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Ziel dieses Beitrags ist der Vergleich von Formen und Diskursfunktionen der nominalen Anredeformen in verschiedenen Fernsehwahldebatten aus Brasilien, Portugal, Deutschland, Frankreich und Spanien.
Die sprachvergleichende Perspektive ist aus mehreren Gründen von besonderem Interesse. Zum einen liegt ein sprachstruktureller Unterschied zwischen dem Portugiesischen und den anderen Sprachen vor, der darin besteht, dass das Portugiesische eine große Zahl nominaler Anredeformen in sein Pronominalparadigma integrieren kann, wohingegen es diese Möglichkeit im Deutschen, Spanischen und Französischen nicht oder nur sehr begrenzt gibt.
Ein anderer Unterschied ist, dass es im Portugiesischen einen gewissen Spielraum dafür gibt, die interlokutive Distanz in der Interaktion durch Anredeformen auszuhandeln, was sich auch in den Wahldebatten zeigt. In den anderen drei Sprachen besteht diese Möglichkeit nur sehr eingeschränkt.
In allen fünf Debatten stehen die Anredeformen jedoch in engem Zusammenhang mit Fragen, wie z.B. der, wie Respekt oder Professionalität gezeigt wird, wodurch somit ein gewisser Zusammenhang zwischen der Wahl der Anredeformen und dem diskursiven Ethos manifest wird. Die Wahl der Anredeformen kann als strategisch betrachtet werden, wie auch der Wechsel von der Anrede zur delocutio in praesentia (Rede über den Gesprächspartner in seiner Gegenwart). Doch trotz dieser Parallelen zeigen sich deutliche Unterschiede in der Ausgestaltung, die die Frage nach interkulturellen Differenzen aufwerfen.
Životopis Mije Lončarića
(2011)
This paper presents doublets in the phonology and accentuation of a Kajkavian dialect in central Croatia, where all three major Croatian groups of dialects meet. Inconsistencies in the vowel and consonant systems are also noted. The second part considers the accentual system, its units and their distribution. Many fluctuations were noted, even with respect to retractions and special Kajkavian features. These are explained through influences of neihbouring local dialects and from the urban dialect of Karlovac and Standard Croatian.
Cilj je ovoga rada opis zamjeničke deklinacije u jednom hrvatskoglagoljskom rukopisu, Akademijinu brevijaru iz 14. stoljeća, i potom usporedba sa stanjem u kanonskim starocrkvenoslavenskim rukopisima, zatim u hrvatskoglagoljskim fragmentima i liturgijskim rukopisima, u zbornicima, i na koncu u tiskanim brevijarima. Nadalje se na temelju proučene i izložene građe pokušava odgovoriti na pitanje postoji li razlika, i u kojoj mjeri, kod zamjeničkih oblika između prvoga (Psaltira) i drugoga dijela brevijara (Komunala), kao što je to već ustanovljeno za neke jezične razine, odnosno koliko je u drugome dijelu prisutan utjecaj narodnoga piščeva govora.
Die genannte Publikation fokussiert auf eine mehrdimensionale Problematik, deren fachliche Betrachtung eine längere Tradition in der allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft hat. Trotzdem gelingt es den Autoren, die Problematik aus neuen Perspektiven zu beleuchten und auf neue Ansätze hinzuweisen. Damit schaffen sie eine innovative und richtungsgebende Grundlage für die Kollokationsforschung.
Die Metapher "Zorn ist der Feind, (Kampf) Gegner und Krieg" im Tschechischen und im Deutschen
(2011)
Das Ziel dieses Beitrags ist es, verschiedene Möglichkeiten der Versprachlichung von Zorn vorzustellen, wie sie im Wortschatz (der Phraseologie) des heutigen Tschechischen und Deutschen gespeichert sind. Diese vergleichende Untersuchung zur Versprachlichung der Emotion des Zorns im neuen Tschechischen und Deutschen bewegt sich im Rahmen der kognitiven Linguistik. Im Mittelpunkt unserer Aufmerksamkeit steht nur ein eingeschränkter Bereich des Wortschatzes beider Sprachen, und zwar Lexeme, in deren Benennungsstruktur die Emotion des Zorns als Feind, (Kampf)Gegner und Krieg erscheint. Im Wesentlichen handelt es sich also um Metaphern, mit deren Hilfe Benutzer des Tschechischen und Deutschen über Zorn als über eine Emotion, der man hilflos ausgeliefert ist, den Angriff eines Gegners u. ä. nachdenken und reden, was sich in der Sprache widerspiegelt.
Die kontrastive und didaktisch orientierte Sprichwortforschung ist bisher [...] stark vernachlässigt worden. Dieses Desiderat ist durch jüngste Untersuchungen, die empirischlinguistische, korpusbasierte, kontrastive und didaktische Gesichtspunkte einbezogen haben, deutlich zu Tage getreten ist (vgl. v.a. P. Ďurčo: Sprichwörter in der Gegenwartssprache, Trnava, 2005). Es gibt bisher keine statistisch relevanten empirischen Untersuchungen zum aktuellen Gebrauch und zur gegenwärtigen Kenntnis von Sprichwörtern bei den Sprachbenutzern. Und es sind folgerichtig bisher keine spezialisierten Sprichwortkorpora erstellt worden. Es fehlen ebenso moderne ein- bzw. zweisprachige Sprichwortlexika, die ausschließlich auf der Basis umfangreicher Korpusanalysen erstellt worden wären. Ungelöst scheint nach wie vor die Problematik einer theoretisch und funktional begründeten parömiologischen Äquivalenz zwischen verschiedenen Sprachen. Offen ist nicht zuletzt die Frage der kontrastiven Klassifikation und Differenzierung von Sprichwörtern aus linguistischer Sicht.
Einfalt (in) der Vielfalt : Reduktionismus in den Sprachwissenschaften und die Fraktale der Sprache
(2009)
Kaum eine wissenschaftliche Disziplin ist derart von einem methodisch und theoretisch nur wenig reflektierten, aber immer wieder praktizierten Reduktionismus gekennzeichnet wie die Sprachwissenschaft. Dabei stellt schon der Begriff Sprachwissenschaft eine zugegebenermaßen einfache Reduktion dar: Dem Kompositum ist die Paraphrase Wissenschaft von der Sprache zuzuordnen, wobei der Singular Sprache die Subsumption der Pluralität von Sprachen (derzeit rund 6.500) unter den Singular die Vermutung reflektiert, dass Sprachen eine Instanziierung von Sprache darstellen. Der heutzutage nur noch selten aufscheinende Begriff Sprachenwissenschaft hätte aber durchaus programmatisches Potential haben und sich von dem der Sprachwissenschaft abgrenzen können: Der Plural signalisiert die Pluralität des Objektbereichs, hat also eher typologische denn unifizierende Zielsetzungen, was der Sprachwissenschaft hätte vorbehalten sein können. Diese Distinktion hat sich aber nicht durchgesetzt, ganz im Gegensatz etwa zum Französischen, wo wir problemlos zwischen science du language und science des langues unterscheiden können.
