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Syntactic Categories and Subcategories
... Animacy and individuation are related (Comrie 1989: 199). Sasse (1993) even prefers to talk of a hierarchy of individuation rather than of animacy. Animate entities (boys and cats, for example) tend to occur in clearly delineated packages, as it were, unlike abstract entities (philosophising) and masses (ethanol). ...
Despite some claims in the literature, even NP-internal agreement can be meaningful in Norwegian and Swedish, and the arbitrariness of lexical gender (also known as ‘formal gender’ or ‘syntactic gender’) in these two languages has been overstated. This shows up also in homonyms of different genders, which pattern in a way linked to animacy. Furthermore, not all pronominal gender agreement in these languages is meaningful, either. Although there are differences between pronominal gender agreement and other kinds of agreement, this is a difference in degree, not in kind, so we should not draw a sharp distinction between pronominal gender agreement and other kinds of gender agreement. The paper also contributes to the long-standing discussion on the redundancy and usefulness of gender: gender is not as outlandish and different from other grammatical categories (such as tense and number) as it may seem, since no grammatical category correlates directly with conceptual distinctions.
... There has been a quite intense research in language theory and linguistic typology on the status and the universality of the major parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective) (see, for instance, the studies by Dixon 1977Dixon , 2010Schachter 1985;Hopper & Thompson 1984;Croft 1991Croft , 2001Sasse 1993Sasse , 1995Hengeveld 1992;Vogel & Comrie 2000;Baker 2003, and many others); none of these studies on parts of speech deals with PNs in particular. Most of them follow the core assumptions of a functionally oriented typology and favor a kind of usage-based approach; the only exception is Baker (2003) who is an advocate of the ideas of generative grammar. ...
Personal names in Hoocąk - a North American Indian language of the Siouan language family - are considerably distinct from personal names in the languages of Europe. Mostly they are multi-word constructions that do not resemble European given names and last names. Hoocąk names are always semantically transparent and often correspond to complete clauses. This observation poses the following theoretical problem. Proper names are usually considered as a subclass of nouns in descriptive linguistics and in typology. The research question of this study hence is: are personal names in Hoocąk a sub-category of nouns in Hoocąk, or not, and how could this be proven? In order to find an answer, the morphosyntactic and distributional properties of common nouns are compared to the corresponding properties of personal names in Hoocąk applying criteria that were developed and systematized in typological research on parts of speech. The study shows that personal names in Hoocąk are neither a sub-category of nouns nor of pronominals, but rather a structural category of its own resembling idiomatic expressions as described in phraseology. As such, personal names in Hoocąk are closely related to other types of referential clauses in Hoocąk.
... Gender shifts in OE and in ME do not seem to be random or chaotic: indeed, conflicting gender choices correspond to a conceptual distinction which goes beyond animacy or sex, and more generally reflect a broader distinction, i.e. individuated vs. non-individuated entity (Sasse 1993;Vogel 2000). This factor becomes more and more stronger in the gender marking system as nominal inflection weakens and loses in transparency. ...
In the last couple of decades, there have been numerous studies on gender renewal (Unterbeck et al. 2000; Fernández Ordoñez 2009; Fanego et al. 2011; Aikhenvald 2016; Samuel, Cole, and Eacott 2019), all of them stressing the relevance of conceptual categories, such as animacy and individuation, in the transition towards (more) semantic systems. These studies mainly focus on the emergence of new gender system and on pronominal agreement strategies. The phenomenon of gender variation concerns the change of gender assignment and also co-exists within fully-grammaticalised and/or standardised gender system[s]. This paper deals with gender assignment variation in English children’s literature, where the factors ruling gender assignment apparently diverge from those claimed in traditional grammar. Examining a more marginal phenomenon, i.e. multi-gender nouns (Corbett 1991; Vezzosi 2008; Semplicini and Vezzosi 2017) in the history of English, I propose to show how gender is not too different from other nominal categories, and its assignment is a matter of semantic-pragmatic agreement. Accordingly, individuation still plays a major role in the gender systems of English varieties and informal register.
... Whether or not syntactic and semantic agreement obtains seems to be a question of scale (see Figure 1) where the further left an element falls the more likely it is that syntactic agreement holds, whereas working towards the right there is a greater chance of the element in question exhibiting semantic agreement (Corbett, 1979: 204;Enger, 2004: 20, 23-24;Sasse, 1993). ...
In this work, I examine the morphosyntactic formation of nouns and adjectives in Spanish to address noun formation and noun-adjective agreement in Asturian and their meaning. This is carried out largely through a Distributed Morphology account.
Part of this work includes linguistic variation in Asturian through elicited native speaker data and both a descriptive and theoretical analysis of mass neuter in Asturian.
... A relevant factor frequently discussed in the literature is the Animacy hierarchy (Silverstein 1976, also referred to as the "individuation hierarchy", see, e.g., Sasse 1993;Timberlake 1985). Animacy is grammatically relevant for a variety of phenomena in Russian, most particularly in the marking of accusative case, where both masculine animate nouns in the singular and all animate nouns in the plural have differential marking syncretic with the genitive case, meaning that the marking of animate nouns is distinct from the accusative case marking of inanimate nouns. ...
This article contributes to Construction Grammar, historical linguistics, and Russian linguistics through an in-depth corpus study of predicate agreement in constructions with quantified subjects. Statistical analysis of approximately 39,000 corpus examples indicates that these constructions constitute a network of constructions (“allostructions”) with various preferences for singular or plural agreement. Factors pull in different directions, and we observe a relatively stable situation in the face of variation. We present an analysis of a multidimensional network of allostructions in Russian, thus contributing to our understanding of allostructional relationships in Construction Grammar. With regard to historical linguistics, language stability is an understudied field. We illustrate an interplay of divergent factors that apparently resists language change. The syntax of numerals and other quantifiers represents a notoriously complex phenomenon of the Russian language. Our study sheds new light on the contributions of factors that favor singular or plural agreement in sentences with quantified subjects.
