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Class features as probes
(2008)
In this article, we adress (i) the form and (ii) the function on inflection class features in minimalist grammar. The empirical evidence comes from noun inflection systems involving fusional markers in German, Greek, and Russian. As for (i), we argue (based on instances of transparadigmatic syncretism) that class features are not privative; rather, class information must be decomposed into more abstract, binary features. Concerning (ii), we propose that class features qualify as the very device that brings about fusional infection: They are uninterpretable in syntax and actas probes on stems, with matching inflection markers as goels, and thus trigger morphological Agree operations that merge stem and inflection marker before syntax is reached.
The information-structural status of clitic left dislocated arguments in Spanish has been argued to depend crucially on their thematic role. Earlier HPSG analyses of related phenomena in other languages do not take into account this sort of information. A formalization will be presented which can handle differences in information-structure arising from different thematic roles of clitic left dislocated phrases.
This paper describes a number of verbal argument marking patterns found in the world's languages and provides HPSG analyses for them. In addition to commonly-occurring variations of morphosyntactic alignment (e.g. nominative-accusative, ergative-absolutive), this paper also presents analyses of more complex phenomena, including ergativity splits, Austronesian-style focus-case systems, and direct-inverse systems and their interaction with case.
This paper is an inductive look at the constituents found in a randomly selected Tagalog text, Bob Ong’s Alamat ng Gubat (Makati City, MM: Visual Print Enterprises, 2004). The analysis is based on the full text, but we will only be able to go through the first few lines of the text here, which we will do one by one, and discuss the structures found in each line of the text in bullet format after the relevant line. At the end of the paper we will bring up some important questions about the structures found in Tagalog based on this text.
Either in the realm of the mother tongue debating, or in the problematization of the second language classroom, the matters related to the assessment conduct and to the linguistic behavior of both teachers and students should not be underestimated or even left aside. Linguistic diversity is broadly present in the school context, and it is imperative not to overlook the way this reality is considered and the linguistic policies which are present and necessary. Whereas the assessment process is an integral part of the formation of the student’s identity, it is relevant to consider the theoretical concept of this process as well as the practice current in the school context. This paper gathers definitions on the assessment conduct and linguistic behavior, highlighting the role played by the teacher in classroom routine aiming at the flexibility of the process, as well as the appreciation of the pupil’s linguistic individuality.
Many teachers of German as a second language make some statements regarding this language that mix concepts from three distinct fields: Orthography (letters), Phonetics (phones or speech sounds) and Phonology (phonemes). In this paper I attempt to shed some light on these concepts and fields. I also provide examples of such statements and make comments on them.
Cet article étudie la relation entre les grammaires darbres adjoints à composantes multiples avec tuples darbres (TT-MCTAG), un formalisme utilisé en linguistique informatique, et les grammaires à concaténation dintervalles (RCG). Les RCGs sont connues pour décrire exactement la classe PTIME, il a en outre été démontré que les RCGs « simples » sont même équivalentes aux systèmes de réécriture hors-contextes linéaires (LCFRS), en dautres termes, elles sont légèrement sensibles au contexte. TT-MCTAG a été proposé pour modéliser les langages à ordre des mots libre. En général ces langages sont NP-complets. Dans cet article, nous définissons une contrainte additionnelle sur les dérivations autorisées par le formalisme TT-MCTAG. Nous montrons ensuite comment cette forme restreinte de TT-MCTAG peut être convertie en une RCG simple équivalente. Le résultat est intéressant pour des raisons théoriques (puisqu’il montre que la forme restreinte de TT-MCTAG est légèrement sensible au contexte), mais également pour des raisons pratiques (la transformation proposée ici a été utilisée pour implanter un analyseur pour TT-MCTAG).
