BOOK OF ABSTRACTS
49th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea
31 August – 3 September 2016
University of Naples Federico II, Naples (Italy)
SOCIETAS LINGUISTICA EUROPAEA President: Martin Haspelmath (MPI-SHH Jena) VicePresident: Marianne Mithun (California) President-Elect: Martin Hilpert (Neuchâtel)
Secretary/Treasurer: Dik Bakker (Amsterdam) Editor FL: Hubert Cuyckens (Leuven) Editor FLH:
Muriel Norde (Humboldt- Berlin) Conference Manager: Ana Díaz-Negrillo (Granada)
ORGANISING COMMITTEE Chair: Michela Cennamo (Naples Federico II) Members: Amelia
Bandini (Naples Federico II), Giorgio Banti (Naples L'Orientale), Giancarmine Bongo (Naples Federico
II), Paolo Donadio (Naples Federico II), Francesca Dovetto (Naples Federico II), Claudia Fabrizio
(University of Chieti-Pescara), Livio Gaeta (Turin), Patrizia Giuliano (Naples Federico II), Simona
Leonardi (Naples Federico II), Silvia Luraghi (Pavia), Emma Milano (Naples Federico II), Laura
Minervini (Naples Federico II), Salvatore Musto (Naples Federico II), Daniela Puolato (Naples Federico
II), Rosanna Sornicola (Naples Federico II) SLE Conference Manager: Ana Díaz-Negrillo (Granada)
SLE Conference Assistant: Eva Gómez-Jiménez (Jaén) Treasurer: Dik Bakker (Amsterdam)
SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE Chair of the General Session: Maria Josep Cuenca (Valencia) Chair
of Workshops: Bert Cornillie (Leuven) Members: Werner Abraham (Wien/München), Karin Aijmer
(Gothenburg), Laura Alba-Juez (UNED Madrid), Azeb Amha (Leiden), Peter Arkadiev (Moscow),
Behrooz Mahmoodi Baktiari (Tehran), Nicolas Ballier (Paris 7/Diderot), Jóhanna Barðdal (Bergen),
Valeria A. Belloro (Querétaro), Paola Benincà (Padua), Marcela Bertuccelli (Pisa), Ronny Boogaart
(Leiden), Kasper Boye (Copenhagen), Wayles Browne (Cornell), Anne Carlier (Lille), Carole Chaski
(Institute for Linguistic Evidence), Michela Cennamo (Naples), Denis Creissels (Lyon), Concepción
Company (Mexico), Mily Crevels (Leiden), Hubert Cuyckens (Leuven), Kristin Davidse (Leuven), Stuart
Davis (Indiana), Philippe De Brabanter (Paris), Walter De Mulder (Antwerp), Nicole Delbecque
(Leuven), Pierpaolo Di Carlo (Florence), Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk (Poznań), Andrés EnriqueArias (Illes Balears), Victoria Escandell-Vidal (UNED Madrid), Małgorzata Fabiszak (Poznań), Claudia
Fabrizio (Chieti-Pescara), Teresa Fanego (Santiago de Compostela), Kazuhiko Fukushima (Kansai
Gaidai), Livio Gaeta (Turin), Antonio García Gómez (Alcalá), María del Pilar García Mayo (Basque
Country), Francesco Gardani (Vienna), Spike Gildea (Oregon), Alessandra Giorgi (Venice), María de los
Ángeles Gómez González (Santiago de Compostela), Francisco Gonzálvez (Almería), Stefan Th. Gries
(UCSB), Kleanthes K. Grohmann (Cyprus), Eitan Grossman (Jerusalem), Salomé Gutiérrez (CIESAS),
Eva Hajičová (Prague), Björn Hansen (Regensburg), Martin Hilpert (Neuchâtel), Hans Henrich Hock
(Urbana-Champaign), Elly Ifantidou (Athens), Johannes Kabatek (Zürich), Gunther Kaltenböck (Wien),
Simin Karimi (Arizona), Olga Kepinska (Leiden), Mikhail Kissine (Bruxelles), Seppo Kittilä (Helsinki),
Hannes Kniffka (Bonn), Martin Kohlberger (Leiden), Björn Köhnlein (Leiden), László Komlósi (Pécs),
Bernd Kortmann (Freiburg), Lívia Körtvélyessy (Kosiče), Gitte Kristiansen (Complutense Madrid),
Martin Kümmel (Jena), Karen Lahousse (Leuven), Lior Laks (Bar-Ilan), Meri Larjavaara (Turku – Åbo),
Pierre Larrivée (Caen), David Lasagabaster (Vitoria), Nikolaos Lavidas (Thessaloniki), María Luisa
Lecumberri (Vitoria), Elisabeth Leiss (Munchën), María Rosa Lloret (Barcelona), María José López
Couso (Santiago de Compostela), Nobuo Ignacio Lopez-Sako (Granada), Lucía Loureiro-Porto (Balearic
Islands), Andrej Malchukov (Mainz), Theodore Markopoulos (Patras), Francesca Masini (Bologna),
Belén Méndez-Naya (Santiago de Compostela), Helle Metslang (Tartu), Amina Mettouchi (Paris),
Katarzyna Miechowicz-Mathiasen (Poznań), Laura Minervini (Naples Federico II), Edith Moravcsik
(Wisconsin), Henrik Høeg Müller (Copenhagen), Nicola Munaro (Venice), Pieter Muysken (Nijmegen),
Akiko Nagano (Tohoku), Nicole Nau (Poznań), Jan Nuyts (Antwerp), Miren Lourdes Oñederra (Vitoria),
Carita Paradis (Lund), Paola Pietrandrea (Roma III), José Pinto de Lima (Lisbon), Vladimir Plungjan
(Moscow), Lola Pons Rodríguez (Sevilla), Chris Reintges (Paris-Diderot), Eric Reuland (Utrecht),
Nikolaus Ritt (Vienna), Anna Roussou (Patras), Francisco Ruiz de Mendoza (Logroño), Cinzia Russi
(Austin), Andrea Sansò (Insubria), Stephan Schmid (Zürich), Elena Seoane-Posse (Vigo), Petra Sleeman
(Amsterdam), Elena Smirnova (Hannover), John Charles Smith (Oxford), Augusto Soares da Silva
(Braga), Andrew Spencer (Essex), Dejan Stosic (Toulouse 2), Cristina Suárez-Gómez (Illes Balears),
Jarmila Tárnyiková (Olomouc), Villy Tsakona (Democritus U. of Thrace), Catherine Travis (Canberra),
Salvador Valera (Granada), Dorien Van De Mieroop (Leuven), Johan van der Auwera (Antwerp), Elly
Van Gelderen (Arizona), Henk van Riemsdijk (Tilburg), Guido Vanden Wyngaerd (Brussels), Arie
Verhagen (Leiden), Jean-Christophe Verstraete (Leuven), Letizia Vezzosi (Perugia), Nigel Vincent
(Manchester), Jacqueline Visconti (Genova), Ferdinand von Mengden (Berlin), Søren Wichmann
(Leipzig), Bartosz Wiland (Poznań), Dominique Willems (Ghent), Alena Witzlack-Makarevich (Zürich),
Magdalena Wrembel (Poznań), Fernando Zúñiga (Bern), Paulina Zydorowicz (Poznań).
SLE 2016 BOOK OF ABSTRACTS EDITOR Eva María Gómez-Jiménez (Jaén)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PLENARY LECTURES ........................................................................... 13
Martin Haspelmath .....................................................................................................3
Delia Bentley ..............................................................................................................4
Marc van Oostendorp .................................................................................................7
Durk Gorter ................................................................................................................9
Suzanne Romaine .....................................................................................................11
Antonella Sorace ......................................................................................................13
GENERAL SESSION ............................................................................... 15
Carlos Acuña-Fariña ................................................................................................17
Evangelia Adamou ...................................................................................................18
Anna Alexandrova....................................................................................................20
Angela Almela Sanchez-Lafuente ............................................................................24
Cormac Anderson .....................................................................................................25
Daniele Baglioni .......................................................................................................27
Anna Bartra-Kaufmann ............................................................................................28
Aicha Belkadi ...........................................................................................................30
Simone Bettega ........................................................................................................32
Dagmar Bittner and Jeruen E. Dery .........................................................................34
Anna Bondaruk, Bożena Rozwadowska and Wojciech Witkowski ........................35
Cristiano Broccias ....................................................................................................37
Benjamin Brosig.......................................................................................................39
Maria Bylin ..............................................................................................................41
Basilio Calderone, Franck Sajous and Nabil Hathout ..............................................43
Daniéla Capin and Pierre Larrivée ...........................................................................45
Esperança Cardeira and Roxana Ciolăneanu ...........................................................47
Carole E. Chaski .......................................................................................................49
Michael Chiou ..........................................................................................................50
Eleanor Coghill ........................................................................................................52
Laura Collu ...............................................................................................................53
Bert Cornillie ............................................................................................................55
David Correia Saavedra ...........................................................................................57
Blanca Croitor ..........................................................................................................58
Sonja Dahlgren .........................................................................................................60
Nina Dobrushina, Michael Daniel and Ruprecht von Waldenfels ...........................61
Shadi Davari and Mehrdad Naghzguy-Kohan .........................................................63
Stefano De Pascale, Stefania Marzo and Dirk Speelman.........................................64
Merlijn De Smit and Silvia Luraghi .........................................................................65
Astrid De Wit, Frank Brisard and Michael Meeuwis ..............................................67
Éva Dékány and Orsolya Tánczos ...........................................................................68
Scott DeLancey ........................................................................................................70
Francesca Di Garbo ..................................................................................................72
Martin Drápela .........................................................................................................73
Bridget Drinka ..........................................................................................................75
Claudia Fabrizio .......................................................................................................77
Abdelkader Fassi Fehri.............................................................................................81
Chiara Fedriani and Maria Napoli ............................................................................84
Gertraud Fenk-Oczlon ..............................................................................................85
Beatriz Fernández .....................................................................................................87
Guro Fløgstad ...........................................................................................................89
Diana Forker and Geoffrey Haig ..............................................................................91
Kazuhiko Fukushima................................................................................................92
Livio Gaeta ...............................................................................................................94
Fabio Gasparini ........................................................................................................95
Lena Gialabouki and Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou ...................................................97
Alessandra Giorgi .....................................................................................................98
Ion Giurgea .............................................................................................................100
Michał Głuszkowski...............................................................................................103
Henri-Joseph Goelen and Jan Nuyts ......................................................................105
María de los Ángeles Gómez González .................................................................106
Caterina Guardamagna ...........................................................................................108
Victoria Guillén-Nieto............................................................................................109
Foong Ha Yap and Anindita Sahoo........................................................................110
Eva Hajičová ..........................................................................................................113
Rivka Halevy ..........................................................................................................114
Camiel Hamans ......................................................................................................116
Björn Hansen ..........................................................................................................118
Peter Harder, Violaine Michel Lange and Maria Messerschmidt ..........................120
Stefan Hartmann .....................................................................................................122
Steffen Haurholm-Larsen and Tammy Stark .........................................................124
Paul Heggarty and Cormac Anderson ....................................................................125
Steffen Heidinger ...................................................................................................127
Charlotte Hemmings ..............................................................................................129
Tiit Hennoste, Helle Metslang and Külli Habicht ..................................................131
Martin Hilpert and David Correia Saavedra ..........................................................132
Henrik Høeg Müller ...............................................................................................134
Klaus Hofmann and Andreas Baumann .................................................................135
Ingunn Hreinberg Indriðadóttir and Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson .................................137
Xiaoshi Hu..............................................................................................................138
Yujing Huang .........................................................................................................140
Marianne Hundt and Rahel Oppliger .....................................................................141
Tuomas Huumo ......................................................................................................143
Britta Irslinger ........................................................................................................144
Johannes Kabatek ...................................................................................................146
Danny Kalev ...........................................................................................................147
Monica Karlsson ....................................................................................................149
Lena Karssenberg and Daniela Guglielmo.............................................................150
Dziubalska-Kołaczyk Katarzyna, Grzegorz Krynicki, Jarosław Weckwerth,
Grzegorz Michalski, Kamil Kaźmierski, Barbara Maciejewska and Bożena
Wiskirska-Woźnica ................................................................................................152
Seppo Kittilä...........................................................................................................155
Hannes Kniffka ......................................................................................................156
Ana Kondic ............................................................................................................157
Kristina Kotcheva ...................................................................................................159
Ana Krajinović .......................................................................................................161
Gitte Kristiansen and Dirk Geeraerts .....................................................................163
Małgorzata Krzek ...................................................................................................163
Milena Kuehnast, Victoria Bartlitz, Dagmar Bittner and Thomas Roeper ............165
Abhishek Kumar Kashyap and Foong Ha Yap ......................................................166
Karen Lahousse and Lena Karssenberg .................................................................168
Nedžad Leko, Nermina Čordalija, Ivana Jovović, Lidija Perković, Nevenka
Marijanović, Midhat Šaljić, Dženana Telelagić and Amra Bešić ..........................170
Alexander Letuchiy ................................................................................................171
Wojciech Lewandowski .........................................................................................173
Dong-yi Lin ............................................................................................................175
Lucía Loureiro-Porto ..............................................................................................176
Javier Martín Arista ................................................................................................178
Jessica Mathie ........................................................................................................180
Dejan Matić ............................................................................................................182
Simone Mattiola .....................................................................................................184
Jekaterina Mažara, Sabine Stoll and Jean-Pascal Pfister .......................................186
Lidia Federica Mazzitelli .......................................................................................189
Robin Meyer ...........................................................................................................191
Roland Mühlenbernd and Dankmar Enke ..............................................................193
Mehrdad Naghzguy-Kohan and Shadi Davari .......................................................195
Koichiro Nakamura ................................................................................................196
Jakob Neels and Stefan Hartmann .........................................................................198
Peter Juul Nielsen ...................................................................................................200
Chiyo Nishida .........................................................................................................202
Paloma Núñez-Pertejo ............................................................................................203
Jeremiah Anene Nwankwegu .................................................................................205
Gareth O’Neill ........................................................................................................206
Pavel Ozerov ..........................................................................................................207
Sara Pacchiarotti .....................................................................................................209
Soyoon Park ...........................................................................................................211
Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou ....................................................................................212
Peter Petré ..............................................................................................................214
Dirk Pijpops and Dirk Speelman ............................................................................215
Serhiy Potapenko....................................................................................................217
Ulriikka Puura and Outi Tanczos ...........................................................................219
Fariba Ramezani Sarbandi, Giti Taki and Pakzad Yousefian ................................220
Béatrice Rea ...........................................................................................................221
Maria Reile, Nele Põldver and Kristiina Averin ....................................................223
Josep Ribera ...........................................................................................................224
Michael Rießler and Rogier Blokland ....................................................................225
Stéphane Robert .....................................................................................................228
Paula Rodríguez Abruñeiras...................................................................................230
Jorge Emilio Rosés Labrada ...................................................................................231
Anna Ruskan ..........................................................................................................233
Valentina Russo......................................................................................................235
John M. Ryan .........................................................................................................237
Jonah Rys ...............................................................................................................239
Janne Saarikivi .......................................................................................................240
Vieri Samek-Lodovici ............................................................................................241
Erika Sandman .......................................................................................................243
Marion Schulte .......................................................................................................245
Kerstin Schwabe .....................................................................................................246
Frank Seifart ...........................................................................................................247
Guido Seiler............................................................................................................249
Andreu Sentí ...........................................................................................................253
Pieter Seuren ..........................................................................................................255
Masaharu Shimada and Akiko Nagano ..................................................................256
Sigríður S. Sigurðardóttir and Thórhallur Eythórsson ...........................................258
Elena Siminiciuc ....................................................................................................260
John Charles Smith.................................................................................................262
Florian Sommer and Paul Widmer .........................................................................264
Marie Steffens ........................................................................................................266
Dieter Stein, Victoria Guillén Nieto, Angela Almela Sanchez-Lafuente and Carole
E. Chaski ................................................................................................................268
Sabine Stoll and Jekaterina Mazara .......................................................................269
Thomas Stolz and Nataliya Levkovych .................................................................270
Natalia Stoynova ....................................................................................................271
Hiroko Takanashi ...................................................................................................273
Jarmila Tárnyiková .................................................................................................275
Stefan Thim ............................................................................................................276
Beata Trawiński......................................................................................................278
Ewa Trutkowski .....................................................................................................279
Justina Urbonaitė and Inesa Šeškauskienė .............................................................280
Aina Urdze .............................................................................................................282
Hans van Halteren ..................................................................................................284
L. W. van Gils and C. H. M. Kroon .......................................................................285
Rik van Gijn ...........................................................................................................286
Koen Van Hooste ...................................................................................................288
Wout Van Praet, Kristin Davidse and Lieven Vandelanotte ..................................290
Bram Vertommen ...................................................................................................291
Olga Vinogradova and Egor Kashkin ....................................................................293
Carl Vogel ..............................................................................................................295
Ruprecht von Waldenfels and Bernhard Wälchli ...................................................297
Magdalena Wrembel and Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk ..................................298
Yuko Yoshinari, Fabiana Andreani and Miho Mano .............................................300
Eva Zehentner ........................................................................................................301
POSTER PRESENTATIONS ................................................................ 304
Xavier Bach ............................................................................................................305
Lucie Barque, Pauline Haas, Richard Huyghe and Delphine Tribout ...................306
Andreas Baumann, Christina Prömer and Nikolaus Ritt........................................308
Laura Becker ..........................................................................................................310
Olga Broniś ............................................................................................................311
Gerd Carling and Chundra Cathcart .......................................................................313
Danniel Carvalho....................................................................................................315
Fernanda Cerqueira and Danniel Carvalho ............................................................317
Jan Chromý, Štěpán Matějka and Jakub Dotlačil ..................................................319
Irantzu Epelde and Oroitz Jauregi ..........................................................................320
Aoife Finn ..............................................................................................................322
Bernard Fradin........................................................................................................324
Dmitry Gerasimov ..................................................................................................325
Sampsa Holopainen ................................................................................................329
Anna Inbar ..............................................................................................................330
Klára Jágrová, Irina Stenger, Tania Avgustinova and Roland Marti .....................332
Rosangela Lai .........................................................................................................334
Yuda Lai .................................................................................................................336
James Myers ...........................................................................................................337
Yunju Nam .............................................................................................................339
Johanna Nichols .....................................................................................................340
Sofia Oskolskaya ....................................................................................................342
Andrea Padovan, Alessandra Tomaselli, Ermenegildo Bidese and Ricardo Etxepare
................................................................................................................................343
Marie-Caroline Pons ..............................................................................................345
Christina Prömer ....................................................................................................346
Andra Rumm and Tiit Hennoste ............................................................................348
Maria Sidorova .......................................................................................................350
Luigi Talamo ..........................................................................................................352
Arseniy Vydrin .......................................................................................................354
Aigul Zakirova .......................................................................................................355
WORKSHOP PRESENTATIONS ........................................................ 357
Ad-hoc categories and their linguistic construction. Typology, diachrony and use......... 359
Mira Ariel ...............................................................................................................361
Alessandra Barotto .................................................................................................363
Valentina Benigni ...................................................................................................364
Pierre Chauveau-Thoumelin ..................................................................................366
Michael Daniel .......................................................................................................368
Ilaria Fiorentini and Eugenio Goria .......................................................................369
Ulrich Geupel and Guglielmo Inglese ....................................................................370
Itai Kuperschmidt ...................................................................................................372
Maria Cristina Lo Baido .........................................................................................373
Wiltrud Mihatsch....................................................................................................375
Emanuele Miola .....................................................................................................377
Muriel Norde ..........................................................................................................378
Carla Umbach .........................................................................................................380
Johan van der Auwera ............................................................................................381
Compounding and derivation: Interactions in structure and interpretation ................... 383
Paolo Acquaviva (keynote speaker) .......................................................................386
Ana-Maria Barbu....................................................................................................388
Wolfgang U. Dressler, Katharina Korecky-Kröll, Sabine Sommer-Lolei, Reili
Argus, Ineta Dabašinskiene, Johanna Johansen Ijäs, Victoria V. Kazakovskaya,
Klaus Laalo and Evangelia Thomadaki .................................................................389
Urtzi Etxeberria, Aritz Irurtzun and Ricardo Etxepare ..........................................391
Gianina Iordăchioaia, Artemis Alexiadou, and Andreas Pairamidis .....................393
Andrew McIntyre ...................................................................................................394
Chiara Naccarato ....................................................................................................396
Åshild Næss............................................................................................................398
Niina Ning Zhang ...................................................................................................399
Vitor Nóbrega and Phoevos Panagiotidis...............................................................401
Susan Olsen (keynote speaker) ..............................................................................403
Steve Pepper ...........................................................................................................404
Angela Ralli............................................................................................................406
Barbara Schlücker ..................................................................................................407
Diachronic and functional explanations in linguistic typology ............................................. 409
Balthasar Bickel and Damián E. Blasi ...................................................................411
Damián E. Blasi......................................................................................................412
Hilary Chappell and Denis Creissels ......................................................................413
Sonia Cristofaro......................................................................................................415
Michael Cysouw .....................................................................................................417
Barbara Egedi .........................................................................................................417
Olga Fischer ...........................................................................................................419
Eitan Grossman ......................................................................................................420
Borja Herce Calleja ................................................................................................423
Eugen Hill ..............................................................................................................424
Jessica Katiuscia Ivani ...........................................................................................426
Jan Křivan, Michal Láznička and Eva Lehečková .................................................428
Natalia Levshina .....................................................................................................430
Susanne Maria Michaelis and Martin Haspelmath ................................................432
Karsten Schmidtke-Bode........................................................................................433
Ilja Serzant..............................................................................................................434
Anita Slonimska and Sean G. Roberts ...................................................................436
