contribute compositionally its meaning to the meaning of the entire explicit performative sentence. Conversely, if we account for the truth conditional contribution of the performative clause and deny that the meaning of the performative verb is purely performative, then we have to find a way to account for the speech act expressed by the performative verb. Of course, there is already the widely accepted and very appealing indirectness account for explicit performative utterances developed by Bach & Harnish (1979). Roughly, Bach and Harnish solve this puzzle in deriving the performativity by means of a pragmatic inference process. According to them, the important speech act performed by means of the utterance of the explicit performative sentence is a kind of the conventionalized indirect speech act. However, the boundary between semantics and pragmatics can be drawn in many various ways. Therefore, I think there could be other perspectives regarding the interface between the truth-functional treatment of the declarative explicit performative sentences and the speech acts performed with their utterances and which are expressed by the performative verbs. Hence, this thesis consists in the experiment to develop a further analysis and to check out its consequences with respect to the semantics and pragmatics of explicit performative utterances and the new interface emerged. Briefly, the experiment runs as follows: First, I develop an analysis for explicit performative sentences framed by parenthetical structures such as in (1)(a). In a second step, this parenthetical analysis is applied to the proper Austinian explicit performative sentences in (1)(b). (1) a. Tomorrow, I promise you this, I will teach them Tyrolean songs. b. I promise you that I will teach them Tyrolean songs. To analyze at first explicit performatives framed by parenthetical structures bears the convenience that we are faced with two utterances of two main clauses. In (1)(a) there is the utterance of the host sentence Tomorrow I will teach them Tyrolean songs, and the utterance of the explicit parenthetical I promise you this, where the demonstrative this refers to the utterance of Tomorrow I will teach them Tyrolean songs. Since speakers perform speech acts with utterances of main clauses, I assume that the meaning of the explicit parenthetical I promise you this specifies that the actual illocutionary force of the utterance of Tomorrow I will teach them Tyrolean songs is the illocutionary force of a promise. Hence, instead of deriving an indirect illocutionary force by means of a pragmatic inference schema, we can deal with an ordinary direct speech act that is performed with the utterance of the host sentence. This kind of analysis stresses the particular discourse function of explicit performative utterances. Performative verbs are used whenever the contextual information is not sufficient to determine the illocutionary force of the corresponding implicit speech act. The resulting consequences of the parenthetical analysis are interesting since they cast a different light on performative verbs. Surprisingly, the performative verbs are not performative at all. They do not constitute the execution of a speech act, but are execution supporting. Instead of constituting the particular illocutionary force, they merely specify the illocutionary force of the utterance of the host sentence. For instance, the speaker utters the explicit parenthetical I promise you this for specifying what he is simultaneously doing. Hence the speaker does not succeed in performing the promise simply because he is uttering I promise you this. Rather, by means of the information conveyed by the utterance of I promise you this, the potential illocutionary forces of the utterance of the host sentence are disambiguated. Thus, it is not the case that explicit parentheticals are trivially true when uttered. Their function is more complex. Their self-verifying property (‘saying so makes it so’) is explained by means of disambiguation. Furthermore, according to the parenthetical analysis, instead of being purely performative, the performative verbs contribute compositionally their meanings to the truth conditions of the entire explicit performative sentence. Together with its consequences, this analysis is applied to the proper Austinian performatives, which display subordination. I assume that regardless of their structure, explicit performatives always semantically and pragmatically behave as the parenthetical analysis predicts.
This is a survey of the development of the model of PARTICIPATION (P'ATION) with reference to the postulated sequence of the techniques on the dimension of P'ATION. Along with a brief explanation of the techniques this article contains a discussion of the major claims with regard to the sequence of the techniques and the possibilities of subjecting the claims to empirical verification.
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.
In attempting to understand the history of the morphology of a language or group of languages, we occasionally face a problem of isomorphy, where two or more semantic categories evince the same formal marking. We then must decide which use of that particular form of marking is the oldest, and also determine the possible source and path of development of the marking. In languages with written documents of great time depth this is often not a problem, but in unwritten languages it can be quite difficult. This paper discusses two tools that can be used for this purpose: the concepts of markedness and prototypes.