Unter dem schlichten Titel "Anglizismen in der Werbung" haben wir im Jahr 2000 im Rahmen einer Dissertation eine Untersuchung des Vorkommens von Anglizismen in deutschen und tschechischen Fernsehwerbespots vorgenommen. Das Ziel dieser Untersuchung bestand darin zu überprüfen, in welchem Maße in der Werbung – einem Teilbereich der modernen Kommunikation –, die Carstensen im Jahre 1965 (25 ff.) als "eines der Haupteinfalltore für Anglizismen" bezeichnete, derartige Lexeme auffindbar sind, und zwar in beiden natürlichen Sprachen gleichermaßen. Obwohl es sich um einen relativ kleinen Wirklichkeitsausschnitt handelte, konnte nachgewiesen werden, dass sich in der Werbebranche die Verwendung von Anglizismen zu einem gewissen Standard herausgebildet hat, wobei Fink bereits einige Jahre vorher das Englische als ideale Werbesprache (1980, 210) bezeichnet und in diesem Zusammenhang von deutschen Marketing- und Werbefachleuten als den "Kreatoren" so genannter "deutscher" Anglizismen (1997, 12) gesprochen hatte. Eine steigende Tendenz der Verwendungshäufigkeit war zum damaligen Zeitpunkt auch in Tschechien zu beobachten. Für die Untersuchung, die keinerlei Anspruch auf Vollständigkeit erhob und sicherlich nicht repräsentativ war, wurden die Werbeblöcke vor bzw. nach den Hauptnachrichten auf jeweils einem deutschen und einem tschechischen öffentlich-rechtlichen und einem privaten Sender gewählt. Beim Vergleich der Werbeblöcke im deutschen und im tschechischen Fernsehen ergaben sich im Jahre 2000 quantitativ keine wesentlichen Unterschiede. Weiterhin konnten keine Differenzen zwischen den öffentlich-rechtlichen und den kommerziellen Fernsehsendern in Bezug auf die Anzahl von Anglizismen festgestellt werden. Auf allen Kanälen liefen Spots mit einem mehr oder weniger hohen Anteil an englischen Wörtern, Redewendungen oder anderen Kommunikationsmitteln (Musik mit englischen Texten).
Der vorliegende Artikel befasst sich mit dem aktuellen Thema des Anglizismengebrauchs in der deutschen Sprache. Er konzentriert sich ausschließlich auf den Anglizismengebrauch in der Zeitschrift Marketing Journal. Verglichen werden zwei Ausgaben, und zwar das zweite erschienene Exemplar aus dem Jahr 1969 und das erste Heft aus dem Jahr 2007. Es wird herausgestellt, welche qualitativen, quantitativen und lexikalischen Veränderungen der Ang-lizismengebrauch im Laufe von 39 Jahren erfahren hat. Darüber hinaus wird auf die Schreibweise der Anglizismen näher eingegangen.
Im folgenden Artikel wird der Versuch unternommen, die Hauptmerkmale der phonetischen Forschung in der slowakischen Germanistik (teils aus kontrastiver Sicht) in den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten zu dokumentieren.
Aus verständlichen Gründen verzichten wir dabei auf Vollständigkeit: Die Ergebnisse der phonetischen Arbeiten sind in bibliographischen Abteilungen der Bibliotheken bzw. im Internet zusammengetragen. In unserer Analyse berücksichtigen wir nur diejenigen AutorInnen, die wir aus anderen slowakischen Universitäten kennen und mit denen wir im regelmäßigen Kontakt sind. Es handelt sich um folgende PhonetikerInnen: Viera Chebenová (UKF Nitra), Zuzana Bohušová (UMB Banská Bystrica), Viera Lagerová (Trnavská univerzita) und Anna Džambová (Prešovská univerzita). Es wird sich in der Zukunft sicher die Möglichkeit ergeben, die aktuelle Situation gründlich zu recherchieren (z. B. im Rahmen eines Projektes), die Liste der AutorInnen und ihrer Werke zu vervollständigen, zu analysieren und zu diskutieren. Deren niedrige Zahl beruht auf der Tatsache, dass die deutsche Phonetik nicht zu den bevorzugten Gebieten der germanistischen Linguistik in der Slowakei gehört (auf dieses Problem wiesen wir in unseren Beiträgen der letzten Jahre mehrmals hin). In der Slowakei gibt es zahlreiche GermanistInnen, die sich eher für Gebiete wie Lexikographie, Lexikologie, Phraseologie, Grammatik, Didaktik, Translatologie, Pragmatik interessieren.
Die vorliegende Studie von Christine Konecny ist ein umfassendes Sammelwerk, das die internationalen Tendenzen in der Betrachtung von Kollokationen ausführlich erfasst. Der Titel und der Untertitel weisen eindeutig auf die theoretische und analytische Ausrichtung der Arbeit hin. Im ersten Teil werden die Kollokationen linguistisch betrachtet, es werden Auffassungs-, Definitions- und Abgrenzungsprobleme von Kollokationen detailliert geschildert. Eine Schlüsselkomponente im Titel ist jedoch nicht nur das Wort Kollokationen, das das Thema der Studie benennt. Aussagekräftiger ist der Untertitel, konkret sind es die Wörter Versuch und Annäherung. Die Studie ist der Versuch, einerseits die Position der Kollokationen sowohl in der Systemlinguistik als auch auf der Supraebene zu beschreiben, andererseits die Kollokationen nach unterschiedlichen sprachwissenschaftlichen Gesichtspunkten – vor allem unter phraseologischen, korpuslinguistischen, systemlinguistischen, pragmalinguistischen Aspekten - sowie aus der Sicht der kognitiven Psycholinguistik, Fremdsprachendidaktik, Wortbildungslehre, Lexikographie, kontrastiven und konfrontativen Linguistik und Translatologie zu bestimmen. Ein weiterer Versuch betrifft die Abgrenzung und Klassifikation der Kollokationen. Die Autorin hat sich u. a. zum Ziel gesetzt, Kollokationen von festen, teil- und nicht idiomatischen Wortverbindungen zu unterscheiden und sie anhand unterschiedlicher Klassifizierungskriterien hauptsächlich nach syntaktisch-morphologischen und semantisch-begrifflichen Unterscheidungsmerkmalen zu kategorisieren.
Decomposing coordination
(2014)
Natural languages display a surprising diversity of expression of elementary logical operations. The study of this variation is emerging as an important topic of cross-linguistic semantics. In this paper, we address the expression of coordination from this perspective, especially coordination of individual denoting expressions such as "John and Mary". We argue that there is an underlying universal structure for individual coordination, and that the cross-linguistic variation can be explained by assuming that languages pronounce different morphemes of this universal structure. In particular, we argue that there two main types of system for the expression of individual coordination: the J-type and the μ-type. In μ-type languages the morpheme used for individual coordination also has uses a quantificational or focus particle, while in the J-type languages it doesn't. Instead at least in many J-type languages the same morpheme is used for individual and propositional coordination. The evidence we present for our model comes from two sources: new data from specific data of the J-type and μ-type languages, and from a study of the historical development of the expression of individual coordination in Indo-European which switched from a μ-type to a J-type system.
This paper discusses word classes in Tagalog, the dominant language of the Philippines, using analyses developed by Himmelmann (2007) and LaPolla (2008). The goal is to clarify issues related to the identification of word classes in Tagalog, and show the distinct features of these word classes. Through the discussion of word classes in Tagalog, the authors also hope to shed some light on the issue of word classes in Chinese.
The papers collected in this volume have very diverse topics – such as prosodic peculiarities (Meinunger and Hamlaoui & Roussarie), morphological items (McFadden and Steriopolo), or phenomena concerning syntax and its interfaces, such as syntax-morphology (Kamali), syntax-parsing (Winkler), or syntax-pragmatics (Bittner & Dery). The languages considered range from quite prominent German and French via Turkish to very exotic Nuuchahnulth or no longer spoken Old and Middle English. However, all contributions center around structural phenomena and provide analyses in terms of grammatical theory.
This paper presents epistemological and methodological problems found in work on the subgrouping of Sino-Tibetan languages and the reconstruction of features of the languages. A key problem is the lack of an accepted standard for judging this work, one that can stand up to statistical evaluation. An alternative methodology that involves using fixed sets of features to give us the statistical probability of common origin is suggested.
