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Ich möchte […] drei Beispiele für den produktiven Dialog zwischen Historischer Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachtypologie liefern: 1. Den phonologisch-typologischen Wandel des Deutschen von einer Silben- zu einer Wortsprache, 2. die frühnhd. 'Justierung' der Abfolge grammatischer Kategorien am Verb gemäß der universellen Relevanzskala, und 3. die Entwicklung unseres Höflichkeitssystems am Beispiel der Anredepronomen. Weder liefere ich Neues noch kann ich ins Detail gehen. Es geht hier nur darum, für die gegenseitige Wahrnehmung und Zusammenarbeit linguistischer Disziplinen zu werben.
Qiang
(2003)
Qiang is spoken in Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in northwest Sichuan Province. China; it belongs to the Qiangic branch of Tibeto-Burman. There are two major Qiang dialects. Northern Qiang (spoken in Heishui County, and the Chibusu district of Mao County; roughly 70,000 speakers) and Southern Qiang (spoken in Li County, Wenchuun County, Mao County, and Songpan County; about 60,000) (Sun 1981a: 177-78), The dialect presented here is the Northern Qiang variety spoken in Ronghong Village, Yadu Township, Chibusu District, Mao County.
Dulong
(2003)
Dulong [...] is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in China, closely related to the Rawang language of Myanmar (Burma). The Dulong speakers mainly live in Gongshan Dulong and Nu Autonomous County in Yunnan, China, and belong to either what is known as the Dulong nationality (pop. 5816 according to the 1990 census), or to one part (roughly 6000 people) of the Nu nationality (those who live along the upper reaches of the Nu River). The exonym 'Dulong' (or 'Taron', or 'Trung') was given to this nationality because they mostly live in the valley of the Dulong (Taron/Trung) River. In the past, the Dulong River was known as the Kiu (Qiu) river, and the Dulong people were known as the Kiu (Qiu), Kiutze (Qiuzi), Kiupa, or Kiao. Dulong is usually talked about as having four dialects, based on areas where it is spoken: First Township, Third Township, Fourth Township, and Nujiang. In this chapter, we will be using data of the First Township dialect spoken in Gongshan county.
Dulong/Rawang is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken on both sides of the China/Myanmar (Burma) border just south and cast of Tibet. [...] In this chapter, I will be using data of the Mvtwang (Mvt River) dialect, which is considered the most central of those dialects in Myanmar and so has become something of a standard for writing and intergroup communication, though most of the phenomena we will be discussing are general to dialects in both China and Myanrnar. I will use the short form 'Rawang' in referring to this dialect.
[W]hy are not all Malagasy adverbs postverbal with reverse Cinque order? The predicate raising mechanism […] operates around heads, and this leads Rackowski & Travis (2000: 122) to suggest that preverbal adverbs are not heads, but are phrasal, and are located in the Specifier positions themselves. The crucial consequence of this is that the specifier position is blocked, thus effectively preventing further predicate raising. Given that the entire analysis crucially rests on the assumption that certain elements are heads and others are phrases, it would be an advantage if some independent evidence for the X I XP status of the elements could be unearthed. Unfortunately, such evidence is hard to come by in Malagasy. However, other Austronesian languages with similar word order patterns do display rather robust evidence for the head status of certain elements. One such language in the Formosan language Seediq.
In this paper, I discuss four different verb forms in Ndebele (a Nguni Bantu language spoken mainly in Zimbabwe) - the imperative, reduplicated, future and participial. I show that while all four are subject to minimality restrictions, minimality is satisfied differently in each of these morphological contexts. To account for this, I argue that in Ndebele (as in other Bantu languages) Word and RED are not the only constituents which must satisfy minimality: the Stem is also subject to minimality conditions in some morphological contexts. This paper, then, provides additional arguments for the proposal that Phonological Word is not the only sub-lexical morpho-prosodic constituent. Further, I argue that, although Word, RED and Stern are all subject to the same minimality constraint – they must all be minimally bisyllabic - this does not follow from a single 'generalized' constraint. Instead, I argue, contra recent work within Generalized Template Theory (see, e.g., McCarthy & Prince 1994, 1995a, 1999; Urbanezyk 1995, 1996; and Walker 2000; etc.) that a distinct minimality constraint must be formalized for each of these morpho-prosodic constituents.
The present investigation is concerned with German participles II (past participles) as lexical heads of adjuncts.
Within a minimalist framework of sound-meaning correlation, the analysis presupposes a lexicalist conception of morphology and the differentiation of Semantic Form and Conceptual Structure. It is argued that participles II have the same argument structure as the underlying verbs and can undergo passivization, perfectivization and conversion to adjectives. As for the potential of participles to function as modifiers, it is shown that attributive and adverbial participle constructions involve further operations of conversion. Participle constructions are considered as reduced sentences. They do not have a syntactic position for the subject, for an operator (comparable to the relative pronoun in relative clauses) or for an adverbial relator (as in adverbial clauses). The pertinent components are present only in the semantic structure.