German linking elements are sometimes classified as inflectional affixes, sometimes as derivational affixes, and in any case as morphological units with at least seven realisations (e.g. -s-, -es-, -(e)n-, -e-). This article seeks to show that linking elements are hybrid elements situated between morphology and phonology. On the one hand, they have a clear morphological status since they occur only within compounds (and before a very small set of suffixes) and support the listener in decoding them. On the other hand, they also have to be analysed on the phonological level, as will be shown in this article. Thus, they are marginal morphological units on the pathway to phonology (including prosodics). Although some alloforms can sometimes be considered former inflectional endings and in some cases even continue to demonstrate some inflectional behaviour (such as relatedness to gender and inflection class), they are on their way to becoming markers of ill-formed phonological words. In fact, linking elements, above all the linking -s-, which is extremely productive, help the listener decode compounds containing a bad phonological word as their first constituent, such as Geburt+s+tag ‘birthday’ or Religion+s+unterricht ‘religious education’. By marking the end of a first constituent that differs from an unmarked monopedal phonological word, the linking element aids the listener in correctly decoding and analysing the compound. German compounds are known for their length and complexity, both of which have increased over time—along with the occurrence of linking elements, especially -s-. Thus, a profound instance of language change can be observed in contemporary German, one indicating its typological shift from syllable language to word language.
On transitivity
(2011)
This paper critically discusses and contrasts some of the different conceptualisations of transitivity that have been presented in the literature, and argues that transitivity as a morphosyntactic phenomenon and effectiveness of an event as a semantic concept should be separated in discussions of transitivity, and also, like many other aspects of grammar, transitivity should be seen as a constructional phenomenon, and so each construction in a language needs to be examined separately, in natural contexts. An Appendix presents some general questions one can consider when analysing language data.
This paper presents the analyses of transitivity and questions about transitivity in two languages (Rawang and Qiang) that have been described using very different definitions of transitivity, with a view to showing that each language must be analysed on its own terms, and so the criteria used for identifying transitivity, if it is to be identified at all, might be different between languages. In the case of these two languages it is at least partly due to the two languages differing in terms of the degree of systematicity of the marking, with the Rawang marking being more systematic.
In terms of the direction of development, I referred to Johanna Nichols' work on head-marking vs. dependant marking. Nichols did not make reference to any languages in Tibeto-Burman, but all of the Tibeto-Burman languages that do not have verb agreement systems are solidly dependent-marking (i.e., they have marking on the nouns for case or pragmatic function); those languages with verb agreement systems, a type of head marking, also have many dependent-marking features (of the same types as the non-pronominalized languages). The question, then, is which is older, the dependent-marking type or the headmarking (actually mixed) type?
Seit einiger Zeit ist zu beobachten, dass zu dem Handwerkszeug eines DaF-Lerners […] nicht mehr Grammatiken und Wörterbücher im klassischen Sinne gehören. Das Nachschlagen in Printwerken wird auf allen Stufen und für alle Benutzersituationen durch die Konsultation in den unterschiedlichsten über Internet frei zugänglichen Materialien ersetzt. […] So scheint es, dass gerade im DaF-Bereich die Printnachschlagewerke bald schon zu einem Relikt anderer Zeiten angehören werden. Aber genauso wie für die Benutzung von Printwörterbüchern, benötigt der DaF-Lerner durch die ganz neu entstehenden online-Nachschlagetechniken (Engelberg/Lemnitzer 2009, 111) genügend Information und Schulung, um für seine jeweilige Benutzersituation in dem dafür am besten geeigneten Konsultationssystem die jeweils adäquateste Rechercheoption auszuwählen. […] Das gilt gleichermaßen für Print- wie für Onlineressourcen, wobei allerdings gerade bei Internetwörterbüchern bei der Suchanfrage das Risiko des Orientierungsverlustes („lost in hyperspace“) verstärkt auftreten kann (cfr. Haß/Schmitz 2010, 4). Es ist daher Aufgabe der Lehrenden, die entsprechende Orientierung und Hilfestellung zu leisten. Leider ist zu bemerken, dass im DaF-Bereich die nötige lexikographische Kompetenz nicht genügend vermittelt wird, was nicht zuletzt oft an der mangelnden lexikographischen Vorbildung der DaF-Lehrer liegt. Ziel des Beitrages ist es daher, einige Internetwörterbücher (IWB) mit freiem Zugang für die Deutsche Sprache in groben Zügen vorzustellen und für ihren Nutzen in unterschiedliche Benutzersituationen im Bereich DaF zu kommentieren, um dem DaF-Lerner und Lehrer die Auswahl aus dem inzwischen recht unübersichtlichen Angebot für seine jeweiligen Bedürfnisse zu erleichtern. In Anlehnung an die vorgeschlagenen Kriterien von Engelberg/Lemnitzer (42009, 220ff.), Storrer (2010) und das Evaluationsraster zur Beurteilung von online-WB von Kemmer (2010) sollen verschiedene aktuelle IWB der deutschen Gegenwartssprache beurteilt werden. Zur Wörterbuch-Typologisierung orientiere ich mich an den Vorschlägen von Engelberg/Lemnitzer (42009), beschränke aber in diesem Rahmen den Gegenstandsbereich auf zweisprachige IWB, spezifische einsprachige DaF-IWB und einige modularisierte allgemeinsprachige Wörterbuchportale, in denen verschiedene IWB miteinander verlinkt sind.
