Dieter Wunderlich

Centre for General Linguistics, Berlin, Germany

Polarity, a type of syncretism, is decomposed into diagonal syncretism (one feature marked, the other feature unmarked, i.e. +F,-G and -F,+G expressed by the same form) and full reversal (two features either both marked or both unmarked). Diagontal syncretism is found in various inflectional systems and can be regarded as a phenomenon of second ord...

The article considers four scenarios along the way human language developed, the neolithic transition from nomadic to agricultural societies, the upper paleolithic revolution when a sudden proliferation of art, tools and complex social organization took place, the emergence of homo sapiens possibly supported by the rise of the vocalization ability,...

The article gives a brief summary of work dealing with morphosyntactic phenomena in Optimality Theory and also addresses more general problems. It highlights questions of optimal ordering, optimal case, and optimal agreement, including phenomena such as morphological gaps, repairs, and case split. It finally addresses the concepts of stochastic OT...

This paper deliberates for a number of linguistic features whether they are part of UG, i.e., specific to human language , or whether they are adapted from other cognitive capacities which were evolutionarily prior to language. Among others, it is argued that the distinction between predication and reference already belongs to the conceptual system...

This paper relates to two articles by Arnim von Stechow, whom I have always admired for his semantic expertise but with whom at the same time I have always quarrelled in questions on the overall architecture of grammar. I first present an argument showing that morphology restricts adverbial scope differently from syntax. I will then provide a coupl...

On the necessity of doing linguistics What kind of discipline is linguistics? Linguistics is a basic anthropological discipline: Linguists investigate the linguistic categories and the structures formed on the basis of these categories, their information values and the interpretation of com-plex structures, in psychological, neurological, sociologi...

The language capacity is fundamental to human nature, and the comparative study of its many manifestations - quite a few of them now rapidly disappearing - can tell us something about who we are. Such a study should try to encompass the full range of structural variation across languages. Why, for example, do we have a split between two devices to...

This is the second of a two-volume selection of refereed and revised papers, originally presented at the special workshop of the international conference From NP to DP at the University of Antwerp. Reflecting the stage of current research with respect to the expression of possession in the noun phrase, it focusses on issues such as alienable and in...

In order to describe the possible and impossible pronominal prefix combinations in the Yimas verb, a set of partially ordered constraints is proposed within the correspondence format of Optimality Theory (OT). These constraints simultaneously explain the split in the inventory, the order of prefixes, why gaps appear in some category combinations, a...

In the preceding paper, Evans, Brown and Corbett (henceforth: EBC) presented the complex system of pronominal prefixation in Dalabon. They proposed an analysis that describes this system by a number of statements associated with the nodes of a Network Morphology. Some of these statements have the formal nature of referrals (Zwicky 1985, Stump 1993)...

This paper was initiated by Paul Kiparsky in 1992. I am grateful to Ingrid Kaufmann, Gereon Mller, Albert Ortmann, Barbara Stiebels, an anonymous reviewer and the editors of this volume for their comments, as well as to Kristjn rnason, Jhannes Jnsson, and Sigga Sigurjnsdttir for their judgements. In particular, I would like to thank Jhanna Bar#dal...

1 This study about case patterns is concerned with two related Germanic languages, which excessively use lexical case marking on verbs, Icelandic more than German. The paper shows that all existing case patterns of German, occurring either in the active or in the passive, can be derived from three sources: (i) the underlying argument ranking encode...

We consider two variants of morphological case: structural case (such as accusative, ergative, or dative), which is encoded by abstract case features reflecting the semantic ranking of arguments, and semantic case (such as instrumental or directional), which encodes an additional semantic relation to be licensed by the meaning of the verb. Individu...

this paper, I will mainly consider two constructions: resultative extensions and possessor extensions.

German noun plurals not ending in -s are not as irregular as Clahsen suggests. Feminine nouns get the -n plural, unless they umlaut and are subject to a constraint that requires a reduced final syllable in the plural. Another regular class is masculine nouns ending in schwa, which are weakly inflected. It is suggested that more differentiated psych...

This paper analyzes the argument structure of Yucatec Mayan. In line with traditional assumptions but in contrast to more recent proposals, we show that Yucatec has ergative morphology but not a split-ergative system. For intransitive verbs there is a strict correlation between aspect and the type of linker: they take ergative clitics in the imperf...

In this paper we present a unified account of irregular noun stems ("second stems") in Hungarian; these stems are selected just in those cases where the noun combines with suffixes that have an initial "non-moraic" vowel (type III suffixes), regardless of the derivational or inflectional status of the suffix. The observed stem suffix combinations t...

Quechua, which is spoken from the southern parts of Colombia to the northern parts of Chile and Argentina, exhibits a rich verbal morphology. The various dialects of Quechua can be ranked in terms of developmental stages, according to the way in which the inflectional system is organized. Some Peruvian dialects (such as those of Ancash and Ayacucho...

In this paper we investigate resultative constructions in Italian, German, Dutch, and English, and also compare them with those in Japanese and Chinese. We pursue a lexical approach in which the Semantic Form of individual verbs (and, hence, their subcategorization frame) can be extended by an additional result predicate, provided that the verb lic...