Annemarie Verkerk and Andreea Calude ..............................................................438
Vasilisa Verkhodanova and Natalia Kuznetsova ...................................................439
Paul Widmer, Manuel Widmer, Sandra Auderset, Johanna Nichols and Balthasar
Bickel .....................................................................................................................440
Diachronic treebanks..................................................................................................................... 442
Ulrike Demske and Marianna Patak.......................................................................443
Hanne Martine Eckhoff ..........................................................................................445
Christine Grillborzer ..............................................................................................446
Dag Trygve Truslew Haug and Nikolaos Lavidas .................................................448
Guglielmo Inglese ..................................................................................................449
Timo Korkiakangas ................................................................................................450
Silvia Luraghi and Edoardo Maria Ponti................................................................451
Francesco Mambrini ...............................................................................................453
Erica Pinelli and Christine Grillborzer ...................................................................454
Eleonora Sausa, Chiara Zanchi and Francesco Mambrini .....................................456
Alexandra Simonenko, Benoit Crabbé and Sophie Prévost ...................................457
Dmitri Sitchinava ...................................................................................................459
Ann Taylor and Susan Pintzuk ...............................................................................460
Uliana Yazhinova and Radomyra Shevchenko ......................................................462
Emergence and evolution of complex adpositions in European languages ....................... 465
Christophe Béchet ..................................................................................................468
Benjamin Fagard, Dejan Stosic and Alexandru Mardale .......................................470
Vittorio Ganfi and Valentina Piunno .....................................................................471
Riho Grünthal .........................................................................................................474
Veronika Hegedűs and Éva Dékány.......................................................................475
Anni Jürine .............................................................................................................476
Karolina Krawczak .................................................................................................479
Christian Lehmann .................................................................................................480
José Pinto de Lima and Elena Smirnova ................................................................482
Rodrigo Romero Méndez and Varinia Estrada García...........................................484
Elena Smirnova ......................................................................................................485
Katerina Stathi ........................................................................................................486
Formal approaches to Romance microvariation .................................................................... 488
Heather Burnett ......................................................................................................489
Jan Casalicchio and Federica Cognola ...................................................................491
Alice Corr ...............................................................................................................492
Silvio Cruschina .....................................................................................................494
Adina Dragomirescu and Alexandru Nicolae ........................................................497
Anna Pineda ...........................................................................................................499
Silvia Rossi and Jacopo Garzonio ..........................................................................500
Francesc Torres-Tamarit and Clàudia Pons-Moll ..................................................502
Sam Wolfe ..............................................................................................................503
Language contact in the territory of the former Soviet Union ............................................. 506
Nino Amiridze ........................................................................................................507
Erika Asztalos ........................................................................................................509
Svetlana Edygarova ................................................................................................512
Kapitolina Fedorova ...............................................................................................513
Evgeny Golovko .....................................................................................................515
Katalin Gugán, Piibi-Kai and Anne Tamm ............................................................516
Boglárka Janurik and Zsófia Schön .......................................................................517
Egor Kashkin and Nikita Muraviev .......................................................................519
Olga Kazakevich ....................................................................................................521
Kirill Kozhanov ......................................................................................................522
Niko Partanen .........................................................................................................524
Elena Perekhvalskaya .............................................................................................525
Alexander Rusakov ................................................................................................527
Andrey Shluinsky and Olesya Khanina .................................................................528
Eugénie Stapert ......................................................................................................529
Denys Teptiuk ........................................................................................................531
Evgenia Zhivotova .................................................................................................532
Light verb constructions as complex verbs. Features, typology and function .................. 535
Noemi De Pascale ..................................................................................................538
Marcos García Salido .............................................................................................539
Lars Hellan .............................................................................................................541
Gh. Karimi-Doostan and Mahdiyeh Eshaghi .........................................................542
Václava Kettnerová ................................................................................................544
Lu Lu ......................................................................................................................546
Jakob Maché...........................................................................................................547
Roberta Mastrofini .................................................................................................549
Johanna Mattissen ..................................................................................................550
Daria Mishchenko ..................................................................................................551
Tonjes Veenstra ......................................................................................................552
Middle and Early New Indo-Aryan: A crucial period for linguistic development? ........ 555
Ashwini Deo, Christin Schätzle and Miriam Butt..................................................558
Andrea Drocco .......................................................................................................558
Hans Henrich Hock ................................................................................................560
Khokhlova Liudmila and Zakharyin Boris.............................................................561
Paolo Milizia ..........................................................................................................564
Annie Montaut........................................................................................................566
Mayya Shlyakhter and Leonid Kulikov .................................................................569
Krzysztof Stroński ..................................................................................................570
Joanna Tokaj ..........................................................................................................572
Saartje Verbeke ......................................................................................................574
Negation at the syntax, semantics and pragmatics interfaces: Theoretical, empirical and
experimental approaches.............................................................................................................. 576
Elena Albu ..............................................................................................................577
Joanna Blochowiak ................................................................................................578
Bert Cappelle, Anne Carlier, Benjamin Fagard and Machteld Meulleman ...........580
Louis de Saussure and Thierry Raeber ...................................................................582
Teresa Espinal, Susagna Tubau, Joan Borràs-Comes and Viviane Déprez ...........583
Gaëtanelle Gilquin and Marie-Aude Lefer.............................................................584
Pierre Larrivée ........................................................................................................586
Karoliina Lohiniva .................................................................................................587
Amina Mettouchi....................................................................................................589
Jacques Moeschler..................................................................................................591
Maria Molina ..........................................................................................................593
Genoveva Puskas....................................................................................................595
Emilio Servidio, Giuliano Bocci and Valentina Bianchi .......................................597
Elisabeth Stark........................................................................................................599
Debra Ziegeler ........................................................................................................602
Notions of 'feature' in linguistic theory: Cross-theoretical and cross-linguistic perspectives
............................................................................................................................................................ 604
Dorothee Beermann................................................................................................606
Theresa Biberauer ..................................................................................................609
Walter Bisang .........................................................................................................610
Michela Cennamo ..................................................................................................612
Greville G. Corbett and Oliver Bond .....................................................................613
Chiara Gianollo ......................................................................................................614
Sean Gleason ..........................................................................................................616
Andrej Malchukov..................................................................................................617
Wataru Nakamura ..................................................................................................619
Tabea Reiner ..........................................................................................................621
Ian Roberts and Theresa Biberauer ........................................................................623
Federico Silvagni....................................................................................................624
Sandhya Sundaresan ...............................................................................................627
Akira Watanabe ......................................................................................................629
Susanne Wurmbrand ..............................................................................................631
Paradigms in word-formation: New perspectives on data description and modeling .... 633
Marco Angster and Livio Gaeta .............................................................................635
Olivier Bonami and Jana Strnadová .......................................................................637
Georgette Dal and Stéphanie Lignon .....................................................................638
Serena Dal Maso and Hélène Giraudo ...................................................................640
Antje Dammel and Luise Kempf ...........................................................................642
Alain Kihm .............................................................................................................644
Lior Laks ................................................................................................................645
Marine Lasserre and Fabio Montermini .................................................................647
Perspective-indexing constructions: Irregular perspective shifts and perspective
persistence ........................................................................................................................................ 649
Henrik Bergqvist ....................................................................................................652
Martine Bruil ..........................................................................................................654
Linda Konnerth ......................................................................................................656
Tatiana Nikitina ......................................................................................................658
Sergeiy Sandler and Esther Pascual .......................................................................659
Aung Si and Stef Spronck ......................................................................................661
An van Linden ........................................................................................................662
Lieven Vandelanotte ..............................................................................................664
Max van Duijn and Arie Verhagen ........................................................................666
Manuel Widmer and Marius Zemp ........................................................................667
Toshiko Yamaguchi ...............................................................................................669
Sonja Zeman ...........................................................................................................671
Marius Zemp ..........................................................................................................672
Propositions vs. states-of-affairs .................................................................................................. 675
Marta Carretero ......................................................................................................678
Kristin Davidse and An Van linden .......................................................................679
Scott Grimm and Louise McNally .........................................................................681
Axel Holvoet ..........................................................................................................683
Horie Kaoru ............................................................................................................685
Birsel Karakoç and Annette Herkenrath ................................................................687
Marie-Louise Lind Sørensen and Kasper Boye .....................................................688
Jackie Nordström....................................................................................................690
Natalia Serdobolskaya ............................................................................................691
Stef Spronck ...........................................................................................................693
Tamara Vardomskaya ............................................................................................695
Ivana Vrdoljak ........................................................................................................696
Björn Wiemer and Pino Marco Pizzo ....................................................................697
Similarities and differences between inflectional and derivational paradigms: Individual
languages and beyond ................................................................................................................... 700
Maris Camilleri ......................................................................................................702
Sascha Gaglia .........................................................................................................703
Valeriia Generalova................................................................................................705
Martin Hummel ......................................................................................................707
Andra Kalnača and Ilze Lokmane ..........................................................................709
Lívia Körtvélyessy and Pavel Štekauer ..................................................................711
Giulia Meli .............................................................................................................712
Magda Ševčíková and Adéla Limburská ...............................................................714
Pius ten Hacken ......................................................................................................716
Jaap van Marle .......................................................................................................717
The crosslinguistic diversity of antipassives: Function, meaning and structure............... 719
Peter Arkadiev and Alexander Letuchiy ................................................................722
Sandra Auderset .....................................................................................................724
Gilles Authier .........................................................................................................727
Koen Bostoen, Sebastian Dom and Guillaume Segerer .........................................730
Anna Bugaeva ........................................................................................................731
Robert Carlson........................................................................................................733
Denis Creissels .......................................................................................................735
Spike Gildea, Natalia Cáceres, Sérgio Meira and Racquel-Maria Sapién .............737
Katharina Haude .....................................................................................................739
Raina Heaton ..........................................................................................................740
Cristian Juárez and Albert Álvarez ........................................................................742
Larisa Leisiö and Alexey Kozlov ...........................................................................743
Marianne Mithun ....................................................................................................746
Claire Moyse-Faurie ...............................................................................................747
Doris L. Payne ........................................................................................................749
Sandy Ritchie .........................................................................................................751
Andrea Sansó..........................................................................................................752
Martine Vanhove ....................................................................................................755
Alejandra Vidal ......................................................................................................756
Meagan Vigus ........................................................................................................758
The language of the first farmers ................................................................................................ 760
Anna Berge .............................................................................................................762
Nicholas Emlen and Willem Adelaar .....................................................................764
Alexander Francis-Ratte .........................................................................................765
Tom Güldemann and Anne-Maria Fehn ................................................................766
Adam Hyllested and Jens Soelberg ........................................................................767
Brian D Joseph .......................................................................................................768
Joseph Koni Muluwa and Koen Bostoen ...............................................................769
Martin Kümmel ......................................................................................................774
Martine Robbeets ...................................................................................................775
Laurent Sagart and Romain Garnier.......................................................................776
Antoinette Schapper ...............................................................................................778
George Starostin .....................................................................................................779
The profile of event delimitation ................................................................................................. 781
Bianca Basciano and Chiara Melloni .....................................................................784
Patrick Caudal and Robert Mailhammer ................................................................786
Anna Maria Di Sciullo ...........................................................................................788
Hana Filip ...............................................................................................................790
Richard Huyghe......................................................................................................792
Gioia Insacco and Viviana Masia...........................................................................793
Serge Sagna ............................................................................................................796
Eva Schultze-Berndt ...............................................................................................797
Gladys Tang, Jia He and Jia Li ..............................................................................799
Giuseppina Todaro and Fabio Del Prete ................................................................801
Xiaoqian Zhang ......................................................................................................802
The rise of complementizers and their relation to subjunctive mood and (ir)realis
distinctions ....................................................................................................................................... 804
Werner Abraham ....................................................................................................807
Oleg Belyaev ..........................................................................................................808
Kasper Boye and Marie-Louise Lind Sørensen .....................................................810
Éva Á. Csató, Lars Johanson and László Károly ...................................................811
Nina Dobrushina ....................................................................................................813
Victor Friedman and Brian Joseph .........................................................................815
Carlos García-Castillero .........................................................................................816
Anton Granvik ........................................................................................................817
Sungok Hong ..........................................................................................................819
Julian Rentzsch.......................................................................................................821
Konstantinos Sampanis, Eleni Karantzola and Ioannis Fykias ..............................822
Anastasiya Kozhemyakina and Natalia Serdobolskaya .........................................824
Barbara Sonnenhauser ............................................................................................826
Towards a typology of olfactory expressions............................................................................ 828
Kate Bellamy ..........................................................................................................830
Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano ......................................................................................832
Teresa Oliveira .......................................................................................................834
Amy Pei-jung Lee ..................................................................................................835
Seongha Rhee .........................................................................................................836
Francesca Strik Lievers and Eleonora Sausa..........................................................837
Åke Viberg .............................................................................................................838
Typology of Uralic languages: Towards better comparability............................................. 842
Timofey Arkhangelskiy and Maria Usacheva ........................................................844
Marianne Bakró-Nagy ............................................................................................846
András Bárány ........................................................................................................847
Jeremy Bradley.......................................................................................................850
Guillaume Enguehard .............................................................................................852
Louise Esher ...........................................................................................................854
Anja Harder and Michael Rießler ..........................................................................856
Lotta Jalava and Max Wahlström...........................................................................857
Olesya Khanina and Andrey Shluinsky .................................................................859
Maria Kholodilova, Anton Kukhto and Maria Privizentseva ................................861
Katalin É. Kiss and Erika Asztalos ........................................................................863
Natalia Kuznetsova ................................................................................................865
Helle Metslang, Külli Habicht and Karl Pajusalu ..................................................867
Matti Miestamo ......................................................................................................869
Nikita Muravyev ....................................................................................................871
Mark Norris ............................................................................................................872
Miina Norvik ..........................................................................................................874
Karl Pajusalu, Péter Pomozi, Endre Nemeth, Tibor Fehér and Kristel Uiboaed ...875
Polina Pleshak ........................................................................................................877
Ksenia Shagal .........................................................................................................879
Orsolya Tánczos .....................................................................................................881
Susanna Virtanen....................................................................................................883
Hannah Wegener ....................................................................................................885
PLENARY LECTURES
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Explaining universals of syntactic argument coding
Martin Haspelmath
(MPI-SHH Jena/Leipzig)
In this presentation, I will discuss various ways in which the coding properties of
verbal arguments have been explained by linguists, e.g. accusative and ergative
marking, or presence or absence of person-indexing of objects. The focus will be on
standard transitive and ditransitive constructions. I will distinguish between internal
explanations, which are really the same as elegant descriptions, and functional-adaptive
explanations, which make reference to language use and language change, and are
necessarily explanations of language universals. I will evaluate a number of proposals
that have been made recently and not so recently, putting emphasis on the formfrequency correspondence principle, which has wide-ranging explanatory power in
diverse domains of grammar. I will argue that attempts to elevate internal explanations
of particular phenomena to general principles of human language often fail because they
make unwarranted (aprioristic) uniformity assumptions. Functional-adaptive
explanations, by contrast, do not have to make such assumptions and are readily testable
by cross-linguistic and usage data.
3
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
S-V and V-S agreement on evidence from Italo-Romance
Delia Bentley
(University of Manchester)
It has long been known that if, in a given language, the verb agrees with a
following argument with a certain syntactic function, it will also agree with a preceding
argument with the same syntactic function (Moravcsik 1978, Corbett 1979, Lehmann
1982, see Greenberg’s universal 33). This is observed in Italo-Romance, a family of
Romance languages that include Italian. While person and number agreement of the
verb with a preceding argument in subject position is generally obligatory in this
language family, a great deal of variation is observed in verb-subject agreement. This
variation has received much attention in the syntactic literature (see Brandi/Cordin
1981, 1989 and Samek-Lodovici 2002 for two different approaches). Although it has
been noted that V-S agreement varies in accordance with verb class (Parry 1997, 2000,
2013, Savoia 1997, Benincà 2001, Manzini/Savoia 2005, etc.), the extent of this
variation, and its rationale, are poorly understood. Table 1 shows three principal patterns
of verb agreement that are found in Italo-Romance.
Table 1. Patterns of (person and) number agreement on the Italo-Romance verb
S-V agreement
V-S agreement with…
(i) Italian, Sicilian
+
A, U, non-argumental NP
(iia) Cairese (C. Montenotte)
+
A, U
(iib) Milanese
+
A, +/- U
(iii) Grosino (Grosio)
+
A
(A = actor; U = undergoer)
The controller of person and number agreement on the verb can be a clauseinternal argument or the clause-external antecedent of a clause-internal anaphora. In the
former case agreement is grammatical, in the latter it is anaphoric (Givón, 1976,
Lehmann 1982, Bresnan/Mchombo 1987). In Table 1 we have shown patterns of
grammatical agreement. The selection of the controller is normally captured in terms of
macrorolehood (Van Valin/LaPolla 1997: 326), with actor being the default controller
and undergoer the marked one. As mentioned, V-S agreement differs across dialects. In
pattern (i) the verb can agree with a post-verbal actor or undergoer, or, failing this, with
a clause-internal non-argumental noun phrase endowed with person and/or number
features. This happens in existential constructions, where the post-copular noun phrase
is not an argument (Francez 2007, Cruschina 2012, Bentley et al. 2015).
(1)
Ci sunnu picciriddri malati. (Sicilian)
PF be.3PL children
sick
‘There are sick children.’
4
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Contrastingly, in patterns (iia) and (iib), the existential copula agrees
anaphorically with an implicit spatio-temporal antecedent (Francez’s 2007 implicit
argument), the anaphora being an etymologically locative clitic (see i in 2). Pattern (iib)
optionally allows the same kind of anaphoric agreement in VS constructions other than
existentials (cf. 3). This type of agreement is subject to verb-class restrictions. These
restrictions are reminiscent of the unaccusative-vs.-unergative divide. In the light of
first-hand evidence, we propose that the predicate must be stage level, and hence
include a contingent or temporally-bounded state, to be predicated of a slice of space
and time.
(2)
As
poruma nenta divurzié perché u i
è
i fiöi (Cairo Montenotte)
REFL can.1PL NEG
divorce because ESCL LSCL be.3SG the children
‘We cannot divorce because there are the children.’
(3)
a. Gh’
è
mort tanti suldà. (Milan S. Ambrogio, Lombardy)
be.3SG died many soldiers
b. In
mort tanti suldà.
be.3PL died many soldiers
‘There died many soldiers.’
LSCL
The fact that patterns (iia) and (iib) are only found in northern dialects is not
trivial. On the contrary, it is due to the presence, in these dialects, of clause-internal
anaphoras that are non-personal pre-verbal clitics (Poletto 1993, 2000, Tortora 1997,
2014). Optional anaphoric agreement in V-S constructions other than existentials, in
pattern (iib), is the manifestation of a synchronic conflict between anaphoric agreement
and grammatical agreement with the marked macrorole. Lastly, pattern (iii) solely
allows grammatical V-S agreement with an actor. In fact, V-S agreement is only
obligatory if S is a transitive actor (AT) and a topical undergoer is resumed clauseinternally by an object pronoun.
(4)
Quel cinema, i
l’ a
vedu tantisima gent.
that film
SCL.3PL OCL have.3PL seen very.many people
‘That film, many people have seen it.’