Der vorliegende Beitrag gibt zunächst einen Überblick über die sprachwissenschaftlichen Zugänge zur Onomatopöie und den derzeitigen Forschungsstand. Danach wird dargestellt, dass Onomatopoetika insbesondere für den Sprachvergleich ein lohnendes, aber bislang noch unzureichend behandeltes Forschungsthema darstellen. Dabei zeigen sich zahlreiche Fragestellungen, die auch für die Sprachdidaktik relevant sind. Auf dieser Grundlage zeigt der Beitrag, wie und warum Onomatopoetika sprachdidaktisch nutzbringend thematisiert werden können.
V lingvistickém výzkumu byla malá pozornost věnována onomatopoickým výrazŧm ĉasto uţívaným zvláště v komiksech a v dětské literatuře jako nástroj k vyjádření emocí. Ĉlánek, jehoţ cílem je vyplnit mezeru ve výzkumu, nejprve podává přehled o vztazích mezi onomatopoi a emocemi. Autor zdŧrazňuje, ţe konkrétní realizace onomatopoických slov je v kaţdém jazyce jiná a závisí na jazykových konvencích. Následně jsou srovnána německá a ĉeská onomatopoická slovesa s emoĉními konotacemi. Srovnání ukazuje širokou škálu rozdílŧ, které se týkají nejen formálních aspektŧ, ale také významu těchto sloves. Závěrem vyplývá, ţe emoce jsou vázány na jazykový kontext, a proto nemohou být přesně přeloţeny.
Interjeições e onomatopéias recebem pouca atenção dentro dos estudos lingüísticos, e gramáticas e dicionários freqüentemente restringem-se a apresentar uma definição estereotipada e alguns poucos exemplos. Desprezadas pela literatura tradicional, essas expressões encontram seu "habitat natural" nas histórias em quadrinhos, nas quais se tornam elementos imprescindíveis da linguagem própria desse gênero textual. Este breve experimento sobre interjeições e onomatopéias presentes em mangás (histórias em quadrinhos japonesas) traduzidos para alemão e português mostra que, embora haja padrões fonéticos básicos comuns de acordo com o que representam (riso, passos etc.), as interjeições e onomatopéias da amostra diferem muito em ambas as línguas, o que ressalta sua condição de signos lingüísticos, mesmo que diferenciados em relação aos demais elementos do léxico.
In this paper we describe SOBA, a sub-component of the SmartWeb multi-modal dialog system. SOBA is a component for ontologybased information extraction from soccer web pages for automatic population of a knowledge base that can be used for domainspecific question answering. SOBA realizes a tight connection between the ontology, knowledge base and the information extraction component. The originality of SOBA is in the fact that it extracts information from heterogeneous sources such as tabular structures, text and image captions in a semantically integrated way. In particular, it stores extracted information in a knowledge base, and in turn uses the knowledge base to interpret and link newly extracted information with respect to already existing entities.
[D]ie polnischen Familiennamen [unterlagen] bis ins 19. Jahrhundert hinein nur geringer amtlicher Kontrolle [...]. Diese Situation begünstigte den sukzessiven Aufbau onymischer Allomorphik aus den […] Flexions- und Derivationsmorphemen, die ursprünglich zur Bildung von Herkunftsbezeichnungen, Patronymika und Übernamen angewendet wurden. Die sekundäre Nutzung dieser Flexions- und Wortbildungsmorpheme als onymische Suffixe trieb den […] Dissoziationsprozess der Familiennamen voran. Die wachsende Produktivität dieser onymischen Morphe, die bis heute andauert, sicherte ihnen die Spitzenposition unter den Proprialitätsmarkern im polnischen Familiennamensystem. Heute sind die onymischen Allomorphe -ska, -ski, -icz, -ak das wichtigste Mittel, mit dem die Zugehörigkeit eines Wortes zum Onomastikon gekennzeichnet wird. […] In diesem Beitrag werden die Entstehungswege und die Ausbreitungspfade der drei produktivsten Gruppen der polnischen onymischen Suffixe präsentiert. Es werden auch die außersprachlichen Faktoren berücksichtigt, die die Erhöhung der Produktivität durch sukzessive Erweiterung der Kombinationsmöglichkeiten der einzelnen Suffixe ermöglicht haben. Es wird gezeigt, dass die ursprünglichen Selektionsbeschränkungen der Basen mit den Suffixen (Toponyme + -ska-Suffixe, Appellative und Adjektive + k-haltige Suffixe, Vornamen + -icz-Suffixe) im Zuge ihrer Ausbreitung und Festigung aufgegeben wurden. Die onymischen Allomorphe sind heute frei kombinierbar und können im Falle des Namenwechsels zur Bildung eines neuen Namens herangezogen werden.
