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This paper examines the syntactic behavior of the Mauritian copula in predicative and extracted sentences. As it is the case in many languages, the Mauritian copula ete is absent in certain constructions: It only appears in extraction contexts. Our aim is to show that the postulation of a null copula, which has been proposed in various analyses, is inadequate for the Mauritian data. The phenomenon, as it is argued, rather lends itself to a strictly construction-based analysis within the framework of HPSG and is based on the distribution of weak pronouns and TAM markers.
In this work, I provide an analysis of adjectival depictive constructions which accounts for most of their fundamental properties. First, I focus on the restrictions having to do with the integration of the depictive and the verbal predicate: they are based on aspectual compatibility between the two predicates, which, in turn, will depend on the ability, on the part of the depictive, to make reference to some (sub)event in the event structure of the verbal predicate. Facts not captured by previous approaches in the literature will be straightforwardly accounted for, among them the possibility to have I-L depictive constructions, and the impossibility to combine a depictive with some non-stative verbal predicates. Second, it will be shown that the informational import of the depictive in the sentence can be equivalent to that of the verbal predicate: both can be the primary lexical basis of predication. This is reflected in the sentence in various ways, having to do with aspectual modifiers, and in the properties of the sentential subject. In this connection, we will reconsider the notion of subject, arguing that no subject-predicate relation takes place in the lexical domain of sentences, and hence that the argument the depictive is oriented to, the common argument, cannot be a subject of the depictive. Finally, a minimalist analysis is proposed for the syntax of the construction, in terms of direct syntactic merge of predicative constituents and sidewards (q-to-q) movement for the common argument, from the lexical domain of the depictive to the lexical domain of the verb. As to morphosyntactic properties, a syntactic Double Agree relation is assumed to hold between T/v, as probes, on the one hand, and the common argument and depictive, as simultaneous goals, on the other, which would allow for the deletion of Case features on both goals. The assumed presence of Structural Case on the adjectival depictive will be responsible for the well-known restriction on the orientation of depictives to the sentential subject or object.
This paper presents a syntactic HPSG analysis of distance distributivity in Polish, where the challenge is to uniformly analyse a number of function lexemes PO 'each' which share their form and semantic contribution, but differ in their syntactic behaviour. To this end, the HPSG notion of weak head is employed in a novel way.
Freeze (1992) argued on the basis of data from several different languages that there is a close relationship between existential sentences (stating the existence of an entity) and locative sentences (stating the location of an entity). Freeze (1992) proposes that they are both derived from the same base structure and that the surface differences are rather due to the distinct information structures.This paper argues against this position with the data from Serbian existentials, which show clear syntactic differences from the locatives. Thus, the close relationship between existential and locative sentences that Freeze (1992) observes is conceptual, but not (necessarily) part of the syntax of the language. In order to account for the data, we propose that existential sentences originate from a different syntactic predication structure than the locative ones. The existential meaning arises, as we will show, from the interaction of this predication structure with the structure and meaning of the noun phrase.
Of all French functional elements, the form de has without question the widest variety of uses, and presents the greatest challenge for linguistic description and analysis. Historically a preposition, it still has a number of prepositional uses in modern French, but in many contexts it calls for an altogether different treatment. We begin by outlining a general distinction between oblique and non-oblique uses of de. We then develop a detailed account of constructions where de combines with an N'. We provide a unitary analysis of de in three constructions (quantifier extraction, "quantification at a distance", and negative contexts) which have been not been considered to be related in previous accounts.
In this paper I put forward and justify a syntactic configuration that I call Complex Small Clause-structure. I show that this single syntactic structure can explain both the semantic value and the syntactic behavior of a range of constructions that up to now have been explored separately and, hence, proposed divergent analyses among them.
This paper investigates the syntax of the English "not only ... but also ..." construction, focusing on the linearization possibilities of "not only". Based on novel corpus data, I argue that the "not only ... but also ..." construction exhibits different properties from the "not ... but ..." construction or the adverbial "only". I propose that a linearization-based account, along with coordinate ellipsis, can explain the various linearization possibilities of "not only". I also propose that the construction as a whole is a subtype of the type correlative-coord-ph, which is a novel subtype of coord-ph. Finally, I argue that subject-auxiliary inversion triggered by the clause-initial not only is a new subtype of the type "negative-inversion-ph".