(Grosino)
The variation observed thus indicates that, while S-V agreement is fully
grammaticalised, V-S agreement abides by constraints that are best captured at the
semantic-syntax interface.
References
Benincà, P. 2001. The Position of Topic and Focus in the Left Periphery. In G. Cinque
and G. Salvi (eds.), Current Studies in Italian Syntax. Essays Offered to Lorenzo
Renzi. Amsterdam: Elsevier, pp. 39-64.
Bentley, D., F. M. Ciconte and S. Cruschina. 2015. Existentials and Locatives in
Romance dialects of Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Brandi, L. and P. Cordin. 1981. Dialetti e italiano: un confronto sul Parametro del
Soggetto Nullo. Rivista di Grammatica Generativa 6: 33-87.
Brandi, L. and Cordin, P. 1989. Two Italian Dialects and the Null Subject Parameter. In
O. Jaeggli and K. Safir (eds), The null subject parameter. Dordrecht: Foris, pp.
111-142.
5
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Bresnan, J. and S. A. Mchombo. Topic, Pronoun, and Agreement in Chichewa.
Language 63: 741-782.
Corbett, G. 1979. The agreement hierarchy. Journal of Linguistics 15: 203-224.
Cruschina, S. 2012. Focus in Existential Sentences, in V. Bianchi and C. Chiesi (eds),
Enjoy Linguistics! Papers Offered to Luigi Rizzi on the Occasion of his 60th
Birthday. Siena: CISCL Press, pp. 77-107.
Francez, I. 2007. Existential Propositions. PhD thesis, Stanford University.
Givón, T. 1976. Topic, pronoun and grammatical agreement. In C. Li (ed.), Subject and
Topic. New York: Academic Press, pp. 149-188.
Lehmann, C. 1982. Universal and typological aspects of agreement. In H. Seiler and F.
J. Stachowiak (eds), Apprehension. Das sprachliche Erfassen von Gegenständen
II. Tübingen: Narr, pp. 201-267.
Maiden, M. and M. Parry 1997 (eds). The dialects of Italy. London: Routledge.
Manzini, M. R. and L. Savoia. 2005. I dialetti italiani e romanci. Morfosintassi
generativa, 3 vols. Alessandria: Edizioni Dell’Orso.
Moravcsik, E. 1978. Agreement. In J. Greenberg (ed.), Universals of Human Language.
4 vols. Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 331-374.
Parry, M. 1997. Piedmont, in Maiden and Parry (eds.), 237-44.
Parry, M. 2000. Accordo e soggetti postverbali in piemontese. In Actes du XXIIe
Congrès International de Lingüistique e Philologie Romane, Bruxelles 1998, VI.
De la grammaire des formes à la grammaire du sens, Tübingen: Niemeyer, pp.
391-402.
Parry, M. 2013. Variation and Change in the Presentational Constructions of NorthWestern Italo-Romance Varieties, in E. van Gelderen, M. Cennamo and J.
Barðdal (eds), Argument Structure in Flux: The Naples/Capri Papers. Amsterdam
/ Philadelphia: Benjamins, pp. 511-548.
Poletto, C. 1993. La sintassi del soggetto nei dialetti italiani settentrionali. Padua:
Unipress.
Poletto, C. 2000. The Higher Functional Field. Evidence from Northern Italian
Dialects. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Samek-Lodovici, V. 2002. Agreement impoverishment under subject inversion. A
crosslinguistic analysis. In G. Fanselow and C. Féry (eds), Resolving conflicts in
grammar (Linguistiche Berichte Sonderheft 11), pp. 49–82.
Savoia, L. 1997. The Geographical Distribution of the Dialects. In Maiden and Parry,
225–234.
Tortora, C. 1997. The Syntax and Semantics of the Weak Locative. PhD thesis,
University of Delaware.
Tortora, Christina. 2014. A Comparative Grammar of Borgomanerese. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Van Valin, Robert Jr. and Randy LaPolla. 1997. Syntax. Structure, meaning and
function. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
6
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Artificial language and linguistic theory
Marc van Oostendorp
(Meertens Instituut/Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences)
Most linguists consider themselves students of a phenomenon that belongs to the
natural world: many textbooks start by explaining that the object of study is 'natural
language'. There may be some discussion as to where in the natural world the object
resides (is it an innate mental organ? Does it emerge spontaneously in natural
interaction between agents? etc.), but there is little disagreement as to the desirability of
the general point of view.
In recent years, there are some slow changes, mostly coming from experimental
work. If one studies the human language capacity, itself presumably part of the natural
world, one can of course in principle study how this capacity reacts to non-natural work.
The paradigm case of 'unnatural' language in such work is of course the Wug test, but
nowadays we see examples of rather complicated 'artificial languages' being offered to
participants of experiments.
In this presentation, I discuss what are the problems with dealing with artificial
language material for linguists and then proceed to argue that such material actually
gives us a unique window into human language. I discuss three seemingly diverse case
studies. First, I show how Dutch poets in the 16th Century adapted French and Italian
poetic forms to suit their poetic and linguistic needs. This shows how seemingly
conscious decisions lead to a result that fits our expectations about natural language
prosody. Secondly, I discuss results about language acquisition in children learning
Esperanto, demonstrating how 'artificial' input leads to results that are indistinguishable
from that of children learning natural languages. And thirdly, I discuss a case of
'polarisation' in Dutch dialects, showing how even in varieties of language that
traditionally were considered most 'purely natural' of all, conscious decision seems to
have played a role.
7
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
ROUND TABLE
MULTILINGUALISM IN A CHANGING
EUROPE: THEORETICAL AND
EMPIRICAL ISSUES
Multilingual speakers of European minority languages
Durk Gorter
(University of the Basque Country/IKERBASQUE – Basque Foundation for Science)
Three essentially monolingual frames dominate the debate on multilingualism in
Europe. First, English is perceived as the global language and finds an increasing
presence in society. As a consequence the adoption of a single language, English, for
communication in specialized domains, among others, multinational corporations,
higher education, or international travel, becomes the preferred choice and keeps out
other languages, while disregarding the language backgrounds of the persons involved.
Second, the ideology that supports state languages implies that Europe is
fundamentally seen as a conglomerate of states, and this political reality should be the
basis for language practices as well. Thus, the official language of a state should be the
major vehicle for communication at the national level but also be equally recognized
and uniquely favoured in international communication.
Third, the idea that speakers of all languages, including minority languages or any
other mother tongue have equal rights and should be supported for use in as many
domains as possible, as an issue to be considered on its own.
Multilingual practices in Europe by and large are a sort of awkward middle way
of policies based on those three frames, but lacking a clear sense of direction or
rationale. The underlying monolingual mindset is a determining factor. More recently
ideas about the complexity of multilingualism, in which languages are no longer seen as
fixed entities, may flourish in the research literature, but they gain only gradually a
minor influence among policy makers or in society at large. Several myths with regard
to multilingualism are persistent and can be found everywhere in popular and even in
academic discourse.
Unique minority languages such as Basque, Catalan, Frisian or Welsh seem to
have obtained an important public support and their use as everyday languages in social
life is accepted, but also contested, at least in the European regions concerned. Their
speakers often try to secure a sustainable future through intergenerational transmission
and they support language policies for such minority languages in education,
workplaces, public spaces and beyond. In many situations, the use of the minority
language, the dominant language and English are always negotiated, which creates new
challenges for minority groups and changes the ways in which minority languages are
used.
9
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
The macro developments at European level, changes due to globalization, or
technological innovation, influence increasingly dynamic and diverse ways of being a
multilingual speaker of a minority language. These changes in multilingualism present
new demands for the learning and use of the minority language, the state language and
alongside often English. Such developments and transformations concern Basque,
Frisian and other minority languages in Europe.
In this paper I want to analyze the changing practices of minority language users
in the context of language education, the workplace and in public space. Data come
predominately from research projects in the Basque Country, Spain and in Friesland,
The Netherlands. I also aim to present some solutions on the use of multiple languages
and to identify areas for further research and debate.
10
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Multilingual Europe in the age of superdiversity: Language rich but
policy poor?
Suzanne Romaine
(University of Freiburg/Hawaii)
Europe has long been multilingual and multilingualism has always been an
important dimension of the European project and the EU’s conception of a
supranational European identity. My presentation examines some issues arising from
the lack of a coherent legally binding EU language policy on multilingualism either at
the level of EU institutions or in member-states (Nic Craith 2006, Krżyzanowski and
Wodak 2011, Romaine 2013). Despite the EU’s motto in varietate concordia (‘unity in
diversity’), and the promotion of multilingualism as a symbol of common European
identity and a key to integration in official discourses (e.g. European Commission
2005a,b, European Commission 2008), the challenges to creating an inclusive
multilingualism policy are arguably greater than they have ever been before. New forms
of minoritization arising from linguistic ‘superdiversity’ demand a coordinated and
unified policy response, but instead threaten to lead to increasing political and cultural
fragmentation and disintegration (Blommaert and Rampton 2011, Moore 2015, Wodak
and Boukala 2015). I address, in particular, unequal relationships between official and
nonofficial languages as well as hierarchies within non-official languages between those
currently accorded some measure of legal protection and those without any. I also
examine the issue of language endangerment, comparing the EU to other parts of the
world.
References
Blommaert, Jan and Rampton, Ben 2011. Language and superdiversity. Diversities
13(2): 1–21.
European Commission 2005a. A new framework strategy for multilingualism. COM
(2005) 596. 22/11/2005. Brussels.
European Commission 2005b. Action plan on communicating Europe. SEC (2005) 985
final, 20 July 2005. Brussels.
European Commission 2008. Multilingualism: An asset for Europe and a shared
commitment. COM (2008) 566. 18/09/2008. Brussels.
Krżyzanowski, Michal and Wodak, Ruth 2011. Political strategies and language
policies: The European Union Lisbon strategy and its implication for the EU’s
language and multilingualism policy. Language Policy 10: 115–136.
Moore, Robert 2015. From revolutionary monolingualism to reactionary
multilingualism: Top-down discourses of linguistic diversity in Europe, 1794present. Language & Communication 44: 19–30.
Nic Craith, Mairead 2006. Europe and the politics of language. Citizens, migrants and
outsiders. Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan.
Romaine, Suzanne 2013 Politics and policies of multilingualism in the European Union.
Language Policy 12:115-137.
Vertovec, Steven 2007. Super-diversity and its implications. Ethnic and Racial Studies
30(6): 1024–1054.
11
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Wodak, Ruth and Boukala, Salomi 2015. (Supra)national identity and language:
rethinking national and European migration policies and the linguistic integration
of migrants. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 35: 253-273.
12
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Bridging the divide: Enhancing the scientific and public understanding
of bilingualism
Antonella Sorace
(University of Edinburgh)
There are two types of “bridges” that can foster the scientific and public
understanding of bilingualism. The first type links different research disciplines in the
effort to address particular research questions. I will illustrate this with examples
of convergent developmental paths in the pronominal domain attested in advanced adult
second language (L2) speakers and in speakers experiencing native language (L1)
attrition due to long-term use of a second language. Reference tracking requires the
language user to infer appropriate pronoun-referent mappings and dynamically update
the discourse model following a change of referent status. Recent research shows that
pronouns and other referring expressions requiring efficient updating of contextdependent information remain variable even in highly proficient L2 speakers and
become unstable in L1 attrition. In both cases, variability manifests itself as ‘overexplicitness’ and higher tolerance of redundancy. I will first explore possible
explanations focusing on the interaction of language with non-linguistic cognitive
control, which especially affects the construction of reference. I will then consider the
possibility that the convergence between L1 attrition and L2 acquisition may ultimately
reflect a cognitive reconfiguration that allows successful late bilinguals to efficiently
handle cross-language competition. In other words, the ‘good language learner’ may be
the one whose native language is most open to change.
The second type of bridge connects research to the community: the aim to enable
people from all sectors of society to make informed decisions based on research rather
than misconceptions. I will briefly describe how the research and information
centre Bilingualism Matters is successfully addressing this challenge in Scotland,
Europe, and the US, and how the scientific and public understanding of bilingualism
can benefit each other.
13
GENERAL SESSION
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
A cross-linguistic completion study of the role of morphology in setting
agreement biases in production
Carlos Acuña-Fariña
(University of Santiago de Compostela)
Agreement has always posed a puzzle to both linguists and psycholinguists
because both cross-linguistically and intra-linguistically grammatical biases and
processing biases exhibit a seemingly capricious mixture of form regulation and blunt
semantic interference (Corbett 1979, 2006). English in particular is famous for the latter
(e.g. This committee(-sg) are(-pl) satisfied with the proposal; That three days(-pl) in
Athens was(-sg) amazing; The hash browns(-pl) at table four is(-sg) getting angry
(Pollard & Sag 1994)). The research question addressed here is the thesis that
agreement in production is sensitive to the size of the morphological component of
every language. To be precise, the idea is that the richer the morphology of a language
the greater the formal encapsulation of its agreement operations is likely to be.
Conversely, the poorer the morphology the more semantic interference (agreement ad
sensum) will be attested (Berg 1998; Acuña-Fariña 2012). The same underlying
principle is predicted to be at work in both grammar and processing/production
(Eberhard et al. 2005). By way of method, four completion studies with two dialectal
versions of Spanish and two dialectal versions of Portuguese were carried out in order
to put this thesis to the test. Both versions of both languages differ in morphological
strength: thus, whereas the Spanish spoken in the south of Spain (in the region of
Andalucía) is characterized by acute morphological erosion, the one spoken in the north
(in the region of Galicia) preserves an intact morphology. The difference is even greater
between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, whose profound
morphological erosion is well-known (Costa & Figueiredo Silva 2006; Cerqueira 2009;
Floripi & Moreno 2010). Predictions: if it can be proved that the degree of a language´s
morphological component determines the degree of informational encapsulation of its
agreement operations (or, alternatively, their porosity or sensitivity to conceptual
pressures), then the perennial problem of accounting for the variable and seemingly
inconsistent nature of agreement both intra- and inter-linguistically can be more
effectively addressed. Since languages differ in their morphological repertories in
unique ways, their recourse to mismatching caused by semantic infiltration would
correspondingly be predicted to be unique as well. This makes agreement probabilistic,
but predictably so. Results: in general, the tests show robust effects of the morphology
in the predicted direction. These results provide important evidence to bear on the true
nature of agreement.
References
Acuña-Fariña, C. 2012. Agreement, attraction and architectural opportunism. Journal of
Linguistics 48/2, 257-296.
Berg, T. 1998. The resolution of number agreement conflicts in English and German
agreement patterns. Linguistics 36, 41-70.
Cerqueira, M. Santos de. 2009. Operation Agree and partitive constructions in Brazilian
Portuguese and European Portuguese. Doctoral Dissertation. Universidade
Federal de Alagoas, Maceió.
17
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Corbett, G. 1979. The agreement hierarchy. Journal of Linguistics 15, 203-224.
Corbett, G. 2006. Agreement. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Costa, J., Figueiredo Silva, M. C. 2006. Nominal and verbal agreement in Portuguese:
an argument for Distributed Morpholoby. In: Costa, João; Silva, Maria Cristina
Figueiredo. (Eds.) Studies on agreement. Linguistics today. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins Publishing Co. v. 86, p. 25-46.
Eberhard, K., J. C. Cutting, & K. Bock. 2005. Making syntax of sense: Number
agreement in sentence production. Psychological Review 112/3, 531-559.
Floripi, S. & Moreno, I. 2010. Marcas de concordância no caboverdiano e no português:
uma visão comparative. Estudos da Lingua(gem) 8/1, 223-240.
Pollard, C. & I. A. Sag. 1994. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press and Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Subject preference in languages with ambiguous relative clauses.
Evidence from Ixcatec (Otomanguean, Mexico)
Evangelia Adamou
(French National Centre for Scientific Research)
In a typological perspective, Keenan and Comrie (1977) have shown that subjects
are more accessible to relativization than direct objects, indirect objects, oblique
objects, possessors, and objects of comparison. Since then, there has been a great
amount of work confirming the original explanation that subject preference in relative
clauses “directly reflects the psychological ease of comprehension” (Keenan & Comrie
1977: 88). Indeed, experimental studies offer ample evidence for the fact that subject
relative clauses (SRCs) are easier to process than object relative clauses (ORCs).
In most of these studies, however, the processing advantage of SRCs is influenced
by language-specific morphological and syntactic confounds. Following Polinsky et al.
(2013: 275), I suggest that an unconfounded result should be looked for in the
interpretation of ambiguous relative clauses. While temporary ambiguous relative
clauses have been investigated (Frazier 1987, Mecklinger et al. 1995, Carreiras et al.
2010), little research has been done on fully ambiguous relative clauses (e.g., Clemens
et al. 2015).
In this talk I present evidence relevant to the discussion from Ixcatec, a criticallyendangered Otomanguean language of Mexico, that has ambiguous relative clauses in
the third person. This is illustrated in (1).
(1)
ndi²ra² ki¹ʔi² sa¹ kwa²-ʔĩ¹
[la²
te²ngi²ʔe² sa¹ mi²-tʃa²]
where
LOC
DEF CLF-little COMP
follow
DEF CLS-woman
SRC: ‘Where is the girl who follows the woman?’ or
ORC: ‘Where is the girl that the woman follows?’
(high tone ¹, mid tone ², low tone ³, COMP: complementizer, CLS: class
term,
CLF: classifier, DEF: definite article, LOC: locative)
18
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
It can be seen that there are no syntactic or morphological cues that would allow
the Ixcatec speakers to disambiguate between SRCs and ORCs. More specifically,
Ixcatec SRCs and ORCs are formed with the gap strategy and an uninflected
complementizer la². Subjects and objects both appear in the postverbal position within
the relative clause. Also, Ixcatec is a head-marking language with a single series of
subject verb suffixes restricted to first and second person, and no indexing of object
arguments.
Three studies were conducted in order to investigate subject preference in Ixcatec
relative clauses. First, Study 1, a translation task supported by visual stimuli, establishes
that ambiguous SRCs and ORCs are the most frequent option in Ixcatec, representing
79% (N=204) of the responses. This study also reveals that speakers may use wordorder changes in order to disambiguate between SRCs and ORCs (N=53). Study 2, a
picture-matching comprehension experiment inspired by Clemens et al. (2015), shows
that 63% (N=401) of the ambiguous relative clauses are interpreted as SRCs. This study
also shows that the syntactic cues are not successfully interpreted by the Ixcatec
participants. Finally, in Study 3, the analysis of a three-hour, free-speech corpus
indicates that SRCs are significantly more frequent (82%, N=146) than ORCs (30%,
N=17).
In conclusion, the Ixcatec experimental and natural data support universal subject
preference. They also illustrate how lesser-known, oral-tradition languages can
contribute to the theoretical discussions that have mainly been addressed for welldescribed, written languages.
References
Carreiras, Manuel, Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, Marta Vergara, Irene de la Cruz-Pavía &
Itziar Laka. 2010. Subject relative clauses are not universally easier to process:
Evidence from Basque. Cognition 115: 79–92.
Clemens, Lauren Eby, Jessica Coon, Pedro Mateo Pedro, Adam Milton Morgan, Maria
Polinsky, Gabrielle Tandet & Matthew Wagers. 2015. Ergativity and the
complexity of extraction: A view from Mayan. Natural Language and Linguistic
Theory 33: 417–469.
Frazier, Lyn. 1987. Syntactic processing: Evidence from Dutch. Natural Language and
Linguistic Theory 5: 519–559.
Keenan, Edward L. & Bernard Comrie. 1977. Noun phrase accessibility and universal
grammar. Linguistic Inquiry 8: 63–99.
Mecklinger, Axel, Herbert Schriefers, Karsten Steinhauer & Angela Friederici. 1995.
Processing relative clauses varying on syntactic and semantic dimensions: An
analysis with event-related potentials. Memory and Cognition 23(4): 477–494.
Polinsky, Maria, Carlos Gomez-Gallo, Peter Graff & Ekaterina Kravtchenko.
2012. Subject preference and ergativity. Lingua 122(3): 267–277.
19
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Narrowly averted and partially completed events in the languages of
Europe and beyond
Anna Alexandrova
(Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa)
The present paper is an attempt to bridge a gap between two different schools of
thought concerning verbal approximation.
It is assumed since Dowty (1979) that approximators such as almost can receive
two interpretations when they occur with telic predicates under past reference:
(a) the event was on the verge of occurring but it did not;
(b) the event was partially realized but its endpoint was not reached.
