Thomas Stolz

Universität Bremen | Uni Bremen · FB10: Linguistik

The paper aims at suggesting that the parallel terminology of descriptive linguistics and onomastics is misleading in the case of the notion of classifier. It is shown that grammatical and onymic classifiers have fewer properties in common than one might expect at first. On the basis of evidence from languages with different areal, typological, and...

This study investigates the grammar of place names in Chamorro. In particular, the question is raised what factors determine the absence/presence of the place-name article iya in certain morphosyntactic contexts. To this end, the role place names play in the grammar of Chamorro is discussed with special reference to the system of case markers or, a...

The paper analyses colonial place names as multi-dimensional linguistic phenomena regarding their function in place-making as well as in displaying different layers of colonial power. Based on extensive toponymic data from the former German colonies, it is shown that three general contradictions of colonialism manifest themselves in the creation of...

The paper raises the issue of the unexpectedly absent place names on extant maps of the Gani-Islands in Micronesia. It is shown that at different times during the last 360 years of documentation these islands have been inhabited on and off and that their present desertion is of recent origin. This gives rise to the question why there are hardly any...

The Afro-Asiatic language Maltese displays an intricately organised system of prepositions whose internal structure ranges from simple monosyllabic prepositions to fully fledged multiword expressions. The paper focuses on prep-prep combinations and similar phenomena. The inventory of prep-prep compounds is presented. Their functions and morphosynta...

This paper paves the ground for writing the comprehensive synchronic grammar of Maltese prepositions. The extant literature on the subject matter is reviewed in order to determine the size of the inventory of prepositions. It is shown that there is no general agreement as to the exact number of prepositions which are actually functional in the lang...

On the basis of case studies of several languages from Europe, the Americas, Austronesia, and New Guinea structural facts are scrutinized which are potential candidates for the emergence of place-name markers. It is shown that morphemes which outside the onymic domain serve the purpose of relational grammatical categories from part of placename con...

In this study we investigate the hitherto largely neglected issue of the areal distribution of BELONG-constructions in Europe. Several isoglosses are identified on the basis of the etymology of the lexical verb that is used to express the notion of BELONG. It is shown that these isoglosses divide Europe in different subareas which meet in East-Cent...

The paper argues in favor of considering the absence of material exponence (AOME) of grammatical category a morphological mismatch on a par with established categories such as suppletion and syncretism. It is shown that the phenomenon under review can be integrated into the taxonomy of deviations from canonical inflection as proposed within the fra...

This study is dedicated to the differential behavior of place names and person names in morpho-syntactic contexts which trigger the initial consonant mutations on common nouns in modern Welsh. It is shown that place names tend to side with common nouns whereas, more often than not, person names are exempt from undergoing soft, nasal, or aspirate mu...

This paper is meant to demonstrate empirically that the domains of onomastics and linguistics overlap in certain subsections of the grammatical system so that it is worthwhile for both of the disciplines to work hand in hand in order to capture those phenomena which are of common interest to them in the most adequate and comprehensive way possible....

A particularly frequent pattern of toponym-formation in colonial contexts involves the use of already established anthroponyms. Across the European colonial toponomasticons, anthroponymically-based toponyms are attested especially in the domain of settlement names. The study investigates whether this pronounced preference of toponym-formation patte...

This paper reviews the major recurrent motives of place naming in the context of European colonialism. The focus is on colonial place names which involve a European anthroponym as one of the components of the toponym. It is examined to what extent patterns emerge which are common to all or most of the European colonizers. We adopt a comparative per...

Digitale Version der Festschrift für Gabriel Altmann zum 60. Geburtstag. Ursprünglich im Druck 1991 erschienen.

It is argued that the traditional belief that the formal expression of the dual in Chamorro is restricted to intransitivity / low transitivity is inadequate since it precludes the possibility of accounting constructions in which the dual is also expressed in combination with transitive verbs. In the empirical part of the study, evidence of the recu...