This volume presents working versions of presentations heard at and selected for the Workshop on Syntax of Predication, held at ZAS, Berlin, on November 2-3, 2001 (except the editor’s own paper).
Predication is a many-faceted topic which involves both syntax and semantics and the interface between them. This is reflected in the papers of the volume.
Im vorliegenden Aufsatz werden vor dem Hintergrund der bisherigen germanistischen und bohemistischen Phraseologieforschung und in Anlehnung an die Herangehensweise von PIIRAINEN (2001) bzw. DOBROVOĽSKIJ/PIIRAINEN (2009) einige Phraseme benannt, die eine Art verstärktes Potenzial für eine geschlechtsbedingte Restriktion aufweisen. Die Überlegungen zu der Auswahl dieser Phraseme, ihrer phraseographischen Verarbeitung, der Ermittlung erforderlicher Angaben zur Geschlechtsmarkierung und einem eventuellen interlingualen phraseologischen Vergleich werden an verbalen Phrasemen mit Substantivkomponenten aus dem semantischen Bereich der Somatismen illustriert.
The annual conferences on Sino-Tibetan languages and linguistics began on a small scale at Yale in 1968, with only eight conferees sitting around a table, but have grown tremendously over the years, until they now usually attract over 100 participants, and have become the chief focus of scholarly activity in the field. Ever since 1971, the word “international” has appeared in the official title of the Conferences, and rightly so, since they have become truly global in scope. Since the mid-1970’s, they have increasingly been held outside the U.S.: Copenhagen (1976), Paris (1979), Beijing (1982), Bangkok (1985), Vancouver (1987), Lund (1988), Bangkok (1991), Osaka (1993), Paris (1994) [planned].
[...] Most of the papers presented at the Conferences are of high quality, and usually find their way into print within a few years. Yet in spite of valiant attempts to put out real volumes of Proceedings, e.g. the partial collection achieved for #14 (University of Florida, 1983), the most that has been managed is a photocopied version of the papers velo-bound together (e.g. for #16, University of Washington, 1983), or a collection of the abstracts submitted by the participants, e.g. for #15 (Beijing, 1982), for #18 (Ramkhamhaeng University, Bangkok, 1985), or for #25 (University of California, Berkeley, 1992). It was realized early on that it would be a good thing to keep some kind of record of which papers were presented when, before things got too badly out of hand. [...] The first version of this Bibliography (1989) was produced with admirable thoroughness and rapidity by the members of the STEDT staff. John B. Lowe devised the Macintosh software for the job, and the inputting of the authors and titles was done by many willing hands. Randy J. LaPolla did most of the editorial work on the first edition: he translated the dozens of Chinese titles, tracked down almost all the published versions of the papers by scouring journals and bibliographies, and wrote personally to many authors requesting addenda and corrigenda to the listings of their works.
Chinese is often taken as a prime example of an isolating language. Most relation marking takes the form of particles rather than affixes or inflections. Possibly relevant to the facts that are presented below, Chinese has been argued to not have grammaticalized the sort of pivot constructions normally associated with grammatical relations. That is, it has been argued to not have any particular alignment, as there are no grammatical relations, and the clause pattern is simply topic-comment (Chao 1968, Lü 1979, LaPolla 1993, 1995, 2009; LaPolla & Poa 2005, 2006). We will first talk more generally about structures found in Sino-Tibetan languages, and then focus on Modern Mandarin Chinese.
This paper discusses the use of comparative data when describing a particular language. That is, even tho ugh we might be describing one variety, we can gain insights into the development of that variety from comparisons with related varieties. The examples presented are from the Rawang and Dulong languages. two closely related Tibeto-Burman languages in Myanmar and China respectively. We see that comparison with Dulong data can help us to understand the development of the applicative benefactive in Rawang. and comparison with Rawang can help us understand the development of the verbal first-person plural long vowels and nominal agentive marking long vowels in Dulong.
Evidentiality is a grammatical category which has source of information as its primary meaning — whether the narrator actually saw what is being described, or made inferences about it based on some evidence, or was told about it, and so on. Evidentials are a particularly salient feature of Tibeto-Burman languages. This volume features in-depth studies of evidentiality systems in six languages: Rgyalthang, a Kham Tibetan dialect, by Krisadawan Hongladarom; Yongning Na (Naxi group; believed to be closely related to Lolo-Burmese), by Liberty Lidz; Darma (Almora branch of Western Himalayish), by Christina Willis; nDrapa (Qiangic), by Satoko Shirai; Magar (Himalayish), by Karen Grunow-Hårsta, and Tabo (or Spiti), a Tibetan dialect, by Veronika Hein. Each opens new perspectives on the composition and the semantics of evidential systems, on the marking of more than one information source in one sentence, and on the grammaticalized expression of mirativity.
The new insights on evidentiality and related issues from the Tibeto-Burman area are crucial for understanding evidentials in a cross-linguistic perspective.
This paper compares the Dulong language of northwestern Yunnan Province in China to other Tibeto-Burman languages and to Proto-Tibeto-Burman, with a view toward understanding the historical development of Dulong and toward supporting, revising, and adding to the body of accepted PTB reconstructions.
DİYALOG ist das Organ von GERDER, dem türkischen Germanistenverband.
DİYALOG wendet sich an Leser, die an interkulturellen und komparatistischen Themen interessiert sind und/oder auf den Gebieten des Multilingualismus oder der Multikulturalität arbeiten. Auch wenn diyalog die türkische Schreibweise für Dialog ist, so soll der Dialog nicht nur auf Deutschland und die Türkei beschränkt sein, sondern kann sich auf beliebige Kulturen, Sprachen oder Literaturen unserer Welt beziehen. Multi-/Interkulturalität und Mehrsprachigkeit sind im weitesten Sinne die Bereiche, innerhalb derer sich die Beiträge in DİYALOG bewegen. Aufsätze behandeln Themen aus den Bereichen Deutsch als Fremdsprache, Literaturwissenschaft, Sprachwissenschaft und Übersetzungswissenschaften. DİYALOG ist eine internationale, peer-reviewed Zeitschrift, die zweimal jährlich online erscheint. Die ersten Nummern erscheinen 2013.
Diyalog 2013/1
(2013)
"Jelen přeplotil skok" : kontrastiver Vergleich von Wortspielen und idiomatischen Wortverbindungen
(2014)
The article presents some of the outcomes of the contrastive comparison of the Czech original text and its German translation. It tries to show some hidden implications as well as many other peculiarities of wordplay and idiomatic phrases that a reader of the translated text may be deprived of.
Das hethitische Phonem /xw/
(2014)
In the Hittite phonological system there was a labialized velar fricative /xw/ beside the plain velar fricative /x/ parallel to the opposition between the velar stops /kw/ and /k/. The frequent syllable /xwa/ was spelled either hu-(u) or hu-wa. Evidence from the frequency of words with initial hu in the lexicon, from spelling variations and from ablaut alternations is presented to demonstrate the existence of /xw/. It is suggested that Hittite /xw/ regularly corresponds to the reflexes of *w in the non-Anatolian Indo-European languages.
Der Beitrag präsentiert die Problematik der Possessivität in zwei typologisch diversen Sprachsystemen. Die Autoren analysieren die Ausdrucksweisen und die Spezifika der Kategorie der Possessivität in der deutschen Sprache (als einem Repräsentanten der germanischen Sprachgruppe) und in der slowakischen Sprache (als einem Repräsentanten der slawischen Sprachgruppe und zugleich der Muttersprache der Autoren). Es werden die vielseitigen semantischen und strukturellen Aspekte in beiden Sprachen beschrieben, wobei die konfrontative und kontrastive Betrachtung von Bedeutung ist. Es wurden die Konstruktionen beider Sprachen ausgewählt, die nach der von den Autoren angenommenen Begriffsbestimmung der Possessivität als possessiv zu betrachten sind. Die präsentierte Problematik kann für weitere Analysen und Untersuchungen sowohl im Bereich der Sprachwissenschaft als auch für die Erweiterung der interlingualen Kompetenz in beiden Sprachsystemen inspirierend und hilfreich sein.