The paper considers a phenomenon in Korean where ambiguity in the written language is resolved prosodically. An LFG analysis is provided which extends the proposals of Mycock and Lowe (2013) to Korean, based on experimental evidence on the prosodic expression of focus in Korean which challenges the phrase-boundary based account of Jun and Oh (1996), and suggests that considering expanded pitch range may give a more robust account of focus expression.
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.
In France, literature has been for a long time the basis for the teaching of French as mother tongue. Today, however, its role and position are being questioned because of both empirical difficulties linked with its daily teaching and disciplinary changes in French didactics. Its formerly obvious use is now giving way to doubts. While some firmly stick to their old positions, as expressed in press pamphlets and media discussions (« C'est la littérature qu'on assassine rue de Grenelle », Le Monde, 4 March, 2000), others try to « remodel » the teaching of French in redefining the functions of its various components (literature ranging at the top) and in finding new ways to link them. These are the issues at stake in the current debate that we hope to clarify through an analysis of the Education Ministry's new instructions on secondary teaching.
This article considers the impact on the teaching of writing and the curriculum, of changes in culture associated with mass media and new means of communication such as the internet. It specifically focuses on the implications these changes might have for the ways in which writing is taught and practised in schooling today. The article is based on interviews with three Swedish upper-secondary school mother-tongue teachers and presents their views on how the writing situation has changed for their students. According to the teachers, the curriculum faces challenges from students' access to and use of mass media culture and computer-mediated communications. For example, the teachers reported that students currently are less interested in grammar and spelling, and more interested in images and layout. Students also use what teachers consider to be plagiarism in their methods of communication. The article draws on media ecology to understand these reported changes in the sense that students are seen to develop new media practices involving several media-specific competences (Mackey, 2002) which gives them access to new ways of meaning-making in their acts of reading or writing. It is tentatively claimed that students may thus develop alternative notions of authors as well as texts, which affect their own view of text production in school. Other theoretical frameworks drawn on in the article include Habermas' discussion of how the public and private sphere fuse and Ziehe's (1989) perceptions of teachers as 'relation workers' in increasingly intimate school environments.
The purpose of this paper is to show how WH questions interact with the complex tonal phenomena which we summarized and illustrated in Hyman & Katamba (2010). As will be seen, WH questions have interesting syntactic and tonal properties of their own, including a WH-specific intonation. The paper is structured as follows: After an introduction in §1, we successively discuss non-subject WH questions (§2), subject WH questions (§3), and clefted WH questions (§4). We then briefly present a tense which is specifically limited to WH questions (§5), and conclude with a brief summary in §6.
This article aims to recast the properties of topic-prominent languages and their differences from subject-prominent languages as documented in the functionalist literature into the framework of the Principle-and-Parameter approach. It provides a configurational definition of the topic construction called Topic Phrase (TP), with the topic marker as its head. The availablity of TP enables topic prominent languages to develop various topic structures with properties such as morphological marking; cross-categorial realization of topics and comments; and mutiple application of topicalization. The article elaborates the notion of topic prominence. A topic prominent language is characterized as one that tends to activate the TP and to make full use of the configuration. Typically, it has a larger number and variety of highly grammaticalized topic markers in the Lexicon and permits a variety of syntactic categories to occur in the specifier position and the complement position of TP.
This paper proposes a corpus encoding standard that meets the needs of linguistic research using a variety of linguistic data structures. The standard was developed in SFB 441, a research project at the University of Tuebingen. The principal concern of SFB 441 are the empirical data structures which feed into linguistic theory building. SFB 441 consists of several projects, most of which are building corpora to empirically investigate various linguistic phenomena in various languages (e.g. modal verbs in German, forms of address and politeness in Russian). These corpora will form the components of the "Tuebingen collection of reusable, empirical, linguistic data structures (TUSNELDA)". The TUSNELDA annotation standard aims at providing a uniform encoding scheme for all subcorpora and texts of TUSNELDA such that they can be processed with uniform standardized tools. To guarantee maximal reusability we use XML for encoding. Previous SGML standards for text encoding were provided by the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) and the Expert Advisory Group on Language Engineering Standards (Corpus Encoding Standard, CES). The TUSNELDA standard is based on TEI and XCES (XML version of CES) but takes into account the specific needs of the SFB projects, i.e. the peculiarities of the examined languages and linguistic phenomena.
