Linguistik
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (1269)
- Part of a Book (784)
- Conference Proceeding (646)
- Working Paper (254)
- Review (181)
- Preprint (122)
- Book (109)
- Part of Periodical (64)
- Report (58)
- Doctoral Thesis (23)
Language
- English (1931)
- German (1055)
- Croatian (298)
- Portuguese (120)
- Turkish (43)
- Multiple languages (24)
- French (21)
- mis (16)
- Spanish (7)
- Polish (4)
Has Fulltext
- yes (3528) (remove)
Keywords
- Deutsch (436)
- Syntax (152)
- Linguistik (127)
- Englisch (123)
- Semantik (112)
- Spracherwerb (101)
- Phonologie (86)
- Rezension (77)
- Fremdsprachenlernen (69)
- Kroatisch (68)
Institute
- Extern (438)
- Institut für Deutsche Sprache (IDS) Mannheim (113)
- Neuere Philologien (43)
- Sprachwissenschaften (43)
- Universitätsbibliothek (5)
- Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaften (3)
- Gesellschaftswissenschaften (2)
- Medizin (2)
- Präsidium (2)
- SFB 268 (2)
The paper examines borrowed instances of what we call emphatic superlative ever (ES-ever) into two Germanic languages (Dutch and German) and two Romance languages (French and Spanish). We base our study on extensive corpus data. We model the data in three stages ranging from constructional borrowing (Stage-1: el coolest job ever 'the coolest job ever'), via diaconstructions (Stage-2: la mejor canción ever 'the best song ever'), up to lexical borrowing (Stage-3: las portadas más photoshopeadas ever 'the most photoshoped portals ever'). We extend an earlier approach to social meaning in HPSG to borrowing.
How things become red in Mandarin Chinese? A case study of deadjectival change of state predicates
(2023)
This paper provides an HPSG analysis for the morphosyntax and the semantics of deadjectival change of state (CoS) verbs in Mandarin Chinese. We first show that adjectives are a distinct word class from verbs in Mandarin Chinese and argue for the derivation of CoS verbs from property concept adjectives. We then model this derivation with a lexical rule. Finally, since CoS verbs can be combined with another verb to form a resultative verb compound (RVC) to express caused CoS, we also propose a lexical rule to account for RVCs.
Maliseet-Passamaquoddy (Algonquian, New Brunswick and Maine, MP) employs a set of enclitic particles to express tense, aspect, and various adverbial notions. These occupy second position in a clause: they follow either the first word in the clause or the first constituent. Johnson and Rosen (2015) propose an analysis of clitic placement in Menominee (Algonquian, Wisconsin) that takes clitics to occupy a functional head in the left periphery, postulating movement of one item into a specifier position to the left of this functional head, thus leaving the clitics in second position. Here I propose an alternative account for MP in the framework of Sign-Based Phrase Structure Grammar (Sag 2012) that makes no use of functional heads and postulates no movement operations. Instead, clitic positions are determined by a small number of maximally simple constructional statements.
Murrinh-Patha, a polysynthetic Non-Pama-Nyungan language of Australia features competition of subject and object agreement markers for a particular position (i.e. slot 2), meaning that certain subject agreement markers are realised in this position, unless already occupied by overt object agreement markers. In their typology of variable morphotactics, Crysmann & Bonami (2016) cite the case of Murrinh-Patha as an instance of misaligned, conditioned placement. I shall propose a formal account of this positional competition in Murrinh-Patha within Information-based Morphology. To this end, I shall generalise the "pivot" features previously proposed for placement relative to the stem (Italian; Crysmann & Bonami, 2016) or the edge (Soranî Kurdish; Bonami & Crysmann, 2013; Salehi & Koenig, 2023) and show how this will facilitate the treatment of conditioned placement in Murrinh-Patha.
A number of types of Welsh subordinate clause are introduced by what looks like the preposition 'i' 'to', 'for'. Earlier research has shown that there are three different lexemes here. It is not unusual for a language to have homophonous lexemes, but these lexemes share a variety of properties, and also share properties with the preposition 'i'. The similarities and the differences among these lexemes can be captured if they are grouped together as four different realisations of a single 'super-lexeme' within the hierarchical lexicon.
The theory of respectively interpretation proposed in Yatabe and Tam (2021) "In defense of an HPSG-based theory of non-constituent coordination" (Linguistics and Philosophy 44, pp. 1-77) entails that Binding Conditions A and B need to be formulated as constraints on the form of semantic representations. It is possible to formulate the two binding conditions as such constraints if anaphoric relations are encoded in semantic representations in a way analogous to the way they are encoded in Discourse Representation Theory.
