Linguistik-Klassifikation
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Part of a Book (72)
- Working Paper (54)
- Article (13)
- Book (3)
- Conference Proceeding (1)
- Periodical (1)
- Preprint (1)
- Report (1)
- Review (1)
Language
- English (104)
- German (34)
- mis (3)
- French (2)
- Multiple languages (2)
- Portuguese (2)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (147)
Keywords
- Sprachtypologie (49)
- Kontrastive Linguistik (27)
- Linguistik (21)
- Syntax (18)
- Deutsch (17)
- Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft (16)
- Semantik (15)
- Phonologie (13)
- Sprachliche Universalien (13)
- Prädikat (12)
Institute
- Extern (2)
In the present monograph, we will deal with questions of lexical typology in the nominal domain. By the term "lexical typology in the nominal domain", we refer to crosslinguistic regularities in the interaction between (a) those areas of the lexicon whose elements are capable of being used in the construction of "referring phrases" or "terms" and (b) the grammatical patterns in which these elements are involved. In the traditional analyses of a language such as English, such phrases are called "nominal phrases". In the study of the lexical aspects of the relevant domain, however, we will not confine ourselves to the investigation of "nouns" and "pronouns" but intend to take into consideration all those parts of speech which systematically alternate with nouns, either as heads or as modifiers of nominal phrases. In particular, this holds true for adjectives both in English and in other Standard European Languages. It is well known that adjectives are often difficult to distinguish from nouns, or that elements with an overt adjectival marker are used interchangeably with nouns, especially in particular semantic fields such as those denoting MATERIALS or NATlONALlTIES. That is, throughout this work the expression "lexical typology in the nominal domain" should not be interpreted as "a typology of nouns", but, rather, as the cross-linguistic investigation of lexical areas constitutive for "referring phrases" irrespective of how the parts-of-speech system in a specific language is defined.
In my paper "Thesen zum Universalienprojekt" (1976) I mention two complementary procedures for discovering language universals: 1. The investigation of the dimensions and principles whose existence is necessitated by the communicative function of language; 2. The development of a formal language in which all syntactic rules are explicitly formulated and in which all syntactic categories are defined by their relation to a minimally necessary number of syntactic categories. Since the first procedure is treated in many of the other papers of this volume, I wish to discuss the role of formal methods in the research of language universals. As an example I want to take the dimensions of determination and show how expressions denoting concepts are modified and turned into reference identifying expressions. There is a general end a specific motivation for the introduction of formal methods into linguistics. The general motivation is to make statements in linguistics as exact and verifiable as they are in the natural sciences. The specific motivation is to make the grammars of various languages comparable by describing them with the same form of rules. The form has to be flexible enough to describe the phenomena of any possible natural language. All natural languages have in common that they may potentially express any meaning. The flexibility of the form of grammatical rules may therefore be attained, if syntactic rules are not isolated from the semantic function they express and syntactic classes are not defined merely by the relative position of their elements in the sentence, but also by the communicative function their elements fulfill in their combination with elements of other classes.
Montague (1974) has shown that this flexibility may be attained by using the language of algebra combined with categorial grammar. Algebraic systems have been developed by mathematicians to model any systems whose operations are definable. Montague does not merely use the tools of mathematics for describing the features of language, but regards syntax, semantics and pragmatics as branches of mathematics. One of the advantages of this approach is that we may apply the laws developed by mathematicians to the systems constructed by linguists for the description and explanation of natural language.
What are incremental themes?
(2001)
In this paper I examine the approach to incremental themes developed in Krifka 1992,1998, Dowty 1991 and others, which argues that the extent of a telic event is determined by the extent of its incrementally affected theme. This approach identifies the defining property of an accomplishment event as being the fact that the theme relation is a homomorphism from parts of the event to parts of the (incremental) theme. I show that there are a large number of accomplishments, both lexical and derived via resultative predication, which cannot be characterised in this way. I then show that it is more insightful to characterise accomplishments in terms of their internally complex structure: an accomplishment event consists of a non-incremental activity event and an incrementally structured 'BECOME' event, which are related by a contextually available one-one function in such a way that the incremental structure of the latter is imposed on the activity.
This paper presents an analysis of secondary predicates as aspectual modifiers and secondary predication as a summing operation which sums the denotation of the matrix verb and the secondary predicate. I argue that, as opposed to the summing peration involved in simple conjunction, there is a constraint on secondary predication; in the 0 case of depictives, the event introduced by the matrix verb must be PART-OF the event introduced by the secondary predicate, where e1 is PART-OF e2 if the running time of e1 is contained in the running time of e2 and if e1 and e2 share a grammatical argument. I argue resultative predication differs from depictive predication in that the PART-OF constraint holds in resultative constructions between the event which is the culmination of e1 and e2: formally, while depictive predication introduces the statement PART-OF(e1,e2), resultative predication introduces the statement PART-OF(cul(e1),e2). I show that this is all that is necessary to explain the well-known properties of resultative predication.
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.
The aim of this paper is to show what role prosodic constituents, especially the foot and the prosodic word play in Polish phonology. The focus is placed on their function in the representation of extrasyllabic consonants in word-initial, word-medial, and word-final positions.
The paper is organized as follows. In the first section, I show that the foot and the prosodic word are well-motivated prosodic constituents in Polish prosody. In the second part, I discuss consonant clusters in Polish focussing on segments that are not parsed into a syllable due to violations of the Sonority Sequencing Generalisation, i.e. extrasyllabic segments. Finally, I analyze possible representations of the extrasyllabic consonants and conclude that both the foot and the prosodic word play a crucial role in terms of licensing. My proposal differs from the ones by Rubach and Booij (1990b) and Rubach (1997) in that I argue that the word-initial sonorants traditionally called extrasyllabic are licenced by the foot and not by the prosodic word (cf. Rubach and Booij (1990b)) or the syllable (cf. Rubach (1997)). For my analysis I adopt the framework of Optimality Theory, cf. McCarthy and Prince (1993), Prince and Smolensky (1993), in which derivational levels are abandoned and only surface representations are evaluated by means of universal constraints.
Même dans le domaine de la typologie il est nécessaire de s'interroger sur le type de suppositions et sur le status des operations que l'on conduit pour en comprendre 1a valeur epistemologique, pour – en employant les mots de Ferdinand de Saussure – "montrer au linguistique ce qu'il fait". Car il est hors de doute que – pour le dire encore avec le maître genevois – dans une discipline qui s'occupe d'un phénomène humain si comp1exe et historiquement variable tel que le langage, "c'est le point de vue qui crée l'objet". L'objet d'une analyse n'est pas une chose qui 'va de soi'; il suffit de penser aux changements au cours du developpement de la linguistique du concept même de 'langue', tout comme celui de 'matière' en physique, au fur et à mesure que les connaissances ont avancé. Or, il y a dans les théories linguistiques les plus recentes et aussi à la page des suppositions qui sont suggérées, voire conditionnées, par le cadre theorique choisi, mais dont la réalité empirique reste à vérifier ou, ce qui revient au même, a falsifier.
Identity effects in phonology are deviations from regular phonological form (i.e. canonical patterns) which are due to the relatedness between words. More specifically, identity effects are those deviations which have the function to enhance similarity in the surface phonological form of morphologically related words. In rule-based generative phonology the effects in question are described by means of the cycle. For example, the stress on the second syllable in cond[ɛ]nsation as opposed to the stresslessness of the second syllable in comp[ǝ]nsation is described by applying the stress rules initially to the sterns thereby yielding condénse and cómpensàte. Subsequently the stress rules are reapplied to the affixed words with the initial stress assignment (i.e. stress on the second syllable in condense, but not in compensate) leaving its mark in the output form (cf. Chomsky and Halle 1968). A second example are words like lie[p]los 'unloving' in German, which shows the effects of neutralization in coda position (i.e. only voiceless obstruents may occur in coda position) even though the obstruent should 'regularly' be syllabified in head position (i.e. bl is a wellformed syllable head in German). Here the stern is syllabified on an initial cycle, obstruent devoicing applies (i.e. lie[p]) and this structure is left intact when affixation applies (i.e. lie[p ]Ios ) (cf. Hall 1992). As a result the stern of lie[p]los is identical to the base lie[p].
