Nikolaus P. Himmelmann's research while affiliated with University of Cologne and other places
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Publications (52)
The prosody of Papuan Malay, spoken in the easternmost provinces of Indonesia, is not fully described and understood. The limited work available suggests that phrase prosody in this language is different from other well-studied (West-Germanic) languages. However, not much is known about possible correlates of focus marking, for which prosody is use...
This article argues that the prosodic category stress in West Germanic languages, which implicitly underlies practically all work on stress, is a complex cluster concept consisting of at least six dimensions which in turn involve a number of subdimensions. Because of its complexity, this concept is not useful for cross-linguistic comparison. A prom...
The article investigates the hypothesis that prominence phenomena on different levels of linguistic structure are systematically related to each other. More specifically, it is hypothesized that prominence relations in morphosyntax reflect, and contribute to, prominence management in discourse. This hypothesis is empirically based on the phenomenon...
This study investigates the linguistic expression of bring and take events and more generally of the semantic domain of directed caused accompanied motion (‘directed CAM’) across a sample of eight languages of the Pacific and the Americas. Unlike English, the majority of languages in our sample do not lexicalise directed CAM events by simple verbs,...
This pilot study addresses the question of whether the Uniform Information Density principle (UID) can be proved for eight typologically diverse languages. The lexical information of words is derived from dependency structures both in sentences preceding the sentences and within the sentence in which the target word occurs.
Dependency structures ar...
To clarify the role of prosodic phrasing in the emergence of phrase structure, it is necessary to be clear as to how syntactic phrasing relates to prosodic phrasing. The core proposal here is that a distinction must be made between two basic types of syntactic constructions; namely, syntactic configurations for which prosodic phrasing is part of th...
This paper presents some observations on the syntax and semantics of the Tagalog phrase marking particles ang, ng, and sa. While there is some evidence for the widely held view that the phrase marking particles form a kind of paradigm in that they are at least in partial complementary distribution, they differ significantly in their distributional...
This paper investigates the basic valency orientation and different ways of transitivization in Totoli, a western Austronesian symmetrical-voice language of Indonesia. Totoli can be considered a transitivizing language that makes use of four major valency-increasing strategies: causativization proper, transitive- intransitive alternation within the...
Western Austronesian symmetrical voice languages exhibit at least two basic transitive constructions. This paper investigates what factors influence speakers’ choice of one voice over another in natural spoken discourse. It provides a thorough assessment of all factors that have been proposed to be relevant for voice choice in the literature on sym...
This paper argues that recent proposals to sharply distinguish between language description and comparison are ill-conceived for two reasons. First, comparison is unavoidable and hence an integral part of description. Second, the proposals for a strict separation are based on an unrealistic and anachronistic conception of descriptive categories, as...
Words in utterance-final positions are often pronounced more slowly than utterance-medial words, as previous studies on individual languages have shown. This paper provides a systematic cross-linguistic comparison of relative durations of final and penultimate words in utterances in terms of the degree to which such words are lengthened. The study...
This paper shows how the Rapid Prosody Transcription method (RPT, cp. Cole & Shattuck-Hufnagel, 2016) can be utilized when investigating the prosodic systems of a little-described language. We report the results of a set of perception experiments on the prosody of Papuan Malay, which support the claim made in earlier (production) studies that Malay...
It has frequently been shown that speakers prosodically reduce repeated words in discourse. This phenomenon has been claimed to facilitate speech recognition and to be language universal. In particular, the relationship between the information value of a word in a discourse context and its prosodic prominence have been shown to correlate. However,...
The paper presents aims and results of the project KA³ (Kölner Zentrum Analyse und Archivierung von audiovisual -Daten), in which advanced speech technologies are developed and provided to enhance the process of indexing and analysing speech recordings from the oral history domain and the language sciences. Close cooperation between speech technolo...
This study is concerned with the identifiability of intonational phrase boundaries across familiar and unfamiliar languages. Four annotators segmented a corpus of more than three hours of spontaneous speech into intonational phrases. The corpus included narratives in their native German, but also in three languages of Indonesia unknown to them. The...
The concept of ‘renewal’ is widely used in the literature on morphosyntactic change, but hardly ever theorized. Here we scrutinize the viability of this concept theoretically as well as empirically, revisiting in detail the most frequently cited case of renewal, namely the resemblance between the Latin and French synthetic futures. Phenomena accoun...
It is a well-known fact that across the world’s languages there is a fairly strong asymmetry in the affixation of grammatical material, in that suffixes considerably outnumber prefixes in typological databases. This article argues that prosody, specifically prosodic phrasing, plays an important part in bringing about this asymmetry. Prosodic word a...
This paper proposes an analysis of the system of voice and applicative alternations in Totoli, a language spoken on Sulawesi in Indonesia. This system appears to be unique among Western Malayo-Polynesian languages (at least the ones reasonably well known to date). Its uniqueness is due to a particularly intricate interplay of (symmetrical) voice an...