Accomplishments ([+durative], [+telic]) are generally compatible with both, while
achievements ([-durative], [+telic]) accept only (a). In turn, English lacks specialized
adverbials for meanings (a) and (b).
However, the domain of verbal approximation can be structured in different ways
and the English situation is not the only possible one. In numerous languages (a) and (b)
are encoded separately (e.g., in Russian, Lithuanian, Buryat, Tyvan etc). Kuteva (1998;
2000; 2001) in her seminal studies introduced the Avertive as a semantically complex
category, grammaticalized in a wide range of languages, with a meaning that exactly
coincides with (a). However, she does not say anything about meaning (b).
My aim is to approach some issues that so far have not been in the focus of either
typological or formal semantic studies:
- asymmetries (e.g., a specialized avertive vs. an underspecified approximator
in both functions in the same language);
- interactions with event structure (e.g., are specialized avertives always
compatible with accomplishments?), tense and viewpoint aspect;
- compositionality (e.g., avertive constructions consisting of an irrealis marker
denoting counterfactuality and an adverbial denoting imminence);
A typological account of these issues would be impossible if only second-hand data
were used, in that most of the relevant information is missing from grammars. Hence,
first-hand data was collected for a convenience sample of over 42 languages from
Europe and beyond, using translation questionnaires.
20
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Table 1. The main sample (first-hand data)
Indo-European
Isolate
Afro-Asiatic
Turkic
Uralic
Mongolic
Sino-Tibetan
Austronesian
Albanian
Armenian
Greek
Romance
Germanic
Slavic
Baltic
Basque
Semitic
Oghuz
Kipchak
Oghur
Siberian
Baltic Finnic
Ugric
Permic
Volgaic
Sinitic
Malayo-Sumbawan
Greater Central Philippine
French, Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese
German, Swedish, Danish
Czech, Bulgarian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Croatian,
Slovene, Ukrainian, Upper Sorbian
Latvian, Lithuanian
Maltese
Turkish, Azerbaijani, Gagauz, Turkmen
Tatar
Chuvash
Khakas, Sakha, Tuvan
Estonian, Finnish
Hungarian
Udmurt
Hill Mari, Meadow Mari
Buryat
Mandarin Chinese
Indonesian
Tagalog
Some of the results are:
(1) Verbal approximation marking strategies are subject to massive areal
skewing across Eurasia. For instance, avertive constructions of the type
‘a.bit NEG V’ were copied from Russian into numerous Turkic and Uralic
languages. Another area with a wealth of negative avertives is South
Europe (several Romance languages, Albanian, Balkan Slavic and
Maltese).
Figure 1. Languages with at least one avertive construction with negation1
1
The maps were created using the Interactive Reference Tool (WALS program), which can be
downloaded at https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/research/tool.php.
21
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(2)
Avertives are often irrealis-based, while partial completion is construed
as pertaining to realis in Europe. Irrealis-based avertives are concentrated
in South Europe, Iranic and Turkic languages that have undergone
extensive contact with Iranic.
Figure 2. Languages with at least one irrealis-based avertive construction
*Bulgarian also has ‘ADV+IRR’ constructions
(3) Specialized markers of partial completion are less common than
avertives. Asymmetric marking is highly diffused, with generic
approximators that can be used in both functions, competing with
avertives (e.g., in Tagalog, Basque, French, and Finnish). No
grammaticalized markers of partial completion have been found so far.
(4) While pastness is a defining feature of the avertive (Kuteva 1998), partial
completion can only be construed as an ongoing process in some
languages, e.g. it is marked by the nonpast progressive in
Eastern/Meadow Mari:
Maša
tort-əm
kija,
kočk-ən pətar-en
Masha.NOM cake-ACC eat-CVB finish-CVB
lie.NPST.3SG
ik
izi
gəna
užaš-əže
kod-ən.
one
small
RESTR
part-POSS3SG remain-NDIRPST.3SG
‘Masha has almost eaten the cake, only a small slice is left.’
(5)
Non-durative predicates are prototypical for the avertive. The following
implicational hierarchy arises from the data:
In a given language, if the avertive can co-occur with accomplishment
verb phrases, it can also co-occur with achievement verb phrases.
Avertive marking: achievements < accomplishments
22
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
References
Arkadiev, Peter. 2011. On the aspectual uses of the prefix be- in Lithuanian. Baltic
Linguistics 2. 37–78.
Auwera, Johan van der & Vladimir A. Plungian. 1998. Modality’s semantic map.
Linguistic Typology 2(1). 79–124.
Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect: an introduction to the study of verbal aspect and
related problems. (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics). Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Comrie, Bernard. 1986. Conditionals: a typology. In Elizabeth Traugott, Alice ter
Meulen, Judy Snitzer Reilly & Charles A. Ferguson (eds.), On conditionals, 77–
99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cristofaro, Sonia. 2012. Descriptive notions vs. grammatical categories: Unrealized
states of affairs and “irrealis”. Language Sciences 34(2). 131–146.
Dahl, Östen. 1985. Tense and aspect systems. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd.
Dahl, Östen. 2001. Principles of areal typology. In Martin Haspelmath, Ekkehard
König, Wulf Oesterreicher & Wolfgang Raible (eds.), Language typology and
language universals: An international handbook, vol. 2, 1456–1470. Berlin / New
York: Walter de Gruyter.
Dickey, Stephen M. 2000. Parameters of Slavic aspect: A cognitive approach.
Cambridge University Press.
Dowty, David R. 1979. Word meaning and Montague Grammar: The semantics of
verbs and times in Generative Semantics and in Montague’s PTQ. Dordrecht,
Holland – London: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Heine, Bernd & Tania Kuteva. 2002. World Lexicon of Grammaticalization.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kuteva, Tania. 1998. On identifying an evasive gram: Action Narrowly Averted.
Studies in Language 22(1). 113–160.
Kuteva, Tania. 2000. TAM-auxiliation, and the avertive category in Northeast Europe.
In Areal Grammaticalization and Cognitive Semantics: the Finnic and Saami
languages, 27–41. Tallinn: Eesti Keele Sihtasutus.
Kuteva, Tania. 2001. Auxiliation: An enquiry into the nature of grammaticalization.
Oxford University Press.
Nichols, Johanna. 1992. Linguistic diversity in space and time. Chicago / London: The
University of Chicago Press.
Plungian, Vladimir A. 2001. Antirezul’tativ: do i posle rezul'tata. In Vladimir A.
Plungian (ed.), Issledovanija po teorii grammatiki. Vyp. 1: Glagol’nye kategorii,
50–88. Moskva: Russkie slovari.
Serebrennikov, Boris A. 1960. Kategorii vremeni i vida v finno-ugorskix jazykax
permskoj i volžskoj grupp. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk SSSR.
Smith, Carlota S. 1991. The parameter of aspect. Kluwer Academic Press.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1985. Conditional markers. In John Haiman (ed.), Iconicity
in Syntax: Proceedings of a symposium on iconicity in syntax, Stanford, June 24–
26, 1983, 289–310. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing
Company.
Ziegeler, Debra. 2006. Interfaces with English aspect: Diachronic and empirical
studies. (Studies in Language Companion Series). Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Publishing Company.
23
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Alternative Paradigms for Linguistics as Legal Evidence
Angela Almela Sanchez-Lafuente
(Universidad Politecnica de Cartegena-Centro Universitario de la Defensa)
Linguistics can offer important, sometimes incriminating and sometimes
exculpatory evidence in legal matters. These types of legal matters have been classified
in four broad categories: identification, text-typing, inter-textuality and linguistic
profiling. Within identification, linguistic evidence can reveal author, speaker and
language identity. Within text-typing, linguistic evidence can classify texts according to
specific types with forensic significance such as threats, suicide notes, child allegation
of sexual abuse, deception and false confession. Within inter-texuality, linguistic
evidence can determine the distance between documents that are assumed to be
independent or dependent. Within linguistic profiling, linguistic evidence can group
texts in terms of sociolinguistic and demographic features such as age, race, education,
dialect and native language. The linguist usually confronts one of these tasks in actual
casework.
This paper addresses the research question: what research paradigm enables
linguistics to provide this kind of evidence in a way that serves the legal community?
Or, we might ask in another way, what kind of linguistic research produces evidence
that the legal community can actually use reliably?
To answer this question, we examine the history of "forensic linguistics" over the
last 150 years. The pattern of "linguistic evidence" shows four approaches: (a) prestructuralist, prescriptive grammar; (b) a merger of sociolinguistic and prescriptive
grammar in qualitative analysis; (c) stylometric analysis in quantitative analysis; and (d)
computational linguistics constrained by legal standards. All of these approaches are
currently available and proffered as linguistic evidence, by linguists, police officers or
other experts, but not all of these approaches produce evidence that can actually be used
as testimony in trial. In fact, the first three approaches have a record of being excluded
as testimony; such cases are reviewed. Therefore, in this talk, we focus on a paradigm
that undergirds the last approach, computational linguistics constrained by legal
standards, or the "ILE paradigm."
While the first three approaches are often called “forensic linguistics”, the ILE
paradigm approaches the tasks of linguistic evidence seeing “linguistics as a forensic
science”. The first and traditional approach presents forensic linguistics as one subfield
of linguistics, like phonology or syntax. However, in actual reports, experts using this
approach may employ methods that are not even similar to other subfields in linguistics,
such as prescriptive grammar or literary analysis. The second approach regards
linguistics as a forensic science, where standard methods of linguistics are used to
analyse linguistic data in a forensic context. In this second approach, because only
standard methods in linguistics are employed, forensic data may spur innovation in the
main subfields of linguistics. In this paper, we contrast paradigms in terms of seven
features: the source of methods for analysis of language, as just mentioned, as well as
the expert's community; the place and timing of research; the data management
principles; the analytical treatment of the data and its implementation; the use or nonuse of statistics; and the statement of conclusions.
24
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Key words: forensic linguistics, forensic science, linguistic methodology, stylometry,
statistics, computational linguistics, ILE paradigm.
References
Almela, Angela, Rafael Valencia-Garcia And Pascual Cantos. 2013. Seeing through
Deception: A Computational Approach to Deceit Detection in Spanish Written
Communication. LESLI: Linguistic Evidence in Security, Law and Intelligence
1.
Almela, Angela, Rafael Valencia-Garcia And Pascual Cantos. 2012. Detectando la
mentira en lenguaje escrito. Procesamiento de Lenguaje Natural 48.
Chaski, Carole E. 2013. Best Practices and Admissibility of Forensic Author
Identification. Journal of Law and Policy XXI:2, pp. 333-376.
Chaski, Carole E. 2012. Author Identification in the Forensic Setting. In Tiersma &
Solan, 489-503.
Cheng, Edward. 2013. Being Pragmatic about Forensic Linguistics. Journal of Law and
Policy XXI:2, pp. 541-550.
Heydon, Georgina. 2012. Helping the Police with Their Enquiries: Enhancing the
Investigative Interview with Linguistic Research. The Police Journal. 85(2)
Solan, Lawrence. 2013. Intuition versus Algorithm: The Case of Forensic Authorship
Attribution. Journal of Law and Policy XXI:2, pp. 551-576.
Tiersma, Peter M., And Lawrence Solan (eds.) 2012. The Oxford Handbook of
Language and Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Explaining hiatus vowels in Old Irish
Cormac Anderson
(MPI-SHH, Jena)
Old Irish permits vowels in hiatus, provided that the first of the two vowels is
stressed. There is even a class of hiatus verbs, in which vowels in hiatus alternate
with long vowels or diphthongs in different forms in the paradigm. Hiatus vowels
are also to be found in the nominal system, in some cases alternating with short
vowels. This paper gives a phonological account of these alternations and proposes
a new classification of hiatus verbs in Old Irish.
The Old Irish verbal system distinguishes weak verbs, often causative or
denominative in origin and quite uniform in their flexion, from strong verbs, which
are inherited and vary widely in their stem formation. In addition, there is a class
of hiatus verbs, grouped with the weak verbs by Thurneysen (1946) and as a
separate class by McCone (1987). These verbs are not uniform in their inflexion
and appear to exhibit characteristics of both weak and strong verbs.
In certain forms, these verbs exhibit vowels in hiatus, e.g. biuu ‘I am wont to
be’, gniid ‘he/she does’, as·luat ‘they escape’. In other forms, a long vowel or
diphthong is found instead, e.g. ní·bíu ‘I am not wont to be’, ní·gní ‘he/she does
not do’, as·luí ‘he/she escapes’. Generally speaking, the forms with hiatus are
found where strong verbs have person endings beginning in a vowel, while the
25
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
forms with long vowels and diphthongs are found in cases where strong verbs
express person and number by a change in the ‘colour’ of the final consonant.
What might coherently explain this distribution?
Until recently, standard accounts of Old Irish phonology have described a
consonant system of around forty members, with a two-way ‘colour’ contrast
between palatalised and non-palatalised pervading the entire system. The vowel
system, meanwhile, was analysed as consisting of eight short vowels and
diphthongs and up to twelve long vowels and diphthongs. However, recent work
has revived the earlier postulate of a three-way distinction in consonant colour
(McCone 2014; Hock 2015), which in Anderson (2014) is framed in the context
of a two-member vertical short vowel system.
Assuming a vertical vowel system, the alternation between vowels in hiatus
and long vowels/diphthongs provides evidence for the phonological structure of
the latter. In common with other vertical vowel systems (e.g. Marshallese in
Bender 1968; many Northwest Caucasian languages in Colarusso 2014), long
vowels and diphthongs can be seen as combinations of a short vowel plus a glide,
or abstract consonant, i.e. /v∅/. This suggests a representation /v∅v/ for vowels in
hiatus. The change in ‘colour’ in the forms of some strong verbs can be
represented as an abstract consonant ending, to which the final consonant of the
verbal form assimilates in ‘colour’. The same set of endings, when added to hiatus
verbs, which end in a short vowel, yield long vowels instead. The distributional
constraint that hiatus can only occur in conjunction with primary stress is a regular
consequence of syncope, which deletes every second, non-final, vowel in the
language.
References
Anderson, Cormac. 2014. ‘Consonant quality in Old Irish revisited’ in Roma and
Stifter eds. Proceedings of the XIV International Congress of Celtic Studies:
Selected Papers on Early Irish Language. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1-30.
Hock, Hans Heinrich. 2015. Old Irish consonant quality reexamined. Paper given at
22nd International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Naples 27-31 July,
2015.
McCone, Kim. 1987. The Early Irish Verb. Maynooth: An Sagart.
McCone, Kim. 2014. ‘Unstressed vowels and consonant quality in Old Irish: u or nonu?’ in Bretnach, Liam et al., eds., Proceedings of the XIV International Congress
of Celtic Studies, Maynooth 2011. Dublin: DIAS.
Thurneysen, Rudolf . 1946. A Grammar of Old Irish. Dublin: DIAS.
26
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Coronal consonants and the palatal glide in interaction. Evidence from
three Romance varieties of Italy
Daniele Baglioni
(Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia)
As is well-known, the articulatory-based feature [coronal], first introduced by
Chomsky & Halle (1968), replaced to a limited extent the feature [acute] (or [-grave])
proposed by Jakobson, Fant & Halle (1952), having an acoustic foundation and being
thus able to include consonants, vowels and glides under the same natural class.
Therefore, while in Jakobson, Fant & Halle’s classification dental consonants, front
vowels and the palatal glide all share the same feature specification [-grave], in
Chomsky & Halle’s taxonomy dental consonants are labelled as [coronal] and
subsequently set apart from both front vowels and the palatal glide. However, it has
been noted by Hume (1994: 6) that “the recurring patterning of front vocoids and
coronal consonants cross-linguistically […] suggests that the traditional classification of
these two classes of sounds as [coronal] and [-back] for vowels is unsatisfactory”. In
order to justify these recurrences Hume, in the framework of Clements’ Unified
Features Theory (Clements 1991), claims that both dental consonants and front vocoids
must be specified as [coronal]. Other scholars instead think it better to salvage [±grave],
which allows to account for affinities also between labial and velar consonants, back
vowels and the velar glide, thus interpreting a vast range of vowel shifts conditioned by
surrounding consonants as “gravity interactions” (Ladefoged 1975: 265; Loporcaro
2001).
In this paper the alternation between diphthongs [wɔ] (and [wo]) and [jɔ] (and
[jo]) in three linguistic varieties of Italy, i.e. Venetian, Friulian and the Tuscan dialect of
Castiglion Fiorentino, will be considered. In all these varieties an original diphthong
[wɔ] has shifted to [jɔ] (or [jo]) when preceded by a coronal consonant (Early Modern
Ven. liogo ‘place’, niovo ‘new’, tior ‘to take’, rioda ‘wheel’, ziogo ‘game’; Friulian
gnove (niove) ‘new (f.)’, sioser ‘father-in-law’; Castiglionese liọgo, niọvo, tiọni
‘thunders’), while it has been maintained after labials and velars, eventually undergoing
further evolutions (Early Modern Ven. cuor ‘heart’, fuogo ‘fire’ [today fọgo]; Friulian
cûr, fûc, muart ‘dead’; Castiglionese cọre, fuọco and fọco; data from Ferguson 2007;
Benincà 1989; Pieri 1886). This process has been variously explained by scholars, who
have attributed the development of [j] to analogy with diphthong [jɛ] (Gartner 1882), to
backness dissimilation between the glide and the following vowel (Rohlfs 1966-1969: §
115) or to an unconditioned fronting tendency such as attested in Bonifacio Ligurian
(Bottiglioni 1928). Nevertheless, none of these explanations account for the systematic
occurrence of [j] exclusively after a preceding coronal segment (and, subsequently, for
the preservation of [w] after labial and velar consonants).
It will be argued, instead, that the glide alternation has been triggered by the
preceding consonant and can thus be interpreted as a gravity interaction in the domain
of the syllable onset. By adopting a non-linear representation, it will be assumed that the
velar glide has been delinked from the feature [+grave] of the following vowel in order
to be associated with the [±grave] feature of the preceding segment, thus showing a
higher solidarity with the onset consonant than with the vocalic nucleus, as crosslinguistically confirmed by many studies on diphthongs (see Marotta 1987).
27
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
References
Benincà, Paola. 1989. Friaulisch: Interne Sprachgeschichte I. Grammatik. Evoluzione
della grammatica. In G. Holtus; M. Metzeltin; Ch. Schmitt (eds.), Lexikon der
romanistischen Linguistik. Vol. 3. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 563-585.
Bottiglioni, Gino. 1928. L’antico genovese e le isole linguistiche sardo-corse. L’Italia
dialettale 4: 1-60.
Chomsky, Noam; Halle, Morris. 1968. The Sound Pattern of English. New York:
Harper & Row.
Clements, George Nick. 1991. Place of articulation in consonants and vowels: a unified
theory. In G.N. Clements; E.V. Hume (eds.), Working Papers of the Cornell
Phonetics Laboratory. Vol. 5. Ithaca: Cornell University, 77-123.
Ferguson, Ronnie. 2007. A Linguistic History of Venice. Firenze: Olschki.
Gartner, Theodor. 1882. IO aus UO in Venetien. Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie
16: 174-182.
Hume, Elizabeth V. 1994. Front Vowels, Coronal Consonants and their Interaction in
nonlinear Phonology. New York – London: Garland Publishing.
Jakobson, Roman; Fant, Gunnar; Halle, Morris. 1952. Preliminaries to Speech Analysis.
The Distinctive Features and their Correlates. Cambridge (Massachussetts): The
M.I.T. Press.
Ladefoged, Peter. 1975. A Course in Phonetics. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Loporcaro, Michele. 2001. Distinctive features and phonological change: vowel
fronting and gravity interactions in Altamurano. Rivista di Linguistica 13/2: 255308.
Marotta, Giovanna. 1987. Dittongo e iato in italiano: una difficile discriminazione.
Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Classe di Lettere e Filosofia 17
(serie III): 847-887.
Pieri, Silvio. 1886. Note sul dialetto aretino. Pisa: Tipografia T. Nistri e C.
Rohlfs, Gerhard. 1966-1969. Grammatica storica della lingua italiana e dei suoi
dialetti. Torino: Einaudi.