... In all the systems discussed, quantification and individuation play a role, so differences according to very general and cognitively relevant semantic categorization are marked using the "overdistinguished" pronouns left from former three-gender systems. The Individuation Hierarchy (Sasse 1993, Siemund 2008 captures the most relevant categories in this respect. It expands the Animacy Hierarchy according to individuation and views proper names as most individuated, and mass nouns as least individuated, with the following steps on the cline as presented in (9): (9) Individuation Hierarchy proper names human beings animal physical objects abstracts mass nouns most individuated least individuated ...
Grammatical gender in the Germanic languages
... However, interesting as those future developments will certainly be, we are not currently expecting to see surprises of arbitrary magnitude. While cross-linguistic empirical research has demonstrated that languages differ with regard to the inventory of lexical and/or syntactic categories (Sasse 1993;Wunderlich 1996), it does not seem rational to be holding our breaths for the discovery of a language that makes absolutely no distinctions at all with regards to members of its lexical inventory of atoms of meaning or structure. Semantically, we would, as a discipline, be shocked to find that a certain language makes no use of function-argument pairings, as found in predicateargument type structures (and many similar semantic constellations). ...
This introduction proposes to investigate mismatches and indeterminacies in languages much more than has hitherto been done. Such seemingly unruly aspects of language(s), it is argued, are interesting since they may help shed light on the internal make-up of grammatical systems. The question of the internal make-up of grammar(s), it is argued, cannot be addressed by the normal modus operandi of linguistic research, which is to find matches (rather than mismatches) between the observable (sound and meaning) interface systems, and to find how the interface representations map unto each other deterministically: It is only in the “lo-fi” aspects of mappings that the internal mechanisms of the overall grammatical architecture may reveal themselves.
The introduction also points out that our concern is independent of the various theoretical orientations linguists may choose for their work, since the problem presents itself in all approaches to language research currently available, it seems – if in slightly different ways.
We propose, in sum, that mismatches and indeterminacies are an extremely worthwhile field for future linguistic research, and one that should be on the agenda (or minimally, within the field of view) for linguists of all theoretical convictions.
... Thus, disagreement triggered by nonhuman referents does not actually constitute failure of agreement or disagreement. When human, the trigger nouns are most likely to bear the expected natural gender (i.e., [+masculine]), and, by virtue of their position at the top of Individuation Hierarchy (Audring, 2008;Brustad, 2000;Sasse, 1993) (a version of the Animacy hierarchy), the expected number feature [+plural]. Barlow (1988) argues that high agency, animacy, familiarity, and clear definition of individual entities (specificity and clear boundaries between them) define individuality and how a group may be treated as a set of individuals (and therefore, as a plural) or as a unit/group (and therefore, as a singular). ...
We used event-related brain potentials to identify the neurophysiological responses of Arabic speakers to processing full and deflected agreement in plural noun-adjective constructions in (written) Standard Arabic. Under full agreement, an adjective fully agrees in number and gender with a preceding plural noun; but this happens only when this noun is human. However, under deflected agreement, the adjective is marked feminine singular when the noun is non-human. We recorded grammaticality judgment and ERP responses from 32 speakers of Arabic to sentences violating full and deflected agreement and their well-formed counterparts. The participants were relatively fast and accurate in judging all the sentences, although violations, especially deflected agreement violations, were not always deemed ungrammatical. However, the ERP responses show a differential processing of human versus non-human violations. Violations of full agreement involving human nouns elicited larger N400 and P600 components than did violations of deflected agreement involving non-human nouns, whose ERP signatures were statistically identical to those of their acceptable counterparts. Our results present clear evidence for animacy (more specifically, humanness) effects on language processing and may also be taken to suggest possible effects of diglossia on the dynamics of language processing. We discuss these results in light of the ERP literature on agreement processing and the role of animacy/humanness in grammar, and the emerging results on idiosyncratic patterns of agreement as found in Spanish. Although it is not a central point in the paper, we discuss the potential effect of diglossia on the architecture of the mental grammar of Arabic speakers.
... In traditional school grammars a noun is defined as referring to a person, thing or phenomenon, while a verb is defined as referring to an action or state. Such semantic definitions are also postulated by many linguists such as, for instance, Sasse (1993), who claims that nouns are thing-like concepts and verbs are event-like concepts, Croft (2000), who suggests that nouns refer to objects and verbs express predication of an action, Dixon (2004), who argues that there are certain semantic types that are always associated with nouns only, e.g., people, parts, flora, etc., whereas motion, speaking are always verbs. According to Givon (1979), nouns represent ontological categories that are stable in time, unlike verbs, which are time-unstable. ...
In this paper we intend to provide a unified picture of the organization of knowledge about nouns and verbs in the mind emerging from the results of recent foundational studies that use a variety of different experimental techniques and research methods ranging from processing experiments, language acquisition and aphasia studies to more advanced neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies. Each of the authors of the articles discussed in the present paper attempts to show that the distinction between nouns and verbs originates only (or mainly) at one of the following levels: the conceptual-semantic, the lexical or the morphological level. Our overview points to a conclusion that the knowledge about verbs and nouns in the mind cannot be attributed to a single level, but rather it seems to be the case that it is organized in the form of a distributed network of specialized functions in which many processes related to noun or verb processing may happen in a parallel fashion. Even though in some respects the presented studies do not entirely lead to a coherent picture of what happens in the brain when people process nouns and verbs, it is still possible to find overlapping results. For example, nominal and verbal concepts of objects or actions are processed in the vicinity of the visual and motor cortex respectively. Lexical (orthographic and phonological) representations of nouns and verbs are stored in mid temporal and left frontal cortex respectively. Noun- and verb-dependent morphological operations happen in left anterior occipitotemporal gyrus and prefrontal/frontotemporal cortex respectively.