This paper proposes a unified account of the semantic and syntactic properties of certain particle and prefix verbs in German as well as of constructions involving resultative and depictive predicates. I will argue that the secondary predicates, considered to be adjuncts, are lexically integrated into the verb by an operation called Argument Extens...

In this paper we aim at a comprehensive but minimal description of verb classes in Basque in terms of their argument structure. We assume the principles of Lexical Decomposition Grammar, according to which lexically decomposed semantic representations determine the argument hierarchy and a common feature system encodes both the argument hierarchy a...

In this paper,1 I will give a short summary of the basic assumptions and principles of Minimalist Morphology (MM) proposed in Wunderlich (1992a) and Wunderlich and Fabri (1993). I will then consider the construction of paradigms more precisely and finally turn to two questions raised in the recent literature: how inflectional classes are made up, a...

In this paper we advocate a minimal characterization of inflectional morphology as a combinatorial system of underspecified stems and affixes which is controlled by a hierarchy of categories, by general principles of affixation, and by principles that regulate paradigm structures. We first contrast our views on inflection with other proposals found...

In this paper we assume that particle verbs are formed lexically and we show that the property of separability determines both their morphological and syntactical behavior. We assume a lexical feature %+ max], which forces syntactic visibility of the particle throughout all morphological operations. We also assume that this feature is restricted to...

In this paper, agreement is treated as a phenomenon in the syntactic-semantic interface. In syntax, agreement is a relation between syntactic constituents which is induced by particular agreement features. In semantics, agreement is a grammatical means of keeping record of individual referents. In languages which display agreement, constituents whi...

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In this paper I will deal with one important aspect of the relationship of syntactic structure and intonational structure. Syntactic structure is organized hierarchically and may involve some co-indexing between parts of it, whereas intonational structure is organized linearly and from left to right. I shall argue that in matching these two differe...

Die kognitive Linguistik befaßt sich mit der mentalen Grundlage von sprachlichem Verstehen und Produzieren, und zwar unter den Aspekten der Struktur—Repräsentation sprachlichen Wissens und ihrer Umsetzung in Verarbeitungsprozesse. In der Regel wird die Annahme gemacht, daß Repräsentationen wie auch Prozesse modular organisiert sind, also partiell u...

This article presents an analysis of German prefix verbs within both the theory of predicate-argument structure and the theory of word structure. For deriving the lexical entry of a complex word, I assume a specific interactior between the word structure and the lexical entries of its constituents. In section 1, a lexical entry is considered as a p...

I regard the notion of ‘speech act’ as one of the most fruitful notions of contemporary linguistic theorizing. It orients our scientfic endeavours towards the function of language in human communication. In doing so, it allows for a combination of different methods and fields of linguistic, as well as of philosophical, investigation, such as, e.g.,...

Searle and Lewis have argued that it is a convention in making an assertion that the speaker tries to say only what is true (or what he has proved to be true). Rather, as a point out, this “convention” follows as a safeguard-consequence from the condition that a speaker must be ready to defend his assertion [§1–5]. Two kinds of argumentation, the t...

I consider speech act theory to be an extension of the theory of meaning in natural language. Whereas up to now the theory of meaning has almost exclusively been concerned with the meaning of strictly declarative sentences, the aim of speech act theory is to characterize the meaning of non-declarative sentences as well as declarative ones in terms...

I shall sharply distinguish between utterance acts and speech acts: an utterance act is considered simply as the physical activity of a person which produces phonic or graphic events, whereas a speech act is considered an interpretation of such an activity relative to a particular language system, a particular action system, and the social situatio...

this paper would be touched.The two major results are the following. (i) The various semantic conditions for the realizationof ACC and ERG do not belong to the lexical specifications of these cases because such an assumptionwould lead to inconsistencies. However, if these conditions are captured by markedness constraints,the universally motivated o...

Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf) 5. Juni 2002, Mainzer Universitätsgespräche 1. Evolution und Sprache Der moderne Mensch, der homo sapiens sapiens, entstand wahrscheinlich vor mehr als 100.000 Jahren in Ostafrika. Er entwickelte sich aus Vorläufern, die ihm ähnlich waren, Werkzeuge herstellten und wahrscheinlich auch schon spre-chen konnten u...

Düsseldorf), Potsdam 28. Jan. 2003 work in progress Topik und Fokus sind nur aus der Syntax bekannt, sie sind sogar wesentlich mitverantwort-lich für Syntax. Teile eines Wortes (Tempus, Aspekt, pronominale Affixe) können norma-lerweise weder topikalisiert noch fokussiert werden. Aber Affixe können eine Prominenz-beziehung zwischen Argumenten festle...

Grammatical agreement is a phenomenon in which word forms cooccurring in a clause are sensitive to each other. Inflected forms often agree in their values of number, gender, or person, as can be seen from the contrasting examples in (1a,b) to (4a,b): (1) French a. La fsg fille fsg est 3sg belle fsg . b. Les pl garcons mpl sont 3pl beaux mpl . 'The...

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On time reference and tense.The problems of time reference and tense in natural languages are discussed in their syntactic and semantic aspects. The syntactic description is based on the principles of the generative transformational grammar. Since tense is a deictic category, the semantics language must be a pragmatically extended system. Furthermo...