Conference PaperPDF Available

Structural and typological diamorphism through the invasive borrowing of Anglo-Americanisms in contemporary literary German

January 2013

DOI:10.13140/2.1.5072.3208

Conference: Annual Meeting of Societas Linguistica Europaea 2013
At: Chroatia, University of Split
Volume: 1, page 219

Authors:

Juri Kobenko

Tomsk Polytechnic University

Olga Kostrova

Samara State University of Teacher Training

The paper substantiates the problem of structural and typological diamorphism through the invasive borrowing of Anglo-Americanisms in contemporary literary German.

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The passive and impersonal values of French indefinite “on”.

Achard, Michel

(Rice University)

The so-called “passive” and “impersonal” uses of the French indefinite pronoun on ‘we/they’ are well attested in the

literature, even though they are not always precisely distinguished. They are respectively illustrated in (1) and (2).

(1) Aujourd'hui, on me remet cette lettre. Avez-vous lu comment il me traite à la fin? (Camus, A. Les possédés; pièce en

trois actes: 996)

‘Today this letter was delivered to me. Did you see how he talks to me at the end?’

(2) Ce qu'on appelle création dans les grands artistes n'est qu'une manière particulière à chacun de voir, de coordonner

et de rendre la nature. (Huyghe, R. Dialogue avec le visible: 266)

‘What we call creation among the great artists is only their own particular way of seeing, arranging, and depicting

nature.’

This presentation illustrates how these passive and impersonal indefinites represent two independent paths of semantic

extension from the pronoun’s personal (referential) usage illustrated in (3):

(3) J'envoyai un mot au jeune Bresson que je retrouvai un soir vers six heures au Stryx; on parla de Jacques, qu'il

admirait; mais le bar était désert et il n'arriva rien. (Beauvoir, S. de. Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée: 268)

‘I sent a note to young Bresson whom I met one evening around 6 o’clock at the Stryx; we talked about Jack whom

he admired; but the bar was empty and nothing happened.’

Personal on in (3) is distinguished from its indefinite (passive or impersonal) counterparts by two specific characteristics,

namely i) the identifiability of its referent (the author and Bresson), and ii) that referent’s exclusive responsibility for the

realization of the event the predicate profiles (no one else is involved in the conversation). This presentation argues that

the passive and impersonal values arise when one or both of these characteristics are missing. More specifically, passive on

emerges when the pronoun’s referent is not identified, but nonetheless remains solely responsible for the event coded by

the predicate. This is the case in (1), where the delivery of the letter can only be imputed to the courier, even though the

latter is not identified. Impersonal on emerges when both characteristics of the pronoun’s personal sense are missing,

namely the referent is not only unidentified, but also maximally “delimited” (Langacker 2009: 123), or in other words

inclusive of all relevant conceptualizers. This is illustrated in (2) where on refers to the homogenous mass composed of all

the French speakers who have used or understood the word création.

Importantly, if the presence or absence of the two features mentioned above orients the indefinite pronoun

toward the passive or impersonal functional categories, the degree of fit of the ensuing construction within these

categories depends on a variety of other factors. For instance, constructions with transitive predicates where the patient is

mentioned such as the one illustrated in (1) arguably make better passives than their intransitive counterparts illustrated in

(4):

(4) On frappe, et on entrouvre la porte. (Montherlant, H. de. La ville dont le prince est un enfant: 918)

‘There is a knock and someone pries the door open.’

This presentation also investigates the two main ways in which the referent of indefinites obtains the degree of generality

required of its impersonal status, namely the homogenization and virtualization of experience.

References

Langacker, Ronald W. 2009. Investigations in Cognitive Grammar. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Mouton de Gruyter.

Discourse-based rise of positive qualifiers from intensified indefinite quantifiers.

Adámková, Petra

(Palacký Univerzity Olomouc)

This usage-based study examines the influence of specific discourse characteristics on a context-induced change in the

diachronic development of the positive-qualification functioning. It is a semantic shift containing following stages:

quantifier > intensifier > (emotionally charged) evaluation of quality > adjective of quality. The completed process is

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signalized by derivation, in the Czech language it is specifically suffixation. In this study I intend to explain certain

mechanisms of formation of positive qualification from intensified quantification.

The described phenomenon is substantially present in the language of teenagers who gather at Internet chat

forums. Strong need to share opinions, short emotive addresses and positive expressive evaluation are typical for chat

communication. I analyzed material from the Czech web, mainly chat entries and comments to photographs. I focused of

the expressions hafo (from original German Handvoll: handful > Czech hafo(l[ec]: a bunch of) and mrtě (forest litter) that

originally functioned as nominal quantifiers:

1. Intensified indefinite quantifier:

Mám hafo/mrtě kamarádů/filmů.

I have bunch (intens. indef. quant.)/forest litter (intens. indef. quant.) friends/movies.

I have a lot of friends/movies.

In transitive constructions and/or used with singular, these intensifiers non-specifically strengthen lexical meaning. Since

the categorical status of these expressions is unclear (ø morphological marking [petrified in Acc.sg./pl.]; semantically

depletive [intensity +]), they incline both to NP and to VP (noun modifier/verb modifier) and create ambiguous

constructions (compare for example 1a and 1b):

1a. Intensifier (adj. ø morphol. marking):

Mám hafo/mrtě kamarády/filmy.

I.have [bunch.intens.adj./forest.litter.intens.adj. friends/movies]

I have real friends/movies. (emotionally charged)

1b. Intensifier (adv. ø morphol. marking):

Mám hafo/mrtě kamarády/filmy.

[I.have bunch.intens.adv./forest.litter.intens.adv] friends/movies

I really have friends/movies. (emotionally charged)

Even though it is an emotionally charged intensification, while evaluating it is used as neutral. The character of

intensification is controlled by semantic properties of the modified lexeme, by meaning of the utterance and by pragmatic

features of the situation. The intensifiers appear predominantly in positively assessing, emotionally charged constructions.

Their co-appearance with negative assessment is very rare. Intensifiers gradually adopt the function of positive assessment.

Such assessments syntactically function as noun modifiers (see for example 1a.1.) or interjections (see 1a2.):

1a.1. Evaluation of quality (adj. ø morphol. marking):

Ona je moje hafo kamarádka!

she is my bunch.qual.adj. friend

She is a very (good) friend of mine! (emotionally charged)

1a.2. Evaluative interjection:

Hafo!

bunch.interj.

Great!

Language users who do not communicate in this discourse find the constructions completely incomprehensible, both

grammatically and semantically. The process is completed by formation of qualification adjectives (through derivation) that

confirms semantic and morphologic-syntactic stability of these expressions (see for example 1a.1a.):

1a.1a. Evaluative adjective (morphol. marked):

To byl hafový víkend!

It was a very good weekend!

it was bunch.qual.adj. weekend

I deem that the speed of the shift depends on the extent of expressivity of the discourse and that the absorbed meaning

proportionally reflects semantic differentiation of individual contexts. I suppose that the phenomenon might function as a

language universal in typologically identical discourses.

The Function of Medial Verbs and Their Aspectual Categories in Northern Mao Narrative.

Ahland, Michael

(SIL International)

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Northern Mao (NM), an Afroasiatic/Omotic/Mao language, employs a subset of its verbal constructions and aspectual

morphology to distinguish events on the main storyline from background support and comment in narrative discourse.

Much of this work is done by medial verb constructions--the most common verbal forms in NM narrative (Ahland 2012:555-

61). Like many OV type languages (Longacre 1985), NM exhibits widespread clause chaining. A new corpus of NM texts

show certain medial verb + aspect combinations move the storyline forward while others are relegated to commenting on

main events. This paper explores the interaction between medial verb types, aspect marking, and discourse function in

natural NM narrative and also highlights the grammaticalization pathways of the three medial verb suffixes as well as the

aspectual markers themselves.

Three types of morphologically marked medial verb constructions show their relation to the preceding clause: 1)

those having the same subject, marked with /-in/; 2) those having a different subject, marked with /-iʃ/; and 3) those

expressing an event temporally overlapping with the event of the preceding clause (regardless of subject co-reference),

marked with /-et/. Types 1 and 2 convey main events when either morphologically unmarked for aspect or when marked

with perfect/anterior aspect; alternatively, they convey non-main events when marked with progressive aspect. While

types 1 and 2 can be used to express either main or non-main events, depending on their aspectual marking, type 3 is used

only for commenting on main events and for background or non-main events (Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Interaction of Medial Verb Types, Aspect and Narrative Function

No morphological aspectual marking has been attested on temporally-integrated medial verbs (Ahland 2012:576).

An examination of the historical development of NM’s medial verb suffixes shows that types 1 and 2 derive from a

coordinate conjunction and a case marker, respectively. The coordinate conjunction source for type 1 highlights the

important role of sequential relations in the development of mainline event marking (Comrie 1976:52; Hopper 1979:214).

Alternatively, the type 3 medial verb suffix derives from a locative postposition and demonstrates the role of location as a

metaphor for simultaneity and commentary (cf. Comrie 1976:98 and Givón 1982:123). This paper also offers a diachronic

examination of the development of two perfect suffixes (/-kòt’/ and /-ti/) as well as the progressive suffix (/-biʃ/). In

addition to the exploration of the grammaticalization of these forms, the roles of the two perfect suffixes are discussed.

In short, while temporally-integrated clauses and progressive aspect (i.e. non-punctual events, cf. Givón 1982:123)

are not surprisingly associated with non-main events in NM narrative, the choice of NM medial verb types itself is also

clearly relevant to narrative discourse function. And within the type 1 and 2 medial verb switch-reference system, the

choice of aspectual marking also corresponds to narrative function. It is not possible to adequately describe NM’s medial

verb forms and their aspectual markers, or to explain their distributions, without recourse to wider pragmatic concerns.

References

Ahland, Michael B. 2012. A grammar of Northern Mao (Màwés Aas’è). Eugene, Oregon: University of Oregon dissertation.

Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect. Cambridge textbooks in linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Givón, T. 1982. Tense-aspect-modality: The creole prototype and beyond. Tense-aspect: Between semantics and

pragmatics: Containing the contributions to a symposium on tense and aspect, held at UCLA, May 1979, ed. by Paul

J. Hopper, 115-163. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Hopper, Paul J. 1979. Aspect and foregrounding in discourse. Syntax and semantics, 12: Discourse and syntax, ed. by T.

Givón, 213-241. New York: Academic Press.

Longacre, Robert. 1985. Sentences as combinations of clauses. Language typology and syntactic description: complex

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constructions, ed. by Timothy Shopen, 235-286. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Standardization conflict, language crisis, and the workings of capital in Galiza.

Alvarez-Cáccamo, Celso

(Universidade da Corunha)

Galizan Portuguese, or Galizan, is undergoing its most severe crisis ever in terms of overall usage. Given the growing social

expansion of Spanish, Galizan Portuguese may soon become a minority language in its own territory. Language policies for

over 30 years have been aimed mainly at standardizing Galizan formally as a separate language, and at producing cultural

materials for internal consumption within the intellectual and educational fields, but not at reversing intergenerational

language loss. Further, the model followed has been entrenchendly differentialist vis-à-vis standardized Portuguese. The

result has been a devalued form of the language which is proving unsuitable for fulfilling the three main functions of: social

cohesion, social and economic advancement in class society, and identity reference. And, with the current ultraliberal

offensive, subsidies for language promotion have been greatly diminished, thus accentuating a sociolinguistic Darwinism

which favors both Spanish and new garden varieties of "multilingualism" as an unreachable object of desire.

The Galizan model for standardization has had its costs: there is both a skeptical general sense that intellectual

elites have been gratuitously arguing over details of the language form (the "reintegrationism" versus "isolationsm"

debate), and an estrangement among sectors of the intellectual field whose exclusion has been the keystone of isolationist

language policies. Pierre Bourdieu's model of the cultural market, and of capital and its forms, offers us a powerful tool to

understand today's language crisis in Galiza as much more than a technical fight over a few letters -- as a transparent

example of the commodification of both value-laden languages and identities. This paper examines the recent development

of the Galizan cultural field around a particular view of "the Galizan language", in terms of the definition of its object, the

legitimate questions to be posed, and the elites strategies of conservation and subversion. It will be argued that the cultural

capital circulation market in Galizan has reached its peak, and that the recent burst of the speculative "discursive bubble"

over language and identity has unmasked the reality of a precarious language insufficiently sustained in productive daily

practices.

Semantic convergence in the Lower Volta Basin (West Africa).

Ameka, Felix

(Leiden University)

The Lower Volta Basin, with its languages belonging to different subgroups of the Kwa family, has been described as a

convergence zone (Ellis 1984). The languages are geographically contiguous and there is social contact, often of

asymmetrical nature, among the different groups. The spread of loanwords from and via the dominant lingua francae

(Akan, Ewe, Ga) into smaller languages in the area as well as some of the shared grammatical patterns have been noted

(e.g. author 2006). Both Ewe and Ga have also borrowed from Akan, the language of an erstwhile hegemonic group in the

area.

In this paper I examine the convergence in the area of semantics. I explore the following lexicalisation patterns

across the languages:

(a) the coding of disintegration of objects into ’SMASH BREAK’ i.e. leading to complete fracture of the object, and

‘SNAP BREAK’, or ‘FULCRUM BREAK’, i.e. the snapping of an object at a point along the fulcrum, e.g. a stick (Majid

and Bowerman 2007);

(b) the coding of OPENING situations distinguished as to whether the separation is internally caused or some external

force is applied to bring about the separation. These are mirrored in the lexicalisation of bringing parts of an object

together to block access, i.e. CLOSING events. The application of the ‘opening’ and ‘closing’ predicates to body

parts provide important clues to their semantics.

Furthermore, various idiomatic structures which manifest similar underlying semantic templates are investigated, for

example, those related to the expression of concepts such as ‘believe’, based on receiving something and perceiving or

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experiencing it; ‘begin’, based on making contact with the base; ‘suffer’, based on coming into contact with something

unspecified; and ‘speak a language well’, based on consuming salt or water from a local river.

Another shared pattern discussed is body image constructions for expressing feelings in the body such as ‘perceive

in the body’ for emotion; ‘eye red’ for ‘jealousy, covetousness, seriousness, etc.’ ‘head strong’ for ‘wickedness,

stubbornness’ etc.

Diffused routine formulae are also investigated. Some of these involve a replicated pattern such as ‘ I take off your

hat’ for expressing deference. Others are forms that are copied across the languages. For instance the expression ayekoo

used even in Ghanaian English for complimenting and congratulating someone on good work done probably originates from

Ga (Kropp Dakubu 1981).

Parallels in the semantic structures across the languages show convergence which may be due to genetic relations

or contact. However clusters of semantic-pattern divergences will point to networks of contact among the languages. For

instance given a difference in the pattern of the expression of ‘believe’ in Akan (lit. get something /someone eat ) and Ewe

(lit get something or someone perceive), the other languages which show the former pattern will be shown to have been in

contact with Akan while those that show the latter pattern would be shown to have been in contact with Ewe. Thus the

patterns of divergence within a convergence zone can help us understand the history of contact among lexicons.

References

Author. 2006. Grammars in contact in the Volta Basin (West Africa): On contact induced grammatical change in Likpe. In A Y

Aikhenvald and RMW Dixon (eds) Grammars in contact: a cross-linguistic typology, 114-142. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Ellis, Jeffrey. 1984. Some speculations on language contact in a wider setting. In Robiun Fawcett et al (eds) The semiotics of

culture and language. Vol. 1 Language as a semiotic system, 81-104. London: Painter.

Kropp Dakubu, Mary esther. 1981. One voice: the linguistic culture of an Accra lineage. Leiden: African Studies Centre.

Majid, Asifa and Melissa Bowerman (eds) 2007. Cutting and breaking events: a crosslinguistic perspective. Cognitive

Linguistics 18(2) Special issue.

Grammaticalization of Yæ'ni ('meaning') in the Ordinary Persian.

Amouzadeh, Mohammad and Noora, Azam

(University of Isfahan)

An extensive body of researches in linguistics deals with discourse/pragmatic markers, the expressions that contain mainly

procedural rather than propositional meanings. Adopting a discourse-pragmatic approach, this study examines the

grammaticalization of Persian discourse marker yæ'ni to develop a better understanding of the structural and semantic

changes involved in the evolution of discourse/pragmatic markers as well as to help making some generalization about the

process of grammaticalization/pragmaticalization. The expression yæ'ni in Persian, borrowed originally from Arabic, can be

translated as 'meaning' or 'in other words'. This study investigates how yæ'ni, through the process of grammaticalization,

exhibits different pragmatic functions to characterize changes involved in the evolution of a discourse/pragmatic marker. In

a sense, its behavior in the ordinary Persian interactions reveals how desemanticization taken place in favor of some new

procedural-pragmatic meanings and functions relating to the discourse situations. The current study also shows the ways in

which yæ'ni loses its lexical and denotative meanings by being decategorized and undergone erosion (Kuteva, 2012).

Moreover, Pragmaticization of yæ'ni, to a great extent, supports, the grammaticalization principles of divergence and

persistence (in Hopper's terms, 1991).

This paper will also illustrate how yæ'ni acquires new pragmatic and procedural meanings/functions through the

process of invited inferencing, which can be classified into three major categories, not intended to be mutually exclusive:

a) Appositional / Metalinguistic uses

yæ'ni serves to express 'the content of the preceding item or items' or 'add another formulation'. This function has a

number of different sub-varieties (e.g. repairing, reformulating, making more explicit or exemplifying the code); as these

varieties focus on the code or on the particular expression used, they can be treated as metalinguistic functions. For

example:

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(1) færdâ sobh be-het zæng mi.zæn.æm, yæ'ni, bæ'dæzor

tomorrow morning to-you ring IMP.beat.1SG meaning after-noon

I'll call you tomorrow morning, actually in the afternoon.

b) Subjective / Metacommunicative uses

yæ'ni here expresses a variety of speaker attitudes: it may emphasize/assert the veracity of an utterance; it may express a

kind of evaluation or judgment, too. It may also express sincerity in the sense "I'm serious when I say". For example:

(2) xeili bædeh, yæ'ni xejalætavær.eh ke âdæm æz yeki mesle Sænâ

very bad.be, meaning embarrassing.be that human from one like Sana

kotak bo.khoreh!

whacking IMPM.eat.3SG

It's really bad, I mean, it's embarrassing to be beaten by someone like Sana.

c) Intersubjective uses

Yæ'ni also conveys different types of intersubjective meanings identified by Ghesquiere, Brems and Velde (2012) including:

Attitudinal, Responsive, and Textual. For example:

(3) fekr ne.mi.koni væghtešeh ke sigar-o tærk-koni, yæ'ni

thought not.IMP.do.2SG time.it.be that ciggarette.OM leave do.2SG, meaning

bebin bâ.hât chi kâr kærde!

look with.you what work do.PREPERF.3SG

Don't you think it's time you quit smoking? I mean, look how much it has hurt you!

In short, the argument will be that it is rather impossible to establish a single unilinear course of semantic development;

yet, the pragmatic meanings tend to arise through invited inferences. For the case of yæ'ni, it can further argued that its

subjective meanings clearly precede its intersubjective uses.

Polarity and agreement: conflicting values in the use of yes/no particles in Italian L2.

Andorno, Cecilia Maria

(Università di Torino)

Discourse particles of polarity as yes/no allow an easy management of the talk-in-interaction and occur since early stages of

L2 acquisition (Perdue 1993; Andorno 2008, Bernini 1996, 2000 for Italian L2). However, problems can arise in their use,

especially in replies to negative questions or assertions, because of cross-linguistic differences in the main value encoded in

their semantics: either the (positive/negative) truth value the speaker attributes to the proposition in his answer; or the

agreement/disagreement with the truth value conveyed by the proposition in the question (Moravsik 1971, Pope 1976,

Sadock/Zwicky 1985, Farkas/Bruce 2010; Akiyama 1992, Choi 1991; Kitagawa 1980, Morris-Jones 1999, Sorjonen 2001).

Moreover, systems sharing similar semantic models ("polarity" or "agreement" oriented) can differ in the number of

particles lexicalizing specific values, e.g. Italian sì/no vs. French oui/non/si. As pragmatic transfer has been proved to affect

L2 discourse (Gass 1992, Matras, 1998, Myers-Scotton 2002), cross-linguistic differences may account for both the

imperfect mastery of the particles and potential misunderstandings in interlanguage conversations.

Among romance languages, the Italian sì/no particles are generally considered as polarity oriented (Bernini 1995),

but the actual behaviour of Italian native speakers has never been verified by specific corpus studies. Our research

investigates the use of sì/no in Italian by native speakers and by L2 speakers with different L1s, both similar (French,

Spanish, German, Polish) and distant (Turkish, Chinese, Mongolian) from the expected mainly polarity-oriented Italian

system.

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The data have been gathered through two interactional tasks (an interview and a Map Task); informants have to

react to both positive and negative questions and assertions, which convey different degrees of expectation for a negative

reply (Bublitz 1981, Koshik 2005), as in the following examples.

(1) /NATIVE SPEAKER/ non l’avete studiato? Haven't you studied it?

/CHINESE LEARNER/ sì Yes (meaning " We haven’t studied it", instead of the target “no”).

(2) /NATIVE SPEAKER/ e non era inglese and he [the professor] wasn't English

/MONGOLIAN LEARNER/ no No (meaning " He was English", instead of the target “sì”).

The main research questions are, as for both Italian L1 and L2:

- do speakers conform to the expected polarity-oriented model in their use of sì/no in replies?

- do discourse strategies, such as the use of further discourse particles (infatti, ma) and expansions, play a role in the

expression of agreement and polarity value in replies?

- do different kinds of speech acts ("open" or conducive questions, confirmation checks, corrective assertions… ) induce a

different selection of particles in replies?

As for Italian L2:

- to what extent do L2 speakers transfer L1 principles in the use of L2 particles?

First results suggest that native speakers mainly follow a polarity oriented model, but also show that replying to negative

answers and assertions involves a set of (lexical, prosodic) strategies in order to avoid misunderstandings. Learners often

fail to use these strategies, and this can lead to communication breakdown, especially when cross-linguistic influence of the

L1 agreement-oriented system arises.

References

Akiyama M.M. 1992. Cross-linguistic contrasts of verification and answering among children. Journal of Psycholinguistic

Research 21 (2), 67-85.

Andorno C. 2008. Entre énoncé et interaction: le role des particules d'affirmation et négation dans les lectes d'apprenants.

Acquisition et interaction en langue étrangère, 26. 173-190.

Bernini G. 1995. Le profrasi. In Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, vol.III. Bologna, Il Mulino, 175-224.

Bernini G. 1996. Stadi di sviluppo della sintassi e della morfologia della negazione in italiano L2. Linguistica e Filologia 3, 7-

33.

Bernini G. 2000. Negative items and negation strategies in nonnative Italian. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 22 (3),

399-438.

Bublitz W. 1981. Conducive yes-no questions in English. Linguistics 19, 851-870.

Choi S. 1991. Children’s answers to yes-no questions: a developmental study in English, French, and Korean. Developmental

Psychology 27 (3), 407-420.

Farkas, D. F. and Bruce, K. B. 2010. On Reacting to Assertions and Polar Questions. Journal of Semantics 27, 81-118.

Gass S. 1992. Pragmatic transfer. Second Language Research 8, 203-231.

Kitagawa C. 1980. Saying Yes in Japanese, Journal of Pragmatics 4 (2), 105-120.

Koshik I. 2005. Beyond Rhetorical Questions. Amsterdam, Benjamins.

Matras Y. 1998. Utterance modifiers and universals of grammatical borrowing. Linguistics 20, 281-331.

Moravsik E.E. 1971. Some cross-linguistic generalizations about yes-no questions and their answers. In Working papers on

language universals, vol.7. Stanford CA : Stanford University Linguistic Department. 45-193.

Morris Jones B. 1999. The Welsh Answering System. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Myers-Scotton C. 2002. Contact Linguistics: Bilingual. Encounters and Grammatical Outcomes. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Perdue, C. 1993. Second language acquisition by adult immigrants. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pope E. 1973. Question-answering systems. In: Proceedings of Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago, Chicago Linguistics

Society. 482-492.

Sadock J.M. and Zwicky A.M. 1985. Speech Act Distinctions in Syntax. In Shopen T. (ed.) Language Typology and Syntactic

Description, vol.I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 155-196.

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Sorjonen M-L. 2001. Responding in Conversation: A study of response particles in Finnish. Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Publishing Company.

Impersonal passives in Romance and Slavic: Contact effects in the Balkans.

Aranovich, Raúl

(University of California, Davis)

Parameter theory provides individual grammars with predetermined universal choices, some of which are so fundamental

as to affects all kinds of linguistic phenomena. Such Macro-Parameters come close to capturing the "genius" of a language,

defining a language type (Baker 1996). But in well-defined linguistic areas, a certain feature may come to be shared among

neighboring languages that are typologically distinct, resulting in unexpected feature combinations. I will show that the

distribution of impersonal passives in the Balkans represent a case in which language contact comes into conflict with

Parameter Theory. Impersonal passives are illustrated by the Standard Serbocroatian examples in (1). In these sentences,

marked by the presence of a reflexive pronoun (glossed as SE), the agent is interpreted as an arbitrary human actor (Bidwell

1965-6, Djordjević 1988). They can be formed with transitive verbs like EAT (1a), or with intransitive verbs like SLEEP (1b).

When the verb is transitive, the patient (i.e. the canonical object) can bear nominative case, as in (1). However, in the

Čakavian dialect of Serbocroatian (Houtzagers 1985, Kalsbeek 1998), the patient retains accusative case, as (2) shows

(1) a. Jede se samo bela riba. b. Qvde se dobro spava.

One only eats white fish (NOM)' 'One sleeps well here.'

(2) Se stavi nuter juhu

'One puts in the rennet (ACC).'

I will refer to the argument that alternates in case as the "pivot". Romanian and Bulgarian, like Standard Serbocroatian,

allowing only nominative pivots. In general, nominative-pivot languages restrict impersonal passives of intransitive

predicates to unergatives like SLEEP, as in (1b). Thus, in Romanian, impersonal passives of copulatives like (3a) are

disallowed (Dobrovie-Sorin 1994). This is not so in accusative-pivot languages. There is some evidence from the Čakavian

dialect that points in this direction, as in (3b) (Kalsbeek 1998).

(3) a. *Nu se este niciodată mulţumit. b. i se je stalo odzât va cr

evke

'One is never satisfied.' 'and one would stand at the back of the church.'

Cinque's (1988) Parameter Theory account provides two types of impersonal SE. Argument SE absorbs an external semantic

role, allowing the patient to receive nominative case. Since argument SE cannot absorb an internal role, the reflexive clitic

cannot occur with unaccusatives, copulatives, or periphrastic passives. Non-argument SE, on the other hand, licenses an

arbitrary pro in subject position, without absorbing a semantic role . If there is a pivot, it remains in object position, receives

accusative case. Since proarb can also be an internal argument, unaccusative verbs (and similar predicates) can combine

with non-argument SE. Nominative-pivot languages have argument SE, while accusative-pivot languages have non-

argumental SE. But the Balkans provide a two-way exception to this prediction. Impersonal passives of unaccusatives like

DIE are found in Standard Serbocroatian (4a), in spite of the fact that this is a nominative-pivot language (Djordjević 1988).

In Slovene, on the other hand, impersonal passives of unaccusatives are disallowed (4b), even though Slovene has

accusative pivots.

(4) a. Umiralo se za otadžbinu. b. *Od časa do časa se je kaznovano od prijateljev

'One died for their country.' 'From time to time one is punished by friends.'

I suggest an areal explanation. Except for Čakavian, the areal features of impersonal passives in theBalkans are nominative

pivots and unergative intransitives only. This results in a typologically coherent area. However, the features of the Čakavian

impersonal passive "leak" into neighboring languages in a selective way: accusative pivots into Slovene, unaccusative

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intransitives into the impersonal passives of Standard Serbocroatian. An areal account, then, provides a better explanation

for the (illusory) clustering of features found across impersonal passives than Parameter Theory, raising the question of

how predictive formal principles of grammar are when dealing with language contact (Joseph 2001).

Existence-to-possession: evidence from “two” Basque verbs.

Ariztimuño, Borja

(University of the Basque Country)

The conceptual relation between existential and possessive domains is well-established in typological studies (Croft 2002,

Heine 1997). In several cases, it is possible to draw a diachronic line that leads to a quite common evolutionary path of

existence/copula/location-to-possession (Heine and Kuteva 2002).

In the case of the Basque language we find, historically, various verbs for these concepts: izan ‘to be’ and e(*d)un ‘to

have’ are autonomous as well as auxiliary verbs, whereas the reconstructed *edin ‘to be(come)’ and *ezan ‘to have, obtain?’

are only auxiliaries today. However, the original meaning of the latter is either recorded in old written data (*edin) or

partially reconstructed (*ezan). Along with these verbs there is another one that is worth mentioning, eduki ‘to keep, hold’

(and dialectally ‘to have’), which originally was a ditransitive partner of the abovementioned e(*d)un ‘to have’, with the so-

called “dative flag” -ki.

The first four verbs are in a roughly complementary distribution in their use as auxiliaries: izan ‘intransitive realis’,

*edin ‘intransitive irrealis’, *edun ‘transitive realis’, *ezan ‘transitive irrealis’. There is yet an intersection between izan and

*edun, whereby non-finite forms of the verb ‘to be’ (izan) are used also as transitive, with the meaning ‘to have’, in western

and central dialects. This occurs from the earliest attestations (ca. 16

c.); although at that time there still existed the form

eun ‘to have’. In the easternmost part of the Basque territory the participial form of the verb ‘to have’ is ukan, which is

usually explained as a more recent back-formation from conjugated forms of eduki, such as daukat ‘I keep it’ ← ‘I have it for

somebody’ (Trask 1981).

In this way, although being historically a dialectal trait, I pose that the use of izan as transitive is not strictly an

innovation, but reminiscent of an old, common stage of the paradigm of this verb, in which it might have developed a

dative-construction that eventually underwent morphological leveling in accord with the common ergative-absolutive

pattern in Basque. In support of this statement, I retake the diachronic analysis of the ergative and dative agreement by

Oregi (1974), who considered the morphological coincidence of their suffixes, and I give a new interpretation to the

transitive auxiliary *ezan, which can be argued to be etymologically related with the intransitive izan (Fig. 1). For that

purpose, we have to bear in mind that the paradigm of *ezan has a striking variation in the present tense vowel (-a-/-e-)

throughout all the dialects, which may be due to the addition of a prefixed dative flag (cf. dagit ‘I do [something]’ vs. degit

‘It does [something] for me’). Indeed, the prefix i- of the non-finite form (izan) would be a trace of the evolution held in this

proposal.

Fig. 1 STAGE I STAGE II STAGE III STAGE IV

intr. *e-zan intr. *e-zan intr. *ezan intr. izan (‘to be’, ‘intr. realis aux.’)

dat. *(e-)i-zan → trans. *(e)izan trans. izan (non-finite ‘to have’ / finite ‘irrealis tr. aux.’)

References

Croft, W., 2002. Typology and Universals (2

edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Heine, B., 1997. Possession: Cognitive Forces, Sources, and Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Heine, B. and Kuteva, T., 2002. World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Oregi, J., 1974. “Euskal-aditzaz zenbait gogoeta”, Fontes Linguae Vasconum 17: 265-283.

Trask, R. L., 1981. “Basque Verbal Morphology”, in Bascologists International Meetings (Lejona 1980) (= Iker 1). Iruñea-

Pamplona: Euskaltzaindia. 285-304.

Perfect and negation in Lithuanian vs. Standard Average European.

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Arkadiev, Peter

(Russian Academy of Sciences)

Theoretically, two mutual scope relation between perfect and negation are possible (McCawley 1999, de Swart and

Molendijk 1999):

NEG > PERF: ‘a past situation V is not currently relevant’ (“upper” negation)

PERF > NEG: ‘a past situation not-V is currently relevant’ (“lower” negation)

In most European languages which have perfect as a separate grammatical category distinct from (perfective) past, e.g. in

English and Bulgarian, there is only one morphosyntactic position of negation in the verbal domain, covering both the upper

and the lower interpretations, cf. ex. (1) and (2):

NEG > PERF

(1) a. English: I have not worked for the State Security.

b. Bulgarian: Ne săm rabotil za Dăržavna Sigurnost. ‘id.’

PERF > NEG

(2) a. English: I have not slept for four days.

b. Bulgarian: Ne săm spal ot četiri dni. ‘id.’

Ex. (2) is roughly paraphrasable as “I am in a state resulting from not sleeping for four days”.

A different situation is observed in Lithuanian (Baltic). In this language the perfect consists of an active past participle of the

lexical verb and the ‘be’-auxiliary and expresses resultative and experiential meanings (Geniušienė, Nedjalkov 1988).

However, in contrast to English and Bulgarian, in Lithuanian the negative prefix ne- can attach both to the auxiliary and to

the participle, thus formally distinguishing between the upper and the lower interpretations, cf. (3).

Lithuanian

(3) a. Niekada nesu miegojęs lauke. ‘I have never slept outdoors.’ (NEG > PERF)

b. Jau dvi dienas esu nemiegojęs. ‘I have not slept for two days already.’ (PERF > NEG)

The main goal of this paper is to provide a detailed account of the semantic and pragmatic differences between the two

types of negated perfect in Lithuanian. Attention will be paid to the kinds of lexical verbs favouring the “upper” or the

“lower” negation, to the interaction of negation and its position with the resultative vs. the experiential meanings of the

perfect, and to the discourse factors favouring the use of each type of construction. The data comes mainly from the Corpus

of Lithuanian Language (http://tekstynas.vdu.lt/) and the Internet, and native speakers’ intuition is appealed to, as well.

From an areal perspective, it can be observed that Latvian patterns with English and Bulgarian, and not with

Lithuanian, banning the negation on the participle in perfect constructions and allowing the “lower” interpretation when

negation attaches to the auxiliary, cf. (5).

Latvian

(5) Visu nakti neesmu gulējis. ‘I have not slept whole night.’

By contrast, the Belorussian and North-West Russian dialects, which have a kind of periphrastic perfect (Kuz’mina and

Nemčenko 1971, Mackevič and Grinaveckienė 1993, Wiemer and Giger 2005), allow the double attachment of negation,

like Lithuanian. Double position of negation in perfect constructions is also attested in various languages of Eurasia, e.g. in

Nakh-Dagestanian and in Japanese. Thus, the position of negation might be treated as an areal-typological feature

distinguishing the “Eastern” type of perfect from the one attested in the Western European languages.

References

de Swart, H. and A. Molendijk. 1999. Negation and the temporal structure of narrative discourse. Journal of Semantics, 16,

1–42.

Geniušienė E. and V.P. Nedjalkov. 1988. Resultative, passive, and perfect in Lithuanian. In V.P. Nedjalkov (ed.), Typology of

Resultative Constructions. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 369–386.

Kuz’mina I.B. and E.V. Nemčenko. 1971. Sintaksis pričastnyx form v russkix govorax. (The Syntax of Participles in Russian

Dialects.) Moscow: Nauka.

Mackevič J.F. and E. Grinaveckienė. 1993. Dzeeprysloŭi na -(ŭ)šy ŭ belaruskix narodnyx gavorkax. (Participles in -(ŭ)šy in

Belorussian dialects.). Lietuvių kalbotyros klausimai 30, 105–108.

McCawley, J.D. 1999. Some interactions between tense and negation in English. In P.C. Collins, D.A. Lee (eds.), The Clause in

English: in Honour of Rodney D. Huddleston. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 177–185.

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Wiemer B. and M. Giger. 2005. Resultativa in den nordslavischen und baltischen Sprachen. Bestandaufnahme unter arealen

und grammatikalisierungstheoretischen Gesichtpunkten. München, Newcastle: LINCOM Europa.

The morphology of Albanian nouns in the Albanian National Corpus: some issues of representation.

Arkhangelskiy, Timofey; Daniel, Michael; Morozova, Maria and Rusakov, Alexander

(Higher School of Economics, Moscow and Russian Academy of Sciences)

The paper considers some issues of representation of the Albanian noun morphology in the Albanian National Corpus,

being developed by the team from Saint-Petersburg and Moscow. The Albanian corpus employs the experience of other

corpora, such as the Russian National Corpus (Plungian 2005, 2009) and the Eastern Armenian National Corpus (Daniel et al.

2009).

The first batch of issues is related to the development of lexical morphological markup for the Corpus, which in

some instances requires the reinterpretation and changes to the “traditional” model of the Albanian grammar description

(Buchholz, Fiedler 1987). Some changes were made on the ground of a range of theoretical preconditions and/or practical

targets such as providing the opportunities for refined search to the users and creating the background linguistic model of

the Albanian morphology that is “understandable” for the parser and allows to minimize the parsing error rate.

For example, the noun cases tagset was enriched with a tag abl2 (ablative 2), marking a specific ablative indefinite

plural form ending in -sh (1). Along with the said formal characteristic, the decision to add “ablative 2” into the case

marking tagset of the Albanian corpus was influenced by the specific functionality of this form: predominantly non-

prepositional use; use in NPs with non-referential possessor (2).

(1) prej fshatra-sh = prej fshatra-ve

from village-PL.ABL2 = from village-PL.ABL

‘from villages’

(2) lesh dele-sh

wool sheep-PL.ABL2

‘sheep wool’

The second group involves the issues related to the representation of variation that is typical for the colloquial Albanian and

for the Albanian dialects (the further development plans include the creation of dialectal subcorpus). They include the

development of special tags marking the dialectality and non-standardness of grammatical patterns or word forms, which

are formally different from the standard ones (stem variation, case forms variation, etc.), as well as the issues of

lemmatization: the variants can be treated as belonging to different lemmas (for example, forms with alternative prefixes:

çlodhje // shlodhje ‘rest’) or to a single lemma, for example, ujë // ujti ‘water’ (Gjinari 2007). In the last case the variants can

be lemmatized as standard and dialectal respectively, the dialectal lemma containing a kind of “lexical reference” pointing

to the standard one. As a result, dialectal word forms belonging to the lemma ujtë will be easily found by a search by the

standard lemma ujë. At the same time the user still keeps the opportunity to search for either the standard or the dialectal

variant separately.

Such kind of language features, although differing from the existing standard, as well as from the tradition of the

Albanian grammar description, should be considered while expanding the grammatical wordlist and the text collection. This

approach meets the main aim pursued by the creators of the Albanian National Corpus, which is the clear and coherent

representation of all possible lexical variants and grammatical patterns in their regional and social variety, reflecting the

usage of Albanian in oral and written communication.

References

Albanian National Corpus. Online: http://web-corpora.net/AlbanianCorpus/search/. (Accessed from December 2011 until

January 2013).

Buchholz, Oda and Fiedler, Wilfried. 1987. Albanische Grammatik. Leipzig: Verlag Enzyklopädie.

Daniel, Michael A. et al. 2009. “Vostochnoarmyanskij nacionalnyj korpus” [Eastern Armenian National Corpus]. In:

Bayandur А. (Ed.) Armyanskij gumanitarnyj vestnik. Т. 3, 2 [Armenian Humanities Bulletin. Vol. 3, 2]. Erevan. 9–33.

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Gjinari, Jorgi et al. 2007. Atlasi dialektologjik i gjuhës shqipe. Vëllimi I [The Dialectological Atlas of the Albainian Language.

Vol. 1]. Napoli.

Plungian, Vladimir A. et al. (Eds.). 2005. Nacionalnyj korpus russkogo jazyka: 2003–2005. Sbornik statej [Russian National

Corpus: 2003–2005. Collected works]. Мoscow: Indrik.

Plungian, Vladimir A. et al. (Eds.). 2009. Nacionalnyj korpus russkogo jazyka: 2006–2008. Novye rezultaty i perspektivy

[Russian National Corpus: 2006–2008. New Results and Perspectives]. Saint-Petersburg: Nestor-History.

What’s in a name? Ideologies and linguistic development in the North.

Arnason, Kristjan

(Univeristy of Iceland)

Among the names used in medieval texts to refer to Nordic varieties and the written norm are the Danish tongue (dönsk

tunga) and the Norwegian tongue (norræna) (Karker 1977, Hagland 1984). Although most of the texts were written in

Iceland, the term Icelandic or the Icelandic tongue (íslenska or íslensk tunga) does not occur until the 15

or 16

century. In

modern scholarly work, the terms Old Norse, Old Icelandic (forníslenska) Old Norwegian (gammelnorsk), Old Danish

(gammeldansk) and Old Swedish (fornsvenska) are familiar, and not surprisingly, the term gammelnorsk and forníslenska

tend to be used respectively by Norwegian and Icelandic scholars to refer to the same idiom, the west-nordic written norm

of the Icelandic and kings’ sagas, also used in Orkney in the high middle ages. At the University of Iceland old and modern

Icelandic have down to the present been looked on as one field of study (íslenska, íslenskt mál). And according to folk

linguistics, there are no (social or geographic) dialects in Iceland. In the rest of Scandinavia, notably including the Faeroes,

there is no such sense of unity, and folk linguistics and linguistic culture acknowledges dialectal diversity, much in the same

way as the rest of Europe (Auer 2005).

I want to discuss how this relates to linguistic development in the area, in particular the North- West. On the one

hand I will ask to what extent the labelling of linguistic varieties is justified by formal differences or sameness, and to what

extent the functional demands and ideologies behind the naming conventions have an effect on formal development and

elaboration. I will maintain that the “ideology” of applying labels to different idioms can have a unifying effect through

standardisation and levelling, and through language planning (Haugen 1966, Ottósson 1987, Jahr 1989, Árnason 2003). But

purism and preservationist ideology can also have a diversifying effect, when applied to dialects, since e.g. Norwegian

speakers have been known to try to speak a “pure dialect” (ren dialekt). But on the whole, normal laws of linguistic

development are the main forces active in the history of the languages, as I will illustrate with some examples from

Icelandic, Faroese and West Norwegian.

References

Árnason, Kristján. 2003. Language Planning and the Structure of Icelandic. Kristján Árnason (ed.): Útnorður. West Nordic

Standardisation and Variation, pp.193-218. Reykjavík. Institue of Linguistics – University of Iceland Press.

Auer, Peter. 2005. Europe’s Sociolinguistic Unity, or: A Typology of European Dialect / Standard Constellations. Nicole

Delbecque, Johan van der Auwera and Dirk Geeraerts (eds.): Perspectives on Variation (Trends in Linguistics 163),

pp. 7-42. Berlin. De Gruyter.

Hagland, Jan Ragnar. 1984. Riksstyring og språknorm. Spørsmålet om kongens kanselli i norsk språkhistorie på 1200- og

første halvdel av 1300-tallet. Doctoral dissertation. University of Trondheim.

Haugen, Einar. 1966. Language Conflict and Language Planning. The Case of Norwegian. Cambridge Mass. Harvard

University Press.

Jahr, Ernst Håkon. 1989. Utsyn over norks språkhistorie etter 1814. Oslo. Novus forlag.

Karker, Allan. 1977. The disintegration of the Danish tongue. Sjötíu ritgerðir helgaðar Jakobi Benediktssyni 20. júlí 1977.

Reykjavík. Stofnun Árna Magnússonar.

Ottósson, Kjartan G. 1987. An archaising aspect of Icelandic purism: the revival of extinct morphological patterns. Pirkko

Lilius and Mirja Saari (eds.): The Nordic Languages and Modern Linguistics 6, pp. 311-24. Helsinki. Helsinki

University Press.

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Twisted by the norm – Serbian verb trebati ’should’.

Arsenijevic, Boban and Simonovic, Marko

(University of Niš and Utrecht University)

While all the standards emerging from Serbo-Croatian are based on the relatively homogeneous Neo-Štokavian group of

dialects, each of them bears certain idiosyncrasies, which are often results of normative interventions.

A case at hand is the modal verb trebati „should“ (for a recent overview, see Kordić, 2002: 175-190). Serbian

standard trebati is different from all other modals, both in standard Serbian and other related standards, in two ways. First,

Serbian trebati is not allowed to display any phi-features. Second, whereas other modals can take either an infinitive

complement or the da+present construction, trebati is only allowed with the latter.

(1) Ti možeš da ideš/ići. grammatical in all standards

You can.2Sg da go.2Sg/go.Inf

„You can go.“

(2) Ti može da ideš/ići. bad in all standards

You can.3Sg da go.2Sg/go.Inf

„You can go.“

(3) Ti trebaš da ideš/ići. out in Serb., grammatical in Bos/Cro.

You should.2Sg da go.2Sg/go.Inf

„You should go.“

(4) Ti treba da ideš/*ići. grammatical in Serb., out in Bos/Cro.

You should.3Sg da go.2Sg/go.Inf

„You should go.“

As its primary meaning is a weak deontic necessity, we argue that this verb was subject to a politeness restriction in

Serbian: its impersonal, expletive use, which is grammatical in all varieties, was stylistically preferred to the use of the

personal version with the roughly some meaning.

(5) Treba da ti ideš kući.

should da you go.2Sg home

„You should go home.“

Serbian prescriptivists turned this preference into a prescriptive rule, formulated as a filter at the level of morphological

forms („no finite forms of trebati“). This resulted in a set of undefined grammatical domains. For instance, a relative clause

with a singular neuter subject (6) will be the same in all varieties, because the phi-features projected by the nouns dijete

happen to be the same as the ones in impersonal clauses and no form violates the Serbian filter.

(6) dijete koje je trebalo da stigne

wine which.N.SG Aux.SG should.N.SG da arrive.SG

„The child which was supposed to arrive.“

However, for the same clause in plural, neither of the two possibilities is fully acceptable: the impersonal one (7) because

the relative clause has a subject, and the personal one (8) because it violates the filter.

(7) djeca koja je trebalo da stignu

children which.N.SG Aux.SG should.N.SG da arrive.PL

in Serb: ?

in Bos/Cro: out

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(8) djeca koja su trebala da stignu

children which.N.PL Aux.PL should.N.PL da arrive.PL

in Serb: ?

in Bos/Cro: „(the) children which were supposed to arrive“

Our paper discusses five theoretically interesting consequences of this intervention:

1) topicalization and focalization structures moving the embedded subject into the impersonal matrix clause as the

underlying structure of the ’personal-impersonal’ uses.

2) the derivation of the hypercorrect forms (7), which actually involves the personal derivation (8) followed by the

application of a phi-feature erasure operation.

3) syntactic lacunas emerging in contexts (such as relative clauses of the type (7) and (8)),

4) semantic lacunas emerging from the fact that the personal use has a weak implication that the modality originates in the

subject of the modal.

5) strong grammaticality judgments of adult Serbian speakers which include the filter.

References

Kordić, Snježana (2002) Riječi na granici punoznačnosti [Words on the Border Between Lexicon and Grammar]. Zagreb:

Hrvatska sveučilišna naklada.

A Quantitative Diagnosis of the North/South Linguistic Boundary in California English.

Asnaghi, Costanza

(Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano and University of Leuven)

California’s geographical north-south midway point lies just below the city of San Jose. However, the distinction between

‘NorCal’ and ‘SoCal’ does not coincide with the geographical halfway line. In fact, the boundary between Northern and

Southern California is debated in popular culture. This is even more relevant because of the well-established NorCal and

SoCal rivalry (Smith 2011).

The results of the regional lexical variation survey of California English presented in this paper address the debate

in linguistic terms through a quantitative analysis of written newspaper texts.

Traditional methods of data collection, which include linguistic interviews and questionnaires, would not allow a

sufficient data gathering for a lexical dialect survey. Therefore, a new method of data collection based on web searches

restricted to the websites of newspaper from cities across a region of interest has been developed, which returns large

quantities of lexical data (Grieve and Asnaghi 2011, Grieve et al. submitted).

A list of 334 Californian newspapers from 274 Californian cities was collected, together with a list of 45 word

alternations for analysis such as mesa/butte, buddy/pal, and car/automobile, choosing variables from previous dialectology

studies (e.g. Vaux 2003, Kurath 1949, Cassidy 1985-2002, Grieve et al. 2011). Moreover, the regionally distributed use of

the expressions ‘NorCa’ and ‘SoCal’ has been analyzed.

After data collection, the proportions of the raw individual results were calculated and mapped. Local spatial

autocorrelation statistics was used to identify underlying patterns of regional linguistic variation (Ord and Getis 1995,

Grieve 2011). Finally, the results were subjected to multivariate analyses to identify common patterns of regional linguistic

variation. Additional cultural and historical explanations for the assessed linguistic boundary as well as results from previous

linguistic research (e.g. Zelinsky 1973, Bright 1971, Bucholtz et al. 2007, Bucholtz et al. 2008) are provided.

References

Bright E. 1971. A Word Geography of California and Nevada. Berkeley, California: University of California Press.

Bucholtz M, Bermudez N, Fung V, Edwards L, Vargas R. 2007. Hella Nor Cal or Totally So Cal? The Perceptual Dialectology of

California. Journal of English Linguistics 35, 325-352.

Bucholtz M, Bermudez N, Fung V, Vargas R, Edwards L. 2008. The Normative North and the Stigmatized South: Ideology and

Methodology in the Perceptual Dialectology of California. Journal of English Linguistics 36, 62-87.

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Grieve J. 2011. A Regional Dialect Survey of Contraction Rate in Written Standard American English. International Journal of

Corpus Linguistics 16: 514-546.

Grieve J, Speelman D, Geeraerts D. 2011. A statistical method for the identification and aggregation of regional linguistic

variation. Language Variation and Change 23: 193-221.

Grieve J, Asnaghi C. 2011. The Analysis of Regional Lexical Variation using Site-Restricted Web Searches. Presented at

Methods in Dialectology 14, London, Canada, August 3, 2011.

Grieve J, Asnaghi C, Ruette T. (under review, 2013). Site-Restricted Web Searches for Data Collection in Regional

Dialectology. American Speech.

Kurath H. 1949. A Word Geography of the Eastern United States. University of Michigan Press.

Ord JK, Getis A. 1995. Local Spatial Autocorrelation Statistics: Distributional Issues and an Application. Geographical

Analysis 27: 286-306.

Smith J. 2011. NorCal vs. SoCal: Culture Communication. Thesis. California Polytechnic State University.

Vaux B. 2003. Harvard Survey of North American Dialects. Online Publication.http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/

dialect/index.html (March 2012).

Zelinsky W. 1973. The Cultural Geography of the United States. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.

La syntaxe balkanique. Aspects typologiques et diachroniques.

Assenova, Petya

(Sofia University)

1. Dans les domaines linguistiques proches que sont la linguistique balkanique et l’eurolinguistique (Reiter 1991), les objets

de recherche recouvrent deux classes typologiques de langues: l’union linguistique balkanique (ULB) et l’union linguistique

européenne (SAE). Les méthodes utilisées ainsi que les approches d’étude se recoupent. Bien que l’eurolinguistique soit née

au sein de la linguistique balkanique, l’ULB est considérée comme constituante de la SAE, à sa périphérie. Les similitudes et

les différences entre les « balkanismes » et les « européismes » peuvent être décrites comme suit.

Les européismes, comme les balkanismes, se manifestent au niveau syntaxique et touchent certaines catégories

grammaticales; les européismes (comme les balkanismes) sont, en général, des néologismes (Haspelmath 2001).

Les balkanismes de plus recouvrent des types communs à tous les niveaux des langues balkaniques, mais les

similitudes d’ordre morphologique sont particulièrement remarquables dans le cas de l’ULB. Parmi les balkanismes, on

trouve également des archaïsmes.

L’union linguistique, étant un groupe aréal et typologique par définition, convient au mieux à l’application des

méthodes typologiques et aréales. Ceci vaut tant pour la SAE que pour l’ULB. Mais il est à noter que cette dernière recoure à

la méthode comparative et historique pour atteindre un résultat satisfaisant dans la recherche des origines convergentes de

certaines balkanismes; l’application des critères diachroniques à la typologie mène vers une typologie diachronique

(Assenova 1990).

Après avoir étudié depuis longtemps les balkanismes, l’idée s’est fait jour depuis un certain temps qu’on rencontre

ceux-ci partout en Europe et qu’on peut donc les considérer comme européismes. Mais le présent rapport se fonde sur la

conviction que l’ULB présente «un phénomène unique d'éléments non-uniques » (Цивьян 1989).

2. La plupart des similitudes entre les langues balkaniques sont d’ordre syntaxique: il est notoire qu’après le lexique, c’est le

niveau syntaxique qui résiste le moins au processus des contacts entre les langues. Bien qu'elles soient les plus nombreuses,

les similitudes syntaxiques ne déterminent pas l'existence (ou la non-existence) de l'union linguistique, mais il n’existe pas de

l’union linguistique sans similitudes syntaxiques.

L’importance de la syntaxe pour la formation d’un groupe des langues convergentes se manifeste au niveau de la

morphologie: une bonne partie des balkanismes, tels que les formes du future et du conditionnel, ainsi que l’article défini,

sont apparus comme des syntagmes qui, par la suite ont été morphologisés. Dans les cas restreints du bilinguisme actuel

aux Balkans, la sensibilité de la syntaxe est observable en état d’action.

3. Mais il ne suffit pas d’analyser le rapprochement ou l’identité des phénomènes sur lesquels se concentrent la linguistique

balkanique ou l’eurolinguistique (ou encore la géolinguistique), “it is essential to note similarities in function, even where

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there are no similarities in form” (Joseph 1983): dans les langues balkaniques, ce sont les fonctions distinctives de l’article

défini, qu’il soit postposé ou préposé, l’universalité du subjonctif analytique, apte à agir dans les domaines des autres

modes, la nécessité de l’expression de l’évidentiel par des moyens grammaticalisés, etc. qui seront examinés dans le rapport.

Countability and gender in modern Dutch.

Audring, Jenny

(University of Amsterdam)

Modern Dutch has a mismatching gender system: nouns distinguish two genders, pronouns three. As a result, speakers are

uncertain which pronoun to use with which noun. In colloquial speech, an ingenious solution has emerged. This solution

makes use of the count-mass distinction: masculine gender has come to be associated with countable, neuter gender with

uncountable referents (Audring 2006, 2009).

Waar

ligt

pen/

het

boek?

–

Wacht,

pak

‘m

voor

je.

where

lies

def.c.sg

pencil(c)

def.n.sg

book(n)

wait

get

pro.3sg.m

for

you

‘Where is the pencil/the book?

–

Wait, I’ll get it (lit.

him

) for you.

Als

melk/

water

kookt

mag

‘t

niet

heet

worden.

when

you

milk(c)

water(c)

kook

may

pro.3sg.n

not

too

hot

become

‘When you’re boiling milk/water it shouldn’t get too hot.

This spontaneous resemanticization poses interesting problems for the theory of morphosyntax. First off, the question arises

where the link between gender and countability comes from. While such links have been claimed for other languages (Vogel

2000, Matasović 2004, Siemund 2008), no language has a gender system entirely based upon countability. Such a language,

if it existed, it would be problematic theoretically, as nouns are typically flexible with regard to countability, while gender is

regarded as an invariant lexical feature.

Secondly, the side-by-side existence of the new semantic genders of Dutch and the traditional syntactic gender

system leads to massive variety in gender agreement. Such variety is usually associated with exceptional nouns called

“hybrids”, the standard example being the German noun Mädchen ‘girl’.

Das

Mädchen

kommt

morgen

zurück,

wenn

es/sie

wieder

gesund

ist

def.n.sg

girl(n)

comes

tomorrow

back

when

pro.3sg.n/f

again

healthy

‘The girl will come back tomorrow when she’s feeling better.’

Hybridity usually arises from conflicts between the natural gender of persons and the grammatical gender of person nouns.

The count-mass distinction, however, permeates the entire noun vocabulary. For Dutch, this means that every neuter count

noun and every common mass noun is a potential hybrid: a massive number of hybrid nouns.

Third, the flexibility of nouns between a count or a mass reading has the consequence that many nouns are hybrids

only some of the time. This poses theoretical difficulties for a model in which hybridity is considered a lexical property of

nouns.

In this talk, I will discuss the unique data situation of Dutch as well as the three theoretical problems. I will propose

a solution in terms of a pronominal view of gender agreement and the Hierarchy of Individuation (after Sasse 1993).

References

Audring, Jenny. 2006. Pronominal Gender in Spoken Dutch. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 18:85-116.

Audring, Jenny. 2009. Reinventing Pronoun gender. Utrecht: LOT.

Matasović, Ranko 2004. Gender in Indo-European. Heidelberg: Winter.

Sasse, Hans-Jürgen. 1993. Syntactic categories and subcategories. In Syntax. Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer

Forschung/ An International Handbook of Contemporary Research, JoachimJacobs, Arnim von Stechow, Wolfgang

Sternefeld and Theo Vennemann (eds.), Berlin: de Gruyter, 646-686.

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Siemund, Peter. 2008. Pronominal Gender in English - A study of English varieties from a cross-linguistic perspective. London:

Routledge.

Vogel, Petra M. 2000. Nominal abstracts and gender in Modern German. A ‘quantitative’ approach towards the function of

gender, in B. Unterbeck, M. Rissanen T. Nevalainen, M. Saari (eds.), Gender in Grammar and Cognition. Berlin:

Mouton de Gruyter. 461-93.

Anaphoricity and polarity of "dynamic" spatial PPs:

two properties of motion constructions, in the light of verb semantics.

Aurnague, Michel

(CLLE-ERSS)

This contribution will tackle two important aspects of the interactions between (intransitive or “indirect” transitive) motion

verbs and spatial PPs in French (Aurnague 2008, 2011, Boons et al. 1976, Borillo 1998, Guillet 1990, Vandeloise 1987). First,

we will recall the main notions we use in order to characterize motion predicates –change of basic locative relation (Boons

1987) and change of placement– and we will show how these notions combine within the semantic content of the verbs

denoting a motion in the strict sense (as opposed to verbs of manner of motion; Talmy 1985, 2000). Then, we will

concentrate on the possibility, for the various verbs, of appearing in implicit landmark constructions (i.e. constructions in

which the landmark or locating entity involved in the process is not expressed: 1-5; Cornish 1999) and it will appear that

these constructions largely depend on the spatio-temporal structure of the verbs (in particular, on whether this structure is

centred or not on the change of relation) and on various other factors –deixis/perspective point (Fillmore 1975), world

knowledge, typing of the landmark.

(1) Il est parti une nuit… en coupant simplement à la cisaille les deux rangs de barbelés de l’enceinte de son oflag

(R. Abellio, Heureux les pacifiques, 1946)

‘He left one night… by simply clipping through the two rows of barbed wire of his oflag’s fence’

(2) Au deuxième [coup de revolver], il y a eu des cris, un blessé, et tout le monde s’est enfui (A. Camus, La Peste, 1947)

‘At the second [gun shot], there were cries, an injured person, and everybody ran away’

(3) L’homme est sorti, et lentement s’est éloigné (M. Genevoix, Ceux de 14, 1950)

‘The man went out, and slowly moved away’

(4) Djala, qui est venu hier ? (P. Louys, Aphrodite, 1896)

‘Djala, who came yesterday?’

(5) Alors le maire est arrivé et il a fait trois grands saluts de tout le corps (M. Barrès, Mes cahiers, t. 1, 1898)

‘Then the mayor arrived and he made three big bows with his whole body’

In a third step, we will examine the association of verbs and PPs with opposite polarities, which turns out to be in close

correlation with the existence of an implicit use of the verb (compare (6) with (1), (7) with (4), (8) with *Max est allé and (9)

with *Max a abouti).

(6) notre cher président du conseil, aussitôt après sa chute, est parti à la Sierra avec un fusil... (A. Malraux,

L’Espoir, 1937)

‘our dear prime minister, straight after his fall, left for the Sierra with a gun…’

(7) il est venu de Rennes avec moi (Villiers de L’Isle-Adam, Contes cruels, 1883)

‘He came from Rennes with me’

(8) *Max est allé de la cuisine

‘Max went from the kitchen’

(9) *Max a abouti du carrefour

‘Max ended up from the crossroads’

In conclusion, we will emphasize the asymmetries/dissymetries between initial and final changes of relation and placement

(Lakusta and Landau 2005, Regier and Zheng 2007) revealed by the two constructions studied and will relate them to other

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facets of the asymmetry of motion descriptions in French.

References

Aurnague, Michel. 2008. Qu’est-ce qu'un verbe de déplacement ? : critères spatiaux pour une classification des verbes de

déplacement intransitifs du français. In Actes du Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française, CMLF’08, Jacques

Durand, Benoît Habert and Bernard Lacks (eds.), 1905-1917 (cd-rom). Paris : ILF and EDP Sciences,

http://www.linguistiquefrancaise.org/articles/cmlf/pdf/2008/01/cmlf08041.pdf

Aurnague, Michel. 2011. “How motion verbs are spatial: the spatial foundations of intransitive motion verbs in French”.

Lingvisticae Investigationes 34:1: 1-34.

Boons, Jean-Paul. 1987. “La notion sémantique de déplacement dans une classification syntaxique des verbes locatifs”.

Langue Française 76: 5-40.

Boons, Jean-Paul, Alain Guillet and Christian Leclère. 1976. La structure des phrases simples en français : constructions

intransitives. Geneva: Droz.

Borillo, Andrée. 1998. L’espace et son expression en français. Paris: Ophrys.

Cornish, Francis. 1999. Anaphora, discourse, and understanding: evidence from English and French. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Fillmore, Charles J. 1975. Santa Cruz lectures on deixis 1971. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Linguistics Club.

Guillet, Alain. 1990. Une classification des verbes transitifs locatifs. Thèse de Doctorat d’Etat, Université Paris 7.

Lakusta, Laura and Barbara Landau. 2005. “Starting at the end: the importance of goals in spatial language”. Cognition 96: 1-

33.

Regier, Terry and Mingyu Zheng. 2007. “Attention to endpoints: a cross-linguistic constraint on spatial meaning”. Cognitive

Science 31: 705-719.

Talmy, Leonard. 1985. “Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms”. In Language typology and syntactic

description (vol. 3): grammatical categories and the lexicon, T. Shopen (ed.), 57-143. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a cognitive semantics (vol. I and II). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Vandeloise, Claude. 1987. “La préposition à et le principe d’anticipation”. Langue Française 76: 77-111.

Borrowing of apudlocative flagging in Georgian and other languages of the Caucasus.

Authier, Gilles

(Inalco Paris)

Apudlocative may be proposed as a cover term for “the coding of spatial relations with human landmarks” (Luraghi, in

Kittilä, Västi and Ylikoski 2011) or rather any flagging device (adposition or case) denoting exclusively location near a human

person. The presence of a dedicated apudlocative flagging device is an areal feature extending over most of the Eastern

Caucasus.

We propose to show that the category has spread across families represented in the area, from East Caucasian to

Tat (Iranian) to Georgian (South Caucasian).

In East-Caucasian languages, cases systems are notoriously large, due to the presence, in most of the languages of

this family, of a special locative subparadigm which combines at least to morphemes, denoting location and orientation (cf.

Comrie 1997) as opposed to ‘grammatical cases’. But the border between both domains is not clear-cut, as spatial cases

tend to acquire grammatical functions. And some functions, for instance apudlocative, can be expressed by a case

morphologically integrated in the locative subparadigm, or be part of the non-integrated grammatical cases, or be expressed

by a postposition : while locative cases are cognate in all branches of the familiy (Alekseev 1997), there is no apulocative

case marker reconstructible for proto-East Caucasian. What’s more, some instances of ergative flagging appear to have been

borrowed from another language.

In contact with East Caucasian, various dialects of Tat (Iranian) where various nouns have grammaticalized as an

apudlocative preposition, have borrowed the apulocative category (Authier 2012). Various body part nouns have

grammaticalised as apulocative prepositions in different Tat languages : yan ‘side’, tan ‘body’, kinar ‘flank’ or kun ‘buttocks’.

Georgian is a South Caucasian language not genetically related to East Caucasian languages which we propose to

recognize as the origin of the apudlocative category, and with no or few contact with these. But Georgian has borrowed

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from Iranian – probably from a Tat outsider dialect like the one still spoken in Gombori, near Tbilisi – the use of the noun tan

‘body’ as an apudlocative marker, and turn what is in Tat a preposition into a postposition, described in Georgian grammars

as a case.

References

Alekseev, M., 1997, Reconstruction of the Proto-East-Caucasian locative morphemes. In van den Berg, H. Studies in

Caucasian Linguistics, CNWS, Leiden

Auhier, G., 2012, Emergence of personal cases (apudlocative and comitative) in two unrelated languages in contact (Eastern

Caucasus) (SWL5 Dubrovnik - sept 2012)

Comrie, B., 1999, « Spatial cases in Daghestanian languages », STUF 52.

Kittilä, S., Västi K., and Ylikoski J. (Ed.) Case, Animacy and Semantic Roles. University of Helsinki / University of Oulu and

University of Helsinki / University of Helsinki and Sámi University College.

Under the radar: Normativity and unconventional syntax.

Backus, Ad and Onar Valk, Pelin

(Tilburg University)

Languages may be said to be held together by norms. Whenever we come across forms that we perceive as ungrammatical,

weird, or otherwise remarkable, underlying this judgment is some comparison of the utterance with what we had expected

to hear. These expectations are based on past experience. What we expect is adherence to conventions; when we hear

something unconventional, the norm is breached.

While normativity probably plays a role in a wide range of human behavior, language norms may well be

characterized by special features. Primarily, language is produced rapidly and often fairly automatically, and this means the

norms (or conventions) must be entrenched very well, since otherwise conscious attention would be needed before they

can be reproduced. Of course, cognitive activity is involved in any act of speaking, but psycholinguistic research suggests

that much of this cognitive activity is beyond our conscious attention, i.e. it is ‘under the radar’. And, except perhaps for

phonology, no area of language seems as much under the radar as syntax.

In our contribution, we examine syntactic change in Turkish as spoken in immigrant populations in Western Europe.

Speakers are bilingual in at least Turkish and the locally dominant language, in our case Dutch. As our data from

conversational recordings and acceptability judgments show, their Turkish, which we refer to as ‘NL-Turkish’ (as opposed to

the ‘TR-Turkish’ of Turkey) undergoes a lot of Dutch influence; in our paper, we look at subordinate clauses. Interestingly,

NL-Turkish speakers are aware of speaking a ‘deviant’ form of Turkish, and they bemoan this fact in interviews, yet seem

powerless to do anything about it. Language change can be conceptualized as the competition between rival norms, in this

case between a fairly immutable ‘external norm’ (i.e. how things are said in TR-Turkish) and the constantly evolving

‘internal’ norm of the speakers (i.e. what is entrenched in their idiolectal competence). In our discussion, we will first

present empirical data on how large the differences are between the external TR-Turkish norm and the internal norms of

our various participants, and then explore the reasons why it is especially syntax that is under the radar. Speakers are, for

example, reasonably good at avoiding Dutch lexemes when their use is socially not appropriate (e.g. when talking to

monolinguals). As part of this discussion, we investigate the possibly interacting contributions of high frequency (high

frequency means deeper entrenchment and therefore lesser accessibility to conscious attention) and low semantic

specificity (syntactic form is relatively meaningless and thus makes conscious attention harder). While we will focus on

empirical data, we will entertain the hypothesis that this interaction is a design feature of language, something which would

be more or less in line with usage-based approaches to linguistic theory.

Lingua Receptiva: taking the best from the norms.

Bahtina-Jantsikene, Daria

(Utrecht University)

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- Bent u hier bekend?

- Well, try me!

- Eh, do you know where the ‘apotheek’ is?

The world switched on the globalization mode long time ago, yet here we are, still adjusting to an ever increasing complexity

of realities, wondering how come the old norms no longer apply. Like that stranger passing on a bike, answering your Dutch

phrase in English – what do you say back? Do you even know that English is not your only option? Is there multilingualism

beyond English as the classical lingua franca? Imagine speaking your own language to another person and understanding

theirs. They call it lingua receptiva, the multilingual mode based on receptive skills and linguistic repertoires (Rehbein, ten

Thije and Verschik, 2012), knowing a language beyond the standard ‘speak L2 fluently’ definition.

The notion of receptive multilingualism, existing in one form or another for a considerable amount of time, has

been largely neglected both by language users and scholars for the last two centuries. The reason is the nation state

formation in the 17

– 19

centuries, shifting linguistic landscape towards monolingualism and introducing the ideal of

‘one language for one country’ (Braunmüller, 2007). From the Indian American tribes to the merchants in the Habsburg

Empire in the past to Scandinavia and Switzerland as the modern hotspots of multilingual contacts, lingua receptiva

(henceforth, LaRa) offers communication mode aimed at mutual understanding with the minimal effort. Recent studies

indicate that people tend to remain unaware of this option, sometimes even despite being occasional users of LaRa (e.g.,

business communication in the border areas, Beerkens, 2010).

The current paper investigates lingua receptiva between the speakers of Estonian and Russian in Estonia. The data

were collected in the experimental settings and analysed along with the participants’ socio-linguistic information (e.g.,

history of language acquisition, attitudes to L2) and their L2 proficiency (both measured and self-reported). The results from

the 38 LaRa dialogues demonstrate that there is more to receptive competence than the L2 tests can possibly indicate. For

instance, some subjects with extremely low L2 proficiency managed to establish mutual understanding in the LaRa mode

and achieved communicative success; their self-assessed knowledge of the foreign language was also very low. The

outcomes are used to argue that efficiency depends on more factors: it is hypothesised that mutual understanding can be

reinforced by integrating all available linguistic resources (e.g., code-mixing), introducing meta-communication to monitor

interaction as well as relaxing the grammaticality norms.

References

Beerkens, R. (2010). Receptive multilingualism as a language mode in the Dutch–German border area. Münster, Germany:

Waxmann.

Braunmüller, K. (2007). Receptive multilingualism in Northern Europe in the Middle Ages: A description of a scenario. In: J.

D. ten Thije and L. Zeevaert (Eds.). Receptive multilingualism: Linguistic analyses, language policies and didactic

concepts (pp. 25–47). Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.

Rehbein, J., Thije, J. D. ten, Verschik, A. (2012). Lingua Receptiva (LaRa) – The quintessence of Receptive Multilingualism. In:

J. D. ten Thije, J. Rehbein, A. Verschik (2012) (Eds.) Receptive Multilingualism. Special issue of the International

Journal for Bilingualism, September 2012 (16):248-264.

Borrowing adpositions through contact with Spanish: typological constraints?

Bakker, Dik and Hekking, Ewald

(University of Amsterdam and University of Queretaro)

There seem to be few constraints on the borrowing of elements from the two major lexical categories, nouns and verbs

(Matras 2009:166). Potential explanations for this are the generally presumed universality of these two categories (Croft

2003:184), their prosodic prominence, and the high absolute and relative frequencies of many corresponding lexemes in

discourse. Furthermore, they often have rather transparent and concrete meanings, which contributes to their accessibility

in the conceptual sense. This, however is less clear for other lexical categories, such as adjectives, which may have only a

small set of representatives in both the source or the target language, if any at all. And it is even less clear for most

grammatical categories, be they free or bound. Adpositions hold an intermediate position on the lexicon-to-grammar cline,

both synchronically and diachronically, and as such make an interesting touchstone for the testing of hypotheses with

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respect to lexical and grammatical borrowing. A number of factors may play a role in the borrowing of adpositions, of which

the following might be the more crucial ones. Firstly, assuming that there exist adpositions in the source language of a

borrowing pair in the first place, they may or may not be present in the target language. Secondly, in either of the two

languages, there may be just a few adpositions or very many, which may be occuring frequently in discourse or very

infrequently. Furthermore, they may not be very grammaticalized, with a relatively long form, possibly reminiscent of the

noun or verb that they are derived from, and with a rather concrete meaning. Or they may be highly grammaticalized, with

a short form, and with very abstract semantics. Finally, typologically, languages may be postpositional (48.7% in Dryer 2011),

prepositional (43.2%), both (4.9%), inpositional (0.7%), or there may be no adpositions at all (2.5%).

In this paper, we try to establish the extent to which the above factors play a role in the borrowing of adpositions.

Our point of departure is that ‘anything goes’ in linguistic borrowing, as long as borrowers have some kind of pragmatic

motivation. There might, however be typological constraints that prevent a successful transfer. E.g. we would predict that

postpositional languages do not borrow prepositions, however ‘useful’ they might seem, and vice versa.

In order to test our hypothesis, we use corpora of three Native American languages, viz. Guaraní (Paraguay; SVO-

free/postpositional), Quichua (Ecuador; SOV/suffixing), and Otomí (Mexico; VOS/no adpositions). Each corpus consists of

around 100,000 words of spoken language, produced by 25 – 50 native speakers of different age groups, of two dialects. The

three languages are in close contact with Spanish, the official language of the respective countries. As a result, all three

languages have borrowed profusely from Spanish: anywhere between 15 and 20% of the tokens in the corpora are Spanish

loans. The languages, however, differ considerably with respect to the amount of Spanish prepositions among these loans.

The paper will seek to explain these differences in terms of the factors mentioned above. We will also check whether the

borrowing behaviour is consistent over the two dialects of each language.

References

Dryer, Matthew S. (2011). Order of Adposition and Noun Phrase. In: Dryer, Matthew S. and Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) The

World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, chapter 6. Available online at

http://wals.info/chapter/6. Accessed on 2013-01-07.

Croft, William (2003). Typology and Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Matras, Yaron (2009). Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

A missed opportunity: the notion of "spoiled language" in historical linguistics.

Bakró-Nagy, Marianne

(Hungarian Academy of Sciences)

This paper attempts to shed light on the processes through which the view that the most archaic and most

„original“ language variety should be the exclusive basis of descriptive fieldwork elevated to the status of a principle in

Uralic studies. Until the end of the 19

century, historical linguistic research was mainly based on written sources. When

Uralic linguists finally began to focus on oral texts, they concentrated their work on folklore texts of the most archaic quality

possible, believing that these preserve a kind of “unspoiled” and archaic state of the language and therefore would be most

valuable for comparative-historical linguistics. The collectors of the texts registered whether other linguistic codes were

used in everyday communication, but since the documentation or investigation of these did not fit the primary aims of the

research, incomparably less attention was accorded to them (cf. Hajdú 1980. 24). The view that the most archaic and most

“original” language variety had to be found and documented became elevated to the status of a principle, since any other

variety represented a “spoiled” state which historical linguistics need not concern itself with.

This principle almost exclusively dominated fieldwork based research up until recent times and has been further

strengthened by the fact that the languages in question are endangered and should, thus, be documented as quickly as

possible before they disappear. Thus, from its self-important ideological heights, historical linguistics rejected (and mostly

still rejects, unfortunately) the documentation and description of all those varieties which, in its view, do not represent the

“more original” state (whatever “more original” means). Grammatical descriptions are referring every now and then to

innovations that are differing from the original properties, e.g. nouns which designate animates do not take local case

anymore or there is a shift of the word stress partly due to Tatar influences in Udmurt (Csúcs 199. 279, 282), etc. but

systematic descriptions of the recent spoken language (like the description of the Taimyr pidgin resulting from the contact of

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Russian, Nganasan, Dolgan, Evenki and Even – Xелимский 1987, Stern 2005) are rare. As if they were not the products of

historical linguistic processes, as if, as a result of increasing bi- and multilingualism, amongst a myriad of grammatical code-

switching, it were not new varieties that have been emerging, with their linguistic systems neither better nor worse, only

different from the earlier “original” variety successfully used for communication. But, with few exceptions, this linguistic

“otherness” was not studied by historical linguistics, it was excluded from its focus of investigation. In doing so, and this is

the conclusion of the paper, historical linguistics deprived itself from taking the opportunity to follow the development of

the language of the community in question, starting from the materials of the earliest collections as the oldest sources and

up to the present. This is what I mean by a missed opportunity – missed for good.

References

Xелимский, Е. А. (1987) «Русский говорка место казать будем» (Таймырский пиджин). In: И. Ф. Вардуль – В. И. Беликов

(изд.) Возникновение и функционирование контактных языко. Москва. 84–93.

Csúcs, Sándor (1998) Udmurt. In: Daniel Adondolo ed. The Uralic Languages. London – New York: Routledge. 331-375.

Hajdú, Péter (1980) Az uralisztikai kutatások története és mai állapota [=History and recent state of the Uralic studies]. In:

Hajdú, Péter – Domokos, Péter: Uráli nyelvrokonaink [=Our Uralic language relatives]. Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó.

Stern, Dieter (2005) Taimyr Pidgin Russian (Govorka). Russian Linguistics 29, Issue 3: 289-318.

Typological evidence against universal effects of referential scales on agent case marking.

Balthasar, Bickel; Witzlack-Makarevich, Alena and Zakharko, Taras

(University of Zurich)

Introduction: If a language develops differential agent marking by case or adpositions, this is widely hypothesized to result

from a universal effect of referential scales, such that, for example, first and second person pronoun stand a higher chance

for accusative as opposed to ergative case marking. The idea was developed in the late 70s (Silverstein 1976, Moravcsik

1978, Comrie 1981, among others) and despite the lack of large-scale empirical tests, it is now widely taken to be an

established finding (cf. Aissen 1999).

Methods: In this paper we subject the idea of scale effects on differential agent case marking to empirical testing against

data from a large typological database with world-wide coverage. In order to do so, we consider various versions of the idea

and reformulate them as testable hypotheses: On the one hand, scale effects can be understood as a universal negative

correlation between the odds of overt agent case marking and scale ranks, or as an implicational universal proposing that, if

a language has a split in agent case marking, this split fits a universal scale.

We interpret scale effects as making predictions about abstract markedness relations and not about overt marking

patterns. The terms ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ thus describe which grammatical relation is structurally more constrained or

specified than the other: the sets {A} and {P} are more specific than the sets {S,P}, {S,A} and {S,A,P}. Under this

interpretation low-ranking agent arguments are predicted to be mapped into marked grammatical relations associated with

{A} relations, while high-ranking agents are predicted to be mapped into unmarked grammatical relations associated with

sets that include S, (i.e. {S,A,P} or {S,A}).

These predictions were tested using the Family Bias Method (Bickel 2011) which estimates preferences in

diachronic developments within established language families, based on the synchronic results of these developments.

Results and conclusions: Of the 462 systems (435 languages) in the sample, 59 have splits on agent, i.e. differential agent

marking of any kind (fitting or not fitting scales). Regardless of how one spells out the details of universal scales (e.g. first

and second over third person, or pronoun over noun), we found that the probabilities of developing differential agent

marking that fits a universal scale is in the same statistical ballpark as the estimated probability of developing differential

agent marking that does not fit a universal scale. What we do find, by contrast, is significant area effects: agent case-

marking splits tend to have developed and spread in Eurasia and the New-Guinea/Australia (‘Sahul’) macro-areas. This

suggests that any replication of scale effects across language families results from areal diffusion in repeated language

contact events rather than from universal principles in grammar or cognition.

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References

Aissen, Judith. 1999. Markedness and subject choice in optimality theory. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 17.

Bickel, Balthasar. 2011. Statistical modeling of language universals. Linguistic Typology 15:401 – 414. Comrie, Bernard. 1981.

The Languages of the Soviet Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moravcsik, Edith. 1978. On the

distribution of ergative and accusative patterns. Lingua 45.

Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Hierarchy of features and ergativity. In Grammatical Categories in Australian Languages, ed.

Dixon, Robert M. W. New Jersey: Humanities Press.

Binding in Chinese – anaphora and pronominals between syntax and pragmatics.

Bao, Meiyi and Bisang, Walter

(Mainz University)

In recent linguistic theories of the generative tradition, the description of anaphoric processes has been unified under what

has been termed the ‘Binding Theory’, a proposed module of Universal Grammar (e.g. Chomsky 1981, Reinhart and Reuland

1993).

However, in Chinese, the interpretation of anaphora and pronominals does not always follow purely structural

principles (cf. blocking effect: Huang 1984, Xue, Pollard & Sag 1994, Huang and Tang 1991, Xu 1993, Pan 1997, etc.). In our

most recent study, it turned out that even in sentences consisting of only one clause the interpretation of Chinese anaphora

depends on grammatical and pragmatic factors, the pragmatic features being [±intentionality] and [±introversion] for verbs

and [±relationality] for nouns. In a sentence with positive values for each feature las in (1), ziji tends to be bound by Lilin:

(1) Ziji de nü‘er bei Lilin daochu xuanyao.

SELF POSS daughter PASS Lilin everywhere show.off

‘Self’s daughter is showed off by Lilin everywhere.’

(xuanyao ‘show off’: [+intentional], [+introverted]; nü’er ‘daughter’: [+relational])

In contrast, in a sentence with all negative features as in (2), ziji is most likely to have disjoint interpretation.

(2) Ziji de zhutuo bei Lilin wangji-le

SELF POSS commission PASS Lilin forget-PF

‘Self’s commission is forgotten by Lilin.’

(wangji ‘forget’: [-intentional], [-introverted]; zhutuo ‘commission’ [-relational])

Based on such examples, an extensive self-paced reading experiment was conducted. Three conditions were tested:

• Sentence types: simple declarative, topic and bei passives (with 4 subtypes in the case of bei through combining the

verb with adverbial modifiers like ‘intentionally’) => 6 sentence types

• Pragmatic features: [±intentional], [±introverted], and [±relational] => 8 feature combinations

• Anaphor ziji vs. pronominal ta.

For each of these 96 test conditions (6 sentence types x 8 feature combinations x 2 anaphor vs. pronominal), 4 verbs were

selected. Thus, the whole experiment consisted 384 test items (4 x 96) plus twice as many fillers (768 ). The test was done

by 28 native speakers of Mandarin between 19 and 26 years.

In each example, the participants had to decide whether the anaphor/pronoun is coindexed with Lilin (cf. examples

(1), (2)) after seeing each phrase. If binding were subject to rigid syntactic rules, the results would always be discrete, i.e.,

100% [yes] with the anaphor ziji and 100% [no] with the pronoun ta. The data clearly show that this is not the case. The

ratio of [yes]/[no] judgments is subject to the following two hierarchies:

• Sentence-type hierarchy: In declarative sentences, the binding relationship between the anaphor/pronominal and the

local antecedent is stronger than in topic sentences, and even much stronger than in bei sentences.

• Hierarchy within the pragmatic factors (co-referential reading of anaphora/pronominals with local antecedent vs. long-

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distance antecedent): Plus features > Minus features; Combination of features > Single feature; Verb features > noun

feature.

In addition, the paced-reading experiment showed that the [yes]/[no] judgments differed at different positions in the

clause. Thus, coindexation is an incremental phenomenon.

References

Chomsky, N. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.

Huang, Y. -H. 1984. Reflexives in Chinese. Studies in Literature and Linguistics 10.

Huang, J. C.-T., A. Y.-H. Li and Y. Li. 2009. The syntax of Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Huang, C.-T. J. and C.-C. J. Tang. 1991. The Local Nature of the Long-Distance Reflexive in Chinese. In Koster, J. and Reuland,

E. (eds), Long-distance Anaphora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pan, H. 1997. Constraints on Reflexivization in Mandarin Chinese. New York: Garland Publication.

Reinhart, T. and E. Reuland. 1993. Reflexivity. Linguistic Inquiry 24, 657-702.

Xu, L. 1993. The Long Distance Binding of ziji. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 21, 123-141.

Xue, P., C. Pollard and I. A. Sag. 1994. A New Perspective on Chinese Ziji, in the Proceedings of the 13th West Coast

Conference on Formal Linguistics, pp. 432-447. The University of Chicago Press and CSLI Publication.

Imperative evidentiality in Innu language.

Baraby, Anne-Marie

(Université du Québec à Montréal)

Languages with a rich morphology, such as Innu (an Algonquian aboriginal language spoken in Northern Quebec, Canada),

have contributed significantly to our knowledge in several domains of linguistics, because these languages clearly mark

phenomena that may seem less obvious in more analytic languages. Innu is of particular interest in terms of imperative

typology, because, in that language, the imperative is more than just a ‘grammatical mood’ (Aikhenvald, 2010: 1). It is

actually part of a conjugation system, the orders, which subsume all verb paradigms found in Algonquian languages. In

short, the three orders – the independent, the conjunct and the imperative – comprise various conjugations and control

different types of clauses (for instance, most independent affirmative clauses and global interrogative clauses use

independent order verb forms; most independent negative clauses, embedded clauses, and clauses introduced by specific

particles use conjunct order verb forms). In addition, each order, including the imperative, encompasses different tenses

and/or moods (or modalities) and displays various conjugations or paradigms. Morphologically, each order has a specific set

of inflections, as we can see in the following examples, with first plural inclusive person (2+1): Tshitatussenan ‘We work (You

and me/us)’ (independent indicative); Apu atusseiat ‘We don’t work’ (conjunct indicative); Atussetau! , ‘Let’s work!’

(imperative indicative).

Within the imperative order there are three separate paradigms, which are morphologically marked. Actually, these

three paradigms are specialized imperatives, that is verbal forms used only in ‘directive’ clauses. They involve second person

subjects (singular and plural), except for the indicative which also involves a first plural inclusive person (you+me/us). These

imperatives occur in complementary distribution, either in terms of tense (immediate vs. delayed imperatives) or mood

(indicative vs. indirect imperatives): ‘Work!’ Atusse! (imperative indicative); Atussekan! (imperative delayed); Atusseme!

(imperative indirect). It is the latter that is the subject of our presentation, because that kind of imperative is less known in

studies about imperatives and it seems to be cross-linguistically rare (Aikhenvald: 2010). The Innu indirect imperative is a

kind of ‘absentative’ or ‘reported’ imperative’ (we find both meanings), but we argue that it actually expresses evidentiality,

a very productive grammatical category in Innu that is also found in independent and conjunct orders (In Innu grammar, the

moods marking evidentiality in independent and conjunct orders are called indirect). Indeed, there is, in that language, a

parallelism among the three orders, since in each order an indicative mood is opposed to an indirect mood, the latter

representing evidentiality. The existence of evidentiality within the imperative is not as easy to demonstrate as it is with

other types of structures, hence the need to study languages like Innu where that kind of grammatical category is clearly

marked by morphology.

Our analysis of Innu Imperatives is based on data obtained from transcribed oral narrative texts and from direct

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elicitation. Both kinds of data are necessary, since canonical imperative occurrences are not frequent in narrative texts. Our

approach to explain the use of imperative in Innu language is mostly descriptive and typological.

References

Aihkenvald, A. Y. 2010. Imperatives and Commands. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Baraby, A.-M. 2004. Guide de conjugaisons en langue innue. Sept-Îles (Québec): ICEM.

Xrakovskij, V. S. (dir.) 2001. Typology of Imperative Constructions, Munich: Lincom Europa.

The existential question revisited.

Bar-Asher Siegal, Elitzur

(Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

This paper focuses on the “existential question” (Francez 2007): "What propositions do existentials express, and how do

they come to express them?"

We should establish some terminology first:

There is a book on the shelf

pivot coda

There are two groups of approaches regarding the basic construction:

I. Bare existentials (those without codas) are the basic construction (McNally 1992)

II. Existential sentences with codas are the basic construction (Zucchi 1995 and Keenan 1987)

Francez (2007) raises problems with all previous theories and mentions two phenomena that a theory of existentials should

include:

a) the context dependence of bare existentials.

b) the pivot is the only obligatory cross-linguistic element in this construction, hence bare-existentials are the basic

construction.

In light of this, he proposes that pivots are the main predicates of existential constructions, the implicit argument of the

pivot is the context (time and space).

This paper follows Francez' direction, and provides new (morphological and syntactic) evidence from the Semitic

languages to support his claims:

a) There are many languages with bare existentials;

b) Pivots functions as the main predicate in existential clauses;

c) Various historical processes manifest the role of the context in existential predication.

It is, however, unclear in what sense bare-existentials are unique in their requirement for context to the extent that only in

this type of predication context is the implicit argument.

In the same way that the truth value of existential sentences are context-dependent, the following sentence from

Hebrew is context-dependent as well:

xisalti et-ha-tapuxim

consume.1.SG.PST ACC-DEF-apple-PL

“I consumed (all) the apples”

The clear result of the action is that the object of the action ceases to exist. But does this mean that we should consider

such verbs to be two-position predicates (with a context as an argument) as well? It seems more natural that the context is

not the argument but simply provides a domain. Thus, similarly this should the case be with bare-existentials.

Consequently, this paper argues the following:

1) As free-logics claim, the main predicate of the existentials is the predicate EXIST.

2) The predicate EXIST tends to be covert - (as is also) the case in every verbal sentence, where the existence of events is

asserted.

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This claim is supported by the fact that when existential sentences cannot be “translated” into sentences with subject

(pivot) and predicate (coda), they can be "translated" to sentences with the overt predicate EXIST, as is, for example, the

case when the codas have quantifiers:

a. i. There is only one kind of fish in every pond.

ii. Only one kind of fish exists in every pond.

(necessarily: every pond has just one kind of fish)

b. Only one kind of fish is in every pond.

(possibly: every pond has more than one kind of fish)

Thus, regarding the "existential question": existentials express existence of an entity, and they tend to express them with a

covert predicate. This discussion also sheds some light on the role of the context (time and space) in existential predications.

Why is quelques (‘some’) a better trigger of scalar inferences than certains (‘some’) in French?

Barbet, Cécile

(University of Neuchâtel)

In this paper, we set forth the results of two experiments. The first experiment shows that scalar inferences (SIs) ‘not all’

are easier to derive with the lexical trigger quelques than with certains. The high frequency of quelques compared to

certains could explain the facilitation effect with quelques. We test and invalidate this hypothesis in the second experiment

and therefore discuss the semantic properties of both quantifiers which could account for the results.

It has been shown that children are more likely to draw the SI ‘not all’ with quelques than with certains

(Pouscoulous et al. 2007). This finding is somewhat puzzling: certains is considered a proper partitive while quelques a

simple existential; therefore one would expect speakers to draw more SIs with certains. The proposed hypothesis is that

certains is a complex quantifier, leaving few resources for children to compute the SI. In contrast, quelques, being more

frequent and less complex, would be easier to process and hence would allow the derivation of SIs. The adults in the

control group in Pouscoulous et al.’s experiment derived SIs slightly more often with quelques than with certains, but the

results were not significant.

In a first segment-by-segment self-paced reading task, we found that, in 24 adult French native speakers, SIs were

easier to draw with quelques than with certains. We compared the reading times of an anaphoric segment (les autres, ‘the

others’) in 2 conditions:

a. C’était la fête des écoles hier. | Quelques enfants | ont dansé, | les autres | ont joué une pièce.

It was the school party yesterday. Some children danced, the others performed a play.

b. C’était la fête des écoles hier. | Certains enfants | ont dansé, | les autres | ont joué une pièce.

The anaphoric segment is expected to be easier to process when the SI had already been computed (Katsos et al. 2005).

Our results showed that it was read significantly more quickly when quelques was used in the preceding context

than when certains was used. Lexical frequency or lexical simplicity, or both, seem to help adults, just as they help children.

In order to investigate the contribution of frequency, we used the pronoun quelques-uns (‘some’) in a second

reading task. The determiner quelques is more frequent than the determiner certains, but the pronoun quelques-uns is less

frequent than the pronoun certains (‘some’). In an eye-tracking experiment, 36 adult native French speakers read brief

conversations in 2 conditions:

c. Marc: Tous les élèves de ta classe ont dansé à la fête hier soir ?

Sylvie: Quelques-uns ont dansé. Les autres n’ont pas osé, je crois.

Did all of the students in your class danced at the party last night?

Some did. The others didn’t dare, I think.

d. Marc: Tous les élèves de ta classe ont dansé à la fête hier soir ?

Sylvie: Certains ont dansé. Les autres n’ont pas osé, je crois.

The question (did all of the x do Y?) made the SI ‘not all’ relevant in the context. Fixation times on the anaphoric phrase les

autres were shorter in the quelques-uns-condition. Furthermore, the readers made fewer regressive saccades from that

region in this condition. Evidently, SI derivation is eased by quelques-uns, but here the facilitation effect cannot be due to

frequency. Instead, the semantic properties of quelques(-uns) and certains must underlie the results. Several hypotheses

concerning these properties (from i.a. Le Querler 1994, Corblin 2001, Banga et al. 2009) will be discussed.

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References

Banga, A., Heutinck, I. Berends, S. M. and Hendriks, P. (2009). “Some implicatures reveal semantic differences”, In: B. Botna

and J. van Kampen (Eds), Linguistics in the Netherlands 2009, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 1-13.

Corblin, F. (2001) "Où situer "certains" dans une typologie des groupes nominaux?", in Kleiber, G., Laca, B., Tasmowski, L.

eds, Typologie des groupes nominaux, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, pp.99-117.

Katsos, N., Breheny, R. and Williams, J. (2005). “The interaction of structural and contextual constraints during the on-line

generation of scalar inferences”, In Bara, B., Barsalou, L. and Bucciarelli (eds.), Proceedings of the 27th Annual

Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1108-13. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Le Querler, N. (1994). « Tout, chaque, quelque, certain : conditions d’équivalence entre indéfinis », Faits de langue, 4 : 89-

95.

Pouscoulous, N., Noveck, I. A., Politzer, G. and Bastide, A (2007). “A developmental investigation of processing costs in

implicature production”, Language Acquisition, 14(4): 347-375.

Using a parallel corpus in comparative Slavic aspectology.

Barentsen, Adrian

(University of Amsterdam)

The importance of Aspect – (Perfective (pf) vs. Imperfective (ipf)) – as a central category of the Slavic verb is well known.

Until quite recently assumptions about the nature of Slavic aspect were to a large extent based on data from aspect use in

Russian. However, during the last decades it has become evident that there exist systematic differences in choosing the

proper aspect between an Eastern (Russian, Belorussian, Ukrainian and Bulgarian) and a Western (Czech, Slovak, Sorbian

and Slovene) group of the Slavic languages, with Polish and Serbian/Croatian as transitional areas. On the whole the Eastern

group appears to have more possibilities of using ipf aspect for describing total events (achievements, complete

accomplishments etc.) and these possibilities decrease towards the West. This general picture and some of the most

important cases are well shown by Dickey (2000); nevertheless, detailed investigations of various specific cases are still

highly necessary to make the picture more complete. In view of the number of languages involved, such research is hard to

perform if it has to be based entirely on working with native informants (as is done by Dickey). For this reason it is

interesting to check the possibilities of using data from parallel corpora.

The paper presents a case study based on data from the parallel corpus that the author has been developing for

more than a decade. The corpus contains several parallel texts in all the main Slavic languages. I.e. the languages men-

tioned above but without Sorbian and plus Macedonian (which has not yet been treated by Dickey).

The case study consists of the comparison in these languages of aspect choice in past tense sentences of the kind

As soon as the telephone rang he (always) would immediately take the receiver. In such cases there is an interesting conflict

of two factors determining aspect choice in Slavic: on the micro level (of the individual events) there is a very prominent

sense of sequentiality, which usually asks for pf, while on the macro level we have ‘unbounded repetition’, which is widely

connected with ipf.

Although the number of such examples in the corpus is not very high, the pattern found is very consistent. The

main East-West distinction is properly confirmed. But the material also shows some interesting properties of a number of

these languages in coping with the specific conflict mentioned above. These languages systematically use means from other

verbal categories and/or display differences in aspect choice between main clause and dependent clause. To properly

account for these differences one has to divide the Slavic languages in no less than six groups. Such findings must certainly

be taken into account when we try to define more accurately the differences in meaning of the aspects in the various Slavic

languages.

The results of the case study suggest that the development of comparative Slavic aspectology could indeed profit

from a more extensive use of parallel corpus data.

Reference

Dickey, Stephen. 2000. Parameters of Slavic Aspect. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

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Same setting, different speakers: an investigation of idiolects.

Barlow,Michael

(University of Auckland)

To investigate differences in the production of different speakers, the speech of several White House press secretaries

taking part in press conferences is examined. An important advantage of working with this dataset is that the context of the

discourse is held constant across the different samples, which consist of between 200,000 and 1,200,000 words of running

text for each speaker and covers several months of press conferences. The transcripts were obtained using PHP scripts,

which enabled the relevant parts of the web pages to be accessed and downloaded automatically to yield the sets of

transcripts. The files were tagged for POS using the CLAWS7 tagset and for semantic tags using the USAS tagset.

Using a variety of probes, based on frequent bigrams and trigrams strings, POS tag sequences, grammatical

sequences, and semantic tags, we find that inter-speaker variability is greater than the intra-speaker variability and that the

frequency of use of expressions by individual speakers diverge markedly from the norm associated with multiple speakers.

In other words, there are clear differences in the speech of individuals despite changes in topic and despite interactions

with members of the media. One illustration of this is shown below. If we take just four very general constructions ---

passive, present perfect, negation (not/n't) and it BE ADJ to --- and use the frequency of each construction for each of the

different speech samples, we can use the matrix as input into a correlation analysis (Baayen 2008: 129).

The correlation analysis clusters samples by the same speaker (indicated by the same initial letter) in same region

on the two-dimensional graph. This shows the tendency of each speaker to be consistent in their use of constructions (in

terms of frequency) over time, despite other discourse factors that would naturally lead to greater variability in speech

patterns.

In this presentation we provide details on the nature and extent of individual differences in production routines. In

addition, we explore the consequences for grammatical theory of the fact that the patterns of production by individuals

differ quite markedly from the amalgamated input arising from the speech of others.

Reference

Baayen, R.H. 2008. Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Optimizing the norm: eye dialect, spelling pronunciation and constraint re-ranking.

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Baroni, Antonio

(Università degli Studi di Padova)

When it comes to linguistic norms, no aspect of language is more explicitly regulated than orthography. Speakers are

generally aware of most orthographic norms and are able to manipulate them in order to obtain specific stylistic results. A

clear example is Eye Dialect (ED henceforth), namely, spelling a word in a non-standard way while still reflecting its standard

pronunciation (Hull Bowdre 1961). English examples are <tonite>, <sed>, <thru>, <tho>, <woz> for tonight, said, through,

though, was. French examples are <koi>, <jamè>, <z’yeux> for quoi, jamais, (le)s yeux. ED is a quite conscious process, since

its function is either to give the impression of non-standard speech or to result ‘cool’ and/or rebellious.

A diametrically opposite phenomenon is Spelling Pronunciation (SP) or Buben effect (Levitt 1978; Blanche-

Benveniste and Chervel 1978). In this case, it is not the spelling that is made closer to the actual pronunciation, but the

other way around: letters that used to be silent are given a phonetic value or are interpreted as part of a complex

grapheme, e.g. in French, many final silent letters are now (optionally or compulsorily) pronounced, as in but [by ~ byt], cinq

[sɛ͂ ~ sɛ͂k], août [ut] (formerly [u]), sens [sɑ͂s] (formerly [sɑ͂]). In English, several words of classical origin now contain a [θ]

that was never there, as in author [ɔːθə/ɚ], from Latin auctor [auktor] (Neuman 2009:400). Unlike ED, SP is generally

considered acceptable in all contexts.

Since ED and SP do not apply evenly throughout the lexicon, one might assume that they are haphazard,

unpredictable processes, but it will be shown instead that they follow general patterns of standard orthography. In both

cases, the result is a more straightforward correspondence between phonemes and graphemes.

The two phenomena will be analyzed in a framework couched in Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky 1993, cf.

Song and Wiese 2010 for application to orthography). A few case studies from English and French will be considered. The

difference between standard and ED spelling will be accounted for with different constraint rankings: in the standard,

specific bidirectional phoneme ↔ grapheme constraints are ranked higher than general ones and the orthographic form is

present in the input together with the phonological form, whereas in ED the input is only phonological and general

bidirectional constraints are ranked higher than specific ones. SP is triggered by the high ranking of a constraint militating

against silent letters, Dep-L. Since Faithfulness constraints block deletion, the only viable way not to violate Dep-L is to

associate a corresponding phoneme to a formerly silent grapheme. Phonotactic constraints block the emergence of

phonologically non-acceptable strings, so that <often> can correspond to either [ɒfn̩] or [ɒftn̩] but <know> can never

correspond to *[knoʊ].

References

Blanche-Benveniste, C. and Chervel, A. (1978). L’orthographe. Paris: Maspero.

Hull Bowdre, P. jr. (1964). A Study of Eye Dialect. PhD Dissertation, University of Florida.

Levitt, J. (1978). The Influence of Orthography on Phonology: a Comparative Study (English, French, Spanish, Italian,

German). Linguistics 208.

Neuman, Y. (2009). L’influence de l’écriture sur la langue. PhD Dissertation, Université de Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle.

Prince, A. and Smolensky, P. (1993). Optimality Theory: constraints interaction in generative grammar. Ms., Rutgers

University.

Song, H. J. and Wiese, R. (2010). Resistance to complexity interacting with visual shape – German and Korean orthography.

Writing Systems Research 2.2. 87-103.

Multiple yeah: conventional prosody and constructions.

Barth-Weingarten, Dagmar

(University of Basel and University of Freiburg)

Response tokens are usually not the first items that come to mind when talking about grammar and constructions. On the

other hand, they are a pre-requisite for smooth interaction: They have been shown to regulate turn-taking, signal

understanding and organize the participants‘ relationship, and their non-occurrence can significantly influence the further

course of the exchange. Therefore response tokens are an intricate part of spoken grammar.

The response token yeah is the most frequent response token in American English. It functions as a continuer, an

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acknowledgement token with high speakership incipiency and an affirmative response to a yes/no question. For interaction

to continue smoothly, participants should be able to identify the relevant function of yeah because it has different

implications for the further course of talk: the primary speaker can continue uninhibitedly with the continuer, say just a little

more with the acknowledgement token or should stop because the question is already answered. To date, various cues to

the function of response tokens have been mentioned: context, sequential environment, co-text and prosodic-phonetic

form.

Multiple sayings of the response token yeah are much less studied, like multiple sayings of response tokens in

general. This presentation will show that multiple yeahs differ from repeated yeahs in that they occur in stable forms in a

number of variants in American English telephone conversation. The variants are distinguished by their specific prosodic-

phonetic form, in particular their intonation contour, and they seem to be used conventionally in specific contexts with

specific functions. The latter range from alignment to disalignment as well as from affiliation to disaffiliation.

The findings are based on a pilot study of multiple yeahs which were culled from 15 hrs of (semi-)private American-

English telephone conversation (CallHome Corpus) and analyzed by methods from Interactional Linguistics and Phonology

for conversation.

The findings raise a number of issues for a construction-grammar approach:

1) If the phenomenon qualifies as a construction, as I believe it does, how many constructions are we talking about?

2) How can their prosodic-phonetic, phrasal and functional aspects be united in (a) constructional description(s)?

3) How can specifically interactional aspects (sequential placement, sequential consequences etc) be incorporated

into this?

4) What is their position in a constructional network?

5) How did they emerge?

With these, the presentation touches upon a number of issues to be raised in the workshop.

Control your mood! The structure of subjunctive clauses across European languages.

Baunaz, Lena; Puskas, Genoveva and Socanac, Tomislav

(University of Geneva)

We discuss alternations between embedded subjects in obviation and control contexts. Standard approaches (Quer 2005,

Farkas 1992, Dobrovie-Sorin 2001) roughly divide the world of embedded subjects in two: (obligatory) obviation generally

occurs in subjunctive embedded clauses and control in infinitives.

We pose two theoretical questions, which we claim are related: a) what is the structural underpinning of

subjunctive/infinitive clauses; and b) what is the status of embedded subjects in such clauses. We take obviation/control to

be a diagnostic for subjunctive/infinitive-like clauses, regardless of the surface morphological marking. We account for the

licensing of different kinds of embedded subjects using evidence from French (Fr), Romanian (Ro), Neapolitan (Na),

Hungarian (Hu) and Croatian (Cr). The conclusions we reach should simplify control theory.

We consider clauses embedded under verbs of different classes, which systematically select either subjunctive or

infinitive-type clauses cross-linguistically: directives (command), desideratives (want), purposives (strive), modals (can),

implicatives (succeed) and aspectuals (begin). We make several observations:

(i) Subjunctive/infinitive distribution with these predicates is not uniform cross-linguistically. Directives, desideratives

and purposives are systematically associated with the subjunctive (in non-control contexts), while modals and

implicatives/aspectuals vary between infinitives and subjunctives.

