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The paper presents results from a combined production and comprehension study addressing some of the factors which guide the establishment of intersentential pronominal reference in child and adult Bulgarian. We investigate the time course and different stages in the acquisition of null, personal and demonstrative pro-nouns and their specific anaphoric functions. We target possible age-induced changes in the salience hierarchy of referent features such as animacy and grammatical role. Following the general consent in the field of anaphora research, we assume a division of labour between different pronominal forms with respect to the salience of their referents. Based on the data of Bulgarian preschool children we investigate the validity of this form-function relation, its language-specific shape and its developmentally induced variation. The results reveal an initial prominence of animate referents which later on develops into preference for animate subjects. Although the investigated 3 to 5 year old Bulgarian children do not stick to the adult anaphora resolution strategy, they comply with the principle of the reversed mapping within the range of tested pronouns and react according to their salience criteria which promote animate subjects as the most prominent co-reference candidates.
The aim of this paper is to outline the means for encoding information structure in Yucatec Maya. Yucatec Maya is a tone language, displaying a three-fold opposition in the tonal realization of syllables. From the morpho-syntactic point of view, the grammar of Yucatec Maya contains morphological (topic affixes, morphological marking of out-of-focus predicates) and syntactic (designated positions) means to uniquely specify syntactic constructions for their information structure. After a descriptive overview of these phenomena, we present experimental evidence which reveals the impact of the nonavailability of prosodic alternatives on the choice of syntactic constructions in language production.
Integration and social advancement in our time without a solid language skills are no longer possible. What has not been done for decades, they now try through the integration abroad and in Germany make up very successful. But German is unfortunately only the first, though perhaps the most important step for a successful integration. The next question should now be: Lack of integration in spite of good knowledge of German - why?
Schwager (2011) and Sudo (2014) argued that there are cases of the so-called third readings of attitude reports, initially discovered by Fodor (1970), that cannot be accounted for in terms of a theory of indexed world variables (Percus, 2000), which is often referred to as the Standard Solution. More complicated alternatives to the Standard Solution have been recently formulated in the literature in a number of papers. We argue that all the seemingly problematic cases can be naturally accounted for in terms of the Standard Solution, if we take into account the existence of previously unrecognized elided material in these reports.
Mit der Möglichkeit, anhand digitaler Telefonanschlüsse Familiennamen nach Bestand, Trägerzahl und räumlicher Verbreitung mit großer Genauigkeit zu erfassen, hat eine neue Epoche der Anthroponomastik begonnen. Der Schatz von 850661 verschiedenen Familiennamen, die im Jahre 2005 in 28205713 privaten Festnetzanschlüssen registriert waren, ist immens, und die Fragestellungen zu seiner Erforschung sind in ihrer Ausrichtung und in ihrer Anzahl unerschöpflich. In dieser Situation ergaben sich vordringlich zwei Aufgaben: Erstens musste angesichts der von Jahr zu Jahr wachsenden Bevölkerungsmobilität, angesichts der Auswirkung neuerer Namengesetzgebung und angesichts der schnell zunehmenden Ablösung lokalisierter Festnetzanschlüsse durch Mobiltelefone der Namenbestand spätestens jetzt aufgrund der zuverlässigsten Quelle und in legitim nutzbarer Weise gesichert und archiviert werden. Die geschichtlich gewachsenen Namenlandschaften sind gerade noch, und zwar in erstaunlicher Stabilität, erhalten. Die Daten wurden nach Klärung der Datenschutzfragen von der Deutschen Telekom auf Stand Juni 2005 dem Deutschen Familiennamenatlas zur Verfügung gestellt und ihre Nutzung zur namenkundlichen Forschung mit Vertrag vom 28.06.2005 geregelt.
This paper discusses how focus change s prosodic structure in Tokyo Japanese. It is generally believed that focus blocks the intonational process of downstep and causes a pitch reset. This paper presents experimental evidence against this traditional view by looking at the prosodic behavior of Wh words, which receive focus lexically in Japanese as in other languages. It is demonstrated, specifically, that the focused Wh element does not block downstep although it receives a much higher pitch than its preceding element. This suggests that presence of lexical focus does not trigger pitch reset in Japanese.
A visual articulatory model and its application to therapy
of speech disorders : a pilot study
(2005)
A visual articulatory model based on static MRI-data of isolated sounds and its application in therapy of speech disorders is described. The model is capable of generating video sequences of articulatory movements or still images of articulatory target positions within the midsagittal plane. On the basis of this model (1) a visual stimulation technique for the therapy of patients suffering from speech disorders and (2) a rating test for visual recognition of speech movements was developed. Results indicate that patients produce recognition rates above level of chance already without any training and that patients are capable of increasing their recognition rate over the time course of therapy significantly.