Two templates serve the composition of modifiers - including participle constructions - with the modificandum. It is necessary to differentiate between modification which unifies two predicates relating to participants or to situations and frame setting modification where the modifier is given the status of a propositional operator.
The proposed analysis shows that the high degree of semantic underspecification and interpretative flexibility of German participle II constructions resides in the indeterminacy of participles II with respect to voice and perfect, in the absence of certain constituents in the syntactic structure and in the presence of corresponding parameters in the Semantic Form of the participle phrases.
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.
The argument-modifier distinction is less clear in NPs than in VPs; nouns do not typically take arguments. The clearest cases of arguments in NPs are in certain kinds of nominalizations which retain some "verbal" properties (Grimshaw 1990). The status of apparent arguments of non-deverbal relational nouns like sister is more controversial.
Genitive constructions like 'John's teacher', 'team of John's' offer a challenging testing ground for the argument-modifier distinction in NPs, both in English and cross-linguistically. On the analyses of Partee (1983/97) and Barker (1995), the DP in a genitive phrase (i.e. 'John' in 'John's') is always an argument of some relation, but the relation does not always come from the head noun. On those "ambiguity" analyses, some genitives are argument-like and some are modifier-like. Recent proposals by Jensen and Vikner and by Borschev and Partee analyze all genitives as argument-like, a conclusion we are no longer sure of.
In this paper we explore a range of possible analyses: argument-only, modifier-only, and ambiguity analyses, and consider the kinds of semantic evidence that suggest that different analyses may be correct for different genitive or possessive constructions in different languages.
The present paper offers evidence that there are two variants of adverbial modification that differ with respect to the way in which a modifier is linked to the verb's eventuality argument. So-called external modifiers relate to the full eventuality, whereas internal modifiers relate to some integral part of it. The choice between external and internal modification is shown to be dependent on the modifier's syntactic base position. External modifiers are base-generated at the VP periphery, whereas internal modifiers are base generated at the V periphery. These observations are accounted for by a refined version of the standard Davidsonian approach to adverbial modification according to which modification is mediated by a free variable. In the case of external modification, the grammar takes responsibility for identifying the free variable with the verb's eventuality argument, whereas in the case of internal modification, a value for the free variable is determined by the conceptual system on the basis of contextually salient world knowledge.
The paper investigates a recent proposal to resultativity by G. Jäger and R. Blutner (J&B). J&B say that the representation of result states of accomplishments by means of CAUSE and BECOME is not correct and should not be done in the syntax in terms of decomposition. They develop an axiomatic approach where each accomplishment/achievement is related to its result by a particular axiom. Modification of the result by "again" makes use of these axioms and the restitutive/resultative ambiguity is a matter of lexical ambiguity or polysemy. They argue that the classical decomposition theory cannot treat the restitutive reading of "A Delaware settled in New Jersey again" (there had been Delawares in New Jersey but not this particular one; and those earlier Delawares never moved to New Jersey but were borne there). I discuss (and dispute) these data and compare the two theories. J&B's contains an OT-part dealing with the disambiguating role of stress. While the decomposition theory cannot deal with the data mentioned, it can integrate the OT-part of J&B's theory.
Rethinking the adjunct
(2000)
The purpose of the present paper is twofold: first, to show that, when defining the adjunct, it is necessary to distinguish in a strict modular way between the syntactic level and the lexico-semantic level. Thus, the adjunct is a syntactic category on a par with the specifier and the complement, whereas the argument belongs to the same set as does (among others) the modifier. The consequence of this distinction is that there is no direct one-to-one opposition between adjuncts and arguments. Nor is there any direct one-to one relation between adjuncts and modifiers.
The second and main purpose of the paper is to account for the well-known difference between the position of a specific set of modifiers (cause, time, place etc.) in, on the one hand, English and Swedish, on the other, German. In English and Swedish the default position of these modifiers is postverbal, whereas in German it is preverbal. Further, in English and Swedish, these modifiers occur in a mirror order compared with their German counterparts, an order which, from a semantic point of view, is not the expected one. I shall demonstrate that this difference is due to the different settings of the verbal head parameter, the former languages being VO-languages and the latter being OV -languages. I shall further argue that in English and Swedish these modifiers are base generated as adjuncts to an empty VP, which is a complement of the main verb of what I shall call the minimal VP (MVP), whereas in German they are adjuncts on top of the MVP. Finally, I shall argue that the postverbal modifiers move at the latest at LF to the top of the MVP, in order to take scope over it, the restriction being 'Shortest move'. The movement results in the correct scope order of the postverbal modifiers.