Kant, Piaget et Unityp
(1988)
Le livre de H. Seiler, "Apprehension. Language, Object and Order", présente un grand intérêt même pour und épistémologue ne disposant pas d'une formation de linguíste. A cela il y a au moins deux raísons: en premier lieu "Apprehension. Language, Object and Order" étudie la notion d'objet introduisant la DIMENSION de l'APPREHENSION et, en deuxième lieu, à travers l'étude des langues elle vise une universalité fonctionelle de l'activité cognitive. La notion d'objet est traditionellement importante pour toute recherche épistémologique et ces dernières années elle a été définitivement liée aux recherches sémantiques (Tugendhat 1976: 48). "Apprehension. Language, Object, and order" englobe cet aspect; en effet, le terme de APPREHENSION indique l'activité de saisie notionelle de l'objet telle qu'elle apparaît dans les langues. La structure des langues, mise en évidence dans cette DIMENSION de l'APPREHENSION, est considerée comme la manifestation (REPRAESENTATIO) d'un concept, le REPRAESENTANDUM. Dans notre cas, il s'agit du concept d'objet, dont la richesse esst détectable par la complexité de la REPRAESENTATIO línguistique, qui en met en évidence la nature fonctionelle. Mais sa nature polymorphe, apparaissant dans les TECHNIQUES de la DIMENSION, fait que la saisie due réel mise en oeuvre par ce concept ne pourra pas se reduire à une simple perception de l'objet. En developpant les recherches de "Apprehension. Language, Object and Order", on purra dépasser non seulement les conceptions de la sémantique fondées sur la notion d'adéquation (ou de satisfaction), mais aussi celle qui se réclament d'un 'jeu de vérification' (Tugendhat 1976: 265). Ces conceptions, loin de se vider de leur sens, seront intégrées dans un cadre plus général. En effet, la nature même de l'objet dépend, dans sa définition et dans sa saisie, de cette activité. Le dépassement de la notion d'adéquation amène à une reformulation de l'ontologie, que l'ensemble de "Apprehension. Language, Object and Order" suggère. Il faudra introduire, à mon avis, une conception constructiviste.
Der Begriff "Subjekt" ist etwa so alt wie die ersten europäischen Ansätze zur Sprachbeschreibung. [...] Mit zunehmender Erforschung außereuropäischer Sprachen in neuerer zeit verbreitete sich jedoch die Einsicht, daß verschiedene der von den traditionellen europäischen Grammatiken vergebenen Kategorien nicht für jede Sprache deskriptiv adäquat waren und deshalb aus dem Bereich der Sprachuniversalien im Sinne der für jede Sprache gültigen Kategorien zu eliminieren seien. Das "Subjekt" aber behauptete noch sehr lange Zeit seinen Platz unter den allgemeingültigen Kategorien der Sprachbeschreibung. Erst genauere Studien beispielsweise der Ergativsprachen, denen das "Subjekt" als deskriptive Kategorie nicht mehr gerecht zu werden schien, ließen Zweifel an der Universalität des "Subjekts" aufkommen [...]. Seit Mitte des vergangenen Jahrzehnts wurde das "Subjekt" zu einem der meistdiskutierten Themen der Linguistik, was in der Herausbildung der vier gängigen Subjektstheorien resultierte, die ab Kap. 3 im Detail behandelt werden sollen. [...]
Als Prüfstein der Anwendbarkeit der [...] Theorien und zum Versuch der generellen Beantwortung der Frage nach der Universalität des "Subjekts" wurde eine sowohl in genetischer wie auch in struktureller Hinsicht nicht-indogermanische Sprache gewählt, das Ayacucho-Quechua (AQ). Die strukturelle Divergenz des AQ vom "Standard Average European" eröffnet möglicherweise auch bezüglich der Suche nach einem universalen "Subjekt" neue Perspektiven.
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.
Even if we can generate a logical form, principles of use may limit the ways in which we can use it. In this paper, I motivate one such principle of use, and explore its effects. Much of the discussion involves kinds of sentences that have received attention in the literature on "individual-level predicates".
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.
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.
Der Terminus "switch-reference" ist eine Schöpfung von W. Jacobson (1967). Er bezog sich auf ein Phänomen, das zunächst in den putativen Hokan-Sprachen Tonkawa, Washo und Kashaya (Southern Pomo) entdeckt worden war. Es wurde bald als areales Merkmal von Sprachen des Südwestens Nordamerikas erkannt. Es findet sich in allen Great-Basin-Sprachen sowie der westlichen Hälfte des Südwest-Phylums und in Teilen der Phyla Kalifornien, Plateau, Plains und Südost (Jacobson 1983:172). [...] Seit einigen Jahren bringt man diese Erscheinung funktional und terminologisch in Verbindung mit den sog. Medialverben der Papua-Sprachen […]. "Switch-reference" ist die oppositionelle explizite Signalisierung der Identitätsrelation zwischen dem Subjekt des Satzes, an dem die Markierung vorgenommen wird (oder dem sie unmittelbar folgt) und dem Subjekt eines kommenden Satzes (vorzugsweise des nächsten). Sie hat also kriterial eine antizipatorische Komponente. Sie tritt in verbfinalen Sprachen auf und wird deshalb meist durch Enklitika oder Suffixe verkörpert (quasi als Brücke zum folgenden Satz), die den markierten Satz subordinieren. Mit der Subjektidentität (die zwangsläufig auf die eine oder andere Weise mit den Kategorien Person und Numerus interagiert) gehen meist andere Bedeutungen einher, vorzugsweise interpropositionale. Die "switch-reference" hat logischerweise zwei Optionen: Disjunktheit, "different subject" (DS) , und Identität "same subject" (SS). "Oppositionelle Signalisierung" impliziert, daß eine Option gegenüber der anderen keinen grundlegenden Umbau der Satzstruktur erfordert. Davon unberührt bleibt die Tatsache, daß DS-Markierung merkmalhaft er ist. [...] Die Arbeit sollte sich ursprünglich auf Papua- und amerindische Sprachen erstrecken. Obwohl auch letztere ausgiebig untersucht wurden, kam die Darstellung nicht über die Verhältnisse in den Papua-Sprachen hinaus. Angesichts der Sprachenvielfalt scheint mir der Begriff Typologie im Titel noch gerechtfertigt. Ebenfalls keine Berücksichtigung fand die SV der südamerikanischen Sprachen, wofür die Untersuchungsgrundlage aber ohnehin dürftig gewesen wäre. Verwandte Phänomene in australischen, kaukasischen und afrikanischen Sprachen werden im Kapitel 8 lediglich gestreift.
Possessive constructions are grammatical constructions which contain two nominals and express that the referent of one of these nominals belongs to the other. The kind of relationship denoted by possessive constructions is not only that of ownership (1), as the term "possessive" might suggest, but also that of kinship (2), bodypart relationship (3), part/whole relationship (4) and similar relationships [...]. The following investigation will start with possessive constructions on phrase level, i.e. possessive phrases, and then deal with possessive constructions on clause level.
Ergativity in Samoan
(1985)
Most typological and language specific studies on so- called ergative languages are concerned with case marking patterns, particularly split ergativity, with the organization of syntactic relations as defined by syntactic operations such as coreferential deletion across coordinate conjunctions, Equi-NP-deletion and relativization , and with the notion of subject, but usually neglect the notion of valency, though the inherent relational properties of the verb , i. e. valency, play a fundamental role in the syntactic organization of sentences in ergative as well as in other languages . The following investigation of ergativity in Samoan aims to integrate the notion of valency into the description of semantic and syntactic relations and to outline the characteristic features of Samoan verbal clauses as far as they seem to be relevant to recent and still ongoing discussions on linguistic typology and syntactic theory. The main points of the definition of valency […] are: Valency is the property of the verb which determines the obligatory and optional number of its participants, their morphosyntactic form, their semantic class membership (e.g. ± animate, ± human) , and their semantic role (e.g. agent , patient , recipient). All semantic properties and morphosyntactic properties of participants not inherently given by the verb and therefore not predictable from the verb, are not a matter of valency. Valency is not a homogenous property of the verb, but consists of several exponents which show varying degress of relevance in different languages or different verb classes within a single language.
Rezension zu Elke Hentschel, Negation und Interrogation. Studien zur Universalität ihrer Funktion. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag 1998 (Reihe Germanistische Linguistik 195, ix + 250 S., 112,00 DM, ISBN 3-484-31195-9)
This paper offers an extensive analysis of the reflexes of the Proto-Indo-European word-initial cluster *sk- in Proto-Slavic. It is argued that the regular reflex of this cluster is the Proto-Slavic *x-, but that *sk- was analogously re-introduced in a great number of cases under the influence of prefixed forms and cases where forms with and without the so-called "s-mobile" co-existed in Slavic. This conclusion is in accordance with the fact that *x- < *sk- is far more common in derivationally isolated words that do not occur with prefixes.
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.