De-constructing passives: A Romance diachronic perspective
Anna Bartra-Kaufmann
(Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona – CLT)
We provide diachronic arguments for the statement that “passive” is a cover term
with no empirical import or explanatory power (Chomsky 1981), and we offer a neoconstructionist explanation of the properties of periphrastic passives in Old Romance
(OR). Besides vP and/or VoiceP (Kratzer 1996; Collins 2005; Alexiadou,
Agnostopoulou and Schäffer 2015 a.o.), the crucial category is AspP, which valuates
the Aspect of the Past Participle (Gehrke and Grillo 2009). This compositional view
allows that the differences between OR varieties and the contemporary ones are less
than previously assumed. Our leading idea is that OR passives are participial absolute
constructions to which a light verb (ésser or estar) is merged to license its temporal
features. Specifically, two layers are relevant in passive sentences: a lower area headed
28
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
by an Aspect projection and a higher one in the T-C system. We explore a phase-based
account. Further support to our view comes from the analysis of the perfective system
and the passivizing morphology of Latin.
The examples (1) – (3), with atelic and stative predicates, challenge classical
accounts, such as Mendikoetxea (1999) or Gehrke & Grillo (2009) that only
accomplishments or achievements (involving BECOME) should be able to form passives.
In (4), there is an intransitive verb, and (5) involves a complex predicate.
(1) mandamos seer guardadas & tenidas. en la forma que es dita de iuso. (sic)
[Fueros Aragón 1247,].
(2) la lengua del rey mucho deve ser mirada & guardada en lo que oviere de
decir [Libro del Cavallero Cifar, 1300-1350].
(3) Lu nume di sanctus Benedictu fu saputu e canoschutu quasi da tucta
gente ky habitavano in là appresu [Giovanni Campulu, 1302/37]
(4) per què fou aquí deliberat e conclòs en la forma següent, (Llibre de les
Solemnitats de Barcelona I, 97, 19).
(5) e que sia fet protest ab scriptura (G. Eiximeno, Crim, XV, carta 2, a.).
In our compositional analysis, the features of the functional categories determine
the properties of the construction. The Internal Aspect (AspI) hosts the internal
argument, saturating the quantificational variable of the head (Borer 2005). vP hosts the
eventive value of the predicate (Chomsky 1995, Alexiadou & al. 2015). VoiceP is the
site of the external argument and passive morphology (Latin). In OR, the internal
argument agrees with the Gender and Number of the PstPrt. At VoiceP, all features are
valued and the chunk is send to SpellOut. Following Chomsky (2015), we assume that
in pro drop languages T has no EPP feature, and no DP has to be merged in [Spec, T].
The PstPr has its features valued in AspP(External). The auxiliary BE is inserted in T as
a last resort to value its tense feature. We challenge classical views of telicity and
stativity and we also discuss the relevance of AspP in Phase Theory. A simplified
structure is the following:
[T [T BE [ uT] [AspE [AspE mirada [uPerf] [VoiceP [Voice [vP [v [<CAUSE>] [AspIP la lengua del
rey [AspI [uQ] [√ [√ mirada] [DP la lengua del rey ]]]]]]]]]]]]]
References
Alexiadou, A.; Anagnostopoulou, E., & Schäfer, F. 2015. External arguments in
transitivity alternations: A layering approach. Oxford: OUP.
Borer, H. 2005. Structuring Sense II. Oxford, New York: OUP.
Chomsky, N. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris. //Chomsky,
N. 2001 “Derivation by phase”, in Kenstowicz, M. ed. Ken Hale: A life in
language: 1-52.
Chomsky, N. 2015. “Problems of projection. Extensions”, in di Domenico, E., & al.,
ed., Structures, strategies and beyond. Srudies in honour of Adriana Belletti.
Amsterdam, John Benjamins: 1-16.
Collins, C. 2005. “A smuggling approach to the passive in English”, Syntax, 8.2: 81–
120.
29
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Gehrke, B., & Grillo, N. 2009. How to become passive. In Grohmann, K., ed.
Explorations of phase theory: features and arguments. Berlin, de Gruyter: 231268.
Harley, H. 2013. “External arguments and the Mirror Principle: On the distinctness of
Voice and v”, Lingua, 125, 34-57.
Kratzer, A. 1996. “Severing the external argument from its verb”, in Rooryck, J. & L.
Zaring ed. Phrase Structure in the Lexicon, Dordrecht, Kluwer: 109-137.
Mendikoetxea, A. 1999 “Construcciones inacusativas y pasivas”, in Bosque, I. &
V. Demonte (ed.), Gramática descriptiva de la lengua española, 2: 1575-1629,
Madrid: Espasa.
Towards a definition of the category ‘associated motion’
Aicha Belkadi
(School of Oriental and African Studies)
The term ‘associated motion’ (AM), introduced by Koch (1984), refers to
morphemes affixed onto a verb to associate the event it encodes with a subordinate
motion event.
(1)
Kaytej (Australia; Koch, 1984)
Arntwe
nte
eyle-yene-ne
water
you:ERG get-go&do-IMPV
‘Go fetch some water.’
Allarre-layte-nke
artepe
kwerarte-pe
kill-do&go-PRES
that:ACC it:ACC-FOC
‘(the hawk) kills that animal and goes off.’
atnwenthe-pe
animal:ACC-FOC
AM has since been reported in languages of Australia and South America, as
well as some in Asia and Africa. The most prototypical morphemes occur with nonmotion verbs and form complex paradigms which contrast along several ‘parameters’
such as the time of motion with respect to the verb’s event (prior, simultaneous or
subsequent), the path of motion and its figure (Wilkins, 1991; 2006; Guillaume, 2009).
AM is now analysed as a grammatical category and, in the literature, is distinguished
from the category of deictic directionals on the ground that the latter occur with verbs
lexicalising motion for which they simply specify a deictic path (Voisin, 2013;
Vuillermet, 2013; Rose, 2015; Guillaume, under review).
In the talk, I will present the results of a comparative survey of morphemes
categorised as AM and deictic directionals in a number of African, Australian and
South American languages, focussing on their interaction with motion and non-motion
verbs. I will show that many languages indeed make a clear dichotomy between AM
markers and path satellites. However, in others the two categories share striking
similarities in terms of their semantic functions and distribution. In some languages
AM markers form simple paradigms and contrast only with respect to the deictic
30
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
semantics they encode. They also occur with motion verbs where they are interpreted
as directional markers (cf. the Yidiɲ AM affix ŋadan/ŋada:ɲ in 2).
(2)
Yidiɲ (Australia; Dixon, 1977)
ɲundu:ba d̡ambu:l wunaŋadan yiŋgu
‘You two come and sleep here!’
d̡uŋgaŋada:ɲ / gangul:l / ginda:d̡a /
burud̡u:r/
burud̡u:r/
run-coming-PAST grey
wallaby-ABS cassowary-ABS pademelon-ABs
‘(...) the grey wallaby, the cassowary and the pademelon came running.’
Most crucially, deictic directionals (such as the ventive =d in 3) may in some
contexts ─ often with non-motion verbs ─ also encode subordinate motion events
which share the characteristic features of AM events in terms of time, path and figure.
This phenomenon is particularly frequent in African languages.
(3)
Taqbaylit (Algeria)
tlm-γ
=d
taqbaylit
learn.PRF-1SG
=VEN
Taqbaylit
‘She learned Taqbaylit and came back.’
These similarities have typological significance. They first support observations
in the literature that AM as a monoverbal construction to encode additional
backgrounded motion events is a widespread and valid cross-linguistic strategy.
However, they show that languages can use different devices to encode AM, even non
motional elements. This means that a definition based on motion encoding and
occurrence with non-motion verbs alone can be insufficient to distinguish the
grammatical category of AM. In the talk I will propose an additional criterion, related
to grammaticalization. AM morphemes are generally grammaticalized from motion
verbs, often in compounds and serial-verb constructions (Koch, 1984; Guillaume,
2013) or in motion-encoding constructions. In many languages, the source verbs or
constructions are still visible, in others AM morphemes often occur in the scope of a
motion verb. Adapting an analysis by Nicholle (2002), I will propose that ambiguous
morphemes from the category AM are structurally grammaticalized from but often still
have the lexical properties of the source verbs and motion-encoding constructions.
Deictic directionals on the other hand do not have these lexical properties, and appear
to be more restricted in their pragmatic and syntactic distributions.
References
Dixon, Richard. 1977. A grammar of Yidiny. London: Cambridge University Press.
Guillaume, Antoine. 2009. Les suffixes verbaux de ‘mouvement associé’ en cavineña,
in Faits de Langues, Les Cahiers, N.1. OPHRYS
Guillaume, Antoine. 2013. Reconstructing the category of “associated motion” in
Tacanan languages (Amazonian Bolivia and Peru). In Ritsuko Kikusawa &
Lawrence A. Reid (eds.), Historical Linguistics 2011. Selected papers from the
20th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Osaka, 25-30 July 2011,
129–151. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
31
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Guillaume, Antoine. under review. Associated Motion in South America: typological
and areal perspectives.
Koch, Harold. 1984. The category of ‘associated motion’ in Kaytej. Language in
Central Australia 1: 23–34.
Nicolle, Steve. 2002. 'The grammaticalization of movement verbs in Digo and English.'
Révue de Semantique et Pragmatique 11: 47-68.
Rose, Françoise. 2015. Associated motion in Mojeño Trinitario: Some typological
considerations.
Folia Linguistica 49(1). 117–158.
Voisin, Sylvie. 2013. Expression de trajectoire dans quelques langues atlantiques
(groupe nord) dans Faits de langues, Catherine Chauvin (Ed) Sémantique des
relations spatiales.
Vuillermet, Marine. 2013. Spatial obsession in the Ese Ejja verbal domain: a look at its
associated motion system. Fieldwork Forum. University of California Berkeley.
Wilkins, David P. 1991. The Semantics, Pragmatics and Diachronic Development of
“Associated Motion” in Mparntwe Arrernte. Buffalo Papers in Linguistics 1. 207–
257.
Wilkins, David. 2006. Towards an Arrernte grammar of space, pp.24-62 in Stephen C. Levinson
and D.P. Wilkins, Grammars of space: explorations in cognitive diversity. CUP.
Patterns of agreement in modern Omani Arabic
Simone Bettega
(University of Torino)
Despite the fact that in Modern Standard Arabic plural human controllers
categorically require strict agreement (i.e. plural agreement, either masculine or
feminine depending on the inherent gender on the controller) and plural non-human
controllers categorically require deflected agreement (i.e. feminine singular agreement;
for the terms “strict” and “deflected” agreement see Ferguson, 1989), in the spoken
dialects a remarkable amount of variation concerning plural agreement has been
documented (see Belnap 1993 for Cairene, Brustad 2000 and Cowell 1964 for
Damascene, Brustad 2000 and Harrell 2004 for Moroccan, Holes 1990 for Gulf Arabic).
A number of factors have been found to influence the kind of agreement which a given
plural referent attracts, and these are: the morphological status of the controller (i.e.
whether it is a “sound” or “broken” plural, see Belnap 1993 and Brustad 2000), the
distance between target and controller in terms of phonological words (see Belnap 1993,
who builds on Corbett’s 1983 work on agreement in Slavic), and the distinction
between “scattered” and “grouped” plurals (i.e. plurals where collectivity is emphasized
as opposed to particularity; see Cowell 1964 and Belnap 1991, who draws on Barlow’s
1988 work on agreement in various languages of the world). Brustad (2000), in
particular, drawing on Khan’s (1984) work on Semitic languages, maintains that an
individuation hierarchy exists which affects the syntactic behavior of nouns: this list
includes features such as agency, animacy, definiteness, concreteness, quantification
and qualification.
32
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
The present work focuses on a largely under-researched variety of spoken Arabic,
Omani Arabic, a dialect which - unlike many major dialects of North Africa and the
Levant - still retains gender distinction in the plural forms of the verb, adjective and
pronoun. This additional morphological option renders agreement patterns in Omani
Arabic even more varied and complex than they are in other Arabic vernaculars:
however, these patterns have not been analyzed in depth (although variation in
agreement patterns has been documented for all sub-varieties of Omani Arabic hitherto
described, see for instance Reinhardt, 1894, and Davey, 2013). The database on which
the present research is based consists of five hours of audio material drawn from the
popular Omani sit-com Yōm u-yōm (‫)يوم ويوم‬, the analysis of which resulted in a corpus
of 181 plural controllers with 270 corresponding targets. This corpus has been
statistically analyzed with respect to the syntactic categories mentioned above (e.g.
animacy, quantification, morphological status of the controller, and so on). The results
of this analysis appear to confirm Belnap’s (1993) and Brustad’s (2000) claim that
speakers of Arabic can use agreement as a syntactical tool to more narrowly classify
referents (in other words, deflected agreement shows a marked statistical tendency to
co-occur with certain types of controllers, and not with others). However, the Omani
data also show remarkable differences from Belnap’s findings on Cairene Arabic: in
particular, the percentage of targets depending on inanimate controllers and showing
strict agreement seems to be significantly higher in Omani than in Cairene dialect. This
fact would seem to suggest that the loss of a morphological category (i.e. gender
distinction in the plural) causes a rearrangement of the whole agreement system which
tends to level out variation in the kind of agreement that plural (and especially nonhuman) controllers can trigger. In this respect, the study of agreement in Omani Arabic
may help improving our understanding of the history of the Arabic language(s).
References
Barlow, Michael. 1988. A Situated Theroy of Agreement. Unpublised PhD thesis,
Standford: University of Stanford.
Belnap, Kirk. 1991. Grammatical Agreement Variation in Cairene Arabic. Unpublished
PhD thesis, Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania.
Belnap, Kirk. 1993. The meaning of deflected/strict agreement in Cairene Arabic. In M.
Eid, C. Holes (eds.) Perspective on Arabic Linguistics I. Amsterdam and
Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 97-119
Brustad, Kristen. 2000. The Syntax of Spoken Arabic: a Comparative Study of
Moroccan, Egyptian, Syrian, and Kuwaiti dialects. Washington, D.C.:
Georgetown University Press.
Corbett, Greville. 1983. Hierarchies, Targets and Controllers: Agreement Patterns in
Slavic. London: Croom Helm.
Cowell, Mark. 1964. A Reference Grammar of Syrian Arabic (Based on the Dialect of
Damascus). Washington D.C.: Georgetown university press.
Davey, Richard. 2013. Coastal Dhofārī Arabic: a sketch grammar. Unpublished PhD
thesis, Manchester: University of Manchester.
Ferguson, Charles. 1989. Grammatical agreement in Classical Arabic and the modern
dialects: a response to Versteegh’s pidginization hypothesis. Al-ʕArabiyya 22: 517.
Harrell, Richard. 2004. A Short Reference Grammar of Moroccan Arabic. Washington,
D.C.: Georgetown University Press.
33
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Holes, Clive. 1990. Gulf Arabic. London and New York: Routledge.
Khan, Geoffrey. 1984. Object Markers and Agreement Pronouns in Semitic Languages.
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 47: 468-500.
Reinhardt, Carl. 1894. Ein arabischer Dialekt gesprochen in Oman und Zanzibar.
Amsterdam: Philo Press.
Backward and forward orientation in the use of personal and
demonstrative pronouns in German discourse
Dagmar Bittner and Jeruen E. Dery
(ZAS Berlin; Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft)
A well-known exotic property of German is the existence of demonstrative
pronouns (D- PRO) overlapping in use with personal pronouns (P-PRO). For the last 50
years, the research on which rules guide production and comprehension of these
pronoun types has focused on either backward-oriented discourse use, such as anaphoric
relations, (e.g. Accessibility Theory, Centering Theory) or on forward-oriented
discourse effects such as on pronoun choice on the unfolding discourse (Weinrich
1993). Anaphoric (backward) use of pronouns is constrained by the needs to
disambiguate pronoun reference, while forward orientation of pronoun use is regulated
by constraints pertaining to discourse flow, as well as expectations on topic
maintenance or change. In the current research, we investigated how these two
orientations interact in the choice of pronouns in discourse. We additionally examined
whether there is an effect of narrator perspective (point-of-view) on pronoun choice
(e.g. whether it is located inside or outside of the narrative).
We collected a corpus of narratives using picture-book-stories with 80 adults. To
control narrator perspective participants received different types of devices concerning
their fictitious situation as a narrator. We analyzed All D- and P-PROs produced in
nominative and accusative case, which were coded for backward reference (subject or
object antecedent, how many propositions ago) and forward continuation of the pronoun
referent (subject or object, how many propositions later). Furthermore, we distinguished
between pronouns with more than one or exactly one potential antecedent in the
previous context.
The results are as follows: In case of pronouns with more than one potential
antecedent reference disambiguation is required. Therefore backward orientation of
pronoun use is predominant. As claimed by anaphora resolution theories, given this
situation, P-PROs are more likely than D-PROs to refer back to higher activated or
more salient referents, as suggested by the higher frequency of subject reference with Pthan D-PROs. In case of pronouns with exactly one possible antecedent, no reference
disambiguation is required and forward orientation in discourse becomes predominant.
In the data, this comes to light by differences in referent continuation. In this case, DPRO referents are more tightly related to subjects, occurring more frequently as the
referent of the subject in the immediately following proposition than P-PRO referents,
confirming Weinrich’s Profilbildung-function. D-PROs are therefore used to activate or
increase the salience of upcoming topics.
34
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
It turns out that pronoun use that do not require reference disambiguation is not
arbitrary but is constrained by the same salience-based opposition between P- and DPRO as pronoun use requiring reference disambiguation, though both types of pronoun
use have different orientations (backward vs. forward) in discourse. The data provides
further evidence that pronoun use-specifically use of D-PRO-not requiring reference
disambiguation is more frequent when the narrator takes an external than an internal
perspective for narration, suggesting that alternating between P- and D-PRO use is a
means of identifying the author/speaker’s perspective.
Psych passives in Polish
Anna Bondaruk, Bożena Rozwadowska and Wojciech Witkowski
(John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin; Wrocław University; Wrocław
University)
Within the debate about the special status of Experiencer verbs, one of the
contentious issues has been whether they form verbal passives in the same way as other
transitive verbs. Belletti and Rizzi (1988) claim that Object Experiencer (OE) predicates
form only adjectival passives. Pesetsky (1995) and Landau (2010) take only eventive
OE verbs to be able to form verbal passives. Finally, Grafmiller (2013) argues that all
psychological predicates, even stative ones, are capable of forming verbal passives.
The aim of this paper is to examine whether Polish OE verbs can form verbal
passives to obtain some insight into their syntactic and event structure. Two groups of
OE verbs are taken into account, stative and non-stative, distinguished by Biały (2005).
Stative OE verbs include: interesować ‘interest’, martwić ‘worry’, trapić ‘plague’,
zasmucać ‘grieve’, etc., whereas the non-stative OE verbs comprise: dręczyć ‘torment’,
rozbawić ‘amuse’, straszyć ‘scare’, zaskoczyć ‘startle’, etc. Passive sentences containing
33 stative and 46 non-stative OE verbs have been extracted from the National Corpus of
Polish (www.nkjp.pl). Additionally, judgements based on specifically constructed
passive sentences with the two types of OE verbs have been collected. The data have
been examined in the light of the criteria to distinguish adjectival from verbal passives,
present in the literature (cf. Wasow 1977, Emonds 2006, Gehrke 2011, 2012, to appear),
such as Polish equivalents of: i) un-prefixation, ii) selection by different classes of V,
iii) the use of degree modifiers such as too, iv) the modification by space, time and
manner adverbials, v) appearance in the progressive, and vi) control into purpose
clauses.
The quantitative analysis of the corpus data shows that whereas non-stative OE
verbs do not show any clear preferences for auxiliary być ‘to be’ or zostać ‘to become’
in the passive, stative OE more readily accept the auxiliary być ‘be’. Whereas zostać is
unambiguously found in verbal passives in Polish (Zabrocki 1981), być–passives can be
verbal, when followed by the imperfective passive participle, or adjectival, when
accompanied by the perfective passive participle. A thorough analysis of the data
demonstrates that non-stative OE verbs form verbal passives with zostać only when
they have an agentive or eventive meaning. They also allow for verbal passives with
być, but then they are interpreted as referring to an intermittent state, arising whenever
35
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
the Experiencer thinks about the stimulus (cf. Grafmiller 2013). Hence, they refer to a
change of state or to an onset to a state and are therefore treated as eventive. Stative OE
verbs form verbal passives more frequently with być than with zostać. However, in
those passive structures their meaning is not stative at all, but they express a change of
state, an onset to a state, or an intermittent state, and are hence interpreted as eventive.
Consequently, the conclusion is drawn that verbal passives are formed of stative OE
verbs only on their non- stative interpretation, which results from the polysemous nature
of these verbs. This supports the claim that stative OE verbs in Polish do not give rise to
verbal passives. As a result, our analysis goes against Żychliński’s (2013) contention
that these verbs do not differ from ordinary transitive verbs and supports the position
that they are special in being polysemous (or, alternatively, on constructivist
approaches, the event interpretation is triggered by the syntactic context).