In the course of the ME period, HAVE began to encroach on territory previously held by BE. According to Rydén and Brorström (1987); Kytö (1997), this occurred especially in iterative and durational contexts, in the perfect infinitive and modal constructions. In Early Modern English (henceforth EModE), BE was increasingly restricted to the most common intransitives come and go, before disappearing entirely in the 18th and 19th centuries. This development raises a number of questions, both historical and theoretical. First, why did HAVE start spreading at the expense of BE in the first place? Second, why was the change conditioned by the factors mentioned by Rydén and Brorström (1987) and Kytö (1997)? Third, why did the change take on the order of 800 years to go to completion? Fourth, what implications does the change have for general theories of auxiliary selection? In this paper we’ll try to answer the first question by focusing on one the earliest clearly identifiable advance of HAVE onto BE territory – its first appearance with the verb come, which for a number of reasons is an ideal verb to focus on. First, come is by far the most common intransitive verb, so we get large enough numbers for statistical analysis. Second, clauses containing the past participle of come with a form of BE are unambiguous perfects: they cannot be passives, and they did not continue into modern English with a stative reading like he is gone. Third, and perhaps most importantly, come selected BE categorically in the early stages of English, so the first examples we find with HAVE are clear evidence for innovation. We will present evidence from a corpus study showing that the first spread of HAVE was due to a ban on auxiliary BE in certain types of counterfactual perfects, and will propose an account for that ban in terms of Iatridou’s (2000) Exclusion theory of counterfactuals.
In der arabischen Welt herrscht eine sehr alte und stabile Situation der Diglossie, d.h. des funktional geregelten Nebeneinanders von zwei historischen Entwicklungsstufen der gleichen Sprache. Das Moderne Hocharabisch ist eine konservierte Form des Klassischen Arabisch. Es genießt hohes Ansehen und dient als Schriftsprache, wird aber nicht muttersprachlich erworben, sondern durch Unterricht erlernt. Im mündlichen und informellen Bereich werden die jeweiligen Dialekte verwendet; sie sind die natürliche Muttersprache der Bevölkerung, genießen jedoch keinerlei Ansehen. Da die Hochsprache in ihrer äußeren Form nicht verändert werden darf, aber auch die Dialekte sich nicht zu modernen geschriebenen Volkssprachen entwickeln dürfen, scheint die Diglossiesituation für alle Zeit festgeschrieben. Dadurch ist das Überleben der Dialekte gesichert, obgleich sie sich untereinander stärker annähern. Die Geringschätzung der Dialekte in der arabischen Welt bedingt auch eine Ablehnung der Dialektologie. Deshalb war die arabische Dialektologie immer eine Domäne westlicher Forscher, doch nun deutet sich auch im Westen ihr Niedergang an.
U radu se analizira uloga deiktičkih obilježivača (markera) u generičkom strukturiranju diskursa. Najprije se podsjeća da u postojećim tipologijama žanrova diskursa prisutnost deiktičkih obilježivača i drugih tragova subjektivnosti predstavlja važan kriterij za razgraničenje žanrova koji koegzistiraju u određenom društveno-povijesnom okviru unutar određenog tipa diskursa i za deskripciju uvjeta njihove diversifikacije. Zatim se, na primjeru diskursa medijske informacije na čije generičko strukturiranje utječu različite strategije objektivizacije, nastoji pokazati da primjena tog kriterija dobiva svoj puni smisao tek u kombinaciji s kriterijima koji se odnose na tekstualna i situacijska obilježja relevantna za generičko strukturiranje diskursa, a to su, s jedne strane, komunikacijski ciljevi sudionika u interakciji i specifične diskurzivne aktivnosti koje oblikuju relacijski profil tekstualnih struktura i, s druge strane, složenost interakcijskog okvira i stupanj heterogenosti deiktičkih i polifonijskih struktura.
Fußball ist ohne Zweifel das weltweit populärste Mannschaftsspiel. Nicht zu Unrecht wird es daher seit Jahrzehnten als „König“ metaphorisiert. Nach allem, was heute bekannt ist, wurde eine Urform in China schon vor 5000 Jahren gespielt. In Europa soll seit dem 12. Jahrhundert vor allem im nördlichen Frankreich und in England ein fußballähnliches Spiel betrieben worden sein, und in Florenz und anderen norditalienischen Städten war seit dem 15. Jahrhundert das noch recht urwüchsige calcio sehr beliebt, bei dem je 27 Spieler darum kämpften, den Ball mit Faust oder Fuß über die Begrenzung der gegnerischen Schmalseite des Spielfeldes zu schlagen und so ein „Mal“ zu erzielen.
