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Institute
- Extern (12)
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.
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.
"The documentation of... descriptive generalizations is sometimes clearer and more accessible when expressed in terms of a detailed formal reconstruction, but only in the rare and happy case that the formalism fits the data so well that the resulting account is clearer and easier to understand than the list of categories of facts that it encodes.... [If not], subsequent scholars must often struggle to decode a description in an out-of-date formal framework so as to work back to... the facts.... which they can re-formalize in a new way. Having experienced this struggle often ourselves, we have decided to accommodate our successors by providing them directly with a plainer account." (Akinlabi & Liberman 2000:24)
This questionnaire is intended as an aid to eliciting different relative clause types – restrictive, non-restrictive, free, cleft. We have taken care to include examples where the head plays a variety of grammatical functions in the relative clause (subject, object, indirect object, possessor, adjunct). We have also taken care to include examples where the relative clause is in different positions in the sentence: initial, medial and extraposed. 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, as well as some illustrative examples in English and Swahili of the basic relative clause types. While we had Bantu languages in mind in devising the questionnaire, we hope it could also be useful to linguists with an interest in other languages.
All of the papers in the volume except one (Kaji) take up some aspect of relative clause construction in some Bantu language. Kaji’s paper aims to account for how Tooro (J12; western Uganda) lost phonological tone through a comparative study of the tone systems of other western Uganda Bantu languages. The other papers examine a range of ways of forming relative clauses, often including non-restrictive relatives and clefts, in a wide range of languages representing a variety of prosodic systems.
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.
Símákonde is an Eastern Bantu language (P23) spoken by immigrant Mozambican communities in Zanzibar and on the Tanzanian mainland. Like other Makonde dialects and other Eastern and Southern Bantu languages (Hyman 2009), it has lost the historical Proto-Bantu vowel length contrast and now has a regular phrase-final stress rule, which causes a predictable bimoraic lengthening of the penultimate syllable of every Prosodic Phrase. The study of the prosody / syntax interface in Símákonde Relative Clauses requires to take into account the following elements: the relationship between the head and the relative verb, the conjoint / disjoint verbal distinction and the various phrasing patterns of Noun Phrases. Within Símákonde noun phrases, depending on the nature of the modifier, three different phrasing situations are observed: a modifier or modifiers may (i) be required to phrase with the head noun, (ii) be required to phrase separately, or (iii) optionally phrase with the head noun.
This paper examines locative relatives in Durban Zulu. We show that locative relatives differ from nominal relatives crucially in prosodic phrasing as well as in resumptive pronoun marking. We propose that the best way to account for locative relatives in Zulu is to resort to the old style adjunction analysis of relative clauses, with an empty operator. The system we propose assumes that such an adjunction analysis co-exists with a head-raising analysis, which accounts for the nominal relative clauses.
Símákonde is an Eastern Bantu language (P23) spoken by immigrant Mozambican communities in Zanzibar and on the Tanzanian mainland. Like other Makonde dialects and other Eastern and Southern Bantu languages (Hyman 2009), it has lost the historical Proto-Bantu vowel length contrast and now has a regular phrase-final stress rule, which causes a predictable bimoraic lengthening of the penultimate syllable of every Prosodic Phrase. The study of the prosody / syntax interface in Símákonde Relative Clauses requires to take into account the following elements: the relationship between the head and the relative verb, the conjoint / disjoint verbal distinction and the various phrasing patterns of Noun Phrases. Within Símákonde noun phrases, depending on the nature of the modifier, three different phrasing situations are observed: a modifier or modifiers may (i) be required to phrase with the head noun, (ii) be required to phrase separately, or (iii) optionally phrase with the head noun.
The morpho-syntax of relative clauses in Sotho-Tswana is relatively well-described in the literature. Prosodic characteristics, such as tone, have received far less attention in the existing descriptions. After reviewing the basic morpho-syntactic and semantic features of relative clauses in Tswana, the current paper sets out to present and discuss prosodic aspects. These comprise tone specifications of relative clause markers such as the demonstrative pronoun that acts as the relative pronoun, relative agreement concords and the relative suffix. Further prosodic aspects dealt with in the current article are tone alternations at the juncture of relative pronoun and head noun, and finally the tone patterns of the finite verbs in the relative clause. The article aims at providing the descriptive basis from which to arrive at generalizations concerning the prosodic phrasing of relative clauses in Tswana.
Relative clauses in Haya
(2010)
This paper gives an overview of the morphology and syntax of Haya relative clause constructions. It extends previous work on this topic (Duranti, 1977) by incorporating data from a number of different dialects and by introducing new data on locative relative clauses. The dialects discussed in addition to the Kihanja data from Byarushengo et al. (1977) include Kiziba, Muleba and Bugabo dialects. Nyambo data taken from Rugemalira (2005) is also compared to Haya in places. The focus of the discussion is on the grammaticality of pronominal elements attached to the verb that refer back to the relativized entity with different types of relativized constituents in Haya. It is shown that there are differences between subjects, objects and locatives in terms of this kind of morphology inside the relative clause, as well as differences between these kinds of morphemes and resumptive pronouns.
Introduction
(2010)
The papers in this volume were originally presented at the Bantu Relative Clause workshop held in Paris on 8-9 January 2010, which was organized by the French-German cooperative project on the Phonology/Syntax Interface in Bantu Languages (BANTU PSYN). This project, which is funded by the ANR and the DFG, comprises three research teams, based in Berlin, Paris and Lyon. [...] This range of expertise is essential to realizing the goals of our project. Because Bantu languages have a rich phrasal phonology, they have played a central role in the development of theories of the phonology-syntax interface ever since the seminal work from the 1970s on Chimwiini (Kisseberth & Abasheikh 1974) and Haya (Byarushengo et al. 1976). Indeed, half the papers in Inkelas & Zec’s (1990) collection of papers on the phonology-syntax interface deal with Bantu languages. They have naturally played an important role in current debates comparing indirect and direct reference theories of the phonology-syntax interface. Indirect reference theories (e.g., Nespor & Vogel 1986; Selkirk 1986, 1995, 2000, 2009; Kanerva 1990; Truckenbrodt 1995, 1999, 2005, 2007) propose that phonology is not directly conditioned by syntactic information. Rather, the interface is mediated by phrasal prosodic constituents like Phonological Phrase and Intonation Phrase, which need not match any syntactic constituent. In contrast, direct reference theories (e.g., Kaisse 1985; Odden 1995, 1996; Pak 2008; Seidl 2001) argue that phrasal prosodic constituents are superfluous, as phonology can – indeed, must – refer directly to syntactic structure.
As work like McCarthy (2002: 128) notes, pre-Optimality Theory (OT) phonology was primarily concerned with representations and theories of subsegmental structure. In contrast, the role of representations and choice of structural models has received little attention in OT. Some central representational issues of the pre-OT era have, in fact, become moot in OT (McCarthy 2002: 128). Further, as work like Baković (2007) notes, even for assimilatory processes where representation played a central role in the pre-OT era, constraint interaction now carries the main explanatory burden. Indeed, relatively few studies in OT (e.g., Rose 2000; Hargus & Beavert 2006; Huffmann 2005, 2007; Morén 2006) have argued for the importance of phonological representations. This paper intends to contribute to this work by reanalyzing a set of processes related to vowel harmony in Shimakonde, a Bantu language spoken in Mozambique and Tanzania. These processes are of particular interest, as Liphola’s (2001) study argues that they are derivationally opaque and so not amenable to an OT analysis. I show that the opacity disappears given the proper choice of representations for vowel features and a metrical harmony domain.