... In the theoretical literature scholars have usually used semantic/conceptual and formal criteria to define nouns and verbs. Based on semantic criteria, nouns are defined as denoting thing-like concepts which are stable in time, whereas verbs are defined as denoting event-like concepts which are time-unstable (see Givon 1979;Sasse 1993;Croft 2000). These semantic definitions are problematic when confronted with nouns denoting events, such as a divorce, a discussion, or when confronted with stative verbs which are stable in time, such as to know or to be a human. ...
Traditionally, languages are assumed to minimally manifest a distinction between nouns and verbs. This assumption has occasionally been debated in the theoretical linguistic literature, in particular in the context of challenging verbal noun constructions that simultaneously manifest nominal and verbal features. From a psycholinguistic perspective, one of the most promising diagnostic criteria for determining whether a given word belongs to the category NOUN or VERB is an event-related brain potential (ERP) component, P200, whose amplitude is larger for verbs than for nouns. So far, a challenge for the interpretation of the P200 has been whether this component reflects verbal (e.g., action) semantics, lexical category or verb-related morphological operation. In the present study we report an ERP experiment whose goal was to contribute to a better understanding of the nature of the "verbal" P200 component by monitoring the comprehension of Polish morphologically related finite verbs, converbs, and verbal nouns. Thereby, we manipulated the syntactic category and morphological complexity of the critical words while keeping their semantics identical. The results show that finite verbs engender a smaller amplitude of the P200 component than less prototypical "verbs" such as verbal nouns and converbs. Based on this observation, we argue that the P200 component reflects the brain activation triggered by the demands of verb-related morphological integration processes performed on the verbal base of derived forms.
https://www.glossa-journal.org/articles/10.5334/gjgl.365/
DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.365
... Though languages of the Pacific Northwest have received much of the attention concerning the noun vs. verb distinction, the issue is prominent in many other language families as well. Sasse (1988;1993a;1993b) claims that Iroquoian languages do not distinguish noun and verb on the basis of superficial similarities between nominal and verbal affixes. Mithun (2000) shows that these similarities are indeed superficial, and that the two classes are clearly distinct. ...
This chapter is a survey of word classes in indigenous North American languages, with the aim of providing an introduction to the study of parts of speech, and of highlighting the unique place and contribution of North American indigenous languages in this research. Section 2 defines lexical vs. grammatical and open vs. closed classes, and how these distinctions are realized in North American languages. Section 3 summarizes the prominent themes in word classes research in North America: 1) at what level a word is categorized (root, stem, or inflected word), 2) whether a given language distinguishes noun and verb, and 3) whether a given language has an adjective category. The chapter concludes that North American languages present serious challenges to the definition and status of word classes in linguistic theory, and that the development of distinct lexical categories in a language is not necessarily a given.
... This yields several contrasts with the neighbouring German language, which has preserved a more conservative pronominal gender system. Two of these contrasts are illustrated in (1) The example in (1a) concerns the noun meisje/Mädchen 'girl', which refers to an animate entity ranking high on the so-called Individuation Hierarchy (Sasse 1993;Siemund 2008), as do all entities that carry biological gender. In this case, there is a conflict between biological gender (female) and the noun's neuter gender, which yields the possibility to use feminine pronouns like Dutch ze or German sie 'she', rather than the neuter pronoun (Dutch het, German es 'it'). ...
Dutch is currently undergoing a ‘resemanticisation’ of its pronominal gender, in which syntactic agreement is replaced with a system in which pronouns are chosen in accordance with the degree of individuation of the antecedent. Current accounts of resemanticisation link the process to the extent to which the three-way nominal gender distinctions are still entrenched. Using experimental data gathered with speeded grammaticality judgements from speakers of both Netherlandic and Belgian varieties of Dutch, of German, and of German learners of Dutch, we unambiguously relate the rise of semantic agreement in Dutch to an increased uncertainty with respect to grammatical gender. In addition, reaction time measurements suggest that an agreement system with a strong propensity towards grammatical agreement allows for faster processing of agreement relations than systems in which semantic agreement plays a larger role.
... Another basic function of nominal classification systems is a consequence of the close relationship between classification and individuation. This relationship is reflected in such phenomena as the portmanteau expression of gender and number in fusional languages, the complementary distribution of obligatory numeral classifiers and obligatory pluralization as well as various hierarchies that have been proposed with respect to the categorization of nouns, e.g., the animacy hierarchy (Smith-Stark 1974;Silverstein 1976) and the individuation hierarchy (Sasse 1993). The degree of individuation can be expressed in gender systems by overt marking on the noun (either inflectional or derivational), oppositions between semantically related nouns as well as pronominalization. ...
We examine the complex nominal classification system in Nepali (Indo-European, Indic), a language spoken at the intersection of the Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan language families, which are usually associated with prototypical examples of grammatical gender and numeral classifiers, respectively. In a typologically rare pattern, Nepali possesses two gender systems based on the human/non-human and masculine/feminine oppositions, in addition to which it has also developed an inventory of at least ten numeral classifiers as a result of contact with neighbouring Sino-Tibetan languages. Based on an analysis of the lexical and discourse functions of the three systems, we show that their functional contribution involves a largely complementary distribution of workload with respect to individual functions as well as the type of categorized nouns and referents. The study thus contributes to the ongoing discussions concerning the typology and functions of nominal classification as well as the effects of long-term language contact on language structure.