The purpose of this paper is to describe the TüBa-D/Z treebank of written German and to compare it to the independently developed TIGER treebank (Brants et al., 2002). Both treebanks, TIGER and TüBa-D/Z, use an annotation framework that is based on phrase structure grammar and that is enhanced by a level of predicate-argument structure. The comparison between the annotation schemes of the two treebanks focuses on the different treatments of free word order and discontinuous constituents in German as well as on differences in phrase-internal annotation.
In this paper I investigate the usage of the adverb and particle 'so' in spontaneous speech (interviews) collected from 21 speakers of the urban multi-ethnolectal youth language Kiezdeutsch. Speakers from the neighborhoods Kreuzberg and Wedding in Berlin are ranging in age from 14 to 18. The 1454 tokens of so available in the corpus (about 5 hours of speech) were classified into 10 different categories; some were structurally defined while others were defined along dimensions of meaning. Our current results indicate that there are differential usages patterns depending on the speaker's gender and age for some of these categories. Further, it appears that some patterns that have been attributed grammatical meaning may not appear frequently enough to establish a separate meaningful grammatical category. Rather, most instances of this kind of use of so appear to have a hedging function, indicating speakers' non-commitance to a specific circumstance.
The focus of the present paper is on the difference between English and German learners‘ use of perfectivity and imperfectivity. The latter is expressed by means of suffixation (suffix -va-). In contrast, perfectivity is encoded either by suffixation (-nou-) or by prefixation (twenty different prefixes that mostly modify not only aspectual but also lexical properties of the verb).
In the native Czech data set, there is no significant difference between the number of imperfectively and perfectively marked verb forms. In the English data, imperfectively and perfectively marked verb forms are equally represented as well. However, German learners use significantly more perfective forms than English learners and Czech natives. When encoding perfectivity in Czech, German learners prefer to use prefixes to suffixes. Overall, English learners in comparison to German learners encode more perfectives by means of suffixation than prefixation.
These results suggest that German learners of Czech focus on prefixes expressing aspectual and lexical modification of the verb, while English learners rather pay attention to the aspectual opposition between perfective and imperfective. In a more abstract way, the German learner group focuses on the operations carried out on the left side from the verb stem while the English learner group concentrates on the operations performed on the right side qfrom the verb stem.
This sensitivity can be to certain degree motivated by the linguistic devices of the corresponding source languages: English learners of Czech use imperfectives mainly because English has marked fully grammatical form for the expression of imperfective aspect – the progressive -ing form. German learners, on the other hand, pay in Czech more attention to the prefixes, which like in German modify the lexical meaning of the verb. In this manner, Czech prefixes used for perfectivization function similar to the German verbal prefixes (such as ab-, ver-) modifying Aktionsart.
The study investigates the contribution of tactile and auditory feedback in the adaptation of /s/ towards a palatal prosthesis. Five speakers were recorded via electromagnetic articulography, at first without the prosthesis, then with the prosthesis and auditory feedback masked, and finally with the prosthesis and auditory feedback available. Tongue position, jaw position and acoustic centre of gravity of productions of the sound were measured. The results show that the initial adaptation attempts without auditory feedback are dependent on the prosthesis type and directed towards reaching the original tongue palate contact pattern. Speakers with a prosthesis which retracted the alveolar ridge retracted the tongue. Speakers with a prosthesis which did not change the place of the alveolar ridge did not retract the tongue. All speakers lowered the jaw. In a second adaptation step with auditory feedback available speakers reorganised tongue and jaw movements in order to produce more subtle acoustic characteristics of the sound such as the high amplitude noise which is typical for sibilants.
This paper addresses remarks made by Flemming (2003) to the effect that his analysis of the interaction between retroflexion and vowel backness is superior to that of Hamann (2003b). While Hamann maintained that retroflex articulations are always back, Flemming adduces phonological as well as phonetic evidence to prove that retroflex consonants can be non-back and even front (i.e. palatalised). The present paper, however, shows that the phonetic evidence fails under closer scrutiny. A closer consideration of the phonological evidence shows, by making a principled distinction between articulatory and perceptual drives, that a reanalysis of Flemming’s data in terms of unviolated retroflex backness is not only possible but also simpler with respect to the number of language-specific stipulations.
The so-called was-w-construction in German has received a fair amount of attention in recent syntactic theorizing. Most of the discussion has focused on the properties of was.