We present a CYK and an Earley-style algorithm for parsing Range Concatenation Grammar (RCG), using the deductive parsing framework. The characteristic property of the Earley parser is that we use a technique of range boundary constraint propagation to compute the yields of non-terminals as late as possible. Experiments show that, compared to previous approaches, the constraint propagation helps to considerably decrease the number of items in the chart.
The aim of this paper is to address two main counterarguments raised in Landau (2007) against the movement analysis of Control, and especially against the phenomenon of Backward Control. The paper shows that unlike the situation described in Tsez (Polinsky & Potsdam 2002), Landau's objections do not hold for Greek and Romanian, where all obligatory control verbs exhibit Backward Control. Our results thus provide stronger empirical support for a theoretical approach to Control in terms of Movement, as defended in Hornstein (1999 and subsequent work).
In the recent literature the phenomenon of long distance agreement has become the focus of several studies as it seems to violate certain locality conditions which require that agreeing elements in general stand in clause-mate relationships. In particular, it involves a verb agreeing with a constituent which is located in the verb's clausal complement and hence poses a challenge for theories that assume a strictly local relationship for agreement. In this paper we present empirical evidence from Greek and Romanian for the reality of long distance agreement. Specifically, we focus on raising constructions in these two languages and we show that they do not involve movement but rather instantiate long distance agreement. We further argue that subjunctives allowing long distance agreement lack both a CP layer and semantic Tense. However, since the embedded verb also bears phi-features, these constructions pose a further problem for assumptions that view the presence of phi-features as evidence for the presence of a C layer. Finally, we raise the question of the common properties that these languages have that lead to the presence of long distance agreement.
Nominalization in Rawang
(2009)
This paper discusses the types of relative clause and noun complement structures found in the Rawang language, a Tibeto-Burman language of northern Myanmar, as well as their origin and uses, with data taken mainly from naturally occurring texts. Two types are preposed relative clauses, but in one the relative clause is nominalized, and in the other it is not. The non-nominalized form with a general head led to the development of nominalizing suffixes and one type of nominalized relative clause structure. As the nominalized form is a nominal itself, it can be postposed to the head in an appositional structure. There is also discussion of the Rawang structures in the context of Tibeto-Burman and the development of relative clause structures in the language family.
Many linguists in China and the West have talked about Chinese as a topic-comment language, that is, a language in which the structure of the clause takes the form of a topic, about which something is to be said, and a comment, which is what is said about the topic, rather than being a language with a subject-predicate structure like that of English. Y. R. Chao (1968), for example, said that all Chinese clauses have topic-comment structure and there are no exceptions.
This paper deals with the variable position of adjectives in the Romanian DP. As all other Romance languages, Romanian allows for adjectives to appear in both prenominal and post-nominal position. In addition, however, Romanian has a third pattern: the so-called cel construction, in which the adjective in the post-nominal position is preceded by a determiner-like element, cel. This pattern is superficially similar to Determiner Spreading in Greek. In this paper we contrast the cel construction to Greek DS and discuss the similarities and differences between the two. We then present an analysis of cel as involving an appositive specification clause, building on de Vries (2002). We argue that the same structure is also involved in the context of nominal ellipsis, the second environment in which cel is found.
Freeze (1992) argued on the basis of data from several different languages that there is a close relationship between existential sentences (stating the existence of an entity) and locative sentences (stating the location of an entity). Freeze (1992) proposes that they are both derived from the same base structure and that the surface differences are rather due to the distinct information structures.This paper argues against this position with the data from Serbian existentials, which show clear syntactic differences from the locatives. Thus, the close relationship between existential and locative sentences that Freeze (1992) observes is conceptual, but not (necessarily) part of the syntax of the language. In order to account for the data, we propose that existential sentences originate from a different syntactic predication structure than the locative ones. The existential meaning arises, as we will show, from the interaction of this predication structure with the structure and meaning of the noun phrase.
In this paper we investigate the distribution of PPs related to external arguments (agent, causer, instrument, causing event) in Greek. We argue that their distribution supports an analysis, according to which agentive/instrument and causer PPs are licensed by distinct functional heads, respectively. We argue against a conceivable alternative analysis, which links agentivity and causation to the prepositions themselves. We furthermore identify a particular type of Voice head in Greek anticausative realised by non-active Voice morphology.
In this paper we compare the distribution of PPs introducing external arguments in nominalizations with PPs introducing external arguments in the verbal domain. We show that several mismatches exist between the behavior of PPs in nominalizations and PPs in the verbal domain. This leads us to suggest that while PPs in the verbal domain are licensed by functional structure alone, within the nominal domain, PPs can also be licensed via an interplay of the encyclopaedic meaning of the root involved and the properties of the preposition itself. This second mechanism kicks in in the absence of functional structure.
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.
The claim of this paper is that embedded definites can, despite the appearances, be accounted for on the uniqueness approach. Far from being a surprise, we argue that the behavior of embedded definites is actually expected once two independent facts are taken into account: the ability of noun phrases to take scope, i.e., to be interpreted in a different place from their syntactic position, and the interaction of presuppositions and scope-taking elements. Specifically, we analyze embedded definites as a case of inverse linking (Gabbay and Moravscik, 1974; May, 1977): the embedded definite takes scope over the embedding one. The presupposition of the embedded definite is weakened as a result of the independently motivated process of intermediate accommodation (Kratzer, 1989; Berman, 1991). In our case, this process transfers the presupposition of the embedding definite into the restrictor of the embedded one.
Like other scope-taking processes, inverse linking is generally taken to be subject to locality constraints: if a syntactic island, such as a finite clause boundary, intervenes in the path of a scope-taking element, then the resulting reading is unavailable or degraded (Rodman, 1976). Since our account views embedded definites as cases of inverse linking, we predict that inserting an island into an embedded definite, all else being equal, should lead to a similar degradation. We report results from an online survey with 800 participants that confirm this prediction.
It has been established since Kanerva’s work that focus conditions phrasing – directly or indirectly – in several other Bantu languages, e.g. Chimwiini (Kisseberth 2007, Downing 2002, Kisseberth & Abasheikh 2004), Xhosa (Jokweni 1995, Zerbian 2004), Chitumbuka (Downing 2006, 2007), Zulu (Cheng & Downing 2006, Downing 2007), Bemba (Kula 2007), etc.
In this paper, I will argue that focus also conditions phrasing in Shingazidja, a Bantu language3 spoken on Grande Comore (or Ngazidja, the largest island of the Comoros).
Many works have been dedicated to the tonology of Shingazidja. The bases of the system were firstly identified by Tucker & Bryan (1970) and reanalyzed by Philippson (1988). Later, Cassimjee & Kisseberth (1989, 1992, 1993, 1998) provide a very convincing analysis of the whole system of the language, and my own research (Patin 2007a) shows a great correspondence with their results. However, little attention has been paid by these authors or others (Jouannet 1989, Rey 1990, Philippson 2005) to the phonology-pragmatics interface, especially on the relation between focus and phrasing. This paper thus proposes to explore this question. It will be claimed that focus, beside syntax, has an influence on phrasing in Shingazidja.
This paper is an inductive look at the constituents found in a randomly selected Tagalog text, Bob Ong’s Alamat ng Gubat (Makati City, MM: Visual Print Enterprises, 2004). The analysis is based on the full text, but we will only be able to go through the first few lines of the text here, which we will do one by one, and discuss the structures found in each line of the text in bullet format after the relevant line. At the end of the paper we will bring up some important questions about the structures found in Tagalog based on this text.