(ii) Despite these apparent mood variations, all languages exhibit similar constraints on subject licensing. Directives

exhibit obligatory obviation; desideratives alternate between control and subject obviation. Modals, aspectuals and

implicatives only exhibit subject control, including in Cr and Ro which can introduce a subjunctive form instead of an

infinitive in such contexts.

(iii) Obligatory subject-obviation property in directives resembles what is found in imperatives, which ban 1.p.sg.: in

both cases, the agent that makes the command cannot direct it to him/herself. Subjunctive complements under

directives contain something more in their structure, which relates them to imperatives. A clear indication for this

comes from Na and Hu: under directives, Na introduces a modal-like operator similar to should, while Hu exhibits verb-

particle inversion, which is also found in imperatives (Tóth 2008).

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(iv) There is a distinction between different types of embedded clauses w.r.t. to Topic/Focus (HaegemanandÜrögdy

2010): in non-control (subjunctive) clauses, Topics and Foci move relatively freely to the embedded left periphery,

while with modals, implicatives and aspectuals, such movements are strongly degraded.

On the basis of (i)-(iv), we propose that subjunctive/infinitive clauses across languages have different structures, with a

more or less truncated left periphery. Predicates do not select subjunctive/infinitive clauses as such but clauses of different

sizes. Restrictions on left peripheral phenomena in subject control-structures indicate a more truncated left periphery.

These structural differences can account for embedded subject licensing. We propose that lexical/pro subjects are

not related to the same position as PRO: they are associated with a relatively high left-periphery projection- SubjP

(RizziandShlonsky 2007)- where they receive a referential value, whereas PRO remains lower (SpecTP). This, in turn,

explains subject-control: in embedded clauses with smaller structures, SubjP is truncated and consequently the embedded

subject stays under SpecTP, where it can only be anaphoric to the matrix subject. Subject control is thus related to the size

of structure.

References

Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht : Foris Publications. (GB).

Dobrovie-Sorin, C. 2001. Head-to-head merge in Balkan Subjunctives and Locality. In: Comparative Syntax of the Balkan

Languages. M.-L. Rivero and A. Ralli (eds.), 44-73. Oxford:OUP.

Farkas, D. 1992. On Obviation. In: Lexical Matters. Ivan Sag and A. Szabolcsi (eds.), 85-109: CSLI.

Haegeman, Liliane and Barbara Ürögdi (2010) Referential CPs and DPs: An operator movement account. Theoretical

Linguistics 36: 233-246.

Quer, Josep 2005. "Subjunctive". In The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, volumes I-V, Martin Everaert, Henk van Riemdsdijk ,

Rob Goedemans, and Bart Hollebrandse (eds), ch.68. Oxford: Blackwell.

Rizzi, Luigi and Ur Shlonsky. 2007. “Strategies of Subject Extraction”, in H.- M.Gärtner and U. Sauerland (eds). Interfaces +

Recursion = Language? Chomsky's Minimalism and the View from Syntax-Semantics. 115-16. Berlin: Mouton de

Gruyter.

Tóth, Enikö. 2008. Mood Choice in Complement Clauses. A Semantic Approach with Special Reference to Hungarian.

Collection: Metalinguistica, volume 21.

The system of subordination in Ossetic: influence from North-West Caucasian.

Belyaev, Oleg

(Russian Academy of Sciences)

The system of subordinate clause marking in Ossetic (Iranian > Indo-European) is characterized by the prevalence of the so-

called correlative construction, where the subordinate clause is normally left-detached and contains the

interrogative/relative pronoun or NP in preverbal position, and is obligatorily accompanied in the main clause by a

demonstrative element (≪correlate≫), which does not form a constituent with the subordinate clause. The preverbal NP

and the correlate are in principle independent and can even countain different nouns (1). This construction is used not only

for restrictive relative clauses1, but also for most adverbial clause types, including temporal clauses (2), locative clauses,

manner clauses, and causal clauses. It is also used for most complement clause types (3). Most of the non-relative

subordinate clauses in Ossetic are thus headless correlative clauses.

This system is drastically different from the systems encountered in other Iranian languages, which are

characterized by the use of clause-initial subordinators for complement clauses and postnominal relative clauses (like

persian ke). Adverbial clauses are introduced either by specialized subordinators, or by the use of headed relative clauses

(like Persian vaqt-i ke ‘at the time when’).

The correlative construction is absent from most New Iranian languages; in those languages where it is present, its

use is limited to relative clauses. The latter situation also applies to Avestan and other ancient Indo-European languages.

A system of subordination that closely resembles that of Ossetic is the system of Circassian languages (North-West

Caucasian), in particular Adyghe. Relative clauses in these languages can be both internally and externally-headed, or even

contain both heads at the same time (4). The relativized argument(s) are cross-referenced on the verb by preverbal markers

accompanied by the relative marker z



-. The most striking similarity between the two systems is that in Adyghe, like in

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Ossetic, the headless relative construction is used for adverbial clauses (5) and for factive complement clauses (6). In

(Gerasimov and Lander 2008), it has been argued that factive complement clauses in Adyghe involve the relativization of the

≪factive argument≫ of the subordinate clause.

Therefore, headless relative clauses in Adyghe, like in Ossetic, can be used for all types of subordinate clauses.

Such an expansion of headless relative clauses in the domain of subordination is cross-linguistically unusual and

does not appear in any languages of the Caucasus except for Ossetic and North-West Caucasian. The Ossetic system, being

untypical for Iranian languages, is thus most likely a result of contact influence from neighbouring Circassian languages, even

though the correlative construction itself is a feature inherited from Proto-Iranian.

Examples

(1) OSSETIC

[uroč-ə či /sə lɜpːu qɜr-ɜj zərd-t-ɑ], wəj /

lesson-IN who.NOM what boy voice-ABL speak-TR-PST.3

DemDist.GEN

wəsə fədwɑǯ-ə nəjːɑrǯ-ət-ɜm fɜ-zur-zən-ɜn

DemDist misbehaver-GEN parent-PL-ALL PV-speak-FUT-1SG

‘I will speak of the parents of the misbehaving boy who spoke loudly at the lesson’

(2)

[dɜ= nəχaš =dən kʷə a-jqʷəšt-on], wɜd bɑ-sin kod-t-on

SG.POSS

speech 2S

G.ENCL.DAT

when

PV-

hear-

PST.TR

then

-happiness do-

TR-PST

‘When I heard your voice, I became happy’

(3)

[də =jɜ kɜj bɑ-kod-t-aj], wəj žon-ən

G.NOM

G.ENCL.GEN COMPL PV-

-TR-PST

IST.NOM

know-

PST

‘I know that you’ve done it’

(4) ADYGHE

[ʒeḳʷeλ̣-ew jə-qale qe-z-ʁe-ʁʷəna-ʁe] λ̣əχʷəẑə-r ja.dež’ qe-ḳʷe-ž’ə-ʁ

soldier-ADV POSS-town DIR-REL.A-CAUS-border-PST hero-ABS home DIR-go-RE-PST

‘The hero-soldier who has protected his town has returned home.’(Lander 2012: 244)

(5)

[a-xe-r č’əle-m qə-ze-ḳʷe-ž’ə-m] sase zvenjevoj pe-rə-tə-š’tə-ʁe

that-PL-ABS village-OBL DIR-REL.TEMP-go-RE-OBL Sase workteam_leader LOC-INSTR-stand-AUX-PST

‘When they returned to the village, Sase was a workteam leader’ (Arkad’ev et al. 2009: 97)

(6)

[azemat qə-zere-ḳʷe-š’tə-r] s-e-ŝŝe

Azamat DIR-FCT-go-FUT-ABS 1SG.A-DYN-know

‘I know that Azamat will come’ (Serdobol’skaja, Motloxov 2009: 545)

References

Arkad’ev, P. M., Ju. A. Lander, A. B. Letučij, N. R. Sumbatova and Ja. G. Testelec. 2009. Vvedenie. Osnovnye svedenija ob

adygejskom jazyke [Introduction: general information on Adyghe]. In: Ja. G. Testelec (ed.). Aspekty polisintetizma:

očerki po grammatike adygejskogo jazyka.Moscow: RGGU, pp. 17120.

Gerasimov, D. V. and Ju. A. Lander. 2008. Reljativizacija pod maskoj nominalizacii i faktivnyj argument v adygejskom jazyke

[Relativization under the guise of nominalization and the factive argument in Adyghe]. In: V. A. Plungjan, S. G.

Tatevosov (eds.). Issledovanija po glagol’noj derivacii. Moscow: Jazyki slavjanskoj kul’tury, pp. 290313.

Lander, Ju. A. 2012. Reljativizacija v polisintetičeskom jazyke: adygejskie otnosite’lnye konstrukcii v tipologičeskoj

perspektive. PhD dissertation, Russian State University for the Humanities.

Serdobol’skaja, N. V. and A. V. Motloxov. 2009. Semantika konstrukcij s sentencial’nymi aktantami v adygejskom jazyke

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[The semantics of complement clauses in Adyghe]. In: J.G. Testelec (ed.).Aspekty polisintetizma: očerki po

grammatike adygejskogo jazyka. Moscow: RGGU, pp. 498558.

Cognitive strategies in intensification of meaning (comparative study of Russian and English).

Berestnev, Gennady and Vasilieva, Inga

(Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University)

Expressivity is one of the fundamental and obligatory features in language intimately associated with mental activity of

humans. Expressivity is realized in language via a range of lexical and grammatical means among which intensifiers are

particularly prominent. In our study we refer to intensifiers as adverbs of degree which reinforce the meaning of a

syntactically-related element (Biber et al., 2003:209). A conventionalized, or closed, set of intensifiers in languages (e.g.

very, too) is complemented by intensifiers of an open-class. The latter represents a particularly dynamic semantic category

of adverbs that perform multiple discursive functions and are significant in terms of social interaction (Tagliamonte 2008;

Vasilieva 2007).

The present study attempts to look at open-class intensifiers in English and Russian from a cognitive perspective in

order to reveal deeper mental patterns producing elements whose function is to enhance meaning and to compare the two

languages in this respect. The material for the study has been drawn from spoken corpora and two reference corpora –

English and Russian respectively – have been used to verify the results.

A semantically-open class of intensifiers seems to have deep cognitive roots: subjectivity and multiplicity of

intensification in human mentality predefines its unrestricted realization in language (Paradis 2008). Metaphorization

provides a general mechanism for functional transformation of adverbs already available in language into adverbs

enhancing the meaning of adjectives.

While it is generally unproblematic to supply Russian semantic equivalents to English intensifiers, some functional

gaps may occur in the two languages. For example, English manner adverb perfectly (= in a perfect way, manner) can also

function as an intensifier modifying an adjective, e.g. perfectly normal/clear (= completely normal/clear). The Russian

adverb sovershenno (perfectly), however, can only be used as an intensifier (e.g., sovershenno nerazreshimaya problema)

but not as a manner adverb.

The semantic classes of adjectives from which open-class intensifiers are derived make up a series of patterns

which enable us to reconstruct deeper cognitive motivations for intensification in language. One of the productive patterns

in both English and Russian is “metaphysical force → intensification” realized by two versions: “evil force → intensification”

and “blessed force → intensification”. The version with negative meaning is represented in both languages, e.g. devilishly <

devil, fiendishly < fiend (English) and d’yavollski < d’yavol, chertovski < ch’ort (Russian). The version with positive meaning is

represented by divinely < divinity, awesomely < awe (English) and bozhestvenno < Bog, angel’ski < angel (Russian). It is

worth noting that awesomely appears quite wide-spread in spoken English, while Russian intensifiers in this group have

very restricted collocations. Another pattern is “strong emotional impact → intensification”, for example, stunningly,

horribly, terrifyingly (English) and strashno, uzhasno, oshelomitel’no (Russian). From an extralinguistic point of view the

adverbs refer to the result of a corresponding emotional impact on the speaker but in language the adverbs associated with

these emotions indicate a high degree of a quality.

The study which is still in progress is aimed at describing consistent underlying cognitive patterns for intensifiers in

English and Russian in this way revealing cognitive strategies for intensification in the two languages which, in turn, may be

related to their typological features.

Corpora

Corpus of Contemporary American English http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/

National Corpus of Russian Language http://ruscorpora.ru/index.html

References

Biber D., Conrad S. and Leech G., 2003: Student grammar of spoken and written English. Harlow.

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Tagliamonte S. 2008: So different and pretty cool! Recycling intensifiers in Toronto, Canada. In: English Language and

Linguistics 12.2: 361–394.

Paradis C. 2008: Configurations, construals and change: expressions of degree. In: English Language and Linguistics 12.2:

317–343.

Vasilieva I. 2007: Gender-specific use of intensifiers in computer-related English texts. In: Språk och kön i nutida och

historiskt perspektiv. In: Gunnarsson, Entzenberg, Ohlsson (eds.). Elanders Gotab, Stockholm: 131-141.

Picture noun reflexives in the context of different noun-types.

Berger, Sina; Belke, Eva and Kiss, Tibor

(Ruhr-Universität Bochum)

According to Binding Theory, reflexives in NPs headed by the noun picture are bound locally. In (1), the subject is the local

antecedent. However, if the picture NP contains a possessor, as in (2), the possessor is the local antecedent and Binding

Theory predicts that the reflexive can only be bound by the possessor:

(1) Anna

saw a picture of herself

(2) Anna

saw Katrin

’s picture of herself

*1/2

Recent on-line studies of sentence processing (cf. e.g. Runner et al. 2003, 2006, Sturt 2003) have shown that reflexives

contained in NPs are often bound to non-local antecedents (even if an antecedent is available within the NP, thus violating

Binding Theory’s predictions). Critically the authors of these studies either restrict their experiments to the noun picture

heading the NP, or they adopt, without further proviso, the assumption formulated in models in theoretical linguistics and

psycholinguistics that other nouns behave exactly like picture in terms of binding.

We conducted a sentence verification experiment in German to test the hypothesis that, unlike result nouns, such

as picture, deverbal event nouns behave according to Binding Theory’s predictions. We derived this hypothesis from the

following two conjectures: German does not make use of exempt reflexives (Kiss 2001, 2012), and deverbal event nouns

inherit the argument structure of the verb. We predicted that the reflexive is bound to its local antecedent if the respective

head is a deverbal event noun.

We compiled sentences like (3), systematically varying the noun-type (deverbal event noun, result noun) and the

sentence-type (article-sentence, possessor-sentence). To this end, we selected 17 deverbal event nouns and 17 result

nouns and created one article-sentence without a possessor and one possessor-sentence with each noun. Having no local

antecendent, we expected all article sentences to be bound non-locally, as predicted by Binding Theory.

(3) a) Anna erzählte, dass Katrin das Bild von sich betrachtete.

Anna reported that Katrin looked at the picture of herself.

b) Anna erzählte, dass sie Katrins Bild von sich betrachtete.

Anna reported that she looked at Katrin’s picture of herself.

There were no differences between result nouns and deverbal event nouns in terms of binding. Independent of the noun

type, participants answered about 90% of the questions compatible with Binding Theory with article-sentences, but only

about 35% with possessor-sentences. Interestingly, participants responded significantly faster (by 700 ms) to article-

sentences than to possessor-sentences, indicating some kind of processing difficulty for the latter sentence type. There

were substantial individual differences between nouns regarding the magnitude of the processing difficulty observed for its

possessor-sentence relative to its article-sentence. Interestingly, the possessor-sentence containing the noun Bild (3b)

turned out to be especially difficult to process relative to (3a). However, neither the distinction between result and event

nouns nor Binding Theory provides an adequate explanation for why, for any given noun, the possessor-sentences caused

marked processing difficulties or not.

Our findings emphasize the importance of testing different nouns and refute the claim that reflexives in NPs all

behave like reflexives in the picture NP.

References

Kiss, T. (2001). Anaphora and Exemptness. A comparative treatment of anaphoric binding in German and English. In

Flickinger, D., & Kathol, A. (Eds.). (2001). The Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase

Structure Grammar. 182-197. CSLI Publications.

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Kiss, T. (2012). Reflexivity and Dependency. In: Alexiadou, A., Kiss, T. Müller, G. (Eds.): Local Modeling of Non-Local

Dependencies. Linguistische Arbeiten 547, 155 - 185.

Runner, J. T., Sussman, R. S. & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2003). Assignment of reference to reflexives and pronouns in picture noun

phrases: Evidence from eye movements. Cognition, 89, B1 – B13.

Runner, J. T., Sussman, R. S. & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2006). Processing reflexives and pronouns in picture noun phrases.

Cognitive Science, 30, 193 – 241.

Sturt, P. (2003). The time-course of the application of binding constraints in reference resolution. Journal of Memory and

Language, 48, 542 – 562.

From EPIC to EPTIC: building and using an intermodal corpus of translated and interpreted texts.

Bernardini, Silvia; Ferraresi, Adriano and Miličević, Maja

(University of Bologna, University of Bologna and University of Belgrade)

In corpus-based translation and interpreting studies translated or interpreted texts are typically compared to source texts

on the one hand, and comparable original texts in the target language on the other, most often in an attempt to identify

translation / interpreting universals. In this paper we present a new resource we are currently building that extends this

paradigm by joining into a single corpus translations and interpretations. EPTIC (European Parliament Translation and

Interpreting Corpus) is a four-way corpus that includes simultaneous interpretations paired with their source texts, and the

corresponding translations and source texts. The corpus builds on the well-known EPIC corpus (European Parliament

Interpreting Corpus; Sandrelli and Bendazzoli 2005, Bendazzoli 2010), from which the transcripts of interpreted talks and

their source texts were taken. The revised source texts on which the (independently produced) translated versions are

based were obtained from the European Parliament website. The language combination represented in the corpus is

English-Italian, and translations / interpretations in both directions are included. The corpus consists of a total of 392 texts;

the bigger, English>Italian portion contains four versions of 81 texts, while the smaller Italian>English portion has four

versions of each of 17 texts, for a total of about 180,000 words. The corpus was part-of-speech tagged and lemmatised

using the TreeTagger and indexed with the Corpus WorkBench. Available metadata include speaker identity, gender and

political affiliation, speech delivery type (read or impromptu), speech length and topic.

The purpose of the paper is threefold. First, it discusses EPTIC’s design, construction and annotation, focusing in

particular on methodological issues such as the appropriate corpus setup for the investigation of the interface between

interpreting and translation data, and technical issues such as the alignment of spoken / interpreted and written /

translated texts whose source texts are only partially overlapping. Second, it compares this corpus to related intermodal

resources such as the corpus constructed by Shlesinger (2009) - which includes translational and interpretational outputs of

the same source text by six professional translators / interpreters - and TIC, the Translation and Interpreting Corpus created

by Kajzer-Wietrzny (2012), another corpus of texts produced during the European Parliament plenary sessions, which

however does not include bilingual parallel data. Finally, the paper illustrates how a corpus like EPTIC can be used to study

the features of different modes of translation and the factors that influence translation universals. In particular, a case

study is presented in which we investigate lexical simplification across interpreted and translated texts focusing on lexical

density, frequency of common words and repetitions of core vocabulary, thus replicating for this new corpus set up the

influential study carried out by Laviosa (1998) on monolingual comparable corpora of translated and non translated texts,

and by Sandrelli and Bendazzoli (2005) and Kajzer-Wietrzny (2012) on monolingual comparable corpora of interpreted and

non-interpreted texts.

References

Bendazzoli, C. 2010. Corpora e interpretazione simultanea. Bologna: Asterisco.

Kajzer-Wietrzny, M. 2012. Interpreting universals and interpreting style. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Adam Mickiewicz

University, Poznań.

Laviosa, S. 1998. “Core patterns of lexical use in a comparable corpus of English narrative prose”. Meta 43(4): 557–570.

Sandrelli, A. and Bendazzoli, C. 2005. “Lexical patterns in simultaneous interpreting: a preliminary investigation of EPIC

(European Parliament Interpreting Corpus)”. Proceedings from the Corpus Linguistics Conference Series, 1(1),

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(http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/activity/corpus/publications/conference-archives/2005-conf-e-journal.

aspx) (date of access: 14 Jan. 2013).

Shlesinger, M. 2009. “Towards a definition of Interpretese: An intermodal, corpus-based study”. In Efforts and Models in

Interpreting and Translation Research: A tribute to Daniel Gile, Hansen, G., A. Chesterman and H. Gerzymisch-

Arbogast (eds.), 237–253. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

From Phonotactics to Syllables. A psycho-computational approach.

Bertinetto, Pier Marco and Calderone, Basilio

(Scuola Normale Superiore, CNRS and Université de Toulouse II - Le Mirail)

Purpose

This study aims at modeling the Italian syllabic structure by exploiting the language’s phonotactic constraints. The latter

create a sort of ‘phonotactic space’ accounting for all possible syllable profiles, including the less frequent segment

combinations and even seemingly illegal (but existing) ones, for which deterministic models fail to provide insightful

solutions.

The approach is based on the assumption that the language-specific invariant phonotactic regularities allow the

speaker to draw meaningful generalizations out of the recurring consonant clusters, yielding the emerging syllable

structure.

Method

For the present purpose, a phonologically-encoded list of words (about 5,000 items) was designed, aiming at representing

the various syllable types of Italian. Each segment was labeled according to two parameters: i) phonotactic context (as

defined by phonemic neighborhood); ii) syllabic context (position within the syllable).

Two competing data vector representations were adopted in the simulation:

a) a coarse-grained representation, based on phonological natural classes: vowel, glide, liquid, nasal, fricative, stop,

affricate;

b) a fine-grained representation, expressing the actual identity of each segment.

This sort of representation allows a double level of generalization with respect to syllable structure, respectively based on

the major natural classes, and on the specific individuality of each segment within the respective class. The latter level

accounts, e.g., for the different phonotactic behavior of /s/ vs. /f/ within the class of fricatives.

The model yields, for each phoneme, a mapping linear function between the phonotactic and the syllabic contexts it may

appear in. The function exploits a feed-forward two-level neural network, implementing a back-error propagation protocol

to minimize output errors.

For any given segment in the corpus, the system provides values between 0.0 and 1.0, defining the output in terms

of intersegmental attraction, thus adhering to the spirit of Dziubalska-Kołaczyk’s (2001) proposal. Obviously, in no case did

the output activation exactly reach 0.0 or 1.0, but at most approximations to the scale’s extremes.

Results

The model was able to generate a fairly robust syllabic “knowledge”, assigning a syllable profile to new words, capitalizing

on generalizations from the training data. In particular, the model allowed to go beyond the mere sonority scale values,

based on acontextual and rigid specifications for each segment, by relativizing its syllabic propensities to the actual contexts

it may appear in.

One special focus of the analysis were /s/ + C clusters, notoriously a matter of debate. Another one were the rare

/tl/ and /tm/ clusters. These were not included in the training set, yet the system was able to process them. The output

results showed a non-deterministic behavior for some clusters, pointing towards an intermediate position between tauto-

and heterosyllabic status. This converges with the psycholinguistic results gathered by Bertinetto (2004), proving that the

present model is cognitively faithful.

The model allows great flexibility in taking experimentally into account various sorts of phonotactic information,

e.g. by hiding any given segment or segments cluster in the training phase, to observe the generalization capacity of the

automaton.

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References

Bertinetto, Pier Marco. 2004. On the undecidable syllabification of /sC/ clusters in Italian: Converging experimental

evidence. Italian Journal of Linguistics, 16:349-372.

Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Katarzyna. 2001. Phonotactic constraints are preferences. In: Dziubalska- Kołaczyk, K. (ed.). Constraints

and Preferences. Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 69–100.

Joanisse, Marc. 1999. Exploring syllable structure in connectionist networks. In Proceedings of the XIVth International

Congress of Phonetic Sciences, San Francisco, CA.

Notes on the distribution and the interpretation of the Romanian subjunctive in a Balkan perspective.

Bilbiie, Gabriela and Mardale, Alexandru

(Université Paris Diderot and INALCO de Paris)

We examine here some aspects concerning the distribution and interpretation of the subjunctive in Romanian, a

phenomenon that illustrates areal influences. Two issues are addressed.

The first one is concerned with the morpho-syntactic status of the subjunctive. We address the question of

whether it is a mood by itself or a variant of the indicative. Recall the Balkan tradition (Feuillet 2012 for Bulgarian and

Greek), which adopts the latter hypothesis (cf. the same exponent for both moods). Indeed, the Romanian subjunctive is

formed on the present indicative (vorbesc ‘talk.IND.1P’ vs. să vorbesc ‘talk.SUBJ.1P’). However, we reject such a hypothesis,

for two main reasons: first, the Romanian subjunctive displays a specific (and exclusive) marker să; second, it has specific

forms for the 3

and 6

persons (vine ‘come.IND.3S’ vs. să vină ‘come.SUBJ.3P’).

Correlatively, we address the controversial question of the morpho-syntactic status of the subjunctive marker să,

which, like da in Bulgarian and na in Greek (Monachesi 2005), should be categorized either as a complementizer (like că

‘that’ introducing the indicative) or as a morpheme (i.e. an affix). We show that că and să do not have the same distribution.

Moreover, să displays various affix-like properties. Consequently, we consider (contra GALR 2005) that să is not a

complementizer, but a morphological affix of the subjunctive (Barbu 1999).

The second issue deals with the distribution of the Romanian subjunctive in embedded and main clauses. Crucially,

we will show that it has a hybrid (Romance-Balkan) behaviour. The Romanian subjunctive in embedded clauses behaves

more like – though not identically to – the French subjunctive wrt the semantics of the matrix predicates (Farkas 1992,

Godard to appear). On the contrary, the Romanian subjunctive in main clauses is closer to the one in Bulgarian and Greek,

i.e. it appears only with the imperative and interrogative types. If both Balkan and Romance languages allow the subjunctive

in imperatives (Bulg. Da vărvi po djavolite!, Gr. Na pai sto diaolo!, Rom. Să se ducă la dracu’!, Fr. Qu’il aille au diable! ‘Let

him go to hell!’), only in Balkan languages can it occur in main interrogatives (Bulg. Kăde da otida?, Gr. Pu na pao?, Rom.

Unde să merg ? vs. Fr. *Où que j’aille? ‘Where should I go?’). Additionally, Romanian – like Balkan languages – systematically

displays the subjunctive in main interrogatives, in order to express various pragmatic and dialogical functions. The latter has

been little studied, especially from a comparative perspective, so they represent the focus of this second part of our talk.

Finally, we link the high frequency of the Romanian subjunctive in both main and embedded clauses to the loss and/or

attrition of the infinitive in these languages: indeed, Romanian, contrary to French, but just like Greek, Bulgarian or

Macedonian, is on the way to losing its infinitive, which it has replaced with the subjunctive: Vreau a pleca ‘I want to

leaveINF’ (obsolete) vs. Vreau să plec ‘I want to leaveSUBJ’.

Numeral classifiers as (in)definiteness markers and the role of information structure.

Bisang, Walter

(University of Mainz)

Numeral classifiers are generally associated with counting and with the lack of obligatory plural marking (Greenberg 1974).

They individuate or atomize a concept. What is less known is that they also can express (in)definiteness if they occur in the

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[classifier+noun] construction. This is the case in various Sinitic languages (Cantonese, Wu Chinese, and marginally in

Mandarin) and in various Hmong-Mien languages, among them Hmong and Weining Ahmao.

The paper will start with a description of the definiteness marked by classifiers in [classifier+noun] constructions.

Classifier-based definiteness differs from article-based definiteness (e.g. in English) as follows (Li & Bisang 2012):

(i) Classifiers mark familiarity/identifiability rather than uniqueness.

(ii) Classifiers are not obligatory even if they are highly grammaticalized. Once a referent is firmly established in discourse,

it will be expressed by a bare noun.

In spite of these similarities, there are also differences between the Sinitic and the non-Sinitic languages of East and

mainland Southeast Asia. In Sinitic, the interpretation of the classifier depends on word order. In preverbal positions, the

classifier in [classifier+noun] is definite, while it tends to be indefinite in the postverbal position. In Hmong and Weining

Ahmao, word order is irrelevant. Hmong classifiers can only express definiteness. Weining Ahmao has developed an

inflectional paradigm for classifiers that combines definite/indefinite, singular/plural and size (augmentative, medial,

diminutive).

The paper will argue that the differences within Sinitic and across Sinitic is due to two factors:

(1) In Sinitic, the (in)definiteness interpretation associated with information structure was transferred to the syntax of

simple clauses (Givón 1979 on the grammaticalization of discourse into syntax). The classifier is a variable whose

(in)definiteness is determined by word order.

(2) The variation within Sinitic depends on the strength of the disposal construction (ba-construction in Mandarin, more

generally: ‘take’-construction), which moves postverbal definite objects to the preverbal position.

On (1): Topics are prototypically associated with the degree of activation/identifiability of a referent (cf.

Lambrecht’s 1994: 165 topic accessibility scale), while informational focus is free with regard to the question of

identifiability/activation but tends to be situated at the lower end of the scale. As in many other languages, topics are

preverbal and focus tends to be postverbal in Sinitic (Xu 2004). What is special is that Sinitic has generalized the

identifiability of nominal referents to syntax. This is prototypically the case in Wu Chinese. In preverbal [classifier+noun]

constructions, the classifier is always definite, while it is always indefinite postverbally. Definite objects must be moved to

the preverbal position by the disposal construction. In non-Sinitic languages, word order is not related to (in)definiteness.

On (2): Cantonese differs from Wu with regard to the postverbal position in which the classifier can mark

definiteness or indefiniteness. This is due to the reduced function of the ‘take’-construction in Cantonese, which allows

indefinite objects to remain in situ (Matthews & Yip 1994: 144). The non-Sinitic languages also have ‘take’-constructions but

their function is much broader than in Sinitic.

References

Givón, T. 1979. Understanding Grammar. Academic Press, New York.

Greenberg, J. H. 1974. Numeral classifiers and substantival number: problems in the genesis of a linguistic type. In:

Proceedings of the 11th International Congress of Linguistics, Bologna – Florence, August–September, 1972,

Bologna, pp. 17–37.

Lambrecht, K. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Li, HsuPing & Bisang, W. 2012. Classifiers in Sinitic languages: From individuation to definiteness-marking. Lingua 122, 335-

355.

Matthews, S. & Yip, V. 1994. Cantonese: A Comprehensive Grammar. Routledge, London.

Xu, L. 2004. Manifestations of informational focus. Lingua 114, 277–299.

A cross-linguistic comparison of death-related intensifiers:

evidence from English, French, German,Portuguese,and Spanish.

Blanco-Suárez, Zeltia

(University of Santiago de Compostela)

From an anthropological point of view, death is a matter which pervades our daily lives, and is thus an issue of the most

genuine concern for all cultures and societies worldwide. With such an impact on our routines, it comes as no surprise that

it can be exploited not only as a linguistic taboo, but also as a source of intensification in language, perhaps even cross-

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linguistically (cf. Claridge 2011).

This paper offers a corpus-based approach to the intensifying strategy, and sets out to provide a diachronic analysis

of the hyperbolic uses of several death-related intensifiers (cf. Bolinger 1972) across a number of European languages,

namely English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. In particular, the intensifiers examined are dead, mortal, and to

death in English (cf. Margerie 2011), mortel and mort(e) d’ in French, tod and zu Tod(e) in German, mortal and morto/a de in

Portuguese, and mortal and muerto/a de in Spanish.

The results from this cross-linguistic comparison reveal different degrees of grammaticalisation for these death-

related intensifiers. Even though they all follow the common cline of development for intensifiers noted by Adamson (2000),

according to which they originate in descriptive or literal meanings (cf. (1)), gradually develop subjective meanings ((2)-(3)

below), and finally grammaticalise as intensifiers ((4)-(5) below), their degrees of productivity as intensifiers vary in the

different languages. Thus, in some cases their descriptive meanings or their subjective/affective ones are foregrounded

instead.

(1) Los otros habían muerto de hambre y enfermedades. (Corpus del Español. 1534-1554. Ulrico Schmidel. Relatos de la

conquista del Río de la Plata y Paraguay).

‘The others had died of hunger and of illnesses’.

(2) Lequel serment nous ordonnons que soit le derrenier des troiz sermens pour la mortelle hayne qui est entre eulx. (DMF,

s.v. mortel1adj.).

‘This one we order to be the last of the three sermons on the mortal hate between both of them’.

(3) E esta era a uosa mortal pena (Corpus do Português. 1431-1443. Crónica de D. Fernando).

‘And this was your mortal grief’.

(4) And although the attainment be neuer so difficult yet hauing him in my companye, I hope to make all things dead sure.

(EEBO. 1583. Pedro de la Sierra. The second part of the Myrror of Knighthood).

(5) Meine Mutter war zu Tode froh [...] (Kernkorpus des 20. Jahrhunderts. 2001. Bertha von Suttner. Autobiographie).

‘My mother was happy to death’.

The aim pursued in this diachronic research is therefore twofold. On the one hand, it shows how these forms have evolved

semantically over time. On the other, an analysis of their collocations additionally reveals interesting cross-linguistic

parallels, which suggests a human need to emphasise certain domains or semantic fields for intensification purposes.

Data for the present paper are taken from EEBO, COHA, COCA and BYU-BNC for English, the DMF and FRANTEXT for

French, the BG, the Kernkorpus des 20. Jahrhunderts and the Kali Corpus for German, and the Corpus do Português and

Corpus del Español for Portuguese and Spanish, respectively.

Sources

BG = Bibliotheca Germanica. Available online at: http://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/augustana.html#ge.

BYU-BNC = Brigham Young University-British National Corpus. Davies, Mark. 2004-2012. Available online at:

http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/.

COCA = Corpus of Contemporary American English. Davies, Mark. 2008- 2012. Available online at:

http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.

COHA = Corpus of Historical American English. Davies, Mark. 2010-2012. Available online at: http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/.

Corpus del Español. Davies, Mark. 2002-2012. Available online at: http://www.corpusdelespanol.org/x.asp.

Corpus do Português. Davies, Mark, and Michael Ferreira. 2006-2012. Available online at:

http://www.corpusdoportugues.org/.

DMF = Dictionnaire du Moyen Français (version 2012). ATILF, CNRS, and Université de Lorraine. Available online at:

http://www.atilf.fr/dmf.

EEBO = Early English Books Online. Chadwyck Healey. 2003-2012. Available online at: http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home.

FRANTEXT = Base Textuelle FRANTEXT. ATILF, CNRS, and Université de Lorraine. Available online at: http://www.frantext.fr./.

Kali Korpus. Gabriele Diewald. Leibniz Universität Hannover. Available online at: http://www.kali.uni-

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hannover.de/?mmc=1&smc=0.

Kernkorpus des 20. Jahrhunderts. Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Available online at:

http://www.dwds.de/.

References

Adamson, Sylvia. 2000. A lovely little example: Word order options and category shift in the premodifying string. In

Pathways of change. Grammaticalization in English, eds. Olga Fischer, Anette Rosenbach, and Dieter Stein, 39-66.

Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Bolinger, Dwight. 1972. Degree words. The Hague and Paris: Mouton.

Claridge, Claudia. 2011. Hyperbole in English: A corpus-based study of exaggeration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Margerie, Hélène. 2011. Grammaticalising constructions: To death as a peripheral degree modifier. Folia Linguistica Historica

32(1), 115-147.

Gender and homophony: diachronic and synchronic aspects of Norwegian homophones with different gender.

Bobrova, Maria

(University of Oslo)

In Norwegian, as in some other Germanic languages, there exist homophonic words with different grammatical genders,

e.g. en kar (m.) ‘fellow’ vs. et kar (n.) ‘vessel’. In these homophone pairs the difference in gender correlates with a

difference in meaning. Gender variation is a well-known phenomenon in Norwegian, but usually this variation is connected

to masculine and feminine forms. In such cases it does not change the meaning of the word (e.g. ei bok (f.) ’book’ vs. en bok

(m.) ’book’), and is explained socilolinguistically (Hanssen 2010). The homophones in my data always oppose neuter to

either masculine or feminine (e.g. et yrke (n.) ’profession’ vs. ei/en (f./m.) yrke ’weekdays’). Both words are usually found in

the same dialect, and the meaning of the word changes depending on the chosen gender (Faarlund et al. 1997: 157).

Homophones with different gender are the ideal data for testing the hypotheses about the semantics of genders in

Norwegian.

The main research questions in my study are:

• How did the gender differences in Norwegian homophones arise?

• Are we dealing with homonymy or polysemy?

• Does gender correlate with the meaning of the word?

• If so, is this correlation a part of the linguistic competence of the speakers?

I follow the approach that gender assignment is rule based and that ”native speakers have the ability to ‘work out’ the

gender of a noun” (Corbett 1991: 7). According to Corbett, there are three types of assignment criteria: semantic,

morphological and phonological. The difference in gender of all homophone pairs in my material can only be explained

semantically, since their form and morphology are alike.

The data was first analyzed from a diachronic perspective in order to find out how it actually happened that words

with the same form have been assigned different genders. Then each homophone was coded according to its meaning to

demonstrate how gender can correlate with different semantic categories. Finally, I am conducting a psycholinguistic

experiment to give a wider support to the semantic findings.

The study includes 370 homophone pairs from the Norwegian Bokmål dictionary Bokmålsordboka (no homophony

dictionary exists for Norwegian). The material includes both words that are originally Norwegian and loan words. The

preliminary results are the following:

- Diachronic analysis has shown that homophone pairs are distributed over the following categories:

(a) homophones originated from two different words – 54%; (b) homophones originated from the same word –

44%; and (c) the pair was homophonous already in Old Norse or in the foreign language of origin– 2%.

- However, according to my approach, diachronic evidence cannot play any role in gender assignment, as diachronic

information is not a part of the competence of an average speaker. Synchronically only semantics could be a

possible explanaition for the difference in gender. The findings support the meaning of the Animacy Hierarchy

(Comrie 1989: 185) for gender assignment.

- Psycholinguistic experiments are currently being run, and the results will be communicated when obtained.

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References

Comrie, B. 1989. Language universals and linguistic typology: syntax and morphology. Oxford.

Corbett, G. 1991. Gender. Cambridge.

Faarlund, J.T., S. Lie & K.I.Vannebo. 1997. Norsk referansegrammatikk. Oslo.

Hannsen, E. 2010. Dialekter i Norge. Bergen.

Wangensteen, B (red). 2005. Bokmålsordboka: definisjons- og rettskrivningsordbok / utarbeidet av Universitetet i Oslo,

Institutt for lingvistiske og nordiske studier og Språkrådet. Oslo.

Quirky reflexive construction in Daghestanian languages.

Bogomolova, Natalia; Forker, Diana and Ganenkov, Dmitry

(Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Science and University of Bamberg)

Most linguists seem to agree that in reflexive constructions of accusative as well as of ergative languages the controller of

the reflexive must be the most prominent argument (i.e. higher on a hierarchy of grammatical roles), whereas the reflexive

pronoun itself must be a less prominent argument (Chomsky 1981, Reinhart & Reuland 1993, Dixon 1994). Similarly, it has

been claimed that anaphors do not trigger agreement (Rizzi 1990, Woolford 1999). However, Daghestanian languages

provide fascinating data that violate such proposed universals regarding the syntactic alignment in reflexive (and reciprocal)

constructions. For instance, in Icari Dargwa there is a choice between the canonical reflexive construction for transitive

verbs (1), whereby the controller is in the ergative case (agent), and the pronoun is in the absolutive case (patient), and the

unusual pattern involving a ‘reversal of grammatical roles’ (2).

(1) murad-il cinna_ca-w w-alXː-a=ca-w

Murad-

ERG REFL

[

ABS

]

-feed:

IPFV

PROG

COP

‘Murad is earning his own living.’ (lit. ‘is feeding himself’)

(2) murad cinna_cinni w-alXː-a=ca-w

Murad[

ABS

]

REFL

ERG

m-feed:

IPFV

PROG

COP

‘Murad is earning his own living.’ or ‘As for Murad, he is earning his own living.’

In this talk, we will first provide a descriptive account of reflexive constructions in a number of Daghestanian languages by

considering parameters that determine the ‘reversal of grammatical roles’: (i) the form of the reflexive pronouns (simple vs.

different types of complex pronouns), (ii) the valency type of the predicate (canonical transitive, affective, extended

intransitive), (iii) the grammatical role of the controllers and the pronouns (S, A, P, experiencer, stimulus, non-canonical

agent, other), and occasionally (iv) word order. Most of the data has been gathered by the authors during fieldwork in

Daghestan.

In the second part we will examine previous analyses of the Daghestanian data and of quirky reflexive

constructions in other languages (Anagnostopoulou & Everaert 1999, Amiridze 2003). We will show that Yamada’s (2004)

proposal to analyze sentences similar to (2) as intransitive cannot be maintained. Instead, it is possible to analyze the

‘reversal of grammatical roles’ building on Ljutikova (1997). The difference between (1) and (2) must be explained through

the historical development of reflexive constructions and subtle pragmatic differences. In (2) the antecedent NP behaves

similar to left-dislocated NPs (e.g. it bears the unmarked case) and only the reflexive is a true argument of the predicate

‘feed’ (see the translation). This is supported by the fact that in Icari Dargwa simple reflexive pronouns are also used to

establish coreference between clauses (Sumbatova & Mutalov 2003: 167-168).

The talk concludes by proving that anaphors in Daghestanian languages trigger verbal agreement in gender and

number (1), but the agreement is rather different from the person agreement in familiar European languages.

References

Amiridze, Nino. 2003. The anaphor agreement effect and Georgian anaphors. In Claire Beyssade, O. Bonami & P. C. F.

Cabredo Hofherr (eds.), Empirical issues in formal syntax and semantics 4, 99–114. Paris: Presses de l'université

Paris-Sorbonne.

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Anagnostopoulou, Elena & Martin Everaert. 1999. Towards a more complete typology of anaphoric expressions. Linguistic

Inquiry 30. 97–119.

Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris.

Dixon, Robert M. W. 1994. Ergativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ljutikova, Ekatarina A. 1997. Refleksivy i èmfaza. Voprosy jazykoznanija(6). 49–74.

Reinhart, Tanya & Eric Reuland. 1993. Reflexivity. Linguistic Inquiry 24. 657–720.

Rizzi, Luigi. 1990. On the anaphor-agreement effect. Rivista di Linguistica 2. 27–42.

Sumbatova, Nina R. & Rasul O. Mutalov. 2003. A grammar of Icari Dargwa. München: Lincom Europa.

Woolford, Ellen. 1999. More on the anaphor agreement effect. Linguistic Inquiry 30. 257–287.

Yamada, Hisanari. 2004. On the ergative reciprocal tsotsaz construction in Standard Avar: Talk at the LENCA2 conference,

University of Kazan.

Modelling reduplication as a canonical vs. non-canonical exponent of negation.

Bond, Oliver

(University of Surrey)

Modelling reduplication as a canonical vs. non---canonical exponent of negation Negation of declarative verbal main clauses

is most commonly expressed using a negative particle, with affixation of negative exponents to a verbal stem occurring as

the next most frequently encountered strategy in the world’s languages (Dahl 1979, Dryer 1989, Miestamo 2005). While the

morphological expression of negation through affixation is widespread, other non-concatenative exponents of negation are

comparatively rare or geographically restricted in terms of their distribution. For instance, Dryer (2011) indicates that of

1326 languages investigated for a study of minor morphological means of signaling negation, only 10 languages deviate

from the dominant strategies. Unusual strategies for marking negation include tone (seven languages), infixation (two

languages), and stem changes (one language). In this paper, I examine a further rare strategy used in the exponence of

negation, namely reduplication.

Although (partial or total) reduplication is found in certain negative constructions in a diverse range of languages

including Chepang (Tibeto-Burman), Coast Tarangan (Austronesian) and Mono (Niger-Congo), it has been claimed to be

insufficient for the formation of a negative clause without some other exponent of negation present (cf. Payne 1985).This

appears to be a very robust generalisation. A logical analytical consequence of such patterns is to decide whether

reduplication in negative constructions ever results as a direct consequence of the neg feature value (i.e. is an exponent of

negation) or whether the presence of reduplication results from morphology internal rules that do not directly realize

feature values (i.e. not a canonical exponent of negation).

In this paper Idemonstrate, using cases tudies from Eleme (Niger-Congo) and Mikir (Tibeto-Burman) that the

presence of verbal reduplication within negative redicates may require radicallydifferent morphological explanations.

(1) Eleme (own data)

a. ǹ-sí-a b. ǹ-sí∼sì

1SG-go-HAB 1SG-REDUP∼go.NEG

‘I (usually) go.’ ‘I don’t (usually) go.’

(2) Mikir (Jeyapaul 1987:119)

a. ne non co-bom-lo b. non ne co-bom∼b-e-laŋ

I now eat-CONT-NFUT now I eat-CONT∼REDUP-NEG-DUR

‘I am eating now.’ ‘I am not eating now.’

Using realization rules formalized in a Paradigm Function Morphology approach, I develop two distinct analyses that rely

on the application ofphonology-sensitive morphological processes. I propose that verbal reduplication in negative

predicates in Eleme is an asemantic stem formation process, such that it is not a genuine exponent of negation (i.e. not

directly triggered by the presence of the feature neg). Instead, negation is indicated by tone across a reduplicated stem.

Conversely in Mikir,reduplication marking negation applies to the output of rules of exponence indicating aspect. This fact

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indicates that reduplication is not merely a stem formation process and that reduplication is triggered by virtue of the

presence of the feature value neg.

The data presented contribute to the typology of negation whilst the analysis contributes to developing a

distinction between canonical and non-canonical exponence.

References

Dahl, Ö. 1979. Typology of sentence negation. Linguistics 17, 79-106.

Dryer, M. S. 2011. Minor morphological means of signaling negation. In M. S. Dryer, & M. Haspelmath (eds.), The World

Atlas of Language Structures Online. Max Planck Digital Library. Feature 143G. Available online at

http://wals.info/feature/143G [Accessed on 15-01-2013].

Jeyapaul, V.Y. 1987. Karbi Grammar. Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages.

Miestamo, M. 2005. Standard Negation: The Negation of Declarative Verbal Main Clauses in a Typological Perspective.

Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Payne, J.R. 1985. Negation. In T. Shopen (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Volume I: Clause Structure, 197-

--242. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Polish equatives as symmetrical structures.

Bondaruk, Anna

(John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin)

The paper examines the structure of equative copular constructions in Polish, which consist of two pronouns or two proper

names surrounding the copula, as can be seen in (1) and (2) below.

(1) Ja jestem ty. (2) Dr Jekyll to (jest) pan Hyde.

I-nom. am you-nom. Dr Jekyll-nom. TO is Mr.-nom. Hyde

‘I am you.’ ‘Dr Jekyll is Mr. Hyde.’

or contain one pronoun and one proper name, flanking the copula, as illustrated in (3) and (4).

(3) Ja jestem Ania. (4) Ja to (jestem) Ania.

I-nom. am.Ania-nom. I-nom. TO am Ania-nom.

‘I am Ania.’ ‘I am Ania.’

The copula in Polish can be realised either by the verb być ‘be’ or by the pronominal element to, and the two copulas can

even co-occur, as is made clear by the sentences in (2) and (4).

The equatives analysed here differ considerably both from predicational and specificational clauses (in the sense of

Higgins (1979)) as regards verbal agreement and Person Case Constraint (PCC) effects. In equatives agreement is always

with the pre-copular DP (cf. examples (1), (3) and (4) above), whereas in Polish predicational sentences a difference arises

depending on whether they exhibit the verbal or the pronominal copula. The predicational sentences with być ‘be’ show

agreement with the pre-copular element, whereas in clauses with to the verb agrees with the post-copular element. In

specificational clauses, on the other hand, the verbal agreement is always with the post-copular item. Furthermore, even if

the order of the two DPs is reversed in equatives, the agreement is always with the pre-copular DP, as can be seen in (5),

the reversed version in (1).

(5) Ty jesteś ja.

you-nom. are I-nom.

‘You are me.’

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The Person Case Constraint effects are clearly present in predicational clauses in Polish with the pronominal copula to, since

and 2

person subjects are blocked in this kind of structure, unlike 3

person subjects (cf. Bondaruk (2012)). These

effects are totally absent from equatives, which allow their subjects to be 1

or 2

person (cf. (1), (3) and (4) above).

It is argued in the paper that the two differences equatives exhibit can be accounted for by positing a special

symmetrical structure for this type of structure.

It is argued that the verbal agreement typical solely of equatives arises as a result of a structural difference

equatives exhibit in comparison with predicational and specificational clauses. Whereas the latter have an asymmetrical

structure, where the predication relation is mediated by the Pred head, a symmetrical structure is posited for equatives,

following Pereltsvaig’s (2001) proposal made for Russian. It is argued that her proposal must be modified to be applicable

to Polish. The proposed modification relies on Moro’s (2006) idea that the two merged DPs form a bare small clause (BSC),

a structure that lacks a label. One of the DPs from within a BSC must be internally merged with it and thus provide it with a

label, as can be seen in (6) and (7) below:

(6) [

DP [

BSC

DP DP]] (Moro (2006: 3))

(7) [

DP [

BSC

DP DP]]

(6) and (7) show that either of the two DPs can move and thus supply the BSC with a label. The DP that moves is closer to

the T probe than the other DP and thus establishes Agree with it, has its case valued as nominative and determines verbal

agreement. This accounts for the fact that in Polish equatives either DP can determine verbal concord (cf. (1) and (5)). This

analysis also explains why PCC effects never arise in equatives. If the PCC effects are derived in terms of multiple Agree (cf.

Bèjar and Rezac (2003)), then since no multiple Agree applies in equatives, but only one DP is targeted by T, no PCC effects

are expected to arise there.

To sum up, the symmetrical structure proposed for Polish equatives has made it possible to account for both the

lack of PCC effects in equatives and the agreement pattern specific only to equatives. The main motivation behind the

symmetry breaking movement, i.e. labelling, makes this account similar to Ott’s (2012) analysis of German split

topicalication, couched within the guidelines of Chomsky (2012).

References

Bèjar, S. and M. Rezac. 2003. Person licensing and the derivation of PCC effects. In: A. T. Pèrez-Leroux and Y. Roberge, eds.

Romance Linguistics: Theory and acquisition. 49-62. John Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia.

Bondaruk, A. 2012. Person Case Constraint effects in Polish copular clauses. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 59: 49-84.

Chomsky, N. 2012. Problems of projection. To appear in Lingua.

Higgins, R. F. 1979. The pseudo-cleft construction in English. New York: Garland.

Moro, A. 2006. Some notes on unstable structures. Ms. Universitá Vita Salute San Raffaele.

Ott. D. 2012. Local instability: Split topicalisation and quantifier float in German. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin and New York.

Pereltsvaig, A. 2001. On the nature of intra-clausal relations. Doctoral dissertation, McGill University.

Lexical changes as response to new trends on the labour market.

Bralić, Snježana; Bezić, Maja and Bilić, Maja

(University of Split)

The labour market has passed through significant changes in the last decades so that nowadays we are faced with the crisis

of an era characterised by economic and technological development, contracts for «indefinite» period of time (ital. contratti

a tempo indeterminato), «permanent» employment contracts (ital. posti fissi) and loyalty towards an employee. In the new

era flexibility and job rotation, i.e. expressions meaning the possibility of relocating employees on different job positions,

have become the key words. Job rotation has become the practice due to multiplication of atypical jobs (ital. lavori atipici),

while flexibility has become sophisticated synonym for precariousness (ital. precarietà). In Italy, beginning from the last

decade of the XX century, the modalities of employment have changed and the gap between them and the traditional ways

of employment has deepened.

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Lately, while some jobs have disappeared either from the labour market or from the lexis, other jobs have

remained more or less the same, but with a different nomenclature applied. For example, an Italian bidello (‘janitor’) has

become operatore scolastico (‘school operator’), and afterwards assistente scolastico (‘school assistant’), while the

occupations in the field of health and social welfare are expressed by the common English syntagm help professions.

Furthermore, due to the constant lack of time in the modern Italian families there are more and more male baby sitters,

nonni sitters (‘elder sitters’), as well as dog sitters whose job is put under the common English syntagm dog sitting or the

word dog-sitteraggio adapted to Italian. There is no doubt that the new professions in Italy speak English in the first place.

Considering these facts and the need to analyse and to classify the lexical changes in the Italian language caused by

the new trends in the field of employment, the goal of this paper is to collect the corpus of neologisms, to analyse and to

compare them to their Croatian equivalents. The corpus will be extracted from the Italian dictionaries of new and foreign

words (Adamo – Della Valle, 2003; Adamo – Della Valle, 2005; Adamo – Della Valle, 2008; De Mauro – Mancini, 2004) and

from on-line work ads (www.lavoro.org), while the Croatian equivalents will be checked for in the Croatian dictionaries of

new and foreign words (Brozović-Rončević et al., 1996; Anić – Goldstein, 2009; Klaić, 2012). Having compared the Italian

and the Croatian neologisms in the labour market lexis, the majority of which are formed according to the English model,

we will analyse their behaviour and productivity in both languages. Considering relative openness of the Italian language to

foreign influences on one side, and purist orientation and hermetic tendencies of the Croatian language on the other side,

our analysis and classification should confirm much greater presence of original, non adapted English terms in the Italian

corpus. Also, due to the greater tendency of the Italian language to forming new words, it is to be expected that the Italian

corpus will contain a certain number of exclusively Italian neologisms, which are not present in the Croatian language.

References

Anić, Vladimir – Goldstein, Ivo (2009). Rječnik stranih riječi. Zagreb: Novi Liber.

Adamo, Giovanni – Della Valle, Valeria (2003). Neologismi quotidiani. Un dizionario a cavallo del millennio (1998-2003).

Firenze: Leo S. Olschki Editore.

Adamo, Giovanni – Della Valle, Valeria (2005). 2006 parole nuove. Un dizionario di neologismi dai giornali. Milano: Sperling

& Kupfer.

Adamo, Giovanni – Della Valle, Valeria (2008). Il Vocabolario Treccani. Neologismi. Parole nuove dai giornali. Roma: Istituto

della Enciclopedia Italiana.

Brozović-Rončević, Dunja et al. (1996). Rječnik novih riječi: mali vodič kroz nove riječi i pojmove u hrvatskim glasilima.

Zagreb: Minerva.

De Mauro, Tullio – Mancini, Marco (2004). Dizionario. Parole straniere nella lingua italiana. Milano: Garzanti.

Klaić, Bratoljub (2012). Novi rječnik stranih riječi. Zagreb: Školska knjiga.

Left-/right asymmetries and the diachronic emergence of German adpositional constructions.

Bücker, Jörg

(University of Münster)

One way of discussing the relationship between interaction and (Construction) Grammar can be to ask for the role the

interactional organization of syntactic positions within clauses plays for the diachronic emergence of grammatical items.

Several studies have shown, for example, that exposed clausal positions in German sentences – in particular, the pre-front

field as the "left periphery" and the end field as the "right periphery" – are often occupied by linguistic items which share

the feature that they are entrenched in the sense of Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, amongst others) and tend to

be deployed as interaction-structuring devices, i.e. as large scale operators with a pragmatically driven scope that affects

complex stretches of prior or follow-up talk. Examples for such constructions are discourse markers in the pre-front field

(see Günthner 2000; Auer/Günthner 2005; Bücker i.pr. a, for example) and post-positioned stance markers (Auer 2006: 281),

"topic tags" (Bücker i.pr. b; see also Barth-Weingarten/Couper-Kuhlen 2002) and entrenched reporting frame devices

(Bücker i.pr. c) in the end field.

In contrast to the vast quantity of studies which are concerned with the present-day forms and functions of

discourse markers and related constructions in the pre-front and the end field, less work has been done regarding the role

exposed syntactic positions play for the diachronic development of linguistic devices (but see Fried 2009 and Hilpert 2012 as

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regards a diachronic approach to the rise of constructions). Due to this, I would like to discuss how and for which reasons

the pre-front field and the end field – two syntactically and interactionally exposed and prominent positions – can influence

the diachronic development of linguistic devices. I will take the example of German constructions with "wegen" (i.e.

"deswegen", "von wegen", "wegen" and so on). Referring to Auer's concept of "left-/right asymmetries" (paper given on a

conference in Münster, June 2012) which emphasizes that the synchronic differences between elements in the "left" and in

the "right periphery" can be linked to the overall organization of talk-in-interaction, I will show that the pre-front field and

the end field can also be syntactic hosts for diachronic developments that result in the diachronic emergence of quite

distinct interaction-structuring constructions. For example, the pre-front field and the end field instances of the Early New

High German preposition "von wegen" 'because of' developed into at least three very different constructions which are all

large scale operators with a pragmatically driven scope in present-day German, and which typically occur in informal talk-in-

interaction: The pre-front field instances of "von wegen" evolved into a speech-act linking device and then into an

interjection-like exclamative construction, whereas the end field instances of "von wegen" evolved into a reporting frame

device (Bücker 2008, i.pr. c). This shows that a diachronic perspective on the relationship between interaction and

(Construction) Grammar can contribute to a better understanding of the impact the interactional function of exposed

syntactic positions can have on the diachronic emergence and development of grammatical items.

References

Auer, Peter (2006): Increments and more. Anmerkungen zur augenblicklichen Diskussion über die Erweiterbarkeit von

Turnkonstruktionseinheiten. In: Arnulf Deppermann/Reinhard Fiehler/Thomas Spranz-Fogasy (Eds.): Grammatik

und Interaktion. Radolfzell: Verlag für Gesprächsforschung, 279-294.

Auer, Peter/Susanne Günthner (2005): Die Entstehung von Diskursmarkern im Deutschen – ein Fall von

Grammatikalisierung? In: Torsten Leuschner/Tanja Mortelsmans (Eds.): Grammatikalisierung im Deutschen.

Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 335-362.

Barth-Weingarten, Dagmar/Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (2002): On the development of final "though": A case of

grammaticalization? In: Ilse Wischer/Gabriele Diewald (Eds.): New Reflections on Grammaticalization, 363-378.

Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 345-361.

Bücker, Jörg (2008): Elf Freunde soll ihr sein? Von wegen! Nicht-präpositionale Spielarten mit von wegen als

Projektorkonstruktionen in der deutschen Gegenwartssprache (= GIDI Arbeitspapierreihe, Nr. 17).

Bücker, Jörg (i.pr. c): Prepositions as tying constructions: German mit and the topical organization of talk-in-interaction. In:

Ronny Boogaart/Timothy Colleman/Gijsbert Rutten (Eds.): Extending the scope of construction-based grammar.

Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.

Bücker, Jörg (i.pr. b): Konstruktionen und Konstruktionscluster: Die Zirkumposition von XP her im gesprochenen Deutsch. In:

Alexander Lasch/Alexander Ziem (Eds.): Grammatik als Inventar von Konstruktionen? Sprachliches Wissen im Fokus

der Konstruktionsgrammatik. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.

Bücker, Jörg (i.pr. c): Indexing narrative metalepsis in everyday German story-telling: The case of von wegen and nach dem

Motto. In: Pragmatics.

Fried, Mirjam (2009): Construction Grammar as a tool for diachronic analysis. In: Constructions and Frames 1/2, 261-290.

Goldberg, Adele E. (1995): Constructions: A Construction Grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: Chicago

University Press.

Hilpert, Martin (2012): Diachronic collostructional analysis. How to use it, and how to deal with confounding factors. In: J.

Robynson/K. Allan (Eds.): Current methods in Historical Semantics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 133-160.

A semantic map approach to English articles (a, the, and Ø).

Butler, Brian

(University of Oregon)

The three structural possibilities marking a noun with an English article are a, the, and Ø (the absence of an article).

Although these structural possibilities are simple, they encode a multitude of semantic and pragmatic functions, and it is

these complex form-function interactions that this study explores and explains using a semantic map model (Berlin and Kay,

1969; Anderson, 1982, 1986; Pederson, 1991a, 1991b; Croft, 2001; Haspelmath, 2003; and De Haan, 2004, 2010). The study

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employs a functional approach to address the following research question: What are the semantic and pragmatic functions

that determine English article usage?

The semantic map that is proposed contains three dimensions which were derived from the extant literature on

English articles (e.g., Christophersen, 1939; Chafe, 1976; Lyons, 1977; Hawkins, 1978; Du Bois, 1980; Heim, 1982, 1983; Fox

& Thompson, 1990; Rice & Prideaux, 1991; Barsalou, 1992; Lambrecht, 1994; Epstein, 1999; Berezowski, 2001; Givón, 2001,

2005; Abbott, 2001, 2011; Riley, 2007; Matushansky, 2008). I refer to these three dimensions as Grammatical Number,

Referentiality, and Discourse Mode. Each of these dimensions contains a number of further semantic values or pragmatic

functions – which I will label “attributes” – that are implicated in English article choice.

In order to determine which selection and arrangements of dimensions and attributes best predicts Standard

American English article usage, four different versions of the basic semantic map were tested with a methodological

approach that used data collected in a controlled protocol from an elicited conversational discourse. The data were coded

according to a number of features involving grammatical number, referentiality, and discourse mode so that the versions

could be compared.

The version that provided the most accurate predictions is used as a basis for proposing a comprehensive semantic

map of Standard American English article usage that includes the following dimensions and dimensional attributes: a

Grammatical Number dimension with 3 attributes (singular, plural, and uncountable); a Referentiality dimension with 11

attributes, including 7 referential attributes that describe kinds of identifiability (proper names, shared lexis, shared speech

situation, frame, current discourse, identifiable to speaker only [“new reference”], and identifiable to neither speaker nor

listener [non-specific]) as well as 4 non-referential attributes (categorization, general non-referential expressions, finite verb

[verb-object] "noun incorporation", and idioms); and a Discourse Mode dimension with 4 attributes (headline, immediacy,

normal, and reintroducing).

This model of English articles contributes to the field of research on articles as well as to the field of English

language instruction and learning. In addition, it is suggested that the methodological paradigm used to test the semantic

map model may be useful as an experimental paradigm for testing semantic maps of other constructions and languages.

References

Abbott, B. (2001). Definiteness and identification in English. In N. T. Enikö (Ed.), Pragmatics in 2000: Selected papers from

the 7th International Pragmatics Conference (Vol. 2, pp. 1–15). Antwerp: International Pragmatics Association.

Abbott, B. (2011). Support for a unique theory of definiteness. Proceedings of SALT (Vol. 9, pp. 1–15).

Anderson, L. B. (1982). The “perfect” as a universal and as a language-particular category. In P. J. Hopper (Ed.), Tense-aspect:

between semantics & pragmatics, Typological studies in language (Vol. 1, pp. 227–264). Presented at the

Symposium on Tense and Aspect, May 1979, UCLA: John Benjamins Publishing Co.

Anderson, L. B. (1986). Evidentials, paths of change, and mental maps: typologically regular asymmetries. In W. Chafe & J.

Nichols (Eds.), Evidentiality: The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology (pp. 273–312). Norwood, NJ: Ablex Pub. Corp.

Barsalou, L. (1992). Frames, concepts, and conceptual fields. In A. Lehrer & E. F. Kittay (Eds.), Frames, Fields, and Contrasts:

New Essays in Semantic and Lexical Organization (pp. 21–74). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Berezowski, L. (2001). Articles and proper names. Wydawn: Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego.

Berlin, B., & Kay, P. (1969). Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Chafe, W. (1976). Givenness, contrastiveness, definiteness, subjects, topics, and point of view in subject and topic. In W.

Chafe & C. Li (Eds.), Subject and Topic (pp. 24–55). New: Academic Press.

Christophersen, P. (1939). The articles: a study of their theory and use in English. Copenhagen: Einar Munksgaard.

Croft, W. (2001). Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

De Haan, F. (2004). On representing semantic maps. E-MELD Language documentation conference 2004: Workshop on

linguistic databases and best practice.

De Haan, F. (2010). Building a semantic map: top-down versus bottom-up approaches. Linguistic Discovery, 8(1), 102–117.

Du Bois, J. W. (1980). Beyond definiteness: The trace of identity in discourse. In W. Chafe (Ed.), The pear stories: Cognitive,

cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production (pp. 203–274). Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corp.

Epstein, R. (1999). Roles, frames, and definiteness. In K. Van Hoek, A. A. Kibrik, & L. G. M. Noordman (Eds.), Discourse

studies in cognitive linguistics: selected papers from the fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference,

Amsterdam, July 1997 (pp. 53–74). Presented at the Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference,

Amsterdam. Philadelphia: J. Benjamins.

Fox, B. A., & Thompson, S. A. (1990). A discourse explanation of the grammar of relative clauses in English conversation.

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Language, 66(2), 297–316.

Givón, T. (2001). Syntax: an introduction (Vols. 1-2, Vol. 1). Amersterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Givón, T. (2005). Context as other minds: The pragmatics of sociality, cognition, and communication. Amersterdam: John

Benjamins Publishing Company.

Haspelmath, M. (2003). The geometry of grammatical meaning: Semantic maps and cross-linguistic comparison. In M.

Tomasello (Ed.), The new psychology of language (Vol. 2, pp. 211–242). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Hawkins, J. (1978). Definiteness and indefiniteness: a study in reference and grammaticality prediction. London: Croom

Helm.

Heim, I. (1982). The semantics of deﬁnite and indeﬁnite noun phrases. (Doctoral dissertation). University of Massachusetts,

Amherst.

Heim, I. (1983). File change semantics and the familiarity theory of definiteness. In J. Gutiérrez-Rexach (Ed.), Semantics.

Critical Concepts in Linguistics Series: Vol. 3 (pp. 108–135). London: Routledge.

Lambrecht, K. (1994). Information structure and sentence form: topic, focus, and the mental representations of discourse

referents. Cambridge; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.

Lyons, J. (1977). Semantics. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Matushansky, O. (2008). On the linguistic complexity of proper names. Linguistics and Philosophy, 31(5), 573–627.

Pederson, E. (1991a). The Ecology of a Semantic Space. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics

Society (Vol. 17, pp. 457–468).

Pederson, E. (1991b). Subtle semantics: Universals in the polysemy of reflexive and causative constructions. (Doctoral

dissertation). University Microfilms International, University of California at Berkeley.

Rice, S., & Prideaux, G. (1991). Event-packing: the case of object incorporation in English. In Proceedings of the Annual

Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on The Grammar of Event Structure

(Vol. 17, pp. 283–298).

Riley, J. A. (2007). Mental representations: Reference and definiteness. Journal of Pragmatics, 39(5), 831–871.

Modal habere-constructions in the Balkan context.

Buzarovska, Eleni and Mitkovska, Liljana

(University of Ss Cyril and Methodius and FON University)

We examine here the inflected and uninflected variants of the modal ima da-construction ‘habere + subjunctive clause’ in

Macedonian with reference to their equivalents in other Balkan languages. The difference between the two variants lies in

the forms of ima ‘have’: inflected forms carry person and number markers (Imam/imaš da odam/ odiš ‘I/you have to go’,

etc…) as opposed to uninflected (ima da odam/odiš ‘I/you shall go’, etc.). There is also a semantic difference: uninflected

constructions express stronger obligation than inflected ones, while predicting a future event. We work to determine the

exact meanings of these constructions and the interrelation between them.

Despite high frequency in spoken language, the construction habere+subjunctive clause has not received due

attention in the grammars of Balkan languages. In Macedonian, Čašule (1989) and Topolińska (2000) treat these

constructions as modal. Lunt (1952) and Kramer (1986) also mention ima as a future or a modal marker, but provide scarce

explanation.

Our analysis of inflected ima da-constructions (Bužarovska & Mitkovska 2011) shows that there is greater semantic

variability within each formal type than previously assumed. This fact, coupled with the conclusion that their formal division

into two types is not semantically fuzzy, prompts us to query the exact modal status of the inflected and uninflected ima in

the context of typological categorizations of modality.

To explain this pattern we take into account available diachronic evidence and the fact that the precursor of ima da-

constructions is the habere+infinitive construction. As a structural borrowing from Balkan Romance languages, it was used

for translation of several means of expressing futurity in Greek biblical texts until the 12

century (Asenova 2002:205-211),

but later was replaced by desiderative velle+infinitive constructions, although habere has survived in negated constructions.

Asenova (2002:215) points out that the unequal status of the future habere-constructions vs. their velle counterparts is

reflected in their dialectal and stylistic distribution: in peripheral Balkan dialects habere-constructions express futurity, but if

both forms exist they express modality in spoken registers. Cyhun (1981:160) also believes these constructions were used

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for temporal-modal functions. This suggests that the presence of two rival forms in Balkan languages - habere+subjunctive

and velle +subjunctive - has led to their specialization for separate non-factual domains: velle for future and habere for

deontic and epistemic modality. But how these two types of modal meanings map onto the two formal variants of the

habere+subjunctive construction in Balkan Slavic has not yet been investigated.

Research on the nature of ima da-constructions can be justified with three arguments. First, the reflexes of

habere+infinitive construction have either modal or future function in other European languages, but these Macedonian

constructions exhibit an overlap of modal and future semantics. Therefore, a clearer demarcation within this blend is

needed. Second, it would be significant for typological research to categorize, explain and place these meanings within the

modality system. Third, the areal character of these constructions also provokes interest: they are used in a relatively large

territory shared by a number of different Balkan languages.

References

Asenova, Petya (2002). Balkansko ezikoznanie: Osnovni problem na balkanskija ezikov sǎjuz. V. Tǎrnovo: Faber.

Bužarovska, Eleni & Liljana Mitkovska (2011). Ličnite ima da-konstrukcii vo makedonskiot jazik. Makedonski jazik LVII, 120-

133.

Čašule, Ilija (1989). Modalnite glagoli vo makedonskiot jazik. Prilozi 14/2. Skopje: MANU, 89-117.

Cyhun, Gennadij A. (1981). Tipologicheskie problemy balkanoslavyanskogo yazykogo areala. Minsk: Nauka i tehnika.

Kramer, Christina E. (1986). Analytic Modality in Macedonian. München: Verlag Otto Sagner.

Lunt, Horace (1952). A Grammar of Macedonian Literary Language. Skopje: Državno Knigoizdatelstvo.

Topolińska, Zuzana (2000). Polski-makedonski: gramatička konfrontacija. Studii od morfosintaksata. Tom 3. Skopje: MANU.

All's well what ends well: final consonant clusters in Algherese Catalan inherited nominal.

Cabrera-Callís, Maria

(Universitat de Barcelona)

Introduction and data

Intermorphic final consonant clusters are generally mapped faithfully in Algherese Catalan nominals: camp ‘field’ /kamp/

[kámp], polp ‘octopus’ /polp/ [pólp]. When the plural suffix /z/ is added, the general solution is the deletion of the second

segment and the regressive assimilation of the coronal place of C3: cf. camps ‘fields’ /kamp+z/ [káns], polps ‘octopuses’

[póls] [2]. When the intermorphic final consonant cluster consists of liquid + nasal, however, some idyosinchratic

phenomena are triggered. First of all, it must be noticed that, due to a historic process of lateralization of preconsonantal

rhotics (cf. mort ‘dead MASC.’ /mɔɾt/ ~ /mɔlt/ [mɔ́lt], morta ‘dead FEM.’ /mɔɾt+a/ ~ /mɔlt+a/ [mɔ́lta]), which still offers a few

cases of synchronic alternations (cf. por ‘fear’ /poɾ/ [póɾ], pors ‘fears’/poɾ+z/ [póls]), all preconsonantal rhotics in Algherese

inherited nominals are realized as a lateral. (And thus, assuming Lexicon Optimization, from now on they are underlyingly

represented as /l/, unless [ɾ] ~ [l] alternation is given.) The activity of this process, nonetheless, would have given rise to a

very marked structure: a final -ln## sequence, derived from the lateralization of the rhotic followed by a coronal nasal:

forn > *foln ‘oven’. The sequence, however, is unattested in Catalan (and it also appears to be odd in other languages, like

Spanish). In order for Algherese to avoid it, a process of deletion has applied, leading to a surface singleton coda: forn >

*foln > fol [fól] ‘oven’. The addition of the plural suffix /z/ to a liquid + coronal nasal final cluster is realized with the

maintenance of the nasal deletion: forns ‘ovens’ [fóls]. It must be noticed, however, that in these cases a /ln/ underlying

form (i.e., /foln/, /foln+z/ and not just /fol/, /fol+z/) must be assumed, since the derivated forms (fornet ‘oven DIM.’

/foln+et/ [fulnét]) exceptionally exhibit a word internal heterosyllabic /l.n/ cluster, an otherwise forbidden structure: cf.

fornet [fulnét] vs. taverna ‘bar’ [tavɛ́na], cisterna ‘cistern’ [sistɛ́na], ajornar [aʒuná]. The addition of the plural suffix /z/ to a

liquid + labial nasal final cluster triggers the appearance of an epenthetic [u], being the vowel exceptionally preserved in the

singular: ferm ‘firm’ /fɛlm/ [fɛ́lmu], ferms /fɛlm+z/ [fɛ́lmus] (cf. fermat ‘to firm’ /fɛlm+a+r/ [falmá]); calm ‘quiet MASC.’

/kalm/ [kálmu], calms /kálm+z/ [kálmus] (cf. calmar ‘to calm’ /kálm+a+r/ [kalmá]).

Interpretation

Algherese general tendency to avoid the triconsonantal final clusters by means of deleting C2 can be easily accounted for by

means of a hierarchy in which *COMPLEXCODA3 and CONTIGUITY are top-ranked:

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/kamp+z/

CONTIG

*CCC

SHARE(PA)

DEP

MAX

IDENT(PA)

→

a. [kán

b. [kámps]

c. [kámpus]

d. [káms]

e. [káps]

The behavior of liquid + coronal nasal + /z/ final clusters is determined by the general tendency of avoiding final -ln

sequences, which acts yet in singular forms yielding to a surface singleton coda: forn [fól] (*[fóln]). To explain it, a temporary

top-ranked *ln# restriction is assumed. Since the realization of the plural forms is no longer determined by

*COMPLEXCODA3, preservation occurs as predicted.

/foln+z/

CONTIG

*In#

*CCC

DEP

MAX

→

a. [fól

b. [fólns]

c. [fólnus]

d. [fón

The exceptional maintenance of the liquid in the derivated forms (fornet [ful.nét]), where it stands in preconsonantal

internal coda position and thus is predicted to be deleted (cf. taverna [tavɛ́na]) focuses our attention: in this paper, it is

claimed that this behavior is due to a surface resemblance effect by which the presence of the segment in final position,

triggered by markedness (*ln#), is also spread word-internally, where deletion would be expected. Optimal Paradigms

model [5] is proved to be the appropriate framework to describe the case at study:

foln

+et/

*ln#

MAX

C [_V]

CORRESPONDENCE

CODA

INTERNAL

MAX

→

fól

fuln

ét

fóln

fuln

ét

fól

ful

ét>

**W

fól

fun

ét

****W

**W

The also singular behavior of liquid + labial nasal + /z/ final clusters can be interpreted at least in two different ways. Again,

it can be understood as the effect of a surface resemblance through paradigm memberships, by which the epenthesis in the

plural, triggered by the need of the labial nasal segment to be preserved and by the activity of *COMPLEXCODA3, is also

spread to singular forms, where otherwise it would not be predicted:

If,

however, it is sought to avoid postulating MAX(labial nasal), which seems to be a very specific constraint, a parallel

interpretation of [u] in terms of gender allomorphy can be assumed, along the lines of [1] and [4].

References

Bonet, Eulàlia (2006), «Gender allomorphy and epenthesis in Spanish», in MARTÍNEZ-GIL, Fernándo & COLINA, Sonia (ed.),

Optimality-theoretic Studies in Spanish Phonology, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Cabrera, Maria (in prep.), Contactes consonàntics en alguerès. Proposta de descripció sincrònica. Manuscript. Universitat de

/fɛlm, fɛlm+z/ CONT *CCC

MAX (lab

nas)

CORRESP

(PA) DEP MAX

(Pl)

→

ɛ́

lmu

ɛ́

lmu

b. <

ɛ́

c. <

ɛ́

lmu

**W

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Barcelona.

Kuen, Heinrich (1932), «El dialecto del Alguer y su posición en la historia de la lengua catalana», Anuari de l’Oficina

Romànica de Llengua i Literatura, V, p. 121-127.

Lloret, Maria-Rosa & Viaplana, Joaquim (1998), «El binarismo del género gramatical en castellano y en catalán», Verba, 25,

pp. 71-91.

McCarthy, John (2005), «Optimal Paradigms», dins DOWNING, Laura; HALL, Tracy Alan; RAFFELSIEFEN, Renate (ed.),

Paradigms in Phonological Theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 170-210.

The use of Akkadian prepositions in Hittite.

Cajnko, Mojca

(University of Ljubljana)

In the second millennium BC an Indo-European people known as the Hittites lived in what is now Turkey. The documents of

the Hittite state were written in a cuneiform script. Together with this script, the Hittites adopted a number of written signs

and words of Akkadian and Sumerian origin. Hurrian, Luwian, Hattic and Palaic language material is also attested.

Akkadian case markers were frequently used in Hittite; besides Akkadian case endings for the nominative,

accusative and genitive, ten Akkadian prepositions were used. These case markers could encode core grammatical relations

as well as possession, core and peripheral local meanings, etc. The use of Akkadian case markers in Hittite has yet to receive

a systematic treatment, as it is commonly assumed that they are mere graphemes or scribal variants of Hittite case

markers.

The descriptive-qualitative and applicative research of Akkadian prepositions in Hittite presented here attempts to

shed light upon their use through the perspective of functional grammar. This theory views linguistic expression as the

result of adherence to rules of expression, which are determined by the communication goals of the participants. The

internal grammatical construction of a word is not the only source of information; the syntactic and semantic constructions

of larger units can also serve this purpose, whereas communication goals are of a more or less pragmatic nature. With this

methodology, it is possible to assess the functional value of individual variants.

The corpus of the research contains nearly 100 texts, or roughly 6000 non-fragmentary sentences and 1800

occurrences of Akkadian prepositions. A description of factors such as text type (story: oracle), standardisation of language

(drafts : final version), social relations between participants of communication (equal : non-equal social status) and

diachronic differences (Old : New Hittite) is accompanied by a syntactic, semantic and pragmatic analysis of the

circumstances underlying the use of the individual case markers.

The analysis of the functional aspects of the use of Akkadian prepositions in Hittite is intended to show that the

semantic content of these prepositions in Hittite did not wholly match the meanings they had in Akkadian, as they were

gradually approximated to the meanings of Hittite case markers. However, the meanings of Akkadian prepositions do not

perfectly overlap with the meanings of Hittite case markers in any period of Hittite; their semantic fields are narrower than

those of their Hittite counterparts and, at the same time, they display uses which are characteristic only of them. This is

particularly visible in their social-deictic uses and in uses limited to particular text types and their associated formulas. The

research is also intended to show that competition between Akkadian and Hittite case markers was linked to the marking of

originally different language material (whereby Akkadian case markers primarily appear before lexemes of non-Hittite

origin, proper names and numerals) and to the characteristics of different text types. Competition between Akkadian and

Hittite case markers in the framework of individual text types merits further study.

Raised grounds in Dutch and English: common underlying semantics.

Cappelle, Bert

(Université Lille Nord de France)

Background

Recent years have witnessed the publication of several detailed monographs on adpositions in English and/or in other

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Germanic languages (e.g., Beliën 2008, Blom 2005, Dehé et al. 2002, Elenbaas 2007, Los et al. 2012, Thim 2012). From

these, interesting underlying parallels despite superficial differences have emerged between structures across these

languages. One interesting observation is that Dutch allows motion verbs to be followed by a preposition and a noun

phrase (NP) (e.g. (1a)) or by an NP and a ‘postposition’ (e.g. (1b)):

(1) a. Ze liepen over het plein.

they ran-PLUR over the square

≈ ‘They were running across the square.’

b. Ze liepen het plein over.

they ran-PLUR the square over

≈ ‘They ran across the square.’

Beliën (2008) suggests that structures containing constituents traditionally analyzed as [NP+postposition] (as in (1b)) could

and should be given an alternative treatment, in terms of the NP functioning as an object(-like) constituent at clause level.

Beliën’s main semantic argument is that the ‘Ground’ or ‘Landmark’ NP in (1b) is conceptualized as being (partly or fully)

traversed, just like the referent of a direct object of motional verbs in verb-framed languages (cf. Talmy 1985).

Question. Is the semantic difference observable between (1a) and (1b) an isolated fact of Dutch grammar or is it expected

given existing patterns in Dutch and/or other Germanic languages? In particular, can the alternation between (1a) and (1b)

be subsumed under a more general phenomenon which also renders possible so-called ‘Ground promotion’ or

‘unpredicated particles’ (Declerck 1976, McIntyre 2007, Levin and Sells 2008, Oya 2009, Svenonius 2003, Sweep 2012),

exemplified in (2b), which alternates with the assumedly more canonical sentence in (2a)?

(2) a. He wiped crumbs off the table.

b. He wiped the table off.

Approach. We take a constructionist and contrastive approach to the above research question. That is, (1a) and (1b) are not

treated as derivationally linked; rather, they are viewed as instances of two separate form-meaning pairings which

nonetheless stand in a semantic relationship. We attempt to identify the commonalities between the alternation in (1a-b)

and that in (2a-b) in order to obtain a higher degree of generalization.

Method. All constructions involved are analyzed in terms of multiple smaller or more general constructions that they

integrate or realize (cf. Goldberg’s (1995) ‘subpart links’ and ‘instance links’ between constructions). Standard constituency

tests (clefting, movement) are applied and semantic equivalence across languages checked with parallel corpora.

Data. Authentic data are drawn from Dutch and English, which represent two structurally different Germanic languages (cf.

Los et al. 2012).

Results. Formal and especially semantic parallels suggest that Dutch ‘postpositional’ constructions are indeed similar to

cases of ground promotion: they have a ‘Ground’ argument and receive a holistic reading. As a more unexpected upshot,

prepositional phrases in English motion constructions can often be shown to be syntactically ambiguous between adjuncts

and arguments, depending on their semantic (partial vs. holistic) interpretation and, accordingly, on their possible

equivalence in Dutch with either a prepositional or a particle-like ‘postpositional’ construction.

References

Beliën, Maaike. 2008. Construction, Constaints, and Construal. Adpositions in Dutch. Utrecht: LOT Publications.

Blom, Corrien. 2005. Complex Predicates in Dutch: Synchrony and Diachrony. Utrecht: LOT Publications.

Declerck, Renaat. 1976. A Proposal Concerning the Underlying Structure of Literal Phrasal Verbs. Preprint No. 2. Katholieke

Universiteit Leuven Campus Kortrijk.

Dehé, Nicole, Ray Jackendoff, Andrew McIntyre and Silke Urban. 2002. Verb-Particle Explorations. Berlin: Mouton de

Gruyter.

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Elenbaas, Marion. 2007. The Synchronic and Diachronic Syntax of the English Verb-particle Combination. Utrecht: LOT

Publications.

Goldberg, Adele. 1995. Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: The University of

Chicago Press.

Levin, Beth and Peter Sells. 2008. Unpredicated particles. In: Lian Hee Wee and Linda Uyechi (eds.), Reality Eploration and

Discovery: Pattern Interaction in Language and Life. Stanford: CSLI Publications, 303-324.

Los, Bettelou, Corrien Blom, Geert Booij, Marion Elenbaas and Ans Van Kemenade. 2012. Morphosyntactic Change: A

Comparative Study Of Particles And Prefixes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McIntyre, Andrew. 2007. Particle verbs and argument structure. Language and Linguistics Compass 1(4): 350-367.

Oya, Toshiaki. 2009. Ground arguments in German particle verbs: A comparison with Dutch and English. Journal of

Germanic Linguistics 23(3), 257-296.

Svenonius, Peter. 2003. Limits on P: Filling in holes vs. falling in holes. Nordlyd: Tromsø University Working Papers on

Language & Linguistics 31(2), 431-445.

Sweep, Josefien. 2012. Metonymical Object Changes: A Corpus-oriented Study on Dutch and German. Utrecht: LOT

Publications.

Talmy, Leonard. 1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In: Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language

Typology and Syntactic Description. Volume 3 Grammatical Categories and the Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 57-149.

Thim, Stefan. 2012. Phrasal Verbs: The English Verb-Particle Construction and its History. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Reiterated sequences in Supyire narrative.

Carlson, Robert

(Africa International University and SIL)

In some narratives, the repetition of some events is important to the plot. While repetition of single events a single time

(e.g. “she knocked on the door again”) is probably the most common type, and multiple repetitions of a single event (e.g.

“she knocked on the door repeatedly”) are also very common, the multiple repetion of sequences of events in cyclic fashion

is doubtless also a possibility in narratives in all languages. This paper examines the marking of the multiplex reiteration of

sequences of events in Supyire (Niger-Congo, Gur) narratives. The approach is empirical and corpus-based. The corpus

consists of 126 narratives, with 105,000+ words in 17,290 clauses. For the composition of this corpus, which is extracted

from a much larger corpus of oral texts collected over the past thirty years, “narrative” is narrowly defined as a

linguistic

production meant to evoke a coherent series of events in temporal sequence (see Talmy 2000). The narratives vary greatly

in length from 20 clauses to many thousands of clauses. The framework assumed in the analysis is broadly that of cognitive

linguistics, with a reliance on the notion of construction as used in Cognitive Grammar (see Langacker 1999, 2008).

The marking of reiterated sequences in Supyire narratives is very different from the marking of repetitions of single

events, whether single or multiple. Single event repetitions are primarily marked by lexical means (by adverbs, serial verbs,

or repetition of the verb), and not aspectual or modal auxiliaries. Reiterated sequences, in contrast, are primarily marked by

a configuration of constructions in which aspect and mood figure prominently. Importantly, none of the constructions used

is “dedicated” to the marking of reiterated sequences in narratives. For example, in one type of reiterated series, the

beginning of the series is marked either by a clause type that elsewhere serves as a simple conditional:

U ahá ḿpá…

he/she

COND

come

‘If/When he/she comes,…’

When such a clause occurs in a past-time narrative context, it is given the interpretation “Whenever he/she came …” or

“Each time he/she came …”. Within the reiterated series, most clauses are marked by one of a group of aspect auxiliaries

which can be roughly labeled as “habitual” in their non-narrative uses (see Carlson 1994). Typically, the events in the

reiterated series are perfective in the sense that the end-point of each of the events is in view within the conceptualization

cued by the clause. Insofar as these sequences can be characterized as “habitual”, they show that in Supyire “habitual”

cannot be classified as a subspecies of imperfective, as has been claimed by some (e.g. Givón 2001:289), but cross-cuts the

distinction of perfective/imperfective, as suggested by Dahl (1985). This paper shows that the narrative interpretation of

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the constructions in question is better understood as a specific instance of the general indeterminacy of grammar due to its

basically metonymic nature, as suggested by Langacker (2009).

References

Carlson, Robert. 1994. A grammar of Supyire. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Dahl, Osten. 1985. Tense and aspect systems. New York: Blackwell.

Givón, T. 2001. Syntax: an introduction, vol. 1. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Langacker, Ronald. 1999. Grammar and conceptualization [Cognitive Linguistics Research 14]. Berlin & New York: Mouton

de Gruyter.

Langacker, Ronald. 2008. Cognitive Grammar: a basic introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Langacker, Ronald. 2009. Metonymic grammar, in Metonomy and metaphor in grammar, ed. Klaus-Uwe Panther, Linda

Thornburg, and Antonio Barcelona. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 45-74.

Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a cognitive semantics, volume II: typology and process in concept structuring. Cambridge,

Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Parallel corpora and the cross-linguistic annotation of modality.

Caterina, Mauri; Nissim, Malvina; Pietrandrea, Paola and Sansò, Andrea

(University of Pavia, University of Bologna, Lattice CNRS and University of Insubria)

The aim of this paper is to present a multi-lingual annotation scheme for modality developed and deployed on a parallel

corpus.

Recently, the Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing communities have shown interest in

automating the recognition of extra-propositional components of meaning in general and modality in particular. The first

step towards the development of systems that can automatically deal with the interpretation of modality is the creation of

appropriate, annotated resources. Indeed, the last few years have witnessed the development of annotation schemes and

annotated corpora for different aspects of modality in different languages. See, for example, Nierenburg and McShane

(2004), Hendrickx et al. (2012), Baker et al (2012) , Wiebe et al (2005), Szarvas et al. (2008), Sauri and Pustejovsky (2009).

While important contributions, these remain mainly separate efforts. And while there have also been efforts towards

finding a common avenue for modality annotation, the computational linguistics community is still far from having

developed working, shared standards for converting modality-related issues into annotation categories. Under this respect,

linguistic typology has already gone a long way in the study of modality across languages.

Thus, we promote (i) a cross-linguistic annotation model of modality which relies on a wide, strongly typologically

motivated approach, and (ii) a hierarchical, layered model, by accounting for both factuality and speaker's attitude, while

modelling these two aspects through separate annotation schemes. Within this frame, the issue of annotation units,

linguistically, becomes crucial, and we claim that such a two-layered framework provides the best way to deal with it.

Working in a multilingual environment will ease the task of leaving the layer of functional categories distinct from

the actual linguistic realisation. Indeed, each language encodes with its own means what is specified at the functional level.

This is a crucial step towards a homogeneous view of modality cross-linguistically, and it has obvious linguistic and

computational advantages. In this sense, using (strict) parallel corpora, at least at the very first stages, is an enormous

advantage. For this reason, our annotation scheme will be firstly developed on the Europarl corpus (Koehn 2005). From a

practical point of view, we plan to exploit existing collaborative platforms, such as GATE Teamware, to perform distributed

annotation over the web, so as to optimise the contribution of native speakers.

In our presentation, first we will discuss what issues need to be dealt with to achieve shared standards for

modelling the annotation of modality, then we will describe our two-layered approach under a cross-linguistic perspective,

then we will discuss issues related to the linguistic units of annotation and why this should be addressed carefully, and how

this can fit in the proposed model, lastly we will stress the importance of working on parallel corpora to achieve our goals.

References

Baker, K., B. Dorr, M. Bloodgood, C. Callison-Burch, N. Filardo, C. Piatko, L. Levin, and S. Miller (2012). Use of modality and

negation in semantically-informed syntactic MT. Computational Linguistics 38(2).

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Hendrickx, I., A. Mendes, and S. Mencarelli (2012). Modality in text: a proposal for corpus annotation. In Proceedings of the

Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012), Istanbul, Turkey.

Koehn, P. (2005). Europarl: A Parallel Corpus for Statistical Machine Translation. In Conference Proceedings: the Tenth

Machine Translation Summit, Phuket, Thailand, pp. 79–86. AAMT.

Nirenburg, S. and M. McShane (2008). Annotating modality. Technical report, University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

Sauri, R. and J. Pustejovsky (2009). Factbank: a corpus annotated with event factuality. Language Resources and Evaluation

43(3), 227-268.

Szarvas, G., V. Vincze, R. Farkas, and J. Csirik (2008). The bioscope corpus: annotation for negation, uncertainty and their

scope in biomedical texts. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Current Trends in Biomedical Natural Language

Processing, BioNLP ’08, Stroudsburg, PA, USA, pp. 38-45. ACL.

Wiebe, J., T. Wilson, and C. Cardie (2005). Annotating expressions of opinions and emotions in language. Language

Resources and Evaluation 39(2-3), 165-210.

Relations between the forms and functions of discourse markers and levels of competence in L2 Italian acquisition.

Ceković-Rakonjac, Nevena

(University of Belgrade)

The discourse markers (DMs) have been a subject of increasingly focused linguistic studies since the 1970s. Yet, they are still

a topic of lively academic discussions both in terms of their terminological definitions and the possible classifications and

descriptions of their functions. As a consequence of such insufficiently clear theoretical status of DMs, the applied linguistics

and theory of L2 have only recently expressed more interest for this phenomenon, which, however, has not yet yielded

definitive answers to the questions: when and how DMs are acquired, and how to teach them?

The first studies on the acquisition of DMs in L2 Italian were published in the late 1980s and early 1990s, coming to

their full swing in the first decade of the 21st century. Focusing on exactly that period of time, the aim of this paper is to

present the contents and results of the relevant pedagogical researches related to the acquisition of DMs in L2/FL Italian.

For this purpose, we will first specify the appropriate terminology (Bazzanella 1995, 2002, 2005, 2006) and briefly

indicate the pedagogical implications related to the acquisition of DMs. Afterwards we will provide a description of eight

relevant studies on the topic (Brigetti & Licari 1987, Fellin & Pugliese 1994, Bardel 2003, Ferraris 2004, Andorno 2007, Guil

et al. 2008, Bini & Pernas 2008, Nigoević & Sučić 2011) stating their basic theoretical and methodological assumptions as

well as the proposed conclusions. Finally, we will take a critical look at the researches.

Our main objective is based on the discovery that, despite the fact that the need for an inventory of the DMs

represented in the interlanguage was expressed as early as the pioneering work in this field, such inventory has not yet

been produced. Therefore, on the basis of the analyzed literature, we will try to suggest a potential range of DMs in the

interlanguage, and to determine whether there is a correlation between the forms and functions of DMs, on the one hand,

and certain levels of the students’ communicative competence (basic, intermediate and advanced), on the other hand.

Our effort to reconstruct the authors’ findings will confirm the hypothesis that the DMs occur even in the early

stages of L2 acquisition, followed by the hypothesis on the absence of correlation between the level of competence and the

presence of DM, as well as the hypothesis on the existence of a correlation between the level of the students’ pragmatic-

discourse competence and a specific type of DMs (more lexicalized markers and more complex lexical expressions as DMs at

higher competence levels). Finally, on the basis of the analyzed literature, we will suggest an absence of correlation between

the functional values of DMs and given levels of competence, since all determined functions are represented at each

individual stage of acquisition.

We hope that this work could serve as a useful guideline for future research that would throw more light on this

topical, yet insufficiently researched phenomenon within the theory and practice of L2 acquisition.

References

Andorno, C. (2007). Apprendere il lessico: elaborazione di segnali discorsivi (sì, no, così). In M. Chini et al. (a cura di), Atti del

6º Congresso Internazionale dell’Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Applicata, 95-121. Perugia: Guerra.

Bardel, C. (2003). I segnali discorsivi nell’acquisizione dell’italiano L2. In C. Crocco, R. Savy & F. Cutugno (a cura di), Archivio

del Parlato Italiano. Napoli: Multimedia press.

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Bazzanella, C. (1995). I segnali discorsivi. In L. Renzi et al. (a cura di), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione, volume III

(pp. 225-257). Bologna: Il Mulino.

Bazzanella, C. (2002). Le facce del parlare. Un approccio pragmatico all’italiano parlato. Firenze: La Nuova Italia.

Bazzanella, C. (2005). Linguistica e pragmatica del linguaggio: un'introduzione. Roma–Bari: Editori Laterza.

Bazzanella, C. (2006). Discourse markers in Italian: towards a “compositional” meaning. In K. Fischer (ed.), Approaches to

discourse particles, volume 1 (pp. 449-465). Oxford: Elsevier.

Bini, M., & Pernas, A. (2008). Marcadores discursivos en los primeros estadios de adquisición del italiano L2. In R. Monroy &

A. Sánches (eds.), Actas del VI Congreso de la Asociación Española de Lingüística Aplicada, 25-32. Murcia: Editum.

Brigetti, C., & Licari, C. (1987). “Magari”: per una sensibilizzazione all'uso di alcuni connettori nella didattica della lingua

italiana per stranieri. In C. G. Cecioni & G. Del Lungo Camiciotti (a cura di), Lingua letteraria e lingua dei media

nell'italiano contemporaneo, 62-74. Firenze: Le Monnier.

Fellin, L., & Pugliese, R. (1994). I connettivi e i segnali discorsivi nell’apprendimento dell’italiano per scopi accademici in

studenti di scambio internazionale. In A. G. Ramat & M. Vedovelli (a cura di), Italiano lingua Seconda/Lingua

Straniera, Atti del XXVI Congresso Internazionale di Studi, Società di Linguistica Italiana, 34, 379-389. Roma:

Bulzoni.

Ferraris, S. (2004). Come usano ma gli apprendenti di italiano L1 e L2? In G. Bernini et al. (a cura di), Atti del 3° congresso di

studi dell’Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Applicata, 73-89. Perugia: Guerra Edizioni.

Guil, P., Bazzanella, C., Kondo, C., Gillani, E., Gil, T., Bini, M., Borreguero, M., Pernas, A., & Pernas, P. (2008). Marcadores

discursivos y cortesía lingüística en la interacción de los aprendices de italiano L2. In A. Briz et al. (eds.), Cortesía y

conversación: de lo escrito a lo oral, Actas del III Congreso Internacional del Programa EDICE, 711-729. València:

Universitat de València.

Nigoević, M. & Sučić, P. (2011). Competenza pragmatica in italiano L2: l'uso dei segnali discorsivi da parte degli apprendenti

croati. Italiano LinguaDue, 2, 94-114.

Parallel corpora in research on argument structure.

Celano, Giuseppe; Lehmann, Christian; Luraghi, Silvia and Marschke, Christian

(University of Erfurt and University of Pavia)

The project on ‘Argument structure in texts - Typological and diachronic corpus research’ aims at extracting argument

structures from annotated texts by procedures of text typology. The data basis is constituted by corpora of two

typologically different languages, Ancient Greek and Yucatec Maya. The corpora are partly independent, partly parallel. The

latter portion stems from the New Testament and its Yucatec version. Of the latter, there is a written translation, and for a

few sections, there is an oral translation of the Spanish version and a free oral account. The Yucatec data thus provides

stylistic variation between the written and spoken registers. The texts have been annotated according to the Prague

Dependency Treebank model (Lee & Haug 2010). The Greek project corpus will, at the same time, be a contribution to the

online corpus of the P

ERSEUS

project.

Although the annotations use a dependency formalism, argument-structure frames are described in a

construction-grammar approach (Croft 2001). The corpus annotations are researched with software tools that use pattern

matching algorithms (Pajas & Štěpánek 2009). Evaluation of the results uses the statistics package R. The very first results

appear to confirm the following hypotheses:

The average number of dependents per verb is higher in Ancient Greek than in Yucatec.

The number of different verb valency frames is higher in Ancient Greek than in Yucatec.

Likewise, the number of valency frames that a given verb may alternately be used in (in the sense of Levin 1993) is

higher in Ancient Greek than in Yucatec.

We attribute this difference to the dependent marking syntax of Ancient Greek, which allows the aggregation of

dependents in diverse syntactic and semantic functions on a single verb. Yucatec head marking syntax, on the other hand,

correlates with lesser possibilities to distinguish co-present actant functions on a single verb, consequently with a much

more rigid valency and concomitant reduced freedom to adjoin dependents not provided in the valency.

References

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Croft, William 2001, Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective. Oxford: OUP.

Lee, John & Haug, Dag 2010. “Porting an Ancient Greek and Latin Treebank”. Proceedings of the Seventh conference on

International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), European Language Resources Association (ELRA),

http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/631_Paper.pdf

Levin, Beth 1993, English verb classes and alternations. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Pajas, Petr & Štěpánek, Jan 2009, “System for Querying Syntactically Annotated Corpora”. Proceedings of the ACL-IJCNLP

2009 Software Demonstrations (Association for Computational Linguistics). Suntec, Singapore, pp. 33-36.

Passive and impersonal reflexives in Italo-Romance: synchronic and diachronic aspects.

Cennamo, Michela

(University of Naples Federico II)

In this paper I will discuss the morphosyntax of passive and impersonal reflexives in contemporary Italian dialects and in

some XIII-XIV century northern, central and southern vernaculars.

In particular, I will examine some parameters of variation in the use of these patterns in Italo-Romance, both

synchronically and diachronically: (i) the functional domains covered by the reflexive morpheme, (ii) the morphological

and/or syntactic distinction between passive and impersonal reflexives, (iii) the nature of the subject, (iv) tense-aspectual

restrictions, (v) the interplay of generic vs specific time reference with differential behaviour of transitive-unergatives vs

unaccusatives, in determining the occurrence/lack of the reflexive in impersonal function in perfective contexts, (vi) auxiliary

selection in perfective tenses.

I will show that the synchronic and diachronic variation in the distribution and incidence of the reflexive in passive

and impersonal functions throws light on some highly debated issues of Italian morphosyntax, such as the nature and

function(s) of the reflexive morpheme in these patterns and the function of ci in the impersonal of reflexives.

The investigation of variational data also gives some insights as to whether passive and impersonal reflexives realize

two different syntactic constructions or whether they involve the same morpheme, although with varying uses and

functions.

More specifically, I will underline the existence of a correlation between the spread of the reflexive in impersonal

function — not equally attested in the Italian dialects and the early vernaculars, unlike the passive reflexive — and its

(inclusive/non-inclusive) interpretation. Dialects where the reflexive never acquires an inclusive interpretation, such as

Neapolitan, have a more limited use of this morpheme in impersonal function, with other strategies being employed. In

contrast, varieties where the reflexive may have both a non-inclusive and an inclusive interpretation, such as Paduan,

Venetian and Florentine, show a wide range of impersonal patterns, covering all the syntactic domains in which the pattern

occurs in Standard Italian. Interestingly, in Florentine the inclusive interpretation of the reflexive is fully grammaticalised,

with si + third person active replacing the first person plural ending, as in si va =andiamo 'We go').

Finally, I will give evidence for passive and impersonal reflexives as being two different structures, reflecting two

different diachronic paths, which at some point merge. While the passive reflexive is a Late Latin development, related to

changes in the encoding of voice in the transition from Latin to Romance, the impersonal function of the reflexive with one-

argument verbs is a Romance phenomenon, not equally attested in the Romance languages and in the Italian dialects,

probably related to a stage where the reflexive pronoun acquires a non-anaphoric pronominal value, whereby Latin se = is,

occurring also to refer to first and second person participants (se = nos, vos) (Cennamo 1991, 1993: 81).

References

Bentley, D. 2006. Split Intransitivity in Italian. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Cennamo, M. 1991. Se, sibi suus nelle Inscriptiones Latinae Christianae Veteres ed i successivi sviluppi romanzi. Medioevo

Romanzo XVI: 3-20.

Cennamo, M. 1993. The Reanalysis of Reflexives: a Diachronic Perspective. Naples: Liguori.

Cennamo, M. 1997. Passive and impersonal constructions. In M. Maiden & M. Parry (eds), Dialects of Italy. London:

Routledge, 145-161.

Cinque, G. 1988. On si constructions and the theory of Arb. Linguistic Inquiry 19: 521-581.

D'Alessandro, R. 2007. Impersonal si Constructions. Agreement and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Manzini, M.R. & L. Savoia 2005. I Dialetti Italiani e Romanci. Vol 2. Alessandria: Edizioni Dell'Orso.

Parry, M. 1998. The reinterpretation of the reflexive in Piedmontese: ‘impersonal’ se constructions, Transactions of the

Philological Society 96.1: 63-116.

Salvi, Giampaolo. 2008a. Imperfect systems and diachronic change", in U. Detges & R. Waltereit (eds), The Paradox of

Grammatical Change. Perspectives from Romance, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 127-145.

Salvi, Giampaolo. 2008b. La formazione della costruzione impersonale in italiano", Linguistica. Revista de estudios

linguísticos da Universitdade de Porto 3/1: 13-37.

Code-switching as an indicator of language shift. A case study of the Romagnolo dialect of Gatteo a Mare, Italy.

Cenni, Irene

(University College Ghent)

According to Sasse’s (1992) stages of language disappearance, the Romagnolo dialect in North East Italy is in its final life

stage. As is true for other Italian dialects – such as the Marchigiano dialect (Parry 2002) – the last few generations of

speakers have neglected to pass on the dialect as a native tongue to the next generation. As a result, Italian has

progressively come to assume the function of primary language of socialisation.

The main goal of the present research consists of approaching the issue of language shift from a new perspective,

namely investigating the bilingual behaviour of the participants and zooms in on the spreading and use of the final

remnants of Romagnolo, a dying barely described dialect. More specifically, “differences in code-switching patterns across

generations are to be expected” (Alfonzetti 2005:94), but what are the specific differences among the code-switching

behaviour between older and younger generations? Focusing first on the older speakers, what are the specific code-

switching patterns among this group of participants? What kind of pragmatic-functional roles does their code-switching

fulfil? What are the most frequent functions and the most uncommon ones? On the other side, in what consists of the

bilingual behaviour of younger speakers, if they have one? Which linguistic functions are expressed in Romagnolo instead of

Italian and why?