One line of research maintains that was is a scope marker that indicates the semantic scope of the wh-phrase in the embedded interrogative clause. The alternative view, usually referred to as the indirect analysis, was first developed with respect to Hindi (Dayal 1994) and then generalized to German (Dayal 1996). It holds that the was of the was-w-construction is associated not with the embedded wh-phrase, but rather with the embedded clause as a whole.
Hinrichs and Nakazawa present some novel evidence in favor of an indirect analysis of the was-w construction. However, the main focus of their research is on two questions that by comparison have received little attention, namely:
1. what is the set of matrix predicates that can enter into this construction, and
2. how can one account for the curious fact that predicates that ordinarily do not license wh-complements allow such complements in the was-w-construction?
On the basis of Ginzburg and Sag's verb classification (Ginzburg and Sag, in preparation) Hinrichs and Nakazawa identify a natural class of predicates that license this construction and utilize the notion of type coercion to account for the apparent mismatch between the syntactic form of the embedded interrogative and its semantic function.
In the research field initiated by Lindblom & Liljencrants in 1972, we illustrate the possibility of giving substance to phonology, predicting the structure of phonological systems with nonphonological principles, be they listener-oriented (perceptual contrast and stability) or speaker-oriented (articulatory contrast and economy). We proposed for vowel systems the Dispersion-Focalisation Theory (Schwartz et al., 1997b). With the DFT, we can predict vowel systems using two competing perceptual constraints weighted with two parameters, respectively λ and α. The first one aims at increasing auditory distances between vowel spectra (dispersion), the second one aims at increasing the perceptual salience of each spectrum through formant proximities (focalisation). We also introduced new variants based on research in physics - namely, phase space (λ,α) and polymorphism of a given phase, or superstructures in phonological organisations (Vallée et al., 1999) which allow us to generate 85.6% of 342 UPSID systems from 3- to 7-vowel qualities. No similar theory for consonants seems to exist yet. Therefore we present in detail a typology of consonants, and then suggest ways to explain plosive vs. fricative and voiceless vs. voiced consonants predominances by i) comparing them with language acquisition data at the babbling stage and looking at the capacity to acquire relatively different linguistic systems in relation with the main degrees of freedom of the articulators; ii) showing that the places “preferred” for each manner are at least partly conditioned by the morphological constraints that facilitate or complicate, make possible or impossible the needed articulatory gestures, e.g. the complexity of the articulatory control for voicing and the aerodynamics of fricatives. A rather strict coordination between the glottis and the oral constriction is needed to produce acceptable voiced fricatives (Mawass et al., 2000). We determine that the region where the combinations of Ag (glottal area) and Ac (constriction area) values results in a balance between the voice and noise components is indeed very narrow. We thus demonstrate that some of the main tendencies in the phonological vowel and consonant structures of the world’s languages can be explained partly by sensorimotor constraints, and argue that actually phonology can take part in a theory of Perception-for-Action-Control.
Middle Welsh is a VSO language with the verb before the subject in all kinds of finite clause. However, positive declarative main clauses normally show verb-second order with a constituent of some kind before the finite verb. There are questions about the nature of this restriction. There are also questions about subject-initial sentences, which show surprising agreement properties, whether the subject is a topic or a focused constituent. All these questions can be given plausible answers within HPSG.
The purpose of this paper is to provide a unified (i.e. independent of lexical categories) account of Persian stress. I show that by differentiating word- and phrase-level stress rules, one can account for the superficial differences exemplified in (1) above and many of the stipulations suggested by previous scholars. The paper is organized as follows. In section 1, I look at nouns and adjectives and propose a rule that would account for their stress pattern. In section 2, I extend the stress rule to verbs and show the problem this category poses to our generalization. The main proposal of this paper is discussed in section 3. I introduce the phrasal stress rule in Persian and show that by differentiating word-level and phrase-level stress rules, one can come to a unified account of Persian stress. Section 4 deals with some problematic eases for the proposed generalization and discusses some tentative solutions and their theoretical consequences. Section 5 concludes the paper.