Questions on transitivity
(2008)
This handout (it isn’t a paper) presents phenomena and questions, rather than conclusions, related to the concept of transitivity. The idea is to return to these questions at the end of the Workshop to see if we can have a clearer consensus about the best general analysis of phenomena associated with transitivity. Section 2 presents alternative analyses of transitivity and questions about transitivity in three languages I have worked on. Section 3 discusses a few of the different conceptualisations of transitivity that might be relevant to our thinking about the questions related to these languages or that bring up further questions. Section 4 presents some general questions that might be asked of individual languages.
The renowned Grimm Dictionary (1854-1961) makes the statement that the German copula sein (to be) is “the most general and colourless of all verbal concepts” (der allgemeinste und farbloseste aller verbalbegriffe). A more concise summary of the linguistic issues surrounding the copula is hardly possible. These two properties (and the latent tension between them!) make copulas a particularly interesting and vexing subject of linguistic research. Copulas appear to be almost colourless, i.e., devoid of any concrete meaning, thus leading to the question of why such expressions exist at all, not only in German but in the majority of the world’s languages. And at the same time copulas presumably provide the best window into the core of verbal concepts thereby telling us what it actually means to be a verb – at least in a language like German or English. While there is a rather rich body of research on copulas in philosophical and formal semantics including several in-depth studies on the copular systems of individual languages, copulas have received comparably little attention from a typological perspective. The monograph of Regina Pustet sets out to fill this gap. She presents an extensive cross-linguistic study of copula usage based on a sample of 154 languages drawn from the language families of the world. The analysis is embedded in the theoretical framework of functional typology. The study aims at uncovering universal principles that govern the distribution of copulas in nominal, adjectival, and verbal predications. Its major objective is the development of a “semantically-based model of copula distribution” (p.62) by means of which the presence vs. absence of copulas can be motivated through the inherent meaning of the lexical items they potentially combine with. Drawing mainly on the work by Givón (1979, 1984) and Croft (1991, 2001), who provide a functional foundation of the traditional parts of speech, Pustet identifies four semantic parameters which, if taken together, are claimed to support substantial generalisations on copula distribution – within a given language as well as crosslinguistically. These parameters are DYNAMICITY, TRANSIENCE, TRANSITIVITY, and DEPENDENCY. Pustet goes on to argue – and this is in fact the driving force behind the overall monograph – that the distributional behaviour of copulas, in turn, yields a useful methodology for developing a general approach to lexical categorization. Thus, in the long run Pustet aims at contributing to a better understanding of the traditional parts of speech, noun, adjective, and verb by defining them in terms of “semantic feature bundles, which can be arranged in [a] coherent semantic similarity space” (p.193).
The goal of this paper is to re-examine the status of the condition in (1) proposed in Alexiadou and Anagnostopoulou (2001; henceforth A&A 2001), in view of recent developments in syntactic theory. (1) The subject-in-situ generalization (SSG) By Spell-Out, vP can contain only one argument with a structural Case feature. We argue that (1) is a more general condition than previously recognized, and that the domain of its application is parametrized. More specifically, based on a comparison between Indo-European (IE) and Khoisan languages, we argue that (1) supports an interpretation of the EPP as a general principle, and not as a property of T. Viewed this way, the SSG is a condition that forces dislocation of arguments as a consequence of a constraint on Case checking.
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.
This paper deals with the development of discourse competence in German-, Russian- and Bulgarian-speaking children. In particular, it examines the use of anaphoric pronominal reference in elicited narrations of children between the ages of 2;6 and 6;0. As the pronominal (and nominal) systems of target German, Russian and Bulgarian differ in the repertoire and functions of anaphoric elements we will examine which kind of noun phrases children use to make reference to story participants. In a second step of the analysis, we will investigate how pronominal expressions relate to antecedents. In this respect the pronominal form of the anaphor, the syntactic function of the antecedent and the distance between antecedent and anaphor will be analyzed. The findings will be discussed with regard to predictions made by proposals such as the Complementary Hypothesis (Bosch, Rozario, and Zhao 2003) which assumes an asymmetry between the use of personal pro-nouns and demonstrative pronouns when referring back to subject or object antecedents.
It is well known that English children between the age of 4 and 6 display a so-called Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) in that they allow pronouns to refer to a local c-commanding antecedent. Their guessing pattern with pronouns contrasts with their adult-like interpretation of reflexives. The DPBE has been explained as resulting from a lack of pragmatic knowledge or insufficient cognitive resources. However, such extra-grammatical accounts cannot explain why the DPBE only shows up in particular languages and in particular syntactic environments. Moreover, such accounts fail to explain why the DPBE only emerges in comprehension and not in production. This paper hypothesizes that the presence or absence of the DPBE can be explained from the properties of the grammar. Fischer's (2004) optimality-theoretic analysis of binding, explaining cross-linguistic variation, and Hendriks and Spenader's (2005/6) optimality-theoretic account of the acquisition of pronouns and reflexives are combined into a single model. This model yields testable predictions with respect to the presence or absence of the DPBE in particular languages, in particular syntactic environments, and in comprehension and/or production.
This paper investigates the production and comprehension of intrasentential anaphoric pronominal reference in Russian. In particular, it examines the elicited imitation and comprehension of three anaphoric pronouns in subject position – personal 3rd singular masculine, demonstrative and zero – in one hundred and eighty monolingual Russian-speaking children and twenty adults. The three types of pronouns were designed to have an antecedent in the preceding sentence containing a verb and two arguments. These antecedents differ in their syntactical role and animacy. The sentence position, agentivity and topicality remained constant. The sentences with (in)animate subjects and objects constituted the following four 'conditions': two sentences with a subject and an object being either animate or inanimate and two sentences with a subject and an object exhibiting a diverse (in)animacy. Regarding the resolution of the anaphoric pronouns the similarity principle (or feature-concord rule) and its possible violations were tested. This principle suggests that an anaphoric pronoun is most likely resolved to the antecedent with a maximum of similar characteristics or features and it primarily governs the assignment of an antecedent to anaphoric pronouns in subject position in the absence of the violating conditions. Results show the influence of this rule on the anaphora resolution process increasing with age, on the one hand, and the development of the impact of animacy, syntactic role and the type of anaphoric pronouns that violate the feature-concord rule, on the other.
This paper presents results of corpus analytic investigations of children's use of referring expressions and considers possible implications of this work for questions relating to development of theory of mind. The study confirms previous findings that children use the full range of referring forms (definite and indefinite articles, demonstrative determiners, and demonstrative and personal pronouns) appropriately by age 3 or earlier. It also provides support for two distinct stages in mind-reading ability. The first, which is implicit and non-propositional, includes the ability to assess cognitive statuses such as familiarity and focus of attention in relation to the intended referent; the second, which is propositional and more conscious, includes the ability to assess epistemic states such as knowledge and belief. Distinguishing these two stages supports attempts to reconcile seemingly inconsistent results concerning the age at which children develop theory of mind. It also makes it possible to explain why children learn to use forms correctly be-fore they exhibit the pragmatic ability to consider and calculate quantity implicatures.
In this article, I will present a survey of control structures in Korean. The survey is based on a sample of seventy SOA-argument-taking predicates, which are classified with respect to their complementation patterns and control properties. As a result, Korean is characterized as a language in which semantically determined control is predominant, whereas constructionally induced control is only marginal. In the discussion of the sample, I will show that there are two major classes of verbs exhibiting semantic control: the first class consists of matrix verbs such as hwuhoyhata 'regret' or kangyohata 'force', which require obligatory coreference between a matrix argument and the embedded subject due to their lexical meaning. The verbs of the second class are utterance verbs such as malhata 'tell', which select clauses headed by the quotative complementizer ko. With these verbs, subject, object, or split control arises if specific modal suffixes are attached to the verb heading the complement clause. In the second part of the paper, I will provide a lexical analysis of control in Korean, which adopts the Principle of Controller Choice proposed by Farkas (1988) as well as additional constraints which have to be assumed independently.
