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.

Content uploaded by Juri Kobenko

Content may be subject to copyright.

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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)

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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:

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

(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.

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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.

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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.

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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.

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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.

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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.

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

(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.

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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.

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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)

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

- 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

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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.

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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-

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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.

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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.

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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.

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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.

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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).

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

(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

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

[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.

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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.

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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),

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

(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.

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

[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-

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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-

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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.

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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.

SLE 201

University

of Split

. Book of abstracts

SLE

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

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

Abstract