Within the Davidsonian paradigm copula-predicative constructions are commonly assumed to involve a state argument. Its source is taken to be either the copula 'be' (cf. e.g. Bierwisch 1988) or the predicative (cf. the ongoing stage level/individual level debate). Yet, a critical examination of copula-predicative constructions in contexts that call for Davidsonian arguments (locative modifiers, manner adverbials, perception verbs, etc.) reveals that they do not behave as expected. In fact, the data examined here do not support the assumption that copula-predicative constructions are equipped with a Davidsonian argument nor is there any evidence for a grammatically reflected distinction between temporary and permanent properties. The present paper argues alternatively for a grammatical distinction between states like' sit', 'stand', 'sleep', 'wait', 'live' and statives like 'resemble', 'know', 'hate', 'cost' which is invoked by the presence or absence of a Davidsonian argument. Copula-predicative constructions are shown to belong uniformly to the class of statives. The acceptability differences of copula-predicative constructions in combination with locative modifiers are accounted for pragmatically on the basis of conversational implicatures.
Recent developments in typology which put the notions of linguistic function and operation into the focus of interest and establish them as the ultimate base on which languages are comparable prove fruitful for contrastive linguistics. The functional approach is illustrated in a contrastive analysis of Persian and German relative clauses. In a sketch of the theory of the relative clause, four grammatical functions to be fulfilled by relative constructions are deduced, and the two languages are compared with respect to the various ways in which they realize them. Learning problems can thus be predicted with greater confidence, be explained more satisfactorily, and be remedied more efficiently, because they are seen as learner's attempts to transfer, beside the underlying functions and operations, which the languages do have in common, the techniques of their realization, which they do not have in common.
At the end of last year, I designed an inquiry about the present state of linguistic typology in the form of a questionnaire. It was an attempt to cover the whole field by formulating the questions which seemed most relevant to it. This questionnaire is reproduced, without modifications, following this preface. In the first days of this year, it was sent to 33 linguists who I know are working in the field. The purpose was to form, on the basis of responses received, a picture of convergences and divergences among trends of present-day linguistic typology. The idea was also to get an objective basis for my report on "The present state of linguistic typology", to be delivered at the XIII. International Congress of Linguistics at Tokyo, 1982.
Some conceptual and empirical issues in linguistic theory : an illustration with pronominal clitics
(2001)
I would like to discuss a few general conceptual issues in linguistic theory, and see how they bear on some empirical facts about pronominal clitics. In particular, I would like to show that the conception of linguistic theory, justified on independent grounds, limits the class of issues and possible explanations for grammatical properties of specific linguistic expressions. I argue that this is not simply a consequence of a specific conception of grammar, conceived of as a system of principles and rules governing language, but has non-trivial empirical ramifications. Pronominal clitics are a good case study, since their grammatical properties bear on a wide range of facts falling under the purview of principles of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics.
On transitivity
(2011)
This paper critically discusses and contrasts some of the different conceptualisations of transitivity that have been presented in the literature, and argues that transitivity as a morphosyntactic phenomenon and effectiveness of an event as a semantic concept should be separated in discussions of transitivity, and also, like many other aspects of grammar, transitivity should be seen as a constructional phenomenon, and so each construction in a language needs to be examined separately, in natural contexts. An Appendix presents some general questions one can consider when analysing language data.
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.
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.
This paper presents the analyses of transitivity and questions about transitivity in two languages (Rawang and Qiang) that have been described using very different definitions of transitivity, with a view to showing that each language must be analysed on its own terms, and so the criteria used for identifying transitivity, if it is to be identified at all, might be different between languages. In the case of these two languages it is at least partly due to the two languages differing in terms of the degree of systematicity of the marking, with the Rawang marking being more systematic.
This paper is an overview of the motivations and methodology for doing empirical in situ fieldwork on languages. It suggests specific methods for carrying out fieldwork in a maximally empirical way.
This brief paper discusses the nature of linguistic typology and its relationship to historical linguistics. It argues that typology includes a historical component, and historical linguistics includes a typological component, as grammaticalization studies can be said to be diachronic typology and some concepts such as markedness can be used in understanding the development of morphological systems, but the main foci differ in terms of synchronic vs. diachronic considerations. Typology can be of some help with understanding the direction of change in language, but it cannot be used as a standard for what is possible/impossible when we are doing reconstructions, and typological features cannot be used for establishing genetic relatedness.
This paper discusses word classes in Tagalog, the dominant language of the Philippines, using analyses developed by Himmelmann (2007) and LaPolla (2008). The goal is to clarify issues related to the identification of word classes in Tagalog, and show the distinct features of these word classes. Through the discussion of word classes in Tagalog, the authors also hope to shed some light on the issue of word classes in Chinese.
This paper presents epistemological and methodological problems found in work on the subgrouping of Sino-Tibetan languages and the reconstruction of features of the languages. A key problem is the lack of an accepted standard for judging this work, one that can stand up to statistical evaluation. An alternative methodology that involves using fixed sets of features to give us the statistical probability of common origin is suggested.
Language contact has become a major focus of inquiry in historical and typological linguistics in the last twenty years, spurred in a large part by the publication of Thomason & Kaufman (1988), which tried to make sense of a large amount of language contact data. They argued that there was a direct relationship between the degree or intensity of language contact and the amount and type of influence the contact would have on one or more of the languages involved. Essentially, the greater the degree of bilingualism, the greater the degree of contact influence (see also Thomason 2001); if the contact and bilingualism was minimal, then there might just be a few loanwords adapted to the borrowing language's phonology and grammatical system, but if the contact and bilingualism was of a greater degree there would be influence in the grammar and phonology of the affected language. As more linguists came to take language contact more seriously, they came to realize how common language contact phenomena are.
Sino-Tibetan languages
(2006)
The Sino-Tibetan (ST) language family includes the Sinitic languages (what for political reasons are known as Chinese ‘dialects’) and the 200 to 300 Tibeto-Burman (TB) languages. Geographically it stretches from Northeast India, Burma, Bangladesh, and northern Thailand in the southeast, throughout the Tibetan plateau to the north, across most of China and up to the Korean border in the northeast, and down to Taiwan and Hainan Island in the southeast. The family has come to be the way it is because of multiple migrations, often into areas where other languages were spoken (LaPolla, 2001).
Qiang
(2003)
This paper is more about presenting phenomena and questions related to the concept of transitivity in Tibeto-Burman languages that I hope will stimulate discussion, rather than presenting strong conclusions. Sections 2 and 3 present alternative analyses of transitivity and questions about transitivity in two Tibeto-Burman languages I have worked on. In Section 4 I discuss some general issues about transitivity.
Einführung
(2000)
Der vorliegende Band setzt im Anschluss an den Band ZAS Papers in Linguistics 14 (1999) die Vorpublikation von Arbeiten fort, die innerhalb oder im Umkreis des von der DFG geförderten Projekts "Schnittstellen der Semantik: Kopula-Prädikativ-Konstruktionen" am ZAS entstanden sind. Das Rahmenthema, wie es in ZAS PIL 14 einleitend knapp umrissen wurde, wird derzeit im Projekt in drei Untersuchungssträngen bearbeitet.
Einführung
(1999)
[...] Was macht Kopula-Prädikativ-Konstruktionen unter dem Blickwinkel ihrer grammatischen Schnittstellen so attraktiv? Die kurze Einführung will darauf eine partielle Antwort geben, aber nicht indem sie versucht, unter Beachtung ausgewogener Erwähnungsfrequenz die einzelnen Aufsätze zusammenzufassen (was sich durch die jeweils vorangestellten Abstracts eh erübrigt), sondern indem sie – a field is defined by certain questions ! – die aus Titeln und Abstracts nicht sofort ersichtlichen theoretischen Koordinaten des hier gewählten Ausschnitts der Kopula-Forschungslandschaft skizziert, um darin einige in den Beiträgen vorgeschlagene Antworten zu orten. So kommen die Relativität des Erreichten, aber auch das Potential, das in z.T. kontrovers geführten Argumentationen und konkurrierenden Analysen steckt, gleichermaßen zur Geltung.
Implikative Universalien, linguistische Prinzipien und Sprachtypologie / J.C.P. Auer, Wilfried Kuhn
(1977)
Wir wollen in diesem Aufsatz die Möglichkeiten typologischer Forschung prüfen, die sich aus Greenbergs Aufsatz "Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements" ergeben. Greenbergs primäres Interesse ist nicht typologisch, sondern an der Universalienforschung orientiert. Er ermittelt aus einem 'sample' von 30 Sprachen 45 implikative Universalien der allgemeinen Form V(x) [A(x) → B(x)], wobei A und B beliebige sprachliche Merkmale sind und über die Menge aller Sprachen x quantifiziert wird. Überdies versucht Greenberg die relativ große Zahl von implikativen Universalien unter eine kleine Zahl von sog. Prinzipien ('principles') zu subsummieren, die allgemeine Bauprinzipien von Sprachen darstellen sollen und so Erklärungscharakter für die empirisch gewonnenen Universalien haben. Typologie wird von Greenberg zunächst nur in einem klassifizierenden Sinn verstanden; die Verteilung der untersuchten Merkmale in der Stichprobe von 30 Sprachen klassifiziert diese in solche, in denen das Merkmal anzutreffen ist und solche, in denen es nicht anzutreffen ist. Im folgenden wird zu zeigen sein, daß darüber hinaus auch auf der Ebene der Universalien und der Ebene der Prinzipien typologische Ansätze möglich sind.