Complement control is a well-known phenomenon in Turkish linguistics, and different proposals for analysing it are available. The majority of these treat control as a structural phenomenon, cf. Kerslake (1987), Özsoy (1987; 2001) and Kural (1998). In sum, control is predicted only in sentences with complement clauses formed with the suffixes -mEk and -mE, which can be case-marked, but the appearance of a possessive marker definitely precludes control. As far as the control relations are concerned, the research so far has attested the classical cases of subject and object control. In addition to that, variable control is discussed by Taylan (1996). The status of the controlled element is discussed by Bozşahin (in press), which concludes that the syntactic subject is appointed by this function in Turkish.
In this paper I will argue that the currently established approach to control is insufficient. The shortcomings of a strictly configurational approach become clear if a broader perspective on control is adopted. I follow the approach to control outlined by Stiebels (this volume), and show that two types of control must be distinguished. Inherent control is encoded in the lexical entry of the verb. Verbs which show inherent control either select only control-inducing structures or trigger control in environments not requiring control. Structural control, on the other hand, arises through the use of a control-inducing structure with a verb which does not inherently require control. Structural control verbs show control only with control-inducing structures. No control occurs with such verbs in other configurations. The data discussed in this paper will show that control is a ‘mixed’ phenomenon, since it may arise structurally or semantically. Its explanation must therefore consider the semantics of the relevant matrix verbs and the syntactic properties of complement clauses on an equal basis.
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.
In this paper, I examine two object control constructions in Korean which differ only in the surface word order: in one of the constructions, the control complement follows the controller, but in the other, precedes it. I argue that the contrast between these constructions cannot be attributed to scrambling. The difference between these constructions can only be captured if one of them is analyzed as OC, and the other as instantiating NOC. Section 2 presents the relevant constructions and their earlier analyses available in the literature; section 3 presents a detailed discussion of differences between the two object control constructions. My proposal for analyzing these constructions is presented in section 4. Section 5 introduces two outstanding questions related to the proposed structures: the status of scrambling in Korean and the analysis of the inverse control construction. Conclusions and general discussion follow in section 6.
Previous work examining the role of antecedent accessibility in pronominal coreference has often linked coreference to prominent structural positions that in turn are linked to information structure statuses such as topic. Three experiments examine the influence of topichood independently of structural prominence by exploring the influence of the pragmatic notion of aboutness on the written production of pronominal coreferring expressions. The results show that being mentioned in an about-phrase increases the likelihood that a referent will be selected as the future topic of a following sentence as well as increasing the proportion of responses with early, pronominal coreference to that referent, at the expense of coreference with the subject. These results suggest that coreference is sensitive to the status of other, structurally non-prominent referents in discourse, and that the pragmatic notion of aboutness influences pronominal coreference.
This volume represents a collection of papers that present some of the results of two projects on control: on the one hand, the project Typology of complement control directed by Barbara Stiebels and funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG STI 151/2-2), and on the other hand the project Variation in control structures directed by Maria Polinsky and Eric Potsdam and funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF grants BCS-0131946, BCS-0131993; website http://accent.ucsd.edu/). Whereas the first project pursued a lexical approach to control with a semantic definition of obligatory control, the second project has mainly pursued a syntactic approach to control – with special emphasis on less studied control structures (such as adjunct control, backward control, finite control, etc.). Both projects have aimed at extending the research on complement control to structures that differ from the prototypical cases of infinitival complements with empty subjects found in many Indo-European languages; their common interest was to bring in new empirical data, both primary and experimental.
It is the aim of this paper to evaluate the various types of sentential complementation available in terms of complement control cross-linguistically. I will propose a lexical classification of control classes on the basis of the instantiated subordination patterns. I want to focus on an important distinction, namely that of structural vs. inherent control. Structural control is found with predicates that select a clausal complement whose structure requires argument identification and thus 'induces' control. Infinitival complements are prototypical cases for this kind of control because in most languages infinitival complements can only 'survive' in structures of control or raising. The interesting question is which predicates license structural control and which cross-linguistic differences emerge between potential licensors. Inherent control is found with predicates that require control readings independent of the instantiated structure of sentential complementation (e.g. a directive predicate such as zwingen 'force'). In addition, I will recapitulate and add arguments for the dual lexical-syntactic nature of complement control.
This questionnaire focuses on control structures that are instantiated by predicates that take a state of affairs (SOA) argument. Noonan (1985) has called these predicates 'complement-taking predicates'; I will use the notion of SOAAtaking predicates (SOAA = state of affairs argument).
Prototypically, complement control is instantiated by certain classes of verbs; however, adjectives (be eager to) and nouns (e.g. nominalizations such as promise) may function as control predicates as well. 'Control' refers to the pattern of argument identification between an argument of the SOAA-taking predicate and an argument of the SOAA-head. In the literature the notion of 'equi deletion' or 'equi-NP deletion' has been used (following Rosenbaum 1967), which refers to structures in which an overt argument of the matrix predicate is identified with a covert argument of the embedded predicate. This questionnaire aims at a cross-linguistic application of the notion of control and thus uses a semantic definition of complement control. It extends the notion of control to other patterns of referential dependency between arguments of a SOAA-taking predicate and of the embedded predicate.
In anaphora resolution theory, it has been assumed that anaphora resolution is based on a reversed mapping of antecedent salience and anaphora complexity: minimal complex anaphora refer to maximal salient antecedents. In order to ex-amine whether and by which developmental steps German children gain command of this mapping maxim we conducted an experiment on production and comprehension of intersentential pronouns including the three pronoun types zero, personal, and demonstrative pronoun. With respect to antecedent salience, the experiment varied syntactic role (subject/object) and in/animacy. Six age groups of children (age range from 2;0 to 6;0) and an adult control group has been tested. The hypothesis arising from the mapping maxim is that zero pronoun correlates with more salient antecedents than personal and demonstrative pronoun, the latter correlating with the least salient antecedents. The results are: In production, children first establish the opposition of zero pronoun with animate antecedents vs. demonstrative pronoun with inanimate antecedents. In a next step, syntactic role comes into play and a more complex system opposing the three presented pronoun types is established. In comprehension, however, the effect of pronoun type re-mains weak and antecedent features remain a strong factor in reference choice. However, also adults employ pronoun type and antecedent features. The oldest children and the adults show variation in personal pronoun resolution according to the animacy pattern of the potential antecedents. In case of identical animacy features, the subject is the preferred candidate; in case of distinct animacy features, there is a tendency to choose the object antecedent.
The 48th volume of the ZAS Papers in Linguistics presents selected papers from the conference on Intersentential pronominal reference in child and adult language held at the ZAS in December, 2006. The conference, organized by the project Acquisition and disambiguation of intersentential pronominal reference, brought together leading researchers dealing with anaphora resolution in diverse theoretical approaches and the acquisition perspective on pronominal reference taken by the ZAS project.
Rawang (Rvwàng) is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the far north of Myanmar (Burma), and is closely related to the Dulong language spoken in China. Rawang manifests a kind of hierarchical person marking on the predicate which marks first person primarily (in several different ways - suffixes, change of final consonant, vowel length - and up to five times within one verb complex), and second person indirectly with a sort of marking similar to the inverse marking found in some North American languages: it appears when there is a first person participant, but that referent is not the actor, and when the second person is a participant. This system is quite different from those that reflect semantic role (e.g. Qiang) or grammatical relations (e.g. English).
