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Institute
Research on adverbials in sentence-medial position in the North- Ghanaian Gur language Buli suggests that the language offers two divergent slots for adverbials between subject and verb. Special attention is paid to the group of sentence-medial deictic temporal adverbials. While they have the potential to develop into tense markers, this process seems to depend on special information structural conditions.
This talk concerns the copula system in Buli, a Ghanaian language which has also been attested in Bahia (Rodrigues 1935, Zwernemann 1968). Special focus will be put on the categorization of two copula-reminiscent elements for which I will propose a discoursepragmatic analysis.
Sluicing phenomena
(2001)
The paper shows that in various sluicing types, the wh-phrase in the sluicing sentence as well as its relatum in the antecedent clause must be F-marked, and it explains this observation with Schwarzschild's (1999) and Merchant's (1999) focus theory. According to the semantics of the wh-phrase, it will argue that the relatum of the wh-phrase is an indefinite expression that must allow a specific interpretation. Following Heusinger (1997, 2000), specificity will be defined as an anchoring relation between the discourse referent introduced by the indefinite expression and a discourse given item. Because specific indefinite expressions are always novel, contexts like the scope of definite DPs, the scope of thematic matrix predicates, and the scope of downward-monotonic quantifiers which all exhibit non-novel indefinites do not allow sluicing.
The Present Perfect in Portuguese has the curious property of forcing iteration of the eventuality described. This paper proposes an account of the iterativity in terms of selectional restrictions of the Present Tense and independent properties of the Perfect and argues against the account of Giorgi and Pianesi 1998 in which the Portuguese Present Perfect is treated as containing two main verbs.
Die Grundlagen der heutigen modernen Wortartenklassifikationen gehen bis in die Antike zurück: Bereits zu dieser Zeit hat Dionysius Thrax ein Schema mit acht Wortarten etabliert. Die darin auftretenden Wortarten sind Substantive, Verben, Adjektive, Artikel, Pronomen, Präpositionen, Adverbien und Konjunktionen. Diese Zahl wird wiederum in den unterschiedlichen Grammatikansätzen unserer Zeit variiert. So verwendet der generative Ansatz beispielsweise vier Wortarten – Bergenholtz/Schaeder (1977) verzeichnen dagegen ganze 51 verschiedene Wortarten und zusätzlich 5 Lexemklassen. Allein diese starken Schwankungen in der angenommenen Anzahl der Wortarten verdeutlichen die allgemeinen Schwierigkeiten bei der Abgrenzung der Wortarten in ihren Kriterien.
Das Zitat "Denn sie gliedern sich in Stämme wie die Menschen" aus Érik Orsennas "Die Grammatik ist ein sanftes Lied" leitet den Titel dieser Arbeit ein und markiert gleichzeitig eine Schnittstelle zwischen der Literaturwissenschaft und der Linguistik und speziell der Grammatik. Als metasprachliche Erzählung setzt sich Orsennas Erzählung literarisch mit der Sprache und ihrer Grammatik auseinander. In der vorliegenden Arbeit beschäftige ich mich vorrangig mit der Analyse der Kriterien zur Klassifikation von Wortarten und ihrer literarischen Darstellung und Ausgestaltung in Orsennas Text über die Wörter, die in Stämmen in der Stadt der Wörter zusammenleben und in einer Fabrik miteinander zu Sätzen verbunden werden können. Der Originaltext von Orsenna ist eine Erzählung in französischer Sprache. Die Übersetzerin Caroline Vollmann hat den Text an die Gegebenheiten und speziellen Phänomene der deutschen Sprache angepasst. Aus diesem Grund spreche ich in der Arbeit von Orsenna und Vollmann als Verfassern.
Da die Darstellung der Wortarten bei Orsenna und Vollmann primär durch Metaphern realisiert wird und den Wörtern als "Stämmen" in einer Stadt menschliche Eigenschaften zugewiesen werden, möchte ich besonders auf die Grundlagen der kognitiven Metapherntheorie von Lakoff und Johnson eingehen. Um eine möglichst wissenschaftlich fundierte Grundlage für die Analyse von Kriterien zur Wortartenklassifikation zu gewährleisten, habe ich drei Grammatiken als Vergleichsmedium für die spätere Analyse von Orsennas und Vollmanns Text ausgewählt. Dadurch gewinne ich sowohl eine syntaktisch als auch morphologisch und semantisch orientierte Perspektive auf den Untersuchungsgegenstand. Aus den Grammatiken von Hentschel/Weydt (2003), Helbig/Buscha (2005) und Boettcher (2009) soll im Verlauf der Arbeit ein Kriterienkatalog erstellt werden, der in einem weiteren Schritt auf die Analyse der Wortartenklassifikation des literarischen Textes angewendet werden kann.
Early features
(1995)
A contrast to a trace
(2001)
For movement, such as quantifier raising, the three different structures illustrated in (1) are discussed in the recent literature.
(1) A girl danced with every boy
a. [every boy]x a girl danced with x (copy + replace)
b. [every boy]x a girl danced with [every boy] (copy)
c. [every boy]x a girl danced with [thex boy] (copy + modify)
In this paper, I'll call the proposal illustrated by (1a) the copy+replace theory since the movement is analyzed as first copying the moving phrase followed by replacing the moving phrase with a trace in the base position of movement. Chomsky (1993) and Fox (1999) argue against the copy+replace theory (1a) on the basis of Condition C data that show that moved material can behave as if it occupied the base position of movement. This behavior would, for example, be expected on the copy theory of movement illustrated by (1b), which also seems conceptually simpler than the copy+replace theory since it involves only copying without replacement. This conceptual advantage, however, is probably only apparent since a theory of the interpretation of structures like (1b) would probably be more complicated than for (1a). Standard assumptions about interpretation, at least, don't predict the right meaning when applied to (1b). For this reason, Chomsky and Fox propose what I'll call the copy+modify-theory illustrated in (1c). This proposes that copying is followed by a trace modification operation that replaces the determiner of the moved DP with something else. I assume that this is an indexed definite determiner, the interpretation of which is to be clarified below.
The interpretation of traces
(2004)
This paper argues that parts of the lexical content of an A-bar moved phrase must be interpreted in the base position of movement. The argument is based on a study of deletion of a phrase that contains the base position of movement. I show that deletion licensing is sensitive to the content of the moved phrase. In this way, I corroborate and extend conclusions based on Condition C reconstruction by N. Chomsky and D. Fox. My result provides semantic evidence for the existence of traces and gives semantic content to the A/A-bar distinction.
This paper addresses the syntax and semantics plurals, and then applies it to reciprocal expressions. In the course of this investigation, I address two problems for the conventional view that a reciprocal makes essentially the same semantic contribution to the sentence as other noun phrases, but has an interesting internal structure. I will show that both problems are properties of plurality in general, and can be successfully explained along these lines. As a result, the paper is more about plurality in general than reciprocals though the goal of the paper is to account for the two problems relating to reciprocals.
This paper corroborates the interpretability proposal of Chomsky (1995) with evidence from scrambling in Japanese and German. First it is shown that scrambling in Japanese is semantically vacuous, whereas scrambling in German is semantically contentful. Chomsky’s proposal then predicts that the feature driving Japanese scrambling is erased after checking, while the corresponding feature in German remains visible, specifically for the Shortest Attract condition. Looking at patterns of movement that result in overlapping paths, this prediction is seen to be correct.
