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This paper draws a link between the typological phenomenon of the paradigmatically supported evidentiality evoked by perfect and/or perfectivity and the equally epistemic system of modal verbs in German. The assumption is that, if perfect(ivity) is at the bottom of evidentiality in a wide number of unrelated languages, then it will not be an arbitrary fact that systematic epistemic readings occur also for the modal verbs in German, which were preterite presents originally. It will be demonstrated, for one, how exactly modal verbs in Modem German still betray sensitivity to perfect and perfective contexts, and, second, how perfect(ivity) is prone to evincing epistemic meaning. Although the expectation cannot be satisfied due to a lack of respective data from the older stages of German, a research path is sketched narrowing down the linguistic questions to be asked and dating results to be reached.
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.
This paper deals with complex prefix-particle structures like aberkennen in German. First, it presents a scheme to analyse these double complex words from a synchronic point of view. Second, it is shown for words with ab-, that this type of word formation is typical for Middle and Early Modern High German and reasons for the decrease are discussed.
Word formation in Distributed Morphology (see Arad 2005, Marantz 2001, Embick 2008): 1. Language has atomic, non-decomposable, elements = roots. 2. Roots combine with the functional vocabulary and build larger elements. 3. Roots are category neutral. They are then categorized by combining with category defining functional heads.
In this paper we investigate Greek, an optional clitic doubling language not subject to Kaynes generalization (Jaeggli 1982), and we argue that in this language, doubled DPs are in A-positions. We propose that Greek clitics are formal features that move, permitting DPs in argument positions. This leads to a typology according to which there are two types of clitic/agreement languages -configurational and nonconfigurational ones-, depending upon whether clitics are instantiations of formal features or not.
Structuring participles
(2008)
In this paper we discuss three types of adjectival participles in Greek, ending in -tos and –menos, and provide a further argument for the view that finer distinctions are necessary in the domain of participles (Kratzer 2001, Embick 2004). We further compare Greek stative participles to their German (and English) counterparts. We propose that a number of semantic as well as syntactic differences shown by these derive from differences in their respective morpho-syntactic composition.
Verbs, nouns and affixation
(2008)
What explains the rich patterns of deverbal nominalization? Why do some nouns have argument structure, while others do not? We seek a solution in which properties of deverbal nouns are composed from properties of verbs, properties of nouns, and properties of the morphemes that relate them. The theory of each plus the theory of howthey combine, should give the explanation. In exploring this, we investigate properties of two theories of nominalization. In one, the verb-like properties of deverbal nouns result from verbal syntactic structure (a “structural model”). See, for example, van Hout & Roeper 1998, Fu, Roeper and Borer 1993, 2001, to appear, Alexiadou 2001, to appear). According to the structural hypothesis, some nouns contain VPs and/or verbal functional layers. In the other theory, the verbal properties of deverbal nouns result from the event structure and argument structure of the DPs that they head. By “event structure” we mean a representation of the elements and structure of a linguistic event, not a representation of the world. We refer to this view as the “event model”. According to the event model hypothesis, all derived nouns are represented with the same syntactic structure, the difference lying in argument structure – which in turn is critically related to event structure, in the way sketched in Grimshaw (1990), Siloni (1997) among others. In pursuing these lines of analysis, and at least to some extent disentangling their properties, we reach the conclusion that, with respect to a core set of phenomena, the two theories are remarkably similar – specifically, they achieve success with the same problems, and must resort to the same stipulations to address the remaining issues that we discuss (although the stipulations are couched in different forms).
Class features as probes
(2008)
In this article, we adress (i) the form and (ii) the function on inflection class features in minimalist grammar. The empirical evidence comes from noun inflection systems involving fusional markers in German, Greek, and Russian. As for (i), we argue (based on instances of transparadigmatic syncretism) that class features are not privative; rather, class information must be decomposed into more abstract, binary features. Concerning (ii), we propose that class features qualify as the very device that brings about fusional infection: They are uninterpretable in syntax and actas probes on stems, with matching inflection markers as goels, and thus trigger morphological Agree operations that merge stem and inflection marker before syntax is reached.
This article addresses the controversial question how non-derived denominal verbs (e.g. wingsuit, kennel, trombone) build their argument structures. Based on selected subsets of conceptually related verbs it will be shown that the argument structures of these verbs are flexible though not arbitrary. Without context, these verbs evoke frame-like default situations which are determined by speakers' shared encyclopaedic knowledge and sensorimotor experience and which are mapped onto a small set of abstract event schemata that 'predesign' thematic configurations. The discourse context, which also provides the syntactic context, either meets or models our expectations as to the context-free readings. In the latter case, new (metaphorical) readings are contextually created. These configurations are not arbitrary either because the meanings of verbalized nouns should always be (a) in a relation of contiguity to the base-noun concepts and (b) compatible with the semantics of the syntactic constructions.
The International Morphology Meeting is a biennial event held alternately in Vienna and Budapest. The eighteenth edition took place in Budapest in May 2018 and it was organised by the Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in collaboration with the Department of Theoretical Linguistics and the Department of English Linguistics of Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE). The meeting has invariably dealt with all aspects of morphology, with no preference for any particular framework or approach, albeit offering a leitmotif to orient authors who wish to give a presentation in the main session. This edition’s main theme was "Paradigms in inflection and word formation synchronically and diachronically", which provided potential presenters with the opportunity to submit abstracts in a wide range of topics. In addition to the main session, the conference hosted three workshops: (1) Models and methods in morphology; (2) The learnability of complex constructions from a cross-linguistic perspective; (3) Morphological aspects of Uralic and Turkic languages.
Aspectos dos tempos verbais
(1998)
In this paper I present two tenses of the German verbal system, the so called Doppelperfekt and Doppelplusquamperfekt. Although these tenses have only been marginally dealt with in the grammars, more studies have recently been made on them within the field of Linguistics. In order to describe these tenses, I will concentrate on the following authors: Hauser-Suida & Hoppe-Beugel (1972), Eroms (1984), Thieroff (1992) und Vater (1994). The tenses will be analysed formally and their meaning and usage illustrated with examples taken from the articles above.
This paper approaches productivity by considering three case studies: compounds, blends and phrasal verbs. The aim of the paper is to encourage a discussion about the factors involved in the notion of productivity, and to show why so many of the established measures are not completely satisfactory or are interpreted in a way that is not.
Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich mit dem muttersprachlich Erwerb (L1) des Genus im Deutschen. Im Zentrum der Untersuchung steht die Frage, wie ein Kind aus dem ihm angebotenen Sprachinformationen das komplexe System der Genusmarkierung erwirbt. Sie wird anhand von Daten aus einer Langzeitstudie eines monolingual aufwachsenden deutschen Kindes erörtert. Der Rahmen dieser Arbeit erforderte bei ihrem Aufbau gewisse Einschränkungen. So habe ich mich in der Auswertung der Erwerbsdaten auf den bestimmten Artikel als Genusanzeiger konzentriert. Als Artikel zeichnet er sich gegenüber den ebenfalls genusabhängigen Adjektiven dadurch aus, dass er eine meist obligatorische Konstituente einer Nominalphrase (NP) mit einem Substantiv darstellt. Der bestimmte Artikel wiederum ist einerseits der frequenteste unter den Artikelwörtern und weist andererseits das differenzierteste Formeninventar auf, wobei er als einziger Artikel im Nominativ alle drei Genera differenziert. Auch habe ich mich entschlossen, auf eine Gegenüberstellung und Diskussion verschiedener Spracherwerbstheorien zu verzichten und stattdessen ausführlicher auf die Aspekte, die im Erwerbsprozess selbst und somit für die Datenanalyse relevant sind, einzugehen. Dabei sollen unterschiedliche Ansätze berücksichtigt sowie die aktuelle Forschungslage dargestellt werden.
Verb agreement and epistemic marking : a typological journey from the Himalayas to the Caucasus
(2008)
Studies of the epistemic categories expressed in Tibetan auxiliaries and copulas have mostly compared the phenomena with mirativity marking, and this is no doubt the correct comparandum in diachronic research. However, synchronic descriptions are also often tempted to compare the relevant categories with agreement systems or similar reference-related structures, at least for expository purposes when explaining how the system works (e. g. Denwood 1999, Tournadre 1996, Goldstein et al. 1991).
In Belhare (Sino-Tibetan, Nepal), consonant prothesis at morpheme boundaries and deletion of stem "augments" is found if either metrical or morphological parsing would violate the bimoraic trochee pattern that underlies the stress system of the language. This finding corroborates Dresher & Lahiri’s (1991) "Principle of Metrical Coherence" and provides new evidence for the cross-linguistic applicability of Crowhurst’s (1994) "Tautomorphemic Foot" constraint. The data also support a view of the Prosodic Hierarchy as weakly layered, allowing consonants to be directly dominated by the foot or word node if they are prothetic and do not therefore need feature licensing within the syllable canon.
