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Institute
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.
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.
This paper is one argument for a theory of grammatical relations in Chinese in which there are no grammatical relations beyond semantic roles, and no lexical relation-changing rules. As the passive rule is one of the most common relation changing rules cross-linguistically, in this paper I will address the question of whether or not Mandarin Chinese has lexical passives, that is, passives defined as in Relational Grammar (see for example Perlmutter and Postal 1977) and the early Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) literature (e.g. Bresnan 1982), where a 2-arc (object) is promoted to a 1-arc (subject).
In attempting to reconstruct the morphosyntax of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, one of the most basic questions to be answered is what was the unmarked word order of the proto-language? Chinese, Bai, and Karen are verb-medial languages, while all of the Tibeto-Burman languages except for Bai and Karen have verb-final word order. lf these languages are all related, as we can assume from lexical correspondences, then either Chinese, Bai and Karen changed from verb-final to verb-medial word order, or the other Tibeto-Burman languages changed trom verb-medial to verb-final order. How we answer the question of which languages changed their word would then give us the answer to the question of word order in Proto-Sino-Tibetan.
Thirty-one years ago Tsu-lin Mei (1961) argued against the traditional doctrine that saw the subject-predicate distinction in grammar as parallel to the particular- universal distinction in logic, as he said it was a reflex of an Indo-European bias, and could not be valid, as ‘Chinese ... does not admit a distinction into subject and predicate’ (p. 153). This has not stopped linguists working on Chinese from attempting to define ‘subject’ (and ‘object’) in Chinese. Though a number of linguists have lamented the difficulties in trying to define these concepts for Chinese (see below), most work done on Chinese still assumes that Chinese must have the same grammatical features as Indo-European, such as having a subject and a direct object, though no attempt is made to justify that view. This paper challenges that view and argues that there has been no grammaticalization of syntactic functions in Chinese. The correct assignment of semantic roles to the constituents of a discourse is done by the listener on the basis of the discourse structure and pragmatics (information flow, inference, relevance, and real world knowledge) (cf. Li & Thompson 1978, 1979; LaPolla 1990).
Middle voice marking is very rarely recognized as such in the grammars written on Tibeto-Burman languages. It is often simply treated as a normal direct reflexive or as an intransitivizer. In order to draw the attention of scholars to the existence and function of middle voice marking in Tibeto-Burman languages, the present paper discusses the form and function of middle marking in several of these languages. We will first discuss key facts about middle marking in general, then discuss the individual Tibeto-Burman examples.
Ever since the publication of Greenberg 1963, word order typologists have attempted to formulate and refine implicational universals of word order so as to characterize the restricted distribution of certain word order patterns, and in some cases have also attempted to develop general principles to explain the existence of those universals.
Evidentiality in Qiang
(2003)
The Qiang language is spoken by about 70,000 (out of 200,000) Qiang people, plus 50,000 people classified as Tibetan by the Chinese government. Most Qiang speakers live in Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture on the eastern edge of the Tibetan plateau in the mountainous northwest part of Sichuan Province, China. The Qiang language is a member of the Qiangic branch of the Tibeto-Burman family of the Sino-Tibetan stock. Within Tibeto-Burman, a number oflanguages show evidence of evidential systems, but these systems cannot be reconstructed to any great time depth. The data used in this chapter is from Ranghang Village, Chibusu District, Mao County in Aba Prefecture.
Adjectives in Qiang
(2004)
Qiang is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken by 70,000-80,000 people in Northern Sichuan Province, China, classified as being in the Qiang or Tibetan nationality by the Chinese government. The language is verb final, agglutinative (prefixing and suffixing), and has both head-marking and dependent-marking morphology.
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.
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.
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.
The philosophy of language comes in three varieties. 1. The functionalist’s view: linguistic forms are instruments used to convey meaningful elements. This is the basis of European structuralism. 2. The formalist’s view: linguistic forms are abstract structures which can be filled with meaningful elements. This is the basis of generative grammar. 3. The parasitologist’s view: linguistic forms are vehicles for the reproduction of meaningful elements. This is the view which I advocated twelve years ago in a Festschrift (1985).
In his magnum opus (Syntax and Semantics, Leiden 1978, henceforth: S&S) C.L. Ebeling makes a distinction between temporal gradation (pp 301-308 and 337-339) and temporal limitation (pp 311-315). In the case of temporal gradation “p , q”, the meaning “q” specifies the time during which the referent carries the mean-ing “p”.