To achieve this purpose we analyse more thoroughly the current linguistic situation in the village of Gatteo a Mare,

in the region Emilia-Romagna, on the basis of empirical data collected on fieldwork. More specifically, the present

investigation is based on the analysis of the bilingual speech production of 39 participants, all members of the community

of Gatteo a Mare. The corpus is made of a series of spontaneous conversations within familiar and informal contexts.

As one could expect, remarkable differences emerged in the speech behaviour across different generations of

speakers and the most influencing factors appear to be age and thus proficiency in Romagnolo. At the same time some

interesting patterns came to surface. For instance, one of the most striking findings among older speakers is represented by

the recurrent switch of code when referring to members of the family. On the other side, studying the bilingual behavior of

younger speakers we notice a contracted production of linguistic elements in Romagnolo, namely restricted only to jokes

and interjections. In line with Alfonzetti (2005:106): “what the young Italian-oriented generations are ready to accept and

even positively evaluate is just a reduced, controlled, symbolic use of dialect, whose expressive connotations are exploited

in a code-switching style which is shown to be an intentional communicative strategy”. Finally, observing the great adoption

of interjections, used widely by all our participants, we could state that certain linguistic remnants of this dialect, such as

interjection, seem to have been granted a new lease of life in a specific discourse context.

References

Alfonzetti G. (2005). “Intergenerational variation in code switching. Some remarks”. In: Rivista di Linguistica 17.1, pp. 93-

112.

Ameka F. (1992). “Interjections: The universal yet neglected part of speech”. In: Journal of Pragmatics 18, 101-118.

Auer P. (2010). “Code-switching, conversational structure and social identities”. In: Atti del 10° Congresso dell’Associazione

Italiana di Linguistica Applicata. Lingue e culture in contatto. In memoria di Roberto Gusmani. A cura di Bombi R.,

D’Agostino M., Dal Negro S. & R. Franceschini. Bolzano 18-19 febbraio 2010. Perugia: Guerra Edizioni.

Backus A. (1992). “Variation in codeswitching patterns”. In: Code-switching Summer School. Strasbourg: European Science

Foundation, 251-262.

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Parry M. (2002). “The challenge to Multilingualism Today”. In: Lepschy A.L. & A. Tosi (2002). Multilingualism in Italy: Past

and Present. Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre of University of Oxford.

Sasse H.J (1992). “Theory of Language Death”. In: Brenzinger, Matthias (Ed.). Language death: Factual and theoretical

explorations with special reference to East Africa. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Meillet’s spiral and the case of Greek.

Chatzopoulou, Katerina

(University of Chicago)

There are multiple parameters that may influence a particular negator renewal path in a language. This presentation (i)

examines negator renewal in Greek, from Classical Greek NEG1 u:(k) to Standard Modern NEG1 dhen, (ii) discusses reasons

for which the particular pathway of change was selected (no-doubling stage), and (iii) argues for a broader––although not

universal––definition for Jespersen’s Cycle or Meillet’s Spiral, which is inclusive not only to Greek, but to a number of other

atypical negator renewal manifestations (e.g. triple stage negators, cf. Van der Auwera and Neuckermans 2004, Devos et al.

2010, Van der Auwera et al., to appear).

In Modern Greek the expression of standard negation, NEG1 dhen (Late Medieval (u)dhén), has its origin in the

Hellenistic and Classical Greek indefinite u:den (not.even.one.

NEUT

, cf. Roussou 2007, Horrocks 1997/2010, Rijksbaron

2012). Greek negation, similarly to Latin, did not manifest a doubling or discontinuous negation stage (Willmott

forthcoming), as opposed to what is anticipated in the traditional approach of Jespersen’s Cycle and the prototypical case of

French (ne…, ne…pas, …pas).

(1)

(2)

(3)

lego:

Classical Greek (5

c. BC)

udhén

légho

Medieval Greek (10

c. AD)

dhen

léo

Standard Modern (20

c. AD)

Standard negation (NEG1)

say.

PRES

IND

‘I don’t say.’

I present two reasons for which the particular negator renewal path was followed: (i) the variety of negative concord found

in Classical Greek was non-strict and as a result Classical Greek allowed for two strategies of negative reinforcement: (a) n-

word verb or (b) NEG verb n-word; it was strategy a that gave rise to the Modern Greek NEG1 dhen. Strategy a was

significantly more frequent (81% on a sample of 550 cases of negative reinforcement using u:den in 5

and 4

c. BC prose

texts, see Chatzopoulou 2012)

(4)

a. u:den lego:

NEG1-thing say.

PRES

IND

Classical Greek:

b. u: lego: u:den Non-Strict Negative Concord

NEG1 say.

PRES

IND

NEG1-thing

‘I didn’t say anything.’

(ii) a shift in underived word order from OV to VO took place during Hellenistic times (Blass and Debrunner 1961, Joseph

1978/1990, Lightfoot 1981, Devine and Stephens 1994, Taylor 1994, Deligianni 2011; cf. De Cuypere 2008 for the relevance

of this change). I argue that this shift facilitated the reanalysis of the former indefinite udhén to a structurally higher

position, according to the tendency in endogenous syntactic change for lexical elements to ‘move’ to higher structural

positions (Roberts and Roussou 2003, Van Gelderen 2004, Roberts 2010).

CLASSICAL GREEK: OV KOINE/MEDIEVAL GREEK: VO

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NEGP NEGP

NEG VP NEG VP

Ø O V V O

u:den lego: udhén légho

‘I say nothing.’ ‘I don’t say.’ (UPWARD REANALYSIS)

The history of negation in Greek, along with other atypical negator renewal manifestations, provides motivation for a

refinement of the traditional understanding of Jespersen’s Cycle (or Meillet’s Spiral) in a way that abstracts away from

previous morphosyntactic and phonological descriptions of the phenomenon and explicitly places its regularities in

semantics (Chatzopoulou 2012, forthcoming): the transformation of predicate negation to propositional.

References

Blass, Friedrich and Albert Debrunner. 1961. A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature,

trans. by R. W. Funk, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chatzopoulou, Katerina. 2012. Negation and Nonveridicality in the History of Greek. Doctoral dissertation, University of

Chicago.

Chatzopoulou, Katerina. (forthcoming). Re(de)fining Jespersen’s Cycle, Proceedings of PLC 36, PWPL vol. 19.1.

De Cuypere, Ludovic. 2008. Limiting the iconic: from the metatheoretical foundations to the creative possibilities of iconicity

in language. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Deligianni, Efrosini. 2011. Modern Greek word order in the process of syntacticization: preliminary evidence from Late

Byzantine and Early Modern Greek. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Greek Linguistics (ICGL

9), ed. by Katerina Chatzopoulou, Alexandra Ioannidou and Suwon Yoon, 440–455. e-publication.

Devine, Andrew and Lawrence Stephens. 1994. The prosody of Greek speech. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press.

Devos, Maud, Michael Kasombo Tshibanda and Johan van der Auwera. 2010. Jespersen cycles in Kanincin: double, triple

and maybe even quadruple negation, Africana Linguistica 16.155–182.

Horrocks, Geoffrey. 1997/2010. Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers. 1997. Addison: Wesley Publishing

Company. 2010. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Joseph, Brian, D. 1978/1990. Morphology and universals in syntactic change: evidence from Medieval and Modern Greek.

PhD dissertation, Harvard University.

Lightfoot, David W. 1981. Explaining syntactic change. In Explanation in Linguistics: The logical problem of language

acquisition, ed. by Norbert Hornstein and David Lightfoot, 209–240. London-New York: Longman.

Rijksbaron, Albert. 2012. Does Ancient Greek have a word for 'No'? Journal of Greek Linguistics 12(1).140–160.

Roberts, Ian. 2010. Grammaticalization, the clausal hierarchy and semantic bleaching. In Gradience, gradualness and

grammaticalization, ed. by Elizabeth Closs Traugott and Graeme Trousdale, 45–73. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Roberts, Ian and Anna Roussou. 2003. Syntactic change. A minimalist approach to grammaticalization. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Roussou, Anna. 2007. Minimalism and Diachronic Syntax: The Development of Negative Expressions. In Festschrift for Prof E

Panagopoulos, 17

International Symposium on Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, ed. by n Agathopoulou E., M.

Dimitrakopoulou, D. Papadopoulou, 11-27.

Taylor, Ann. 1994. The Change from SOV to SVO in Ancient Greek. Language Variation and Change 6.1–37.

Van der Auwera, Johan and Neuckermans, Annemie. 2004. Jespersen's cycle and the interaction of predicate and quantifier

negation. In Dialectology meets typology. Dialect grammar from a cross-linguistic perspective, ed. Bernd Kortmann,

453–478. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Van der Auwera, Johan, Frens Vossen and Maud Devos. (forthcoming). Le cycle de Jespersen à trois ou quatre negations.

Actes du Colloque International ‘A Contrario’, ed. by Jacques François, Isabelle Haïk, Dominique Legallois, Michel

Morel, Franck Neveu. Paris : Honoré Champion.

Van Gelderen, Elly. 2004. Grammaticalization as Economy. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Willmott, Jo (forthcoming). Greek: A tale of two negators. Submitted for Willis et al. (eds.), The History of Negation in the

Languages of Europe and the Mediterranean.

A morphonological perspective for Brugmann’s law.

Chilà, Annamaria

(Università di Messina)

The research shoots for a twofold purpose: 1) verifying whether and to what extent a morphological reinterpretation of the

Brugmann’s Law (from now on, BL: IE *ŏ > ved. ā in open syllable) can be supported; 2) spelling out the reason why such a

morphonological change operates in the two compact verbal classes of the perfects and the causatives of the Vedic

language, but is with no dubt less regular within the category of the noun, that is in isolated formations.

The analysis performed on 206 verbal forms of perfects and 327 causatives stems shows that, in the former, the

presence of long ā < *ŏ in opposition to ă allows to distinguish, on a micro-paradigmatic level, the 3

person singular from

the 1

(e.g. ved. cakăra “I did” vs. cakāra “s/he did”); in the latter, the opposition between the short ă and the long ā

outcome of the BL allows to distinguish, on a macro-paradigmatic level within the wide group of the -áya- formations, the

forms with a causative meaning from the forms marked out by an intensive or iterative acceptation (e.g. ved. patáyati “to

flutter about” vs. pātáyati “makes fly”). Therefore, the vowel length is the only feature operating a functional differentiation

between a specific Aktionsart against others, that would otherwise be fully similar from a formal point of view.

As far as the noun domain is concerned, a careful examination of the main lexica clearly shows that the

operativeness of the BL is here really fuzzy and less systematic. Nevertheless, typological comparisons with romance

languages (and Italo-Romance varieties above all) prove that some phonological changes operate nearly exclusively in the

verb, and not in the noun, because of the characteristic irregularity of the verbal paradigm, in which, as Maiden clearly

argued, a single lexical root tends to appear in a considerable number of phonological forms. In both Old Indo-Aryan and

romance varieties, the noun and the adjective are mainly invariant and, in comparison with the verb, they don’t show any

leaning towards suppletive allomorphy: in most cases, the noun/adjective class tends to reject all the morphonological

changes creating allomorphy within a regular paradigm. Furthermore, it is well known that, already at an indo-european

prehistorical stage, the verb bore a greater number of grammatical categories and, unlike the noun, was therefore in greater

need of both functional and formal distinctions.

By throwing a light on the (phono-)morphological nature of the BL, it could be also possible to ride over the

“ideological” difficulty perceived by the earliest scholars of the comparative Linguistics, that have often shown a certain

hesitancy in recognizing the status of Lautgesetz to a law which is so controversial, irregular and problematic in its

expressions.

References

Belardi, W., Sulla tipologia della struttura formale della parola nelle lingue indoeuropee, in “RALinc”, Classe di Scienze

Morali, Storiche e Filologiche, s. IX, 4, 1993, pp. 535-570.

Brugmann, K., Zur Geschichte der stammabstufenden Declinationen. Erste Abhandlung: Die Nomina auf -ar- und -tar-, in

“Curtius’ Studien” 9, 1876, pp. 361-406.

Jamison, S. W., Function and Form in the -áya- Formations of the Rig Veda and Atharva Veda, Göttingen 1983.

Kümmel, M. J., Das Perfekt im Indoiranischen. Eine Untersuchung der Form und Funktion einer ererbten Kategorie des

Verbums in den altindoiranischen Sprachen, Wiesbaden 2000.

Lubotsky, A., Review of: Marianne Volkart, Zu Brugmanns Gesetz im Altindischen (Universität Bern. Institut für

Sprachwissenschaft. Arbeitspapier 33), Bern 1994, 68 p., in “Kratylos” 42, 1997, pp. 55-59.

Maiden, M., On the phonological vulnerability of complex paradigms: beyond analogy in Italo- and Ibero-Romance, in

“Romance Philology” 44, 1991, pp. 284-305.

Maiden, M., Irregularity as a determinant of morphological change, in “Journal of Linguistics” 28, 1992, pp. 285-312.

Volkart, M., Zu Brugmanns Gesetz im Altindischen, Bern 1994.

Biabsolutives in Archi.

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Chumakina, Marina

(University of Surrey)

Nakh-Daghestanian languages are predominantly ergative, both in terms of argument alignment and agreement strategies:

the verb and other parts of speech such as agreeing adverbs, postpositions and (focus) particles which allow agreement

have the absolutive of the clause as the agreement controller.

Many languages also allow a special biabsolutive construction, which can be thought of as a particular case of

differential subject marking, since the logical subject can be expressed either by the ergative or by the absolutive case. The

biabsolutive variant is often associated with a specific information structure: the subject is topicalized and the object gets

demoted.

A Lezgian language Archi has the biabsolutive construction, compare ergative (1a) and biabsolutive (1b) alignment:

(1a) tuw-mi paha-r-ši i qilin

he(

ERG

smoke-

IPFV

CVB

.be.

PRS

cigarette(

)[

ABS

]

(1b) tuw paha-r-ši w-i qilin

he(

)

ABS

smoke-

IPFV

CVB

-be.

PRS

cigarette(

)[

ABS

]

‘He is smoking a cigarette.’

(1a) is more likely to be said if the speaker has drawn a conclusion about the smoking by indirect evidence, whereas (1b) is

more appropriate when the speaker saw the person smoking. The studies of the biabsolutive construction have mainly

concentrated on the status of the object: it has been claimed to be incorporated in Forker (2012); the same reasoning

allowed Polinsky (2005) to include Archi in the list of languages that have antipassive. However, in Archi the variation in

subject marking entails variation in the agreement of other parts of speech. This, the adverb can agree with the subject (2)

or with the object (3):

(2) tu-w q’onq’ o‹r›kɬin-ši w-i ditːa‹w›u

that-

ABS

book(

)[

ABS

]

.read‹

IPFV

›-

CVB

-be.

PRS

early‹

›

He is reading a book early.

(3) tu-w q’onq’ o‹r›kɬin-ši w-i ditːa‹t’›u

that-

ABS

book(

)[

ABS

]

.read‹

IPFV

›-

CVB

-be.

PRS

early‹

›

He is reading a book early.

The focus particle demonstrates similar behaviour, allowing the agreement with the subject (5), but this is considered

grammatical by limited amount of speakers:

(4) lo χilibχˁi-j‹b›u bu-kan-ši e‹r›di

child(

)[

ABS

] porridge(

III

)[

ABS

EMPH

‹

III

›

III

-eat.

IPFV

CVB

‹

›be.

PST

akɬ’ kummu-s kilaw

meat(

).[

ABS

] [

]eat.

IPFV

FIN

than

The girl is eating the porridge, she likes it better than eating meat.

(5) lo χilibχˁi-j‹r›u bu-kan-ši e‹r›di

child(

)[

ABS

] porridge(

)[

ABS

EMPH

‹

III

›

III

-eat.

IPFV

CVB

‹

›be.

PST

akɬ’ kummu-s kilaw

meat(

).[

ABS

] [

]eat.

IPFV

FIN

than

The girl is eating the porridge, she likes it better than eating meat.

In this paper, I discuss the semantic, pragmatic and syntactic factors which determine the choice of the argument marking

and the conditions on agreement with the absolutive subject.

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References

Forker, Diana. 2012. The Biabsolutive Construction in Nakh-Daghestanian. Folia Linguistica 46/1, 75–108.

Polinsky, Maria. 2005. Antipassive Constructions. The World Atlas of Language Structures, ed. by Martin Haspelmath,

Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil and Bernard Comrie, 438-442. Oxford: OUP.

Iranian and Greek influence on the Syriac lexicon: the emergence of compound words.

Ciancaglini, Claudia A. and Alfieri, Luca

(University of Rome “La Sapienza”)

Introduction

The Classical Syriac language (1st-13th CE) shows a great number of Iranian and Greek loanwords, amounting to nearly one

third of the Syriac vocabulary. The Greek loans date from the Hellenistic to the Byzantine period (Shall 1960; Brock 1999;

Healey 1995; Taylor 2002); the Iranian ones show an even more complex diachronic stratification, since they include Old and

Middle Persian loans borrowed into Official or Talmudic Aramaic and continued or reborrowed in Syriac, as well as Middle

and New Iranian loans directly borrowed into Syriac (Telegdi 1935; Shaked 1987; Folmer 1995; Ciancaglini 2008).

Research question. The prolonged contact between Syriac, Greek and Iranian produced a paramount case of bi- or tri-

lingualism plus diglossia among prestige languages, which is barely described in the literature on lexical contact (e.g.

Haspelmath & Tadmor 2009). The paper aims to show that the emergence of compounds in Aramaic is due to the contact

with Greek and Iranian.

Methodology

The Syriac lexicon is aptly gathered in the traditional lexical sources (Payne-Smith 1879-1901; 1927; Brockelmann 1928

;

Sokoloff 2009), which are to be supplemented with the texts edited after 2009 in the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum

Orientalium Scriptores Syri and other recent works (e.g. Gignoux 2011). The compounds found in these sources will be

gathered and divided into a certain number of types, depending on the chronology, the degree of adaptation, the presence

of reborrowings, learned etymologies and claques, as suggested by Gusmani (1986), Thomason & Kaufmann (1988), and

Koptjevskaja-Tamm (2011):

i) direct or indirect borrowings from Old Iranian into Aramaic, hence into Syriac (e.g. Syr. g(y)zbr’ ←

O.Pers. *ganza-bara- ‘treasurer’, through Official Aramaic gnzbr’);

ii) direct or indirect borrowings from Middle Iranian into Syriac (e.g. Syr. krbwz ← M.Pers. xar-buz

‘antelope’);

iii) direct or indirect borrowings from Greek into Syriac (e.g. Syr. pylwswpy’ ← Gk. p

ilo-sop

ía);

iv) structural or semantic, total or partial calques (e.g. Syr. lqṭt pr’ ← M.Pers. kah-rūbāy ‘amber, lit. straw-

attractor’);

v) learned etymologies (e.g. Syr. byt zyn’ ‘armoury’ ← M.Pers. zēndān ‘jail, armoury’);

vi) hybrids (e.g. Syr. rš d-gwd’ ← M.Pers. gund sālār ‘chief of the army’).

Expected results

From Imperial Aramaic to Syriac, a progressive increase in the number of compounds and a progressively higher degree of

competence in interpreting, calquing and analysing foreign compounds is expected. Typologically, this is an interesting

phenomenon, since Syriac, as all Semitic languages, is mainly right-branching and Head-marking (following the terms of

Nichols 1986), and it has the construct state (e.g. ḥyy byš’yt, calqued on Gk. kakó-bioi) rather than compounds. By contrast,

Greek and Iranian show the typical Modifier-marking, left-branching structure of the Indo-European languages (e.g. M.Pers.

gund sālār and Gk. p

ilo-sop

ía). The emergence of compounds, therefore, may represent a case in which not only the

lexical structure of the language but also its marking strategy has changed, at least in part, due to the influx of foreign lexical

material.

References

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Brock S.P. 1999. From Ephrem to Romanos. Interactions between Syriac and Greek in Late Antiquity. Hampshire: Saint

Anselm College Press.

Brockelmann K. 1928

. Lexicon Syriacum. Halle: Max Niemeyer.

Ciancaglini C.A. 2008. Iranian Loanwords in Syriac. Wiesbaden: Reichert.

Folmer L.M. 1995. The Aramaic language in the Achaemenid period: A study in linguistic variation. Leuven: Peeters.

Gignoux Ph. 2011. Lexique des termes de la pharmacopée syriaque. Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études

Iraniennes.

Gusmani R. 1986

. Saggi sull’interferenza linguistica. Alessandria: Ed. Dell’Orso.

Haspelmath M. & Tadmor U. (eds.) 2009. Loanwords in the World’s Languages: A Comparative Handbook. Berlin: Mouton.

Healey J. 1995. Lexical Loans in Early Syriac: a comparison with Nabatean Aramaic “Studi Epigrafici e Linguistici” 12, 75–84.

Koptjevskaja-Tamm M. 2011. Linguistic typology and language contact. The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology, Song

J.J. (ed.), 568–590. Oxford: OUP.

Nichols J. 1986. Head-marking and dependent-marking grammar. “Language” 62, 56-119.

Payne Smith R. 1879-1901. Thesaurus Syriacus. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Payne Smith R. 1927. Supplement to the Thesaurus Syriacus of R. Payne Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Shaked Sh. 1987. Aramaic. III. Iranian loanwords in Middle Aramaic. In: Encyclopaedia Iranica II/3, E. Yarshater (ed.), 259-

261. Costa Mesa (US): Mazda Publisher.

Schall A. 1960. Studien über griechische Fremdwörter im Syrischen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Taylor D.G.K. 2002. Bilingualism and Diglossia in Late Antique Syria and Mesopotamia. In: Bilingualism in Ancient Society,

J.N. Adams, M. Janse & S. Swain (eds.), 298-331. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Telegdi S. 1935. Essai sur la phonétique des emprunts iraniens en araméen talmudique. “Journal Asiatique” 226, 177–256.

Thomason S.G. & Kaufmann T. 1988. Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley-Los Angeles-Oxford:

University of California Press.

Sokoloff M. 2009. A Syriac Lexicon. A Translation from the Latin, Correction, Expansion, and Update of C. Brockelmann’s

Lexicon Syriacum. Indiana: Eisenbrauns & Gorgias Press.

Alignment change in Eastern Aramaic.

Coghill, Eleanor

(University of Konstanz)

The eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects, spoken in Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria, are highly diverse: one thing they nevertheless

share is the loss of the old Semitic verbal forms (the Prefix and Suffix Conjugations) and their replacement by forms based

on participles. A secondary effect of this process was the development of ergative alignment in the perfect (later the past

perfective). In the modern dialects ergativity is restricted to verbal agreement inflection. While some dialects preserve

ergative verbal agreement, even in these it is being eroded, both by movement towards Split-S alignment and by the

increasing use of separate markers for the patient. Other dialects have lost ergative alignment altogether. Thus an entire

cycle of alignment change can be seen in the documented history of Aramaic.

The pathways through which alignment change take place are controversial: for Iranian, Indo-Aryan and Aramaic,

various possibilities have been suggested, including the reanalysis of passives or of possessive predicates (cf., e.g.

Benveniste 1952, Cardona 1970, Kutscher 1969). More recently, a connection between dative (expressing roles such as

experiencer) and ergative has been noted (e.g. Butt 2006, Haig 2008). The textual evidence from Aramaic suggests that

what became the ergative construction was originally limited mostly to verbs with experiencer roles, such as ‘see’, ‘hear’

and ‘know’, which could take a kind of dative subject. These experiencers were then reanalysed as agents. There is also

evidence suggesting that beneficiaries too were reanalysed as agents. Aramaic is ideal as a case-study for alignment change,

due to the wealth of texts, dating from 3000 years ago to the present day. The paper will present evidence from both

ancient texts and modern dialects, in order to understand the changes in alignment and their motivations.

References

Benveniste, Émile. 1952 ‘La construction passive du parfait transitif’, Bulletin de la Société de linguistique 48, 52-62.

Butt, Miriam. 2006. ‘The Dative-Ergative Connection.’ In Patricia Cabredo-Hofherr (ed.), Proceedings of the Colloque Syntax-

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Semantique Paris (CSSP) 2005.

Cardona, G. 1970. ‘The Indo-Iranian construction man



(mam



) kŗtam.’ Language 46, 1-12.

Haig, Geoffrey L. J. 2008. Alignment Change in Iranian Languages: A Construction Grammar Approach. Berlin; New York:

Mouton de Gruyter.

Kutscher, Y.E., 1969, ‘Two “passive” constructions in Aramaic in the light of Persian’, Proceedings of the international

conference on Semitic studies, Jerusalem, 132-151.

Generalized noun modifying clause constructions in the North Caucasus.

Comrie, Bernard and Khalilova, Zaira

(MPI-EVA)

The Generalized Noun Modifying Clause Construction (GNMCC) is a single construction consisting of a head noun and a

modifying clause and which covers English relative clauses, fact-S constructions, as well as others. Recent interest in the

topic was spurred by Matsumoto (1997)’s work on Japanese. We propose to initiate an investigation of the phenomenon in

the North Caucasus.

In Japanese, the same construction is used in all of (1)–(3), each of which requires a distinct construction in English.

(1) [gakusei ga kat-ta] hon

student

NOM

buy-

PST

book

‘the book that the student bought’

(2) [gakusei ga hon o kat-ta] zizitu

student

NOM

book

ACC

buy-

PST

fact

‘the fact that the student bought the book’

(3) [sakana o yak-u] nioi

fish

ACC

grill-

PRS

smell

‘the smell of (someone) grilling fish’

GNMCCs are widespread in Daghestanian languages (Daniel & Lander 2010), as illustrated by the following Bezhta

examples:

(4) [abo y-oo-yo] biƛo

father.

ERG

IV-do-

PST

PTCP

house(IV)

‘the house that father built’

(5) [hini-s öžö axo qohda-calas] xabar

self-

GEN

1 boy well study-

PRS

PTCP

news

‘the news that his son studies well’

(6) [bisa ziza-yas] mäh

fish fry-

PRS

PTCP

smell

‘the smell of frying fish’

Turkic languages in general have distinct constructions rather than a GNMCC. Thus, Turkish has no direct analog of (3), and

uses albeit slightly different constructions in (7) and (8). In (7), the usual construction for relativizing non-subjects, the verb

of the dependent clause is a nominalization in -DIK, and the head noun has no possessive suffix. In (8), the fact-S

construction, the same nominalization is used, but the head noun requires a third person singular possessive suffix.

(7) [öğrenci-nin al-dığ-ı] kitap

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student-

GEN

buy-

NMZ

-3

book

‘the book which the student bought’

(8) [cumhurbaşkanı-nın gel-diğ-i] haber-i

president-

GEN

come-

NMZ

-3

news-3

‘the news that the president has come’

While the details of translation equivalents of (7) and (8) in other Turkic languages differ, e.g. some would require or allow a

possessive suffix on the head noun in (7) agreeing in person-number with the subject of the dependent clause, a structural

distinction between the two constructions is usually maintained. However, precisely in Karachay-Balkar, a Turkic language

of the North Caucasus, we find GNMCCs, as illustrated in (9)–(11).

(9) [oquwču al-ɣan] kitap

student buy-

PTCP

book

‘the book that the student bought’

(10) [prezident kel-gän] hapar

president come-

PTCP

news

‘the news that the president has come’

(11) [et biš-gän] iyis

meat cook-

PTCP

smell

‘the smell of meat cooking’

The anomalous position of Karachay-Balkar within Turkic and its geographical location in the North Caucasus strongly

suggests areal influence leading to accommodation in this Turkic language to a pattern that is widespread in genealogically

unrelated languages of the area.

References

Daniel, Michael and Yuri Lander. 2010. A girl of word, meat of a ram, and a life of longing. On peculiar cases of relativization

in East Caucasian languages. Paper presented at the conference Syntax of the World’s Languages IV, Lyon.

Matsumoto, Yoshiko. 1997. Noun-modifying constructions in Japanese: a frame semantics approach. Amsterdam:

Benjamins.

Afrikaans between Dutch and English.

Conradie, Jac

(University of Johannesburg)

Quite apart from numerous influences of English on Afrikaans in all sections of grammar and the lexicon since the early 19

century (cf. Donaldson 1987), a number of parallel changes in both languages, absent or virtually absent in Dutch, may be

pointed out. It will be argued on the basis of a synchronic grammatical comparison supported by data from language

corpora, that by these developments Afrikaans has been positioned typologically closer to English than to Dutch, its closest

cognate. It is expected that Afrikaans will prove to be close to or virtually similar to English on every score. For Afrikaans,

these changes may furthermore present a key to distinguishing between contact induced and spontaneous development.

In the verbal system, the following may be pointed out:

• Deflection of the finite verb – more advanced in English than in Dutch and complete in Afrikaans – compensated for

by an ordering arrangement involving strict adjacency of the subject to the first verb in the verbal string. (Cf. inter alia

Deumert 2004.)

• Virtual disappearance of the distinction between finite verb and infinitive accompanied by a more rigid ordering of

elements of the verbal string in both English and Afrikaans, in contrast to Dutch.

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• Replacement of the BE perfect (Du. zijn, etc., Afr. is) by the HAVE perfect (Du. hebben, etc., Afr. het) in so-called

mutative verbs (e.g. verbs expressing movement or change) in the course of the 19

cent., a distinction still maintained in

Dutch. (Cf. Denison 1993:359.)

• The isolation of modal verbs as a separate verbal category in English and Afrikaans to a much larger extent than in

Dutch, e.g. by their lacking present and past participles, by not allowing ellipsis of the main verb, etc., and through detailed

changes such as the parallel loss of a preterite for Eng. may and Afr. mag (but cf. Du. mocht).

• The retention of relatively conservative forms of the past participle in attributive function and/or with semantic

specialisation or in a figurative sense, e.g. Eng. drunken, beholden, ill-gotten, proven, new-mown, molten, misshapen,

shrunken, stricken, etc. (cf. Jespersen 1942:47-82) and Afr. gebonde (boek) vs gebind, gebroke (hart) vs gebreek,

opgewonde (kind) vs opgewen, etc.

In the nominal system, two major developments will be discussed:

• The loss of grammatical gender in both English and Afrikaans, while Dutch retains a two-class distinction.

• The frequent and very similar usage of the prenominal genitive, as in Eng. the hunter’s shot, a year’s work, Afr. die

jagter se skoot, ’n jaar se werk.

References

Denison, David. 1993. English Historical Syntax: Verbal Constructions. London, etc.:Longman.

Deumert. Ana. 2004. Language Standardization and Language Change. The dynamics of Cape Dutch. Amsterdam: John

Benjamins.

Donaldson, B.C. 1987. The Influence of English on Afrikaans; a Case Study of Linguistic Change in a Language Contact

Situation. Pretoria: Serva.

Jespersen, Otto. 1942. A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. Part VI: Morphology. Copenhagen: Ejnar

Munksgaard.

Mismatches.

Contreras-García, Lucía

(University of Amsterdam)

A main issue in contemporary linguistics is how to best design a grammar that represents linguistic phenomena. This paper

defines, classifies and discusses the theoretical adequacy and status of empty categories and mismatches. It will be argued

that mismatches (Francis & Michaelis 2000, Sadock 2002) between various levels of representation are used in any theory of

language in order to avoid the use of empty categories (Sadock 2012). Mismatches will thus be defined as the

representational antonym for empty categories. The use of mismatches or empty categories will in turn be related to a

linguistic model’s architectural tenets, in particular with regard to the model's syntax-semantics interface. The method to be

used will be comparative, following a typological analysis including Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese to illustrate

Romance languages and Dutch, German and English to illustrate the Germanic family. In order to fully grasp the type of

mismatches that a theory may use in order to avoid empty categories, a classification of mismatches will be proposed. This

classification will include a.o.:

1. 1) Quantitative non one-to-one correspondences between

a. a. The number of elements representing one feature at various levels.

b. b. The number of potential representations at various levels.

c. c. Whole vs. partial mapping of a linguistic unit at various levels.

a. 2) An infringement upon the expected qualitative default iconicity between two differing levels of formal

representation between

b. a. The category of formal items representing a linguistic unit at various levels.

c. b. The structure of formal items representing a linguistic unit at various levels.

d. c. The default co-relation between smaller and bigger units within the same level.

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The data used to illustrate this claim will be real-world examples in the languages mentioned above. Various phenomena

will be used in order to illustrate the advocated classification of mismatches, each one illustrating the corresponding cases

named above:

1. 1 a. Verbal morphology.

a. b. Quantifier scope ambiguity.

b. c. Non-compositional modification.

a. 2) a. Cross-cutting syntactic categories.

b. b. Raising/control.

c. c. Aspect coercion.

A main research question will be whether the architecture of a theory of language (whether its levels are derived from each

other, see Jackendoff 2002; whether there exists a compulsory direction for derivations, see Zwicky 1972) determines a

theory's use of mismatches or empty categories. It will be claimed that the architectural tenets of a given theory of

language do influence the use of empty categories or mismatches, although a fully deterministic view will be proven wrong.

It will also be claimed that the use of representational mismatches makes a theory of language less redundant in its

representations.

References

Francis, E. J. and L.A. Michaelis (2000), Approaches to mismatch. Introduction. In Butt, M. & Holloway King, T. (eds.),

Proceedings of the BFG00 Conference Workshops. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Jackendoff, R. (2002). Foundations of Language. Oxford: OUP.

Sadock, J. M. (2002). Mismatches in Autonomous Modular versus Derivational Grammars. In Francis, E. J. & Michaelis, L. A.

(eds.), Mismatch – Form - Function Incongruity and the Architecture of Grammar. Chicago: University of Chicago

Press.

Sadock, J. M. (2012). The Modular Architecture of Grammar. Cambridge: CUP.

Zwicky, A. M. (1972). Remarks on directionality. In Journal of Linguistics, 8: 103-109.

Asymmetries in differential argument marking.

Coon, Jessica and Preminger, Omer

(McGill University and Syracuse University)

This paper addresses two questions: (1) Does DSM exist in accusative languages, or is it intrinsic to ergativity? And (2) Does

DSM always adhere to Silverstein’s (1976) animacy hierarchy?

We argue first that both types of Differential Argument Marking (DSM & DOM) are independent of alignment, and

second, that neither can be said to adhere directly to Silverstein’s hierarchy. Rather, we present evidence for the

generalizations in (1):

(1) Differential Argument Marking Generalization

a. DSM: Ergative marking is based on the presence or absence of 1/2 [+participant] person features on the subject

b. DOM: Accusative marking is governed by definiteness, specificity, and animacy of the object

We show that differential marking of subjects is based on the presence/absence of local participant features; other features

(e.g. animacy) do not play a role. Drawing on independent evidence from the Person Case Constraint as well as Inverse

systems, we argue that [+participant] arguments require extra licensing, and that this licensing mechanism has effects on

the transitivity of a clause. This pertains to ergativity only insofar as ergativity depends on transitivity: in an ergative system,

only transitive subjects are marked ergative. We argue that [+participant] subjects in certain languages are effectively

intransitive subjects, and thus do not bear ergative marking. The apparent absence of DSM in accusative systems is thus

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illusory, arising because by definition, transitive and intransitive subjects pattern alike in such a system.

Turning to (1b), we provide evidence from various languages—ergative (Hindi, Pama-Nyungan, Tibeto-Burman) and

accusative (Hebrew, Spanish, Turkish)—that DOM is based not on person features, but on definiteness, specificity, and

animacy. Like DSM, it too is independent of grammatical alignment.

A putative counter-example to (1a-b) is found in what Silverstein (1976) calls binary split systems—e.g. in Dyirbal—

where both the subject and object have been argued to adhere to (1a). Crucially, however, these languages lack 3rd-person

pronominals altogether; thus, we can assert without loss of generality that subjects in Dyirbal follow (1a), while the object

split actually involves pronominality—a canonical DOM property—and thus adheres to (1b). It is the lack of 3rd-person

pronouns that make a pronominality split indistinguishable from a 1st/2nd-vs.-3rd split, giving rise to the epiphenomenon of

a binary split.

If the generalization in (1a-b) and its proposed interaction with ergativity are true, it serves to further reduce the

number of primitives needed to account for ergative vs. accusative systems, and their respective behaviors.

Paradigm conventions.

Corbett, Greville

(University of Surrey)

Until recently the glossing of examples even in the top journals could be characterized, politely, as chaotic. That situation is

being improved, by linguists’ collective conscience and the availability of the Leipzig Glossing Rules (adopted by SLE). We

can now consider similarly how we represent the forms of lexemes. For some linguists, this reflects key issues in inflectional

morphology; others treat paradigms as epiphenomena, but it is still important to know what can and cannot be inferred

from their choices of representation. The need for greater clarity arises because others, such as psycholinguists, are

increasingly interested in paradigms, and we risk misleading them by our unstated conventions. And within morphology,

recent entropy based and principal part based approaches start from paradigms, implicitly or explicitly, and evaluating their

conclusions depends on our understanding the starting point.

The following conventions, beginning with the more superficial and progressing to those with greater analytical

significance, all deserve discussion:

• We conventionally represent different features by different dimensions (as in a case X number layout rather than a

simple list of forms); this is difficult when we need more than two dimensions;

• Portrait view is favoured over landscape view, leading to specific choices of paradigm layout: for instance, person

values in rows and number values in columns;

• We follow traditional ordering of feature values (absolutive before elative);

• We split or combine cells according to unspoken conventions about majority distributions within and across

lexemes; for instance, Russian nouns are represented with six case values, though an additional four values occur

in different combinations on subsets of nouns;

• We “know” that some conditions on paradigms belong in the representation while others are textual notes; for

example, mass nouns have no separate paradigm, rather we state somewhere that the plural is available only for

nouns of particular semantic types;

• We appreciate elegance (witness the original minimal-augmented analyses of number systems);

• We (at least some of us) believe that syntax is morphology-free; hence we include non-autonomous values (such

as the Romanian neuter gender) in paradigms. This approach avoids invoking strange rules of agreement or

government, but requires additional paradigm cells which are systematically syncretic;

• We represent morphosyntactic patterns rather than morphomic patterns.

All of these conventions individually have merit. Good practice requires us to be fully explicit about our use of them and our

departures from them, particularly where there come into conflict.

Conclusions

• The substance matters more than the representation; conventions should help make clear what the analyst

intends, so that the reader is able to agree or disagree with the actual intention.

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• The representation has enormous potential: it can clarify our understanding of our material (so that claims are

made with full awareness) or it can mislead the unwary.

• We are cleaning up our act with regard to morphosyntactic glossing. It is time to begin being more explicit about

how we represent the forms of lexemes. Our largely unspoken conventions form a good basis.

Segnali discorsivi di riformulazione, cioè, volevo dire… dai gruppi di discussione all’Italiano come LS.

Corino, Elisa

(Università di Torino)

Nel 1998 Fraser (1998 :301) definiva l’analisi dei segnali discorsivi “a growth market in linguistics”; a qualche lustro di

distanza non possiamo che constatare l’estrema attualità delle sue parole, poiché molti e vari sono ancora oggi gli studi che

affrontano la questione sotto diversi punti di vista e abbracciano tutti i livelli descrittivi, da quello sintattico a quello

semantico, a quello testuale.

Di recente lo studio sui segnali discorsivi si è poi arricchito dei dati su una varietà di lingua nuova, quella della

Comunicazione Mediata dal Computer, e delle riflessioni teoriche sui concetti di formalità e informalità, registro, stile,

sottocodice, genere, tipo di testo e soprattutto delle questioni relative all’opposizione tra scritto e parlato che da tempo le

ruotano intorno.

La testualità ricopre un ruolo centrale in uno studio che riguardi tali tipi di testo; le motivazioni che muovono le

scelte di particolari forme linguistiche, infatti, si articolano e si specificano soprattutto in base alle caratteristiche semantico-

comunicative del testo in cui si realizzano le forme stesse (si pensi ad esempio alla profusione di frasi scisse nell’italiano

scritto neo-standard, con la funzione di creare due fuochi informativi, sfruttate anche in funzione coesiva).

Un primo esame sulle funzioni dei segnali di riformulazione, e di cioè in particolare, in un corpus di newsgroup

(Corino 2012) ha messo in luce non solo alcune differenze prevedibili tra gli usi del segnale discorsivo in varietà formali e

informali di lingua, ma ha fatto emergere sfumature semantiche e usi fino ad ora trascurate dalla letteratura a riguardo (ad

esempio il valore consecutivo e modale di cioè, il suo ruolo di indicatore di forza illocutiva e le sue funzioni testuali).

In chiave contrastiva, poi, si suppone che, sulla scorta di Hopper e Traugott (1993), i marcatori discorsivi formati a

partire da strutture comuni diventino una fonte lessicale comune, associata alla funzione che essi ricoprono, e che siano il

risultato di strategie codificate che diventano fisse e convenzionali anche a livello interlinguistico.

Questo contributo quindi si propone di confrontare i risultati ottenuti dal corpus italiano con usi e funzioni di

segnali discorsivi equivalenti tratti dai testi di NG formali e informali in francese e spagnolo da una parte e inglese e tedesco

dall'altra, due coppie lingue tipologicamente diverse la cui testualità e struttura argomentativa in parte divergono da quella

italiana, e di confrontarli con l'uso effettivo che gli apprendenti di italiano provenienti da queste L1 fanno dei segnali

discorsivi di riformulazione nei corpora VALICO e ADIL2.

Nel quadro di un progetto realizzato presso l'Università di Torino- VALERE (Varietà Alte di Lingue Europee in REte,

www.progettovalere.org), infine, verranno presentati esercizi ed attività incentrate sui risultati dell'analisi, volti a migliorare

la competenza degli apprendenti stranieri di italiano nell'uso dei segnali discorsivi in contesti di varietà formali.

Bibliografia

Barbera M. ; Marello C. (2009). Tra scritto-parlato, Umgangssprache e comunicazione in rete: i corpora NUNC. In: A. Antoni ;

Stefania Stefanelli (eds.), Studi di Grammatica Italiana XXVII (2008) = Per Giovanni Nencioni. Convegno

Internazionale di Studi. Pisa - Firenze, 4-5 Maggio 2009 ; 157-185.

Bazzanella C. (1994). Le facce del parlare. Un approccio grammatico all‘italiano parlato. Firenze: La Nuova Italia Editrice.

Bazzanella C. (1995). I segnali discorsivi. In: L. Renzi ; G. Salvi ; A. Cardinaletti (eds), Grande grammatica italiana di

consultazione. Bologna: il Mulino ; 225-257.

Bazzanella C. (2003). Nuove forme di comunicazione a distanza, restrizioni contestuali e segnali discorsivi. In: N. Maraschio,

T. Poggi Salani (eds), Italia linguistica anno Mille – Italia linguistica anno Duemila. Atti del XXXIV Congresso della SLI

(Firenze 19-21 ottobre 2000). Roma: Bulzoni ; 403-415.

Bazzanella C. (2005a), Tratti prototipici del parlato e nuove tecnologie, in E. Burr (ed), Tradizione ed innovazione, Atti del VI

Convegno della SILFI (Duisburg 28 giugno-2 luglio 2000). Firenze: Cesati ; 427-441.

Bazzanella C. ; Caffi C. ; Sbisà M. (1991). Scalar Dimensions of Illocutionary Force. In : I. Z. Zagar (ed). Speech Acts. Fiction or

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Reality?. Ljubljana : Ipra distribution Centre for Jugoslavia ; 63-76.

Corino E. (2012), Signaux discursifs de reformulation, cioè, volevo dire... [c’est-à-dire, je voulais dire...] entre formalité et

informalité de la langue des newsgroups, in Verbum XXXIII, 2011, no 1-2, 147-182.

Fraser B. (1998). Contrastive discourse markers in English. In: A. Jucker ; Y. Ziv (eds), Discourse Markers: description and

theory. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins ; 301-326.

Hopper p. J., traugott E. (1993). Grammaticalization. Cambridge (UK) : Cambridge University Press.

Kotschi, Th. (1990). Reformulierungsindikatoren und Textstruktur. Untersuchungen zu frz. c’est-à-dire. Sprache und

Pragmatik 19, 1-26.

Manzotti E. (1999). Spiegazione, riformulazione, correzione, alternativa : sulla semantica di alcuni tipi e segnali di parafrasi.

In : L. Lumbelli, B. Mortara Garavelli (eds), Parafrasi. Dalla ricerca linguistica alla ricerca psicopedagogica.

Alessandria : Edizioni dell’Orso, 169-206.

VALERE http ://www.progettovalere.org/

VALICO http://www.valico.org

The use of dissociative, completive, and narrative morphology in Totela narratives.

Crane, Thera

(University of California, Berkeley)

Narratives in Totela (Bantu, Zambia) employ three main tense/aspect categories: “dissociative” (∼ pre- hodiernal) pasts,

associative “completive” (∼ hodiernal) morphology, and narrative morphology. This paper describes their narrative

distribution and the implications for understanding the Totela tense/aspect system. Claims are supported by results of

logistic regression.

Dissociative markers (imperfective ka- and completive -ka-) appear most commonly at the beginnings and ends of

narratives. The first verb(s) of a narrative are almost universally dissociative. Imperfectives give information about the

scene and the state of the participants, while completives detail actions that lead up to the main story line (1). Virtually

every narrative ends with a conventionalized coda, marked with dissociative -ka- (2). In framing a narrative, dissociative

marking delineates a world, separate from the world of telling, where listener belief can be suspended to include narrative

events. Inside that world, associative forms are used to reflect story-internal reality.

(1) Âwò kàlì mùchèchè àkáfwìlwá bànyìnà. Éènì. Chwàlè nìngá bàkáfwà bànyìnà, náàkásìyàlá kùbésì. Bésì nòkúsèsà

yùmwí òmwánàkázì.

‘There once was

[

PREHOD

IPFV

]

a child, his mother died on him

[

PREHOD

CMPL

Yes. Well, when his mother died

[

PREHOD

CMPL

]

, that’s

when he was left

[

PREHOD

CMPL

]

with his father. Then his father married

[

NARR

]

another woman.’ (ZT2009NarrA12.VB.2-6,

Kañandu)

(2) Pólwàkàmànínà.

‘That’s where it [the story] ended

[

PREHOD

CMPL

]

.’

(ZT2009NarrA16.GS.79, Kanyama)

Verbs marked with completive -a- most commonly occur at the beginning of new sub-episodes within a narrative. Verbs

describing sequential events or actions occur with narrative morphology, but major episodic changes (changes of location,

activity, plans, etc.) are marked with completive -a-. This scene-changing use is particularly seen in the frequent use of -a-

with motion verbs like ‘go’ and ‘arrive’ (3). Furthermore, -a- occurs only rarely on verbs immediately following songs in

narratives. Songs are disruptive to story action, and the use of a consecutive form, rather than a boundary marking form,

help bring audiences back to the main narrative stream. Another common use for a completive in narrative is to sum up a

series of events, to provide background information about situations that had occurred before current narrative time, or in

temporal clauses (‘having Xed…’).

(3) Kùmànà kùzàbìkà pèlè nòkákòlàmà kôkó kèkálà, kùmàlìbélà êñándà. Nàbó bà...àbénì bè....bêñándà bàsìkà. Hii!

‘Finishing

[

NARR

]

soaking

[

NARR

]

[the millet], then she went up

[

NARR

]

to where she stays

[

PRES

]

, in the corner of the house [in

the roof]. And those owners of the house arrived

[

CMPL

]

. Hii!’ (ZT2009NarrA16.GS.50-52, Kanyama)

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Logistic regression on a data set of 547 verbs from nine narratives found significant predictors of inflection vs. narrative

morphology.

ORE LIKELY TO BE INFLECTED

ESS LIKELY TO BE INFLECTED

Last before song

Restricted clauses

Not in verb sequence

First in episode

Lower valency

First after song

Narrative clauses

In verb sequence

Not first in episode

Higher valency

Not significant in the model are factors such as character reference, theta role structure, and syntactic factors such as word

order.

Examination of the role of verbal inflection within narrative discourse not only provides clues to the narrative

functions of TAM marking, but also sheds light on the markers’ general meanings.

Lexical convergence and shared derivation patterns in the Ethiopian linguistic area.

Crass, Joachim and Treis, Yvonne

(University of Mainz and CNRS-LLACAN)

The present paper is a contribution to the study of language contact phenomena in the Ethiopian Linguistic Area, a

convergence zone in which Omotic (O), Cushitic (C) and Semitic (S) languages of Afroasiatic and Nilo-Saharan languages are

in contact. The existence of shared lexicalisation patterns was observed but not further investigated by Hayward (1991,

2000), who provided a list of shared polysemies, shared heterosemies and shared derivational patterns in one Cushitic, one

Omotic and one Semitic language.

Building on a study of perception verbs in the Cushitic language Kambaata (Treis 2010), the present paper

investigates, in the first part, how the semantic field of perception verbs is carved up in all the Ethiopian languages we have

data on. The focus will be on detecting contact-induced lexical convergence. It will be shown that many Ethiopian languages

distinguish only three perception modalities lexically, i.e. the verbs ‘see’ and ‘hear’ are used to express perception by one’s

tongue (‘taste’) and skin/body (‘feel’); in addition, there is a verb ‘smell’ for olfactory perception. Furthermore, often no

lexical distinction is made between perception activities and perception experiences. While this is not unexpected from a

cross-linguistic point of view (cf. Viberg 1983, 2001), the widespread use of the active form of ‘hear’ for auditory

experiences and activities and the use of the passive derivation of the ‘hear’ verb to express tactile perception (‘feel’) is a

lexicalisation pattern, as far as we were able to find out, unattested elsewhere in the world and thus a likely candidate of

recent contact-induced lexical convergence. We argue that the use of the passive derivation of ‘hear’ for the expression of

‘feel’ is most likely the result of influence of the Ethiopian national language Amharic on other languages of the area.

The second part of the paper elaborates further on shared derivational patterns, especially shared causative

patterns. Semitic, Cushitic and Omotic languages have a causative suffix {s} (or similar), which is probably of Afroasiatic

origin. While the meaning of causative verbs is usually predictable from the meaning of the verbal basis, there are some

causative verbs in many Ethiopian languages with – at first view – idiosyncratic meanings, e.g. ‘spend the night’ + CAUS =

‘administer, govern’, ‘be ill’ + CAUS = > ‘nurse a patient’, ‘want’ + CAUS = ‘be necessary’ (cf. Hayward 1991, 2000 on Amharic

(S), Oromo (C) and Gamo (O); Crass 2007: 101 on K’abeena (C); Mous (2004: 222) on Konso; Roba & Wedekind (2008) on

Burji. Based on a large sample of Ethiopian languages and a control group of genetically related non-Ethiopian languages,

we will show, by adopting an areal perspective, that the meanings of these causative verbs are not idiosyncratic but the

result of contact-induced conceptual borrowings and a feature of the Ethiopian Linguistic Area. The main evidence is that

Afroasiatic languages outside Ethiopia, e.g. Arabic and Hebrew, do not share these lexicalisation patterns although they

possess cognate causative morphemes.

References

Crass, Joachim. 2007. Grammatical borrowing in K’abeena. In Matras, Y. & J. Sakel (eds.). Grammatical borrowing in cross-

linguistic perspective. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 91-105.

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Hayward, Richard 1991. À propos patterns of lexicalization in the Ethiopian Language Area. In D. Mendel, D. & U. Claudi

(eds.). Ägypten im afro-orientalischen Kontext. Special Issue of Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere. Cologne: Institute of

African Studies, pp. 139-56.

Hayward, Richard 2000. Is there a metric for convergence? In C. Renfrew, A. McMahon & L. Trask (eds.), Time Depth in

Historical Linguistics. Vol. 2. Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, pp. 621-40.

Mous, Maarten 2004. The causative in Konso. In: Kastenholz, R. & A. Storch (eds.). Sprache und Wissen in Afrika. Cologne:

Köppe, pp. 213-228.

Roba Dame & Charlotte Wedekind 2008. Burji Dictionary. Ms. Available online:http://www.kwedekind.de/Eingang1/

PdfFiles/2008_Burji_Dictionary_of_1994.pdf

Treis, Yvonne 2010. Perception verbs and taste adjectives in Kambaata and beyond. In: Storch, A. (ed.). Perception of the

Invisible. Religion, Historical Semantics and the Role of Perceptive Verbs (SUGIA – Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika,

21) Cologne: Köppe, pp. 313-346.

Viberg, A. 1983. The verbs of perception: A typological study. Linguistics 21: 123-162.

Viberg, A. 2001. Verbs of perception. In: Haspelmath, M. et al. (eds.). Language typology and language universals. An

international handbook. Vol. 2, Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, pp. 1294-1309.

Existential predication in typological perspective.

Creissels, Denis

(University of Lyon)

Existential predication is the usual designation of predicative constructions expressing presence of an entity at a given

location (English There is..., French Il y a...). Such constructions are not necessarily paraphrasable by means of verbs such as

exist, and must rather be defined as involving an abstract predicate ‘be a place p such as an entity e can be found at p’,

which means that the same two-place predicate BE_AT(e, p) perspectivized in two different ways underlies locative

predication (‘be an entity e such as e can be found at p’) and existential predication. The fact that locative predication is

more canonical than existential predication with respect to the ontological status of its terms explains both the variations

observed in the morphosyntactic expression of existential predication cross-linguistically. It also explains that existential

predications tend to show properties departing from those of canonical predication (in particular in the distribution of the

properties that characterize subjects of canonical predications), and in particular tend to depart from the more canonical

constructions from which they may derive.

In many languages, the relation between existential and locative predication is straightforwardly reflected in the

fact that their coding differs only in constituent order (Entity is at place vs. At place is entity). However, other possibilities

are attested cross-linguistically:

• existential predication aligned on comitative predication: Place is_with entity;

• existential predication partially aligned on transitive predication, with a transitive verb of possession (or a verb

‘give’) used impersonally: At place has/gives entity;

• presence expressed as the result of coming into existence: At place entity has_appeared.

‘Zero-marked existential predication’, in which a noun phrase without any additional material can constitute an existential

clause, is not a type of its own. It must be related to locative predication realized as the mere juxtaposition of a phrase

representing the entity and a phrase representing the place, the difference in perspective explaining why the phrase

encoding the place is obligatory in the locative predication (in which it fulfills the role of predicate) but optional in the

existential predication (in which it is typically topical).

Have-exitentials reflect the fact that possessive predication can be viewed as abstract location with the personal

sphere of an individual in the role of ground, and transitive verbs of possession can be viewed as expressing the abstract

predicate ‘be an individual i such as an entity e can be found in the personal sphere of i’. Consequently, the mere deletion of

the term referring to the possessor can trigger a semantic shift from ‘presence in the personal sphere of some individual’ to

‘presence at some place’, since the role of ground is typically fulfilled by places.

Interestingly, in languages with have-existentials, the existential construction tends to show particularities that

distinguish it from the possessive construction it originates from. In French, the obligatory presence of an expletive (non-

referential) locative clitic, irrespective of the fact that the place is lexically encoded or left unspecified, distinguishes il y a

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‘there is’ from il a ‘he has’. But such obligatory expletive (non-referential) locatives are common in existential predications

otherwise aligned on locative predication too (English there in there is). This can be viewed as a tendency to overtly signal

the involvment of an atypical argument, not necessarily expressed, whose status in the perspectivization of the predicative

relation is similar to that of the subject of canonical predication, although it differs from canonical subjects in other

respects.

References

Bar-Asher, Elitzur. 2011. ‘From typology to diachrony: synchronic anddiachronic aspects of predicative

possessiveconstructions in Akkadian’. Folia Linguistica Historica 32. 43–88.

Clark, Eve 1978. ‘Locationals: Existential, locative and possessive constructions’. In J. Greenberg (ed.), Universals of Human

Language. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 85–126.

Freeze, Ray. 1992. ‘Existentials and other locatives’. Language 68, 553–95.

Hazout, Ilan. 2004. ‘The syntax of existential constructions’. Linguistic Inquiry 35. 393–430.

Hengeveld, Kees. 1992. Non-verbal predication. Mouton de Gruyter.

Kuno, Susumo. 1971. ‘The position of locatives in existential sentences’. Linguistic Inquiry 2, 233–278.

Kuroda, Shige-Yuki. 1972. ‘The categorical and the thetic judgment’. Foundations of Language 9. 153–185.

Mac Nally, Louise. 2011. ‘Existential sentences’. In von Heusinger, Maienborn and Portner (eds.), Semantics (HSK 33.2). de

Gruyter.1829–1848.

Partee, Barbara H. & Vladimir Borschev. 2007. ‘Existential sentences, BE, and the genitive of negation in Russian’. In I.

Comorovski & K. von Heusinger (eds.), Existence: Semantics and Syntax. Dordrecht: Springer. 147–190.

Stassen, Leon. 2009. Predicative possession. Oxford University Press.

Typological explanations in synchrony and diachrony: the evolution of adnominal possession.

Cristofaro, Sonia

(University of Pavia)

According to Haiman (1983, 1985), the structure of adnominal possessive constructions is iconically motivated by the

conceptual distance between possessor and possessee. Higher conceptual distance, as found in alienable as opposed to

inalienable possession, is reflected byhigher distance between the two elements encoding possessor and possessee, as

determined by the use of overt morphemes indicating the possession relationship or free, rather than bound morphemes.

In an alternative hypothesis (Nichols 1988, Koptjevskaja-Tamm 1997, Dahl and Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2001, Haspelmath 2008),

the structure of possessive constructions is motivated by the frequency of different possession types. Alienable nouns are

not usually possessed, so the possession relationship is more difficult to identify, and must be specified overtly. Inalienable

nouns are typically possessed, so the possession relationship need not be specified overtly, and the frequency of possessor-

possessee combinations leads to the fusion of the relevant morphemes.

These hypotheses are mainly based on the synchronic distribution of different types of possessive constructions

cross-linguistically, rather than the actual diachronic processes that give rise to these constructions in individual languages.

The paper discusses several such processes, based on extensive cross-linguistic evidence, and argues that these processes

pose a number of challenges both for the iconicity and for the frequency hypothesis. For example,

(i) There are systematic correlations between a number of restrictions in the use of individual possessive constructions and

the original meaning of the construction. Constructions not used for body parts or kin terms typically originate from spatial

expressions, expressions encoding the concept of property, or demonstratives modifying a possessee, and other

constructions not used for body parts originate from from directional expressions. These retrictions are naturally accounted

for in terms of relative incompatibility between the relevant possession types and the original semantics of the

construction, so there is no obvious evidence that they reflect any differences in conceptual distance or frequency between

the relevant possession types.

(ii) Individual possessive morphemes are used for possession types related to their original meaning, but not for possession

types that are equally frequent and involve the same degree of conceptual distance, but are less directly related to the

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original meaning of the morpheme. For example, morphemes derived from locative elements are only used when the

alienable possession relationship involves a salient spatial component, and morphemes presumably originating from ‘eat’

and ‘drink’ verbs are used to indicate possession of edible and drinkable items, but not other types of alienable possession.

These facts raise a general point about typological explanations. Typologists identify particular construction types (e.g.

particular types of possessive constructions) on synchronic grounds, and account for these types in terms of categories and

functional factors associated with their distribution (e.g. alienability, conceptual distance or frequency). Yet, each type may

originate from distinct diachronic processes in different languages, each motivated by principles other than those that can

be postulated on synchronic grounds. Hence typologicalexplanations should be based on the comparison of diachronic

processes, rather than the comparison of construction types defined on synchronic grounds.

References

Dahl, Oe. and M. Koptjevskaja-Tamm (2001). Kinship in grammar. In I. Baron, M. Herslund, and F. Soerensen (Eds.),

Dimensions of Possession. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Haiman, J. (1983). Iconic and economic motivation. Language 59, 781–819.

Haiman, J. (1985). Natural syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Haspelmath, M. (2008). Frequency vs. iconicity in explaining grammatical asymmetries. Cognitive Linguistics 19, 1–33.

Koptjevskaja-Tamm, M. (1997). Possessive noun phrases in Maltese: Alienability, iconicity and grammaticalization. Rivista di

Linguistica 8, 245–74.

Nichols, J. (1988). On alienable and inalienable possession. In W. Shipley (Ed.), In Honor of Mary Haas, pp. 557–609. Berlin:

Mouton de Gruyter.

Frame semantic annotation for parallel corpora: some whys and a how.

Culo, Oliver

(Mainz University)

Semantic annotation of parallel corpora may aid the description of typical semantic shifts in translation, as was aimed at by

the FUSE project (Cyrus 2006), and may help uncover divergencies on a broader scale, like the often-cited differences in

framing motions in Germanic and Romance languages (Talmy 2000; Slobin 2004). Most parallel corpora nowadays, however,

only contain morpho-syntactic annotation, though there are exceptions. One such exception is a corpus which is a subset of

the Europarl corpus, 1,000 English and 1,000 German sentences annotated with syntactic structures and frame semantics

(Padó and Lapata 2009).

The proposed talk will present studies on English-German and German-English translations and examine some

typical cases of how they diverge from each other both grammatically and semantically. This will include a survey on

semantic divergencies observed in various projects utilising frame semantic annotation (cf. e.g. Burchardt et al. 2006; for an

overview of frame semantics, see e.g. Petruck 1996) and add observations made on a small sample of bi-sentences from the

above-mentioned corpus compiled by Padó and Lapata as well as the German-English CroCo corpus (Neumann and Hansen-

Schirra 2005). The talk will show how grammar and semantics interact in at least two ways in translation: Sometimes,

typological restrictions make it harder to express certain semantic content the “same” grammatical way in two languages,

and sometimes, it is different conventions (for German-English cf. e.g. House 1997) in how we say things that may lead to

semantic divergencies. It will also be shown how frame semantic annotation may aid in describing semantic divergencies.

Čulo (2011, 67) demonstrates this on an example in which a Cause_change frame is translated by a State_of_entity frame:

The translation solely focusses on the end state of the process, making the cause implicit.

Besides these linguistic/translational insights, the talk will also present an annotation mode developed for the TrEd

treebank annotation tool which allows to easily edit the structural annotation and alignment of parallel texts with both

phrase structure and frame semantic annotation. Also, practical issues like the process of creating semantic dictionaries for

the annotation of multiple languages will briefly be addressed.

References

Burchardt, Aljoscha, Katrin Erk, Anette Frank, Andrea Kowalski, Sebastian Pado, and Manfred Pinkal. 2006. “The SALSA

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Corpus: a German Corpus Resource for Lexical Semantics.” In Proceedings of LREC 2006. Genoa, Italy.

Čulo, Oliver. 2011. “Querying Multilevel Annotation and Alignment for Detecting Grammatical Valence Divergencies.” In

Multilingual Resources and Multilingual Applications Proceedings of the Conference of the German Society for

Computational Linguistics and Language Technology (GSCL) 2011, 63–68. Hamburg.

Cyrus, Lea. 2006. “Building a Resource for Studying Translation Shifts.” In Proceedings of LREC 2006.

House, Juliane. 1997. “Mißverstehen in Interkulturellen Begegnungen.” In Wie Lernt Man Sprachen - Wie Lehrt Man

Sprachen, 154–169.

Neumann, Stella, and Silvia Hansen-Schirra. 2005. “The CroCo Project. Cross-linguistic Corpora for the Investigation of

Explicitation in Tranlsations.” In Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Conference Series. Vol. 1.

Padó, Sebastian, and Mirella Lapata. 2009. “Cross-lingual Annotation Projection of Semantic Roles.” Journal of Artificial

Intelligence Research 36: 307–340.

Petruck, Miriam R. L. 1996. “Frame Semantics.” In Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ole Östman, Jan

Blommaert, and Chris Bulcaen. Philadel: John Benjamins.

Slobin, Dan I. 2004. “The Many Ways to Search for a Frog: Linguistic Typology and the Ex-pression of Motion Events.” In

Relating Events in Narrative: Typological Perspectives, ed. S. Strömqvist and L. Verhoeven. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence

Erlbaum Associates.

Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics: Vol. II: Typology and Process in Concept Structuring. Cambridge, MA:

MIT Press.

The Old Avestan injunctive between mood and modality.

D'Amato Fabio, Massimo

(La Sapienza University of Rome)

The paper presents an analysis of the Old Avestan (henceforth OA) verbal system from what is now the traditional

perspective of the study of modality (Palmer 1986, Bybee 1995) with regard to both syntactic and semantic variables.

By investigating the relationship between modal values and their grammatical codifications in OA, the argument

will focus on the so-called “injunctive” mood, which represents a set of verb forms lacking the distinctive markers of mood

and is identifiable by secondary (or historical) endings bound directly to the aspectual stems:

pres.: vaza- + -ǝm/-ō/-aţ...

√vaz “to pull”

aor.: važ- + -ǝm/-ō/-aţ...

Although they lack modal-specific morphology, these forms cover a wide range of modal values, overlapping with nearly all

other mood domains. As Kellens (1984) and Lazzeroni (1997) have exhaustively described, and as Christol (2003) and

Kiparsky (2005) have underlined in their works on the Vedic injunctive, the present/aorist injunctive is the main means of

expressing the narrative past tense (1) in contrast to indicative augmented forms (2). However, the aorist injunctive is also

used in place of the imperative (3) as well as the present injunctive, which can express the general-atemporal present (4) or

the desiderative (5). Thus both forms, if preceded by mā, mark prohibition (6).

(1) Y.30.7a: ahmāicā xṣ̌aϑrā jasat̰ (INJ.AOR) manaŋhā vohū aṣ̌ācā (“And now is come Xṣ̌athrā, and Vohū Manah and Aṣ̌ā”)

(2) Y.29.6a: at̰ əvāocat̰ (IND.AOR) ahurō mazdā vīduuā vafūš viiānaiiā. (“so Ahura Mazdā spoke, (because he) knows the

texture of the nets”)

(3) Y.28.7c: dāidī (IMP.AOR) aṣ̌ā [...] dāidī (IMP.AOR) tū ārmaitē […] dā̊s (INJ.AOR) tū mazdā xṣ̌aiiācā. (“give Aṣ̌ā […] give thou

Armaiti […] give thou Mazdā”)

(4) Y.32.14c: hiiat̰cā gāuš jaidiiāi mraoī (INJ.PRS). (“when the cow is spoken for killing”)

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(5) Y.44.15b: yā tū mazdā dīdərəžō (INJ.PRS). (“which thou wishest to establish O Mazdā”)

(6) Y.48.5c: huxṣ̌aϑrā xṣ̌ə̄ṇtąm mā nə̄ duṣ̌ə.xṣ̌aϑrā xṣ̌ə̄ṇtā (INJ.AOR) (“do not let bad rules assume rule over us”)

Through a review of almost all 220 injunctive occurrences in Gāthās, it is claimed that injunctive use is governed by the

utterance modal domain, and that the opposition between indicative and injunctive involves a fundamental selection of

epistemic vs deontic values.

This leads to a consideration regarding the 2

grade category nature of mood in OA: according to West (2011), the

OA mood system is to be interpreted as a convenient designation of morphemic combinations (typically aspectual stem +

suffix modifiers) rather than a grammatical feature proper.

Diachronically speaking, the productive continuation of the archaism represented by injunctive forms in this branch

of the Iranian group (together with the equally conservative case of the Vedic) bears witness to the persistence of an

underlying [± modal] trait alongside those of [± aspect] and [± time] in determining PIE verb distinctive semantics.

References

Christol A., 2003, L'injonctif védique, in Modes de repérages temporels, Amsterdam.

Bybee J.L. 1995, Modality in grammar and discourse, Amsterdam.

Kellens J., 1984, Le Verbe avestique, Wiesbaden.

Kiparsky P., 2005, The Vedic Injunctive: Historical and Synchronic Implications, in The Yearbook of South Asian Languages

and Linguistics, Mouton.

Lazzeroni R., 1997, Fra glottologia e storia: ingiuntivo, aumento e lingua poetica indoeuropea, in Scritti scelti di Romano

Lazzeroni, Pisa.

Palmer E.R., 1986, Mood and Modality, Cambridge.

West M.L., 2011, Old Avestan syntax and stylistics, Berlin.

Southwest Ukrainian as a Balkan language?

Danylenko, Andriy and Nomachi, Motoki

(Pace University and Hokkaido University)

Areal relationship among the languages of Europe has been extensively discussed in recent literature (cf. Heine and Kuteva

2006). Yet questions about their areal-typological profiling and areal hierarchy have not yet received definitive answers,

hence a number of linguistic areas with fuzzy borders within the geographic bounds of Europe, including the ‘oldest’ Balkan

Sprachbund. Its uncontroversial members (Albanian, Aromanian, Bulgarian, Modern Greek, Macedonian, Balkan Romani,

Rumanian, the southernmost and eastern dialects of Serbian) demonstrate a number of contact-induced properties, called

‘Balkanisms’. Some of them are shared by Turkish. Other neighboring languages may also be considered members of this

Sprachbund, for instance Judezmo (Judeo-Spanish) (Joseph 2011).

It is not, however, clear how many ‘Balkanisms’ are enough to consider a particular language a member of the

Balkan Sprachbund or at what ‘geographical point’ they are likely to turn into typological convergences? In other words, one

should answer a chicken-and-egg question vexing, although under various guises, specialists in Balkan linguistics – which

comes first, ‘language of the Balkans’ or ‘Balkan language’ (cf. Schaller 1975), or, in case of morphosyntactic properties,

‘comparative syntax of the Balkan languages’ or ‘Balkan comparative syntax’ (Joseph 2001)?

Southwest Ukrainian is an obvious teaser for the said conundrum. A member of the Carpathian (Danubian)

linguistic area, it connects East Slavic via Rumanian to the rest of the Balkan Sprachbund. This relationship has been in the

focus of Eastern Slavic linguistics since Bernštejn (1972/1968), hence the alleged existence of a Carpathian-Balkan

Sprachbund (Klepikova 1986, 15). The Carpathian area is characterized by ‘Carpathisms’ (primary local convergences),

attested also in North Ukrainian and South Belarusian, and ‘Balkanisms’ (secondary local convergences). Among the

morphosyntactic ‘Balkanisms’, Nimčuk (1993) identified 21 features, including the enclitic use of the dative possessive

pronoun, analytic adjectival comparative forms, a superessive marker for numerals between ‘11’ and ‘19’, a periphrastic de-

volitive future with a want-auxiliary. The author traced most of the ‘Balkanisms’ to the Common Slavic period (cf. the use of

the periphrastic future formation with the auxiliary xotity ‘to want’ in Southeast Ukrainian). For some cases Nimčuk did not

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exclude a mutual reinforcement by languages genetically and typologically distant such as Ukrainian and Hungarian. The

above-mentioned numerals might be supported by parallel forms in Hungarian and Rumanian.

In view of the continuum of ‘Balkanisms’ spreading through Southwest Ukrainian, one wonders whether an

uncontroversial Sprachbund-oriented comparative description of Balkan morphosyntactic parallels is possible.

References

Asenova, P. 2002. Balkansko ezikoznanie. Osnovni problem na balkanskija ezikov sajuz. Sofia: Faber.

Bernštejn, S.B. 1972. Problemy karpatskogo jazykoznanija. In: G. P. Klepikova (ed.), Karpatskaja dialektologija i onomastika.

Moskva: Nauka, 3–15.

Joseph, Brian D. 2001. Is Balkan Comparative Syntax Possible? Rivero, Maria-Luisa and Angela Ralli (eds.). Comparative

Syntax of Balkan Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 17–43.

Joseph, Brian D. 2011. Review of: Olga Mišeska Tomić, Balkan Sprachbund Morpho-syntactic Features. Dodrecht: Springer,

2006. 749 + xxi pp. Acta Slavica Iaponica 29, 123–131.

Heine, Bernd and Tania Kuteva. 2006. The Changing Languages of Europe. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press.

Klepikova, G. P. 1986. Karpatskoe jazykoznanie – sostojanie i perspektivy meždunarodnogo sotrudničestva. Myl’nikov, A. S.

(ed.). Zarubežnaja istoriografija slavjanovedenija i balkanistiki. Moskva: Nauka, 13–29.

Nimčuk, V. V. 1993. Ukrajins’ki hovory ta balkans’kyj movnyj sojuz. In: Slov´´jans’ke movoznavstvo. Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 41-

63.

Schaller, Helmut Wilhelm. 1975. Die Balkansprachen: Eine Einführung in die Balkanphilologie. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.

Switch-reference in Kobon and Haruai: areal influences within Highland New Guinea.

Davies, John and Comrie, Bernard

(Summer Institute of Linguistics and MPI Leipzig)

Switch-reference is an areal typological characteristic of Highland New Guinea languages. Roberts (1997) presents an

overview of a significant range of typological variation found within switch-reference systems of Papua New Guinea (PNG).

Kobon and Haruai are two neighboring languages of Highland PNG; there is no evidence of a genealogical

relationship between them, although they are in close contact. Formally, the switch-reference morphologies of the two

languages are very different: Haruai simply distinguishes a single same-subject suffix from a single different-subject suffix

with no marking of person-number, while Kobon has person-number marking in distinct same-subject and different-subject

paradigms.

However, on a number of structural points Kobon and Haruai are virtually identical, in areas where Roberts

documents considerably diversity within PNG more generally. For instance, in both Kobon and Haruai it is rather strictly the

grammatical subject that is tracked, rather than the highest semantic role or the topic. Thus, in constructions of the type

“hunger shoots me” for ‘I am hungry’, it is the stimulus “hunger” (which also triggers person-number indexing in the verb)

rather than the experiencer “me” whose referent is tracked.

In constructions where the referent of one clause is properly included in that of the other, some languages of PNG

make no distinction depending on whether the referent of the matrix clause is included in that of the dependent clause or

vice versa, while others at least under some circumstances use same-subject marking if the referent of the matrix clause is

properly included in that of the dependent clause, but different-subject marking where the reverse relation holds. Thus,

with “we” interpreted inclusively, “we X-ing, you Y” receives same-subject marking, while “you X-ing, we Y” receives

different-subject marking. Both Kobon and Haruai belong to this latter type.

In some languages of PNG, in cases of properly included reference it makes no difference whether the two subjects

are of the same grammatical person or not, while in others under at least some circumstances two subjects of the same

grammatical person trigger same-subject marking while those of different grammatical person trigger different-subject

marking. Both Kobon and Haruai show this grammatical person constraint: Even where other factors would suggest a

different-subject marker, if the two clauses have the same grammatical person then a same-subject marker is used, i.e. one

finds same-subject marking in “I X-ing, we Y”, but different-subject marking in “you X-ing, we Y” (with “we” interpreted

inclusively).

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While both direction of the proper inclusion relation and identity versus non-identity of grammatical person are

often relevant parameters cross-linguistically when the tracked noun phrases have overlapping rather than absolutely

identical reference, both Kobon and Haruai agree in the precise interaction of these parameters. We argue that areal

properties in switch-reference are not found only as general properties across large areas such as Highland New Guinea,

but also serve in more specific form to define smaller sub-areas, as in the case of Kobon and Haruai.

References

Comrie, Bernard. 1998. ‘Switch reference in Haruai: grammar and discourse’. In Marc Janse, ed.: Productivity and Creativity,

421–432. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Davies, John. 1981. Kobon. Amsterdam: North-Holland.

Roberts, John R. 1997. ‘Switch-reference in Papua New Guinea: A preliminary survey’. In A. Pawley, ed.: Papers in Papuan

Linguistics, No. 3, 101-241. Pacific Linguistics, A-87.

Directivity in varieties of English: a closer look at business correspondence.

De Clerck, Bernard

(University College Ghent)

Varieties of English not only differ in spelling, pronunciation, phonology and syntax (see Mesthrie & Bhatt 2008, Götz &

Schilk 2011, Mukherjee 2010, Kirkpatrick 2012, Laporte 2012), politeness and directivity, too, are expressed differently.

Katikar (1984), for instance, observes that deontic could and shall are used more frequently in Indian English than in British

English whereas Mehrotra (1992, 2003), observes that tentative might occurs less frequently despite the great importance

that is attached to face, formality and politeness. De Clerck (2012), in his turn, notes that the imperative occurs three times

more frequently in Indian English data. Different and diverging strategies are also found African varieties of English as in

Nkemleke (2005) on the use of must and should in Cameroon English and in Kasanga (2006) on request strategies in South

African varieties of English. Most of these studies, however, single out one specific aspect that is relevant to the expression

of directivity (e.g. the use of modals or the ways in which requests are realized), but fail to present an overall picture of how

directivity as a whole is expressed in specific contexts.

This paper wants to provide a more systematic approach to the expression of deontic obligation (or directivity) in a

very specific setting; i.e. that of business correspondence. Using data from the ICE-corpora, this paper examines how

directivity is expressed in Indian English, American English and British English business letters, not only by looking at the use

of modals, but also by paying attention to imperatives, performatives and the use of politeness markers. From a quantitative

perspective, directive strategies will be identified, categorized and compared, followed by a qualitative analysis of these

directives within the rhetorical make-up of the business letters and the different moves in it, embedded within the specifics

of the communicative context they occur in. As such, this paper wants to lay bare potential areas of communicative friction

in the cross-cultural realization of directive speech acts in a global English business environment.

Results based on multiple correspondence analysis not only reveal statistically significant differences in the use of

modals, but also in the use of imperative structures, the politeness marker please, performative uses of the verb request

and the use of honorifics, all of which are related to more general cross-linguistic differences in the realization of directive

speech acts. Attested differences will be positioned and (partially) explained in Hofstede’s macro model of cultural

dimensions, while sensitivity to micro context will be demonstrated by comparing the current results with Offergeld’s (2008)

analysis of letters to editors.

References

De Clerck, B. 2012. Coulda, shoulda, woulda. A closer look at modals in Indian English and British English. Paper presented at

Icame 26, 30May-3 June 2012, KULeuven.

Götz, S. & M. Schilk. 2011. Formulaic sequences in spoken English: Focus on British English, Indian English and Learner

English of advanced German learners. In Mukherjee and Hundt (eds.), 79-100.

Kasanga, L.A. 2006. Requests in a South African variety of English. World Englishes 25 (1): 65-89.

Katikar, P.B. 1984. The meanings of the modals in Indian English. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis. Shivaji University, Kolhapur.

Kirkpatrick, A. 2012. World Englishes: Implications for International Communication and English Language Teaching.

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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Laporte, S. 2012? Mind the gap!: Bridge between Word Englishes and Learner Englishes in the making. English Text

Construction 5,2: 264-293.

Mehrotra, R.R. 1992. Verbalization of Polite Behaviour in Indian English. In The Third International Symposium on Language

and Linguistics. Bangkok: Chulalongkorn University. 962-971.

Mehrotra, R.R. 2003. A British response to some Indian English usages: Is Indian English usage significantly opaque to

outsiders? English Today 75 (19, 3): 19-25.

Mesthrie, R. & R. M. Bhatt. 2008. World Englishes: The Study of New Linguistic Varieties. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Mukherjee, J. 2010. Corpus-based insights into verb-complementational innovations in Indian English. In Grammar between

Norm and Variation, Alexandra N. Lenz and Albrecht Plewnia (eds.). Frankurt a.m.: Peter Lang, 219-241.

Nkemleke, D.A. 2005. Must and Should in Cameroon English. Nordic Journal of African Studies 14 (1): 43-67.

Offergeld, M.A. 2008. Lexico-Grammatical Variation in the Use of REQUEST Strategies in Indian and British ‘Letters to the

Editor’: A Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Study. Ph.D diss, Otto-Von- Guericke-Universität Magdeburg

Fronted-infinitive constructions, progressive aspect and predication focus in Kikongo.

De Kind, Jasper; Dom, Sebastian; de Schryver, Gilles-Maurice and Bostoen, Koen

(Ghent University)

A formal and historical relationship between progressive aspect and predication focus has been observed across Bantu

(Güldemann 2003; Hyman and Watters 1984). One particular construction manifesting such polyvalence is a compound verb

form consisting of an infinitive followed by a conjugated form of the same verb, the ‘fronted-infinitive

construction‘ (Güldemann 2003: 335). It commonly occurs in Bantu languages of Guthrie’s zones B and H (Hadermann

1996). Güldemann (2003: 335) offers two possible structural interpretations for this fronted infinitive pattern: a) pre-posing

of the infinitive to pre-verbal focus position before the verb and b) the functional reanalysis of a construction having a topic-

focus organization. In this paper, we shed new light on the origins of this construction’s polyvalence through a detailed study

of its uses in a number of Kikongo varieties, hereby relying on newly collected fieldwork data dedicated to information

structure.

In the western Kikongo varieties Fiote and Yombe, the fronted-infinitive construction conveys progressivity

(Hadermann 1996: 161). A similar strategy occurs in Ciwoyo, another western Kikongo variety, as the fieldwork data in (1)

illustrate:

(1) Sálá yìsálá (Ciwoyo)

Ø -sal-a yi-sal-a

-work-FV sc

1sg

-work-FV

“I am working”

The same pattern in Ciwoyo is used to express predication focus (2), as is the case in Civili (3), where progressivity is

expressed by the suffix -ang-.

(2) Vè, núngúná tókà nnùngwíní (Ciwoyo)

Vè Ø-núngún-á tókà Ø-n-nùngún-ídí

No NP

-push-FV only sc

-oc

-push-PVF

No, she only pushed him.

(3) Kó kútélạ kó ùàńtélạ (Civili)

kó kú-tél-ạ kó ù-á-ń-tél-ạ

ADV NP

-call-FV ADV sc

-PVF-OC

-call-FV

She called him.

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Similar focus strategies exist in several eastern Kikongo dialects, such as Kimbeko in (4). Progressivity in these languages is

expressed by the TAM-marker -ta-.

(4) sónìkà kákà bàsónìkénì (Kimbeko)

Ø-sónìk-à kákà bà-sónìk-ídì

-write-FV only SC

-write-PVF

They only wrote (a report).

In line with Güldemann (2003), we argue that the progressive interpretation of the fronted-infinitive pattern evolved from

its use as focus marker. The focalized verb is placed in immediate-before-the-verb position, commonly associated with

argument focus in western Bantu (Bostoen and Mundeke 2012). Moreover, the focus interpretation has a much larger

distribution than the progressive interpretation. The latter seems to be confined, at first sight, to western Kikongo varieties.

Elsewhere verbal affixes convey progressivity. The sound-symbolic association between verb reduplication and iterative

aspect, as reported in traditional Kikongo grammars (Bentley 1887: 974; Laman 1912: 178), may have facilitated this

functional extension.

(5) tunga-tunga (Kisikongo, cited from Bentley 1887: 974)

Ø-tung-a Ø-tung-a

-build-FV NP

-build-FV

‘to build quickly’

References

Bentley, W.H. 1887. Dictionary and Grammar of the Kongo language as spoken at San Salvador, the Ancient Capital of the

Old Kongo empire, West Africa. London: Baptist Missionary Society and Trübner & Co.

Bostoen, K. and L. Mundeke. 2012. Subject Marking and Focus in Mbuun (Bantu, B87). Southern African Linguistics and

Applied Language Studies 30 (2): 139-154.

Güldemann, T. 2003. Present progressive vis-à-vis predication focus in Bantu. A verbal category between semantics and

pragmatics. Studies in Language 27: 323–360.

Hadermann, P. 1996. Grammaticalisation de la structure 'infinitif + verbe conjugué' dans quelques langues bantoues. Studies

in African Linguistics 25: 155-196.

Hyman, L. and J.R. Watters. 1984. Auxiliary focus. Studies in African Linguistics 15: 233-273.

Laman, K.E. 1912. Grammar of the Kongo language (Kikongo). New York: Christian Alliance Publishers.

The use of discourse markers in learners of Italian as L2.

De Marco, Anna and Mascherpa, Eugenia

(University of Calabria)

In the last ten years the growing interest for the use of (Discourse Markers) DMs in the acquisition of L2 with particular

reference to Italian (Bazzanella /Borreguero Zuloaga 2011, Nigoević/Sučić 2011, Bardel 2004, De Marco/ Leone 2012) has

produced interesting outcomes. Our work focuses on the use of DMs by learners of Italian L2 in order to highlight what kind

of functions and textual organization DMs show in the ongoing interaction with native speakers of Italian.

The analysis aims to describe functions (pragmatic and interactional), forms (i.e. sì, bene, esatto, è chiaro, no),

compositions (one or more forms combined) distribution (i.e., does a particular position of the DM correlates to a specific

function?), and frequency of lexical DMs in Turkish and Spanish non native conversations (A2, B2 proficiency level) with

Italian native speakers. We have two sets of video recorded conversations for each pair composed by an Italian speaker and

a non native speaker. In order to determine if the type of task affects the use of DMs we have considered, for the current

analysis, two conversational tasks for each pair: a. a self presentation, b. a discussion on hobbies and sport preferences.

Research has shown that learners at various level of proficiency use different DMs, therefore the level of proficiency will be

considered in our analysis. The analysis will be run on the native corpus as well in order to compare the different uses of

DMs.

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Our approach to the analysis of DMs is a functional/pragmatic approach and will refer to the model of construction

grammar (Goldberg, 1995, 2002; Fried/Östman 2005). The aspect of distribution and structural position of DMs will be the

main point of our analysis since it contributes in a relevant manner to their interpretation. The illocutionary force of DM,

their modal expression, and their function of discourse management as internal elements of the proposition - which

receives in turn a syntactic and pragmatic value - is of great importance for our analysis. In this sense, taken as a support to

the ideational structure of the discourse, DMs occurs both at the interactional level (e.g. communicative strategies) and at

the level of global organization of speech orienting the structure of the sentence. Furthermore, the identification of DMs

structural position can improve the explanatory power of the pragmatic description and shed lights on the interpretation of

new occurrences (Fischer 2010).

Our research findings could help to improve our understanding of the acquisition of DMs use in non native

speakers and could constitute a corpus that teachers can use with their students for activities of noticing on the use of DMs

in conversation.

References

Borreguero Zuloaga, M. (forthcoming): Focalizzatori nelle varietà di apprendimento: il caso di anche [Focal particles in L2

Italian: the case of anche]. Atti dell'XI Convengo della Società Internazionale di Linguistica e Filologia Italiana.

Napoli, 7-10 ottobre 2010.

Bazzanella, C./ Borreguero Zuloaga, M. (2011). Allora e entonces: problemi teorici e dati empirici [Allora and entonces:

theoretical problems and empirical data]. Oslo Studies in Language, 3: 1, pp. 7-45.

Bardel, C. (2004). La pragmatica in italiano L2: l’uso dei segnali discorsivi. In F. Albano Leoni, F. Cutugno, M. Pettorino & R. Savy

(a cura di), Il Parlato Italiano. Atti del Convegno Nazionale (Napoli, 13-15 febbraio 2003). Napoli: D’Auria.

De Marco, A./Leone, P. (2012). Computer Mediated Conversation for Mutual Learning: Acknowledgement and

Agreement/Assessment Signals in Italian as L2. In L. Bradley & S. Thouësny (Eds.), CALL: Using, Learning, Knowing,

EUROCALL Conference, Gothenburg, Sweden, 22-25 August 2012, Proceedings. Dublin: Research-publishing.net.

Fischer K. (2010). Beyond the sentence: Constructions, frames and spoken interaction, Constructions and frames, vol. 2, 2,,

pp. 185-207.

Fried, M./J. Östman (2005). Construction Grammar and spoken language: The case of pragmatic particles, Journal of

Pragmatics, 371752–1778.

Goldberg, A. E., (1995). A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Goldberg, A. E., (2002). Surface generalizations: an alternative to alternations. Cognitive Linguistics 13 (4), 327–356.

Nigoević, M. /P. Sučić, (2011) Competenza pragmatica in italiano L2: l’uso dei segnali discorsivi da parte di apprendenti

croati, Italiano LinguaDue, n. 2.

Speaking vulgar in the Neapolitan area: use and perception.

De Rosa, Francesca; Mancini, Azzurra; Russo, Valentina and Buccione, Alessandra

(Università degli studi di Napoli)

Swearing and cursing represent some of the most common linguistic taboo in daily conversation and, at the same time, one

of the most spontaneous ways of expressing one’s most intimate feelings. Even thought the phenomenon has been brought

to light since ancient time, it is quite an unexplored field in linguistic studies. Ethno- and sociolinguists – as well as

anthropologists, sociologists and psychologists – have approached the matter focusing on the cognitive, emotional and

social values and, in particular, on the intrinsic gender differences of their use (s., a.o., Jay 2000, Allan/Burridge 1991,

McEnery , Stephens et. al 2009).

This study aims at calling attention to the communicative intentions underlying a set of specific expressions

attested in the Italian varieties spoken in the Neapolitan area, linking them to the different situational context and to the

specific lexicalization and grammaticalization processes involved in their use.

By using an ethno-sociopragmatic approach we investigate a range of vulgar expressions built up with body parts

and, more specifically, with sexual elements. These show evidence of a shared imagery finding its realization in a common

linguistic behaviour that can be traced back to a long and deep literary tradition (Russo). Not only semantic and lexical

features, but also syntactic and pragmatic strategies, will be analysed in order to point out some typical constructions such

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as “that X of Y” or “Y is a X”, “The X that you Verb (PP)”, where X indicates the swearing word and Y is a variable (a noun, an

adjective, an expression or another vulgar form). A particular strategy of generating meanings is the syntactic inversion by

means of which one can express different intentions (‘o cazz’ ch’‘e cacat [lit.: the dick you shit] vs. c’‘e cacat’ ‘o cazz’ [lit.:

you shit us the dick] where the former refers to something useless or a tautology, while the latter means you are bothering

me. Each construction has its own collocation perceived and used as such. Particularly interesting are those involving

gender limitations which exclude random or parallel combinations (e.g. ‘a fess’ ‘e soreta [lit. the pussy of your sister] vs. *‘o

cazz’ ‘e fratet’ [lit. the dick of your brother]; ‘o frat’ d’ò cazz’ [lit. the brother of the dick] and ‘a sora d’a fessa [lit: the sister

of the pussy] vs. *‘o frat’ d’à fessa and *‘a sora d’ò cazz’).

Even more important are the lexicalization and grammaticalization processes leading to semantic bleaching: even if

the investigated expressions are perceived as vulgar, they do not stimulate anymore a direct mental association with sexual

organs or activities. Sometimes the semantic bleaching is so pervasive to let us consider some of the examined vulgar

expressions as discourse markers or intensifiers. By means of a sociolinguistics perceptive test we will proof that there is a

hierarchy among those intensifiers – oscillating from the euphemism up to the cursing – that can be linked to the vulgarity

hierarchy.

References

Allan, K. / Burridge, K., 1991, Euphemism and dysphemism: Language used as shield and weapon, New York, Oxford

University Press.

Jay, T., 2000, Why we curse: A neuro-psycho-social theory of speech, Philadelphia, John Benjamins.

McEnery, T. 2006, Swearing in English: Bad Language, Purity and Power from 1586 to the Present, London and new York,

Routledge Advances in Corpus Linguistics.

Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston (2009). “Swearing as a Response to Pain” Neuroreport 20 (12): 1056–

60.

Future tense in French and Italian: non-temporal meanings in contrast.

de Saussure, Louis and Baranzini, Laura

(Université de Neuchâtel)

This work compares modal (epistemic) and temporal meanings of the future tense (FT) in French and Italian and attempts

at drawing deeper conclusions about the respective semantics of FT in both languages. In particular, empirical data seems

to suggest that Italian FT is more epistemic and French FT is more evidential.

Together with many other Romance languages, French and Italian FT (just like English, Dowty 1979), present both a

temporal (1) and an epistemic (2) meaning:

(1) Paolo viendra demain (French) / Paolo verrà domani (Italian)

Paolo will come tomorrow.

(2) [doorbell rings] : Ce sera le facteur. (French) / Sarà il postino (Italian).

That’ll be the postman.

When it does not simply consider that FT-utterances are always modal for the reason that the future is by nature uncertain

(but see inter alia Morency & Saussure 2012 and Gosselin to appear for other views), the literature usually assumes i) that

epistemic meanings of FT develop on the basis of previous temporal meanings, and ii) that argumentative meanings, such

as concessive ones in Italian (3) or Spanish, are only found in languages where epistemic meanings of FT are also common:

(3) Sarà simpatico, ma non ha amici.

(he) be-FUT nice, but NEG (he) has friends

‘He may be nice, but he hasn’t got any friends’.

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We notice a number of dissimilarities between French and Italian FT. In particular, the contextual conditions that license

epistemic futures (EF) differ. For example, in (4), when asked for a specific brand of shoes, a French salesman can answer

with an EF whereas it appears unnatural to do so in Italian (4). We also notice that EF enter naturally in causal relations in

Italian but not in French (5):

(4) Elles [those shoes you are looking for] seront sur le présentoir là-bas (French).

Saranno sullo scaffale là in fondo (Italian).

They be-FUT there on that stand.

(5) Devo tornare a casa perché Marco mi starà aspettando (Italian).

Je dois rentrer parce que Marco sera en train de m’attendre (French).

I must go home because Marco be-FUT waiting for me.

We suggest that different patterns of interpretation, or ‘procedures of pragmatic enrichment’ are active in the two

languages on the basis of a core meaning. We suggest that in Italian, probability meanings with future tense are elaborated

on the basis of a modal meaning about the impossibility to verify the state of affairs at speech time, whereas in French, the

fact that epistemic future cannot enter causal constructions as in (5) connects it rather with an evidential function of

indicating that the proposition is the result of an inferential process predicted verified true in some future. These

observations allow getting back to considerations about the evolution of future tenses in romance.

Our work follows the line of investigation according to which tenses are grams that encode procedures of

pragmatic enrichment (Nicolle 1997; Moeschler 1998; Saussure 2003; Saussure 2011; for the future tense in French and

English, Morency & Saussure 2012).

References

Blakemore, Diane (1987), Semantic Constraints on Relevance, Oxford: Blackwell.

Carston, Robyn (2002), Thoughts and utterances: the pragmatics of explicit communication, Oxford: Blackwell.

Dowty, David (1979), Word Meaning and Montague Grammar: The Semantics of Verbs and Times in Generative Semantics

and in Montague’s PTQ, Dordrecht: Reidel.

Gosselin, Laurent (to appear), Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects of the Interaction of Time and Modality in French: An

Interval-Based Account. In K. Jaszczolt & L. de Saussure (eds), Time : Language, cognition and reality. Oxford

University Press.

Moeschler, Jacques (1998), Le temps dans la langue: de la grammaire à la pragmatique, Langues 1/1, 14-23.

Nicolle, Steve (1997), Conceptual and procedural encoding: Criteria for the identification of linguistically encoded

procedural information, in M. Groesferma (ed), Proceedings of the University of Hertfordshire Relevance Theory

Workshop, Hatfield: Peter Thomas, 47-56.

de Saussure, Louis (2003), Temps et pertinence. Éléments de pragmatique cognitive du temps, Bruxelles: De Boeck-Duculot.

de Saussure, Louis (2011), On some methodological issues in the conceptual/procedural distinction, in V. Escandell-Vidal,

M. Leonetti & A. Ahern (eds), Procedural Meaning. Problems and Perspectives, Bingley: Emerald, (vol. 25 CRISPI

series), 55-79.

de Saussure, Louis & Morency Patrick (2012), A cognitive-pragmatic view of the French epistemic future, Journal of French

Language Studies, 22: 207-223.

Southern ka in Standard Swahili: an emphatic Perfective?

De Schryver, Gilles-Maurice and Devos, Maud

(Ghent University and Royal Museum for Central Africa)

Standard Swahili has a peculiar verb form that can only be used with third person singular subjects (ex.: ka-fik-a). It has been

referred to either as a short narrative form (i.e. the narrative without 3sg subject concord a-: kafika < a-ka-fik-a ‘and s/he

arrived’, Sacleux 1909, Ashton 1951, Maw 1985), which is most typically used to carry the storyline, or, as a regionally bound

alternative to the Standard Swahili perfect (i.e. kafika = amefika ‘s/he has arrived’, Leonard 1980, Bertoncini 1987&1995,

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Schadeberg 1992, Güldemann 1996) with an origin in southern North-East Coast Bantu languages (NEC). In the latter case ka

is interpreted not as a TAM marker but rather as a special 3sg subject concord deviating from regular Swahili a-.

We believe that both analyses continue to be followed mainly because these special ka forms can be used to carry

the storyline, as in (1), but also have uses which are very much Perfect-like, as in (2). In (1) the forms (katoka, kaniaga) are

used alongside a regular 1sg singular narrative form (nikauliza), which supports an interpretation as a shortened narrative

form. However, in (2), the ka form is used in a complex verbal construction which favors Perfect forms and does not allow

regular instances of narrative ka.

(1) Katoka hapa. Kaniaga, ‘Mimi nakwenda mchezoni.’ Mimi nikauliza, ‘Na nani?’ “He left here and bid me farewell saying ‘I

am going to the play’. And I asked ‘With whom?’.

(2) Alikuwa kalala hivyo. ‘He was sleeping’

(Hussein 1971)

The present paper will give further evidence for the substrate analysis . However, instead of downplaying narrative uses, we

claim, based mainly on comparative evidence, that Swahili southern ka goes back to a NEC perfective (with some remnant

anterior meaning) and not to a perfect. This helps to explain why the short narrative analysis is still in vogue (Deen 2002), as

southern ka indeed has narrative uses, which are compatible with an interpretation as a perfective but which the Swahili

perfect typically lacks (Drolc 1992).

Based on a selection of texts from (southern) Swahili authors, the paper than continues to show that southern ka

distinguishes itself from Standard Swahili narrative and perfect forms by typically referring to unexpected subsequent events

or unexpected results. The paper discusses whether this emphatic meaning is a consequence of its present use alongside

Swahili perfects and narratives or whether emphasis is (already) part of the meaning of cognate forms in substrate

languages. To this end, we take a closer at discourse materials from NEC Bantu languages which have the cognate perfective

form (ex.: Vumba, Kikae, Mwani).

Last but not least, the paper compares the usage frequency of southern ka in a selection of novels by authors form

the southern Swahili sphere to its usage frequency in a regionally unbounded reference corpus. This together with the use

of an historical corpus will help to verify whether southern ka is a regionally bound substrate on its way out or (has become)

a more generalized Standard Swahili form.

References

Ashton, E. 1944. Swahili Grammar. London: Longmans.

Bertoncini, Z.E. 1987. Kiswahili kwa Furaha. Corso di Lingua Swahili. Napoli.

Deen, K. U. 2002. The Acquisition of Nairobi Swahili:The Morphosyntax of Inflectional Prefixes and Subjects. University of

California: PhD thesis.

Drolc, U. 1992. On the perfect in Swahili. AAP 29: 63-87.

Güldemann, T. 1996. Verbalmorphologie und Nebenprädikationen im Bantu. Bochum: Brockmeyer.

Hussein, E.N. 1971. Mashetani. Nairobi, Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press.

Leonard, Robert A. 1980. Swahili e, ka and nge as Signals of Meanings. Studies in African Linguistics 2-2: 209-226.

Maw, J. 1985. Twende. A practical Swahili course. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sacleux, Ch. 1909. Grammaire swahilie. Paris: Procure des PP. du Saint-Esprit

Schadeberg, Thilo C. 1992. A sketch of Swahili morphology. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe.

What non-canonical switch-reference systems tell us about switch-reference.

de Sousa, Hilario

(EHESS)

Switch-reference (sr) systems have been reported in many parts of the world (e.g. Austin 1981, Haiman and Munro 1983,

Reesink 1983, Roberts 1997). Generally speaking, switch-reference markers indicate coreference (cr) or disjoint-reference

(dr) between some salient references (subject or ‘topic’) across clauses. Switch-reference systems are of high typological

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interest: while many grammatical phenomena involve coreference, grammatical markers which indicate disjoint-reference

are relatively rare. The following is an example of a switch-reference system from the Papuan language Menggwa Dla, where

the sr markers in the cosubordinate (non-final) clauses indicate that the subject is coreferential or disjoint-referential with

the subject of the following clause.

hwi=mbe ma-safa-i-Ø-mbona,

water=INS DR-put-3MSG-3MSG:O-DEP

“he put him (the moon) into the water, and (DR)”

rani hya hri-Ø-ya-a fa-Ø-ya-a-mbo amamo rani,

DEM INTJ come.out-CR-3SG-3FSG:O COMPL-CR-3SG-3FSG:O-DEP moon DEM

“the moon came out, and (cr)”

hahuf-u-hya no.

go.up-3MSG-PAST:FOC COP:3FSG

“went up to the sky.”

Switch-reference is often described as a reference tracking mechanism. While this is not to be disputed, why would the vast

majority of switch reference systems require obligatory marking of switch-reference for even first and second person

references, if reference tracking is the only or main purpose of switch-reference? In this talk we will discuss a number of

non-canonical switch reference system, and see in what capacity they are used for the other function of canonical switch-

reference systems: the indication of participant continuity and discontinuity (Givón 1983a,b) of the ‘salient’ reference in

discourse. Participant continuity is the continuous comprehension accessibility of referents across clauses, and it is part of

discourse continuity. The disjoint-referential markers in canonical switch-reference systems are thus often employed to

indicate other types of discourse discontinuity like temporal and spatial discontinuity. The function of indicating participant

continuity or discontinuity is also independent from the person-number-gender features of the references (c.f. switch-

reference markers being used for first and second person references in canonical switch-reference systems). Less-canonical

switch-reference systems depart from the function of indicating participant continuity and discontinuity of the salient

references in various ways. Often they are more geared towards reference tracking, disregarding or only partially regarding

what referents are salient in the discourse. Amongst the non-canonical switch-reference systems that we will discuss in this

talk are the young-speakers’ switch-reference system in Menggwa Dla, where cr cosubordinate verb forms have become the

default (sr-neutral) cosubordinate verb forms when the person-number-gender features of the verb already indicate that

they must be coreferential or disjoint-referential. Other non-canonical switch-reference systems that we will discuss include

the “echo-subject systems” in Vanuatu, and the ‘third person’ switch-reference systems that exist in some Esk-Aleut

languages and Tupí languages.

References

Austin, Peter. 1981. Switch-reference in Australia. Language 57: 309–334.

Givón, Talmy. 1983a. Topic Continuity in Discourse: A Quantitative Cross-Language Study. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Givón, Talmy. 1983b. Topic continuity in discourse: the natural domain of switch reference. In John Haiman and Pamela

Munro (eds.): 51–82.

Haiman, John and Pamela Munro (eds). 1983. Switch Reference and Universal Grammar: Proceedings of a symposium on

switch reference and universal grammar, Winnipeg, May 1981. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Reesink, Ger. 1983. Switch reference and topicality hierarchies. Studies in Language 7(2): 215–246.

Roberts, John R. 1997. Switch-reference in Papua New Guinea: A preliminary survey. In Andrew Pawley (ed.). Papers in

Papuan linguistics, No. 3, 101–241. Pacific Linguistics, A-87.

Why does the English simple present seem anything but a present tense?

De Wit, Astrid and Brisard, Frank

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(University of Antwerp)

It is well known that, paradoxically, the simple present tense in English cannot be used to refer to present-time events:

(1) * I talk right now.

Langacker (2001) accounts for this restriction by arguing that the (English) present tense requires full and exact coincidence

between the denoted event and the speech event. In many cases, however, there can be no such coincidence, since the

two events typically do not have exactly the same duration (durational problem) and since the conceptualizer, at the time

of speaking, usually does not have knowledge about the event actually reaching its endpoint, so that it cannot be fully

identified (epistemic problem).

While this is an illuminating attempt to analyze the semantics of the English simple present, it does not address the

question why the incompatibility problem between the simple present and dynamic situations seems to pose itself only in

English and not in languages like French or German, in which simple-present forms (such as mange and gehe in (2) and (3))

can be used straightforwardly to refer to ongoing events in the present:

(2) Je mange en ce moment.

‘I’m eating at this moment.’

(3) Ich gehe jetzt nach Hause.

‘I’m going home now.’