It is well-known that in many if not most Sino-Tibetan languages relative clause and attribute/genitive markers are identical with nominalization devices and that sentences bearing such markers can also function as independent utterances (cf. Matisoff 1972, Kölver 1977, DeLancey 1989, Genetti 1992, Ebert 1994, Bickel 1995, Noonan 1997, etc.). This morphological convergence of syntactic functions, which we may dub the ‘Standard Sino-Tibetan Nominalization’ (SSTN) pattern, is particularly prominent in some languages spoken in the eastern and southeastern part of the Kirant because these languages not only feature prenominal relative clauses, but also allow, albeit as a minor type, internally headed constructions.
Nominalinkorporation
(1980)
Inkorporation ist [...] eine Technik, die zur Wortkomplexität beiträgt. Es handelt sich dabei um eine besondere Art von Wortbildung: eine (evtl. mehrere) Prädikatsbestimmung (Subjekt, direktes Objekt, adverbiale Bestimmungen) wird ins Prädikat einverleibt. Das besondere an dieser Wortbildungstechnik ist – A. ihre syntaktische Relevanz: es werden zwei syntaktische Elemente zu einem Wort komponiert; gleichzeitig muss aber betont werden, dass die ursprüngliche syntaktische Relation der Mitglieder in dem Kompositum nicht unverändert bestehen bleibt; – B. die Offenheit des Prozesses, die erlaubt, Inkorporation sowohl gegenüber Derivationsprozessen als auch gegenüber anderen Arten von Komposition abzugrenzen. [...] Die hier relevanten Prädikatsbestimmungen (diejenigen also, die inkorporiert werden können) sind zwar nicht immer, aber vorwiegend durch Nomina realisiert. In dieser Arbeit wird nur die Inkorporation von Nomina berücksichtigt.
The main tenet of the present paper is the thesis that nominalization – like other cases of derivational morphology – is an essentially lexical phenomenon with well defined syntactic (and semantic) conditions and consequences. More specifically, it will be argued that the relation between a verb and the noun derived from it is subject to both systematic and idiosyncratic conditions with respect to lexical as well as syntactic aspects.
Romance suffix rivalry of action nouns from Middle English verbs in the OED textual prototypes
(2007)
In the present paper, I will argue that even in a language like German, where the verb system does not contain a grammaticized aspect distinction, aspectual features do underlie the early form-function-mapping of verb forms in L1-acquisition. Furthermore, it will be argued that it is not only past tense forms that may receive an aspectual interpretation in early child language but also other forms of the verbal input. In the case of German, these are the forms of the present tense paradigm and the past participle. Showing and discussing various piecesof evidence for this assumption should strengthen the "aspect before tense" or "primacy of aspect" hypothesis. In general, the paper aims at a deeper understanding of the hierarchical relation between tense and aspect whereby aspect is the basic category and, therefore, aspectual features are the inevitable starting point of the acquisition of grammar.
This paper deals with the emergence of verb morphology in one German child up to the time mini-paradigms occur in the data. I will focus on the role of protomorphology as a transitional stage between rote learning and the productive use of morphological distinctions.
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.
Eine wesentliche morpho-syntaktische Eigenschaft pronominaler Formen ist ihre Kongruenz mit dem Nomen. In den Grammatiken werden die pronominalen Paradigmen deshalb anhand der Kategorien des Nomens konstruiert. So wird traditionellerweise im Deutschen für all die verschiedenen pronominalen Elemente wie bestimmter/unbestimmter Artikel, Negationsartikel, Possessiv- und Demonstrativpronomen, starke/schwache Adjektive ein und dieselbe Struktur des Paradigmensystems zugrundegelegt. Die 3 Genusklassen konstituieren je ein Paradigma im Singular sowie ein gemeinsames Pluralparadigma. Jedes dieser 4 Paradigmen hat 4 Kasuspositionen, Nom., Gen., Dat., Akk. Dies ergibt ein Paradigmensystem mit 16 Paradigmenpositionen. Jede Position beschreibt eine der möglichen syntaktischen Umgebungen von nominalen Einheiten auf der Äußerungsoberfläche. Nicht nur im Deutschen existiert nun aber keineswegs für jede dieser Positionen auch eine eigenständige pronominale Form. Die Diskrepanz ist bekanntlich beachtlich. Das Paradigmensystem des bestimmten Artikels - das hier exemplarisch diskutiert werden sol1 - weist mit 6 Formen noch den größten Formenreichtum auf. Das Demonstrativpronomen dies und der Negationsartikel kein z.B. haben 5 distinkte Formen, die schwachen Adjektive schließlich nur 2.
Die Frage, die sich unmittelbar aufdrängt, ist, welche (grammatische) Ratio steckt hinter diesem hohen Maß an Formidentitäten. Inwieweit haben wir es hier mit motivierten Synkretismen, d.h. auf inhaltlich begründeten Neutralisationen beruhenden Formidentitäten, und/oder zufälligen Homonymien zu tun?
The study presents a first investigation of two different processes in the L1-acquisition of German: The acquisition of definite pronominal forms and the occurence of finite verbs. The aim of the study is to find out if there are inherent relations between both processes. Inherent relations are understood as developmental relations based on the structural properties which demand a correlated emergence of the finite verb and definite pronominal forms.
Introduction
(2000)
In the following, we will discuss the acquisition of plural forms in German from the unified perspective of the two, in our opinion compatible, approaches, on the basis of a longitudinal data sample of eight children. There are at least six recordings of each child, all of whom are girls. Together, the data cover the acquisition period from 1;11 to 2;10. One may thus anticipate that the data sample under investigation reflects the transition from purely lexical memorization to the acquisition of regularities or patterns.
Simple Event nominals with Argument Structure? – Evidence from Irish deverbal nominalizations
(2020)
Deverbal nominals in Irish support Grimshaw's (1990) tripartite division into complex event (CE-), simple event (SE-) and result nominals (R-nominals). Irish nominals are ambiguous only between the SE- and R-status. There are no CE-nominals containing the AspP layer in their structure. SE-nominals (also found in Light Verb Constructions) are number-neutral and incapable of pluralizing and are represented as [nP[vP[Root]]]. R-nominals are devoid of the vP layer and behave like ordinary nouns. The Irish data point to v as the layer introducing event implications and the vP or PPs as the functional heads introducing the internal argument (Alexiadou and Schäfer 2011). Event denoting nominals in Irish can license the internal argument but aspectual modification and external argument licensing are not possible (cf. synthetic compounds in Greek (Alexiadou 2017)), which means that, counter to Borer (2013), the licensing of Argument Structure need not follow from the presence of the AspP layer.
The present paper deals with grammaticalization as a comprehensive model of erosive processes in the history of natural languages, exemplified in German and Brazilian Portuguese. Grammaticalization is conceived of as the reduction of pragmatic versatility, semantic concreteness, syntactic liberty and phonetic substance of linguistic elements. It is subdivided into the processes of lexicalization, which transforms polylexematic into monolexematic elements, and deslexicalization, which reduces lexematic to sublexematic elements. In the middle of these processes stands the lexicon, which is seen as the central stock of linguistic elements. Within the lexicon, the process of grammaticalization continues, from lexical word classes through intermediate classes to grammatical word classes. The lower boundary of the lexicon is critical threshold, down to which the process of grammaticalization is compensated for by linguistic recycling that leads lexematic elements back into the linguistic circuit, through the formation of new polylexematic units. Beyond this threshold, however, no recycling is possible any more, so that elements which have once lost their lexical character are condemned to disappear in the long run. The different stages of grammaticalization are introduced and illustrated by means of concrete examples, first from Brazilian Portuguese and afterwards from German.
In this study explanations are sought for the often reported associations in child language between tense/aspect morphology and situation type. The study is done on the basis of adult-adult data, child language and input language to the children. First of all it is shown that the associations are natural, since they are strong in adult-adult English as well. Only in the early stages does child language differ from this distribution, in that the associations are either stronger or different. Input data appear to account to a large extent for these differing patterns. An additional explanation is found in the discourse topics: within the context of talking about the here-and-now, the combinations of morphology and situation type that can be seen as unmarked suffice. In the context of talking about past events and of giving general comments about the world, marked combinations are necessary. It is shown that children in and their parents at the early ages mainly talk about the here-and-now, whereas adults among themselves hardly ever do so. Later, describing past events and commenting on the world becomes more frequent in child language and input, and, as a consequence, marked combinations of tense/aspect morphology and situation types increase in use.