Aus der Faktenlage ergeben sich folgende Probleme, die derzeit in der einschlägigen Literatur diskutiert werden bzw. bisher noch nicht zur Diskussion gelangt sind und die nun im vorliegenden Beitrag behandelt werden:
(i) Worauf sind Unterschiede in der Kodierung deontischer und epistemischer Lesarten von Modalverben durch (synthetische) Präsens- bzw. Präteritalformen und (analytische bzw. periphrastische) Perfekt- bzw. Plusquamperfektformen zurückzuführen? Worin liegt der genuine Beitrag des (periphrastischen) Perfekts/Plusquamperfekts bei der Manifestierung der kategorialen Funktion von Modalverben?;
(ii) Welches sind die Spezifika der Perfektformen von Modalverben in der Diachronie bzw.welchen kategorialen Wandel erfahren sie im Laufe ihrer Entwicklung?;
(iii) Wie ist die formale und funktionale Konstellation zwischen den Konstruktionen Modalverb + Infinitiv II und der Umschreibung würde + Infinitiv II synchron wie diachron zu beurteilen?;
(iv) Darf vor dem Hintergrund der Formenasymmetrie im Indikativ und Konjunktiv der Umschreibung werden + Inf. I/II (würde + Inf. I/II vs. *wurde + Inf. I/II) von einer "Lücke" im Verbalparadigma gesprochen werden?
There is good reason to be ambivalent about the usefulness of general considerations in linguistic reconstruction. As a heuristic device, a theoretical framework can certainly be helpful, but the negative potential of aprioristic considerations must not be underestimated. E.g., there is a whole range of phenomena which receive a natural explanation when we assume that glottalization is ancient in Germanic. The methodological question is: why have scholars been reluctant to identify the vestjysk stød with the English glottalization as a historical reality which may have been inherited from the proto-language? The role of general linguistics is to provide an idea of what can be expected in linguistic development, not by theoretical reasoning but by inspection of what actually happens.
In his magnificent book on the language relations across Bering Strait (1998), Michael Fortescue does not consider Nivkh (Gilyak) to be a Uralo-Siberian language. Elsewhere I have argued that the Indo-European verbal system can be understood in terms of its Indo-Uralic origins (2001). All of these languages belong to Joseph Greenberg’s Eurasiatic macro-family (2000). In the following I intend to reconsider the grammatical evidence for including Nivkh into the Uralo-Siberian language family. The Indo-Uralic evidence is of particular importance because it guarantees a time depth which cannot otherwise be attained.
Im folgenden wird zuerst das Modell vorgestellt, das als theoretische Grundlage für die Betrachtung der Semantik der Aspekt-Tempus-Formen dient (Abschnitt 2). Danach werden die syntagmatischen Markiertheitsrelationen der einzelnen aspektuell-temporalen Formen im Rahmen dieses Modells analysiert (Abschnitt 3). Im Abschnitt 4 werden die paradigmatischen Relationen zwischen den Aspekt-Tempus-Formen erörtert. Abschließend (Abschnitt 5) wird das Fazit aus der Untersuchung gezogen.
This paper deals with early verb development (e.g., person, tense) until the emergence of verb-paradigms in two French-speaking children.
I will show the parallelism between the two children in the gradual building of paradigms, despite considerable differences in the rate of development. Individual differences on the other hand will bring me to reconsider the broad category of premorphological rote-learnt forms which already displays some patterning in one of the children's data.
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.
This paper shows the early development of the first approximately 50 verbs found in the recorded speech production of one Croatian girl. The aim is to analyse and interpret the child's verb development in terms of the distinction of a pre- and a protomorphological phase before modularised morphology in language acquisition (Dressler & Karpf 1995). Furthermore, focus will be laid on the emergence of first verb paradigms.
The purpose of this paper is to provide a unified (i.e. independent of lexical categories) account of Persian stress. I show that by differentiating word- and phrase-level stress rules, one can account for the superficial differences exemplified in (1) above and many of the stipulations suggested by previous scholars. The paper is organized as follows. In section 1, I look at nouns and adjectives and propose a rule that would account for their stress pattern. In section 2, I extend the stress rule to verbs and show the problem this category poses to our generalization. The main proposal of this paper is discussed in section 3. I introduce the phrasal stress rule in Persian and show that by differentiating word-level and phrase-level stress rules, one can come to a unified account of Persian stress. Section 4 deals with some problematic eases for the proposed generalization and discusses some tentative solutions and their theoretical consequences. Section 5 concludes the paper.
This paper deals with a series of semantic contrasts between the copula "be" and the preposition "as", two functional elements that both head elementary predication structures. It will be argued that the meaning of "as" is a type lowering device shifting the meaning of its complement NP from generalized quantifier type to property type (where properties are conceived as relations between individuals and situations), while the copula "be" induces a type coercion from (partial) situations to (total) possible worlds. Paired with van der Sandt's 1992 theory of presupposition accommodation, these assumptions will account for the observed contrasts between "as" and "be".
The paper investigates the issue whether the stage-level/individual level contrast introduced by Carlson 1977 requires the assumption of two homonymous copulas depending on the categorization of the predicative. We argue that instead of a uniform stage-level/individual level distinction we have to distinguish several similar but independent contrasts, none of which crucially depend on the semantics of the copula. In the second part of the paper, we concentrate on one group of phenomena-the distribution of weak subjects-and propose an explanation in terms of an interaction between topic/comment structure and aspectual properties of the predicate.
Seit mehr als 60 Jahren dominiert in der historisch-phonologischen Umlaut-Landschaft EIN Aufsatz, eine vierseitige Skizze des althochdeutschen Umlauts von W. Freeman Twaddell. Keller (1978: 160) nennt diese Theorie 'one of the finest achievements of American linguists'. Ähnliche Lobsprüche findet man mehrmals in der Literatur und der Artikel bleibt bis heute noch DER Eckpfeiler der Umlaut-Debatte (s. Krygier 1997, Schulte 1998).
In den letzten paar Jahren haben wir mit einigen Kollegen – Anthony Buccini, Garry Davis, David Fertig, Dave Holsinger, Robert Howell, Regina Smith – einen neuen Ansatz entwickelt, die wir "ingenerate Umlaut" nennen. "Ingenerate" heißt hier ungefähr 'vorprogrammiert, inhärent, angeboren' und deutet darauf hin, daß wir die Wurzeln vom Umlaut in der Phonetik – noch genauer: in der Koartikulation – suchen. Auch meinen wir, die allmähliche Entfaltung des Prozesses in den "Ausnahmen" zum Umlaut sehen zu können, mit anderen Worten genau in den umlautlosen Formen, die in der Twaddellschen Tradition als willkürliche Ergebnisse der Analogie gesehen werden müssen.
I argue in this study that consonantal strength shifts can be explained through positional bans on features, expressed over positions marked as weak at a given level of prosodic structure, usually the metrical foo!. This approach might be characterized as "templatic" in the sense it seeks to explain positional restrictions and distributional patterns relative to independently motivated, fixed prosodic elements. In this sense, it follows Dresher & Lahiri's (1991) idea of metrical coherence in phonological systems, namely, "[T]hat grammars adhere to syllabic templates and metrical patterns of limited types, and that these patterns persist across derivations and are available to a number of different processes ... " (251). [...] The study is structured as follows: section 1 presents a typology of distributional asymmetries based on data from unrelated languages, demonstrating that the stress foot of each of these languages determines the contexts of neutralization and weakening of stops. Section 2 elaborates the notion of a template, exploring some of its formal properties, while section 3 presents templatic analyses of data from English and German. Section 4 explores the properties of weak positions, especially weak onsets, in more detail, including discussion of templates in phonological acquisition. Section 5 summarizes and concludes the study.
[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.