In this paper, it is argued that the word-boundary is not crucial when it comes to distinguishing pragmatically motivated repetition from grammatically motivated reduplication. It is shown that both phenomena may involve entire syntactic words as their input to yield strings of identical words. Similarly, there is also evidence of repetition and re...

This paper addresses the issue of the reported optional character of numeral classifiers in Classical and Colonial Nahuatl. On the basis of the qualitative assessment of the co-occurrence of numerals with classifiers or zero in constructions which serve the purpose of quantifying or ordinally ranking NPs, the optionality hypothesis is assessed. The...

Maltese gives evidence of a certain degree of permeability of word-class categories in the sense that finite (intransitive) verbs in the 3rd person imperfective of both genders and numbers may function as NP-internal attributes and thus behave like adjectives, albeit only to a limited extent. The focus is on a small selection of those verbs which a...

This study introduces canonical reduplication as a common yardstick for reduplicative phenomena as they are discussed for individual languages or cross-linguistically. The (mainly methodological) advantages of the canonical approach over extant competitors (as e.g. prototypical reduplication) in research dedicated to reduplication in general are ou...

This contribution presents and evaluates colonial place names in German South-West Africa which have thus far largely been excluded from research on German colonial toponomy for technical reasons. Newly collected data close a large empirical gap and contribute to assessing the conclusiveness of hypotheses formulated on the basis of evidence from ot...

This study provides evidence in favor of a Special Toponymic Grammar by discussing instances of zero-marking of spatial relations in selected languages, with special focus on Maltese. It is shown that zero-marking is often a privilege of toponyms, which sets them apart from common nouns. Special attention is paid to the differential behavior of sub...

The extant generalizations about the grammar of space rely heavily on the analyses of declarative sentences. There is a need to check whether these generalizations also hold in the domain of interrogation. To this end this book analyzes data from some 450 languages (including non-standard varieties). The focus is on paradigms of spatial interrogati...

This study is meant to sketch some aspects of the behavior of PPs with identical heads under coordination. It is shown that there is variation of coordinative constructions which realize both of the prepositions and those constructions which give evidence of ellipsis of the second preposition. It is argued that this variation is not random but rule...

Dieser Pilotversuch stellt sich die Aufgabe, zu eruieren, ob und inwiefern die Unterscheidung von Oikonymen und Anoikonymen im Rahmen der vergleichenden Kolonialtoponomastik in der Art relevant ist, dass mit der Zuordnung der Bezeichnung von Geo-Objekten zu der einen oder der anderen der beiden Klassen (kolonial)linguistisch ausdeutbare Muster korr...

Introduction This chapter addresses the synchronic structural similarity and dissimilarity of languages in general by way of discussing selected phenomena of the segmental phonology of the languages of Europe in particular. Our guiding question is whether or not the distribution of certain properties of phonological systems provides at least circum...

This paper compares the role played by suppletion and a selection of other morphological form-function mismatches in the paradigms of ordinal numerals in the languages of Europe and Mesoamerica. The focus is on identifying the similarities and dissimilarities of those properties which are typical of the two (macro-)regions. The paradigmatic relatio...

The article aims at demonstrating that toponymy in colonial and postcolonial settings is a promising area for linguistically-informed research. On the basis of evidence drawn from erstwhile colonies of France (with a focus on Senegal) and Spain (with a focus on the Western Sahara) it is shown that, on the Atlantic coast of West Africa, the processe...

The paper is meant to demonstrate that it is worthwhile studying European colonial toponymies in comparative perspective. Examples from fourteen cases of European colonizer nations which have had an impact on the maps of their overseas possessions are presented. They represent the prototypical exonymic construction which involves an anthroponymic c...

This study addresses the issue of telling Missionary Linguistics and Colonial Linguistics apart. It is argued that the two approaches complement each other (with an area of overlap). Their differences are highlighted and their similarities are identified. A case-study sheds light on the succession of linguists of Chamorro in the first half of the 2...