Conventional wisdom holds that productive morphology is regular morphology. Drawing evidence from French, we argue that the description of many lexeme formation processes is simplified if we hold that a productive rule may give rise to inflectionally irregular lexemes. We argue that the notion of a stem space allows for a straightforward description of this phenomenon: each lexeme comes equipped with a vector of possibly distinct stems, which serve as bases for inflectional form construction. The stem space is structured by default relations which encode the regular pattern of inflection; (partial) irregularities occur when a lexeme specifies a stem space violating the default relations. Derived irregularity is then the effect of a productive lexeme formation rule which specifies an irregular stem space for its output.
This paper presents a general approach to verbal inflection with special emphasis on suppletion phenomena. The paper focuses on French, but the approach is general enough to apply to a wide variety of languages.
In the first part of the paper, we show that suppletion is not erratic: suppletive forms tend to always appear in groups, in definite areas of verbal paradigms. Our analysis is based on the observation of a number of dependency relations between inflectional forms of verbs (somewhat similar to rules of referral (Zwicky 1985, Stump 1993)). We define for each language a stem dependency tree based on these observations, which allows one to predict the whole paradigm of every verb in the language on the basis of a minimal number of idiosyncratic stems. We use the tree to minimize the quantity of redundant phonological information that has to be listed in the lexicon for a given lexeme, assuming that an optimal analysis of inflection should be able to derive all and only intuitively predictable inflectional forms from a single representation.
The second part of the paper attempts to integrate the analysis in an HPSG hierarchical lexicon. Morphological dependency relations are represented directly by mentioning a lexical sign in another sign's lexical entry. The approach to suppletion proposed in the first part is made explicit using a combination of online type construction and default constraints on the phonology of dependent signs.
In most recent work, Crysmann and Bonami (2012) suggest to reconcile the insights of inferential-realisational morphology (Anderson, 1992; Stump, 2001; Brown and Hippisley, 2012) with the full typology of variable morphotactics: situations where the expression of analogous feature sets can appear in various positions in the string. The authors proposed to account for these facts by importing, into HPSG, a variant of Paradigm Function Morphology (Stump, 2001) where realisation rules are doubly indexed for linear position and paradigmatic opposition. In this paper we first introduce more empirical challenges for theories of morphotactics that neither PFM nor the reformist approach of Crysmann and Bonami (2012) can accommodate. We then argue for a reappraisal of methods for morph introduction, and propose a new approach that replaces stipulation of classes of paradigmatic opposition with a general distinction between expression and conditioning (Carstairs, 1987; Noyer, 1992) which greatly expands the scope of Pāṇini’s Principle.
The paper investigates the interpretation of the Romanian subjunctive B (subjB) mood when it is embedded under the propositional attitude verb crede (believe). SubjB is analyzed as a single package of three distinct presuppositions: temporal de se, dissociation and propositional de se. I show that subjB is the temporal analogue of null PRO in the individual domain: it allows only for a de se reading. Dissociation enables us to show that subjB always takes scope over a negation embedded in a belief report. Propositional de se derives this empirical generalization. The introduction of centered propositions (generalizing centered worlds), together with propositional de se, dissociation and the belief 'introspection' principles, derives the fact that subjB belief reports (unlike their indicative counterparts) are infelicitous with embedded probabil.
Der vorliegende Arbeitsbericht ist die Zusammenfassung eines Beitrags zu einem von Prof, Dr. H. Seiler geleitetem "Field-work-Seminar" mit Japanisch als exemplarischer Objektsprache. In diesem Seminar wurden praktische Verfahren und Methoden erörtert, die der Linguist im field work benutzen muß, um seine Arbeit, Data zu kollationieren und diese gleichzeitig auch schon einer Voranalyse zu unterziehen, rationell und deskriptiv adäquat durchzuführen. […] Die Ausdrücke "phonetisch", "phonemisch", ':morphophonemisch" etc. sind im folgenden lediglich als prätheoretische Begriffe aufzufassen. Die Übergänge von einer "phonetischen" zu einer "phonemischen" und von dieser zu einer "morphophonemlschen" Notierung usw. sind hier verstanden als nach gewissen Plausibilitätskriterien durchgeführte Abstrahierungen, die ein sinnvolles Aufstellen und Behandeln des Corpus ermöglichen sollen. Damit ist die Frage der, Struktur und des Status eines "morphophonemischen Teils" im Rahmen eines spezifischen Grammatikmodells weder gestellt noch beantwortet.
In the typology of West African languages, tone has been noted to play crucial grammatical and lexical roles, but its function in word formation has been less systematically explored and remains to be fully understood. Against this backdrop, the present study seeks to examine the form and function of tonal morphology in the formation of action nominals in four Kwa languages spoken in Ghana, namely Akan, Gã, Lεtε, and Esahie, a relatively unexplored language of the Central Tano subgroup. Relying on data from both secondary and primary sources, we argue that tone raising is an important component of Kwa action nominalization, as it is found across different languages and derivational strategies. Specifically, while across the Kwa languages considered, tone raising tends to be an epiphenomenon of phonological conditioning, sometimes tone is the sole component of the nominalization operation or, as in Esahie, it concurs with the affix to the derivation, hence playing a morphological function.
We describe an empirical method to explore and contrast the roles of default and principal part information in the differentiation of inflectional classes. We use an unsupervised machine learning method to classify Russian nouns into inflectional classes, first with full paradigm information, and then with particular types of information removed. When we remove default information, shared across classes, we expect there to be little effect on the classification. In contrast when we remove principal part information we expect there to be a more detrimental effect on classification performance. Our data set consists of paradigm listings of the 80 most frequent Russian nouns, generated from a formal theory which allows us to distinguish default and principal part information. Our results show that removal of forms classified as principal parts has a more detrimental effect on the classification than removal of default information. However, we also find that there are differences within the defaults and principal parts, and we suggest that these may in part be attributable to stress patterns.
It has been previously reported that in languages demonstrating the Root Infinitive (RI) Stage the use of RIs is characterized by two properties: these forms are overwhelmingly eventive and have, in the majority of instances, a modal interpretation. Hoekstra and Hyams (1998, 1999) have proposed a theory stating that these two properties of RIs are co-dependent in that the application of the modal reference restriction limits the use of the aspectual verbal classes to eventive predicates. Furthermore, this theory assumed that the described mutual dependency of these constraints was valid cross-linguistically.
In this paper, we investigate the application of this theory to the case of RIs in Russian, one of the languages exhibiting the RI Stage. Using new longitudinal data from two monolingual Russian-speaking children, we demonstrate that the predictions of Hoekstra and Hyams’ approach are not realized for Russian child speech. While the constraint requiring that Ris have a modal reference does not seem to apply in Russian since the infinitival forms do receive past and present tense interpretation, these predicates are still overwhelmingly eventive and stative predicates appear mostly as finite verbs. Having shown that a theory connecting the application of the two restrictions on RIs does not account for the Russian data, we examine several alternative analyses of Russian RIs. We arrive at a conclusion that an explanation based on the lack of the event variable in stative predicates (Kratzer 1989) necessary for the interpretation of RIs in discourse (Avrutin 1997) succeeds in handling the Russian data presented in this article.
The paper explores factors that influence the distribution of constituent words of compounds over the head and modifier position. The empirical basis for the study is a large database of German compounds, annotated with respect to the morphological structure of the compound and the semantic category of the constituents. The study shows that the polysemy of the constituent word, its constituent family size, and its semantic category account for tendencies of the constituent word to occur in either modifier or head position. Furthermore, the paper explores the degree to which the semantic category combination of head and modifier word, e.g., x=substance and y=artifact, indicates the semantic relation between the constituents, e.g., y_consists_of_x.
Besides some well-established forms like autoritär 'authoritarian'; humanitär 'humanitarian'; new coinages ending with -itär can be found in German. These adjectives are closely related to nouns ending with -ität. From an etymological point of view; these formations are morphologically transparent. Not only are the adjectives new; but -itär emerges as a new suffix.
A typical characteristic of Central German dialects, especially of the Ripuarian dialect, is that it has collective nouns with ge- + -ze (cf. gesteinze) besides those with ge- + -e (cf. gesteine) corresponding to Dutch gesteente and gestene. A relationship between ge- + -ze and ge- + -te has been assumed for a long time. A corpus-based comparison is given in order to explain the genesis of these different formation types (ge- + -e, ge- + -ze, ge- + -te) and their relations. It seems likely that earlier Dutch formations influenced their Ripuarian counterparts. Rarely, the circumfix ge- + -te also occurs in Ripuarian texts and may be autochthone. One main result is that the suffic -ze in Ripuarian restores the collective formation in the circumfix ge- + -e when it was destroyed by the e-apokope. This is a rare instance where an element of word formation is replaced by another one in order to neutralize the isolation effect of sound change.