Zulu shows an alternation of conjoint and disjoint (conjunctive/disjunctive, short/long) verb forms. Certain contexts suggest that the distribution of these forms is related to focus. For example, certain adverbial expressions receive a focal interpretation when preceded by a conjoint form but not when preceded by a disjoint form. Similarly, a wh-phrase must be preceded by a conjoint form. This has led some researchers to argue or suggest that the alternation encodes focus directly. This paper examines two different focal hypotheses, one in which a disjoint form encodes focus on the verb and another in which the conjoint form encodes focus on the element following the verb. It is shown that both of these hypotheses are inadequate because certain contexts requiring the conjoint form do not display the predicted focal interpretation. Relativization morphology is argued to also support an analysis independent of focus. It is proposed that the alternation is regulated entirely by the position of the verb within the surface constituencies first proposed in Van der Spuy (1993) and that the associated focal interpretations are the result of a range of interpretations permitted within the different constituencies. Elements remaining within the relevant constituent are nontopical, and focus is one of a range of interpretations they can receive.
Mit der Einbeziehung der Slowakei in die globalisierte Welt erhielten die lexikographischen Werke, die sich mit der Äquivalenz der deutschen Lexeme in der slowakischen Sprache und umgekehrt beschäftigen, größere Bedeutung. Besonders im Bereich der Wirtschaft entwickelt sich die Lexik im Laufe der Zeit rasant. Slowakische und deutsche Partner treten immer häufiger in Kontakt, um auf die mannigfaltigen Probleme, die im Laufe der Zeit zu lösen sind, einzugehen.
Thematic Roles (or Theta-Roles) are theoretical constructs that account for a variety of well known empirical facts, which are more or less clearly delimited. In other words, Theta-Roles are not directly observable, but they do have empirical content that is open to empirical observation. The objective of the present paper is to sketch the nature and content of Theta-Roles, distinguishing their universal foundation as part of the language faculty, their language particular realization, which depends on the conditions of individual languages, and idiosyncratic properties, determined by specific information of individual lexical items.
This paper desribes four areas in which grammar engineers and theoretical linguists can interact. These include: using grammar engineering to confirm linguistic hypotheses; linguistic issues highlighted by grammar engineering; implementation capabilities guiding theoretical analyses; and insights into architecture issues. It is my hope that we will see more work in these areas in the future and more collaboration among grammar engineers and theoretical linguists. This is an area in which HPSG and LFG as a distinct advantage, given the strong communities and resources available.
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.
Frederick Turner and Ernst Pöppel (1983) proposed that lines of metrical poetry tend to measure three seconds or less when performed aloud, and that the metrical line is fitted to a three second "auditory present" in the brain. In this paper I show that there are faults both in their original argument, and in the claims which underlie it. I present new data, based on the measurement of line durations in publicly available recorded performances of 54 metrical poems; in this corpus, lines of performed metrical verse are often longer than three seconds: 59% of the 1155 lines are longer than 3 seconds, 40% longer than 3.5 seconds and 26% longer than 4 seconds. On the basis of weaknesses in the original paper, and the new data presented here, I propose, against Turner and Pöppel, that there is no evidence that lines of verse are constrained by a time-limited psychological capacity.
In this paper we address the question of which transitive verbs allow there-insertion in Danish. We propose that two constraints have to be met in order for verbs to appear in Danish there-constructions. Firstly, as have been noted by others, an empty direct object position must be available. This constraint is not sufficient for restricting the set of verbs in there-constructions. We further propose a locative constraint. The transitive verbs allowing there-insertion will be shown to coincide with verbs that allow a locative analysis.
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.
The aim of this paper is to propose three improvements to the HPSG model theory. The first is a solution to certain formal problems identified in Richter 2007. These problems are solved if HPSG models are rooted models of utterances and not exhaustive models of languages, as currently assumed. The proposed solution is compatible with all existing views on the nature of objects inhabiting models. The second improvement is a solution to "Höhle’s Problem", i.e., the problem of massive spurious ambiguities in models of utterances. The third is a formalisation of Yatabe's (2004) analysis of the coordination of unlike categories, one that requires a second-order extension of the language for stating HPSG grammars.