This article takes stock of the basic notions of Information Structure (IS). It first provides a general characterization of IS — following Chafe (1976) — within a communicative model of Common Ground (CG), which distinguishes between CG content and CG management. IS is concerned with those features of language that concern the local CG. Second, this paper defines and discusses the notions of Focus (as indicating alternatives) and its various uses, Givenness (as indicating that a denotation is already present in the CG), and Topic (as specifying what a statement is about). It also proposes a new notion, Delimitation, which comprises contrastive topics and frame setters, and indicates that the current conversational move does not entirely satisfy the local communicative needs. It also points out that rhetorical structuring partly belongs to IS.
Human manual action exhibits a differential use of a non-dominant (typically, left) and a dominant (typically, right) hand. Human communication exhibits a pervasive structuring of utterances into topic and comment. I will point out striking similarities between the coordination of hands in bimanual actions, and the structuring of utterances in topics and comments. I will also show how principles of bimanual coordination influence the expression of topic/comment structure in sign languages and in gestures accompanying spoken language, and suggest that bimanual coordination might have been a preadaptation of the development of information structure in human communication.
It is by now a weIl-known topic in semantics that there are striking similarities between the meanings of nominal and verbal expressions, insofar as the mass:count distinction in the nominal domain is reflected in the atelic:telic distinction in the verbal domain (cf. Leisi 1953, Taylor 1977, Bach 1986, to cite just a few authors). However, these supposed similarities have not be made explicit in formal representations.
Nominalreferenz, Zeitkonstitution, Aspekt, Aktionsart : eine semantische Erklärung ihrer Interaktion
(1989)
In der vorliegenden Arbeit berichte ich über den Erklärungsansatz, den ich im Rahmen einer modelltheoretischen Semantik zur Beschreibung dieses Phänomens entwickelt habe. Ich konzentriere mich hierbei auf die zugrundeliegende Motivation und die intuitive Charakterisierung dieser Theorie. Leser, die an den Einzelheiten der Durchführung und an weiteren Anwendungsmöglichkeiten der Theorie interessiert sind, seien auf Krifka (1987, 1989) verwiesen: ein forschungshistorischer Abriß zu alternativen Theorien findet sich in Krifka (1986).
We propose a compositional analysis for sentences of the kind "You only have to go to the North End to get good cheese", referred to as the Sufficiency Modal Construction in the recent literature. We argue that the SMC is ambiguous depending on the kind of ordering induced by only. So is the exceptive construction – its cross-linguistic counterpart. Only is treated as inducing either a 'comparative possibility' scale or an 'implication-based' partial order on propositions. The properties of the 'comparative possibility' scale explain the absence of the prejacent presupposition that is usually associated with only. By integrating the scalarity into the semantics of the SMC, we explain the polarity facts observed in both variants of the construction. The sufficiency meaning component is argued to be due to a pragmatic inference.
"Werden" plays an important role in German, especially as a copula and as an auxiliary verb. It constitutes the analytic (periphrastic) part of the verbal paradigm being used as an auxiliary by encoding the categories of Tense (Future), Mood (Conditional), and Diathesis (Passive).
The original meaning of PIE *uuerth- includes two basic readings – a terminative and an aterminative. Both of them have been used in the process of grammaticalisation of werden in constructions with participles and the infinitive. The terminative reading based on the feature "Change of a State" was originally the categorical marker of "werden" within the opposition "sein" vs. "werden", where "sein" indicated the meaning of "State". As a result of the further development which started in the later OHG period, the aterminative reading of "werden" in constructions with the Participle II mixed with the terminative one by establishing the Passive-Paradigm. This evolution forced "sein"+ Part. II into the periphery of the Diathesis where in NHG it is marked as a resultative (terminative) construction. On the other hand, werden + Participle I (later with Infinitive) did not establish aterminative readings due to the peculiarities of the semantics of the Participle I – form. In connection with the Infinitive the terminativity of werden developed in the process of its auxiliarisation to the prospective I prognostic reading in the future-tense perspective and to the epistemic reading in the perspective of the present tense. In the perspective of the past tense (cf. MHG "ward varen" {became ride}, "was ridden") it disappeared because in this perspective prospective or prognostic readings are impossible.