How to be a ham sandwich or an eel: The English deferred equative and the Japanese eel sentence
(2022)
In some languages including English and Japanese, a nominal predicate construction (NPC; "NP1 is NP2") has a marked variety—"open-ended-relation NPCs" (ONPCs), to label it—where the referents of the subject NP and the predicate NP are understood to be in some pragmatically prominent relation other than identity or inclusion (e.g. I'm the ham sandwich 'I'm the customer who ordered the ham sandwich'). The Japanese ONPC has been called the "eel sentence (eel construction)", after an oft-cited example involving unagi 'eel' as its predicate NP. The English ONPC is discussed in good detail by Ward (2004; "Equatives and deferred reference", Language 80) under the rubric of the "deferred equative". The ONPCs in the two languages can be naturally used only under limited discourse configurations, with the English one being more severely constrained than the Japanese one. This work develops semantic analyses of the two ONPCs that improve on previous accounts.
This paper considers Chinese quantifier scope, an important, outstanding area of Chinese linguistics. In particular, there are two open questions on the subject: (1) the guiding principles that determine (a) the scopal readings of quantifiers and (b) the sometimes mandatory co-occurrence of the universal quantifier mei (every) and the universal adverb dou, and (2) the semantic functions of mei and dou and their connection to the co-occurrence of these words.
We reappraise three prior accounts of these subjects, reason through their consequences on some exemplary data, offer a new explanation based upon concord, a mechanism that is commonplace in many languages, and formulate it in lexical resource semantics (LRS). We use two principles adapted from Richter and Sailer's (2004) analysis of negative concord, expanded with a new quantifier order constraint to generate a coherent answer to the two aforementioned questions.
Computational Grammars can be adapted to detect ungrammatical sentences, effectively transforming them into error detection (or correction) systems. In this paper we provide a theoretical account of how to adapt implemented HPSG grammars for grammatical error detection. We discuss how a single ungrammatical input can be reconstructed in multiple ways and, in turn, be used to provide specific, high-quality feedback to language learners. We then move on to exemplify this with a few of the most common error classes made by learners of Mandarin Chinese. We conclude with some notes concerning the adaptation and implementation of the methods described here in ZHONG, an open-source HPSG grammar for Mandarin Chinese.
In this paper, we deal with register-driven variation from a probabilistic perspective, as proposed in Schäfer, Bildhauer, Pankratz, Müller (2022). We compare two approaches to analyse this variation within HPSG. On the one hand, we consider a multiple-grammar approach and combine it with the architecture proposed in the CoreGram project Müller (2015) - discussing its advantages and disadvantages. On the other hand, we take into account a single-grammar approach and argue that it appears to be superior due to its computational efficiency and cognitive plausibility.
This paper investigates the variation of resultative serial verb constructions in Benue-Kwa languages. The main claim is that the variation can be explained assuming three versions of general lexicon rules which turn main verbs into complex predicates selecting for a second verb and attracting its arguments. Each language has a language specific version of these lexicon rules, enriched with language specific peculiarities to account for the specific behaviour of verbal inflection. The fact that not all of the lexicon rules do operate in each languages is another source of variation.
In this paper, I shall discuss a peculiar coordination construction in German, where the shared subject of the two conjuncts is not found peripheral, but is contained within the first conjunct. Following Höhle (1983), this construction is called "Subject Gaps in Finite/Fronted" clauses (SGF). I shall discuss previous accounts, both symmetric coordination approaches (Frank, 2002; Kathol, 1999), as well as asymmetric adjunction approaches (Büring & Hartmann, 1998). The analysis I shall propose will treat the construction as coordination semantically, yet assume a head complement structure that combines the licensing first conjunct with an incomplete (=slashed) coordinate structure complement. I shall show how this addresses the ATB condition, permits straightforward licensing of the subject gap, and provides better control over the second conjunct, thereby improving over the adjunct analysis.
Welsh noun phrases have had much less attention than Welsh clauses, and there are unresolved issues about the nature of possessors, attributive adjectives, and the definite article and agreement clitics. There is evidence, especially from agreement, that possessors are complements, evidence that attributive adjectives are adjoined to a preceding [LEX+] nominal constituent, and evidence that the definite article and agreement clitics are specifiers. The last of these positions makes it fairly simple to capture the relation between the definite article and agreement clitics and possessors. It is not difficult to formalize these ideas within HPSG.
The paper looks at constraints on non-wh relatives in Sorani Kurdish (Iranian) and English (Germanic). We argue that some of them are grammatical, whereas others introduce social meaning. We present a basic, lexicalist syntactic analysis and expand it with social meaning constraints. We propose that classical sociolinguistic variables have the status of conventional implicatures and the overall assessment of a style is treated as a particularized conversational implicature.
