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Prinzipien der Proprialitätsmarkierung : Familiennamenindikatoren in den nordeuropäischen Sprachen
(2004)
In dem grundlegenden Beitrag "Svenska släktnamn i gar, i dag - i morgon?" liefert Thorsten Andersson einen kompakten Überblick über ein bewegtes Jahrhundert schwedischer Familiennamengeschichte. Dabei handelt es sich zur Überraschung deutscher Leser/innen um das 20. Jahrhundert. In Deutschland wüsste man mit dem Titel ,,Deutsche Familiennamen gestern, heute -morgen?" nicht viel anzufangen, zumindest nicht mit der Frage nach dem Heute und dem Morgen: Die deutschen Familiennamen sind seit Jahrhunderten fixiert; von seltenen und wohlbegründeten Ausnahmen abgesehen kann niemand seinen Familiennamen wechseln geschweige denn frei kreieren. Und die Frage nach dem Morgen hat sich vermutlich noch nie jemand gestellt.
For this paper, 170 Tibeto-Burman languages were surveyed for nominal ease marking (adpositions), in an attempt to determine ifit would be possible to reeonstruet any ease markers to Proto· Tibeto-Burman, and in so doing leam more about the nature of the grammatieal organization of Proto-Tibeto-Burman. The data were also eross-cheeked for patterns of isomorphy/polysemy, to see ifwe can leam anything about the development ofthe forms we da find in the languages. The results of the survey indicate that although a11 Tibeto-Bunnan languages have developed some sort of relation marking, none of the markers ean be reconstrueted to the oldest stage of the family. Looking at the patterns of isomorphy or polysemy, we find there are regularities to the patterns we find, and on the basis of these regularities we can make assurne that the path of development most probably followed the markedness/prototypicality clines: the locative and ablative use would have arose first and then were extended to the more abstract cases.
Adjectives in Qiang
(2004)
Qiang is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by 70,000-80,000 people in Northern Sichuan Province, China, classified as being in the Qiang or Tibetan nationality by the Chinese government. The language is verb final, agglutinative (prefixing and suffixing), and has both head-marking and dependent-marking morphology.
Since 1973 I have been advocating the view that the Balto-Slavic acute tone was in fact glottalic and has been preserved unchanged in originally stressed and unstressed syllables in Žemaitian and Latvian, respectively (e.g. 1975, 1977, 1985, 1998). Jay Jasanoff has now (2004) adopted the gist of my view, but with-out mentioning my name. It may therefore be useful to sketch the background of our differences and to point out the remaining discrepancies.
Elsewhere I have argued that the three Old Prussian catechisms reflect consecutive stages in the development of a moribund language (1998a, 1998b, 2001a). After first eliminating the orthographical differences between the three versions of parallel texts while maintaining the distinction between linguistic variants and then assigning separate phonemic interpretations to the three versions on the basis of the historical evidence I listed the following phonological differences between the three catechisms.
Docherty et alii have "noted that several sociolinguistic accounts have shown a sharp distinction between the social trajectories for glottal replacement as opposed to glottal reinforcement, which have normally been treated by phonologists as aspects of 'the same thing'. It may therefore not always be appropriate to treat the two phenomena as manifestations of a single process or as points on a single continuum (presumably along which speakers move through time). From the speaker’s point of view (as manifested by different patterns of speaker behaviour) they appear as independent phenomena" (1997: 307).
The origin of the Goths
(2004)
Witold Ma´nczak has argued that Gothic is closer to Upper German than to Middle German, closer to High German than to Low German, closer to German than to Scandinavian, closer to Danish than to Swedish, and that the original homeland of the Goths must therefore be located in the southernmost part of the Germanic territories, not in Scandinavia (1982, 1984, 1987a, 1987b, 1992). I think that his argument is correct and that it is time to abandon Iordanes’ classic view that the Goths came from Scandinavia. We must therefore reconsider the grounds for adopting the latter position and the reasons why it always has remained popular.
Most scholars nowadays reconstruct a static root present with an alternation between lengthened grade in the active singular and full grade in the active plural and in the middle. I am unhappy about this traditional methodology of loosely postulating long vowels for the proto-language. What we need is a powerful theory which explains why clear instances of original lengthened grade are so very few and restrains our reconstructions accordingly. Such a theory has been available for over a hundred years now: it was put forward by Wackernagel in his Old Indic grammar (1896: 66-68). The crucial element of his theory which is relevant in the present context is that he assumed lengthening in monosyllabic word forms, such as the 2nd and 3rd sg. active forms of the sigmatic aorist injunctive.