The phenomenon of phonological opacity has been the subject of much debate in recent years, with scholars opposed to the Optimality Theory (OT) research program arguing that opacity proves OT must be false, while the solutions proposed within OT, such as sympathy theory and stratal OT , have proved to be unsatisfying to many OT proponents, who have found these proposals to be inconsistent with the parallelist approach to phonological processes otherwise characteristic of OT. In this paper I reexamine one of the best known cases of opacity, that found in three processes of Tiberian Hebrew (TH), and argue that these processes only appear to be opaque, because previous analyses have treated them as pure phonology, rather than as an interaction between phonology and morphology. Once it is recognized that certain words of TH are lexically marked to end with a syllabic trochee, and that the goal of paradigm uniformity exerts grammatical pressure on phonology, the three processes no longer present a problem to parallelist OT. The results suggest the possibility that all crosslinguistic instances of apparent opacity can be explained in terms of the phonology-morphology interface and that purely phonological opacity does not exist. If this claim is true, then parallelist OT can be defended against its detractors without the need for additional mechanisms like sympathy theory and stratal OT.
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.
This paper presents the results of Open Quotient measurements in EGG signals of young (18 to 30 year old) and elderly (59 to 82 year old) male and female speakers. The paper further presents quantitative results on the relation between the OQ and the perception of a speaker's age. Higgins & Saxman (1991) found a decreased OQEGG with increasing age for females, whereas the OQEGG in sustained vowel material increased for males as the speakers age increased. In Linville (2002), however, the spectral amplitudes in the region of F0 (obtained by LTAS-measurements of read speech material) increased with increasing age independent of gender; this could be interpreted indirectly as an increasing OQ. We measured the OQEGG not only for sustained vowels, but also in vowels taken from isolated words. In order to analyse the relation between breathiness in terms of an increased OQ and the mean perceived age per stimulus a perception test was carried out in which listeners were asked to estimate speaker's age based on sustained /a/-vowel stimuli varying in vocal effort (soft - normal - loud) during production. The results indicated the following: (i) The decreased OQ for elderly females originally found by Higgins & Saxman is not apparent in our data for sustained /a/-vowels. For our female speakers no significant difference between the OQ of young and old speakers was found; for elderly males, however, we also found an increasing OQ with increasing age.(ii) In addition, a statistically significant increased OQEGG occurs for the group of the elderly males for the vowels from the word material. (iii) Our results show a strong positive relation between perceived age and OQ in male voices. Regarding (i) and (ii), at least the male speaker's voice becomes more breathy as age increases. Considering (iii), increased breathiness may contribute to the listener’s perception of increased age.
The Deep Linguistic Processing with HPSG Initiative (DELH-IN) provides the infrastructure needed to produce open-source semantic transfer-based machine translation systems. We have made available a prototype Japanese-English machine translation system built from existing resources include parsers, generators, bidirectional grammars and a transfer engine.
U članku se analizira opis glagolskoga vida u gramatikama hrvatskoga kajkavskoga književnog jezika, nastalim od druge polovice 18. do prve polovice 19. stoljeća (Vitkovićeva, Szentmartonyjeva, Kornigova i Matijevićeva te gramatike J. Đurkovečkoga i I. Kristijanovića). Analizom gramatičkoga diskursa u navedenim se gramatikama razlučuju temeljne glagolskovidske sastavnice u različitim pristupima gramatičkome opisu: glagolski vid i definicija kategorije te definicije članova vidske oprjeke, (im)perfektivizacija, zatim odnos glagolskoga vida i glagolskih oblika, te sastava glagola.
Objavljene gramatike hrvatskoga kajkavskog književnog jezika pokušaj su, prije svega, olakšavanja učenja toga jezika strancima s njemačkoga govornog područja. Iako imaju opisni karakter, one su i ogledalo stupnja normiranosti hrvatskoga kajkavskog književnog jezika. U ovom radu donosi se opis i sistematizacija tvorbe komparativa u kajkavskim gramatikama.