It has become commonplace to introduce works on aspect with the remark that there is hardly another field in linguistics so much plagued by terminological and notional confusion. [..] About 20 major books claiming a comprehensive treatment have come to my attention during little more than the past half decade […]. Among these books are five that form the subject of this paper in a narrower sense, given that the present article originally started out as a combined review of these five works: […] Even if one is not at all keen on monocultures, it is clear that the obvious disunity in fundamental points of view makes the situation increasingly difficult for the "ordinary working linguist". It is getting impossible to keep up with the many different issues raised in the theoretical literature when, for instance, writing a chapter on aspect for a descriptive grammar of a language. As a result, a tremendous gap between descriptive and theoretical work has arisen. This has not gone unnoticed in the literature. There are several recent publications in which explicit attempts are made to bridge this gap […], all of them trying to add a typological perspective to aspect theory and to free it from its purely truth-conditional embedding, which was the dominant paradigm in the 70ies and 80ies. But again, these works are often themselves cast into specific theoretical frameworks, more often than not ignoring other approaches to the field if they do not fit their persuasions. I will therefore avail myself of the opportunity of this review article by briefly sorting out the differences in the fundamental assumptions and theoretical primitives of the various approaches, in order to come to grips with the aspectological landscape. A general, chiefly historically oriented assessment is presented in the first part of this paper (see section 1). The second part is then devoted to a detailed discussion of the books under review against the background etablished in this survey (see section 2). At the end, I will try to draw some conclusions and hint at some directions for future work with aspect in a descriptive and/or typological context (see section 3).
What are incremental themes?
(2001)
In this paper I examine the approach to incremental themes developed in Krifka 1992,1998, Dowty 1991 and others, which argues that the extent of a telic event is determined by the extent of its incrementally affected theme. This approach identifies the defining property of an accomplishment event as being the fact that the theme relation is a homomorphism from parts of the event to parts of the (incremental) theme. I show that there are a large number of accomplishments, both lexical and derived via resultative predication, which cannot be characterised in this way. I then show that it is more insightful to characterise accomplishments in terms of their internally complex structure: an accomplishment event consists of a non-incremental activity event and an incrementally structured 'BECOME' event, which are related by a contextually available one-one function in such a way that the incremental structure of the latter is imposed on the activity.
This paper presents an analysis of secondary predicates as aspectual modifiers and secondary predication as a summing operation which sums the denotation of the matrix verb and the secondary predicate. I argue that, as opposed to the summing peration involved in simple conjunction, there is a constraint on secondary predication; in the 0 case of depictives, the event introduced by the matrix verb must be PART-OF the event introduced by the secondary predicate, where e1 is PART-OF e2 if the running time of e1 is contained in the running time of e2 and if e1 and e2 share a grammatical argument. I argue resultative predication differs from depictive predication in that the PART-OF constraint holds in resultative constructions between the event which is the culmination of e1 and e2: formally, while depictive predication introduces the statement PART-OF(e1,e2), resultative predication introduces the statement PART-OF(cul(e1),e2). I show that this is all that is necessary to explain the well-known properties of resultative predication.
U radu se opisuju primjeri češće uporabe akuzativa bez prijedloga u suvremenim hrvatskim medijima i razgovornom jeziku. Primjeri se takve uporabe razvrstavaju u nekoliko skupina: 1. sintagme s nepunoznačnim glagolom i besprijedložnim akuzativom, 2. glagol + *imenska riječ (A) + imenska riječ (A) < glagol + od + imenska riječ (G) + imenska riječ (A), 3. neprijelazni glagol → prijelazni glagol. Među sintagmama s akuzativom promjene se primjećuju i u sljedećoj, 4. skupini: glagol + unutrašnji objekt → glagol + hiponimni objekt (rubni izravni objekt?). Pri opisu se potvrđuje da se akuzativ kao puni, središnji padež, kojim se predmet obuhvaća u potpunosti, nameće rubnosti ostalih perifernih padeža, pr. instrumentala (kod glagola kontaktirati). Pokazuje se da su, usprkos normi koja uz glagole traženja ne preporuča uporabu dvaju akuzativa bez prijedloga, nego jednoga besprijedložnoga akuzativa (ili dijelnoga genitiva) te drugoga genitiva s prijedlogom od, uz glagol tražiti u jeziku suvremenih medija česte potvrde dvaju besprijedložnih akuzativa.
In this paper I show that the different case marking possibilities on predicate adjectives in depictive secondary predicates in Russian constitute the uninterpretable counterpart of the interpretable tense and aspect features of the adjective. Case agreement entails that the predicate adjective is non-eventive, i.e., it occurs when the event time of the secondary predicate is identical to the event time of the primary predicate. The instrumental case, however, entails that the secondary predicate is eventive: some change of state or transition occurred prior to or during the event time of the primary predicate. I claim that case agreement occurs in conjoined tense phrases in Russian, while the instrumental case occurs in adjoined aspectual phrases. In English, secondary predication is sensitive both to the structural location of its antecedent and to the event structure of the primary predicate. I suggest that depictives with subject antecedents in English are true adjunction structures, while those with direct object antecedents occur in a conjoined aspectual phrase. This hypothesis finds support in the different movement and semantic constraints in conjunction versus adjunction phrases in both English and Russian.
This paper is about the semantics of wh-phrases. It is argued that wh-phrases should not be analyzed as indefinites as, for example, Karttunen (1977) and many others have done, but as functional expressions with an indefinite core -their function being to restrict possible focus/background structures in direct or congruent answers. This will be argued for on the basis of observations made with respect to the distribution of term answers in well-formed question/answer sequences. This claim having been established, it will be integrated in a categorial variant of Schwarzschild's (1999) information-theoretic approach to F-marking and accent placement, and – second – its consequences with respect to the focus/background structure of wh-questions will be outlined.
Koreferenzielle Pro-Formen im Deutschen und Italienischen : Analyse von Korpora gesprochener Sprache
(2011)
Gegenstand dieses Beitrags ist die vergleichende Untersuchung von deutschen und italienischen verweisenden Pronomen. Für das Deutsche wird die Alternanz zwischen der/die/ das (im Folgenden d-Pronomen; vgl. Ahrenholz 2007 und Wiltschko 1998) und Personalpronomen betrachtet. Für das Italienische werden Demonstrativ- und Personalpronomen (freie und klitische) untersucht. In vorherigen Forschungsarbeiten wurde auf semantische, syntaktische und pragmatische Bedingungen hingewiesen, die das Vorkommen von d-Pronomen anstatt anderer Pronominalformen wie z.B. den Personalpronomen im Deutschen stark begünstigen (vgl. dazu Ravetto 2009). Ziel dieser Arbeit ist, zu überprüfen, ob in den zwei Vergleichssprachen ähnliche Tendenzen bzw. Bedingungen zu beobachten sind, die mit der Wahl der jeweiligen verweisenden Form verknüpft sind.
This paper concerns the argument structure analysis of raising-to-subject with passive predicates in Swedish and other Germanic languages. Support is given for the analysis in which the raising-to-subject construction constitutes a regular passive, the passive counterpart of active raising-to-object. The fact that there does not seem to be an active counterpart for certain predicates, such as the predicate say, as well as the fact that raising-to-subject does not seem to be possible with the periphrastic passive in Swedish is attributed to certain semantic restrictions on the raising-to-object construction and the periphrastic passive construction, respectively.
Progress toward distinguishing clearly between generative and model-theoretic syntactic frameworks has not been smooth or swift, and the obfuscatory term 'constraint-based' has not helped. This paper reviews some elementary subregular formal language theory relevant to comparing description languages for model-theoretic grammars, generalizes the results to trees, and points out that HPSG linguists have maintained an unacknowledged and perhaps unintended allegiance to the idea of strictly local description: unbounded dependencies, in particular, are still being conceptualized in terms of plugging together local tree parts annotated with the SLASH feature. Adopting a description language with quantifiers holds out the prospect of eliminating the need for the SLASH feature. We need to ask whether that would be a good idea. Binding domain phenomena might tell us. More work of both descriptive and mathematical sorts is needed before the answer is clear.
Wh-questions in Malagasy
(2004)
Wh-questions in Malagasy consist of a clause-initial wh-phrase followed by an invariant particle and then the remainder of the clause. This paper considers the structural analysis of Malagasy wh-questions and argues for a biclausal cleft analysis in which the initial wh-phrase is a predicate and the remaining material is a headless relative in subject position. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 introduces some basic facts about Malagasy clause structure and wh-questions. Section 3 lays out two competing structural analyses of wh-questions: the cleft analysis and a fronting analysis in which Malagasy wh-questions are derived by wh-movement. Section 4 introduces various evidence in favor of the pseudocleft analysis and against the fronting analysis. Section 5 concludes.