Aus der Faktenlage ergeben sich folgende Probleme, die derzeit in der einschlägigen Literatur diskutiert werden bzw. bisher noch nicht zur Diskussion gelangt sind und die nun im vorliegenden Beitrag behandelt werden:
(i) Worauf sind Unterschiede in der Kodierung deontischer und epistemischer Lesarten von Modalverben durch (synthetische) Präsens- bzw. Präteritalformen und (analytische bzw. periphrastische) Perfekt- bzw. Plusquamperfektformen zurückzuführen? Worin liegt der genuine Beitrag des (periphrastischen) Perfekts/Plusquamperfekts bei der Manifestierung der kategorialen Funktion von Modalverben?;
(ii) Welches sind die Spezifika der Perfektformen von Modalverben in der Diachronie bzw.welchen kategorialen Wandel erfahren sie im Laufe ihrer Entwicklung?;
(iii) Wie ist die formale und funktionale Konstellation zwischen den Konstruktionen Modalverb + Infinitiv II und der Umschreibung würde + Infinitiv II synchron wie diachron zu beurteilen?;
(iv) Darf vor dem Hintergrund der Formenasymmetrie im Indikativ und Konjunktiv der Umschreibung werden + Inf. I/II (würde + Inf. I/II vs. *wurde + Inf. I/II) von einer "Lücke" im Verbalparadigma gesprochen werden?
1. The functionalist’s view: linguistic forms are instruments used to convey meaningful elements. This is the basis of European structuralism. 2. The formalist’s view: linguistic forms are abstract structures which can be filled with meaningful elements. This is the basis of generative grammar. 3. The parasitologist’s view: linguistic forms are vehicles for the reproduction of meaningful elements. This is the view which I advocated twenty years ago in the Festschrift for Werner Winter’s 60th birthday (1985). Here I intend to discuss the evolutionary origin and the physiological nature of the linguistic parasite. My theory of language is wholly consistent with Gerald Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection.
In his magnificent book on the language relations across Bering Strait (1998), Michael Fortescue does not consider Nivkh (Gilyak) to be a Uralo-Siberian language. Elsewhere I have argued that the Indo-European verbal system can be understood in terms of its Indo-Uralic origins (2001). All of these languages belong to Joseph Greenberg’s Eurasiatic macro-family (2000). In the following I intend to reconsider the grammatical evidence for including Nivkh into the Uralo-Siberian language family. The Indo-Uralic evidence is of particular importance because it guarantees a time depth which cannot otherwise be attained.
Maligne Tumore der Mundhohle und der Zunge stehen weltweit an sechster Stelle aller Krebserkrankungen (Becker, 1997; Werner, 2000). Neben einer Reihe therapeutischer Behandlungsmöglichkeiten nimmt die chirurgische Resektion der Tumore eine wichtige Stellung ein. Auf Grund der häufig sehr ausgedehnten Befunde führt der resektionsbedingte Verlust anatomischer Strukturen im Bereich des Kiefers, des Mundbodens oder der Zunge oft zu Störungen aller oraler Funktionen und Funktionsabläufe. Bei vielen Patienten sind das Kauvermögen, das Schlucken, das Sprechen; die Sensibilität, die Geschmacksempfindung, aber auch die Ästhetik im Kopf- und Halsbereich betroffen (Schroder, 1985; Grimm, 1990; Panje &. Morris, 1995; Reuther & Bill, 1998; Lenarz & Lesinski-Schiedat, 2001). Orale Tumore haben daher einen massiven Einfluss auf die postoperative Lebensqualität der betroffenen Patienten. Neben dem Bemühen das Überleben der Patienten zu sichern, nimmt daher das Bestreben die Lebenssituation der Patienten zu verbessern einen zunehmend wichtigeren Platz ein. Hierzu gehört zum einen, das medizinische Vorgehen so zu planen, dass ein maximaler Funktionserhalt angestrebt wird. Zum anderen ist postoperativ das gezielte sprachtherapeutische Vorgehen wichtig um funktionelle und artikulatorische Fähigkeiten gezielt schulen zu können (Stadtler, 1989). Dies ist jedoch nur möglich, wenn die postoperativen funktionellen Veränderungen bekannt sind. Um eine Prüfung der oralen Fähigkeiten zu ermöglichen, wurde am Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft ein Motorischer Bogen entwickelt, der eine gezielte und systematische Überprüfung ermöglicht.