The paper explains the absence of resultative secondary predication in Russian as arising from a conflict of inferential interpretations. It formalises the framework necessary to express this proposal in terms of abductive reasoning with Poole systems in Gricean contexts. The conflict is shown to arise for default rules regulating alternative realisation of verb-internally specified consequent states. The paper thus indicates that typological variation may be due not only to different parameter values but to general inferential properties of the syntax-semantics mapping. The proposed theory also contradicts some widespread proposals that the absence of resultative secondary predication is due to the absence of some particular language feature.
Approaching the grammar of adjuncts : proceedings of the Oslo conference, September 22 - 25, 1999
(2000)
Issues on topics
(2000)
The present volume contains papers that bear mainly on issues concerning the topic concept. This concept is of course very broad and diverse. Also, different views are expressed in this volume. Some authors concentrate on the status of topics and non-topics in so-called topic prominent languages (i.e. Chinese), others focus on the syntactic behavior of topical constituents in specific European languages (German, Greek, Romance languages). The last contribution tries to bring together the concept of discourse topic (a non-syntactic notion) and the concept of sentence topic, i.e. that type of topic that all the preceding papers are concerned with.
Nominalizations
(2002)
The present volume is a selection of the papers presented in workshops at ZAS in Berlin in November 2000 and at theUniversity of Tübingen in April 2001, devoted to synchronic and, diachronic aspects of various types of nominalizations. Nominalization has a long history in linguistic research. Its nature can only be captured by taking into account the interface between morphology, syntax and semantics on the one hand, and the interface between semantics and conceptual structure on the other.
Agreement is traditionally viewed as a cross-referencing device for core arguments such as subjects and (primary) objects.1 In this paper, I discuss data from Bantu languages that lead to a radical departure from this generally accepted position: agreement in a subset of Bantu languages cross-references a (sentential) topic rather than the subject. The crucial evidence for topic agreement comes from a construction known as subject-object (S-O) reversal, where the fronted patient agrees with what has uniformly been taken to be a `subject marker'. The correct analysis of S-O reversal as a topic construction with `topic agreement' explains a range of known facts in the languages in question. Furthermore, synchronic variation across Bantu in the presence/absence of S-O reversal and in the properties of the (topic/subject) agreement marker suggests a diachronic path from topic to subject marking. The systematic variation and covariation in the syntax of Bantu languages and the historical picture that it offers would be missed altogether if we continue to reject the idea that the notion of topic can be deeply grammaticized in the form of agreement.
Specificity distinction
(2001)
This paper is concerned with semantic noun phrase typology, focusing on the question of how to draw fine-grained distinctions necessary for an accurate account of natural language phenomena. In the extensive literature on this topic, the most commonly encountered parameters of classification concern the semantic type of the denotation of the noun phrase, the familiarity or novelty of its referent, the quantificational/nonquantificational distinction (connected to the weak/strong dichotomy), as well as, more recently, the question of whether the noun phrase is choice-functional or not (see Reinhart 1997, Winter 1997, Kratzer 1998, Matthewson 1999). In the discussion that follows I will attempt to make the following general points: (i) phenomena involving the behavior of noun phrases both within and across languages point to the need of establishing further distinctions that are too fine-grained to be caught in the net of these typologies; (ii) some of the relevant distinctions can be captured in terms of conditions on assignment functions; (iii) distribution and scopal peculiarities of noun phrases may result from constraints they impose on the way variables they introduce are to be assigned values.
Section 2 reviews the typology of definite noun phrases introduced in Farkas 2000 and the way it provides support for the general points above. Section 3 examines some of the problems raised by recognizing the rich variety of 'indefinite' noun phrases found in natural language and by attempting to capture their distribution and interpretation. Common to the typologies discussed in the two sections is the issue of marking different types of variation in the interpretation of a noun phrase. In the light of this discussion, specificity turns out to be an epiphenomenon connected to a family of distinctions that are marked differently in different languages.
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 argument-modifier distinction is less clear in NPs than in VPs; nouns do not typically take arguments. The clearest cases of arguments in NPs are in certain kinds of nominalizations which retain some "verbal" properties (Grimshaw 1990). The status of apparent arguments of non-deverbal relational nouns like sister is more controversial.
Genitive constructions like 'John's teacher', 'team of John's' offer a challenging testing ground for the argument-modifier distinction in NPs, both in English and cross-linguistically. On the analyses of Partee (1983/97) and Barker (1995), the DP in a genitive phrase (i.e. 'John' in 'John's') is always an argument of some relation, but the relation does not always come from the head noun. On those "ambiguity" analyses, some genitives are argument-like and some are modifier-like. Recent proposals by Jensen and Vikner and by Borschev and Partee analyze all genitives as argument-like, a conclusion we are no longer sure of.
In this paper we explore a range of possible analyses: argument-only, modifier-only, and ambiguity analyses, and consider the kinds of semantic evidence that suggest that different analyses may be correct for different genitive or possessive constructions in different languages.
The present paper offers evidence that there are two variants of adverbial modification that differ with respect to the way in which a modifier is linked to the verb's eventuality argument. So-called external modifiers relate to the full eventuality, whereas internal modifiers relate to some integral part of it. The choice between external and internal modification is shown to be dependent on the modifier's syntactic base position. External modifiers are base-generated at the VP periphery, whereas internal modifiers are base generated at the V periphery. These observations are accounted for by a refined version of the standard Davidsonian approach to adverbial modification according to which modification is mediated by a free variable. In the case of external modification, the grammar takes responsibility for identifying the free variable with the verb's eventuality argument, whereas in the case of internal modification, a value for the free variable is determined by the conceptual system on the basis of contextually salient world knowledge.
The paper investigates a recent proposal to resultativity by G. Jäger and R. Blutner (J&B). J&B say that the representation of result states of accomplishments by means of CAUSE and BECOME is not correct and should not be done in the syntax in terms of decomposition. They develop an axiomatic approach where each accomplishment/achievement is related to its result by a particular axiom. Modification of the result by "again" makes use of these axioms and the restitutive/resultative ambiguity is a matter of lexical ambiguity or polysemy. They argue that the classical decomposition theory cannot treat the restitutive reading of "A Delaware settled in New Jersey again" (there had been Delawares in New Jersey but not this particular one; and those earlier Delawares never moved to New Jersey but were borne there). I discuss (and dispute) these data and compare the two theories. J&B's contains an OT-part dealing with the disambiguating role of stress. While the decomposition theory cannot deal with the data mentioned, it can integrate the OT-part of J&B's theory.
Rethinking the adjunct
(2000)
The purpose of the present paper is twofold: first, to show that, when defining the adjunct, it is necessary to distinguish in a strict modular way between the syntactic level and the lexico-semantic level. Thus, the adjunct is a syntactic category on a par with the specifier and the complement, whereas the argument belongs to the same set as does (among others) the modifier. The consequence of this distinction is that there is no direct one-to-one opposition between adjuncts and arguments. Nor is there any direct one-to one relation between adjuncts and modifiers.