The argument that I tried to elaborate on in this paper is that the conceptual problem behind the traditional competence/performance distinction does not go away, even if we abandon its original Chomskyan formulation. It returns as the question about the relation between the model of the grammar and the results of empirical investigations – the question of empirical verification The theoretical concept of markedness is argued to be an ideal correlate of gradience. Optimality Theory, being based on markedness, is a promising framework for the task of bridging the gap between model and empirical world. However, this task not only requires a model of grammar, but also a theory of the methods that are chosen in empirical investigations and how their results are interpreted, and a theory of how to derive predictions for these particular empirical investigations from the model. Stochastic Optimality Theory is one possible formulation of a proposal that derives empirical predictions from an OT model. However, I hope to have shown that it is not enough to take frequency distributions and relative acceptabilities at face value, and simply construe some Stochastic OT model that fits the facts. These facts first of all need to be interpreted, and those factors that the grammar has to account for must be sorted out from those about which grammar should have nothing to say. This task, to my mind, is more complicated than the picture that a simplistic application of (not only) Stochastic OT might draw.
The aim of this paper is the exploration of an optimality theoretic architecture for syntax that is guided by the concept of "correspondence": syntax is understood as the mechanism of "translating" underlying representations into a surface form. In minimalism, this surface form is called "Phonological Form" (PF). Both semantic and abstract syntactic information are reflected by the surface form. The empirical domain where this architecture is tested are minimal link effects, especially in the case of "wh"-movement. The OT constraints require the surface form to reflect the underlying semantic and syntactic representations as maximally as possible. The means by which underlying relations and properties are encoded are precedence, adjacency, surface morphology and prosodic structure. Information that is not encoded in one of these ways remains unexpressed, and gets lost unless it is recoverable via the context. Different kinds of information are often expressed by the same means. The resulting conflicts are resolved by the relative ranking of the relevant correspondence constraints.
Weak function word shift
(2004)
The fact that object shift only affects weak pronouns in mainland Scandinavian is seen as an instance of a more general observation that can be made in all Germanic languages: weak function words tend to avoid the edges of larger prosodic domains. This generalisation has been formulated within Optimality Theory in terms of alignment constraints on prosodic structure by Selkirk (1996) in explaining thedistribution of prosodically strong and weak forms of English functionwords, especially modal verbs, prepositions and pronouns. But a purely phonological account fails to integrate the syntactic licensing conditions for object shift in an appropriate way. The standard semantico-syntactic accounts of object shift, onthe other hand, fail to explain why it is only weak pronouns that undergo object shift. This paper develops an Optimality theoretic model of the syntax-phonology interface which is based on the interaction of syntactic and prosodic factors. The account can successfully be applied to further related phenomena in English and German.
This paper evaluates trills [r] and their palatalized counterparts [rj] from the point of view of markedness. It is argued that [r]s are unmarked sounds in comparison to [rj]s which follows from the examination of the following parameters: (a) frequency of occurrence, (b) articulatory and aerodynamic characteristics, (c) perceptual features, (d) emergence in the process of language acquisition, (e) stability from a diachronic point of view, (f) phonotactic distribution, and (g) implications. Several markedness aspects of [r]s and [rj] are analyzed on the basis of Slavic languages which offer excellent material for the evaluation of trills. Their phonetic characteristics incorporated into phonetically grounded constraints are employed for a phonological OT-analysis of r-palatalization in two selected languages: Polish and Czech.
