Linguistik
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Institute
Simplicity as a methodological orientation applies to linguistic theory just as to any other field of research: ‘Occam’s razor’ is the label for the basic heuristic maxim according to which an adequate analysis must ultimately be reduced to indispensible specifications. In this sense, conceptual economy has been a strict and stimulating guideline in the development of Generative Grammar from the very beginning. Halle’s (1959) argument discarding the level of taxonomic phonemics in order to unify two otherwise separate phonological processes is an early characteristic example; a more general notion is that of an evaluation metric introduced in Chomsky (1957, 1975), which relates the relative simplicity of alternative linguistic descriptions systematically to the quest for explanatory adequacy of the theory underlying the descriptions to be evaluated. Further proposals along these lines include the theory of markedness developed in Chomsky and Halle (1968), Kean (1975, 1981), and others, the notion of underspecification proposed e.g. in Archangeli (1984), Farkas (1990), the concept of default values and related notions. An important step promoting this general orientation was the idea of Principles and Parameters developed in Chomsky (1981, 1986), which reduced the notion of language particular rule systems to universal principles, subject merely to parametrization with restricted options, largely related to properties of particular lexical items. On this account, the notion of a simplicity metric is to be dispensed with, as competing analyses of relevant data are now supposed to be essentially excluded by the restrictive system of principles.
Generative grammar
(2001)
Generative Grammar is the label of the most influential research program in linguistics and related fields in the second half of the 20. century. Initiated by a short book, Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures (1957), it became one of the driving forces among the disciplines jointly called the cognitive sciences. The term generative grammar refers to an explicit, formal characterization of the (largely implicit) knowledge determining the formal aspect of all kinds of language behavior. The program had a strong mentalist orientation right from the beginning, documented e.g. in a fundamental critique of Skinner's Verbal behavior (1957) by Chomsky (1959), arguing that behaviorist stimulus-response-theories could in no way account for the complexities of ordinary language use. The "Generative Enterprise", as the program was called in 1982, went through a number of stages, each of which was accompanied by discussions of specific problems and consequences within the narrower domain of linguistics as well as the wider range of related fields, such as ontogenetic development, psychology of language use, or biological evolution. Four stages of the Generative Enterprise can be marked off for expository purposes.
Reflexive pronouns as central anaphoric elements are subject to general principles determined by Universal Grammar and shared by all languages that use reflexives as part of their grammatical structure. In addition to these general conditions, there are language particular properties, which different languages can exhibit on the basis of different regulations. One variation of this sort is the particular role of Reflexives in German, which can show up as improper Arguments, which are subject to standard syntactic and morphological conditions, but do not represent an argument of the head they belong to. Hence the particular property is the effect of syntactic, morphological and semantic conditions. A simple illustration of the phenomena I will explore in this contribution is based on the following observation.
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.
Semantic form as interface
(2007)
The term interface had a remarkable career over the past several decades, motivated largely by its use in computer science. Although the concept of a "surface common to two areas" (Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary, 1980) is intuitively clear enough, the range of its application is not very sharp and well defined, a "common surface" is open to a wide range of interpretations.
The main tenet of the present paper is the thesis that nominalization – like other cases of derivational morphology – is an essentially lexical phenomenon with well defined syntactic (and semantic) conditions and consequences. More specifically, it will be argued that the relation between a verb and the noun derived from it is subject to both systematic and idiosyncratic conditions with respect to lexical as well as syntactic aspects.
The present study argues that variation across listeners in the perception of a non-native contrast is due to two factors: the listener-specic weighting of auditory dimensions and the listener-specic construction of new segmental representations. The interaction of both factors is shown to take place in the perception grammar, which can be modelled within an OT framework. These points are illustrated with the acquisition of the Dutch three-member labiodental contrast [V v f] by German learners of Dutch, focussing on four types of learners from the perception study by Hamann and Sennema (2005a).
Syntax-semantics interface
(2001)
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.
Introduction
(2007)
Semantics
(2007)
Morphology
(2007)
Introduction
(2007)
The annotation guidelines introduced in this chapter present an attempt to create a unique infrastructure for the encoding of data from very different languages. The ultimate target of these annotations is to allow for data retrieval for the study of information structure, and since information structure interacts with all levels of grammar, the present guidelines cover all levels of grammar too. After introducing the guidelines, the current chapter also presents an evaluation by means of measurements of the inter-annotator agreement.
Information structure
(2007)
Traces
(2007)