Current analyses of specificity are unable to provide an explanatory account for why specific and nonspecific uses of indefinites are available. While Abusch (1994), Reinhart (1997), and Kratzer (1998) provide successful mechanisms for deriving specific readings, they do not provide a fundamental explanation for the availability of this mechanism. This is due to the fact that specific indefinites are treated as involving an interpretive component or procedure unique to themselves: storage (Abusch) or choice function (Reinhart and Kratzer), for example. It would be preferable if specific indefinites could be understood as deriving from the use of independently motivated meaning components and interpretive mechanisms.
Here I will pursue the idea, building on Portner & Yabushita (1998), that specificity has to do with the indefinite's interaction with a topical domain (note similarities with the proposals of Enç 1991, Cresti 1995, and Schwarzschild 2000). In this conception, specificity is a matter of degree: the narrower the topical domain, the more specific the indefinite. More precisely, sentences containing specific indefinites will be understood as involving ordinary existential quantification in combination with a topical domain function.
Sätze mit Verberststellung können im Deutschen eine kausale Bedeutung haben, wobei sie jedoch eine Besonderheit aufweisen. In diesen Sätzen tritt immer unbetontes doch auf, dem der Status einer Modalpartikel zugeschrieben werden kann. Dabei handelt es sich um eine Randerscheinung, die in den Grammatiken häufig vernachlässigt wird.
Even if we can generate a logical form, principles of use may limit the ways in which we can use it. In this paper, I motivate one such principle of use, and explore its effects. Much of the discussion involves kinds of sentences that have received attention in the literature on "individual-level predicates".
[V]oice in Malagasy is less like voice in English and more like wh-agreement, of the sort which Chung (1998) documents for Chamorro. In A' -extraction contexts in Chamorro, regular subject agreement […] is replaced by special morphology indicating whether the extracted element is a subject, object, or oblique […]. In Pearson (to appear) I suggested that Malagasy voice marking is a 'generalized' version of this type of marking: While in Chamorro wh-agreement is confined to questions, relative clauses, and the like, in Malagasy it appears in all clause types due to a requirement that the specifier of WhP be filled in every clause. [...]
In this paper I focus on the voice affixes themselves and propose an account of their distribution. Specifically, I argue that they are realizations of light verbs and Case-checking heads, which combine with the root through head-to-head movement. The distribution of the affixes is determined by the positions from which, and through which, the null operator […] moves on its way to the specifier of WhP. For example, the actor-topic prefix m- is treated as a nominative Casechecking head, which gets spelled out just in case the operator raises through its specifier. (My analysis is thus in the spirit of Guilfoyle, Hung, & Travis (1992), who also associate voice morphemes with Case licensing.)
In what follows, we will first put forward the claim that syntactic ergativity results from morphological ergativity by examining relativization and pea-coordination in Tongan (Section 2). In Sections 3 and 4, we compare 'O-constructions with pea-constructions to conclude a) that unlike pea, 'O should be regarded as a complementizer rather than a conjunction; and b) that the gap in 'O-clauses is not an outcome of deletion, but a null anaphor. We will then discuss a Minimalist approach to binding proposed by Reuland (2001) and see how it accounts for the distribution and behavior of proSE in Tongan. Some implications of the current proposal are discussed in Section 6, with section 7 in conclusion.
Inuktitut wird in der kanadischen Arktis, im Territorium Nunavut und in Arctic Quebec, von ca. 30.000 Menschen gesprochen und steht in einem Varietätenkontinuum mit den benachbarten Sprachen der Familie „Eskimo-Aleut“, deren Verbreitungsgebiet sich von Ostgrönland bis zur Nordostspitze Asiens erstreckt. Inuktitut ist eine polysynthetische Sprache und zeichnet sich durch uneingeschränkte morphologische Produktivität und Komplexität aus. Die vorliegende grammatische Skizze richtet ihr Augenmerk vorrangig auf diese synthetischen Prozesse, die sich keineswegs auf lexikalische Produktivität im Sinne einer ‚Wortbildung’ beschränken, sondern weitestgehend grammatisch konfigurierende Prozesse umfassen. Ausführlich behandelt werden auch die Kapazitäten der extrem differenzierten Flexionsparadigmen, insbesondere der Verbalflexion, die vollständige Propositionen konstituiert und durch die allein ein kohärenter Diskurs gewährleistet wird.
The Inuit inhabit a vast area of--from a European point of view--most inhospitable land, stretching from the northeastern tip of Asia to the east coast of Greenland. Inuit peoples have never been numerous, their settlements being scattered over enormous distances. But nevertheless, from an ethnological point of view, all Inuit peoples shared a distinct culture, featuring sea mammal and caribou hunting, sophisticated survival skills, technical and social devices, including the sharing of essential goods and strategies for minimizing and controlling aggression.
U ovome se radu razmatra odabir naziva diskursnih oznaka za određene jezične elemente i ukazuje na moguće zakonitosti njihova nastanka. Raščlanjuju se pojedine karakteristike, formalne i funkcionalne prirode, koje se najčešće povezuju s diskursnim oznakama. Pri određivanju jezičnih elemenata u funkciji diskursnih oznaka opredjeljuje se, prije svega, za funkcionalni kriterij, dok su formalne karakteristike tek pokazatelji njihove pripadnosti zajedničkoj kategoriji.
This paper discusses critically a number of developments at the heart of current syntactic theory. These include the postulation of a rich sequence of projections at the left periphery of the sentence; the idea that movement is tied to the need to eliminate uninterpretable features; and the conception put forward by Chomsky and others that advances in the past decade have made it reasonable to raise the question about whether language might be in some sense ‘perfect’. However, I will argue that there is little motivation for a highly-articulated left-periphery, that there is no connection between movement and uninterpretable features, and that there is no support for the idea that language might be perfect.
In this work we examine several sentential particles, occurring in imperatives, main exclamative and interrogative sentences, which display a uniform syntactic behaviour. We analyse them as heads of high CP projections which require their specifier to be filled either by the wh-item (in sentences where there is one) or by the whole clause, yielding the sentence final position of the particle. The hypothesis that they are C°-heads accounts for their sensitivity to sentence type and for their occurrence only in matrix contexts. We also provide a first sketch of their semantic contribution, showing that they select ‘non standard’ contexts and interact with tense and modality of the verb when the whole CP has moved to their specifier.
Das vorliegende Arbeitspapier ist das Skript einer Vorlesung, die ich während des Wintersemesters 1986/87 am Institut für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität zu Köln gehalten habe. […] Das Arbeitspapier gliedert sich in zwei Teile. Im ersten Teil, Kapitel 1 - 4, werden die bei der Untersuchung und Beschreibung einer Sprache auftretenden soziolinguistischen Probleme besprochen, während im zweiten Teil, Kapitel 5 - 11, behandelt wird, wie eine Grammatik geschrieben werden sollte. Es geht dabei also nicht um die grammatische Analyse sprachlicher Daten, sondern um die Darstellung einer Sprache, d.h. um die schriftstellerische Aufgabe des Linguisten, des Grammatikers im eigentlichen Sinn.
The goal of this paper is to study the influence of information structure in the referential status of linguistic expressions such as bare plurals and indefinite NPs in Spanish. In particular, we will argue for the following claims: (a) Spanish bare plurals can receive a generic interpretation in object position and (b) Spanish bare plurals in object position can be topics in siru. We will focus on object position because of the well known semantic and syntactic constraints that affect preverbal subject bare plurals in Spanish.
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.
Chicheŵa, a Bantu language of East Central Africa, displays mixed properties of configurationality such as the existence of VP, on the one hand, and discontinuous constituents (DCs), on the other. In the present work we examine the discourse and syntactic properties of DCs, and show that DCs in Chicheŵa arise naturally from the discourse-configurational nature of the language. We argue that the fronted DCs in Chicheŵa are contrastive topics that appear in a leftdislocated external topic position, with the remnant part of the split NP in the right-dislocated topic position. Once the precise discourse functions of DCs are properly integrated into the syntactic analysis, all the facts and restrictions observed in Chicheŵa DCs can be explained in a straightforward fashion.