The article aims to give an overview about the application of Optimality Theory (OT) to the domain of pragmatics. In the introductory part we discuss different ways to view the division of labor between semantics and pragmatics. Rejecting the doctrine of literal meaning we conform to (i) semantic underdetermination and (ii) contextualism (the idea that the mechanism of pragmatic interpretation is crucial both for determining what the speaker says and what he means). Taking the assumptions (i) and (ii) as essential requisites for a natural theory of pragmatic interpretation, section 2 introduces the three main views conforming to these assumptions: Relevance theory, Levinson’s theory of presumptive meanings, and the Neo-Gricean approach. In section 3 we explain the general paradigm of OT and the idea of bidirectional optimization. We show how the idea of optimal interpretation can be used to restructure the core ideas of these three different approaches. Further, we argue that bidirectional OT has the potential to account both for the synchronic and the diachronic perspective on pragmatic interpretation. Section 4 lists relevant examples of using the framework of bidirectional optimization in the domain of pragmatics. Section 5 provides some general conclusions. Modeling both for the synchronic and the diachronic perspective on pragmatics opens the way for a deeper understanding of the idea of naturalization and (cultural) embodiment in the context of natural language interpretation.
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.
U ovome će se radu dati uvod u optimalnosnu teoriju (engl. Optimality Theory, Prince i Smolensky 1991/1993, 2004), jednu od najznačajnijih suvremenih teorija jezika. Iako uživa najveći ugled među fonolozima, prikazat će je se kao opću jezičnu teoriju s naglaskom na njezinu primjenu u fonologiji. Prikazat će se kontekst njezina nastanka s obzirom na tada vodeću generativnu fonološku teoriju i naravnu fonologiju te će se predstaviti njezino polazište i ciljevi. Objasnit će se temeljni pojmovi optimalnosne teorije (ograničenja, obilježenost, vjernost, optimalnost) i pretpostavljeni model gramatike (input, output, generator, evaluator) te će se uvesti u princip jezične analize u njezinu teorijskom okviru, a analiza će se oprimjeriti na dvjema fonološkim pojavama – jednačenju šumnika po zvučnosti u suglasničkome skupu i obezvučivanju na kraju riječi.
U radu se propituje status općeeuropskih frazema hrvatskoga jezika u izdanjima Rječnika stranih riječi Bratoljuba Klaića. Pod općeeuropskim se frazemima podrazumijevaju međunarodni frazemi potvrđeni u europskim jezicima s jednakim značenjem i velikom strukturnom podudarnošću. Za te je frazeme važno da najčešće imaju poznat zajednički izvor, tj. podrijetlo, ali postoje i općeeuropski frazemi kojima još nije utvrđeno točno podrijetlo, odnosno jezik i tekst iz kojega su uzeti i prošireni. Stoga je cilj rada utvrditi i opisati status općeeuropskih frazema u Klaićevu Rječniku stranih riječi. Naime, Bratoljub Klaić u njemu donosi vrijedne podatke o izvoru pojedinoga frazema, izreke ili poslovice. Pri tome su u Rječnik uključeni općeeuropski frazemi kojima je sastavnicom strano vlastito ime, strani apelativ ili termin ili je riječ o prevedenicama iz latinskoga i drugih jezika. Dolazi se do zaključka da Klaićev rječnik može, kao nezaobilazno polazište nekom budućem hrvatskom etimološkom frazeološkom rječniku, biti važnim izvorom proučavanju podrijetla frazema.
Innerhalb der Dimension der PARTIZIPATION werden Valenz, als die minimale sprachliche Signalisierung des Vorhandenseins der RELATION der PARTIZIPATION (Seiler 1984:95) und Gerichtetheit, was wir als Orientierung bezeichnen, [...] als getrennte Techniken behandelt, die zueinander in einem implikativen Verhältnis stehen. Orientierung setzt sie VALENZ voraus, ist aber bei dieser selbst "noch nicht 'aktuell'" (ebd.101). Bei VALENZ handelt es sich um das, was "im Partizipatum selber über die Anwesenheit von Partizipanten sowohl quantitativ (Anzahl der Partizipanten) als auch qualitativ (in Bezug auf ihre strukturellen Eigenschaften so entschieden wird, daß die sprachliche Signalisierung minimal, d.h. ohne weitere Kennzeichnung insbesondere an den Partizipanten erfolgt." (Seiler 1984:97f) Ein Verb wie 'töten' beinhaltet demnach sowohl, daß zwei Partizipanten beteiligt sind, als auch, daß beide in unterschiedlicher Weise beteiligt sind. [...] [D]ie Zuordnung: Subjekt-Agens ist nicht universell vorgegeben. Eine Handlung kann als vom Agens ausgehend beschrieben werden, es kann aber auch der Patiens als Ausgangspunkt gewählt werden. [...] Die unterschiedlichen Darstellungsrichtungen bezeichnen wir im folgenden als Orientierung. [...] Den Vorgang vom Agens her darstellen heißt, diesen - syntaktisch gesehen - als zentrale Einheit des Satzes zu enkodieren, während im anderen Fall der Patiens die zentrale Einheit ist. Wir werden im folgenden die beiden unterschiedlichen Betrachtungsrichtungen als A-Orientierung bzw. O-Orientierung bezeichnen. Orientierung wird dabei als Überbegriff verwendet.