The speakers of the Paraná dialect of Kaingáng, from whom the data of this study were gathered, have lived in close contact with the Brazilians since before the turn of the century. Although many members of this group are still monolingual and Kaingáng is spoken in all the homes, the influence of Portuguese is making an impact on the language. This can be seen not only in isolated loan words, but it is slowly changing the time dimension of the language and the thinking of the Indians. The change seems to have come about first through loan words, but it is now also affecting the semantic structure of the language and is beginning to affect the grammatical structure as well. The study here presented deals with this change as it can be seen in relation to time expressions such as yesterday – today – tomorrow; units of time such as day – month – year; kinship terms; and finally aspect particles. In considering the time expressions the meaning of various paradigms will be discussed. The paradigms are related to the time when events took place, to sequence of events, and to the point of the action. No Brazilian influence can be observed here. In the discussion of the units of time the semantic area of these units before and after Brazilian influence will be explored. Through Brazilian influence vocabulary has been developed with which it is possible to accurately pinpoint events in time which was not possible before this. The time distinctions within the kinship system will be discussed, and how they change with the influence of Brazilian terms. A whole new generation distinction is added in the modified kinship system. Similary several new aspect particles are being created through contractions, which now contain a time element. The whole development shows an emphasis on fine distinctions in time depth which came about through the contact with Portuguese and which can be observed in several points of the structure of Kaingáng.
It is traditionally assumed that lexical causative verbs (e.g. kill) express direct causation only, while periphrastic (bi-clausal) causatives (e.g. cause to die) may also express indirect causation. In favour of this constraint, Fodor famously observed that the (change of) state introduced by lexical causative verbs is not accessible for separate adverbial modification by temporal (or manner) adverbials. In this paper, I present old and new arguments against the direct causation constraint under the definitions of directness of Fodor and Wolff. I then propose a new definition of directness in terms of ab-initio causal sufficiency framed in Kvart’s probabilistic account of singular causation. I argue that directness so redefined is an implicature rather than an entailment of lexical causative verbs, which enables me to account for old and new data. Furthermore, I account for why the constraint on separate modification by temporal adverbials can be relaxed with eventuality-denoting subjects.
Predmet interesa ovoga rada dvije su ustaljene sveze riječi koje su dio hrvatskoga pomorskog nazivlja, a u jeziku se često koriste s frazeološkim značenjem. U radu se analizira njihovo podrijetlo, moguća frazeološka značenja i konteksti u kojima se upotrebljavaju. Potencijalni frazemi uspoređuju se i s njihovim ruskim frazeološkim značenjskim ekvivalentima.
Ključne riječi: hrvatska frazeologija; ruska frazeologija; hrvatsko pomorsko nazivlje; potencijalni frazemi mali od palube i mali od kužine
This talk concerns the copula system in Buli, a Ghanaian language which has also been attested in Bahia (Rodrigues 1935, Zwernemann 1968). Special focus will be put on the categorization of two copula-reminiscent elements for which I will propose a discoursepragmatic analysis.
This paper challenges the assumption that the nature of apparent word order and verb form irregularities in the German verbal complex is that of an irreducible cluster of idiosyncrasies surrounding an exceptional word order possibility. I discuss two lesser known sets of data which raise serious problems for the traditional 'idiosyncrasy-based' analysis. I conclude that the verbs in the upper-field are exceptional in a 'deeper' sense, in that they do not construct as ordinary syntactic heads. Instead they seem to behave more like functional elements as characterized by Abney (1987). On the basis of such a revised syntactic analysis most of the unexpected word order and verb form irregularities resurface as related regular properties.
Buli is an Oti-Volta tone language spoken in Northern Ghana. This paper outlines the basic features of its tonal system and explores whether and in which way pitch respectively phonemic tone is approached as a means to indicate the pragmatic category of focus. Pursued are cases with focus-related surface tone changes as well as cases where pitch could help to disambiguate between broad and narrow foci. It is argued that focus is not consistently encoded by pitch or tone. Parallel findings for the closely related languages Kopen o (phonetic symbol)nni and Dagbani suggest that the apparent lack of significant prosodic focus signals in Buli might pertain to a larger group of tonal languages of the Gur family.
"The documentation of... descriptive generalizations is sometimes clearer and more accessible when expressed in terms of a detailed formal reconstruction, but only in the rare and happy case that the formalism fits the data so well that the resulting account is clearer and easier to understand than the list of categories of facts that it encodes.... [If not], subsequent scholars must often struggle to decode a description in an out-of-date formal framework so as to work back to... the facts.... which they can re-formalize in a new way. Having experienced this struggle often ourselves, we have decided to accommodate our successors by providing them directly with a plainer account." (Akinlabi & Liberman 2000:24)
As has been shown in other Polynesian languages, in Tongan, adnominal elements can modify incorporated nouns in the noun incorporation construction. Two analysis are considered in this paper for understanding this construction within HPSG. The first, lexical sharing (Kim and Sells, this volume), views the verbs that include incorporated nouns as being single words corresponding to two syntactic atoms. However, this analysis makes incorrect predictions on the transitivity of incorporation clauses. A second analysis, extending Malouf (1999), views these words as verbs, but with some of the combinatorial properties of nouns. This offers both a better account of the data, and preserves the more restrictive theory of the morphology-syntax interface.