References
Belletti, Adriana, and Luigi Rizzi. 1988. Psych-verbs and θ theory. Natural Language
and Linguistic Theory 6: 291–352.
Biały, Adam. 2005. Polish Psychological Verbs at the Lexicon-Syntax Interface in
Cross- linguistic Perspective. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Emonds, Joseph. 2006. Adjectival passives. In M. Everaert and H. van Riemsdijk (eds.),
The Blackwell Companion to Syntax, vol. 1. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 16-60.
Gehrke, Berit. 2011. Stative passives and event kinds. In I. Reich, E. Horch, and D.
Pauly (eds.), Sinn und Bedeutung 15: Proceedings of the 2010 Annual Conference
of the Gesellschaft für Semantik. Saarbrücken: Universaar - Saarland University
Press, 241-257.
Gehrke, Berit. 2012. Passive states. In V. Demonte and L. McNally (eds.), Telicity,
Change, and State: A Cross-Categorial View of Event Structure. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 185-211.
Gehrke, Berit. to appear. Adjectival participles, event kind modification and pseudoincorporation. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory.
Grafmiller, Jason. The semantics and syntactic choice. An analysis of English emotion
verbs. Ph.D. diss. Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
Landau, Idan. 2010. The locative syntax of Experiencers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pesetsky, David. 1995. Zero Syntax: Experiencers and Cascades.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wasow, Thomas. 1977. Transformations and the Lexicon. In P. Culicover, T. Wasow,
and A. Akmajian (eds.), Formal Syntax. New York: Academic Press, 327-360.
Zabrocki, Tadeusz. 1981. Lexical rules of semantic interpretation. Poznań:
Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu im. A. Mickiewicza w Poznaniu.
Żychliński, Sylwiusz. 2013. On some aspects of the syntax of object Experiencers in
Polish and English. Ph.D. diss. Poznań, Adam Mickiewicz University.
36
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
A radical approach to metonymy
Cristiano Broccias
(Università di Genova)
Although metonymy, like metaphor, is interpreted in terms of cognitive
operations (Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez 2011) and it is recognized that the boundary
between metonymy and e.g. metaphor may be fuzzy (Bierwiaczonek 2013: 34) and that
a prototypical/schematic approach may be needed (Barcelona 2011), the (implicit)
assumption persists that metonymy, like metaphor, is a “platonic” form, i.e. a category
that exists independently of its instantiations and whose essence can somehow be
“revealed”. This seems to be so even in the case of those researchers that make at least
some of the assumptions mentioned above (see for example Bierwiaczonek 2013: 33).
Quite surprisingly, no researcher so far has proposed that we apply to the analysis
of metonymy (and figurative language, in general) the same “radical” line of reasoning
that Croft (2001) has advocated for the analysis of e.g. syntactic functions. As is wellknown, Croft argued that such categories cannot be defined exhaustively and
independently of their instantiations. Rather, they correspond to taxonomic networks
where specific instances exhibit varying degrees of overlap with one another.
I will contend that a similar approach is also necessary in metonymy studies and,
in fact, in investigations of figurative language generally. The classification of
instantiations of figurative language as “metonymic” is somewhat arbitrary because it
depends on definitions that are intended to be encompassing and independent of specific
instances, while the reality is that (a) a variety of conceptual operations are at play
simultaneously in the production and understanding of “metonymic” patterns and (b)
analysts resort to multiple criteria in their taxonomies, from conceptual operations to
formal (viz. constructional) features.
I will argue that agreement about what constitutes metonymy can only be reached
at a very abstract level. Specific examples should rather be analyzed in terms of a
multidimensional space defined by both conceptual and formal features. While most
analysts would agree that metonymy is an umbrella term for cognitive operations
involving connectivity between conceptualizations within a domain, disagreement
emerges even in the analysis of such stock examples as those in (1). (A further selection
will be offered in the presentation.)
(1) a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
This book is easy.
The dog bit the cat.
Loud colour.
Baker (vs. to knife).
He is a lion.
I’m all ears.
He fell to his death.
For instance, is facetization (e.g. Paradis 2004), as in (1a), distinct from
metonymy? Are active zones, see (1b), metonymic (see e.g. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez
2011 vs. Bierwiaczonek 2013)? Does synesthesia, (1c), involve metonymy (see e.g.
Barcelona 2003)? Can derivational morphology (vs. zero-derivation), see (1d), be
37
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
metonymic (see e.g. Brdar and Brdar-Szabó 2014)? Are lean mappings (see e.g.
Ungerer and Schmid 2006), as in (1e), perhaps metonymic? Are predicational cases
such as (1f) only metonymic? Is to his death in (1g) a metonymy “for the place where is
presumed to die” (see e.g. Broccias 2014 vs. Iwata 2014)?
I will argue that these are flawed questions often based on circular reasoning (i.e.
the boundaries of metonymy are tested on the very examples that are used to define it).
What one can and should do is isolate features in the analysis of specific examples, such
as the level of activation of the connected conceptualizations, constructional conflicts,
the feasibility of structural substitution, and speaker’s vs. hearer’s conceptualizations, to
name just a few.
More generally, the lesson that can be taken from this discussion of metonymy is
that a radical approach is in fact probably needed in many areas of linguistic analysis.
References
Barcelona, Antonio. 2003. On the plausibility of claiming a metonymic motivation for
conceptual metaphor. In: Antonio Barcelona (ed.). Metaphor and Metonymy at the
Crossroads: A Cognitive Perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 31–58.
Barcelona, Antonio. 2011. Reviewing the properties and prototype structure of
metonymy. In: Réka Benczes, Antonio Barcelona, Francisco José Ruiz de
Mendoza Ibáñez (eds.). Defining Metonymy in Cognitive Linguistics: Towards a
Consensus View. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 7–58.
Bierwiaczonek, Boguslaw. 2013. Metonymy in Language, Thought and Brain.
Sheffield: Equinox Publishing Ltd.
Brdar, Mario and Rita Brdar-Szabó. 2014. Where does metonymy begin? Some
comments on Janda (2011). Cognitive Linguistics 25(2): 313–340.
Broccias, Cristiano. 2014. Tight metaphors vs. deadly metonymies: a further rebuttal of
Iwata’s bipartite adjectival resultatives. Language Sciences 44: 40–46.
Croft, William. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological
Perspective. Oxford:
Oxford University Press. Iwata, Seizi. 2014. “Tight links” make convenient
metaphors but loose explanations: replying to a reply. Language Sciences
42: 15–29.
Paradis, Carita. 2004. Where does metonymy stop? Senses, facets and active zones.
Metaphor and Symbol 19(4): 245–264.
Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, Francisco José. 2011. Metonymy and cognitive operations. In:
Réka Benczes, Antonio Barcelona, Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez (eds.).
103–123.
Ungerer, Friedrich and Hans-Jörg Schmid. 2006. An Introduction to Cognitive
Linguistics. London: Routledge.
38
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Apprehensive and preventive constructions in Central Mongolic
Benjamin Brosig
(Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
Constructions that express fear of a future event (apprehensives) or exhort an
addressee to avoid such an event (preventives) tend to resist classification. Preventives
have been differentiated from negative commands in that they tend to exhibit a lack of
control (Birjulin&Xrakovskij 2001), but they can go beyond cautioning by exhorting to
active avoidance (Kalinina&Kartashova 2015). Apprehensives/Preventives are often
expressed by forms that express possibility (Lichtenberk 1995, Pakendorf&Schalley
2007) or probability (Jing-Schmidt&Kapatsinski 2012), but the forms that express them
can range from positive futures to negated subjunctives and negated perfectives.
Similarly, while the basic underlying emotion is fear, they can pattern with wishes
(Dobrushina 2015) or even threats (Kalinina&Kartashova 2015). In this paper, I will try
to show that the synchronous meaning of apprehensive/preventive constructions can be
better understood by looking at their diachronic evolution and, in particular, at their
source constructions. I focus on three unrelated morphological apprehensive/preventive
grams in Central Mongolic, using data from the literature, corpora, and participant
observation.
The first form to be discussed is an almost complete instantiation of the
grammaticalization chain possibility/probability → apprehensive → preventive →
prohibitive postulated by Dobrushina (2006) and Pakendorf&Schalley (2007) across a
dialect group. The source construction *-xU tʃe (-FUT PROBABILITY) retained its
epistemic properties, but acquired overtones of desired and undesired apprehension in
Middle Mongol (-ʊːtsai) and Kalmyk Oirat (-wzæ), with very similar meaning under
negation. In Buryat, -ʊːʒa developed into a general future, but is negated through an
imperative negator. In Literary Khalkha, -ʊːtsæ was restricted to the negative
apprehension of inherently undesirable events. Qinghai Oirat dispensed with
apprehension, so that -wzæ: can be used to prohibit an undertaking for the addressee’s
sake.
The second form, Colloquial Khalkha -wɑː, exemplifies the grammaticalization of
a non-negated perfective past into an apprehensive. In contemporary usage, -wɑː can
express apprehensive, past interrogative and past mirative meanings. However, it goes
back to Middle Mongol -bA, a perfective past suffix with no concrete evidential values,
but factual overtones (Street 2009). I propose that a change neutral past → mirative
past took place when the evidential system innovated a distinction between wellestablished and not-yet-established information and the former perfect -(g)sAn
displaced -bA as a neutral past. The development mirative past → apprehensive future,
in turn, forms part of a process during which all perfective past suffixes acquired
epistemic future meanings according to their evidential values. During this process, the
notion ‘surprise’ was narrowed down to ‘unpleasant surprise’ and coupled with a
preventive intent.
Finally, -ləg in Eastern Mongolian, which apparently derives from a Proto-Central
Mongolic derivational resultative *-lgA, denotes addressee intention plus speaker
disapproval (rather than fearful apprehension). Its negated form -ləg=gʉɛ is used to
prohibit the addressee, for her own good, from undertaking an event.
39
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
All three grams developed specific forms of speaker apprehension
(wish/fear/disapproval) from corresponding aspectual and epistemic notions. Preventive
intent and intersubjectivity started out as implications, but once this meaning became
fixed, the forms started to be permissible for well-meaning prohibitions.
Examples (glosses and translations are the author’s)
Apprehensive (fear/wish):
(1) Kalmyk (Vlada Baranova, elicitation)
ter
kövü-n
töörü-vzä
DEM.DIST
boy-3POSS get.lost-PREV
‘That boy might get lost!’
(2) Kalmyk (Saj et al. 2009: 823)
en
taka-gǝ
xotǝ-nj
ikär cac-ad
ödǝr bolʁǝn ög-xlägǝ
DEM.PROX hen-ACC
food-3POSS very throw-CVB day every give-SUCC.CVB
nan-dǝ
xošad bolnu ʁurv-ad
öndǝg ʁar-ʁ-ǯǝ
ögǝ-vzä
1sg-DAT twice maybe three-DISTRIBUTIVE egg exit-CAUS-CVB
give-PREV
‘If I scatter a lot of grain for this hen every day, it will maybe lay 2 or 3 eggs for me.’
Negative apprehensive with preventive intent. The event in question is beyond the full
control of the addressee, but s/he might still influence it:
(3) Khalkha (http://gashuun.mn/1198, Mongol hün hiigeed hyatad hün, 2014-11-16,
retrieved 2016-1-7)
eh
orn=oo
ald-uuzai
mother
country=REFL.POSS
lose-PREV
‘[It is true that (when) in China, today every Mongolian is worrying:] “I might lose my
motherland [through assimilation].’
Non-apprehensive preventive bordering on prohibitive. The event is under the complete
control of the addressee, though its apprehended, separately expressed consequences are
not. The intended beneficiary of the prevention is the addressee.
(4) Qinghai Oirat (Benjamin Brosig, overheard utterance)
tʰɑ
jɔw-ʊzæ,
ʊn-dʒi-nɑ
2SG.HON
go-PREV
fall-proceed-FUT
‘Don’t go, you will fall!’
ʃuː
SP
Prohibitive: The addressee is in control of the event. The intended beneficiary of the
prohibition is unspecified.
(5) Qinghai Oirat (adapted from Oyunceceg 2009: 215)
tʃʰiː
pitigiː
jɔw-Øǃ
2SG
IMP.NEG
go-IMP
‘Don’t go!’
40
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
References
Bayancoɣtu. 2002. Qorčin aman ayalɣun-u sudulul [A study of Khorchin Mongolian].
Kökeqota: Öbür mongɣul-un yeke surɣaɣuli-yin keblel-ün qoriy-a.
Birjulin, Leonid A. & Xrakovskij, Victor S. 2001. Imperative sentences: Theoretical
Problems. In: Victor S. Xrakovskij (ed.), Typology of imperative constructions.
München: Lincom Europa: 3-49.
Dobrushina, Nina. 2006. Grammatičeskie formy I konstrukcii so značeniem opasenija i
predostereženija [Grammatical forms and constructions with the meaning of
prohibition and prevention]. Voprosy jazykoznanija 2: 28-67.
Dobrushina, Nina. 2015. Negation in the complement clauses of fear-verbs. Paper
presented at Diversity Linguistics: Retrospect and Prospect, 1-3 May 2015
(Leipzig).
Jing-Schmidt, Zhuo & Vsevolod Kapatsinski. 2012. The apprehensive: Fear as
endophoric evidence and its pragmatics in English, Mandarin, and Russian.
Journal of Pragmatics 44: 346-373.
Kalinina, Alevtina A. & Elena P. Kartashova. 2015. Preventive imperatives among
correlative meanings. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences 6.3: 65-70.
Lichtenberk, Frantisek. 1995. Apprehensional Epistemics. In: Joan Bybee & Suzanne
Fleischman (eds.), Modality in Grammar and Discourse. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins: 293-327.
Oyunceceg. 2009. Degedü monggul aman ayalgun-u sudulul [A study of Qinghai
Oirat]. Kökeqota: Öbür monggul-un arad-un keblel-ün qoriya.
Pakendorf, Brigitte & Ewa Schalley. 2007. From possibility to prohibition. Linguistic
Typology 11: 515–540.
Saj, Sergej S. & Vlada V. Baranova & N. V. Serdobol’skaja (eds.). 2009: Issledovanija
po grammatike kalmyckogo jazyka – Teksti. – Acta linguistica petropolitana V,2:
730–856.
Street, John. 2009. On the three past tense endings of early Middle Mongol. UralAltaische Jahrbücher 23: 126–159.
Continuing the deconstruction of semantic agreement. A case of
semantic attributive adjectival agreement sensitive to sex, historical
gender, formality and genericity
Maria Bylin
(Stockholm University)
As Johnson and Joseph (2014) point out, semantic agreement is a notion much in
need of deconstruction. It is often understood as dependent on the meaning of a lexeme
(Corbett 2006), but sometimes perceived as coding the properties of a referent (Enger
2013: 278). However, as Dahl (2000) argues, some cases of apparent incongruity may
be explained by both factors. Thus, what is traditionally named semantic agreement
may be thought of as a combination of semantic and referential agreement, i.e. semantic
and pragmatic agreement.
41
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
This idea of semantic agreement as composed of several types of agreement is
much supported by the complex variation pattern of the Swedish adjectival agreement
of animacy and sex. The paradigm consists of two forms only. The -a is used for
inanimates, females, and rather often for males. It is usually described as syntactic
agreement. The marked morpheme is the -e, coding animacy and masculinity, but also
strongly associated with white collar work and the public sphere. Interestingly, female
referents are occasionally marked with an -e when they hold public office or powerful
positions at work or in sports:
(1)
Vår nye finansminister Magdalena Andersson
Our new:MASC finance minister Magdalena Andersson
Our new minister of finance, Magdalena Andersson
For generic individuals, both -a and -e are used as (intended) gender neutral
forms. However, none is accepted as such by the entire speech community. Thus, the
choice of form does not only involve competition between syntactic and semantic
agreement, but also between different kinds of semantic factors stemming from the
controller as a lexeme and the properties of the referent.
A statistical analysis of the modern variation in a corpus of texts is presented. The
corpus is comprised of newspaper texts representing the public sphere and texts from a
family oriented discussion forum representing the private sphere. On the basis of the
results of the analysis, it is argued that the phenomenon is best understood as complex
semantic agreement, where different types of semantic factors are at play. The
differences in the variation patterns between specific and generic individuals indicate
that the more abstract conception of the properties of a generic referent makes it much
less susceptible to semantic factors, while the puzzling patterns of women and men are
much better understood if reference as well as lexical meaning are both taken to be parts
of semantic agreement.
References
Corbett, Greville G. 2006. Agreement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Dahl, Östen. 2000. Animacy and the notion of semantic gender. In: B. Unterbeck (ed.)
Gender in Grammar and Cognition. I Approaches to Gender. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Enger, Hans-Olav. 2013. Scandinavian pancake sentences revisited. Nordic journal of
Linguistics 36, pp 275–301.
Johnson, Cynthia A. & Joseph, D. Brian. 2014. Morphology and syntax … and
semantics … and pragmatics. Deconstructing “semantic agreement”. Lingvisticae
Investigationes 37:2, pp 306–321.
42
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
GLAW-IT
A free large Italian dictionary encoded in a fine-grained XML format
Basilio Calderone, Franck Sajous and Nabil Hathout
(CNRS/Université de Toulouse 2)
We present GLAW-IT (Un Grande Lessico Automaticamente estratto da
Wiktionary Italia), a free large dictionary extracted from Wikizionario, the Italian
edition of the collaborative dictionary Wiktionary.
The rise and quick expansion of corpus linguistics and data-driven approaches
made lexical resources essential for quantitative and qualitative language studies. Italian
language suffers from data scarceness: most of the lexical resources are not freely
available (Bel et al., 2000; Roventini et al., 2000) while others focus on particular
aspects: morphology and syntax (Talamo et al., 2016; Zanchetta & Baroni, 2005;
Bertinetto et al., 2005), phonology transcriptions (Goslin et al., 2014), argument
structures (Lenci et al., 2012). To our knowledge no workable, free and large Italian
dictionary combines different levels of linguistic information. This lack motivated the
creation of GLAW-IT, produced by collecting Wikizionario’s lexicographical material.
As Sajous & Hathout (2015), we adopted a lexicographical perspective focused on the
integration of different levels of linguistic information in a coherent, structured and
homogeneous format, rather than resorting to automated translation, aggregation and
alignment of heterogeneous resources, such as BabelNet (Navigli & Ponzetto, 2010).
As a result, GLAW-IT is a machine-readable dictionary structured in an XML
format encoding the micro- and macrostructure of Wikizionario’s articles (an example
is given in Figure 1).
It contains almost 320,000 wordforms with sections reporting:
 Definitions (glosses) including linguistic labels (attitudinal, diatopic,
diachronic information and specialized domain markers)
 Usage examples
 Parts of speech including morphosyntactic features
 Phonemic transcriptions in IPA
 Inflectional paradigms: the complete set of the inflected forms related to
lemmas
 Morphologically or semantically related words
 Etymology
 Translations in different languages
GLAW-IT is the only free machine-readable dictionary for Italian. Coverage
evaluation shows GLAW-IT’s superiority and qualitative comparisons to other Italian
lexicons confirm the overall quality and reliability of GLAW-IT, notably concerning the
consistency of the phonemic transcriptions. To our knowledge, only the recent lexicon
PhonItalia (Goslin et al., 2014) provides phonemic transcriptions for Italian words
(smaller than GLAW-IT, it counts 120,000 wordforms).
Conceived as a general-purpose dictionary, GLAW-IT is intended to be directly
workable or used to easily derive customized lexicons dedicated to specific uses
including NLP, linguistic description and psycholinguistics. Filtering linguistic labels or
other markups instantly permits on demand tailoring of sublexicons such as loanwords,
regionalisms, dated and domain- specific words, etc. Regarding lexicographic analysis,
43
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
an immediate application could be the exploitation of GLAW-IT for neologisms
detection. We also are currently designing a large morphosyntactic and phonological
based grounded on GLAW-IT that hopefully will benefit Italian linguistic studies and
NLP applications.
Figure 1. General structure of the article danno in GLAW-IT
44
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
References
Bel, Núria, Federica Busa, Nicoletta Calzolari, Elisabetta Gola, Alessandro Lenci,
Monica Monachini, Antoine Ogonowski, Ivonne Peters, Wim Peters, Nilda
Ruimy, Marta Villegas & Antonio Zampolli. 2000. SIMPLE: A General
Framework for the Development of Multilingual Lexicons. In Proceedings of the
Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC
2000), Athens, Greece.