Genitive focus in Supyire
(2006)
Supyire has two distinct genitive constructions, one consisting of juxtaposed nouns, and the other marked with a particle. This study demonstrates that the marked genitive correlates significantly in natural discourse with contrastive focus as operationally defined in Myhill and Xing (1996). The method used avoids the vicious circularity of many discourse-based studies of focus. Contrastive focus, rather than being "coded", is a pragmatic construal which is dependent on other elements in the communicative context. This construal is only one of the possible construals of the marked genitive (contra Carlson 1994). In this it is not unlike other so-called "contrastive focus" constructions noted in the literature, such as contrastive stress in English.
The aim of this paper is to give the semantic profile of the Greek verb-deriving suffixes -íz(o), -én(o), -év(o), -ón(o), -(i)áz(o), and -ín(o), with a special account of the ending -áo/-ó. The patterns presented are the result of an empirical analysis of data extracted from extended interviews conducted with 28 native Greek speakers in Athens, Greece in February 2009. In the first interview task the test persons were asked to force(=create) verbs by using the suffixes -ízo, -évo, -óno, -(i)ázo, and -íno and a variety of bases which conformed to the ontological distinctions made in Lieber (2004). In the second task the test persons were asked to evaluate three groups of forced verbs with a noun, an adjective, and an adverb, respectively, by using one (best/highly acceptable verb) to six (worst/unacceptable verb) points. In the third task nineteen established verb pairs with different suffixes and the ending -áo/-ó were presented. The test persons were asked to report whether there was some difference between them and what exactly this difference was. The differences reported were transformed into 16 alternations. In the fourth task 21 established verbs with different suffixes were presented. The test persons were asked to give the "opposite" or "near opposite" expression for each verb. The rationale behind this task was to arrive at the meaning of the suffixes through the semantics of the opposites. In the analysis Rochelle's Lieber's (2004) theoretical framework is used. The results of the analysis suggest (i) a sign-based treatment of affixes, (ii) a vertical preference structure in the semantic structure of the head suffixes which takes into account the semantic make-up of the bases, and (iii) the integration of socioexpressive meaning into verb structures.
In this paper I present five alternations of the verb system of Modern Greek, which are recurrently mapped on the syntactic frame NPi__NP. The actual claim is that only the participation in alternations and/or the allocation to an alternation variant can reliably determine the relation between a verb derivative and its base. In the second part, the conceptual structures and semantic/situational fields of a large number of “-ízo” derivatives appearing inside alternation classes are presented. The restricted character of the conceptual and situational preferences inside alternations classes suggests the dominant character of the alternations component.
Inhärenz und Etablierung
(1981)
Die folgenden Überlegungen zum Problem der Inhärenz und Etablierung beziehen ihre wesentlichen Anregungen aus dem Aufsatz von H. Seiler "Zum Problem der sprachlichen Possessivität" (1972), wo eben dieses Problem eingebettet wird in den Rahmen von Inhärenz und Etablierung. […] Ziel der Untersuchung ist es, ausgehend von einer vorläufigen Definition der letztgenannten Begriffe […] und angelehnt an eine kasussemantische Methodik, Possessivität als ein sprachliches Phänomen zu beschreiben, das verstanden werden muß im Rahmen allgemeiner relationaler Erscheinungen: Inhärenz und Etablierung ist in meinem Verständnis immer Inhärenz und Etablierung semantischer Relationen, einem Lexem ist immer eine solche Relation (mehr oder weniger) inhärent, es wird stets zwischen Lexemen eine Relation etabliert. Damit ist auch eine Brücke zur Valenz, die man als Inhärenz im verbalen Bereich verstehen könnte, gegeben […]. Nach einer Klärung des Umfeldes wird die Inhärenz zunächst für das Deutsche und Türkische einer genaueren Untersuchung unterworfen, eine weitere Detailanalyse ist dem Nahuatl gewidmet. Untersuchungen zu weiteren Sprachen […] sollen das gewonnene Bild erweitern und modifizieren. Die Untersuchungen zur Etablierung können nur als allererste Ansätze gelten, wie die gesamte Arbeit lediglich den Anspruch stellt, den Bereich nicht etwa erschöpfend abzuhandeln, sondern nur die Richtung aufzuzeigen, in der mögliche Ergebnisse zu suchen sind.
Das Phänomen der Inkorporation, spezieller Nominalinkorporation (NI), wurde ursprünglich in der Forschung vor allem in nordamerikanischen Indianersprachen untersucht und zu ihrer typologischen Beschreibung herangezogen. Daraus ergab sich eine Definition von NI als einem morphologischen Verfahren, bei dem ein prädikativer Ausdruck (V) einen referenzfähigen Ausdruck (N) inkorporiert, um einen komplexen prädikativen Ausdruck (V) abzuleiten. Nach heutigen Erkenntnissen jedoch gilt NI als relativ universell vertretenes Verfahren, das in den Sprachen der Welt mehr oder weniger prominent zu finden ist. Strittig ist dabei, ob das Inkorporat nur seinen syntaktischen Status – dies wäre als weit gefaßte Definition zu bezeichnen – oder auch seinen Wortstatus – dagegen eng gefaßte Definition (=Komposition) – verliert. Mit dieser Frage verbunden scheint die Diskussion um den Status von NI innerhalb eines Sprachmodells: Handelt es sich um ein syntaktisches Verfahren und ist als solches produktiv mit einer relativen Eigenständigkeit der Elemente (Sadock 1986/Baker 1988) oder um Lexikalisierung (Mithun 1984), also um einen Wortbildungsmechanismus mit einer zumindest tendenziellen Verfestigung der beteiligten Elemente? Allen diesen Modellen gemeinsam bleibt jedoch die Tatsache, daß sie im Bereich der Morphologie ansetzen. Wir wollen in dieser Arbeit den umgekehrten Weg beschreiten und anhand des von Mithun (1984) aufgestellten Katalogs von Charakteristika nach Phänomenen "nicht-morphologischer" NI suchen und sie am Material der jeweiligen Sprache erörtern.
There are fascinating problems at the syntax-morphology interface which tend to be missed. I offer a brief explanation of why that may be happening, then give a Canonical Typology perspective, which brings these problems to the fore. I give examples showing that the phenomena could in principle be treated either by syntactic rules (but these would be complex) or within morphology (but this would involve redundancy). Thus 'non-autonomous' case values, those which have no unique form but are realized by patterns of syncretism, could be handled by a rule of syntax (one with access to other features, such as number) or by morphology (with resulting systematic syncretisms). I concentrate on one of the most striking sets of data, the issue of prepositional government in Latvian, and outline a solution within Network Morphology using structured case values.
Backshift is a phenomenon affecting verb tense that is visible as a mismatch between some specific embedded contexts and other environments. For instance, the indirect speech equivalent of a sentence like 'Kim likes reading', with a present tense verb, may show the same verb in a past tense form, as in 'Sandy said Kim liked reading'. We present a general analysis of backshift, pooling data from English and Romance languages. Our analysis acknowledges that tense morphology is ambiguous between different temporal meanings, explicitly models the role of the speech time and the event times involved and takes the aspectual constraints of tenses into consideration.
Floating affixes in Polish
(2006)
The morphosyntactic status of Polish past tense agreement markers has been a matter of considerable debate in recent years (Spencer 1991, Borsley & Rivero 1994, Borsley 1999, Bański 2000, Kupść 2000, Kupść & Tseng 2005). Past tense agreement is expressed by a set of bound forms that either attach to the past participle, or else float off to a host further to the left. Despite this relative freedom of attachment, it is often noted in the literature, e.g., Borsley 1999, Kupść & Tseng 2005, that the combination of verbal host and agreement marker forms a word-like unit.
In this paper I will argue that these agreement markers are best analysed as affixes uniformly introduced on the verb whose inflectional features they realise. Building on the linearisation-based theory of morphology-syntax interaction proposed in Crysmann 2003, syntactic mobility of morphologically introduced material will be captured by mapping phonological contributions to multiple lexically introduced domain objects. It will be shown that this is sufficient to capture the relevant data, and connect the placement of floating affixes to the general treatment of Polish word order Kupść 2000.
Murrinh-Patha, a polysynthetic Non-Pama-Nyungan language of Australia features competition of subject and object agreement markers for a particular position (i.e. slot 2), meaning that certain subject agreement markers are realised in this position, unless already occupied by overt object agreement markers. In their typology of variable morphotactics, Crysmann & Bonami (2016) cite the case of Murrinh-Patha as an instance of misaligned, conditioned placement. I shall propose a formal account of this positional competition in Murrinh-Patha within Information-based Morphology. To this end, I shall generalise the "pivot" features previously proposed for placement relative to the stem (Italian; Crysmann & Bonami, 2016) or the edge (Soranî Kurdish; Bonami & Crysmann, 2013; Salehi & Koenig, 2023) and show how this will facilitate the treatment of conditioned placement in Murrinh-Patha.