Deutschsprachige und bilinguale Studiengänge : eine Chance für Deutsch als Fremdsprache in Russland
(2008)
Der Bericht der Ständigen Arbeitsgruppe Deutsch als Fremdsprache (2006) für das Jahr 2005 zeigt, dass Russland, trotz eines Rückgangs der Lernerzahlen, immer noch das Land mit den meisten Deutschlernern (mehr als 3,3 Millionen) und mit dem größten Deutschlernangebot an den Schulen und den Universitäten (ca. 1000 Hochschulen) ist. Bei einer Umfrage unter 1025 Personen in den Städten Jakutsk, Kaliningrad, Moskau, Saratov und St. Petersburg waren 100 % der Befragten der Meinung, dass Englisch für die beruflichen Aussichten die wichtigste Sprache sei, aber 89 % schätzten die Kenntnis des Deutschen für ebenso wichtig ein und 95 % waren sogar der Meinung, dass durch ein sehr gutes Erlernen der deutschen Sprache im bilingualen Unterricht an Schulen sich die Berufschancen der Lerner erheblich verbessern (vgl. Baur 2005).
Developing linguistic resources, in particular grammars, is known to be a complex task in itself, because of (amongst others) redundancy and consistency issues. Furthermore some languages can reveal themselves hard to describe because of specific characteristics, e.g. the free word order in German. In this context, we present (i) a framework allowing to describe tree-based grammars, and (ii) an actual fragment of a core multicomponent tree-adjoining grammar with tree tuples (TT-MCTAG) for German developed using this framework. This framework combines a metagrammar compiler and a parser based on range concatenation grammar (RCG) to respectively check the consistency and the correction of the grammar. The German grammar being developed within this framework already deals with a wide range of scrambling and extraction phenomena.
Zur Etymologie von psyche gab es bislang eine erstaunlich einhellige und feste Meinung, aber keine fundierte Untersuchung. Die hier vorgelegte Untersuchung hat ergeben, dass psyche nicht die 'Atemseele' und auch etymologisch nicht auf das Atmen zurückzufuhren ist. Die etymologische Bedeutung von psyche ist vielmehr die 'Kälte', nämlich die Kälte des Leichnams, übertragen auf die Totenseele.
In unserem Beitrag möchten wir die Besonderheiten des systemhaften Aufbaus der funktional-semantischen Kategorien der Modalität und Aspektualität zeigen, und zwar anhand der Konstruktion können + Infinitiv im Deutschen und deren Äquivalente im Englischen. Unser Hauptanliegen ist es, die modalen Konstruktionen zu untersuchen, Unterschiede und Ähnlichkeiten in den beiden germanischen Sprachen zu systematisieren und Sprachmittel verschiedener Ebenen zu diskutieren, um festzustellen, wie diese Mittel bei der Formierung des Plans der Begrenztheit und Unbegrenztheit der Handlung und deren aktionalen Schattierungen funktionieren.
Die Sprachen der Städte
(2008)
Die frühen Sprachkarten, für die Georg Wenker Ende des 19. Jh. in über 40.000 Schulorten des deutschen Reiches schriftliche Übersetzungen in die Mundart gesammelt hatte, dokumentieren die Sonderstellung vieler Städte im sprachlichen Raum. Zum Beispiel zeigen Berlin und die nähere Umgebung sprachliche Formen, die sonst erst weiter südlich oder in der Schriftsprache gelten.
Based on the bilingualism and ethnolinguistic identity research, this study aims to observe the role identity and linguistic attitudes play in a minority mother language’s maintenance or shifting process in early bilingualism cases in a societal bilingualism situation. The analyzed context comprises native speakers of essentially bilingual communities that migrate to an urban center like Porto Alegre, where the opportunities for minority mother language use are drastically restrained by the monolingual Portuguese context. It’s asked how this language was maintained and what is the identity and linguistic attitude after the removal of the original context identified as more rural, isolated and ethnic and culturally different. The data collection derives from semi-structured interviews, recorded and subsequently transcribed. The data analysis suggests that the ‘geographic’ factor isn’t so relevant to the maintenance/shifting of a minority language than the speaker’s ‘micro-decisions’ to preserve the cultural and affectionate ties with their origin group, the family. Besides family group, community, school and government should be called to come together to construct new ways for the linguistic and cultural preservation of the bilingual community in Brazil. In that sense, this research intends to contribute to a wider understanding of the identity and linguistics attitudes’ role in the languages’ teaching and learning in general.