Rawang [...] is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by people who live in the far north of Kachin State in Myanmar (Burma), particularly along the Mae Hka ('Nmai Hka) and Maeli Hka (Mali Hka) river valleys (see map on back page); population unknown, although Ethnologue gives 100,000. In the past they had been called ‘Nung’, or (mistakenly) ‘Hkanung’, and are considered to be a sub-group of the Kachin by the Myanmar government. Until government policies put a stop to the clearing of new land in 1994, the Rawang speakers still practiced slash and burn farming on the mountainsides (they still do a bit, but only on already claimed land), in conjunction with planting paddy rice near the river. They are closely related to people on the other side of the Chinese border in Yunnan classified as either Dulong or Nu(ng) (see LaPolla 2001, 2003 on the Dulong language). In this paper, I will be discussing the word-class-changing constructions found in Rawang, using data of the Mvtwang (Mvt River) dialect of Rawang, which is considered the most central of those dialects in Myanmar and so has become something of a standard for writing and inter-group communication.
Morphology
(2007)
Introduction
(2007)
Information structure
(2007)
Semantics
(2007)
This paper presents psycholinguistic evidence on the factors governing the resolution of German personal pronouns. To determine the relative influence of linear order versus grammatical function of potential antecedents, two interpretation-preference tasks were designed. Their specific aim was to disentangle salience factors conflated in previous research on pronoun interpretation, such as linear or-der, first mention and topicalization. Experiment 1 tested pronoun resolution to non-sentence-initial position (scrambling) and Experiment 2 tested pronoun resolution to sentence-initial position (topicalization). The results across different verb types and across different syntactic contexts in Experiments 1 and 2 show that grammatical function, yet neither linear order, first mention nor topicalization predicts pronoun resolution in German.
This paper discusses results from a corpus study of German demonstrative and personal pronouns and from a reading time experiment in which we compared the interpretation options of the two types of pronouns (Bosch et al. 2003, 2007). A careful review of exceptions to a generalisation we had been suggesting in those papers (the Subject Hypothesis: "Personal pronouns prefer subject antecedents and demonstratives prefer non-subject antecedents") shows that, although this generalisation correctly describes a tendency in the data, it is quite wrong in claiming that the grammatical role of antecedents is the relevant parameter. In the current paper we argue that the generalisation should be formulated in terms of in-formation-structural properties of referents rather than in terms of the grammatical role of antecedent expressions.
In what follows, I first briefly review Perlmutter (1968, 1970), in which it is argued that aspectual verbs are ambiguous between control and raising. I suggest that while the argument for the raising analysis is solid, the arguments supporting the control analysis of aspectual verbs are less so. As an alternative hypothesis to consider, I introduce the structural ambiguity hypothesis. In Section 3, I review three recent analyses of control and raising. Although there are important differences among them, they all share the basic assumption that the control/raising distinction is due to differences in selectional restrictions that the lexical items impose. Under such an assumption, the lexical ambiguity hypothesis is the only available option. In Section 4, I present evidence for the structural ambiguity hypothesis from studies concerning aspectual verbs in languages from four distinct families, German (Wurmbrand 2001), Japanese (Fukuda 2006), Romance languages (Cinque 2003), and Basque (Arregi Molina-Azaola 2004). These data strongly suggest that across languages aspectual verbs can appear in two different syntactic positions, either below or above vP, or the projection with which an external argument is introduced (Kratzer 1994, 1996, Chomsky 1995). Given these findings, I argue that it is the aspectual verbs' position with respect to vP which creates the control/raising ambiguity. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is lower than vP, an external argument takes scope over the aspectual verb. Thus, it is interpreted as control. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is higher than vP, on the other hand, it is the aspectual verb that takes scope over an entire vP, including the external argument. Thus, it is interpreted as raising. In section 5, I extend the scope of this study to include a discussion of want-type verbs in Indonesian, as analyzed in Polinsky & Potsdam (2006). Polinsky & Potsdam argue that the Indonesian want-type verbs must be raising in at least certain cases where they allow a rather peculiar interpretation. Although they assume that there are also control counterparts of the want-type verbs, I argue that applying the proposed analysis to the want-type verbs does away with the need for stipulating two distinct lexical entries for these verbs. Section 6 concludes the paper.
The causative/anticausative alternation has been the topic of much typological and theoretical discussion in the linguistic literature. This alternation is characterized by verbs with transitive and intransitive uses, such that the transitive use of a verb V means roughly "cause to Vintransitive" (see Levin 1993). The discussion revolves around two issues: the first one concerns the similarities and differences between the anticausative and the passive, and the second one concerns the derivational relationship, if any, between the transitive and intransitive variant. With respect to the second issue, a number of approaches have been developed. Judging the approach conceptually unsatisfactory, according to which each variant is assigned an independent lexical entry, it was concluded that the two variants have to be derivationally related. The question then is which one of the two is basic and where this derivation takes place in the grammar. Our contribution to this discussion is to argue against derivational approaches to the causative / anticausative alternation. We focus on the distribution of PPs related to external arguments (agent, causer, instrument, causing event) in passives and anticausatives of English, German and Greek and the set of verbs undergoing the causative/anticausative alternation in these languages. We argue that the crosslinguistic differences in these two domains provide evidence against both causativization and detransitivization analyses of the causative / anticausative alternation. We offer an approach to this alternation which builds on a syntactic decomposition of change of state verbs into a Voice and a CAUS component. Crosslinguistic variation in passives and anticausatives depends on properties of Voice and its combinations with CAUS and various types of roots.
It has often been noticed that one syntactic argument position can be realized by elements which seem to realize different thematic roles. This is notably the case with the external argument position of verbs of change of state which licenses volitional agents, instruments or natural forces/causers, showing the generality and abstractness of the external argument relation. (1) a. John broke the window (Agent) b. The hammer broke the window (Instrument) c. The storm broke the window (Causer) In order to capture this generality, Van Valin & Wilkins (1996) and Ramchand (2003) among others have proposed that the thematic role of the external argument position is in fact underspecified. The relevant notion is that of an effector (in Van Valin & Wilkins) or of an abstract causer/initiator (in Ramchand). In this paper we argue against a total underspecification of the external argument relation. While we agree that (1b) does not instantiate an instrument theta role in subject position, we argue that a complete underspecification of the external theta-position is not feasible, but that two types of external theta roles have to be distinguished, Agents and Causers. Our arguments are based on languages where Agents and Causers show morpho-syntactic independence (section 2.1) and the behavior of instrument subjects in English, Dutch, German and Greek (section 2.2 and 3). We show that instrument subjects are either Agent or Causer like. In section (4) we give an analysis how arguments realizing these thematic notions are introduced into syntax.
In the recent literature there is growing interest in the morpho-syntactic encoding of hierarchical effects. The paper investigates one domain where such effects are attested: ergative splits conditioned by person. This type of splits is then compared to hierarchical effects in direct-inverse alternations. On the basis of two case studies (Lummi instantiating an ergative split person language and Passamaquoddy an inverse language) we offer an account that makes no use of hierarchies as a primitive. We propose that the two language types differ as far as the location of person features is concerned. In inverse systems person features are located exclusively in T, while in ergative systems, they are located in T and a particular type of v. A consequence of our analysis is that Case checking in split and inverse systems is guided by the presence/absence of specific phi-features. This in turn provides evidence for a close connection between Case and phi-features, reminiscent of Chomsky’s (2000, 2001) Agree.
In this paper I argue in favor of a Matching Analysis for German relative clauses. The Head Raising Analysis is shown to fail to account for parts of the reconstruction pattern in German, especially cases where only the external head is interpreted and the absence of Principle C effects. I propose a Matching Analysis with Vehicle Change and make consistent assumptions about possible deletion operations in relatives so that the entire pattern can be captured by one analysis which therefore proves superior to previous ones.