The argument that I tried to elaborate on in this paper is that the conceptual problem behind the traditional competence/performance distinction does not go away, even if we abandon its original Chomskyan formulation. It returns as the question about the relation between the model of the grammar and the results of empirical investigations – the question of empirical verification The theoretical concept of markedness is argued to be an ideal correlate of gradience. Optimality Theory, being based on markedness, is a promising framework for the task of bridging the gap between model and empirical world. However, this task not only requires a model of grammar, but also a theory of the methods that are chosen in empirical investigations and how their results are interpreted, and a theory of how to derive predictions for these particular empirical investigations from the model. Stochastic Optimality Theory is one possible formulation of a proposal that derives empirical predictions from an OT model. However, I hope to have shown that it is not enough to take frequency distributions and relative acceptabilities at face value, and simply construe some Stochastic OT model that fits the facts. These facts first of all need to be interpreted, and those factors that the grammar has to account for must be sorted out from those about which grammar should have nothing to say. This task, to my mind, is more complicated than the picture that a simplistic application of (not only) Stochastic OT might draw.
The aim of this paper is the exploration of an optimality theoretic architecture for syntax that is guided by the concept of "correspondence": syntax is understood as the mechanism of "translating" underlying representations into a surface form. In minimalism, this surface form is called "Phonological Form" (PF). Both semantic and abstract syntactic information are reflected by the surface form. The empirical domain where this architecture is tested are minimal link effects, especially in the case of "wh"-movement. The OT constraints require the surface form to reflect the underlying semantic and syntactic representations as maximally as possible. The means by which underlying relations and properties are encoded are precedence, adjacency, surface morphology and prosodic structure. Information that is not encoded in one of these ways remains unexpressed, and gets lost unless it is recoverable via the context. Different kinds of information are often expressed by the same means. The resulting conflicts are resolved by the relative ranking of the relevant correspondence constraints.
This paper argues for a particular architecture of OT syntax. This architecture hasthree core features: i) it is bidirectional, the usual production-oriented optimisation (called ‘first optimisation’ here) is accompanied by a second step that checks the recoverability of an underlying form; ii) this underlying form already contains a full-fledged syntactic specification; iii) especially the procedure checking for recoverability makes crucial use of semantic and pragmatic factors. The first section motivates the basic architecture. The second section shows with two examples, how contextual factors are integrated. The third section examines its implications for learning theory, and the fourth section concludes with a broader discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed model.
Weak function word shift
(2004)
The fact that object shift only affects weak pronouns in mainland Scandinavian is seen as an instance of a more general observation that can be made in all Germanic languages: weak function words tend to avoid the edges of larger prosodic domains. This generalisation has been formulated within Optimality Theory in terms of alignment constraints on prosodic structure by Selkirk (1996) in explaining thedistribution of prosodically strong and weak forms of English functionwords, especially modal verbs, prepositions and pronouns. But a purely phonological account fails to integrate the syntactic licensing conditions for object shift in an appropriate way. The standard semantico-syntactic accounts of object shift, onthe other hand, fail to explain why it is only weak pronouns that undergo object shift. This paper develops an Optimality theoretic model of the syntax-phonology interface which is based on the interaction of syntactic and prosodic factors. The account can successfully be applied to further related phenomena in English and German.
German dialects vary in which of the possible orders of the verbs in a 3-verb cluster they allow. In a still ongoing empirical investigation that I am undertaking together with Tanja Schmid, University of Stuttgart (Schmid and Vogel (2004)) we already found that each of the six logically possible permutations of the 3-verb cluster in (1) can be found in German dialects.
This paper reports the results of a corpus investigation on case conflicts in German argument free relative constructions. We investigate how corpus frequencies reflect the relative markedness of free relative and correlative constructions, the relative markedness of different case conflict configurations, and the relative markedness of different conflict resolution strategies. Section 1 introduces the conception of markedness as used in Optimality Theory. Section 2 introduces the facts about German free relative clauses, and section 3 presents the results of the corpus study. By and large, markedness and frequency go hand in hand. However, configurations at the highest end of the markedness scale rarely show up in corpus data, and for the configuration at the lowest end we found an unexpected outcome: the more marked structure is preferred.
This paper is part of a research project on OT Syntax and the typology of the free relative (FR) construction. It concentrates on the details of an OT analysis and some of its consequences for OT syntax. I will not present a general discussion of the phenomenon and the many controversial issues it is famous for in generative syntax.
Eine Einführung in eine Reihe von linguistischen Phänomenen von Phonetik bis Pragmatik, einige theoretische Ansätze zur Beschreibung/für diese Phänomene, mit einem Blick auf Phänomene und Ansätze, die für kognitive Linguisten und Neurologen interessant sind. Der Begriff "Schnittstelle" ist in der Linguistik ein technischer Terminus, der beschreibt, wie verschiedene Typen von Phänomenen miteinander in einer Beziehung stehen, aber der Terminus soll auch beschreiben, wie linguistische und außerlinguistische Phänomene ineinandergreifen.