Nsong is a western Bantu language spoken in the neighbourhood of Kikwit (5°2'28"S 18°48'58"E, Kwilu District, Bandundu Province, DRC) and encoded as B85d in the New Updated Guthrie List (Maho 2009). To this B80 or Tiene-Yanzi group also belongs Mbuun, encoded as B87 by Guthrie (1971: 39) and spoken in the wider vicinity of Idiofa (4°57'35"S 19°35'40", Kwilu District, Bandundu Province, Democratic Republic of the Congo). Both languages are closely related. They share a high percentage of fundamental and other vocabulary as well as several rather atypical phonological innovations (Bostoen & Koni Muluwa 2014; Koni Muluwa 2014; Koni Muluwa & Bostoen 2012). Preliminary elicitation-based research on Mbuun has pointed out that the pre-verbal domain plays a crucial role in the marking of argument focus in Mbuun (Bostoen & Mundeke 2011, 2012). In this paper, we assess whether this is also the case in Nsong on the basis of a text corpus which the first author has been collecting, transcribing and annotating in 2013 and 2014 as part of an endangered language documentation project funded by the DoBeS program of the Volkswagen Foundation through a 3-year grant (2012-2015). More information on the project can be found on http://www.kwilubantu.ugent.be/. This Nsong text corpus exclusively consists of oral discourse and currently counts 48.022 tokens and 11.973 types. The team’s 2013 fieldwork aimed at documenting Nsong speech events in as many different cultural settings as possible. As a result, the corpus comprises different text genres, such as political speeches, historical traditions, folk music, tales, proverbs, hunting language, ceremonial language used during circumcision and twin rites, and popular biological knowledge. In line with previous research on Mbuun, we concentrate here on mono-clausal argument focus constructions, even if preliminary research has pointed out that bi-clausal focus structures are more common in the Nsong corpus.
In Nłeʔkepmxcin, consonant-heavy inventories, lengthy obstruent clusters and widespread glottalization can make potential F0 cues to prosodic phrase boundaries (e.g. boundary tones or declination reset) difficult to observe phonetically. In this paper, I explore a test that exploits one behaviour of phrasefinal consonant clusters to test for prosodic phrasing in Nłeʔkepmxcin clauses. Final /t/ of the 1pl marker kt is aspirated when phrase-final, but not phraseinternally. Use of this test suggests that Thompson Salish speakers parse verbs, arguments and adjuncts into separate phonological phrases. However, complex verbal predicates and complex noun phrases are parsed as single phonological phrases. Implications are discussed, especially in regards to findings that (absence of) pitch accent is not employed to signal the informational categories of Focus and Givenness, even though Nłeʔkepmxcin is a stress language.
This paper discusses a semantic analysis of three syntactic types of English each, namely, floated each, binominal each, and prenominal each. It is argued that floated each consists of two parts, a quantifier and an inaudible element which functions as its restrictor, which together form a tripartite quantificational structure when they compose with the predicate. Binominal each and an associated NP such as two topics (which is generally called the 'distributive share') are syntactically analyzed as forming a subject-predicate relation within a DP in which the NP undergoes so-called 'predicate inversion'. Semantically, binominal each is analyzed as having the same semantic value as floated each, while prenominal each is shown to have a different logical type from floated and binominal each. As can be seen from analogous constructions in some Romance languages, it does not lexically contain its restrictor.
This paper concerns the distribution of wh-words in Asante Twi, which has both a focus fronting strategy and an in-situ strategy. We show that the focusing and the in-situ constructions are not simply equally available options. On the contrary, there are several cases where the focusing strategy must be used and the in-situ strategy is ungrammatical. We show that the cases in Asante Twi are "intervention effects", which are attested in other languages, like German, Korean, and French. We identify a core set of intervening elements that all of these languages have and discuss their properties.
Using MAIN in South Africa
(2020)
South Africa is a country marked by cultural and linguistic diversity with 11 official languages. The majority of school children do not receive their formal schooling in their home language. There is a need for language assessment tools in education and rehabilitation contexts to distinguish between children with language learning problems and/or SLI, and language delay as a result of limited exposure to the language of learning. The Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (LITMUS-MAIN) provides clinicians and researchers with an appropriate and culturally relevant tool to assess bilingual children in both languages. So far MAIN has been widely used in Afrikaans-English bilingual children. However, translating and adapting MAIN to our other nine official languages to achieve functional and cultural equivalence is more challenging.