The second and main purpose of the paper is to account for the well-known difference between the position of a specific set of modifiers (cause, time, place etc.) in, on the one hand, English and Swedish, on the other, German. In English and Swedish the default position of these modifiers is postverbal, whereas in German it is preverbal. Further, in English and Swedish, these modifiers occur in a mirror order compared with their German counterparts, an order which, from a semantic point of view, is not the expected one. I shall demonstrate that this difference is due to the different settings of the verbal head parameter, the former languages being VO-languages and the latter being OV -languages. I shall further argue that in English and Swedish these modifiers are base generated as adjuncts to an empty VP, which is a complement of the main verb of what I shall call the minimal VP (MVP), whereas in German they are adjuncts on top of the MVP. Finally, I shall argue that the postverbal modifiers move at the latest at LF to the top of the MVP, in order to take scope over it, the restriction being 'Shortest move'. The movement results in the correct scope order of the postverbal modifiers.
The proposed structure also accounts for the binding data, in particular for the binding of a specific Swedish possessive anaphor 'sin'. This pronoun, which may occur within the MVP, must not occur within the postverbal modifiers in the empty VP. This supports the assumption that there is a strict borderline between the MVP and the assumed empty VP. The account is also in accordance with the focus data, the specific set of modifiers being potential focus exponents in a wide focus reading in English and Swedish, but not in German.
In this study, I investigate the positions and interpretations available to 'manner' adverbs in English. My central claim, contra Wyner (1994, 1998), is that an association does exist between 'manner' adverb positions and interpretations, which is best characterized in terms of Peterson's (1997) distinction between 'restrictive' and 'non-restrictive' modification. I also claim, however, that the association in question is not as general as commonly claimed; and, in particular, does not apply directly to 'manner' adverbs in 'fronted' and 'parenthetical' positions, which require special syntactic description.
It is argued that there is a surprising gap in the distribution of adverbial modifiers, namely that there are (practically) no adverbs that modify exclusively stative verbs. Given the general range of selectional restrictions associated with adverb/verb modification, this comes as a surprise. It is argued that this gap cannot be the result of standard selectional restrictions. An independently motivated account of the state-event verb contrast, in which state verbs are proposed to lack Davidsonian arguments is presented and argued to account for this stative adverb gap. Some apparent and real problems with the analysis are discussed.
Editorial preface
(2000)
The present issue grew out of two sources. The main one was the workshop on Adding and Omitting (A & 0) held during the DGfS Conference organized in Konstanz at the beginning of 1999 by our ZAS project on Syntax der Fokusbildung. The purpose of the workshop was to bring together people working on topicalization (addition of expressions, in a sense) and ellipsis (omission, i.e. deletion of linguistic material) and their relations and interaction. Since the workshop was very successful and met with a great deal of interest on the part of both participants and outsiders, we decided to collect and publish the papers that were presented. Towards the end of 1999, a follow-up workshop on Ellipsis and Information Structure was organized by Kerstin Schwabe and Susanne Winkler (Tübingen). The papers given at this second meeting were supposed to be an integral part of the publication as well. More and more people got involved, further developing our common understanding of the topic phenomenon, so that there was too much material for a single volume. We therefore decided to split the enterprise into two volumes. The ellipsis papers are to be published by 'Benjamins' this year in Interpreting Omitted Structures.
On the early development of aspect in greek and russian child language, a comparative analysis
(2003)
The category of aspect is grammaticized in both Greek and Russian opposing perfective and imperfective verb forms in all inflectional categories except the nonpast (‘present’). Despite these similarities there are important differences in the way the aspectual systems function in the two languages. While in Greek nearly all verbs oppose a perfective to a given imperfective grammatical form, Russian aspect is more strongly lexicalized with pairs of imperfective and perfective lexemes not only differing aspectually, but also as far as their lexical meanings are concerned. This is especially true of perfective verbs formed by prefixes as compared to their imperfective bases. Thus, in pairs of prefixed and unprefixed dynamic verbs, the derived prefixed (perfective) member has a telic meaning while its unprefixed (imperfective) counterpart is atelic (e.g. sjest’ (PFV) ‘to eat up’ vs. jest’ (IPF) ‘to eat’). Such derived perfective verbs may in turn be “secondarily” imperfectivized by suffixation furnishing the only “true” perfective/imperfective pairs of verbs (e.g. sjest’ (PFV) ‘to eat up’ vs. sjedat’ (IPF) ‘to eat up’ (iterative)). “Secondary” imperfectives do not occur in our child data.
In this pilot study, we will analyze the tense-aspect-mood forms of the 20 most frequent verbs with equivalent meanings occurring in the longitudinal audiotaped data of a Greek and a Russian boy between 2;1 and 2;3 (their entire lexical inventories comprise approx. 100 verbs each).
We adopt a constructivist perspective on the development of aspect in Greek and Russian child language and will show that in spite of a broad inventory of imperfective and perfective verb forms to be found in the speech of both children aspect has not yet developed into a generalized grammatical category, but is strongly dependent on aktionsart (stative/dynamic, telic/atelic) in both languages. While this results in a strong preference for perfective verb forms of telic verbs and of imperfective forms of atelic ones in the speech of the Greek boy, the Russian child tends to use the unmarked members.
This 18th issue of ZAS-Papers in Linguistics consists of papers on the development of verb acquisition in 9 languages from the very early stages up to the onset of paradigm construction. Each of the 10 papers deals with first-Ianguage developmental processes in one or two children studied via longitudinal data. The languages involved are French, Spanish, Russian, Croatian, Lithuanien, Finnish, English and German. For German two different varieties are examined, one from Berlin and one from Vienna. All papers are based on presentations at the workshop 'Early verbs: On the way to mini-paradigms' held at the ZAS (Berlin) on the 30./31. of September 2000. This workshop brought to a close the first phase of cooperation between two projects on language acquisition which has started in October 1999:
a) the project on "Syntaktische Konsequenzen des Morphologieerwerbs" at the ZAS (Berlin) headed by Juergen Weissenborn and Ewald Lang, and financially supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and
b) the international "Crosslinguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition" coordinated by Wolfgang U. Dressler in behalf of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Acquisition of aspect
(2003)
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.
Introduction
(2000)
(Non)retroflexivity of slavic affricates and its motivation : Evidence from polish and czech <č>
(2005)
The goal of this paper is two-fold. First, it revises the common assumption that the affricate <č> denotes /t͡ʃ/ for all Slavic languages. On the basis of experimental results it is shown that Slavic <č> stands for two sounds: /t͡ʃ/ as e.g. in Czech and /ʈʂ/ as in Polish.
The second goal of the paper is to show that this difference is not accidental but it is motivated by perceptual relations among sibilants. In Polish, /t͡ʃ/ changed to /ʈʂ/ thus lowering its sibilant tonality and creating a better perceptual distance to /tɕ/, whereas in Czech /t͡ʃ/ did not turn to /ʈʂ/, as the former displayed sufficient perceptual distance to the only affricate present in the inventory, namely, the alveolar /t͡s/. Finally, an analysis of Czech and Polish affricate inventories is offered.
This volume presents working versions of presentations heard at and selected for the Workshop on Syntax of Predication, held at ZAS, Berlin, on November 2-3, 2001 (except the editor’s own paper).
Predication is a many-faceted topic which involves both syntax and semantics and the interface between them. This is reflected in the papers of the volume.
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.
I argue in this study that consonantal strength shifts can be explained through positional bans on features, expressed over positions marked as weak at a given level of prosodic structure, usually the metrical foo!. This approach might be characterized as "templatic" in the sense it seeks to explain positional restrictions and distributional patterns relative to independently motivated, fixed prosodic elements. In this sense, it follows Dresher & Lahiri's (1991) idea of metrical coherence in phonological systems, namely, "[T]hat grammars adhere to syllabic templates and metrical patterns of limited types, and that these patterns persist across derivations and are available to a number of different processes ... " (251). [...] The study is structured as follows: section 1 presents a typology of distributional asymmetries based on data from unrelated languages, demonstrating that the stress foot of each of these languages determines the contexts of neutralization and weakening of stops. Section 2 elaborates the notion of a template, exploring some of its formal properties, while section 3 presents templatic analyses of data from English and German. Section 4 explores the properties of weak positions, especially weak onsets, in more detail, including discussion of templates in phonological acquisition. Section 5 summarizes and concludes the study.