The purpose of this dissertation is to defend the idea that the empirical responsibilities of binding theory can be handled in a more psychologically and historically realistic way when assigned to the field of pragmatics. In particular, I wish to show that Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince & Smolensky, 1993), the stochastic OT and Gradual Learning Algorithm of Boersma (1998), the Recoverability of OT of Wilson (2001) and Buchwald et al. (2002), and the bidirectional OT of Blutner (2000b) and Bidirectional Gradual Learning Algorithm of Jäger (2003a) can all participate in a formal framework in which one can formally spell out and justify the idea that the distributional behavior of bound pronouns and reflexivs is a pragmatic phenomenon.
Este artigo apresenta contrastivamente os diferentes tipos de categorização grammatical do item lexical advérbio em uma gramática brasileira e em duas alemãs. O objetivo é apontar a complexidade de descrição do advérbio em uma classe única. A característica heterogeneidade do advérbio é exemplificada por três tipos de advérbio: advérbios modalizadores discursivos (CASTILHO 2010), advérbios de comentário (DUDEN 2006) e palavras modais (HELBIG & BUSCHA 2001).
Sentence mood in German is a complex category that is determined by various components of the grammatical system. In particular, verbal mood, the position of the finite verb and the wh-characteristics of the so called 'Vorfeld'-phrase are responsible for the constitution of sentence mood in German. This article proposes a theory of sentence mood constitution in German and investigates the interaction between the pronominal binding of indefinite noun phrases which are semantically analyzed as choice functions. It is shown that the semantic objects determined by sentence mood define different kinds of domains which have to be uniquely accessible as the range of the choice function. The various properties of the pronominal binding of indefinites can be derived by the interplay of the proposed theoretical notions.
This paper takes a close look at the properties of Hungarian relative clauses that occur in the left periphery of the main clause, preceding a (pro)nominal associate. It will be shown that these left-peripheral relative clauses differ in many ways from relative clauses dislocated on the right periphery, as well as from relative clauses embedded under a (pro)nominal head. To capture the precise syntax of these left-peripheral clauses, these will be compared to ordinary left-dislocated items, with which they have some properties in common. Despite the surface similarities between the two, however, there are a few decisive aspects of behaviour, most notably, distributional properties and connectivity effects, which argue against taking left-peripheral relatives as cases of clausal left-dislocates in Hungarian. Instead, one is led to consider these as correlative clauses, on the basis of the properties they share with well-established correlatives in languages like Hindi.
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.
Although the linear order of arguments (and adverbials) in German is relatively free, it underlies certain restrictions; these don’t apply to the so-called unmarked order for arguments (Lenerz 1977) and adverbials (Frey/Pittner 1998). It is a common assumption to take the unmarked order as basic and derive all other orders from it by scrambling, whatever its specific characteristics may be (cf., amongst others, Haider/Rosengren 1998). The observable restrictions obtaining for some linear ordering may then be considered as constraints on a movement operation (scrambling). [...] In the following, I will try to present the outlines of a possible explanation for the restriction, based on a proposal governing the proper referential interpretation of indefinite NPs.
On transitivity
(2011)
This paper critically discusses and contrasts some of the different conceptualisations of transitivity that have been presented in the literature, and argues that transitivity as a morphosyntactic phenomenon and effectiveness of an event as a semantic concept should be separated in discussions of transitivity, and also, like many other aspects of grammar, transitivity should be seen as a constructional phenomenon, and so each construction in a language needs to be examined separately, in natural contexts. An Appendix presents some general questions one can consider when analysing language data.
This book is a full reference grammar of Qiang, one of the minority languages of southwest China, spoken by about 70,000 Qiang and Tibetan people in Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture in northern Sichuan Province. It belongs to the Qiangic branch of Tibeto-Burman (one of the two major branches of Sino-Tibetan). The dialect presented in the book is the Northern Qiang variety spoken in Ronghong Village, Yadu Township, Chibusu District, Mao County. This book, the first book-length description of the Qiang language in English, is the result of many years of work on the language.
Using arguments based on the data on verb agreement (pronominalization) in Tibeto-Burman, LaPolla 1989 (see also LaPolla 1992) argues that Proto-Tibeto-Burman should be reconstructed as a language with no inflectional morphology. In that paper it is argued that the Proto-Tibeto- Burman system of grammatical relations1 was closer to the typical 'role-dominated' (Van Valin & Foley 1980) Burmese-Yipho system (epitomized by Lahu—see Matisoff 1973). That is, a system where there is no definable 'subject' or 'direct object'; a system where semantic and pragmatic principles govern the organization of discourse, not syntactic functions. In this paper we look at the nature of 'objects' in Tibeto-Burman languages, and here also find support for this view of Proto-Tibeto-Burman grammatical relations. From a survey of ninety-five reliable grammars or descriptions of languages in the Tibeto-Burman family, I found eleven languages with no nominal object marking, twenty languages with nominal morphology consistently marking the patient as object, regardless of clause type, and sixty-four languages with a type of marking where the patient in monotransitve clauses is often or always marked with the same postposition as the goal or beneficiary (dative) in ditransitve clauses. This type of marking is discussed in Dryer 1986 as Primary Object marking. I argue that this type of marking in the Tibeto-Burman languages reflects the semantically based nature of grammatical relations in Proto-Tibeto-Burman.
This paper presents the analyses of transitivity and questions about transitivity in two languages (Rawang and Qiang) that have been described using very different definitions of transitivity, with a view to showing that each language must be analysed on its own terms, and so the criteria used for identifying transitivity, if it is to be identified at all, might be different between languages. In the case of these two languages it is at least partly due to the two languages differing in terms of the degree of systematicity of the marking, with the Rawang marking being more systematic.
Human communication takes place when one person does something that when seen or heard by another person is taken to be done with the intention to communicate, and the other person, having seen the communicator show his or her intention to communicate, then uses inference to determine what the communicator intends to communicate. This is possible because the addressee assumes that the communicator is a rational person, that is, acts with goals in mind (see Grice 1975), and so must be doing the act for a reason, and it is worth the addressee’s effort to try to determine what that reason is, that is, determine the relevance of the act.
The bulk of this dissertation is an analysis of grammatical relations (including syntactic, pragmatic, and semantic relations) in Modern Mandarin Chinese. In Chapter I the background, functional framework, and concepts used in the dissertation are introduced. In Chapter II it is shown that Chinese has not grammaticalized the syntactic functions 'subject' and 'object', and has no syntactic function-changing passive construction. In Chapter III the nature of word order and its relationship to information structure in Chinese is examined. It is argued that word order in Chinese does not mark 'definite' and 'indefinite' NPs, as is commonly assumed, but marks information structure. A number of marked focus structure constructions are also discussed. In Chapter IV the discussion is of the structure of Chinese discourse, developed from an analysis of the nature of discourse referent tracking. It is shown that recovery of anaphora is not based on syntactic functions, but is based on real world knowledge (semantics and pragmatics) and discourse structure. Chapter V gives the conclusions, followed by a discussion of some of the diachronic considerations that arose in the course of this investigation. It is suggested that within Sino-Tibetan, Chinese should be seen as an innovator in terms of word order, and that grammatical relations in Proto-Sino-Tibetan should be seen to be pragmatically based rather than syntactically based.
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 argues that long-standing problems in the analysis of Chinese, such as the question of word classes and grammatical relations, can be resolved, or actually done away with completely, if we take a constructionist approach in the analysis. This means the constructions are taken as basic, so we only need to look at the propositional functions of elements in the construction (referential, modifying, or predicative), and do not need to posit global categories such as word classes and grammatical relations.