Im folgenden wird zuerst das Modell vorgestellt, das als theoretische Grundlage für die Betrachtung der Semantik der Aspekt-Tempus-Formen dient (Abschnitt 2). Danach werden die syntagmatischen Markiertheitsrelationen der einzelnen aspektuell-temporalen Formen im Rahmen dieses Modells analysiert (Abschnitt 3). Im Abschnitt 4 werden die paradigmatischen Relationen zwischen den Aspekt-Tempus-Formen erörtert. Abschließend (Abschnitt 5) wird das Fazit aus der Untersuchung gezogen.
Im Frühaltrussischen koexistierten die drei miteinander konkurrierenden aspektuellen Oppositionen, namlich die alten indoeuropäischen Aspekte (der imperfektive, der perfektive und der perfektische), die alte slavische Opposition Nicht-Iterativität/lterativität und die neuen slavischen Aspekte (=Opposition Imperfektivität/Perfektivitat). Im Laufe der Sprachentwicklung wurden die ersten zwei Oppositionen durch die dritte Opposition verdrängt. Der Verlauf und die Mechanismen dieser Entwicklung werden dargestellt und auf der Grundlage des Konzepts des natürlichen grammatischen Wandels erklärt. Es werden Markiertheitsprinzipien betrachtet, die den natürlichen grammatischen Wandel determinieren. Diese Prinzipien werden als generelle Faktoren typologischen Wandels angesehen, mit deren Hilfe die grammatischen Veränderungen im Sprachsystem erklärt werden können. Die Ausprägung der neuen slavischen Aspekte und die immer starker werdende Einbeziehung der Aspekte in das gesamte Verbalsystem haben entscheidend zur Herausbildung des neuen reduzierten aspektsensitiven Tempussystems beigetragen.
Der Umbau des Tempussystems und andere Veränderungen im russischen Verbalsystem wurden durch die Ausprägung der neuen slavischen Aspekte ausgelöst. Die Ausformung und die immer stärker werdende Einbeziehung der Aspekte in das gesamte Verbalsystem hat tiefgreifende Veränderungen der systemdefinierenden Struktureigenschaften des russischen Verbs hervorgerufen. Die Aspekte sind im Laufe der Sprachentwicklung zur eigentlichen Grundlage des gesamten russischen Verbalsystems geworden. Die Entwicklung der Tempora verläuft im präteritalen und im nichtpräteritalen Bereich gewissermaßen in entgegengesetzten Richtungen. Das Subsystem der Vergangenheitstempora wurde im Altrussischen maximal reduziert, während der Funktionsbereich der Nicht-Vergangenheit in Präsens und Futur aufgelöst wurde. Die beiden Entwicklungsrichtungen stehen in direktem Zusammenhang mit der Ausprägung der Aspekte. Ich betrachte deshalb die Entwicklung der Tempora und die Entwicklung der Aspekte parallel.
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. ...
Das Neldophon gehört mittlerweile zum internationalen Wortschatz Europas. Neldophonieren ist heute alltägliche Praxis. Die Globalisierung des ausgehenden zweiten Jahrtausends setzt die Entwicklung der Neldophonie voraus, um idealtypisch in naher Zukunft von jedem Punkt der Erde aus mit jedem beliebigen anderen Punkt in neldophonischer Verbindung zu sein. Eurosemantische Gemeinsamkeiten des Neldophonierens und die außersprachliche Partizipiation an der entsprechenden Technologie erleichterten die Akzeptanz des Terminus in den romanischen (und anderen) Sprachen Europas und der Welt trotz des Unikalmorphems Neldo-(vergleichbar mit Him- und Brom- in Him-, bzw. Brombeere) in Verbindung mit dem ansonsten global in verschiedenen Graphien verbreiteten Restmorphem -phon. Wörter haben ihre Geschichte. Der Ausdruck läßt sich auf seinen etymologischen Entstehungsort, den Congrés Europeu sobre Planificació Lingüística (Barcelona 9.-10. November 1995) zurückführen, andem auch der Gründer der FFM teilnahm. Offensichtlich wurde der Terminus hier in internationaler Umgebung erstmalig geprägt und sogleich panromanisch umgesetzt. Die barceloniner Gastgeber sprachen von neldòfon, während hingegen die wenigen Hispanophonen neldófono bevorzugten. Das Verbum neldofonar ist in der Zwischenzeit auch im Portugiesischen belegt, die Académie française wird sich kaum einer Äußerung enthalten können, ob neldophoner oder neldofoner (da offensichtlich im katalanischen Sprachbereich entstanden) die normgerechte Graphie repräsentiere, während Italien den europäischen Neologismus seit dem Herbst 1995 bereits kennt (chiamami più tardi al neldefono) und - zu Recht? - das etymologische ius primi loci beansprucht. In Rumänien erhielt das Verb eine systemimanente Stammerweiterung (Petre neldofoneazã mult) seit 1996. Nach zuverlässigen Quellen (Jernudd 1995) trat der Terminus Ende 1995 in seiner englischen Variante in Honkong in Kontakt mit dem Kantonesischen. Sein Überleben scheint jedoch hier (nach 1997) insbesondere wegen der phonologischen Problematik des liquiden Auslauts der Silbe nel- und diverser noch zu erwartender sprachpolitischer Konflikte nicht gesichert. Da die europäischen Neldophone in USA noch nicht funktionieren, ist eine gewisse Skepsis für den terminologischen Siegeszug der Neldophonie im Amerikanischen Englisch nicht unangebracht. ...