Ein zentrales Thema in den Arbeiten Klaus Welkes ist die Analyse formal bestimmter Relationen, die semantisch interpretierbar sind (vgl. etwa WELKE 1988, 1992, 1994, 2001, 22005). Wichtige Fragestellungen sind hier insbesondere: Wie ist die Hierarchie logisch-pragmatischer Rollen, wie die syntaktischer Funktionen? Wie hängen die beiden Bereiche zusammen? Wie können wir dies mit Hilfe von Argumentstrukturen erfassen? Der vorliegende Beitrag wird sich mit dem hierfür zentralen Aspekt der Verknüpfung syntaktischer und semantischer Relationen aus einer evolutionären Perspektive befassen. In Übereinstimmung mit WELKE (22005) gehe ich davon aus, „daß es neben einer Syntax formaler Strukturen auch eine Syntax semantischer Strukturen gibt“ (WELKE 22005, 4) und untersuche vor diesem Hintergrund, wie eine Entstehung dieser beiden Domänen und die Verknüpfung der betreffenden Strukturen im Rahmen der Evolution menschlicher Sprache aussehen könnte.
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.
In letzter Zeit haben trennbare Verben, meist "Partikelverben" genannt, groß es Interesse gefunden, insbesondere solche, bei denen der trennbare Teil eine Präposition darstellt. Ich werde mich im folgenden auf Verbindungen konzentrieren, die sich aus einem Substantiv als Erstglied und einem Verb als Zweitglied zusammensetzen. Es soll gezeigt werden, daß es sich bei Verbindungen wie Auto fahren, Klavier spielen um komplexe Prädikate handelt, die sich in ihren Eigenschaften deutlich von parallelen syntaktischen Strukturen unterscheiden, in denen dem Substantiv der Status einer selbständigen Konstituente zukommt.
Unter Syntaktikern besteht generell die Tendenz, im Deutschen die Freiheit bezüglich der Positionierung der Adverbiale sogar für noch größer zu halten als die Freiheit der Positionierung der Argumente. Wie die Stellungsfreiheit der Argumente im Mittelfeld eines deutschen Satzes theoretisch zu erfassen sei, wird seit langer Zeit kontrovers diskutiert. Die Hauptfrage dreht sich darum, ob alle Serialisierungen der Argumente basisgeneriert sind oder ob es eine ausgezeichnete Serialisierung der Argumente, eine sogenannte Grundabfolge, gibt, aus der sämtliche anderen Aktantenserialisierungen durch eine Ableitungsoperation bzw. Bewegung zu gewinnen sind. Diese grundsätzlichen Fragen stellen sich auch bezüglich der Positionierungsmöglichkeiten der Adverbiale, auch wenn sie hierfür bei weitem nicht so häufig gestellt und diskutiert wurden.
Der Ausgangspunkt ist die These, daß die verschiedenen Adverbialklassen im Deutschen unterschiedliche Basispositionen aufweisen und daß sich diese durch unterschiedliche strukturelle Anforderungen an die Klassen ergeben. Es soll gezeigt werden, daß sich die plausible Vermutung, daß die Adverbialklassen in Sprachen wie dem Deutschen und dem Englischen entsprechenden strukturellen Bedingungen unterliegen, bestätigt. Unterschiede im Verhalten der Adverbiale in den beiden Sprachen werden demnach nicht durch unterschiedliche Eigenschaften der Adverbiale erfaßt, sondern diese ergeben sich durch die unterschiedlichen Satzstrukturen und die unterschiedlichen Weisen der Argumentverwaltung. Dies wird illustriert anhand von Adverbialen der Art und Weise, Lokal- und Temporaladverbialen, Adverbialen der Subjekthaltung und Satzadverbialen.
This paper deals with restitutive and repetitive wieder. Proceeding from the assumption that adverbial adjuncts have base positions which reflect their semantic relations to the rest of the sentence, it is shown that repetitive wieder belongs to the class of event adverbs minimally c-commanding the base positions of all arguments whereas restitutive wieder has many properties in common with process adjuncts, minimally c-commanding the final verb.
This paper argues for a scopal explanation of the readings of the adverb wieder (‘again’). It is the syntactic entity that wieder is related to which determines whether the repetitive or the restitutive reading obtains. If it is adjoined to the minimal verbal domain, it relates to a situation-internal state thus producing a restitutive interpretation, if adjoined to a higher verbal projection, it relates to an eventuality resulting in a repetitive interpretation. Proceeding from the assumption that adverbial adjuncts have base positions which reflect their semantic relations to the rest of the sentence, repetitive wieder is shown to belong to the class of eventuality adverbs that minimally c-command the base positions of all arguments, whereas restitutive wieder has many properties in common with process (manner) adjuncts that minimally c-command the verb in clause-final base position.