Vanden Wyngaerd (2005) suggests that these languages allow events to extend beyond the speech event, while the English

simple present is only compatible with events that have “Very Short Duration” (as in, e.g., sports commentaries or

performative expressions). Another explanation for the observed differences comes from Michaelis (2011), who refers to

the varying “coercion potential” of the present tenses in the languages involved. In (2), for instance, the French simple

present is said to coerce an event (manger) into a state, thus enabling alignment with the speech event. The simple present

in English, on the other hand, does not have this type of potential. However, it is not clear why the English simple present

should not allow temporal extension or why it does not shift events to the class of states in ways similar to, e.g., French.

In our paper, we will argue that, for historical reasons (i.e., the high degree of grammaticalization of the

independently developing present progressive, marking imperfective aspect), the English simple present has, in fact,

become a present perfective marker. Its French and German counterparts, on the other hand, are aspectually ambiguous

(allowing both perfective and imperfective readings). This means that the English simple present only construes situations

as occurring in the present and, at the same time, as fully perceivable and known to the conceptualizer. This aspectual

analysis will be illustrated for each of the uses of the simple present (with states and habitual/generic situations and in

specific contexts, such as performative expressions, etc.). We will further demonstrate that, in other contexts (such as (1)),

this combination of ‘presentness’ and ‘perfectivity’ is conceptually infelicitous – an incompatibility problem that needs to

be resolved by means of the progressive.

References

Langacker, Ronald W. 2001. The English present tense. English language and linguistics 5: 251-273.

Michaelis, Laura A. 2011. Stative by construction. Linguistics 49: 1359-1399.

Vanden Wyngaerd, Guido. 2005. Simple tense. In Marcel Den Dikken & Christina Tortora (eds), The function of function

words and functional categories, 187-215. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

(Anti)-agreeing with Old Hungarian infinitives.

Dékány, Éva

(RIL HAS)

This paper aims to document a so far unknown pattern of agreement among Old Hungarian infinitives, offer a Minimalist

analysis of this pattern, and explain its loss in the Middle Hungarian period.

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Hungarian infinitives fall into two natural classes. If the matrix predicate is monadic, with the infinitive as the only

argument, then the infinitive has an overt Dative subject with independent reference. However, if the matrix predicate has a

(Nominative, Accusative, or Dative marked) DP argument, too, then this obligatorily controls the reference of the infinitive's

subject.

Tóth (2011) shows that while in modern Hungarian only infinitives with an overt subject or infinitives with a PRO

subject controlled by a Dative argument can agree with their subject, in Old Hungarian all infinitives could optionally show

agreement, regardless of the case of the controlling DP or the argument vs. adjunct status of the infinitive. This paper shows

that Old Hungarian infinitives with a controlled PRO subject had three possible agreement patterns, in fact: they could show

no agreement, could bear regular agreement, and could also optionally anti-agree with their subject (3sg agreement with a

non-3sg subject). To our best knowledge, infinitival anti-agreement has not been documented in any other language so far.

(1) iott-onk [imad-ni-a o-tot] (Döbrentei codex 140r)

came-1pl [worship-inf-3sg he-acc]

‘We have come to worship him.’

The data were collected using a new online corpus of Old Hungarian short texts and codices available at

http://ohc.nytud.hu/. There are examples of one and the same sentence appearing in all three agreement variants in the

same codex. Optionality is thus a genuine phenomenon in natural language, contrary to what current Minimalistic

approaches suggest.

I argue that the T head of Old Hungarian infinitives could optionally bear agreement features. Lack of such features

yielded infinitives without agreement, while the presence of those features yielded regularly agreeing or anti-agreeing

infinitives. Furthermore, Old Hungarian infinitives could be either weak or strong phases, and this distinction correlated with

regular agreement and anti-agreement respectively. In weak infinitives, no phase boundary separated the controller DP in

the matrix clause and the embedded PRO subject, so PRO could get reference from the controller without any problems.

The PRO that had already gotten its reference could, in turn, value the embedded T's agreement features, yielding regular

agreement. In strong phases a phase boundary separated the embedded PRO from its controller. Due to the PIC, PRO could

not get is reference before it was shipped off to the interfaces, and it could not value T's agreement features. PRO got its

reference at LF, by long-distance variable-binding (cf. Sundaresan 2010). However, this was too late to value the agreement

features of T, which needed to be valued already in the syntax. To prevent T's agreement features from reaching the

interfaces without a value, a last resort feature-filling mechanism valued the relevant features as the default 3sg. This

rescued the derivation and yielded anti-agreement.

Anti-agreement was lost in Middle Hungarian because infinitives could not be strong phases any more.

References

Tóth, Ildikó 2011. A ragozott főnévi igenevek a kései ómagyar korban. [Inflected infinitives in late Old Hungarian]. In:

Marianne Barkó-Nagy and Tamás Forgács (eds.), A nyelvtörténeti kutatások legújabb eredményei VI [The most

recent results of diachronic research VI] , 249-265. SZTE, Szeged.

Sundaresan, Sandhya 2010. A reductionist treatment of control and anaphora. Ms., University of Tromso.

Are translators really that conservative? Finding the answers

by applying profile-based correspondence analysis in corpus-based translation studies.

Delaere, Isabelle and De Sutter, Gert

(University College Ghent and Ghent University)

Are translators really that conservative? Finding the answers by applying profile-based correspondence analysis in corpus-

based translation studies.

In line with the aims of the workshop, we wish to present an innovative, multivariate corpus-based technique for

investigating language use in translated and non-translated text types called profile-based correspondence analysis (De

Sutter, Delaere, & Plevoets, 2012). This technique allows us to create a clear and objective image of the linguistic behaviour

of translators on the one hand and that of other authors on the other hand while simultaneously taking into account several

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possibly influencing factors. It is a modified version of the more widely used correspondence analysis (Greenacre, 2007) and

it is based on using linguistic profiles, i.e. sets of synonymous onomasiological variants that can be used to express a single

given concept, e.g. car and automobile (Speelman, Grondelaers, & Geeraerts, 2003).

In the present paper, we want to illustrate this technique by investigating to what extent differences in lexical

behaviour between translations and non-translations can be attributed to factors such as source language and text type.

More particularly, we want to find out whether these two factors have an influence on the extent to which translators’

lexical choices are more often conform to existing norms or, in other words, whether conservatism is truly a feature of

translated language (Baker, 1996; Kenny, 2000).

We carried out three case studies on the basis of the Dutch Parallel Corpus (Macken, De Clercq, & Paulussen, 2011)

which, on the one hand, consists of translated Dutch from English, translated Dutch from French and non-translated Dutch

and, on the other hand, contains a number of text types. It is a high-quality corpus of considerable size (10 million words)

which has been enriched with lexical information (such as lemmas and word class information ) and which is balanced both

with respect to text type and to translation direction.

The first case study investigates the use of standard language versus substandard language, thereby hypothesizing

that translators will opt for the conservative option, i.e. standard language. With a second case study, we expanded the

research on the use of standard language: we looked at the dispersion of General Standard Dutch versus Belgian Standard

Dutch. General Standard Dutch is the standard variety of Dutch in the entire Dutch-speaking area (Belgium and the

Netherlands). Belgian Standard Dutch, on the other hand is the standard variety in Belgium only. So, if we look at these

options from the conservatism perspective, we hypothesized that translators will opt for General Standard Dutch. In the

third case study we operationalized the conservatism hypothesis by investigating the dispersion of formal language

alternatives versus informal or neutral alternatives, based on the hypothesis that translators will opt for the conservative,

i.e. formal, alternatives.

Preliminary analyses show that not all attested variation can be attributed to the translators’ hypothesized

conservative behaviour, as in all three case studies the differences between non-translated Dutch and Dutch translated from

English are smaller than the differences between non-translated Dutch and Dutch translated from French, which shows that

the differences are source language dependent. Additionally, we can see that translators opt for different choices according

to the text type , which also shows that the differences cannot entirely be attributed to the translators’ assumed

conservative behaviour.

References

Baker, M. (1996). Corpus-based translation studies: the challenges that lie ahead. In H. Somers (Ed.), Terminology, LSP and

translation: studies in language engineering in honour of Juan C. Sager (pp. 175-186). Amsterdam/Philadelphia:

John Benjamins.

De Sutter, G., Delaere, I., & Plevoets, K. (2012). Lexical lectometry in corpus-based translation studies. Combining profile-

based correspondence analysis and logistic regression modeling. In M. Oakes & J. Meng (Eds.), Quantitative

Methods in Corpus-based Translation Studies. A practical guide to descriptive translation research. (pp. 325-345).

Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Greenacre, M. (2007). Correspondence analysis in practice, Second edition. . Boca Raton: Chapman & Hall/CRC.

Kenny, D. (2000). Lexical Hide-and-Seek: looking for creativity in a parallel corpus. In M. Olohan (Ed.), Intercultural Faultlines:

Research Models in Translation Studies I: Textual and Cognitive Aspects (pp. 93-104). Manchester: St. Jerome.

Macken, L., De Clercq, O., & Paulussen, H. (2011). Dutch Parallel Corpus: a Balanced Copyright-Cleared Parallel Corpus.

Meta, 56(2).

Speelman, D., Grondelaers, S., & Geeraerts, D. (2003). Profile-based linguistic uniformity as a generic method for comparing

language varieties. Computers and the Humanities 37(3), 317-337.

Teaching discourse markers in FFL: a particular linguistic/semantic approach for a renewed model of course design.

Delahaie, Juliette

(Paris Diderot-Paris 7 University)

This communication deals with the teaching and learning of discourse markers in spoken French, for FFL (French as a Foreign

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Language) courses. It has been demonstrated –but mainly for English language- that discourse markers (henceforth DMs)

can be taught as linguistic realizations of the pragmatic competence. Moreover, learners benefit more from instruction than

from immersion (Schmidt: 1993 ; Bardovi-Harlig: 2001 ; Rose: 2005). In addition, The Common European Framework of

Reference for Languages (2001/2011) focuses on pragmatic and sociolinguistic skills such as the knowledge of scripts, the

ability to manage interaction, and these skills need linguistic forms like DMs. These items however are not seriously taken

into account in textbook lessons and dialogues of FFL, except by Calbris & Montredon (2011), which focus on French DMs

(see also Delahaie:2012). Therefore is still a relevant question to know how discourse markers should be taught. This paper

proposes a semantic approach of DMs leading to a renewed model of course design.

The difficulty in teaching DMs is that such words are generally considered as multifunctional (Brinton: 1996 ;

Schourup: 1999), mainly because they seem to be closely linked to context-based aspects of communication. The method

generally adopted here to find the core meaning of a DM is frequently a data-driven approach: it is necessary to gather all

the contexts where one DM occurs in order to determine its core meaning. This is for instance Schiffrin’s (1987) method and

more broadly, the discourse analysis approach. This way of dealing with DMs has significant impact on DMs teaching and

lead to a particular manner of course design: in order to acquire the ability to use DMs in a contextually appropriate way,

learners have to notice and to be aware of how the target language realizes pragmatic features in various contexts (Bardovi-

Harlig: 2001 ; Kasper & Roever: 2005 ; Wichmann& Chanet: 2009). The danger is to multiply the contexts where one DM is

employed, so that learners are unable to find any logic and any core meaning.

Therefore, we want to adopt another theoretical starting point, inspired in particular by Anscombre’s framework of

Integrated Pragmatics (Anscombre 2009a and b) ; it will be demonstrated that DMs are not interpretable only through the

context, but on the contrary, that they keep semantic properties throughout (and despite) their multiple functions which are

in fact context-sensitive. We will study the semantic meaning of DMs in authentic spoken interactions from the Lancom

corpus (Louvain-Leuven University). It’s a native-non-native corpus, half registered in Flemish classrooms of FFL and half in

France with Francophone speakers in natural settings. We will more specifically use a set of interactions in a travel agency

and play roles of the same kind, and we will focus on a little number of DMs that are very frequent in travel interactions and

not used by Flemish learners, like voilà, bon, tiens, en fait, etc. Finally, we will propose pedagogical patterns of contrastive

exchanges and interactions that make salient the core meaning of a DM.

References

Anscombre, J.C. (2009a). Les marqueurs d’attitude énonciative : présentation. In: Langue français, 161, pp.3-8.

Anscombre, J.C. (2009b). Apparences, Indices et attitude énonciative : le cas de apparemment. In: Langue française, 161,

pp.39-58

Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2001). Empirical evidence of the need for instruction in pragmatics. In: K.R. Rose & G. Kasper (eds.),

Pragmatics in language teaching. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp.13-32.

Brinton, L.J. (1996) : Pragmatic markers in English : grammaticalization and discourse functions. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Calbris, G. & Montredon, J. (2011). Clés pour l’oral. Gestes et paroles dans l’argumentation conversationnelle. Paris:

Hachette.

Council of Europe (2001/2011). Common European Franmework of Reference for Languages. Council of Europe.

Delahaie, J. (2012). Vers une transposition didactique de l’inventaire raisonné des marqueurs discursifs. In: D. Paillard & N.

Vu Thi (Eds.), Inventaire raisonné des marqueurs discursifs du français. AUF/Université nationale de Hanoï : Hanoï

(Vietnam), pp. 253-314.

Kasper, G. & Roever, C. (2005). Pragmatics in second language learning. In: E. Hinkel (ed.), Handbook of Research in SL

teaching and learning. Mahwah, New Jersey: Erlbaum, pp.317-334.

Lancom. In: Elicop, spoken French data (Lancom, corpus de Tours, corpus d’Orléans) : http://bach.arts.kuleuven.be/elicop.

Rose, K.R. (2005). On the effects of instruction in second language pragmatics. System, 33/3, pp.385-399.

Schiffrin, D. (1987). Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schmidt, R. (1993). Consciousness, learning, and interlanguage pragmatics. In: G. Kasper & S. Blum-Kulka (Eds.),

Interlanguage pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press, pp.21-42.

Schourup, L. (1999). Discourse markers. In: Lingua, 107, pp.227-265.

Wichmann, A. & Chanet, C. (2009). Discourse markers : a challenge for linguists and teachers. In: Nouveaux cahiers de

linguistique française, 29, pp.23-40.

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The rise of coherent infinitival constructions in German.

Demske, Ulrike

(Universität Potsdam)

Since Bech (1955), the distinction between coherent and incoherent constructions is well established in work on infinitival

syntax in Modern German. Haider (2010, 311ff.) lists sixteen syntactic and semantic properties reflecting the

monosentential structure of coherent and the bisentential structure of incoherent infinitival constructions. As to the

historical record of German, data of Old High German and Middle High German suggest that a similar distinction does not

hold for infinitival constructions in earlier stages of the German language (Askedal 1998, Demske 2008).

In the present paper, I argue that a prerequisite for coherent infinitival constructions to arise is that infinitival

clauses are frequently used in the middlefield of their respective matrix clause, a word order pattern that is attested in

considerable numbers in historical sources originating in the 16th century. Pertinent examples comprise infinitival

constructions allowing either for a coherent or an incoherent interpretation as well as infinitival constructions where only an

incoherent interpretation is possible for structural reasons such as accusative control verbs, cf. zwingen ‘force’, drängen

‘urge’ (nominal predicates or adjunct infinitives are likewise attested in the middlefield):

(1) vnnd war vns der Strom vnnd Windt so entgegen / daß wir [mit vnsern kleinen Nachen den Vorwindt zu nemmen]

gezwungen wurden.

Concurrently, we observe unambiguous word order patterns suggesting either a mono- or a bisentenial structure. The latter

is instantiated by infinitival constructions where non-verbal material intervenes between the two verbs in questions,

prohibiting the formation of a verbal cluster:

(2) NAch dem der VeldtObriste/ Ertzhertzog Maximilian vor Raab ligende/ [nach vermögen fürsehung zuthan/] sich vast

bemühet/…

Evidence for a coherent infinitival construction is provided by examples like (3) where the pronoun sie ›she‹ precedes the PP

vmb der kürze willen ›for space reasons‹, though the pronoun functions as a complement to the infinitive zu setzen ›to put‹,

whereas the PP modifies the matrix predicate unterlassen ›refrain from‹.

(3) weilen aber nichts fürtreffliches geschehen/ habe ich sie

/ vmb kürtze willen/ t

hieher [

zu setzen vnterlassen].

More support for the assumption that the distinction between coherent and incoherent infinitival constructions is being

established over the course of the Early New High German period comes from scope and binding facts.

References

Askedal, J. O. (1998). Zur Syntax infiniter Verbalformen in den Berthold von Regensburg zugeschriebenen deutschen

Predigten. Vorstufe der topologischen Kohärenz-Inkohärenz-Opposition. In J. O. Askedal (Ed.), Historische

germanische und deutsche Syntax, pp. 231–259. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.

Bech, G. (1955). Studien über das deutsche verbum infinitum. Copenhagen: Munksgaard.

Demske, U. (2008). Raising patterns in Old High German. In T. Eythórsson (Ed.), Grammatical Change and Linguistic Theory:

the Rosendahl Papers, pp. 143–172. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Haider, H. (2010). The Syntax of German. Cambridge Syntax Guides. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

From when on the French quotative conditional has been an evidential marker?

Dendale, Patrick

(Universiteit Antwerpen)

Since 1991, one of the three main groups of uses of the French conditional, the use which we will call here “quotative use”,

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has been described in the literature as an evidential marker (Dendale 1991, 1993), a marker with an evidential component

(Abouda 1997, Kronning 2005) or an evidential “extension/strategy” (Aikhenvald 2004).

In grammars and in the specialized literature, the quotative use of the conditional is characterized by (some or all

of) the following semantic features: (a) uncertainty of the propositional content (or of the speaker about the propositional

content), (b) refusal of commitment (by the speaker) to the truth of the proposition, (c) borrowing of the propositional

content by the speaker from a (specific or non specific) source and (d) necessity of future confirmation of the propositional

content.

Two questions will be treated in relation to these semantic features.

A first question is whether, amongst these four semantic features, there is a clearly dominant feature, and if so

which one it is. This question has received several answers in the literature the last two decades, but they are often

mutually conflicting. We will briefly recall them. A solidly founded answer to this question however would constitute an

important argument in the debate about the evidential status of this use of the conditional and, accessorily, determine

which one of the about 60 names this use of the conditional has had in the literature (see Kronning 2004), would best

describe its semantic value.

A second question is where the “borrowing feature” of the quotative conditional is diachronically coming from, a

question whose answer is less difficult for at least two other semantic features of the quotative conditional ((a) uncertainty

and (b) refusal of commitment), because those features do also characterize semantically, in one way or another, the two

other (“non evidential”) groups of use of the conditional. In our presentation, we present new data that can help, one day,

to formulate a satisfactory answer to this (and also the first) question. Those data are recently gathered examples (Baeyens

2012, Bourova & Dendale à par., Dendale 2010), coming from three types of old texts, about the earliest occurrences ever

cited by grammarians and linguists of what (apparently) are quotative conditionals (dates: 1518 (juridical), 1577 (historical),

1631 (journalistic)), and elements of interpretation of their semantic value. We will also present data from studies we

recently conducted on the treatment of the quotative conditional in old grammars (important stages here are: 1606, 1819,

1850, 1889).

References

Abouda L., 1997, Recherches sur la syntaxe et la sémantique du conditionnel en français, Thèse de doctorat, Université Paris

Aikhenvald, A. Y., 2004, Evidentiality, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Baeyens, L., 2012, Le conditionnel épistémique dans les textes juridiques du XIVe siècle, Anvers, Universiteit Antwerpen,

mémoire de master non publié.

Bourova, V. & Dendale, P., à par., «Serait-ce un conditionnel de conjecture? Datation, évolution et mise en relation des deux

conditionnels à valeur évidentielle», Cahiers Chronos.

Dendale, P., 1991, Le marquage épistémique de l’énoncé : esquisse d’une théorie avec applications au français, Thèse de

doctorat, Anvers, Université d’Anvers.

Dendale, P., 1993, «Le conditionnel de l’information incertaine: marqueur modal ou marqueur évidentiel?», in Hilty, G. (ed.),

1993, Actes du XXe Congrès International de Linguistique et Philologie Romanes, Université de Zurich (6-11 avril

1992), Tübingen, Francke Verlag, tome 1, p.165-176.

Dendale, P., 2010, «Il serait à Paris en ce moment. Serait-il à Paris? A propos de deux emplois épistémiques du conditionnel.

Grammaire, syntaxe, sémantique», in Castro, C. A., Bango de la Campa, Fl. & Donaire, M.L. 2010, Liens linguistiques.

Etudes sur la combinatoire et la hiérarchie des composants, Bern, Peter Lang, p. 291-317.

Dendale, P., 2012, «Le conditionnel "journalistique", marqueur de modalisation en discours second: éléments d’archéologie

grammaticale», in Branca-Rosoff, S. e.a. (éds), L’hétérogène à l’œuvre dans la langue et les discours. Hommage à

Jacqueline Authier-Revuz, Paris, Lambert-Lucas, p.229-248.

Dendale, P. & Coltier, D., 2012, «La lente reconnaissance du "conditionnel de reprise" par les grammaires du français», in

Colombat, B., Fournier, J.-M.& Raby, V. (éds), 2012, Vers une histoire générale de la grammaire française. Matériaux

et perspectives. Actes du colloque international de Paris (HTL/SHESL, 27-29 janvier 2011), Paris, Champion, p.631-

652.

Kronning, H., 2002, «Le conditionnel ‘journalistique’ : médiation et modalisation épistémiques», Romansk forum 16, 2, p.

561-575.

Kronning, H., 2004, “Kunskapens källa och kunskapens styrka. Epistemisk konditionalis i franskan som evidentiellt och

modalt grammatiskt uttryck”, Kungl. Humanistiska Vetenskaps-Samfundet i Uppsala. Årsbok 2002./Annales

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Societatis Litterarum Humaniorum Regiae Upsaliensis, Uppsala, Swedish Science Press, p. 43-123.

Kronning, H. 2005, « Polyphonie, médiation et modalisation : le cas du conditionnel épistémique», in Bres, J. et al. (éds),

Dialogisme, polyphonie : approches linguistiques, Bruxelles, De Boeck-Duculot, p. 297-312.

From going away to negative marker in Niger-Congo?

Devos, Maud

(Royal Museum for Central Africa)

In several, both closely and distantly related, Niger-Congo languages a cross-linguistically rare negative marker is attested:

the possessive stem. It typically occurs as a second or even a third sentential negative marker, is co-referential with the

subject and follows the verb immediately. Examples from the Narrow Bantu language Lengola are given in (1).

(1) Lengola (Sibatu Ikamanya 1977)

sí-lim-áni sú-lim-áyi

NEG.1SG-cultivate-POSS.1SG NEG.2SG-cultivate-POSS.2SG

‘I have not cultivated.’ ‘You have not cultivated.’

So far, possessives used as negative markers are found in Narrow Bantu (Devos et al. 2010 and Devos and Van der Auwera),

Grassfields Bantu (Watters 2003, Mihas 2009, Asongwed 1980), Jukunoid (Storch 2009) and Adamawa-Ubangi (Tucker and

Bryan 1966). Most languages attesting this negative strategy are surrounded by languages that have similar negation

patterns but do not use the possessive stem. In Mituku, for example, which is closely related to Lengola, sentential negation

is marked by a pre-initial negative marker only, as seen in (2).

(2) Mituku (Stappers 1973)

a-tú-bu̧ndá

NEG-1PL-take

‘We do not take.’

Such variation invokes a Jespersen account. For Bantu languages it has indeed been claimed that possessive stems

grammaticalize as negative markers via an intermediate stage as an emphatic marker (Devos & Van der Auwera). However,

evidence for such an emphatic intermediate stage is scarce in Bantu. The comparative evidence brought forward in this

paper points more specifically to an intermediate stage as a contrastive subject marker but also puts forward the possible

importance of a related construction expressing ‘go away’. In this construction, which will be shown to be quite general in

Niger-Congo, the verb expressing ‘go’ is modified by a possessive stem to express unilateral motion undertaken by the

subject of the sentence. An example from Swahili is given in (3).

(3) Swahili (Ashton 1949:57)

na-enda z-angu

1SG.PRS-go NP

-POSS

‘I’m off.’

In some languages this construction appears to be restricted to verbs of motion even becoming more or less lexicalized (as

appears to be the case in Swahili) but in others the possessive can be used with a wide range of verbs and different

meanings varying from contrastive focus (Koops 2009 and Koops & Bendor-Samuel) to mirativity (Storch 2009), casualness

(Asongwed 1980) and perfectivity (Koops) can be expressed. Strikingly similar functions are attributed to possessives used

adverbially in non-related languages (see Noss 1995 on Hebrew). The Niger-Congo (possessive) negative marker thus

appears to be a typologically rare offspring of a more common instance of polygrammaticalization.

References

Ashton, E.O. 1951. Swahili grammar. London, New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co.

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Asongwed, T. Sentence negation in Ngamambo. In Bouquiaux, L. (ed.) L’expansion bantue. Paris: Selaf, 551-561.

Devos, M., M. Kasombo Tshibanda and J. van der Auwera. 2010. Jespersen cycles in Kanincin: double, triple and maybe

even quadruple negaton. Africana Linguistica 16: 155-182.

Devos, M. & J. van der Auwera. To appear. Jespersen Cycles in Bantu: double and triple negation. Journal of African

Languages and Linguistics.

Ikamanya, S. 1977. Aspects de la syntaxe du kilengola: lexicalisation et sérialisation. Mémoire de licence. Lubumbashi:

Université nationale du Zaïre.

Koops, R. 2009. A grammar of Kuteb. A Jukunoid language of East-Central Nigeria. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag.

Koops, R. & J.T. Bendor-Samuel. 1974. The recapulating pronouns in Kuteb. The Journal of West African Languages 9, 1: 5-16.

Mihas, E. 2009. Negation in Metta. Rice Working Papers in Linguistics 1: 197-222.

Noss, P.A. 1995. The Hebrew post-verbal lamed preposition plus pronoun. The Bible Translator 46,5: 326-335.

Stappers, L. 1971. Esquisse de la langue lengola. Africana Linguistica 5: 255-307.

Storch, A. 2009. Negation in Jukun. In N. Cyffer, E. Ebermann & G. Ziegelmeyer (eds). Negation patterns in West African

Languages and Beyond. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 107-120.

Tucker, A.N. & M.A. Bryan. 1966. Linguistic Analysis: the Non-Bantu languages of North-Eastern Africa. London: Oxford

University Press.

Watters, J.R. 2003. Grassfields Bantu. In D. Nurse & G. Philippson (eds.). The Bantu Languages. New York/London:

Routledge, 225-256.

Deontic meanings of conditional and complement insubordination in Germanic languages.

D'Hertefelt, Sarah

(University of Leuven)

This paper deals with two ‘non-imperative’ directive (or deontic) strategies in Germanic languages, i.e. the use of

independent or ‘insubordinate’ (Evans 2007: 367) conditional constructions (1) and complement constructions (2):

(1) Als u uzelf even kort introduceert en uw vraag stelt. (CGN)

COND

you

REFL

PART

briefly introduce.

PRS

and your question ask.

PRS

‘If you could just briefly introduce yourself and ask your question.’

(2) Dass du ja deine Schularbeiten machst! (Pasch 2003: 204)

COMP

you

PART

your homework make.

PRES

‘You should do your homework!’

In the literature, both types have been discussed to some extent for some languages (see for example Stirling 1999 on

conditional insubordination in English, Verstraete, D’Hertefelt and Van linden 2012 on complement insubordination in

Dutch, Ammann & Van der Auwera 2004 on deontic complement constructions in Balkan languages, and Mauri & Sansò

2011 on directive constructions from a typological perspective). However, the two strategies have not yet been investigated

in relation to each other: what is their relative functional range, and how do they map out across the Germanic languages?

In this paper, I wish to address both issues. I use spoken corpus data (supplemented with data from an internet corpus and

informant-based work) to investigate deontic uses of complement and conditional insubordination for six Germanic

languages, i.e. Dutch, German, English, Swedish, Danish and Icelandic.

First, the comparative perspective demonstrates that even closely related languages like the ones studied here

show clear differences in their functional range, with Dutch and German showing a much wider array of deontic functions

(especially as concerns complement insubordination) than the other languages. For example, both Dutch and German can

use a complement construction to express a direct request (see example (2) above), which is not attested in the other

Germanic languages. I propose an explanation for this divergence, appealing to features such as word order and the

existence of alternative (insubordinate) constructions to express the same meaning.

Second, as concerns the comparison of deontic complement and conditional insubordination, I show that although

the two strategies can be used with roughly the same functions, they are not completely interchangeable. For example,

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polite indirect requests (as in example (1) above) can be expressed with conditional but not with complement

constructions, whereas direct requests can be expressed only with complement constructions. I relate these differences in

expressive range to the basic semantics of complementation and conditionality, appealing to the distinction between

presupposition and supposition.

References

Ammann, Andreas & Johan van der Auwera. 2004. ‘Complementizer-headed main clauses for volitional moods in the

languages of South-Eastern Europe: A Balkanism?’ in Olga Mišeka Tomić (ed.) Balkan syntax and semantics.

Amsterdam: Benjamins. 341-362.

CGN, Corpus Gesproken Nederlands (Spoken Dutch Corpus). Nederlandse Taalunie (Dutch Language Union). More

information at http://lands.let.kun.nl/cgn/.

Evans, Nicolas. 2007. ‘Insubordination and its uses’ in Irina Nikolaeva (ed.) Finiteness: Theoretical and empirical foundations.

Oxford: University Press. 366-431.

Mauri, Caterina & Andrea Sansò. 2011. ‘How directive constructions emerge: Grammaticalization, constructionalization,

cooptation.’ Journal of Pragmatics 43. 3489-3521.

Pasch, Renate. 2003. Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Stirling, Lesley. 1999. ‘Isolated if-clauses in Australian English’, in Peter Collins & David Lee (eds.) The clause in English: In

honour of Rodney Huddleston. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 273-294.

Verstraete, Jean-Christophe, Sarah D’Hertefelt & An Van linden. 2012. ‘A typology of complement insubordination in

Dutch’. Studies in Language 36.1. 123-153.

Telling a story: the use of connectors and discourse markers

by native speakers and by learners of French and Spanish.

Diao-Klaeger, Sabine

(University of Koblenz-Landau)

Telling a story is a complex activity for which speakers have to activate more than lexical and/or grammatical

competences: they need pragmatic skills to structure the narration, to present the plot in a certain chronological

order, to give a coherent picture of the situation, to orient and to give hints for consistent interpretation to their

interlocutor(s). To accomplish this kind of task, speakers can combine different devices. “Small words” such as

connectors and discourse markers are the most important ones amongst them.

In Romance Linguistics, these elements are well described (see for example Atayan 2006, Drescher/Frank-Job

eds. 2006, Gülich 1970, Christl 1992, Ducrot 1980, Mosegaard Hansen 1998 – to mention only a few of them). Even

larger is the number of studies in Anglophone and German linguistics; cf. Fischer who observes that “[…] by now it is

almost impossible to find one’s way through this jungle of publications” (2006: 1).

Most of the existing studies on discourse markers work with data of L1 speakers. Studies on learners’ use of

connectors and discourse markers, as well as on the evolution of this competence during the acquisition process are

rather rare (but see for example Delahaie 2011, Grupo A.Ma.Dis 2008). This may be surprising, on the one hand, as

they are so vital and omnipresent in verbal interaction, or, as Wierzbicka (

2003: 341) puts it: “Their meaning is

crucial to the interaction mediated by speech; [...] If learners of a language failed to master the meaning of its

particles, their communicative competence would be drastically impaired”. On the other hand, they are rather

difficult to analyse: they are extremely polyfunctional, and they are optional. To describe their absence or “wrong”

use in learners’ speech is therefore not an easy task.

In my paper, I will present strategies L2 speakers use to structure their narration, with special emphasis on

connectors and discourse markers (or their absence). I use an Interactional Linguistics approach, i.e. I analyse form-

function and function-form relations, focusing a) on pragmatic transfers L2 speakers make and b) on (other)

compensatory strategies they use when they are in “lack” of connectors and discourse markers L1 speakers would

use to accomplish certain tasks.

My analysis is part of a larger project on the use of discourse markers by learners (L1: German) of French and

Spanish and the evolution of this pragmatic competence during the acquisition process. The project’s data is

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telephone calls, face-to-face interactions with two speakers who have to plan a holiday together, and picture stories.

References

Christl, Joachim (1992): Gliederungssignale oder Sprechersignale? Eine Untersuchung am Beispiel des gesprochenen

Spanisch von San Miguel de Tucum. Hamburg: Dr. Kovač.

Delahaie, Juliette (2011): “Les marqueurs discursifs, un objet d’enseignement pertinent pour les étudiants Erasmus?”.

In: ELA. Études de linguistique appliquée, 162, 153-163.

Drescher, Martina/Frank-Job, Barbara (eds.) (2006): Les marqueurs discursifs dans les langues romanes. Frankfurt am

Main et al.: Lang.

Ducrot, Oswald (1980): Les mots du discours. Paris: Minuit.

Fischer, Kerstin (2006): “Frames, Constructions and invariant Meanings: The Functional Polysemy of Discourse

Particles”. In: Fischer, Kerstin (ed.): Approaches to discourse particles. Amsterdam et al.: Elsevier, 1-18.

Gülich, Elisabeth (1970): Makrosyntax der Gliederungssignale im gesprochenen Französisch. München: Fink.

Mosegaard Hansen, Maj-Britt (1998): The function of discourse particles: A study with special reference to spoken

standard French. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins.

Wierzbicka, Anna (22003): Cross-Cultural Pragmatics. The semantics of human interaction. Berlin: Mouton de

Gruyter.

Capturing the meaning of Hindi ideophones in a constructional analysis.

Diatka, Vojtěch

(Charles University Prague)

It is only recently that ideophones have been discovered in another Indo-European language – in Hindi. These “marked

words that depict sensory imagery” (Dingemanse 2011:25) seem to be ubiquitous in this language and are clearly of an

iconic nature. They extend the notion of imitation of onomatopoeic words depicting sounds to other sensory domains

(visual, tactile...). Ideophones evoke the scene or the attribute depicted by them. For example, the word cipcipā depicts the

tactile sensation of something sticky, clinging, slimy or greasy.

Ideophones pose a challenge for an analysis that would attempt to capture their meaning in isolation. Their

semantics is rather unclear without context and their interpretation emerges fully only in actual usage, in the context of a

given utterance and communication. They represent underspecified lexical units, which get specified by being chosen by a

speaker on a particular occasion in order to serve specific communicative purposes. From this it follows that their meanings

are not completely random or fully unpredictable and can be studied systematically. We will demonstrate their context-

dependent nature by examining the relationship between specific ideophones and the rest of the utterance, showing that

by appearing in a larger syntactic unit, a particular subpart of the ideophone semantics is activated. We demonstrate it on

this example:

Barsāt meM unkā cehrā cipcipā ho jātā hai jisse unkā mekap kharāb ho jāegā.

Rain in her face sticky gets thereby her makeup bad gets

Her face gets sticky in the rain and this causes her makeup to blur.

The right interpretation for the word cipcipā gets chosen in accordance with other elements of the first sentence. The

whole situation of rain drops blending together with makeup results in understanding this ideophone as marking something

as sticky and not, for example, greasy.

This context-dependent nature of ideophones also leads us to claim that it is a whole construction that shapes

their meaning (cf. Tsujimura 2005). For such an analysis of context-dependent meanings, we consider the framework of

Construction Grammar as most suitable, as it captures very well the interaction between language units such as words and

sentences and the larger context they occur in (Fried 2009). It is impossible to determine a meaning of an ideophone

without taking into consideration the meaning of a whole sentence.

To our knowledge there aren´t many corpus studies of ideophones in any language; for many languages with

ideophones, there is no corpus material even to turn to. Hindi thus offers a unique opportunity to study their usage in

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authentic texts: there are many digitally available Hindi texts, including online sources, and there are also several electronic

corpora (Intercorp, EMILLE). Primary sources of language data will be written texts taken mainly from Intercorp

(predominately fiction) and from online blogs, both of which are rich in these expressions.

Our study is a first attempt to examine these Hindi ideophones in their natural environment and thus also ground

any claims about this complicated phenomenon in authentic usage.

References

Dingemanse, Mark. 2011. The Meaning and Use of Ideophones in Siwu. PhD Thesis. Radbound Univeristy Nijmegen.

Fried, Mirjam. 2009. Representing contextual factors in language change: between frames and constructions. In A. Bergs &

G. Diewald (eds.), Context and constructions, 63-94. John Benjamins.

Tsujimura, Natsuko. 2005. A constructional approach to mimetic verbs. In M. Fried & H. C. Boas (eds.), Grammatical

Construcions, 137-153. John Benjamins

Revisiting orientation in –ly premodifying adverbs.

Diaz-Negrillo, Ana

(University of Granada)

Premodification within the English Adjective Phrase (hereafter AP) and, in particular, premodification by ‘-ly’ adverbs, is

known to exhibit a number of features that typically characterise adverbials. One of these features is their range of

meanings, such that the semantic classification that some grammars use for adverbials is also used to classify ‘-ly’ adverbs of

the type discussed here: manner, space, time, order, degree, reason, concession, condition, and style- or content-related

qualifications (Quirk et al., 1972: 276-7; Quirk et al. 1985: 448; Pullum & Huddleston 2002: 583).

Another feature associated with some adverbials is subject-orientation, that is, the transfer of the primary

reference or characterization of the adverbial from the verb (or, in general, from the predication) to the accompanying

subject. Like the adverbials’ semantic types, subject-orientation may also transfer to ‘-ly’ adverbs as premodifiers in APs. The

conditions under which subject-orientation applies in adverbials have been described in the specialised literature and

reference publications (Huang, 1975: 43-5; Quirk et al., 1972: 465-9; Quirk et al., 1985: 573; Mittwoch, Huddleston & Collins

2002: 672-3, 676-7), and is usually explained by the occurrence of a number of variables, among which lexical compatibility

with the subject of the adjectival base from which the ‘-ly’ adverb is derived, and position of the adverb stand out.

This paper studies subject-orientation in premodifiers of adjectives realized by adverb phrases headed by ‘-ly’

adverbs, and also discusses their multiple reference as predication of a co-occurring noun, and as the manner or degree in

which the quality described by the premodified adjective applies in the sentence, and as a comment on the sentence

contents. Specifically, this paper explores the conditions which govern orientation, in particular the conditions that may

explain why ‘-ly’ adverbs may not be oriented towards a co-occurring noun and only show adverbial meaning, may be

oriented and at the same time retain adverbial meaning and, specially, may be oriented without any trace of adverbial

meaning.

This paper is based on the bigrams of the type *ly_AJ? contained in the British National Corpus as accessed via the

CQPweb site (http://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk). Specifically, it is based on the list of 54,928 bigrams (out of the initial list of

199,637 bigrams complying with the above query conditions) whose frequency of occurrence in the corpus is 1. This is the

frequency range where the occurrence of intensifiers is lowest by comparison with other frequency ranges where the ‘-ly’

element is merely an intensifier and is therefore not relevant for the purposes of this paper, that is, this is the frequency

range where the chance to find cases of orientation is highest, because the occurrence of intensifiers is higher in higher

frequency ranges. The bigrams were classified based on the premodification patterns described in Pullum & Huddleston

(2002: 583) and then supplemented by Quirk et al. (1972: 507-20) and Quirk et al. (1985: 448). This paper follows the latter

two references for the description in terms of disjuncts of what the former presents as domain, modality, evaluation and

speech-act relatedness that may surface as premodifiers within an AP.

References

Huang, Shuan-Fan. 1975. A Study of Adverbs. The Hague: Mouton.

Mittwoch, Anita, Rodney Huddleston and Peter Collins. 2002. “The Clause: Adjuncts.” In R. Huddleston and G.K. Pullum

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(eds.), The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Quirk, Rodney, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech Geoffrey and Svartvik Jan. 1972. A Grammar of Contemporary English. London:

Longman.

Quirk, Rodney, Greenbaum, Sidney, Leech Geoffrey and Svartvik Jan. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English

Language. London: Longman.

Pullum, Geoffrey K. and Rodney Huddleston. 2002. “Adjectives and Adverbs.”. In R. Huddleston and G.K. Pullum (eds.), The

Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dativus ethicus and dativus iudicantis in German from a constructional perspective.

Diewald, Gabriele; Stathi, Katerina and Smirnova, Elena

(Leibniz Universität Hannover)

In German the dative has a broad range of functions, some of which have been traditionally assigned to the peripheral

category of the “free dative”, suggesting that they are not arguments of the verb. However, this category is not

homogeneous with respect to syntactic structure and function. The subclasses known as dativus commodi (2), dativus

incommodi (3), and the possessive dative (dativus possessivus) (4) resemble dative objects (1) in terms of syntactic

structure. In a recent account combining valency theory and Construction Grammar (Welke 2011) they are treated as

examples of unification/fusion of the ditransitive construction with non-ditransitive verbs:

(1) Sie gab mir ein Buch.

she give.

PST

DAT

ACC

book

‘She gave me a book.’

(2) Sie kaufte mir ein Buch.

she buy.

PST

DAT

ACC

book

‘She bought me a book.’

(3) Sie zerriss mir ein Buch.

she tear.

PST

DAT

ACC

book

‘She tore me a book.’

(4) Sie klopfte mir auf die Schulter.

she knock.

PST

DAT

on the.

ACC

shoulder

‘She patted me on the shoulder.’

On the other hand, the subclasses of dativus iudicantis (5) and the ethic dative (dativus ethicus) (6) occur in different

syntactic structures than (2)-(4) and show multiple restrictions: comparatively fixed syntactic structures, use of the dative

mainly in the first person singular (mir), presence of particles, pragmatic conditions, prosodic patterns, etc. (Abraham 1971,

Wegener 1989).

(5) Komm mir nicht zu spät!

come.

IMP

DAT

NEG

too late

‘Don’t be late, I beg you.’

(6) Das ist mir zu schwer.

this be.

PRS

DAT

too heavy

‘This is too heavy, as far as I am concerned.’

These restrictions have not been studied empirically and still lack a convincing explanation. This paper focuses on these two

latter subclasses of the “free dative” and seeks to determine their usage conventions. This will allow us to test to what

degree the proposed restrictions hold, and to find out whether the two subclasses share properties which set them off from

the other “free datives” ((2)-(4)).

The study follows a usage-based approach, since we assume that grammatical regularities are shaped by language

use. Methodologically it is based on data from corpora of spoken present-day German, which are analyzed in quantitative

and qualitative terms.

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Departing from the identified restrictions and usage conventions, we propose to treat the dativus iudicantis and

the ethic dative as constructions in the technical sense of this term (Goldberg 1995, 2006; Croft 2001). The theoretical

framework of Construction Grammar allows us to represent the range of restrictions as well as the commonalities between

the two subclasses of datives in a coherent way. As a result, the study will delineate the exact constructional make-up of

the two constructions and facilitate an evaluation of their relative degrees of idiomaticity as compared to more schematic

dative constructions ((1) - (4)).

This corpus study constitutes a first step towards the comprehensive description and explanation of the multiple

functions of the dative in present-day German. A brief outlook takes a cross-linguistic perspective and compares the

peculiarities of the German constructions with similar ones in other languages (such as Russian and Ancient Greek).

References

Abraham, Werner (1971): Der „ethische Dativ“. In: Moser, H. (ed.), Fragen der strukturellen Syntax und der kontrastiven

Grammatik. Düsseldorf: Schwann, 112-134.

Croft, William (2001): Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University

Press.

Goldberg, Adele (1995): Constructions: a Construction Grammar Approach to Argument Structure. Chicago: Chicago

University Press.

Goldberg, Adele (2006): Constructions at Work: the Nature of Generalization in Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wegener, Heide (1989): Eine Modalpartikel besonderer Art. Der Dativus Ethicus. In: Weydt, H. (ed.), Sprechen mit Partikeln.

Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 56-73.

Welke, Klaus (2011): Valenzgrammatik des Deutschen: Eine Einführung. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter.

Formal and functional explanation in reflexive marking.

Dimitriadis, Alexis

(Utrecht University)

Generative and functionalist modes of explanation differ not only in the explanatory forces they appeal to, but also in what

they consider to be in need of explanation. I show that the two approaches frequently complement, rather than contradict,

each other. Simply put: they often give different answers because they ask different questions. I argue that certain robust

cross-linguistic generalizations must be explained by appeal to grammatical rather than functional factors, contra

Haspelmath (2008); and I attempt to integrate the contributions of generative and functionalist approaches to the topic.

As starting point we take two of Haspelmath’s (2008a,b) proposals regarding reflexive marking: On the distribution

and form of “middle” reflexives, and on reflexive marking in possessives and locative PPs.

“Middle” reflexives (Faltz 1977) are reflexive markers whose use is restricted to a subset of all transitive verbs.

Haspelmath observes that in languages that have a separate middle reflexive, its exponent is never longer than the

corresponding primary reflexive: zich vs. zichzelf in Dutch, zero-marking vs. himself in English, etc. He proposes that

frequency of use can account for this, and many other morphosyntactic asymmetries: “more frequent patterns are coded

with less material.” (Haspelmath 2008a). But it is also predictable under a licensing-based theory like Reinhart and Reuland’s

(1991) Reflexivity: Reflexivity is lexically licensed in verbs that take a middle reflexive; but the primary reflexive has to do

more work, hence is likely to be longer.

A frequency account straightforwardly explains why middle reflexives must be used with verbs of grooming and

other “self-directed” activities. Reflexivity makes no predictions about membership in this class, treating it as lexically

specified. The two arguments are both valid and complementary: In view of cross-linguistic variation, membership of any

particular verb in the middle-reflexive class cannot be predicted and hence must be lexically specified. But languages make

“reasonable” (i.e., useful) choices for their grammars and lexicons; hence, this class is populated by frequently reflexive

verbs, as Haspelmath demonstrates.

A subtler problem is posed by PPs containing a pro-form bound by the subject of the clause. Some languages use a

reflexive for this purpose (e.g. German neben sich), while others use an ordinary pronoun (English near him). Haspelmath

considers this a consequence of the very high frequency with which pro-forms in PPs are coreferential with the subject (30-

50% in German locative PPs, for example). But this cannot be right: At these frequencies, the referent of the pro-form is less

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predictable (higher entropy/uncertainty) than for pro-forms in direct object position. Zipf’s (1949) economy principles, on

which Haspelmath’s theory is founded, predict that it should be more important, not less, to make a distinction in coding. A

licensing-based approach gives a ready explanation: Reflexivity has to be licensed within a single minimal predicate. Hence

ordinary pronouns are almost never used as primary reflexives. But pro-forms in PPs need not be licensed (“exempt”

positions, in Reinhart & Reuland’s terms), and hence vary freely under the competing functional pressures of economy and

expressivity.

Another visit to BE supposed to.

Disney, Stephen

(Marjon University)

The BE supposed to construction has attracted some attention in the literature on language change because the

development of an obligative (deontic) sense, e.g. (1), seems to break some well-established patterns of language change, in

particular the tendency for constructions to develop from deontic to epistemic meanings and not vice versa.

1) A girl is not supposed to ask for an introduction to a man, but--low be it spoken--she often does; (1903. Devereux The

Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage.)

It has been argued that SUPPOSE was borrowed with one original meaning (Berkenfield 2006, Moore 2007, Visconti 2004,

Zeigler 2003), two (Traugott 1989), or three (Noël and van der Auwera 2009). However, research to date has relied on small

corpora, like ARCHER, or the OED, which is problematic. For example, while the argument presented by Noël and van der

Auwera (2009) is convincing, the examples that the OED provides on which the argument is based are less so. For instance,

the OED provides only the last line of (2). Outside the full context it does appear to be deontic. However, is supposed to here

is not an instruction to do something; it is reporting an assumption relating the position on the map to the position on the

ground, similar to is supposed to be standing in PDE.

2) SUR: Then I pray you, let me haue one to goe before me, alwaies to stand with a marke at (e)uery angle.

BAY: There is one gone.

SUR: I see him: Loe, I stirre not the table, now it is truly rectified, and vpon this line I make a pricke, which is the

very station where the instrument is supposed to stand. (1607. J. Norden Surveyors Dialogue)

In fact, none of the OED examples cited in Noël and van der Auwera (2009) have deontic meanings in their original context.

This paper therefore presents the results from searches made of the Early English Books Online, a +500,000,000 word

corpus of English texts dating between 1460 and 1720. I added a corpus of 18

Century English texts specially compiled

from Project Gutenberg. In over 11,000 tokens, no deontic examples were found from before 1800. In samples of the same

data, no ‘intend’ uses were found in the active either. However, although no bridging example exist in the passive form,

there are examples of active suppose(d) that are ambiguous between ‘expectations’ and concepts like ‘wish/desire/hope’.

A possible solution is proposed, framed in usage-based construction grammar perspective (Goldberg 1995, Langacker 2008),

in which SUPPOSE / BE supposed to is not considered in isolation, as it has to date. I conclude that the deontic sense of this

construction arose by analogy to a schematic deontic passive construction that mirrors the Hearsay NCI (Noël 2001). The

resulting semantic reanalysis of BE supposed to is argued to have been triggered partly by its functional overlap with the

similar BE expected to deontic extension, but was partly social. This suggests that the bridging to the deontic BE supposed to

may not be a case of ‘grammaticalisation’ per se and therefore not counter to any unidirectional path of change.

References

Berkenfield, C. (2006) Pragmatic motivations for the development of evidential and modal meaning in the construction be

supposed to X. Journal of Historical Pragmatics, 7(1): 39-71.

Goldberg, A. E. (1995) Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

Langacker, R. W. (2008) Cognitive grammar: a basic introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Moore, C. (2007) The spread of grammaticalized forms: The case of be + supposed to. Journal of English Linguistics, 35(2):

117.

Noël, D. (2001) The passive matrices of English infinitival complement clauses: Evidentials on the road to auxiliaryhood?

Studies in Language, 25(2): 255-296.

Noël, D. and van der Auwera, J. (2009) Revisiting be supposed to from a diachronic constructionist perspective. English

Studies, 90(5): 599-623.

Traugott, E. C. (1989) On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: an example of subjectification in semantic change.

Language, 65(1): 31-55.

Visconti, J. (2004) Conditionals and subjectification: Implications for a theory of semantic change. Typological Studies in

Language, 59: 169-192.

Ziegeler, D. (2003) On the generic origins of modality in English. English modality in context. Diachronic Perspectives. Peter

Lang, Bern, 33–69.

An empirical investigation of the universality of the Universal Grinder.

Djalali, Alex; Grimm, Scott and Levin, Beth

(Stanford University, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and Stanford University)

The “universality” of the “Universal Grinder” plays a central role in argumentation in the mass/count literature, particularly

for the prevalent contextualist view (Pelletier 1979, 1991; Borer 2005), which asserts that a noun may be realized with

either mass or count morphosyntax, with the choice determined largely by context. Here we investigate the grinding

operation across a variety of nominal types and constructions through a sentence rating task, yielding results implicating

that an unconstrained version of the contextualist hypothesis is problematic. The results suggest that the overall felicity of

Grinder sentences reflects the relationship between situational contexts, i.e. the construction that the noun finds itself in,

and the type of noun at issue.

Experimental Design

Each participant rated seven Grinder and eight filler sentences on a 7 point Likert acceptability scale. Stimuli were created

using three Grinder construction types, each of which had two variants, as shown in (1). Grinder sentences were then

completed with one of five nouns from seven different noun types (making 35 nouns in all). Noun types were chosen to

capture a spectrum of individuation based on complexity, animacy and size including: group terms (swarm, bouquet),

shapes (sphere, cube), simplex artifacts (hammer, pencil), complex artifacts (car, computer), animals (squirrel, butterfly),

and foodstuff (steak, pea). An example stimulus item is shown in (2). 290 subjects saw a counterbalanced subset of the total

210 stimuli.

(1) a. There is NOUN in the bread/concrete.

b. There is NOUN all over the floor/highway.

c. A robot/A termite eats NOUN.

(2) [There is [cracker]

noun

in the [bread]

variant

]

construction

Results

Grinder sentences were on average given quite low acceptability ratings (2.33/7; SD 1.81) compared to filler sentences

(5.68/7; SD 1.85). Although the different constructions did not reliably influence acceptability, acceptability was affected by

noun type, from worst to best: group terms < shape, simplex artifacts, complex artifacts < animals < foodstuff. Foodstuff

and animals are likely more felicitous due to the dual life of food nouns as natural entities or food stuff and of animate

nouns as natural entities or their flesh (see Apresjan 1973, Jakobson 1936, Nunberg and Zaenen 1992, and Ostler and Atkins

1991). The other nouns of the other types do not regularly show such dual associations.

Outlook

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The results demonstrate that there is an interaction between noun type and construction which contextualist theories of

the mass/count distinction do not speak to. While this argues against the claim that nouns vary arbitrarily between count

and mass determinations, or that that all nouns could be underlyingly mass (Borer 2005: 94), it also opens new territory for

further investigation: the differential felicity of grinder sentences reflects the relationship between situational context and

noun type, which in turn reflect intrinsic nominal properties and world knowledge conventionally associated with the

referents of nouns.

References

Apresjan, J. (1973) “Regular Polysemy”. Linguistics 142:5-32.

Borer, H. (2005) Structuring Sense I: In Name Only, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Jakobson, R. (1936) “Contribution to the General Theory of Case: General Meanings of the Russian Cases”, in L. Waugh, ed.,

Russian and Slavic Grammar: Studies 1931-1981, Mouton, Berlin, 59-103.

Nunberg, G. and Zaenen, A. (1992) “Systematic polysemy in lexicology and lexicography.” EURALEX '92, Proceeding I-II.

Tampere.

Ostler, N. and Atkins, B. (1991) “Predictable meaning shift: some linguistic properties of lexical implication rules.” In

Pustejovsky, J. and Bergler, S., eds., Lexical semantics and knowledge representation. Proceedings of the first

SIGLEX Workshop. Springer-Verlag, 87-100.

Pelletier, F.J. (1979) “Non-Singular Reference: Some Preliminaries”, in F.J. Pelletier, ed., Mass Terms, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1-

14.

Pelletier, F.J. (1991) “Mass Terms”, in B. Smith and J. Burkhardt, eds., Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, Philosophia

Press, Munich, 495-499.

Patterns of neighbor contacts in Daghestan.

Dobrushina, Nina

(National Research University-Higher School of Economics)

More than 40 languages are spoken on the relatively small territory of mountainous Daghestan. People living in a

traditional Daghestanian village normally speak 2-4 languages which are either unrelated or only distantly related. The

linguistic repertoire may be different in two neighboring villages. The villages are usually homogenous from the point of

view of their L1, but the villages with different first languages may be in a walking distance from one another, with intensive

social and economic contacts between them.

If two neighboring villages spoke languages A and B which were not mutually comprehensible, there were several

possible patterns of language contact:

- one of two languages is chosen as a main means of communication. This meant that the language contact was

asymmetrical, with one language community having good command of their neighbors’ tongue (80-90% of dwellers), while

the neighbors did not speak the language of the first community.

- using either language A or language B depending on the situation. This meant that the neighbor language contact was

symmetrical, with both parties having some command of their neighbors’ language.

- language C is used which is not native to either of the villages (lingua franca situation).

According to a field research undertaken by the author the asymmetrical pattern was a more frequent in Daghestan, the

symmetrical situation was attested only once in the data, and the lingua franca situation was not attested (in traditional

setting). The paper focuses on asymmetrical contacts and on which of the two languages becomes dominant in a particular

contact situation. The aim of the paper is to identify the factors that trigger this choice. The study is based on an overview

of several cases of asymmetrical neighbor contact situations as compared with one symmetrical situation.

The data was obtained through a particular method of investigating language contacts for unwritten languages,

tested in 5 groups of mountain villages of Daghestan in 2009 - 2012. The method is based on short interviews with the

speakers comprising the questions about the languages spoken by the respondent or used by him/her for other purposes

(e.g. Arabic for reading Koran). The respondent is asked to answer the same set of questions about all his elder relatives he

thinks he remembers well. The interviewer thus obtains information about the period which is inaccessible to a direct

study.

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The asymmetrical contact pattern was found in the following clusters:

- Archib, Chittab, Shalib (dominating languages Avar and Lak, subordinate language Archi)

- Mehweb, Obokh (dominating language Avar, subordinate Mehweb)

- Khiv, Arkhit, Laka (dominating language Lezgian, subordinate Tabassaran)

- Mallakent, Chumli, Jangikent, Temenler (dominating language Kumyk, subordinate Dargwa)

The symmetrical contact pattern was found in one cluster:

- Chittab, Shalib (Avar and Lak respectively)

Detecting on-going language change in Turkish-Dutch online interactions.

Dogruoz, Seza

(Tilburg University)

Languages change constantly (Weinreich, 1953; Thomason, 2001; Heine & Kuteva, 2005) and contact with other languages is

one of the factors that lead to language change. Turkish is spoken by 2% of the population in the Netherlands (CBS, 2011)

and it is changing due to Dutch influence (Backus, 2005; Doğruöz, 2007; Doğruöz & Backus, 2007, 2009; Doğruöz & Gries,

2012). The on-going changes are mainly observed within the fixed and partially fixed multi-word units (i.e. constructions)

that are literally translated from Dutch into Turkish.

Turkish has been an immigrant language in Western Europe since 1960’s due to labor immigration. Although the

first generation of immigrants mainly spoke Turkish, the second and third generations grow up bilingual (Dutch and Turkish).

Dutch influence on Turkish has mainly been analyzed through spoken data analysis so far. Although spoken data

provide invaluable insights about language change, they reflect the language use of individuals only at a given time segment

and their size is limited due to the difficulties in data collection (e.g. fieldwork, transcription, coding, standardization).

Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) provides excellent opportunities to overcome these limitations by analyzing

large scale digitalized data through automatized computational tools (Androutsopoulos, forthc., Paolillo, 2001). The current

study investigates the on-going constructional changes in Turkish spoken in the Netherlands (NL-Turkish) through analyses

of longitudinal CMC between the NL-Turkish community members on an online discussion forum. Such data provide ideal

grounds for exploring the grammar-interaction interface.

Following the usage-based approaches, the current study analyzes the online CMC data to find out:

a) what makes NL-Turkish constructions sound unconventional for Turkish speakers in Turkey (e.g. lexical or structural

change): How do we detect unconventionality? What types of unconventional constructions are there? How do we

classify them?

b) the level of schematicity (e.g. fixed, partially fixed or schematic) for the changing constructions

The initial analyses of the CMC data and comparison with NL-Turkish spoken data indicate that context seems to influence

the constructional use. Although there are some similarities between the constructions used in the CMC and spoken data,

there are also differences in terms of the frequency and the types of the changing constructions.

References

Androutsopoulos, J. (forthc.). Code-switching in computer-mediated communication. In S.C. Herring, D. Stein & T. Virtanen

(eds.), Handbook of the Pragmatics of CMC. Mouten de Gruyter.

Backus, A. (2005). Code-switching and language change: One thing leads to another. International Journal of Bilingualism, 9,

307-340.

Central Bureu voor Statistics (2011) http://statline.cbs.nl/StatWeb/publication/?VW=T&DM=SLNL&PA=03742&D1=0-

4&D2=0&D3=129-132&D4=0-2,35,43,56,92,149,171,230,238&D5=0&D6=0,5,12-l&HD=100302-321&HDR=,G4,G5&

STB=G1,G3,G2

Doğruöz , A.S. (2007). Synchronic Variation and Diachronic Change in Dutch Turkish: A Corpus Based Analysis. Ph.D. thesis.

Tilburg University Press.

Doğruöz, A.S. & Backus, A. (2007). Postverbal elements in immigrant Turkish: Evidence of change? International Journal of

Bilingualism, 11 (2), 185-220.

Doğruöz, A. S. & Backus, A. (2009). Innovative constructions in Dutch-Turkish: An assessment of on-going contact-induced

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change. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 12 (1), 41-63.

Doğruöz, A.S. & Gries, S.Th. (2012). Spread of on-going change in an immigrant speech community: Turkish in the

Netherlands. Review of Cognitive Linguistics, 10 (2), 401-426.

Heine, B. & Kuteva, T. (2005). Language contact and grammatical change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Paolillo, J.C. (2001). Language variation on Internet Relay Chat: A social network approach. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 5, 180-

213.

Thomason, S.G. (2001). Language Contact: An introduction. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press.

Weinreich, U. (1953). Languages in contact: Findings and problems. The Hague: Mouton.

Contact-induced “pattern replication” in the lexicon of the Balkan languages.

Domosiletskaya, Marina

(Russian Academy of Sciences)

The Balkan Peninsula is the most appropriate and promising area for investigation of outcomes of prolonged language

contacts between genetically not closely related Indo-European (and even Non-Indo-European) languages, especially in the

realm of the lexicon. It was the first area identified as “Sprachbund” (linguistic area) where the situation “languages in

contact” had ruled for centuries. In spite of quite long existence of Balkan linguistics (more than 180 years) the first atlas of

the Balkan languages was initiated 15 years ago by a group of Russian linguists. It was the “Small Dialectological Atlas of the

Balkan Languages” (SDABL), for which researchers from Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Germany, Greece, Macedonia,

Montenegro, Russia and Serbia took part in the collection of linguistic data 1996-2005. The recent developments in the

Balkan areal linguistics have concerned both lexical and grammar phenomena. So far 4 volumes describing exceptionally

lexicon have been published; they are “Spiritual culture” (2005), “Human being. Family” (2006), “Animal breeding” (2009)

and “Landscape” (2010). The maps of SDABL are of different types: (1) lexical (or lexical-etymological), (2) semantic

(including patterns of polysemy), (3) describing the organization of a micro-field and (4) maps of lexical motivation, which

are about one third and which often demonstrate amazing structural isomorphisms in the lexicon of the Balkan languages.

The mapping of comparable or similar lexical phenomena helps to distinguish some Balkan linguistic sub-areas, which are

the result of long-term “convergent language communities”, some lexical phenomena can lead to reconstructing of former

contacts.

The contribution will deal mainly with structural isomorphism (“pattern replication”) in the phytonimical lexicon of

the Balkan languages – the field of lexics which has not yet been described by SDABL and which will be treated in one of

succeeding volumes. The names of only two plants will be described here – one is a cultivated plant (Humulus lupulus, hop),

the other is a non-cultivated one (Convolvulus, bindweed). The lexical data of 7 languages and their dialects of SDABL

(Albanian, Aromanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbian, Croatian, Greek) was added by the phytonyms of Rumanian as one

more language of Southeastern Europe.

A detailed classification of phytonomastical patterns is given (deverbative, denominative, metaphors, legends,

comparison with other plants). Both plants do not possess any pan-Balkanic models of nomination, only some regional

ones. As for hop, they are: 1. “western” (Albanian and Croatian) – from the verb ‘to bend, to curve’, 2. “south-eastern”

(Albanian and Greek) – from the noun ‘bud, swelling’, 3. “eastern” (Bulgarian and Serbian) – from the verb ‘to vomit’. The

other models (‘to weave’, ‘to climb’, ‘white’, ‘bitter’, ‘sweet’, ‘wolf-cub’, ‘hemp’, ‘ferment’ are limited to one language or

even a dialect. As for bindweed, he mostly spread conceptual models are: 1. ‘to twist’ (Albanian, Rumanian, South Slavic); 2.

‘dress/skirt’ (Greek, Rumanian, South Slavic), 3. ‘morning flower’ (Rumanian, Bulgarian, Turkish). Though there are no pan-

Balkanic “pattern replications”, the similarities in the conceptual organization of the areally restricted phytonyms are really

striking, they testify prolonged language and ethnic contacts in the Peninsula and help to understand the “Balkan world

image”.

References

Domosiletskaya, Plotnikova, Sobolev 1998 – Domosiletskaya M. V., Plotnikova A. A., Sobolev A. N. Malyj dialektologicheskiy

atlas balkanskih jazykov // Slavjanskoe jazykoznanije. XII Mezhdunarodnyi sjezd slavistov. Doklady rossijskoj

delegacii. Moskva: Nauka, 1998. S. 196-211.

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Malyj dialektologicheskiy atlas balkanskih jazykov. Probnyj vypusk. München: Biblion Verlag, 2003. Serija leksicheskaja. T. I.

Leksika duhovnoj kultury. München: Biblion Verlag, 2005. T. II. Chelovek. Semja. München: Biblion Verlag, 2006. T.

III. Zhivotnovodstvo. Sankt-Peterburg: Nauka; München: Otto Sagner Verlag, 2009. T. IV. Landshaft. Sankt-

Peterburg: Nauka; München: Otto Sagner Verlag, 2010.

Loan translations as the missing link between lexical and structural effects of contact.

Dorleijn, Margreet and Backus, Ad

(University of Amsterdam and Tilburg University)

Loan translations occupy an ambiguous position among the effects of language contact. They instantiate lexical interference

but without overt borrowing of words, that is, of phonological material. They also instantiate a form of structural

interference because at the very least some semantic and combinatory characteristics of the other language are imported.

Because of the pervasive distinction in contact linguistics between codeswitching and structural contact-induced change,

loan translations are usually discussed along with other kinds of structural contact effects (‘selective copying’ in Johanson

2002; ‘pattern borrowing’ in Matras 2008), but given the preference for syntactic phenomena in this research, there has

not been much systematic study of loan translations. In addition, similarities with the prominent lexical contact phenomena,

codeswitching and the adoption of loanwords, are under-researched because of this state of affairs.

In our contribution, we aim to point out what loan translations have in common with codeswitching, lexical

borrowing and structural borrowing. Inspired by usage-based approaches to linguistic competence (e.g. Bybee 2010), we

posit a continuum from more lexical to more structural contact effects, in which loan translations cover the full scale. We

illustrate this continuum with examples from the Turkish as spoken by the immigrant community in Holland, based on data

from a large range of studies, some published and some still on-going, that we have been involved in over a 20-year period.

At the lexical side, we find foreign-inspired collocations of compound words (such as the Dutch Turkish rendition of ‘to play

(a musical instrument)’, which combines the words for ‘play and ‘instrument’ (just like Dutch but unlike Turkish as spoken in

Turkey where a verb meaning ‘knock’ or ‘hit’ would be used rather than ‘play’); at the structural side we find the Dutch-

inspired use of function words and grammatical morphemes, such as the indefinite article or Dutch-type subcategorisation

patterns. We will also argue that it is important to study this phenomenon in on-going contact settings, since this provides

snapshots of change in progress (Backus, Doğruöz & Heine 2011). In particular, loan translations often contain the seeds of

future structural change. Moreover, the study of linguistic practices in relatively new multilingual settings such as the Dutch-

Turkish community reveals that items such as loan translations may become a conventionalized part of the communal

repertoire rather quickly. For an item to become part of the community ‘linguistic norm’ does not always require a long

time: we will allude to Internet and acceptability judgment data that suggest that some loan translations have become the

norm in the immigrant variety. What this analysis promises is an integration of lexical and structural analyses of contact

effects, as well as a chance to close the gap between research on codeswitching and on structural contact linguistics.

The relevance of nominal ellipsis with participial remnants in Old Romanian.

Dragomirescu, Adina and Alexandru, Nicolae

(Institute of Linguistics, Bucharest and University of Bucharest)

The facts.

In the domain of nominal ellipsis, the comparison of Old (ORom) and Modern Romanian (MRom) shows a sharp contrast:

(1) a. Vindecatul nu ştia cine iaste (Coresi, 1567−1568)

healed.DEF not know.IMPF who is

‘The healed man did not know who he was.’

b. Cum iertăm şi noi greşiţilor noştri (Coresi, 1559-1560)

as forgive.IND.PRES.3SG as well we erred.DEF.DAT ours

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‘As we forgive the ones who made mistakes towards us.’

(2) a. Cel vindecat nu știa cine este

DEF healed not know who is

b. Cum îi iertăm noi pe cei care au greșit

as CL.ACC forgive we PE DEF who have erred

In ORom (centuries 16-18), nominal ellipsis with (active/passive) past participles is licensed by the suffixal definite article (1),

while in MRom it is the freestanding article cel that licenses ellipsis with participial or wh- remnants (2). The structures in (1)

are no longer used.

The aim of the paper is to show how the relevance of this difference for the appearance of a second definite article

(cel) in Romanian.

Empirical and theoretical distinctions.

In contrast to ORom and to the other Romance languages, MRom possesses two definite articles, in complementary

distribution: (i) the suffixal article (-l, -a, -i, -le) attaches to the first noun or prenominal adjective of the DP (băiatul boy.def,

frumosul băiat beautiful.def boy); (ii) the freestanding article cel occurs when the DP-initial position is occupied by a

cardinal or ordinal quantifier (cei trei oameni def three men). Cel also occurs in polydefinite DPs, being preceded by a full

definite DP (copilul meu cel cuminte child.def my def nice), with an information structure related function.

A theoretical distinction between nominal ellipsis and substantivization is called for. Nominal ellipsis is a Discourse

Grammar phenomenon (Williams 1977, López 2000), which presupposes the PF-deletion of an anaphoric constituent

otherwise syntactically present. Substantivization is a lexical process, which presupposes the incorporation of a silent noun

(Kayne 2005) with a precise lexical content (e.g. [human] – bolnavul sick.def ‘the sick man’; [colour] – galbenul yellow.def

‘the yellow colour’), and is not subject to an anaphoricity condition.

MRom distinguishes strictly between nominal ellipsis (with cel) and substantivization (with the suffixal article)

(Cornilescu, Nicolae 2012).

Our conclusions are based on the investigation of a corpus of texts from the 16

to the 19

century.

ORom, contrasting to MRom, possesses a single definite article, the suffixal one, which is equally used for licensing

nominal ellipsis and for substantivization, like in other Romance languages (French, cf. Sleeman 1996). In the 16

century,

the structure [past participle + suffixal article] marking nominal ellipsis is rather frequent (38 examples of type (1) in our

corpus); however, it gradually disappears until the 19

century. It has currently survived in a few words (bătuta – name of a

dance, spusele ‘the said things’).

This change is parallel to the grammaticalization of the article cel, which began in the 17

century (Iordan, Manoliu

1965; Nicolae 2012, 2013), when the structure [past participle + suffixal article] had already become rare; as to nominal

ellipsis and substantivization, the two articles gradually specialised their function, eliminating the ambiguity typical of

ORom. It is the grammaticalization of cel that has allowed for this specialisation of the two Romanian definite articles.

References

Cornilescu, A., A. Nicolae, 2012, “Nominal Ellipsis as Definiteness and Anaphoricity”, Lingua, 122, 1070–111.

Iordan, I., M. Manoliu, 1965, Introducere în lingvistica romanică, Bucureşti, Editura Didactică şi Pedagogică.

Kayne, R.S., 2005, “Silent years, silent hours”, in Movement and Silence, Oxford, OUP, p. 241–260.

López, L., 2000, “Ellipsis and Discourse-linking”, Lingua, 110, 183–213.

Nicolae, A., 2012, “On the Diachronic Syntax of the Romanian Definite Phrase: The Rise of the Determiner cel”, talk given at

the University of Oxford, 10 May.

Nicolae, A., 2013, “The determiner cel”, in G. Pană Dindelegan (ed.), The Grammar of Romanian, Oxford, OUP (in press).

Sleeman, P., 1996, Licensing Empty Nouns in French, The Hague, Holland Academic Graphics.

Williams, E., 1977, “Discourse and Logical Form”, Linguistic Inquiry, 8, p. 101–139.

Standard average European East and West: perfects under two rooves.

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Drinka, Bridget

(University of Texas at San Antonio)

In the conclusion to his edited volume in the eurotyp Series on adverbs, Johan van der Auwera (1998b: 824) introduces the

term “Charlemagne Sprachbund” to refer to the area of western Europe where languages adhere to an array of similar

grammatical patterns and thus provide evidence for the existence of a European linguistic area, also called “Standard

Average European” (SAE). Van der Auwera notes that the “core” languages of the Sprachbund are French, German, and

Dutch, with Italian and Polish closely linked—all located within or near the area ruled by Charlemagne. Besides coining this

evocative term, van der Auwera makes an additional significant contribution in this work: he concludes, following Kortmann

(1998b: 530-535), that “Standard Average European” should more accurately be split into “Standard Average Eastern

European” and “Standard Average Western European” (van der Auwera 1998: 120).

In this paper, the validity of both of these claims—the existence of the Charlemagne Sprachbund and the split of

SAE into East and West—is explored in detail, through a close examination of the distribution of the periphrastic perfects

across the map of Europe. The perfects of Europe turn out to be remarkably well-suited to the task: within western Europe,

the perfects, formed with have and be auxiliaries, show a layering of nuclear, core, and peripheral distribution like that

noted by Haspelmath (1998, 2001) for other structural features, and thus provide solid evidence for the accuracy of the

Charlemagne Sprachbund as a construct (Drinka, forthcoming). Within eastern Europe, on the other hand, perfects are built

especially with be auxiliaries, and show a different distribution, one reminiscent of that noted by Kortmann (1998a, 1998b)

for adverb clauses. What emerges as most influential in the west / east split is the role played by “roof” languages, Latin

and Greek, and the early cultural divide connected with Roman Catholicism and Greek Orthodoxy.

References

Drinka, Bridget. (Forthcoming). Sources of Auxiliation in the Perfects of Europe. In: Freek Van de Velde, Hendrik De Smet,

and Lobke Ghesquière (eds.). Multiple source constructions in language change. Studies in Language Series.

Haspelmath, Martin. 1998. How young is Standard Average European? Language Sciences 20: 271-87.

Haspelmath, Martin, Ekkehard König, Wulf Oesterreicher, and Worfgang Raible. 2001.

Language typology and change. Sprachtypologie und sprachliche Universalien. La typologie des langues et les universaux

linguistiques. Vol. 2. Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter.

Kortmann, Bernd. 1998a. The evolution of adverbial subordination in Europe. In: Monika Schmid, Jennifer Austin, and Dieter

Stein (eds.). Historical Linguistics 1997. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: Benjamins. 213- 28.

Kortmann, Bernd. 1998b. Adverbial subordinators in the languages of Europe. In: van der Auwera (ed.). 457-561.

van der Auwera, Johan (ed.). 1998a. Adverbial constructions in the languages of Europe. (Empirical Approaches to Language

Typology, EUROTYP 20-3) Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

van der Auwera, Johan. 1998b. Conclusion. In: van der Auwera (ed.) 1998a: 813-36.

The extension of the ergative case-marker ‘ne’ to (all) ‘A’ in Western Hindī and Eastern Rājasthānī dialects:

an opportunity to understand the (re)emergence of non-nominative marked subject.

Drocco, Andrea

(University of Turin)

With the gradual loss of finite past tense verb forms in the first and middle stage of Middle Indo-Aryan, the past

construction which has developed out of the earlier predicative use of the past participle in -ta become so frequent to be, in

the last stage of Middle Indo-Aryan, the only available means of expressing all past transitive propositions. In this stage the

specific case for A was the Instrumental, and O, sharing always the same form of S, was in concord with the verb (Bloch

1934; Bubenik 1993, 1996, 1998). In the first period of Western New Indo-Aryan the general mechanisms which lead to the

case syncretism in nominal declension cause, for the majority of singular nouns, the attrition of the distinction between S

and A in the past: this situation is clearly testified by Old Western Rājasthānī and Old Western Hindī (Khokhlova 1992, 1995,

2001; McGregor 1968; Sigorsky 2007). But if it is true that the case marking system of the first of these languages has

survived till present times, it is also true that in the latter, starting from the 16

century, we find clear signs of a process of

restoration of an old function, the distinction of A in the past tenses, by means of a new ergative case-marker, the

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postposition ne (Beames 1872-1879; Hoernle 1880). Recently I tried to demonstrate that the “macro-history” of this

postposition suggests that the discriminatory function of case marking is clearly important in the beginning of its process of

diffusion. In this talk, I want to carry on this line of research by adding that there is no single interpretation as regards the

high initial variability of the ergative case with A in this process. In fact, as I will show starting from data taken from texts

written in Old Western Hindī dialects and also from the present-day Eastern Rājasthānī dialects, where, in both cases, the

use of the postposition ne is surely optional, but only apparently random, the full set of conditions on case alternations for A

in the past is really complex. In fact to determine which A in the past get the ergative postposition we need to take into

account a series of nested, sometimes competing, morpho-syntactic and semantic factors. For example the presence in the

construction of a human O and/or of an indirect object or the presence of a non-finite intransitive form. In some cases it

seems very likely that there are also pragmatic factors governing the presence or absence of the new ergative case-marker

with A. In other cases the presence of the new ergative case-marker ne in the languages taking here into account is surely

determined by the use of other different ergative case-markers and/or by the influence of the verbal agreement of O. As a

consequence in the conclusion I would like to stress the importance of Old Western Hindī and present-day Eastern

Rājasthānī as languages where we can study the phenomenon of ‘Optional Ergative Marking’ and ‘Differential Ergative

Marking’ as proposed by McGregor (2009).

References

Beames, J. 1872-1879. A comparative grammar of the modern Aryan languages of India. London: Trubner & Co. (reprint

1966, Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal).

Bloch, J. 1934. L’indo-aryen du véda au temps moderne. Paris: Adrien Maisonneuve. (English edition largely revised by the

author and translated by Alfred Master, Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1965).

Bubenik, V. 1993. ‘Morphological and Syntactic Change in Late Middle Indo-Aryan’, Journal of Indo-European Studies 21.259-

281.

Bubenik, V. 1996. The Structure and Development of Middle Indo-Aryan Dialects. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.

Bubenik, V. 1998. A Historical Syntax of Late Middle Indo-Aryan (Apabhraṃśa). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hoernle, A. F. Rudolf. 1880. A Comparative Grammar of the Gauḍian (Aryo-Indian) Languages. Amsterdam: Philo Press.

Khokhlova, L. V. 1992. ‘Trends in the Development of Ergativity in New Indo-Aryan’, Osmania Papers in Linguistics 18.71-97.

Khokhlova, L. V. 1995. ‘The Development of Patient-Oriented Constructions in Late Western NIA Languages’, Osmania

Papers in Linguistics 21.15-54.

Khokhlova, L. V. 2001. ‘Ergativity Attrition in the History of Western New Indo-Aryan Languages’, in Singh, R. (ed.) 2001. The

Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics, Tokyo Symposium on South Asian Languages. Contact,

Convergence and Typology. New Delhi – Thousand Oaks – London: Sage Publications, 159-184.

McGregor, Ronald S. 1968. The Language of Indrajit of Orchā. A Study of early Braj Bhāsā prose. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

McGregor, William B. 2009. ‘Typology of Ergativity’, Language and Linguistics Compass 3:1.480-508.

Sigorsky, Alexander A. 2007. ‘Case, split nominativity, split ergativity, and split accusativity in Hindi: a historical perspective’,

in Masica, C. P. (ed.) 2007, Old and New Perspectives on S. Asian Languages: Grammar and Semantics, Delhi:

Motilal Banarsidass, 34-61.

Analytic versus periphrastic modality in English.

Du Mon, Denies

(University of Antwerp)

It is well-known that English has lexical and grammatical strategies to express modality. The main subject of study has

consistently been the grammatical expression of modality, particularly the core modal verbs can, could, will, would, shall,

should, may, might, must (Palmer 2001; Perkins 1982; Coates 1983; Lyons 1977; Traugott and Dasher 2005, pp. 105-151). In

the past few years, some attention has also been paid to lexical means for expressing modality, for example the modal

adverbs probably, possibly, certainly, well, ... (Nuyts 2001, 2009). The combination of these particular strategies – which I

will call ‘periphrastic modality’ (1-4) – has been under-researched and lacks a solid framework (see Hoye 1997; Shibasaki

2004, 2009; Nykiel 2010).

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(1) How our company health check-up may well have saved lives.

(http://www.sappipositivity.com/how-our-company-health-check-may-well-have-saved-lives)

(2) The most important rule in our development is always to do the simplest thing that could possibly work.

(http://www.xprogramming.com/Practices/PracSimplest.html)

(3) It will probably come right away. We'll see.

(http://www.bloodyelbow.com/2012/12/27/3809612/ufc-dana-white-strikeforce-gil-melendez-immediate-lightweight-title-shot)

(4) Facilitators might certainly grow their sequence.

(http://eyeofcolombo.com/facilitators-might-certainly-grow-their-sequence/)

Although most modal verbs have been attested to decline in frequency in Present Day English (Krug 2001; Kennedy 2002;

Leech 2003; Leech et al. 2009), will, would, can, could and might seem to resist this change more than the others (Close and

Aarts 2010, pp. 167-168; Leech et al. 2009, pp. 72-73). Incidentally, it is these (often epistemic) verbs that collocate with

modal adverbs (Hoye 1997; Shibasaki 2004, 2009) (curiously in addition to may, which, in spite of decline, frequently

combines with well). The main topic for investigation deals with the question whether there is a competition dynamic

between analytic (i.e. the core) and periphrastic modal constructions. In order to answer this, it needs to be addressed in

what way the collocation of the higher frequency modals with modal adverbs is responsible for this resistance/persistence.

In other words: are the periphrastic constructions the reason for the persistence of the mentioned modals or is the higher

frequency of these modals responsible for their now periphrastic nature? It is shown that several processes of change are at

work in modal collocation resulting in a continuum of utterances displaying degrees of lexical and grammatical

constructionalisation.

A corpus study on data from (Early) Modern English until roughly the 20

Century on could and may with their

adverb satellites reveals co-occurrence patterns within the same sentence as well as the development of modal (ad)verbs in

isolation. On the basis of a descriptive analysis of the co-occurrence patterns, periphrastic modality is defined. As the study

takes a cognitive-functional approach with reference to construction grammar, it consequently shows that periphrastic

modality should be understood as an emerging construction with strong internal dependencies and a level of schematicity.

This, in turn, explains why the modal verbs that often collocate with modal adverbs have resisted a decline in use.

References

Coates, J. 1983. The semantics of the modal auxiliaries. London and Canberra: Croom Helm.

Close, J. and Aarts, B. 2010. Current change in the modal system of English. In: Lenker, U., Huber, J. and Mailhammer, R.

(eds.). English Historical Linguistics 2008. Volume I: The history of English verbal and nominal constructions.

Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 165-182.

Desagulier, G. 2004.

WANT TO

WANNA

Verbal polysemy versus constructional compositionality. In: Nowak, P.M., Yoquelet, C.

and Mortensen, D. (eds.). Proceedings of the 29th annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 29(1), pp. 91-

102.

Hopper, P.J. and Traugott, E.C. 2003. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hoye, L. 1997. Adverbs and modality in English. London & New York: Longman.

Krug, M. 2001. Frequency, iconicity, categorization: evidence from emerging modals. In: Bybee, J. and Hopper, P.J. (eds.).

Frequency and the emergence of linguistic structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 309-335.

Leech, G. 2003. Modality on the move: The English modal auxiliaries 1961-1992. In: Facchinetti, R., Krug, M. and Palmer, F.

Modality in contemporary English. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Leech, G., Hundt, M., Mair, C. and Smith, N. 2009. Change in contemporary English. A grammatical study. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Lyons, J. 1977. Semantics II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nuyts, J. 2001. Subjectivity as an evidential dimension in epistemic modal expressions. Journal of Pragmatics 33, pp. 382-

400.

Nuyts, J. 2009. The “one-commitment-per-clause” principle and the cognitive status of qualificational categories. Linguistics

47 (1), pp. 141-171.

Nykiel, J. 2010. The interplay of modal verbs and modal adverbs. A history of mæg eaþe. In: Lenker, U., Huber, J. and

Mailhammer, R. (eds.). English Historical Linguistics 2008. Volume I: The history of English verbal and nominal

constructions. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp.143-164.

Palmer, F.R. 2001. Mood and modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Perkins, M.R. 1982. The core meaning of the English modals. Journal of Linguistics 18, pp. 43-81.

Shibasaki, R. 2004. Patterns of semantic harmonization in English: The case of may well. In: Nowak, P.M., Yoquelet, C. and

Mortensen, D. (eds.). Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society 29(1), pp. 391-

402.

Shibasaki, R. 2009. Another look at the development of epistemic meanings: A historical collocational approach. Studies in

Modern English 25, pp. 63-84.

Traugott, E.C. and Dasher, R.B. 2005. Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

van der Auwera, J. 2009. The Jespersen Cycles. In: van Gelderen, E. (ed.). Cyclical change. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 35-71.

Binding of reflexives in second language acquisition: the relevance of finiteness morphology.

Eide, Kristin Melum and Busterud, Guro

(Norwegian University of Science and Technology)

One important finding and longstanding generalization in the research on binding of reflexives in second language

acquisition (SLA) of English is that SLA learners more readily allow for non-local binding across a non-finite clause than

across a finite clause. That is, they are typically more willing to allow for the coreference of himself and George in 1a than

herself and Helen in 1b. This is known as the “tense-infinitive asymmetry” (TIA) in SLA reflexive binding and is even attested

in SLA of other languages, e.g. Norwegian (cf. Busterud, forthcoming). Several attempts have been made to explain the TIA,

by means of syntactic and semantic theories.

1. a. George wants the manager to praise himself.

b. Helen knows that her mother always sees herself on television.

In this paper we take as our point of departure the study on binding of reflexives by Japanese SLA learners of English

reported in Matsumura (2007). The experiments in this study were set up so as to reveal the exact scope of the TIA, and

Matsumura concludes that the explanation for this asymmetry must be sought, not in syntax, but in semantics. Indeed, the

asymmetry is caused by the SLA informants being sensitive to the degree of factivity expressed by the embedding and

embedded predicates involved in depicting the situation described by a particular embedding configuration, the author

argues. By varying the degree of factivity expressed by the predicates in the individual sentences presented to informants,

the author claims to achieve interpretational differences reflected by the willingness of informants to violate the otherwise

rather strict locality requirement of reflexives in the English target language (cf. the examples in 1a versus 1b).

Our paper closely examines the individual test sentences in Matsumura’ s study and show that the alleged

variation in degree of factivity is not the only relevant difference in these sentences. In fact, the varying degree of factivity,

as the author defines it, strictly and in fact quite strikingly correlates with the occurrence and combination of

complementizers, auxiliaries and main verbs in these English sentences. Thus, the author ignores and fails to exclude

potentially very important variables, basically syntactic, not semantic, in nature.

The patterns attested by Matsumura are explained by exploiting the finiteness theory of Eide (2008, 2009ab) which

claims that the morphological finiteness feature in modern English is unevenly distributed across main verbs and auxiliaries.

Main verbs do not productively show finiteness distinctions, unlike auxiliaries have and be. Modals and auxiliary do are

always morphologically finite. In addition to Eide’s finiteness generalizations, we use the theory of Nordström (2010), who

argues that the subordinators IF and THAT in Germanic languages are syntactic expressions of subjunctive and indicative

moods, respectively. Combining these theories, we reject Matsumura’s claim that SLA learners prevailingly use semantic

cues in deciding the relevant locality binding domain of reflexives. Instead, we will build a case that the attested cues are, in

fact, all syntactic.

References

Busterud, Guro (forthcoming). Anaforiske bindingskonstruksjoner i norsk som andrespråk [Anaphoric binding constructions

in Norwegian as a second language]. PhD Thesis, Faculty of Arts, NTNU.

Eide, Kristin Melum (2008) Finiteness in Norwegian, English, and…Chinese? Comparative Grammar and Language

Acquisition in the Age of Globalization: Norwegian and Chinese. Tapir Akad. Forlag. 39-64.

Eide, Kristin Melum ( 2009a). Finiteness: The haves and the have-nots. Advances in Comparative Germanic Syntax. John

Benjamins Publishing Company: 357-390.

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Eide, Kristin Melum (2009b): Tense, finiteness and the survive principle: Temporal chains in a crash-proof grammar.

Towards a Derivational Syntax: Survive-minimalism. John Benjamins Publishing Company. 91-132.

Matsumura, Masanori (2007): “Semantics behind the structure, and how it affects the learner: A new perspective on

second language reflexives” in International review of applied linguistics inlanguage teaching 45 (4): 321-352.

Nordström, Jackie (2010): Modality and Subordinators. Studies in Languages Companion Series 116. Amsterdam: John

Benjamins Publishing Company.

Applying process research to analyze translators’ use of the web as corpus.

Enriquez, Raido

(University of Auckland)

Studies of the translation process and its features have been mushrooming ever since introspection, usually in the form of

thinking aloud, was borrowed from the field of psychology. More recently, the adoption of ever-more sophisticated

methods and tools such as keystroke-logging, eye-tracking and screen-recording software has further contributed to an

already significant body of knowledge on translation processes. In this paper, I will provide an overview of these methods

and tools, and discuss the pros and cons of their application in examining the use of the Web as Corpus, or WAC (De

Schryver 2002), for translation problem solving and decision making. Following this overview, I will argue that screen

recorders are among the most effective and least obtrusive tools available for observing translation patterns (cf. Asadi and

Séguinot 2005; Göpferich 2008; Angelone 2012) and translation choices that may have been influenced by the use of

multilingual Web-based information. To illustrate how research in this area could shed new light on behavioral patterns in

corpus-based translation studies, I will present a process-oriented study that I carried out to explore the Web search

behaviors of a small group of six participants—four translation students in their first year of study and two translators with

three and 15 years of professional experience, respectively—in connection with various user attributes (translation and

Web search expertise, and domain knowledge) and task attributes (translation brief, text type, and degree of

specialization). In doing so, I will show how qualitative analyses supported by descriptive statistics can be used to process

research data and provide a multi-faceted overview of subjects’ use of the WAC, in particular their depth and range of

search, their degree of iterative behavior, as well as their query construction and query modification patterns, among

others. Finally, I will outline the main findings of the study, which suggest that users’ level of translation expertise has a

bearing on the choice of information sources—which, in turn, seems to affect the degree of iterative Web search behaviors.

A look at task-related factors suggests that increased task complexity (along with increased translation experience) also has

an impact on users’ choice of resources. Furthermore, task-related attributes appear to have a greater impact on the range

of search behaviors than on the depth of research. In addition, it was possible to observe that the lower the level of Web

search expertise (and translation expertise) was, the more basic and unplanned the search statements and the less

sophisticated the refinement of queries were. Finally, both domain knowledge and task factors seem to have a combined

effect on the amount and type of translation-related information needs. In general, the higher the level of perceived

domain knowledge is, the lower the number of information needs and the less specialized the nature of these needs are.

Furthermore, both the type of research and the amount of time spent online appear to influence translation quality.

Overall, the more in-depth the nature of research and the higher the increase in research time, the higher the level of

translation quality.

References

Angelone, E. (2012): “Watching and Learning from ‘Virtual Professionals’: Utilizing Screen Recording in Process-oriented

Translator Training”, Translation and the Politics of Recognition, 4th Conference of the International Association

for Translation and Intercultural Studies, Queen's University Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK, July 24-27, 2012.

Asadi, P., and Séguinot, C. (2005): “Shortcuts, Strategies and General Patterns in a Process Study of Nine Professionals.”

Meta 50.2: 522–547.

De Schryver, G.M. (2002). “Web for/as Corpus: A Perspective for the African Languages.” Nordic Journal of African Studies

11(2): 266-288.

Göpferich, S. (2008): Translationsprozessforschung: Stand – Methoden – Perspektiven. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.

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The insertion of voiced fricative sibilants in Northern Basque.

Epelde, Irantzu and Jauregi, Oroitz

(Iker, CNRS / University of the Basque Country)

In language contact situations it is very common to have the less prestigious language being influenced by the most

prestigious one, but the contrary is also attested (Heine & Kuteva 2005). Basque is considered a 'vulnerable' language

(Moseley 2010), one that lives in a diglossic situation with respect to two of the world's most powerful languages; Spanish

and French. Nowadays, all Basque speakers are bilingual with either French or Spanish, and this language contact situation

makes Basque very prone to borrowings from these two languages.

The case of phonetic features is of a special relevance in external variation and change phenomena, given that it is

widely assumed that, in cases of language contact, phonetic features are amongst the easiest ones to borrow (Silva-

Corvalán 2001). In this poster, we will focus on the addition of two French voiced fricative sibilants, the apico-alveolar and

the prepalatal, both units absent in the Basque varieties at the heart of this study. These phonemes occur almost exclusively

in the borrowed vocabulary (Hualde 1991, 2003).

In our data, the insertion of these units appeared to be associated with differences in age. We will focus on three

age groups: youngs (-30), middle-aged (40-60) and octogenarians (+70) from the traditional provinces of Lapurdi, Low

Navarre and Zuberoa (France). All of the informants (60) have the Basque language as their mother tongue and home

language, but the older ones received education only in French language and use French in formal (and often informal)

situations, in oral and in written communication. The data come from recorded interviews —individual as well as in-group—

held in Basque, and from specific questionnaires and word lists (944 items) used in our project Norantz: contact des langues

et variation linguistique. Création d’un observatoire des nouveaux parlers basques. A sample of data is analysed in detail

with the Praat speech analysing program in order to study the voiced or voiceless condition of each unit.

Language variation can mark stable class differences or stable sex differences in communities, but it can also

indicate instability and change. When it marks change, the primary social correlate is age (Chambers 2002), and the change

reveals itself prototypically in a pattern whereby some minor variant in the speech of the oldest generation occurs with

greater frequency in the middle generation and with still greater frequency in the youngest generation. If the incoming

variant truly represents a linguistic change (Labov 1994, Trudgill 1974), as opposed to an ephemeral innovation as for some

slang expressions or an age-graded change, it will be marked by increasing frequency down the age scale, as it occurs with

the younger generation in this community.

References

Chambers, J. K. 2002. Patterns of Variation including Change. In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change. Oxford:

Blackwell. 349-372.

Heine, B. & Kuteva, T. 2005. Language Contact and Grammatical Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hualde, J. I. & J. Ortiz de Urbina. 2003. A Grammar of Basque. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Hualde, J. I. 1991. Basque Phonology. Routledge: London.

Labov, W. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.

Moseley, C. 2010. Atlas of the world’s languages in danger. Paris: UNESCO.

Silva-Corvalán, C. 2001. Sociolingüística y pragmática del español. Washington: Georgetown University Press.

Trudgill, P. 1974. Linguistic change and diffusion: description and explanation in sociolinguistic dialect geography. Language

in Society 3: 215-246.

Non-standard orthography and cultural dissonance in From a Pitman’s Notebook by Arthur Eaglestone.

Escott, Hugh

(University of Sheffield)

‘All my life I have been bound within the turgid flow of mediocrity [ …] One struggles as

for one’s very soul for days and weeks on end against the utter placidity of the daily

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thought and common speech of such a place as Tollgate. The most unthinking miner

seems far happier than I.’ Eaglestone (1925)

In 1925 Arthur Eaglestone (aka Roger Dataller) published his first book From a Pitman’s Notebook, an autobiographical

journal in which he documented his experiences of working in a South Yorkshire coal-mine. A pit time-keeper Eaglestone

was heavily invested in literature and high art, but frustrated by his cultural environment and this intellectual frustration is

evident in his notebook.

In this paper I will be examining how Eaglestone’s use of non-standard orthography (Kress 2000, Sebba 2007) to

represent the speech of the South Yorkshire miners and their families, is one of the ways in which the tensions between

Eaglestone’s aspirations to succeed in ‘legitimate culture’ (Lahire 2008) and his regional working-class identity are played

out. Examining Eaglestone’s use of non-standard orthography within the social milieu of the period in which it was

published and also its position within his literary language system underlines the author’s experiences of cultural dissonance

and explores ideas concerning the ‘ensemble of properties that define [an author’s] historically determined space’ (Lahire

2010).

This investigation takes the form of a ‘ficto-linguistic’ reading (Ferguson 1998) of Eaglestone’s journal which

examines the ‘systems of language’ that appears within this notebook and also draws on meta-linguistic comment (Jaworski

et.al 2004) and folk-linguistic beliefs (Niedzielski and Preston 2003, Lippi-Green 2012) concerning language from newspaper

reviews of this journal at the time of its publication. Reviewers combined linguistic value judgements with literary criticism

in their reviews making comments concerning the ‘bad’ language of the miners and their use of ‘trammelling dialect’ in

contrast to Eaglestone as a ‘sensitively articulate’ miner. The notebook itself serves as an attempt by Eaglestone to join the

‘legitimate culture’ of the literary middle-classes meaning that he has to negotiate a complex set of identities as well as

create a work of literary value. However in order to achieve this Eaglestone relies on his readers’ evaluations of his

authenticity as a member of the mining-class and his position as an articulate and trustworthy guide for middle class

readers.

Investigating the use of non-standard orthography in this way provides insight into how spelling functions as social

practice and how dialect representation contributes to the ‘idea of authenticity’ in identity formation (Hakala 2010: 389,

Coupland 2010).

References

Coupland, N. (2010). ‘The Authentic Speaker and Speech Community’. In Llamas C. and D. Watt (eds.) Language and

Identities.

Eaglestone, A. A., (Dataller, R.) (1925). From a Pitman’s Notebook. London, Cape: 91

Ferguson, S. (1998).‘Drawing Fictional Lines: Dialect and narrative in the Victorian novel.’ Style. Northern Illinois University,

Department of English.: 3-4.

Hakala, T. (2010) ‘A Great Man in Clogs: Performing Authenticity in Victorian Lancashire’. Victorian Studies 52(3): 387-412.

Jaworski, A., Coupland N., et al (2004). Metalanguage: Social and ideological perspectives. Berlin, Walter de Gruyter.

Kress, G. (2000). Early Spelling: Between convention and creativity. London, Routledge.

Lahire, B. (2010). ‘The Double Life of Writers.’ New Literary History 41(2): 445-447.

Lahire, B. (2008). ‘The Individual and the Mixing of Genres: Cultural dissonance and self-distinction.’ Poetics 36: 176-177.

Lippi-Green, R. (2012). English With an Accent: Language, ideology and discrimination in the United States, second edition.

London, Routledge.

Niedzielski, N. and D. Preston (2003). Folk Linguistics. Berlin, Walter de Gruyter.

Sebba, M. (2007). Spelling and Society. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

El estilo directo como construcción gramatical. Sobre la relación introductora y la secuencia citada.

Estévez Rionegro, Noelia

(Universidad de Santiago de Compostela)

El estilo directo es una de las cuestiones más tratadas y controvertidas del panorama gramatical del español. A pesar de

constituir una sección fundamental en todas las gramáticas publicadas y ser objeto de estudio de multitud de trabajos, no

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existe todavía un acuerdo entre los diferentes lingüistas que han teorizado sobre el tema, por lo que sigue siendo un

importante motivo de disquisición en lo que atañe fundamentalmente a dos aspectos: por una parte, el tipo de verbos que

pueden introducir un discurso en estilo directo y, por otra, la relación que existe entre estos y la secuencia citada.

Dada una construcción de estilo directo del tipo María dijo: “estoy completamente segura” (en la que María dijo

constituye la expresión introductora y “estoy completamente segura” la secuencia citada) podemos hallar tres hipótesis

fundamentales en los estudios gramaticales: la primera, defendida en las gramáticas de corte más tradicionalista (desde la

Real Academia: 1931 hasta Alarcos Llorac: 1994) considera que entre la expresión introductora y la cita existe una relación

sintáctica de hipotaxis en la que la segunda se subordina al verbo principal de la primera, como sucede en su equivalente en

estilo indirecto (María dijo que estaba completamente segura); la segunda, sostenida por algunos representantes de la

gramática considerada moderna (como Maldonado González: 1991 o Reyes: 1993) establece que la relación que se da entre

las secuencias no es de subordinación, sino paratáctica o de yuxtaposición, acuñándose el concepto de “adyacencia

discursiva”; por último, la tercera hipótesis, la más reciente en la tradición gramatical española (Fuentes Rodríguez: 1998) y

tomada de la noción de incorporation de la gramática del inglés (Partee: 1973, Munro: 1982, Coulmas: 1986 o Banfield:

1993), desecha radicalmente las anteriores al considerar que entre los miembros de las construcciones de estilo directo no

existe ningún tipo de relación sintáctica, sino meramente discursiva, producto de la confluencia de dos enunciados

independientes en un mismo discurso.

Ante tal divergencia de opiniones, el presente trabajo surge como una propuesta de análisis de la lengua en uso,

más allá de los ejemplos ad hoc y las construcciones prototípicas, con la finalidad de observar hasta qué punto puede

verificarse en la lengua real alguna de las hipótesis anteriores o, cuando menos, tratar de contribuir a la descripción y

caracterización del estilo directo tomando como fundamento empírico la propia lengua y el uso real que los usuarios hacen

de ella. El corpus empleado (en torno a 3600 secuencias) ha sido extraído del Archivo de Textos Hispánicos de la Universidad

de Santiago y contiene ejemplos de estilo directo producidos en lenguaje formal oral y escrito (prensa, novela, ensayo y

teatro). A través de su estudio, podemos comprobar un claro proceso de enriquecimiento y desarrollo en las construcciones

de estilo directo que parecen evolucionar desde las secuencias más prototípicas hacia toda una serie de variantes que no

han sido reflejadas en estudios anteriores y que contradicen gran parte de las ideas sostenidas en ellos, tanto en lo que a la

naturaleza de los verbos de la expresión introductora se refiere como a la relación que se establece entre esta y la cita que

introduce.

Referencias

Academia, Real Española (1931), Gramática de la lengua española, nueva edición, reformada, de 1973, Madrid: Espasa-

Calpe.

Alarcos Llorach, Emilio (1994): Gramática de la lengua española, Madrid, Espasa-Calpe.

Banfield, Ann (1993), “Where epistemology, style, and grammar meet literary history: the development of represented

speech and thought”. En LUCY, John A. (ed.), Reflexive language. Reported speech and metapragmatics, Cambridge

University Press.

Croft, William (2001), Radical Construction Grammar. Syntactic Theory in Typologica Perspective, New York, Oxford

University Press.

Coulmas, Florian (1986), “Reported speech: Some general issues”, en COULMAS, Florian (ed.), Direct and Indirect Speech,

Berlín: Mouton de Gruyter. Págs. 1-28.

Fuentes Rodríguez, Catalina (1998), “Estructuras parentéticas”, en Lingüística del español actual, nº 20. Págs. 138-174.

Maldonado González, Concepción (1991), Discurso directo y discurso indirecto, Madrid: Taurus Universitaria (Gramática del

español, 3).

Munro, Pamela (1982), “On the transitivity of “say” verbs”, en HOPPER, P. and THOMPSON, S. A., Sudies in Transitivity

(Sintax and Semantics, vol. 15). Págs. 301-318.

Partee, B. H. (1973), “ The syntax and semantics of quotation”, en ANDERSON, S. R. y P. KIPARSKY, A Festchrift for Morris

Halle, New York: Rinerhart & Winston. Págs. 410-418.

Reyes, Graciela (1993), Procedimientos de cita: estilo directo y estilo indirecto, Madrid: Arco / Libros.

Measuring count nouns.

Etxeberria, Urtzi and Etxepare, Ricardo

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(CNRS-IKER)

Basque vague weak quantifiers (asko ‘many/much’, gutxi ‘few/little’, ugari ‘abundant’, franko ‘quite a number’, gehiegi ‘too

much/many’, a.o.) optionally agree with the inflected verb in number. In (1a), the auxiliary shows plural number agreement

with the quantified phrase. (1b) shows the alternative form, with the auxiliary showing default 3

person singular

agreement. That the form in (1b) lack number specification is shown by the fact that it does not license secondary

predication, which requires number agreement (2b).

(1) a. Plural agreement: b. No agreement:

[Mutil asko] etorri dira gaur. [Mutil asko] etorri da gaur.

boy many come aux.pl today boy many come aux.sg today

‘Many boys came today.’ ‘Many boys came today.’

(2) a. b.

[Liburu asko] hondatuak ikusi ditut *[Liburu asko] hondatua ikusi dut

book many worn-out.pl seen aux.pl book many worn-out.sg seen aux.sg

‘I've seen many books worn-out.’

When the predicate is of a non-agreeing sort (note the non-agreeing participle –ta in (3)) secondary predication is possible:

(3) [Liburu asko] hondatu-ta ikusi dut/ditut

Book many worn-out.part seen aux.sg/aux.pl

‘Ive seen many books worn-out’

The set of Qs that give rise to the agreement alternation in Basque operates across a large class of contexts: besides plural

count nouns (1), they can quantify over masses (4a); and they can function as adverbial Qs (4b).

(4) a. b.