Der unmittelbare Anlaß der folgenden etwas scholastisch anmutenden Begriffsdistinktionen war die Erfahrung mit der Vorbereitung und dem Verlauf der Sektionssitzung zum Thema "Der Universalienstreit heute" am 16. Weltkongreß für Philosophie 1978 in Düsseldorf. Die Mehrheit der Philosophen assoziierte das Thema mit dem traditionellen Streit zwischen Nominalisten, Konzeptualisten und Realisten und nicht mit der in der Linguistik seit zwei Jahrzehnten neu angefachten Problematik, die in der traditionellen Philosophie unter dem Titel Grammatica universalis behandelt worden war. Darüber hinaus wurde allermeist gar nicht realisiert, daß der Terminus universal in den beiden Themenkreisen auch in formaler Hinsicht nicht im gleichen Sinn gebraucht wird {vgl. § ll}. Eine Konsultation der wissenschaftstheoretischen Literatur ergab dann, daß in ihr, bei aller Oberproduktion von Textbüchern und Sammelbänden, universal und sein ganzes Wortfeld kaum je explizit und systematisch diskutiert und definiert wird. Gewöhnlich hält man sich an die in der klassischen Logik geläufige Unterscheidung zwischen generellen, universalen, partikulären und singulären Aussagen (vgl. § 9.1.) oder an die kantianische zwischen generalen (induktiven) und universalen (deduktiven) Aussagen (vgl. § 9.3.). Neu in den Vordergrund gerückte Gesichtspunkte in der formalen Struktur von allgemeinen wissenschaftlichen Aussagen (vgl. § 9.4.) werden dagegen kaum reflektiert und terminologisch fixiert. Dies gilt insbesondere für den linguistischen Bereich, dessen Probleme und Leistungen in der allgemeinen Wissenschaftstheorie trotz aller Achtungsbezeugungen kaum einen Niederschlag gefunden haben. Die folgenden Ausführungen sind daher auch als ein bescheidener, nämlich bloß terminologischer und begriffsdefinitorischer Beitrag zur Sch1ießung dieser Lücke intendiert.
Adjectival secondary predicates can enter into two Case frames in Russian, the agreeing form and the Instrumental. The paper argues that these Case frames go together with two syntactic positions in the clause which are correlated with two different interpretations, the true depictive and the temporally restricted reading, respectively. The availability of the two readings depends on the houndedness of the secondary predicate. Only bounded predicates can enter into both Case frames and only partially non-bounded predicates can appear in the Instrumental. The paper therefore argues that the pertinent two-way SL/IL-contrast is to he replaced by a three-way distinction in terms of boundedness. The paper outlines the syntax and semantics of the true depictive and the temporally restricted interpretation and discusses how adjectival secondary predicates whose salient properties involve a cotemporary interpretation with the matrix predicate and a control relation of an individual argument, differ from temporal adjuncts as well as from non-finite clauses.
This contribution is concerned with prefixed forms in western Austronesian languages which have been called a wide variety of names including 'stative', 'accidental', 'involuntary', 'potential', 'coincidence', 'momentary', and so on. Although widely neglected in the literature, these formations are of major import to the grammar of many western Austronesian languages, where for all event expressions there is an obligatory choice between a neutral form and a form marked for 'involuntariness', 'potentiality', 'coincidence', or the like. Furthermore, this distinction has implications for a wide range of theoretical issues, including the nature of unaccusativity and causativity, split-intransitivity, and the grammar of control and complementation.
The main goal of this contribution is to bring some basic order to the fairly broad and, on first sight at least, somewhat heterogeneous range of uses and meanings associated with these forms. I will argue that the different uses can be grouped into two semantically and morphosyntactically quite different construction types, which I will call STATIVE (proper) and POTENTIVE, respectively.
Section 2 presents the major uses of the 'stative' prefix ma- in Tagalog. In section 3, it is shown that despite superficial similarities the various examples with ma-marked predicates presented in section 2 involve two different constructions and that the prefix ma- belongs to two different morphological paradigms. Section 4, finally, provides a systematization of stative and potentive uses and discusses similarities and differences between the Tagalog system and superficially similar systems in so-called split-S languages.
The approach outlined in the present paper is based on observations made with African languages. Although the 1000-odd African languages display a remarkable extent of structural variation, there are certain structures that do not seem to occur in Africa. Thus, to our knowledge, an African language having anything that could be called an ergative case or a numeral classifier system has not been discovered so far. It may turn out that our approach can, in a modified form, be made applicable to languages outside Africa. This , however, is a possibility that has not been considered here. The present approach is based essentially on diachronic findings in that it uses observations on language evolution in order to account for structural differences between languages. Thus, it has double potential: apart from describing and explaining typological diversity it can also be material to reconstructing language history.
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/.
The distribution of trimoraic syllables in German and English as evidence for the phonological word
(2000)
In the present article I discuss the distribution of trimoraic syllables in German and English. The reason I have chosen to analyze these two languages together is that the data in both languages are strikingly similar. However, although the basic generalization in (1) holds for both German and English, we will see below that trimoraic syllabIes do not have an identical distribution in both languages.
In the present study I make the following theoretical claims. First, I argue that the three environments in (1) have a property in common: they all describe the right edge of a phonological word (or prosodic word; henceforth pword). From a formal point of view, I argue that a constraint I dub the THIRD MORA RESTRICTION (henceforth TMR), which ensures that trimoraic syllables surface at the end of a pword, is active in German and English. According to my proposal trimoraic syllables cannot occur morpheme-internally because monomorphemic grammatical words like garden are parsed as single pwords. Second, I argue that the TMR refers crucially to moraic structure. In particular, underlined strings like the ones in (1) will be shown to be trimoraic; neither skeletal positions nor the subsyllabic constituent rhyme are necessary. Third, the TMR will be shown to be violated in certain (predictable) pword-internal cases, as in Monde and chamber; I account for such facts in an OptimalityTheoretic analysis (henceforth OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993) by ranking various markedness constraints among themselves or by ranking them ahead of the TMR. Fourth, I hold that the TMR describes a concrete level of grammar, which I refer to below as the 'surface' representation. In this respect, my treatment differs significantly from the one proposed for English by Borowsky (1986, 1989), in which the English facts are captured in a Lexical Phonology model by ordering the relevant constraint at level 1 in the lexicon.
Starting from a consideration of the internal make-up of adverbial clauses this paper shows that the widespread assumption that fronted arguments in English and CLLD constituents in Romance occupy the same position leads to a number of problems. I will conclude that the position occupied by English topicalized arguments differs from that of the CLLD topics in Romance. In particular, English topics occupy a higher position in the left periphery. The final part of the paper compares three proposals for the lower topic position in Romance.
With the rise of minimalism, many concepts related to the geometrical relations of phrase structure held fast to in earlier approaches have been reconsidered. This article deals with distinguishing (relational and technical) properties of specifiers and adjuncts in a Bare Phrase Structure framework (X'-Theory). I extend specific aspects of X-structure relevant to the discussion of specifiers vs. adjuncts. I argue that unique specifiers can be derived from the system and that adjunction, possibly multiple, results from Direct Merge only. The final product is a series of relationships in line with recent thoughts and minimalist premises, but formally more similar to earlier conceptions of the X'-schema.
I address conceptual, empirical and theoretical arguments against multiple specifiers and related issues next, that is beyond the predictions immediately following from the tripartitional view of clause structure proposed in Grohmann (2000). After laying out my motivations to critically consider the issue, I present a set of data that casts serious doubt over the justifications offered to replace Agr with v as the accusative casemarker. Having conceptual and empirical back-up, I then tackle the theoretical validity of specifiers, and ways to distinguish unique specifiers from (multiple) adjuncts. I introduce a version of Bare Phrase Structure that does so, yet keeps the spirit of defining structural identification over relational rather than categorial properties.
The present study offers an analysis of the Russian copular constructions with predicate nominals. In such copular sentences two cases may mark the predicate: the nominative and the instrumental as in 'Anna byla medsestra/medsestroj' - 'Anna was-3sg.fem.a nursenom/instr'. In the present tense the copula has a null-form and the predicate nominal can only be in the nominative. I argue that the case alternation corresponds to the distinction of Stage Level and Individual Level Predicates in the sense of Kratzer (1994) and Diesing (1992), but with some objections. The copula with Instrumental forms S-Predicates, which are analyzed as predicates applying to situations referring to time. The copula with nominative forms I-Predicates, which attribute properties to individuals without referring to time. I-Predicates have no situation argument. Data that show the (in-)compatibility of copular sentences with certain spatial or temporal modifiers provide a reason to assume a situation argument in byt' + Instr but not in byt' + Nom.
Byt' behaves differently in different grammatical contexts: in contexts of sentence negation, yes/no-questions and under focus byt' + Instr behaves like a lexical category, while byt' + Nom behaves like a functional category. As a functional category byt' + Nom is non-overt in the present and is always finite. The semantic distinction between nominative and instrumental predicate NPs is pegged to an opposition between a structure with a functional copula as the only tense and agreement marker with base position in TP and a lexical copula in VP (Franks 1995, Bailyn&Rubin 1991). To explain phenomena of the copula in Russian I propose an integrated syntactic model for two copulas. The two copulas may be conceived as distinct realizations of one verbal lexical entry which will be specified as a lexical or as functional category in the course of lexical insertion. The Model of Parallel Morphology might be used to explain this phenomenon.