Investigating the morphological and syntactic properties of discontinuous negative marking in Hausa, I shall suggest a constructional approach involving edge inflection, accounting simultaneously for the morphologically bound nature of the initial marker and its interaction with the TAM system, haplology of the final marker, and wide scope over coordination. I will argue that the degree of morphological integration of initial markers and haplology of final markers both favour an edge feature approach over phrasal affixation.
Recent years have witnessed a renewal of interest in variable morph ordering, the situation where the position of a morph in the word is not constant. These situations present a challenge to extant inferential-realisational approaches to morphology (Stump, 2001), insofar as these adopt implicitly or explicitly an a-morphous approach to morphological composition (Anderson, 1992). In this paper we will first review the typology of known variable morph ordering phenomena in inflection. We then argue that the challenges can be met by making a distinction between paradigmatic opposition classes and syntagmatic position classes, and show that this distinction can readily be implemented in HPSG while keeping the amorphous assumption.
In this paper we discuss two contrasting views of exponence in inflectional morphology: the atomistic view, where content is associated individually with minimal segmentable morphs, and the holistic view, where the association is made for the whole word between complex content and constellations of morphs. On the basis of data from Estonian and Swahili, we argue that an adequate theory of inflection should be able to accomodate both views. We then show that the framework of Information-based Morphology (Crysmann and Bonami, 2016) is indeed compatible with both views, thanks to relying on realisation rules that associate m units of forms with n units of content.
In this paper, we study Old French declension, a system which exhibits the theoretically challenging phenomenon of morphological reversal (Baerman, 2007). Furthermore, the declension system of Old French only recognises a single exponent -s, which marks different case/number combinations in different paradigms, contrasting with the unmarked form. We show that reversal is only one of several syncretism patterns found in the language and propose that Old French declension is best understood in terms of two systematic syncretisms: a natural split between singular and plural for feminines, and a Paninian split for masculines that systematically marks the objective plural. Reversal, and other seemingly morphomic splits arise as a result of idiosyncrasy in the NOM.SG cell, comprising inflection class-specific s-marking, as well as stem alternation and overabundance. We provide a formal analysis in terms of Information-based Morphology (Crysmann & Bonami, 2016) that effortlessly captures the systematic splits, as well as the variation in the nominative singular. We suggest that the high degree of idiosyncrasy in this cell paired with the reduced frequency of overt nominative NPs when compared to objective NPs may serve to explain why the system was actually quite short-lived.
This study explores four German nominalization patterns (-ung; -erei; Ge- -X-e; nominalized infinitives) using corpus and web data. We conclude that they can be considered a word formation paradigm, as some functions depend on paradigmatic oppositions. Our case study supports gradual differences between inflectional and word formation paradigmaticity.
Crosslinguistic research on the production of tense morphology in child language has shown that young children use past or perfective forms mainly with telic predicates and present or imperfective forms mainly with atelic predicates. However, this pattern, which has come to be known as the Aspect First Hypothesis, has been challenged in a number of comprehension studies. These studies suggest that children do not rely on aspectual information for their interpretation of tense morphology. The present paper tests the validity of the Aspect First Hypothesis in child Greek by investigating Greek-speaking children’s early comprehension of present, past and future tense morphology as well as the role that lexical aspect plays in the early use of tense morphology. It is suggested that although Greek-speaking children have not yet fully mapped the tense concepts to the correct tense morphology, tense acquisition does not seem to be significantly affected by the aspectual characteristics (i.e. the telicity) of the verb.
Although the original framework of HPSG is mostly compatible with independent theoretical claims or analyses in lexical lexeme base morphology (Anderson 1992, Aronoff & Fudeman 2004, Beard 1995, Booij 2005, Carstairs-McCarthy 1992, Fradin 2003, Haspelmath 2002, Matthews 1991, Plag 2003, for example), so far, most research in morphology has been done on inflexional phenomena (Orgun & Inkelas 2002, Bonami & Boyé 2006), and few on derivational morphology (Koenig 1999, Riehemann 1998). Yet, we believe it is worth investigating how the formal and theoretical apparatus of HPSG deals with capturing multilevel constraints that apply in the lexeme formation of French Verb-Noun nominal compounds, such as as GRILLE-PAIN (lit. grill-bread, 'toaster'), PERCE-OREILLE (lit. pierce-ear, 'earwig'), TOURNEVIS (lit. turn-screw, 'screwdriver'), or LÈCHE-VITRINE (lit. lick-window, 'window-shopping'). Contrary to what has often been said, we argue VN lexemes formation comes under morphological constraints but not under syntactic mechanisms. Our analysis integrates VN lexemes into a multiple-dimension typed-hierarchy of lexemes and provides an account for semantic generalizations involved in different types of lexeme formation (compounding, derivation, and conversion).
Deutsche Komposita haben einige forschungsrelevante Eigenarten, zum Beispiel die Fugenelemente. Kopf hatte deshalb befürchtet, das Thema Fugenelement sei längst "leergeforscht" (S. 1). Natürlich ist kein Thema wirklich leergeforscht. Weil wir verschiedene Ansichten und Einsichten haben. Weil niemand auf Forschungsfragen definitiv antworten kann. Weil sich unsere Sprache – wie alles in der Welt – ständig verändert.
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.
This paper presents a sketch of the prosodic, syntactic and morphological means of expressing focus in Chitumbuka, an underdescribed Bantu language of Malawi. The chief prosodic correlate of focus is boundary narrowing – rephrasing conditioned by focus – which is used not only to signal in situ focus but also in syntactic and morphological focus constructions. Of theoretical importance is the fact that rephrasing does not lend culminative prominence to the focused constituent. Although Chitumbuka has culminative sentential stress, its position remains fixed at the right edge of the clause, independent of the position of focus. This makes Chitumbuka a challenge for theories of focus prosody which claim that the focused constituent must have culminative sentential prominence.
Introduction
(2006)
The papers in this volume reflect a number of broad themes which have emerged during the meetings of the project as particularly relevant for current Bantu linguistics. [...] The papers show that approaches to Bantu linguistics have also developed in new directions since this foundational work. For example, interaction of phonological phrasing with syntax and word order on the one hand, and with information structure on the other, is more prominent in the papers here than in earlier literature. Quite generally, the role of information structure for the understanding of Bantu syntax has become more important, in particular with respect to the expression of topic and focus, but also for the analysis of more central syntactic concerns such as questions and relative clauses. This, of course, relates to a wider development in linguistic theory to incorporate notions of topic and focus into core syntactic analysis, and it is not surprising that work on Bantu languages and on linguistic theory are closely related to each other in this respect. Another noteworthy development is the increasing interest in variation among Bantu languages which reflects the fact that more empirical evidence from more Bantu languages has become available over the last decade or so. The picture that emerges from this research is that morpho-syntactic variation in Bantu is rich and complex, and that there is strong potential to link this research to research on micro-variation in European (and other) languages, and to the study of morpho-syntactic variables, or parameters, more generally.
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.
In the last two decades Philippine languages, and of these especially Tagalog, have acquired a prominent place in linguistic theory. A central role in this discussion was played by two papers written by Schachter (1976 and 1977), who was inspired by Keenan's artcle on the subject from 1976. The most recent contributions on this topic have been from de Wolff (1988) and Shibatani (1988), both of which were published in a collection of essays, edited by Shibatani, with the title Passive and Voice. These works, and several works in-between, deal with the focus system specific to Philippine languages. The main discussion centers around the fact that Philippine languages contain a basic set of 5 to 7 affix focus forms. Their exact number varies not only in the secondary literature, but in the primary sources, i.e. Tagalog grammars, as well, where considerable differences in the number of affix focus forms can be found. All of these works, however, do agree on one point: the Philippine focus system basica1ly consists of agent, patient (=goal or object), benefactive, locative, and instrumental affix forms. Schachter/Otanes (1972) list a number of further forms, and in Drossard (1983 and 1984) we tried to show (in an attempt similar to those of Sapir 1917 and Klimov 1977) that the main criterion for a systematization of the Philippine focus system consists in the difference between the active and stative domains, an attempt which in our opinion was largely misunderstood (cf. the brief remarks in Shibatani (1988) and de Wolff (1988). The present paper is thus, on the one hand, an attempt to repeat and clarify our earlier position, and on the other, a further step towards such a systematization. A first step in this direction was an article on resultativity in Tagalog from 1991. In the present paper this approach will be extended to reciprocity. In the process we will show that it is valid to make a distinction between an active (=controlled action) vs. a stative (=limited controlled action) domain. First, however, we will take a brief look at what makes up the active and stative voice systems.