Bertinetto, Pier Marco, Cristina Burani, Alessandro Laudanna, Daniela Ratti Lucia
Marconi & Claudia Rolando. 2005. Corpus e Lessico di Frequenza dell’Italiano
Scritto (CoLFIS). http://linguistica.sns.it/CoLFIS/Home.html.
Goslin, Jeremy, Claudia Galluzzi & Cristina Romani. 2014. PhonItalia: a phonological
lexicon for Italian. Behavior Research Methods 46(3): 872–886.
Poletto, Cecilia. 2000. The Higher Functional Field. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wolfe, Sam. 2015. The nature of Old Spanish Verb Second reconsidered. Lingua 165:
132–155.
Lenci, Alessandro, Gabriella Lapesa & Giulia Bonansinga. 2012. LexIt: A
Computational Re- source on Italian Argument Structure. In Proceedings of the
Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC
2012), 3712–3718. Istanbul, Turkey.
Navigli, Roberto & Simone Paolo Ponzetto. 2010. BabelNet: Building a Very Large
Multilingual Semantic Network. In Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL’2010), 216–225. Uppsala,
Sweden.
Roventini, Adriana, Antonietta Alonge, Nicoletta Calzolari, Bernardo Magnini &
Francesca Bertagna. 2000. ItalWordNet: a Large Semantic Database for Italian. In
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and
Evaluation (LREC 2000), 783–790. Athens, Greece.
Sajous, Franck & Nabil Hathout. 2015. GLAWI, a free XML-encoded MachineReadable Dic- tionary built from the French Wiktionary. In Proceedings of the of
the eLex 2015 conference, 405–426. Herstmonceux, UK.
Talamo, Luigi, Chiara Celata & Pier Marco Bertinetto. 2016. derIvaTario: An
Annotated Lexicon of Italian Derivatives. Word Structure: 9(1).
Zanchetta, Eros & Marco Baroni. 2005. Morph-it! A free corpus-based morphological
resource for the Italian language. Corpus Linguistics: 1(1).
Register, text type and syntactic change in early French
Daniéla Capin and Pierre Larrivée
(University of Strasburg; University of Caen)
The syntactic evolution of Old French has been assessed mostly on the basis of
literary material. Legal material has however been drawn upon recently to bring new
light on the chronology and vectors of change. Quantitative analyses of such legal
material indicate that the loss of Null Subject takes place three centuries before it does
in literary material (Balon and Larrivée 2014, Capin and Larrivée submitted).
45
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Comparable results for other related syntactic phenomena are also provided by
Zimmerman (2014) and Wolfsgruber (2014). The argument is that because it does not
have the same degree of stylistic concern, legal material was less removed from the
Primary Linguistic Input of the early periods, and therefore a better reflection of
language structure and change.
This argument is challenged by recent work. One challenge is put forward by
Marchello-Nizia (2015). Using an extensive survey of V2, Null Subjects and Stylistic
Fronting in a series of mostly literary texts, she stakes the claim that the significantly
lower rate of these Old French constructions in legal material as compared to literary
material is due to the length of texts, rather than their relative closeness to the Primary
Linguistic Input. A second challenge is articulated by Prévost (2015) who claims again
on the basis of mostly literary texts that subjects are realised at a greater rate with 1 st
person pronouns as compared to 3rd person pronouns. Since these contrasted results are
found in the same texts, the difference cannot be attributed to text register, and it is
proposed to relate to the emphatic character of the first person that is lost through
overuse, following a standard grammaticalization process.
We test whether quantitative patterns relate to text type (legal vs. literary) or to
other factors such as text length and/or grammatical subject. We provide new
quantitative data about legal material from the Paris region. We use a long text – the
Établissement des Capétiens, a law code from the end of the 13th century –, and a series
of short texts in French from the same period – in the online Cartulaires d’Île-deFrance. The results are at odds with predictions by Marchello-Nizia’s and Prévost’s
proposals. Long and short legal texts display Null Subjects at essentially the same rates,
and they evidence little variation regarding 1st or 3rd grammatical person. This stability,
and some of the data provided by Prévost and Marchello-Nizia themselves, indeed
supports the view that legal material is closer to the PLI than other text types at the
time, and that the Null Subject as a productive rule is lost in the 13th century. Not only is
legal material dated, localised, signed, in prose and generally abundant, but it provides a
consistent reflection of the PLI. It is suggested that this may be true for the history of
other languages of Europe, and beyond. By comparing charters and law codes, a
contribution is brought to the understanding of variation of linguistic features according
to text type.
References
Balon, Laurent and Pierre Larrivée. 2014. L’Ancien français n’est déjà plus une langue
à sujet nul. Nouveau témoignage des textes légaux. Journal of French Language
Studies: 1-17.
Capin, Daniéla and Pierre Larrivée. Submitted. La disparition du sujet nul en ancien
français et la continuité référentielle.
Marchello-Nizia, Christiane. 2015. Les plus anciens textes français (9e-mi 12e s.) : les
facteurs de l’évolution de la syntaxe propositionnelle. Paper read at the
DIACHRO 7 Conference, Paris, February 5-7 2015. Powerpoint presentation, 22
slides.
Prévost, Sophie. 2015. Diachronie du français et linguistique de corpus : une approche
quantitative renouvelée. Langages 197: 23-45.
46
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
van Reenen, Pieter and Lene Schøsler. 2001. The Pragmatic Functions of the Old
French Particles AINZ, APRES, DONC, LORS, OR, PUIS, and SI. Susan C.
Herring, Pieter van Reenen and Lene Schøsler. Textual parameters in older
languages. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 59-105.
Wolfsgruber, Anne. 2014. Impersonal se-constructions and the Puzzle of Old French
Subjects. Poster presentation at the DiGS 16 Conference, Budapest.
Zimmermann, Michael. 2014. Expletive and Referential Subject Pronouns in Medieval
French. Berlin: de Gruyter.
The marriage lexicon in a comparative perspective
Esperança Cardeira and Roxana Ciolăneanu
(University of Lisbon)
In the present study we aim to analyse how the Latin lexical variation related to
the conceptual field of marriage is reflected in the Romance languages. We start from
the assumption that the marriage-related conceptual variation in Latin, be it
onomasiological, i.e. “a particular referent or type of referent may be named by means
of various conceptually distinct lexical categories” (Geeraerts : 3) or semasiological, i.e.
“a particular lexical item may refer to distinct type of referents” (Geeraerts : 3) has been
selectively transmitted to the Romance languages depending on the various contexts of
use distinguished by geographical, cultural and even social characteristics.
Latin used several words for marriage, to marry, husband and wife that had
slightly different connotations: the noun MATRIMONIUM (‘marriage’, ‘motherhood’) was
used to designate the relationship; the verbs SPONSARE (‘to marry’, ‘to commit’),
NUBERE (‘to marry’, ‘to cover with a veil’) and MARITARE (‘to marry’) for the act of
getting married; and, for husband and wife, the nouns VIR (‘man’, ‘husband’), MARITUS
(‘husband’) and SPONSUS (‘spouse’, ‘husband’), MULIER, FEMINA (‘woman’, ‘wife’),
UXOR (‘wife’) and SPONSA (‘wife’, ‘bride’). Romance languages have selected only
some of these words and their current distribution can clarify which are the oldest etyma
and their geographical expansion. For instance, the Portuguese, Galician and Catalan
casamento -casar (‘marriage’-‘to marry’) and the Romanian căsătorie - a (se) căsători
allow postulating an imperial Latin *CASAMENTUM, derived from CASA (´home’). The
Spanish pair matrimonio - casarse (‘marriage’-‘to marry’), on the other hand, points to
an ancient word casamento, later replaced by matrimonio. Therefore, the concept
‘couple’ is also designated by different words: in Portuguese casal, and in Spanish,
matrimonio.
Basing our semantic and conceptual analysis of the selected terms on the
comparative method applied synchronically and diachronically, we expect to identify
cultural, geographical and social differences that may have conditioned the selection of
one term or another in various Romance languages. For instance, in Portuguese and
Romanian the choice focuses on ‘cohabitation’ (casar, căsători, from CASA), while in
French the emphasis seems to be on ‘acquiring a husband’ (marrier, from MARITUS),
and in Italian, on the idea of ‘commitment’ (sposare, from SPONSIO, ‘promise’, ‘vow’).
More interestingly, in Romanian there are three terms whose selection is gender-based:
47
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
a (se) mărita (only for women), a (se) însura (only for men) a se căsători (used
irrespective of the gender). The analysis will be mainly based on lexicographical
sources: dictionaries, lexicons and corpora, e.g. CdP, CLP, DCECH, DELP (for the
complete list of sources, see the references and sources section below).
References
Aitchinson, J. 1987. Words in the Mind. U.K.: Blackwell Publishers.
Bidu-Vrănceanu, Angela. 2008. Câmpuri lexicale din limba română. Probleme
teoretice și aplicații practice. București: Editura Universității din București.
Cruse, D.A. 2004. Meaning in Language: an Introduction to Semantics and Pragmatics.
Oxford: Oxford University Press (2ª edition).
Geeraerts, D., S. Grondelaers, P. Bakema 1994. The structure of lexical variation.
Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Hock, H. 1991. Principles of Historical Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
Labov. W. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change. Social Factors. U.K.: Blackwell
Publishers.
Lass, R. 1997. Historical Linguistics and language Change. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Lieber, R. 2009. Morphology and Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Nunes, J. J. 1928. Filologia do beijo e do casamento, in Digressões Lexicológicas.
Lisboa: Liv. Clássica Editora, 101-110.
Paiva Boléo, M. 1964. Metodologia do estudo etimológico de palavras antigas e
modernas. Sep. Lições de Linguística portuguesa. Coimbra: Coimbra Ed.
Piel, J.-M. (1989). Estudos de Linguística Histórica Galego-Portuguesa. Lisboa:
Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda.
***
BLOCH, O & WARTBURG, W ( 1950). Dictionnaire Étymologique de la Langue
Française, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
CUNHA, A. G. (19862 [19821]. Dicionário Etimológico Nova Fronteira da Língua
Portuguesa, Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira.
[CdP] Davies, Mark/ Ferreira, Michael J., Corpus do Português, United States: National
Endowment for the Humanities, http://www.corpusdoportugues.org/.
[CLP]
Corpus
Lexicográfico
do
Português.
Lisboa:
CLUL,
http://clp.dlc.ua.pt/inicio.aspx.
[DCECH] Corominas, J.& Pascual, J. A (1980-1991). Diccionario crítico etimológico
castellano e hispánico, 6 vol., Madrid: Gredos.
[DELP] Machado, J. P. (19773 [19521]). Dicionário etimológico da língua portuguesa,
5 vol., Lisboa: Horizonte.
Dexonline. Dicționare ale limbii române: https://dexonline.ro/
Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia Española, http://www.rae.es.
Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa, Porto: Porto Editora, 2008.
Dicionário de dicionários do galego medieval- Corpus lexicográfico medieval da
lingua galega. Ernesto González Seoane (coord.), María Álvarez de la Granja &
Ana Isabel Boullón Agrelo, Instituto da Lingua Galega, 2006-2012,
http://sli.uvigo.es/DDGM.
Dicionário Priberam da Língua Portuguesa, http://www.priberam.pt/dlpo/.
48
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Houaiss, A. & S. Villar, M. 2001. Dicionário Houaiss da Língua Portuguesa, Rio de
Janeiro: Objectiva.
Le Trésor de la Langue Française Informatisé, http://atilf.atilf.fr/.
Morais
Silva,
A.,
(1789).
Dicionário
da
Língua
Portugueza.
http://www.brasiliana.usp.br/dicionario/2.
TLIO = Tesoro della Lingua Italiana delle Origini. http://tlio.ovi.cnr.it/TLIO/
Register, Genre, Topic and Scalability in Forensic Authorship
Identification
Carole E. Chaski
(Institute for Linguistic Evidence)
In author identification, most methods seek to identify the author of a document
(or attribute a document to an author) by comparing the questioned document to known
documents of several possible authors. The forensic setting for this exercise is
especially challenging for several reasons.
First, in most instances of forensic author identification, in contrast to literary
author identification, the register and genre of the questioned document differ from the
known documents. For instance, a questioned suicide note may have to be compared to
love letters, apologies, student essays, blog posts, letters of complaint about a service or
product. Thus, any method that operates in the forensic setting must be able to operate
across registers and genres.
Second, the topics of the questioned document and the known comparative
documents usually differ. For instance, the nasty anonymous letter about a CEO will
have to be compared to known documents, none of which will be about the nasty CEO:
if there were already known documents about the nasty CEO, then there is little need to
investigate the anonymous one, although one can imagine scenarios of copycat crimes
in which a questioned document and known documents may share a similar topic. Thus,
any method that operates in the forensic setting must be able to handle different topics,
and not be biased to identify authorship simply because topics are similar.
Third, most forensic authorship issues arise around fairly brief documents such as
letters, emails and blog posts. But sometimes the authorship of "micro-texts" such as
Facebook posts, and text messages is crucial evidence. And sometimes the authorship of
very long documents such as judicial rulings, dissertations and complex business
documents are questioned legally and require forensic authorship identification. Thus,
any method that operates in the forensic setting must be able to scale from micro-texts
to medium-sized documents to very long documents.
Therefore, this talk addresses the research question: can methods of forensic
authorship identification operate reliably under different conditions of register, genre,
topic and size of data? This talk presents a syntactic method that reliably operates across
registers, genre, topics and at both small, medium and large text sizes.
We report the results of several experiments. The syntactic method is applied to
extract and quantify features from ground-truth (also known as gold-standard) data sets
where the authorship of the documents is known; the three datasets include (i) text
49
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
messages between spouses, (ii) emails, essays, letters; and (iii) legal argumentation. In
each experiment, the quantified syntactic features are subjected to statistical analysis
using discriminant function analysis with stepwise entry, Mahalonobis distance and
leave-one-out cross validation. The error rate (and accuracy rates) can then be
calculated based on how often the DFA classified the documents to the correct known
author. In each experiment, the syntactic method attained at least 95% accuracy.
Further, variations of leave-one-out and nfold cross-validation did not affect the
accuracy, but variations on entry in DFA did.
Keywords: author identification, syntax, forensic linguistics.
References
Chaski, Carole. 2013. “Best Practices and Admissibility in Forensic Author
Identification.” Journal of Law & Policy. XXI:2.
Chaski, Carole. 2012. “Author Identification in the Forensic Setting.” In Lawrence
Solan and Peter Tiersma, editors. The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law,
Oxford University Press.
Chaski, Carole. 2010. “Linguistics as a Forensic Science: The Case of Author
Identification.” In Susan Behrens and Judith A. Parker, editors. Language in the
Real World. Routledge.
Chaski, Carole. 2007. “The Keyboard Dilemma and Author Identification.” In Sujeet
Shinoi and Philip Craiger, editors. Advances in Digital Forensics III. New York:
Springer.
Chaski, Carole. 2005. “Discriminant Function Analysis in Forensic Authorship
Attribution.” Proceedings of the Classification Society of North America/Interface
Foundation Annual Meeting. Interface Symposium and its Proceedings:
Computing Science and Statistics. St. Louis: Washington University.
Chaski, Carole. 2005. “Who’s At the Keyboard? Recent Results in Authorship
Attribution.” International Journal of Digital Evidence. Volume 4:1. Spring
2005. Available at http://www.ijde.org
Summing up the paths: The pragmatics of future tense in Greek
Michael Chiou
(Metropolitan College, Athens)
Future events always come with an inherent degree of uncertainty and therefore
they exist in the realm of probabilities rather than of actualities. Nevertheless, when
communicating, speakers can refer to future events as if they are certainties by the use
of the future tense (henceforth FUT). FUT is not a mere expression of futurity or
probability but it is an actual 'measurement', an evaluation of how the future will turn
out to be based on the state of consciousness of the speaker at the time of the utterance.
I shall refer to these readings as ‘prospective readings’.
50
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
In Greek, FUT is formed with the particle tha (θα = will) followed by the
[+perfective], [-past] verb form. Current research (see Giannakidou 2013, 2014
Giannakidou & Mari 2013, 2014) has shown that FUT constructions are semantically
non-veridical assertions conveying partitioned, non- homogenous epistemic states
which allow for at least two alternative updates, namely, p and ~p. In other words, at
the level of sentence meaning, FUT has the semantics of inquisitive assertions and
conveys epistemic possibility (p/~p). Nevertheless, relevant evidence shows that at the
level of the speaker meaning, this epistemic possibility interpretation is not intended
and indeed it is not conveyed. What is actually communicated is not the probability but
the certainty of an event (epistemic necessity, p only), i.e. a pure prospective reading.
In this paper I would like to address the issue of how and why a nonhomogenous modal interpretation (epistemic possibility) at the level of sentence
meaning turns out as a prospective reading (epistemic necessity) at the level of what is
communicated.
As to the ‘how’ question, I argue that the preferred prospective reading is not
compositional but it arises as an informativeness implicature, in the spirit of Levinson
(2000), triggered by virtue of background assumptions about language use, interacting
closely with the form of what has been said. Evidence will be presented according to
which the ‘prospective’ reading evaporates when FUT is used along with other modal
expressions.
The ‘why’ question can be answered if we assume that all possible ‘paths’ an
event can take in the future interfere with the ‘paths’ allowed by speaker’s state of
consciousness. When a modal expression is used the sum of all paths allows for both p
and ¬p worlds and therefore, what is actually communicated is the probability of an
event. However, when FUT is used, the sum of all paths gives p only. In other words,
the speaker by using FUT causes a set of probabilities (p ...¬p) to instantaneously
assume only one value, namely, (p). This is the case of the prospective reading.
At first, this paper intends to make a theoretical point, which could be the basis
for further research, by putting forth the idea that future tense (at least in the case of
Greek) is achieved at the level of communication and it is subject to a body of
knowledge and practice related with the use of language, semantic information and the
availability of alternate expressions. An equally important aim is to add up to the
arguments in support of the theorising that future tense is subsumed under modality.
References
Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2013. Inquisitive assertions and nonveridicality. In: Maria
Aloni, Michael Franke, and Floris Roelofsen (eds.) The dynamic, inquisitive, and
visionary life of Ø, ? Ø, and ◊ Ø: A festschrift for Jeroen Groenendijk, Martin
Stokhof, and Frank Veltman. The Netherlands: Pumbo, 115-126.
Giannakidou, Anastasia. 2014. The futurity of the present and the modality of the
future: a commentary on Broekhuis and Verkuyl. Natural Language & Linguistic
Theory, Volume 32 (3): 1011-1032.
Giannakidou, Anastasia & Mari, Alda. 2012. The evidential nature of reasoning with
the future. Ms. University of Chicago and ENS Paris.
Giannakidou, Anastasia & Mari, Alda. 2013. A two dimensional analysis of the future:
modal adverbs and speaker’s bias. In: Maria Aloni, Michael Franke and Floris
Roelofsen (eds.) Proceedings of the Amsterdam Colloquium, 115-122.
51
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Giannakidou, Anastasia & Mari, Alda. 2014. The future in Greek and Italian: truth
conditional and evaluative dimensions. Ms., University of Chicago and ENS Paris
Levinson, Stephen. 2000. Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized
conversational implicature. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Ancient and modern dialectal variation in a language with a 3000year history: a case-study on change and pertinacity in Aramaic
Eleanor Coghill
(University of Zürich)
The Aramaic language, attested since early antiquity, is represented in modern
times by a multiplicity of varieties divided into four separate branches:
– Western Neo-Aramaic (villages near Damascus, e.g. Arnold 1990)
– Ṭuroyo/Surayt and Mlaḥso (Ṭur ʿAbdin, Turkey, e.g. Jastrow 1985/1993)
– North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic/NENA (N. Iraq, N.E. Syria, S.E. Turkey, N.W.
Iran, refs. too many to list)
– Neo-Mandaic (W. Iran, e.g. Häberl 2009)
All varieties are endangered now, due to war and persecution. Thanks to
documentation efforts since the mid 19th century, intensifying in recent years, a great
deal is now known of the dialectal variation within Neo-Aramaic languages.
Dialectal variation in earlier Aramaic stages is also relatively well documented:
the language was used by various distinct ethno-religious communities and this is
reflected in the number of different written forms it took. While these all underwent
some degree of standardization, geographical dialectal variation can also be clearly
detected in them, especially by the Late Aramaic stage (c. 200–700 AD). Traditionally
these has been divided into Western and Eastern Aramaic, but more recently scholars
have viewed this as too stark a divide (see, e.g., Kim 2008).