This paper is the second in a series arguing for a discourse·based analysis of grammatical relations in Chinese in which there is a direct mapping between semantic role and grammatical function, and there are no relation-changing lexical rules such as passivization that can change that mapping. The correct assignment of semantic roles to the constituents of a discourse is done by the listener purely on the basis of the discourse structure and pragmatics (real world knowledge). Though grammatical analyses of certain constructions can be done on the sentence level, the sentence is generally not the central unit for understanding anaphora and grammatical relations in Chinese. Two related arguments are presented here: the question of 'subject' and the structure of discourse developed from an analysis of the nature of discourse referent tracking.
In chapters seven and eight of his book Language, Sapir talked about what he called ‘drift’, the changes that a language undergoes through time [...]. Dialects of a language are formed when that language is broken into different segments that no longer move along the same exact drift. Even so, the general drift of a language has its deep and its shallow currents; those features that distinguish closely related dialects will be of the rapid, shallow currents, while the deeper, slower currents may remain consistent between the dialects for millennia. It is this latter type that Sapir felt is ‘fundamental to the genius of the language’ (p. 172), and he said that ‘The momentum of the more fundamental, the pre-dialectal, drift is often such that languages long disconnected will pass through the same or strikingly similar phases’ (p. 172).
This paper points out certain flaws in the semantics for lexical rule specifications developed in Meurers (2001). Under certain circumstances, certain words may not be licit inputs to a rule according to this semantics while one would expect them to be from inspecting the specification of the rule. The reasons for this are shown to be that whether properties of paths should be transferred from the input of a rule to its output is decided considering only the respective paths and their properties in isolation, ignoring the ‘non-local’ effects that transferring their properties can have. Furthermore, the semantics is insensitive to the possible shapes of inputs to the rule, which also makes it possible that inputs of certain shapes are unexpectedly not accepted. An alternative semantics is developed that does not suffer from these deficits.
Traditionally, parsers are evaluated against gold standard test data. This can cause problems if there is a mismatch between the data structures and representations used by the parser and the gold standard. A particular case in point is German, for which two treebanks (TiGer and TüBa-D/Z) are available with highly different annotation schemes for the acquisition of (e.g.) PCFG parsers. The differences between the TiGer and TüBa-D/Z annotation schemes make fair and unbiased parser evaluation difficult [7, 9, 12]. The resource (TEPACOC) presented in this paper takes a different approach to parser evaluation: instead of providing evaluation data in a single annotation scheme, TEPACOC uses comparable sentences and their annotations for 5 selected key grammatical phenomena (with 20 sentences each per phenomena) from both TiGer and TüBa-D/Z resources. This provides a 2 times 100 sentence comparable testsuite which allows us to evaluate TiGer-trained parsers against the TiGer part of TEPACOC, and TüBa-D/Z-trained parsers against the TüBa-D/Z part of TEPACOC for key phenomena, instead of comparing them against a single (and potentially biased) gold standard. To overcome the problem of inconsistency in human evaluation and to bridge the gap between the two different annotation schemes, we provide an extensive error classification, which enables us to compare parser output across the two different treebanks. In the remaining part of the paper we present the testsuite and describe the grammatical phenomena covered in the data. We discuss the different annotation strategies used in the two treebanks to encode these phenomena and present our error classification of potential parser errors.
Es ist aus mindestens zwei Gründen interessant, sich mit Phänomenen der Fokussierung und Topikalisierung zu beschäftigen: zum einen um der Fokussierung und Topikalisierung selbst willen, zum anderen aber auch, um aus den Beobachtungen hierzu Erkenntnisse für andere Bereiche der Grammatik zu gewinnen. In diesem Aufsatz geht es mir vor allem um dieses zweite Ziel.
Mein Beitrag stützt sich auf die in Münster, in Nitra und in Bochum gehaltenen Vorträge zum Problem der Satzklammerverletzung am Beispiel der Subjunktoren weil und obwohl. Die Analyse der Mannheimer Korpora wies eine niedrige Anzahl von weil- und obwohl-Sätzen mit Erststellung auf, was mich dazu veranlasste, die weil- und obwohl-Erststellung als Tendenzerscheinung zu bezweifeln. Ich habe beschlossen, meine Untersuchung zu erweitern und auch die anderen kausalen Subjunktoren da, damit, wobei zu berücksichtigen. Dadurch wird fast der ganze Kausalbereich abgedeckt, was es ermöglicht, meine Thesen zu verifizieren bzw. zu präzisieren.
Indo-Uralic and Altaic
(2006)
Elsewhere I have argued that the Indo-European verbal system can be understood in terms of its Indo-Uralic origins because the reconstructed Indo-European endings can be derived from combinations of Indo-Uralic morphemes by a series of well-motivated phonetic and analogic developments (2002). Moreover, I have claimed (2004b) that the Proto-Uralic consonant gradation accounts for the peculiar correlations between Indo-European root structure and accentuation discovered by Lubotsky (1988).
1. There are two classes of theories of Universal Grammar: (1) Formalist theories, such as the widespread varieties of generative grammar. These theories start from the assumption that certain strings of linguistic forms are grammatical while other strings are ungrammatical. A grammar of this type produces grammatical strings and does not produce ungrammatical ones. All theories of this class fail in the same respect: they do not account for the meaning of the strings. (2) Semiotactic theories, which describe the meaning of a string in terms of the meanings of its constituent forms and their interrelations. The only elaborate formalized theory of this class presently available is the one advanced by C.L. Ebeling (Syntax and Semantics, Leiden: Brill, 1978). I shall discuss some of its mathematical properties here.
Indo-European is a branch of Indo-Uralic which was radically transformed under the influence of a North Caucasian substratum when its speakers moved from the area north of the Caspian Sea to the area north of the Black Sea (cf. Kortlandt 2007b). As a result, Indo-European developed a minimal vowel system combined with a very large consonant inventory including glottalized stops, also grammatical gender and adjectival agreement, an ergative construction which was lost again but has left its traces in the grammatical system, especially in the nominal inflection, a construction with a dative subject which was partly preserved in the historical languages and is reflected in the verbal morphology and syntax, where it gave rise to new categories, and a heterogeneous lexicon. The Indo-Uralic elements of Indo-European include pronouns, case endings, verbal endings, participles and derivational suffixes. In the following I shall give an overview of the grammar of Proto-Indo-European as it may have been spoken around 4000 BC in the eastern Ukraine, shortly after the ancestors of the Anatolians left for the Balkans (for more recent developments I refer to Beekes 1995).
In an earlier study (1983) I argued that unlike aorists and athematic presents, Indo-European perfects and thematic presents originally had a dative subject, as in German mir träumt ‘me dreams’ for ich träume ‘I dream’, e.g. Greek oida ‘I know’ < ‘it is known to me’, édomai ‘I will eat’ < ‘it is eatable to me’. On the basis of Oettinger’s epoch-making book (1979), I proposed that the Hittite hi-flexion originated from a merger of the perfect, where *-i was added to 3rd sg. *-e in order to supply a new present, with the thematic flexion of causatives and iteratives, where the final *-e of 3rd sg. *-eie was dropped before the loss of intervocalic *-i- (1983: 315).
Objavljene gramatike hrvatskoga kajkavskog književnog jezika pokušaj su, prije svega, olakšavanja učenja toga jezika strancima s njemačkoga govornog područja. Iako imaju opisni karakter, one su i ogledalo stupnja normiranosti hrvatskoga kajkavskog književnog jezika. U ovom radu donosi se opis i sistematizacija tvorbe komparativa u kajkavskim gramatikama.
Im Frühaltrussischen koexistierten die drei miteinander konkurrierenden aspektuellen Oppositionen, namlich die alten indoeuropäischen Aspekte (der imperfektive, der perfektive und der perfektische), die alte slavische Opposition Nicht-Iterativität/lterativität und die neuen slavischen Aspekte (=Opposition Imperfektivität/Perfektivitat). Im Laufe der Sprachentwicklung wurden die ersten zwei Oppositionen durch die dritte Opposition verdrängt. Der Verlauf und die Mechanismen dieser Entwicklung werden dargestellt und auf der Grundlage des Konzepts des natürlichen grammatischen Wandels erklärt. Es werden Markiertheitsprinzipien betrachtet, die den natürlichen grammatischen Wandel determinieren. Diese Prinzipien werden als generelle Faktoren typologischen Wandels angesehen, mit deren Hilfe die grammatischen Veränderungen im Sprachsystem erklärt werden können. Die Ausprägung der neuen slavischen Aspekte und die immer starker werdende Einbeziehung der Aspekte in das gesamte Verbalsystem haben entscheidend zur Herausbildung des neuen reduzierten aspektsensitiven Tempussystems beigetragen.