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.
Research on a variety of structurally different languages suggests that information is assigned to grammatical form in way of preferred representations of arguments. These preferences can be captured by four interacting constraints which are based on the analysis of spoken and written discourse. These constraints represent measurable discourse preferences: pragmatically unmarked utterances seem to follow them blindly and widely. Consequently, the preferences motivating these constraints seem to represent the default structuring of discourse in immediate relation to elementary grammatical form. Discourse is no longer viewed as acting upon grammatical form, but as being ‘grammatical’ itself.
Agreement is traditionally viewed as a cross-referencing device for core arguments such as subjects and (primary) objects.1 In this paper, I discuss data from Bantu languages that lead to a radical departure from this generally accepted position: agreement in a subset of Bantu languages cross-references a (sentential) topic rather than the subject. The crucial evidence for topic agreement comes from a construction known as subject-object (S-O) reversal, where the fronted patient agrees with what has uniformly been taken to be a `subject marker'. The correct analysis of S-O reversal as a topic construction with `topic agreement' explains a range of known facts in the languages in question. Furthermore, synchronic variation across Bantu in the presence/absence of S-O reversal and in the properties of the (topic/subject) agreement marker suggests a diachronic path from topic to subject marking. The systematic variation and covariation in the syntax of Bantu languages and the historical picture that it offers would be missed altogether if we continue to reject the idea that the notion of topic can be deeply grammaticized in the form of agreement.
This paper investigates what factors make a particular referent a good antecedent for subsequent pronominal reference. In particular, it explores two seemingly conflicting claims in the literature regarding the effects of topicality and focusing on referent salience. In light of new experimental results combined with a review of existing work, I conclude that neither topicality nor focusing alone can explain referent salience as indicated by patterns of pronoun reference. Rather, the data provide support for a multiple-factor model of salience (e.g. Arnold 1999). More specifically, the results show that grammatical role has a striking effect: being a subject makes a referent more salient than either pronominalization/givenness or focusing alone. Furthermore, the results of the experiment suggest that the likelihood of subsequent pronominal reference is also influenced by structural focusing and pronominalization, but not as strongly as by subjecthood. I argue that these data are best captured by a multiple-factor model in which factors differ in how influential they are relative to one another, i.e. how heavily weighted they are. A single-factor system does not seem adequate for these data.
This paper focuses on restrictions on the ordering of internal constituents of noun phrases in Chichewa, especially when those constituents are discontinuous. The motivation for discontinuity of the NP constituents will be given, together with discussion of constructions that can be subsumed under this rubric but that do not really involve discontinuity in the canonical sense. These are constructions where a topic NP in a left periphery position is either linked anaphorically with a modifier "remnant" or semantically with its hyponym in post-verbal position. According to Guthrie's classification of Bantu languages, Chichewa is placed in zone N unit N31. It is regarded as a dialect of Nyanja, classified as belonging to unit N30 (Guthrie 1967-71).
Russian predicate cleft constructions have the surprising property of being associated with adversative clauses of the opposite polarity. I argue that clefts are associated with adversative clauses because they have the semantics of S-Topics in Büring's (1997, 2000) sense of the term. It is shown that the polarity of the adversative clause is obligatorily opposed to that of the cleft because the use of a cleft gives rise to a relevance-based pragmatic scale. The ordering principle according to which these scale
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.
Since Haiman (1978), a general assumption concerning the information structure of conditional sentences is that "conditionals are topics". However, in Chadic South Bauchi West languages spoken in Northern Nigeria, as well as in Banda Linda, an Adamawa language spoken in the République Centre-Africaine, conditionals share their structure with focus, not topic. This seriously questions Haiman’s claim and forces us to reconsider the facts and characterizations of conditionals, topic and focus in general.
In order to do this, we will first examine the facts of conditionals in some Chadic languages, then their information structure. We will see how both data and theory invalidate Haiman's claim. Then we will see that if they are not topics, they are different from focus as well. We will argue that if the elements which make a topic or a focus can appear in conditionals, these must be separated from what constitutes the identity of conditions. Then, we will see if these can be characterized in the same way as Lambrecht characterizes temporal clauses, viz. as "activated propositions" (Lambrecht 1994). We will finally conclude that they should rather be defined as "fictitious assertions" (Culioli 2000).
Tone as a distinctive feature used to differentiate not only words but also clause types, is a characteristic feature of Bantu languages. In this paper we show that Bemba relatives can be marked with a low tone in place of a segmental relative marker. This low tone strategy of relativization, which imposes a restrictive reading of relatives, manifests a specific phonological phrasing that can be differentiated from that of non-restrictives. The paper shows that the resultant phonological phrasing favours a head-raising analysis of relativization. In this sense, phonology can be shown to inform syntactic analyses.
In my paper, I show that the so-called German right dislocation actually comprises two distinct constructions, which I label 'right dislocation proper' and 'afterthought'. These differ in their prosodic and syntactic properties, as well as in their discourse functions. The paper is primarily concerned with the right dislocation proper (RD). I present a semantic analysis of RD based on the 'separate performative' account of Potts (2004, 2005) and Portner (forthc.). This analysis allows a description of the semantic contribution of RD to its host sentence, as well as explaining certain semantic constraints on the kind of NP in the RD construction.
The collection of papers in this volume presents results of a collaborative project between the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, the Zentrum für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung (ZAS) in Berlin, and the University of Leiden. All three institutions have a strong interest in the linguistics of Bantu languages, and in 2003 decided to set up a network to compare results and to provide a platform for on-going discussion of different topics on which their research interests converged. The project received funding from the British Academy International Networks Programme, and from 2003 to 2006 seven meetings were held at the institutions involved under the title Bantu Grammar: Description and Theory, indicating the shared belief that current research in Bantu is best served by combining the description of new data with theoretically informed analysis. During the life-time of the network, and partly in conjunction with it, larger externally funded Bantu research projects have been set up at all institutions: projects on word-order and morphological marking and on phrasal phonology in Leiden, on pronominal reference, agreement and clitics in Romance and Bantu at SOAS, and on focus in Southern Bantu languages at ZAS. The papers in this volume provide a sampling of the work developed within the network and show, or so we think, how fruitful the sharing of ideas over the last three years has been. While the current British Academy-funded network is coming to an end in 2006, we hope that the cooperative structures we have established will continue to develop - and be expanded - in the future, providing many future opportunities to exchange findings and ideas about Bantu linguistics.
The Bantu language Makhuwa makes a distinction between cojoint and disjoint verb forms. Two hypotheses are made from generalisations on the distribution of the conjoint and disjoint verb forms in Makhuwa. 1) The verb appears in its conjoint form when a focal element occupies the Immediate After Verb (IAV) position; 2) the verb appears in its disjoint form when the IAV position is empty. A syntactic analysis is provided that accounts for these hypotheses if the IAV position is defined in terms of structural rather than linear adjacency between two heads in a direct c-command relation.
In the syntactic analysis two focus projections are proposed: one under TP (Ndayiragije 1999) hosting the disjoint morpheme and one under vP, to whose specifier focal elements move. Non-focal elements remain in-situ. This analysis accounts both for the strong adjacency requirement of a cojoint verb form and its focal object and for the empty IAV position that requires a verb to appear in its disjoint form.