Depictive secondary predicates such as 'raw' in 'George ate the fish raw' are important for current issues in syntactic and semantic theory, in particular predication theory, phrase structure theories, issues of control and grammatical relations, and verbal aspect. This book approaches depictive secondary predication from a cross-linguistic point o...
This chapter discusses an innovative workshop program which has been developed and piloted to train a new generation of Indonesian linguists. It explores the goals and methods of the program, and the various challenges which participants are facing in their communities. More broadly, the authors examine ways in which contemporary linguistic fieldwo...
Using the Tomini-Tolitoli languages of northern Central Sulawesi as its main example, the paper exemplifies the scenario approach to language endangerment. In this approach, language endangerment is not defined with respect to a list of more or less disparate criteria but rather it is seen as the result of a specific and complex constellation of va...
Language documentation is a rapidly emerging new field in linguistics which is concerned with the methods, tools and theoretical underpinnings for compiling a representative and lasting multipurpose record of a natural language. This volume presents in-depth introductions to major aspects of language documentation, including overviews on fieldwork...
In responding to globally accelerating rate at which linguistic varieties are disappearing, structural linguistics is confronted with a number of challenges for which it is ill-equipped because of limitations in its basic conceptualization of linguistic knowledge. Apart from providing a brief history of the recent promotion of language endangerment...
This article presents some observations on the syntax and semantics of the Tagalog phrase marking particles ang, ng, and sa. While there is some evidence for the widely held view that the phrase marking particles form a kind of paradigm in that they are at least in partial complementary distribution, they differ significantly in their distributiona...
This chapter begins with a critical survey of past classifications of adverbials and secondary predicates. It argues that significant overlaps exist between participant-oriented manner adverbials, depictive secondary predicates, and the so-called weak free adjuncts. Thus, from a cross-linguistic viewpoint, it is essential to use an overarching cate...
Little is known about depictive secondary predicates such as raw in She ate the fish raw in languages other than a few European ones. The goal of this paper is to broaden the database for this grammatical construction by reviewing its recurring formal properties, introducing a crosslinguistically applicable def-inition and delimiting it from other,...
'accidental', 'involuntary', 'potential', 'coincidence', 'momentary', and so on. Although widely neglected in the literature, 2 these formations are of major import to the grammar of many western Austronesian languages, where for all event expressions there is an obligatory choice between a neutral form and a form marked for 'involuntariness', 'pot...
It has been widely assumed that Tagalog allows zero anaphora freely for both actors and undergoers in semantically transitive constructions. The data presented here strongly suggest that this assumption is wrong for actors in one of the two basic construction types: undergoer-oriented constructions. In these constructions, the actor argument does n...
It has been widely assumed that Tagalog allows zero anaphora freely for both actors and undergoers in semantically transitive constructions. The data presented here strongly suggest that this assumption is wrong for actors in one of the two basic transitive construction types: undergoer-oriented constructions. In these constructions, the actor argu...
Much of the work that is labeled 'descriptive' within linguistics comprises two activities, i.e. the collection of primary data and a (low-level) analysis of these data. These are indeed two separate activities as shown by the fact that the methods employed in each activity differ substantially. To date, the field concerned with the first activity...
The use of definite or specific articles in adpositional phrases often differs from that in other syntactic environments such as subject or object position. In the grammars of individual languages this is generally presented as an exception to the rules of article use in that particular language. Cross-linguistically, however, such "irregularities"...
Baucau. 1
1. Some preliminary divisions and definitions When discussing typological characteristics of a genetically coherent group of languages, there are two points of view, an external and an internal one. Externally, the focus is on such features which characterize the group as a whole vis à vis other language families or linguistic areas. Internally, th...
This contribution explores the potentials of combining corpora of language use data with language description in e-grammars (or digital grammars). We present three di-rections of ongoing research and discuss the advantages of combining these and similar approaches, arguing that the technological possibilities have barely begun to be ex-plored.
This paper presents a new definition of documentary linguistics, based on a typology of linguistic data types. It clarifies the distinction between raw, primary, and structural data and argues that documentary linguistics is concerned with raw and primary data and their interrelationships, while descriptive linguistics is concerned with the relatio...
Language documentation involves linguistic analysis of the collected material, which is typically done manually. Automatic methods for language processing usually require large corpora. The method presented in this paper uses techniques from bioinformatics and contextual information to morphologically analyze raw text corpora. This paper presents i...
The paper addresses problems of corpus building and retrieval resulting from code-switching, which is a characteristic feature of endangered language recordings. The typical appearance of code-switching phenomena is first outlined on the basis of data collected in the DoBeS 'ECLinG' project, which dealt with three endangered Caucasian languages spo...