Dualist Syntax
(2008)
A dualist syntax has two components: (1) the lexicon, a structured set of formatives ('words'); and (2) rules for combining those formatives into utterances. This paper defends syntactic dualism against three 'monist' challenges. First, evidence for lexical argument structure can be found in deverbal nominalization, which preserves that structure systematically. Second, words represent the smallest units for idiom formation and contextual polysemy effects, which is expected on the dualist view but not if word meanings are composed in the syntax. Third, the count/mass properties of nouns suggest an interleaving of conceptual and grammatical information in semantic composition.
Seitdem die Junggrammatiker den Begriff des Lautgesetzes geprägt haben, sind deren fast ebenso viele aufgestellt wie in der Folge hinterfragt, widerlegt und vielleicht am Ende sogar doch wieder erfolgreich verteidigt worden. Jedes Lautgesetz wirkt in einem unterschiedlichen Zeitraum. Ist aus dem Zeitraum des Wirkens mehrerer zeitlich benachbarter oder gar einander zeitlich überlappender Lautgesetze ein ausreichend großes Textkorpus erhalten, so ist es ein Leichtes, die Reihenfolge des Wirkens der Gesetze zu ermitteln, oder, im günstigsten Fall, den Zeitraum ihres Wirkens sogar mit gewisser Präzision datieren zu können. Anders verhält es sich hingegen, wenn schriftliche Überlieferungen der untersuchten Sprache in der entscheidenden Epoche nur spärlich oder gar nicht vorliegen. Hier muss daher traditionell darauf zurückgegriffen werden, die Reihenfolge anhand der allein möglichen Entwicklung einzelner Wörter, auf die besonders viele der betreffenden Lautgesetze gewirkt haben, zu bestimmen. Diese Methode birgt jedoch die Gefahr menschlicher Fehler, insbesondere in Fällen, in denen eine klare Reihenfolge nur unter Betrachtung mehrerer Wörter zu ermitteln ist. Die Forscher vergangener Jahrzehnte und Jahrhunderte hatten hier allerdings keine andere Wahl. Mit den heute verfügbaren Computern eröffnen sich jedoch ungeahnte Möglichkeiten. Zuvor in Programmiersprache umgeschriebene Lautgesetze können in Sekundenschnelle auf immense Textkorpora angewandt werden. Um aber – ohne jegliche Zuhilfenahme außersprachlichen Wissens – die eine oder mehrere mögliche Reihenfolgen verschiedener Lautgesetze zu bestimmen, ist es nötig, sämtliche Möglichkeiten anhand eines Wortkorpus durchzuspielen und die jeweiligen Ergebnisse mit den tatsächlichen, vorliegenden Ergebnissen zu vergleichen. Dieser Versuch soll im Folgenden unternommen werden. Auf diese Weise könnten dann relative Chronologien von Lautgesetzen, die als längst etabliert gelten, noch einmal auf den Prüfstand gestellt und möglicherweise sogar noch präzisiert werden. Nach einer kurzen Begriffsgeschichte des Lautgesetzes soll zunächst auf sprachliche Problemstellungen eingegangen werden, die das Vorhaben erschweren, bevor die Auswahl zweier den Untersuchungszeitraum begrenzender Sprachstufen sowie eine Beschreibung des Datenmaterials – Wortkorpus und Lautgesetze – folgen. Nun soll das Computerprogramm, von den Anforderungen bis hin zur Umsetzung, erläutert werden. Anschließen soll sich hieran eine Darstellung der Erkenntnisse, die die Ergebnisse des Programms gewähren. Im Schlussteil sollen die offen gebliebenen und die neu entstandenen Fragen noch einmal zusammengefasst und Möglichkeiten zur hierauf basierenden weitergehenden Forschung erörtert werden.
The article analyzes the system of focus-sensitive particles and, to a lesser extent, clefts in Vietnamese. EVEN/ALSO/ONLY foci are discussed across syntactic categories, and Vietnamese is found to organize its system of focus-sensitive particles along three dimensions of classification: (i) EVEN vs. ALSO vs. ONLY; (ii) particles c-commanding foci vs. particles c-commanding backgrounds; (iii) adverbial focus-sensitive particles vs. particles c-commanding argument foci only. Towards the end of the paper, free-choice constructions and additional sentence-final particles conveying ONLY and ALSO semantics are briefly discussed. The peculiar Vietnamese system reflects core properties of the analogous empirical domain in Chinese, a known source of borrowings into Vietnamese over the millennia.