This paper presents a sketch of the prosodic, syntactic and morphological means of expressing focus in Chitumbuka, an underdescribed Bantu language of Malawi. The chief prosodic correlate of focus is boundary narrowing – rephrasing conditioned by focus – which is used not only to signal in situ focus but also in syntactic and morphological focus constructions. Of theoretical importance is the fact that rephrasing does not lend culminative prominence to the focused constituent. Although Chitumbuka has culminative sentential stress, its position remains fixed at the right edge of the clause, independent of the position of focus. This makes Chitumbuka a challenge for theories of focus prosody which claim that the focused constituent must have culminative sentential prominence.
This paper discusses locative inversion constructions in Otjiherero against the background of previous work by Bresnan and Kanerva (1989) on the construction in Chichewa, and Demuth and Mmusi (1997) on Setswana and related languages. Locative inversion in Otjiherero is structurally similar to locative inversion in Chichewa and Setswana, but differs from these languages in that there are fewer thematic restrictions on predicates undergoing locative inversion. As Otjiherero has a three-way morphological distinction of locative subject markers, this shows that there is no relation between agreement morphology and thematic restrictions in locative inversion, confirming the result of Demuth and Mmusi. The availability of transitive predicates to participate in locative inversion in Otjiherero furthermore raises questions about the relation between locative inversion, valency, and applicative marking, and these are addressed in the paper, although further research is needed for a full analysis. In terms of function of the locative subject markers, Otjiherero presents, like Chishona, a split system where all markers support locative readings, but where one of them is also used in expletive contexts. In contrast to Chishona, though, this is the class 16, rather than the class 17 marker.
Genitive focus in Supyire
(2006)
Supyire has two distinct genitive constructions, one consisting of juxtaposed nouns, and the other marked with a particle. This study demonstrates that the marked genitive correlates significantly in natural discourse with contrastive focus as operationally defined in Myhill and Xing (1996). The method used avoids the vicious circularity of many discourse-based studies of focus. Contrastive focus, rather than being "coded", is a pragmatic construal which is dependent on other elements in the communicative context. This construal is only one of the possible construals of the marked genitive (contra Carlson 1994). In this it is not unlike other so-called "contrastive focus" constructions noted in the literature, such as contrastive stress in English.
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).
Introduction
(2006)
The papers in this volume reflect a number of broad themes which have emerged during the meetings of the project as particularly relevant for current Bantu linguistics. [...] The papers show that approaches to Bantu linguistics have also developed in new directions since this foundational work. For example, interaction of phonological phrasing with syntax and word order on the one hand, and with information structure on the other, is more prominent in the papers here than in earlier literature. Quite generally, the role of information structure for the understanding of Bantu syntax has become more important, in particular with respect to the expression of topic and focus, but also for the analysis of more central syntactic concerns such as questions and relative clauses. This, of course, relates to a wider development in linguistic theory to incorporate notions of topic and focus into core syntactic analysis, and it is not surprising that work on Bantu languages and on linguistic theory are closely related to each other in this respect. Another noteworthy development is the increasing interest in variation among Bantu languages which reflects the fact that more empirical evidence from more Bantu languages has become available over the last decade or so. The picture that emerges from this research is that morpho-syntactic variation in Bantu is rich and complex, and that there is strong potential to link this research to research on micro-variation in European (and other) languages, and to the study of morpho-syntactic variables, or parameters, more generally.
Modern theorists rarely agree on how to represent the categories of tense and aspect, making a consistent analysis for phenomena, such as the present perfect, more difficult to attain. It has been argued in previous analyses that the variable behavior of the present perfect between languages licenses independently motivated treatments, particularly of a morphosyntactic or semanticsyntactic nature (Giorgi & Pianesi 1997; Schmitt 2001; Ilari 2001). More specifically, the wellknown readings of the American English (AE) present perfect (resultative, experiential, persistent situation, recent past (Comrie 1976)), are at odds with the readings of the corresponding structure in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), the 'pretérito perfeito composto' (default iterativity and occasional duration (Ilari 1999)). Despite these variations, the present work, assuming a tense-aspect framework at the semantic-pragmatic interface, will provide a unified analysis for the present perfect in AE and BP, which have traditionally been treated as semantically divergent. The present perfect meaning, in conjunction with the aspectual class of the predicate, can account for the major differences between languages, particularly regarding iterativity and the "present perfect puzzle", regarding adverb compatibility.
Focus on verbal operators such as aspect or tense ("predication focus", lucidly described by Hyman & Watters (1984) under the label "auxiliary focus") has been noticed to exist in African languages of Afroasiatic and Niger-Congo affiliation, but not so far in Saharan. The Saharan language Kanuri is assumed to have substantially reorganized its TAM system, particularly in the perfective aspect domain (Cyffer [2006] dates major changes between the years 1820 and 1900). The paper discusses, for the first time in Kanuri scholarship, the existence of a neat subsystem of predication focus marking by suffix in the perfective aspect which is made up of a total of six conjugational paradigms that uniformly encode predication focus by suffix {-ò}. Kanuri dialects differ in strategies and scope of focus marking encoded in verb morphology. In the light of data from the Yerwa (Nigeria) and Manga (Niger) dialects the paper discusses some "anomalies" with regard to general focus theory which we account for by describing the "Kanuri Focus Shift" as a diachronic process which is responsible for leftward displacement of scope of focus.
Questions in Northern Sotho
(2006)
This article gives an overview of the marking of polar and constituent questions in Northern Sotho, a Bantu language of South Africa. It thereby provides a contribution to the typological investigation of sentence types in the world’s languages. As will be shown, Northern Sotho follows cross-linguistic tendencies in marking interrogative sentences: It uses intonation as main indicator in polar questions and question words as main indicator in constituent questions. Nevertheless, it also shows interesting language-specific variation, e.g. with respect to the location of raised intonation in polar questions, the presence of two pragmatically distinct question particles in polar questions, or a split in the formation of constituent questions based on the grammatical function of the questioned constituent.
Zulu shows an alternation of conjoint and disjoint (conjunctive/disjunctive, short/long) verb forms. Certain contexts suggest that the distribution of these forms is related to focus. For example, certain adverbial expressions receive a focal interpretation when preceded by a conjoint form but not when preceded by a disjoint form. Similarly, a wh-phrase must be preceded by a conjoint form. This has led some researchers to argue or suggest that the alternation encodes focus directly. This paper examines two different focal hypotheses, one in which a disjoint form encodes focus on the verb and another in which the conjoint form encodes focus on the element following the verb. It is shown that both of these hypotheses are inadequate because certain contexts requiring the conjoint form do not display the predicted focal interpretation. Relativization morphology is argued to also support an analysis independent of focus. It is proposed that the alternation is regulated entirely by the position of the verb within the surface constituencies first proposed in Van der Spuy (1993) and that the associated focal interpretations are the result of a range of interpretations permitted within the different constituencies. Elements remaining within the relevant constituent are nontopical, and focus is one of a range of interpretations they can receive.
Beria, a member of the Saharan language family, is one of the rare languages in Africa exhibiting both an ergative and an active/agentive alignment system of grammatical relations.1 While the active/agentive pattern is shown by the participant reference markers, the ergative pattern is attested both in the constituent order and in the focus markers on the core constituents. In the pragmatically unmarked constituent order, the Agent constituent precedes the Patient constituent. An unmarked single constituent immediately preceding the verb may represent a Patient or a Subject argument. In this position, the Agent constituent requires the clitic GU. The focused Patient and Subject constituents are both either marked by the clitic DI or by a cleft construction.
