Elisabeth Verhoeven

• PhD
• Professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

The difference in the default prosodic realization of simple sentences with unergative vs. unaccusative/passive verbs (assigning early nuclear accent with unaccusative/passive verbs but late nuclear accent with unergative verbs) is often related to the syntactic distinction of their nominative arguments as starting off in different hierarchical pos...

This article addresses the question of whether the influence of thematic roles (in particular, experiencers and patients) on word order is an epiphenomenal effect of other factors (such as information structure and animacy). For this purpose, I have investigated argument realization with different verb classes, including canonical verbs and either...

An important challenge in the study of focus constructions is teasing out the properties of the layers of linguistic structure that are involved, in particular identifying which interpretational properties are associated with the syntactic operation at issue, which properties arise through inferential processes, and which properties can be deduced...

The article reports the results of a cross-linguistic production study the main goal of which was to identify the impact of animacy and thematic asymmetries on linear order and subject choice. The experimental study was carried out on a sample of heterogeneous languages, namely German, Greek, Turkish, and Chinese, which allows us to draw generaliza...

The right clause edge links the utterance to the larger discourse and supports interlocutors in navigating the communicative situation, making such linguistic alternatives prime candidates to be exploited for register distinction. We investigate whether right-peripheral subjects behave similar with respect to registers in the verb-final languages G...

The goal of the CRC 1412 "Register: Language Users' Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation" is to answer the overarching research question "What constitutes a language user's register knowledge?". Our starting point is the observation that many situational and functional parameters-such as the relation between the interlocutors, the purpose...

Transitive causative change of state (TCoS) verbs elicit scalar readings, distinguishing them between: upper-bounded verbs (e.g., dry), denoting a culminating change of state, and lower-bounded verbs (e.g., wrinkle), denoting a change from a zero to a non-zero value (or from one value to another) regarding the property described by the semantic cor...

The Lang*Reg corpus records intra-speaker variation across languages and different situational-functional contexts, presumed to result in different registers. It has been prepared in the SFB1412 Register with data collections taking place in 2021-2022 for the following languages included in this version: German, Persian, Kurdish. The data sets for...

En esta ponencia presentamos los resultados de una investigación de la variación diatópica de los auxiliares (también llamados marcas) de aspecto y modo del maya yucateco. Nuestros resultados muestran que, si bien la mayoría de los auxiliares no muestran variación diatópica, sí se observa variación en un subconjunto (5) de ellos. La variación que e...

In the present review paper by members of the collaborative research center “Register: Language Users' Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation” (CRC 1412), we assess the pervasiveness of register phenomena across different time periods, languages, modalities, and cultures. We define “register” as recurring variation in language use depending...

The present study investigates the function of noun incorporation within the domain of participation. The focus is on the accommodation of peripheral participants in incorporative structures. As many other languages, Yucatec Maya, the Mayan language of the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, incorporates into the verb especially those participants that re...

The Collaborative Research Center 1412 “Register: Language Users’ Knowledge of Situational-Functional Variation” (CRC 1412) investigates the role of register in language, focusing in particular on what constitutes a language user’s register knowledge and which situational-functional factors determine a user’s choices. The following paper is an extr...

Mayan languages, mainly V-initial languages allowing both VSO and VOS orders in (syntactically and pragmatically) most unmarked contexts (England 1991), use preverbal positions for information structural purposes such as topic and focus, yet in Yucatec Maya there is evidence that preverbal constituents are not necessarily associated with discourse...

Among the sources of non-culminating readings, we find the agentive properties of the external argument. According to the Agent Control Hypothesis (ACH), the agenthood of the subject licenses a non-culminating interpretation with causative accomplishment predicates, whereas non-agentive subjects generally oblige a culminating reading. Experiencer o...

Languages differ in whether or not they allow discontinuous noun phrases. If they do, they further vary in the ways the nominal projections interact with the available syntactic operations. Yucatec Maya has two left-peripheral configurations that differ syntactically: a preverbal position for foci or wh-elements that is filled in by movement, and t...

Languages differ with respect to the morphological structure of their verbal inventory: some languages predominantly derive intransitive experiencer-subject verbs from more basic transitive experiencer-object verbs by morphosyntactic operations such as stative passivization (e.g., German, English), reflexivization (e.g., German, Spanish), or mediop...

Bound anaphors inside subjects challenge the c-command requirement for binding. At least in some languages, experiencer-object verbs such as worry or please are reported to license this type of backward dependence. In many cases, the underlying facts are based on unstable intuitions potentially influenced by intervening factors, such as accidental...

This article reports the results of a study on the self-embedding depth of nominal, verbal and clausal projections in spoken corpora of German. We compared two spoken registers featuring public and non-public (i.e. private) conversation by measuring the depth of self-embedding in C, V, and N projections. The findings confirm the hypothesis that the...

This article reports the results of a study on the self-embedding depth of nominal, verbal and clausal projections in spoken corpora of German. We compared two spoken registers featuring public and non-public (i.e. private) conversation by measuring the depth of self-embedding in C, V, and N projections. The findings confirm the hypothesis that the...

Several syntactic properties of verbal heads are accounted for through their semantic properties. Verbal features such as agentivity, volitionality, stativity etc. have been proven a useful tool for predicting several aspects of their syntactic behavior such as passivization, auxiliary selection etc. In the context of the empirical turn in current...