... Thus, 8 disagreement triggered by non-human referents does not actually constitute failure of agreement 9 or disagreement. When human, the trigger nouns are most likely to bear the expected natural 10 gender (i.e., [+masculine]), and, by virtue of their position at the top of Individuation Hierarchy 11 (Audring, 2008;Brustad, 2000;Sasse, 1993) (a version of the Animacy hierarchy), the expected 12 number feature [+plural]. Barlow (1988) argues that high agency, animacy, familiarity, and clear 13 definition of individual entities (specificity and clear boundaries between them) define 14 individuality and how a group may be treated as a set of individuals (and therefore, as a plural) or 15 as a unit/group (and therefore, as a singular). ...
We used event-related brain potentials to identify the neurophysiological responses of Arabic speakers to processing full and deflected agreement in plural noun-adjective constructions in Standard Arabic. Under full agreement, an adjective fully agrees in number and gender with a preceding plural noun, but only when this noun is human, while it is systematically marked feminine singular when the noun is non-human under deflected agreement. We recorded grammaticality judgment and ERP responses from 32 speakers of Arabic to sentences violating full and deflected agreement and their well-formed counterparts. The participants were relatively fast and accurate in judging all the sentences, although violations, especially deflected agreement violations, were not always deemed ungrammatical. However, the ERP responses show a differential processing of human versus non-human violations. Violations of full agreement involving human nouns elicited larger N400 and P600 components than violations of deflected agreement involving non-human nouns, whose ERP signatures were hardly distinguishable from those of their acceptable counterparts. Our results present evidence for animacy (more specifically, humanness) and inter-dialect effects on language processing. We argue that violations of Standard Arabic deflected agreement are not treated as outright violations because non-human referents permit both full and deflected agreement in Spoken Arabic. We discuss these results in light of the ERP literature on agreement processing and the role of animacy/humanness in grammar, and highlight the potential effect of diglossia on the architecture of the mental grammar of Arabic speakers.
... In this research I make use of the Individuation Hierarchy in (16), which I base on related hierarchies that have been used in the literature, e.g. Sasse's Continuum of Individuality (Sasse 1993), Dixon's potentiality of agency scale (Dixon 1979), and the Individuation Hierarchy in Audring (2009). The Individuation Hierarchy is essentially a variant of the Animacy Hierarchy (e.g. ...
This article presents results from a study on agreement with conjoined singular noun phrases in Icelandic. A survey was conducted to elicit agreement choices on two agreement targets (predicate adjectives and personal pronouns) with agreement controllers from four individuation levels (human, animal, countable object, uncountable abstract). The aim was to provide an overview of the strategies for determining agreement with conjoined noun phrases in Icelandic, and examine whether two typological hierarchies – the Agreement Hierarchy and the Individuation Hierarchy – can predict the distribution of agreement options. This research identifies and examines five different agreement strategies with conjoined singular noun phrases in Icelandic. The distribution of these patterns in relation to the two hierarchies is evaluated with the aim of discerning what influences agreement choices. Both typological hierarchies are shown to affect the choice of agreement strategies. In addition to discussing semantic resolution, syntactic resolution, and partial agreement in Icelandic – this paper identifies and argues for two types of neuter default agreement. The first is neuter plural, a fixed value for agreement with conjoined noun phrases, and the second is neuter singular: semantic default agreement triggered by referents that are low on the Individuation Hierarchy. This research presents new data that has implications for the understanding of agreement with conjoined noun phrases and the function of neuter in Icelandic and related languages.
... 2.2.5.4.,examples (23) and (24). 34 As this is a matter of cognition and not of the language system, this problem arises in all languages to a certain degree (cf., for example, Sasse 1993: 648-649, Lehmann 2013 example, a patient or an action/event is expressed by the predicate base just as often as the agent. In order to point out the differences, some authors refuse to use the term "subject". ...
... 2.2.5.4.,examples (23) and (24). 34 As this is a matter of cognition and not of the language system, this problem arises in all languages to a certain degree (cf., for example, Sasse 1993: 648-649, Lehmann 2013 example, a patient or an action/event is expressed by the predicate base just as often as the agent. In order to point out the differences, some authors refuse to use the term "subject". ...
... r Trennung der Analyseebenen angebracht, nämlich zwischen lexikalischer Ebene, die die Kategorisierung auf Wortartenebene betrifft (in Nomen, Adjektive, Verben etc.) und syntaktischer Ebene, die die Kategorisierung lexikalischer Formen in aktuellen Äußerungen hinsichtlich ihrer syntaktischen Konfigurationen und Position bzw. Relation betrifft (vgl.Sasse 1993). In folgenden Beispielen (24) a. und b. sind die Wortformen bese 'böse' und hingade 'hinkende' aufgrund morphologischer Kriterien als Adjektiv bzw. Partizip zu klassifizieren. Aufgrund syntaktischer Kriterien handelt es sich hierbei um "substantivierte" Adjektive in Nominalphrasen. Darüber hinaus sind sie Beispiele für die systematisch ...
... In the theoretical literature scholars have usually used semantic/conceptual and formal criteria to define nouns and verbs. Based on semantic criteria, nouns are defined as denoting thing-like concepts which are stable in time, whereas verbs are defined as denoting event-like concepts which are time-unstable (see Givon 1979;Sasse 1993;Croft 2000). These semantic definitions are problematic when confronted with nouns denoting events, such as a divorce, a discussion, or when confronted with stative verbs which are stable in time, such as to know or to be a human. ...
