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Russian and Spanish each have two variants of the predicational copular sentence. In Russian, the variation concerns the case of the predicate phrase, which can be nominative or instrumental, while in Spanish, the variation involves the choice of the copular verb, either ser or estar. It is shown that the choice of the particular variant of copular sentence in both languages depends on the speaker’s perspective, i.e., on whether or not the predication is linked to a specific topic situation.
There is an elegant account, proposed by Beaver and Condoravdi (2003), that assumes that the temporal connectives before and after are converses (i.e., they are analyzed by means of a unified lexical schema), and that explains away their different logical and veridical behavior appealing to other factors. There is an elegant explanation that connects the licensing of Polarity Items to informational strengthening requirements: Polarity Items are viewed as existentials that lead to a widening of the domain of quantification, and they are predicted to be legitimate only when this widening leads to a stronger statement (roughly, in downward monotone contexts). My plan is to connect these two approaches – by proposing an amendment in the definition Beaver and Condoravdi presented for before and after that is meant to account also for their Polarity Items licensing behavior.
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.
This paper presents a preliminary survey of the positions and prosodies associated with Wh-questions in two Bantu languages spoken in Malawi. The paper shows that the two languages are similar in requiring focused subjects to be clefted. Both also require 'which' questions and 'because of what' questions to be clefted or fronted. However, for other non-subjects Tumbuka rather uniformly imposes an IAV (immediately after the verb) requirement, while Chewa does not. In both languages, we found a strong tendency for there to be a prosodic phrase break following the Wh-word. In Tumbuka, this break follows from the general phrasing algorithm of the language, while in Chewa, I propose that the break can be best understood as following from the inherent prominence of Wh-words.
This paper sketches the morphosyntactic and prosodic properties of questions in Fipa, discussing three varieties: Milanzi, Nkansi and Kwa. The general word order and morphological patterns relevant to question structures are outlined and different types of wh-question constructions are described and tentatively linked to the prosodic features of Fipa questions.
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 questionnaire is intended as an aid to eliciting different question types, including yes/no questions, alternative questions, and wh-questions on a range of constituents. We have taken care to include examples that allow one to test for common Bantu phenomena, such as a subject/non-subject asymmetry in wh-questions and an obligatory immediately after the verb (IAV) position for questioning verb complements. The questionnaire is intended as a guide, only, as every language will have its own set of possibilities and complications. At the end of the questionnaire is a checklist. While we had Bantu languages in mind in devising the questionnaire, we hope it will also be useful to linguists with an interest question constructions in other languages.
In this paper, we deal with the semantic interaction between ung-nominalizations of different event types and temporal prepositions like wiihrend 'during', vor 'before', nach 'after', bis 'until' and seit 'since'. According to the two-level-approach to selnantics (Bierwisch 1983, Bierwisch / Lang 1989), we will argue that the meaning of ten~poral prepositions is determined on the level of semantic form (SF). When combined with an event nominal, the period in time required by the preposition has to be inferred on the level of conceptual structure (CS). Very often, the exact nature of the period in time is determined by pragmatic factors. There are, however, some important restrictions to this inference procedure which rely on the event noun's Aktionsart. In Ehrich/Rapp (2000), it was claimed that eventive ungnominals inherit the Aktionsart of their base verb. This assumption receives strong support by the data presented in this paper.
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 tests three current theories of the phonology-syntax interface – Truckenbrodt (1995), Pak (2008) and Cheng & Downing (2007, 2009) – on the prosody of relative clauses in Chewa. Relative clauses, especially restrictive relative clauses, provide an ideal data set for comparing these theories, as they each make distinct predictions about the optimal phrasing. We show that the asymmetrical phase-edge based approach developed to account for similar Zulu prosodic phrasing by Cheng & Downing also best accounts for the Chewa data.