Als eine der grundlegenden Systematisierungen im Bereich der Kausativität und damit – aus der Sicht des Kölner Universalienprojekts – der Technik KAUSATIVIERUNG – hat sich meines Erachtens die von Comrie (1981:165ff) eingeführte – und von H. Seiler wiederaufgenommene (1984:67) – und als Kontinuum angeordnete, Dreiteilung in analytische (= periphrastische), morphologische und lexikalische Bildungen erwiesen. Im Mittelpunkt des folgenden Aufsatzes steht der Versuch, im Tagalog, der wichtigsten philippinischen Sprache, diese drei Erscheinungsformen der Kausativierung zu untersuchen und systematisch aufeinander zu beziehen. Dabei ist von besonderer Relevanz, daß in diesem Zusammenhang der semanto-syntaktischen Eigenheit des Tagalog als Vertreter des aktiscischen Sprachbaus wesentliche Bedeutung zukommt. Weiterhin ist zu berücksichtigen, daß aus der Sich der Gesamtdimension PARTIZIPATION Phänomene aus anderen Techniken (z .B. aus der TRANSITIVIERUNG) nicht unerwähnt bleiben dürfen. Auf diese Weise führt die vorliegende Arbeit letztlich dazu, Zusammenhänge zwischen TRANSITIVIERUNG und KAUSATIVIERUNG in Form von kontinuierlichen Übergängen aufzuzeigen.
Morphology Days is a (nearly) biennial international meeting which deals with morphology within different frameworks and in various perspectives Previous editions of this conference have taken place in Leuven (2015), Leeuwarden (2013), Leiden (2012), Nijmegen (2011), Luik (2009) and Amsterdam (2007) While the first editions of the conference were mainly addressed to researchers working on morphology in the Netherlands and in Belgium, the last editions – including this one – included international contributions The programme and the book of abstract is available at the conference’s homepage at https://morphologydays2017.wordpress.com/program/. Organized by Philippe Hiligsmann, Kristel Van Goethem, Nikos Koutsoukos and Isa Hendrikx from the Université Catholique de Louvain, and Laurent Raiser from the Université de Liège, this edition of Morphology Days hosted more than 30 researchers, among which 3 plenary speakers, coming not only from Belgium but also from France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States. Although both inflection and derivation (affixation) where dealt with in the talks, this conference report will only address the studies on derivation.
A number of the languages of Polynesia, including Tongan and Samoan, display a process whereby a pronominal argument of the main predicate of a clause appears to be realized as a preverbal 'second position' (2P) pronoun. All other arguments, if overt, are realized postverbally, the languages being rigidly predicate-initial. This paper examines the characteristics of these pronouns in Tongan arguing that in most cases they are best treated as distinct words in their own right (though often phonologically deficient) while in a handful of cases they are affixal material composed morphologically with a preceding preverbal Tense/Aspect Marker (TAM). Despite the fact that Tongan preverbal pronouns clearly do not appear in a typical argument position, standard approaches to 2P pronominal elements (e.g. 'clitic climbing' and 'prosodic inversion') do not seem naturally applicable to the Tongan data. The relation-based analysis provided here exploits a natural consequence of various potential definitions of 'subjecthood' within HPSG, treating the preverbal pronouns as the (unique) instantation of the valence feature SUBJ and correctly blocking the possibility of the pronoun appearing in true second position above the TAM when a clause-initial conjunction is present, except in particular specified circumstances. Thus the Tongan pronouns are not strict '2P' elements despite the fact that they most often appear in second position in a clause.
This paper investigates the spelling of compound nouns in a corpus comprised of Early New High German protocols of witch trials from the 16th and 17th century. Previous studies on the spelling of compound nouns in printed texts have found that scribes increasingly write compound nouns as one word during the 16th century. However, this paper will show that there is still much variation in handwritten texts from that time. The study focusses on identifying factors that lead scribes to write compound nouns either as one word or two, such as linking elements and the use of upper case letters. I will argue that while there is more variation in the spelling of compound nouns in the handwritten corpus than in printed texts, there still is a strong tendency to line up the boundaries of the graphemic and syntactic words.
This paper deals with selected semantic, morphological and syntactic characteristics of Yiddish modal verbs, compared to their cognates in German and other Germanic language. In particular, it focuses on the modal ker, the subjunctive zoln and the conditional with volt. The synchronic description is completed by diachronic observations which refer to the Middle High German basis of Yiddish.
Inuktitut : Affixliste
(2003)
A phonestheme can be situated somewhere between a morpheme and a sound symbolic unit as well as between single-language and widespread appearance. Very often, phonesthemes are defined statistically. Consonant clusters like "gl-" appear in many words with certain aspects of meaning like "glint, glimmer, glitter". These cases seem to be restricted to individual languages or language families and resemble morphemes. A natural or iconic relationship between form and meaning is not obvious. Several authors, however, include sound symbolic phenomena with implicit natural features such as "i" for small things. This is a very widespread phenomenon and an example for some natural link between form and meaning. The article pleads for a two-fold definition and two types of phonesthemes. Further discussion takes into account the idea of an interrelation between increasing iconicity and higher diffusion as exemplified by the phonesthemes.
Standard accounts of HPSG assume a distinction between morphology and syntax. However, despite decades of research, no cross-linguistically valid definition of 'word' has emerged (Haspelmath, 2010), suggesting that no sharp distinction is justified. Under such a view, the basic units are morphemes, rather than words, but it has been argued this raises problems when analysing phenomena such as zero inflection, syncretism, stem alternations, and extended exponence. We argue that with existing HPSG machinery, a morpheme-based approach can in fact deal with such issues. To illustrate this, we consider Slovene nominal declension and Georgian verb agreement, which have both been used to argue against constructive morpheme-based approaches. We overcome these concerns through use of a type hierarchy, and give a morpheme-based analysis which is simpler than the alternatives. Furthermore, we can recast notions from Word-and-Paradigm morphology, such as 'rule of referral' and 'stem space', in our framework. We conclude that using HPSG as a unified morphosyntactic theory is not only feasible, but also yields fruitful insights.
Most systematic discussion of dyad morphemes has focussed on Australian languages, owing to a combination of their relative prevalence there, and the development of a descriptive tradition that investigates them in some depth. In the course of researching this paper, however, I became aware of functionally and semantically similar morphemes in many other parts of the world, almost invariably described in isolation from any typological reference point. I have incorporated such data as far as I am aware of it, in the hope that a systematic study will encourage other investigators to identify, and investigate in detail, similar constructions in a range of languages. The current state of our research, however, as well as some interesting geographical skewings that I discuss below, such that outside Australia dyad constructions almost exclusively employ reciprocal morphology, means that most of this paper will focus on Australian languages.
In Modern Greek there is a rich aspectual system, which involves both morphologically expressed grammatical aspect and eventuality types, carried primarily by the meaning of the verbal predicate. Particular emphasis is paid to the interaction between grammatical aspect and eventuality types, since it is due to this interaction that the verbal predicate acquires distinct meanings. In order to explain potential changes in the meaning of the eventualities caused by the interaction with grammatical aspect, I propose a formal analysis within HPSG, using Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS) for the semantic representations. Following the MRS architecture, I introduce a number of relations, which represent both grammatical aspect and eventuality types. The close interaction between grammatical aspect and eventuality types triggers special meanings which traditionally can be explained by inserting contextual information into the representations. In this paper, I argue against such an analysis, providing an alternative which is based on the introduction of subeventual templates formulated by Michaelis (2003) and Pustejovsky (1995). In this context, grammatical aspect combines with eventuality types and selects eventualities or subeventualities appropriate to its selection restrictions, using information that is already there in the denotation of the eventualities.
We address three properties of Turkish morphology and VP coordination: the identification of tense and aspect values across conjuncts, the optional omission of affixes on non-final conjuncts coordinated with the word ve and the obligatory sharing of scopal modals across conjuncts in coordination structures with the affix -ip. For the modals in an -ip structure, we propose an analysis that uses syntactic features to trigger the application of a construction at the level of the coordinated VP introducing the scopal predications. Our analysis is implemented in a small HPSG grammar and tested against datasets confirming the functionality and consistency of the analysis.