Traditionally, languages are assumed to minimally manifest a distinction between nouns and verbs. This assumption has occasionally been debated in the theoretical linguistic literature, in particular in the context of challenging verbal noun constructions that simultaneously manifest nominal and verbal features. From a psycholinguistic perspective, one of the most promising diagnostic criteria for determining whether a given word belongs to the category NOUN or VERB is an event-related brain potential (ERP) component, P200, whose amplitude is larger for verbs than for nouns. So far, a challenge for the interpretation of the P200 has been whether this component reflects verbal (e.g., action) semantics, lexical category or verb-related morphological operation. In the present study we report an ERP experiment whose goal was to contribute to a better understanding of the nature of the “verbal” P200 component by monitoring the comprehension of Polish morphologically related finite verbs, converbs, and verbal nouns. Thereby, we manipulated the syntactic category and morphological complexity of the critical words while keeping their semantics identical. The results show that finite verbs engender a smaller amplitude of the P200 component than less prototypical “verbs” such as verbal nouns and converbs. Based on this observation, we argue that the P200 component reflects the brain activation triggered by the demands of verb-related morphological integration processes performed on the verbal base of derived forms.
... 1.3 To hierarkier 4 animathetshierarkiet er relevant for mange språklige fenomener (se f.eks. Comrie 1989, Sasse 1993, Corbett 2000, Croft 1990, naess 2007, nesset og enger 2011, Dolberg 2014. Hierarkiet fins i mange litt ulike versjoner og under ulike navn, som figure-ground hierarchy og individuation hierarchy. ...
Artikkelen handler om styrking og svekking av genussemantikk i skandinavisk, med hovedvekt på norsk. Det argumenteres for at både såkalt pannekakekongruens, som i setninger av typen Pannekaker er godt og Vodka er sunt på den ene sida, og innføring av anaforisk den på den andre, kan knyttes til styrking av trekk i det semantiske kjernesystemet for genus. Nærmere bestemt ser begge fenomener ut til å være knyttet til individueringsgraden til de aktuelle referentene, og dermed til animathetshierarkiet. Ved konstruksjoner med pannekakekongruens og deres motstykker med tradisjonell kongruens er det grader av akseptabilitet, og denne korrelerer blant annet med subjektets individueringsgrad. Synkron gradualitet er som ventet ved et språklig fenomen som har oppstått forholdsvis nylig. Utviklinga av konstruksjonen i skandinavisk innebærer både resemantisering og desemantisering. Utviklinga skjer både internt i NP-er og NP-eksternt, noe som styrker en hypotese om at kongruens innafor og utafor NP er nærskyldte fenomener.
Although the category of nouns, or “substantives” (for a long time, the word “noun” was used for a broader category that included more subparts of speech, especially adjectives), has been described in grammars since at least Dionysius Thrax c. 100 BC (Robins 1989: 39), the exact relationship between formal and semantic characteristics, both in language and discourse, still requires investigation. This is the aim of the present volume. This relationship matters because nouns, along with verbs, are commonly regarded as a universal linguistic category. In the 1980s and 1990s, a few typological studies questioned the existence of a class of “nouns” in a small minority of languages such as Salish, Wakasham, Austronesian or Iroquoian languages (Mithun 2000; Baker 2003; Lobeck and Denham 2013). But crucially, linguists found that this conclusion was due to an understanding of parts of speech that was too restrictive: a multi-criterial approach shows evidence that the noun/verb distinction is indeed robust in these languages (ibid.). Nouns stand at the interface of morphology, syntax and semantics, and there might be misalignments of these levels. These misalignments trigger a definitional complexity that requires further theorization. Understanding how morphology, syntax and semantics interact is also crucial for nominal interpretation in discourse, which is under-researched to date as well. A number of effects of context on interpretation have been made out; for instance, a generic reading might yield a kind interpretation of the NP (e.g. The dinosaur is now extinct). The dynamic interaction of nouns with their syntactic and semantic environment is central to language processing.
This volume offers a comprehensive overview of the range of varieties of English spoken on the island of Ireland, featuring information on their historical background, structural features, and sociolinguistic considerations. The first part of the volume explores English and Irish in their historical framework as well as current issues of contact and bilingualism. Chapters in Part II and Part III investigate the structures and use of Irish English today, from pronunciation and grammar to discourse-pragmatic markers and politeness strategies, alongside studies of specific varieties such as Urban English in Northern Ireland and the Irish English spoken in Dublin, Galway, and Cork. Part IV focuses on the Irish diaspora, with chapters covering topics including Newfoundland Irish English and Irish influence on Australian English, while the final part looks at the wider context, such as the language of Irish Travellers and Irish Sign Language.
Agreement variation is a critical issue in discussing syntactic configuration and semantic integration. Two competing hypotheses have been proposed to account for how semantic integration contributes to agreement variation: the lexical-grammatical hypothesis and the notional hypothesis. Using data from NOW, a large corpus of World Englishes, this study presents a multifactorial analysis of the probabilistic factors that constrain agreement variation in it-clefts, an important but low-frequency construction, with collective nouns as clefted constituents. We employ random forests and conditional inference trees to examine how the Outer circle varieties have developed preferences different from those of the Inner circle varieties for agreement patterns of it-clefts. The principal findings include: (1) singular agreement is the default pattern worldwide, while plural agreement appears probabilistically along the continuum of collective plurality; (2) Inner circle speakers use more plural agreement than Outer circle speakers, with British English users employing more plural agreement than American English users; and (3) Semantic integration exerts more influence on Inner circle speakers in agreement implementation than on Outer circle speakers, who are more easily affected by morpho-grammatical markers. The quantitative case study on the collective noun team corroborates the lexical-grammatical hypothesis that semantic integration encourages plural agreement. This focused attention on agreement variation in it-clefts with collective nouns as clefted constituents further suggests that the extraposition analysis, rather than the expletive analysis, offers a suitable theoretical model for the syntactic configuration of the it-cleft construction.