The paper proposes structural constraints for different adjunct classes in German and English. Approaches in which syntax has only the task to provide adjunct positions and in which principles of scope are supposed to explain the distribution of adjuncts are rejected as incomplete. The syntactic requirements are not as rigid as other approaches require, such that there is just one possible position for a given adjunct. Rather the syntactic constraints may be fulfilled in different positions.
Two main types of sentences are traditionally distinguished in the context of semantic theories of questions and answers: declarative sentences, corresponding to statements, and interrogative sentences, corresponding to questions. The interrogative forms can be further subdivided into dialectical ones (yes-no-questions) and non-dialectical ones (constituent questions). These distinctions are made for both root and embedded sentences. The predicates that select sentential complements fall into three classes: predicates that license only declaratives, those that allow only for interrogatives, and those that embed both types of sentences. In this connection, verbs of doubt are interesting in that they allow for declaratives as well as dialectical interrogatives, while non-dialectical interrogatives do not seem to be appropriate complements.
In what follows, our main concern will be with the German verb of doubt zweifeln and its possible sentential complements. Speaker intuitions as to which constructions are grammatical or acceptable vary, particularily with respect to rare expressions like zweifeln. Therefore, interviews and corpus analysis were applied as a means to acquire reliable linguistic data. These as well as data from historical sources and from some languages other than German (esp. English and Italian) are presented and analysed. In the last section, based on the notion of ‘subjective probability’, an attempt is made at explaining the observations.
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.
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.
This paper is concerned with the fact that a number of adverbal modifications involve a systematic reinterpretation of at least one of the expressions connected by the operation in question. It offers an approach in which such transfers of meaning turn out to be a result of contextually controlled enrichments of an underspecified as well as a strictly compositionally structured semantic representation. The approach proposed is general for three reasons: First, it takes into account not only reinterpretations in temporal but also such in non-temporal modification. Second, it allows considering so-called secondary predications as a particular kind of adverbal modification. Third, it explains the respective reinterpretations within a uniform formal framework of meaning variation.
Im vorliegenden Beitrag plädiere ich für ein Vorgehen, bei dem Kopulasätze generell als Beschreibungen von Situationen behandelt werden. Genauer nehme ich an, daß Sätze mit der Kopula 'sein' semantische Repräsentationen haben, die über eine darin vorkommende existenzquantifizierte Variable auf eine noch näher zu spezifizierende Situation referieren. Drei grundlegende Klassen von Fällen werden unterschieden: Erstens kann es sich bei der fraglichen Situation um einen durch das Prädikativ charakterisierten Zustand handeln, in dem sich das mit dem Subjektausdruck erfaßte Objekt befindet. Zweitens kann die Situation ein mit dem Subjektausdruck erfaßter Zustand sein, der über das Prädikativ eine zusätzliche Charakterisierung erhält. Und drittens kann die Situation auch ein Ereignis (im weiteren Sinne) sein, das nun entsprechend mit dem betreffenden Subjektausdruck erfaßt und durch das Prädikativ näher charakterisiert wird.
Während es in einem ersten Teil zur "Kasusmarkierung und der Zentralität von Partizipanten" (Drossard 1986 a) vornehmlich um den Zusammenhang von Rollennivellierung und Desemantisierung einerseits und die Zentralität von Kasus andererseits ging, konzentrieren wir unser Augenmerk in den vorliegenden Ausführungen auf dazu komplementäre Fälle und Prinzipien. Somit geht es zum einen um ein gegebenes "split case marking", das direkt mit der Peripherizität der involvierten Kasus korreliert, und zum anderen um sprachliche Prozesse, die Peripherizität zuvor zentraler Partizipanten herbeiführen und dabei, wie im Falle der gegebenen differentiellen Markierung, zu mehr semantischer Transparenz führen. Man stelle sich beispielsweise vor, daß in einem Passivsatz des Deutschen das Agens in seinem INITIANTEN-Status deutlich hervortritt, indem es mit einer Präposition zur Bezeichnung einer Herkunft (Source), mit von eingeführt wird, während das Agens im transitiven Aktivsatz im Nominativ erscheint, der semantisch entleert ist, da er ein intr. A, intr. O, und im Passivsatz ein tr. O, wie auch andere Rollen (Force, Instrument etc.) subsumiert. Generell kann man somit statische und dynamische Erscheinungsformen unterscheiden. "Statisch" bedeutet, daß man, wie oben ausgeführt, in manchen Sprachen ein "split case marking" als gegeben vorfindet, "dynamisch" heißt, daß man durch Passivierung oder Antipassivierung z.B. für eine Agens- oder Patiens-Kodierung ein "splitting" erzielen kann. In beiden Fällen gilt, daß Peripherizität, gesetzt oder abgeleitet, semantisch transparenter ist, während Zentralität, wie in Drossard 1986 a gezeigt, mit Desemantisiertheit bzw. Desemantisierung korreliert. Dementsprechend könnte man Fälle, bei denen durch bestimmte Prozesse in markierten Konstruktionen (Passiv, Antipassiv) die INITIANTEN - oder BETROFFENEN-Semantik von Partizipanten wieder hervorgekehrt wird als "Semantisierung" bezeichnen, d.h. der Agensstatus in einer NOMinativ-Sprache im Aktivsatz "verschleiert", wird durch Passivierung "semantisiert" und sozusagen "entschleiert". Wenn wir nun in unseren weiteren Überlegungen vornehmlich auf nominativische und ergativische Sprachen Bezug nehmen, so gehen wir davon aus, daß in beiden Sprachtypen verschiedene Grade von gesetzter Nivelliertheit bzw. Nichtnivelliertheit vorliegen (vgl. Drossard 1986 a), andererseits zeigt der von Šaumjan (1985) durchgeführte Vergleich der beiden Sprachtypen, daß sich nominativisch und ergativisch spiegelbildlich zueinander verhalten im Hinblick auf die jeweiligen Markiertheitsverhältnisse von aktiven zu nicht-aktiven Sätzen. Andererseits offenbaren sich hinsichtlich der Zentralität und Peripherizität von Partizipanten neben den. von Šaumjan aufgeführten Beispielen (zu Passiv und Antipassiv) auch in anderen Kontexten Varianten, die einem "mirror image" gehorchen. Grundsätzlich verleiht uns die šaumjansche Konzeption ein heuristisch wertvolles Instrumentarium, das sich bei der Gewinnung und Systematisierung des Sprachmaterials als sehr förderlich erweist.
Studien zur Lokalisation: Teil: 2.: Verbgebundene Lokalisation vs. Lokalisation von Propositionen
(1992)
Der vorliegende Aufsatz gliedert sich in zwei Unterabschnitte. In Abschnitt I geht es um verbgebundene, von der Valenz geforderte Lokalisation. Die einzelsprachlichen Beispiele zeigen, daß es sich konstant um Verben der Position oder Positionsveränderung (Bewegungs - und Transferverben) handelt, die lokale Relationen wie LOK (Ortsruhe), SOURCE oder GOAL fordern. Unter Bezugnahme auf die Erkenntnisse zur Dimension der PARTIZIPATION (H. Seiler/W. Premper 1991) können die Varianten, wie sie in der einzelsprachlichen Kodierung zu beobachten sind, zwischen den Polen zentralisiert und dezentralisiert (peripher) angeordnet werden . Dies bedeutet, daß lokale Relationen (als verbgebundene Entitäten) einerseits am Partizipatum selbst und andererseits im Bereich der Partizipanten in Gestalt verschiedener grammatischer Relationen in Erscheinung treten können. Im ersteren Fall kann die Inkorporation einer lokalen Ergänzung ins Partizipatum als optimal zentralisiert betrachtet werden, während eine Kodierung als Präpositionalphrase das andere Extrem darstellt. Dazwischen liegt eine Kodierung als "Subjekt"- bzw. "Objekt"-Relation, für die sich, wie auch für die anderen Fälle, eine Reihe von Beispielen finden lassen. Somit schwankt die Skala der Kodierungsmöglichkeiten für verbgebundene lokale Relationen zwischen Inkorporation und Präpositional-/Postpositionalphrasen, was letztlich eine Differenzierung in markierte und unmarkierte, im letzteren Falle gar prototypische Instanzen bedeutet. Im II . Abschnitt geht es darum, so weit dies möglich erscheint, Varianten zu beschreiben, die funktional die Aufgabe einer Situierung einer Gesamtproposition bewerkstelligen.