In this work, I examine a set of languages which appear to require resyllabification postlexically; in less derivational terms, a word's syllabification in isolation differs from its syllabification in a phrase-internal context. Although many people, myself included, have been looking at such cases in isolation over the years, I bring together several examples here to see what features they share and how an Optimality Theory analysis improves upon rule-based derivational approaches.
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.
This paper deals with early verb development (e.g., person, tense) until the emergence of verb-paradigms in two French-speaking children.
I will show the parallelism between the two children in the gradual building of paradigms, despite considerable differences in the rate of development. Individual differences on the other hand will bring me to reconsider the broad category of premorphological rote-learnt forms which already displays some patterning in one of the children's data.
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.
The source of the data used in this paper are recordings of conversations with a Lithuanian girl, Rūta. Rūta lives in Vilnius and is the only child in the family. Both parents speak standard Lithuanian without dialectal influences. The recordings were taken on a free basis without a fixed schedule, then transcribed by the mother of the child, double-checked and coded in accordance with CHILDES by the author of the paper. At the moment of writing this contribution the data taken between 1;7-2;5 have been fully processed. Over this period about 34.5 hours of recordings were collected.
This article aims to recast the properties of topic-prominent languages and their differences from subject-prominent languages as documented in the functionalist literature into the framework of the Principle-and-Parameter approach. It provides a configurational definition of the topic construction called Topic Phrase (TP), with the topic marker as its head. The availablity of TP enables topic prominent languages to develop various topic structures with properties such as morphological marking; cross-categorial realization of topics and comments; and mutiple application of topicalization. The article elaborates the notion of topic prominence. A topic prominent language is characterized as one that tends to activate the TP and to make full use of the configuration. Typically, it has a larger number and variety of highly grammaticalized topic markers in the Lexicon and permits a variety of syntactic categories to occur in the specifier position and the complement position of TP.
The complexity of human languages has always inspired research for some human faculty that makes language learning possible. The system that generates the complexity of human languages, ideally, is simple and effective. Recent developments of the generative grammatical theory explore deeper into the issue of simplicity or economy. The Minimalist Program developed in Chomsky (1991, 1993, 1995) tries to provide contents to such notions. What does it mean to be more economic or least effort? An important instantiation of such notions is the proposal that movement is the last resort assuming that movement is more costly than non-movement. Processes occur only because they are necessary. The definition of necessity generally is cast in morphological terms. Moreover, the notion of "economy" or "least effort" is deterministic of the appropriate derivations for sentences: a shorter derivation is better than a longer one. In this work, we show that the notion of "least effort," - do minimally if possible - is manifested not only in derivations but also in other aspects of the grammar. We take Chinese as an example and show that this language exhibits the properties manifesting some "least effort" guidelines in the area of movement and reconstruction, and in the projection of syntactic positions: when there is a choice, non-application of moyement/reconstruction and non-projection of a position are adopted. These phenomena essentially are attested in topic structures. The question arises as to why topic structures exhibit such minimal effort effects. We suggest that this is due to the fact that topic structures can be derived by movement or base-generation. When there are morpho-syntactic clues that reconstruction is necessary, the structure is a movement structure. Otherwise, the less costly non-movement structure is assumed. Moreover, because of the possibility of assuming a topic NP to be base-generated, bearing a predication (or aboutness) relation with the comment clause, the argument position which otherwise would be related to the topic (conveniently termed the trace position) is not projected when there is a choice of projecting or not projecting it.
This volume comprises papers that were given at the workshop Information Structure and the Referential Status of Linguistic Expressions, which we organized during the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) Conference in Leipzig in February 2001. At this workshop we discussed the connection between information structure and the referential interpretation of linguistic expressions, a topic mostly neglected in current linguistics research. One common aim of the papers is to find out to what extent the focus-background as well as the topic-comment structuring determine the referential interpretation of simple arguments like definite and indefinite NPs on the one hand and sentences on the other.
This paper shows the early development of the first approximately 50 verbs found in the recorded speech production of one Croatian girl. The aim is to analyse and interpret the child's verb development in terms of the distinction of a pre- and a protomorphological phase before modularised morphology in language acquisition (Dressler & Karpf 1995). Furthermore, focus will be laid on the emergence of first verb paradigms.
Our results indicate some differences in the use of aspect between French and Croatian speaking children. In Croatian language children always manage to keep the appropriate aspect, unlike French children. However, the imperfective aspect seems to be better acquired in French children than the perfective aspect. The perfective aspect, the marked form both in French as well as in Croatian, is related to the lexical meaning of the verbs. The acquisition of the Aktionsart in both languages seems to be more a matter of semantics than of morphology. Furthermore, our data suggest the existence of a specific developmental trend in the use of Aktionsart (intensive, iterative and inchoative), which is similar for children speaking Slavic and Romanic languages.
The focus of the present paper is on the difference between English and German learners‘ use of perfectivity and imperfectivity. The latter is expressed by means of suffixation (suffix -va-). In contrast, perfectivity is encoded either by suffixation (-nou-) or by prefixation (twenty different prefixes that mostly modify not only aspectual but also lexical properties of the verb).
In the native Czech data set, there is no significant difference between the number of imperfectively and perfectively marked verb forms. In the English data, imperfectively and perfectively marked verb forms are equally represented as well. However, German learners use significantly more perfective forms than English learners and Czech natives. When encoding perfectivity in Czech, German learners prefer to use prefixes to suffixes. Overall, English learners in comparison to German learners encode more perfectives by means of suffixation than prefixation.
These results suggest that German learners of Czech focus on prefixes expressing aspectual and lexical modification of the verb, while English learners rather pay attention to the aspectual opposition between perfective and imperfective. In a more abstract way, the German learner group focuses on the operations carried out on the left side from the verb stem while the English learner group concentrates on the operations performed on the right side qfrom the verb stem.
This sensitivity can be to certain degree motivated by the linguistic devices of the corresponding source languages: English learners of Czech use imperfectives mainly because English has marked fully grammatical form for the expression of imperfective aspect – the progressive -ing form. German learners, on the other hand, pay in Czech more attention to the prefixes, which like in German modify the lexical meaning of the verb. In this manner, Czech prefixes used for perfectivization function similar to the German verbal prefixes (such as ab-, ver-) modifying Aktionsart.
The left periphery has enjoyed extensive study over the past years, especially drawn against the framework of Rizzi (1997). It is argued that in this part of the clause, relations are licensed that have direct impact on discourse interpretation and information structure, such as topic, focus, clause type, and the like. I take this line of research up and argue in favour of a split CP on the basis of strictly left-peripheral phenomena across languages. But I also want to link the relation of articulated clause structure, syntactic derivations, and information structure. In particular, I outline the basics of a model of syntactic derivation that makes explicit reference to the interpretive interfaces in a cyclic, dynamic manner.
I suggest a return to older stages of generative grammar, at least in spirit, by proposing that clausal derivation stretches over three important areas which I call prolific domains: the part of the clause which licenses argument/thematic relations (V- or θ-domain), the part that licenses agreement/grammatica1 relations (T- or ϕ-domain), and the part that licenses discourse/information-relevant relations (C- or ω-domain). It is thus a rather broad and conceptual notion of "adding" and "omitting" that I am concerned with here, namely licensing of material to relate to information structure, and the desire to find an answer to the question which elements might be added or omitted across languages to establish such links.
This paper is a preliminary comparative study of the relation between word order and information structure in three Null Subject Languages ((NSLs) Spanish, Italian and Greek). The aim is twofold: first I seek to examine the differences and the similarities among these languages in this domain of their syntax. Secon, I investigate the possible derivations of the various patterns and attempt to localize the differences among these languages in different underlying syntactic structures.