The proposed structure also accounts for the binding data, in particular for the binding of a specific Swedish possessive anaphor 'sin'. This pronoun, which may occur within the MVP, must not occur within the postverbal modifiers in the empty VP. This supports the assumption that there is a strict borderline between the MVP and the assumed empty VP. The account is also in accordance with the focus data, the specific set of modifiers being potential focus exponents in a wide focus reading in English and Swedish, but not in German.
In this study, I investigate the positions and interpretations available to 'manner' adverbs in English. My central claim, contra Wyner (1994, 1998), is that an association does exist between 'manner' adverb positions and interpretations, which is best characterized in terms of Peterson's (1997) distinction between 'restrictive' and 'non-restrictive' modification. I also claim, however, that the association in question is not as general as commonly claimed; and, in particular, does not apply directly to 'manner' adverbs in 'fronted' and 'parenthetical' positions, which require special syntactic description.
This paper proposes that we can predict which adverbs cannot adjoin to the right in headinitial languages by means of a particular semantic property, that of being a "subjective" adverb, one which maps an event or proposition onto a scale with the high degree of indeterminacy and context-dependence. Such adverbs, such as 'probably' or 'luckily', cannot adjoin to the right with non-manner readings, while other adverbs (like 'politically', 'often', or 'deliberately') may. This supports the view that the distribution of adverbs depends heavily, and subtly, on their lexicosemantic properties.
It is argued that there is a surprising gap in the distribution of adverbial modifiers, namely that there are (practically) no adverbs that modify exclusively stative verbs. Given the general range of selectional restrictions associated with adverb/verb modification, this comes as a surprise. It is argued that this gap cannot be the result of standard selectional restrictions. An independently motivated account of the state-event verb contrast, in which state verbs are proposed to lack Davidsonian arguments is presented and argued to account for this stative adverb gap. Some apparent and real problems with the analysis are discussed.
The present study offers the analysis of the role of adverbials in the semantic structure of a sentence. To clarify this role new notions "Adverbials with floating and fixed semantic scope" are proposed. This classification also can clarify the role of adverbials from the point of view of the division into arguments vs. adjuncts.
In this paper it is argued that several typologically unrelated languages share the tendency to avoid voiced sibilant affricates. This tendency is explained by appealing to the phonetic properties of the sounds, and in particular to their aerodynamic characteristics. On the basis of experimental evidence it is shown that conflicting air pressure requirements for maintaining voicing and frication are responsible for the avoidance of voiced affricates. In particular, the air pressure released from the stop phase of the affricate is too high to maintain voicing which in consequence leads to a devoicing of the frication part.
In this paper, we investigate two pairs of structures in German and English: German Weak Pronoun Left Dislocation and English Topicalization, on the one hand, and German and English Hanging Topic Left Dislocation, on the other. We review the prosodic, lexical, syntactic, and discourse evidence that places the former two structures into one class and the latter two into another, taking this evidence to show that dislocates in the former class are syntactically integrated into their 'host' sentences while those in the latter class are not. From there, we show that the most straightforward way to account for this difference in 'integration' is to take the dislocates in the latter structures to be 'orphans', phrases that are syntactically independent of the phrases with which they are associated, providing additional empirical and theoretical support for this analysis — which, we point out, has a number of antecedents in the literature.
The goal of this paper is to survey the accent systems of the indigenous languages of Africa. Although roughly one third of the world’s languages are spoken in Africa, this continent has tended to be underrepresented in earlier stress and accent typology surveys, like Hyman (1977). This one aims to fill that gap. Two main contributions to the typology of accent are made by this study of African languages. First, it confirms Hyman's (1977) earlier finding that (stem-)initial and penult are the most common positions, cross-linguistically, to be assigned main stress. Further, it shows that not only stress but also tone and segment distribution can define prominence asymmetries which are best analyzed in terms of accent.
This article examines the motivation for phonological stop assibilations, e.g. /t/ is realized as [ts], [s] or [tʃ] before /i/, from the phonetic perspective. Hall & Hamann (2003) posit the following two implications: (a) Assibilation cannot be triggered by /i/ unless it is also triggered by /j/, and (b) Voiced stops cannot undergo assibilations unless voiceless ones do. In the following study we present the results of three acoustic experiments with native speakers of German and Polish which support implications (a) and (b). In our experiments we measured the friction phase after the /t d/ release before the onset of the following high front vocoid for four speakers of German and Polish. We found that the friction phase for /tj/ was significantly longer than that of /ti/, and that the friction phase of /t/ in the assibilation context is significantly longer than that of /d/.