TT-MCTAG lets one abstract away from the relative order of co-complements in the final derived tree, which is more appropriate than classic TAG when dealing with flexible word order in German. In this paper, we present the analyses for sentential complements, i.e., wh-extraction, thatcomplementation and bridging, and we work out the crucial differences between these and respective accounts in XTAG (for English) and V-TAG (for German).
It has been established since Kanerva’s work that focus conditions phrasing – directly or indirectly – in several other Bantu languages, e.g. Chimwiini (Kisseberth 2007, Downing 2002, Kisseberth & Abasheikh 2004), Xhosa (Jokweni 1995, Zerbian 2004), Chitumbuka (Downing 2006, 2007), Zulu (Cheng & Downing 2006, Downing 2007), Bemba (Kula 2007), etc.
In this paper, I will argue that focus also conditions phrasing in Shingazidja, a Bantu language3 spoken on Grande Comore (or Ngazidja, the largest island of the Comoros).
Many works have been dedicated to the tonology of Shingazidja. The bases of the system were firstly identified by Tucker & Bryan (1970) and reanalyzed by Philippson (1988). Later, Cassimjee & Kisseberth (1989, 1992, 1993, 1998) provide a very convincing analysis of the whole system of the language, and my own research (Patin 2007a) shows a great correspondence with their results. However, little attention has been paid by these authors or others (Jouannet 1989, Rey 1990, Philippson 2005) to the phonology-pragmatics interface, especially on the relation between focus and phrasing. This paper thus proposes to explore this question. It will be claimed that focus, beside syntax, has an influence on phrasing in Shingazidja.
Much work on the interaction of prosody and focus assumes that, crosslinguistically, there is a necessary correlation between the position of main sentence stress (or accent) and focus, and that an intonational pitch change on the focused element is a primary correlate of focus. In this paper, I discuss primary data from three Bantu languages – Chichewa, Durban Zulu and Chitumbuka – and show that in all three languages phonological re-phrasing, not stress, is the main prosodic correlate of focus and that lengthening, not pitch movement, is the main prosodic correlate of phrasing. This result is of interest for the typology of intonation in illustrating languages where intonation has limited use and where, notably, intonation does not highlight focused information in the way we might expect from European stress languages.
Focus asymmetries in Bura
(2008)
This article presents the central aspects of the focus system of Bura (Chadic), which exhibits a number of asymmetries: Grammatical focus marking is obligatory only with focused subjects, where focus is marked by the particle án following the subject. Focused subjects remain in situ and the complement of án is a regular VP. With nonsubject foci, án appears in a cleft-structure between the fronted focus constituent and a relative clause. We present a semantically unified analysis of focus marking in Bura that treats the particle as a focusmarking copula in T that takes a property-denoting expression (the background) and an individual-denoting expression (the focus) as arguments. The article also investigates the realization of predicate and polarity focus, which are almost never marked. The upshot of the discussion is that Bura shares many characteristic traits of focus marking with other Chadic languages, but it crucially differs in exhibiting a structural difference in the marking of focus on subjects and non-subject constituents.
This paper focuses on a specific type of verbless utterance, labeled PVU, which is defined by two properties:
• PVUs are not discourse fragments.
• PVUs can host a phrase in their right periphery which is coreferential with their external argument. This phrase is labeled α-phrase.
PVUs are analyzed as clausal predicative phrases. Although PVUs can have various illocutionary forces, their content type is constrained by their syntactic form. As for α-phrases, they are shown to be right-dislocated phrases. Right-dislocation is analyzed as a local anaphoric phenomenon. This ap proach is consistent with the anaphoric properties of PVUs’ external arguments.