Jonek haragi asko/gutxi jan du Jonek asko/gutxi lo egin du

Jon-erg meat much/little eaten aux.sg Jon-erg much/little sleep aux.sg

‘Jon ate a lot of/little/much/too much meat’ ‘Jon ate a lot/much/too much’

In this sense, vague Qs in Basque correspond to what Doetjes (1997, 2001) calls ‘degree-Qs’, which are insensitive to the

categorical properties of the phrase they combine with, as far as the latter are cumulative. They operate on event and

nominal arguments having scalar properties. In other words, the relevant Basque quantificational expressions are measures.

We propose that the Basque non-agreeing Qs (NAQs) are Measure Phrases (MP). With Schwarzschild (2002), we

assume that the measure function must be monotonic. Measures trivially apply to masses. In Basque though, they also

seem to apply to count nouns, which do not show number. In line with Borer (2005), we claim that the function that counts

(number) and the function that individuates (classifier) must be different functions. The latter provides the basis for the

counting function: it structures the denotation of the N into cells of atomic individuals and their sums. Unlike the

approaches that only distinguish between counting and dividing heads, we show that Basque must involve an independent

Measure Head (different from classifiers and number) that can directly apply to these Classifier Phrases. Counting can only

operate through an extra Number head, but this triggers number agreement in Basque. NAQs in Basque are therefore bare

MPs which lack the functional structure necessary to provide a discourse referent and saturate the predicate (Chung and

Ladusaw, 2004).

The impact of translation direction on the characteristics of translated texts:

a multivariate analysis for English and German.

Evert, Stefan and Neumann, Stella

(FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and RWTH Aachen University)

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The idea of translation universals (for a critique cf. House 2008, Becher 2011) predicts that, regardless of the source

language, all translations share some typical features that allow us to distinguish translated from non-translated texts.

By contrast, Toury (1995)’s law of interference claims that a difference in prestige between two languages may lead

to a unidirectional tendency, in which translations from the more prestigious language into the less prestigious one show

stronger interference from the source language than in the opposite translation direction.

If the universals hypothesis is correct then a multivariate analysis should systematically separate translated from

non-translated texts. If Toury’s law of interference is correct, the multivariate analysis should reveal different characteristics

of translations depending on the translation direction. A strong universals hypothesis would be refuted if this latter

hypothesis is confirmed for a given language pair. This does not preclude the possibility of a weaker hypothesis that claims

that translations display some typical properties.

In the research presented here, we explore the validity of this hypothesis based on a selection of 300 texts from the

CroCo corpus of English-German and German-English translations (Hansen-Schirra et al. 2012) and using the linguistic

indicators proposed by Neumann (forthcoming).

Using machine-learning techniques such as linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and support vector machines (SVM),

we were able to distinguish translations from originals with an accuracy of up to 90% in our corpus. A first exploration of

the data (Diwersy et al. to appear) showed a slight tendency of German translations to move in the direction of the English

source texts in a multivariate visualisation, which was not the case for English translations. This was seen as an indication of

Toury’s law of interference from more prestigious English.

The present paper investigates these findings in more detail, building on the combination of multivariate analysis,

visualisation and minimally supervised machine learning introduced by Diwersy et al. (to appear). In particular, we

investigate in which way translations differ from parallel and comparable texts depending on the language and translation

direction. The multivariate approach enables us to detect hidden patterns of feature combinations that cannot be observed

in conventional frequency-based analyses such as Neumann (forthcoming), providing new evidence on the validity of

unidirectional interference.

A key challenge at this stage is to find meaningful “latent dimensions”, i.e. combinations of features which account

for the different properties of German-English and English-German translations. The detailed linguistic examination of these

latent dimensions will ultimately advance our understanding of feature bundles that are responsible for the distinctiveness

of translated texts.

References

Becher, Viktor. 2011. “Explicitation and Implicitation in Translation. A Corpus-based Study of English-German and German-

English Translations of Business Texts”. PhD dissertation, Hamburg: Universität Hamburg. http://ediss.sub.uni-

hamburg.de/volltexte/2011/5321/.

Diwersy, Sascha, Stefan Evert, and Stella Neumann. to appear. “A Semi-supervised Multivariate Approach to the Study of

Language Variation.” In Linguistic Variation in Text and Speech, Within and Across Languages, ed. Benedikt

Szmrecsanyi and Bernhard Wälchli. Linguae Et Litterae: Publications of the School of Language and Literature,

Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.

Hansen-Schirra, Silvia, Stella Neumann, and Erich Steiner. 2012. Cross-linguistic Corpora for the Study of Translations -

Insights from the Language Pair English-German. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.

House, Juliane. 2008. “Beyond Intervention: Universals in Translation?” Trans-kom 1 (1): 6–19.

Neumann, Stella. forthcoming. Contrastive Register Variation. A Quantitative Approach to the Comparison of English and

German. Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.

Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Non-canonical subject marking of verbs denoting physical events in Finno-Ugric languages.

F. Gulyás, Nikolett; Horváth, Laura and Németh, Szilvia

(University of Budapest)

In Finno-Ugric languages, there are several constructions containing primary (S/A) arguments which deviate from the

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subject prototype (Schiefer 1981). Following Keenan (1976), Siewierska (2008) and Onishi (2001), we consider subjects non-

canonical if they have special case marking and/or require differential verbal encoding (e.g. causative, passive etc).

Our research is aimed at providing a collection of non-canonically marked verb phrases in Finnish, Estonian,

Udmurt, Komi, Permyak, Mari, Surgut Khanty and Hungarian on the basis of Onishi’s (2001) semantic verb classes.

Additionally, our goal is to propose a characterisation of these verbs based on both morphosyntax and conceptualization,

and to outline some general features of these constructions within the language family, if they exist.

In our study, we first set up a questionnaire containing 111 sentences in Hungarian and Russian, using an extended

sentence list of Onishi’s (2001) semantic verb classes. Data was provided by 8 informants. Secondly, we arranged the data

using the following three criteria: a) morphological encoding of the verb (if present), b) case marking of the primary

argument and finally, c) conceptualization of meaning of the verb. Henceforth, we concentrate on physical verbs.

According to the first criterion, verb forms show the following hierarchy:

(1) active > copula > zero verb > causative > auxiliary-like verb > infinite verb.

Some languages use special encoding more frequently than others:

(2) Finnish=Permyak > Udmurt=Komi=Mari > Estonian > Hungarian > Khanty

Using criterion b), data reveals differential case marking hierarchy as follows:

(3) Gen (43,36 %) > Loc (20,36 %) > Acc–Par (19,47 %) > Dat (16,81 %).

Referring to the use special case marking, the languages examined here differ in some degree:

(4) Permyak > Finnish > Udmurt=Mari > Komi > Estonian > Khanty > Hungarian.

The conceptualization criterion shows how the speaker perceives a particular event. Since the speaker does not

conceptualize the subject as an agent, the encoding changes by a) making the event not exclusively overt (5), b) some non-

subject-like participant stands as the causer of the event (6), c) the subject, despite of its close connection to the event, is

being demoted (7). FU languages use all of these types:

(5)

Tal/Poisil

janu.

(Estonian)

(s)he/boy:ade

cop.3sg

thirst

(6)

ö/

Зонка

ö.

(Permyak)

(s)he/boy:acc

drink:caus.3sg

(7)

Тудын/Рвезын

йӱмыж

шуэш.

(Mari)

(s)he/boy:gen

drink:ptcp.px3sg

go:3sg

’(S)he/the boy is thirsty’

On the basis of our data, languages show closer correlation of verb form and case on the basis of their areal status, namely

Finnish and Estonian on the one hand, and Udmurt and Mari on the other, tend to encode certain conceptual types by the

same encoding.

References

Aikhenvald, A. Y.–Dixon, R. M. W.–Onishi, M. (eds.) 2001. Non-Canonical Marking of Subjects and Objects.

Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Bereczki, G–Molnár, J. (eds.) 1981. Lakó-emlékkönyv. Budapest: ELTE.

Keenan, E. 1976. Towards a universal definition of subject. In Li, C. (ed.) 1976: 303-334.

Li, C. ed. 1976. Subject and topic. New York, NY: Academic Press.

Onishi, M. 2001. Non-canonically marked subjects and objects: Parameters and properties. In Aikhenvald, A. Y.–Dixon, R. M.

W.–Onishi, M. (eds.) 2001: 1–51.

Schiefer, E. 1981. Das anonyme Subjekt in den finnisch-ugrischen Sprachen. In Bereczki, G.‒Molnár, J. (eds.) 1981: 140‒157.

Siewierska, A. 2008. Introduction: Impersonalization from a subject-centred vs. agent-centred perspective. Transactions of

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the Philological Society 106 (2): 115–37.

Types, areal contact and genetic relationship:

Romance, Germanic and Slavonic languages as a test case for Talmy’s typology.

Fagard, Benjamin; Zlatev, Jordan; Cerruti, Massimo and Blomberg, Johan

(Lattice (ENS and CNRS), CCS (Lund) and University of Turin)

Starting at least with Tesnière’s remarks on motion in French and German (1959; see also Bally 1932), researchers have

noticed that languages differ in the way they encode motion events. The verb-framed vs satellite-framed typology

proposed by Talmy (1985) and taken up a.o. by Slobin (1996) has been the focus of many studies in the last twenty or thirty

years (e.g. Bohnemeyer et al. 2007, Filipovič 2007, Beavers et al. 2010, Croft et al. 2010). It is now commonly assumed, for

instance, that Germanic and Slavonic languages are satellite-framed, i.e. tend to express the path component of motion

events in a satellite, as in (1), and that Romance languages are verb-framed, i.e. tend to express the path component in the

verb, as in (2).

(1) eine Frau läuft aus der Höhle raus von der Kamera weg

“a woman walks (out) out of the cave, away from the camera”

(2) une dame sort d’une sorte de grotte entourée d’arbres pour aller on ne sait où

“a lady exits from some kind of cave surrounded by trees and goes somewhere”

Various studies have insisted on the need for more refined distinctions (cf. Beavers et al. 2010 for a recent overview). It has

been argued that, in order to capture cross-linguistic and intra-linguistic variation, we should consider ‘language strategies’

rather than ‘language types’ (Beavers et al. 2010:331, Croft et al. 2010:202, Hickmann & Robert 2006:5, Fortis & Vittrant

2011). Concerning Romance, various authors have noted the existence of SF features in some varieties at least (Gsell 1982,

Berthele 2006, Iacobini & Masini 2006, Cini 2008, Iacobini 2009, Bernini 2010), possibly on account of language contact. Do

these invalidate Talmy’s typology?

This is the issue we address here. With a language elicitation tool made of 76 video-clips, we gathered data from

five European languages: Swedish, German, Polish, French and Piedmontese. The tool in question was built specifically to

elicit descriptions of paths in ‘natural’ contexts (beach, park, mountain, etc.), with various manners of motion (walking,

running, jumping) and from various perspectives (with similar scenes viewed from different angles). On the basis of these

data (e.g. (1)-(2) above), amounting to approximately 10,000 sentences (100,000 words), we analysed the strategies

adopted by participants in describing the scenes and compare both languages as a whole and participant strategies. There

are clear differences between languages. Thus, deixis is expressed much more frequently in German than elsewhere, and is

particularly rare in Piedmontese and Polish. Manner of motion is expressed most frequently in German and Polish; its

frequency in Swedish is lower than expected, and it is expectedly low in French and Piedmontese. Finally, we observed that

these differences are not exactly those predicted by a simple verb-framed/satellite-framed distinction, with strong within-

type differences between German and Swedish, as well as between French and Piedmontese. Another important result is

the high interindividual variation, within each language. The initial research question may therefore need to be rephrased,

asking to what extent a language ‘imposes’ a given strategy to its speakers.

References

Beavers J., B. Levin & S.W. Tham. 2010. The Typology of Motion Expression Revisited. Journal of Linguistics 46(3), 331-377.

Bernini G. 2010. Word classes and the coding of spatial relations in motion events: a contrastive typological approach. In G.

Marotta, A. Lenci, L. Meini & F. Rovai (eds), Space in language. Pisa: ETS, 29-52.

Berthele R. 2006. Ort und Weg: Die sprachliche Raumreferenz in Varietäten des Deutschen, Rätoromanischen und

Französischen. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.

Bohnemeyer J., N.J. Enfield, J. Essegbey, I. Ibarretxe-Antuñano, S. Kita, F. Lüpke & F.K. Ameka. 2007. Principles of event

segmentation: the case of motion events. Language 83, 495-532.

Cini M. (ed). 2008. I verbi sintagmatici in italiano e nelle varietà dialettali. Stato dell’arte e prospettive di ricerca. Frankfurt:

Peter Lang.

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Croft W., J. Barðdal, W.B. Hollmann, V. Sotirova & C. Taoka. 2010. Revising Talmy’s typological classification of complex

event constructions. In H.C. Boas (ed), Contrastive Studies in Construction Grammar. Amsterdam: John Benjamins,

201-235.

Filipovič L. 2007. Talking about Motion: A Crosslinguistic Investigation of Lexicalization Patterns. Amsterdam / Philadelphia:

John Benjamins.

Fortis J.-M. & A. Vittrant. 2011. L’organisation syntaxique de l’expression de la trajectoire : vers une typologie des

constructions. Faits de Langues. Les Cahiers 3, 71-98.

Hickmann M. & S. Robert (eds). 2006. Space in Languages. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Gsell O. 1982. Las rosas dattan ora – les röses da fora – le rose danno fuori: Verbalperiphrasen mit Ortsadverb im

Rätoromanischen und im Italienischen. In S. Heinz & U. Wandruszka (eds), Fakten und Theorien: Beiträge zur

romanischen und allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft. Festschrift für Helmut Stimm zum 65. Geburtstag. Tübingen:

Narr, 71-85.

Iacobini C. & F. Masini. 2006. The emergence of verb-particle constructions in Italian: locative and actional meanings.

Morphology 16, 155-188.

Iacobini C. 2009. The role of dialects in the emergence of Italian phrasal verbs. Morphology 19, 15-44.

Slobin D. 1996. From ‘thought and language’ to ‘thinking for speaking’. In J. Gumperz & S. Levinson (eds), Rethinking

linguistic relativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 70-96.

Talmy L. 1985. Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms. In Timothy Shopen (ed), Language typology and

syntactic description, vol. III: Grammatical categories and the lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 57-

149.

Tesnière L. 1959. Éléments de syntaxe structurale. Paris: Klincksieck.

Resultative constructions headed by denominal and deadjectival verbs.

Farkas, Imola Agnes

(Babes-Bolyai University)

Aim and data

The aim of our talk is to explore the relationship between Romanian denominal/deadjectival verbs, like the ones in (1) and

what we have called Romanian metaphorical resultatives or result(ative) expressions, like the ones in (2):

(1)

a. a îngheța ‘to freeze, to become frozen’ (derived by prefixation: în- ‘in/into’ + gheaţă ‘ice’)

b. a răci ‘(to cause to) become cold/to catch a cold’ (derived by conversion)

(2)

a.Lacul a îngheţat bocnă.

lake.the AUX.3SG freeze.PRF bone

‘The lake froze solid.’

(The lake froze as hard as the bone.)

b. Prietenul meu a ăcit cobză.

friend.the my aux.3SG catch a cold.PRF kobsa

‘My friend caught a terrible cold.’

(My friend caught such a terrible cold that his voice sounded like a kobsa.)

Such constructions have either been overlooked in the approaches to Romanian resultatives (cf. Lupşa 2004, Drăgan 2005,

2012, Baciu 2010) or if included in the class of resultatives, they have not been given a (detailed) analysis (cf. Ionescu 1998,

Baciu 2007).

Research questions

This presentation provides an l-syntactic account of these derived verbs and these result constructions in the spirit of

Ramchand (2008) and it addresses three major research questions:

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A. Given the co-occurrence restrictions of such derived verbs in such predicate constructions because of the existence of a

shared l-syntactic structure and some shared crucial properties (cf. Hale and Keyser 1993, Gumiel et al. 1999 a.o.), how is it

possible to build resultatives, like (2a), given that the N gheaţă ‘ice’ the verb is derived from occupies the same syntactic

position as the NP predicate bocnă ‘bone’, i.e. complement of RP (Ramchand 2008)?

B. Given that Ramchand’s (2008) Underassociation is proposed for English denominal/deadjectival verbs (where the N/A

feature is underassociated), as well as for resultative constructions (where the res feature is underassociated), what

differences do we find in the way this linguistic phenomenon manifests itself in the correspondent derived verbs and

predicate structures in Romanian?

C. Based on our Romanian data, is it legitimate to ask the question whether there are resultatives constructions in Romanian

or not?

Proposed answers

A. Based on our Romanian data we confirm the general statement that although there are co-occurrence restrictions on

building resultative structures with denominal/deadjectival verbs, these derived verbs are compatible in a result

configuration if the predicate highlights the degree of the outcome of the event, intensifies the action of the verb or further

specifies the final state codified in the meaning of the verb, but it cannot delimit its event. Based on the data put forth for

English (Ramchand 2008), we argue that Romanian denominal/deadjectival verbs are derived by incorporating the N/A

feature from complement-of-res position into the upper res head; thus, deriving [(init), proc, res]-type of verbs.

B. Similarly to English, in Romanian denominal/deadjectival verbs the N/A feature is underassociated, hence, making the

addition of the result predicate possible. As opposed to English, in Romanian resultative constructions the res feature of the

same verb is not underassociated, as the res functional head must be identified by the verb itself (i.e. it cannot be left null

and it cannot be identified by the predicate or the preposition heading the predicate).

C. Although there are important distinctions between English and Romanian resultatives both in matter of frequency and in

matter of typology, this should not lead to the general conclusion that there are no resultatives in Romanian. We argue that

the basic question is not whether there are result structures in Romanian or not, but what kind of resultatives we find in this

language and, naturally, why.

References

Baciu, I., 2007, Aspect și construcții rezultative. In G. Pană-Dindelegan (ed.), Limba română. Stadiul actual al cercetării.

Actele celui de al 6-lea colocviu al catedrei de limba română, 51–58. București: Editura Universității din București.

Baciu, I., 2010, Romanian Resultatives Revisited. Paper presented at the University of Bucharest, June 4.

Drăgan, R., 2005, On Resultative Constructions and ÎN/IN (-EN) Prepositions/Prefixes in Romanian and English. In M. Burada

(ed.), Conference on British and American Studies, 99–104. Braşov: Editura Universităţii Braşov.

Drăgan, R., 2012, Aspects of Lexical Structure: Verbs in Locative Constructions in English and Romanian. Bucureşti: Editura

Universităţii din Bucureşti.

Gumiel, S., Nieto, I. and Pérez, I., 1999, Some Remarks on De-adjectival Verbs and Resultative Secondary Predicates. Catalan

Working Papers in Linguistics 7: 107–124.

Hale, K. and Keyser, S. J., 1993, On Argument Structure and the Lexical Expression of Syntactic Relations. In K. Hale and S. J.

Keyser (eds.), The View from Building 20. Essays in Linguistics in Honor of Sylvain Bromberger, 53-109. Cambridge,

MA: The MIT Press.

Ionescu, D. C., 1998, Small Clauses in English and Romanian. Bucureşti: Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti.

Lupşa, C. D., 2004, Resultative Phrases as Modifiers. Doctoral Dissertation, Tohoku University.

Ramchand, G., 2008, Verb Meaning and the Lexicon. A First-Phase Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Combining gender and classifiers.

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Fedden, Sebastian

(University of Surrey)

Many languages systematically categorize their nominal vocabulary into groups. This can happen along the lines of a gender

system, as in Italian, where nouns are assigned to either the masculine or the feminine gender. Another possibility is a

system of classifiers, as in the Austronesian language Kilivila, which distinguishes at least 177 categories (Senft 1996), based

on semantic properties, for example long and flexible objects, pots, or wooden objects. For the most part a language will

have only one system or the other. To have both gender and classifiers is a relatively rare type (see for example Aikhenvald

(2000) and Seifart (2005)).

Mian, a Papuan language of Papua New Guinea, is such a language. It has a gender system with four genders:

masculine, feminine, and two neuter genders. Agreement targets are the articles, pronouns and person indices on the verb.

In addition there are six classifiers: an M-class (containing male referents), an F-class (containing female referents), long

objects, bundles, objects which cover something, and a residue class. These classifiers have the form of prefixes on verbs of

object handling or movement, such as ‘give’, ‘take’, throw’ and ‘fall’. Agreement in gender and number with the controller

fút ‘tobacco (neuter)’ and the use of the classifier tob- ‘long object (

)’ is illustrated in example (1):

(1) nē fút=e tob-ò-n-i=a

tobacco=

ART

LONG

-take-

-1

SBJ

=and

‘I take the long tobacco leaf and then I …’

Although linguists agree that there is a distinction between gender and classifier systems, the definitions vary. Furthermore,

there are clearly intermediary cases. Therefore I take a canonical approach (Corbett 2011; Brown, Chumakina, and Corbett

2012) to give a precise characterization of both Mian categorization systems, based on their behaviour with respect to the

standard criteria given in the literature (cf. Dixon 1982; Dixon 1986; Aikhenvald 2000; Grinevald 2000). The Mian gender

system is canonical is all respects, while the classifiers constitute a more mixed system with properties of both types of

nominal categorization. For example, they encode classifier-type shape distinctions, such as ‘long object’, but their

occurrence as verbal prefixes is more reminiscent of the agreement affixes characteristic of gender systems. It is expected

that it should be the Mian gender system which is canonical rather than the classifier system given the language’s

morphological type. Mian is an inflecting (synthetic) language with the agreement morphology necessary for canonical

gender systems. Canonical classifiers, on the other hand, are rather associated with isolating languages.

The Mian evidence shows that we as linguists must not see nominal categorization systems as discrete entities but

that they are better captured as being more or less close to a canonical ideal. This allows us to integrate into our typology

the intermediate cases we find in the languages of the world.

References

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2000. Classifiers: A Typology of Noun Categorization Devices. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Brown, Dunstan, Marina Chumakina, and Greville G. Corbett. 2012. Canonical Morphology and Syntax. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Corbett, Greville G. 2011. The penumbra of morphosyntactic feature systems. Morphology 21 (=Jonathan Bobaljik, Uli

Sauerland, and Andrew Nevins (eds.), Markedness and Underspecification in the Morphology and Semantics of

Agreement), 445-480.

Dixon, R. M. W. 1982. Where Have All the Adjectives Gone? and Other Essays in Semantics and Syntax. Berlin: Mouton.

Dixon, R. M. W. 1986. Noun classes and noun classification in typological perspective. In Colette Craig (ed.), Noun Classes

and Categorization, 105-112. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Grinevald, Colette. 2000. A morphosyntactic typology of classifiers. In Gunter Senft (ed.), Systems of Nominal Classification,

50-92. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Seifart, Frank. 2005. The Structure and Use of Shape-based Noun Classes in Miraña (North West Amazon). Radboud

University PhD dissertation.

Senft, Gunter. 1996. Classificatory Particles in Kilivila. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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The particle n/ge in Ts'ixa - a narrative aspect?

Fehn, Anne-Maria

(Humboldt University and University of Cologne)

This talk will present preliminary results of an ongoing documentation project focusing on Ts’ixa, an Eastern Kalahari Khoe

language spoken by about 150 people in northeastern Botswana. Ts’ixa is a predominantly aspect-marking language, with

its aspectual system being based upon a

PERFECTIVE

IMPERFECTIVE

opposition. Ts’ixa has a special marker, the particle nǀge

(ne), which is primarily found in narrative texts, but sometimes also in constructions that emphasise a causal connection

between two successive events (ex. 1).

(1) baa=m ko ǁʔoo-no ti ka damaxu=m nǁge ǁʔɛ.m.xa.

father=sg.M IPFV die-SUB 1sg POSS sibling.y=sg.M NARR headman

‘When my father died my brother became headman.’

There is some evidence to suggest that in stories, events on the main narrative line are encoded by nǀge, while background

information, depending on the context, is encoded by

PERFECTIVE

IMPERFECTIVE

constructions.

Syntactically, nǀge behaves like Tense/Aspect/Mode (TAM)-marking particles in that its default position is after the

subject of the sentence. When pro-drop occurs, it either follows the verb or the discourse referential markers thia (tha) and

thoo whose exact functions still need to be determined.

nǀge is different from other TAM-marking particles in that it is not negated by the default negation suffix

ite, but by the suffix -tee which is attached to the verb stem (ex.2).

(2) ǁũũ-xa=dzi nǁge mũũ-a ʔãã-tee ǁu=si ǁũã ka te kau ta.

parent-?=pl.F NARR see-LINK know-NARR.NEG one=sg.F child POSS PRF stay COMP

‘The mothers did not notice one of the children had stayed behind.’

It is argued that clauses marked by n

ge perpetuate the continuation of action on the main narrative line. The sequence of

actions thereby strictly follows chronological order. Only events that actually further the storyline, i.e. that move the

narration-internal timeline forward, are marked by n

ge (ex. 3a-c).

(3a) hii-ǁũã haaka-se tha nǁge kũũ-ʔa ǁʔam goɛ=sa ʔa.

tree-DIM bring-ADV DRM NARR go-LINK beat cattle=sg.F ACC

‘Taking a stick, [she] went to beat the cow.’

(3b) tha goɛ=si nǁge tan.

DRM cattle=sg.F NARR stand.up

‘Then the cow stood up.’

(3c) ʔe.si nǁge ya-a tan tha ʔe.sera nǁge kuun na=sera ka

3sg.F NARR step-LINK stand.up DRM 3du.F NARR go DEM=du.F POSS

ǁʔae=m ʔo.

home=sg.M LOC

‘She rode on it and then they went to their home.’

Situations that form an ongoing background setting for the main narrative line or stretch across a sequence of singular

events are marked by the imperfective ko (ex.4):

(4) mĩĩ=tha ǁui ʔe.na ko k’ũĩ-se khoe=si ka ǁũã=si nǁge ǁʔora.

say=DRM one 3.pl.C IPFV live-ADV person=sg.F POSS child=sg.F NARR grow.

‘While they were only living like that, the woman's child grew up.’

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In contrast, the perfective -ha encodes completed events and situations that supplement the main narrative line without

moving the timeline forward (ex.5):

(5) biyee=dzi nǁge ǁgai-ku ǁũã =dzi ǁxoa. ǁau-se ǁgai-na-ha.

zebra=pl.F NARR run-REC child=pl.F COM be.big-ADV run-LINK-PFV

‘The zebras ran together with the children. It was a big run.'

The relevance of scalar implicatures: evidence from shallow processing of connectives AND and OR.

Fekete, István; Gerőcs, Mátyás and Surányi, Balázs

(Hungarian Academy of Sciences)

On one prominent view, common in neo-Gricean approaches (e.g., Levinson 2000, Horn 2006), scalar implicatures like “but

not both” in the exclusive interpretation of the conjunction or “A or B but not both”, are generated automatically by

default. On another, equally influential view, advocated by Relevance Theory, scalar implicatures are generated only in

contexts in which they are relevant, viz. they yield a significant cognitive effect at a reasonable processing cost (Sperber and

Wilson 1987/1995, Wilson and Sperber 2012). Although some recent psycholinguistic experiments, performed to assess the

opposing predictions of these two major theories of the way scalar implicatures arise, apparently disfavor the neo-Gricean

view (Bott and Noveck 2004, Breheny et al. 2006, Huang and Snedeker 2009), the results have been contested (Feeney et

al. 2004, Grodner et al. 2010).

We have addressed this debate by performing an experiment based on a form of ‘shallow’ processing. We tested

the processing of two connectives in Hungarian: and and or, in a sentence-picture verification task similar to those used in

the mental simulation literature (e.g., Stanfield and Zwaan, 2001; Zwaan et al., 2002). Each picture was preceded by a

sentence describing a scenario with two objects, appearing as NPs conjoined either by and or by or (Connective Type), e.g.,

John peeled the orange and/or the banana. The state of the two objects either matched or mismatched (Congruence) the

scenario explicitly described in the previous sentence. For example, in the mismatching condition of and-sentences only

one of the two objects was peeled (incongruently with and’s entailment). In the case of or-sentences, both objects were

peeled in the mismatching condition (incongruently with or’s implicature). Participants’ task was unrelated to both

Connective Type and Congruence: they had to decide if both of the two objects have been mentioned in the previous

sentence or not (without considering the states of the objects depicted). The dependent measure was response time to

picture stimuli. As the implicature associated with or would not yield any effect in terms of the task itself, on Relevance

Theoretic assumptions it should not arise.

Preliminary results with 33 participants suggest that there is a significant interaction between Connective Type

(and/or) and Picture Congruence (matching/mismatching), F(1, 31)=5.960, p=0.021. The main effect of Congruence was

marginally significant, F(1, 31)=3.371, p=0.076. Connective Type did not reveal a significant main effect, F(1, 31) = 0.491, p =

0.489. Importantly, mismatching pictures were verified significantly slower than matching pictures only in the case of

sentences with and-connectives, t(32)=-2.160, p=0.038. Such a congruence effect was not yielded after the or-sentences,

t(31)=0.159, p=0.875.

Our results indicate that, in this task, while the entailment of the connective and was computed automatically, the

implicature of or was not activated. This finding supports the Relevance Theoretic approach to scalar implicatures over neo-

Gricean accounts. Further, it may also be readily interpreted in the broader context of “good-enough” (Ferreira et al. 2002)

or “shallow” cognitive representations (Louwerse and Jeuniaux 2010).

Figure

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References

Barsalou, L. W. (1999). Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 22, 577–609.

Bott, L., & Noveck, I. A. (2004). Some utterances are underinformative: The onset and time course of scalar inferences.

Journal of Memory and Language, 51, 437–457.

Chevallier, C., Noveck, A, Nazir, T, Bott, L., Lanzetti, V., & Sperber, D. (2008). Making disjunctions exclusive. Quarterly

Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61, 1741-1760.

Feeney, A., Scafton, S., Duckworth, A., & Handley, S. J. (2004). The story of some: Everyday pragmatic inferences by children

and adults. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 121–132.

Ferreira, F., Ferraro, V., & Bailey, K. G. D. (2002). Good-enough representations in language comprehension. Current

Directions in Psychological Science, 11, 11–15.

Glenberg, A. M., & Kaschak, M. P. (2002). Grounding language in action. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 9, 558–565.

Grodner, D., Klein, N. M., Carbary, K. M., & Tanenhaus, M. K. (2010). ‘‘Some’’, and possibly all, scalar inferences are not

delayed: Evidence for immediate pragmatic enrichment. Cognition, 116, 42–55.

Huang, Y. T., & Snedeker, J. (2009). On-line interpretation of scalar quantifiers: Insight into the semantic-pragmatics

interface. Cognitive Psychology, 58, 376–415.

Levinson, S. (2000), Presumptive Meaning. The MIT Press.

Louwerse, M.M., & Jeuniaux, P. (2010). The Linguistic and Embodied Nature of Conceptual Processing. Cognition, 114, 96-

104.

Stanfield, R.A., & Zwaan, R.A. (2001). The effect of implied orientation derived from verbal context on picture recognition.

Psychological Science, 12, 153-156.

Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Zwaan, R.A., Stanfield, R.A., & Yaxley, R.H. (2002). Language comprehenders mentally represent the shapes of objects,

Psychological Science, 13, 168-171.

Zwaan, R. A., & Madden, C. J. (2005). Embodied sentence comprehension. In D. Pecher & R. A. Zwaan (Eds.), Grounding

cognition: The role of perception and action in memory, language, and thinking (pp. 224–245). New York:

Cambridge University Press.

Parallel texts and cross-linguistic correlations.

Fenk-Oczlon, Gertraud and Fenk, August

(Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt)

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In this paper we shall present quantitative data and cross-linguistic correlations gained from ‘translational’ parallel textual

material.

Syllable complexity and word length are considered as important variables in language typology. But how to

compare languages with respect to syllable complexity? Should one count the maximally elaborate syllable type or the

predominant syllable type in a language (Maddieson 2009). And how to compare word length in different languages - on the

basis of lexicon entries or on the basis of textual material? In our ongoing project we are using parallel textual material (i)

for cross-linguistic comparisons concerning these variables and (ii) to ascertain cross-linguistic correlations in the language

system.

Material. In order to make large-scale cross-linguistic comparisons, we need first of all a textual material that is easily

translatable in a large number of languages. Moreover, the possibilities or the freedom of the translations should be

minimized. Simple declarative clauses encoding one proposition and using a rather basic vocabulary meet these conditions;

they also seem to be universal from a syntactic perspective (Quite a number of languages use almost exclusively a series of

minimal-predications instead of more complex sentences. Cf. Sasse 1993, Heeschen 1994). Thus we constructed a set of 22

simple declarative sentences as source text. Examples for the test sentences are: The sun is shining. I thank the teacher. The

spring is on the right. Grandfather is sleeping. My father is a fisherman. Blood is red.

Procedure. Native speakers of meanwhile 51 languages from all continents (19 Indo-European, 32 Non-Indo-European) were

asked to translate the 22 sentences into their mother tongue. Furthermore, they were asked to count the number of

syllables in normal speech. The written translations allowed, moreover, counting the number of words per clause. The

number of phonemes was determined by the authors, assisted by the native speakers and by grammars of the respective

languages.

Results. In our sample of 51 languages, the mean number of syllables per clause is 7.02, ranging from 4.64 in Thai up to

10.96 in Telugu. The mean number of phonemes per syllable is 2.24, ranging from 2.79 in German to 1.76 in Hawaiian.

Further statistical analyses of our parallel texts revealed

– significant cross-linguistic correlations between syllable complexity and the

• number of syllables per clause and per word

• number of monosyllabic words

• number of cases

– interactions between metric and non-metric properties of language:

• associations between syllable complexity and morphological type (isolating, fusional, agglutinative), cumulative vs.

non-cumulative case exponents

• associations between syllable complexity and word order (OV vs. VO) as well as adposition order

• associations between intrinsic tempo (mean number of syllables per clause) and rhythm classes (stress-timed,

syllable-timed, mora-timed)

Verbs of seeming in Catalan, Galician and Spanish.

Fernández-Jaen, Jorge and Gónzalez-Vázquez, Mercedes

(University of Alicante and University of Vigo)

The aim of this study is to analyse what kind of evidential meaning can be attributed – following the parameters proposed

by Wiemer & Stathi (2010, EUROEVIDMOD Project)- to the Catalan, Galician and Spanish verbs of seeming: sembla, paréixe

+ infinitive, sembla/ paréixe que + finite construction, parece+ infinitive, parece que+ finite construction. We will examine the

various types of syntactic environments in which these verbs appear and will discuss whether the meanings are dependent

upon the complement type. Special attention is paid to the evidential meaning of parecer + infinitive, as it has been argued

that it is restricted to inference + perceptual and – perceptual (cfr. Cornillie 2009). Our assumption is, by contrast, that

parecer +infinitive in Spanish and Galician can also be interpreted as hearsay evidential, when it takes as complement an

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infinitive aspectually marked as + progressive (1) or + resultative ( 2 and 3).

1. La economía europea parece estar sufriendo la mayor recesión desde los años 30 (inferential and reportative

reading)

‘The European economy seems to be suffering / is said to be suffering the biggest recession since 1930’

2. El electricista parece haber robado el Códice Calixtino de la catedral (retrospective inference and reportative)

‘The electrician seems to have stolen/is said to have stolen the Calixtian Codex from the Cathedral’ ( I infer/ I was

told that the electrician...)

3. ’La cadena de alimentación “Día” parece haber tenido este año uno de sus mayores beneficios (inferential and

reportative reading).

‘The supermarket Día seems to have had/ is said to have had this year one of its biggest profits’ (I infer /I was told)

Furthermore, it will be discussed whether the link between the perceptual inferential reading and reportative reading

concerns the dimension of (inter)subjectivity (shared vs.non shared information). This paper also attempts to show to what

extent (inter)subjectivity plays a role in the evidential- epistemic interaction, as has been pointed out by Nuyts (2001) and

Cornillie (2009). Taking into account the complement type and the domain of (inter)subjectivity, we will try to prove that in

Catalan semblar and paréixer are not completely interchangeable and they activate different evidential meanings. Our

findings are based on corpus-based analyses using synchronic data of the mentioned languages.

References

Cornillie, B. (2009): Evidentiality and epistemic modality. Functions of Language 16-1, 44-62.

Nuyts, Jan (2001): Epistemic Modality, Language, and Conceptualization: A Cognitive-Pragmatic Perspective. Amsterdam:

Benjamins.

Squartini, Mario (2008): Lexical vs. grammatical evidentiality in French and Italian. Linguistics 46–5: 917–947.

Wiemer, Björn and Katerina Stathi (2010): Introduction: The database of evidential markers in European languages. A bird’s

eye view of the conception of the database (the template and problems hidden beneath it). In: Björn Wiemer and

Katerina Stathi (eds.) Database on Evidentiality Markers in European Languages. STUF-Language Typology and

Universals 63 (4): 275-285.

Intralinguistic variation in the categorization and labelling of body parts in Catalan: a methodological reflection.

Ferrerós, Carla

(Universitat de Girona)

According to the evidence that there is intralinguistic variation (individual or between speakers) in the categorization and

labelling of body parts that don’t have visually perceptible boundaries (

AUTHOR

, 2012), our main question is what kind of

relationship exists between the intralinguistic variation we have observed in Catalan data and the methodology we have

used to elicit the data, related to both the sample and the procedures. The literature on semantic categorization of body

parts focuses especially on the study of interlinguistic differences and similarities, from a typological or descriptive point of

view (Enfield et al., 2006; Majid, 2010), or from a universalistic approach (Andersen, 1978; Brown, 1976; Wierzbicka, 2007).

In our study, instead, we will not focus on the comparison between languages: we will describe aspects related to the

intralinguistic variation in the categorization and labelling of body parts in a unique linguistic variety, the central Catalan,

and we will delve into related methodological questions that the aforementioned authors don’t cast light on.

The data we have worked with was screened from the dictionary and from interviews and tests done by some

consultants. The sample is composed of sixteen Catalan L1 speakers of different ages (four groups of four speakers each),

sex (two men and two women for each group of age), and educational level (two speakers with higher degrees, and two

with primary studies in each group). All the consultants have made tests that induce metalinguistic reflection, and a semi

structured interview in order to generate spontaneous conversation.

The most important results of the study are:

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a) Each kind of methodological procedure leads to obtain different information about categorization and labelling of body

parts, depending on whether it origins a spontaneous speech, or a speech based on a metalinguistic reflection.

b) Some characteristics of the sample, i.e., age, educational level and sex of the consultants, are relevant to explain the

variation between different speakers.

We can conclude that depending on the methodological decisions (the choice of the procedures and the characteristics of

the sample) we will obtain different information about semantics and labelling. This implies that these decisions affect the

data the researcher bases his analysis on, and, therefore, the validity of their conclusions. This also opens up doors to

future research: What is the “real” categorization made by the speakers? The one they describe when they are in a

situation of metalinguistic reflection, or the one showed in spontaneous speech? Which one should be taken into account

in such studies, in the case the researcher really had to choose?

References

Andersen,

S. (1978): «Lexical Universals of Body-Part Terminology». A: Greenberg,

H. (ed.): Universals of Human

Language. Stanford (Califòrnia): Stanford University Press, vol. 3 (Word Structure), p. 335-367.

Brown,

H. (1976): «General principles of human anatomical partonomy and speculations on the growth of partonomic

nomenclature». American Ethnologist, 3, p. 400-424.

Enfield,

J.,

Majid

Van Staden (2006): «Cross-Linguistic Categorisation of the Body: Introduction». A: Majid,

A.,

Enfield

Van

Staden (eds.): Parts of the Body: Cross-Linguistic Categorisation (Special Issue). Language Sciences,

28, p. 137-147.

Majid, A. (2010): «Words for parts of the body». A: Malt, B.D. i P. Wolff (eds.): Words and the Mind: How words capture

human experience. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 58-71.

Wierzbicka, A. (2007): «Bodies and their parts: a NSM approach to semantic typology», Language Sciences, 29, p. 14-65.

Areal and typological distributions of features as evidence for language contacts in Western Europe.

Filppula, Markku

(University of Eastern Finland)

Extrapolation from areal and typological distributions of linguistic features is a particularly useful method for obtaining

additional evidence for language contacts in situations where there are few or no written records available from the earliest

periods of contact. This method has been successfully used, e.g. by Kiparsky (1969) to ascertain Finno-Ugrian substrate

influence on certain features of Russian syntax. It has similarly been used in comparative typological research, e.g. by

Haspelmath (1998) to explain the origins of the features that define Standard Average European (SAE), also known as the

European Sprachbund. Its ‘nucleus’ comprises French, Dutch, German, and (northern dialects of) Italian. The classic example

in this kind of research is, of course, the Balkan Sprachbund.

In this paper I seek to demonstrate how the same method can be applied to shed light on the nature and extent of

contacts between western European languages, including most notably English, French, and the Celtic languages. In the

linguistic literature, this idea has been mooted by various scholars writing on some syntactic or phonological features shared

by these western European languages. For example, Wagner (1959) observes a clear ‘geolinguistic connection’ between the

French mise en relief construction, i.e. c’est-clefting, and its Insular Celtic parallels. More recently, Wehr (2001) elaborates

on this by noting that clefting of this type is unidiomatic or at best rare in German, but a long-established and robust feature

of the Celtic languages and, of course, French. Wehr goes on to suggest that the Celtic and Romance languages, especially

French and Portuguese, form the core of a westlich-atlantischer Sprachbund, i.e. a western European linguistic area (see

Wehr 2001; Filppula 2009 for discussion). Another example of a Western European shared feature is verbal periphrasis by

means of a semantically empty verb ‘do’. Thus, van der Auwera and Genee (2002) and McWhorter (2009) have argued that

English and Celtic are typologically unusual amongst the languages of Europe and, indeed, of the whole world, in using

semantically empty ‘do’ constructions in negated and interrogative sentences. When one adds to this the earlier findings on

the regional distribution of periphrastic DO amongst English dialects (Poussa 1990; Klemola 2002), the case for contact

influence (most probably via the Cornish language) on this feature of English syntax seems strong enough.

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My focus in this paper will be on the above-mentioned geolinguistic connection between French c’est clefting, its

Insular and (possible) Continental Celtic parallels, and the English it-cleft construction. More particularly, it will be argued

that the prominence of clefting in these and some other Western European languages cannot be satisfactorily explained

without assuming a considerable degree of both earlier and later contact influences between them.

References

Filppula, Markku. 2009. ‘The rise of it-clefting in English: areal-typological and contact-linguistic considerations’. English

Language and Linguistics 13.2: 267–293.

Filppula, Markku, Juhani Klemola and Heli Pitkänen (eds) 2002. The Celtic Roots of English. Joensuu: Joensuu University

Press.

Haspelmath, Martin 1998. ‘How young is Standard Average European?’, Language Sciences 20:271-87.

Kiparsky, Valentin. 1969. Gibt es ein finnougrisches Substrat im Slavischen? Helsinki: The Finnish Academy of Sciences.

Klemola, Juhani. 2002. ‘Periphrastic do: dialectal distribution and origins’. In Filppula, Klemola and Pitkänen (eds), 199–210.

McWhorter, John. 2009. ‘What else happened to English? A brief for the Celtic hypothesis’. English Language and Linguistics

13.2: 163–191.

Poussa, Patricia. 1990. ‘A contact-universals origin for periphrastic do, with special consideration of OE-Celtic contact’. In

Adamson S. et al. (eds), Papers from the 5

International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, Cambridge,

6–9 April 1987. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 407–434.

Van der Auwera, Johan and Inge Genee. 2002. ‘English do: On the convergence of languages and linguists’. English Language

and Linguistics 6.2: 283–307.

Wagner, Heinrich 1959. Das Verbum in den Sprachen der Britischen Inseln. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.

Wehr, Barbara. 2001. ‘Ein westlich-atlantischer Sprachbund: Irisch, Französisch, Portugiesisch’. In H. Eichner, P.-A. Mumm, O.

Panagl, and E. Winkler (eds) Fremd und Eigen. Untersuchungen zu Grammatik und Wortschatz des Uralischen und

Indogremanischen in memoriam Hartmut Katz, Wien: Edition Praesens, 253–78.

Italian discourse markers in Ladin bilingual speech.

Fiorentini, Ilaria

(University of Pavia and Free University of Bolzano/Bozen)

Discourse markers are a multi-functional class of words with compositional meaning (Bazzanella 2006), which functions

include “providing cohesion by relating parts of a text to other parts, indicating the speaker’s attitude to an utterance, and

often thereby indicating the speaker’s attitude to the hearer” (Wichmann & Chanet 2009: 27).

The borrowing of discourse markers is very frequent in language contact situations (cf. for example Dal Negro

2005, Stolz 2007). Bilingual conversation offers “a unique perspective from which to examine discourse markers” (Maschler

2000: 437), also because they often occur with the bilingual strategy of language alternation. This alternation would

suggest, according to Maschler, that discourse markers are perceived by bilingual speakers as a distinct and unified

category, and are used as a strategy to mark the boundaries of continuous discourse (cf. Maschler 1994), therefore framing

units of talk, as already proposed by Schiffrin (1987). Furthermore, Matras (1998, 2000) has hypothesized that bilinguals,

when faced with the choice between the systems they have at disposal, tend to prefer the set of elements of the

pragmatically dominant (and so cognitively advantageous) language, i.e. the linguistic system to which speakers “direct

maximum mental effort at a given instance of linguistic interaction” (Matras 2000: 521).

The present research investigates the use of Italian discourse markers in the bilingual speech of Ladin speakers.

Ladin is a vital minority language spoken in the autonomous region of Trentino- South Tyrol. The data were collected in

Fassa Valley (in the province of Trento) and are made up of recordings of spontaneous and semi-spontaneous speech

(conversations and interviews) of bilingual speakers who interact daily usually in both Italian and Ladin; however, for the

recordings they were asked to use their local variety of Ladin.

I will focus on the Italian discourse markers allora (Ladin enlouta ‘then, well’; cf. Stolz 2007, Bazzanella &

Borreguero Zuloaga 2011), comunque (Lad. aboncont ‘however’), quindi (Lad. donca ‘then, therefore’) and cioè (Lad. vel dir,

voi dir ‘that is’). Although Ladin speakers have at their disposal these specific discourse markers in both languages, in my

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data they rarely use Ladin markers; they prefer to switch to Italian instead, especially as a strategy to mark out discourse

boundaries.

The expected result of the research is therefore twofold: firstly, to find out if the Italian discourse markers listed

above have replaced the equivalent Ladin markers (so signaling that Italian is the pragmatically dominant language for

these speakers); secondly, in the case Ladin markers are still a competing resource, to verify if they are used

interchangeably or if they specialized in function (cf. Auer 1998).

References

Auer, P. (1998). From codeswitching via language mixing to fused lects: towards a dynamic typology of bilingual speech. In

The International Journal of Bilingualism, 3(4), 309-332.

Bazzanella, C. (2006). Discourse markers in Italian: towards a ‘compositional’ meaning. In Fischer, K. (ed.), Approaches to

discourse particles, Amsterdam: Elsevier, 449-464.

Bazzanella, C. & Borreguero Zuloaga, M. (2011). Allora e entonces: problemi teorici e dati empirici. In Khachaturyan, E. (ed.),

Oslo Studies in Language 3:1, 7-45.

Dal Negro, S. (2005). Lingue in contatto: il caso speciale dei segnali discorsivi. In Banti, G.,Marra, A. & Vineis, E. (eds), Atti del

4 congresso di studi dell’Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Applicata (Modena, 19-20 febbraio 2004), Perugia:

Guerra Edizioni, 73-88.

Maschler, Y. (1994). Metalanguaging and discourse markers in bilingual conversation. In Language in Society 23, 325-366.

Matras, Y. (1998). Utterance modifiers and universals of grammatical borrowing. In Linguistics 36, 281-331.

Matras, Y. (2000). Fusion and the cognitive basis for bilingual discourse markers. In International Journal of bilingualism 4,

505-528.

Schiffrin, D. (1987). Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stolz, T. (2007). Allora. On the recurrence of function-word borrowing in contact situations withItalian as donor language.

In: Rehbein, J., Hohenstein, C. & Pietsch, L. (eds.), Connectivity in grammar and discourse, Amsterdam: John

Benjamins, 75–99.

Wichmann, A. & Chanet, C. (2009). Discourse markers: a challenge for linguists and teachers. In Nouveaux cahiers de

linguistique française 29, 23-40.

Exploring the interactional notion of 'normative orientation'

for describing linguistic generalization in construction grammar.

Fischer, Kerstin

(University of Southern Denmark)

In construction grammar, which sees grammar as the cognitive organization of experience with language use (e.g. Bybee

2006: 711), the traditional notion of ‘rule’ is replaced by the notion of cognitive schema, which mayaccount for different

chaacteristics, such as regularity, schematicity and productivity (cf. Dabrowska 2008, 2010). Furthermore, the

generalizations made may differ between speakers such that people may schematize constructions to varying degrees (e.g.

Street & Dabrowska 2010). Constructions thus form a highly dynamic network which is taken to be constructed by language

users themselves. Due to their focus on cognitive processing, construction grammarians aim at the empirical validation of

the structures assumed, for instance, by for instance, experimental learning tasks and corpus studies (e.g. Gries & Wulff

2009), card sorting and selecting tasks (e.g. Street & Dabrowska 2010), comprehension tests and generalization to nonce

words (e.g. Goldberg 2006).

In contrast, in ethnomethodological conversation analysis (CA, cf. Sacks et al. 1974), 'rules' are understood as

normatively attended to practices (Hutchby & Wooffitt 1998: 50); they are therefore not simple descriptions of people’s

behaviors, but instead “followable, practiced, employed – oriented to by the participants“ (Schegloff 1992: 120). Normative

orientation shows in various ways; for instance, deviance from the rules is accountable, such that speakers may justify the

violations of these rules, or co-participants may request such justifications (cf. Heritage 1988). Orientation to a particular

structure however is also revealed if this structure is jointly produced, as, for instance, in collaborative construction (Auer

2005).

In this presentation, I want to investigate to what extent 'normative orientation' can be used to provide an

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empirical methodology to demonstrate the cognitive reality of cognitive processes (or the resulting structures) assumed in

construction grammar. Thus, while conversation analysts generally reject cognitive explanations (e.g. Hopper 2011), the

methodology to investigate what participants orient to, i.e. what constitutes participant categories, may constitute a so far

unused method to identify the generalizations members of a speech community really attend to online during speech

production. I present example analyses that show how conversation analytic methodologies can provide evidence for

various types of schematizations and generalizations as participant categories. Studies of interaction by means of CA may

thus provide a methodology contributing to identifying grammar as attended to organization of experience with language

use and thus contribute a possible path from interaction to (construction) grammar.

Moreover, I want to argue that ‘rules’ in construction grammar and in conversation analysis share many central

characteristics, such that they are assumed to be participant categories (cognitively or socially attended to), they are

optional, yet their violation has semantic or interactional consequences, they are not causal, and they are simultaneously

context-free and context-sensitive.

Dialectological evidence for a predicate focus analysis of Gascon ‘que’.

Floricic, Franck

(Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle)

As is well known, Gascon is an Occitan variety spoken in the southwestern part of the Occitan domain. The question I will

address in this talk concerns the so-called “que déclaratif” or “que énonciatif”, whose distribution is illustrated in (1) with

examples from Fleischer (1913: 121) and Ronjat (1913: 80):

(1)

a. Era ceremounia que couménce

the.fem.sg ceremony.sg Enc begin.3sg

‘The ceremony is beginning’

b. Qué bèni

Enc come.1sg

‘I am coming’

c. Qué plau

Enc rain.3sg

‘It’s raining’

d. Eras mountanhos qu’èron frédos

the.fem.pl mountain.pl Enc were cold.fem.pl

‘The mountains were cold’

e. You que’t pàrli

I Enc ClO2sg talk.1sg

‘As far as I am concerned, I’am talking to you’

As shown in (1a-d), the particle “que” immediately precedes the verb, whatever its argumental structure; “que” can be

separated from the verb mainly by clitics, as shown in (1e). The distributional constraints in the use of “que” are rather

complex and have given rise to many discussions and various hypotheses among Romanists. I will not discuss the syntactic

status of the different utterance-level particles found in Gascon (cf. bè, se, e, jà, etc.) nor will I investigate the supposed

correlation between basque and gascon constructions and the interference between enunciative particles and other types

of modalities (interrogation, negation, etc.). I will simply provide evidence for a predicate-focus analysis of Gascon “que”,

basing myself on unpublished dialectological material gathered in the 1970’s in the Occitan area. I will show that these data

support the view put forth by Dauzat (1906: 234), according to which «Les patois d’une masse linguistique donnée et de

même origine – par exemple les parlers romans – nous présentent en leur infinie variété géographique un aperçu simultané,

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dans l’espace, des phénomènes qui se sont produits dans le temps à des époques très différentes».

The unpublished data I will discuss clearly show that the particle “que” is used in the context of a fossilized cleft

sentence: it will be argued that the Gascon utterance particle first appears in sentences like French C’est qu’il pleut “The fact

is that it is rainning”. Once the auxiliary disappears, we are left with a clause-initial complementizer endowed with the

function of marking the predicate focus domain. It will be asked whether the evolutionary scenario should be described as a

grammaticalization process. I will argue that the Gascon data favour a transgrammaticalization analysis: a given

(grammatical) marker “refunctionalizes” as a predicate focus marker.

Switch reference systems in the Barbacoan languages and their neighbors

Floyd, Simeon and and Elisabeth Norcliffe

(Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)

All of the Barbacoan languages of Ecuador and Colombia feature some kind of switch reference, but the morphology and

semantic distinctions of the systems vary greatly from language to language. This paper surveys switch reference in the

Barbacoan languages and asks to what extent switch reference is a feature of the family versus an areal feature of the

region more generally. The only clear cognate morpheme shared among the systems is the same referent marker in

Cha’palaa (-tu) and Tsafiki (-to) (Dickinson 2002). Awa Pit is reported to have no switch reference system for sequential

dependent clauses, only for purpose clauses (Curnow 1997). The other three languages do have sequential switch

reference, but only Cha’palaa is reported to also have a version of the purpose clause-marking system like Awa Pit.

sequential

Tsafiki

Cha'palaa

Awa Pit

Guambiano

same referent

different referent

ñu

purpose clause

Tsafiki

Cha'palaa

Awa Pit

Guambiano

same referent

different referent

napa

The dissimilarity of the different Barbacoan switch-reference systems complicates an account of their origins as exclusively

through family inheritance. Areality is also a likely contributor, since most other regional languages also feature switch

reference systems. Ecuadorian Quechua, for example, has both sequential and purpose clause switch reference marking.

However, the fact that all Barbacoan languages feature variants of the system partially supports an account of it as a

particular feature of the family. Likely, the truth lies somewhere in between, with both genetic and areal factors setting the

stage for different cycles of development, loss and reanalysis of switch reference morphology. This scenario, in turn,

informs accounts of the mechanisms by which the Americas have come to be an area where switch reference is especially

widespread.

References

Curnow, Timothy J. 1997. A Grammar of Awa Pit (Cuaiquer): An indigenous language of south-western Colombia. Ph.D. diss.

Canberra: Australian National University.

Dickinson, Connie. 2002. Complex Predicates in Tsafiki. PhD dissertation. University of Oregon.

Gerunds in Late Middle and Late Modern English: a case of shifting discourse-functional paradigms?

Fonteyn, Lauren; De Smet, Hendrik and Heyvaert, Liesbet

(University of Leuven)

This paper discusses the development of nominal and verbal gerunds from Late Middle to Late Modern English with a focus

on their use in prepositional environments. Nominal gerunds, as in (1) and (2), have the internal syntax of a noun phrase

(NP), whereas verbal gerunds, as in (3), have the internal syntax of a clause.

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(1) And at the comyng of the camptayne [captain] yn to Sowtheworke, he lete smyte of the hedde of a strong theff that

was namyd Haywardyn. (c1475, PPCME2)

(2) (…)in savyng of oure lyvys , we woll do as thou commaundys us.(a1470, PPCME2)

(3) Onely they that be called beneficiall, and do use the vertue of beneficence, whiche consisteth in counsaylinge and

helpinge other with any assistence in tyme of need.(

1531, PPCEME)

De Smet (2008) suggests that in Early Modern English the verbal gerund (VG), which developed from the nominal variant,

replaced the determinerless bare nominal gerund (BNG) (2). While both gerund types had largely similar discourse-

functional behaviour (expressing mostly generic and indefinite reference) and distribution (occurring with the same set of

prepositions), De Smet (2008) suggests that the verbal gerund is syntactically more flexible. Definite nominal gerunds

(DNGs) as in (1) did not compete with verbal gerunds, as they most often denoted a specific definite event and were thus

discourse-functionally distinct. Moreover, the DNG was the only gerund type that favoured use as a temporal landmark,

and thus combined with a distinct set of temporal prepositions (after, before, since, upon, at).

De Smet (2008) adds that "BNGs and especially VGs can occasionally refer to a specific event without being

necessarily indefinite, provided that the implied agent of the gerund is controlled by an element in the matrix clause” (De

Smet 2008: 83):

(4) (…) then, soone after, I tooke my Cotch and went to Linton, wher, I aftor saluting my mother, praied, and so went to

supper (1599–1601, HC)

The present paper wishes to re-examine the discourse-functional and distributional behaviour of DNGs, VGs and BNGs.

Since the use of controlled VGs became much more common after 1640, it can be expected that the increased discourse-

functional and distributional overlap between DNGs and VGs challenged the existing division of labour. To that end, the

present paper (i) maps out the contexts in which the BNG and VG acquired specific meaning and (ii) studies the nature and

outcome of the resulting competition between the DNG and VG. This hypothesis is addressed by analysing the nominal and

verbal gerunds found in the suite of the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English, divided into 3 periods covering the 1420-

1914 time span.

(i)Results show that BNGs and VGs acquired specific non-indefinite meanings through a number of prepositions

that simultaneously allow for a generic (as described in Declerck 1986) and a specific event reading:

(5) (…)Syr , I vndyrstond +tat +ge han synned in letchery , in dyspeyr & in kepyng of wordly good.(c1450, PPCME2)

(ii)However, the resulting increased discourse-functional overlap between VGs and DNGs after 1640 seems to have

had very little effect on the frequency of DNGs in prepositional and other environments, indicating that DNGs and

controlled VGs are not competing variants. It will be suggested that the system of gerunds evolved to a new division of

labour: the nominal gerund now constitutes a system with nominal grounding, primarily concerned with referent

identification (Langacker 2009:150) and using definite and indefinite determiners to indicate whether or not the designated

event is known to the hearer. The verbal gerund, on the other hand, has come to focus more on clausal grounding

categories (based on whether an event did, will or can occur) and is as such increasingly tied to the modal and temporal

space evoked by the matrix clause.

References

De Smet, Hendrik. 2008. “Functional motivations in the development of nominal and verbal gerunds in Middle and Early

Modern English”. English Language and Linguistics 12:55-102.

Declerk, R. 1986. “The manifold interpretations of generic sentences”. Lingua 68:149-188.

Langacker, R. W. 2009. Investigations in Cognitive Grammar. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.

Recontextualising slogans and concepts from the past:

a discourse-historical analysis of the re/branding of the Austrian Freedom Party.

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Forchtner, Bernhard and Wodak, Ruth

(Humboldt University and Lancaster University)

Among the many contemporary far-right populist parties, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), together with the Swiss

People’s Party, is the most salient member of this party family. Having its origins in the German Nationalist movement, its

success rests on a variety of factors, ranging from the specific political structures in Austria to a more generic xenophobic

and antisemitic rhetoric (e.g. Maas 1985; Reisigl & Wodak 2000, 2001; Wodak & Pelinka 2002; Mudde 2007; Schmitz-Bering

2007; Krzyżanowski & Wodak 2009; Richardson & Wodak 2009a, b; Harrison & Bruter 2011; Köhler & Wodak 2011; Wodak

et al. 2013).

Since 2005, the style of the FPÖ’s political campaigning has become increasingly innovative, including not only the

use of (new social) media but also rap songs and comic-like booklets (Forchtner & Wodak 2013; Wodak & Forchtner 2013).

On the one hand, this new kind of political communication integrates elements of advertising genres (e.g. rhetorical and

pragmatic elements, such as creating new forms of address as well as employing new textual structures via indirect appeals,

insinuations, presuppositions and implicatures) (Wodak 2007; Mitsikopolou 2009). On the other hand, the data illustrates

the increasing commodification of politics and the recontextualisation of literary genres and elements from popular culture

(Forchtner et al. 2013; Tolson & Ekström 2013).

Against this background, we explore how the FPÖ communicates with an ever more pluralistic audience, addressing

both ‘moderates’ through anti-elitist populism as well as more nationalistic and revisionist voters, sometimes echoing even

National Socialist themes and slogans.

We utilize the discourse-historical approach in CDS in order to trace conceptual, rhetorical and discursive

continuities (Reisigl & Wodak 2009; Wodak et al. 2009). Furthermore, we draw on theories of conceptual history (Wengeler

2003; Koselleck 2004; Krzyżanowski 2010), multimodality (Kress & Van Leeuwen 2006; Machin 2007; Van Leeuwen 2010),

and on hybrid political genres such as rap songs and comics (Forchtner & Kolvraa 2013; Cap & Okulska 2013; Wodak 2010,

2012; Saraceni 2003; Sabin 1996; van Leeuwen & Suleiman 2010). For example, we focus on such old-new concepts as

umvolken or Heimat and trace their semantic shifts in ‘new’ genres.

Our data consist of four rap songs (2006, 2008, 2009 and 2010), two extensive hybrid comic books (2009 and 2010),

and an antisemitic caricature posted by the leader of the FPÖ on Facebook (2012) as well as several party campaign posters.

We illustrate, first, how audio, textual and visual modes have enabled the FPÖ to address a pluralistic audience, i.e. more

moderate voters and their core extreme rightwing audience, via the discursive strategy of calculated ambivalence (Engel &

Wodak 2009, 2012). We argue, second, that these interventions have consolidated the party’s self-representation and

performance as ‘young’, ‘modern’ and ‘saying the unsayable’. While thus showing in linguistic detail how old ideologies are

revamped in new rhetoric and genres, we, third, argue that their emergence can only be understood within the

contemporary trend of ‘fictionalisation of politics’ (Wodak 2010, 2011; Forchtner & Wodak 2013).

References

Cap, P. and Okulska, U. (Eds.) (2013) Political Genres. Benjamins.

Engel, J. and Wodak, R. (2009): Kalkulierte Ambivalenz, ‘Störungen’ und das ‘Gedankenjahr’: Die Causen Siegfried Kampl und

John Gudenus, in: R. de Cillia and R. Wodak (Eds.). Gedenken im ‚Gedankenjahr‘. Zur diskursiven Konstruktion

österreichischer Identität im Jubiläumsjahr 2005. Studienverlag, 79-99.

Engel, J. and Wodak, R. (2012). Calculated ambivalence and Holocaust denial in Austria, in: R. Wodak and J. E. Richardson

(Eds.). Analysing European Fascist Discourse. Fascism in Talk and Text. Routledge.

Forchtner, B. and Kølvraa, C. (2012): The desire for unity in Austrian and Danish post-war-films: The case of Der Bockerer

(1981) and Matador (19781981). Zeitgeschichte. 39(6): 388-402.

Forchtner, B. and Wodak, R. (2013): Conveying regression through comics – the case of the Austrian Freedom Party: a critical

discourse analysis. In: F. Virchow (Ed.). The Far Right and Visual Politics. VS (in press).

Forchtner, B., Krzyzanowski, M. and Wodak, R. (2013): Mediatisation, right-wing populism and political campaigning: the

case of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), in: A. Tolson and M. Ekström (Eds.). Media Talk and Political Elections in

Europe and America. Palgrave (in press).

Harrison, S. and Bruter, M. (2011). Mapping Extreme Right Ideology: An Empirical Geography of the European Extreme

Right. Palgrave.

Köhler, K. and Wodak, R. (2011): ‘”Mitbürger, Fremde und ‘echte Wiener’” – Ein- und Ausgrenzung über Sprache’,

Deutschunterricht 6(11): 2-20.

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Koselleck, R. (2004). Future Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press.

Kress, G. R. and van Leeuwen, T. (2006). Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. Taylor & Francis.

Krzyżanowski, M. and Wodak, R. (2008). The Politics of Exclusion: Debating Migration in Austria. Transaction Publisher.

Krzyżanowski, M. (2010): Discourses and concepts: Interfaces and synergies between Begriffsgeschichte and the discourse-

historical approach in CDA, in: R. De Cillia, H. Gruber, M. Krzyżanowski and F. Menz (Eds.). Politik–

Identität/Discourse–Politics–Identity. Stauffenburg Verlag, 125–137.

Maas, U. (1985). "Als der Geist der Gemeinschaft eine Sprache fand": Sprache im Nationalsozialismus. Versuch einer

historischen Argumentationsanalyse. VS.

Machin, D. (2007). Introduction to Multimodal Analysis. Bloomsbury.

Mitsikopolou, B. (2009): Introduction: Branding Political Entities and Discursive Practices, Journal of Language and Politics

7(3): 1–17.

Mudde, C. (2007). Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge University Press.

Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (2001). Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism. Routledge.

Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (2009): The discourse-historical approach. In: R. Wodak and M. Meyer (Eds.). Methods of Critical

Discourse Analysis. Sage, 87-121. (2

revised edition).

Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (Eds.) (2000) The Semiotics of Racism. Approaches in Critical Discourse Analysis. Passagen-Verlag.

Richardson, J. E. and Wodak, R. (2009a): The impact of visual racism: visual arguments in political leaflets of Austrian and

British far-right parties. Controversia 6(2): 45-77.

Richardson, J. E. and Wodak, R. (2009b): Recontextualising fascist ideologies of the past: right-wing discourses on

employment and nativism in Austria and the United Kingdom. Critical Discourse Studies 6(4): 251-267.

Sabin, R. (1996). Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art. Phaidon.

Saraceni, M. (2003). The Language of Comics. Routledge.

Schmitz-Bering, C. (2007). Vokabular des Nationalsozialismus. de Gruyter.

Tolson, Andrew and Ekström, Mats (Eds.) (2013). Media Talk and Political Elections in Europe and America. Palgrave.

Van Leeuwen, T. (2010). The Language of Colour: An introduction. Taylor & Francis.

van Leeuwen, T. and Suleiman, U. (2010): Globalizing the local: the case of an Egyptian superhero comic, in: N. Coupland

(Ed.), The Handbook of Language and Globalization. Wiley-Blackwell, 232-254.

Wengeler, M. (2003): Kalter Krieg, Abschreckung, Politik der Stärke. Die fünfziger Jahre als ‚Sattelzeit’ außenpolitischer

Begrifflichkeit, in: C. Dutt (Ed.). Herausforderungen der Begriffsgeschichte. Universitätsverlag Winter, 195-218.

Wodak, R. (2007) Pragmatics and Critical Discourse Analysis. A cross-disciplinary analysis. Pragmatics and Cognition, 15(1):

203-225.

Wodak, R. (2010): The glocalization of politics in television: fiction or reality? European Journal of Cultural Studies 13(1), 1-

20.

Wodak, R. (2011). The Discourse of Politics in Action – Politics as Usual. Palgrave (2

revised edition).

Wodak, R. and Forchtner, B. (2013): Embattled Vienna 1683/2010: right-wing populism, collective memory and the

fictionalisation of politics. Visual Communication (in press).

Wodak, R. and Pelinka, A. (Eds.) (2002). The Haider Phenomenon in Austria. Transaction.

Wodak, R., De Cillia, R., Reisigl, M., Liebhart, K. (2009). The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh University

Press (2

revised edition).

Wodak, R. (2012): Discrimination via discourse: Theories, methodologies and examples. Zeitgeschichte, 39(6): 403-422.

Wodak, R., KhosraviNik, M. and Mral, B. (Eds.) (2013). Rightwing Populism across Europe. Politics and Discourse. Bloomsbury

(in press).

Russian-Hinuq language contact.

Forker, Diana

(University of Bamberg)

Hinuq is a Nakh-Daghestanian language with around 600 speakers. It has been in contact with the surrounding languages

such as Tsez, Bezhta, Georgian, and Avar for many centuries. Avar (Nakh-Daghestanian) was a major lingua franca in the area

where Hinuq is spoken and has left numerous traces particularly in the Hinuq vocabulary. However, since the last 50 years or

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so Russian has taken over the role of Avar. Russian is now by far the most important second language for Hinuq speakers,

though they normally do not have many contacts with Russian native speakers.

In my talk I will explore the influence of Russian on Hinuq in two domains of the grammar, namely the lexicon and

the word order.

Concerning the lexicon I will focus on two questions: 1. Do Russian loans preferably replace Avar loans or do they

merely extend the Hinuq lexicon? For instance, the verb ‘to live’ can be expressed in Hinuq with ʕumru -uː-, lit. ‘life do’

consisting of the noun ʕumru, which entered the language from Avar, and a Hinuq verb. However, many Hinuq speakers use

a Russian loan verb and a different Hinuq verb: žit -iq- lit. ‘live be’. Similarly, the Avar loan xexɬi ‘fast’ is frequently replaced

by the Russian adverb begom (lit. ‘on the run’). 2. The Hinuq lexicon contains a large number of verbal borrowings with the

structure of light verb construction consisting of an Avar or nowadays Russian verb in the infinitive and the Hinuq verbs -iq-

‘be, become, happen’ or - uː- ‘do’. Are these light verb constructions always a combination of two verbs with the same

valency, as in (1), which combines a Russian transitive verb (saedinit) with a Hinuq transitive verb -uː- (‘do’)?

(1) saedinit r-uw-o!=ƛen eƛin

unite V-do-IMP=QUOT say.CVB

‘“Unite them!” he said.’

Second, an important area in which Russian influence on the grammatical structure may be noticed is word order: Russian is

usually assumed to have free word order, but with an underlying SVO structure (cf. Tomlin 1986). Nakh-Daghestanian

languages also have free word order, but SOV is clearly the preferred and most common variant (REF). Thus, if Russian

influence on Hinuq has grown within the last 50 year, one expects to find significantly more sentences with SVO structure in

modern Hinuq texts than in old Hinuq texts. In order to explore this question I will compare ten published narratives

collected in the 1940es and 1950es (Lomtadze 1963, Imnajšvili 1963, Bokarev 1967) with ten narratives from young Hinuq

speakers (11-27 years old) collected from 2006-2011. Similar changes (from OV to VO) have been reported for other

languages in the Caucasus (cf. Skopeteas 2012).

The data used in this talk has been collected by the author in the field. The published texts have been checked

again with native Hinuq speakers.

References

Bokarev, Evgenij A. 1967. Ginuxskij jazyk [Hinuq]. In Evgenij A. Bokarev & K. V. Lomtatidze (eds.), Jazyki narodov SSSR, Vol. IV,

436–454. Moscow: Nauka.

Imnajšvili, David S. 1963. Didojskij jazyk v sravnenii s ginuxskim i xwaršijskim jazykami [The Dido language in comparsion

with Hinuq and Khwarshi]. Tbilisi: Izd. AN Gruzinskoj SSR.

Lomtadze, Èlizbar A. 1963. Ginuxskij dialekt didojskogo jazyka [The Hinuq dialect of the Dido language]. Tbilisi: Izd. AN

Gruzinskoj SSR.

Skopeteas, Stavros. 2012. Syntactic change and language contact in Caucasian Urum. Talk at the conference “Typology,

Theory: Caucasus”, Boğaziçi University Istanbul.

Testelec, Jakov G. 1998a. Word order in Daghestanian languages. In Anna Siewierska (ed.), Constituent order in the

languages of Europe, 257–280. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Testelec, Jakov G. 1998b. Word order variation in some SOV languages of Europe. In Anna Siewierska (ed.), Constituent order

in the languages of Europe, 649–679. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Tomlin, Russell. 1986. Basic word order: Functional principles. London: Croom Helm.

The modal category concern.

Frajzyngier, Zygmunt

(University of Colorado)

Background and open questions

Frajzyngier et al. 2005 proposes the existence in Mina (Central Chadic) of a grammatical category ‘point of view of the

subject’, marked by the particle ka (with tone polar to that of the preceding syllable), which invites the listener to consider

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how the event affects the subject and also codes the speaker’s empathy with respect to the subject (1a). The sentence

without the marker kà does not indicate empathy (1b). The problem with the analysis in Frajzyngier 2005 is that there are

examples involving ka that do not indicate empathy (ex. 2). This raises question 1: What is the function of the particle ka?

and the larger question 2: How does one discover the function of a grammatical form?

Methodology. In order to discover the function of a grammatical form, it is necessary to study the contrast between this

form and other forms available in the given language.

Language-specific hypothesis. The particle ka is a modal marker that codes the speaker’s concern with respect to the event

or one of the participants of the event. This hypothesis replaces the hypothesis in Frajzyngier et al. 2005. The category

‘concern’ has not been postulated within the modal system or any other system (Palmer 1986). The speaker’s concern

subsumes the speaker’s disapproval (3a) or approval (3b) and the benefit for the speaker (3c) or the object (ex. 4). The

category concern also implies that the speaker considers the event to be unusual, newsworthy. In ex. 5, perceiving that just

one sesame seed fell into the water is an unusual fact that warrants the speaker’s concern.

Argumentation. The evidence that the particle ka belongs to the category mood is provided by the fact that while ka can

occur in affirmative indicative and imperative moods it cannot occur in polar questions, negative, or prohibitive moods, all

of which are marked by clause-final particles. This raises questions concerning relationships within the modal systems of

Mina. This co-occurrence restriction indicates, that concern is a subdomain of the epistemically unmarked mood. It cannot

occur with the negative and interrogative clauses, because these are epistemically marked. It can occur with imperative,

because imperative belongs to a different type of modality, deontic. The particle ka is in contrast with the clause-final

particle zà, which does not code the speaker’s concern (as in ex. 2). If the action is obviously detrimental to the speaker or

affects the speaker in some other way, the form kà must be used (ex. 6).

Implications. The present study demonstrates the existence of a grammatical category that has not been observed so far.

Markers of modality belonging to different subdomains with the domain of modality can co-occur, while markers belonging

to the same subdomain cannot co-occur. The reason the category concern cannot occur in negative clauses (with the

exception of rhetorical negatives) is that within the epistemic mood two marked modalities such as negation and concern,

or question and concern would contradict each other. On the other hand, the indicative mood can occur with the category

concern, and moods from different domains, imperative and concern can cooccur with each other.

References

Frajzyngier, Zygmunt, and Eric Johnston,with Adrian Edwards. 2005. A Grammar of Mina. Berlin/New York: Mouton de

Gruyter.

Palmer, F.R. 1986. Mood and modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Context-specific motivation for constructionalization.

Fried, Mirjam

(Charles University)

The central concern of this talk is the emergence of new linguistic structure in spoken interaction (in the spirit of Fillmore

1974/1981, 1982, which was concerned primarily with written discourse). In a corpus-based constructional analysis of

conversational Czech, I investigate the details of a process in which a bi-clausal genuine information question (1) loses its

transparent syntactic and propositional composition and gradually evolves into a single expression of the speaker’s

subjective stance (3), through various intermediate stages in which the main clause atrophies into a mere particle (2). The

process appears to be closely associated with argumentative contexts and this connection helps account for the outcome: a

new construction, whose function is to provide a counter-argument to something in the immediately preceding discourse.

One cluster of questions to be addressed concerns the disappearance of the erstwhile matrix clause – a full-fledged

question (1); another concerns the changes in the embedded clause, fully established in (3): semantic (‘know if p’ > ‘I don’t

think that p’, with an adversative flavor), pragmatic (genuine question > assertion), formal (addition of the negative polarity

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marker vůbec ‘not at all’, with consequences for negation on the verb), and prosodic. I argue that the pattern in (3) is a

distinct grammatical construction. The example in (2) illustrates a transitional variant between (1) and (3), but it can be

shown that this hybrid is already associated with distinctly different communicative contexts and interactional surroundings

than the cases shown in (1).

(1) Kdo (z vás) ví, jestli bude příští týden zkouška?

who (of you) knows if will.be next week rehearsal

‘Who (among you) knows if there’s a rehearsal next week?’

(2) (K)doví jestli bude příští týden zkouška.

PART if will.be next week rehearsal

‘There may not be a rehearsal next week; [I doubt there will be].’

(3) (Ale) jestli (vůbec) bude příští týden zkouška.

But if (not.at.all) will.be next week rehearsal

‘(But) I don’t think there will be a rehearsal next week (at all).

The material is all taken from the spoken corpora of the Czech National Corpus and the analysis is based in a Construction

Grammar approach to linguistic strucure, enriched by certain strands of the Conversation Analysis approach (e.g. (Linell,

2009, Lindström and Londen, 2008).

The aim of the study is two-fold: (i) to validate the view that a systematic study of spoken syntax is a source of

valuable insight into the cognitive and communicative underpinnings of linguistic structure, its variability, and change over

time (cf. also Fried & Őstman 2005, Fried 2011, Ariel 2010, Fischer 2010, among others); and (ii) to explore the nature of

constructionalization as a distinct process of forming new grammatical entities by reshaping existing pattterns used in

specific interactional contexts, joining the current debates on this topic (e.g. Traugott 2008, 2010, Trousdale 2010, Hoffmann

and Trousdale 2011).

Parallel universes and universal parallels: Romani evidential strategies.

Friedman, Victor

(University of Chicago)

As Hamp (1977) has argued in the context of typology, and as Joseph (2001) has argued in the context of formal syntax,

areal linguistics (or contact linguistics) is an historical discipline, the mirror image of genealogical linguistics. Anthropological

linguists have seriously questioned the distinction between change during transmission (in the course of child language

acquisition) and change via diffusion (i.e., contact induced), while sociolinguists adduce new evidence for the difference

(Labov 2007). Bisang (2004, 2006) argues for an integrative approach to language change utilizing typology, dialectology,

sociolinguistics, and contact linguistics. This paper will contribute to Bisang’s argument by examining the question of

differentiating the typological versus the areal in explicating causation, specifically in the realm of evidentiality.

The approach is basically structural-functional, and the methodology involves the comparative analysis of original

fieldwork material and material from published sources. The concrete data center on use of the Slavic interrogative particle

li in the Kriva Palanka Arli dialect of Romani (Republic of Macedonia) to mark dubitativity in declarative sentences. This

usage suggests that the use of li as a general evidential strategy (Aikhenvald 2003) which occurs in the Romani dialect of

Sliven, Bulgaria (Kostov 1973, Igla 2006) also has its origins in the semantic reinterpretation of the interrogative particle. This

stands in contrast to Kostov’s hypothesis that Sliven Romani evidential li has its origins in a reinterpretation of the Bulgarian

morpheme -l (pl. -le) that forms the resultative participle, which is crucial in Bulgarian evidential strategies.

This conclusion is supported by the use of the Turkish interrogative particle mi in the Barutči Arli dialect of Romani

spoken in Skopje, Republic of Macedonia in exactly the same context as the Kriva Palanka Arli Romani use of li. It is also

supported typologically by such parallels as the expressive use of li in former Serbo-Croatian and the use of the interrogative

negative optative to express surprise in Turkic languages. These data further demonstrate how typological (i.e., universal)

and areal (i.e., contact) explanations can be used together in a nuanced fashion, and without conflation, to account for

language change: typology provides the rationale and contact provides the mechanism. The connection between

interrogation and dubitativity is a typological one, but, whereas the development of interrogative markers into dubitative or

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evidential markers in Romani dialects in Macedonia and Bulgaria occurred independently, they both did so precisely in

contact with languages that already had evidential strategies in their grammars. The Macedonian Romani developments

demonstrate a shared functional reinterpretation of different forms.

References

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2003. Evidentiality in Typological Perspective. In A.Y. Aikhenvald and R.M.W. Dixon (eds.), Studies in

Evidentiality, 1-31. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Bisang, Walter. 2004. Dialectology and typology — an integrative perspective. Dialectology meets typology. Dialect grammar

from a crosslinguistic perspective, ed. by Bernd Kortman, 11-45. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Bisang, Walter. 2006. Contact-induced convergence: Typology and areality. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed. by

Keith Brown, Vol. 3, 88-101. Oxford: Elsevier.

Enfield, Nick J. 2005. Areal Linguistics and Mainland Southeast Asia. Annual Review of Anthropology 34:181–206.

Hamp, Eric P. 1977. On some Questionans of Areal Linguistics. Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley

Linguistics Society, ed. by K. Whistlers et al., 279-282. Berkeley.

Igla, Birgit. 2006. Zur Renarrative im slivener Romani. Balkansko ezikoznanie 40,1.55-63.

Joseph, Brian D. 2001. Is Balkan Comparative Syntax Possible? Balkan Syntax in a Comparative Light, ed. by M. Rivero & A.

Ralli. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Kostov, Kiril. 1973. Zur Bedeutung des Zigeunerischen für die Erforschung Grammatischer Interferenzerscheinungen.

Balkansko ezikoznanie 16,2.99-113.

Labov, William. 2007. Transmission and diffusion. Language 83,2.344-387.

Grammaticalization of the strategies of negation in Brazilian Portuguese.

Furtado da Cunha, Maria Angélica

(Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte)

Spoken Brazilian Portuguese exhibits three strategies of clausal negation: a) the standard preverbal negative não + VP, b)

the double negative não + VP + não, and c) the postverbal negative VP + não. This work analyzes and interprets these

strategies from the viewpoint of principles of iconicity (Givón, 1990; Haiman, 1985) and the concept of grammaticalization

(Hopper and Traugott, 1993; Traugott and Heine, 1991), based on functionally grounded explanations. I follow the

assumption that the grammar of natural languages is never static and complete: taken synchronically, the grammar of every

language exhibits, simultaneously, regular patterns and patterns that are not completely fixed, but fluid. In this sense,

language is conceived of as a malleable structure, since it is subjected to the pressures of use and consists of a non-entirely

arbitrary code (Hopper, 1987; Du Bois, 1985). Taken as a whole, the morphosyntactic coding results from the use of

language. The database for this study is a corpus of written and spoken material produced by students from different levels

of schooling. The central question I am concerned with is: a) how can we explain the coexistence of different strategies of

negation in Brazilian Portuguese? This question is related to the following more specific ones: b) in which aspects do written

and spoken language differ regarding the use of the strategies of negation? c) is there any correlation between the

speaker’s level of schooling/age and the use of different mechanisms of negation? The negative patterns perform the same

general discourse function of denying. The variation attested in present-day Brazilian Portuguese between preverbal

negation (não V), double negation (não V não), and postverbal negation (não V) represents a common universal process

which has been known as “Jespersen cycle”: “the original negative adverb is first weakened, then found insufficient and

therefore strengthened, generally through some additional word, and this in its turn may be felt as the negative proper and

may then in course of time be subject to the same development as the original word.” (Jespersen, 1917:4). It is assumed

that variation reflects a linguistic change in progress. The analysis of the emergent strategies of negation in Brazilian

Portuguese reveals the interaction of two external competing motivations (Du Bois, 1985; Haiman, 1983). The apparent

arbitrariness of postverbal negatives can be interpreted as the result of a conflict between iconic and economic

motivations. On one hand, the need to maintain communicative clarity leads to the emergence of double negative, in a

movement towards iconicity; on the other hand, the demand for economy motivates the development of postverbal

negative, in a movement against iconicity.

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References

Du Bois, John. 1985. Competing motivations. In: Haiman, J. (Ed.). Iconicity in syntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 343-

365.

Givón, Talmy. 1990. Syntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Haiman, John. 1983. Iconic and economic motivation. Language 59, 781-819.

Haiman, John. (Ed.). 1985. Iconicity in syntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hopper, Paul and Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1993. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jespersen, Otto. 1917. Negation in English and other languages. Copenhagen. Reprinted 1962 in Selected Writings of Otto

Jespersen, Allen and Unwin, London.

Traugott, Elizabeth Closs and Heine, Bernd. (Ed.). 1991. Approaches to grammaticalization, v. I and II. Amsterdam: John

Benjamins.

Discourse markers in Italian textbooks: an empirical study.

Fuschi, Laura

(Universität Bielefeld)

Compared to other word classes, discourse markers seem to be particularly complex in their functioning and difficult to

grasp. As pragmatic elements, not pointing to any referent in the extralinguistic world, but indicating discourse processes,

discourse markers are used by native speakers with high frequency but mostly unconsciously, and they represent a real

challenge for learners of a second language.

Already three decades ago Weydt et al. (1983) pointed out the importance of learning how to use the pragmatic

elements of a second language for successful interaction. Learners start to use discourse markers already in the first stages

of L2-acquisition, however, as was revealed, for instance, by some works on Italian as L2, the usage is restricted to elements

with little semantic-pragmatic weight (Guil et al. 2008). The acquisition of functionally more complex markers, and even of

the full functional spectrum of a single marker (see e.g. Pellet 2005), is only reached at higher stages, with consequences for

the learners’ ability to interact with native speakers. At the same time, it has been shown that the learners’ competence in

the use of discourse markers can be improved through explicit training (Bueno Santos 2006).

Although such training is not commonly provided in didactic materials for Italian as L2, discourse markers do

appear in textbooks and grammars, and some attention is given to their usage. Starting from this observation, my

contribution aims to examine the present state of the representation of discourse markers in didactic materials for Italian

as L2. The study focuses on the treatment of senti (‘hear’, ‘listen’), as an example of a very frequent Italian marker. As a

textbook corpus I have chosen the widely used Italian textbooks for German speaking learners Espresso 1, 2, and 3

(Ziglio/Rizzo 2009). More specifically, the study aims to analyse:

1. in what contexts the marker is found in the books and how it is explained

2. to what extent the uses illustrated in the books and the respective explanations account for the usage in real

conversations

The contribution will start by illustrating typical contexts of use and the corresponding functions of senti, drawing on a large

corpus study based on natural data of spoken Italian. In a second step, the analysis of the books will show in what

conversational contexts the marker appears, whether/how it is explained (for example through translations, German

(partial) equivalents etc.), and what functions are thereby attributed to it. The findings will then be compared with the

system of contexts and functions resulting from natural corpus data, as previously illustrated.

As a result, we will gain a data-based, possibly objective picture of how the representation of the marker in the

books accounts for its actual use. It will be shown that the books only partially cover the real contexts of use and the

possible functions of the marker. In a broader perspective, this will allow for considerations on possible improvements.

References

Bueno Santos, G. (2006) O Papel da Instrução na Produção Oral de Aprendizes de Língua Inglesa: um Estudo sobre

Marcadores Conversacionais , Belo Horizonte, Faculdade de Letras da UFMG.

Guil, P. / C. Bazzanella / M. Bini / P. Pernas / T. Gil / M. Borreguero / A. Pernas / C. M. Kondo / E. Gillani (2008) “Marcadores

discursivos y cortesía lingüística en la interacción de aprendices de Italiano L2”, in Cortesía y conversación: de lo

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escrito a lo oral. III Coloquio Internacional del Programa EDICE, Valencia: Departamento de Filología Espanola,

Universitat de València, 711-729.

Pellet, S. H. (2005) The Development of Competence in French Interlanguage Pragmatics: The Case of the Discourse Marker

‘donc’, Austin: University of Texas at Austin.

Weydt, H. / D. Rösler / T. Harden (1983) Kleine deutsche Partikellehre, München: Klett Edition Deutsch.

Ziglio L. / G. Rizzo (2009) Espresso: ein Italienischkurs, vol. 1, 2, 3, Ismaning: Hueber.

Ecco giunta colei che ne pareggia: the tenacious persistence of a primitive scaffolding.

Gaeta, Livio

(University of Turin)

What is ecco? Although the word is extremely frequent and early used in first as well as in second language acquisition, its

treatment in the most common grammars of Italian is really embarassing. In fact, ecco is generally taken to be an adverb, in

spite of the oddity of this classification which leaves completely unaccounted its role as predicative center of the utterance,

as shown in the verse reported in the title, which is taken from Dante’s Rime cvi, 74.

In contrast with the traditional view, ecco will be shown to generally introduce thetic sentences, provided with a

presentative function and completely lacking a subject role. From this viewpoint, it functions as a thetic copula, which,

among other costructions, gives rise to mininal pairs differently specified for boundedness:

(1) Ecco giungere colei che ne pareggia

‘There’s coming the one who makes us all equal’

(2) Ecco giunta colei che ne pareggia

‘There’s come the one who makes us all equal’

Notice that these pairs are only possible with unaccusative verbs, in which the subject clearly displays object-like properties

(2). In fact, an unergative verb cannot be licensed in the construction containing a past participle (4), which therefore

qualifies as a test for unaccusativity:

(3) Ecco lui dormire nel sacco a pelo.

‘There’s him sleeping in the sleeping bag’.

(4) *Ecco lui dormito nel sacco a pelo.

‘There’s him slept in the sleeping bag’.

The paper will show that ecco as a predicate is largely integrated into the contructional syntax of Italian: in fact it is not only

highly selective as for the governed verbs, but it can also be embedded into several subordinate clauses, and in particular

temporal, causal, consecutive, relative clauses, etc. Embedding is only possible when the thetic value is preserved, i.e. when

the subordinate clauses are asserted and accordingly follow the main clause. At any rate, its predicative status is non-

prototypical in that ecco does not display typical morphosyntactic properties of verbs like inflection or negation.

Finally, ecco is interesting from a more general perspective in the light of (i) its thetic value which makes it a

powerful mean of expression for basic communicative situations, and (ii) its very long history which goes uninterruptedly

back to its Latin ancestor ecce: This displayed the same basic value of ecco, but was much more restricted in its

constructional entrenchment (cf. Cuzzolin 1998). The basic communicative function and the long history suggest that it

might be treated on a par with those “relics of earlier stages of the language capacity remain[ed] as pockets within modern

language”, which according to Jackendoff (2009: 113) testify to the role of a protolinguistic substrate lying below modern

language. This primitive scaffolding still irradiates its cognitive strength in contemporary Italian.

References

Cuzzolin, Pierluigi (1998), Quelques remarques syntaxiques à propos de ecce. In Benjamín García Hernández (ed.), Estudios

de lingüística latina. Actas del IX Coloquio Internacional de Lingüística Latina, Madrid: Ediciones Clásicas, 261-271.

Jackendoff, Ray (2009), Compounding in the parallel architecture and conceptual semantics. In Rochelle Lieber & Pavel

Štekauer (eds.), The Oxford handbook of compounding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 105-128.

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Gay dialect and sociolinguistic awareness: a preliminary study among native speakers of Spanish.

Galindo, Mar; Pérez, Aarón and Thöny, David

(University of Alicante)

It has been fifty years since the emergence of the first sociolinguistic studies that revolutionized the field of Linguistics and,

since then, there have been several research trends under this label. One of the most productive is the one analyzing the

relationship between language and gender, which includes milestones of the literature such as the clasic work by Robin

Lakoff Language and woman’s place (1975) or Así hablan las mujeres (2003), by Pilar García Mouton, in the Spanish

tradition. Nevertheless, the traditional distinction between men and women’s talk has been recently questioned by the

arising of a third communicative style, typical of homosexuals. Indeed, their discourse contains some features that cannot

be related to the stereotyped male or female’s speech. Its study has originated a new linguistic orientation called Queer

Linguistics (Motschenbacher, 2010), that constitutes a translation of Queer Theory into Linguistics.

In order to investigate the presence of this gay communicative style in the sociolinguistic awareness of native

speakers of Spanish, we have carried out a preliminary study consisting of an eight-open-question survey related to gay

dialect in Spain. Specifically, our questionnaire has been designed to address pronuntiation issues, lexicon and pragmatics,

all of them related to the perception of gay speech by native speakers of Spanish, regardless of their sexual orientation. The

focus of this research, therefore, is not the analysis of gay speech but its perception by speakers of a given language

community. It is, we aim to describe language and sociolinguistic awareness instead of language behaviour.

Questionnaires were distributed in Fall 2012 and 100 of them were collected. Data from the surveys have followed

a qualitative and quantitative analysis, and results have been established according to the age and sex of the informants,

both men and women between 12 and 65 years old.

In general, results clearly show that native Spanish speakers overwhelmingly recognize the existence of a gay

communicative style and, furthermore, claim they can, in fact, state the sexual orientation of a speaker only by hearing the

way he speaks. Moreover, data reveal specific language features associated to homosexuals, such as the use of certain

words, diminutives and, especially, a more expressive language. Our presentation will explain this investigation in detail,

focusing on the language features attributed to homosexual communication in Spanish.

In short, our small-scale study calls for the consideration of sexual orientation as a source of sociolinguistic

variation; at least, as perceived by native Spanish speakers in our investigation on sociolinguistic awareness.

References

García Mouton, Pilar (2003): Así hablan las mujeres. Madrid, La Esfera de los Libros.

Lakoff, Robin (1975): Language and woman’s place. CUP.

Motschenbacher, Heiko (2010): Language, Gender and Sexual Identity. Amsterdam, John Benjamins.

Diachronic evolution of the subjunctive in Dargwa.

Ganenkov, Dmitry

(Russian Academy of Sciences)

The paper discusses a case of diachronic evolution of the subjunctive found in Dargwa, a branch of the East Caucasian

family (Daghestan, Russia). The starting point of the discussion is that some Dargwa languages use reflexes of the Proto-

Dargwa subjunctive to mark complements with control and raising verbs like ‘want’, ‘begin’, ‘can’, instead of reflexes of the

Proto-Dargwa infinitive. The data for this study comes mainly from my own fieldwork on Chirag, Khuduts, Qunqi, Muira, and

Itsari Dargwa, and, to a lesser degree, from grammatical descriptions.

Originally, the subjunctive is an adverbial verb form used in temporal (‘until V’) and causal (‘in order to V’) clauses,

as still found in Chirag Dargwa. The subjunctive in Chirag has three important properties: (a) it cannot be used as a

complement to control and raising verbs, (b) there is no referential dependency between the subject of the matrix clause

and the subject of the subjunctive clause, i.e. the subjects may refer to different participants, (c) the subjunctive clause is a

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CP, (d) the subjunctive has person agreement. Dargwa languages show certain variation with respect to these properties,

which allows us to reconstruct the diachronic evolution of the subjunctive along each of these dimensions.

Use with control verbs: The subjunctive expands into the control domain and is used with control/raising verbs on a

par with the original infinitive (as in Khuduts Dargwa), until the former gradually pushes out the latter from this domain,

and the original infinitive is completely lost (Qunqi, Itsari, and Muira Dargwa).

Adverbial uses: The subjunctive loses its adverbial uses.

Referential dependency: Change from no dependency between the subjects of the control verb and the subjunctive

clause in Qunqi and Itsari to the obligatory control in Muira via an intermediate stage attested in Khuduts, where the

subjunctive clause may have a referentially independent subject only when the latter is in the scope of the focus particles

‘only’, ‘by oneself’, ‘also, even’.

Syntactic category: The category of the subjunctive clause changes from CP to TP, as in Muira Dargwa.

Morphological agreement: The last step is the loss of agreement morphology with subjunctives, the former third

person is used indiscriminately with all persons, as in Muira Dargwa, which means the rise of a new infinitive from the

former subjunctive.

I argue that these dimensions are independent to some extent, in the sense that a certain change along one

dimension does not necessarily entail an automatic change along another dimension. On the other hand, these dimensions

co-vary, in the sense that a change along one dimension is made possible only after a certain change along another

dimension has occurred. I also show how combination of different steps along these dimensions both yields attested

variation across Dargwa languages, and allows us to reconstruct missing evolutionary stages.

P selection/C selection in Italian complex Ps.

Garzonio, Jacopo and Rossi, Silvia

(Università Ca'Foscari Venezia)

Our talk deals with the selection of simple-Ps under lexical Ps in Italian (sopra (a)l tavolo ‘lit. on (to).the table’). We

concentrate on the distributional properties of the grammatical Ps a/di ‘to/of’, showing that the selection of a, di or no

preposition at all is syntactically driven. We argue that there is both an a/Ø alternation based on the internal structure of

the PP, and a di/Ø alternation dependent on the structural status of the DP object of P.

Lexical Ps come in three groups (Rizzi 1988): group 1 Ps, obligatorily requiring simple Ps (e.g. davanti a ‘in front

of’); group 2 Ps, optionally requiring a (dietro (a) ‘behind (of)’); group 3 Ps requiring no P (verso ‘towards’). We concentrate

on alternations like:

(1) a. L’aereo volava sopra di noi

The plane flew above of us ‘The plane was flying above us’

b. L’aereo volava sopra alla chiesa

The plane flew above to.the church ‘The plane was flying above the church’

We claim that there is no a/di alternation in complex Ps; rather, (1) presents the combination of two alternations, a/Ø

dependent on the PP structure and di/Ø dependent on the categorial status of the object of P. Since sopra Ø noi is

ungrammatical, we argue that group 2 Ps appear in two different structures, one in which their complement is introduced

by a, and another in which they select a DP. In the latter case, some DPs require di, which is the prepositional

complementizer observable with infinitives:

(2) [PP sopra [XP a/Ø [YP Ø/di [DP]]]]

Cinque (2010) maintains that the simple P a is either a marker lexicalizing a lower functional head in the DPPlace in (3), P°,

or a proper P lexicalizing the higher stative/directional heads of PPdir/PPstat.

(3) [PPdir a [PPstat a [DPPlace …. [AxPartP [PP/KP a [Ground PLACE]…]

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Thus the interpretative differences associated with the alternation a vs. di/Ø in group 2 Ps (locative vs. directional, bounded

vs. unbounded, see Tortora 2008) can be captured in terms of lexicalization possibilities of these heads together with the

internal syntactic workings of the PP structure.

The di/Ø alternation is based on a bare/complex alternation of the selected noun. We propose that di is the same

prepositional complementizer observable with infinitives and that it is present when the DP selected by P lacks a restrictor.

(4) [SubP di [DP / IP]]

The strong hypothesis we make is that di, unlike a, is neither a real P nor a functional marker but rather a prepositional

complementizer required by the bare nature of the DP object of P—a complementizer which is not required when the DP

object of P has a complex nature.

References

Cinque, G. (2010), “Mapping Spatial PPs: an introduction”. In: G. Cinque, L. Rizzi (eds.) Mapping Spatial PPs. The

Cartography of Syntactic Structures. Vol. 6, 3-25. New York-Oxford: OUP.

Rizzi, L. (1988). “Il sintagma preposizionale”. In: L. Renzi, G. P. Salvi & A. Cardinaletti (eds.). Grande grammatica italiana di

consultazione, 507-531. Bologna: Il Mulino.

Tortora, C. (2008), “Aspect inside PLACE PPs”. In: A. Asbury, J. Dotlacil, B. Gehrke & R. Nouwen (eds.). Syntax and Semantics

of Spatial Ps, 273-301. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Tense use in English factive complements.

Gentens, Caroline; Brems, Lieselotte; Davidse, Kristin and Vandelanotte,Lieven

(University of Leuven, Université de Liège and FNDP)

Kiparsky & Kiparsky (1971) identified factive complements in terms of specific semantic-pragmatic and formal features. One

such form-meaning correlation which has received little attention so far is that complements presupposed true by the

speaker readily take absolute tenses, like is in (1), while also allowing the ‘sequence of tenses’, e.g. was in (1).

(1) John grasped that the earth is (was) flat. (Kiparsky & Kiparsky 1971:162)

In this paper, we subject this hypothesized tendency to empirical verification and theoretical reflection.

First, we verify the hypothesis implied by the Kiparskys, viz. that factive complements take more absolute tenses

than do reported speech/thought complements, which are expected to favour sequence of tenses, as in (2)

(2) The Church said/thought that the earth was flat.

Our analysis considers tense use in indirectly reported complements of say and think, and in factive complements of regret

and accept. Random samples of 200 hits (compiled from WordbanksOnline) of these verbs in the preterit, including

negatives and passives, allow us to test the Kiparskys’ hypothesis about the relative proportions of absolute tense and

sequence of tenses.

Second, on the basis of in-depth qualitative analysis of the data we propose refinements of both the factive

presupposition and the different tense uses found in complement clauses.

Necessary refinements of the factive presupposition include the points that

(i) it is sometimes a reported, not the actual, speaker who presupposes the truth of the proposition (cf. Delacruz 1976), e.g.

(3) Someone, who did not accept the Medjugorgje phenomena were supernatural in origin,... (WB)

(ii) factive complements may involve presupposed commitment to a deontic, rather than truth-oriented, proposition

(Halliday 1994), e.g.

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(4) I did not accept that we should follow the Law’s Commision’s recommendation (WB)

Accordingly, we need to redefine both what is presupposed and the nature of the presupposition.

Our proposed refinements of tense use relate to the distinction between absolute tenses, which have the time of

speaking - or temporal zero-point (t

) (Lyons 1977) - as reference point, and relative tenses, whose reference point is

another situation (Declerck 2006). We argue that absolute tenses have to be further divided into those that relate to the

actual speaker’s time of utterance, the real t

, and those that relate to the represented speaker’s time of utterance, a t

derived from the represented speech situation (cf. Haberland 1986, author

, author

3,4

). As for the sequence of tenses, the

‘backshifting’ involved in it may be directly relative to a described situation, or it may be mediated by the second, derived,

. In our view, tenses in reported speech/thought inherently involve the t

derived from the represented speech situation

(author

3,4

), while factive complements typically have ‘real’ absolute and relative tenses under the deictic control of the

actual speaker. For the marked type of factive complement to which a represented, rather than the actual, speaker is

committed, as in (3), we will have to develop a coherent tense analysis.

Collectively, the proposed quantitative and qualitative corpus studies afford a new global insight into tense in

factive complements.

References

Declerck, R. in collaboration with S. Reed and B. Cappelle. 2006. The Grammar of the English Verb Phrase, vol. 1: The

Grammar of the English Tense System: A Comprehensive Analysis. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Delacruz, E. 1976. Factives and proposition level constructions in Montague Grammar. B. Partee (ed.) Montague Grammar.

New York: Academic Press. 177–199.

Haberland, H. 1986. Reported speech in Danish. F. Coulmas (ed.) Direct and Indirect Speech. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

219–253.

Halliday, M.A.K. 1994. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 2

Edition. London: Arnold.

Kiparsky, P. & C. Kiparsky. 1971. Fact. D. Steinberg & L. Jacobovits (eds) Semantics: An Interdisciplinary Reader in Philosophy,

Linguistics, and Psychology. Cambridge: CUP. 345–369.

Lyons, J. 1977. Semantics. Cambridge: CUP.

The Nuosu logophor.

Gerner, Matthias

(City University of Hong Kong)

The influence of

SOURCE

-logophors on reference possibilities of other anaphors and personal pronouns is poorly understood.

The Nuosu language (Tibeto-Burman: China) exhibits an African-style logophor, a Chinese-style reflexive and a set of

personal pronouns.

Syntactic function

Discourse role

(Sells 1987: 457)

Nuosu Form

ophor

ular

/PL

ural

SOURCE

i/op

hort

istance

eflexive

anaphor

zyt jie

ong

istance

eflexive

SELF

PIVOT

zyt jie

The Nuosu reflexive and logophor

In a paper submitted for publication, I revise Safir (2004a, 2004b)’s theory in a way that allows deriving complementary

binding of the logophor and the reflexive in their domains. In this abstract, I only survey descriptive language features.

1. SDR excludes LG, LDR and pronouns

The logophor i/op, the long-distance reflexive zyt jie and the pronouns must be free in the co-argument domain in which

the SDR zyt jie must mark dependency on an antecedent.

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(1)

mu ga

hxip

hxie yy

ddix.

male name

say

SENT

TOP

LOG

respect

QUOT

Embedded clause

‘*Muka

said that he

respects himself

.’

mu ga

hxip

1+2

*1+2

hxie yy

ddix.

male name

say

SENT

TOP

LOG

respect

QUOT

Embedded clause

‘*Muka

said that they

1+2

respect themselves

*1+2

.’

(2)

mu ga

ngop

lat mop

zyt jie

1/2

hxie yy

tat xi.

male name

think

SENT

TOP

male name

LDR/SDR

respect

should

Embedded clause

‘Muka

thought that Lamo

should respect himself

1/2

.’