Differential object marking (DOM) refers to the cross-linguistic tendency to mark objects of distinct semantic nature in different ways. Most commonly, it is the status of the object on the axis of definiteness and/or animacy that determines what kind of objects fall under which marking strategy. That the Jewish Arabic dialect of Baghdad (JB), like other dialects of Arabic and the Semitic family in general, is subject to DOM is not a surprise. In JB, definiteness plays the major role in dictating how objects are marked. Indefinite nominal objects are left unmarked while nominal definite objects are marked by quite an elaborate construction. Typically, this construction flags the nominal object by prefixing it with the proposition l-but at the same time also indexes it by suffixing a pronominal object to the verb. Despite the common use of this construction, nominal definite direct objects are sometimes marked by one of its sub-constructions. Thus, in certain cases the object is flagged but unindexed, or it is indexed but unflagged. Moreover, in specific cases, neither a flag nor a person index is involved. This paper focuses on the interaction between the sub-construction and DOM. More specifically, through the restrictions that dictate the use of the different sub-constructions and by comparison to equivalent constructions in Semitic we account for the diachronic development of the different marking strategies, which allows us to draw a clearer picture of the nature of DOM in JB.
Adjectives are often identified via notional or even translational criteria in sign language research, which reflects a lack of formal criteria for identifying this part of speech in the field. This paper presents the results of a guided production task investigating the conservative hypothesis that ASL has a small, closed adjective class consisting only of terms for dimension, age, value, and color. Evidence from the syntactic distribution of these core properties compared to non-core properties will be presented to refute the initial hypothesis and show that ASL has an open adjective class. Its members are characterized by their ability to occur as prenominal modifiers without function-indicating morphosyntax. The semantic distinction between core and peripheral adjectives is nonetheless reflected in a significant preference for core adjectives to be used as modifiers rather than as sentential predicates. Postnominal property signs are analyzed as (in most cases) reduced relative clauses. I further suggest that prototypically verbal signs can be used as prenominal modifiers when they are embedded in reduced relative clauses.
This article deals with the pronoun word-class, its definition and the distinction between pronouns and determiners. It first examines the traditional and etymological definition of the pronoun as a word put ‘instead of a noun’, a definition which is hardly appropriate for various reasons, beginning with the fact that only some pronouns can be used anaphorically. A redefinition of the pronoun class is then proposed as a closed class of grammatical nouns that do not take determiners and whose central members are typically used anaphorically or deictically. The third part of the article focuses on the distinction between pronouns and determiners and related issues such as nominal ellipsis. It is argued that determiners are also grammatical nouns, yet that the distinction between determiners and pronouns is motivated and descriptively useful in at least some cases, most particularly with regard to the articles and the personal pronouns.
This article develops foundations for a new typology of nominal expressions. Despite the significant diversity attested in languages around the world, a view traditionally and sometimes still found holds that languages either have ‘classic’, rigidly structured noun phrases (NPs) or lack them. A simple dichotomy, however, does not adequately represent the significant language-internal and crosslinguistic diversity of forms and functions of nominal expressions. While many linguists may not in fact think in such binary terms, a comprehensive typology is still wanting. This article offers foundations towards such a typology, with a particular emphasis on language-internal diversity. This diversity within languages has received little attention in previous studies, even while it reveals much about the actual complexity in the nominal domain. Besides surveying structural types and their motivating factors across as well as within languages from around the world, this article approaches nominal expressions also from a variety of other perspectives to enrich our understanding of them. This includes approaching nominal expressions from the perspective of word class systems as well as diachronically. We round off the article by looking at the impact of orality-literacy dimensions and communicative modes.
Few issues in the history of the language sciences have been an object of as much discussion and controversy as linguistic categories. The eleven articles included in this volume tackle the issue of categories from a wide range of perspectives and with different foci, in the context of the current debate on the nature and methodology of the research on comparative concepts – particularly, the relation between the categories needed to describe languages and those needed to compare languages. While the first six papers deal with general theoretical questions, the following five confront specific issues in the domain of language analysis arising from the application of categories. The volume will appeal to a very broad readership: advanced students and scholars in any field of linguistics, but also specialists in the philosophy of language, and scholars interested in the cognitive aspects of language from different subfields (neurolinguistics, cognitive sciences, psycholinguistics, anthropology).
The paper attempts to reflect on the evolution of the social norm and on linguistic and codification-related changes with regard to feminine personal nouns. The main aim is to posit and reflect on the problem of feminine forms in contemporary Polish on the basis of a critical comparison of opinions on their creation and use formulated by the Polish Language Council, a body issuing opinions and giving advice on the use of the Polish language. The significant differences in positions taken by scientists over the course of just a few years suggest that the issue of feminine forms was and continues to be to a large extent an element of the sociopolitical debate with an ideological, social and emotional tinge, rather than an issue resulting from the actual limitations of the language system.
Abstract: The paper attempts to reflect on the evolution of the social norm and on linguistic and codification-related changes with regard to feminine personal nouns. The main aim is to posit and reflect on the problem of feminine forms in contempo- rary Polish on the basis of a critical comparison of opinions on their creation and use formulated by the Polish Language Council, a body issuing opinions and giving advice on the use of the Polish language. The significant differences in positions taken by sci- entists over the course of just a few years suggest that the issue of feminine forms was and continues to be to a large extent an element of the sociopolitical debate with an ideological, social and emotional tinge, rather than an issue resulting from the actual limitations of the language system.
Keywords: personal nouns, feminine forms, linguistic norm, Polish language, Polish Language Council
The article addresses the relation between the grammatical gender and the linguistic encoding of sex distinction (natural gender). Our goal is to problematize the category of gender as a multipart and multifunctional linguistic phenomenon operating in diverse dimensions of a language. The analysis of Italian and Polish languages illustrates that grammatical gender-whose main function is to signal syntactic relations between text constituents-and natural gender-whose main function is to encode information about the sex of a referent-are in principle autonomous and independent linguistic phenomena which are however strongly interrelated in a linguistic system through a morphological and syntactic interface.