Am 5. und 6. Mai 2022 fand am Institut für Germanistik der Universität Leipzig der von Adele Baltuttis, Anna Bliß, Barbara Schlücker und dem Autor dieses Berichts organisierte internationale Workshop "Word Formation and Discourse Structure" statt. Gegenstand des Workshops war ein bisher in der Forschung weitgehend unbeachtetes Thema, nämlich die Rolle der Wortbildung für die Struktur und Verständlichkeit von Texten: Inwieweit tragen komplexe Wörter zum Strukturaufbau und zur inhaltlichen Verknüpfung über Satzgrenzen hinweg bei? Vor dem Hintergrund dieses Desiderats sollte der Workshop ein Forum bieten, in dem zu diesem Thema Perspektiven interdisziplinärer Forschung erarbeitet werden. Zwar sind bereits in den 1970er bis 1990er Jahren erste Arbeiten zur Interaktion von Wortbildung und Text- bzw. Diskurslinguistik entstanden, im Anschluss ist das Thema jedoch kaum noch verfolgt worden. Dabei fanden in der Text-/Diskurslinguistik enorme Entwicklungen statt, etwa bei der Einbeziehung neuer Methoden, insbesondere aus der Psycho- und Computerlinguistik oder hinsichtlich elaborierter theoretischer Modellierungen. Der Aspekt der Wortbildung blieb hierbei aber weitgehend außen vor. Der Workshops sollte deshalb neue und bekannte Fragen und Probleme (wieder) aufgreifen und vor dem Hintergrund der aktuellen Erkenntnisse und Methoden neu diskutieren. Das Thema Wortbildung und Diskursstruktur ist insofern ein neues und interdisziplinäres Thema, das das Zusammenspiel unterschiedlicher linguistischer Bereiche und Traditionen erfordert. Dies zeigt sich auch im Programm des Workshops, das internationale Wissenschaftler:innen aus verschiedenen linguistischen Teilbereichen (Wortbildung, historische Sprachwissenschaft, Diskurs-/Textlinguistik, Fachsprachen, Korpus- und Computerlinguistik) zusammengebracht hat.
An verschiedenen Stellen meiner Arbeit (Fuhrhop 1998/1999) bin ich auf den besonderen Einfluß von morphologischer Komplexität auf weitere morphologische Prozesse gestoßen. Insbesondere verhalten sich suffigierte Stämme anders als einfache, sowohl in der Komposition als auch in der Derivation. Im folgenden möchte ich die Fakten zusammenstellen, Überlegungen zur theoretischen Interpretation und Relevanz anstellen und das ganze mit dieser Vorveröffentlichung zur Diskussion stellen.
In what follows, I first briefly review Perlmutter (1968, 1970), in which it is argued that aspectual verbs are ambiguous between control and raising. I suggest that while the argument for the raising analysis is solid, the arguments supporting the control analysis of aspectual verbs are less so. As an alternative hypothesis to consider, I introduce the structural ambiguity hypothesis. In Section 3, I review three recent analyses of control and raising. Although there are important differences among them, they all share the basic assumption that the control/raising distinction is due to differences in selectional restrictions that the lexical items impose. Under such an assumption, the lexical ambiguity hypothesis is the only available option. In Section 4, I present evidence for the structural ambiguity hypothesis from studies concerning aspectual verbs in languages from four distinct families, German (Wurmbrand 2001), Japanese (Fukuda 2006), Romance languages (Cinque 2003), and Basque (Arregi Molina-Azaola 2004). These data strongly suggest that across languages aspectual verbs can appear in two different syntactic positions, either below or above vP, or the projection with which an external argument is introduced (Kratzer 1994, 1996, Chomsky 1995). Given these findings, I argue that it is the aspectual verbs' position with respect to vP which creates the control/raising ambiguity. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is lower than vP, an external argument takes scope over the aspectual verb. Thus, it is interpreted as control. When an aspectual verb appears in a position that is higher than vP, on the other hand, it is the aspectual verb that takes scope over an entire vP, including the external argument. Thus, it is interpreted as raising. In section 5, I extend the scope of this study to include a discussion of want-type verbs in Indonesian, as analyzed in Polinsky & Potsdam (2006). Polinsky & Potsdam argue that the Indonesian want-type verbs must be raising in at least certain cases where they allow a rather peculiar interpretation. Although they assume that there are also control counterparts of the want-type verbs, I argue that applying the proposed analysis to the want-type verbs does away with the need for stipulating two distinct lexical entries for these verbs. Section 6 concludes the paper.
While both Japanese and English have a grammatic al form denoting the progressive, the two forms (te-iru & be+ing) interact differently with the inherent semantics of the verb to which they attach (Kindaichi, 1950; McClure, 1995; Shirai, 2000). Japanese change of state verbs are incompatible with a progressive interpretation, allowing only a resultative interpretation of V+ te-iru, while a progressive interpretation is preferred for activity predicates. English be+ing denotes a progressive interpretation regardless of the lexical semantics of the verb. The question that arises is how we can account for the fact that change of state verbs like dying can denote a progressive interpretation in English, but not in Japanese. While researchers such as Kageyama (1996) and Ogihara (1998, 1999) propose that the difference lies in the lexical semantics of the verbs themselves, others such as McClure (1995) have argued that the difference lies in the semantics of the grammatical forms, be+ing and te-iru. We present results from an experimental study of Japanese learners’ interpretation of the English progressive which provide support for McClure’s proposal. Results indicate that independent of verb type, learners had significantly more difficulty with the past progressive. We argue that knowledge of L2 semantics-syntax correspondences proceeds not on the basis of L1 lexical semantic knowledge, but on the basis of grammatical forms.
U članku se opisuje morfonologija glagolske osnove u prezentskoj paradigmi na građi hrvatsko-crkvenoslavenskih (dalje: HCS) glagola s temeljnom osnovom na -i- u kojih tom završnom -i- prethodi zubni sonant: r, l, n (tj. tipa tvori-ti, moli-ti, brani-ti). U obzir su uzeti svi glagolski leksemi tog tipa iz kartoteke Rječnika crkvenoslavenskoga jezika hrvatske redakcije: 110 li-glagola, 127 ni-glagola i 83 ri-glagola i njihovi prezentski oblici. Metoda opisa je usporedba dotičnog fragmenta HCS gramatike sa staroslavenskim stanjem kao i sa stanjem u starohrvatskim (čakavskim) govorima. U staroslavenskom jeziku u prezentskoj je paradigmi tihglagola osnova okrnjena (tj. okrnjen je sufiks -i-) i pojavljuje se u dvije varijante: palatalnoj (u 1. licu jednine), i tvrdoj (u svim ostalim oblicima). Tako u prezentu nalazimo u osnovi alternacije r ~ ŕ, l ~ ĺ i n ~ ń. U HCS tekstovima morfonološki su najinovativniji ri-glagoli. Kako je u hrvatskom depalataliziran fonem ŕ, kod ri-glagola nije sačuvan staroslavenski morfonološki model. HCS građa ne pokazuje staroslavensku alternaciju r ~ ŕ, tj. kod ri-glagola nema variranja osnove u prezentu (okrnjena osnova u svim oblicima završava nepalatalnim suglasnikom). Kod li-glagola i ni-glagola staroslavenski je morfonološki model očuvan. Međutim, u tekstovima su ipak potvrđene rijetke devijacije od tog modela. Naime, usprkos postojanju grafijskoga sredstva za označavanje palatalnosti fonema ĺ i ń ispred gramatičkog morfema 1. lica jednine -u (tj. uporaba slova ű iza l, n), neki su pisari u rijetkim slučajevima izostavljali označavanje palatalnosti, tj. pisali grafem u (molu, branu). Autorica predlaže različita moguća objašnjenja te pogreške i utvrđuje u kojoj je mjeri ta pojava ograničena na određene HCS tekstove.
The purpose of this research was to trace the developmental steps in the acquisition of aspectual oppositions in Russian and to examine the validity of the 'aspect before tense' hypothesis for L1-speaking children. Imperfective/perfective verbs and their inflections, as well as aspectual pairs, were analysed in the first five months of verb production (and the respective months in the input) in three children. Additionally, the first four months of verb production were investigated in one boy with less data. Verb forms marked for the past and for the present occur simultaneously in all children. These early forms relate to 'here and now' situations: verbs marked for the past denote 'resultative' events that are perceived by the children as occurring during the speech time or immediately before it, while verbs marked for the present typically denote on-going events. Thus, with early tense oppositions (or tense morphology) children mark aspectual contrasts in the moment of speech: evidence in favour of the 'aspect before tense' hypothesis.
A strong preference in using the perfective aspect for the past and the imperfective aspect for the present events has been found in both adults and children. Further, only very few aspectual pairs were documented within the analysed period (from the onset of verb production to the period when children produce rule-driven inflectional forms). The productive use of the finite forms of perfective and imperfective verbs doesn't concord with the ability of the productive use of the contrastive forms of one lemma. Data suggest that children (start to) learn aspectual forms in an item-based manner. The acquisition of aspectual oppositions (aspectual pairs) is lexically dependent and is guided by the contextual 'thesaurus'. Aspectual pairs are learned in a peace-meal way during much longer, than observed for this article, period of time. Generally, aspect is not learned as a rule, also because there are no (uniform) rules of forming of aspectual pairs, but as the 'satellite' of the inherent lexical meaning of verbs of diverse Aktionsarten.