(3)

mu ga

ngop

lat mop

cyx

1/*2

hxie yy

tat xi.

male name

think

SENT

TOP

male name

3P SG

respect

should

Embedded clause

‘Muka

thought that he

should respect himself

.’

2. LG excludes LDR and pronouns

The logophor i/op must covary with an internal

SOURCE

in the reported speech domain. The logophor can occur in any

syntactic position (subject, direct object, adjunct).

(4)

mu ga

hxip

lat sse

nzur

jox jjip

ddix.

male name

say

SENT

TOP

male name

LOG

hate

might

DYP

QUOT

‘Muka

said that Laze

might hate him

.’

The LDR and pronouns are illicit in reported speech constructions if they covary with the

SOURCE

(5)

mu hlie

hxip

zyt jie

*1/*2

dde jji

ddix.

male name

say

SENT

TOP

LDR

mature, grow up

DYP

QUOT

‘*Muhlie

said that he

*1/*2

is mature now.’

(6)

mu jie

vut nyop

jox

hxip

*1/2/3

ssox dde

bbo

tat xi

ddix.

male name

female name

say

SENT

TOP

3P SG

school

should

QUOT

‘Mujie

told Vunyo

that she

*1/2/3

should go to school.’

When two speech reports are embedded in each other with two

SOURCES

, then the logophor is bound in the minimal

reported speech clause in which it is contained. Reference to the distant

SOURCE

can be made by means of the LDR or

pronouns.

(7)

mu ga

hxip

ngop

go,

lat mop

hxip

male name

say

1P PL

tell

SENT

TOP

male name

say

SENT

TOP

*1/3

zyt jie

1/2/*3

mup shy dex

op rro

tat xi

ddix.

LOG

LDR

tomorrow

Xichang

come

should

QUOT

‘Muka

told us

that Lamo

said that he

*1/3

/ self

1/2/*3

should come to Xichang tomorrow.’

References

Safir, K. (2004a). The syntax of (in)depedendence. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Safir, K. (2004b). The syntax of anaphora. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sells, P. (1987). Aspects of logophoricity. Linguistic Inquiry 18, 445-479.

Grammaticalized exhaustivity in focus.

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Gerőcs, Mátyás; Babarczy, Anna; Fekete, István and Surányi,Balázs

(Hungarian Academy of Sciences)

The issue. Exhaustivity in the interpretation of focus has been commonly treated in terms of pragmatic implicatures in both

(Neo-)Gricean and Relevance Theoretic accounts, while some recent treatments analyze the relevant exhaustivity effects as

part of grammatically represented and compositionally interpreted exhaustivity operators (Chierchia 2004, Fox 2007, Sevi

2009). Exhaustivity due to pragmatic inferences is characteristic of purely prosodic focus of the Engish type, including

syntactically unmarked focus (SUF) in Hungarian too. On the other hand, some syntactically marked foci in languages,

among them immediately pre-verbal focus in Hungarian (PVF), have been described as exhibiting truth-conditional,

semantic exhaustivity, arising in the same way as it does for the focus of clefts and specificational pseudoclefts (for PVF:

Szabolcsi 1981, 1994, Kenesei 1986, 2006, É-Kiss 1998). Recently, this view of PVF has been both challenged (Wedgwood

2005, 2007, Onea 2007, 2008, Onea and Beaver 2009) and defended (É-Kiss 2010, Horvath 2005, 2007) in theoretical work.

The experiment. We address this debate by presenting novel results from a sentence-picture matching experiment, which

involved a multiple choice task that allowed for multiple responses. Each test sentence, descriibing the culprit of a crime,

contained one of four types of focus: PVF, SUF, (specificational) pseudocleft and cleft. Simultaneously, subjects were

presented with a picture containing four human figures, the potential suspects: Suspect

corresponding to an exhaustive

interpretation, Suspect

corresponding to an unambiguously non-exhaustive interpretation, and two distractors. Subjects

had to choose which suspect or suspects may possibly be the actual offender. We measured the rate of exhaustive

responses (=just Suspect

) and non-exhaustive responses (=Suspect

&Suspect

). As an outstanding advantage, this task

remains implicit, not involving a meta-judgment whether some sentence is ‘true’/‘false’.

Results and discussion. Focus type yielded a significant main effect (Friedman test: χ2(n=31,df=3)=48.803, p<0.001).

Pairwise comparisons using Wilcoxon Matched Pairs tests revealed the following significant differences: SUF and PVF

(p<0.001), SUF and cleft (p<0.001), PVF and cleft (p<0.05), SUF and pseudocleft (p<0.001). The rate of exhaustive responses

in each focus type were: SUF:16%, PVF:51%, pseudoclefts:61%, clefts:64%.

The significant difference found between clefts and PVF agrues against treating the exhaustivity of PVF as arising

semantically in the same way as in clefts. We interpret this finding as supporting a pragmatic account of the exhaustivity of

PVF. We propose, drawing on Onea (2007, 2008), that the word order associated with PVF sentences (as opposed to those

containing SUF) are grammaticalized as a form expressing an answer to the Question Under Discussion (QUD, Roberts 1998;

answers are, by default, pragmatically interpreted exhaustively, e.g., van Rooij and Schulz 2004). Given the availability of

this grammaticalized form, SUF is not interpreted as an answer to the QUD proper, hence it is not exhaustive (Uegaki 2012).

Cross-linguistically, the account can be extended to any focus marked excusively by word order and associated with

relatively high levels of exhaustivity in languages where the ‘focus word order’ is the ordinary word order that is used in

answers to wh-questions, signaling their status as an answer to the QUD.

References

Chierchia, G. 2004. Scalar implicatures, polarity phenomena, and the syntax/pragmatics interface. In A. Belletti (Ed.),

Structures and Beyond. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

É-Kiss, K. 1998. Identificational focus versus information focus. Language 74.

É-Kiss, K. 2010. Structural focus and exhaustivity. In: Zimmermann, M. & C. Féry (eds.) Information Structure. Oxford: OUP.

Horvath, J. 2007. Separating “focus movement” from focus. In S. Karimi, V. Samiian and W. Wilkins (eds.), Phrasal and

Clausal Architecture, 108-145. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Kenesei, I. 2006. Focus as identification. In V. Molnár & S. Winkler (eds.), The Architecture of Focus, 137-168. Berlin: Mouton

de Gruyter.

Onea, E. 2007. Exhaustivity, Focus and Incorporation in Hungarian. In M. Aloni, P. Dekker, and F. Roelofsen (Eds.),

Proceedings of the Sixteenth Amsterdam Colloquium, 169–174. ILLC/Department of Philosophy, University of

Amsterdam.

Onea, E. and D. Beaver. 2011. Hungarian focus is not exhausted. In Cormany, S. I. & D. Lutz (eds.), Proceedings of Semantics

and Linguistic Theory (SALT) 19, 342–359.

Roberts, C. 1998. Focus, the flow of information, and universal grammar. In P. Culicover & L. McNally (eds.), The Limits of

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Syntax, 109-160. San Diego: Academic Press.

van Rooij, Robert, and Katrin Schulz. 2004. Exhaustive interpretation of complex sentences. Journal of Logic, Language, and

Information 13: 491–519.

Szabolcsi, A. 1994. All quantifiers are not equal: The case of focus. Acta Linguistica Hungarica 42: 171-187.

Wedgwood, D. 2005. Shifting the Focus. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Wedgewood, D. 2007. Identifying inferences in focus. In On Information Structure, Meaning, and Form, K. Schwabe & S.

Winkler (eds), 207-227. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

The acquisition of discourse markers in spoken L2 Italian.

Gillani, Eugenio and Pernas, Paloma

(Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

Studies on the acquisition of L2 Romance Languages have normally neglected textual and pragmatics aspects such as

conversational strategies, information structure and cohesive mechanisms. Only recently have these linguistics phenomena

deserved some attention due both to the development of theoretical description and to the technical posibilities of

gathering audiovisual corpora. One of the cohesive mechanisms that has attracted the attention of scholars working on

language acquisition has been discourse makers (Dimroth/Watorek 2000), whose polysemy, multifunctionality and mobility

in the utterance make of them a particularly interesting object of study, as shown by the huge number of descriptive studies

in almost all Romance languages (cf. Fischer 2006, Loureda/Acín 2010).

The advantages and difficulties of acquiring discourse markers in family-related languages, as in the case of Spanish

and Italian, is still a minor research field as most research has been conducted with native speakers of non-Romance

languages (Andorno 2005, 2007, 2008; Bardel 2003, 2004; Casula 2005; Ferraris 2004). In the research project we have

carried out during the last 5 years, we have gathered an audiovisual corpus of Spanish learners of Italian with initial,

intermediate and advance level and we have studied the ocurrence of discourse markers in such a corpus (Bini/Pernas 2008,

Guil et al. 2008, Guil in press). We have paid special attention to the types of discourse markers appearing in each level of

linguistic competence, the discoursive functions they assume – taking a functional taxonomy as theoretical framework

(López Serena/Borreguero 2010) – and their prosodic profile.

We will present the main results of this research, which include the following: a) learners only use a reduced

number of discourse markers, when confronted to Italian native speakers; b) this number increases during the acquisition

process but a core group of 8-10 discourse markers seems to assume almost 80% of the interactive, metadiscursive and

cognitive functions in conversation, so acquisition reaches an stage that has been described as fossilization (Romero Trillo

2002); c) there seems to be an acquisitional pattern which privileges the lexical acquisition of the discourse markers,

followed by the functional acquisition and finally (but not necessarily) by the prosodic profile; d) phonetic similarities

between discourse markers in both languages ease the acquisition process, but they also favour transfer phenomena; and e)

the lack of these lexical elements constrains the learners to turn to a variety of resources (prosody, mimic, phonetic

phenomenal like lenghthening and emphasis) in order to develop a certain discursive function.

References

Andorno, C. 2005. «Additive and Restrictive Particles in Italian as a Second Language». H. Hendricks (a c. di), The Structure of

Learner Varieties. Berlin: De Gruyter, 405-444.

Andorno, C. 2007. «Strutturare gli enunciati e gestire l’interazione in italiano L2. L’uso dei connettivi anche, invece, ma,

però». A. M. De Cesare, A. Ferrari (a cura di), Lessico, grammatica, testualità. Acta Romanica Basiliensia 18, 223-

243.

Andorno, C. 2008. «Connettivi in italiano L2 fra struttura dell’enunciato e struttura dell'interazione». G. Bernini, L. Spreafico,

A. Valentini (a c. di), Competenze lessicali e discorsive nell’acquisizione di lingue seconde. Perugia: Guerra, 481-510.

Bardel, C. 2003. «I segnali discorsivi nell’acquisizione dell’italiano L2». C. Crocco, R. Savy, F. Cutugno (ed.), API: Archivio del

Parlato Italiano. Napoli: CIRASS [DVD].

Bardel, C. 2004a. «La pragmatica in italiano L2: l’uso dei segnali discorsivi». F. Albano Leoni, F. Cutugno, M. Pettorino, R. Savy

(a c. di), Il parlato italiano. Atti del convegno nazionale, Napoli 13-15 febbraio 2003. Napoli: D’Auria [CD-Rom].

Bini, M.; Pernas, A. 2008. «Marcadores discursivos en los primeros estadios de adquisición del italiano L2». R. Monroy, A.

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Sánchez (a c. di), 25 años de Lingüística Aplicada en España: hitos y retos. Actas del VI Congreso de la Asociación

Española de Lingüística Aplicada (AESLA). Murcia: Edit.um. [CD-Rom], 25-32.

Casula, S. 2005. «I segnali discorsivi nell’interlingua degli immigrati senegalesi». A. Dettori (a c. di), Lingue e cultura a

contatto. Quaderni del Dipartimento di Linguistica ed Stilistica dell’Università di Cagliari 4: 75-92.

Dimroth, Ch.; Watorek, M. 2000. «The scope of additive particles in basic learner languages». Studies in Second Language

Acquisition 22 (3): 307-336.

Ferraris, S. 2004. «Come usano ma gli apprendenti di italiano L1 e L2». G. Bernini, G. Ferrari, M. Pavesi (a c. di), Atti del 3º

congresso di studi dell’Associazione Italiana di Linguistica Applicata, Perugia 21-22 febbraio 2002. Guerra: Perugia,

73-91.

Fischer, F. (ed.). 2006. Approaches to discourse particles. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Guil, P.; Bazzanella, C.; Bini, M.; Pernas, P.; Gil, T.; Borreguero, M.; Pernas, A.; Kondo, C.; Gillani, E. 2008. «Marcadores

discursivos y cortesía lingüística en la interacción de aprendices de italiano L2». A. Briz et al. (a c. di.) (2008),

Cortesía y conversación: de lo escrito a lo oral. Actas del III Coloquio Internacional del Programa EDICE. Valencia:

Universidad de Valencia/Programa EDICE, 711-729.

Guil, P. In press. «Marcadores discursivos en la interlengua de aprendices de italiano L2». M. Borreguero Zuloaga, S. Gómez-

Jordana Ferary (eds.), Marqueurs du discours dans les langues romanes: une approche contrastive. Limoges:

Lambert-Lucas.

López Serena, A.; Borreguero Zuloaga, M. 2010. «Los marcadores del proyecto y la variación lengua hablada vs. lengua

escrita». Ó. Loureda, E. Acín (eds.), Los estudios sobre marcadores del discurso en español, hoy. Madrid,

Arco/Libros, 415-495.

Loureda Lamas, Ó.; Acín, E. (a c. di). 2010. Los estudios sobre marcadores del discurso en español, hoy. Madrid: Arco Libros.

Romero Trillo, J. 2002. «The pragmatic fossilization of discourse markers in non-native speakers of English». Journal of

Pragmatics 34: 769-784.

Towards an integrated representation of syntax and prosody: the case of left peripheral topics.

Giorgi, Alessandra

(University of Venice Ca' Foscari)

Main research question

In this paper I propose an integrated representation of prosody and syntax, with the goal of accounting for the properties

and distribution of left-peripheral topic phrases – see Frascarelli and Hinterhoelzl (2007); Bianchi and Frascarelli (2010). Left

peripheral topics (given, familiar phrases) are (often) associated with a peculiar intonational pattern, i.e. the comma

intonation (Selkirk, 2005). The main question is: How is this intonational pattern associated with topics and how is their

peculiar interpretation derived?

The approach: Topics in the left periphery may be followed by a FOCUS. Here I consider topics as based generated

phrases and FOCUS as wh-moved ones (cf. Cinque 1990 and following discussion). I capitalize on Beninca’ and Poletto’s

(2004) revision of Rizzi’s (1997) hierarchy. Instead of the sequence: Topic* FOCUS Topic*, they propose: Topic-layer FOCUS-

layer, showing that all the constituents appearing at the right of FOCUS have been moved, hence no Topic-layer follows the

FOCUS one.

The data

I consider here data from Italian:

(1) A Gianni, di Maria, non gliene parlerò più

To Gianni(top), about Maria(top), I will not talk anymore

(2) A Gianni, MARIA dovremmo presentare, (non Giulia)

To Gianni(top), Maria(contr. Foc) we should introduce (not Giulia)

A Gianni and di Maria in (1) are associated with the comma intonation, whereas in (2) only A Gianni is.

The proposal

In (ref. omitted), in the spirit of the Linear Correspondence Axiom (Kayne 1994), I proposed that the pause, i.e. the Comma,

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is a head, K, and projects a constituent. I discussed this solution for parentheticals. For instance:

(3) Maria, disse Gianni, partirà per Parigi

Maria, said Gianni, will leave for Paris

Is represented as in (5):

(4) [

K [disse Gianni [

K [

Maria partirà per Parigi ] ] ] ]

Obligatory topicalization derives the word order in (3):

(5) [

Maria K [disse Gianni [

K [

e partirà per Parigi ] ] ] ]

Here I propose the same solution for topics, with some difference due to their specific properties. For sentence (1) the

representation is the following:

(6) [

A Gianni K [

di Maria K [

non gliene parlerò più ] ] ] ]

I will discuss and illustrate the advantages of such a. solution, in particular the predictions concerning the differences

between FOCUS and Topic.

References

Benincà, P and C. Poletto, 2004, Topic, Focus and V2: Defining the CP Sublayers, In L. Rizzi, ed., The Structure of IP and CP.

The Cartography of Syntactic Structures, Oxford University Press, New York, 52-75.

Bianchi V. and M.Frascarelli, 2010, Is topic a root phenmenon? Iberia, vol 2, no 1.

Cinque G., 1990, Types of A-bar dependencies, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Kayne, R., 1994, The Antisymmetry of Syntax, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Frascarelli, Mara & Roland Hinterhoelzl. 2007. Types of Topics in German and Italian. In On Information Structure, Meaning

and Form, Susanne Winkler & KerstinSchwabe (Eds), 87-116. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Rizzi, L.,1997, The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery.” In L. Haegeman, ed., Elements of Grammar, Kluwer, Dordrecht, 281-

337.

Selkirk, L, 2005, Comments on Intonationl Phrasing in English, in S. Frota, M. Vigario, and M.-J. Freitas (eds.)

Prosodies. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin.

“Switch”-reference systems as part of a cluster of grammatical meanings in Shuar (Jivaroan, Upper Amazon).

Gnerre, Maurizio

(University of Naples)

In most descriptions of Switch-reference Systems (S-rS) emphasis has been put on the treatment that each language

provides of the dimensions of Same Subject (SS) / Different Subject (DS). However, several dimensions codified in each one

of the S-rS so far described have been overlooked. In fact, if these systems were devoted only to mark SS/DS, one single affix

would be enough to codify a SS subordinate verb.

In most S-rS, however, this not the case. The reason can be found in the fact that in most S-rS, beyond the SS/DS

dimensions, other, very relevant meanings and functions are codified.

In Shuar, a Jivaroan (Aents) languages spoken by approximately 70.000 persons in the Ecuadorian Amazon, a highly

developed S-rS is used, where subordinate verbal forms are marked with endings carrying not only the SS/SD distinctions,

but also other contents and functions. These are in first place “Temporal” and “Causal” relations between clauses. Further

inspection of additional data has shown, however, that still other contents are conveyed through the Shuar S-rS, to the point

of putting under question wether the main focus should be put or not on the SS/DS distinction, which in most cases appears

to be only one component of a more complex cluster of meanings. Examples are:

1Sg/3

1) chichá-ku-i tá- m- ya- y- i

speak-Dep./DS-N.Ad. arrive-Pst.-Indf.-3-S.3-Decl.

‘(While/when) I was speaking, he arrived’

where ku-i codifies a 1Sg DS value, as well as a “temporal” value, usually a simultaneous action, translated here with

“while/when”. The gloss N.Ad. means Non-addressee, a frequent grammatical gloss in Shuar.

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Another DS affix –matai is used to codify a DS “causal relation”:

1Sg/3

2) chichá- s- matai wishi- á- Ø- wa- i

speak-Asp.-Dep./DS/N.Ad. laugh-Asp.-TNeu.-S.3s-Decl.

‘He laughs because I speak’

In other cases, however, the S-rS DS affixes convey ambiguous ‘host’ meanings, as in the case of -n, codifying a relation that

could be interpreted either as ‘temporal’ or as ‘causal’, as in 3):

2/3

3) taká-k-ru-mi-n nijiámchi-n iwiá-inia-wa-i

work-Asp.-Plur.-2-Dep./DS./A manioc beer-Obj. prepare-Plur.-3-Decl.

‘Because/while you (Pl.) work, they prepare the manioc beer’

As an affix of a SS dependent form, (the same ?) –n, codifies “1sg.” and its “host” meaning is interpreted either as

“temporal” or “concessive”, but not as ‘causal”:

1Sg/1/Sg

4) yajá pujú-sa-n antá-u-ja-i

far away stay-Asp.-Dep./SS/1sg listen-Dur-1Sg.-Decl

‘(Even) being far away, I was listening’

Some affixes have a role inside the same S-rS, providing still other meanings, such as “iterativity”, as in the SS (1Sg/1Sg)

sentence:

1Sg/1Sg

5) chichá-s-ua-n antá-u-j-me

speak-Asp.-iter.-Dep./SS-1sg. listen-Asp.-1sg-2

“After having spoken for a while, I listen to you’

To sum up, the Shuar S-rS “hosts” values different from the SS/DS distinction, so that the prominence provided to this

grammatical dimension is not fully justified and should be understood either as one with “additional” or “host” contents, or

as part of a more complex cluster of grammatical meanings.

References

Gnerre, M., 2010, Perfil descriptivo e histórico-comparativo de una lengua amazónica: El Shuar (Jíbaro), Vitoria Euskal

HerrikoUnibertsitatea-Universidad del País Vasco.

Restructuring at the syntax-semantics interface.

Grano, Thomas

(University of Maryland)

Introduction

Wurmbrand’s (2001) survey evidences widespread crosslinguistic agreement in how apredicate’smeaning determines its

restructuring potential: modal, aspectual and implicative predicates generally supportrestructuring but propositional and

factive predicates do not. But relatively little is known about why this isthe case. I propose a novel answer by marrying

Cinque’s (2004)functional approach to restructuring withHornstein’s (1999) Movement Theory of Control.

New descriptive generalization

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Apredicate restructures iff it matches the meaning of an IP-layer functional head below Tense:

Cinque head

Corresponding Predicates

Restructuring status

∗

Mood

speech act

claim, deny, offer, promise

−

Mood

evaluative

regret, be glad, be surprised

−

Mood

evidential

conclude, hear (that)

−

Mod

epistemic

think, know, wonder

−

Tense

Mod

volitional

want

Asp

inceptive

start

Mod

obligation

have, must

Aspsuccess manage ±

Mod

permission

can, may

Asp

conative

try

*Values based partly on Wurmbrand2001:342

Analysis

(1) a. A verb restructures by realizing a semantically corresponding IP head (Cinque 2004).

b. Control is movement into a θ-position (Hornstein 1999).

c. θ-role assignment is established in a Spec-Head configuration.

d. The subject can be no higher than [Spec,TP] (at LF: see von Fintel and Iatridou 2003).

A propositional predicate like claim semantically matches Mood

speech act

and is thus eligible for restructuring. But the result

crashes since Mood

speech act

is above Tense: the subject is too low to receive claim’s θ-role (2). claim must therefore realize a

main verb in a biclausal structure. In contrast, a predicate like try corresponds to an IP head below Tense and hence can

assign its !-role (3).

The analysis also correctly predicts that raising predicates can restructure regardless of clausal position,since no θ-

assignment is at stake: Italian sembrare ‘seem’ restructures (for some speakers) and thereby realizes Mood

evidential

(Haegeman 2006), which is above Tense in Cinque’s hierarchy.

I conclude by reﬁning (1a) in diachronic perspective, suggesting in a vein similar to Cinque (2004) that crosslin-

guistic instability in restructuring status (as in the ‘±’status of manage and try in the table above) reﬂectscrosslinguistic

differences in degree of grammaticalization (and corresponding semantic bleaching) of the relevant predicate.

Metatypy and fabric transfer as mutually supportive phenomena in Chamic.

Grant, Anthony

(Edge Hill University)

Metatypy (Ross 1996) – the typological reshaping of a language through contact-induced linguistic change by transfer of

patterns – is often claimed to be the result of language shift, and as such is the result of a different combination of social

phenomena from those which are supposed to bring about heavy linguistic (and especially lexical) borrowing or fabric

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transfer (Grant 2002).

Using data from a subset of heavily borrowing languages from SE Asia, namely the Austronesian Chamic languages,

which are most closely related to Malayic but which have also been shaped by contact with Mon-Khmer languages while

developing some features independently of the languages which are sociopolitically dominant over the Chamic languages, I

demonstrate that this division is factitious, and show that in fact the two processes interact very powerfully to reshape such

languages. I examine two Chamic languages, Tsat/Hainan Cham (Zheng 2007, Thurgood 2006), which over the past

millennium has been strongly shaped by Cantonese and other Chinese languages, which are prestigious in Hainan, and the

Vietnamese Highland Chamic language Jarai (Siu 2009, Lafont 1963, Headley 1965), which has been strongly shaped by

Mon-Khmer languages (not all of which can be clearly identified), latterly mostly the prestigious national language

Vietnamese. The interaction of transfer of pattern and transfer of fabric has infused these languages with contact

phenomena at all structural levels.

Concentration in this study is upon lexicon, examining basic vocabulary and also subsets of the semantic structures

of the Tsat and Jarai lexicon, specifically kinship terminology, cardinal numeral structures, and numeral classifier systems,

which have converged more closely with the structures of these fields as they are found in Chinese (in the case of Tsat) or in

Vietnamese (as with Jarai) than they do with Malay, although neither Jarai nor Tsat has borrowed the relevant forms

wholesale from the relevant prestige language.

References

Grant, Anthony. 2002.‘Fabric, Pattern, Shift and Diffusion: What Change in Oregon Penutian Languages Can Tell Historical

Linguists.’ Proceedings of the Meeting of the Hokan-Penutian Workshop, June 17-18, 2000, U. of California at

Berkeley. Report 11, Survey of California and Other Indian Languages, 33-56, edited by Laura Buszard-Welcher.

Department of Linguistics, University of California at Berkeley.

Headley, Robert K. 1965. A dictionary of the Jarai language. Privately produced.

Lafont, Pierre-Bernard. 1963. Prières jarai. Paris: Maisonneuve.

Ross, Malcolm. 1996. "Contact-induced change and the comparative method: Cases from Papua New Guinea". In Mark

Durie, Malcolm D. Ross, eds.. The comparative method reviewed: Regularity and irregularity in language change.

New York: Oxford University Press. pp.180–217.

Siu, Lap M. 2009. Developing the first preliminary dictionary of North American Jarai. MA Thesis, Texas Tech.

Thurgood, Graham. 2006. Sociolinguistics and contact-induced language change: Hainan Cham, Anong, and Phan Rang

Cham. Tenth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, Puerto Princesa, Philippines, January 2006.

Zheng Yiqing. 1997. Huihuihua yanjiu. Shanghai: Shanghai Yuandong Chuban She.

De que in Portuguese and Spanish: a contrastive analysis of nominal complement clauses.

Granvik, Anton

(Hanken School of Economics)

It is well known that Spanish exhibits a large number of “unwanted” uses of the combination de que in contexts where no

preposition is required by the grammar, a phenomenon called dequeísmo (cf. Náñez 1984, Gómez Torrego 1999, Sánchez

Lancis 2004, en prensa; Del Moral 2008, Delbecque 2008, NGLE §43.6). Portuguese is not known to present dequeísmo, but

in contrast with other Romance languages such as French, Catalan and Italian, it shows the same historical development as

Spanish with nominal complement clauses including a preposition, typically de. This situation is illustrated by the following

sentences:

A possibilidade de saír / a possibilidade de que ele saia eleito é considerável. (Spa)

La posibilidad de salir / la posibilidad de que él salga elegido es considerable. (Por)

La possibilitat de sortir / la possibilitat que ell surti elegit és considerable. (Cat)

La possibilité de sortir / la possibilité qu’il soit élu est considerable. (Fre)

La possibilità di uscire / la possibilità che lui sia eletto é considerabile. (It)

‘The possibility of becoming / that he is elected is considerable’ (cf. Barra Jover 2002: 465-466)

The aim of this paper is to provide a historical account of the introduction and generalization of de before complement

clauses of nominal heads in Portuguese and Spanish. In Spanish, this development apparently took place in the 16

and 17

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centuries (Serradilla Castaño 2010, Girón Alconchel 2004), but the Portuguese situation has not been thoroughly

investigated. In this sense, then, I will try to identify the formative steps that can be observed in Portuguese, contrasting the

findings with Spanish data, in order to reach an understanding of why the de que construction has generalized so much

further in one language than another. By concentrating on nominal complements, the aim is to gain further insight into the

similarities and differences between the two languages, but also to bring new light on the research on Spanish dequeísmo,

where most research has focused on verbal complementation (cf. Delbecque 2008; Cornillie & Delbecque 2008).

For the purpose of this paper, 500 cases per century of the sequence N + de que were extracted from Davies &

Ferreira (2006-)’s Corpus do Português (CP) and Davies (2002-)’s Corpus del español (CE) corpora. The data show a general

increase in the use of the N + de que sequence from the 14

to the 20

century in both languages. When contrasting

Portuguese and Spanish data, it becomes clear that clausal complements with de que generalize much earlier in Spanish

than in Portuguese. In Spanish, more than half the cases of N + de que are indeed complement clauses from the 16

century on, while the same does not occur in Portuguese until the 19

century.

Furthermore, the data reveal that the overall frequency of de que-complement clauses correlates significantly with

what I have called the de que topic-construction. This construction arises from the fact that a significant amount of the

nominal heads which take clausal complements belongs to the semantic domain of thinking and speaking. They are so

called ideational nouns such as (ideia/idea ‘idea’, noticia/noticia ‘news’, esperança/esperanza ‘hope’), which naturally

combine with de expressing a topic meaning (roughly equivalent to ‘about, regarding’). It is hypothesized that the presence

of the de que topic-construction can go a long way to explaining the rise of dequeísmo in Spanish, an evolution that might

lie still ahead in the case of Portuguese, which is found to possess most of the necessary ingredients.

References

Barra Jover, Mario (2002): “Evolución de la subordinación sustantiva y propiedades del verbo español”, in M

Teresa

Echenique Elizondo & Juan Sánchez Méndez (eds.): Actas del V Congreso Internacional de Historia de la Lengua

Española. Madrid: Gredos, 463-476.

Cornillie, Bert y Nicole Delbecque (2008): “Speaker commitment: Back to the speaker. Evidence from Spanish alternations”,

Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 22, pp. 37-62.

Delbecque, Nicole (2008): “Spanish (de)queísmo: part/whole alternation and viewing arrangement”, en B. Lewandowska-

Tomaszczyk (ed.): Asymmetric Events. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 51-84.

Davies, Mark (2002-) Corpus del español: 100 million words, 1200s-1900s. En internet:

<http://www.corpusdelespanol.org.>.

Davies, Mark and Michael Ferreira. (2006-) Corpus do Português: 45 million words, 1300s-1900s. En internet:

<http://www.corpusdoportugues.org.>.

Del Moral, Gabriel (2008): “Spanish dequeísmo: A Case Study in Subjectification”, Nueva Revista de Lenguas Extranjeras, 10,

183-214.

GDLE = Bosque, Ignacio & Violeta Delmonte (coords.) (1999): Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa

Calpe.

Girón Alconchel, (2004): “Cambios gramaticales en los Siglos de Oros”, in Rafael Cano Aguilar (coord.): Historia de la lengua

española. Barcelona: Ariel, 859-893.

Gómez Torrego, Leonardo (1999): “La variación en las subordinadas sustantivas: dequeísmo y queísmo”, in GDLE, 2105-

2148.

Náñez Fernández, Emilio (1984): “Sobre dequeísmo”, Revista de Filología Románica, II, 239-248.

NGLE = RAE y AALE (2009): Nueva gramática de la lengua española. Madrid: Espasa. 2 vols.

Sánchez Lancis, Carlos (en prensa): “Gramaticalización y (de)queísmo en español: una aproximación diacrónica”, in D. Jacob

& K. Ploog (eds.): Autour de que, El entorno de que.

Sánchez Lancis, Carlos (2004): “Diacronía del (de)queísmo en español”, in M. Villayandre Llamazares (ed.): Actas del V

Congreso de Lingüística General, vol III. Madrid: Arco/Libros, 2507-2518.

Serradilla Castaño, Ana (2010): “La subordinación completiva en español antiguo: continuidad y ruptura de los modelos

latinos”, in Castillo Lluch, Mónica & Marta López Izquierdo (eds.): Modelos latinos en la Castilla medieval.

Madrid/Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 145-158.

Prints of linguistic identity in the post-war linguistic landscape of Mostar.

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Grbavac, Ivana

(University of Mostar)

Identities are constantly made and remade. They are multilayered, variable and dynamic. Linguistic identity in multiethnic

communities also carries thease features. The aim of this research was to measure the presence of different languages and

markers of linguistic identity in the post-war linguistic landscape of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The research question

was: “To what extent does the LL of Mostar reflect the linguistic identities of the two speech communities?“. In multiethnic

ecologies relationship between language and identity is complex and a subject to perpetual changes. The choice of language

and language attitudes are closely connected to the political issues, power relations, language ideologies and opinions of

the interlocutors about identity. All these tenets are demonstrable in the linguistic landscape of the post-war city of Mostar.

The linguistic landscape of this divided city is an arena in which diverse linguistic identities are constantly negotiated.

Different ethnicities struggle to leave more prints of their identity in the linguistic landscape of the city.

While most studies of linguistic landscape approach it as multilingual language policy, we suggest that linguistic

landscape can also provide valuable insights into research on language and identity. The highly visible texts of the LL can also

impact upon the discursive construction of the collective identities of the inhabitants of the place. In the city of Mostar,

which is a multiethnic area, language has emerged as a strong marker of ethnic identity. The presence of one language in

the LL is symbolic of the strength and vitality of its ethnic group. On the other hand, the absence of a language in the LL can

give out the message that the language and its ethnic group have no status in the public social world. Prints of linguistic

identity are an evidence of a group's yearning to emphasise its collective identity in the public. By doing so, each group

marks „its“ territory.

We carried out a quantitative study of 6 survey areas in the city in order to get an objective feel of the LL in terms

of linguistic code choices and preferences. A new variable was introduced into LL research and that is The Presence of

Collective Identity Marker. The data were collected during 13 months of fieldwork in the 6 most frequented city centers.

Altogether 1010 signs were photographed, using sampling method Diversity or Heterogeneity Sampling. All photographed

signs were analysed and coded according to 26 variables. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), Version 19, was

used for the statistical analysis.

The results have shown that the public signs of the post-war LL of the city of Mostar are indeed symbolic markers of

status and power, which tells us a lot about the vitality of different social cleveages in the society. Nevertheless, the high

percentage of the prints of linguistic identity signalizes that, despite recent animosities, the social environment in the city of

Mostar is tolerant and open for diverse social and cultural differences.

Individuating the abstract.

Grimm, Scott

(Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Despite the vast literature on the mass-count distinction, the countability of abstract nouns, as well as their patterns of

polysemy and sense extension, remains largely unexplored territory. Previous literature hypothesized that the countability

of abstract nouns arises from the aktionsart of a noun's derivational source (Mourelatos 1978, Brinton 1998). Derivational

patterns are taken as primary evidence for this connection: states and activities correspond to non-count nouns (run >

much/*a running) while accomplishment and achievements correspond to count nouns (arrive > *much/an arrival). The

countability preference of abstract nouns then, as argued most explicitly in Brinton (1998), could follow from the aktionsart

of their derivational source. I provide an empirical study demonstrating that (i) the countability of abstract nouns is not

fully determined by the derivational source, (ii) the state/event distinction is only one among many distinctions governing

abstract nouns’ countability and (iii) there are several productive paths of sense extension, which play out in different

fashions depending on the semantic field.

To examine the aktionsart hypothesis, I compiled (and hand-corrected) a database of 3100 deverbal nouns

containing each noun's derivational history and countability class (both extracted from the CELEX database) along with the

derivational source's aktionsart information (from the “Lexical Conceptual Structures” database (Dorr 2001)). I evaluated,

using a general linear model, whether the aktionsart of a noun's derivational source predicts its countability class. The

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hypothesis was partially validated: nouns derived from statives and locative statives were significant predictors (p<.002 and

p<.05, respectively) of exclusively uncountable nouns; however, accomplishments or achievements did not consistently

yield countable nouns. A large number of counter-examples, and frequent polysemy between count and non-count

occurrences (much thought/many thoughts), further indicate that this explanation is too coarse-grained.

A second study examines nouns from four semantic domains (mental/bodily states, psych-nouns, qualities

(honesty), event-nouns (crime)). For each domain, I extracted from the COCA corpus up to 200 singular and 200 plural

occurrences of at least 10 different nouns. I exemplify my findings with nouns of the first two domains.

Bodily and mental states (hunger, sleep) are typically uncountable, yet may become countable when anchored to

an event or an individual (“the sleeps of a five-week old baby”). The mental noun intelligence can only be anchored to

individuals (“our intelligences”), but not events; nouns designating social qualities (kindness) can only be anchored to

events, not individuals. The potential for sense extension appears to be related to fundamental semantic properties:

availability of eventive readings correlates with stage-level predicates, while only inalienably possessed qualities/properties

allow anchoring to individuals.

For psych-nouns, nominal countability is determined by whether the noun designates an experiencer-state or a

stimulus. Nouns designating stimuli (irritant) are always countable, while those designating experiencer-states (gloom,

despair) are uncountable, but may permit countable uses as (often marginal) episodic construals. A third type is polysemous

between experiencer-state (much annoyance [uncountable]) and stimulus (several annoyances [countable]).

These results argue that fine-grained semantic generalizations, often relative to particular semantic fields,

underpin the countability of abstract nouns and their potential sense extensions.

References:

Brinton, L. (1998). “Aspectuality and countability: a cross-categorial analogy”. English Language and Linguistics 2: 37-63.

Baayen, R., R. Piepenbrock, and L. Gulikers, The CELEX Lexical Database. Linguistic Data Consortium, University of

Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 1995.

Davies, M. (2008-). The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 425 million words, 1990-present. Available online

at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/.

Dorr, B. (2001). LCS Database. University of Maryland.

Mourelatos, A. (1978). “Events, Processes and States”. Linguistics and Philosophy 2: 415--434.

Evaluating a universal of borrowing: linear structure preservation.

Grossman, Eitan

(Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

According to Moravcsik (1978: 112), “a grammatical word cannot be borrowed unless the linear order with respect to its

head is also ‘borrowed’ […] This statement excludes a language which borrows the form and the meaning of a preposition

and uses it postposed, or which borrows the form and meaning of a postposition and uses it preposed.” The aim of the

present paper is to evaluate the proposed universal – called here Linear Order Preservation – on the basis of a broad cross-

linguistic sample (the sample on which the present study is given below as an annex).

In order to map the possible outcomes of borrowing, it is necessary to take into account:

1. The basic linear order of adposition vis-à-vis complement in the source language;

2. The basic linear order of adposition vis-à-vis complement in the target language; and

3. The linear order of borrowed adposition vis-à-vis-complement in the target language.

This produces a set of eight logical possibilities, only six of which are actually attested. The following table is to be read as ‘X

is borrowed as Y in a language with Z as its basic linear order of adposition vis-à-vis complement,’ e.g., line 1 = ‘Preposition

borrowed as preposition in language with preposition-complement as its basic linear order.’

OURCE

ARGET

ARGET LANGUAGE

BASIC LINEAR ORDER

TTESTED

Prep

Coptic

Post

Kolami

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Prep

Post

Basque

Post

Prep

Kurdish

Prep

Post

Yaqui

Post

Prep

Azerbaijani Neo

Aramaic

Prep

Post

Prep

Post

Prep

Post

Outcomes 1 and 2 are expected, but trivial, since there is no conflict of linear orders. Outcomes 3 and 4 are predicted by

Moravcsik’s universal of Linear Order Preservation. Outcomes 5 and 6 are counterexamples to Moravcsik’s universal.

Outcomes 7 and 8 are logically possible but unattested in the sample, probably because it is unlikely that a disharmonic

order would result when there is no conflict between linear orders of source and target language. Some outcomes involve

only matter replication, while others involve both matter and pattern replication (for the distinction, see Matras & Sakel

2007).

Broadly speaking, the results of this cross-linguistic study demonstrates that linear order conflicts can be resolved

in favor of the linear order of either the source or the target language, thereby providing additional evidence for the

generalization that the structural features of the languages involved, on their own, make poor predictions about the

outcome of borrowing. As such, the motivating and facilitating factors for the particular resolution of linear order conflicts

must be sought elsewhere. This paper looks at areal, sociolinguistic and discourse factors, taking into consideration not only

established borrowings but also sporadic ‘online’ instances of code-switching.

References

Matras, Y. & Sakel, J., 2007. ‘Investigating the mechanisms of pattern replication in language convergence,’ in Studies in

Language 31/4: 829-865.

Moravcsik, E., 1978. ‘Universals of language contact,’ in: J. Greenberg, C. Ferguson & E. Moravsik (eds.) Universals of Human

Language, Volume 1: Method and Theory. Stanford, CA; Stanford University Press, 93-122.

Word order change in the adposition phrase of western Uralic: syntactic transfer or reanalysis?

Grünthal, Riho

(University of Helsinki)

Unlike other Uralic languages and most other languages of the world, western Uralic displays a mixed word order in the

adposition phrase. There are both prepositions (examples 1–2) and postpositions (examples 3–4) in the Finnic languages,

such as Finnish, Estonian, Karelian, Veps and Votic, and the Saamic languages, whereas other Uralic languages exclusively

display postpositions. The variation occurs in any kind of data, both spoken and written language. The following examples

(1–4) represent non-standardised variants that were documented during 19th and 20th century.

(1)Inari Saami tæggær keđgikuouđaš mii moonaj toho, čoođa ton suolluu (MSFOu 213: 25)

such stone hollow what go-IMPF.SG3 there[LAT] through it-GEN island.GEN

‘[there was] such a stone hollow that went there, through the island’

(2) Veps ak se i kol' i edū kolendad sanui ukole… (MSFOu 100: 258)

woman it and die-IMPF.SG3 and before death-PART say-IMPF.SG3 man-ALL

‘the woman died and said to the man before her death…’

(3) Inari Saami te biejjii toho … ton… toj muoraj vuala ja muorajd piejjii oola (MSFOu 213: 25)

then put-IMPF.SG3 there[LAT] it-GEN.SG it-GEN.PL tree-GEN.PL under[LAT] and tree-GEN(-ACC).PL put-

IMPF.SG3 upon[LAT]

‘then (s)he put [it] under the trees and put wood on it’

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(4) Vote miä en näe mitäid, lavvaa takan isun nüd (MSFOu 63: 10)

I NEG-SG1 see.CNG nothing-PRT table.GEN behind[LOC] sit-SG1 now

‘I do not see anything, I am now sitting at the table.’

Typologically the parallel use of prepositions and postpositions is not exceptional but, nevertheless, unexpected as less than

10% of the world’s languages display a mixed order of the adposition and the noun phrase (Dryer 1991, 1992, 2007). The

straightforward explanation for this ambiguity is that the long-term contact between western Finnic and Saamic and the

neighboring Indo-European languages, most notably Germanic and Baltic, triggered the word order change as some linguists

have assumed (Lehtinen 2007: 135).

However, in our paper we suggest that the alleged contact-induced change and emergence of prepositions in Finnic

and Saamic on the basis of Indo-European influence is inadequately motivated. The mixed system has parallels in different

syntactic patterns, which has triggered the variation in contemporary languages. In fact, both synchronically and

diachronically the adposition phrase demonstrates subtle morphosyntactic interplay between case government, adpositions

and grammatical relations.

The main rule is that the basic morphosyntactic structure of a postpositional phrase in Finnic and Saamic

corresponds to the order of the genitive and noun, whereas the morphosyntactic structure of most prepositional phrases in

Finnic presumably corresponds to comparative constructions, historically locational comparatives as Stassen (2011) labels

the given subtype. Methodologically, the diachronic perspective urges one to discuss the typology of synchronic

constructions and language-internal structural diversity in a broader framework. We allege that the combination of

historical linguistics and typology demonstrates those constraints that decrease the influence of language contacts in

grammatically specialised functions such as adpositional phrases.

References

Dryer, Matthew 1991: SVO Languages and the OV/VO Typology. Journal of Linguistics 27. 443–482.

Dryer, Matthew 1992: The Greenbergian word order correlations. Language 68. 81–138.

Dryer, Matthew 2007: Word order. In: Timothy Shopen (ed.), Clause Structure. Language Typology and Syntactic Description.

Vol. 1. Second Edtion. Cambridge University Press.

Lehtinen, Tapani 2007: Kielen vuosituhannet. Suomen kielen kehitys kantauralista varhaissuomeen. Helsinki: Finnish Literary

Society.

Stassen, Leon 2011: Stassen, Leon. 2011. Comparative Constructions. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) The

World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, chapter 121. Available online at

http://wals.info/chapter/121. Accessed on 2013-01-13.

MSFOu 63 = Lauri Kettunen & Lauri Posti: Näytteitä vatjan kielestä. Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne 63. Helsinki:

Finno-Ugrian Society 1932.

MSFOu 100 = E. N. Setälä, J. H. Kala, E. A. Tunkelo & Reino Peltola: Näytteitä äänis- ja keskivepsän murteista. Mémoires de la

Société Finno-Ougrienne 100. Helsinki: Finno-Ugrian Society 1951.

MSFOu 213 = Erkki Itkonen & Lea Laitinen: Inarinsaamelaisia kielennäytteitä. Aanaarkiela čȧjttuzeh. Mémoires de la Société

Finno-Ougrienne 213. Helsinki: Finno-Ugrian Society 1992.

Constituent order and information structure in Cavineña (Tacanan, Amazonian Bolivia).

Guillaume, Antoine

(CNRS and Université de Lyon)

The goal of this paper is to report on an on-going investigation of the discourse-pragmatic categories of topic and focus

(Lambrecht 1994) in Cavineña, a Bolivian Amazonian language from the Tacanan family. This study is based on natural texts

collected in the field between 1996 and 2003. This investigation is the first serious attempt to understand the structure of

discourse in a Tacanan language. It is also one of the very rare studies of information structure in an Amazonian language.

The analysis of discourse structure in Tacanan languages is a challenging enterprise, for the following reasons:

• they are ‘pro-drop’ languages: the arguments (S, A or O) need not be expressed by overt NPs or independent

pronouns

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• when expressed, overt NPs/independent pronouns do not manifest any rigid (or even basic) syntactic order

• Tacanan languages have no clear discursively-marked constructions, like dislocation or cleft constructions

In this paper, I will first report on a number of correlations that I have found between the use of overt NPs in pre- and post-

verbal positions, in association with particular prosodic contours and/or discourse particles, and the expression of various

topic or focus categories. These correlations are listed below:

• post-verbal NP preceded by a pause → antitopic

• post-verbal NP not preceded by a pause → predicate focus

• pre-verbal & sentence-initial NP marked by particle =bakwe → ‘contrastive’ topic

• pre-verbal & sentence-initial NP → argument focus

• pre-verbal NP marked by particle =dya → ‘contrastive’ focus

Secondly, I will discuss a number of problematic examples with NPs in pre-verbal position which can be interpreted as

representing either topics or focus.

Reference

Lambrecht, K. 1994. Information structure and sentence form : topic, focus, and the mental representations of discourse

referents. Cambridge / New York: Cambridge University Press.

Adposition borrowing in North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic.

Gutman, Ariel

(Konstanz University)

The term North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic is a cover term for over 100 different genealogically related dialects spread from

South Eastern Turkey through North Iraq to Western Iran. Although all these dialects are related and are ultimately derived

from a common Eastern Aramaic dialect, they show a great deal of variation, due to their different contact situations.

Amongst the contact languages one may mention Kurmanji and Sorani Kurdish, Persian, Azeri Turkish and Levantine Arabic.

These languages regularly use prepositions, inflectional suffixes as well as post-clitics.

In the proposed paper we shall investigate cases of preposition borrowing, as well as other inflectional markers and

clitics in these dialects (as the Iranian Ezafe marker).

Two questions shall be addressed particularly:

1. Which items are especially prone to be borrowed, either directly or as loan translations?

2. How well are borrowed items syntactically and morphologically integrated into the source language? For

instance, to what extent do borrowed preposition inflect with person suffixes as native Aramaic prepositions do?

In order to answer these questions, a small sample of basic “prepositional” items is established cross-dialectally.

This sample includes basic lexical items are which expressed in NENA as prepositions (such as “in”, or “on”), as well as

markers of grammatical relations (such as the genitive relation), which may be expressed by clitics or adpositions.

The different items of the sample are compared across a selected list of documented dialects, relying mostly on

existing grammatical descriptions (for instance, Khan 2002, 2008, 2009; Cohen 2012) and dictionaries (Sabar 2002). For

some data points, fieldwork results of the author are also used.

As an illustration of the results, we can consider the marking of genitive relation across NENA dialects. In most Iraqi

and Turkish NENA dialects, the genitive relation is marked by a head-marking suffix -əd, derived from the native Aramaic

pro-clitic də, such as in bēs-əd ħakōma “house-of king”. However, the Iranian Trans-Zab dialects (a term coined by Muzafi

2008) have ceased to use this suffix, and instead have adopted (to a certain extent) the Iranian Ezafe clitic marker =e, with

its particular syntactic behaviour. Contrary to the native Aramaic suffix, the borrowed clitic attaches also to nouns extended

by adjectives, such as belá=e rŭwa “house-EZ big”. Moreover, the Ezafe marker often follows non-native Iranian prepositions

used in these dialects.

Similarly, for other borrowed morphemes too we will consider to what extent their syntactic and morphological

behaviour is also borrowed from the donor language.

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References

Cohen, Eran (2012). The Syntax of Neo-Aramaic: The Jewish Dialect of Zakho. Gorgias Neo-Aramaic Studies 13. Piscataway:

Gorgias Press.

Khan, Geoffrey (2002). The Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Qaraqosh. Studies in Semitic languages and linguistics 36. Brill.

Khan, Geoffrey (2008). The Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Urmi. Gorgias Neo-Aramaic Studies 2. Piscataway: Gorgias Press.

Khan, Geoffrey (2009). The Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Sanandaj. Gorgias Neo-Aramaic Studies 10. Piscataway: Gorgias

Press.

Mutzafi, Hezy (2008). “Trans-Zab Jewish Neo-Aramaic”. In: Bulletin of SOAS 71.3, pp. 409–431.

Sabar, Yona (2002). A Jewish Neo-Aramaic dictionary. dialects of Amidya, Dihok, Nerwa and Zakho, northwestern Iraq.

Semitica viva 28. Harrassowitz Verlag.

Agreement as DSM.

Hallman, Peter

(University of Vienna)

In this talk, I propose that subject markedness in differential subject marking (DSM) constructions is expressed by verb

agreement with the subject, in contrast to object markedness, which is expressed by morphological case on the object

(DOM). A case study in the diachronic development of the relation between agreement and definiteness in Arabic supports

this claim. In Classical Arabic (prior to 700 AD), only pronominal subjects trigger number agreement on the verb in the

neutral word order VSO (1a) (the pronoun can be dropped but the agreement is obligatory in any event). Definite and

indefinite subjects occur with default singular (1b) (Fassi-Fehri 1993, among others).

(1) a. wasal-uu (hum) b. wasal-a l-rijaal-u / rijaal-u-n

arrived-3p they.3mp arrived-3ms the-men-nom / men-nom-indef

`They arrived.’ `The men arrived.’ / `Men arrived.’

In modern Levantine Arabic, agreement with pronominal and definite subjects is obligatory.

(2) a. wesl-o (hon) b. wesl-o l-erjaal

arrived-3p they.3p arrived-3p the-men

Indefinite subjects, however, trigger agreement only when specific (Mohammad 2000 and others). Agreement with an

indefinite subject requires that subject to be interpreted as included within the denotation of a discourse antecedent, as Enç

(1991) characterizes specificity, and the text below demonstrates (from Hallman 2007). The continuation with agreement in

(3a) requires the three buses referred to there to belong to the group of buses mentioned in (3). The continuation in (3b)

without agreement does not. "3" is a pharyngeal fricative.

(3) chauffeur l-bas 'ell-na 'inno 3iddet baseet 3il'-o bi-3aj'et seer…

driver the-bus told-us that several buses stuck-3p in-jam traffic

`The bus driver told us that several buses were stuck in traffic…'

a. ba3deen smi3-na 'inno wesl-o tleet baseet m'axxariin.

later heard-1p that arrived-3p three buses late

`Later we heard that three of the buses arrived late.' [specific]

b. ba3deen smi3-na 'inno wesil tleet baseet m'axxariin.

later heard-1p that arrived-Ø three buses late

`Later we heard that three buses arrived late.' [non-specific]

Agreement in both classical and modern Arabic shows the same relationship to the definiteness hierarchy as object case

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marking does in DOM constructions: the occurrence of the marking correlates with high definiteness for the associated

nominal. The diachronic development of Arabic shows a lowering of the cutoff point for markedness for subjects, and in

modern Arabic, the correlation of agreement and subject definiteness is exactly parallel to the correlation of case marking

and object definiteness in typical DOM languages such as Turkish, where non-specific objects are not case-marked but

specific, definite and pronominal objects are. These observations support the claim that agreement is to subject marking

what case is to object marking. The fact that agreement and case tend to be complementary (Greenberg 1966, Keenan

1976) explains Aissen's (2003) assessment that subject markedness (as case) is inversely correlated with definiteness. When

we take agreement to represent subject markedness rather than case, the correlation is the same for subjects and objects:

the more definiteness, the more markedness.

References

Aissen, Judith 2003. Differential Object Marking: Iconicity vs. Economy. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 21:435-483.

Enç, Mürvet 1991. The Semantics of Specificity. Linguistic Inquiry 22:1-27.

Fassi-Fehri, Abdelkader 1993. Issues in the Structure of Arabic Clauses and Words. Dordrecht.

Greenberg, Joseph 1963. Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements. In

Greenberg, Joseph (ed.) Some Universals of Language. MIT Press, pp. 73-113.

Hallman, Peter 2007. Interface Linguistics. In Kees Versteegh (ed.), Encyclopedia of Arabic Language and Linguistics, vol. 2,

365-372, Brill Academic Publishers, Leiden.

Keenan, Edward 1976. Towards a Universal Definition of `Subject'. In Li, Charles (ed.) Subject and Topic, Academic Press, pp.

305-333.

Mohammad, Mohammad 2000. Word Order, Agreement and Pronominalization in Standard and Palestinian Arabic. John

Benjamins.

Frequency effects in translation: further refining the notion of gravitational pull.

Halverson, Sandra

(NHH Norwegian School of Economics)

The gravitational pull hypothesis (Halverson 2003) was put forward as a tentative explanation of some of the linguistic

patterns posited for translated text (or ‘translation universals’). The hypothesis built on Langacker’s theory of cognitive

grammar (1987/1991, 2008) and the distributed feature model of bilingual representation (de Groot 1992, 1993). The key

idea was that the particular configurations of bilingual schematic networks could be used to predict patterns of over- or

underrepresentation in translational corpora.

In later work, two main problems with the original formulation were recognized (Halverson 2010a). The first of

these was the theoretical conflation of what are now recognized as three distinct potential sources of translational effects

deriving from schematic networks. These three potential sources are: 1) the cognitive status (as prototype/schema) of the

target language item (gravitational pull proper), 2) the patterning and strength of links within the bilingual network, and 3)

the cognitive status of the source text (ST) item. The second problem is of a methodological nature and concerns the need

to combine observational data (corpora) with experimental data in cognitive linguistic endeavors. A third issue that has been

discussed separately (Halverson 2010b, 2012) concerns the relationship between translation and other forms of bilingual

language production.

In this paper, I address all three issues through the discussion of the role of frequency in cognitive linguistic models

of translation and bilingual cognition. The relationship between frequency and cognitive status is discussed with a

methodological starting point in Schmid (2010), though the broader issues concerning the relationship between cognitive

status and corpus frequency are also recognized (see also Gilquin (2006)). In addition to the comparison of frequencies

across corpora to test for effect type 1, this paper adapts Schmid’s ‘attraction-reliance’ measures to a translational

environment to test for effect types 2 and 3 above in corpus data.

In the paper, the hypothesis is tested with using data for one particular schematic network: the polysemous verb

get. First, independent corpus-analytical studies of get (Berez and Gries 2008) and of get and its Norwegian counterparts

(Ebeling 2003) are used as a means of establishing a viable model of a bilingual (Norwegian-English) schematic network for

this verb. Then corpus data from the English-Norwegian parallel corpus, the British National Corpus and the Translational

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Corpus of English are investigated to test for the three types of effects. At this point the relative frequency measures from

Schmid (2010) are introduced and adapted. These analyses serve to test the gravitational pull hypothesis, and they also

illustrate the theoretical refinements to the hypothesis as it was originally formulated. The methodological issue of teasing

apart the three potential sources of effects is also addressed. The measures adapted here will also be considered with an

aim to further developing more sophisticated multivariate statistical tests for this hypothesis. Finally, proposals are made for

the frequency-based integration of experimental data and for the comparison of these analyses with data from other

bilingual production modes.

References

De Groot, Anette M.B. (1993). Word-type effects in bilingual processing Tasks. Support for a mixed representational system.

Robert Schreuder, Bert Weltens, eds., The bilingual lexicon. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 27-51.

De Groot, Anette M.B. (1992). Bilingual lexical representation: a closer look at conceptual representations. Ram Frost and

Leonard Katz, eds., Orthography, Phonology, Morphology, and Meaning. Amsterdam: North Holland, 389-412.

Ebeling, Signe O. (2003). The Norwegian verbs bli and få and their correspondences in English: a corpus-based contrastive

study. Doctoral dissertation, Faculty of Arts, University of Oslo.

Gilquin, Gaëtanelle (2006). The place of prototypicality in corpus linguistics. Causation in the hot seat. Stefan Th. Gries and

Anatol Stefanowitch, eds., Corpora in cognitive linguistics. Corpus-based approaches to syntax and lexis. Berlin:

Mouton de Gruyter, 159-191.

Halverson, Sandra (2012). Is translated language unique? Invited lecture, Aston University, Birmingham, UK, 8 February

2012.

Halverson, Sandra (2010a). Cognitive translation studies: developments in theory and method. Gregory Shreve and Erik

Angelone, eds., Translation and cognition. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 349-369.

Halverson, Sandra (2010b). Translation universals or cross-linguistic influence: conceptual and methodological issues. Paper

presented at 6

EST Conference. Leuven, 23-25 September 2010.

Halverson, Sandra (2003). The cognitive basis of translation universals. Target 15:2, 197-241.Langacker, Ronald (1987).

Foundations of cognitive grammar. Volume 1. Theoretical prerequisites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Langacker, Ronald (1991). Foundations of cognitive grammar. Volume 2. Descriptive application. Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press.

Langacker, Ronald (2008). Cognitive Grammar. A basic introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Schmid, Hans-Jörg (2010). Does frequency in text instantiate entrenchment in the cognitive system? Dylan Glynn and Kerstin

Fischer, eds., Cognitive Linguistics Research: Quantitative Methods in Cognitive Semantics. Corpus-driven

approaches. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 101-133.

Afrikaans, cornerstone of European heritage or creole language?

Hamans, Camiel

(European Parliament)

This paper addresses the question of how ideology may influence historical linguistic research and vice versa. The data come

from Afrikaans and the approach is a historiographic search through the literature on the genesis of Afrikaans.

Afrikaans is now one of the eleven national languages of South Africa. The origin and descent of this language has

long been disputed. On the one hand one finds the South African Philological School (Den Besten 1986) and its forerunners

such as Kloeke (1950) who defended a superstrate idea in which linguistic peculiarities of Afrikaans were seen as coming

from dialect varieties of Dutch. Kloeke, a Dutch linguist and dialectologist, imputed a strong founder effect to the Dutch

dialect that was the mother tongue of Jan van Riebeek, the leader of the first Dutch settlement (1652-1662).

The South African Philological School itself is associated with Apartheid (1960-1994) and the idea that the Dutch

settlers, who called themselves Afrikaner Boer later, were sent by God to bring Christian civilization to South Africa and to

protect the original inhabitants against murder, rape and violence. The language of these settlers, Dutch, was instrumental

in bringing God’s truth to Africa. This school, represented by its most prolific writers J. du Plessis Scholtz and Edith Raidt

(Den Besten 1987 and Roberge 2012), was mainly interested in the growth of standard Afrikaans and defended “the idea

that Afrikaans gradually developed out of 17

and 18

century nonstandard Dutch under the accelerating pressure of

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nonnative and sometimes broken Dutch as spoken by French Huguenots, Germans, Khoekhoen (Hottentots), and slaves”

(Den Besten 1987: 67). For each feature that could be regarded as a creolism, a possible Dutch or European antecedent was

sought and was subsequently proclaimed European under the slogan “if a feature can possibly be European, then it must be

European”(Holm 2012: 400).

At the other extreme one finds scholars who defend an opposite view, which says that “Afrikaans is some kind of

creole language” (Roberge 2012: 390). Early proponents of this idea are among others Schuchardt (Meijer & Muijsken

1977), Hesseling (1897, 1899) and Reinecke (1937) (Holm 2012: 399). In the days of Apartheid the leading historical

linguistic view was that of the Philological School and which followed the Eurocentric philosophy of the Apartheid ideology.

Advocates of a creole origin, such as the Dutch Romanist Valkhoff (1966, 1972) were insulted or ridiculed as negrocentric

(Van der Merwe 1982: 3, Hinskens 2009: 20). In a less emotional debate Raidt (1983: 191) blames Den Besten and other

advocates of a creole genesis for not being able to apprehend the causes of the language changes at the Cape of Good Hope

fully (Roberge 2012: 393).

With the abolition of Apartheid the primacy of the Philological School disappeared. Nowadays only right wing

extremists, in South Africa and the Netherlands, defend an exclusive, direct and strong lineage from Dutch dialects to

Afrikaans. Young Afrikaans poets and singer songwriters are proud to call themselves bastardized and Creoles and their

language creolized (De Vries 2012: 137). They claim to belong to Africa and not to Europe anymore. The genesis of their

language is an argument for this claim.

In this presentation data from Afrikaans will be presented with which the two schools tried to prove that they were

right.

The result, or conclusion, of this paper will be a reminder that historical linguists only should take a position in

ideological debates if they do so responsibly, free, as much as possible, of any unwarranted a priori preferences for one view

or the other.

References

Besten, Hans den (1986), Double Negation and the genesis of Afrikaans. In: Pieter Muysken and Norval Smith (eds),

Substrata versus Universals in Creole Genesis. Papers from the Amsterdam Workshop, April 1985. Amsterdam: John

Benjamins: 185-230.

Besten, Hans den (1987) Review of Edith Raidt 1983. Einführung in Geschichte und Struktur des Afrikaans. Darmstadt:

Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 2(1): 67-92.

Besten, Hans den (2012), Roots of Arikaans, Selected Writings ed. by Ton van der Wouden. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John

Benjamins.

Besten, Hans den, Frans Hinskens & Jerzy Koch (eds.) (2009), Afrikaans. Een drieluik. Amsterdam/Münster: Stichting

Neerlandistiek VU & Nodus Publikationen.

Hinskens, Frans (2009), Zuid-Afrika en het Afrikaans, Inleidende notities over egschiedenis, taal en letterkunde. Hans den

Besten, Frans Hinskens & Jerzy Koch (eds.) (2009): 9-33.

Holm, John (2012), Partial restructuring. Dutch on the Cape and Portuguese in Brazil. Hans den Besten (2012): 399-

417.

Kloeke, Gesinus G. (1950), Herkomst en groei van het Afrikaans. Leiden: Universitaire Pers Leiden.

Merwe, Hendrik J.J.M. van der. (1982), Afrikaans, sy aard en ontwikkeling. Pretoria: Van Schaik. 6th edition.

Meijer, Guus & Pieter Muysken. (1977), On the beginnings of pidgin and creole studies: Schuchardt and Hesseling. Albert

Valdman (ed.) Pidgin and creole linguistics, 21-45. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Raidt, Edith H. (1983), Einführung in Geschichte und Struktur des Afrikaans. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.

Roberge, Paul T. (2012) Afrikaans, “Might it be a little more ‘South Africa’?”. Hans den Besten (2012): 389-397.

Vries, Fred de (2012), Afrikaners, Een volk op drift. Amsterdam: Nijgh & Van Ditmar.

Switch-reference description using experiential evidence.

Hammond, Jeremy

(MPI, Nijmegen)

In this paper, I present results from experimental data on switch-reference in the Oceanic language Whitesands (ISO: TNP),

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providing an evidence-based description of the system. Whitesands, like its sister languages of the southern Vanuatu sub-

group, uses a switch-reference system across clauses primarily marking coreference (Lynch 1983, Lynch 2001:177, Crowley

2002:201, Hammond submitted). I present a description of the system in its most canonical form for Whitesands. I then

tackle the properties of antecedents for the same subject clauses using two different experiments. I address the following

questions: Does the Whitesands' system support claims that switch-reference systems are potentially sensitive to discourse

topicality (Reesink 1983) or other extra-syntactic devices (Roberts 1988)? Furthermore, what is the preferred antecedent for

Whitesands speakers in extended discourse?

The m- ‘ER’ inflection is typically used when two adjacent predicates share the same subject. The m- replaces the

person agreement and tense operators in the second clause. In (1) the m- indicates coreference of the subject of the

predicate with the subject of the preceding predicate. The clause m-l-eru is underspecified for person and tense when taken

out of context and is thus ungrammatical as in (1’).

(1) k-l-eni ama [m-l-eru]

3.NPST-TRIAL-say just ER-TRIAL-see

They (TRIAL) just talked and saw.

(1’) * m-l-eru

ER-TRIAL-see

However, in the Whitesands corpus it is clear that a simple “antecedent equals subject” rule does not always hold for same

subject clauses and that a notion of discourse topic might be a potential antecedent alternative. For example, there are

topic chains that use the Echo Referent for continual reference whilst skipping immediately adjacent non-topical subjects.

Further, there are forms where the prefix m- combines previously distinct arguments into a single argument slot.

The first experiment presented here is a production experiment where speakers had to extend natural discourse

using video and audio stimuli. The items were of four types and these were controlled for alignment of grammatical

relations and topicality. The results suggest that a highly topical entity can indeed trigger a coreference pattern.

The second experiment presented is a forced choice comprehension task. I investigate the relationship between

same subject clauses (coreference) and antecedent types. I test what alternative constructions are considered grammatical.

I conclude that the switch-reference clauses are much more likely to be aligned with a topical referent that is also the

subject of the preceding clause than in other configurations tested.

References

Crowley, Terry. 2002. Serial verbs in oceanic : a descriptive typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hammond, Jeremy. Submitted. Switch-reference antecedence and subordination in Whitesands (Oceanic). In Rik van Gijn,

Jeremy Hammond, Dejan Matic, Saskia van Putten & Ana Vilacy Galucio (eds.), Information Structure and Complex

Sentences. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Lynch, John. 1983. Switch-reference in Lenakel. In John Haiman & Pamela Munro (eds.), Switch Reference and Universal

Grammar: Proceedings of a symposium on switch reference and universal grammar, Winnipeg, May 1981, 209–221.

Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Lynch, John. 2001. The linguistic history of southern Vanuatu. Pacific linguistics. (Pacific Linguistics). Canberra: Pacific

Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University.

Reesink, Ger P. 1983. Switch reference and topicality hierarchies. Studies in Language 7(2). 215–246.

Roberts, John. 1988. Switch-reference in Papuan languages: A syntactic or Extrasyntactic device? Australian Journal of

Linguistics 8(1). 75–117.

Pragmaticalization in L2: the case of French voilà in a learner corpus.

Hancock, Victorine

(Mälardalens Högskola, Västerås)

Voilà is known as a recurrent deictic marker in spoken French. Bruxelles and Traverso (2006) study the use of the marker in a

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professional context where architects discuss their projects in the office. As could be expected, the architects use deictic

markers to highlight different features of their models. One observation made by the authors is that voilà is not restricted to

deictic use alone, but carries a number of interactional functions. In a perspective of pragmaticalization (e.g. Dostie 2004,

Dostie & Pusch 2007, Hansen & Rossari 2005), voilà has undergone a number of semantic changes to gain interactional

functions.

In this paper we study the usage of the French marker voilà in spoken French by very advanced Swedish learners. It

has been observed that even frequent exposure to discourse markers is not sufficient for their acquisition and appropriate

use (Romero Trillo 2002). Our approach here is mainly descriptive and we use a method influenced by conversation analysis

as a tool to investigate the functions of voilà. The Swedish learners are compared to a corpus of productions from native

French speakers with identical tasks. We also apply quantitative methods to determine the ‘degree of pragmaticalization’ in

the use of voilà (see Romero Trillo, 2002; Hancock 2012). By pragmaticalization in L2 we mean the development of non

deictic and textual/interactional functions of voilà. The degree would reflect the extent to which the learners make use of

the interactional functions of the markers.

Our data is a corpus of transcribed recordings, altogether with 20 speakers of French (10 non-native speakers with

Swedish L1 and 10 native speakers of French), and comprises two different tasks. In the first task (The telephone

conversation) the speaker has to call his boss to ask for two days off and the length is about 2 x 6000 words. The second task

(the semi-informal conversation) is about 2 x 30 000 words. The subject of the latter conversation is studies, professional

experience, and hobbies. The non-native speakers have lived for at least 10 years in France, where they arrived at the age of

20 to 25. They are highly integrated in the French society and are considered bilingual in French and Swedish.

We ask the following questions: To which extent is voilà pragmaticalized in the use of the non-native speakers? That

is to say, do we find the same textual/interactional functions in the learners’ speech as in the native speakers’ production?

Secondly, do the functions have the same quantitative distribution in the two speaker groups? The third question concerns

the difference between the two tasks: Could the same functions of the marker be found in both tasks? We expect that the

learners, in spite of long exposure to the target language, have not fully pragmaticalized their use of voilà, at least not from

a quantitative point of view.

References

Bruxelles, S. & Traverso, V. 2006 « Usages de la particule voilà dans une réunion de travail : analyse multimodale ». In Les

marqueurs discursifs dans les langues romanes, Drescher M., & Frank-Job, B. (Eds), Les marqueurs discursifs dans

les langues romanes. Approches théoriques et méthodologiques.Frankfurt am Main : Peter Lang, pp. 71-92.

Dostie, G. 2004. Pragmaticalisation et marqueurs discursifs. Bruxelles : DeBoeck, Duculot.

Dostie, G. & Pusch, C.D. 2007. Les marqueurs discursifs. Sens et variation”. Langue Française 154: 3-12.

Hancock, V. 2012. Pragmatic use of temporal adverbs in L1 and L2 French: Functions and syntactic positions of textual

markers in a spoken corpus. In: C. Lindqvist, C. Bardel (eds), The acquisition of French as a second language: New

developmental perspectives / L’acquisition du français langue seconde : nouvelles perspectives développementales.

Special issue of Language, Interaction and Acquisition, Volume 3 : 1. Amsterdam : Benjamins. 29-51. ISSN 1879-

7865.

Hansen, M.-B. M. & Rossari, C. 2005. ”The evolution of pragmatic markers”. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 6 (2): 177–187.

Romero Trillo, J. 2002. “The pragmatic fossilization of discourse markers in non-native speakers of English”. Journal of

Pragmatics 34 : 769-784.

Uru: a conjunct/disjunct system?

Hannss, Katja

(University of Cologne)

This paper will be concerned with Uru as a possible conjunct/disjunct language. Uru belongs to the isolated Uru-Chipaya

language family (Bolivia) and although it became extinct around 1950, recent descriptions based on archival material are

available (see e.g. Muysken 2001, Hannß 2008).

The main research question is whether Uru can be termed a conjunct/disjunct system (see Hale 1980). The term

conjunct/disjunct is “a label for contrasts in verb morphology […] that treat the 1

vs. 2

person distinction in

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statements in the same way as the 2

vs. 1

person distinction in questions” (Creissels 2008: 1; referring to Hale 1980;

emphasis in the original). In the following, conjunct forms refer to a first person in statements and a second person in

questions; everything else is labelled disjunct (see Curnow 2002: 614).

Table 1 provides an overview of the conjunct/disjunct forms of Uru. Note that the conjunct form of a first person

singular in subject position is indexed, somewhat redundantly, by the suffixes –u and –s (see Table 1, column 1). Control or

volition is irrelevant for Uru conjunct/disjunct marking.

While with respect to statements, Uru appears to be a conjunct/disjunct system, this is less so for questions. Unlike

other conjunct/disjunct systems (see e.g. Curnow 2002, on Awa Pit; Creissels 2008, on Nakh-Dagestanian Akhvakh), Uru

does not use any of the conjunct (or even disjunct) forms found in statements, but has an entirely different conjunct form:

the second person singular interrogative pronoun kun. Not only appears the resulting system to be unbalanced (see Table 1),

given the number and types of conjunct/disjunct forms, it is also remarkable that the conjunct form in questions is a free

pronoun, while in statements it is a bound verbal affix.

Conjunct forms in statements Disjunct forms in statements Conjunct form in questions

-u 1

sg. present tense

(subject) Ø 2

sg. to 3

pl. present

tense (subject)

kun 2

sg. (subject, direct and

indirect object)

-s 1

sg. subject Ø 2

sg. to 3

pl. present

tense (subject)

-a 1

sg. future tense

(subject) -aki 2

sg. to 3

pl. future

tense (subject)

s- 1

sg. direct object -n 2

sg. to 3

pl. object

Table 1: Uru conjunct/disjunct forms

The main objective of this paper is to discuss whether Uru can be termed a conjunct/disjunct language. This will be achieved

by a comparison of Uru with other conjunct/disjunct languages (in particular Kathmandu Newari, Hargreaves 1991; Awa Pit,

Curnow 2002; Akhvakh, Creissels 2008). Features that will be considered for the comparison are:

• the number and types of conjunct and disjunct forms found in statements and questions;

• the semantic role(s) a first person in statements and a second person in questions can take;

• the role control, volition, evidentiality, or mirativity play in conjunct/disjunct marking.

By this comparison, it is intended to answer the question whether Uru can be classified as a conjunct/disjunct language and,

if so, to which degree it resembles similar systems.

Furthermore, it will be argued that the Uru perfect marker –u (see Hannß 2008: 217f) gave rise to the conjunct form

–u in present tense (see Table 1, column 1; see also Creissels 2008: 17). Based on this, it will be shown that the apparently

redundant conjunct forms in Uru statements can be explained by the grammaticalisation of the conjunct form –u via the

perfect marker –u.

References

Creissels, Denis. 2008. Remarks on so-called “conjunct/disjunct” systems. Paper presented at the conference on the Syntax

of the World’s Languages III. Berlin. at: http://www.deniscreissels.fr/public/Creissels-conj.disj.pdf [05/01/2013].

Curnow, Timothy J. 2002. Conjunct/disjunct marking in Awa Pit. In: Linguistics 40-3. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. 611-627.

Hale, Austin. 1980. Person markers: finite conjunct and disjunct forms in Newari. In: Ron Trail (ed.), Papers in South-East

Asian Linguistics 7. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics (A-53). 95-106.

Hannß, Katja. 2008. Uchumataqu. The lost language of the Urus of Bolivia. A grammatical description of the language as

documented between 1894 and 1952. ILLA 7. Leiden: CNWS Publications.

Hargreaves, David. 1991. The conceptual structure of intentional action: data from Kathmandu Newari. In: Proceedings of

the 17

Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society. 379-389.

Muysken, Pieter. 2001. El uchumataqu (uru) de Irohito. Observaciones preliminares. In: Revista Lengua 12. 75-86.

The syntax of modal polyfunctionality revisited. Evidence from the languages of Europe.

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Hansen, Björn

(Universität Regensburg)

There is a plethora of studies dedicated to the semantics and the syntax of modal constructions. Syntacticians are especially

interested in the syntactic representation of modal polyfunctionality as found for example in the English modal must:

(1) In future you must try to get here earlier. (deontic)

(2) It must be later than I thought. (epistemic)

Whereas (1) expresses an obligation imposed by regulations or by the speaker’s will, (2) receives the interpretation of a

logical deduction in the sense of ‘in light of what I am seeing I conclude that it is late’. This ambiguity is not an idiosyncratic

feature of English or the Germanic languages, as it is also found in other non-related language families like Slavonic and

Indo-Arian. Notwithstanding this, one has to realise that the most influential studies theorizing about the syntax of modal

constructions deal with English and other Germanic languages. It demonstrates a strong bias towards this language family

and a lack of cross-linguistic studies.

In our contribution, we would like to broaden the empirical base by giving a first account of cross-linguistic

morpho-syntactic variation among modal constructions. The main question we are going to address is: what are the

syntactic features which are cross-linguistically connected to polyfunctionality? We will focus on a) the distinction between

verbs and auxiliaries, b) raising vs control and c) coherence of verbal complexes. We will do this, first, by presenting an

overview of morpho-syntactic variation of modal constructions and, second, by contrasting select claims and discussions

presented in works on the syntactic make-up of Germanic modal constructions with typological data. The data we are going

to discuss are mainly taken from the volume ‘Modals in the languages of Europe. A reference work’ Hansen & de Haan

(2009) which covers all major languages spoken in Europe. The authors claim that modals are generally characterised as

polyfunctional, morphologically autonomous expression of modality which show a certain degree of grammaticalization.

‘Polyfunctional’ means that modals can express more than one meaning type (dynamic, deontic and epistemic), which

distinguishes them from lexical means of expression like e.g. adjectives of the type necessary. This relative semantic

uniformity of modal constructions, however, contrasts with their structural diversity with respect to the following features:

i) the syntactic encoding of the subject argument,

ii) assignment of the subject agreement marking to the modal and/or the main verb,

iii) TAM marking on the modal and/or the main verb,

iv) presence or absence of an auxiliary or light verb.

In the second part of the paper we will try to correlate these cross-linguistic findings with theoretical works on Germanic

modals which discuss the syntactic structures behind modal polyfunctionality. As a point of departure we will use a few

hypotheses that were presented e.g. in Abraham (1998), Reis (2001) and in Barbiers (2005); i.e. we will discuss whether

modal polyfunctionality depends on:

Hypothesis 1: the auxiliary – main verb distinction,

Hypothesis 2: complexity mismatch (raising and control), or

Hypothesis 3: the coherence of verbal complexes.

We will put forward typological evidence in favour of Hypothesis 2.

References

Abraham, W. 1998. “The aspectual source of the epistemic-root distinction of modal verbs in German”. In Sprache in Raum

und Zeit. In Memoriam Johannes Bechert. Band 2: Beiträge zur empirischen Sprachwissenschaft, W. Boeder, Chr.

Schroeder, K. H. Wagner and W. Wildgen (eds), 231- 249. Tübingen: Narr.

Barbiers S. 2005. “The Syntax of Modal Auxiliaries”. In The Blackwell Companion to Syntax Vol V., E. Martin and van R. Henk

(eds), 1-23 Malden: Blackwell.

Hansen, B. and de Haan, F. (eds) 2009. Modals in the Languages of Europe. A Reference Work. [Empirical Approaches to

Language Typology 44]. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Reis, M. 2001. „Bilden Modalverben im Deutschen eine syntaktische Klasse?“ In Modalität und Modalverben im Deutschen

[Linguistische Berichte Sonderheft 9], R. Müller and M. Reis (eds), 287-31. Hamburg: Buske.

A synchronic and diachronic study of the auxiliary verb 'zou'.

Harmes, Ingeborg

(University of Münster and University of Antwerp)

Modal auxiliaries typically express modal meanings, but the Dutch modal zullen 'shall' is a special case in this regards, since

next to some modal meanings it expresses predominantly a temporal meaning (future). The preterite form zou 'should' is

even more special since it serves as the past time of zullen only in roughly 20% of its occurrences. For the rest, it serves

functions which zullen does not, including the marking of evidentiality, hypotheticality and counterfactuality. In addition,

zou very often functions as a modifier of another modal, as for example in zou kunnen 'should can', or zou moeten 'should

must'. All of this indicates that zou has become a separate auxiliary, independently of zullen. This paper will analyze and

compare the different meanings and uses of zou in Modern Dutch (1980 and onwards) and Early New Dutch (1550-1650).

The first aim is to figure out whether the meanings and uses of zou correlate with specific grammatical patterns of their host

clause, such as patterns of indirect speech, embedding under mental state predicates, or the occurrence in the protasis or

apodosis of conditional structures. The second aim is to describe the development of these meanings and uses as well as

the development of the grammatical patterns.

The study is corpus based: I have analyzed a sample of 200 instances for Early New Dutch, and two samples of 200

instances for Modern Dutch, one exclusively written, one exclusively spoken. These samples were drawn from the

representative Corpus Gesproken Nederlands (Nederlandse Taalunie 2004), the CONDIV Corpus (containing newspapers,

Grondelaers et al. 2000), the online Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren (http://www.dbnl.org) and other

reliable internet sources for non-fictional prose. The data were selected on the basis of representativity (geographical

criteria and text genres) and (for the written data) comparability across the two periods. All instances have been analyzed in

terms of their meaning or function (as proposed in a cognitive-functional model, e.g. Nuyts 2001, 2008), as well as in terms

of a range of structural and functional features of the clause in which they appear (e.g. grammatical pattern, type of state of

affairs, temporal structure, presence of other modal forms, etc.).

Preliminary results: Zou does not express any modal meanings in either period. Apart from its use as the past tense

of zullen, its most important function in both periods is the marking of hypotheticality of the state of affairs (I assume this is

not the same as expressing epistemic modality). The evidential use probably developed from the hypothetical use. In

addition, in Modern Dutch zou often serves as a politeness marker, especially in combination with other modals and with

the verbs zeggen 'say' and niet weten 'not know'. These combinations also occur in Early New Dutch, but usually with zou

expressing hypotheticality. The findings suggest that the pragmatic uses of zou developed from the hypothetical use.

References

Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren. URL: http://www.dbnl.org

Grondelaers, S., K. Deygers, H. Van Aken, V. Van Den Heede, D. Speelman (2000), Het CONDIV-corpus geschreven

Nederlands. Nederlandse Taalkunde 5, 356-363.

Nederlandse Taalunie (2004), Corpus Gesproken Nederlands. Version 2.0. Leiden.

Nuyts, J. (2001), Epistemic Modality, language, and conceptualization. A cognitive-pragmatic perspective.

Amsterdam/Philadelphia.

Nuyts, J. (2008), Qualificational meanings, illocutionary signals, and the cognitive planning of language use. Annual Review

of Cognitive Linguistics 6, 185-207.

Written requests in German and Japanese emails.

Harting, Axel

(Hiroshima University).

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The observation that email requests written by Japanese learners of German often fail to meet politeness requirements

prompted me to conduct research on German and Japanese writing styles. The aim of this study is to account for frequently

observed mistakes in learners’ texts, the results of which may contribute to developing teaching materials that enable

Japanese students to write German emails more appropriately. The research questions underlying my study are: “In what

ways do German and Japanese email requests differ in terms of their structure, content, and language use?” and “What

difficulties do Japanese learners face when writing such emails in their L2 German?”.

In order to describe differences between German and Japanese writing styles, a database consisting of 200 L1

request emails, written by German and Japanese students, was created within an experimental framework (100 German

and 100 Japanese emails respectively). In relation to the second research question, 40 emails written by Japanese students

in their L2 German were collected in order to investigate the characteristics of their interlanguage.

Based on findings in text linguistics and interlanguage pragmatics, the formal, structural, and linguistic properties of

the L1 German and L1 Japanese emails were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. The analysis aimed to uncover which

individual text parts, such as the greeting, reasons for the request, the farewell statement, are commonly used in the

languages under investigation and how they are realised linguistically. Of particular interest was the performance of the

request sequence. After establishing the characteristics of the L1 emails in both languages, the L2 German emails were also

analysed in the same way and compared with the L1 results.

In relation to the first research question, the results reveal structural differences in German and Japanese writing

styles as well as differences regarding content and language use. While German emails structurally adhere strictly to the

writing styles of German letters, containing such items as a greeting, a farewell statement and the writer’s name at the end,

the text norms of Japanese emails are more flexible in this regard. At the content level German writers make extensive use

of expressions of gratitude and promises of forbearance in order to support their request, while Japanese writers prefer

apologies for the imposition and repetitions of the request. Also, German writers express themselves more individually by

using creative forms of expression, while Japanese writers are more formal by making extensive use of routine formulae.

The L2 German emails indicate transfer of structural and linguistic characteristics of the learners’ L1 Japanese as

well as use of target language structures and linguistic forms, which are sometimes inadequately expressed. Given the

sensitive nature of making a request, these results may help to explain, why learners sometimes fail to meet politeness

requirements in their L2, and may also serve as an empirical basis for establishing contrastive German-Japanese teaching

materials.

How widespread is transitive encoding?

Hartmann, Iren and Haspelmath, Martin

(MPI, Leipzig)

It is often taken for granted that languages have a large number of transitive verbs, or even that the typical two-argument

verb is transitive. But we know that languages differ in the extent to which they make use of transitive encoding (e.g.

Hawkins 1986 on English/German contrasts: in German, verbs like ‘help’ and ‘follow’ are not encoded transitively).

Typological studies such as Tsunoda (1985) and Malchukov (2005) have tried to formulate generalizations concerning the

kinds of verb meanings that tend to be coded non-transitively in different languages. But so far there has been no serious

published attempt to quantify transitive encoding: How strongly do languages differ? Is English atypical in the prominence it

accords to transitive encoding? There seem to be three major obstacles to such quantification: how to define transitivity

cross-linguistically, how to sample verbs, and how to get systematic cross-linguistic data.

In this presentation, we report on a major study of valency patterns in 35 languages from around the world, which

allows us to overcome the data obstacle: We brought together a consortium of 35 author teams (experts in their respective

languages) to provide a dataset of about 80 verbs with detailed valency information. The individual datasets are comparable

because they consist of counterparts to the same set of 80 basic verb meanings. (The aggregated database, called ValPaL

[=“Valency Patterns Leipzig”] will be published online, so that our results can be easily verified.)

As for the two first obstacles, we basically follow the path of Greenberg (1963): We define our comparative

concepts in a rigorous way, but we do not make an attempt to justify them, being content with some intuition-based

decisions. This concerns, in particular, the choice of 80 verb meanings: We tried to include verb meanings of diverse kinds,

which seem to us reasonably representative. As argued by Lazard (2005), intuition-based decisions are unavoidable in

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typology and do not detract from the methodological rigour of the enterprise. Our definition of transitivity follows Lazard

(2002) and Haspelmath (2011) in spirit: We start out from the typical transitive verb ‘break’ and define “transitive encoding”

as the encoding that is used by this verb. A verb is considered transitive if it contains an A and a P argument, and A and P are

defined as the arguments that are coded like the ‘breaker’ and the ‘broken thing’ roles of the ‘break’ verb. We have found

that this definition appears to give the same result as the criterion of “major two-argument verb class” (Witzlack-

Makarevich 2011), but it is easier to apply.

Our findings are not particularly surprising: Languages differ in the extent to which they use transitive encoding in

their ca. 80 sample verbs, but not dramatically: All our 35 languages have the transitive class as their major verb class, so

the prominence of transitivity seems to be a robust language universal. What is perhaps most surprising is that English is not

extreme in its degree of transitivity prominence.

Comparative standard marking in contact languages: evidence from APiCS.

Haspelmath, Martin and Michaelis, Susanne

(MPI, Leipzig)

Comparative constructions of inequality in contact languages show an unexpected high degree of variation, as we will

discuss on the basis of data from the forthcoming Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures (APiCS, Michaelis et al.

2013). In this talk, we are primarily interested in the coding of the standard. In the English sentence John is taller than Peter,

the standard, Peter, to which John (the topic) is compared, is marked by the particle than. Another example comes from

Nigerian Pidgin (Faraclas 2013) where a verb meaning ‘surpass’ (pas) marks the standard (yù):

À big pas yù.

1SG.SBJ be.big surpass 2SG.OBJ

‘I am bigger than you.’

The most prominent strategy of standard marking within the APiCS languages is the particle marking known from English

(than) and French/Portuguese (que). The second most important construction involves ‘surpass’ verbs, be it as a secondary

serial verb introducing the standard (cf. the example from Nigerian Pidgin), or as a construction with a primary ‘surpass’

verb, as in the example from Lingala (Meeuwis 2013):

Pierre a-lek-í Jean na molaí

Pierre 3SG-surpass-PRS.PRF Jean in tallness

‘Pierre is taller than Jean.’

Mainly in English-based contact languages, some reflexes of the English degree word more have entered a ‘surpass’ verb

construction, cf. the following example from Sranan (Winford & Plag 2013):

John bigi moro Peter.

John big exceed Peter

‘John’s bigger than Peter.’

Besides the particle and ‘surpass’ marking, we find locational marking (‘from’, ‘at’), no standard marking at all, or a

construction which contains two separate predications, so-called conjoined marking.

The geographical distribution of the different standard marking strategies is not random, but we see clear areal

effects: Central African contact languages with either African or European lexifier languages tend to show ‘surpass’ marking.

‘Surpass’ marking also extends to the Caribbean (even though not as the only possible strategy). Particle marking prevails in

North America, the Caribbean and Indian Ocean. East Africa and areas to the east of it prefer locational marking, whereas

Australian contact languages have conjoined marking. A comparison with the world-wide picture (as presented in Leon

Stassen’s 2005 WALS chapter) reveals very clear substrate effects.

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References

APiCS = Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures edited by Susanne Maria Michaelis, Philippe Maurer, Martin

Haspelmath and Magnus Huber, Oxford: OUP 2013.

APiCS Online = Michaelis, Susanne Maria & Maurer, Philippe & Haspelmath, Martin & Huber, Magnus (eds.), Atlas of Pidgin

and Creole Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

Faraclas, Nicholas, 2013. Nigerian Pidgin language structure dataset. In: APiCS Online.

Meewis, Michael. 2013. Lingala language structure dataset. In: APiCS Online.

WALS = World Atlas of Language Structures edited by Martin Haspelmath, Matthew Dryer, David Gil and Bernard Comrie,

Oxford: OUP 2005.

Winford, Donald & Plag, Ingo. 2013. Sranan language structure dataset. In: APiCS Online.

Garifuna attributive possession in comparative perspective.

Haurholm-Larsen, Steffen

(University of Bern)

In this paper, I outline the strategies for expressing attributive possession in Garifuna, an Arawakan language. Furthermore,

by comparing the Garifuna data to other languages I will highlight some (areally) unusual features of the Garifuna system.

The data underlying the research presented here come from fieldwork currently being carried out by the author in Garifuna

communities of Northern Honduras, Central America.

Attributive possession in Garifuna makes a distinction between alienable and inalienable possessed items, the

latter being restricted to kinship terms and body parts. Furthermore, some nouns take different classifiers, here referred to

as relational classifiers following Lichtenberk (1983) depending on the use for which they are intended by the possessor:

either, "X's Y for eating", "X's Y (meat) for eating", "X's Y for drinking", "X's Y for keeping as a pet" or "X's Y (for general

possession)". Relational classification is widely attested in Oceanic Languages (Lichtenberk 1985:106) but it is a rare feature

in The Americas, even within Arawakan, and is possibly borrowed from Cariban (Aikhenvald 2012:46).

According to Grinevald (2000:81) the Amerindian relational classifiers are emergent, i.e. less grammaticalized than

the Oceanic ones, because the choice of relational classifier depends on discourse context rather than being fixed in the

grammar. However, since Grinevald offers no documentation for this claim, I will compare Oceanic, Cariban and Garifuna

examples, such as those in (1-2).

(1) Garifuna (my field notes)

'n-eygã 'faluma

1SG.POSS-CLF coconut

'my coconut (to eat)'

nu-'niye 'faluma

1SG.POSS-CLF coconut

'my coconut (to drink)'

'n-ani 'faluma

1SG.POSS-CLF coconut

'my coconut (to dispose of as I please)'

(2) Bau (Oceanic, Austronesian; (Pawley 1973:168)

na ke-na maqo

ART POSS-his mango

'his mango for eating (i.e. green mango)'

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na me-na maqo

ART POSS-his mango

'his mango for sucking (i.e. ripe, juicy mango)'

na no-na maqo

ART POSS-his mango

'his mango (as property, e.g., which he is selling)'

At a glance there seems to be little difference between the classifiers of Bau and those of Garifuna, but since Grinevald's

statement is dependent on discourse context, I will present as much information in that area as possible.

Fijian, another Oceanic language, also behaves similarly to Garifuna in that its relational classifiers for food and

drink are only used if these items are intended by the possessor to be consumed immediately; in other contexts a classifier

for general possession is used (Dixon 1989:136).

References

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2012. Possession and Ownership. Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and R. M. W. Dixon, eds. Oxford

University Press, USA.

Dixon, R. M. W. 1989. A Grammar of Boumaa Fijian. 1st edition. University Of Chicago Press.

Grinevald, Colette 2000. Systems of Nominal Classification. Gunter Senft, ed. Language, Culture, and Cognition, 4.

Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lichtenberk, Frantisek 1983. Relational Classifers. Lingua 60: 147–176.

Lichtenberk, Frantisek 1985. Austronesian Linguistics at the 15th Pacific Science Congress. Andrew Pawley and Lois

Carrington, eds. Pacific Linguistics, no. 88. Canberra, A.C.T., Australia: Dept. of Linguistics, Research School of

Pacific Studies, Australian National University.

Pawley, Andrew. 1973. Some Problems in Proto Oceanic Grammar. Oceanic Linguistics 12: 103–188.

'Le mal semble plus profond qu'il n'y paraît.' Evidentiality, modality and

cognitive construal of the French verbs sembler and paraître.

Hedbjörk, Ulf

(Uppsala University)

The two French verbs sembler and paraître are often considered as quasi-synonyms, communicating a judgement of

appearance, epistemic modality, or evidentiality (e.g. Bourdin 1986, Nølke 2001, Thuillier 2004, Tutescu 2005, Kallen-

Tatarova 2010, Willems 2011). Admittedly, they share roughly the same syntax and the same semantic area, but the degree

of semantic and pragmatic convergence of the two verbs depends on the syntactic construction involved. Thus, it is

commonly agreed that the impersonal constructions il semble que and il paraît que trigger distinctly different

interpretations, the former conveying an evidential value of hearsay or rumour - il paraît que Marie est malade - while the

latter can express an evidential judgement of inference - il semble que Marie soit malade. On the other hand, followed by

an infinitive, the two verbs are generally considered interchangeable without significant change of meaning: Marie

semble/paraît comprendre. As for the attributive construction, it is usually supposed to convey a judgement of appearance,

typically based on immediate perception: Marie semble/paraît malade, with nevertheless a more pronounced nuance of

direct sensory impression in the case of paraître. Finally, the parenthetical use of the two verbs is seen either as a simple

variant of the impersonal construction, or as an attenuator similar to utterance adverbs by its syntactic independence:

Marie est malade, semble-t-il/paraît-il. In addition, with all the constructions, the speaker has the possibility to state an

overt experiencer as the source of the epistemic-evidential judgement, usually – but not exclusively – in the form of a

personal dative pronoun: il me semble que Marie est malade; Marie me semble/paraît comprendre; Marie me

semble/paraît malade; Marie est malade, me semble-t-il.

How could we explain that these two verbs of originally quite distinct semantic values have come to function as

apparently very close epistemic-evidential markers? What role should be attributed, on the one hand, to the semantics of

the verb, and on the other hand, to the syntactic construction in which it enters? Based on a quantitative and qualitative

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analysis of a corpus of journalistic prose, we propose to present some aspects of sembler and paraître, in the light of

evidential parameters such as type of source of information, access mode and (inter)subjectivity. We will thus be able to

show how the interaction of grammatical construction and lexical semantics of the two verbs contributes to different

cognitive construals – more or less subjective – of the same situation or event (cf. Langacker 1987, Achard 1998). A brief

comparison will also be made with Italian sembrare/parere (cf. Kratschmer 2005) and Spanish parecer (cf. Cornillie 2007).

References

Achard, Michel. 1998. Representation of Cognitive Structures: Syntax and Semantics of French Sentential Complements.

Cognitive Linguistics Research Series 11. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Bourdin, Philippe. 1986. «Sembler et paraître, ou les deux visages de l’apparence». In Semantikos, vol. 10, fasc. 1-2. Paris:

Semantikos, pp. 45-67.

Cornillie, Bert. 2007. Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality in Spanish (semi-)auxiliaries. A Cognitive-functional Approach.

Berlin - New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Kallen-Tatarova, Ana. 2010. Les modalisateurs Sembler vs Paraître. Saarbrücken: Éditions universitaires européennes.

Kratschmer, Alexandra, 2005, sembra/parere... Sproglig polyfoni. Arbejdspapirer 2 ; 2005b, « Raising- og Small Clause-

konstruktioner med italiensk sembra/parere », Sproglig polyfoni. Arbejdspapirer 3.

Langacker, Ronald W, 1987. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol 1 « Theoretical Prerequisites ». Stanford : Stanford

University Press.

Nølke, Henning. 2001. «La dilution linguistique des responsabilités. Essai de description polyphonique des marqueurs

évidentiels il semble que et il paraît que». Le regard du locuteur 2. Paris: Éditions Kimé.

Thuillier, François. 2004. « Synonymie et différences : le cas de paraître et sembler ». Dyptique, 2. Namur: Publication des

facultés universitaires de Namur, pp. 161-178.

Tutescu, Mariana., 2005. L'auxiliation de modalité. Dix auxi-verbes modaux. Bucarest : Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti.

Willems, Dominique, 2011. «Les degrés d’intégration syntaxique de la modalité épistémique. Le cas de sembler et paraître».

In Du système linguistique aux actions langagières.Mélanges en l’honneur d’Alain Berrendonner. Bruxelles :

Éditions Duculot.

Directive past participles in German: context, mood and modality.

Heinold, Simone

(Goethe Universität Frankfurt)

In German the past participle is one way to express a directive speech act. In particular in the typological literature this form

is mentioned with respect to its rareness in the standard language, its restrictedness to a handful of verbs (Aikhenvald

2010) and to the "aggressive overtones" it conveys (Rooryck &Postma 2007). However, up to now the data on which these

statements are based are rather thin. Mostly examples from the military language like (1a) are cited.

A corpus analysis by Heinold (2012), however, shows that directive participles also appear in the German standard

and do not necessarily express a heavy face-threat (1b-d).

(1)

a. Stillgestanden!

'Stand still!''

b. Brust raus und Mut gefasst!

'Chest out and bear up!'

c. Hereinspaziert!

'Come in!'

d. Ah, glückliches Düsseldorf, wo Kraftfahrer und Polizisten unter anmutigen Verbeugungen.

Bekanntschaften schließen; [...] nichts wie hin und falsch geparkt!

'Ah, happy Düsseldorf, where drivers and police officers become acquainted by bowing gracefully

to each other; [...] let's go there and park illegally!'

e. Du da,... genug geraucht für heute!

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'Hey you...(you have) smoked enough for today!'

A similar claim is made for Dutch, where four different modal classes seem to exist covering very aggressive forms as well as

warnings and encouragements according to Coussé & Oosterhof (2012). In this paper I will present new corpus data which

illustrate the array of deontic modality that is possible with directive past participles in German. In Dutch verb particles (for

instance op-) as well as negation (niet) can be made responsible for the different levels of modal force. I will argue that in

German, however, the default interpretation of directive past participles is mostly stable as long as they appear in bare

form (1a). Then their interpretation is almost exclusively restricted to the speech act of order/request (Heinold 2012).

An analysis of larger contexts will show that in combination with certain adverbials (schnell, gleich, nun, jetzt, mal) and

different addressees either an urging or an appeasing undertone can be created that covers the wide modal range from

strict orders to adhortative readings (2a-c).

(2)

a. Du da! Sofort hereinspaziert! – order, very urgent

You there! Come in immediately!

b. Alle mal hereinspaziert! – adhortative, more invitation

Everybody come in!

c. Schnell hereinspaziert! – exhortative, urgent

Come in quickly!

Also certain constructions in which directive participles are embedded can trigger a cohortative interpretation due to their

impersonal semantics, as it is the case in (1d) (Da heißt es V-Part! ‘There the motto is V-Part!’, Nichts wie V-Part! ‘Nothing

but V-part!’). One could even go so far as to say that the participles with weaker modal force are often hardly

distinguishable from assertive past participles (1e). All in all this data-driven approach to German directive participles will

show (a) that they cover a range of modal force that is wider than usually acknowledged and that (b) this array is caused by

the “contextual dependence of the propositional meaning components” in the same way as Kaufmann (2012) predicts it for

the German imperative.

References

Aikhenvald, A., 2010. Imperatives and Commands. Oxford/New York.

Coussé, E. , Oosterhof, A., 2012. “Het imperativische participium in het Nederlands. Vorm, betekenis en gebruik.“ In:

Nederlandse Taalkunde 17, pp. 26-55.

Heinold, S. 2012. "Gut durchlesen! Der deutsche Imperativ und seine funktionalen Synonyme. Ein Vergleich mit dem

Finnischen." In: Deutsche Sprache 12, pp. 32-56.

Kaufmann, M. 2012. Interpreting Imperatives. Dordrecht: Springer.

Rooryck, J., Postma, G., 2007. On Participal Imperatives. In: van der Wurff, W. (Ed.), Imperative Clauses in Generative

Grammar. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, pp. 273-296.

Isomorphisms among cognates and Spanish loans in three Otopame languages of Mexico.

Hekking, Ewald; Bakker, Dik and Galván, Alonso Guerrero

(University of Queretaro, University of Amsterdam and Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia)

Taking the 1460 item list of word meanings from Haspelmath & Tadmor (2009) – henceforth H&T - as a point of departure,

we collected word lists for three languages from Mexico, viz. Otomi, Mazahua, and Chichimeca. These languages all belong

to the Otopame branch of the Otomanguean family. Otomi (and Mazahua are closely related, and form part of the Otomian

sub-branch of Otopame. Both boast several hundreds of thousands of native speakers, and are still passed on to the

younger generations. Chichimeca is somewhat more remote genealogically. With around 2500 speakers to date it is heavily

under threat of extinction. Like most of the other around 300 native languages and language varieties of Mexico (cf. Gordon

ed. 2005), all three of our languages are in close contact with Spanish. As a result, there are relatively few monolinguals.

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This is manifest in the large number of loan words that found their way into these languages. Thus, according to the section

on Otomi in H&T, 9.5% of the entries for this language in the list are borrowed from Spanish. Most of these lexemes have no

native equivalent. For Mazahua and Chichimeca we found a comparable situation.

For the work reported in our paper, we proceeded as follows. We selected a number of nouns, verbs, and

prepositions that correspond to entries in H&T, and that occur with a relatively high frequency in spoken discourse. We took

shared cognates as well as lexemes borrowed from Spanish in at least one of the three languages. For a more or less reliable

estimate of discourse frequencies, we based ourselves on a corpus of around 110.000 tokens of spoken Otomi, produced by

50 native speakers, recruted from different age groups, professional and social strata, that we collected in earlier research

on borrowing from Spanish. On the basis of the dictionnaries mentioned below we made a further selection, keeping those

elements that appeared to have the richest semantic structures.

For both the native lexemes and the Spanish loans in this set we established the amount of structural isomorphism

between the three languages, in terms of shared polysemy (SP) and semantic specialization (SS). As a point of departure for

the comparison of the cognates we used the Otomi dictionnary that we compiled in a recently completed project. With the

help of bilingual native speakers of Mazahua and Chichimeca we established the amount of semantic overlap between the

cognates in terms of SP and SS.

In order to establish the original semantic scope of the Spanish loans we employed the Diccionario del Español de

México. These elements were then assessed with native speakers of all three languages, (near-)monolingual as well as

(near-)bilingual ones.

The paper will present several of the more striking results of these comparisons, and will make an attempt to draw

some more general conclusions with respect to both the historical developments in cognates and the effect on borrowing in

terms of SP and SS. We will also discuss the respective techniques we used to establish the isomorphisms in the two

different situations, and the problems we encountered.

References

De Angulo, Jaime (1933).The Chichimeco Language (Central Mexico).

Diccionario del Español de México. El Colegio de México, A.C., <dem.colmex.mx>.

Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.) (2005). Ethnologue. 15th Edition. SIL International. <www.ethnologue.com>.

Lastra, Yolanda (2009). Vocabulario piloto chichimeco 1. ed. UNAM, Insituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas, México, D.F.

Haspelmath, Martin & Uri Tadmor (eds) (2009). Loanwords in the World’s Languages: A Comparative Handbook. Berlin:

Mouton de Gruyter.

Stewart, Donald (1966). Gramática de Mazahua. PhD Thesis. México: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.

Stewart, Donald & Stewart, Shirley (1954). Vocabulario Mazahua. México: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.

Searching information necessary to implement the answer.