Rezension zu Igor Sosa Mayor, Routineformeln im Spanischen und im Deutschen. Eine pragmalinguistische kontrastive Analyse. Wien: Praesens Verlag, 2006. (451 S., ISBN 13:978-3-7069-0360-8)
Wenn wie im Falle des Instituts für Angewandte Linguistik und Translatologie der Universität Leipzig eine mehr als zehnjährige Germanistische Institutspartnerschaft mit gleich zwei russischen Partnern – den Übersetzer-Fakultäten der Linguistischen Universitäten Moskau und Pjatigorsk – nunmehr ihren Abschluss findet, so bietet es sich natürlich an zu fragen, was die GIP-Langzeitkooperation beiden Seiten an messbaren wissenschaftlichen, wissenschaftsmethodischen und curricularen Ergebnissen, an „Zuwächsen“ im Sinne der Nachwuchsförderung, des Austauschs von Dozenten und Studierenden gebracht hat. Die Bilanz – von uns dargelegt im Jubiläumsband 52 der Dokumente & Materialien des Deutschen Akademischen Austausch Dienstes – kann sich durchaus sehen lassen und rechtfertigt nicht nur die aufgewandten Mittel, sondern auch die kontinuierliche Arbeit, den nachhaltigen Einsatz und die vielfältigen Initiativen der zahlreichen Beteiligten auf beiden Seiten.
U radu se opisuje fonologija, morfologija i leksik govora Jurkova Sela u Žumberku, doseljeničkoga čakavskoga ikavsko-ekavskoga govora. Iako nema zamjenicu ča u samostalnoj upotrebi, govor čuva većinu temeljnih čakavskih crta. Ipak, stabilnost je sustava u nekim elementima narušena – što pokazuje supostojanje određenih dubleta u prozodiji i morfologiji. Leksik, uz ostalo, karakterizira prisutnost većeg broja germanizama, na žumberačkome prostoru očekivanih.
The paper presents an additional argument for a specific account of semantic binding: the flat-binding analysis. The argument is based on observations concerning sloppy interpretations in verb phrase ellipsis when the binder is not the subject of the elided VP. In one such case, it is important that one of the binders belong to the domain of the other. This case can be derived from the flat-binding analysis as is shown in the paper, while it is unclear how to account for it within other analyses of semantic binding.
In an earlier study (1983) I argued that unlike aorists and athematic presents, Indo-European perfects and thematic presents originally had a dative subject, as in German mir träumt ‘me dreams’ for ich träume ‘I dream’, e.g. Greek oida ‘I know’ < ‘it is known to me’, édomai ‘I will eat’ < ‘it is eatable to me’. On the basis of Oettinger’s epoch-making book (1979), I proposed that the Hittite hi-flexion originated from a merger of the perfect, where *-i was added to 3rd sg. *-e in order to supply a new present, with the thematic flexion of causatives and iteratives, where the final *-e of 3rd sg. *-eie was dropped before the loss of intervocalic *-i- (1983: 315).
The present article illustrates that the specific articulatory and aerodynamic requirements for voiced but not voiceless alveolar or dental stops can cause tongue tip retraction and tongue mid lowering and thus retroflexion of front coronals. This retroflexion is shown to have occurred diachronically in the three typologically unrelated languages Dhao (Malayo-Polynesian), Thulung (Sino-Tibetan), and Afar (East-Cushitic). In addition to the diachronic cases, we provide synchronic data for retroflexion from an articulatory study with four speakers of German, a language usually described as having alveolar stops. With these combined data we supply evidence that voiced retroflex stops (as the only retroflex segments in a language) did not necessarily emerge from implosives, as argued by Haudricourt (1950), Greenberg (1970), Bhat (1973), and Ohala (1983). Instead, we propose that the voiced front coronal plosive /d/ is generally articulated in a way that favours retroflexion, that is, with a smaller and more retracted place of articulation and a lower tongue and jaw position than /t/.
The present article illustrates that the specific articulatory and aerodynamic requirements for voiced but not voiceless alveolar or dental stops can cause tongue tip retraction and tongue mid lowering and thus retroflexion of front coronals. This retroflexion is shown to have occurred diachronically in the three typologically unrelated languages Dhao (Malayo-Polynesian), Thulung (Sino-Tibetan), and Afar (East-Cushitic). In addition to the diachronic cases, we provide synchronic data for retroflexion from an articulatory study with four speakers of German, a language usually described as having alveolar stops. With these combined data we supply evidence that voiced retroflex stops (as the only retroflex segments in a language) did not necessarily emerge from implosives, as argued by Haudricourt (1950), Greenberg (1970), Bhat (1973), and Ohala (1983). Instead, we propose that the voiced front coronal plosive /d/ is generally articulated in a way that favours retroflexion, that is, with a smaller and more retracted place of articulation and a lower tongue and jaw position than /t/.