The issues addressed here are relevant for other Slavic languages, exhibiting the morphological category of aspect.
This paper presents an overview on deverbal nominalizations from Ktunaxa, a language isolate spoken in eastern British Columbia, Canada. Deverbal nominalizations are formed uniformly with a left-peripheral nominalizing particle k (Morgan 1991). However, they do not form a single homogenous class with respect to various syntactic properties. These properties are illustrated with novel data, showing that deverbal nominalizations fall into at least two classes, which are analyzed here as nominalization taking place at either vP or VP, where vP-nominalizations include the external argument and VP-nominalizations do not. Evidence for this division comes from how possession is expressed, the interpretation of the passive (and passive-like constructions), and the licensing of verbal modifiers. As both classes of deverbal nominalizations are constructed uniformly with the nominalizing particle, these properties are derived syntactically from the size of the verbal constituent being nominalized.
The 'de-allative'-pattern (Heine/ Kuteva 2008: 103) gives rise to the French grammaticalized periphrasis aller + INF and the Spanish grammaticalized periphrasis ir a + INF. This construction (anar + INF) also consists in Catalan, but here, however, with the periphrasis expressing a past tense. Concerning the grammaticalization path ir a + INF and aller + INF were formerly used to express a past (historical present), whereas anar + INF also expressed a future (and can still take on this function). This paper discusses possible reasons for the development and the thus exceptional position of the Catalan past-periphrasis. In addition to morphological and normative explanations, language contact between Catalan and Spanish/ French as well as sociolinguistic circumstances are factors which may possibly account for the development of the Catalan construction. After a separate presentation of the development and the former and actual use(s) and forms of the three periphrasis, the cognitive processes which took place during the grammaticalization are presented. Afterward the three periphrasis are compared using the parameters of Lehmann. The second part of this paper consists of a corpus which verifies and illustrates the results of the previous part.
Lexical categories and processes of category change. Perspectives for a constructionist approach
(2017)
This paper revisits the notions of lexical category and category change from a constructionist perspective. I distinguish between four processes of category change (affixal derivation, conversion, transposition and reanalysis) and demonstrate how these category-changing processes can be analyzed in the framework of Construction Grammar. More particularly, it will be claimed that lexical categories can be understood as abstract instances of constructions (i.e., form-function pairings) and category change will be assumed to be closely connected to the process of constructionalization, i.e., the creation of new form-meaning pairings. Furthermore, it will be shown that the constructionist approach offers the advantage of accounting for the variety of input categories (ranging from morphemes to multi-word units) as well as for some problematic characteristics related to certain types of category change, such as context-sensitivity, counterdirectionality and gradualness of the changes.
This study proposes a cross-linguistic, corpus-based, and constructionist analysis of denominal verbs (DNVs) in English, Dutch and German. DNV constructions include various morphological construction types, such as conversion (e.g. English bottle > to bottle), prefixation (e.g. Dutch arm 'arm' > omarmen 'to embrace') and suffixation (e.g. German Katapult 'catapult' > katapultieren 'to catapult'). We investigate the correlation between the distribution of DNV constructions and the typological properties of the languages, focusing on boundary permeability, inflectional complexity, syntactic configurationality and word-class assignment. The study shows that, although the three languages have the same repertoire of DNV constructions at their disposal, a Germanic cline can be detected in their preferences for non-overt vs overt marking of the word-class change. As such, the study highlights the impact of typological factors on the shape of language-specific constructional networks.
Ida'an-Begak is a Western Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by approximately 6,000 people on the east coast of Sabah, Malaysia, Borneo and belongs to the Sabahan subgroup of the North Borneo subgroup (Blust 1998). Ida'an-Begak has three dialects, Ida'an, spoken in the villages of Segama to the west of Lahad Datu, Ida'an Sungai spoken in the Kinabatangan and Sandakan districts, and Begak spoken in Ulu Tungku, to the east of Lahad Datu (Banker 1984).1 Moody (1993) deals with Ida'an; this paper concentrates on the Begak dialect. In this paper I will present new data gathered in the field and provide an analysis of the allomorphy. The study is based on spontaneous data as well as examples elicited from my language informants.
One of the most important insights of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993) is that phonological processes can be reduced to the interaction between faithfulness and universal markedness principles. In the most constrained version of the theory, all phonological processes should be thus reducible. This hypothesis is tested by alternations that appear to be phonological but in which universal markedness principles appear to play no role. If we are to pursue the claim that all phonological processes depend on the interaction of faithfulness and markedness, then processes that are not dependent on markedness must lie outside phonology. In this paper I will examine a group of such processes, the initial consonant mutations of the Celtic languages, and argue that they belong entirely to the morphology of the languages, not the phonology.
The phenomenon of phonological opacity has been the subject of much debate in recent years, with scholars opposed to the Optimality Theory (OT) research program arguing that opacity proves OT must be false, while the solutions proposed within OT, such as sympathy theory and stratal OT , have proved to be unsatisfying to many OT proponents, who have found these proposals to be inconsistent with the parallelist approach to phonological processes otherwise characteristic of OT. In this paper I reexamine one of the best known cases of opacity, that found in three processes of Tiberian Hebrew (TH), and argue that these processes only appear to be opaque, because previous analyses have treated them as pure phonology, rather than as an interaction between phonology and morphology. Once it is recognized that certain words of TH are lexically marked to end with a syllabic trochee, and that the goal of paradigm uniformity exerts grammatical pressure on phonology, the three processes no longer present a problem to parallelist OT. The results suggest the possibility that all crosslinguistic instances of apparent opacity can be explained in terms of the phonology-morphology interface and that purely phonological opacity does not exist. If this claim is true, then parallelist OT can be defended against its detractors without the need for additional mechanisms like sympathy theory and stratal OT.
This paper presents a formalization of proportional analogy using typed feature structures, which retains all key elements of analogical models of morphology. With the Kasem number system as an example, I show that using this model it is possible to express partial analogies which are unified into complete analogies. The analysis presented is accompanied by a complete TRALE implementation.
In this paper the first results concerning the development of early verb morphology in an L1-English speaking child are presented. Adopting the framework of morphological development of Dressler (Dressler, this volume) the data of a girl from the CHILDES database, Nina of the Suppes corpus, is analysed with regard to the emergence of early verbal categories (e.g. number and person) and their appearance in a first mini-paradigm. In the sessions analysed so far the child Nina has reached an age of 2;2 when the first mini-paradigm emerges.
In seinen Schriften zur Typologie des Relativsatzes behandelt Lehmann auch das Baskische […] Die Diskussion um den baskischen Relativsatz geht jedoch schon auf De Rijk (1972) zurück und wird von Oyharqabal (1985) fortgesetzt. In diesen Werken geht es um allgemeine Themen der Typologie des Relativsatzes (vor allem um das Problem der Zugänglichkeit), wobei allerdings wichtige Fragen unberücksichtigt bleiben: Warum gibt es im Baskischen mehrere unterschiedliche Relativsatzkonstruktionen? Worin unterscheiden sie sich? Wie lassen sie sich voneinander und gegen andere Verfahren der Nominalisierung abgrenzen, mit anderen Worten: welche Konstruktion gehört noch zu den Relativsatzbildungen, welche nicht mehr? Ich will hier die verschiedenen Verfahren der Relativsatzbildung (Relativierung) vorstellen und versuchen, mit Hilfe von Lehmanns (1984) Kontinuum der Nominalisierung Ordnung in die Phänomene , zu bringen, um schließlich Erklärungsansätze zu finden.
Ich werde zunächst auf neuere Theorien zur Abgrenzung von Komposition und Derivation eingehen, um – darauf aufbauend –einen eigenen Lösungsvorschlag anhand von Sprachdaten auszuarbeiten. Dabei werde ich mich nicht auf das Deutsche beschränken, sondern ein Modell skizzieren, das auch eine gewisse übereinzelsprachliche Gültigkeit besitzt . Das Sprachmaterial entstammt allerdings in erster Linie indogermanischen Sprachen, da sich hier das Problem besonders augenfällig stellt. Es wäre jedoch interessant, das vorgestellte Modell an einer größeren Zahl von Sprachtypen zu überprüfen (und entsprechend zu modifizieren). In einem dritten Abschnitt schließlich möchte ich versuchen, die beobachteten Phänomene (und somit mein Modell) ansatzweise in einen Erklärungszusammenhang zu bringen. Das Hauptgewicht soll jedoch auf die Beschreibung der Phänomene selbst, d. h. den zweiten Teil meiner Ausführungen gelegt werden.