Ortak ve Suni dil üzerine
(2013)
Ortak ve Suni dilin ayrıştığı nokta bir toplum içerisinde bireylerin sağlıklı iletişim kuramamaları sonucu birbirlerini anlamadıkları ve iletişimin abartılı bir durumda değerlendirilmesidir. Bireyler arasında sağlıklı iletişimin sağlanması, aralarında ihtilafın giderilmesi gibi konular dilbilimcilerin başlıca araştırma alanlarını oluşturmaktadır. Diğer bir ifade ile yapay dil ile ortak bir dilin amaçlanması, geliştirilmesi 16.y.y. dan itibaren günümüze değin sürdürülmüştür. Ne var ki konuyu sadece art zamanlı olarak değerlendirmek yerine, aynı toplum içerisinde eş zamanlı olarak nasıl irdelenebilir? Zira ortak dilin "evrensel" bir dil olduğu varsayımından hareketle aynı toplum içerisinde, iletişimin genellikle "yapay" bir dille gerçekleştiği savını da öne sürebiliriz. Bir toplum içerisinde ortak dile ulaşmanın yolu analiz-sentez yolu ile kavrama kültürünün doğru orantılı olmasıdır.
Die Untersuchung von Eigennamen (EN) im Kontext der Kontaktlinguistik stellt ein besonders aktuelles und informatives Forschungsfeld dar: Beispielsweise hat Eichler (1976: 128) bereits vor zweieinhalb Jahrzehnten erkannt, dass "gerade Sprachkontaktforschung heute ohne die onomastische Komponente nicht mehr gut denkbar ist". Beim gegenwärtigen Wissensstand kann auch von der anderen Seite her festgestellt werden, dass – insbesondere in Kulturräumen, in denen mehrere Sprachen miteinander in Berührung kommen – die Namenforschung eines kontaktlinguistischen Blickwinkels bedarf. Denn die EN verkörpern wohl den deutlichsten Nachweis für langfristige Vorgänge und Ergebnisse von Sprachenkontakten. So können diesbezüglich etwa hinsichtlich des "Namenstransfers" (Terminus nach Eichhoff 1991: 264) in mehr oder weniger multilinguale Regionen vor allem die Familien- und Ortsnamen lehrreiche linguistische wie auch interkulturelle Aufschlüsse liefern. Die onomastische Forschung verhält sich in diesem Problembereich unterschiedlich. Die kontaktlinguistischen Implikationen des direkten Transfers von Personennamen (mit phonematischer Anpassung) wurden in angelsächsischer Relation (norwegische, jiddische und ungarische Namen in den USA) bereits von einer Reihe bekannter Linguisten wie Kimmerle (1941: 1ff.; 1942: 158ff.), Haugen (1953: 201ff.), Mencken (1949: 474ff. sowie Supplement II, 1952: 396ff.), Weinreich (1968: 53), Bartha (1993: 41 ff.) und Kontra (1988: 58ff.) angesprochen. Hingegen würdigen nicht wenige Veröffentlichungen mit germanistischer Ausrichtung, auch wenn sie deutsche Nachnamen am Rande oder außerhalb des sog. "geschlossenen deutschen Sprachraums" ausführlich behandeln, diese Sprachenkontaktphänomene keines Hinweises (z. B. Breza 1986, Grünspanová 1975). Einige Arbeiten schneiden zwar die Einwirkung der Kontaktsprache(n) auf die deutschen Familiennamen (FaN) an, machen dies allerdings nicht zu ihrem primären Untersuchungsobjekt (z. B. Čučka/Melika 1979, Hellfritzsch 1990, Matejčík 1993[3] und Mori 1993). Lediglich in deutsch-tschechischer (Knappová 1990) und stärker in deutsch-angloamerikanischer sowie deutsch-costaricanischer Relation liegen einschlägig ertragreiche Beiträge vor, die verschiedene Integrationserscheinungen am Beispiel deutscher FaN in der englischsprachigen Umwelt der USA bzw. dem spanischsprachigen Milieu von Costa Rica thematisieren (Jones 1991 und besonders Eichhoff 1991 bzw. Boving 1986). Vor diesem Hintergrund zielt die vorliegende Studie darauf ab, deutschsprachige FaN in Südungarn einer kontaktlinguistischen Analyse zu unterziehen. Dies verspricht insofern ein besonders reizvolles Untersuchungsfeld, als in den Anthroponymen – dank lang anhaltender intensiver und mannigfacher Sprachen- und Kulturenkontakte trotz ihrer amtlich festgelegten Schreibformen – deutsche und ungarische Sprachelemente miteinander verschmelzen und in enger Symbiose existieren. Die Wechselwirkungen der flektierenden, indogermanischen deutschen Sprache und der agglutinierenden, finnisch-ugrischen ungarischen Sprache sind auch im Hinblick auf die Sprachtypologie besonders interessant.