Der Umbau des Tempussystems und andere Veränderungen im russischen Verbalsystem wurden durch die Ausprägung der neuen slavischen Aspekte ausgelöst. Die Ausformung und die immer stärker werdende Einbeziehung der Aspekte in das gesamte Verbalsystem hat tiefgreifende Veränderungen der systemdefinierenden Struktureigenschaften des russischen Verbs hervorgerufen. Die Aspekte sind im Laufe der Sprachentwicklung zur eigentlichen Grundlage des gesamten russischen Verbalsystems geworden. Die Entwicklung der Tempora verläuft im präteritalen und im nichtpräteritalen Bereich gewissermaßen in entgegengesetzten Richtungen. Das Subsystem der Vergangenheitstempora wurde im Altrussischen maximal reduziert, während der Funktionsbereich der Nicht-Vergangenheit in Präsens und Futur aufgelöst wurde. Die beiden Entwicklungsrichtungen stehen in direktem Zusammenhang mit der Ausprägung der Aspekte. Ich betrachte deshalb die Entwicklung der Tempora und die Entwicklung der Aspekte parallel.
In this paper topic and focus effects at both left and right periphery are argued to be epiphenomena of general properties of tree growth. We incorporate Korean into this account as a prototypical verb-final language, and show how long- and short-distance scrambling form part of this general picture. Multiple long-distance scrambling effects emerge as a consequence of the feeding relationship between different forms of structural under-specification. We also show how the array of effects at the right periphery, in both verb-final and other language-types, can also be explained with the same concepts of tree growth. In particular the Right Roof Constraint, a well-known but little understood constraint, is an immediate consequence of compositionality constraints as articulated in this system.
We argue that Malagasy (and related W. Austronesian languages!) has a positive setting for a macro-parameter RICH VOICE MORPHOLOGY which builds complex predicates that code the theta role of their argument: S = [[PreN(6) + (X)] + DP]. Manifestations of this parameter are: (1) Case and theta role are assigned in situ in nuclear clauses with no movement or co-indexing to a topic position. (2) Relative Clauses (and other "extraction" structures) satisfy the "Subjects Only" constraint, again with no movement or indexing. (3) UTAH is freely violated, as theta role assignment derives from compositional semantic interpretation. Predicates resemble lexical Ns in assigning case directly to arguments without using Prepositions and in combining directly with Dets to form DPs that include tense and negation (Keenan 1995, 2000). The major Predicate-Argument type is modeled on the Noun+Possessor one, not the Verb+Object one.
It has been claimed and widely assumed that caseless direct objects in Turkish exhibit a sort of syntactic incorporation, and only their cased counterparts are true syntactic arguments (Kornfilt 1997; Knecht 1986; Nilsson 1986; Öztürk 2005 among others). Cased and caseless objects are thus widely taken as derivationally related, crystallized in Kelepir's (2001) proposal that objects pick up overt accusative as they move out of the VP. In this paper, I would like to revisit both the empirical evidence and the interpretation leading to these claims and propose revisions.
I first show that not all caseless objects are the same. Mostly drawing on Aydemir (2004), I argue that bare caseless objects and those with indefinite expressions have differences that would be very unusual if they were both incorporated. However, adopting Öztürk (2005) and against Aydemir (2004), neither of the cases can be analyzed as head incorporation.
I then turn to the cased vs. caseless distinction and argue that cased and caseless objects are not that different after all. Based on data with strictly controlled information structure, I arrive at a different generalization than most of the earlier reports and claim that caseless objects are morphosyntactically as moveable as their cased counterparts.
Hence, I propose to replace the notion of incorporation in the literature of Turkish syntax with the notion of weak case (de Hoop 1992) and conclude by a discussion of the domain of syntactic analysis in this primarily semantic phenomenon.
Starting from the basic observation that, across languages, the anticausative variant of an alternating verb systematically involves morphological marking that is shared by passive verbs, the goal of this paper is to provide a uniform and formal account of these arguably two different construction types. The central claim that I put forward is that passives and anticausatives differ only with respect to the event-type features of the verb but both arise through the same operation, namely suppression by special morphology of a feature in v that encodes the ontological event type of the verb. Crucially, I argue for two syntactic primitives, namely act and cause, whereto I trace the passive/anticausative distinction. Passive constructions across languages are made compatible by relegating the differences to simple combinatorial properties of verb and prepositional types and their interactions with other event functors, which are in turn encoded differently morphologically across languages. New arguments are brought forward for a causative analysis of anticausatives. Agentive adverbials are examined, and doubt is cast on the usefulness of by-phrases as a diagnostic for argumenthood.
The work presented here addresses the question of how to determine whether a grammar formalism is powerful enough to describe natural languages. The expressive power of a formalism can be characterized in terms of i) the string languages it generates (weak generative capacity (WGC)) or ii) the tree languages it generates (strong generative capacity (SGC)). The notion of WGC is not enough to determine whether a formalism is adequate for natural languages. We argue that even SGC is problematic since the sets of trees a grammar formalism for natural languages should be able to generate is difficult to determine. The concrete syntactic structures assumed for natural languages depend very much on theoretical stipulations and empirical evidence for syntactic structures is rather hard to obtain. Therefore, for lexicalized formalisms, we propose to consider the ability to generate certain strings together with specific predicate argument dependencies as a criterion for adequacy for natural languages.
This paper examines substantive noun phrases in Niuean, a Polynesian language of the Tongic subgroup with VSO word order, isolating morphology, and an ergative case system. We describe the allowable orderings of elements in the Niuean noun phrase, which include certain variations in the placement of numerals and the genitive possessor, then we provide a phrasal movement analysis for these variations, treating first the possessor variation, then the numeral variation. Parallels will be drawn between the derivation of nominal and sentential word order.