This paper considers the role of nonlocal amalgamation in a system of analyses for typologically diverse languages. Nonlocal amalgamation (Bouma et al. 2001) was suggested in particular to get rid of extraction rules in Pollard and Sag's (1994) analysis of long-distance dependencies. However, in implemented projects like the English Resource Grammar (Flickinger, 2000, 2011) and the Grammar Matrix (Bender et al., 2002, 2010), the extraction rules have been maintained, while nonlocal amalgamation is used for the analysis of phenomena like the easy-adjectives. Zamaraeva and Emerson (2020) argue that, if extraction rules are kept, then supporting the English easy-adjectives may be an insufficient reason to maintain nonlocal amalgamation in a cross-linguistic system like the Grammar Matrix, as it complicates the analysis of multiple question word fronting with flexible word order (in languages such as Russian [rus]). However, I present here a case of morphological marking of questions (in languages like Makah [myh]) which further motivates nonlocal amalgamation, as the analysis is remarkably more simple with it than it is without it. An analysis of morphological marking of questions needs to be part of a cross-linguistic system such as the Grammar Matrix as well as an analysis of multiple fronting, which adds a new tension at the level of the Matrix "core" and provides concrete material for discussion of issues ranging from empirical implementation of theoretical ideas like nonlocal amalgamation to the big question of how much of typological space a single system of grammar is expected to cover.
It is a typologically well-attested generalization that simple personal pronouns are avoided when the purpose is to signal semantic identity between coarguments of a predicate (Faltz, 1985; Comrie, 1999; Levinson, 2000; Haspelmath, 2008, forthcoming; Volkova & Reuland, 2014). Many linguists assume what I call the Unified View, where these pronoun disjointness effects come out as a byproduct of a single syntactic constraint, generally known as Principle B of the Binding Theory (Chomsky, 1981, 1986; Pollard & Sag, 1994; Manning & Sag, 1998; Pollard, 2005; Müller, 2021). This paper argues that the Unified View is mistaken because it is both too weak and too strong. As an alternative, I propose that pronoun disjointness effects stem from a conspiracy of three distinct factors – none of which is a syntactic universal: (i) a preference for expressing identity with coindexation rather than anchoring distinct indices to the same referent (Reinhart, 1983); (ii) a language-specific variant of HPSG’s Principle B; and (iii) a constraint on the morphosyntactic encoding of reflexive relations (Faltz, 1985; Reinhart & Reuland, 1993; König & Siemund, 2000).
In this paper, we propose to extend the Przepiórkowski's 2000 analysis of Long Distance Genitive of Negation to the same phenomenon in Lithuanian. We discuss the features that have their origin in Categorial Grammar. We then develop a novel analysis of the case alternation in Categorial Grammar incorporating features of the HPSG analysis. The two accounts show a surprising convergence in basic assumptions and predictions.
The formal analysis of idioms has been oscillating between approaches that emphasize the unit-like character of idioms and approaches that focus on the autonomy of the idioms' parts. In this paper, we summarize the main arguments for and against these two positions to then propose an account that tries to capture and combine the insights and advantages of both types of analysis. The resulting theory is heavily influenced by the approach taken in Riehemann (2001).
Minimizer strong NPIs such as ''lift a finger'' are known to be more restricted in their occurrence than weak NPIs like ''ever''. Sedivy 1990 points to contexts with a ''negative side message'' in which ''lift a finger'' can occur but ''ever'' cannot. The paper provides a short overview over the relevant contexts and proposes an extension of a representational theory of NPI licensing with the following components: First, an utterance content is introduced that enriches the primary truth-conditional content by conventional implicatures and generalized conversational implicatures. Second, ''ever''-type NPIs can be licensed by weak NPI licensors, but only in the primary truth-conditional meaning of an utterance. ''Lift-a-finger''-type NPIs can only be licensed in the scope of negation, but the licensing can be checked at the representation of the enriched meaning of an utterance.
The aim of this paper is to propose three improvements to the HPSG model theory. The first is a solution to certain formal problems identified in Richter 2007. These problems are solved if HPSG models are rooted models of utterances and not exhaustive models of languages, as currently assumed. The proposed solution is compatible with all existing views on the nature of objects inhabiting models. The second improvement is a solution to "Höhle’s Problem", i.e., the problem of massive spurious ambiguities in models of utterances. The third is a formalisation of Yatabe's (2004) analysis of the coordination of unlike categories, one that requires a second-order extension of the language for stating HPSG grammars.