Der Balkan hält Europa - und andere Kontinente - seit einiger Zeit erneut in Atem. Diese politischen Erschütterungen und die Diskurse darüber haben auch sprachliche Ungereimtheiten und grammatische Zweifels- bzw. Problemfälle deutlich werden lassen, auf die man ohne diese Ereignisse wohl kaum aufmerksam geworden wäre. Der Kosovo-Konflikt scheint also offensichtlich auch im Kontext der deutschen Grammatik - und umfassender der Sprache schlechthin - ein vielschichtiges und subtiles Problem von einiger Brisanz darzustellen.
It could be said that learner’s dictionaries are the most reliable expression of lexicography in terms of providing the necessary tools to help the learning process of a foreign language. This paper analyses three English learner’s dictionaries in order to establish its stylistic patterns as well as to compare them with four German learner’s dictionaries. Undoubtly, the lexicography of English learner’s dictionaries is a model. However, we argue that this model can not be transfered to German lexicography since each language has its own particularities which demand specific solutions.
As linguist, we always have to deal with terms like First, Second and Foreign Languages, but many times we don’t notice, how peculiars they are and how specific and difficult are their definitions. In Brazil, we have peculiar situations of immigrant languages, which are spoken in some groups of people in some communities in their day-by-day. There is much controversy related to the denomination we give to these linguistic varieties, what concerns its status and its relationship with the other neighbor or concurrent varieties. In this paper, we intend to discuss theoretically the terms above, transporting the denomination and its application to the reality of some bilingual communities from Rio Grande do Sul, in which people speak minority languages of Germanic origins. On the basis of empirical tests, we aim to give here a profile of the socio linguistic situation of these minority varieties what concerns its speakers, the foreign language teachers (specially of the High-German) and the community in general.
This paper examines four German transportation verbs with the prefix weg-, concentrating on their syntax and their semantic and pragmatic interpretations. The empirical data investigated are from across-linguistic Corpus of German and Brazilian Portuguese as foreign languages. The analysis is based on the concept of focus, which is defined as a point on the path along which the patient of the process moves. The focus must be either mentioned or contextually evident. Each transportation verb will be able to establish a typical focus. German prefix-verbs with weg- are characterized by a focus-conflict that can be resolved through different interpretation strategies.
U radu se analiziraju osobna imena u "Rječniku varaždinskoga kajkavskog govora" Tomislava Lipljina, najvećemu dosad tiskanomu rječniku jednoga suvremenoga kajkavskoga govora. Iz osobnoimenskih natuknica i osobito pomno biranih rečeničnih potvrda koje sadrže osobno ime iščitavaju se jezične i izvanjezične značajke te, u Lipljinovu Rječniku najzastupljenije, antroponimijske kategorije.
Osobna imena u Velikome rječniku stranih riječi, izraza i kratica (4 1966.) Bratoljuba Klaića
(2014)
Osobna su imena važnom sastavnicom rječnika stranih riječi, pa tako i Rječnika stranih riječi renomiranoga hrvatskoga leksikografa Bratoljuba Klaića. U radu se analiziraju osobna imena u četvrtome izdanju toga rječnika (Zagreb, 4 1966.) jer je to zadnje izdanje koje kao autor potpisuje sâm Klaić. Razmatra se obradba osobnih imena u rječničkome članku s osobitim obzirom na osobno ime kao dio rječničkoga članka, na odabir odrednica u rječničkome članku, na semantički opis natuknice, na tipologiju upućivanja i na osobno ime kao sintagmatsku i frazemsku sastavnicu rječničkoga članka. Na kraju se iščitavaju bitne značajke osobnoimenskoga korpusa i njegova statusa u Klaićevu Rječniku (4 1966.).
Über das Verhältnis von Germanistik und universitärem Spracherwerb geht es in dem Beitrag von Andrea Riedel von der Universität Lissabon. Ihre Überlegungen zielen auf eine Umstrukturierung des universitären DaF-Unterrichts, der so erneuert auch die Germanistik unterstützt und Literatur schon auf Anfängerniveau berücksichtigt.