Hier soll […] ein Versuch unternommen werden, sich sekundären grammatischen Relationen mit Rückgriff auf Sprachdaten aus nur einer Sprache, dem Standard-Swahili, anzunähern. Es soll untersucht werden, welche Beziehungen zwischen dem Objekt im Swahili und seinen jeweiligen semantischen Rollen bestehen. Eine solche Fragestellung lohnt sich in dieser Sprache auf Grund der Tatsache, daß hier bei dreiwertigen Verben nicht der Patiens das Objekt sein kann, sondern allein der Rezipien. Dieser Tatbestand erfordert ein gründliches Nachdenken über Begriffe wie direktes und indirektes Objekt sowie über Konzepte und Kategorien der Verbalsemantik. Hierzu werden in dieser Untersuchung Modelle berücksichtigt, die in jüngerer Zeit durch Dik (1989) und Palmer (1994) zur Diskussion gestellt wurden. Sie ermöglichen eine saubere Trennung der verschiedenen Beschreibungsebenen wie Lexikon, Pragmatik und Syntax, ohne diese als autonome Gebilde zu betrachten. Ein solcher Ansatz führt zu einer zunächst verwirrenden und umfangreichen Terminologie, die im ersten Abschnitt ausfuhrlieh vorgestellt wird. Ebenfalls im ersten Abschnitt wird die empirische Grundlage der Untersuchung offengelegt und einer Kritik unterzogen. Im zweiten Abschnitt wird ein kurzer Abriß über das Swahili, seine Sprachsituation sowie über wesentliche Merkmale der Phonologie, Morphologie und Syntax gegeben. Diese Informationen sollen u.a. dazu beitragen, die im weiteren Verlauf gegebenen Sprachbeispiele zu verstehen und die Glossierungen zu entlasten. Der dritte Abschnitt geht der Frage nach, ob es im Rahmen der in l.l aufgezeigten Begrifflichkeit überhaupt sinnvoll ist, im Swahili nach Objekten zu suchen. Es werden sprachspezifische Kriterien aufgezeigt und einer Gewichtung unterzogen, anhand derer sich Objekte in Sprachdaten identifizieren lassen. Im darauffolgenden Abschnitt werden die in den Daten aus Literatur und Korpus identifizierten Objekte analysiert. Es wird eine Aufstellung gegeben, welche semantischen Rollen die Funktion des Objekts einnehmen können. Zudem wird eine Reihe von Fällen aufgezeigt, in denen es schwierig ist, die semantische Rolle des Objekts eindeutig zu bestimmen. Die vorgefundenen Ergebnisse werden mit universalistischen Aussagen verschiedener linguistischer Theorien und Modelle konfrontiert und auf diese Weise problematisiert. Im fünften Abschnitt werden einige Möglichkeiten vorgestellt, wie sich die im Swahili vorgefundenen Phänomene in verschiedene linguistische Modelle integrieren lassen. Es wird sich zeigen, daß eine solche Integration entweder um den Preis einer fragwürdigen Methodologie erkauft werden muß oder aber substantielle Änderungen in der linguistischen Theorie erfordert. Auf der Grundlage einer solchen Umstrukturierung, die sich auf die Ebene des verbalen Lexikons mit seinen semantischen Rollen erstreckt, wird dann im sechsten Abschnitt ein alternativer Vorschlag zum Verständnis der Phänomene unterbreitet. Dieser ermöglicht es, die Objektzuweisung sowie eine Reihe damit scheinbar nur wenig verwandter Problemfälle der verbalen Semantik (6.2.5 und 6.2.6) als konsistente Ausprägungen des sprachlichen Systems des Swahili zu betrachten. Die Untersuchung schließt mit einem Ausblick auf Möglichkeiten zur Erweiterung des Umfangs relationaler Typologie auf das Verhältnis von sekundären zu tertiären grammatischen Relationen. Zudem werden weitere Sprachen genannt, die sich hinsichtlich dieser Relationen ähnlich verhalten wie das Swahili.
This study outlines the formation of the category of "modal verb" within the grammaticography of German from the beginnings in the 16th century up to its "canonization" in the first half of the 20th century, also showing certain parallels to the treatment of modal verbs in the grammaticography of Portuguese. It also describes the influence German grammaticography had on the formation of this category in the grammaticography of Portuguese.
This paper compares secondary predication constructions (including small clause complements, resultatives, and/or depictives) in English and Korean and argues that these two typologically different languages employ different modes of satisfying the Case Filter (Chomsky 1981) with regard to the Case of the subjects of secondary predication constructions. More specifically, we argue that the subject of the secondary predicate in English is Accusative Case-marked by the higher governing verb, while that in Korean is Nominative Case-marked by default. Evidence for default Nominative Case will be provided from Korean and other languages.
[W]hy are not all Malagasy adverbs postverbal with reverse Cinque order? The predicate raising mechanism […] operates around heads, and this leads Rackowski & Travis (2000: 122) to suggest that preverbal adverbs are not heads, but are phrasal, and are located in the Specifier positions themselves. The crucial consequence of this is that the specifier position is blocked, thus effectively preventing further predicate raising. Given that the entire analysis crucially rests on the assumption that certain elements are heads and others are phrases, it would be an advantage if some independent evidence for the X I XP status of the elements could be unearthed. Unfortunately, such evidence is hard to come by in Malagasy. However, other Austronesian languages with similar word order patterns do display rather robust evidence for the head status of certain elements. One such language in the Formosan language Seediq.
This paper desribes four areas in which grammar engineers and theoretical linguists can interact. These include: using grammar engineering to confirm linguistic hypotheses; linguistic issues highlighted by grammar engineering; implementation capabilities guiding theoretical analyses; and insights into architecture issues. It is my hope that we will see more work in these areas in the future and more collaboration among grammar engineers and theoretical linguists. This is an area in which HPSG and LFG as a distinct advantage, given the strong communities and resources available.
How the left-periphery of a wh-relative clause determines its syntactic and semantic relationships
(2004)
This paper discusses a certain class of German relative clauses which are characterized by a wh-expression overtly realized at the left periphery of the clause. While investigating empirical and theoretical issues regarding this class of relatives, it argues that a wh-relative clause relates syntactically to a functionally complete sentential projection and semantically to entities of various kinds that are abstracted from the matrix clause. What is shown is that this grammatical behaviour clearly can be attributed to the properties of the elements positioned at the left of a wh-relative clause. Finally, a lexically-based analysis couched in the framework of HPSG is given that accounts for the data presented.
The aim of this paper is to give a unified account of the way that German demonstrative pronouns (henceforth: D-pronouns) like der, die and das behave (a) in sentences where they receive a coreferential interpretation, and (b) in sentences where they receive a covarying interpretation because they are in some way dependent on a quantificational expression – either via direct binding or indirectly, because the value they receive varies with the value that is assigned to the variable bound by an indefinite determiner.
Adjectival secondary predicates can enter into two Case frames in Russian, the agreeing form and the Instrumental. The paper argues that these Case frames go together with two syntactic positions in the clause which are correlated with two different interpretations, the true depictive and the temporally restricted reading, respectively. The availability of the two readings depends on the houndedness of the secondary predicate. Only bounded predicates can enter into both Case frames and only partially non-bounded predicates can appear in the Instrumental. The paper therefore argues that the pertinent two-way SL/IL-contrast is to he replaced by a three-way distinction in terms of boundedness. The paper outlines the syntax and semantics of the true depictive and the temporally restricted interpretation and discusses how adjectival secondary predicates whose salient properties involve a cotemporary interpretation with the matrix predicate and a control relation of an individual argument, differ from temporal adjuncts as well as from non-finite clauses.
This paper is concerned with developing Joan Bybee's proposals regarding the nature of grammatical meaning and synthesizing them with Paul Hopper's concept of grammar as emergent. The basic question is this: How much of grammar may be modeled in terms of grammaticalization? In contradistinction to Heine, Claudi & Hünnemeyer (1991), who propose a fairly broad and unconstrained framework for grammaticalization, we try to present a fairly specific and constrained theory of grammaticalization in order to get a more precise idea of the potential and the problems of this approach. Thus, while Heine et al. (1991:25) expand – without discussion – the traditional notion of grammaticalization to the clause level, and even include non-segmental structure (such as word order), we will here adhere to a strictly 'element-bound' view of grammaticalization: where no grammaticalized element exists, there is no grammaticalization. Despite this fairly restricted concept of grammaticalization, we will attempt to corroborate the claim that essential aspects of grammar may be understood and modeled in terms of grammaticalization. The approach is essentially theoretical (practical applications will, hopefully, follow soon) and many issues are just mentioned and not discussed in detail. The paper presupposes a familiarity with the basic facts of grammaticalization and it does not present any new facts.
The interface of lexical semantics and conceptual structure deverbal and denominal nominalizations
(2002)
Nominalizations can refer to events, instances of events or participants in an event. The particular reference is determined by the lexical semantics of the base and the suffix, and by the conceptual structure of the base. The comparison between deverbal and denominal nominalization in -ata in Italian reveals that the conceptual structure plays a crucial role in determining the reference of a nominalization. Italian nominalizations of -ata are productively derived from verbal and nominal bases. Derivations from verbal bases refer to a single event denoted by the base. Derivations from a nominal base N denote events or results corresponding to a limited number of pattems, such as a hit by N, a characteristic action of N, a period of N, a quantity that is contained in N, etc. The paper argues that the function of the suffix operates on the lexical meaning of the base, but the con~positiono f the lexical meaning of the base with the lexical meaning of the suffix is restricted by the conceptual properties of the base.