In this paper we investigate the structure of specificational sentences like [Raskol'nikov]NP 1 - ėto [ubìjca staruxi]NP2 'Raskolnikov - that is the murderer of the old lady' in Russian and Polish, which - depending on the type of NP1 and NP2 - correspond to English pseudo-cleft-constructions (What Raskolnikov is is the murderer of the old lady) and specificational sentences (The person I like most is my father), respectively. We propose that the Slavic constructions can be analysed similarly to their English counterparts: the first fragment contains a semantic variable, which is specified in the second fragment.
We show that the pronouns "ėto" <Rus.> / "to" <Pol.>, which are obligatory in Slavic specificational sentences, have two functions. 1. the deictic function: "ėto/to" take an open proposition available in the discourse or reconstructed from it, and assign this open proposition to another proposition, which provides the value for the variable of the open proposition. 2. the operative function: "ėto/to" link two syntactically independent fragments, the first of which can be semantically interpreted as an indirect question comparable to the wh-clause in the English pseudo-clefts, and the second as an answer to this question.
This paper presents an analysis of secondary predicates as aspectual modifiers and secondary predication as a summing operation which sums the denotation of the matrix verb and the secondary predicate. I argue that, as opposed to the summing peration involved in simple conjunction, there is a constraint on secondary predication; in the 0 case of depictives, the event introduced by the matrix verb must be PART-OF the event introduced by the secondary predicate, where e1 is PART-OF e2 if the running time of e1 is contained in the running time of e2 and if e1 and e2 share a grammatical argument. I argue resultative predication differs from depictive predication in that the PART-OF constraint holds in resultative constructions between the event which is the culmination of e1 and e2: formally, while depictive predication introduces the statement PART-OF(e1,e2), resultative predication introduces the statement PART-OF(cul(e1),e2). I show that this is all that is necessary to explain the well-known properties of resultative predication.
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.
This paper develops the formal foundations of semantic theories dealing with various kinds of nominalisations. It introduces a combination of an event-calculus with a type-free theory which allows a compositional description to be given of such phenomena like Vendler's distinction between perfect and imperfect nominals, iteration of gerunds and Cresswell's notorious non-urrival of'the train examples. Moreover, the approach argued for in this paper allows a semantic explanation to be given for a wide range of grammatical observations such as the behaviour of certain tpes of nominals with respect to their verbal contexts or the distribution of negation in nominals.
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.
An adjunct-DP in the free instrumental case occurs in a number of surface positions where the DP is syntactically optional. does not depend on any element in the sentence, and has a number of different interpretations. We introduce Bailyn's proposal which postulates a uniform syntactic environment for all the uses of instr. This calls for a uniform semantics of these DPs which can nevertheless accomodate the different interpretations. Starting with the hypothesis of Roman Jakobson about the semantics of the instrumental case we formulate a semantic interpretation theory based on abduction. We give a uniform semantics for three different adjunct uses of instr in this framework. In the concluding part of the paper we discuss some possible alternatives and ramifications as well as questions and objections raised with respect to the treatment proposed in this paper.
Das Partizip 1 im Deutschen
(2000)
It is controversial in the literature whether the First Participle in German ('Present Participle'; henceforth: Part I) is an adjective or a verbal form. Syntactically, it occurs exclusively in adjectival positions but it does not behave like an adjective in other respects. This paper provides an analysis of Part I starting from a diachronic perspective and arriving at a synchronic interpretation of its position in the field of 'finite verb + nonfinite verb constructions' in New High German. Against such positions as Paul's (1920), which regard Part I as an adjective only, it will be argued that, for an adequate description of its structural properties, its verbal character must be taken into account both diachronically and synchronically. It will be shown that Part I fits into and completes a paradigmatic structure together with other nonfinite verbal forms.
This paper deals with a series of semantic contrasts between the copula "be" and the preposition "as", two functional elements that both head elementary predication structures. It will be argued that the meaning of "as" is a type lowering device shifting the meaning of its complement NP from generalized quantifier type to property type (where properties are conceived as relations between individuals and situations), while the copula "be" induces a type coercion from (partial) situations to (total) possible worlds. Paired with van der Sandt's 1992 theory of presupposition accommodation, these assumptions will account for the observed contrasts between "as" and "be".
Einführung
(2000)
Der vorliegende Band setzt im Anschluss an den Band ZAS Papers in Linguistics 14 (1999) die Vorpublikation von Arbeiten fort, die innerhalb oder im Umkreis des von der DFG geförderten Projekts "Schnittstellen der Semantik: Kopula-Prädikativ-Konstruktionen" am ZAS entstanden sind. Das Rahmenthema, wie es in ZAS PIL 14 einleitend knapp umrissen wurde, wird derzeit im Projekt in drei Untersuchungssträngen bearbeitet.
Der vorliegende Band setzt im Anschluß an den Band ZAS Papers in Linguistics 14 (1999) die Vorpublikation von Arbeiten fort, die innerhalb oder im Umkreis des von der DFG geförderten Projekts "Schnittstellen der Semantik: Kopula-Prädikativ-Konstruktionen" am ZAS entstanden sind. Das Rahmenthema, wie es in ZASPiL 14 einleitend knapp umrissen wurde, wird derzeit im Projekt in drei Untersuchungssträngen bearbeitet. Sie beinhalten
(1) die Klärung der in der Literatur auch weiterhin häufig bemühten, aber keineswegs eindeutig verankerten, sondern auf mehrere Domänen zu verteilenden Distinktion von Stage Level Predicates vs. Individual Level Predicates (kurz: SLP/ILP-Problematik);
(2) die Klärung des Situationsbezugs von Kopula-Prädikativ-Konstruktionen (KPK) im Hinblick auf die ontologische Natur, die lexikalische Fundierung und die syntaktische Verwaltung des referentiellen Arguments von KPK (kurz: Argumentstruktur von KPK);
(3) die vertiefte Analyse der notorisch idiosynkratischen Kopulaverben in Prädikationsstrukturen, nicht zuletzt im Hinblick auf diejenigen Vorkommen solcher Verben, in denen sie gemeinhin als "Hilfsverben" gelten, was wiederum eine umfassende Analyse der infiniten Verbformen einschließt (kurz: lexical vs. functional category features).
Dieser Beitrag setzt sich zum Ziel, die Kurzwörter zu klassifizieren und statistisch auszuwerten. Die Belege, die beim Lesen der deutschen Alltagspresse gewonnen wurden, verglich die Autorin mit anderen Belegen aus der deutschen Fachpresse und der tschechischen Presse. Statistisch gesehen, bilden die partiellen Kurzwörter, die auch als gebundene Kurzwörter bezeichnet werden, die meist benutzte Kategorie der Kurzwörter in der deutschen Presse. Das deutsche und das tschechische Sprachsystem unterscheiden sich voneinander in der Flexion, was die Variabilität in der Position der gekürzten Form im deutschen Sprachsystem ermöglicht.
Konventionalisierte Routineformeln sind standardisierte Ausdrücke, die in verschiedenen Situationen der täglichen Kommunikation verwendet werden. Für das Fremdsprachenlernen ist es sehr wichtig, solche Routineformeln und Ausdrücke zu lernen, die in einer bestimmten Situation adäquat sind und erwartet werden. Die Routineformeln werden im Hinblick auf ihre Semantik, Syntax und ihre kommunikative Funktion beschrieben. Abschließend werden konventionalisierte Routineformeln im Tschechischen und im Deutschen im Hinblick auf ihre grammatische Struktur und ihre lexikalischen Komponenten verglichen.
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.