Für Romanisten ist Interkomprehension seit der Begründung ihrer Disziplin ein Anliegen, für romanischsprachige Menschen ist sie meist ein persönliches Erlebnis der partiellen Entdeckung, vor 1500 Jahren war sie alltägliche Realität. Es geht um die Fähigkeit, in einer Gruppe von Sprachen, die einen gemeinsamen Ursprung haben, kommunizieren zu können.
Läßt man die Problematik der bei dieser Aussage verwendeten Ausdrücke außer Betracht und schränkt den Blickwinkel auf die Gruppe der romanischen Sprachen ein, so lassen sich eine Reihe von Aussagen über Interkomprehension machen.
Daß zwischen dem sechsten und achten Jahrhundert, also während der protoromanischen Phase, Interkomprehension zwischen entfernten Gegenden des niedergegangen Imperium Romanum möglich war, ist unstrittig, freilich gab es keine außersprachlichen Gründe, die das Faktum Interkomprehension in den Vordergrund hätten rücken können. Die einzig übriggebliebene Zentralmacht Kirche benutzte ihr eigenes Latein. ...
Der Begriff Eurocomprehension steht für Europäische Interkomprehension in den drei großen Sprachengruppen Europas, der romanischen, slawischen und germanischen. Es geht der Eurocomprehension darum, unter EU-konformen sprachpolitischen Zielsetzungen Mehrsprachigkeit über den Einstieg in rezeptive Kompetenzen modularisiert zu erreichen. Dabei liefert die linguistische Interkomprehensionsforschung die interlingualen Transferbasen zur kognitiven Nutzung von Verwandtschaftsbeziehungen in Sprachgruppen, die eine Mehrsprachigkeitsdidaktik umsetzt. ...
This paper argues that Double Access sentences in English (Smith, 1978) are a kind of loose talk. When the meaning of a Double Access sentence is computed literally, the result is infelicity. Double Access sentences can be used meaningfully only when rescued by pragmatics which intervenes to interpret the embedded clause loosely. A formal model for loose interpretation, building on Klecha (2018), is provided.
When we pay close attention to the prosody of Wh-questions in Japanese, we discover many novel and interesting empirical puzzles that would require us to devise a much finer syntactic component of grammar. This paper addresses the issues that pose some problems to such an elaborated grammar, and offers solutions, making an appeal to the information structure and sentence processing involved in the interpretation of interrogative and focus constructions.
This paper examines how questions, both Wh-questions and yes-no questions, are phrased in Chimwiini, a Bantu language spoken in southern Somalia. Questions do not require any special phrasing principles, but Wh-questions do provide much evidence in support of the principle Align-Foc R, which requires that focused or emphasized words/constituents be located at the end of a phonological phrase. Question words and enclitics are always focused and thus appear at the end of a phrase. Although questions do not require any new phrasing principles, they do display complex accentual (tonal) behavior. This paper attempts to provide an account of these accentual phenomena.
We focus in this paper on two prosodic phenomena in Chimwiini: vowel length and accent (or High tone). Vowel length is determined in part by a lexical distinction between long and short vowels, and also by various morphophonemic processes that derive long vowels. Accent is penult in the default case, but final under certain morphosyntactic conditions. In order to account for the distribution of vowel length and the location of accents in a Chimwiini sentence, it is necessary to segment sentences into a sequence of phonological phrases. This paper examines the phonological phrasing of both canonical relative clauses and what we refer to as "pseudo-relative" clauses. An account of relative clause phrasing is of critical importance in Chimwiini due to the extensive use of pseudo-relatives in the language. Close examination of the pseudo-relatives reveals that their phrasing is not exactly the same as the phrasing of canonical relative clauses.
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.