This paper examines some of the problems which arise in connection with the question of whether or not reduplication is a language universal. The point of departure of the study is Moravcsik’s (1978) seminal paper on reduplicative constructions in cross-linguistic perspective. In the main body of the paper, the picture of the geo-linguistic distrib...

(Post-)Colonial Linguistics examines linguistic phenomena and historical positions in the field of Linguistics in colonial and post-colonial contexts.The paper raises the question of the meaning and the discourse-analytical implications of colonialism in the overall layout of this research program. It is argued that colonialism is less of a theme o...

On the basis of a world-wide convenience sample of 116 languages, the distribution of zero-marking of spatial relations over the languages of the world is shown to largely escape any genetically, areally and/or typologically based constraints. The main goal of this book is to firmly establish the cross-linguistic occurrence of the zero-marking of s...

Diese arealtypologische Studie untersucht die grammatischen Mittel, die in den Sprachen Europas verwendet werden, um den Komparativ der Ungleichheit/Überlegenheit auszudrücken. Die bestehenden Theorien und Hypothesen über die morphosyntaktische Struktur und die crosslinguistische Verteilung von Konstruktionstypen werden durchgemustert; das Verhalte...

Irregularität als sprachwissenschaftliches Konzept ist bisher nur unzureichend erforscht. Die Aufsätze dieses Sammelbandes widmen sich der Irregularität in der Flexions-, Derivations- und Kompositionsmorphologie und leisten damit einen Beitrag zum besseren Verständnis von Irregularität. Die Beiträge zielen darauf ab herauszufinden, wo Regelhaftigke...

This collection of articles takes up the issue of Contact Morphology raised by David Wilkins in 1996. In the majority of contact-related studies, morphology is at best a marginal topic. According to the extant borrowing hierarchies, bound morphology is copied only rarely, if at all, because morphological copies presuppose long-term intensive contac...

Der vorliegende Band bietet vielfältige Herangehensweisen zu den Sprachen der indigenen Völker Amerikas – zu den großen Sprachen (Guaraní, Zapotekisch, Otomí, klassisches Aztekisch) ebenso wie zu den kleinen (Mosetén, Cabécar). Die Einflüsse der amerindischen Sprachen auf die Ideengeschichte der Sprachwissenschaft werden genauso berücksichtigt wie...

Der Zusammenhang von Sprache und Kolonialismus wird in zunehmendem Maße zum Gegenstand sprachwissenschaftlicher Forschung an deutschen Universitäten. Der vorliegende Band reflektiert die verschiedenen koloniallinguistischen Arbeitsgebiete: die Untersuchung von Sprachkontakten im Kolonialismus, die Analyse kolonialer Diskurse und der Einstellungen z...

The Sounds of Europe This article is meant to demonstrate not only that it is possible technically but that it also makes sense linguistically to study phonological phenomena in a pan-European perspective. To prove our point, we employ the current comparative methodology associated with the framework of typologically-inspired areal linguistics. The...

Die zwölf Beiträge zu diesem Sammelband legen das Augenmerk auf Variation und Wandel in Lexikon, Morphologie, Syntax und Phonologie des Maltesischen. Verschiede Aspekte der lektalen Variation werden angesprochen: Die Eigenschaften von Soziolekten, Fachsprachen, regionalen Varietäten und verschiedenen Registern des heutigen Maltesischen werden disku...

This paper seeks to determine in which way the introduction of the Spanish indefinite article un into the determiner system of Chamorro interferes with the inherited definiteness-based ergative split of the recipient language. It is argued that modern Chamorro employs Spanish-derived un as an indefinite article to introduce new discourse participan...

In diesem Beitrag wird die Sinnfälligkeit des Projektes Europhonologie vorgestellt. Dafür wird ein Rückblick auf die im Bereich des Lautwesens bisher im Rahmen der Are-allinguistik Europas vorgebrachten Thesen gegeben. Anhand einer überwiegend quantita-tiv ausgerichteten Untersuchung zu den phonematischen Liquiden in den Sprachen Euro-pas zeigen wi...