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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.