The impact of the morphological alternation of subject markers on tense/aspect: the case of Swahili
(2006)
Subject markers for the first, second and third person singular in Southern Swahili dialects display morphological variation in that specific forms are chosen with different tense-aspect markers. This paper documents this variation in the different dialects and presents a distributional chart which reveals the symmetric patterns between these subject markers and their corresponding tense-aspect formatives. The study corroborates earlier work in the manifestation of variant morphological tense-aspect formatives of the regional dialects of Swahili by Mazrui (1983).
This paper deals with early verb development (e.g., person, tense) until the emergence of verb-paradigms in two French-speaking children.
I will show the parallelism between the two children in the gradual building of paradigms, despite considerable differences in the rate of development. Individual differences on the other hand will bring me to reconsider the broad category of premorphological rote-learnt forms which already displays some patterning in one of the children's data.
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.
We argue that Malagasy (and related W. Austronesian languages!) has a positive setting for a macro-parameter RICH VOICE MORPHOLOGY which builds complex predicates that code the theta role of their argument: S = [[PreN(6) + (X)] + DP]. Manifestations of this parameter are: (1) Case and theta role are assigned in situ in nuclear clauses with no movement or co-indexing to a topic position. (2) Relative Clauses (and other "extraction" structures) satisfy the "Subjects Only" constraint, again with no movement or indexing. (3) UTAH is freely violated, as theta role assignment derives from compositional semantic interpretation. Predicates resemble lexical Ns in assigning case directly to arguments without using Prepositions and in combining directly with Dets to form DPs that include tense and negation (Keenan 1995, 2000). The major Predicate-Argument type is modeled on the Noun+Possessor one, not the Verb+Object one.
In this paper, I argue that this apparent problem is accounted for by the interaction of constraints. For the fixed segment [ɛ] in Cɛ-reduplication, I argue that [ɛ] is the second least marked vowel in Palauan, which appears when the default vowel [ǝ] cannot appear. I show that the Palauan facts are not only consistent with the proposals of Urbanczyk (1999) and Alderete et. al (1999), but they actually provide support of their claims. In the following section, I discuss Urbanczyk's (1999) arguments concerning ROOT faithfulness in reduplication and possible asymmetries between affix reduplicants and root reduplicants. In Section 3, I introduce Palauan reduplication and discuss Finer's (1986) observations on the resulting state verb (RSV) form. I show that the RSV forms support the classification that Cɛ-reduplicants are affixes, and CVCV -reduplicants are roots. In Section 4, I discuss the shape and vowel quality of the two reduplicants. The CVCV-reduplicant has three variants: CǝCǝ, CǝC and CV. I explain this variation, illustrating why [ǝ] appears in the first two variations. Then, I discuss the shape and vowel quality of the Cɛ-reduplicant, arguing that the fixed segment [ɛ] in Cɛ-reduplication is a special case of TETU. I show that root faithfulness constraints are crucial in determining the shape and vowel quality of the reduplicants. Section 5 is the conclusion.
Two diametrically opposed stances have emerged from recent theoretical debates on adverbial syntax. One approach, represented by Alexiadou (1997) and Cinque (1999), espouses a rigid hierarchy of functional projections hosting individual adverbs. The other, represented broadly by Jackendoff (1972), McConnell-Ginet (1982) and most recently Ernst (2002), takes adverb placement to be determined by the semantics of the adverbs themselves as opposed to the functional architecture of the clause. Under the latter view, adverbs may be divided into several categories based on their meaning with each category being licensed in a certain range within the sentence.
Here, I undertake a detailed examination of Tagalog adverbs and compare the predictions of the two best articulated recent theories of adverbs, that of Cinque (1999, 2004) and Ernst (2002). The results offer support for some of the basic predictions of the semantically based approach of Ernst. Particularly important are scopal facts which do not obtain a clear explanation under a functional projection-based theory such as Cinque's.
Counteridenticals are counterfactual conditional sentences whose antecedent clauses contain an identity statement, e.g. "If I were you, I’d buy the blue dress". Here, we argue that counteridenticals are best analyzed along the lines of dream reports. After showing that counteridenticals and dream reports exhibit striking grammatical and perceptual parallels, we suggest an analysis of counteridenticals with Percus and Sauerland’s (2003) analysis of dream reports. Following their proposal, we propose to make use of concept generators, realized as centered worlds. To this end, we argue that the presence of 'if' licenses the presence of an 'imagine'-operator, which constitutes the attitude the antecedent clause "x be-PAST y" is taken under. The speaker predicates, in the imagine mode, the consequent property to his/her imagined self.