In this paper I develop a unified analysis of the Japanese passive, which provides a uniform syntactic/semantic representation of the alleged varieties of passives (direct, indirect, possessive) as a complex predicate that encodes the triadic relation of "lack of control" among an agent, undergoer and event. Various differences among the direct, possessive, and indirect passives (the adversative effect implicature, the possibility of reflexive binding, the animacy constraint on the subject, etc.) are explained as cooperative effects of the core syntactic/sematic properties of the passive morpheme -(r)are and functional/pragmatic factors like conversational implicature and empathy constraints.
This paper investigates the structural properties of morphosyntactically marked focus constructions, focussing on the often neglected non-focal sentence part in African tone languages. Based on new empirical evidence from five Gur and Kwa languages, we claim that these focus expressions have to be analysed as biclausal constructions even though they do not represent clefts containing restrictive relative clauses. First, we relativize the partly overgeneralized assumptions about structural correspondences between the out-of-focus part and relative clauses, and second, we show that our data do in fact support the hypothesis of a clause coordinating pattern as present in clause sequences in narration. It is argued that we deal with a non-accidental, systematic feature and that grammaticalization may conceal such basic narrative structures.
In this paper, we outline the foundations of a theory of implicatures. It divides into two parts. The first part contains the base model. It introduces signalling games, optimal answer models, and a general definition of implicatures in terms of natural information. The second part contains a refinement in which we consider noisy communication with efficient clarification requests. Throughout, we assume a fully cooperative speaker who knows the information state of the hearer. The purpose of this paper is not the study of examples. Our concern is the framework for doing these studies.
The script of Caryl Churchill’s short play Hot Fudge (like several other plays by this author) contains detailed directions for overlapping conversation. At certain points in the play these may be contributing to a number of effects similar to those described for the naturally occurring ‘collaborative floor’, such as enthusiasm and mutual support. The importance of an interactive approach to constructed conversation is pointed out in the article, particularly that of analysing the overlapped speaker’s response to appreciate the discursive significance of the overlapping turn. For instance, acknowledging and/or reusing the other speaker’s overlapping formulations in a non-oppositional format can show an understanding of these contributions as collaboratively oriented. Therefore, such an interpretation of overlapping dialogue in a dramatic text will affect the reader’s understanding of the interpersonal context (e.g. dominance-seeking/mutual support/collaboration between pairs of speakers). In particular, this approach is taken to show how certain kinds of overlapping similar to those described for the naturally occurring conversation can be used dramatically to supportive rather than conflictive ends. Overall, it is shown how the dramatic characters’ interpersonal orientations become inferable from their use of certain dialogic options.
Le concept d’eurocompréhension signifie intercompréhension dans les trois grands groupes linguistiques européens, à savoir les langues romanes, slaves et germaniques. Il s’agit, en respectant les objectifs1 de la politique linguistique de l’Union Européenne, de parvenir de façon modulaire au plurilinguisme par le biais de compétences réceptives. Dans ce cadre, les recherches linguistiques effectuées sur l’intercompréhension fournissent les bases de transfert interlangues pour l’exploitation cognitive de la parenté entre les langues des groupes différents. ...
Bilježenje palatalnih konsonanata najviše je problema izazivalo u slavenskih naroda koji su nastojali prilagoditi osnovnu latinicu fonemima svojih jezika. U ovom se radu promatraju bilježenja palatala u pisaca zadarsko-šibenskoga kruga, i to u vremenu od 14. do 17. stoljeća. U toj su regiji nastali prvi hrvatski tekstovi pisani latinicom. Cilj rada jest ustvrditi kako su pojedini autori latinicom zapisali sporne foneme hrvatskoga (čakavskoga) jezika, koje su razlike i istosti njihovih grafijskih rješenja i koje se tendencije ogledaju u višestoljetnoj uporabi latinice na ovom području.
This paper offers a description of the contemporary German lexicography using dictionary taxonomy. The parameters used for the classification of dictionaries are the number of languages (monolingual against bilingual dictionaries), the user’s perspective (how useful is each kind of dictionary for the Brazilian scholar) and the two perspectives of the act of speech (text reception against text production).
All of the papers in the volume except one (Kaji) take up some aspect of relative clause construction in some Bantu language. Kaji’s paper aims to account for how Tooro (J12; western Uganda) lost phonological tone through a comparative study of the tone systems of other western Uganda Bantu languages. The other papers examine a range of ways of forming relative clauses, often including non-restrictive relatives and clefts, in a wide range of languages representing a variety of prosodic systems.