In der diachronen Entwicklung des Deutschen lassen sich mehrere Veränderungen hinsichtlich des Relativpronomens beobachten. Im Alt- und Mittelhochdeutschen (im folgenden AHD und MHD) war die sog. "Kasusattraktion" möglich, d.h. das Relativpronomen konnte einen vom Matrixsatz geforderten Kasus tragen, obwohl die Verhältnisse im Relativsatz einen anderen Kasus erfordert hätten. Zudem konnte im AHD und MHD das Relativpronomen im Gegensatz zum Neuhochdeutschen (im folgenden NHD) ganz fehlen.
Thema dieses Aufsatzes sind die Methoden der Datenerhebung für syntaktische Untersuchungen und deren Auswirkungen auf die Ergebnisse dieser Untersuchungen. Die Wahl der Datenbasis ist selbst schon bestimmt durch bestimmte theoretische Positionen, Einstellungen gegenüber dem Forschungsgegenstand und durch bestimmte Erkenntnisinteressen. Es soll hier also nicht der Eindruck erweckt werden, als wäre die Datenbasis per se für die "Folgen" verantwortlich.
Redekommentierende Einschübe
(1996)
Das Thema dieses Aufsatzes sind redekommentierende Einschübe. Zunächst gilt es zu klären, was unter "Einschub" verstanden werden soll. Einschub verwende ich hier weitgehend gleichbedeutend mit Parenthese. Parenthesen werden jedoch manchmal als "Schaltsätze", also als eingeschobene Sätze, definiert. Einschub ist hier ein weniger vorbelasteter Terminus.
Valenz und Relevanz - eine informationsstrukturelle Erklärung für "obligatorische" Adverbiale
(1995)
Adverbiale stellen ein Problem fü r die Beschreibung der Valenz bzw. der Argumentstruktur von Verben dar, da sie sowohl als Ergänzungen (Argumente) wie auch als freie Angaben (Adjunkte) auftreten können. Die Obligatorik bietet keine Möglichkeit, Ergänzungen von Angaben zu unterscheiden, da Ergänzungen sowohl obligatorisch als auch fakultativ sein können.
In der Regel stehen Quantoren bei dem Nomen, das sie quantifizieren. Im Deutschen wie auch in einigen anderen Sprachen können Quantoren jedoch auch in Distanzstellung zu dem quantifizierten Nomen auftreten. In diesem Aufsatz soll die Fragestellung verfolgt werden, ob das Auftreten von Quantoren in Distanzstellung als Ergebnis von Extraktion aus Nominalphrasen erklä rt werden kann, d.h. ob die Distanzstellung durch eine Bewegung entsteht, bei der eine NP aufgespalten wird. Dabei wird sich zeigen, daß eine ganze Reihe von Daten gegen eine solche Extraktionsanalyse sprechen.
Freie Relativsätze geben eine Reihe von Rätseln auf. Wie schon der Terminus andeutet, handelt es sich hier um eine widersprüchliche Erscheinung, da ein Relativsatz sich per definitionem auf ein Element im Matrixsatz bezieht, dies bei „freien Relativsätzen" jedoch nicht der Fall ist. Sie üben im übergeordneten Satz selbständig eine Satzgliedfunktion aus. Andererseits drängt sich der Eindruck auf, daß ein Bezugselement im Matrixsatz weggelassen wurde, es sich mithin also um verkappte Attributsätze handelt. Leirbukt hat sich kürzlich in einer empirischen Studie mit durch das Pronomen wer eingeleiteten Relativsätzen beschäftigt, und zwar vor allem im Hinblick auf die Frage, wann ein Bezugselement gesetzt wird bzw. nicht gesetzt wird (Leirbukt 1995). Hierzu haben eine Reihe von Grammatikern die Auffassung vertreten, daß ein Bezugselement im Matrixsatz nur dann fehlen kann, wenn das Relativpronomen die Kasusforderung des Matrixsatzes für die entsprechende Leerstelle erfüllt.
The case of German relatives
(1995)
Zur Syntax von Parenthesen
(1995)
In diesem Aufsatz sollen die syntaktischen Eigenschaften der als "Parenthesen" oder auch "Einschübe" bezeichneten Einheiten untersucht werden. Dabei wird sich zeigen, daß die gemeinhin unter Parenthesen subsumierten Strukturen überhaupt keine einheitlichen syntaktischen Eigenschaften aufweisen. Die häufig behauptete und als Definitionskriterium eingesetzte strukturelle Unabhängigkeit gegenüber dem Trägersatz erweist sich dabei als äußerst problematisch und gilt zumindest für einen Teil der Einschübe nicht.
Zur Zeit erweckt die Frage großes Interesse, wie die Semantik und die Syntax von Kasusrahmen zusammenhängen. Dabei geht es darum, herauszufinden, nach welchen Regeln bestimmte thematische Rollen mit bestimmten syntaktischen Positionen verknüpft werden. Dieser Vorgang wird als Argumentselektion oder auch argument linking bezeichnet.