Die Ableitung des Passivs ist typologisch keine einheitlich konfigurierte Konstruktion. In den kontinental-westgermanischen Sprachen und dem Lateinischen setzt sie ein lexikalisch externes Argument (designiertes Subjektargument) voraus, im Englischen, Französischen und Russischen sowohl ein externes wie ein internes Argument (Subjekt und (direktes) Objekt). Gleichwohl sind Passive im Deutschen und Russischen - also quer zu dieser ersten Verbklassifikation – aspektuellen Beschränkungen unterworfen, Passive im Englischen dagegen nicht, jedenfalls auf den ersten Blick. Sehen wir in diesen Kreis von Sprachen noch historische Stufen hinzu, dann ist auch davon auszugehen, daß Sprachen wie das Deutsche von einer Stufe mit einem paradigmatisch einigermaßen systematisch gefestigten Aspektsystem ohne Passiv – dem Althochdeutschen – zu einer Sprache mit Passiv (und ohne Aspekt) wurde. Wir brauchen gar nicht die gemeinsame indoeuropäische Wurzel zu beschwören, um die folgenden Fragen plausibel erscheinen zu lassen: Was hat Aspekt mit Passiv zu tun? Und: Soferne solche Übergänge tatsächlich vorliegen – wie sehen die Schritte von Aspekt zum Genus verbi im einzelnen aus, und wo stehen die Sprachen heute im Vergleich zueinander, also auf einer Art Entwicklungsleiter, mit Vorläufer- gegenüber Nachläuferstufen in der relativen Diachronie von Aspekt zur Passivdiathese?
This volume contains papers on language change and language acquisition. The acquisition papers and some of the language change papers are from ZAS staff. The others were by guest talks especially from the yearly meeting 'Historische Linguistik und Grammatiktheorien' held on December 3 and 4, 1998 with the special theme 'Komplexe Wörter und einfache Phrasen.'
In this paper I investigate the properties of the copula-like verb 'ficar' in Brazilian Portuguese using Pustejovsky's generative lexicon (GL). The verb 'ficar' can be translated as 'stay' or 'become', depending on its complement. With locatives, only the STAY reading is possible. With adjectival complements, both BECOME and STAY readings are possible. I propose that 'ficar' takes an eventuality as its complement and I argue that there is no need to create multiple lexical entries for it, since the readings are the result of the possible combinations between the transition denoted by 'ficar' and the properties of the stative complements.
I argue that the BECOME reading with adjectival predicates is the result of combining part of the qualia of the adjectival predicate with the TRANSITION of 'ficar'. The STAY readings of 'ficar'+adjective are the result of shadowing the transition. In the case of 'ficar'+locative, the BECOME reading is unavailable. Departing from the hypothesis that subevents have to be linked to arguments in order to be able to be modified by certain types of modifiers or be selected by certain types of heads, I argue that the transition, in the case of locative complements, is not associated to any argument because nothing in the qualia of the locative complement is compatible with a transition, given that there is not motion component in either 'ficar' or the locative. Unlinked to any argument, the TRANSITION can only be part of the 'constant' meaning of the verb, which explains why it is not available for modification.
In contradistinction to main verbs copula verbs like 'sein', 'werden' or 'bleiben' ('be', 'become' or 'remain') can, though with some restrictions, take projections of all lexical categories as complements. Semantically 'werden' and 'bleiben' are considered to be dual operators, related to each other by inner and outer (= dual) negation. But there are contexts where 'bleiben' seems to assume the meaning of its dual 'werden'. What at first glance appears to be an idiosyncracy of German turns out to hold for Swedish, Brazil-Portuguese and other unrelated languages as well.
'Werden' is more restricted than 'sein' and 'bleiben', it cannot have a locative complement. 'Bleiben' has the widest distribution, it can also take infinitives of verbs of position as complement. But in this case 'stehen bleiben' is ambiguous between a "remain" -reading and a "become" -reading.
In 15th century the Swedish verb 'bliva' - a borrowing from German - has undergone a change from the "remain"-reading to the "become"-reading. The "become"-reading of 'bliva' (later form 'bli') is only blocked (as is the German verb 'werden') in the case of a locative complement, where the "remain"-reading has survived. The two readings of 'bli' do not produce any ambiguity, except when taking a verb of position as complement - much the same as in German.
The paper attempts to pinpoint the conditions that lead to this surprising shift of meaning between duals.
The paper addresses the longstanding question of whether the copular verb "werden" ('become') is a transitional, i.e. telic, or a nontransitional, i.e. atelic, verb, or verb that is unspecified with regard to telicity. By means of standard tests and historical considerations, it is argued that the verb is telic and refers to accomplishment situations. Nevertheless, there are two types of copular "werden"-clauses with regard to which this view may seem questionable at first sight. First, some "werden"-clauses appear to refer to achievements. This, however, is not a matter concerning the semantics of werden. Rather, the crucial cases are accidentally instantaneous because their predicative complements are absolute predicates. Hence, they do not allow for extended transitions from one state to another. Second, some other "werden"-clauses, expecially those with comparative complements, sometimes appear to refer to processes. However "werden" combined with a comparatival adjective can be shown to be able to refer to clear accomplishment situations. The process-effect is due to a common phenomenon of reinterpretation that leads to iterative transitions between degrees.
The copula "sein" "be" in German, together with its complements, refers to a stative situation. Besides offering argument positions in its Semantic Form SF, it has no other function. Stative verbs are not specified with respect to the beginning or the end of a described situation or with respect to the state before or after. I will take the verb "werden" "become, get" to be a copular verb as well. The only difference to "sein" is that "werden" refers to a nonstative or changing situation. I argue that "werden" is underspecified in two respects. Like motion verbs and successive patient verbs (SUK verbs in Krifka (1989)) "werden" switches between an unlimited and a limited process (accomplishment) dependent on its complement (cf. "älter werden" "get older" / "vorwärts gehen" "go forward" / "Tee trinken" "drink tea" vs. "alt werden" "get old" / "in das Zimmer gehen" "go into the room"/ "eine Tasse Tee trinken" "drink a cup of tea"). But "werden" is even more underspecified than these verbs; it is the only verb which covers all nonstative situations, not only processes and accomplishments but also punctual transitions (achievements), cf. "schwanger werden" "get pregnant". "Werden" is anything but stative. Whether there is a target state implied or not, or whether the transition to this target state is extensible or atomic, is the result of the composition of the meaning of "werden" and its intimal argument added by special meaning postulates. Hierarchically marked subtypes of situational arguments result as a side effect.
This paper investigates syntactic properties of verbless constructions in Chinese. Verbless constructions differ from constructions with overt verbs in three major respects. First, there is a VP-internal nominal raising in Chinese, which is optional if an overt verb shows up, and obligatory if there is no overt verb. Second, while an overt verb can select various kinds of argument, the internal argument of a verbless construction cannot be indefinite. Third, there are two types of object depictive secondary predication constructions, and only one of them allows for a null verb.
This contribution concerns the interaction of morphology, syntax and semantics. It treats German past participles and concentrates on their function as heads in attributive and adverbial modifier phrases. It is argued that participles have the same argument structure as the underlying verbs and can undergo passivization, perfectivization and conversion to adjectives. Since these three operations involve changes in the morphosyntactic categorization they are considered as zero affixation. Two affixless templates – without any categorical changes – convert participle constructions to modifiers relating to participants or to situations. These phrases do not have a syntactic position for the grammatical subject, an operator or an adverbial relator. The pertinent components are present only in the semantic structure. Two further templates serve the composition of participle constructions as modifiers with the modificandum. It is necessary to differentiate between modifiers which function as predicates and those which have the status of a propositional operator. In syntax, these different semantic functions correspond to different adjunct positions of the respective participle phrases.
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.