This article reports the results of a study on the self-embedding depth of nominal, verbal and clausal projections in spoken corpora of German. In order to gain insights about the intentional processes that influence the choice of recursive structures, we compared two spoken registers featuring public and non-public conversation by measuring the de...

Bound anaphors inside subjects challenge the c-command requirement for binding. At least in some languages, experiencer-object verbs such as worry or please are reported to license this type of backward dependence. In many cases, the underlying facts are based on unstable intuitions potentially influenced by intervening factors, such as accident...

Previous work has shown that the relation between acceptability ratings and frequen-cies in speech production is exponential. The present study examines the relation between preference ratings and frequencies of choice with a maximally controlled design, using the same material with two experimental procedures, namely a split-100 rating and a force...

In several languages, non-nominative experiencers tend to appear early on in utterances, which frequently triggers deviations from the preferred word order. These observations are based on linearization preferences, which in most cases involve gradient levels that cannot be determined precisely through singular intuitions. This article presents a c...

This article compares the linearization properties of experiencer objects in German and Greek. Taking the difference in the accounts for experiencer objects in these lan-guages as a starting point, Greek is analyzed as a language showing clear evidence that accusative experiencers are quirky subjects while in German there is no conclu-sive evidence...

Information structure, or the way the information in a sentence is 'divided' into categories such as topic, focus, comment, background, and old versus new information, is one of the most widely debated topics in linguistics. This volume incorporates exciting work on the relationship between syntax and information structure. The contributors are uni...

Constituents in the left periphery are often assumed to bear information structural functions such as topic and focus. Yucatec Maya provides the empirical basis for a challenging case study in this respect, since it provides a distinction between a sentence-initial position that is characterized by a series of enclitics and is labeled 'topic positi...

What happens when a canonically transitive form meets a canonically transitive meaning, and what happens when this doesn’t happen? How do dyadic forms relate to monadic ones, and what are the entailments of the operations that the grammar uses to relate one to the other? Collecting original expert work from acquisition, processing, typological and...

Experiencer-object verbs are known to deviate from the prototype of transitive verbs. Previous studies have shown that a subset of these verbs is stative and non-agentive and argue that this semantic peculiarity accounts for particular non-canonical syntactic properties. This article shows that the stativity/non-agentivity of experiencer verbs is s...

Language description enriches linguistic theory and linguistic theory sharpens language description. Based on evidence from the world's languages, functional-typological linguistics has established a number of thorough generalizations about the nature of linguistic categorizations and their manifestation in natural languages. Empirical studies in t...

This article presents the results of a recall experiment on Modern Greek experiential verbs. The influence of the factors subjecthood, thematic role (agent, experiencer), and animacy on word order and their interaction is investigated with three different types of experiencer verbs, namely experiencer subject (ES) verbs, labile [±agentive] experien...

This article deals with the syntactic and pragmatic properties of left dislocated constituents in Yucatec Maya. It has been argued that these constituents are topics, which implies that a particular structural configuration, namely left dislocation displays a 1:1 correspondence to a particular discourse function. We present evidence that the discou...

Studies on experiencer verbs have shown that certain object experiencers show a special syntactic behavior in contrast to objects of canonical transitive verbs. For Modern Greek, it has been argued that genitive and accusative experiencers co-occurring with non-agentive stimuli display subject-like behavior which manifests itself syntactically thro...

Aims and Scope: Grammaticalization theory has played a major role in the developments in language typology and functional linguistics during the last three decades. Grammaticalization phenomena show that grammars evolve in a continuous way following cross-linguistically established diachronic paths. The contributions in this book shed new light on...

The aim of this paper is to outline the means for encoding information structure in Yucatec Maya. Yucatec Maya is a tone language, displaying a three-fold opposition in the tonal realization of syllables. From the morpho-syntactic point of view, the grammar of Yucatec Maya contains morphological (topic affixes, morphological marking of out-of-focus...

The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.

This book combines a fieldwork-based language-specific analysis with a typological investigation. It offers a detailed and comprehensive analysis of the form and semantics of experiencer constructions in Yucatec, the Mayan language of the Yucatecan peninsula in Mexico. Since the linguistic expression of experience is not restricted to a specific gr...

The three concepts of case , valency and transitivity belong to the most discussed topics of modern linguistics. On the one hand, they are crucially connected with morphological aspects of the clause, including case marking, person agreement and voice. On the other hand, they are related to several semantic issues such as the meaning of case, seman...

The present study investigates the function of noun incorporation within the domain of participation. The focus is on the accommodation of peripheral participants in incorporative structures. As many other languages, Yucatec Maya, the Mayan language of the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, incorporates into the verb especially those participants that re...

This paper presents experimental data on postverbal argument order in Yucatec Maya. Yucatec Maya is a verb initial language which according to previous analyses displays verb-agent-patient as its canonical order. The data presented in this paper were obtained in an experiment on interpreting ambiguous sentences. The experiment evaluated hypotheses...

The domain of investigation is the interface of participation and possession. We present three principal strategies of coding central and peripheral participants. In a given situation, an empathic participant may bear a relation to the situation core as well as to one (or more) other participants. Languages differ as to whether they express the for...

2., rev. ed.