Mit der im Titel dieses Aufsatzes intendierten Gegenüberstellung eines statischen Phänomens (Transitivität) und eines dynamischen (TRANSITIVIERUNG) ergibt sich im Hinblick auf die Dimension der PARTIZIPATION das Postulat einer Interaktion einer indikativischer Sehweise mit einer prädikativischen. Der indikativische Aspekt der Transitivität ist darin begründet, daß auf der Basis von u.U. verschiedenen Definitionen von Transitivität, von Sprache zu Sprache in unterschiedlicher Weise, INITIANTEN-BETROFFENEN-Konfigurationen gesetzt werden, während sich der prädikativische Aspekt (die TRANSITIVIERUNG) darin manifestiert, daß bilaterale Beziehungen etabliert, d.h. INITIANTEN-BETROFFENEN-Relationen durch morphologischen Aufwand am Verb erzeugt werden, und dies zumeist auf der Basis eines intransitiven, meist patiensorientierten Verbs. Letztlich ergibt sich ein typologischer Zusammenhang zwischen der Setzung von Intransitivität/Transitivität (als Input) und der darauf operierenden TRANSITIVIERUNG, wie er von Nichols (1982, 1984a, 1984b) angedeutet ist: Sprachen, deren Verbbestände einen stärker "intransitiven" Charakter haben, werden mehr transitivieren und umgekehrt. Statistische Aussagen über den intransitiven oder transitiven Charakter von Verbbeständen verschiedener Sprachen können dabei auf zweierlei Weise erfolgen. Zum einen kann man die Verteilung von intransitiv vs. transitiv im Rahmen eines international standardisierten Grundwortschatzes ermitteln, zum anderen kann man INITIANTEN-BETROFFENEN-Konfigurationen in eine bestimmte Anzahl von Untergruppen zerlegen, indem man Rollenschemata angibt. Wir werden im folgenden diese an Tsunoda (1981) ausgerichtete Methode erläutern, aber auch an verschiedenen Stellen unserer Ausführungen "grundwortschatzbezogene" Anmerkungen hinzufügen. Im Endeffekt resultiert auf diese Weise bei einem Vergleich verschiedener Sprachen eine intersprachliche Skala, die es erlaubt, Sprachen zwischen den Nicholsschen Polen "fundamentally intransitive" und "fundamentally transitive" einzuordnen und dabei Beobachtungen zur Ausprägung intransitivierender und transitivierender Verfahren ermöglicht. Bei der Aufarbeitung des dazu nötigen Materials wird es einerseits um die Rektion der Verben (und damit auch um Kasusmarkiertheit), andererseits um die Derivation bzw. Nicht-Derivation ("Simplizität") bestimmter Gruppen von Verben gehen. Doch zunächst einige Bemerkungen zum Phänomen "Transitivität".
In these conclusions we can deal only with some of the tentative comparative results of the workshop papers on the early development of verb morphology. The main focus is on criteria of how the child detects morphology and how this emerging morphological competence develops in its earliest phases. In view of the purpose and tentative character of these conclusions, all references will be limited to the papers of the workshop and to earlier studies by workshop participants within the "Crosslinguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition". Much more will be given in the projected final publication.
The distinction between COMPLEMENTS and ADJUNCTS has a long tradition in grammatical theory, and it is also included in some way or other in most current formal linguistic theories. But it is a highly vexed distinction, for several reasons, one of which is that no diagnostic criteria have emerged that will reliably distinguish adjuncts from complements in all cases – too many examples seem to "fall into the crack" between the two categories, no matter how theorists wrestle with them.
In this paper, I will argue that this empirical diagnostic "problem" is, in fact, precisely what we should expect to find in natural language, when a proper understanding of the adjunct/complement distinction is achieved: the key hypothesis is that a complete grammar should provide a DUAL ANALYSIS of every complement as an adjunct, and potentially, an analysis of any adjunct as a complement. What this means and why it is motivated by linguistic evidence will be discussed in detail.
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 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.
We will argue that some seemingly adverbial free DPs in the instrumental in Russian which are traditionally termed measure instrumental are best understood as secondary predicates. We present the relevant syntactic assumptions and propose a semantics of this use of DPs in the instrumental. This proposal hears on the distinction between adjunct modification and secondary predication.
An adjunct-DP in the free instrumental case occurs in a number of surface positions where the DP is syntactically optional. does not depend on any element in the sentence, and has a number of different interpretations. We introduce Bailyn's proposal which postulates a uniform syntactic environment for all the uses of instr. This calls for a uniform semantics of these DPs which can nevertheless accomodate the different interpretations. Starting with the hypothesis of Roman Jakobson about the semantics of the instrumental case we formulate a semantic interpretation theory based on abduction. We give a uniform semantics for three different adjunct uses of instr in this framework. In the concluding part of the paper we discuss some possible alternatives and ramifications as well as questions and objections raised with respect to the treatment proposed in this paper.
Die tschetschenische und die deutsche Sprache gehören bekanntlich zu unterschiedlichen Sprachfamilien. Die traditionelle morphologische Klassifikation zählt das Tschetschenische zu den agglutinierenden Sprachen. Dennoch zeigt das Tschetschenische viele gemeinsame Züge mit den Sprachen anderer genealogischer Strukturen, so zum Beispiel – unserer These nach – mit dem Deutschen auf dem Gebiet der Phonetik. Hinsichtlich der Morphologie und der Syntax gib es Ähnlichkeiten mit den slawischen Sprachen, vornehmlich dem Russischen. Die tschetschenischen Sprachforscher betonen aber, dass ihre Sprache unter den anderen kaukasischen, agglutinierenden Sprachen einen besonderen Platz einnimmt, weil man in ihr viele Merkmale der Flektierbarkeit beobachten kann, besonders bei der Deklination von Gattungsnamen, Adjektiven und Partizipien.
The current study focuses on the prosodic realization of negators in Saisiyat, an endangered aboriginal language of Taiwan, and compares its prosodic realization of negation with that of English. The results of this study indicate that sentential subjects are the most acoustically prominent items in the Saisiyat negative sentences measured. This contrasts sharply with the English experimental sentences, in which the negator itself was the most acoustically prominent item. These findings suggest that Saisiyat is a pitch-accent language; thus, the presence of negators does not significantly change the prosodic parameters of surrounding words. English, in contrast, is an intonation language, so the presence of negation results in substantial prosodic modification. This suggests that the phenomenon of negation is universally prominent; however, languages with different prosodic systems will adopt different strategies for realizing prominence.
In the area of the Modern Greek verb, phenomena which consistently appear are headmarking, many potential slots before and/or after the verb root, noun and adverb incorporation, addition of adverbial elements by means of affixes, a large inventory of bound morphemes, verbal words as minimal sentences, etc. These features relate Modern Greek to polysynthesis. The main bulk of this paper is dedicated to the comparison of affixal and incorporation patterns between Modern Greek and the polysynthetic languages Abkhaz, Cayuga, Chukchi, Mohawk, and Nahuatl. Ultimately, a typological outlook for Modern Greek is proposed.
This paper offers a description of the contemporary German lexicography using dictionary taxonomy. The parameters used for the classification of dictionaries are the number of languages (monolingual against bilingual dictionaries), the user’s perspective (how useful is each kind of dictionary for the Brazilian scholar) and the two perspectives of the act of speech (text reception against text production).
This study investigates supralaryngeal mechanisms of the two way voicing contrast among German velar stops and the three way contrast among Korean velar stops, both in intervocalic position. Articulatory data won via electromagnetic articulography of three Korean speakers and acoustic recordings of three Korean and three German speakers are analysed. It was found that in both languages the voicing contrast is created by more than one mechanism. However, one can say that for Korean velar stops in intervocalic position stop closure duration is the most important parameter. For German it is closure voicing. The results support the phonological description proposed by Kohler (1984).
This is a survey of the development of the model of PARTICIPATION (P'ATION) with reference to the postulated sequence of the techniques on the dimension of P'ATION. Along with a brief explanation of the techniques this article contains a discussion of the major claims with regard to the sequence of the techniques and the possibilities of subjecting the claims to empirical verification.
Introduction
(2000)
Die vorliegende Arbeit geht unmittelbar vom Konzept der Natürlichen Morphologie aus. Am Datenbereich der dt. Substantivflexion soll die explanative Adäquatheit und Prädiktabilität des Konzepts hinsichtlich des Aufbaus und der Veränderung eines Teilflexionssystems als Ganzes überprüft und auf dieser Basis ein Strukturmodell der dt. Substantivflexion vorgeschlagen werden. Insbesondere bei der Erfassung der Gesamtstruktur des Teilflexionssystems werden dabei Probleme des zugrundegelegten theoretischen Ansatzes deutlich werden. Mit der Diskussion und der Überprüfung theoretischer Annahmen, die diese Probleme lösen können, sowie der detaillierten Analyse des Flexionsverhaltens der dt. Substantive soll ein Beitrag zur weiteren Ausformulierung des in eine allgemeine Präferenztheorie einzuordnenden theoretischen Konzepts der Natürlichen Morphologie wie auch zur germanistischen Forschung geleistet werden.