STRESZCZENIE Artykuł podejmuje rozważania na temat relacji między rodzajem gramatycznym a językowym kodowaniem informacji o różnicy płci (rodzaj naturalny). Głównym celem jest sproblematyzowanie kategorii rodzaju (gender) jako wieloaspektowego i wielofunkcyjnego zjawiska językowego. Analiza, opierająca się na przykładach z języka polskiego i włoskiego, pokazuje, iż rodzaj gramatyczny (którego główną funkcją jest sygnalizowanie relacji między elementami tekstu) i rodzaj naturalny (który informuje o płci osoby będącej desygnatem wypowiedzi) to dwa odrębne i niezależne zjawiska językowe, które jednakże są silnie skorelowane na płaszczyźnie morfologicznej i syntaktycznej systemu językowego. SŁOWA KLUCZOWE: rodzaj gramatyczny, rodzaj naturalny, językowe kodowanie informacji o różnicy płci, język włoski, język polski
As an enterprise, linguistic typology is perhaps best understood in terms of the shared ideology of its practitioners. In studying contact‐induced change typologists can begin to understand which features of language are readily acquired or arise through contact. This chapter focuses on recent developments in research on language contact in relation to contemporary thought in linguistic typology. While typology in general is concerned with identifying sets of variables and developing probabilistic theories explaining their distribution, morphological typology relates these goals to the shape, properties, and distribution of morphological systems. The chapter examines some of the ways in an understanding of the diversity of morphological systems can help provide support for contact‐based explanations of linguistic variables. It presents a case study to show that the typological properties of a language may also be changed through contact that leads to loss, rather than augmentation or reorganization.
Previous research has shown that Dutch pronominal gender is in a process of resemanticization: Highly individuated nouns are increasingly referred to with masculine and feminine pronouns, and lowly individuated ones with the neuter pronoun het/’t ‘it’, irrespective of the grammatical gender of the noun (Audring 2009). The process is commonly attributed to the loss of adnominal gender agreement, which is increasingly blurring distinctions between masculine and feminine nouns and, therefore, requires speakers to resort to semantic default strategies (De Vogelaer & De Sutter 2011). Several factors have been identified that influence the choice of semantic vis-à-vis lexical agreement, both linguistic and social. This article seeks to weigh the importance of both structural and social factors in pronominal gender agreement in Belgian Dutch, using the Belgian part of the Spoken Dutch Corpus. A multivariate statistical analysis reveals that most effects are structural, including noun semantics and the syntactic function of the antecedent and the pronoun, as well as the pragmatic status of the antecedent. The most important social factor is speech register. We argue that these effects support a psycholinguistic account in which resemanticization is seen as a change from below, caused by hampered lexical access to noun gender.
This paper takes a well-known observation as its starting point, that is, languages vary with respect to headedness, with the standard head-initial and head-final types well attested. Is there a connection between headedness and the size of a lexical class? Although this question seems quite straightforward, there are formidable methodological and theoretical challenges in addressing it. Building on initial results by several researchers, we refine our methodology and consider the proportion of nouns to simplex verbs (as opposed to light verb constructions) in a varied sample of 33 languages to evaluate the connection between headedness and the size of a lexical class. We demonstrate a robust correlation between this proportion and headedness. While the proportion of nouns in a lexicon is relatively stable, head-final/object-verb (OV)-type languages (e.g., Japanese or Hungarian) have a relatively small number of simplex verbs, whereas head-initial/verb-initial languages (e.g., Irish or Zapotec) have a considerably larger percentage of such verbs. The difference between the head-final and head-initial type is statistically significant. We, then, consider a subset of languages characterized as subject-verb-object (SVO) and show that this group is not uniform. Those SVO languages that have strong head-initial characteristics (as shown by the order of constituents in a set of phrases and word order alternations) are characterized by a relatively large proportion of lexical verbs. SVO languages that have strong head-final traits (e.g., Mandarin Chinese) pattern with head-final languages, and a small subset of SVO languages are genuinely in the middle (e.g., English, Russian). We offer a tentative explanation for this headedness asymmetry, couched in terms of informativity and parsing principles, and discuss additional evidence in support of our account. All told, the fewer simplex verbs in head-final/OV-type languages is an adaptation in response to their particular pattern of headedness. The object-verb/verb-object (OV/VO) difference with respect to noun/verb ratios also reveals itself in SVO languages; some languages, Chinese and Latin among them, show a strongly OV ratio, whereas others, such as Romance or Bantu, are VO-like in their noun/verb ratios. The proportion of nouns to verbs thus emerges as a new linguistic characteristic that is correlated with headedness.
I contributi raccolti nel presente volume delineano lo stato dell’arte delle ricerche di linguistica slava svolte recentemente nell’ambito della slavistica italiana. I saggi sono dedicati a temi di morfologia, sintassi, semantica, lessicologia, pragmatica, sociolinguistica e didattica delle lingue slave, in ottica contrastiva, sincronica o diacronica, secondo quadri teorici e approcci metodologici di scuole e tradizioni diverse. La grande varietà dei temi trattati dagli autori, non solo italiani, è la più viva testimonianza della vivacità e della ricchezza che oggi permeano lo studio delle lingue slave in Italia e non solo.