Questions in Estonian institutional information-seeking dialogues.

Hennoste, Tiit and Rääbis, Andriela

(University of Tartu)

The most important types of sequences in a spoken dialogue are adjacency pairs (e.g. questions and answers, requests and

responses etc). Typically the second-pair part of the adjacency pair follows immediately the first-pair part, but sometimes

there are insert expansions between the parts. They are dividable into two groups in Interactional Linguistics: post-first

insert expansion (e.g. other initiation of repair), which role is to solve the problems of hearing or understanding of the first-

pair part) and pre-second insert expansion (PSIE) which role is to establish the resources necessary to implement the

answer (Schegloff 2007: 106-109). In example the customer C asks for number of the dermatologists office and before

giving the number the operator O formulates an insert expansion question “You mean private clinics, yes” and only after the

answer to the question she gives the number.

C: öelge `Viljandis mingit (.) `nahaarsti kabineti numbrit.

C: tell me some number of dermatologist office in Viljandi

O: jah, üks=`hetk,

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O: yes, one moment

(...)

O: te mõtlete `erakliinikuid jah

O: you mean private clinics yes

(0.5)

C: v:õib `olla erakliinik.

C: it may be a private clinic

The topic of our presentation is the analysis of the PSIE questions in Estonian institutional information-seeking dialogues.

Our data come from the Corpus of Spoken Estonian of the University of Tartu (Hennoste et al 2008). We have

chosen randomly 173 dialogues. There were 859 questions in this data-base and 156 PSIE questions among them.

The method used is interactional linguistics (see Couper-Kuhlen, Selting 2001).

The typology of questions used comes from Nijmegen Max Planck Institute typology of questions (Stivers, Enfield

2010). The formal question has lexico-morpho-syntactic or prosodic interrogative marking and could have also a declarative

form (You are married?). A functional question is an utterance which had to effectively seek to elicit verbal (not physical)

information, confirmation or agreement. The questions are divided into two groups by proposed answer (a) a question

requires information: wh-questions (How old is your mother?), some yes/no questions (Are you married?) or (b) the

question asserts some proposition/assessment and requests for confirmation/agreement: some yes/no questions (You’re

married, aren’t you?).

Our aim is to analyze (a) which formal types of questions are used for PSIE, (b) how the questions are formulated

and (c) in what contexts different formal variants are used.

Our preliminary analysis shows that all formal types of questions are used. There was 282 wh-questions and 40

PSIE among them, 231 yes/no questions which require information (28 PSIE); 300 yes/no questions which require

confirmation (55 PSIE); 46 alternative questions (31 PSIE). As we see, PSIE is the main role for alternative questions in our

data.

Preliminary analysis shows that PSIE questions are dividable into groups (a) by required type of response and (b)

information proposed by the questioner.

References

Couper-Kuhlen, Elizabeth, Selting, Margret 2001. Introducing Interactional Linguistics. – Studies in Interactional Linguistics.

Ed by M. Selting, E. Couper-Kuhlen. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1–22.

Hennoste, Tiit, Gerassimenko, Olga, Kasterpalu, Riina, Koit, Mare, Rääbis, Andriela, Strandson, Krista 2008. From human

communication to intelligent user interfaces: corpora of spoken Estonian. – Proceedings of the Sixth International

Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), 2008, European Language Resources Association, Marrakech,

Morocco, May, 28–30. http://www.lrec-conf.org/ proceedings/lrec2008/. 12.12.2012.

Schegloff, Emanuel A. 2007. Sequence Organization in Interaction. A Primer in Conversation Analysis. Volume 1. Cambridge:

Cambridge UP.

Stivers, Tanya, Enfield, N. J. 2010. A coding scheme for question-response sequences in conversation. − Journal of

Pragmatics 42, 2620−2626.

Do translation memories impose the paradigmatic over the syntagmatic?

A quantitative analysis of levelling in Dutch and French legal translations.

Heylen, Kris; Bond, Stephen and De Hertog, Dirk

(University of Leuven)

Although translations from specialized domains have been compared to other registers and genres in comparative

translation studies (Neumann 2011; Delaere, De Sutter, Plevoets 2012), there has been little research on the relation

between the specific production process of specialized domain translation and its linguistic characteristics (Biel 2010:1). One

feature that is typical for the specialized translation process is the strong reliance on Translation Memories (TMs):

Translators are presented with translation suggestions for segments in the source texts that are very similar to previously

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translated text segments. Experimental studies suggest that the use of TMs influences the cognitive processes underlying

the translation activity (see Paulsen Christensen 2011 for an overview). More specifically, Pym argues that “the paradigmatic

is imposed more frequently on the syntagmatic” (Pym 2011:1): Instead of producing a sentence in the target language from

scratch, translators choose snippets of appropriate translations and edit them where necessary. This amplifies the levelling

phenomenon which was identified by Baker (1996: 180-185) as a translation universal: translation show a tendency to be

more similar to each other than original texts. In this study, we investigate to what extent translations produced with TM-

support show more syntagmatic uniformity than (1) original texts, and (2) than translations produced without TM-support.

As a corpus, we use a 50M word translation memory with bidirectional translations of French and Dutch legal texts compiled

by the translation service of the Belgian Federal Justice Department between 2004 and 2011. The segments in the TM are

time stamped and annotated for translator identity. First, we extract all segment pairs containing highly similar content

words. This mimics the fuzzy matching functionality provided by commercial CAT tools and assures that segments are

paradigmatically similar, i.e. express a similar conceptual content. Next, we calculate the Levinshtein editing distance for all

pairs in order to capture syntagmatic similarity, i.e the extent to which word order, and functions words are the same. Based

on Pym’s (2011:1) theory, we investigate the hypotheses that, given the same level of paradigmatic similarity:

1. the syntagmatic similarity will be larger for segment pairs from translated texts than from original texts

2. syntagmatic similarity of pairs from translated texts increases over time as translators rely more on TMs

These predictions are tested in a mixed-model regression analysis with syntagmatic similarity as response variable, text

type (original vs. translated), paradigmatic similarity, target language and time as fixed-effects predictors, and translator

identity (for translated texts only) as random effect.

References

Baker, Mona (1996): “Corpus-based translation studies: the challenges that lie ahead.” In: Somers, Harold L. (ed.),

Terminology, LSP and Translation. Studies in Language Engineering in Honour of Juan C. Sager.

Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 175-186.

Biel, Łucja (2010): “Corpus-Based Studies of Legal Language for Translation Purposes: Methodological and Practical

Potential.” In: Heine, Carmen and Engberg, Jan (eds.): Reconceptualizing LSP. Online proceedings of the XVII

European LSP Symposium 2009. URL: http://www.asb.dk/article.aspx?pid=23917&lang=en-GB.

Delaere, I., De Sutter, G., & Plevoets, K. (2012). Is translated language more standardized than non-translated language?

Using profile-based correspondence analysis for measuring linguistic distances between language varieties. Target.

International Journal of Translation Studies., 24(2).

Neumann, Stella (2011): Contrastive register variation. A quantitative approach to the comparison of English and German.

Berlin: de Gruyter.

Paulsen Christensen, Tina (2011): “Studies on the Mental Processes in Translation Memory-assisted Translation – the State

of the Art”. In: transkom 4 [2]: 137-160

Pym, Antony (2011): “What technology does to translating?” In: Translation & Interpreting 3 [1]: 1-9

Nominal and verbal gerunds in Present-day English. An aspectual distinction?

Heyvaert, Liesbet

(University of Leuven)

This paper deals with nominal and verbal gerunds in Present-day English. Nominal gerunds (or NGs, e.g. (1)) have the

internal syntax of a noun phrase (NP), verbal gerunds (or VGs, as in (2)), have clause-like internal structure.

(1) a. (...) [the downing of an alleged Indian spy plane over Pakistan] kept tensions high. (Wordb-USnews, 2002)

b. We will never accept [the dismantling of our organization] (…). (Wordb-USnews, 2003)

(2) a. And the mother of another soldier killed in Basra demanded the PM set a deadline for [bringing the troops

home]. (Wordb-UKregionalnews, 2004)

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b. Tony Blair has ruled out [enhancing the post by investing it with more powers]. (Wordb-UKregionalnews, 2001)

While their formal features have been described in detail, the semantic and discourse-functional differences between NGs

and VGs remain to be elucidated. The focus of this paper is on their aspectual features. NGs, Quirk et al. (1985) argue, zoom

in on an “activity that is in process” (1292) rather than on “the action as a whole event, including its completion” (1551).

Brinton (1998: 48) claims that -ing in NGs “does not seem to preserve the aktionsart of the verb” but instead “has the effect

of converting a situation into an activity, of making the situation durative, atelic, and dynamic”. Brinton’s analysis, however,

is based on single-verb NGs (e.g. coughing, living) and does not take into account the impact of nominal arguments and

temporal adverbials on the gerund’s aspectual status.

This paper presents an aspectual analysis of both NGs and VGs based on a set of 500 gerunds randomly extracted

from the Wordbanks corpus, distinguishing between (a) the inherent temporal nature of the situation expressed by the

underlying VP (i.e. ‘Aktionsart’ or ‘ontological’ aspect); and (b) the aspectual view that is taken of that situation in the clause

in which it is embedded (i.e. bounded or nonbounded) (Vendler 1967; Declerck 2006). It maps out the various Aktionsart

categories realized by NGs vs. VGs (States, Activities, Accomplishments or Achievements) and the overall aspectual

perspective taken on them in the clause.

The results show that the existing aspectual claims about NGs cannot be upheld once their usage context is

included in the analysis: (a) a significant number of them turns out to be based on telic VPs (designating an

Accomplishment, for instance, rather than an Activity; see (1a and b)); and (b) they are most often construed as designating

bounded situations (as in (1a and b)), reinforced at the nominal level by the use of the article (which is characteristic of

count nouns or nouns with the nominal (and hence spatial) aspectual property of ‘shape’ or a ‘definite outline’, cf. Rijkhoff

1991: 293). Interestingly, nominal and verbal gerunds do not appear to show fundamental differences in their Aktionsart

features: verbal gerunds too are most often based on telic VPs (e.g. (2a)). Whether or not they represent these telic VPs as

designating a bounded event, however, is much harder to determine than in the case of NGs (cf. (2a and b)). While an

aspectual analysis of NGs and VGs thus reveals great aspectual flexibility of the VP underlying either system (and argues

against positing an ‘Activity’ profile for NGs, for instance), it also sets us on the track of differences in terms of the aspectual

viewpoint taken on gerunds in their distinct usage contexts and brings to the fore the role played by the determiner as a

marker of nominal aspect in NGs.

References

Brinton, Laurel (1998). Aspectuality and countability: a cross-categorial analogy. English Language and Linguistics 2.1: 37-63.

Declerck, Renaat (2006). The Grammar of the English Verb Phrase. Volume 1. Berlin: Mouton.

Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, Jan Svartvik (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English

Language. London: Longman.

Rijkhoff, Jan (1991). Nominal Aspect. Journal of Semantics 8: 291-309.

Vendler, Zeno (1967). Linguistics in Philosophy. Ithaca/NY: Cornell University Press.

/g/-spirantization in Standard Austrian German, the Viennese Dialect, and the Austrian electronic media.

Hildenbrandt, Tina and Moosmüller, Sylvia

(Austrian Academy of Sciences)

Introduction

Since the acknowledgment of German as a pluricentric language, codifying Standard Austrian German (SAG) is an ongoing

process (see e.g. Ammon 1995, Ehrlich 2009). Every user of a national standard has to be comfortable with its norms,

regardless of their dialectal background. Thus every dialect marker has to be left out of a standard norm (Moser 1995). Due

to historical reasons (Moosmüller forthcoming), SAG strongly relies on the pronunciation standards of Standard German as

elaborated in various pronunciation dictionaries, with “Siebs” leading the way. In 1957, the editors of “Siebs” published an

“Österreichisches Beiblatt zu Siebs” ('Austrian supplementary sheet'). With respect to <-ig>, the “Österreichisches Beiblatt”

prescribes the pronunciation with the palatal fricative, with the exception of <-ig> followed by an obstruent (e.g. Königs,

beruhigt). In the “Deutsches Aussprachewörterbuch” ('German pronunciation dictionary'), Wiesinger (2009) also proposes

the pronunciation with the palatal fricative in final position, although he states that the speakers of the “moderate standard

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pronunciation” generally use the plosive. As concerns the Austrian dialects, a mixed picture can be observed (see e.g. Luick

1932, Kranzmayer 1956) with a tendency of the fricative being the prevailing pronunciation. Luick addresses the paradox

that with this respect, stage pronunciation and dialects meet (1932: 92). In the Viennese dialect, both the palatal fricative

and the velar plosive are in use. Only for practical reasons, Luick recommends the velar plosive for SAG. A study will be

conducted to review these claims.

Method

Reading material (Nordwind) and spontaneous speech of speakers of SAG, the Viennese Dialect, and newsreaders of the

Austrian electronic media will be analyzed with respect to their pronunciation of <–ig>.

Discussion

The aim of the study is to demonstrate that German Standards can not simply be adopted for setting up a Standard

pronunciation for Austria. Additionally, the pronunciation of <-ig> in Austria is a perfect example for demonstrating the

problems of prescribed norms and usage based norms. Usage based data collection in Austria (e.g. Kleiner 2010) run the risk

of mixing dialect and Standard speakers. In contrast, speakers of the Austrian electronic media largely rely on the

pronunciation standards elaborated in Siebs and subsequent pronunciation dictionaries (Wächter-Kollpacher 1995). Thus

their pronunciation cannot be called on as being representative for SAG. On the other hand, trained speakers shape the

judgment of standard in the general public, which may give rise to confusion. Therefore, it is expected to find both types of

pronunciation in every speaker. The predominate pronunciation still seems to be the palatal fricative in Viennese Dialect but

the velar plosive in SAG.

References

Ammon, Ulrich. 1995. Die deutsche Sprache in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz. Das Problem der nationalen

Varietäten. Berlin, New York: de Gruyter.

Ehrlich, Caroline. 2009. Die Aussprache des Österreichischen Standarddeutsch – umfassende Sprech- und

Sprachstandserhebung der österreichischen Orthoepie. Dissertation, University of Vienna.

Luick, Karl. 1932. Deutsche Lautlehre. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Sprechweise Wiens und der österreichischen

Alpenländer. Franz Deuticke: Vienna. 3rd edition.

Kleiner, Stefan. 2010. Zur Aussprache von nebentonigem –ig im deutschen Gebrauchsstandard. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie

und Linguistik LXXVII-3, 259-303.

Kranzmayer, Eberhard. 1956. Historische Lautgeographie des gesamtbairischen Dialektraumes. Graz, Köln: Hermann Böhlaus

Nachf.

Moosmüller, Sylvia. forthcoming. Methodisches zur Bestimmung der Standardaussprache in Österreich. In: In: Manfred

Glauninger und Alexandra Lenz (eds.), Standarddeutsch in Österreich – Theoretische und empirische Ansätze.

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht: Vienna.

Moser, Hans. 1995. Westösterreich und die Kodifizierung des „österreichischen Deutsch“. In: Rudolf Muhr, Richard Schrodt

und Peter Wiesinger (eds.), Österreichisches Deutsch. Linguistische, sozialpsychologische und sprachpolitische

Aspekte einer nationalen Variante des Deutschen. Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky: Wien, 167-177.

Siebs, Theodor. 1957. Deutsche Hochsprache. Bühnenaussprache. Together with „Österreichisches Beiblatt zu Siebs“ 16th

edition. eds. v. Helmut de Boor und Paul Diels. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Wächter-Kollpacher, Eva. 1995. Die Sprecherschulung im ORF. In: Rudolf Muhr, Richard Schrodt und Peter Wiesinger (eds.),

Österreichisches Deutsch. Linguistische, sozialpsychologische und sprachpolitische Aspekte einer nationalen

Variante des Deutschen. Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky: Vienna, 269-281.

Wiesinger, Peter. 2009. Die Standardaussprache in Österreich. In: Krech, E.-M. / E. Stock / U. Hirschfeld / L. C. Anders (eds.):

Deutsches Aussprachewörterbuch. Berlin: New York: de Gruyter, 229-258.

The stronghold in the Balkans: Early Modern Romanian infinitives.

Hill, Virginia

(University of New Brunswick SJ)

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The replacement of infinitive clauses with subjunctives occurred late and incompletely in Romanian (Sandfeld 1930). Early

Modern Romanian (EMR) texts, such as Moldavian Chronicles (17

– 18

c.), attest the stages of subjunctive spread in the

language. This paper argues that the emergence of the subjunctive in EMR arises from language internal factors, hence, the

asynchrony with the Balkan phenomenon (see also Demiraj 1970; Philippide 1927).

First, I consider the trigger of infinitive replacement by subjunctives in Balkan languages, i.e., the switch from [-

finite] to [+finite] verb forms, justified on grounds of ambiguity in Primary Linguistic Data (PLD) (Roussou 2009). The

infinitive had been re-categorized as a noun (Tomić 2006: 413-416). The re-categorization of the infinitive also happens in

EMR, but the effects are different:

(i) The nominalized infinitive (e.g., fire ‘be’) is replaced with a short infinitive (not the subjunctive) that lost –re as a mood

marker (e.g., fi ‘be’). The short infinitive displays a preverbal mood marker a ‘to’, which I qualify as a syntactic vs

morphological event; i.e., bare short infinitives may only generate mono-clausal structures in complex future (1a), but

cannot occur in bi-clausal structures unless a ‘to’ is present (1b) - * means ungrammatical if absent.

(1) a. cela ce va fi înţeleptu nu va vinui,

he who will be.INF wise not will sin.INF (Ureche 64)

b. apucatu-m-am şi eu pre urma a tuturora *(a) scrie aceste poveşti

began-me-have and I on track of all.the to write.INF these stories (Ureche 64)

‘I also started to write these stories, by following the others.’

(ii) Alternatively, the switch from [-] to [+finite] involved replacement of the old infinitive with de-indicatives.

(2) cît s-au tîmplat de au fost în viiaţa sa.

how.much REFL-has happened DE has been in life his (Neculce 104)

‘whatever happened to have taken place during his life’

At the time of the two replacements, the subjunctive was not in the picture.

Second, I ask the question ‘why?’: If the nominalized infinitive had successful replacements with a-infinitives or de-

indicatives, why is it still the case that the subjunctive has eventually replaced these two constructions? I argue that this

was triggered by two factors: (i) the elimination of the complementizer de, which was ambiguous for the mapping of -

/+realis modality; and (ii) the loss of finiteness in infinitive clauses, due to scarce evidence for lexical subjects. The

subjunctive emerged after the innovation of a mood marker (sã, equivalent to a ‘to’) and started as a sentential

complement to verbs of ‘want’ (Frâncu 2009). Unambiguous irrealis modality and unambiguous finiteness made the

subjunctive the default option in these environments (but not in others).

To conclude, Romanian preserved the infinitive clause because the nominalization of old infinitives had a different

outcome - new infinitives. The latter are strongly verbal and have undergone replacement only as complements to lexical

verbs, while remaining productive as complements to N and in adverbial clauses.

References

Demiraj, Shaban. 1970. De la perte de l’infinitif en albanais. Studia Albanica 7: 125-130.

Frâncu, Constantin. 2009. Gramatica limbii române vechi (1521-1780). Iaşi: Demiurg.

Iordan, Iorgu. 1955. Ion Neculce, Letopiseţul Ţării Moldovei. Bucureşti: Editura de Stat.

Panaitescu, Petre P. 1958. Grigore Ureche, Letopiseţul Ţării Moldovei. Bucureşti: Editura de Stat.

Philippide, Alexandru. 1927. Originea românilor, 2vol. Iaşi: Viaţa Românească.

Roussou, Anna. 2009. In the mood for control. Lingua 119 (12): 1811–1836.

Sandfeld, Kristian. 1930/1968. Linguistique balcanique: problèmes et résultats. Paris: Klincksiek.

Tomić, Olga Mišeska. 2006. Balkan Sprachbund Morpho-syntactic Features, Dordrecht: Springer.

Nice wheels! The horse, the wheel, the chariot and Indo-European ideologies.

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Hock, Hans Henrich

(University of Illinois)

The interaction between historical linguistics and ideology can be twofold. On one hand, historical linguistic findings may be

seized upon — or rejected — by ideologically motivated movements; on the other, they may themselves be influenced by

(overt or covert) biases or ideological motivations. I examine a current issue in Indo-European reconstruction which has

implications for both types of interaction and conclude that historical linguists must exercise caution, lest they unwittingly

support ideologically motivated agendas or get carried away by their own agendas.

The domestication of horses in Ukraine/Kazakhstan (ca. 4000 BC), the introduction of wheels (ca. 3500), and the

development of chariots (ca. 2000, southeastern Urals), have important consequences for Indo-European (IE) linguistics,

especially in light of the reconstructions *eḱwos ‘horse’ and *(k

e)k

lo /*rotHo- ‘wheel ( chariot)’. The most reasonable

interpretation is that since PIE had words for ‘horse’ and ‘wheel/chariot’, it cannot be dated earlier than the invention of the

wheel (ca. 4000 BC) and must have been spoken near the area where horses were domesticated and chariots were

developed, i.e. in the steppes of Ukraine/Kazakhstan. IE speakers in other areas, such as India, must have migrated there.

See e.g. Anthony 2007.

This conclusion is being challenged from two sides. Indian nationalists reject the notion that (Indo-)Aryans migrated

to India and instead claim that they are indigenous. In their view, only “Aryans”, defined as Hindus, are real Indians; e.g.

Talageri 1993ab, 2008.

Publications by Atkinson and Gray (e.g. 2006ab, also Bouckaert et al. 2012) argue that PIE must go back to a much

earlier time (ca. 6000 BC), locate its home in Anatolia, and reject the reconstruction of the words for ‘horse’ and

‘wheel/chariot’. Instead, they argue that the words are of more recent origin and diffused in the early IE daughter languages

through contact. Various critiques of the general claims and of the methodology they are based on have been published;

e.g. Garrett 2006, McMahon & McMahon 2006, Holm 2007. In this paper I focus on the specific claim of post-PIE diffusion

of the words for ‘horse’ and ‘wheel/chariot’.

What complicates matters it that others, too, argue for borrowing scenarios, related to different agendas.

Gamkrelidze and Ivanov (1995), advocates of a PIE home near the Caucasus, consider reduplicated PIE *k

e-k

l-o a

borrowing from neighboring Near-Eastern languages (e.g. Sumerian reduplicated gil-gul ‘wheel’,

GIŠ

gi-gir ‘wagon’), while

Parpola (2008) postulates borrowing in the opposite direction, arguing that Indo-Europeans invented the wheel.

I examine the different accounts and demonstrate that

• *eḱwos and *(k

e)k

lo cannot be explained as late, post-PIE borrowings but must be reconstructed (pace

Atkinson & Gray)

• Indo-Aryan migration to India therefore cannot be rejected (pace Indian nationalists)

• Similarities in words for ‘wheel’ between IE and Near Eastern languages probably reflect borrowing by

calquing, but there is no evidence to decide who borrowed from whom (pace Gamkrelidze & Ivanov and Parpola).

I conclude that Indo-Europeanists must exercise caution, lest they unwittingly support ideologically motivated agendas or

get carried away by their own agendas.

References

Anthony, David W. 2007. The horse, the wheel, and language: How Bronze-Age riders from the Eurasian steppes shaped the

modern world. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Atkinson, Quentin D., and Russell D. Gray. 2006a. Are accurate dates an intractable problem for historical linguistics? In

Mapping our ancestry: Phylogenetic methods in anthropology and prehistory, ed. by C. Lipo, M. O’Brien, S.

Shennan, and M. Collard, 269–296. Chicago: Aldine.

Atkinson, Quentin D., and Russell D. Gray. 2006b. How Old is the Indo-European Language Family? Illumination or More

Moths to the Flame? In Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, ed. by Peter Forster and Colin

Renfrew, 91-109. Cambridge, UK: The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

Atkinson, Quentin D., Geoff Nicholls, David Welch, and Russell D. Gray. 2005. From words to dates: Water into wine,

mathemagic or phylogenetic interference? Transactions of the Philological Society 103:2. 193–219.

Bouckaert, Remco, Philippe Lemey, … Russel Gray, Marc A. Suchard, and Quentin D. Atkinson. 2012. Mapping the origins and

expansion of the Indo-European language family. Science 337: 957-960.

Gamkrelidze, Thomas V., and Vjačeslav V. Ivanov. 1995. Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans, 2 vols. Berlin: Mouton de

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Gruyter.

Garrett, Andrew. 2006. Convergence in the formation of Indo-European subgroups: Phylogeny and chronology. In

Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, ed. by Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew, 139-182.

Cambridge, UK: The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

Holm, Hans J. 2007. The new arboretum of Indo-European “trees”: Can new algorithms reveal the phylogeny and even

prehistory of IE? Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 14:2-3. 167-214.

Parpola, Asko. 2008. Proto-Indo-European speakers of the Late Tripolye culture as the inventors of wheeled vehicles:

Linguistic and archaeological considerations of the PIE homeland problem. In Proceedings of the 19

Indo-

European Conference, UCLA, ed. by Karlene Bley-Jones et al., 1-59. Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man.

Talageri, Shrikant G. 1993a. Aryan invasion theory and Indian nationalism. New Delhi: Voice of India.

Talageri, Shrikant G. 1993b. The Aryan invasion theory: A reappraisal. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. [≈ 1993a, omitting the

first, Hindutva-ideological chapter.]

Talageri, Shrikant G. 2008. The Rigveda and the Avesta: The final evidence. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.

The illusion of unagreement: a unified structure for DPs, pronouns and “pro”.

Höhn, Georg

(University of Cambridge)

Unagreement (Hurtado 1985) describes a phenomenon observed in various pro-drop languages (e.g. Spanish, Modern

Greek, Bulgarian), involving an apparent agreement mismatch between an third person plural subject DP and first or second

person plural subject agreement on the verb (1), cf. Ackema&Neeleman (In prep.) among others.

Certain other null subject languages like Italian and European Portuguese do not allow this construction (2).

(1) Ftiaksame i ximiki ena oreo keik. (Greek)

made.1pl the chemists a good cake

'We chemists baked a good cake.'

(2) *Gli studenti abbiamo fatto una torta. (Italian)

the students have.1pl made a cake

In languages with articles, the definite article is obligatory in adnominal pronoun constructions (APCs; "we linguists") in

langages with unagreement, while non-unagreement languages proscribe an article in APCs (3).

(3) a. Unagreement

emis i fitites (Greek)

nosotros los estudiantes (Spanish)

nie studenti-te (Bulgarian)

we the students

b. No unagreement

noi (*gli) studenti (Italian)

nós (*os) estudantes (European Portuguese)

we students

This analysis adopts a pronominal determiner analysis the second type of APCs (Postal 1969, Rauh 2003, Roehrs 2005) and

Panagiotidis' (2002) analysis of pronouns as involving a silent noun e

. I suggest that the person features of the subject DP

simply remain unpronounced in unagreement configurations.

The cross-linguistic variation in the availability of unagreement results from a difference in the structure of the

extended nominal projection (xnP). Unagreement is available when person and definiteness features are hosted on separate

heads in xnP (4).

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Non-unagreement languages have regular pronominal determiners encoding definiteness and person on a single

head (5).

(4) [PersP Pers [DP D [NumP Num NP ]]]

(unagreement)

(5) [D

pers

P D

pers

[NumP Num NP ]]

(no unagreement)

Unagreement results from non-realization of Pers in (4) as illustrated in (6). Non-realization of D

pers

in (5) would not result in

the characteristic definite plural DP subject, but in a bare noun. There seems to be an independent constraint in both kinds

of languages that a definite D cannot be silent if there is overt material in NumP (i.e. silent only in pronouns and "pro").

Since in (5) this constraint applies to the head also encoding person features D

pers

, it cannot be silent with overt material in

NumP, cf. (7). The cross-linguistic variation is hence derived as interaction of the structural difference and the conditions on

D-realization.

(6)(7)

In extension, if the overtness of Pers depends on demonstrativity (building on Rauh's 2003 observations on German

pronominal determiners), then the illicity of overt pronouns in quantificational unagreement (5) is explained by the fact that

quantified phrases cannot be demonstrative.

(5) (*Emeis) polloi taksidiotes agapame ti Thessaloniki. (Greek)

we many travellers love.1pl the Thessaloniki

'Many of us travellers love Thessaloniki.'

Apart from accounting for the cross-linguistic variation, this theory suggests a unified treatment of the structure of full DPs,

pronominals and (at least referential) "pro" in terms of (zero) spell-out of parts of the xnP. Open question include the

analysis of null subject languages lacking overt articles and the nature of the constraint on D realization.

References

Ackema, Peter & Ad Neeleman. In preparation. Subset controllers in agreement relations. Ms., University of Edinburgh and

UCL.

Hurtado, Alfredo. 1985. The unagreement hypothesis. In King, L. & Maley, C. (eds.), Selected Papers from the Thirteenth

Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, 187-211. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Panagiotidis, Phoevos. 2002. Pronouns, clitics and empty nouns. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Postal, Paul. 1969. On so-called “pronouns” in English. In David A. Reibel & Sanford A. Schane (eds.), Modern studies in

English: Readings in Transformational Grammar, 201–226. Englewood Cliffs (New Jersey): Prentice Hall.

Rauh, Gisa. 2003. Warum wir Linguisten “euch Linguisten”, aber nicht “sie Linguisten” akzeptieren können. Eine

personendeiktische Erklärung. Linguistische Berichte 196. 390–424.

Roehrs, Dorian. 2005. Pronouns are determiners after all. In Marcel den Dikken & Christina M. Tortora (eds.), The function of

function words and functional categories, 251–285. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Der Himmel hängt voller Geigen. - The Stative Locative Alternation of German.

Hole, Daniel

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(Humboldt University)

In this talk, I present an analysis of the hitherto undescribed Stative Locative Alternation of German (SLA

) as exemplified in

(1) (examples with a g-superscript are from Google searches). The elucidation of its properties lends support to Kaufmann’s

(1995) subclassification of German Stative Localizing Verbs (SLV

), and highlights the heavily different behaviour of English

in this domain (which only has a dynamic counterpart (2); Levin 1993). Moreover, the overt presence of a morpheme – voll

ʻfullʼ – to which the holistic meaning effect known from the English (Dynamic) Locative Alternation and the Spray/Load

Alternations can be attributed may help to justify the presence of the same morpheme in English, albeit in unpronounced

form.

Properties/Restrictions: (i) The locatum subject of the mit-alternant corresponds to the prepositional object of the

basic alternant (promotion of location PO). (ii) The prepositional object of the mit-alternant corresponds to the subject of

the basic variant (demotion of locatum subject). (iii) The string voll mit-PO

DAT

alternates with a ʻholisc parveʼ voller O (cf.

the title). With voller O, O must be a bare nominal without a determiner. (iv) The PO has a plural count N head, or a mass N

head (3) (*locatum atom). (v) The verb must be the copula (1b), or belong to Kaufmann’s (1995) SLV

with a firm supporting

object (mainly kleben, stecken, stehen, liegen, hängen and, heavily restricted, sitzen (4)). (vi) The location referent is totally

covered/filled by the locatum referent (holistic effect). (vii) The location subject must denote a “surfacy” referent, i.e. a

referent with a clear minimally two-dimensional shape (5a) (SURFACE). In the case of stecken (and sitzen?), a holistic three-

dimensional affectedness of the location referent is possible (5b).

Syntax: The syntax of the untensed part of (1b) in (6) is compatible with the topicalization data in (7).

Semantics: (8) proposes a semantics for voll+SURFACE, where SURFACE is to capture (vii)/(5a). The lexical entry in

(8) projects the syntax of (6) in a type-driven way up to the level of the VOLL node; property (i) of the construction must be

accounted for in a different way. (vii) is captured by the surface restriction in the truth-conditions. As it stands, (8) will only

yield good results for plural count locatum referents, and not for mass locatum referents (iv); this must be fixed in future

work. Moreover, the narrow restriction (v) does not yet follow from (8), and three-dimensional objects whose whole

material is affected (5b) are not yet predicted as possible location arguments either.

Outlook: The proposal in (6) and (8) captures most of the properties of SLA

in a general way which will facilitate

cross-constructional and cross-linguistic comparison. SLA

has a dynamic counterpart illustrated in (9). It remains to be seen

whether the proposed analysis can be extended to cover this construction as well.

(1) a. Kartons stehen auf dem Gang. ʻThere are cardboard boxes standing in the aisle.ʼ

Der Gang steht voll mit […] Kartons. ʻThe aisle is full of cardboard boxes.ʼ

(lit.: The aisle stands full of cardboard boxes)

(2) a. Bees are swarming in the garden.

b. The garden is swarming with bees.

(3)

[D]as ganze Eß- und Kochgeschirr klebt voll mit Speisebrei/

not-g

Essensresten.

ʻThe whole dishes have pap/left-overs sticking to it.ʼ

(4)

Das ganze Kornfeld saß voll mit diesen Maikäfern. ʻThe whole ﬁeld had those may beetles sing in it.ʼ

(5) a. Das Ei/*

Die Hühnerstange klebte voll mit Kot. ʻThe whole egg/*

The roost had droppings on it.ʼ

b. Der Heuballen steckte voll mit Würmern./

Sie steckt voll mit Vitaminen […]

ʻThe hay bale was full of worms [sticking in it]./It [the fruit] is full of vitamins [sticking in it].ʼ

(6)

[der Gang]

i VOLL

steh-

mit Kartons

voll e

+SURFACE

(7) a. [Mit Kartons voll] steht der Gang.

b. [Mit Kartons vollstehen] soll der Gang.

c. *[Der Gang mit Kartons voll] soll stehen.

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(8) Οvoll + SURFACEΠ = λx

. λP

#e,t∃

. λf

SLVfirm#e, #e,t∃∃

. ∃y[the surface of x is full with y which has

property P & f

SLVfirm

(y) at place x]

ʻa funcon which takes a place argument x, a predicate of non-atomic referents P

and a stative localizing verb with a firm supporting ground f

SLVfirm

as arguments and

yields true iff the surface of x is fully covered with a referent/referents y that has/have

property P, and f

SLVfirm

(y) at place xʼ

(9) Die Wanne läuft voll mit Öl. ‘Oil is pouring into the tub (until it’s full).’

References

Kaufmann, Ingrid (1995a). Konzeptuelle Grundlagen semantischer Dekompositionsstrukturen: Die Kombinatorik lokaler

Verben und prädikativer Komplemente. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

Levin, Beth (1993). English Verb Classes and Alternations. A Preliminary Investigation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Clause-final negation in northern sub-Saharan Africa: right periphery, intersubjectivity and areality.

Idiatov, Dmitry

(CNRS - LLACAN)

Clause-final negative markers, although typologically rare, can be found in a very wide range of central and west African

languages. This has previously been attributed to the somehow “pragmatic” rather than “semantic” nature of the negative

markers by Dryer (2009) or, focusing on the frequent co-occurrence of the clause-final negative markers and multiple

negative exponence, to the “inherent focal nature of negation” (Beyer 2009). I argue against these accounts and explain the

clause-final position of the negative markers by their origin in other clause-final markers. Furthermore, I relate the fact that

such negative markers are so common in this area to another typological feature of the relevant languages, viz. a

grammatical category of clause-final markers whose core function is the expression of intersubjective meanings. Combined

with the fact that negation is exactly one of those situations, propitious for the use of intersubjective markers, when the

speaker’s assertive authority is at stake, frequency effects account naturally for the tendency to conventionalize clause-final

negative markers.

References

Beyer, Klaus. 2009. Double negation marking: A case of contact-induced grammaticalization in West-Africa? In Norbert

Cyffer, Erwin Ebermann & Georg Ziegelmeyer (eds.), Negation patterns in West African languages and beyond,

205-222. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Dryer, Matthew S. 2009. Verb-object-negative order in Central Africa. In Norbert Cyffer, Erwin Ebermann & Georg

Ziegelmeyer (eds.), Negation patterns in West African languages and beyond, 307-362. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Epistemic and evidential markers in Slovak parallel corpuses.

Ivanová Martina

(Prešov University)

The paper intends to investigate the domains of evidentiality and epistemic modality in Slovak. Whereas the epistemic units

have been investigated in Slovak linguistics intensively, not surprisingly, no official lists of evidential markers in Slovak

linguistic works exist. However, by investigating relevant data, it is possible to synthesize a list of what we may consider

relevant candidates in the search for evidential units in Slovak.

The paper focuses on five Slovak evidential adverbs from the domain of perception based inference (očividne,

evidentne, zjavne, viditeľne, zrejme). Modal adverbs in general are considered to be problematic from a contrastive

perspective due to their multifunctionality (cf. Aijmer 2005). Descriptive contrastive studies of adverbs have been carried

out especially in the functional-semantic domain of epistemic modality (Aijmer 1999, 2001, 2002; Ramón 2006, 2009). The

paper investigates these evidential adverbs and their translations in English and Czech parallel corpuses of contemporary

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texts. The investigation is focused on (i) the translation equivalents chosen to fit in particular context in comparison to the

original example, (ii) foregrounding and backgrounding of epistemic function connected with the choice of a particular unit,

(iii) the role of context providing specific reference to a particular mode of knowledge.

When working on the database of evidential markers the problem of their delimitation from epistemic units often

arises. Evidential markers in general tend to be difficult to translate into a different language because of their varying

epistemic values. Epistemic components can be either inherent part of semantic structure of individual markers or can arise

on the basis of pragmatic implicatures (Wiemer & Socka 2010). By investigating translation equivalents the evidentiality and

epistemic modality interface can be specified more thoroughly. Using epistemic equivalent for evidential adverb is closely

connected with the relation between the degree of speaker´s epistemic commitment and the degree of reliability of

evidential source.

A corpus-based contrastive study of adverbs reveals wide range of translation equivalents including (apart from

evidential adverbs) epistemic adverbs, epistemic modals, evidential and epistemic periphrastic constructions, usually

adjectival or prepositional phrases, which function adverbially (Hoye 1997), raising verbs and other epistemic and evidential

predicates.

A special attention will be focused on omission of evidential adverbs in the translated texts. It proves the

assumption that “since modality does not add anything to the prepositional content of an utterance, it often disappears in

the translation” (Aijmer 2002: 97).

The analysis will have three aims: First, we try to delimit individual types of evidential markers in Slovak taking into

consideration the epistemic component present in their meaning. Second, we will analyze semantic and pragmatic aspects

of evidential and epistemic patterns in implicating the speaker’s attitude towards the evidence s/he has for the proposition.

Third, corpus-based investigation of two parallel corpuses makes it possible to study if there are parallel semantic and

pragmatic tendencies in translation techniques in two (typologically distinct) languages (English and Czech). The description

of various translation possibilities can show us how evidentiality correlates with other closely related functional-semantic

domains and what kind of pragmatic extensions evidential adverbs undergo.

References

Aijmer, K. (1999), Epistemic Possibility in an English-Swedish Contrastive Perspective, In Out of Corpora (H. Hasselgård, S.

Oksefjell, eds.), Amsterdam: Rodopi, 301-323.

Aijmer, K. (2001), Probably in Swedish Translations – A Case of Translationese?, In Gäller Stam Suffix och Ord (S. Allén, S.

Berg, S.-G. Malmgren, K. Norén, B. Ralph, eds.), Göteborg: Elanders Novum, 1-13.

Aijmer, K. (2002), Modal Adverbs of Certainty and Uncertainty in an English-Swedish Perspective, In Information Structure in

a Cross-linguistic Perspective (H. Hasselgård, S. Johansson, B. Behrens, C. Fabricius-Hansen, eds.), Amsterdam:

Rodopi, 97-112.

Aijmer, K. (2005), Evaluation and Pragmatic Markers. In Strategies in Academic Discourse (E. Tognini-Bonelli, G. Del Lungo

Camiciotti, eds.), Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 83-96.

Cornillie, B. (2010), An interactional approach to epistemic and evidential adverbs in Spanish conversation, In Linguistic

realization of evidentiality in European languages (G. Diewald, E. Smirnova, eds.), Berlin, New York:Mouton de

Gruyter, 309-330.

Cornillie, B. (2009), Evidentiality and epistemic modality: On the close relationship between two different categories.

Functions of Language. 16-1, 44-62.

Hoye, L. (1997), Adverbs and Modality in English, London: Longman.

Ivanová, M. (2010), Epistemické funkcie evidenčných operátorov v slovenčine, In Vidy jazyka a jazykovedy. Zborník

z medzinárodnej konferencie usporiadanej pri príležitosti životného jubilea Miloslavy Sokolovej (M. Ološtiak, M.

Ivanová, D. Slančová, eds.), Prešov: FF PU, 145-154.

Nuyts, J. (2001), Epistemic Modality, Language, and Conceptualization: A Cognitive-Pragmatic Perspective, Amsterdam: John

Benjamins.

Pietrandrea, P. (2005), Epistemic Modality. Functional Properties and the Italian System, Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John

Benjamins Publishing Company.

Pietrandrea, P. (2007), The grammatical nature of some epistemic-evidential adverbs in spoken Italian, Italian Journal of

Linguistics, 19-1, 39-63.

Ramón, N. (2006), Approaching Epistemic Modality in English and Spanish: A Corpus-based Contrastive Study of probably

and probablemente. In Lingüística aplicada en la sociedad de la información y la comunición (M. Juan, M.

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Amengual, J. Salazar, eds.), Palma de Mallorca: Universidad de las Islas Baleares, 319-327.

Ramón, N. (2009), Translating Epistemic Adverbs from English into Spanish: Evidence from a Parallel Corpus, Meta: journal

des traducteurs / Meta: Translators´Journal, 54-1, 73-96.

Squartini, M. (2004), Disentangling Evidentiality and Epistemic Modality in Romance, Lingua: International Review of

General Linguistics, 114, 873-895.

Wiemer, B. (2006), Particles, parentheticals, conjunctions and prepositions as evidentiality markers in contemporary Polish

(A first exploratory study), Studies in Polish Linguistics, 3, 5-67.

Wiemer, B. & Socka, A. (2010), How to do contrastive semantics with propositional modifiers: the case of hearsay adverbs.

Talk given at the conference Re-thinking synonymy. Helsinki, Oct., 28-30, 2010.

The auditive in Nenets: synchronic analysis and diachronic observations of a non-visual sensory evidential.

Jalava, Lotta

(University of Helsinki)

This paper discusses synchronic categorization and grammaticalization of the auditive form found in Nenets. Nenets is an

agglutinating language, with SOV constituent order. In the verbal system, in addition to relatively large amount of verbal

moods and several non-finite forms, Nenets has a separate objective conjugation encoding information on both subject and

object. Furthermore, Nenets uses nominal conjugation when expressing some stative relations.

Nenets has a specific form, the auditive, encoding information perceived by hearing, smelling or feeling, e.g.

pida laxanə-wonon-da

(s)he speak-aud-3sg

‘(S)he speaks, as I hear.’

The auditive appears also in other Samoyedic languages, but in context of Uralic languages, it is a rarity. In Nenets, there is

no grammatical marking for visual evidence, which makes the auditive the only direct evidential. However, there are several

mood markers encoding indirect evidentiality, e.g. reported or inferred information, and speaker’s epistemic evaluation of

truth-value of the proposition. One of the peculiarities of the auditive suffix is, that it can be followed by only 3th person

suffixes. These personal endings can be seen either as suffixes of the objective conjugation, or, possessive suffixes, which in

Nenets are identical, e.g. pya-da start-obj.3sg ‘he started it’ and nyebya-da mother-poss.3sg ’his mother’. In grammars and

earlier studies on Nenets, the auditive is usually either included in the list of moods (e.g. Tereshchenko 1965: 902), or, it is

regarded as an evidential form with conjugational peculiarities (Perrot 1996). However, it has also been analysed as a non-

finite form (Salminen 1997: 115).

The focus of this paper is in morpho-syntactic analysis of the form: How should the auditive be classified? Is it a

non-finite or finite predicate? What explains the morpho-syntactic peculiarities and restrictions of the form? The study

suggests that the structure and morpho-syntactic restrictions of the auditive can be better understood from diachronic

approach. In this perspective, the forms can be seen as possessed non-verbal predicates. The marker of the auditive

originates from the word *mon ‘voice’, and in that perspective the original structure of the auditive can be understood as

‘the voice of (happening something) exists’. Crosslinguistically it is typical for evidentials to evolve from verbs instead of

nouns (Willet 1998, Aikhenvald 2004: 271), but, there are languages in which evidentials originate from nouns. E.g. Ainu has

a four-term evidential system, all of them evolving from nouns (Bugaeva 2012), and it seems to provide a parallel case for

Nenets in evidentials evolving from possessed non-verbal structures.

The framework of the study is functional, and the paper also takes part in discussion on how to define a category of

evidentiality and explain and conceptualize grammaticalization of evidentials (see Boye & Harder 2009). The data used in

the paper represents mostly the Tundra Nenets variety, but texts from Forest Nenets are used as well. The data from Tundra

Nenets consist of published text collections of Nenets sample sentences, folklore materials and stories as well as my own

fieldwork recordings.

References

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Boye, Kasper & Peter Harder 2009: Evidentiality: Linguistic categories and grammaticalization. Functions of Language 16/1,

9–43.

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Bugaeva, Anna 2012: Evidentials that come from nouns: a case of Ainu. The Nature of Evidentiality (TNE2012), Leiden, 14-16

June 2012.

Perrot, Jean 1996: Un Médiatif Ouralien: L' auditif en Samoyède Nenets. In Guentchéva, Zlatka 1996 (ed). L' Énonciation

Médiatisée. Louvain-Paris: Peeters. 57–68.

Salminen, Tapani 1997: Tundra Nenets inflection. SUST 227. Helsinki: SUS.

Tereshchenko, N. M = Терещенко, Н. М. 1965: Ненецко-русский словарь. Москва: Советская Энциклопедия.

Willet, Thomas L. 1988: A cross-linguistic survey of the grammaticalization of evidentiality. Studies in Language 12, 51–97.

The modern spoken Xibe verb system: synchrony and diachrony.

Jang, Taeho and Payne, Thomas

(SIL East Asia Group, The University of Oregon and SIL International)

Xibe (also Sibo, Xibo, and Sibe) is a Manchu-Tungusic language spoken by approximately 40,000 individuals in Northwestern

China. In this paper we document the verb system of Xibe, as spoken in Yili-Qapqal County of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous

Region, using methods and techniques of typological field linguistics, including in-context conversations with native

speakers and an extensive text corpus. This research represents the first comprehensive analysis of the verb system of this

important minority language. In the second part of the paper, we propose a scenario for the historical development of this

system.

We show that the "Verb Complex" in Xibe main clauses consists of a semantically main verb, followed by up to

three auxiliaries expressing tense, aspectual and modal categories. Each auxiliary governs a limited set of non-finite clitics

hosted by the preceding verb or auxiliary. The overall template for the Verb Complex is the following ('=' indicates a clitic

boundary):

VERB.STEM (=INFL1 AUX1) (=INFL2 AUX2) (=INFL3 bi) =INFL4

In this template, auxiliaries in AUX1 position govern a set of inflectional enclitics which we describe as "INFL1". Auxiliaries

in AUX2 position govern a distinct (though overlapping) set of inflectional enclitics we term "INFL2". Finally, the last

auxiliary position may be filled only by the existential particle bi. This auxiliary governs "INFL3" enclitics. The whole finite

Verb Complex is terminated by one of four enclitics or enclitic combinations, =he perfective, =m imperfective, =heku

'perfective negative' and =rku 'imperfective negative'. We refer to this set collectively as "INFL4". Naturally occurring

examples of various expansions of this template are given in Table 1.

In the diachronic section we propose that the inflectional enclitics are historically derived from nominalizers, via well-

documented processes of grammaticalization. Evidence for this new analysis includes the fact that the last auxiliary in the

series is the existential semi-verb bi, which elsewhere synchronically takes nominal complements. In brief, the path of

semantic reanalysis is the following:

Someone's VERBing exists => Someone VERBS

Someone's former-VERBing exists => Someone VERBed

Table 1: Some Verb Complexes in Xibe

Text reference STEM (INFL1 AUX1) (INFL2 AUX2) (INFL3 bi) INFL4

Black Dragon River

249

zhe

eat

-m mutu

-INF be.able

-rku o

-NEG become

-m

-IMPRF

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'. . . not able to eat'

Wise Daughter-in

law 087

zhe

eat

-m diriv

-INF start

-he

-PERF

'. . . began eating'

Tiger 018 zhe

eat

-m ixi

-INF sufficient

-rku

IMPF.NEG

'. . . not be enough to eat'

Wise Daughter-in

law 105

zhe

eat

-m vazhi

-INF finish

-rku

IMPF.NEG

'. . . not finish eating'

Wolf Fox 114 zhe

eat

-m bi

-IMPF

EXIST

-he

-PRF

'. . . had been eating'

Clever Foolish 197 beyi

freeze

-m hamirku

-INF cannot.bear

0 ila

stand

-he bi

-PRF

EXIST

-he

-PRF

'. . . was not able to bear freezing'

Mosquito 117 xuanji

choose

-m senda

-INF put

-m o

-INF become

-m bi

-IMP EXIST

-he

-PERF

'. . . should come to choose'

The use of Italian phrasal verbs by Serbian learners.

Janicijevic, Natasa and Radojevic, Dragana

(University of Belgrade)

Although many Italian phrasal verbs (PV), e.g. andare via ’to go away’, mandare giù ‘to swallow’, fare fuori ‘to kill’, are

frequently used in contemporary Italian, until recently they were completely neglected in both theoretical works and

pedagogical grammars. Since the pioneer work of Simone (1997), who was the first to recognize them as a separate verbal

subcategory and who defined them as verbi sintagmatici ‘phrasal verbs’, they have received more attention by other Italian

linguists, such as Antelmi (2002), Jezek (2002), Masini (2005, 2006), Iacobini and Masini (2006). Most of these theoretical

works focus on their typological, historical, syntactic and semantic aspects, and on their lexicalization, but in pedagogical

grammars and textbooks of L2 Italian they still remain a highly neglected topic. The direct consequence of this neglect is

relatively low awareness of PV, their forms, meanings, and registers of use among L2 Italian learners. The aim of this paper

is to investigate the quantity and quality of input concerning Italian PV to which Serbian learners of L2 Italian are exposed,

as well as to analyze the most frequent difficulties that the learners encounter during the process of acquisition of PV.

After briefly discussing the syntactic and semantic features of this particular type of Italian verbs, we compare

them with their Serbian equivalents, claiming that Serbian prefixed verbs are the nearest equivalents of those Italian PV

whose particle expresses spatial meaning, whereas those PV that bare an idiomatic meaning have as their most frequent

Serbian equivalents either a single non-prefixed verb or an idiomatic expression.

Our hypothesis is that native speakers of Serbian have difficulties in acquiring and using Italian PV not only because

of the lack of input, but also due to the fact that similar analytic constructions are not present in their mother tongue. In

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order to prove our arguments, we will use the results of an experiment we conducted on 100 university students of L2

Italian (CEFR levels B1-B2) who are native speakers of Serbian. The students were given a questionnaire consisting of

contextualized examples of the use of the most frequent Italian PV with the scope of investigating their present status in

the students’ interlanguage. Our results indicate a significantly high level of absence or misinterpretation of these verbs not

only on the productive level of their interlanguage, but also on the receptive one, especially in the examples with idiomatic

meaning, whereas in the examples with semantically more transparent PV the error percentage is much lower.

Therefore, since our results confirm our hypothesis, we conclude that the main reasons of the unsatisfactory

acquisition of Italian PV by Serbian learners are the almost complete lack of adequate input in grammars and textbooks, as

well as the absence of such verbs in their mother tongue. Consequently, we give some useful suggestions on different types

of input that could improve and facilitate the acquisition of Italian PV not only in the specific case of Serbian L2 Italian

learners, but also in the case of other languages lacking PV.

References

Antelmi, D. (2002). Il verbo senza significato: possibilità di slittamento del contenuto lessicale su elementi di tipo nominale.

Rivista italiana di linguistica e di dialettologia, 4, 97-117.

Iacobini, C. and Masini, F. (2006). The emergence of verb-particle constructions in Italian: locative and actional meanings.

Morphology, 16, 155-188.

Jezek, E. (2002). Lo sfondamento di un confine tipologico. Il caso dei verbi complessi nell’italiano. In P. Cordin, R.

Franceschini e G. Held (eds.), Parallela 8. Lingue di confine, confini di fenomeni linguistici. Atti dell’ottavo incontro

italo-austriaco dei linguisti (pp. 289-308). Roma: Bulzoni.

Masini, F. (2005). Multi-word expressions between syntax and the lexicon: the case of Italian verb-particle constructions.

SKY Journal of Linguistics, 18, 145-173.

Masini, F. (2006). Diacronia dei verbi sintagmatici in italiano. Archivio Glottologico Italiano, XCI/1, 67-105.

Simone, R. (1997). Esistono verbi sintagmatici in italiano?. In T. De Mauro e V. Lo Cascio (eds.), Lessico e grammatica. Teorie

linguistiche e applicazioni lessicografiche, Atti SLI, 36 (pp. 155-170). Roma: Bulzoni.

On the nature of long consonant clusters in Polish.

Jankowski, Michał

(Adam Mickiewicz University)

The Polish language features a wealth of consonant clusters, which are known to be numerous, varied in length, and

complex in their phonotactics

[2]

. There are approx. 1400 clusters in Polish and they are composed of two to a maximum of

six consonants, eg. /pt/, /skr/, /gʒmj/, /mpstf/, /ntʃzvj/, etc. Although no clusters of length seven or more have been

recorded in our data, longer cluster are possible because the processes which might make new and longer clusters appear in

the language are very much alive. A lesser studied aspect of the Polish consonant clusters is the fact that a fairly large

number of them appear to be present in words which form specific lexical categories

[4]

. The paper will present a quantitative

and qualitative analysis of long clusters which belong to specific lexical categories (grammatical or semantic).

It is noteworthy that a significant number of (longer) clusters are triggered by concatenative morphology, e.g. /fstʃ/

as in ws+trzymać ‘to withhold’ and non-concatenative morphology, e.g. /brvj/, as a result deletion of a root vowel, as in

brwiowy ‘eyebrow’ (ATTR.) ← brew ‘eyebrow’ (NOM.SG.) or word final /mpstf/, as a result of zero-Genitive-Plural formation,

as in przestępstw 'offence’ (GEN.PL.) ← przestępstwo 'offence’ (NOM.SG.)

[3] , [6]

The resources studied are: a collection of newspaper texts spanning two full years (48.6 million tokens, 630k types)

and a list of approx. 190k inflectional forms generated on the basis of a dictionary for learners of Polish

[1]

featuring 8,000

basic core vocabulary items, both transcribed to IPA with the use of software designed and implemented by a member of

the research team, and recently made available on-line as an interactive tool.

This study puts the following research questions: (a) which long consonant clusters appear in which resource, (b)

what grammatical categories are mapped by which clusters, (c) what lexical categories are mapped by which clusters, (d)

what is the morphological structure of longer clusters. The methods used are distributional, where clusters and example

words are extracted from a resource, and lexical, where grammatical and semantic categories are identified and analysed

[5]

Statistical analyses will be presented for all the findings with regard to the nature of long clusters in Polish. This presentation

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will provide explanations of: (a) what determines the form and number of long consonant clusters in a particular language

resource, (b) why the Polish language avoids or prefers specific clusters that are correlated with specific lexical categories.

This study also shows that the resources used – despite their size – prove to be insufficient for an exhaustive study

of long clusters, and what’s necessary is queries of other resources for individual clusters that are known to exist, but

happen to be absent from our resources. This will be shown using as examples the ‘families’ of clusters present in words

with the prefixes kontr- ‘counter’ (eg. /ntrb/, /ntrt/, /ntrf/, etc) and wewnątrz- ‘inside, intra-‘ (eg. /ntʃg/, /ntʃgm/, /ntʃd/,

/ntʃk/, etc).

References

[1] Bartnicka, Barbara and Roxana Sinielnikoff. 1999. Słownik podstawowy języka polskiego dla cudzoziemców. Kielce:

Wydawnictwo Takt.

[2] Dressler, Wolfgang U. and Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk. 2006. Proposing morphonotactics, Rivista di Linguistica, 18 (2):

249-266.

[3] Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Katarzyna. 2009. NP extension: B&B phonotactics, Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 45

(1): 55-71.

[4] Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Katarzyna, Michał Jankowski and Piotr Wierzchoń. 2011. Classification of the Lexicon of Modern

Polish According to the Structure of Consonant Clusters. In: Lee, W.-S.; Zee, E. (eds.) Proceedings of the 17th

International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. 17-21 August 2011. Hong Kong. CD-ROM. Hong Kong: City University of

Hong Kong, 619-622.

[5] Libben, Gary. 2012. Understanding semantic transparency. Plenary talk. 15th International Morphology Meeting, Vienna,

February 9-12, 2012.

[6]Zydorowicz, Paulina. 2010. Consonant Clusters Across Morpheme Boundaries: Polish Morphonotactic Inventory and its

Acquisition. Poznań Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 46/4: 565-588.

The effect of showing and telling to be reluctant to convey bad news.

Jansen, Frank

(Utrecht University)

Background. In their typology of politeness phenomena Brown & Levinson (1987, 187-188) postulate that a speaker can

soften the negative effects of a face threatening act, for example bad news, on the hearer by suggesting that he is reluctant

to convey the bad news to him/her. He can show his reluctance by signalling hesitation just before he presents the bad

news, by inserting a filled pause, eh. An alternative way of indicating reluctance is by using a verbal expression like “I hate

to tell you this but …”. As far as we know, the effectiveness of indicating reluctance as a politeness strategy has never been

tested experimentally. In our presentation we will present the results of a series of effect studies in which we tested the

effects of pausing or verbal expressions in bad news voicemail messages and e-mails.

Method. In the experiments short bad news messages were designed, for example the cancellation of a hotel reservation

and a rejection of an application. Of every message two or more varieties were composed. In the experimental condition of

“showing reluctance” we implemented two or three filled pauses directly before the clause with the face threatening

fragment. In the condition of “telling reluctance” a clause was inserted in which the reluctance was expressed verbally. The

bad news messages in the control condition were presented fluently and without the verbal expressions of reluctance.

More than 300 participants listened to or read only one of the messages, listed their thoughts about the message and

completed a questionnaire with Likert-propositions about several aspects of the message. With varimax rotation the most

relevant evaluative dimensions were selected as dependent variables and the differences between the means for the

conditions statistically evaluated.

Results. Showing reluctance by way of eh turns out to be an effective strategy for senders who want to improve the

impression that receivers have of their relational qualities. Hearers attribute more empathy to them. The downside is that

their presentation skills are valued lower. The effects of telling that you are reluctant to convey the message are less

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impressive. This is in line with a result of an effect study by Jansen & Janssen (2010), who found that two other politeness

strategies that capitalize on just telling about your relation with the receiver had no impact at all.

Reference

Jansen, F. & Janssen, D. (2010). Effects of positive politeness strategies in business letters. Journal of Pragmatics 42(9),

2531-2548.

Subjectivity in the Dutch mental state predicates.

Janssens, Karolien and Nuyts, Jan

(University of Antwerp)

Topic. This paper deals with the question how the ‘subjective’ meaning of the mental state predicates (MSP) has emerged

historically, and what this tells us about the status of this semantic notion. We define subjectivity as in Nuyts (2012): an

evaluation is subjective if it is presented as being the assessor’s sole responsibility (as opposed to an intersubjective

evaluation, which is presented as being shared between the assessor and a wider group of people).

That MSPs such as think or believe can express subjectivity is generally accepted in the literature (e.g. Benveniste

1966, Persson 1993, Aijmer 1997, Simon-Vandenbergen 1998, Van Bogaert 2006, 2009). An example from Persson (1993: 8)

is (1).

(1) Look at that girl. I think she is pretty.

Most authors relate subjectivity (defined in different ways though) to notions such as epistemic and deontic modality (e.g.

Lyons 1977, Coates 1983, Traugott 1989, Traugott and Dasher 2002, Palmer 2009). Also in the literature on the MSPs, the

subjective use is typically correlated with the epistemic use – cf. the fact that think, e.g., is also a frequent marker of

epistemic modality, as in (2).

(2) A: Where is John? B: I think he’s in the library, but you need to check.

Yet, unlike in (2), think in (1) does not appear to have an epistemic meaning: the speaker is not estimating the chances that

‘she’ is pretty. It is rather a pure marker of subjectivity here (in the above definition): it indicates that the aesthetic

evaluation (pretty) is the speaker’s personal opinion. This raises the question whether there is indeed a relationship

between the pure subjectivity use of the MSPs of the kind in (1) and their epistemic use of the kind in (2). We investigate

this issue by means of a diachronic corpus study of four MSPs in Dutch which can express subjectivity: denken ‘think’,

dunken ‘think’ (impersonal), geloven ‘believe’ and vinden ‘find’.

Method. We have analyzed the meanings of these predicates, and the historical evolution in them, in corpora from four

stages of the language: Old Dutch, Middle Dutch, Early New Dutch and Present Day Dutch. We have collected 200 instances

for each period, for each verb (according to criteria such as representativity, e.g. in terms of text genres, and comparability

across the periods). For Present Day Dutch we have selected two different samples, one written and one spoken.

Results. The data show that subjectivity is probably the youngest meaning category in all verbs, although it is not always a

recent meaning (dunken is already used as a subjectivity marker in Early Middle Dutch), and although it is not equally

strongly present in all these MSPs. But more importantly, the data show that the use as a subjectivity marker may but need

not emerge out of an epistemic use of these verbs: in some of the verbs it does, but in others it does not. Our investigation

thus offers support for Nuyts’ (2012) assumption that subjectivity constitutes a meaning category on its own, separate from

epistemic modality.

References

Aijmer, Karin. 1997. “I think – an English modal particle”. In Modality in Germanic Languages, T. Swan and O. Westvik (eds),

1-48. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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Benveniste, Emile. 1971. Problems in General Linguistics. Miami: University of Miami Press.

Coates Jennifer. 1983. The semantics of modal auxiliaries. London & Canberra: Croom Helm.

Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nuyts, Jan. 2012. Notions of (inter)subjectivity. English Text Construction 5: 53-76.

Palmer, Frank R. 2009. Mood and modality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Persson, Gunnar. 1993. Think in a panchronic perspective. Studia Neophilologica 65: 2-18.

Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie. 1998. “I think and its Dutch equivalents in parliamentary debates”. In Corpora and

Crosslinguistic Research, S. Johansson and S. Oksefjell (eds), 297-317. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1989. On the rise of epistemic meanings in English. Language 65: 31–55.

Traugott, Elizabeth C. and Richard B. Dasher. 2002. Regularity in semantic change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Van Bogaert, Julie. 2006. I guess, I suppose and I believe as pragmatic markers: grammaticalization and functions. BELL New

Series 4: 129-149.

Van Bogaert, Julie. 2009. The Grammar of Complement-Taking Mental Predicate Constructions in Present-Day Spoken British

English. PhD thesis, University of Gent.

Towards a diachronic typology of subject-to-subject raising predicates.

Jedrzejowski, Lukasz

(ZAS, Berlin)

The received wisdom has it that subject-to-subject raising predicates (= s-s-predicates) like English promise, Polish wydawać

się (‘seem’) or Spanish amenazar (‘threaten’) have undergone incipient grammaticalization and arose from non-raising

structures (cf. Traugott 1989 and her subsequent work). In this talk, I will re-examine emergence conditions of s-s-

predicates selecting infinitive complements in the history of various European languages. First, I will demonstrate that there

are no homogenous environments giving rise to raising patterns. Second, I shall propose a cross-linguistic diachronic

typology of s-s-predicates.

In what follows, I distinguish (at least) three different groups of s-s-predicates corresponding to three different

development scenarios. To the first group belong predicates that (i) have not undergone any semantic change, (ii) have not

grammaticalized at all. Based on Perlmutter (1970), I will show that Old West- and North-Germanic phase predicates are

the case in point here. Additionally, since they can embed weather verbs and impersonal predicates in the oldest stages,

there are neither empirical nor theoretical signs pointing towards a grammaticalization process.

The second group covers the development of modal verbs taking a non-circumstantial modal base (Kratzer 1977)

and it is divided into two subgroups. The first subgroup encompasses epistemic/evidential modals that developed out of

their circumstantial counterparts. Assuming that circumstantial modals are s-s-predicates too (Axel 2001, Wurmbrand

2001), they are said to have evolved from control verbs, supplying, in the end, the following pattern:

(a) modal predicates  circumstantial modals  non-circumstantial modals

(control verbs) (s-s-predicates) (s-s-predicates)

The second subgroup, in turn, is meant to contain those non-circumstantial modals that did not evolve from their

circumstantial counterparts, but directly from modal predicates, i.e. control verbs. As pointed out by Hill (2011), the

epistemic usage of Romanian putea (‘can’) is a parade example for this pattern. Such a language change forces us to assume

two various development patterns for modal s-s-predicates:

(b) modal predicates  circumstantial modals

(control verbs) (s-s-predicates)

Referring to the history of the Polish modal mieć (‘must/be said/be claimed’), I will show that both scenarios (a vs. b + c) are

appropriate. Moreover, more diachronic data will be provided indicating that the patterns outlined in (ii) and (iii) can be

applied to the development of selected modals in Germanic languages as well.

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The last, third group is represented by s-s-predicates that (i) have been grammaticalized, (ii) have undergone a

semantic change, (iii) their s-s status is due a bridging structure (e.g. ambiguous context, inanimate subject, embedded DP

complement, etc.). To this group mainly belong promise, threaten, verbs of seeming and highly grammaticalized auxiliary

verbs. In this connection, following van Gelderen (2011), I will outline a raising cycle of verbs of seeming in the history of

German. Accordingly, it will be presented that although scheinen did not occur in Old High German as a s-s-predicate (cf.

Demske 2008), it was nevertheless possible to express a similar kind of attitude towards what is embedded by using

dünken.

References

Axel, Katrin (2001): Althochdeutsche Modalverben als Anhebungsverben, in: Modalität und Modalverben ed. by R. Müller &

M. Reis. (Sonderheft Linguistische Berichte 9). Hamburg: Helmut Buske, pp. 37-60.

Demske, Ulrike (2008): Raising patterns in Old High German, in: Grammatical Change and Linguistic Theory. The Rosendal

papers ed. by T. Eythórsson. (Linguistics Today 113). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 143-172.

Gelderen, Elly van (2011): The Linguistic Cycle. Language Change and the Language Faculty. OUP.

Hill, Virginia (2011): Modal grammaticalization and the pragmatic field: A case study, in: Diachronica 28: 25-53.

Kratzer, Angelika (1977): What ‘must’ and ‘can’ must and can mean, in: Linguistics and Philosophy 1: 337-355.

Perlmutter, David (1970): The two verbs begin, in: Readings in English Transformational Grammar ed. by R. Jacobs & P.

Rosenbaum. Waltham, Massachusetts: Ginn and Company, pp. 107-119.

Traugott, Elisabeth (1989): On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: an example of subjectification in semantic change,

in: Language 65: 31-55.

Wurmbrand, Susanne (2001): Modal verbs must be raising verbs, in: Proceedings of the 18

West Coast Conference on

Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 18) ed. by S. Bird, A. Carnie, J. Haugen & P. Norquest. Somerville, Mass: Cascadilla Press,

pp. 599-612.

Switch reference in Iatmul.

Jendraschek, Gerd

(Sogang University)

I will present the switch reference constructions (SR) of the Papuan language Iatmul. Data are from my own fieldwork. In a

first step, I will describe the morphosyntactic encoding of Iatmul SR-constructions. When an SR-clause and the main clause

share their subject referent, a non-finite verb form must be used in the SR-clause. In example (1), this is kukka ‘doing;

preparing’; only the verb of the main clause is marked for tense, person, and number, here ki’li’li’. Note that coordinate (a)

and subordinate (b) interpretations are equally appropriate here.

(1) ki’ki’da kuk-ka yaki ki’-li’-li’

[food do-DEP] [ tobacco eat-IPFV-3SG.F]

a. ‘She was preparing food and smoking.’

b. ‘She was smoking while preparing food.’

Person-marking in both clauses, plus the absence of tense-marking and non-final intonation in the SR-clause, indicates

disjoint reference, as shown in (2). What is typologically remarkable is the fact that the subject switch is not marked by a

dedicated morpheme.

(2) ki’ki’da kut-ti’-li’ yaki ki’-li’-li’

[food do-IPFV-3SG.F] [ tobacco eat-IPFV-3SG.F]

‘(While) she

was preparing food, she

*i/j

was smoking.’

While tense distinctions are neutralized in the SR-clause, they can vary in the final clause. In (3), the SR verb form butdi’ has

irrealis reference, but only on the verb in the final clause do we find the irrealis morpheme -kiya:

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(3) Pius avla but-di’ wuk-kiya-mi’n

[Pius self tell-3SG.M] [hear-IRR-2SG.M]

‘(When) Pius himself tells you, you’ll hear it.’

Switch reference is also used in tail-head linkage, which is ‘a way to connect clause chains in which the last clause of a chain

is partially or completely repeated in the first clause of the next chain’ (de Vries 2005: 363). The occurrence of switch-

reference in tail-head linkage enhances the discourse-structuring function of the latter, as tail-head linkage ‘allows the

switch-reference marking to be carried over from one sentence to the next’ (Stirling 1993: 17). Both tail-head linkage and

the same-subject markers of SR-systems indicate discourse continuity. Tail-head linkage in Iatmul is further attested as a

strategy to link independent clauses, where the recapitulated verb is functionally similar to a clause-linking conjunction.

This means that tail-head linkage has undergone conventionalization as a coordination device. What has been

conventionalized here is not a specific form of a specific lexical item, but the construction as such.

As SR-clauses are typically adjoined, they can constitute so-called clause chains. These are iconic in that they reflect

a chronological order of events. However, a backgrounded subordinate clause can intervene between two linked clauses

(‘skipped clause’) or within one clause (‘centre-embedded clause’) of the chain and thereby make it discontinuous. Iatmul

SR-forms are also found in certain types of biclausal subordinate linkage such as manner or causal clauses.

In summary, the Iatmul data confirm that SR-constructions fulfil the double function of reference tracking and text

cohesion. At the same time, the Iatmul case is an atypical SR-system for having an apparent ‘different-subject zero-

morpheme’.

References

de Sousa, H., 2006. The Menggwa Dla language of New Guinea, Ph.D. thesis, University of Sydney.

http://ses.library.usyd.edu.au/bitstream/2123/1341/8/08chapter7.pdf

de Vries, L., 2005. Towards a typology of tail-head linkage in Papuan languages. Studies in Language 29 (2), 363–384.

Foley, W. A., 1986. The Papuan Languages of New Guinea. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Foley, W. A., 2010. Clause linkage and nexus in Papuan languages. Bril, Isabelle (Ed.), Clause linking and clause hierarchy.

Syntax and pragmatics. Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 27–50.

Foley, W. A., Van Valin, R. D. Jr., 1984. Functional Syntax and Universal Grammar. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Genetti, C., 2005. The participial construction of Dolakhā Newar. Studies in Language 29 (1), 35–87.

Haiman, J. & Munro, P., (Eds.), 1983. Switch-reference and universal grammar. Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.

Haspelmath, M., 1995. The converb as a cross-linguistically valid category. Haspelmath & König (Eds.), Converbs in cross-

linguistic perspective. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, pp. 1–55.

Huang, Y. 2000. Anaphora. A cross-linguistic approach. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Lehmann, C., 1988. Towards a typology of clause linkage. Haiman, J. & Thompson, S. A. (Eds.), Clause Combining in

Discourse and Grammar. Benjamins, Amsterdam, pp. 181–225.

Longacre, R. E., 1985. Sentences as combinations of clauses. Shopen, T. (Ed.)., Language Typology and syntactic description.

Volume II. Complex constructions. First edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 235–286.

Longacre, R. E., 2007. Sentences as combinations of clauses. Shopen, T. (Ed.), Language Typology and syntactic description.

Volume II. Complex constructions. Second edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 372–420.

Reesink, G. P., 1983. Switch-reference and topicality hierarchies. Studies in Language 7 (2), 215–246.

Roberts, J. R., 1997. Switch-reference in Papua New Guinea: a preliminary survey. Pawley, A. (Ed.), Papers in Papuan

Linguistics. Pacific Linguistics. Series A–87, pp. 101–241.

Staalsen, P., 1972. Clause relationships in Iatmul. Pacific Linguistics. Series A – Occasional Papers 31. The Australian National

University, Canberra, pp. 45–69.

Stirling, L., 1993. Switch-reference and discourse representation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Stirling, L., 2001. The multifunctionality of anaphoric expressions. A typological perspective. Australian Journal of Linguistics

21.1, 7–23.

Subject and differential subject marking in colloquial Burmese.

Jenny, Mathias

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(University of Zurich)

While Differential Object Marking (DOM) is well known in the linguistic literature, Differential Subject Marking (DSM) seems

to be less common and is less widely described. In a number of languages, non-canonically marked subjects are triggered by

verbal semantics (see Aikhenvald et al., eds, 2001). In others ergative marking is extended to some intransitive subjects to

mark agentivity or volitionality (DeLancey 2011). DSM in Burmese is apparently independent of both these factors, and

needs other explanations.

The present study looks at natural language use, based mainly on a 250 000-word corpus of spoken Burmese,

complemented with elicited data. As theoretical background we use the typological approach to grammatical relations as

laid out by Bickel (2011). The notion of ‘subject’ (as set of S and A) is seen as present or relevant in specific constructions,

rather than in an individual language as a whole. ‘Subject’ is shown to be a relevant relation in a number of constructions in

Burmese, where canonical subjects are unmarked, though they may optionally take the marker ká. This marker is also used

to mark (some kinds of) topics and ablative relations, that is, it marks the referent as the source of a movement, either

concrete (spatial) or abstract (temporal or other). Despite the different functions of this marker there is little overlap or

ambiguity in the spoken language today. As ká does not obligatorily occur with all subjects and, more importantly, is blocked

in some contexts, it cannot be analyzed as a real ‘subject marker’ or ‘nominative case’, but rather is a form of Differential

Subject Marking. DSM in Burmese occurs with all kinds of intransitive and transitive verbs as well as with non-verbal

predicates, and any kind of subject, irrespective of its animacy, volitionality or agentivity. It’s occurrence is obviously also

independent of the need to distinguish grammatical relations of the arguments in transitive expressions (flagging), though it

can be used in this function.

The marker ká has been described variously as ‘topic’ or ‘subject’ marker, usually ‘contrastive’ or ‘emphatic’ in the

literature (see e.g. Sawada 1995). Contrast and emphasis can not account for the high text frequency and some of the uses

of the marker, though, so other explanations have to be found. To achieve this goal, both comparative data from other

languages (e.g. de Hoop & de Swart 2008; Malchukov 2009; Onishi 2001) and the development of the marker ká from the

ablative marker, are taken into account. Burmese seems to be a rare case of a language developing DSM from an ablative

source without intermediary stages of ergative, possessive or passive constructions. It is also at variance with the extended

use of agentive marking, also known as ‘optional ergative marking’, as described in other Tibeto-Burman languages (e.g.

Coupe 2011; DeLancey 2011; LaPolla 1995; Lidz 2011).

References

Aikhenvald, Alexandra, R. M. W. Dixon & Masayuki Onishi (eds.) 2001. Non-canonical marking of subjects and objects.

Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Bickel, Balthasar. 2011. Grammatical relations typology. In Jae Jung Song (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of linguistic typology.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 399-444.

Coupe, Alexander R. 2011. On core case marking patterns in two Tibeto-Burman languages of Nagaland. Linguistics of the

Tibeto-Burman Area 34.2, 21-47.

de Hoop, Helen & Peter de Swart. 2008. Cross-linguistic variation in differential subject marking. In Helen de Hoop & Peter

de Swart (eds.) Differential subject marking. Dordrecht: Springer, 1-16.

DeLancey, Scott. 2011. “Optional” “ergativity” in Tibeto-Burman languages. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 34.2, 9-20.

LaPolla, Randy. 1995. ‘Ergative’ marking in Tibeto-Burman. In Senri Ethnological Studies 41, 189-228.

Lidz, Libert A. 2011. Agentive marking in Yongning Na (Mosou). Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area 34.2, 49-72.

Malchukov, Andrej. 2009. Rare and ‘exotic’ cases. In Andrej Malchukov & Andrew Spencer. The Oxford handbook of case.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 635-48.

Onishi, Masayuki. 2001. Introduction: Non-canonically marked subjects and objects: parameters and properties. In

Aikhenvald, Alexandra, R. M. W. Dixon & Masayuki Onishi (eds.) Non-canonical marking of subjects and objects.

Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1-51.

Sawada, Hideo. 1995. The usages and functions of particles -kou_/-ka. in colloquial Burmese. In Senri Ethnological Studies

41, 154-87.

The anaphoric and the recognitial uses of 'sådan en' in Danish NP's in spoken and written texts.

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Jensen, Eva Skafte

(The Danish Language Council)

The predeterminer sådan (lit.: 'such') has different functions and different meanings in Danish depending on the NP it is a

part of.

(1) sådan en

'such one'

(2) sådan en bue

SÅDAN

a curve'

The type in (1) consists of the predeterminer sådan and an indefinite pronoun; it is only used in contexts of true anaphoric

reference with a fully identifiable antecedent, cf. (3):

(3) der ligger en gårdsplads med høns [..] så hvis du har sådan en

'there lies a courtyard with chickens [..] so if you have such one'

In (3) sådan en 'such one' refers to en gårdsplads med høns 'a courtyard with chickens'. The sådan en in this type may

always function as an answer to a question what kind?

The type shown in (2) consists of sådan and a full NP with an article and a noun. This type is different from (1) in that it is

not anaphoric, and furthermore in that it contains the meaning component 'you know the kind I mean', cf. (4):

(4) og så skal man gå i sådan en bue lidt vest igen

'and so shall one go in

SÅDAN

a curve slightly west again'

The utterance in (4) would not satisfy a question of what kind - because it carries no information as to the nature of the

kind in (4), and there is no antecedent to get that sort of information from either. I propose, that the use of sådan en in (4)

may be described in terms of the so called 'recognitional' use identified for demonstratives by Himmelmann, i.e. a use that

relies on a "presumably shared knowledge" that doesn't have to be explained further (Himmelmann 1996: 207).

The use in (3) is well known and it is described in academic papers (eg. Jensen 2000: 54-61; Diderichsen 2007: 189;

Wood & Vikner 2011) and in well annotated dictionaries (e.g. Ordbog over det Danske Sprog; Den Danske Ordbog). The use

in (4), however, appears to have never been properly investigated. This could be due to the lack of occurences in traditional

written texts. The component 'you know the kind I mean' calls for situations of communicative intimacy, situations more

commonly achieved in face to face communication (like spoken dialougue) and in the informal style of certain types of the

new CMC-texts, than in traditional written texts of a monologic kind.

In this paper, I will present my findings of the two uses in three different corpora representing different text

situations: One corpus of traditional written texts (KorpusDK), one of spoken dialogues (DanPASS), and one corpus

compiled of blogs and tweets (DSN-CMC).

The approach is functional-structural in the sense described in Engberg-Pedersen et al. 1996, and in Boye & Harder

2012.

References

Boye, Kasper & Peter Harder (2012). A usage-based theory of grammatical status and grammaticalization. Language 88/1,

1-44.

DanPASS – Danish Phonetically Annotated Spontaneous Speech. http://www.cphling.dk/~ng/danpass_webpage/-

danpass.htm

Diderichsen, Philip (2007). Givenness revisited. Indefinite one-anaphora in unscripted Danish Dialogue. Acta Linguistica

Hafniensia 39, 179-208.

Den Danske Ordbog (2003- ). Lars Trap-Jensen et al. (eds.). Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab. http://ordnet.dk/ddo/

DSN-CMC – Dansk Sprognævns Korpus af Computer Mediated Communication.

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Engberg-Pedersen, Elisabeth, Michael Fortescue, Peter Harder, Lars Heltoft & Lisbeth Falster Jakobsen (eds.) (1996).

Content, Expression and Structure. Studies in Danish functional grammar. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John

Benjamins.

Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. (1996). Demonstratives in narrative discourse: a taxonomy of universal uses. In: Fox, Barbara

(ed.): Studies in Anaphora (= Typological Studies in Language 33). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 205-

254.

Jensen, Eva Skafte (2000). Danske sætningsadverbialer og topologi i diakron belysning. Copenhagen: University of

Copenhagen.

KorpusDK - http://ordnet.dk/korpusdk

Ordbog over det Danske Sprog (1918-1956). Verner Dahlerup et al. (eds.). København: Det Danske Sprog- og

Litteraturselskab & Gyldendal. http://ordnet.dk/ods

Wood, Johanna & Sten Vikner (2011). Noun phrase structure and movement. A cross linguistic comparison of

such/sådan/solch and so/så/so. In: Perridon, Harry & Petra Sleeman (eds.): The Noun Phrase in Romance and

Germanic: Structure, Variation and Change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 89-110.

The mass-count distinction, pancake-sentences and gender system changes in Mainland Scandinavian.

Josefsson, Gunlög

(Lund University)

Two phenomena involving gender in Mainland Scandinavian are “pancake-sentences” and the semanticization of formal

gender in Danish, a process that seem to have started in the West Jutlandic dialect. Both phenomena involve a tight

association between neuter and non-countability (which includes readings, such as ‘mass/substance’, ‘aggregated

substance’, ‘eventivity’ etc.). I argue that pancake-sentences and the semanticization of formal gender are parts of the

same process.

Pancake-sentences are characterized by neuter agreement on the predicative adjective, despite an apparent lack

of a source for such agreement. In (1a) the subject is morot ‘carrot’, a common gender noun, and in (1b) the plural morötter

‘carrots’. In both cases the predicative adjective agrees in the neuter, and the reading of the NP is that of ‘substance’ and

‘aggregated substance’, respectively. (2) shows that plural agreement on the predicative renders the subject individuated,

i.e. countable. To account for agreement and the semantic interpretations, [5] proposes that the subject NPs in sentences,

such as (1), is headed by a null neuter classifier, which is crucially without a number feature, as illustrated in (3). This

analysis is easily extended to other types of the pancake-sentences, such as those in (4), where the assumed classifier takes

a vP or small clause complement. (5) shows that the subject of this type of pancake-sentences is larger than the overt NP;

adverbial modifiers can be added, which indicates a clause-like structure.

The gender system of West Jutlandic differs from the rest of Mainland Scandinavian in being consistently semantic;

when a non-countable reading is intended, a noun is obligatorily preceded by a neuter element, primarily det viz. det

egetræ ‘oak wood’, see (6a). (6b) shows that assigning common gender renders the noun a countable reading. I argue that

det in det egetræ is a classifier, see (7), in all relevant aspects identical to the proposed null classifier, heading the subjects

of pancake-sentences, as shown in (3).

The West Jutlandic gender system is ultimately due to phonological changes that started around 1000 AD, with a

gradual loss of morphology, including grammatical gender distinctions. In this situation, semantics seem to have “kicked in”,

and a typical association between neuter and non-countability, and between common gender and countability, became a

rule. The process presumably includes a reanalysis of the neuter demonstrative det/thæt ‘that, this’ as a classifier. I will

assume that pancake-sentences in Standard Danish is a result of a spread of the West Jutlandic classifier construction. More

recently, [2] reports an increased use of a semantically motivated use of the pronouns den (it.

COMMON

) and det (it.

NEUTER

regardless of the formal gender of the antecedent, and [1] a use of the construction det + noun in (sub)standard spoken

Danish. For Swedish, the main consequence seems to be the possibility of using pancake-sentences, which, according to [4],

were introduced around 1900 in Swedish. According to [3], the construction is older in Danish, which makes it plausible that

it has spread from Danish.

(1) a Morot är gul-t. Swedish

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carrot(

COMMON

)

PRES

yellow-

NEUT

’Carrot (viewed as a substance) is yellow.’

b Morötter är gul-t.

carrot(

COMMON

PRES

yellow-

NEUT

’Carrots (viewed as an aggregated substance) are yellow.’

(2) a Morötter är gul-a. Swedish

carrot(

COMMON

PRES

yellow-

’Carrots (viewed as an individuated entities) are yellow.’

(3) ClassP

Class NP/NbP/…

NEUT

morot/morötter/

carrot(

COMMON

)/carrot.

(4) a CLASS

NEUT

...

två älskare är omoralisk-t. Swedish

two lover(

COMMON

PRES

immoral-

NEUT

’To have two lovers is immoral.’

b CLASS

NEUT

…

[henne i en sportbil]

MALL

LAUSE

vore trevlig-t.

her in a sports.car

SUBJ

nice-

NEUT

’To have her in a sports car would be nice.’

(5) CLASS

NEUT

[PRO

HAVE

[två nya älskare] [varje dag]

advl

]vP är omoralisk-t.

two new lover(

COMMON

each day

PRES

immoral-

NEUT

‘To have two new lovers every day is immoral.’

(6) a det egetræ West Jutlandic

NEUT

oak+tree

’oak wood’  substance reading

b dén egetræ West Jutlandic

that.

COMMON

oak+tree

’that oak tree’  individuated reading

(7) ClassP

Class NP

det

neut

mælk

milk

NEUT

morot/morötter/

två älskare/

[henne i en sportbil]

carrot(

COMMON

)/carrot.

HAVE

two lover.

HAVE

[her in a sports car]

References

Arboe, Torben, 2009. Motiveret genus – især vedrørende brug af bestemthedsmorfem In: Hovmark, Henrik, Iben Stampe

Sletten, Gudiksen, Asgerd (eds.). I mund og bog – 25 artikler om sprog tilegnet Inge Lise Pedersen på 70-årsdagen d.

5. juni 2009. Afdeling for Dialektforskning, Nordisk Forskningsinstitut, Københavns Universitet. [1]

Hansen Erik & Heltoft, Lars, 2011. Grammatik over det danske sprog. København: Det danske Sprog- og

Litteraturselskab/Syddansk universitetsforlag. [2]

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Malmgren, Sven-Göran, 1990 [1984]. Adjektiviska funktioner i svenskan [Adjectival functions in Swedish]. Nordistica

Gothoburgiensia 13. Acta Universitatis Gothoburgiensis: Göteborg. [3]

Wellander, E., 1949. [1985]. Riktig svenska. Stockholm: Esselte Studium. [4]

Author --- [5]

Expanding the typology of loanwords: the role of conversational interaction.

Joseph, Brian and Friedman, Victor

(The Ohio State University and The University of Chicago)

Typologies for linguistic borrowing have focused on differences in form (loanwords versus calques), motivation (need versus

prestige, Hockett 1958), and content (cultural versus intimate borrowing, Bloomfield 1933). We argue here that while these

are interesting and useful, they don’t allow for a full appreciation of the human and social dimension to borrowing.

Borrowing can occur without speaker contact, as with literary loanwords from Latin into English, and even with speaker

contact, there can be different degrees of contact, as recognized in Thomason & Kaufmann’s 1988 “scale of borrowability”,

where the borrowing of different types of linguistic material correlates with different levels of intensity of contact among

speakers.

We claim that the most interesting borrowings for understanding social history through language contact stand

outside these typologies and focus less on borrowability or degree of contact than on human interaction. Accordingly, we

propose a new typological distinction, arguing for its cogency based on the Balkan Sprachbund.

Our loan typology recognizes loanwords that are closely tied to conversational interactions between speakers;

accordingly, we dub them “E.R.I.C.” loans, those that are “Essentially Rooted In Conversation”. E.R.I.C. loans include such

typically borrowing-resistant elements as:

• Kinship terms

• Numerals

• Pronouns

• Adpositions

• Negatives

• Complementizers

• Discourse elements (connectives, interjections, gestures)

• Vocatives

• Onomatopoeia

• (Expressive) Reduplication

• Expressive phonology

• Diminutives

• Taboo expressions

• Idioms (and phraseology more generally, even shared proverbs)

• Secret languages, trade languages, jargons

We argue further that these conversationally based loans arise under conditions of speaker interaction of an on-going and

sustained nature, characterizable as intense but simultaneously intimate contact, as opposed to occasional and casual. Such

conditions, especially involving multi-lateral multi-lingualism, also engender structural convergence areas, Sprachbünde, as

in the Balkans.

Of course, speakers in all contact situations interact verbally, and forms that are typically resistant to borrowing get

borrowed in other than Sprachbund-consistent/conducive contexts. But verbal interaction alone is not the issue; rather the

nature, the intensity, and the character of the verbal interaction are. Moreover, the preponderance of ERIC loans in the

Balkans is particularly striking. Balkan ERIC loans are not just incidental regarding the Sprachbund, but rather are telltale

signs of the social circumstances that lead to the structural parallels associated with a linguistic convergence area.

We thus draw a distinction between concrete, informational loanwords rooted in specific interactions involving

material culture (foods, goods, etc.), which pass among speakers under very casual contact situations, and those essentially

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rooted in conversational interactions that need considerable direct speaker mediation for cross-language transmission.

We see ERIC loans as adding to, while intersecting with, existing loanword typologies. For instance, they provide an

overarching rubric for contact influences that draws together expressives, gestures, kinship practices, and pragmatic

markers in discourse, along with much else. Moreover, the notion of ERIC loans cuts across a taxonomy of borrowing by

word-type, implicit in Matras 2009 where “lexical borrowing” and “grammatical borrowing” are treated in separate

chapters, encompassing certain types of lexical items and certain grammatical categories.

References

Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language. New York: Holt.

Hockett, Charles. 1958. A course in Modern Linguistics. New York: MacMillan

Matras, Yaron. 2009. Language Contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thomason, Sarah G. and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley:

University of California.

Dynamic defectiveness and the development of suppletion.

Juge, Matthew

(Texas State University-San Marcos)

Recent studies of defectiveness (e.g. the papers in Baerman, Corbett & Brown 2010) have primarily emphasized synchronic

aspects of missing forms, with frequent attention to modeling such patterns. In this paper I address how defectiveness

arises and interacts with other types of irregularity, especially suppletion, in verb paradigms. Some familiar Indo-European

data show that, as languages change, the categories typical of a verb paradigm also naturally change and, in the process,

what kinds of patterns can be considered defective or suppletive change as well.

As Juge argues in a forthcoming discussion of the aforementioned volume and a collection of papers on deponency

(Baerman et al. 2007), the clearest examples of this type of development are the copula and the perfect participle. The

Latin perfect passive participle (e.g., ruptus ‘(having been) broken’) was missing for many verbs. Interestingly, though, the

papers in Baerman, Corbett & Brown (2010) do not present such verbs as defective. This is probably related to the fact that

this form was historically a deverbal adjective and was not fully integrated into the verb system. Subsequent changes,

however, especially the development of periphrastic perfects with

HABERE

and

ESSE

, led to tighter binding of these forms with

the rest of the verbal paradigm.

This process of semantically related forms becoming bound together may also result in suppletion. For example,

the PIE roots that contribute to the copulas in the various daughter languages were mostly not members of a suppletive

paradigm in the proto-language. Rather, roots like *b

ū-, *h

es-, and *h

ues- expressed related notions that in some

languages came together and created suppletive paradigms (e.g., English be, is, was). This process, which I call coalescence,

is more closely tied to patterns of irregularity like defectiveness than other sources of suppletion, such as the sound

changes that rendered the related English forms am and is suppletive from a synchronic perspective. In the latter case,

there is no interaction between distinct lexemes. Examining how different types of irregularity (and their subtypes)

promises to improve the process of reconstruction, especially for poorly attested families, which can benefit from the

establishment of tendencies. It is particularly important to explore such patterns as they relate to semantic factors, which

have received far too little attention in diachronic morphology.

Juge also argues that an emphasis on interactions between types of irregularity (or, as he calls it, ‘paradigmatic

perversity’) may provide some guidance in seemingly ambiguous cases. For instance, he considers Matthews’s rejection

(2007: 313) of the relationship between Latin fīō ‘become’ and faciō ‘make’ as a potentially exceptional case of deponency

as a missed opportunity, since the clear cases of a given phenomenon may be few and the outliers can sometimes reveal

the most about principles of change.

Juge’s integrationist approach to paradigmatic perversity provides a way to deepen our understanding of some of

the most poorly understood parts of diachronic morphology and is also consistent with Joseph’s emphasis on the

importance of the periphery (1997).

References

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Baerman, Matthew, Greville G. Corbett & Dunstan Brown, eds. 2010. Defective Paradigms: Missing forms and what they

tell us ( = Proceedings of the British Academy, 163). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Baerman, Matthew, Greville G. Corbett, Dunstan Brown & Andrew Hippisley, eds. 2007. Deponency and Morphological

Mismatches ( = Proceedings of the British Academy, 145). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Joseph, Brian D. 1997. “On the Linguistics of Marginality: The centrality of the periphery”. Papers from the 33rd Regional

Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 197-213. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.

Juge, Matthew L. 2013. “Defectiveness and Deponency in Diachrony.” Diachronica 30.1.

Structural conditions for ergativity: a view from North Russian.

Jung, Hakyung

(Seoul National University)

This paper argues that relevant structural conditions may give rise to the development of Tense/Aspect-split ergativity in a

language that is generally not considered ergative. The investigation of the argument encoding strategy of the North Russian

be-perfect construction, as in (1), supports this claim.

(1) u lisicy e uneseno kuročka.

At fox:PPGEN (BE) carried off:Part-no.N.SG chicken:NOM.F.SG

‘A fox has carried a chicken off’ [Kuz’mina and Nemčenko 1971]

The North Russian perfect is composed of a prepositional phrase, consisting of u ‘at’ and a genitive noun, an auxiliary byt’

‘be,’ an indeclinable participle in -no/-to or in -n/-t, originating from the past passive participle, and a nominative/accusative

object phrase (if transitive). The u+GEN phrase generally expresses possessor, beneficiary, and location in (North) Russian,

but in this construction it encodes an agentive external argument (e.g. the u+GEN is incompatible with unambiguously

unaccusative predicates) and appears as a grammatical subject assuming subject properties (e.g. reflexive binding). The

construction does not currently feature differential object marking based on any semantic factor, but it seems to have had

animacy-sensitive object case variation in the past (Jung 2007). In North Russian, intransitive verbs usually constitute a

distinct type of the perfect, taking a participle in –vši, originating from the past active participle. In this construction, the

unique argument appears in the nominative. Given the case alignment scheme with oblique subject and nominative object,

the perfect construction in (1) is classified as ergative.

The way that this construction encodes ergativity shows that Tense/Aspect-split ergativity may arise even in a

typical nominative-accusative language, such as North Russian, via certain syntactic structures that allow obliquely marked

subjects. The North Russian perfect construction involves the be-perfect structure and verbal nominalization, both of which

condition oblique subject marking (u+GEN), which in turn makes nominative object marking possible. Possessive perfect

formation and verbal nominalization typically correlate with ergative marking in be-auxiliary languages (Benveniste 1952,

Trask 1979, Bok- Bennema 1991, Johns 1992, Alexiadou 2001). In this respect, morphological ergativity—in particular,

Tense/Aspect-split ergativity—is a corollary of the particular structures it is associated with.

This conclusion is also supported from a diachronic perspective. The ergativity in North Russian arose as a

transitional stage from the passive to the active, along with the recovery of the demoted agent in the form of possessor. It

has been well observed that Tense/Aspect-split ergative constructions develop from the passive and the perfect/past/

perfective in this way (Anderson 1977).

References

Alexiadou, A. 2001. Functional Structure in Nominals. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Anderson, S. 1977. “On Mechanisms by Which Languages Become Ergative.” In Mechanisms of Syntactic Change, ed. Ch. Li,

317–363. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Benveniste, E. 1952. “La construction passive du parfait transitif.” Bulletin de la société de linguistique de Paris 48, 52-62.

Bok-Bennema, R. 1991. Case and Agreement in Inuit. Dordrecht: Foris.

Johns, A. 1992. “Deriving Ergativity.” Linguistic Inquiry 27, 57–87.

Jung, H. 2007. “Internally Conditioned Language Change: The Development of the North Russian –no/–to Perfect.” Russian

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Linguistics 31(2): 137–156.

Kuz’mina, I. B. and E. V. Nemčenko. 1971. Sintaksis pričastnix form v russkix govorax. Moscow: Nauka.

Trask, R. 1979. “On the Origin of Ergativity.” In Ergativity: Towards a Theory of Grammatical Relations, ed. F. Plank, 385–404.

London: Academic Press.

New data on the evolution of differential object marking in Spanish.

Kabatek, Johannes

(University of Tübingen)

Differential Object Marking (DOM) is a widespread phenomenon and can be found in many of the world’s languages

(Bossong 1998). It consists in an overt differentiation of several classes of objects, particularly universally “marked” objects:

prototypical objects are inanimates that contrast with animate subjects. Animate objects tend to be marked in DOM

languages (Aissen 2003, 459).

In the case of Spanish, DOM used to be a topic marker in the medieval language, and it evolved diachronically

towards a syntactic marker of disambiguation of objects that have prototypical characteristics of subjects (animate objects,

above all) or that appear in sentences where they could also be possible candidates for the subject position (like in

reciprocal constructions with verbs like substituir ‘subsitute’). Now, several authors have observed an increase of DOM with

inanimate objects in recent times (from the second half of the 20

century onwards) above all in American Spanish,

claiming that there might be an evolution of DOM into “OM”: the “differential” object marker could become, according to

Company Company (2002), more and more a generalized object marker, without any distinguishing function within the

category of the objects.

In addition to the data on American Spanish varieties, we have observed that DOM seems to be advancing also in

peninsular Spanish in recent times: examples with inanimate objects that are metonymically linked to humans (institutions,

cultural phenomena and the like) appear more and more with DOM in the last years certain written genres as well as in oral

language. However, we want to claim, against Company Company’s supposition, that DOM has still a clearly anchored

differentiating function in Spanish and that DOM with inanimates will only be found in clearly marked constructions. In

order to show the validity of our hypothesis, we will analyze data from several contemporary Spanish corpora (CREA,

Chilean Grial, Spanish Twitter corpus) and show the psycholinguistic evidence of an eye-tracking experiment with 10 native

speakers exposed to contrastive data in marked constructions (taken from authentic corpus data) with and without DOM.

The result will be a new interpretation of the status of DOM in contemporary Spanish.

References

Aissen, J. (2003). Differential Object Marking: Iconicity vs. Economy. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 21, 435-483.

Bossong, Georg (1998): “Le marquage différentiel de l’objet dans les langues d’Europe”, in: Feuillet, Jack (Hrsg.): Actance et

valence dans les langues d’Europe, Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, 193-258.

Company Company, Concepción (2002): “El avance diacrónico de la marcación prepositiva en objetos directos inanimados”,

in: Bernabé, Alberto / Berenguer, José Antonio / Cantarero, Margarita / De Torres, José Carlos (Hrsg.): Actas del II

Congreso de la Sociedad Española de Lingüística, Madrid: CSIC, 146-154.

von Heusinger, Klaus / Kaiser, Georg A. (2005): “The evolution of differential object marking in Spanish”, in: von Heusinger,

Klaus / Kaiser, Georg A. / Stark, Elisabeth (Hrsg.), Proceedings of the Workshop “Specificity and the Evolution /

Emergence of Nominal Determination Systems in Romance, , Arbeitspapier 119, Fachbereich Sprachwissenschaft,

Universität Konstanz 33-69.

Discourse meets grammar: the distribution of the definite article

and the grammatical encoding of referentiality in an archaic dialect of Hungarian.

Kádár, Edith

(Babes-Bolyai University)

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The Hungarian definite article is a fully grammaticalized category to encode definiteness since the Old Hungarian period. As

Egedi shows for Late Old Hungarian (Egedi in press), the definite article appears only in the constructions where the

referent of the noun phrase is not anchored in another way. As the result of a gradual diachronic change by which the

grammatical realization of definitness spread from context to context, Modern Hungarian makes an extensive use of the

definite article even with posessives, demonstratives or (in some dialects) with proper names.

In the Csángó dialect (the most archaic dialect of Hungarian spoken in Moldova, north-eastern part of Romania)

the distribution of the definite article seems to resemble that of earlier language stages in that the definite article may be

missing in possessive constructions, in case of a generic reading of the noun phrase, etc. But what is most striking about the

syntax of the Csángó noun phrase is that the lack of a definite article seems to be in correlation with the information

structural role of the noun phrase. When used as the topic of the sentence, noun phrases tend to lack a definite article, and,

in case that it is the direct object of the verb that fills the topic position, it frequently calls forth a definite conjugation on

the verb. (In Hungarian, the verb agrees not only with its subject, but also with its object if it is represented by a definite

noun phrase.) É. Kiss 2010 argues that definite conjugation in Hungarian emerged as an agreement marker with a

topicalized object (cf. differential object marking in Dalrymple−Nikolaeva 2011), and its funcon was to signal the topic

function of the object after the -t ending lost its role as a topic marker and became a general accusative marker. As topics

are definite descriptions, agreement with a topicalized object could easily translate into agreement with a definite object.

In the research to be presented I tried to outline the exact distribution of the definite article in Csángó, to find both the

diachronic and contact-induced aspects of its synchronic system, and to propose an analysis that can account for both the

differences in the syntactic structure of the Standard Hungarian and the Csángó noun phrase and the interaction of

grammatical encoding and information structure in this segment of syntax. As no previous literature on the Csángó noun

phrase or referentiality encoding is available, the results may also pertain to reasearch on historical lingusitics of Hungarian

that until quite recently was limited to descriptive statements. More generally it can facilitate our understanding of the

language specific grammatical realization of the universal semantic and pragmatic notion of definiteness.

References

Dalrymple−Nikolaeva 2011 = Dalrymple, Mary−Nikolaeva, Irina 2011: Objects and Information Structure. Cambridge Studies

in Linguistics 131. Cambridge University Press.

Egedi, in press = Egedi, Barbara: Grammatical encoding of referentiality in the history of Hungarian. In: Anna Giacolone

Ramat –Caterina Mauri – Piera Molinelli (eds.): Synchrony and Diachrony: a Dynamic Interface. Studies in Language

Companion. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

É. Kiss 2010 = É. Kiss, Katalin: A magyar tárgyas és alanyi igeragozás kialakulásának szintaktikai hátteréről. [The syntactic

background of the emergence of the Hungarian objective and subjective conjugations.]. Megjelenés előtt:

Nyelvtudományi Közlemények. 107: 131–146.

Modal existential wh-construction in Lithuanian.

Kalėdaitė, Violeta

(Vytautas Magnus University)

In his recent research on modal existential wh- constructions (or MECs) in the world’s languages, Šimík (2011) mentions

Lithuanian among the 27 languages where this structure is attested. The Lithuanian MEC is an existential sentence type

containing (i) a form of the existential verb būti ‘be’, (ii) the wh-word, and , typically, (iii) the infinitive (cf. Rappaport 1986 and

Babby 2000 for Russian). The type is attested both in positive and negative forms:

(1) Ketinau rašyti pareiškimą, kol dar yra kam pasiskųsti.

plan:1PAST write:INF application:ACCsg till still be:3PRS who:DAT complain:INF

‘I was planning to hand in an application, as long as there still is someone/there is

somebody to be found to complain to.’

(2) Nesvarstė, nebuvo kada svarstyti.

not-consider:3PAST not-be:3PAST when consider:INF

‘He wasn’t thinking, there was no time to think’

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The paper focuses on one language-specific aspect of the construction, i.e. the verb form following the wh-word.

Šimík (2011:45) claims that MECs in all languages are predominantly non-indicative; thus according to the grammatical mood

a language uses in MECs, three groups can be distinguished: (1) those that accept infinitive, (2) those that use subjunctive

and (3) those that accept infinitive and subjunctive.

According to our data, Lithuanian seems to belong to a distinct group, which allows the use of infinitives, participles,

as well as subjunctive and indicative verb forms. Viewed from this perspective, the Lithuanian data present a

counterexample to the cross-linguistically attested modality of circumstantial possibility expressed by MECs – indicative verb

forms convey not possibility, but generic or habitual modality. It seems that the Lithuanian MEC which employs subjunctive/

infinitival/ participial and indicative forms may be unique, cf.: Nėra (yra) kas ją prižiūrėtų (subjunctive) ‘There is no one/there

is somebody to look after her’; Nėra (yra) kas daryti (infinitive) / kas bedarą (participle)/ kas daro (present indicative)‘There

is nothing (something) to be done’.