How to compare treebanks
(2008)
Recent years have seen an increasing interest in developing standards for linguistic annotation, with a focus on the interoperability of the resources. This effort, however, requires a profound knowledge of the advantages and disadvantages of linguistic annotation schemes in order to avoid importing the flaws and weaknesses of existing encoding schemes into the new standards. This paper addresses the question how to compare syntactically annotated corpora and gain insights into the usefulness of specific design decisions. We present an exhaustive evaluation of two German treebanks with crucially different encoding schemes. We evaluate three different parsers trained on the two treebanks and compare results using EVALB, the Leaf-Ancestor metric, and a dependency-based evaluation. Furthermore, we present TePaCoC, a new testsuite for the evaluation of parsers on complex German grammatical constructions. The testsuite provides a well thought-out error classification, which enables us to compare parser output for parsers trained on treebanks with different encoding schemes and provides interesting insights into the impact of treebank annotation schemes on specific constructions like PP attachment or non-constituent coordination.
Razmatra se mogućnost hrvatskoga posvojnog pridjeva da bude antecedent relativnoj zamjenici, mogućnost koja se u slavenskim jezicima sve više gubi, odnosno mjesto posvojnoga pridjeva u toj funkciji zauzima genitiv. Potvrdama se pokazuje da ta mogućnost u pisanome hrvatskome (još) postoji. Provedena anketa s izvornim govornicima pokazuje ipak da takve konstrukcije kao prihvatljive ovjerava tek manji dio suvremenih govornika. Analiziraju se tipološki neobična svojstva relativnih rečenica s posvojnim pridjevom kao antecedentom, osobito to da se u njima posvojni pridjev vlada kao padežni oblik imenice, a ne njezin derivat. Ključne riječi: posvojni pridjev, antecedent, relativna rečenica, genitiv, slavenski jezici
U radu se analizira jezik opisan u Della Bellinoj gramatici u odnosu na jezik jednoga od književnih djela koja su mu bila uzorom – Suze sina razmetnoga Ivana Gundulića. Istraživanje je usmjereno na imeničke oblike u obama djelima. Sličnosti i razlike komentiraju se za svaku deklinaciju posebno, i to sustavno za svaki padež. Budući da su neke uvjetovane formom Della Bellina književnoga predloška, pritom se upozorava na stvarne i prividne razlike.
Implicated presuppositions
(2008)
J. Melvinger u radu o supstandardnome prijedložnom infinitivu (1982.) ne spominje mogućnost infinitivne kondenzacije posljedičnih ustrojstava, ni prijedložnog ni besprijedložnog infinitiva, iako donosi primjere u kojima je riječ o infinitivnoj prijedložnoj konstrukciji koja je priložna oznaka posljedice, a ne priložna oznaka načina, kako ona tvrdi: Kožnata jakna smiješna, a šal oko vrata škaklja za poludjeti. Tu mogućnost ne spominje ni u svojoj disertaciji (iako navodi primjere koje mi razumijevamo kao posljedične konstrukcije), a ne navodi je ni M. Ivić.
Welchen Bedingungen unterliegt menschliche Kommunikation? Welche sprachlichen Mittel verwendet ein Sprecher um sicherzustellen, dass sein Zuhörer tatsächlich das versteht, was er kommunizieren möchte? Wie also »verpacken« wir wichtige und weniger wichtige Informationen im alltäglichen Diskurs? Diesen und anderen Fragen geht der SFB 632 »Informationsstruktur«, ein gemeinsames Forschungsunternehmen von Linguisten verschiedener Teildisziplinen der Universität Potsdam und der Humboldt-Universität, nach.
Auf der Grundlage der bisherigen Forschungsergebnisse zu Transfer und Interferenz wird die Übertragung sprachlichen Wissens in die Interimsprache in eine Theorie des Zweitspracherwerbs integriert. Transfer wird dabei als interlinguale Ausprägung der Generalisierung verstanden, eine Sichtweise, die die Untersuchungsergebnisse zu Bedingungen und Ursachen des Transfers in einen Erklärungszusammenhang mit anderen Phänomenen des Zweitspracherwerbs stellt. Darüberhinaus ermöglicht es diese Interpretation, eine Verbindung zu kognitiven Leistungen des Lerners beim Erstspracherwerb sowie beim Lernen überhaupt herzustellen.