Die vorliegende Bibliographie dient zur Beschäftigung mit Themen der germanistischen Linguistik (in interdisziplinärer Perspektive) und richtet sich explizit an Studierende, Lehrende und Gastwissenschaftler an der Tongji-Universität. Die vorliegende Zusammenstellung basiert auf einer im Herbst 2014 und Januar 2015 durchgeführten Auswertung der Bibliotheksbestände im Huiwen-Fakultätsgebäude auf dem Siping Road-Hauptcampus der Tongji-Universität. Dort hat die Deutsche Fakultät ihren Sitz. Es wurde auf die physische Verfügbarkeit der aufgenommenen Titel geachtet; ein Großteil gehört zum Präsenzbestand. Eine gesonderte Auswertung der Bestände der Zentralbibliothek der Tongji-Universität fand aus Ressourcengründen nicht statt. Interessierte seien auf den OPAC verwiesen, der hier einsehbar ist: http://www.lib.tongji.edu.cn/site/tongji/index.html.
Es sind diejenigen linguistischen Titel aufgenommen worden, die Verf. a) im Rahmen seiner Berufung auf eine Professur für Germanistische Linguistik im Jahr 2014 anschaffen durfte (zumeist Titel von 2011 oder später) bzw. in Zusammenarbeit mit der DAAD-Lektorin Kerstin Salewski-Tessmann angeschafft hat oder die b) bereits vorhanden waren und im einschlägigen Fachdiskurs wenigstens (noch) relevant. Frau Salewski-Tessmann gilt es an dieser Stelle für ihren Einsatz zu danken. Die Signaturen sind jeweils in Klammern hinter dem Titel angegeben. Vollständigkeit wird in der vorliegenden Darstellung nicht angestrebt. Die vorliegende Online-Publikation wird laufend erweitert. Ich danke meiner Frau Agnieszka Bitner-Szurawitzki für ihre kritische Durchsicht des Typoskripts. Abschließend gilt mein Dank der Bibliothekarin des Fremdsprachenkollegs, Frau Gu Wenjing, für ihre Assistenz bei der Recherche.
Es werden in alphabetischer Reihenfolge und gängiger linguistischer Zitierweise (außer bei den Duden-Wörterbüchern und Handbüchern zur Sprach- und Kommunikationswissenschaft [HSK]) die vorhandenen Titel aufgeführt. Die Gliederung erfolgt nach Standorten:
1. Handapparat der DAAD-Lektorinnen und -lektoren der Tongji-Universität
2. Heinrich Pfeiffer Bibliothek der Fritz Thyssen Stiftung
3. Germanistische Bibliothek des Fremdsprachenkollegs
4. Aktuelle germanistische Fachzeitschriften aus dem Bereich Linguistik/ Deutsch als Fremdsprache in der Bibliothek des Fremdsprachenkollegs
The paper explicates the notions of topic, contrastive topic, and focus as used in the analysis of Hungarian. Based on distributional criteria, topic and focus are claimed to represent distinct structural positions in the left periphery of the Hungarian sentence, associated with logical rather than discourse functions. The topic is interpreted as the logical subject of predication. The focus is analyzed as a derived main predicate, specifying the referential content of the set denoted by the backgrounded post-focus section of the sentence. The exhaustivity associated with the focus and the existential presupposition associated with the background are shown to be properties following from their specificational predication relation.
In this paper topic and focus effects at both left and right periphery are argued to be epiphenomena of general properties of tree growth. We incorporate Korean into this account as a prototypical verb-final language, and show how long- and short-distance scrambling form part of this general picture. Multiple long-distance scrambling effects emerge as a consequence of the feeding relationship between different forms of structural under-specification. We also show how the array of effects at the right periphery, in both verb-final and other language-types, can also be explained with the same concepts of tree growth. In particular the Right Roof Constraint, a well-known but little understood constraint, is an immediate consequence of compositionality constraints as articulated in this system.