The data for the present analysis were retrieved from the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian language. The

total number of MECs in the 38,659,673-word corpus (including the section of spoken Lithuanian) is over four hundred.

Even though structures with indicative forms are relatively rare (98 occurrences), they are fully productive in contemporary

Lithuanian and are found in all genres of literary and non-literary texts.

To explain the diversity of main verb forms in MECs, Holvoet’s (1999) approach towards a historical development of

infinitival relative clauses in Baltic and Slavonic languages is employed. The paper also discusses the distribution of MECs in

the corpus in relation to the range of wh-words found in MECs and the verbal forms the structure accepts.

References

Babby, L. H. 2000. Infinitival existential sentences in Russian: A case of syntactic suppletion. In Tracy Holloway King & Irina A.

Sekerina, eds. Proceedings of FASL 8. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1–21.

Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian language. http://tekstynas.vdu.lt

Holvoet, A. 1999. Infinitival relative clauses in Baltic and Slavonic. Baltistica 34 (1): 37-53.

Rappaport, G.C. 1986. On a persistent problem of Russian syntax: sentences of the type Mne negde spat‘. Russian

Linguistics 10:1-31.

Šimík, R. 2011. Modal existential wh-constructions. PhD dissertation. The Netherlands: LOT.

Balkan syntax in the light of micro-parametric variation.

Kallulli, Dalina

(University of Vienna)

In this talk, I will revisit Joseph’s (2001) distinction between “comparative syntax of Balkan languages” and “comparative

Balkan syntax” in light of the change of focus from macro-parameters to micro-comparative syntax, in which the languages

being compared are particularly close to one another, the rationale being that it is easier to search for comparative syntax

correlations across a set of more closely related languages than across a set of less closely related languages, since in this

way there will be fewer variables to control for, which in turn increases the likelihood of hitting upon the valid correlations

(see much recent work by Kayne). Naturally the notion of closeness here applies to the relevant dimension, namely

morpho-syntax, which for the languages constituting the Balkan Sprachbund is given as a matter of definition. (As an

important aside, note that taking morphology seriously is absolutely central in the context of micro-parametric variation, as

that is basically the only clue to structure.) Two specific case studies that I will discuss in this light concern microvariation in

clitic doubling patterns, and unaccusative verbs, illustrating yet again that while syntax is inert, the set of syntactic

primitives constrained, and the ordering of elements universal, what may vary is the specification of the lexical items and

the actual realization of functional structure.

Returning to Joseph’s distinction mentioned above, though differences at the micro level may or may not turn out

to be theoretically interesting, even in the context of identifying so-called “Balkanisms”, focusing on microvariation – as did

Sobolev (2004) whose conclusion was that the set of typical Balkan properties should be relativized, or Joseph (2001) on the

similarities and differences of the functions of the modal negation items mos and mi(n) in Albanian and Greek respectively,

as well as on their emergence (as a Balkan innovation) and spread (through contact) – is still advantageous for questions

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bearing on micro-parametric variation and change, especially if universals constrain change, and grammaticalization (and

innovation) is optimization (Kiparsky 2008).

Moreover, though as Joseph (2011) remarks “morpho-syntax is perhaps the most complicated domain of

convergence in the Balkans”, comparative Balkan syntax might actually also impinge on issues whether syntactic

convergence is due to code-switching (Pfaff 1979), e.g. through borrowing of function words (cf. Treffers-Daller 1991 and

Heath 1989 who argue that borrowings originate in code-switching), or alternatively whether syntactic convergence may

lead to code-switching by taking place “around the switch, […] in order to ease” (Clyne 1987) it.

References

Clyne, M. 1987. Constraints on code switching: How universal are they? Linguistics 25.

Heath, J. 1989. From Code-Switching to Borrowing: A Case Study of Moroccan Arabic. London.

Joseph, B. 2001. Is Balkan comparative syntax possible? In M.-L. Rivero and A. Rally (eds.) Comparative Syntax of the Balkan

Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 17-43.

Joseph, B. 2011. Featured Review on O. Tomić, Balkan Sprachbund Morphosyntactic Features. Acta Slavica Iaponica XXIX:

123-131.

Kiparsky, P. 2008. Universals constrain change, change results in typological generalizations. In J. Good (ed.) Linguistic

Universals and Language Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pfaff, C. 1979. Constraints on language mixing. Language 55: 291-318.

Sobolev, A. N. 2004. On the areal distribution of syntactic properties in the languages of the Balkans. In O. Tomić (ed.)

Topics in Balkan Sprachbund Syntax and Semantics 61-100. Benjamins.

Treffers-Daller, J. 1991. Towards a uniform approach to code-switching and borrowing. In Papers for the Workshop on

Constraints, Conditions and Models. (Held in London 27-29 September 1990.) Strasbourg: European Science

Foundation. 259-277.

Adpositional systems in contact: the case of Cappadocian Greek.

Karatsareas, Petros

(University of Cambridge and Open University of Cyprus)

Cappadocian Greek (henceforth Cappadocian) figures prominently in the linguistics literature as a par excellence example of

“heavy borrowing” (Thomason & Kaufman 1988: 215) in which the effects of contact with Turkish are clearly identifiable on

all levels of analysis, from phonology and morphology to syntax, semantics and discourse (Janse 2009 provides an

overview). This paper examines a series of contact-induced changes in a domain of Cappadocian grammar that has received

little, if no, attention: adpositions.

The two languages differ greatly with respect to their adpositional systems. Cappadocian has inherited a

prepositional system that consists of simple and compound members; e.g., se ‘at/to’, me ‘with’; apes se ‘in(side)’, dama me

‘(together) with’ (for the distinction, see Hagège 2010). Turkish, in contrast, is exclusively postpositional displaying an array

of bare and possessive-marked postpositions; e.g. için ‘for’, beri ‘since’; iç- ‘in(side)’, ön- ‘in front of’ (Göksel & Kerslake

2005).

The investigation of a substantial corpus of Cappadocian texts (Costakis 1959, 1962; Dawkins 1916; Kesisoglou

1951; Mavrochalyvidis & Kesisoglou 1960) reveals a number of noteworthy instances of both pattern and matter replication

in the adpositional system of the language (in the sense of Matras & Sakel 2007):

A. Replication of head-final order. In non-contact Greek varieties, all adpositions precede their complements. In

Cappadocian, only simple adpositions do. Compound adpositions, which consist of an adverb and a simple preposition, have

developed into circumpositions: the original preposition remains preposed to the complement whereas the original

adverbial element is postposed (1). This clearly models on Turkish postpositional phrases (2).

(1) Phloïtá Cappadocian (2) Turkish

so nekliʃa ombro kilise-nin ön-ün-de

at.the church front church-

GEN

front-3

POSS

LOC

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‘in front of the church’ ‘in front of the church’

Circumpositional ordering of the Cappadocian type is not unknown to other Greek varieties; it is, however, a clearly marked

option. We can therefore conclude that language contact favoured these marginal variants, promoting them to the status

of unmarked defaults by virtue of their similarity to the corresponding Turkish pattern.

B. Borrowing of postpositions. Certain Cappadocian varieties have incorporated Turkish postpositions wholesale including

their positioning relative to their complement. The cases in which this is found involve the borrowing of postpositions

denoting both peripheral – non-temporal, non-spatial – and central, temporal meanings:

(3) Mistí Cappadocian (4) Ulaghátsh Cappadocian

ap extes bæri (cf. Turkish beri) ap to sevdusi itʃin (cf. Turkish için)

from yesterday since from the love for

‘since yesterday’ ‘because of love’

When borrowed into Cappadocian, Turkish postpositions assume the role of the adverbial element of circumpositions: (a)

they retain their relative positioning after the phrasal complement; but, (b) they have to combine with a native, simple

preposition to form a circumpositional phrase.

The paper discusses the implications of these findings for the typology of adpositions, both from a synchronic and

a diachronic perspective. It focuses on the apparent cross-linguistic rarity of circumpositions and on the predictions that

have been made in the language contact literature regarding the borrowability of adpositions in relation to other linguistic

elements.

References

Costakis, Athanasios P. (1959). Γλωσσικὸν ὑλικὸν ἐκ κατοίκων τοῦ χωρίου Μισθὶ Καππαδοκίας ἐγκατεστημένων νῦν εἰς

Ἁγιονέρι Ἀξιουπόλεως Μακεδονίας. Unpublished manuscript № 755. Manuscript Archive of the Research Centre

for Modern Greek Dialects – Historical Dictionary of Modern Greek. Academy of Athens, Athens, Greece.

Costakis, Athanasios P. (1962). Γλωσσικὸν ὑλικὸν ἀπὸ τὰ Φλογητὰ Χαλκιδικῆς (προσφυγικὸν χωρίον). Unpublished

manuscript № 812. Manuscript Archive of the Research Centre for Modern Greek Dialects – Historical Dictionary of

Modern Greek. Academy of Athens, Athens, Greece.

Dawkins, Richard M. (1916). Modern Greek in Asia Minor: A Study of the Dialects of Sílli, Cappadocia and Phárasa with

Grammar, Texts, Translations and Glossary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Göksel, Aslı & Celia Kerslake (2005). Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar. London: Routledge.

Hagège, Claude (2010). Adpositions: Function-Marking in Human Languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Janse, Mark (2009). Greek-Turkish language contact in Asia Minor. Études Helléniques/Hellenic Studies 17:1, 37–54.

Kesisoglou, Ioannis I. (1951). Τὸ γλωσσικὸ ἰδίωμα τοῦ Οὐλαγάτς (Le dialecte d’Oulagatch). Athens: Institut Français

d’Athènes.

Matras, Yaron & Jeanette Sakel (2007). Investigating the mechanism of pattern replication in language convergence. Studies

in Language 31:4, 829–865.

Mavrochalyvidis, Georgios & Ioannis I. Kesisoglou (1951). Τὸ γλωσσικὸ ἰδίωμα τῆς Ἀξοῦ (Le dialecte d’Axos). Athens: Institut

Français d’Athènes.

Thomason, Sarah Grey & Terrence Kaufman (1988). Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. Berkeley:

University of California Press.

The total-partial alternation in Estonian: DSM in a nominative-accusative language.

Karjus, Andres

(University of Tartu)

Estonian (Finno-Ugric) differentiates between the total and partial both in subjects and objects. The partial object is marked

with the partitive case, indicating that the action involving the object is unfinished or incomplete, while the genitive

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(nominative under certain conditions) marks the total object, and the completeness of the action. The regular (total)

subject is coded in the nominative. The partial subject, taking the partitive case, is grammatical only in intransitive clauses

and in the plural (except for mass nouns, i.e., semantic plural), does not agree with the verb and often occurs in the post-

verbal slot of the canonical object (cf. the prediction in Aissen 2003 on the DSM-DOM relation). The partial subject is

(semi)obligatory in the context of negation, but more interestingly, the alternation can optionally be used to indicate the

partial or unspecified nature of the subject (see example 1). It is used mostly in contexts referring to the location or

existence of the subject (cf. also Vihman 2004: 60).

1a) tänava-l jookse-vad poisi-d 1b) tänava-l jookse-b poisse

street-

ADE

run-3

boy-

[

NOM

] street-

ADE

run-3

boy.

PARTITIVE

‘Boys are running on the street.’ ‘There are (some) boys running on the street.’

The distinction is similar to that of the object marking, but unlike the DOM which obliges the speaker to define if the action

involving the object was completed or not, the DSM conveys more subtle nuances about the nature of the subject(s). In

some cases of the Estonian DSM, speakers claim that there is none to minimal difference between the two variants, while in

others a distinction is perceived. To investigate factors that might determine the relative importance or “strength” of the

difference between pairs of sentences with differentially marked subjects, an experiment using conjoint analysis was

carried out. A commonly used statistical technique in marketing and the social sciences (but cf. Züverink 2009 for a

linguistic example), it allows one to tease apart important variables that influence the choices of the test subjects. The pilot

study consisted of 19 sentence pairs (each rated by 22 subjects) and produced statistically significant models. As expected,

the most important factor influencing the perceived difference is the semantic type of the subject (but not necessarily the

grammatical number), followed then by the adverb type and the verb. As the orthogonal design used for the experiments

contained a number of alternative codings, it was also possible to check, using a subset of sentence pairs, if the indefinite

pronoun mõned ‘some’ would be considered as a lexical “alternative” to the partitive for coding a partial subject – which

appeared to be the case to some extent.

References

Aissen, Judith 2003. Differential Object Marking: Iconicity vs. Economy. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 21: 435–483.

Vihman, Virve-Anneli 2004. Valency Reduction in Estonian. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh.

Züwerink, Tim 2009. Conjoint analysis in linguistics – Multi-factorial analysis of Slavonic possessive adjectives. In: Sam

Featherston, Susanne Winkler (eds) The Fruits of Empirical Linguistics. Volume 1: Process. Berlin/New York:

Mouton de Gruyter.

Quantitative and qualitative aspects of L1 (Swedish) and L2 (English) idiom comprehension.

Karlsson, Monica

(Halmstad University)

According to the Dual Idiom Representation Model (Titone & Connine 1994; Abel 2003), the number of idiom entries

created in a learner’s mental lexicon depends on the decomposability and frequency of the idiom and the time of exposure

to the language in question. This is especially pronounced in a person’s second language. When the idiom is comparatively

opaque, the frequency relatively low and/or little time has been spent on acquiring/learning the language, i.e. little lexical

information is available, the learner, when trying to interpret idioms, instead resorts to conceptual metaphors that exist

across languages. L2 learners also make use of context to a greater extent than native speakers. (Liu 2008) L2 idiom

comprehension thus appears to entail a more heuristic approach than L1 idiom comprehension (Liu 2008).

In the present investigation 15 first-term university students were faced with 80 context-based idioms in English

(L2) and Swedish (L1) respectively (30 of which focused on the source domain of animals which is commonly used in both

languages) and asked to explain their meaning. The idioms were of varying frequency and transparency. Three main

research questions were thus addressed.

1) How well do the subjects master idioms of approximately the same total frequency in their L2 as compared to in

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their L1?

2) How do a) degrees of transparency (full transparency, semi-transparency, no transparency), b) idiom frequency and

c) the choice of source domain affect the subjects’ comprehension in their L2 as compared to in their L1?

3) To what extent is context used when interpreting the idioms in the subjects’ L2 as compared to in their L1?

Native speaker results were used as a point of reference for the L2 test. In addition, the students were also requested to

evaluate their L1 and L2 knowledge.

Preliminary results indicate that while the frequency of idioms do not appear to play a part in whether they are

comprehended or not in either language, the degree of transparency is of great importance in the students’ L2 and to a

lesser degree in their L1. Also the students make extensive use of context in their L2, while there is little use of this in their

L1.

References

Abel, B. (2003) ‘English idioms in the first language and second language lexicon: A dual representation approach.’ Second

Language Research 19:329-358.

Titone, D. A. & Connine, C. M. (1994) ‘Descriptive norms for 171 idiomatic expressions: familiarity, compositionality,

predictability, and literality.’ Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 9:247-270.

Liu, D. (2008) Idioms: description, comprehension, acquisition, and pedagogy. New York: Routledge.

Annotated open-source corpora and comparative linguistic studies.

Kasicheyanula, Taraka Rama and Borin, Lars

(University of Göteborg)

The recent availability of large word-list databases such as ASJP1 (Wichmann et al. 2011) and ABVD2 (Greenhill et al. 2008)

and typological databases such as WALS3 (Haspelmath et al. 2011) in combination with automated statistical and

mathematical methods has prompted a large number of computational historical and typological linguistic studies based on

such secondary language data (Lehmann 2004).

On the other hand, the computational linguistics community has focused on solving problems related to the

classical problems of syntactic (and semantic) parsing and machine translation for a growing number of languages.4 This

potentially opens the possibility of basing computational comparative linguistic work on primary or close-to-primary

linguistic data, in the form of (linguistically annotated) parallel or comparable corpora, work that has so far only begun in

historical linguistics (Cilibrasi & Vitanyi 2007, Singh & Surana 2007, Rama & Singh 2009, Rama & Borin 2011) and language

typology (Cysouw & W¨alchli 2007, W

lchli 2009, W

lchli & Cysouw 2012).

Recently, Gratta et al. (2012) have initiated a large-scale distributed annotation effort, where multi-lingualWikipedia

articles have been annotated at different linguistic levels using a mixture of automatic techniques and manual work. The

resource is known as the Language Library5 and currently contains 409 linguistically annotated documents across 11

languages. In this paper, we report on our experiments using the Language Library for investigating questions such as the

following:

• What are the rank distributions of words across the languages and of the contexts in which they occur?

• What is the variation in the distribution of part-of-speech (POS) tags, multi-lingually, across the same documents? Is the

proposed “universal part-of-speech tagset” of Petrov et al. (2012) useful for this kind of investigation?

• Can we use a distributional similarity measure (such as cross-entropy) to quantify the differences? Further, how much

variation is present in the context window (using the POS tags) of semantically similar words?

References

Cilibrasi, R. & Vitanyi, P. (2007), ‘The google similarity distance’, — IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON KNOWLEDGE AND DATA

ENGINEERING pp. 370–383.

Cysouw, M. & W¨alchli, B. (2007), ‘Parallel texts: using translational equivalents in linguistic typology’, STUF-Sprachtypologie

und Universalienforschung 60(2), 95–99.

Gratta, R. D., Frontini, F., Rubino, F., Russo, I. & Calzolari, N. (2012), The language library: supporting community effort for

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collective resource production, in N. Calzolari, K. Choukri, T. Declerck, M. U. Do˘gan, B. Maegaard, J. Mariani, J.

Odijk & S. Piperidis, eds, ‘Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation

(LREC’12)’, European Language Resources Association (ELRA), Istanbul, Turkey.

Greenhill, S., Blust, R. & Gray, R. (2008), ‘The austronesian basic vocabulary database: from bioinformatics to lexomics’,

Evolutionary Bioinformatics Online 4, 271.

Haspelmath, M., Dryer, M. S., Gil, D. & Comrie, B. (2011), ‘WALS online’. URL: http://wals.info

Lehmann, C. (2004), ‘Data in linguistics’, The Linguistic Review 21, 175–210.

Petrov, S., Das, D. & McDonald, R. (2012), A universal part-of-speech tagset, in ‘Proceedings of the Eighth International

Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’12)’, ELRA, Istanbul.

Rama, T. & Borin, L. (2011), Estimating language relationships from a parallel corpus. a study of the europarl corpus, in

‘NEALT Proceedings Series (NODALIDA 2011 Conference Proceedings)’, Vol. 11, pp. 161–167. URL:

http://hdl.handle.net/10062/17303

Rama, T. & Singh, A. K. (2009), From bag of languages to family trees from noisy corpus, in ‘Proceedings of the Conference

on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing’, Borovets, Bulgaria.

Singh, A. & Surana, H. (2007), ‘Can corpus based measures be used for comparative study of languages?’, Proceedings of

Ninth Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Morphology and Phonology pp. 40–47.

lchli, B. (2009), ‘Similarity semantics and building probabilistic semantic maps from parallel texts’, Linguistic Discovery 8,

331–371.

lchli, B. & Cysouw, M. (2012), ‘Lexical typology through similarity semantics: Toward a semantic map of motion verbs’,

Linguistics 50(3), 671–710.

Wichmann, S., M¨uller, A., Velupillai, V., Wett, A., Brown, C. H., Molochieva, Z., Sauppe, S., Holman, E. W., Brown, P.,

Bishoffberger, J., Bakker, D., List, J.-M., Egorov, D., Belyaev, O., Urban, M., Mailhammer, R., Geyer, H., Beck, D.,

Korovina, E., Epps, P., Valenzuela, P., Grant, A. & Hammarstr¨om, H. (2011), ‘The ASJP database version 14’.

http://email.eva.mpg.de/ wichmann/listss14.zip.

A diachronic perspective on the semantics of infinitive clauses in Greek.

Kavcic, Jerneja

(University of Ljubljana)

It has been observed that New Testament (NT) Greek avoids the aorist infinitive in declarative infinitive clauses dependent

on verbs of saying and thinking (hereafter DInf); cf. Burton 1898: 53, Fanning 1990: 401. This avoidance is uncharacteristic

of the Classical Greek syntax, where DInf containing an aorist infinitive seem to have been a common phenomenon (e.g.,

Plato, Apol. 33 b6, Symp. 178 b3 Resp. 377 e8, 586 c3 Hdt. 1.2.1, 1.129.7, 4.13.1, 4.151.9, 6.68.5, Thuc. 1.67.3, 4.83.5). It has

also been suggested that DInf are characterized in NT Greek by (1) significantly frequent use of the perfect infinitive as well

as of the present infinitives of stative verbs, and (2) avoidance of non-stative present infinitives (Kavčič 2009).

The paper argues that, while the aorist is avoided in DInf, it is markedly more common in finite dependent clauses

introduced with ὅτι/ὡς. In addition to the NT, the corpus examined consists of around 150 private and official papyri

documents dating from the 1

and early 2

centuries AD (appx. 30,000 words). Despite evident parallels between the

language of the non-literary papyri and NT Greek the former also contain higher frequencies of the future infinitives, used

within DInf, than the latter. Nevertheless, the avoidance of the aorist infinitives is evident in both NT Greek and in the

language of the non-literary papyri. On the one hand, the evidence from Hellenistic/Roman Greek (HRG) therefore seems to

indicate that the aspect and Aktionsart played a role in the competition between the infinitive and non-finite complements.

It has been suggested that DInf mostly express states in NT Greek (Thorley 1989: 296). (Thus the HRG construction could

have parallels in English clauses of the type I believe her to be intelligent.) Nevertheless, this explanation is faced with the

problem of the merger between the aorist and the perfect in HRG (cf. Horrocks 2010: 176, Chantraine 1927, McKay 1980). If

the aorist had merged with the perfect by the 1

century AD, then the avoidance of the aorist infinitives and the high

frequency of the perfect infinitives is not the expected situation.

As a consequence, the paper also points out the complexity of the relation of these tendencies to other

developments in HRG, which include the aforementioned merger between the aorist and the perfect, the emergence of the

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periphrastic future forms (cf. Markopoulos 2009: 46–86), and the increasing tendency to employ passive constructions in

the infinitive clauses dependent on the verb κελεύω “order” (cf. Mihevc Gabrovec 1972). This development, in addition to

the acceptability of non-stative passive infinitives within DInf in HRG, will be used in support of the assumption that, in

diachronic terms, the subject of Greek DInf increasingly tended to avoid the semantic role of agent.

References

Burton, E. de Witt. 1898. Syntax of Moods and Tenses in New Testament Greek. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.

Chantraine, P. 1927. Histoire du parfait grec, Paris : Libraire Ancienne Honoré Champion.

Fanning, B. M. 1990. Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Horrocks, G. 2010. Greek. A History of the Language and its Speakers. 2

edition. Oxford & Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell.

Kavčič, J. 2009. “A Feature of Greek Infinitive Clauses Dependent on Verbs of Saying and Thinking,” in: K. Loudová & M.

Žáková (eds.), Early European Languages in the Eyes of Modern Linguistics, 151–68. Brno: Masaryk University.

Markopoulos, Th. 2009. The Future in Greek. From Ancient to Medieval. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McKay, K. L. 1980. “On the Perfect and Other Aspects in the Greek Non-Literary Papyri.” BICS 27, 23–50.

Mihevc Gabrovec, E. 1972. “L’ infinitif du passif avec les verba iubendi.” Živa antika 22, 91– 95.

Thorley, J. 1989. “Aktionsart in New Testament Greek: Infinitive and Imperative.” Novum Testamentum 31, 290–315.

Morphosyntactic isoglosses in Iranian languages of Azerbaijan

(dialects of Taleshi and Tat) and code-copying from Azeri.

Kaye, Steven and Authier, Gilles

(Magdalen College and Inalco)

Based on personal fieldwork data as well as on the available literature (including Miller 1953; Grjunberg 1963; Authier

2012), a series of maps will show the geographical distribution of a number of selected grammatical features. Particular

emphasis will be placed on features not found in Persian, which is the closest relative of the Tat languages and historically

represents the main contact language of the Taleshi dialects:

- extension of the light verb ‘make’ (saxtan) vs ‘do’

(kardan) in the formation of compounds

- presence/absence and value of the mi- prefixed verbal

forms

- presence/absence and value of the be- prefixed verbal

forms

- extension of the use of the bi- prefixed verbal forms

(modal)

- construction of possessive NPs

o juxtaposition

o ezafe

o possessive suffix

o dative-marked possessor

o ablative-marked possessor

o dedicated genitive preposition

- locus of expression of instrumental-comitative marking

o preposed

o postposed

o circumposed

- expression of optative mood

o subjunctive

o subjunctive + particle

o special verb form

- construction of possessive predicates

o transitive (have)

o inverse (dative possessor)

- formation of the causative of transitive verbs

o with ‘leave’

o with ‘do’

o with ‘give’

- formation of the passive construction

o with ‘come’

o with ‘be’

- formation of the progressive aspect

o with participle + ‘be’ periphrasis

o with inflectable copula-like free word

o with special morpheme

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- formations expressing categorical future (“prospective”)

o prefixed

o particle

o suffixed

- expression of comparison with NPs and clauses

o initial (conjunction)

o final (converb)

o other

- construction of relative clauses

o participles with possessive pattern

o nominalized finite clauses

o ki strategy (Persian type)

o relative pronouns

- construction of conditional sentences

o parataxis

o conjunction

o verbal suffix

The aim of this overview will be to assess the amount of Azeri code-copying found in the Iranian languages of Azerbaijan,

and to identify features of these languages which are not attested in Modern or Middle Persian but which equally cannot be

attributed to Turkic influence.

References

Authier, G., 2012, Grammaire juhuri. Wiesbaden.

Grjunberg, A. L., 1963, Jazyk severoazerbajdzhanskix tatov. Moscow.

Miller, B., 1953, Talyshskij jazyk. Moscow.

Johanson, L., & Christiane Bulut (eds.) 2006. Turkic-Iranian contact areas. Historical and linguistic aspects. Wiesbaden:

Harrassowitz.

Complementizer semantics in European languages.

Kehayov, Petar and Boye, Kasper

(University of Regensburg and University of Copenhagen)

Complementizers may be defined as conjunctions that have the function of identifying clauses as complements (cf. e.g.

Noonan 2007: 55). Complementizers may have additional functions, however. Some of these additional functions may be

characterized as pragmatic. For instance, omissible complementizers like English that may serve as pause markers (e.g.

Kaltenböck 2009). Other functions are semantic in the sense that they represent conventional contributions to the

meanings of the complements. The recognition of semantic complementizer functions goes back at least to Frajzyngier

(1995), who demonstrated that complementizers may have modal functions. This idea has recently been revitalized by

Nordström (2010), but complementizer semantics remains heavily understudied. Accordingly, the following questions

remain unanswered:

− How common is it for complementizers to have semantic functions?

Frajzyngier (1995) and Nordström (2010) claim that all complementizers are primarily modal, but van Lier & Boye

(2009) suggest that complementizers need not have semantic functions at all.

− Which kinds of semantic functions may complementizers have?

− They can be modal, but can they encode aspectual or temporal values?

− How do semantic complementizer functions develop diachronically?

− Complementizers are known to typically develop out of demonstrative pronoun or complement-taking predicates

(e.g. Nordström 2010), but how do (some of them) come to encode e.g. modal values?

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Typological evidence shows that the answers to these questions are often intertwined with the following structural issues:

Complementizer omission. Research on complementizer omission (e.g. Elsness 1984; Kaltenböck 2009; Shank & Cuyckens

2010) focuses on factors governing when optional complementizers are actually omitted. The question what qualifies a

complementizer for omission in the first place remains unanswered. The qualification may be, at least partly, functional.

Complementizer combination. In some languages, two or more distinct complementizers may under certain circumstances

be combined in the same clause. A detailed description of semantic complementizer functions may provide insight into to

such combinations, including restrictions on the relative order in which complementizers may occur.

Subordinator functions. In some languages, the selfsame expression serves both as a complementizer and as an adverbial

subordinator (e.g. English if) or relativizer (e.g. English that). A better understanding of semantic complementizer functions

may pave the way for a better understanding of such instances of polyfunctionality.

This paper attempts to answer – or at least get closer to an answer to – the questions above in a survey of complementizer

semantics in European languages. It focuses on finite-clause complementizers (in English, for instance, that, if and whether),

but discusses also non-finite complementation marking devices (of particular significance in the languages of the eastern

part of the continent). The generalizations and analyses proposed in the paper are based on indepth studies of more than

30 languages from 18 major European language families – carried out by leading experts on the relevant languages.

References

Elsness, J. 1984. “That or zero: A look at the choice of object clause connective in a corpus of American English”. English

Studies 65.6. 519-533.

Frajzyngier, Z. 1995. “A functional theory of complementizers”. J. Bybee & S. Fleischman (eds.). Modality in grammar and

discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 473-502.

Kaltenböck, G. 2009. “Is that a filler? On complementizer use in spoken object clauses”. Vienna English Working Papers 18.1.

28-63.

Noonan, M. 2007. “Complementation”. T. Shopen (ed.). Language typology and syntactic description 2: Complex

constructions, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 52-150.

Nordström, J. 2010. Modality and subordinators. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Shank, C. & H. Cuyckens. 2010. “Moving beyond synchrony: Applying a diachronic corpusbased multivariate analysis to

examine the development and use of I + think as an ‘epistemic parenthetical’”. Paper presented at Societas

Linguistica Europaea 2010, Vilnius, September 1-5, 2010.

van Lier; E. & K. Boye. 2009. “Epistemic complementizers: A cross-linguistic survey”. Paper presented at the Eighth Biennial

Conference of the Association for Linguistic Typology, Berkeley, July 23-26, 2009.

Fictive motion of light: frequency and entrenchment of cognitive patterns.

Kemmer, Suzanne

(Rice University)

Talmy (2000) is a typology of ways humans conceptualize static visual scenes as involving motion, such as A steep hill rose

up ahead, in which the motion is conceptual, not actual, hence “Fictive Motion”. This work builds on one of Talmy’s

subtypes, “radiation paths”, in which “radiation emanat[es] continuously from an energy source” (p.111). English The sun is

shining into the cave expresses motion despite lack of perceived motion; light is here conceptualized as beams moving from

a light source (sun) to a target object/location (the cave).

Building on [Author] and Tso (2012), and Tso (2012), corpus studies of Mandarin Chinese, here I observe usage

data from the COCA corpus of Modern English, a 450-million word tagged corpus. Searches were conducted for the noun

light followed by a lemmatized verb within a 4-word span, yielding about 6500 relevant instances. These were categorized

by semantic type of the verb in its usual spatial sense. These semantic types revealed the basic domains drawn on for the

special fictive conceptualizations.

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The corpus data show that light is conceptualized in a striking variety of ways. One prominent subtype in Mandarin

and English is “light as a moving fluid”. In English this pattern is very strong, seen in hundreds of instances in the corpus in

which light spills, fills, pours, streams, floods, seeps, leaks, flows, drains, drips, bathes (objects) and moves in still other

manners:

(all from COCA corpus)

(1) The shade was up and the LIGHT that SPILLED through came from a fancy fixture

(2) A clear bowl of bioluminescent fluid hung from the ceiling, casting the same blue-white LIGHT that FILLED the hall.

(3) Soft natural LIGHT FLOODS the dining room

(4) LIGHT STREAMED in, and she saw the lit patio on the far side

Light can also move as a forceful object; light fractures, cracks, and rips objects; it stabs, penetrates, breaks, cuts, and

shoots through objects.

(5) This same LIGHT PENETRATED her muscles like quills.

(6) ...shafts of white LIGHT STABBING the air like Islamic swords.

(7) The bright streak of LIGHT quickly CUTS through the sky.

A wide range of other verbs appears, representing motion of various conceptualized object types. The results are analyzed

in terms of the frequency of the various semantic types of verbs and the type and token frequency of specific verbs:

frequency patterns point to the relative entrenchment and hence productivity of various fictive motion schemas in English.

The most frequent and productive schemas are those that are most cognitively entrenched (Langacker 1988); thus

frequency is a guide to cognitive significance.

In addition to providing new empirical data and analysis, the present study raises issues regarding the cross-

linguistic similarities and differences, and about the relation of fictive motion to metaphor. It is suggested that although

metaphor can be invoked, a conceptual blending account provides the full range of tools needed to accommodate both the

metaphorical and metonymic processes found in the data within one framework.

References

Kemmer, Suzanne and Tso, Ruby, 2012. Fictive Motion in the Domain of Light. Presented at the UK-CLA conference, London,

July 2012.

Langacker, R. W. 1988. A usage-based model. In B. Rudzke-Ostyn (Ed.), Topics in Cognitive Linguistics, 127-161. Amsterdam:

Benjamins.

Tso, Ruby, 2012. Fictive Motion of Radiation in Mandarin Chinese. (Ms.)

Learning cues for accurate L2 production: determinants of clause order in complex sentences.

Kerz, Elma and Wiechmann, Daniel

(RWTH Aachen University)

Recent corpus-based research has demonstrated the effects of numerous semantic, discourse-functional and processing-

related factors on the relative ordering of main and subordinate clauses in complex sentences in English (Diessel 2008,

AUTHORS 2013). Focussing on complex sentences involving two semantic types of adverbial clauses (ACs), the present study

investigates to what extent clause serialization choices made by German advanced learners of English are governed by the

same factors as those made by expert writers. Equivalently, we ask which distributional cues advanced learners rely on

when planning complex utterances involving multiple clausal constituents.

We compiled an advanced learner corpus comprising 50 term papers produced by German students of English

linguistics in their second and third year of study (N ~ 216,000) and a same-sized control expert corpus of peer-reviewed

articles appearing in various journals on language studies published by Elsevier. The target-constructions were identified by

matching a set of subordinators in the two corpora, yielding a total amount of 1,471 data points. The target structures were

subsequently annotated with information pertaining to 6 variables which target semantic, discourse functional and

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processing-related quantities that have been shown to influence clause order in previous studies (Diessel 2008, AUTHORS

2013) listed below.

1. Structural complexity of AC

2. Proportional size of AC

3. Presence of a cross-sentential anaphoric item

4. Balancedness/deranking of verb forms in ACs

5. Semantic subtype

6. Subordinator choice

Due to some variables being highly correlated (complexity and proportional size of AC, semantic subtype and subordinator

choice), we employed a random forest technique to assess the importance of each variable in predicting the relative

position of the AC (ModelSpecs: Random forest of 500 conditional inference trees with bootstrap aggregating, variable

importance assessed via conditional permutation variable importance; cf. Strobl et al. 2008).

The analysis reveals that expert clause ordering is most strongly governed by the choice of subordinator, which

reflects the effect of subtle semantic differences on clause positioning (Quirk et al 1985: 1098ff.). The second most

important variable is the presence of an anaphoric item, indicating a bridging function of the AC (Verstrate 2004) followed

by the relative size of the AC. In learner language, it is the presence of a cross-sentential anaphor that is the strongest

determinant of clause position, relegating subordinator choice to a secondary role. Learners also rely less than experts on

proportional AC-size and, also in contrast to experts, their choices are more strongly co-determined by the semantic type

and the complexity of the AC, which play only marginal roles in expert language. In summary, our results suggest that

German advanced learners of English tend to underestimate the role of subtle semantic differences associated with

subordinator choices and overestimate the role of structural factors and organization levels that are not very relevant to the

expert. More generally, our results corroborate prior experimental research, which found that L2 learners only gradually

reach expert levels in cue strength and reliability (cf. Ellis and Robinson 2008: 8).

References

Diessel, Holger. 2008. Iconicity of sequence. A corpus-based analysis of the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses in

English. Cognitive Linguistics 19, 457–82.

Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English

language. London: Longman.

Robinson, Peter and Ellis, Nick (Eds.) (2008) Handbook of cognitive linguistics and second language acquisition. London:

Routledge.

Strobl, Carolin, Anne-Laure Boulesteix, Achim Zeileis & Torsten Hothorn. 2008. Bias in Random Forest Variable Importance

Measures: Illustrations, Sources and a Solution. BMC Bioinformatics, 8-25.

Verstraete, Jean-Christophe. 2004. Initial and final position of adverbial clauses in English: the constructional basis of the

discursive and syntactic differences. Linguistics 42, 819–853.

Italian discourse markers: acquisition strategies in L2.

Khachaturyan, Elizaveta

(University of Oslo)

In this paper I would like to discuss the acquisition of Italian discourse markers (DMs) that are used to organize and/or to

structure a text (according to the classification proposed in Bazzanella, 1995, 2006). The data contains texts of different

genres written by my students (advanced level) during the course of written Italian that I held at the University of Oslo from

2007 to 2011, as well as master’s theses.

First of all, I will analyse typical errors, that often concern the word order (e.g. anche, ancora, in effetti) and the

functions of the DMs (e.g. the erroneous use of insomma, infatti, in teoria). After that I will describe some important

features of DMs and will propose some possible exercises that can help to ”catch” these features and to acquire the correct

use of a DM (for some types of exercises see Khachaturyan, 2011).

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To conclude, I will discuss the role of the parallel corpus in the process of teaching and acquisition of DMs.

References

Bazzanella, C. 1995. I segnali discorsivi. In Renzi, L., Salvi, G., Cardinaletti, A. (eds.) Grande Grammatica di consultazione. il

Mulino, v. III.

Bazzanella, C. 2006. Discourse markers in Italian: towards a “compositional” meaning. In: Fisher K. (ed.), Approaches to

Discourse Markers. Studies in Pragmatics 1. Elsevier, 449-464.

Khachaturyan, E. 2011. Segnali discorsivi: problemi d’insegnamento e alcune soluzioni. Arena Romanistica, 8. Pp. 285-298

Ideophonic predication in Komi.

Klumpp, Gerson

(Tartu University)

Komi, a Finnougric language in Northern Russia, has a considerable number of ideophones, often exhibiting reduplication,

expressing visual, acoustic, haptic, or motoric perceptions. However, these notions cannot always be identified

unambigously, and an ideophonic expression often designates a complex perception event as, e.g., buz in (1) which

describes the sound of a liquid splashing on the floor, involving a notion of downward movement. Based on a corpus of

narrative texts, as well as on existing accounts of the topic in question, one may observe three basic syntactic ways for Komi

ideophones to enter a predication:

(i) The bare ideophone constitutes a predicate; subject and indirect object arguments may be accomodated, or

overt—as, e.g., the pronominal subject in (1)—, and the predication may involve localizing adverbials or other modificators.

(ii) The ideophone becomes a verbal predicate with argument positions and full access to the verbal paradigm. In

this case the ideophone undergoes verbal derivation, involving specific suffixes, or it becomes a preverb to a carrier verb as,

e.g., ťśaš in (2). While the latter process is productive and open to any new ideophone, suffixal derivation is not; here we

face rather conventionalized elements whose ideophonic origin is not always transparent. Type (ii) seems to be preferred if

the ideophonic predicate is transitive as in (2).

(iii) The ideophone accompanies a predication as an adverb with wide (sentential) or narrow scopus. Such an

adverb may consist in a bare ideophone, or an adverbial derivation of an ideophone, or a paradigmatic adverbial form of a

derived ideophonic verb, or in a formation in which a 3rd person singular present tense form of a carrier verb with an

ideophone in its preverbal slot functions as a verbal adverb to the main verb as, e.g., in (3). This peculiar pattern is found

exclusively among ideophonic predications.

(1) Komi, Vym’ dialect (Zhilina 1998: 423)

Context: In order to brew beer the subject referent fills mash into pots and puts them into the oven, but the pots

turn out to have holes through which the mash runs out.

Kod-ös śuj-ö, sija i buz.

which-

ACC

put.in-

PRS

this also

IDEO

‘(No matter) which one she puts in, it goes buz.’

(2) Komi, Izhma dialect (Mal’ceva 1944: 147)

Babuška śin-sö ťśaš-vart-a-s

grandmother eye-

ACC

IDEO

-hit-

FUT

-3

‘Grandmother teared her eyes open (in surprise).’

(3) Komi (Lytkin 1955: 250)

Völ-i ťiń-śiďź-ö löń

be-

PST

IDEO

-hit-

PRS

quiet

‘There was a tensed silence.’

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Judging from the variation observable in Komi ideophones are to be considered a word class of its own with no clear

determined access to predication, differing therein from nouns or verbs (cf. Bartens 2000: 25, “Ideophones constitute a

word class of the sublinguistic level which may enter the slots N, Adj, V, Adv of the syntactic level”). The current

investigation searches for parameters of the varying predication strategies for ideophones as transitivity, productivity, and

others. Attention is also payed to adnominal uses of ideophones as well as to similar patterns in the closely related Udmurt

language.

References

Bartens, Angela 2000. Ideophones and Sound Symbolism in Atlantic Creoles. STT Humaniora 304. Helsinki.

Mal’ceva, Nina A. 1944. Materialy dialektologicheskoi ėkspedicii 1944 g., Uxtinskogo, Izhemskogo, Ust’usinskogo rayonov.

Syktyvkar, Arxiv Komi Nauchnogo Centra, fond 1, op. 11, ed. xr. 72.

Lytkin, Vasilij I. (Red.) 1955. Sovremennyj komi yazyk [Modern Komi] I. Syktyvkar.

Zhilina, Tat’yana I. 1998. Vymskij dialekt komi yazyka [The Vym dialect of Komi]. Syktyvkar.

Reflexives, unaccusatives and unergatives in Croatian.

Knežević, Božana and Bogunović, Irena

(University of Rijeka)

Substantial body of research has been dedicated to the status of reflexives. They still remain controversial as the question is

whether reflexives are transitive or intransitive verbs. And if they are intransitive, whether they are unaccusatives or

unergatives. If they are unaccusatives, this means that their external argument is suppressed while their internal argument

is consequently promoted to a subject (Marantz 1984). If, however, they are unergatives, then their internal argument is

suppressed and the subject remains the only argument present in the syntax (Grimshaw 1982, Reinhart & Siloni 2004).

The first aim of this small corpus study is to investigate the behaviour of the clitic se in Croatian with a focus on 87

extracted reflexive constructions, a class of predicates that share properties with unaccusative and unergative verbs. We will

present evidence from the corpus to corroborate the discussion that focuses on the formation of reflexive verbs and the role

of the clitic se.

The second aim is to document the translation of the reflexive clitic se from Croatian into English, that is to analyse

the syntactic features of the clitic se in the source text (ST) and compare them with their translation pairs in the target text

(TT) in order to detect any evidence of change on the syntactic level that occurred in translation. The data are obtained from

two legislative pair texts (Croatian and English), a corpus of 23,140 words.

The findings of the study are significant for a couple of reasons. They stem from the corpus study, and as such they

provide solid evidence for the analysis of reflexive constructions.

This is our further attempt to analyse the properties of unaccusative / unergative verbs in Croatian, the overall aim

is to give prominence to insufficiently analysed constructions in Croatian. We also perceive this study as leading to increased

awareness and deeper understanding of the complexity of translation and translation studies.

References

Belaj Branimir. 2007. Konceptualno-semantički aspekti prototipnih struktura s bezličnim i obezličenim glagolima i njihove

sintaktičke implikacije. In Branko Kuna, ed. Sintaktičke kategorije. Osijek: Filozofski fakultet: 21–50.

Belaj, Branimir. 2001. Prototipno-kontekstualna analiza povratnih glagola u hrvatskom jeziku. Suvremena lingvistika 51-52: 1-

11.

Grimshaw, Jane. 1982. On the lexical representation of Romance reflexive clitics. In Joan Bresnan, ed. The Mental

Representation of Grammatical Relations. Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press: 87–148.

Ham, Sandra. 2005. Subjekt i izravni objekt u pasivnoj i neosobnoj rečenici. Književna revija Vol. 45 No. 3-4: 48-64.

Marantz, Alec. 1984. On the Nature of Grammatical Relations. Cambridge, MA & London: MIT Press.

Reinhart, Tanya & Tal Siloni. 2005. The Lexicon–Syntax parameter: Reflexivization and other arity operations. Linguistic

Inquiry 36 Number 3: 389–436.

Reinhart, Tanya & Tal Siloni. 2004. Against the Unaccusative Analysis of Reflexives. In Artemis Alexiadou, Elena

Anagnostopoulou & Martin Everaert, eds. The Unaccusativity Puzzle, Explorations of the Syntax-Lexicon Interface.

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Oxford: Oxford University Press: 159-180.

Reinhart, Tanya & Eric Reuland. 1993. Reflexivity. Linguistic Inquiry 24: 657-720.

A corpus-based study of second person impersonals:

Russian constructions with the indefinite you and their translations into English.

Knjazev, Jurij

(StPetersburg University)

The aim of present paper is to reveal to what extent original Russian impersonal second person constructions correspond to

the ones in the English translations using the parallel translation Russian-English sub-corpus of The Russian National Corpus.

Second person impersonals (they are called "generalized-personal" constructions in standard grammars of Russian) seem to

be widely attested cross-linguistically (Jespersen 1924; Laberge & Sankoff 1979; Siewerska 1984):

English

(1) You never know what to do in such cases;

French

(2) C’est pas avec des guerres que tu réussis à faire un pays

‘You don’t build a country with wars’;

Russian

(3) Ego ne peresporiš’

‘You cannot out-argue him’ (≈ ‘It’s no use arguing with him’);

Latin

(4) Memoria minitiur nisi eam exerceas

‘Memory weakens unless you practice it’;

Polish

(5) Naigorsz to że nikomu nie możesz wierzyć

‘The worst thing is that you cannot believe anyone’.

Nevertheless, as far as I know, these constructions have not yet been the subject of typological studies. Presumably, we can

assume that the most widespread referential interpretation associated with the indefinite you is the universal one,

exemplified in (1) through (5). In addition, as has been shown in (Siewerska 1984: 242-245), the indefinite you in English

invariably involves the addressee in the range of the potential referents of the subject. The same, probably, applies to

constructions with indefinite you in other languages.

An additional peculiarity of the second person impersonal ("generalized-personal") constructions in Russian is that

they are very often used with reference solely to the speaker. The data taken from the corpus show that universal uses of

second person impersonal are, mainly, rendered into English by the similar means, see (7) and (8) whereas translations of

the speaker-oriented constructions often contain first person pronouns, see (9) and (10):

(7) Lučše poterjat’ darom pjat’ let, čem potom vsju žizn’ zanimat’sja delom, kotorogo ne ljubiš’ (Chekhov. A Dreary Story)

‘Better to have lost your five years than have to spend the rest of your life in doing work you do not care for’;

(8) Gljadja na lico, nikak ne pojmeš’, kakogo on zvanija (Chekhov. Gusev)

‘Looking at him you could not make out of what class he was‘;

(9) I duša tože nespokojna. Postojanno boišsja za detej, za muža (Chekhov. The New Villa)

‘My soul, too, is troubled; I am in continual fear for my children, my husband‘;

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(10) I stala ona po sosedstvu k mne za každym pustjakom obraščat‘sja. Nu, prideš‘, rasporjadišsja, posovetueš (Chekhov.

Peasant Wives)

‘She got into the way of turning to me for every little thing… Well, I'd go over, set things to rights, and give advice‘.

References

Jespersen, O. (1924), The Philosophy of Grammar. London : George Allen & Unwin.

Laberge, S., & Sankoff, G. (1979), Anything you can do. In Syntax and semantics, 12. Discourse and syntax. (Givón, T. ed.).

New York: Academic Press, 419-440.

Siewierska, A. (1984), The passive: a comparative linguistic analysis. London: Croom Helm.

Simultaneously a verb and a complementizer: The case of Kalmyk gi- 'say'.

Knyazev, Misha

(Utrecht Institute of Linguistic OTS and St Petersburg State University)

Typologically, a number of languages use the verb 'say' to introduce complement clauses. Indeed, this is an attested

grammaticalization pattern (Heine & Kuteva 2002). Given this, we can expect that such elements will feature a mixture of

lexical (verbal) and functional (complementizer-like) properties on the synchronic level. Yet it is hard to say in advance how

those properties will be distributed in a given item.

Kalmyk (a Western Mongolic language), which will be the focus of my discussion, presents an interesting case in

this respect. Its complement-introducing elements behave syntactically like converbs (and hence like verbs). Their meaning,

however, is impoverished and suggests a functional status, as their peculiar syntactic properties. I argue that the right

analysis for these data involves a semantically null verb that is combined with a complementizer to form a single lexical unit

gi-.

These conclusions, if correct, contribute to the problem of 'say'-complementizers across languages and also

deepen our theoretical understanding of mixed elements that share functional and lexical properties (as a result of

grammaticalization).

Below I present the data, which is based on my recent field work.

In traditional grammars one finds that Kalmyk uses forms of the verb gi- 'say' to introduce complement clauses,

most notably gi-ž (gi-häd), which is morphologically the imperfective (perfective) converb (Sanžeev 1983). This is illustrated

in (1). It goes unnoticed, however, that gi-ž is replaced by the form gi-sn, which is morphologically the past participle, once

the governing predicate is nominal, as is illustrated in (2).

The simplest analysis is that gi-ž and gi-sn are synchronically a converb and a participle, respectively. The question

is what kind of verb gi- is if gi-ž is compatible with a wide range of non-speech verbs, such as san- 'think', etc. I suggest that

it is a semantically null verb, whose sole function is to introduce complement clauses. This verb is not only peculiar in its

meaning but also in syntactic properties (as it has to be adjacent to its complement unlike ordinary verbs like kel- 'tell', is

unique as a complement-introducer, and is incompatible with nominal complements, as complementizers). I argue that

these properties follow if gi- is a verb and complementizer at the same time (technically, by virtue of incorporating a

complementizer).

This analysis correctly predicts that gi- will also be used as a main verb, as in (3), showing the aforementioned

syntactic properties (its meaning being presumably derived by a default interpretation mechanism).

(1) Baatr cergč-nr-t xol tal jov-tn

B. soldier-

DAT

river towards go-

IMP

gi-ž zak-v.

say-

IPFV

order-

PST

'Baatr ordered that soldiers should go towards the river.'

(2) Cergč-nr xol tal jov-tn gi-sn /

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soldier-

river towards go-

IMP

say-

PST

* gi-ž zakvr av-v.

say-

IPFV

order receive-

PST

‘Soldiers received the order to go towards the river.’

(3) Baatr cergč-nr-t xol tal jov-tn gi-v

B. soldier-

DAT

river towards go-

IMP

say-

PST

'Baatr said that soldiers should go towards the river.'

References

Heine, B. and T. Kuteva. 2002. World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sanžeev, G.D., ed. 1983. Grammatika kalmyckogo jazyka. Fonetika i morfologija [The grammar of Kalmyk language.

Phonetics and morphology]. Èlista: Kalmyckoe knižnoe izdatel'stvo.

Structural and typological diamorphism through the invasive borrowing

of Anglo-Americanisms in contemporary literary German.

Kobenko, Yury and Kostrova, O.A.

(Russia)

A long language contact of American English and German since 1945 resulted in invasive borrowing of Anglo-Americanisms

into the stock of German. According to D. Herberg 60% all neologisms in German during 1990-1999 represent borrowed

words (40%) and those created on the basis of the borrowed material from American English (20%) [Herberg et alt., 2004, p.

XV]. It is therefore suggested to divide all Anglo-Americanisms in modern German typologically in aprioristic, i.e. borrowed

from a donor language, and aposterioric ones. These terms were introduced into the linguistic practice for the first time by

Yu. Kobenko in his work “The theory of exoglossy” [Kobenko, 2010, p. 29]. The empiric basis of the study is represented by a

corpus of Anglo-Americanisms in German of circa 6000 words and expressions borrowed or aposteriorically created in the

period of 1945-2010.

Aposterioric Anglo-Americanisms are considered derivations from the lexical-morphemic material of donor

language with the broken principle of convertibility, i.e. impossibility to establish either synchronously, or diachronously

such a relation despite the preservation of a genetic belonging. Aposterioric neologisms in the German literary language on

the basis of the borrowed English material are presented by six groups of the phenomena: 1) hybrid terminological words

(copulative ones: Tuner-Recorder-Empfänger, and determinative ones: Werbespot), 2) pseudo-borrowings (Ego-Shooter,

Beamer, Dressman), 3) borrowed forms of conjugation of English verbs (geprinted), 4) pseudo-apostrophes (Omaʼs

Geheimnis) and 5) former borrowings from Romanic languages, resounded according to English phonetic norms (Promotion

– Promotion), 6) neosemants (words which originate from an earlier period of borrowing or other language, but they were

provided during the influence of English with new meaning, e.g. Strategie, Motivation).

According to their composition Anglo-Americanisms in German are subdivided into simple, compound words,

acronyms, hybrid and monolingual contaminations, abbreviations.

The borrowing from kindred languages leads to formation of paradigmatic ranks in lexical system of the recipient

language which can be designated as heterolingual homonymy. Heterolingual homonyms of the opposition "(American)

English vs. German" appear in the ratio 1:4 (one heterolingual pair / row for four autochthonous pairs / rows): der Rock

(skirt) – der Rock (musical direction), der Star (starling; a cataract) – der Star (celebrity).

Generally the invasive borrowing of Anglo-Americanisms into the German stock since 1945 increases the resource

heterogeneity of German language and develops the diamorphism (genetic divergence of language material) in peripheral

spheres of lexical system of German.

References

1. Herberg D., Kinne M., Steffens D., Tellenbach E., Al-Wadi D. Neuer Wortschatz: Neologismen der 90er Jahre im

Deutschen [Text] / D. Herberg, M. Kinne, D. Steffens, E. Tellenbach, D. Al-Wadi. – Berlin, NY: Walter de Gruyter,

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2004. – 393 S.

2. Kobenko Yu.V. The theory of exoglossy [Text] / Yu.V. Kobenko. – Tomsk: Polytechnic University Publishers, 2010. –

135 pp.

Typological studies of reflexivity: the state of the art.

Koenig, Ekkehard

(FU Berlin, Universität Freiburg)

After several decades of typological and other empirically oriented cross-linguistic work on reflexives (Faltz, 1985;

Geniušienė, 1987; Huang, 2000; Koenig & Siemund, 2000; Frajzyngier, 2000; Lust et al., 2000; Rousseau, 2007; Koenig &

Gast, 2008; Haspelmath, 2008; Everaert, 2012, etc.) it seems useful and appropriate to take stock of its major results as a

basis for future work, especially since the goals associated with such work have been seriously called into question recently

(Evans & Levinson, 2009).

In my state-of-the-art report an attempt will be made to summarize the following aspects of these studies:

− Cross-linguistic patterns and limits of variation in the domain of reflexivity, formulated in terms of Greenberg-style

implications and implicational hierarchies

− Formal and distributional properties of reflexive markers identified across languages: formal complexity, interaction

with the category of person, possible grammatical functions, distribution in terms of predicate types, possible

antecedents, binding domains, contrast to related categories (intensifiers, middle markers, etc.).

− First attempts to develop a canonical typology for reflexives (Everaert, 2012) which try to draw a distinction

between clear, indisputable instances of reflexive markers and less typical or even marginal instances.

− Recent descriptive contributions to the identification and analysis of reflexive marking in lesser known languages.

These analyses have cast strong doubts on the view that there are languages without reflexive markers.

Results of this survey will then be used to address topics and questions formulated in the program for the relevant

workshop and phenomena that provide serious challenges to current theorizing will be identified. The following questions

will be discussed:

− Is it possible in all languages to draw a clear distinction between reflexive anaphors and logophors, on the one

hand, and reflexive anaphors and intensifiers, on the other?

− Are there clear cases of reflexive markers in subject position?

− Can reflexive markers generally be subsumed under the category ‘anaphor’?

− How relevant are typological generalizations to formal approaches (data source and testing ground?) and how

much inspiration did formal approaches provide for typology?

− How clear and relevant are the limits of variation (“universals”) identified in typological generalizations.

References

Evans, N. & Levinson, S. (2009). “The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive

science”. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32.429-492.

Everaert, M. (2012). “ The criteria for reflexivization”. In: Brown, D. et al. (eds.) Canonical Morphology and Syntax, pp. 190-

206. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Faltz, L. (1985). Reflexivization: A Study in Universal Syntax. New York: Garland.

Frajzingier , Z. & Curl, T.S. (eds.) (2000). Reflexives: Form and Function. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Geniušienė, E. (1987). The Typology of Reflexives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Haspelmath, M. (2008). “A frequentist explanation of some universals in reflexive marking”, Linguistic Discovery 6.1: 40-63.

Huang, Yan (2000). Anaphora – A Cross-Linguistic Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Koenig, E. & Siemund, P. (2000). “Intensifiers and reflexives: A typological perspective”, in Frajzingier , Z. (2000).

Koenig, E. & Gast, V. (2008). Reciprocals and Reflexives. Berlin : Mouton de Gruyter.

Lust, B. et al. (2000) Lexical Anaphors and Pronouns in Selected South Asian Languages. A Principled Typology. Berlin:

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Mouton de Gruyter.

Rousseau, A. et al. (2007) L’énoncé réfléchi. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes.

Applicative morphology in Shiwiar.

Kohlberger, Martin

(Leiden University)

Shiwiar is a Chicham (Jivaroan) language spoken by 1,000 people in the Ecuadorean Amazon. Shiwiar is previously

undescribed and undocumented, and all data presented in this paper were collected by the author through fieldwork

between 2011 and 2012. It is a language with rich verbal morphology, but complex morphophonological alternations often

make it difficult to tease apart individual suffixes. Additionally, some verbal suffixes with identical surface forms are used

for a wide variety of grammatical operations, begging the question of whether they are in fact homophonous suffixes with

different functions, or whether they are a single suffix with a broad function. This paper will focus on one such complicated

case: the Shiwiar verbal morphemes –ru and –tu.

The suffixes –ru and –tu are used primarily in Shiwiar as applicative morphemes. They have identical function but

are in complementary distribution, which is fixed and clearly lexically-determined, i.e. every verb root selects either one or

the other. However, it is not clear what factors originally motivated their distribution, as the two resulting verb groups do

not form a phonological or semantic natural class. In terms of their function, these suffixes are extensively used as

applicative morphemes: they increase the valency of a verb by promoting an oblique object into a core (object) argument

position. By and large, the promoted arguments are beneficiaries/maleficiaries and locatives.

Interestingly, the applicative suffixes –ru and –tu also seem to have less expected uses. Firstly, they function as

verbalisers in Shiwiar. Although they are no longer productive verbalisers, both suffixes can be found in a number of

denominalised verbs for natural phenomena. Secondly, the suffixes –ru and –tu are used as object markers. In this latter

usage, they can cause ambiguity between an applicative and an object reading.

The fact that the two allomorphs are distributed in the same way in all cases (i.e. when they are used as

prototypical applicatives, as verbalisers or as object markers) suggests that they are probably one and the same morpheme.

I will conclude by showing how all three uses of the –ru and –tu suffixes can be linked, and will provide a diachronic

explanation for their current distribution.

The influence of speech melodies on vowel pronunciation: a basic mechanism of language change?

Köhnlein, Björn

(Leiden University)

The issue. The study of sound change is a key topic in phonology. Different types of changes have been identified, among

them Neogrammarian sound change (Brugmann & Osthof 1878), which essentially can be described as a categorical change

in the pronunciation of speech sounds (e.g. Grimm’s Law). Despite extensive research on the subject, the causes of many

sound changes are still unknown. Based on an unprecedented survey of relevant interactions in different languages, we

argue that the structure of speech melodies, whose role in language change has been largely ignored so far, might in fact be

a major driving factor in sound change.

Background and data. Recent phonetic studies suggest that speech melodies can affect the way in which certain speech

sounds (as vowels) are produced (Niebuhr 2009, Kohler 2011). As phonetic tendencies are known to play an important role

in sound change (e.g. Labov 1994), this raises the question as to whether such gradual differences can influence the

pronunciation of vowels systematically, leading to sound change. There is evidence that this may indeed be the case: for

instance, several Franconian dialects (spoken in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands) display potential tone-vowel

interactions in stressed syllables: Franconian contrasts two tone accents; the meaning of a word can depend on its melody.

The basic opposition in statements is one of falling tone (Accent 1) vs. high tone (Accent 2); e.g. Gussenhoven 2000;

Köhnlein 2011. A minimal pair from Sittard (Dols 1953) is given in (1):

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(1) [kɛ

] ‘throat’ [kɛ

] ‘bloke’

In Sittard, some earlier monophthongs diphthongized under Accent 1 but remained unchanged under Accent 2, as a

comparison with the non-diphthongizing Maasbracht dialect indicates (Hermans & Van Oostendorp 2000):

(2) Maasbracht Sittard

[ke

zəl

] [kɛ

zəl

] ‘gravel’

[be

] [be

] ‘bite’

Similar patterns have been attested for other Franconian dialects (e.g. Cajot 2006, Gussenhoven 2007), as well as for

Lithuanian (Abrazas 1997). Effects of speech melodies on vowels are also visible in unstressed syllables: some languages

display uncommonly ‘strong’ unstressed vowels in combination with non-prototypical rising speech melodies; we discuss

data from Frisian, Scandinavian, Wallis German, and Welsh.

Implications. Systematically evaluating evidence from tone-vowel interactions has the potential to substantially deepen our

understanding of the mechanisms underlying language change, and it may provide a novel tool for the reconstruction of

speech melodies of earlier language stages. To exemplify this, we reevaluate selected vowel changes in the history of

German and relate them to (reconstructed) dominant melodies in the respective period. The primary focus will be on the

historical diphthongization of high vowels in West Germanic (e.g. hûs → Haus ‘house’). Remarkably, based on analyses of

accent markings/spelling variation in Old High German manuscripts, Sievers (1920) argues that diphthongs were first

written in syllables with falling tone – a striking resemblance to the Franconian situation. This also indicates that the

applicability of the tool may be extended to the reevaluation of spelling variation in old manuscripts (see also Mihm 2002).

References

Ambrazas, V. (1997): Lithuanian Grammar. Vilnius: Baltos Lankos.

Cajot, J. (2006): Phonologisch bedingter Polytonieverlust – eine tonlose Enklave südlich von Maastricht. In: de Vaan, M.

(ed.): Germanic Tone Accents. Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Franconian Tone Accents,

Leiden, 13-14 June 2003. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik – Beiheft 131, 11-24. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner

Verlag.

Dols, W. (1953): Sittardse diftongering. Sittard.

Gussenhoven, C. (2000): On the origin and development of the Central Franconian tone contrast. In Lahiri, A. (ed.), Analogy,

Levelling, Markedness: Principles of Change in Phonology and Morphology, 215-260. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Gussenhoven, C. (2007): A vowel height split explained: compensatory listening and speaker control. In: Cole, J. & Hualde,

J.I. (eds.): Laboratory Phonology 9, 145-172. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Hermans, B. & Oostendorp, M. van (2000). Synchrone beperkingen op de Sittardse diftongering. In: Taal en Tongval 51, 166-

186.

Kohler, K.J. (2011): Communicative functions integrate segments in prosodies and prosodies in segments. In: Phonetica

68.1-2, 26-56.

Labov, W. (1994): Principles of Linguistic Change. Volume 1: Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.

Mihm, A. (2002): Graphematische Systemanalyse als Grundlage der historischen Prosodieforschung. In: Auer, P., Gilles, P. &

Spiekermann, H. (eds.): Silbenschnitt und Tonakzente, 235-264. Tübingen: Niemeyer (Linguistische Arbeiten 463).

Niebuhr, O. (2009): Intonation segments and segmental intonations. In: Proceedings of the 10th Interspeech conference,

Brighton, UK, 2435-2438.

Osthoff, H. & Brugmann, K. (1878): Morphologische Untersuchungen auf dem Gebiet der indogermanischen Sprachen.

Volume 1. Leipzig: Hirzel.

Sievers, E. (1920): Steigton und Fallton im Althochdeutschen mit besonderer Berückcksichtigung von Otfrids

Evangelienbuch. In: Aufätze zur Sprach- und Literaturgeschichte. Wilhelm Braune zum 20. Februar 1920

dargebracht von Freunden und Schülern, 148-198. Dortmund: Martins.

Towards a typology of person-number agreement in Mande languages.

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Konoshenko, Maria

(Institute of Linguistics, Moscow)

The phenomenon of agreement has been widely discussed in linguistics. As for the languages of Sub-Saharan Africa, Bantu

family (niger-congo) is most popular in this respect, Atlantic ( niger-congo) and Kru (niger-congo) languages being slightly

lower on the charts (consider e.g. [Corbett 2006], [Blake 2008] for general discussion of agreement).

To my knowledge, Mande languages have never been mentioned by typologists with relation to agreement. There

are two reasons of this gap: first, lack of proper analysis within modern theoretical framework conducted by Mandeists

themselves; second, lack of so to say “scientific public relations” which would attract the attention of general typologists to

the phenomenon of agreement in Mande languages. My talk is aimed at restoring justice in both cases.

The framework I adopt in my research is grammatical vs. anaphoric agreement typology introduced in [Bresnan &

Mchombo 1987]. There are three types of agreement markers: syntactic, ambiguous and pronominal (anaphoric). An

agreement marker is syntactic if it is obligatory and cannot occur without an overt controller in the construction. Ambiguous

markers are also obligatory, but they can occur without a local controller and have anaphoric function. Pronominal markers

are in complementary distribution with full NPs thus being used for anaphoric agreement (with non-local controllers).

In my talk I will concentrate on local agreement, so pronominal (anaphoric) markers will be excluded from the

discussion. At the same time, Mande languages do not have purely syntactic agreement markers (another reason why

Mande have not been traditionally described as having agreement). Hence, we will consider ambiguous markers only.

Bantu, Atlantic and many other Niger-Congo languages have noun classes and, consequently, display noun class agreement.

However, Mande languages lack noun classes, but have person-number agreement.

The possible targets of agreement attested for different Mande languages are predicates, possessed nouns and

postpositions (cf. [Siewierska 2004: 127-148] for similar typology). Agreement markers are fused with function words

(predicative, possessive markers or postpositions), so special portmanteau morphemes appear. Cf. the following examples

(portmanteau markers are given in bold type):

(1) Predicates

dan-gweetaa (south mande) [Vydrin, 2010]

Gbȁtȍ

ɤ̏

ɛ̄

nȕ

ɤ̏ɤ̏

ɓɤ̏

ʌ̏

Gbato

3SG.EXI

man

deprive

NEUT

eat

thing

IZF

‘Gbato doesn’t share his food with others’, lit. ‘Gbato he doesn’t share his food with others’.

(2) Possessed nouns

looma (south-west mande) [Mishchenko 2010: 102]

dì

zúnú

ná

ɛ́

1SG.PI

elder.sibling

man

DEF

3SG.POSS

house

DEF

‘My elder brother’s house’, lit. ‘My elder brother his house’.

(3) Postpositions

kpelle (south-west mande) [Konoshenko 2010: 53]

yàá

ɛ̀

ŋw

ɛ́

áà

dìê

2SG

RES

truth

say

guest.PL

3PL.on

‘You (sg.) have told the truth to the guests’, lit. ‘You have told the truth to them the guests’.

Thus, I will show that many Mande languages do have agreement and that they display hierarchically organized variation in

different parameters, such as possible targets of agreement, grammatical conditions of agreement and the structure of

agreement paradigms.

References:

Baker, Mark C. 2008. The syntax of agreement and concord. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bresnan, Joan & Sam Mchombo 1987. Topic, pronoun and agreement in Chichewa. Language 63.4. pp. 741-82.

Corbett, Greville G. 2006. Agreement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Konoshenko, Maria. 2010. Indirect Object Marking in Kpelle: Dative Pronominals and Postpositional Agreement // Personal

pronouns in Niger-Congo languages. International workshop. Saint-Petersburg 13-15 September 2010. pp. 52-55.

Mishchenko, Daria. 2010. Pronominal system of the Looma language: the Woi-Balagha Dialect // Personal pronouns in

Niger-Congo languages. International workshop. Saint-Petersburg 13-15 September 2010. pp. 97-105.

Siewierska, Anna. 2004. Person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Vydrin, Valentin. 2010. Выдрин В.Ф. Еще раз о «субъектных местоимениях» в южных манде: местоимения или

предикативные показатели? // Основы африканского языкознания: Синтаксис. М.: Академия Пресс [Once

more on the problem of “subject pronouns” in South Mande: pronouns or predicative markers? In: Osnovy

afrikanskogo yazykoznania: Syntaxis. Moscow]

An instance of DSM in a family of nominative/accusative languages.

Kornfilt, Jaklin

(Syracuse University)

This paper addresses a Differential Subject Marking (DSM) phenomenon in Turkish and other Turkic languages which

parallels Differential Object Marking (DOM), rather than being a mirror-image of it. DOM, with respect to overt Accusative

marking of the DO, has been widely described in traditional, typological and formal literature on these languages. However,

DSM in these languages has been described to a much lesser extent. DSM is found with respect to Genitive marking on the

subjects of embedded nominalized argument clauses and on the subjects of (a subset of) nominalized adjunct clauses, with

the latter receiving (potential) Genitive marking in only one type of nominalization, while the former receives such

(potential) marking in all types of nominalization. There are three aspects of this DSM phenomenon which this talk

addresses:

1. In all instances, the subjects that do show up with overt Genitive are specific, and are either focalized or topicalized, and

they can scramble away from the verb, both leftwards and rightwards. The semantic/pragmatic feature of relevance is

referentiality/specificity, i.e. the same feature which is relevant for DOM in these languages, too. Animacy plays only a

secondary role, only insofar as non-animates are likelier to be non-specific/non-referential.

Where the Genitive does not show up on the relevant subjects, the subject is non-specific/non-referential, and it

typically cannot be moved away from its immediately pre-verbal position. In other words, morphologically bare (i.e.

Genitive-less) subjects in a potentially “Genitive-checking” syntactic environment are preceded by constituents such as

direct objects and obliques (where such constituents are licensed by the nominalized predicates) and by VP-level adjuncts,

while overtly Genitive subjects typically precede such constituents. In this respect, too, DSM parallels DOM in such

languages, which are Nominative/Accusative languages and not ergative ones.

2. Since underlying direct objects are subject to DOM and since derived subjects (of a nominalized clause) would have to

respect DSM (under similar semantic/pragmatic conditions), it is difficult to attribute apparent DSM of derived subjects to

genuine DSM. However, given the possibility of Intransitive Passive in these languages, I attribute apparent DSM of derived

subjects to DOM rather than DSM.

3. I further show that formal (clausal and phrasal) properties leading to DSM (as well as to DOM), i.e. conditions for the

licensing of structural Case (such as Genitive and Accusative) override factors for DSM (and DOM) based on the relevant

semantic/pragmatic features (i.e. specificity/referentiality).

In other words, if the language has, for example, morpho-syntactic requirements that require an overt,

morphological realization of a structural case, such realization is obligatory, independently from pragmatic/semantic

requirements which would otherwise necessitate absence of overt structural case. For example, in Turkish and many other

Turkic languages, a noun phrase which bears a person-number agreement marker must also exhibit overt accusative

marking, even if the phrase is non-specific. Conversely, certain nominalized adjunct clauses prohibit genitive marking of

their subject, even if the subject is specific. This is true for both underlying and derived subjects.

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Evaluative morphology – a feature of SAE languages.

Körtvélyessy, Lívia

(P. J. Šafárik University Košice)

The paper discusses evaluative morphology as a feature of Standard Average European languages. The proposal is based on

evaluation and comparison of two samples – a sample of SAE languages (71) and a global sample (132). The choice of

languages and their typological identification is based on the World Atlas of Language Structures (Dryer, Haspelmath, 2011).

Basically, the principles of convenience and random sampling were followed. The analyzed data was obtained by means of

data sheets. The data sheets were completed by informants – experts in morphology and typologists, and on the basis of

reference books. Whenever possible both methods were combined. For the sake of analysis a new parameter was

introduced – the evaluative morphology saturation. This parameter reflects the word-formation, the semantic and the

word-class aspects of evaluative morphology in individual languages. This approach divides languages of Europe into 5

groups with saturation values ranging from the highest value to zero (languages without evaluative morphology). The

saturation values were projected on a map of Europe that shows the core/nucleus of SAE as well as its periphery. From the

geographical point of view the core SAE languages according to the parameter of evaluative morphology cover the

Meaditerrean region, the majority of Central and East Europe countries (with certain exceptions, e.g. Hungary), and a great

part of Southern Europe. From the point of view of the genetic classification of languages, it is the territory of Indo-

European languages, basically Romance and Slavic genera. The projected saturation values demarcate the borders of SAE

language area. It is also assumed that the saturation criterion and a two-sample principle could be introduced to other fields

of SAE analysis for the sake of arriving at a unified methodology of SAE feature evaluation.

Reference

Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.). 2011. The World Atlas of Language Structures [CD Room]. Oxford: OUP.

Convergence and divergence in the classification of Dargwa languages.

Koryakov, Yuri

(Russian Academy of Sciences)

Dargwa, officially treated in Soviet times as a single language of the North East Caucasian language family (Nakh-

Daghestanian), in fact represents a language group whose depth can be compared to e.g.Germanic languages [Koryakov,

Sumbatova 2007]. The aim of our research is to produce a classification of Dargwa (Dargwic) languages based on objective

criteria. What subdivisions are found within the Dargwa branch, what are their relationships, was there convergence

between different languages?

Earlier classifications of Dargwa "dialects" were either founded on only one feature or constructed on the basis of

geographical principles. In the absence of generally accepted reconstructions, we have decided to use the lexicostatistical

method of cognate rates [Starostin 2000]. First of all, lists of 100 words of the basic vocabulary (as proposed in Swadesh

1955) were collected in 34 Dargwa villages, and then processed (loanwords eliminated, cognates established). Based on

these data, a matrix of cognate rates was created by means of the Neighbour-Joining method [Saitou 1987], which has

allowed us to define dialect clusters that can be treated as separate languages and distances between them. Those

relationships are visualised in the chart [see Figure 1].

As a result, Dargwa languages have been divided into 4 groups: North-Central, South and two isolates – Chirag and

Kaitag. The first group (5–6 languages) is centered around the largest Dargwa language — North Dargwa.The second one at

first appears to be a a typical language continuum (development of a dialect continuum), some of its 5–6 languages being

spoken only in single villages. But upon a closer view, the South Dargwa group does not seem to form a true genetic clade. It

means that its members were part of a greater dialect chain that have partially converged through geographical proximity.

Consequently, no proto-language can be reconstructed for them. Such conclusion can be drawn from two facts: first, from

the analysis of the pattern of cognate rates: they are rather high for nearest geographical neighbors but drop drastically in

direct proportion to the distance between locations. The second argument is that no lexical innovations that are exclusive

for South Dargwa can be found.

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Thus, the following historical scenario can be recostructed. At a relatively early date, the speakers of most dialects

of the Proto-Dargwa language settled in the southern part of the modern Dargwa area, with only one group of them having

moved to the North. The dialect of the latter group was the ancestor of North-Central Dargwa. Also, at least two other

dialects were isolated from the rest rather early – Proto-Chirag and Proto-Kaitag. The rest of the dialects stayed where they

were and developed independently, being in contact only with their nearest neighbors. Hence, there was never a period of

linguistic unity in which Proto-South-Dargwa could have existed, and during which common South Dargwa innovations could

have occurred.

This hypothesis could be eventually proved or disproved when comparative historical phonology and morphology

are developed and phonological and morphological innovations are established.

Figure 1. Classification chart of Dargwic languages.

References

Koryakov, Y.B., Sumbatova, N.R. "Darginskie jazyki" [the Dargwa languages]. In: Great Russian Encyclopedia, vol. 8. Moscow:

Bolshaya Rossiyskaya Entsiklopediya publisher, 2007. (in Russian)

Saitou N., Nei M. "The neighbor-joining method: a new method for reconstructing phylogenetic trees." Molecular Biology

and Evolution, volume 4, issue 4, pp. 406-425, July 1987.

Starostin, S. Comparative-Historical Linguistics and Lexicostatistics. In: Time Depth in Historical Linguistics, v. 1. Cambridge:

The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, 2000.

Swadesh, M. 1955. Time depths of American linguistic groupings. American Anthropologist 56.3:361-364.

Orthography as a reflection of socio-cultural history: the case of Afrikaans

Kotzé, Ernst

(Northwest University, Potchefstroom;

Nelson Mandela University, Port Elizabeth)

The development of the orthography of Afrikaans, in conjunction with its standardisation, is deeply embedded in the socio-

cultural and political history of South Africa. The initial stage, when a distinct complex of Dutch-related varieties started to

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crystallize at the Cape during the 17

and 18

centuries, took the form of a religion-based initiative, as imams utilized

vocalised classical Arabic (according to the tradition of tajweed) to write down the principles of Islam in the madrassahs

during the 19

century, based on the spoken vernacular used by Cape Muslims in and around the Cape Peninsula. This is a

tradition which lasted for more than a century, involved some creative and innovative orthographic engineering, and came

to an end when Cape Muslim Afrikaans was eventually transliterated into Roman script. At approximately the same time, a

two-way conflict developed among (especially white) Christian speakers of Cape Dutch (or Afrikaans in the making) around

the exclusive acceptance of the colonial language, English, on the one hand, and that of Dutch as standardised code or a

form of Afrikaans (for which a Roman orthography had not yet been devised) on the other, alongside the use of English.

Prior to the recognition of Afrikaans as official language in 1925, the orthographical standard was determined to a large

extent by a period of relexification from Dutch, but also by adaptations to accommodate the differences in pronunciation

between the two languages. The contribution of the Cape Muslim community to the orthographic form of Afrikaans had

been largely ignored during the period of white political dominance. Since the advent of democracy in South Africa,

however, new debates around norms of standardisation, and the concomitant issue of orthographical change have come to

the fore. On the one hand, arguments are put forward to restandardize the language by incorporating the hitherto

nonstandard varieties at various levels of linguistic description, such as the lexicon, syntax and phonology. On the other, a

process of destandardization by default is already underfoot, as the present government tacitly acknowledges the

supremacy of the erstwhile colonial language, English, across the board in communicating with its citizens, to the detriment

of the other 10 official languages, including Afrikaans. As a result, the knowledge base of experts in the field of orthography

is being eroded, so that the debates around restandardisation have all but become irrelevant, unless the functions for

which standard languages, and in the case under discussion, Afrikaans, are utilised, are retained in the long run. Against

this background, the diachronic development of Afrikaans orthography will be traced up to the present, while tendencies of

change will be identified and a possible prognosis made.

Postnominal relative clauses in historical Basque.

Krajewska, Dorota

(University of the Basque Country)

Typological properties of Basque are usually summarized along these lines: “Its basic word order is SOV, and it exhibits

virtually all the typological characteristics commonly associated with SOV word order. Apart from lexical adjectives, all

modifiers are preposed, and this includes large and syntactically complex modifiers like genitives and finite relative clauses“

(Trask 1998:320). While accurate for the modern Basque, this view of the language has been questioned for earlier stages

of Basque (e.g. Lakarra 1995, 2011). Among the features that are in conflict with the properties of a “well-behaved SOV

language”, we find postnominal relative clauses, illustrated in (1). They are attested in all dialects, but has only been

retained in northern varieties (as a marked form). (2) is an example of a prenominal relative, which prevails in modern

Basque.

1. gizon [lur asko dauka-n]-a

man land a.lot have.3sg-COMP-DET

2. [lur asko dauka-n] gizon-a

land a.lot have.3SG-COMP man-DET

‘a man who has a lot of land’

Both constructions are head-external, embedded and marked with a clause final complementiser and differ only in the

order of the constituents. The clause final complementiser makes the postnominal relative clause typologically interesting,

as it is a counterexample to one of the universals proposed by de Vries (2005): “Relative complementizer particles are

clause-final in prenominal relatives, and clause-initial elsewhere”.

Even though the existence of postnominal relatives has not passed unnoticed in Basque linguistics (e.g. de Rijk

1980, Oyharçabal 1987), their history has not been examined in detail. The goal of the present paper is thus to study the

properties of this construction and its competition with the prenominal variant in historical Basque (16

—20

centuries).

Factors that might have contributed to the loss of the postnominal construction will also be discussed. Hendery (2012)

argues that language contact is the most frequent reason for a change in relative clauses. In the case of the Basque

postnominal construction (not mentioned by Hendery), it could not play a role, as Romance languages have postnominal

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constructions. Instead, the loss seems to be related to other changes in the word order. Basque provides thus further

evidence for the generalization proposed by Lehmann (1984:394) and modified by Hendery (2012:207), namely that the

gain of a new prenominal and loss of postnominal relative happens when the language undergoes significant changes in the

word order. In the case of Basque, particularly relevant are several constructions which nowadays have preposed modifiers,

but were also used with postposed modifiers: non-finite relative clauses, genitives and phrases with the relational suffix

(derived adjectival modifiers). These constructions and changes in frequency of the different orders will also be examined in

order to assess their influence on the relative clauses.

References

Hendery, R. (2012). Relative Clauses in Time and Space: A Case Study in the Methods of Diachronic Typology. Amsterdam:

John Benjamins.

Lakarra, J. A. (1995). Reconstructing the Pre-Proto-Basque Root. In J. I. Hualde, J. A. Lakarra, & R. L. Trask (Eds.), Towards a

History of the Basque Language, 189–206. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Lakarra, J. A. (2006). Notas sobre iniciales, cambio tipológico y prehistoria del verbo vasco. Anuario del Seminario de

Filología Vasca Julio de Urquijo, 40(1-2):561–622.

Lehmann, C. (1984). Der Relativsatz: Typologie seiner Strukturen, Theorie seiner Funktionen, Kompendium seiner

Grammatik. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.

Oyharçabal, B. (1987). Etude descriptive de constructions complexes en basque, propositions relatives, temporelles,

conditionelles et consessives. PhD thesis, Université de Paris VII.

de Rijk, R. P. G. (1980). Erlatiboak idazle zaharrengan [Relative clauses in old writers]. Euskera, 25(2):525–536.

Trask, R. L. (1998). The Typological Position of Basque: Then and Now. Language Sciences, 20(3):313–24.

de Vries, M. (2005). The fall and rise of universals on relativization. Journal of Universal Language, 6(1):125–157.

Macedonian orthography: a century of conflicts (1912-2012).

Kramer, Christina

(University of Toronto)

This paper seeks to explore the manner in which Macedonian orthography has been a locus for both internal and external

contestation of language planning and linguistic identity. Since the partition of Macedonia following the Balkan wars of

1912-13, the Macedonian language has developed asymmetrically in the countries in which it is spoken. While some

reference will be made to orthographic encoding of Macedonian in Greece, Bulgaria, and Albania, particularly in the years

prior to the codification of Macedonian in 1944-45, emphasis will be on three periods of orthographic conflict in Vardar,

Macedonia, the region that became the Republic of Macedonia. During codification in the 1940’s there was intense debate

and conflict over the orthography, and two different commissions had to resolve the issues between Republic and

Federation (see, for example, Friedman, 1993, Risteski, 1988). Friedman notes that the alphabet was a major source of

conflict in the early stage of corpus planning, in particular the representation of palatals and schwa. The second period of

orthographic conflict occurred in the late 1980’s when a public debate arose concerning Macedonian orthography and one

of Macedonia’s national parties raised orthographic proposals, including a proposal to introduce schwa, that would have

brought Macedonian orthography closer to Bulgarian. This was a period of internally imposed conflict. The final period to be

examined is the contemporary one in which Cyrillic and various Latin scripts compete in the linguistic landscape as well as in

on-line fora debates about different proposals for orthographic reform (v. for example Kramer and Ivkovik 2012). This final

period is one of both locally and globally imposed conflict.

The iterative nature of orthographic conflict will be examined using historical data from Macedonian archives,

published accounts of the first congresses and the language debates around orthography, newspaper articles published in

the 1980’s and 90’s, as well as a survey of current debates and language usage in on-line fora. Next year, 2013, marks the

centennial of the partition of Macedonia. This paper will demonstrate how shifting borders undermines national cohesion,

and allows all levels of language planning to become sites for identity formation, cohesion, and conflict.

References

Friedman, Victor A. 1993. “Language Policy and Language Behavior in Macedonia: Background and Current Events”.

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Language Contact, Language Conflict, ed. by Eran Fraenkel and Christina Kramer. New York: Peter Lang. pp. 73-99.

Friedman, Victor A. 1992. “Language Planning and Status in The Republic Of Macedonia and in Kosovo” in Language

planning in Yugoslavia ed. by Ranko Bugarski and Celia Hawkesworth. Columbus, Ohio:Slavica Publishers.

Kramer, Christina E. and Dejan Ivkovic. 2012. “Top-down policies and bottom-up practices: Decoding Internet Serbian and

Macedonian from A to З” with .Canadian Association of Slavists. Unpublished conference presentation.

Risteski, Stojan. 1988. Sozdavanjeto na sovremeniot makedonski literaturen jazik. Skopje : Studenski zbor.

Universal constraints on Balkanisms.

Krapova, Iliana and Cinque, Guglielmo

(University Ca' Foscari)

In our talk we would like to discuss one morphosyntactic feature common to various Balkan languages which, though

possibly a consequence of contact or substrate influences, can nonetheless be shown to be conditioned by general laws,

common to all languages; in other words by the way Universal Grammar is conformed.

Our case concerns the morphological syncretism of Dative and Genitive Case in the Balkan languages (in some –

Bulgarian and Romanian – the Dative appears to have subsumed the Genitive; in others – Greek – it is the Genitive that

appears to have subsumed the Dative). Much as in Topolinska (2004) we distinguish the syntactic notion of Case

(understood as a relation of dependence of a noun phrase on either a verb, a noun, a preposition, or an adjective) from its

morphological realization, and argue that the syncretism only affects the latter realization, while syntactic Cases remain

intact, and syntactically distinct. We show, for example, that despite their morphological identity NP internal (and one type

of NP external possessive) “dative” clitics in Bulgarian are actually syntactically genitives while other NP external possessive

“dative” clitics are syntactically Dative.

After motivating this distinction (which many authors fail to make – cf., e.g., Haspelmath 1999), and after discussing

in its light the diachrony of the morphological syncretism, we will explore the plausible theoretical possibility developed in

Caha (2009; cf. also Blake 1994; Baerman et al. 2005) that only contiguous cases on the Case Hierarchy (such as Dative and

Genitive, but not, say, Dative and Nominative) can syncretize. The Case Hierarchy is universal, and in this sense it can be said

to have guided the grammatical changes in question, at least in the Case domain.

We will show that the Case Hierarchy also enters in complex interactions with the Animacy Hierarchy in regulating

other Balkan phenomena, like e.g. Multiple Wh-fronting, which is presumably carried over to Romanian from Slavic

(Bulgarian) on a contact (or substrate) basis.

In a nutshell, our answer to the challenge put forward in Joseph (2001) will be that Balkanisms are language-

specific particular choices arising from contact (bilingual) situations regulated by the general principles of Universal

Grammar.

References

Baerman, Matthew, Dunstan Brown and Greville G. Corbett 2005. The Syntax-Morphology Interface. A Study of Syncretism.

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Blake, Barry J. 1994. Case. Second edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Caha, Pavel. 2009. The nanosyntax of case. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Tromsø.

Haspelmath, Martin. 1999. External Possession in a European Areal Perspective. In D.Payne and I.Barshi, eds., External

Possession. 109-135. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

The intensifying function of modal particles and modal elements in a cross-linguistic perspective.

Kresić, Marijana; Pavić Pintarić, Anita and Batinić, Mia

(University of Zadar)

The aim of the paper is to discuss the intensifying function of modal particles and equivalent modal expressions in a cross-

linguistic perspective. This issue has not received much attention in the literature, so far. The main hypothesis is that some

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modal particles in German and Croatian and corresponding modal elements in English express different degrees and types

of intensity which represents an additional aspect of meaning extending their basic function of relating the respective

utterance to a verbalized or unverbalized pragmatic context (cf. Diewald 2007, Diewald/Kresić 2010).

Intensity is defined as “the quality of language which indicates the degree to which the speaker's attitude toward a

concept deviates from neutrality“ (Bradac/Bowers/Courtright 1979: 258). It is also one of the basic cognitive concepts,

together with space, time and quantity (Wingender 2005), through which we conceive the world around us. Intensity can

be expressed with prosodic, syntactic and lexical means (intensifiers), among which we can find adjectives, adverbs, nouns,

particles and verbs.

Modal particles are non-inflecting items that constitute a clear-cut functional class in German and Croatian, mainly

occurring in spoken discourse. Some of the members of this category are: ger. ja, denn, eigentlich, doch, schon, cro. ma, pa,

a, baš, eto. Modal particles are defined as a word class that is characterized by the clustering of specific formal, structural,

and functional features, such as: syntactic integration, lack of constituent-value, lack of referential meaning, but expression

of functional, pragmatic meanings by referring the utterance back to a pragmatically given unit (cf. Diewald 2007). This

specific pragmatic function is expressed with the help of modal particles in German and Croatian, whereas in English and

some other languages it is accomplished by elements belonging to other formal word classes or other types of linguistic

expression, such as intonation and tag-questions.

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the intensifying aspect of particle meanings, first discussing English with

the most explicit intensifying function on the lexical level (e.g. Why on earth did she just leave?), and then covering a range

of corresponding particles in German (Warum ist sie bloß einfach so gegangen?) and Croatian (Ma zašto je samo tako

otišla?). The corpus used in this study consists of 1470 «Fill the gap» answers of native speakers of German, Croatian and

English who were asked to supply missing modal particles and modal elements in sentences in which their use is obligatory

in a pragmatic sense. The main result of the analysis is that the degrees of intensity expressed with the help of some modal

particles and equivalent modal elements in German, English and Croatian can be classified on the upper part of the

intensification scale and can be categorized into different types of amplification. This intensifying function is treated as an

additional semantic aspect of modal particles which contributes to the expression of emotional and connotative meanings.

References

Bradac, James J. / John W. Bowers / John A. Courtright (1979): Three Language Variables in Communication Research:

Intensity, Immediacy, and Diversity. Human Communication Research, Vol. 5, No. 3, 257- 269.

Diewald, Gabriele (2007): Abtönungspartikel, in: Hoffmann, L. (ed.), Handbuch der deutschen Wortarten. Berlin/New York:

de Gruyter: 117 - 142.

Diewald, Gabriele / Marijana Kresić (2010): Ein übereinzelsprachliches kontrastives Beschreibungsmodell für

Partikelbedeutungen, in: Linguistik online, 44 (http://www.linguistik-online.com/)

Wingender, Monika (2005): "Wesen und Funktion der Graduierung in der Sprache", in Jachnow, Helmut / Aleksandar

Kiklevič / Nina Mečkovskaja / Boris Norman / Monika Wingender (eds.): Kognition, Sprache und phraseologische /

parömiologische Graduierung. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 42 – 57.

Stereotypes of English as a lingua franca in Europe: an experimental study.

Kristiansen, Gitte

(Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

English has slowly but steadily established itself as a lingua franca in a globalised world. This fact is giving rise to a new

linguistic reality, in the context of which the status of the languages of the various European nation states is affected in

various manners and to various degrees. In this paper we examine the existence of social and linguistic stereotypes when

English is spoken as a L2 variety. Do linguistic stereotypes (Kristiansen 2003, 2010) continue to operate in systematic

manners when a lingua franca, such as English within the current socio-historical and linguistic scenario, is spoken instead of

the various languages of the nation states? How accurate is our perception of L2 varieties of English in Europe at different

levels of abstraction?

At the same time, from the point of view of Cognitive Linguistics (Geeraerts 2008) a standard variety on the one

hand embodies a rationalist cognitive model in the sense that it serves as a tool for free expression, a neutral vehicle of

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communication without additional connotations or values. At the same time, however, it also forms part of a romantic

model, according to which dimensions such as prestige, social identity and affect become part of the picture. In this paper

we examine some of the tensions behind the two models: will social identities continue to manifest themselves in English

spoken as a lingua franca through our mental models of linguistic varieties?

In order to address these theoretical questions an empirical study was designed to throw light on the ability of

native speakers of different European languages and regional varieties to identify and characterise members of other

European nations exclusively on the basis of transfer from their mother tongue to English. In the experiments in question 12

different varieties of English (8 L2 accents and 4 native accents) were evaluated and identified by large panels of listeners in

10 different European countries. We present the results of a multivariate analysis of the data and discuss their theoretical

implications.

References

Kristiansen, G. 2003. How to do things with allophones: Linguistic stereotypes as cognitive reference points in social

cognition. In René Dirven, Roslyn Frank & Martin Pütz (eds.), Cognitive Models in Language and Thought:

Ideologies, Metaphors, and Meanings, 69-120. Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Kristiansen, G. 2010. Lectal acquisition and linguistic stereotype formation. In Geeraerts, Dirk, Gitte Kristiansen and Yves

Peirsman (eds.) Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Cognitive Linguistics Research 45. Berlin/New York: Mouton

de Gruyter.

Geeraerts, D. 2008. The logic of language models: rationalist and romantic ideologies and their avatars. In Kirsten Süselbeck,

Ulrike Mühlschlegel and Peter Masson (eds.).Lengua, nación e identidad : la regulación del plurilingüismo en

España y América Latina. Madrid : Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert.

Exploring the mediation effect in translated and edited language

by means of comparable and parallel corpora.

Kruger, Haidee

(North-West University)

This paper presents a quantitative investigation of an under-researched explanatory hypothesis for the features of

translated language, simultaneously drawing into focus a hitherto largely “invisible” aspect of text production, namely

editing, and highlighting its potentially confounding role in corpus-based studies of the features of translated language.

A number of explanatory hypotheses for the features of translated language have been proposed (see Baker

1995; Becher 2010; Halverson 2003; Pym 2005). Ulrych and Murphy (2008) have put forward a case for these features

as resulting from the mediation involved in translation, and have argued that these features should therefore also be

visible in other types of mediated language (see also Bernardini 2007: 14; Chesterman 2004: 10-11), where mediated

language is understood as language use that has undergone some kind of revision or rewriting for a particular audience.

This paper presents the results of a study investigating the hypothesis that the recurrent features of translated

language are primarily the consequence of a mediation process that is shared among different kinds of mediated

language. The investigation made use of a comparable corpus consisting of a subcorpus of English texts translated from

Afrikaans, a subcorpus of comparable edited English texts, and a subcorpus of comparable unedited (and also

untranslated) English texts. The frequency and distribution of linguistic operationalisations associated with three of the

features of translated language (explicitation, normalisation/conservatism, and simplification) across the three

subcorpora were analysed, utilising analysis of variance. The study was guided by the hypothesis that the frequency and

distribution of linguistic features associated with the regularities of translated language would demonstrate similarities

in the two subcorpora of mediated text, as compared to the subcorpus of unmediated text. However, the study yields

no significant evidence for a mediation effect that is shared by translated and edited language. There is, however,

evidence for what appears to be a translation-specific effect, which seems likely to function at a more unconscious,

proceduralised cognitive-linguistic level, and which is probably the consequence of a combination of the bilingual

processing and the active text production involved in translation.

Furthermore, the findings of the study suggest that editing may involve a different kind of mediation effect

altogether, which frequently remains invisible in conventional corpus-based studies comparing translated and non-

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translated language (where the non-translated component usually consists of edited texts). Investigation of some

features of the edited and unedited subcorpora in the comparable corpus indicates that in amending texts editors

frequently introduce collocational variety, rather than reducing variation in favour of more consistently explicit and

standardised language. Mediation in the form of editing therefore does not appear to involve explicitation,

standardisation and simplification to the degree evident in translated language, most likely because editing does not

involve the re-processing and reproduction of a text, but only its amendment. To explore the effects of editing in more

detail, a parallel corpus consisting of the edited texts in the corpus and their unedited counterparts is used to further

investigate the patterns observed in the analysis of the comparable corpus.

References

Baker, Mona (1995). “Corpora in Translation Studies: An Overview and Some Suggestions for Future Research”. Target

7(2): 223-243.

Becher, Viktor (2010). “Abandoning the Notion of ‘Translation-Inherent’ Explicitation: Against a Dogma of Translation

Studies”. Across Languages and Cultures 11(1): 1-28.

Bernardini, Silvia (2007). “Collocations in Translated Language: Combining Parallel, Comparable and Reference corpora”,

in Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Conference (CL2007), University of Birmingham, UK, 27-30 July

2007, ed. by Matthew Davies, Paul Rayson, Susan Hunston and Pernilla Danielsson.

http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/publications/CL2007/ paper/15_Paper.pdf

Chesterman, Andrew (2004). “Hypotheses about Translation Universals”. In Claims, Changes and Challenges in

Translation Studies: Selected Contributions from the EST Congress, Copenhagen 2001, ed. by Gyde Hansen,

Kirsten Malmkjær and Daniel Gile, 1-13. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Halverson, Sandra (2003). “The Cognitive Basis of Translation Universals”. Target 15(2): 197-241.

Pym, Anthony (2005). “Explaining Explicitation”. In New Trends in Translation Studies: In Honour of Kinga Klaudy, ed. by

Krisztina Károly and Ágota Fóris, 29-45. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.

Ulrych, Margherita and Amanda Murphy (2008). “Descriptive Translation Studies and the Use of Corpora: Investigating

Mediation Universals”. In Corpora for University Language Teachers, ed. by Carol Taylor Torsello, Katherine

Ackerley and Erik Castello, 141-166. Bern: Peter Lang.

Grammaticalization of the adversative connective 'suntar' in Old High German.

Kuehnast, Milena and Petrova, Svetlana

(Centre for General Linguistics, Berlin and University of Wuppertal)

The present study was inspired by a phenomenon which in not well understood in the research on Old High German (OHG)

syntax. The adversative connective suntar ‘but’ used with a negative first clause requires subjunctive mood in the second

clause as in (1), which is remarkable because the event in the suntar-clause is factive.

(1) ni méid sih, suntar sie óugti

SUBJ

, then gotes sún sougti (Otfrid I 11,38)

“she was not embarrassed but openly breastfed the Son of God”

Erdmann (1873), who first observed this peculiarity, interprets the suntar-clause to be in the scope of negation, arriving at

the interpretation that the event in the suntar-clause is not factive but rather the hypothetical opposite of the lexicalized

event(2).

(2) sie schämte sich nicht, als dass sie nicht gezeigt hätte, dass sie Gottes Kind stillte (Erdmann 1874, 155)

“she was not embarrassed in such a ways as she would be unwilling to breastfeed the Son of God openly”

In our view, this interpretation unnatural, moreover, none of the literary translations of the example in (1) take into account

this special use of the subjunctive (Petrova 2008, 95 f). As modern discourse relation theories conceive of connectives as

expressing procedural meaning (Blakemore 2002), we assume that the specific syntactic behavior of suntar is motivated by

the intended interpretation of the adversative relation, namely ‘denial of expectation’. We argue that the subjunctive in

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second clause marks an implicit assumption activated in the common ground either through cultural conventions or by the

previous context. In (1) the author rejects the assumption that breastfeeding a child in public is embarrassing.

We conducted a corpus study on all available OHD text sources (Titus database). The analysis revealed a basic distinction

between uses of suntar as an adverbial or as a connective. In the senses ‘separately’ or ‘except’, suntar appears in positive

contexts only. These tokens represented about 16 % of the data. In the remaining examples suntar functions as a connective

and appears in positive and in negative contexts. We found that the subjunctive is not selected obligatorily after a negative

first clause. In 43% of the cases, the suntar-clause contains the indicative (3)

(3) Ni was ér thaz lioht […] / suntar quam

IND

, sie manoti (Otfrid II, 2, 12-13)

“he was not the light but he came to admonish them”

In these sentences sunter marks a contrast on the content level, where an alternative is substituted by another one.

Negative sunter-constructions with indicative thus express semantic opposition, and more specifically correction. On the

contrary, negative sunter-constructions with subjunctive express contrast on the epistemic level, which in OHG still needs to

be overtly marked. As the subjunctive is a prototypical means of signaling assumption in OHG, its mandatory use in ‘denial

of expectation’ readings is straight forward. Furthermore, the analyses of context types allow us to draw inferences about

the grammaticalization process of adversative connectives in OHG in the light of the cognitive complexity hypothesis

(Spooren & Sanders 2008).

References

Blakemore, D. (2002). Relevance and Linguistic Meaning. The Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse Markers. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Spooren, W., & Sanders, T. (2008). The acquisition order of coherence relations: On cognitive complexity in discourse.

Journal of Pragmatics, 40 (12), 2003–2026.

Erdmann, O. (1874). Untersuchungen über die Syntax der Sprache Otfrids. Vol. 1. Die Formationen des Verbums in einfachen

und in zusammengesetzten Sätzen. Halle: Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses.

Petrova, S. (2008). Die Interaktion von Tempus und Modus. Studien zur Entwicklungsgeschichte des deutschen Konjunktivs.

Heidelberg: Winter.

Non-canonical subject- and object-marking in Indo-Aryan in a diachronic perspective:

sources and mechanisms of evolution.

Kulikov, Leonid

(Ghent University)

This paper focuses on the main historical sources and evolution of constructions with non-canonical subject- and object-

marking attested in the Indo-Aryan branch of Indo-European.

By and large, Indo-Aryan perfectly fits Malchukov’s (2006) generalization of the prevalence of DOM in ergative languages

and preponderance of DSM in nominative-accusative languages: Old Indo-Aryan (Sanskrit) attests DOM and has virtually no

DSM patterns (the few examples of non-nominative subjects quoted in handbooks are based on misinterpretations of the

relevant text passages), while several New Indo-Aryan languages show both ergativity and DSM. Indo-Aryan represents thus

a valuable (probably unique) instance of a language family with well-documented history that attests the rise of both

ergativity (from passive constructions) and DSM and the decline of DOM.

Evidence from the history of Indo-Aryan is therefore of particular relevance for a diachronic typology of DSM/DOM,

as we may, presumably, uncover here some basic mechanisms responsible for the rise of DSM, decline of DSM and

correlation of these two phenomena with the type of alignment. In this perspective, I will pay special attention to the Old

Indo-Aryan (Vedic) constructions with passive participles and the genitive marking of the agent. According to P. K. Andersen

(1986), the genitive noun displays a number of subject properties in such constructions, and therefore they should be

qualified as ergative rather than passive properly speaking. From the historical point of view, this pattern can be considered

as an indirect trace of some syntactic types (ergative/active) reconstructed for early Proto-Indo-European.

I will further concentrate on some scenarios of the evolution of these oblique subject constructions in Middle and

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

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234

New Indo-Aryan languages, hitherto only briefly described in a few studies such as Bubenik 1993 or Peterson 1998.

Specifically, a number of the ergative-like features of the Old Indian genitives could be delegated to the instrumental nouns,

giving rise to the full-fledged ergative construction in Middle and New Indo-Aryan, existing alongside with the nominative-

accusative pattern (split ergativity). On the other hand, the genitive subject construction may have found an (indirect)

continuation in some other New Indo-Aryan languages which lack ergative constructions, such as Bengali, where we find a

well-elaborated pattern with the non-volitional genitive subject. This diachronic ‘bifurcation’ must be responsible for the

emergence of the two basic types of the New Indo-Aryan syntax and account for the fact that only some parts of the Indo-

Aryan linguistic continuum display a well-elaborated oblique (genitive) subject construction.

References

Andersen, Paul Kent. 1986. The genitive agent in Rigvedic passive constructions. In: Collectanea linguistica in honorem

Adami Heinz, 9-13. Wrocław etc.

Bubenik, Vit. 1993. Passives and ergatives in Middle Indo-Aryan. In: H. Andersen (ed.) Historical linguistics 1993, 49-57.

Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Malchukov, Andrej. 2006. Transitivity parameters and transitivity alternations: constraining co-variation. In: L. Kulikov et al.

(eds) Case, Valency and Transitivity: a Cross-linguistic Perspective, 330357. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Peterson, John M. 1998. Grammatical relations in Pāli and the emergence of ergativity in Indo-Aryan. München.

ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.

Hungarian focus is not exhausted

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