To capture the different degrees of identification between the subject and the predicate of the identity statement of counteridenticals’ antecedents observed in the literature, we incorporate Percus and Sharvit’s (2014) notion of asymmetric be into the analysis. This proposal has several advantages over existing analyses (Lakoff, 1996; Kocurek, 2016) of counteridentical meaning, as it both explains the different degrees of identification observed for counteridenticals and correctly predicts the parallels between counteridenticals and dream reports.
It is argued that there is a surprising gap in the distribution of adverbial modifiers, namely that there are (practically) no adverbs that modify exclusively stative verbs. Given the general range of selectional restrictions associated with adverb/verb modification, this comes as a surprise. It is argued that this gap cannot be the result of standard selectional restrictions. An independently motivated account of the state-event verb contrast, in which state verbs are proposed to lack Davidsonian arguments is presented and argued to account for this stative adverb gap. Some apparent and real problems with the analysis are discussed.
This paper shows the early development of the first approximately 50 verbs found in the recorded speech production of one Croatian girl. The aim is to analyse and interpret the child's verb development in terms of the distinction of a pre- and a protomorphological phase before modularised morphology in language acquisition (Dressler & Karpf 1995). Furthermore, focus will be laid on the emergence of first verb paradigms.
This article presents an analysis of German nicht...sondern... (contrastive not...but...) which departs from the commonly held view that this construction should be explained by appeal to its alleged corrective function. It will be demonstrated that in nicht A sondern B (not A but B), A and B just behave like stand-alone unmarked answers to a common question Q, and that this property of sondern is presuppositional in character. It is shown that from this general observation many interesting properties of nicht...sondern... follow, among them distributional differences between German "sondern" and German "aber" (contrastive but, concessive but), intonational requirements and exhaustivity effect sondern presupposition is furthermore argued to be the result of the conventionalization of conversational implicatures.
In order to investigate the empirical properties of focus, it is necessary to diagnose focus (or: “what is focused”) in particular linguistic examples. It is often taken for granted that the application of one single diagnostic tool, the so-called question-answer test, which roughly says that whatever a question asks for is focused in the answer, is a fool-proof test for focus. This paper investigates one example class where such uncritical belief in the question-answer test has led to the assumption of rather complex focus projection rules: in these examples, pitch accent placement has been claimed to depend on certain parts of the focused constituents being given or not. It is demonstrated that such focus projection rules are unnecessarily complex and in turn require the assumption of unnecessarily complicated meaning rules, not to speak of the difficulties to give a precise semantic/pragmatic definition of the allegedly involved givenness property. For the sake of the argument, an alternative analysis is put forward which relies solely on alternative sets following Mats Rooth´s work, and avoids any recourse to givenness. As it turns out, this alternative analysis is not only simpler but also makes in a critical case the better predictions.
We present the results of an experimental study which targets prosodic correlates of subclausal quotation marks. We found that written sentences containing passages enclosed by quotation marks were read aloud in a manner that significantly differs in prosody from spoken realizations of corresponding disquoted counterparts. However, we also observed that such prosodic marking of subclausal quotation wasn't strong enough to survive subsequent back-translation into written language: there was no correlation between the presence/absence of quotation marks in the original written examples, and the presence/absence of quotation marks in corresponding back-translations from oral renditions. We investigated three different kinds of uses of quotation marks and found no systematic difference between them with respect to prosodic marking.
Tief im Osten, gleichsam „am Rande der Welt“, in der Republik Burjatien (Russische Föderation), hinter dem Baikalsee gelegen und viele tausend Kilometer von europäischen Großstädten entfernt, hat der Erwerb der deutschen Sprache einen hohen Stellenwert – insbesondere für Deutschlehrer, Deutschlehrerausbilder und Deutschstudierende.
The interest of this work devotes itself to the repeating linguistic actions of the students in the DaF conversation lessons. Repetitions in the lesson discourse are functionally different than repetitions in the daily discourse. The support of repetitions by the students in the class discourse is tried to be demonstrated here on the basis of examples. Recordings from the DaF conversation lessons were transcribed and reconstructed according to Hiat. The kinds of the repetitions and their functions in these DaF conversation lessons are limited with this study. The findings of the study should be concerned consciously in order to accomplish a better understanding and reacting to these repeating actions of the students like inquiry, correction, confirmation, precautionary self-control, verification and confirmation in the conversation lessons –most of which are accomplished by the students for a certain aim however unconsciously.