We present three case studies of the distribution of adjective + head noun (‘adjective’) vs. head noun + noun-genitive (‘genitive’) constructions based on datasets extracted from the Russian National Corpus. Each case study focuses on a different set of non-head referents: case study 1 examines non-heads that are country names (like ‘Norway’ as in norvežskij N vs. N Norvegii), case study 2 looks at non-heads that refer to leaders (like ‘president’ as in prezidentskij N vs. N prezidenta), and the focus of case study 3 is non-heads that are person names (like ‘Petja’ as in Petina N vs. N Peti). Head nouns in all three datasets were annotated for the same set of nine semantic categories representing an Individuation Hierarchy. This hierarchy accounts for only some of the patterns that we see across the case studies. Other patterns can be explained in terms of: ‘uniqueness’, which favors the genitive construction when the head noun is a unique entity; ‘salience’, which favors the genitive construction when the non-head is more salient than the head noun; and ‘obligatoriness’, which favors the genitive construction when the head is a relational noun that presupposes a specific non-head.
Pronouns as a diagnostic feature of language relatedness have been widely explored in historical and comparative linguistics. In this article, we focus on South American pronouns, as a potential example of items with their own history passing between the boundaries of language families, what has been dubbed in the literature as ‘historical markers’. Historical markers are not a direct diagnostic of genealogical relatedness among languages, but account for phenomena beyond the grasp of the historical comparative method. Relatedness between pronoun systems can thus serve as suggestions for closer studies of genealogical relationships. How can we use computational methods to help us with this process? We collected pronouns for 121 South American languages, grouped them into classes and aligned the phonemes within each class (assisted by automatic methods). We then used Bayesian phylogenetic tree inference to model the birth and death of individual phonemes within cognate sets, rather than the typical practice of modelling whole cognate sets. The reliability of the splits found in our analysis was low above the level of language family, and validation on alternative data suggested that the analysis cannot be used to infer general genealogical relatedness among languages. However, many results aligned with existing theories, and the analysis as a whole provided a useful starting point for future analyses of historical relationships between the languages of South America. We show that using automated methods with evolutionary principles can support progress in historical linguistics research.
Large collections of dialect data have been gathered in research projects such
as dialect atlases. This paper evaluates the usability of data from the linguistic
atlas of Bavaria (Bayerischer Sprachatlas) for a new research question: What
is the structure of declension classes, specifically concerning the inventory of
markers and assignment principles? The question is connected to central morphological
theories, which is exemplified by Bybee’s Principle of Relevance as
well as Natural Morphology. An exemplary study of three dialects in neighboring
dialect areas of Northern Bavaria (East Franconian, North Bavarian, and
the transitional zone in between) reveals both parallels and divergences between
the dialects and the standard language regarding the inventory of plural
markers and gender and semantics as assignment criteria. Furthermore, a considerable
number of zero plurals provides a challenge for the principle of relevance
and to the principles of Natural Morphology. In evaluating the data’s
suitability for the research question, we show that they provide a solid basis,
but we also identify some restrictions for in-depth analyses of dialectal declension
classes.
Many languages have an interesting class of nouns, the pluralia tantum, which have restricted number possibilities when, in some sense, they should not. Thus English binoculars has no singular, which is worth noting (that is, it is not predictable). True, there are other nouns denoting items consisting of two significant parts which behave similarly (spectacles, trousers…); indeed they are subject to ‘middle-size generalizations’ (Koenig 1999). But there are two reasons to note such nouns. First there are many English nouns equally denoting items consisting of two significant parts which are unremarkable in this respect: bicycle, bigraph, Bactrian camel, couple, duo… And second, there are languages with number systems roughly comparable to that of English in which the equivalents of binoculars and trousers are normal count nouns: Russian binokl’, French pantalon. While pluralia tantum are of continuing interest, it is typically only the English type which is considered. But these familiar examples offer an entry point to a collection of lexical items, some with much stranger behaviour, lurking between the semi-predictable and the unexpectedly defective. In particular, some instances demonstrate that we cannot maintain the general assumption that the ‘internal’ morphosemantic specification of a paradigm cell and its ‘external’ morphosyntactic requirement are necessarily identical. I therefore set out a full typology of these fascinating nouns, so that their significance can be more fully appreciated. I start from the notion of canonical noun, and calibrate the different non-canonical properties according to a set of orthogonal criteria.
Zusammenfassung
In allen Genussprachen gibt es semantische oder formale Regeln und Regularitäten, nach denen die überwiegende Zahl der Substantive ihr Genus erhält. Für das Deutsche hat Wegener (1995) gezeigt, dass nur fünf Regeln zwei Drittel der Substantive erfassen. Allerdings bleibt bei ihr das Neutrum außen vor. Dass dies aber kein Bereich des Irregulären ist, arbeitet der vorliegende Beitrag heraus. Allein mit formalen Regeln lassen sich 60 % der Neutra eines neueren Frequenzwörterbuchs korrekt voraussagen. Aufgrund der Befunde und unter Berücksichtigung der Semantik des Neutrums werden acht Schritte vorgeschlagen, in denen der DaF-Unterricht für die Regularitäten des Neutrums sensibilisieren kann, um den Genuserwerb der Lerner zu unterstützen.
The increasing diversification of English qua World Englishes contributes to cross-linguistic variation. Still, we tend to consider and model varieties of English from a language-internal perspective. Taking Mair’s (2013) World System of Englishes as a starting point, I here explore how to model World Englishes from a cross-linguistic typological perspective, commenting on the tension between normative pressure and cross-linguistic tendencies and generalizations. Variation studies and language typology investigate micro and macro variation, respectively, though the empirical domains in focus and the methodologies employed show considerable overlap. Moreover, the traditional distinction between language and variety becomes increasingly difficult to draw in today’s multilingual and highly interconnected world. I examine the commonalities and differences of the two approaches to language variation that have largely been working independently of one another focusing on language universals and the ways that grammatical phenomena from World Englishes match up against them. Varieties of English attest a good deal of typological variation, though they also offer curious features rarely found in other languages.
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