Linguistik-Klassifikation
Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Part of a Book (59)
- Article (29)
- Working Paper (19)
- Review (8)
- Conference Proceeding (3)
- Book (2)
- Periodical (1)
- Part of Periodical (1)
- Report (1)
Language
- English (64)
- German (44)
- Portuguese (6)
- Multiple languages (4)
- Croatian (3)
- mis (2)
Keywords
- Kontrastive Linguistik (37)
- Deutsch (31)
- Linguistik (22)
- Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft (22)
- Sprachtypologie (21)
- Syntax (21)
- Semantik (20)
- Spracherwerb (11)
- Tschechisch (11)
- Verb (11)
Institute
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 paper shows the early development of the first approximately 50 verbs found in the recorded speech production of one Croatian girl. The aim is to analyse and interpret the child's verb development in terms of the distinction of a pre- and a protomorphological phase before modularised morphology in language acquisition (Dressler & Karpf 1995). Furthermore, focus will be laid on the emergence of first verb paradigms.
The 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.
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.
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.
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.
Anders als man auf den ersten Blick vermuten könnte ist die vorliegende Sammlung von Aufsätzen nicht aus den Beiträgen eines thematisch einschlägigen Workshops kompiliert worden (ein solcher ist erst für Herbst 1999 vorgesehen), sondern sie entstammt den Diskussionsrunden des Lexikonzirkels am ZAS, die - initiiert vom Projekt "Schnittstellen der Semantik: Kopula-Prädikativ-Konstruktionen" - seit 1997 regelmäßig und mit zunehmender Einbindung externer Mitarbeiter stattgefunden haben. Daß das 1998 mit nur anderthalb DFG-Stellen besetzte Projekt am ZAS eine solche Irradiationswirkung ausübt, verdankt sich wohl dem Zusammentreffen zweier günstiger Bedingungen.
Die erste Bedingung liefern die im Konzept des ZAS angelegten Möglichkeiten kooperativer Forschungsförderung, die hier in beherzter Überschreitung administrativer Grenzen erfolgreich umgesetzt werden konnten. Die Beiträge sind eine Zwischenbilanz von Studien, die im ZAS-Projekt selbst betrieben wurden, und von Studien, die - vom Projekt angeregt - nach kurzem so in dessen Forschung verwickelt waren, daß die resultierende Verflechtung zur unverzichtbaren Grundlage der weiteren Arbeit des Projekts geworden ist.
Die zweite Bedingung besteht offenkundig in der Problemhaltigkeit des Themas und der daraus resultierenden theoretischen Attraktivität. Was macht Kopula-Prädikativ-Konstruktionen unter dem Blickwinkel ihrer grammatischen Schnittstellen so attraktiv?
The present study offers an analysis of the Russian copular constructions with predicate nominals. In such copular sentences two cases may mark the predicate: the nominative and the instrumental as in 'Anna byla medsestra/medsestroj' - 'Anna was-3sg.fem.a nursenom/instr'. In the present tense the copula has a null-form and the predicate nominal can only be in the nominative. I argue that the case alternation corresponds to the distinction of Stage Level and Individual Level Predicates in the sense of Kratzer (1994) and Diesing (1992), but with some objections. The copula with Instrumental forms S-Predicates, which are analyzed as predicates applying to situations referring to time. The copula with nominative forms I-Predicates, which attribute properties to individuals without referring to time. I-Predicates have no situation argument. Data that show the (in-)compatibility of copular sentences with certain spatial or temporal modifiers provide a reason to assume a situation argument in byt' + Instr but not in byt' + Nom.
Byt' behaves differently in different grammatical contexts: in contexts of sentence negation, yes/no-questions and under focus byt' + Instr behaves like a lexical category, while byt' + Nom behaves like a functional category. As a functional category byt' + Nom is non-overt in the present and is always finite. The semantic distinction between nominative and instrumental predicate NPs is pegged to an opposition between a structure with a functional copula as the only tense and agreement marker with base position in TP and a lexical copula in VP (Franks 1995, Bailyn&Rubin 1991). To explain phenomena of the copula in Russian I propose an integrated syntactic model for two copulas. The two copulas may be conceived as distinct realizations of one verbal lexical entry which will be specified as a lexical or as functional category in the course of lexical insertion. The Model of Parallel Morphology might be used to explain this phenomenon.
Within the Davidsonian paradigm copula-predicative constructions are commonly assumed to involve a state argument. Its source is taken to be either the copula 'be' (cf. e.g. Bierwisch 1988) or the predicative (cf. the ongoing stage level/individual level debate). Yet, a critical examination of copula-predicative constructions in contexts that call for Davidsonian arguments (locative modifiers, manner adverbials, perception verbs, etc.) reveals that they do not behave as expected. In fact, the data examined here do not support the assumption that copula-predicative constructions are equipped with a Davidsonian argument nor is there any evidence for a grammatically reflected distinction between temporary and permanent properties. The present paper argues alternatively for a grammatical distinction between states like' sit', 'stand', 'sleep', 'wait', 'live' and statives like 'resemble', 'know', 'hate', 'cost' which is invoked by the presence or absence of a Davidsonian argument. Copula-predicative constructions are shown to belong uniformly to the class of statives. The acceptability differences of copula-predicative constructions in combination with locative modifiers are accounted for pragmatically on the basis of conversational implicatures.