Dialektologie des Schweizerdeutschen : Vorwort des Herausgebers zu Linguistik online 20, 3/04
(2004)
Dialektologie ist in der deutschsprachigen Schweiz die wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzung mit der aktuellen Sprache der Mehrheit der SchweizerInnen, denn in der diglossischen Situation der deutschsprachigen Schweiz nimmt die Mundart die Stellung der Alltagssprache ein. Eine Schichtung von Substandardvarietäten zwischen der Hochsprache und den Dialekten, wie sie in Deutschland und in Österreich vorkommt, existiert in der Schweiz kaum. Eine Ausnahme stellt das Dusselns dar, der Subsidiärdialekt der Deutschwalliser (K. Schnidrig 1986), der offenbar auch in Bosco Gurin vorkommt (C. V. J. Russ in diesem Band). Die schweizerische Alltags- oder Umgangssprache deckt sich also weitestgehend mit dem Dialekt. Dieser stellt dabei aber nicht eine Museumsvarietät der NORMs (non-mobile, old, rural men) dar, sondern ist als lebendige Varietät aller sozialen Schichten in kleinen Weilern und in den großen Städten offen für Einflüsse aus Nachbar- und Kultursprachen. Dementsprechend gibt es auch eine situative und soziolinguistische Variation innerhalb der Mundart. Das wird besonders im offenen System des Wortschatzes deutlich, wo Anglizismen genauso Einzug in die Mundart halten wie in die deutsche Standardsprache: Die hard disk existiert im Schweizerdeutschen ebenso wie in der Standardsprache, und die entsprechende deutsche Lehnbildung Festplatte findet sich in mundartlicher Lautung Feschtplatte auch im Schweizerdeutschen. Dagegen sind Morphologie und Lautung relativ stabil. Sie ermöglichen, wie H. Christen (1998) gezeigt hat, immer noch eine genaue geographische Zuordnung der meisten SprecherInnen des Schweizerdeutschen.
Research on dialectal varieties was for a long time concentrated on phonetic aspects of language. While there was a lot of work done on segmental aspects, suprasegmentals remained unexploited until the last few years, despite the fact that prosody was remarked as a salient aspect of dialectal variants by linguists and by naive speakers. Actual research on dialectal prosody in the German speaking area often deals with discourse analytic methods, correlating intonations curves with communicative functions (P. Auer et al. 2000, P. Gilles & R. Schrambke 2000, R. Kehrein & S. Rabanus 2001). The project I present here has another focus. It looks at general prosodic aspects, abstracted from actual situations. These global structures are modelled and integrated in a speech synthesis system. Today, mostly intonation is being investigated. However, rhythm, the temporal organisation of speech, is not a core of actual research on prosody. But there is evidence that temporal organisation is one of the main structuring elements of speech (B. Zellner 1998, B. Zellner Keller 2002). Following this approach developed for speech synthesis, I will present the modelling of the timing of two Swiss German dialects (Bernese and Zurich dialect) that are considered quite different on the prosodic level. These models are part of the project on the "development of basic knowledge for research on Swiss German prosody by means of speech synthesis modelling" founded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Hier soll ein Blick auf eine wissenschaftliche Methode gegeben werden, deren Grundzüge erst erarbeitet werden müssen. Es geht darum, die Sprachsynthese nicht nur für ihren eigentlichen Zweck, Texte vorzulesen, zu verwenden, sondern auch als Instrument für die Dialektologie und generell für die Sprachwissenschaft. Nach einem Blick auf bestehende dialektologische Fragen und Methoden zeige ich Forschungslücken auf und biete Hinweise, wie die Synthese weiterführen kann. Dabei sollen Möglichkeiten aufgezeigt werden, ohne dass schon konkrete Ergebnisse vorliegen. Die erwähnten Tonbeispiele sind herunterzuladen von http://www.unil.ch/imm/docs/LAIP/wav.files/SiebMeth.zip.
In der Schweizer Dialektologie ist die Sprache der Städte nie in dem Maße aus dem Blick gedrängt worden, wie das innerhalb der deutschen Dialektologie geschehen ist, da die Mundarten in der Schweiz auch in den Städten als Umgangssprache erhalten geblieben sind. Zudem finden sich am Rand der wissenschaftlichen Forschung seit dem Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts eine Vielzahl von Publikationen, welche die städtische Variation, meist in Form von (dialektalen) Sondersprachen, thematisieren. Diese dialektologische Kontinuität zeigt sich bis in heutige Arbeiten zu Stadtsprachen in der Schweiz. Diese enthalten noch immer zu einem Großteil areallinguistische Bezüge, während der Bezug zur Standardsprache oft nur einen relativ kleinen Teil ausmacht. Im Folgenden sollen Aspekte aus Arbeiten mit stadtsprachlichen Bezügen und explizit stadtsprachliche Arbeiten aus verschiedenen Regionen der deutschsprachigen Schweiz präsentiert werden. Einzelne dieser Arbeiten stellen deutliche Meilensteine in der Forschungslandschaft dar, während andere eher exemplarisch für eine Forschungsrichtung genannt werden.