This dissertation is concerned with the phenomenon of intervention effects, observed in three different domains: wh-questions, alternative questions (AltQ) and Negative Polarity Item (NPI) licensing. I propose that these three domains share some common properties, namely, they all involve focus-sensitive licensing, and are thus sensitive to an intervening focus phrase. The overview of the dissertation is as follows. In chapter 2, I discuss the phenomenon of intervention effects in wh-questions, brought to light in the discussion of German in Beck (1996), and Korean in Beck and Kim (1997). The basic idea of their analysis is that quantifiers block LF wh-movement. I show that intervention effects are observed in many other languages, too, suggesting that the intervention effect has a universal character. I then point out some problems with the analysis proposed by Beck (1996) and Beck and Kim (1997). In chapter 3, I propose a new generalization of the wh-intervention effects, namely that the core set of interveners, which is crosslinguistically stable, consists of focus phrases (and not quantifiers in general). Furthermore, I argue that the wh-intervention effect is actually an instance of the more general intervention effect, the "Focus Intervention Effect", which says that in a focus-sensitive licensing construction, no independent focus phrase may intervene between the licensor Op and the licensee XP. The underlying idea is that the Q operator is a focus-sensitive operator and that wh-phrases in-situ are dependent (i.e., semantically deficient) focus elements, which must be associated with the Q operator in order to be interpreted. An intervening independent focus operator precisely blocks that association. I further propose that the domain of focus-sensitive licensing includes not only wh-licensing, but also AltQ-licensing and NPI-licensing. In chapter 4, I show that alternative questions are also subject to the focus intervention effect, just like wh-questions. I provide evidence that the intervention effect in wh-questions and in alternative questions should receive a parallel analysis, in terms of focus-sensitivity. In chapter 5, I discuss a third construction which is sensitive to the focus intervention effect: the licensing of Negative Polarity Items (NPIs). I show that focus consistently blocks NPI licensing, with data from German and Korean. I propose that NPIs are also semantically deficient focus elements, which need to be associated with a NEG operator. Finally, chapter 6 summarizes the intervention effects and suggests some topics for future research into the precise nature of the intervention effect.
Inuktitut wird in der kanadischen Arktis, im Territorium Nunavut und in Arctic Quebec, von ca. 30.000 Menschen gesprochen und steht in einem Varietätenkontinuum mit den benachbarten Sprachen der Familie „Eskimo-Aleut“, deren Verbreitungsgebiet sich von Ostgrönland bis zur Nordostspitze Asiens erstreckt. Inuktitut ist eine polysynthetische Sprache und zeichnet sich durch uneingeschränkte morphologische Produktivität und Komplexität aus. Die vorliegende grammatische Skizze richtet ihr Augenmerk vorrangig auf diese synthetischen Prozesse, die sich keineswegs auf lexikalische Produktivität im Sinne einer ‚Wortbildung’ beschränken, sondern weitestgehend grammatisch konfigurierende Prozesse umfassen. Ausführlich behandelt werden auch die Kapazitäten der extrem differenzierten Flexionsparadigmen, insbesondere der Verbalflexion, die vollständige Propositionen konstituiert und durch die allein ein kohärenter Diskurs gewährleistet wird.
After the very well-organized Leiden conference for which we must be grateful to Tijmen Pronk, it seems appropriate for me to review some of the papers, as I did after the previous conferences in Zagreb and Copenhagen. The aim of this review is merely to point out some of the differences of opinion which require further debate.
Jagić o Maretiću
(2008)
U radu se nastoje prikazati i kontekstualizirati Dujmušićevi jezikoslovni doprinosi očuvanju hrvatskoga standardnog jezika. Puristički se radovi, među kojima je najzanimljiviji i najopširniji “Antibarbarus hrvatskoga jezika”, klasificiraju prema Thomasovoj (1991) kategorizaciji purističke djelatnosti. Dujmušić je zanimljiv ne samo zbog izazovne, potpune anonimnosti, nego i zbog toga što je u vrijeme opozicije između vukovskoga i antivukovskoga purizma bio na onoj slabijoj, antivukovskoj strani. Znanstvena je recepcija Dujmušićeva rada potpuno izostala, što znači da njegove jezikoslovne prinose valja i prikazati i evaluirati.