Eine Reihe von nicht in Kodifikationen des Standards aufgenommenen sprachlichen Mustern wird im Blick auf ihre Karrieren in verschiedenen mündlichen und schriftlichen Texten in einer Flut von Veröffentlichungen thematisiert, meist in der Hoffnung hier grammatische Entwicklungen und die Basis für eine Orientierung der Grammatikschreibung an der Pragmatik zu entdecken. Im Folgenden soll Sprache nicht „konzeptuell schriftlich“ gedacht und „sozusagen literal idealisiert“ werden. Es soll argumentiert werden für eine einheitliche, mit Sprachgeschichte, ontogenetischem Spracherwerb und Variantenbildung verträgliche Erklärung nicht-standardisierter sprachlicher Muster im Rahmen einer Grammatikalisierungstheorie.
It is well known that English children between the age of 4 and 6 display a so-called Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) in that they allow pronouns to refer to a local c-commanding antecedent. Their guessing pattern with pronouns contrasts with their adult-like interpretation of reflexives. The DPBE has been explained as resulting from a lack of pragmatic knowledge or insufficient cognitive resources. However, such extra-grammatical accounts cannot explain why the DPBE only shows up in particular languages and in particular syntactic environments. Moreover, such accounts fail to explain why the DPBE only emerges in comprehension and not in production. This paper hypothesizes that the presence or absence of the DPBE can be explained from the properties of the grammar. Fischer's (2004) optimality-theoretic analysis of binding, explaining cross-linguistic variation, and Hendriks and Spenader's (2005/6) optimality-theoretic account of the acquisition of pronouns and reflexives are combined into a single model. This model yields testable predictions with respect to the presence or absence of the DPBE in particular languages, in particular syntactic environments, and in comprehension and/or production.
This paper will examine the role of various factors in affecting the salience, and hence the accessibility to pronominal reference, of entities introduced into a discourse by a full clause. We begin with the premise that the possibility of pronominal reference with it versus that depends on the cognitive status of the referent, in the sense of Gundel, Hedberg and Zacharski (1993). This formulation of the problem provides grounds for an explanation of the data presented above, and provides a framework within which we examine the role of various other factors in promoting the salience of a clausally introduced entity, including the information structure of the utterance in which the entity is introduced. For entities introduced by clausal complements to bridge verbs, we show that the information structure of the utterance introducing the entity has a partial, or one-sided, effect on the salience of the entity. When the complement clause is focal, the salience of the entity depends only on its referential givenness-newness (in the sense of Gundel 1988, 1999b), as we would expect. But when the complement clause is ground material, the salience of an entity introduced by the clause is enhanced. Other factors, including the presuppositionality of factive and interrogative complements, also serve to enhance the salience of entities introduced by complement clauses.
This paper is concerned with anticausative verbs (or verb-forms), or shortly, anticausatives. [...] [C]ausative/non-causative pairs with a marked non-causative are quite frequent in the languages of the world. However, so far they have not received sufficient attention in general and typological linguistics, a fact which is also manifested in the absence of a generally recognized term for this phenomenon […]. This paper therefore deals with the most important properties of anticausatives (particularly semantic conditions on them), their relationship to other areas of grammar as well as their historical development in different languages. The grammatical domain of transitivity, valence and voice, where the anticausative belongs, takes up a central position in grammar and consequently the present discussion should be of considerable interest to general comparative (or typological) linguists.
It is the aim of this paper to present and elaborate a new solution to the old syntactic problems connected with the Latin gerundive and gerund, two verbal categories which have been interpreted variously either as adjective (or participle) or noun (or infinitive). These questions have been much discussed for quite a number of years […] but for the most part from a philological or purely diachronic point of view. All these linguists try to explain the peculiarities of these categories and their syntax by showing that the gerund is historically prior to the gerundive. [...] It is our thesis […] that in order to arrive at a unified account of gerundive and gerund we do not have to go back to prehistoric times. Even for the classical language gerund and gerundive represent the same category, in the sense that the gerund can be shown to be a special case of the gerundive. Additional evidence from a parallel construction in Hindi is adduced to make the Latin facts more plausible. It is only in the post-classical language that certain tendencies which had shown up already in Old Latin poetry become stronger and finally lead to a reanalysis of the gerundive and a split into two distinct syntactic constructions. The propositional meaning of the gerundive in its attributive use is explained with reference to a conflict between syntactic and cognitive principles. Special constructions which are the effects of such conflicts can be found in other parts of grammar. Languages differ with respect to the degree of syntacticization (or conventionalization) of these special constructions.
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.
Introduction
(2014)
Bantu languages have been at the heart of the research on the interaction between syntax, prosody and information structure. In these predominantly SVO languages, considerable attention has been devoted to postverbal phenomena. By addressing issues related to Subjects, Topics and Object-Verb word orders, the goal of the present papers is to deepen our understanding of the interaction of different grammatical components (syntax, phonology, semantics/pragmatics) both in individual languages and across the Bantu family. Each paper makes a valuable contribution to ongoing discussions on the preverbal domain.
The present study examines a particular kind of rule blockage – referred to below as an 'antistructure-preservation effect'. An anti-structure-preservation effect occurs if some language has a process which is preempted from going into effect if some sequence of sounds [XY] would occur on the surface, even though other words in the language have [XY] sequences (which are underlyingly /XY/). It will be argued below that anti-structure-preservation effects can be captured in Optimality Theory in terms of a general ranking involving FAITH and MARKEDNESS constraints and that individual languages invoke a specific instantiation of this ranking. A significant point made below is that while anti-structure-preservation effects can be handled straightforwardly in terms of constraint rankings they typically require ad hoc rule-specific conditions in rule-based approaches.
On the syntax and pragmatics interface : Left-peripheral, medial and right-peripheral focus in greek
(2004)
The present paper explores the extent to which narrow syntax is responsible for the computation of discourse functions such as focus/topic. More specifically, it challenges the claim that language approximates ‘perfection’ with respect to economy, conceptual necessity and optimality in design by reconsidering the roles and interactions of the different modules of the grammar, in particular of syntax and phonology and the mapping between the two, in the representation of pragmatic notions. Empirical and theoretical considerations strongly indicate that narrow syntax is ‘blind’ to properties and operations involving the interpretive components — that is, PF and LF. As a result, syntax-phonology interface rules do not ‘see’ everything in the levels they connect. In essence, the architecture of grammar proposed here from the perspective of focus marking necessitates the autonomy of the different levels of grammar, presupposing that NS is minimally structured only when liberated from any non-syntactic/discourse implementations, i.e., movement operations to satisfy both interface needs. As a result, the model articulated here totally dispenses with discourse projections, i.e. FocusP.
Starting from a consideration of the internal make-up of adverbial clauses this paper shows that the widespread assumption that fronted arguments in English and CLLD constituents in Romance occupy the same position leads to a number of problems. I will conclude that the position occupied by English topicalized arguments differs from that of the CLLD topics in Romance. In particular, English topics occupy a higher position in the left periphery. The final part of the paper compares three proposals for the lower topic position in Romance.
This paper discusses a variant of German V2 declaratives sharing properties with both subordinate relative clauses and main clauses. I argue that modal subordination failure helps decide between two rivaling accounts for this construction. Thus, a hypotactic analysis involving syntactic variable sharing must be preferred over parataxis plus anaphora resolution. The scopal behavior of the construction will be derived from its 'proto-assertional force,' which it shares with similar 'embedded root' constructions.
This paper proposes a new strategy for accounting for the narrow scope readings of quantificational contrastive topics in Hungarian, which is based on a consideration of the types of questions that declaratives with such contrastive topics can be uttered as partial or complete congruent answers to. The meaning of the declaratives with contrastive topics will be represented with the help of the structured meaning approach to matching questions proposed in Krifka 2002.
Locative inversion in Cuwabo
(2014)
This paper proposes a detailed description of locative inversion (LI) constructions in Cuwabo, in terms of morphosyntactic properties and thematic restrictions. Of particular interest are the use of disjoint verb forms in LI, and the co-existence of formal and semantic LI, which challenges the widespread belief that the two constructions cannot be found in the same language.