In this paper I argue that the syntax of Eastern Bantu does not make reference to the notion 'syntactic object'. That is, there is no linguistic category of objects that is the target of syntactic rules in Eastern Bantu languages. Instead I propose that syntactic rules broadly distinguish complements and adjuncts as well as category type of complement or adjunct. I argue that Bantu languages are typologically special in that (a) the verb complement structure can be expanded by the valency increasing applicative suffix; and (b) that the class of adjuncts can be expanded through verb concord licensing. Because of these properties, Bantu languages have a much-expanded notion of 'complement' and 'adjunct'. Namely, complements consist of (a) inherent complements (subcategorised by the lexical verb), and (b) derived complements (licensed by the applicative suffix). Adjuncts consist of (a) non-subcategorised modifying constituents in the usual sense and (b) phrases that are licensed by verb concord (i.e. Topics in Bresnan and Mchombo (1987)). I propose that most the differences in the licensing of objects in Bantu are due to two causes: (a) the unusual split in the composition of complements and adjuncts and (b) a set of typological parameter settings.
Complex focus versus double focus : investigations on multiple focus interpretations in Hungarian
(2006)
The main aim of this paper is to point out several problems with the semantic analysis of Hungarian focus interpretation and 'only'. For current semantic analyses the interpretation of Hungarian identificational/exhaustive focus and 'only' is problematic, since in classical semantic analyses 'only' is identified with an exhaustivity operator. In this paper I will discuss multiple focus constructions and question-answer pairs in Hungarian to show that such a view cannot be applied to Hungarian exhaustive focus. Next to this I will discuss possible interpretations of Hungarian sentences containing multiple prosodic foci: complex focus versus double focus. My claim is that in order to interpret multiple focus (in Hungarian) we have to take into consideration the different intonation patterns, the occurrence of 'only', and the syntactic structure as well.
Focus theories distinguish different types of focus according to the pragmatic conditions or communicative point on the one side and different scopes of focus on the other side. The assertion in term focus constructions (Dik 1989), called by others argument focus constructions or identificational sentences (Lambrecht 1994), has the purpose of establishing a relation between an argument and an open proposition. Kar, a north-eastern Senufo language of Burkina Faso, which has the basic word order S-Aux-O-V-other, has at its disposal different strategies to mark argument focus, among them fronting of the focused item. In many West African languages the displacement of the focused argument involves other devices, such as the use of special verb forms. In Kar fronting of a focused argument requires the use of special pronouns in the out-of-focus part of the sentence, called background subject pronouns. They are used in other backgrounded contexts, too, for example in relative clauses, adverbial clauses and constituent questions. Their inconsistent use is attributed to a particular sociolinguistic situation in which the data has been collected. The use of the same focus strategies for completive and contrastive focus suggests that Kar does not distinguish pragmatic conditions on the level of sentence grammar.
Many analyses of existential sentences have focused attention on determining which of its elements constitutes the logical subject and predicate, and this has proven to be a not uncontroversial topic of research. Some, from both syntactic and semantic points of view, have argued that there is a subject (cf. Williams 1994) others that it is a predicate (cf. Moro 1997). Similarly, some have argued that the associate NP is a logical subject, others that it is apredicate (Higginbotham 1987).
One logical possibility that has not (to my knowledge) been pursued in the linguistics literature is that these statements are not of the form subject-predicate, a possibility that has been taken up in the philosophical literature by P.F. Strawson (1959). He claims that there are such statements and that their form is simpler than that of subject-predicate statements because it does not, and cannot, involve an expression that makes reference to an individual. Not involving reference to an individual, these sentences are therefore are made true by different means than a subject-predicate statement whose truth, in the simplest cases, depends on the denotation of the subject being a member of the denotation of the predicate. Of interest from the point of view of the present discussion is his claim that existential statements are examples of this kind of statement, which he calls a feature-placing statement. The truth of a statement of the form feature-placer requires that something with the set of features denoted by the associate NP exist at the location or coordinates expressed by the placer. In an existential sentence we can take the associate NP as the feature-denoting expression and the coda-XP as the placer.
This paper focuses on different subtypes of constructions involving temporally bounded quantification, e.g. sequences like David visited Rome three times followed by temporal phrases as different as (i) last year, which defines a time interval; (ii) in less that two months, which defines an amount of time; and (iii) per month, which refers to a time unit. As for the first two types of temporal phrases, data will be presented which shows that they have specific linguistic properties in these quantifying contexts, and do not behave exactly as the locating or duration adverbials they are superficially identical with. The third type of phrases will receive special attention. Structures with frequency adverbials like n times per month will be analysed compositionally, separating the quantified component n times from the temporally binding phrase per month (whose role is comparable to that of adverbials (i) and (ii) in the relevant constructions). The data presented is mainly from Portuguese, although the issues at stake – the linguistic properties of temporally bounded quantification – are obviously relevant to parallel constructions in other languages.
This paper looks at sentences with "quantificational indefinites," discussed by Diesing (1992) and others. I propose that these sentences generate sets of alternatives of the form {p, not p and it's possible that p}, which restrict the quantification by an extension of familiar focus principles. For example, in the sentence "I usually read a book about slugs" (on the relevant reading), "usually" quantifies over pairs <x,t> such that x is a book about slugs, t is a time interval, and one alternative is true from the set {I read x at t, I can but do not read x at t}. In addition to accounting for a well-known contrast between creation and non-creation verbs, this also explains a second contrast that Diesing’s analysis cannot account for.
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.
On describing word order
(2006)
One aspect that is always discussed in language descriptions, no matter how short they may be, is word order. Beginning with Greenberg 1963, it has been common to talk about word order using expressions such as "X is an SOV language", where "S" represents "subject", "0" represents "object", and "V" represents "verb". Statements such as this are based on an assumption of comparability, an assumption that all languages manifest the categories represented by "S", "0", and "V" (among others), and that word order in all languages can be described (and compared) using these categories.
Based on a Relevance Theory-informed view of language development, this paper argues that grammatical relations are construction-specific conventionalizations (grammaticalizations) of implicatures which arise out of repeated patterns of reference to particular types of referents. Once conventionalized, these structures function to constrain the hearer's identification of referents in discourse. As they are construction-specific, and hence language-specific, there is no category "subject" across languages; different languages will either show this type of grammaticalization or not, and if they do, may show it or not in different constructions. Any cross-linguistic use of terms such as "subject" (and "S", as in "SOV") should then be avoided.
Our paper aims at capturing the distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs) within lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG). The condition under which an NPI can occur in a sentence is for it to be in the scope of a negation with no quantifiers scopally intervening. We model this restriction within a recent framework for LTAG semantics based on semantic unification. The proposed analysis provides features that signal the presence of a negation in the semantics and that specify its scope. We extend our analysis to modelling the interaction of NPI licensing and neg raising constructions.
These proceedings, also online available as No. 46 in the ZAS Papers in Linguistics series under http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/index.html?publications_zaspil have resulted from the International Conference "Focus in African languages" held October 6-8, 2005 at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (ZAS) in Berlin. The conference was cooperatively organized by the latter, together with the Collaborative Research Center (Sonderforschungsforschungsbereich) 632, generously funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). It was the first conference bringing together colleagues working on this topic from all over the world in such scale.
Even though this volume contains only ten contributions out of the 35 papers presented at the conference, it displays the wide range of approaches, subjects and languages studied in the field of information structure in African languages. The collection thus reflects the synergetic atmosphere of the conference.
In the name of all organizers (Laura Downing, Ines Fiedler, Katharina Hartmann, Brigitte Reineke, Anne Schwarz, Sabine Zerbian, Malte Zimmermann) we would like to take this opportunity to thank the participant reviewers and student assistants for their contributions by which the conference became such a fruitful forum for inspiring and seminal studies in this field. Also special thanks for their effort in copy editing to our research assistants Lars Marstaller and Paul Starzmann.