It is often assumed that the goal of typology is to define the notion ‘possible human language’. This view, which I call the Universalist Typology view is shared, for example, by virtually all contributors to Bynon & Shibatani’s 1995 volume Approaches to Language Typology, and by Moravscik in her review of this volume in Linguistic Typology 1 (p.105). In the following I claim that this assumption is fundamentally mistaken. To clarify the theoretical status of what is meant by ‘possible human language’, I argue here for a distinction between typological theory (theoretical typology) and grammatical theory (theoretical syntax and theoretical morphology) as distinct subdisciplines of linguistics.
Different languages employ different morphosyntactic devices for expressing genericity. And, of course, they also make use of different morphosyntactic and semantic or pragmatic cues which may contribute to the interpretation of a sentence as generic rather than episodic. [...] We will advance the strong hypo thesis that it is a fundamental property of lexical elements in natural language that they are neutral with respect to different modes of reference or non-reference. That is, we reject the idea that a certain use of a lexical element, e.g. a use which allows reference to particular spatio-temporally bounded objects in the world, should be linguistically prior to all other possible uses, e.g. to generic and non-specific uses. From this it follows that we do not consider generic uses as derived from non-generic uses as it is occasionally assumed in the literature. Rather, we regard these two possibilities of use as equivalent alternative uses of lexical elements. The typological differences to be noted therefore concern the formal and semantic relationship of generic and non-generic uses to each other; they do not pertain to the question of whether lexical elements are predetermined for one of these two uses. Even supposing we found a language where generic uses are always zero-marked and identical to lexical sterns, we would still not assume that lexical elements in this language primarily have a generic use from which the non-generic uses are derived. (Incidentally, none of the languages examined, not even Vietnamese, meets this criterion.)
Die folgende Studie steht in Verbindung mit einer intersprachlichen Untersuchung zu der Dimension des sprachlichen Erfassens von Gegenständen im Rahmen des Kölner Projekts für Universalienforschung und Typologie (UNITYP). Im ersten Kapitel werden die zugrundeliegenden theoretischen Begriffe der sprachlichen Universalien und Typologie sowie die Dimension des Erfassens von Gegenständen kurz erörtert, um die Ziele dieser Arbeit in Beziehung zum Forschungsplan des UNITYPs zu setzen. Im zweiten Kapitel wird das Phänomen klassifikatorischer Verben zunächst definiert, und dann werden Systeme klassifikatorischer Verben in ausgewählten Einzelsprachen beschrieben. Abschließend wird der Versuch gemacht, zu zeigen, inwieweit die für eine Einzelsprache beschriebene Erscheinung ein typologisches Charakteristikum der betreffenden Sprachfamilie bzw. Sprachgruppe ist, um damit die Verbreitung von klassifikatorischen Verben in nordamerikanischen Indianersprachen vorläufig abzustecken. Im dritten Kapitel werden Verallgemeinerungen aus den im zweiten Kapitel vorgelegten Daten gezogen, um eine vorläufige typologische Beschreibung der Erscheinung "klassifikatorische Verben" zu erzielen und somit ihre Stellung in der Dimension des Erfassens von Gegenständen sowie in einer konzept-orientierten Typologie zu charakterisieren.
Evidentiality is a grammatical category which has source of information as its primary meaning — whether the narrator actually saw what is being described, or made inferences about it based on some evidence, or was told about it, and so on. Evidentials are a particularly salient feature of Tibeto-Burman languages. This volume features in-depth studies of evidentiality systems in six languages: Rgyalthang, a Kham Tibetan dialect, by Krisadawan Hongladarom; Yongning Na (Naxi group; believed to be closely related to Lolo-Burmese), by Liberty Lidz; Darma (Almora branch of Western Himalayish), by Christina Willis; nDrapa (Qiangic), by Satoko Shirai; Magar (Himalayish), by Karen Grunow-Hårsta, and Tabo (or Spiti), a Tibetan dialect, by Veronika Hein. Each opens new perspectives on the composition and the semantics of evidential systems, on the marking of more than one information source in one sentence, and on the grammaticalized expression of mirativity.
The new insights on evidentiality and related issues from the Tibeto-Burman area are crucial for understanding evidentials in a cross-linguistic perspective.
This paper studies the acquisition process of Spanish verbal morphology in a monolingual child. The study focuses on the period of the first 50 verb lemmas. This covers the period from age 1;7 till 1;10.
The data shows that the verb acquisition process of this Spanish child follows three main stages:
1. A lexical stage in which verbs are only acquired as a lexical element.
2. A syntactic stage in which the verb, still contemplated as a non-split word, becomes the main element in the development of thematic and semantic relations.
3. A morphological stage in which verb suffixes begin to be analysed separately. At this stage, the relationship between form and meaning starts and the functional categories linked to the verb (tense, aspect, agreement, mood... ) begin to be acquired. Just at this moment, the first miniparadigms appear, which suggests that the acquisition process of verb morphology has started.
The first two stages are premorphological and cover in our child the period till 1;9. In the last stage, which begins at 1;10, the child enters the protomorphological stage.
Die Ableitung des Passivs ist typologisch keine einheitlich konfigurierte Konstruktion. In den kontinental-westgermanischen Sprachen und dem Lateinischen setzt sie ein lexikalisch externes Argument (designiertes Subjektargument) voraus, im Englischen, Französischen und Russischen sowohl ein externes wie ein internes Argument (Subjekt und (direktes) Objekt). Gleichwohl sind Passive im Deutschen und Russischen - also quer zu dieser ersten Verbklassifikation – aspektuellen Beschränkungen unterworfen, Passive im Englischen dagegen nicht, jedenfalls auf den ersten Blick. Sehen wir in diesen Kreis von Sprachen noch historische Stufen hinzu, dann ist auch davon auszugehen, daß Sprachen wie das Deutsche von einer Stufe mit einem paradigmatisch einigermaßen systematisch gefestigten Aspektsystem ohne Passiv – dem Althochdeutschen – zu einer Sprache mit Passiv (und ohne Aspekt) wurde. Wir brauchen gar nicht die gemeinsame indoeuropäische Wurzel zu beschwören, um die folgenden Fragen plausibel erscheinen zu lassen: Was hat Aspekt mit Passiv zu tun? Und: Soferne solche Übergänge tatsächlich vorliegen – wie sehen die Schritte von Aspekt zum Genus verbi im einzelnen aus, und wo stehen die Sprachen heute im Vergleich zueinander, also auf einer Art Entwicklungsleiter, mit Vorläufer- gegenüber Nachläuferstufen in der relativen Diachronie von Aspekt zur Passivdiathese?
This volume presents working versions of presentations heard at and selected for the Workshop on Syntax of Predication, held at ZAS, Berlin, on November 2-3, 2001 (except the editor’s own paper).
Predication is a many-faceted topic which involves both syntax and semantics and the interface between them. This is reflected in the papers of the volume.
Anders als man auf den ersten Blick vermuten könnte ist die vorliegende Sammlung von Aufsätzen nicht aus den Beiträgen eines thematisch einschlägigen Workshops kompiliert worden (ein solcher ist erst für Herbst 1999 vorgesehen), sondern sie entstammt den Diskussionsrunden des Lexikonzirkels am ZAS, die - initiiert vom Projekt "Schnittstellen der Semantik: Kopula-Prädikativ-Konstruktionen" - seit 1997 regelmäßig und mit zunehmender Einbindung externer Mitarbeiter stattgefunden haben. Daß das 1998 mit nur anderthalb DFG-Stellen besetzte Projekt am ZAS eine solche Irradiationswirkung ausübt, verdankt sich wohl dem Zusammentreffen zweier günstiger Bedingungen.
Die erste Bedingung liefern die im Konzept des ZAS angelegten Möglichkeiten kooperativer Forschungsförderung, die hier in beherzter Überschreitung administrativer Grenzen erfolgreich umgesetzt werden konnten. Die Beiträge sind eine Zwischenbilanz von Studien, die im ZAS-Projekt selbst betrieben wurden, und von Studien, die - vom Projekt angeregt - nach kurzem so in dessen Forschung verwickelt waren, daß die resultierende Verflechtung zur unverzichtbaren Grundlage der weiteren Arbeit des Projekts geworden ist.
Die zweite Bedingung besteht offenkundig in der Problemhaltigkeit des Themas und der daraus resultierenden theoretischen Attraktivität. Was macht Kopula-Prädikativ-Konstruktionen unter dem Blickwinkel ihrer grammatischen Schnittstellen so attraktiv?