Citations
... In languages such as Japanese (Kita, 1997) and Basque (Ibarretxe-Antuñano, 2004), Manner is encoded in ideophones. Languages have diverse lexicalization patterns, even among closely related languages (Margetts, 2022). They studied the motionrelated expressions with bring and take using a corpus of eight endangered languages in the Americas and the Paci c regions. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/273717678833665-1442270788563_Q64/Claudia-Wegener-2.jpg)
... (1) a. [hãndã=k'ɔ̀=hí=jó] (1pst)ver=1e=pl=dempl 'Los vimos a esos.' Este artículo propone que la distribución de los morfemas clíticos está correlacionada con la configuración de la frase prosódica (Selkirk, 1984;Nespor y Vogel, 1986;DuBois et al., 1992;Ladd, 2008;Himmelmann et al., 2018;Himmelmann, 2022, entre otros), y que los sentidos codificados por estos morfemas están dentro del grupo de operadores (Van Valin y LaPolla, 1997;Van Valin, 2005). La cláusula puede estar distribuida en una o más frases prosódicas. ...
... We examine and justify the underpinnings of a proposed typology, and relate them to the underlying attributes of the domain (Round & Corbett 2020). In doing so, we take on board advances in related typological disciplines, demonstrating that linguistics is normal (social) science (Spike 2020, Himmelmann 2022. Since doubts were first expressed about the nature of semantic agreement, it has taken many years to offer a way forward: new data, some "less semantic" than semantic agreement, and some "more semantic", have been key. ...
... English showing the strongest effect among nine other languages (Seifart et al., 2021). Taken together, the study by Ueyama (1996) suggests that Japanese learners of English show smaller degrees of phrase-final lengthening than native English speakers by the merging of higher-and lower-level prosodic constituents and/or the transfer of language-specific lengthening strength. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/272452592861186-1441969168163_Q64/Jan-Strunk.jpg)
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... 1 As Ladd and Arvaniti (2023) discuss, a purely general definition of prominence can be disadvantageous in that it does not facilitate discussion of variation across languages in how prominence is produced and perceived (e.g., Riesberg, Kalbertodt, Baumann, & Himmelmann, 2020). ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/345963844653057-1459495616985_Q64/Stefan-Baumann-5.jpg)
... Neurophysiologically, a pattern emerged with all participants exhibiting left-lateralized negativity toward number violations, highlighting the easier distinction between number and person violations. Both groups perceived patient-subject predicates as more challenging to process than agent-subject predicates, aligning with the agent-first hypothesis [15], whereby patient-subject sentences incur greater processing costs due to initial assumptions about sentence-initial non-marked animate arguments being agents. However, in the 300-500 ms window, L1 Spanish dominant native speakers displayed heightened sensitivity to distinctions between patient and agent subject predicates compared to Basque-Spanish bilinguals, the latter showing smaller effects with subject-verb agreement violations, likely due to reliance on case morphology present in their L1, Basque, but absent in Spanish. ...
... Two natural language processing (NLP) techniques (topic modeling and sentiment analysis) were applied to the collected interview transcriptions containing a significant amount of textual data (over 50,000 words) to reveal important latent information that was not able to be captured during the interview. NLP techniques have been increasingly used as a quantitative method to derive meaningful insights such as keywords [29], topics [30], and sentiment [31] from a set of textual data (e.g., transcripts) obtained from the interview. Previous studies have demonstrated the efficacy and potential of applying NLP techniques, addressing limitations (e.g., time-consuming, subjective, and error-prone) that reside in qualitative approaches such as interviews and surveys. ...
![[object Object]](https://i1.rgstatic.net/ii/profile.image/277736414302226-1443228929919_Q64/Joachim-Koehler.jpg)
... McEnery & Ostler 2000;Scannell 2007;Mosel 2014), problematized (cf. Johnson 2004Cox 2011;Jung & Himmelmann 2011;Vinogradov 2016), and evaluated (cf. Thieberger et al. 2015;Thieberger 2016), the field has a long way to go in understanding what a corpus is and is not. ...
Reference: Reflections on Documentary Corpora
... Same as true with the language as it is the mirror of our culture. As Mosel (2006) said that one of the important needs of humans is the desire to preserve the memory of the most meaningful achievements of their lives and to pass on the knowledge about their times, cultures, and civilizations to the next generations. Volume 4 (2) 2023, 373-384 E-ISSN 2723-6919, P-ISSN 2746 Tagabawa Language Vitality, in a study of Hall, W., Lobel J., and Zorc, D. (2019) about Philippine languages and their subfamilies, they considered Tagabawa as a Language, a subfamily of Manobo. ...
Reference: “Gemo Ni”: A Grammar Note on Tagabawa Verbs
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... The limited F0 data available for Papuan Malay do not necessarily shed light on this issue. A recent study (Kaland and Himmelmann, 2019) investigated the extent to which repeated words in discourse were prosodically reduced. Although duration showed the expected reduction effects, F0 was unexpectedly higher in second mentions than in first mentions. ...