Scholars are thus afforded a rare opportunity to trace dialectal variation over a
span of nearly three thousand years. There are, however, complications. Firstly, our
modern data is mainly of vernacular dialects, gathered through fieldwork, and is very
fine-grained. By contrast, for ancient periods, our data is naturally from written,
relatively standardized, varieties and much less fine- grained. Secondly, Aramaic, once
spoken across the whole Fertile Crescent and beyond, has since retreated to a few
isolated pockets. These are not in the places where the literary varieties were developed
in ancient times. For instance the best-known Aramaic variety, Syriac, emerged in
Edessa, modern-day Şanlıurfa. Today the nearest Aramaic-speaking communities are
200km to the east. Furthermore there may well have been significant population
movements, but the historical record is patchy with regard to this.
These factors present challenges for scholars investigating the historical
development of Aramaic and in particular to what extent there is continuity between the
geographical distribution of linguistic traits in ancient times and the modern period.
Nevertheless some pertinacious geographical patterns are identifiable (even within one
branch), and the modern dialects can help us reconstruct ancient varieties which are
missing from the record. This paper will examine one family of verbal constructions
52
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
attested already very early in Aramaic, all involving the active participle, but quite
diverse in their precise morphosyntax, and trace the diverging development of these
constructions across different ancient varieties spoken from Egypt to Babylonia up to
the modern day. It will then examine to what extent ancient dialectal differences in the
constructions’ morphosyntax (in word order, agreement, use of auxiliaries etc.) and
their geographical distributions leave traces in the modern dialects.
References
Arnold, Werner (1990). Das Neuwestaramäische. V. Grammatik (= Semitica Viva 4:5),
Wiesbaden.
Häberl, Charles G. (2009). The Neo-Mandaic Dialect of Khorramshahr (Semitic Viva
45), Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz.
Jastrow, Otto (1985/1993). Laut- und Formenlehre des neuaramäischen Dialekts von
Mīdin im Ṭūr
Abdi̅n, first printed 1967, reprinted with new introduction and bibliography 1985,
reprinted as part of the Semitica Viva series 1993 (Semitica Viva 9). Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz.
Kim, Ronald (2008). ‘“Stammbaum” or “Continuum”? The Subgrouping of Modern
Aramaic Dialects Reconsidered’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 128:3,
505–531.
Vague quantifiers in spoken Italian and German
Laura Collu
(Università degli Studi di Salerno)
I present here a corpus based study on linguistic Vagueness in spoken Italian and
German. Vagueness seems to be a universal cognitive procedure; in fact, as showed by
the analysis of the Italian and German Vagueness Expressions in Voghera, M. and
Collu, L. (2015), Intentional Vagueness (Voghera, 2014) is conveyed by similar
linguistic structures and functional processes in the two languages. One of the most
frequent categories of Vagueness Expressions is related to the process of quantification,
which is a highly essential cognitive function and consequently a very frequent strategy
of Vagueness, both in Italian and German. That of Vague Quantifiers is a rich group of
linguistic tools, used to approximate amounts, frequencies or portions through various
lexical strategies (Table 1).
53
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
ITALIAN
l'ha vista due o tre volte
En.: he/she saw her two
or three times
GERMAN
Linguistic tool
vielleicht vier fünf
(.)zigaretten also so wenich
En.: maybe four five cigarettes
I mean few
Numerical Pair
mo' m'ha chiamato pure mio
cugino da Roma che erano tre
mesi che non mi chiamava
En.: now my cousin from
Rome called and he didn’t
call me for three months
[der is] doch schon seit
zwanzig jahren_n_net mehr
ä[äh] nich mehr präsent oder
En.: he’s not present since
twenty years, is he?
in genere passa dal
terzo giorno
En.: usually it ceases after
the third day
die gelegenheiten kommen ja
nicht so oft und (.)[äh]
En.: those chances arrive not
so often
Round Number
Adverbial
Construction
Some expressions of vague quantity, like un po’ and ein bisschen (a little bit), are
used to convey different types of Vagueness (Voghera, 2014 and Voghera/Collu, 2015),
both to produce vague propositional content (Informational Vagueness), and to mitigate
or reduce the commitment of the speaker (Relational Vagueness):
(1) stiamo a casa mia insomma ci sono un po' di letti dappertutto_
(Informational Vagueness)
En.: we stay by us so there are some beds everywhere
(2) ich find diese leute immer_n bisschen nervig
(Relational Vagueness) En.: I always find these
people a little bit annoying
Moreover, these expressions are sometimes used as Approximating strategies:
(3) es is halt n_bisschen abenteuerurlaub
En.: it’s a bit adventure vacation
Since it is impossible to determine a priori the value of these lexical elements, be
they Approximating strategies, Vague Quantifiers, Informational or Relational
Vagueness’ elements, the aim of my contribution is to define clear and detailed criteria
to categorize all lexical and functional uses of Vague Quantification in Italian and
German, in order to answer following questions:
1. Is Vague Quantification conveyed by the same linguistic structures in Italian
and German?
2. Do Vague Quantifiers have the same meanings in the two languages?
54
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
From a methodological point of view, I analyzed 9 hours of Italian and 9 hours of
German spoken language, taken respectively from the VoLIP and the FOLK corpus.
References
Bazzanella, Carla. 2011. Indeterminacy in dialogue. Language and Dialogue 1 (1): 2143. Caffi, Claudia. 2007. Mitigation. Amsterdam: Elsevier.
Channell, Joanna. 1994. Vague language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ghezzi, Chiara. 2013. Vagueness Markers in Contemporary Italian: Intergenerational
Variation and pragmatic Change. Tesi di dottorato, Università di Pavia.
Kaltenböck, Gunther/Mihatsch, Wiltrud/Schneider, Stefan (eds.). 2010. New
approaches to hedging. Bingley: Emerald.
Mihatsch, Wiltrud. 2010. “Wird man von hustensaft wie so ne art bekifft?”:
Approximationsmarker in romanischen Sprachen. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann.
Prince, Ellen F./Frader, Joel/Bosk, Charles. 1982. On hedging in physician-physician
discourse. In
R.J. Di Pietro (ed.), Linguistics and the Professions. Norwood: Ablex. Ronzitti,
Giuseppina (ed.). 2011. Vagueness: A Guide. Berlin: Springer Verlag.
Rooij, Rob van. 2011. Vagueness and linguistics. In G. Ronzitti (ed.), Vagueness: a
guide. Heidelberg: Springer.
Voghera, Miriam. 2012. Chitarre, violini, banjo e cose del genere, Per Tullio De Mauro.
Studi offerti dalle allieve in occasione del suo 80° compleanno. 341-364. ed. by
Anna M. Thornton & Miriam Voghera. Roma: Aracne.
Voghera, Miriam. 2014. Verso una definizione non vaga di vaghezza intenzionale,
presentazione all’XI Convegno AISC / VIII Convegno CODISCO, CORPI,
STRUMENTI E COGNIZIONE/BODIES, TOOLS AND COGNITION, Roma,
2-5 dicembre 2014.
Voghera, Miriam/Collu, Laura. 2015. How vague are Italian and German?, Poster
presentato al Convegno Intensity, intensification and intensifying modification
across languages, Vercelli, 5-6 novembre 2015.
On the pace of the grammaticalization of ‘threaten’ and ‘promise’ in
the languages of Western Europe
Bert Cornillie
(KU Leuven)
This paper addresses the chronology of the grammatical changes that led to an
auxiliary use of ‘threaten’ and ‘promise’ auxiliaries in Spanish, French, Dutch, German
and English. I will show that the Latin calque of ‘threaten’ + noun, e.g. ‘the wall
threatens fall’, shifts toward a full-fledged auxiliary construction, i.e. ‘threaten’ +
infinitive, e.g. ‘the wall threatens to fall’ in a period of increased cultural confidence
within the vernacular linguistic communities, i.e. the respective “Golden Ages”. Hence,
it will be claimed that the auxiliation of the ‘threaten’ and ‘promise’ verbs is culturallydriven.
55
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Following the chronology of prestigious writing in the national languages, the
syntactic elaboration towards an auxiliary use of the ‘threaten’ verbs takes place first in
French and Spanish, and only later in Dutch, German and English. Moreover, the
‘promise’ verbs grammaticalize once the auxiliary use of the ‘threaten’ verbs is fully
installed. Thus this socio-historical account offers an alternative to the previous
analyses that invoke conceptual and pragmatic mechanisms to explain the pace of the
grammaticalization of the verbs (Traugott 1997, Verhagen 2000) and revises Heine &
Kuteva’s (2006) account of the spread of ‘threaten’ verbs based on the French
influence.
It is common knowledge that Latin has been a source of inspiration for the
modern languages of Europe at many stages of their evolution (Blatt 1957). An
enormous amount of loan words and adaptations entered the lexicon of national
European languages. As for the syntax, Latinate calques and discourse patterns are quite
common in the European languages. For instance, the present-day complementation and
other types of subordination of the national languages is largely determined by Latin
influence.
Recently, the focus is increasingly on the competition between the vernacular
languages and Latin, and on the creativity or elaboration provoked by the quest for
prestige in the national linguistic communities. An example of this is the elaboration of
the Castilian lexicon in the second half of the 13th century: authors wanted to create new
words and therefore often avoided direct borrowing. Yet, elaboration as part of the
writing culture in Castilian cannot be seen apart from innovations in Latin (Kabatek
2005). That is, innovation in Latin causes innovation in the vernacular and those who
are familiar with Latin are the motor of the elaboration in the vernacular languages.
The same happens in the Renaissance of the 15th and 16th century. The choice for
a pure type of Latin runs parallel to the lexical and syntactic elaboration of the Spanish
language. The translators were often creators (cf. Cornillie & Octavio de Toledo 2015).
In the case of Dutch, by contrast, the 16th century translators from Latin limited
themselves to the ‘threaten’ + noun construction. Only in the Golden Age of the 17th
century do writers start to use ‘threaten’ as an auxiliary.
The data used for the analysis come from the big diachronic corpora of the
respective languages.
References
Blatt, Franz. 1957. Latin influence on European syntax. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique
de Copenhague 11: 33-69.
Cornillie, Bert & Álvaro Octavio de Toledo y Huerta. 2015. The diachrony of
subjective amenazar ‘threaten’. On Latin-induced grammaticalization in Spanish.
In New Directions in Grammaticalization Research, Smith, Andrew D. M.,
Graeme Trousdale and Richard Waltereit (eds.), 187-207. Amsterdam Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Heine, Bernd & Tania Kuteva. 2006. The changing languages of Europe. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Kabatek, Johannes. 2005. Die Bolognesische Renaissance und der Ausbau romanischer
Sprachen. Juristische Diskurstraditionen und Sprachentwicklung in Südfrankreich
und Spanien im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag
Tübingen.
56
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1997. Subjectification and the Development of Epistemic
Meaning: The Case of Promise and Threaten. In Modality in Germanic
Languages, Toril Swan & Olaf Jansen Westvik (eds.), 185-210. Berlin – New
York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Verhagen, Arie. 2000. 'The girl that promised to become something': An exploration
into diachronic subjectification in Dutch. In The Berkeley Conference on Dutch
Linguistics 1997: the Dutch Language at the Millennium, Thomas F. Shannon &
Johan P. Snapper, (eds.), 197-208. Lanham MD: University Press of America.
Can we measure grammaticalization? Some proposals for the
quantification of degrees of grammaticalization
David Correia Saavedra
(University of Neuchâtel)
Studies of grammaticalization commonly advocate a continuum view that
distinguishes between ‘weakly grammaticalized’ and ‘strongly grammaticalized’
linguistic markers:
“It is widely agreed that it is more appropriate to operate with
grammaticalization as a continuum […]. For example, verbal inflections are
more strongly grammaticalized than auxiliaries which in their turn are more
strongly grammaticalized than semi-auxiliaries and catenative verbs.”
Davidsen-Nielsen (1996: 298)
The continuum view rests on the qualitative application of several parameters of
grammaticalization (Lehmann 2002, Hopper 1991), such as the length of a marker, its
syntactic scope, or its relative degree of morpho-syntactic fixation. If a grammatical
marker is short, syntactically fixed, and dependent on a host element, we conclude that
it is strongly grammaticalized. While this procedure works well for clear cases, it is less
obvious how it might help to distinguish cases in which two forms have
grammaticalized to similar degrees, or cases that may or may not exemplify incipient
grammaticalization. This paper will therefore explore whether corpus data and
quantitative analytical methods can be used to measure relative degrees of
grammaticalization. It presents a pilot study that tries to identify relevant factors and
their relative importance.
Using data from the British National Corpus, 191 lexical items (nouns, verbs, and
adjectives) and 191 grammatical items (determiners, pronouns, prepositions) were
selected in order to train a binary logistic regression model (Gries 2008) to distinguish
between the two groups. Building on Bybee and Thompson (1997), Lehmann (2002),
and Pierrehumbert (2012), four quantitative factors were taken into account: (1) token
frequency (2) length in syllables (cf. Lehmann’s parameter of phonological integrity),
(3) collocational diversity, i.e. an element’s freedom to occur in different contexts, and
(4) dispersion, i.e. how evenly an element is distributed in a given text. The logistic
regression ranked items according to their degree of grammaticalization, which ranges
57
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
from 0 (low, clearly lexical) to 1 (high, clearly grammatical). The variables that turn out
to be most relevant to the model are token frequency and collocational diversity.
Overall, the model correctly classifies 70.7% of the data, which is better than chance,
but which also leaves a substantial portion of wrongly classified elements. Given that
we conceive of grammaticalization as a continuum, we actually take a special interest in
the elements that are ‘hard to classify’, and we will discuss why the model fails with
these elements. We will finish with an outlook on how future research might further
fine-tune the quantiative model, and what such a model implies for grammaticalization
theory.
References
Bybee, Joan and Sandy Thompson. 1997. Three frequency effect in syntax. In: Juge, M.L.
and Moxley, J.L. (eds). Berkeley Linguistics Society 23. 65-85.
Davidsen-Nielsen, Niels. 1996. Discourse particles in Danish. In E. Engberg-Pedersen,
M Fortescue, P. Harder, L. Heltoft and L. Falster Jakobsen (eds.) Content,
Expression and Structure: Studies in Danish functional grammar. 283-314.
Gries, Stefan Th. 2009. Statistics for Linguistics with R. A Practical Introduction.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Hopper, Paul J. 1991. On Some Principles of Grammaticalization. In: Traugott E.C. and
Heine, B. (eds). Approaches to Grammaticalization. 17-35.
Lehmann, Christian. 2002. Thoughts on grammaticalization. Arbeitspapiere des
Seminars für Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Erfurt 9.
Pierrehumbert, Janet B. 2012. Burstiness of Verbs and Derived Nouns. In: Santos, D.,
Linden, K. And Ng’ang’a, W. (eds). Shall we play the Festschrift Game?: Essays
on the Occasion of Lauri Carlson’s 60th Brithday. Berlin-Heidelberg: SpringerVerlag.
Agreement in pseudocleft and specificational sentences in Romanian
Blanca Croitor
(The Institute of Linguistics, Bucharest)
Romanian pseudoclefts display a contrast between plural NPs and DPs with
respect to agreement. If the focused noun has the definite article, it triggers agreement
on the verb, but if it is a bare plural, the verb cannot agree:
(1) a. Îmi
plac
lalelele,
dar ceea ce îmi
doresc
pentru
CL.1SG.DAT like.PRES.3PL tulip.PL.DEF but what
CL.1SG.DAT wish.PRES.1SG
for
nunta
noastră
este / *sunt trandafiri.
wedding.DEF
our
is
are rose.PL
‘I like tulips, but what I want for our wedding is roses.’
b. Îmi
plac
lalelele,
dar ceea ce îmi
doresc
pentru
CL.1SG.DAT like.PRES.3PL tulip.PL.DEF but what
CL.1SG.DAT wish.PRES.1SG for
nunta
noastră *este / sunt trandafirii din grădina
mamei.
wedding.DEF
our
is
are rose.PL.DEF from garden.DEF mother.DEF.GEN
‘I like tulips, but what I want for our wedding are the roses from my mother’s garden.’
58
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
We propose that this contrast in agreement is not due to a different information
structure of the two sentences, but to semantic-syntactic factors. In short, our proposal is
that the DP triggers agreement because it is ‘heavier’ from a semantic and syntactic
point of view. The NP denotes a property, while the DP has an individual reading.
These agreement properties integrate into a more general pattern of agreement in
specificational copular structures, in which the verb agrees with the postverbal DP (as in
Italian or Portuguese, see Moro 1991, 1997, 2000; Costa 2004, but unlike in English).
In (3) we see that these agreement properties involve person agreement as well:
(2) a. Vrem
să plecăm
în concediu, problema *e / sunt banii.
want.PRES.1PL SUBJ leave.SUBJ.1PL in vacation problem.DEF is are money.PL.DEF
‘We want to go on vacation, the problem is the money.’
b. The real problem is / *are your parents. (Heycock 2012: 213)
(3) a. Vinovatul
sunt /
*este
culprit.DEF
be.PRES.1SG / be.PRES.3SG
‘The culprit is me.’
b. The culprit is me / *am me / *am I / *is I.
eu.
I.NOM
It was shown that Romanian has rich morphology and agreement is highly marked
whenever possible (Croitor 2012). For specificational sentences in Romanian, we
propose that agreement is not driven by the syntactic status of the nominal (it being a
subject or a topic etc.), but by a general principle involving morphosyntactic marking:
agreement must be maximally specified for phi features (gender, number and person).
Agreement is a postsyntactic operation and in a copular sentence both nouns are
syntactically available for agreement. Which of them manages to trigger agreement is
determined by the value of their morphosyntactic features, according to a hierarchy:
plural ˃ singular; first person ˃ second person ˃ third person / default. The DP whose
number and person features are higher in this hierarchy is more heavily marked and
triggers agreement on the verb.
References
Costa, João. 2004. Subject Positions and Interfaces: The Case of European Portuguese.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Croitor, Blanca. 2012. Acordul în limba română. București: Editura Universității din
București.
Heycock, Caroline. 2012. Specification, equation, and agreement in copular sentences.
Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 57(2) : 209–240.
Moro, Andrea. 1991. The Anomaly of Copular Sentences. Working Papers in
Linguistics, 1: 1–29.
Moro, Andrea. 1997. The Raising of Predicates: Predicative Noun Phrases and the
Theory of Clause Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Moro, Andrea. 2000. Dynamic Antisymmetry. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
59
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
On defining an Egyptian Greek variant based on nonstandard
spellings
Sonja Dahlgren
(University of Helsinki)
Hellenistic (koine) Greek in Egypt shows many signs of language contact in the
form of nonstandard spellings and morphosyntactic variation. Variation is evident from
the beginning of the Ptolemaic period onward, first including nonstandard
morphosyntax (see Vierros 2012 for Egyptian-influenced patterns in relative clause
constructions), and growing stronger and more phonological in nature in the Roman
period with reinforcing bilingualism and the emergence of Coptic Egyptian (see Gignac
1976 for nonstandard orthographic variants in Roman and Byzantine periods).
The impact of Egyptian phonology on nonstandard Greek orthography is easily
detected in e.g. the fluctuation between voiced and voiceless stops, Roman period
Egyptian lacking this distinction. Vowel variation is more opaque due to the process of
Greek vowel raising. One clear indicator of Egyptian phonology affecting also
nonstandard vowel orthography, however, is the marking of Greek unstressed wordfinal vowels in accordance with later Coptic conventions for depicting schwa, i.e.
usually with <e> (Peust 1999: 253; Horrocks 2010: 112), as in <kerasen> for the
standard kérason ‘mix.IMP’ (OGN I: 115). Egyptian was a stress-timed language with a
strong tendency to reduce unstressed syllables to schwa, whereas Greek was a moratimed language and relied on word-final vowel quality for certain grammatical
distinctions. This manifestation of Egyptian phonological transfer on Greek
inadvertently caused confusion of e.g. case and mood (Dahlgren and Leiwo in prep.) so
its presence in other than texts written by L1 Egyptians seems unlikely. However,
Egyptian transfer elements such as the reduction of the unstressed vowel also occur in
documents by non-Egyptian writers, e.g. the form pémpson ‘send.IMP’ being written as
<pempson>, <pempsen> and <pempse>, all variants representing the phonetic form
[ˈpempsə] (Leiwo forthc.).
This indicates a wider substrate effect on Greek spoken in Egypt. Egyptian
phonological transfer is also visible in the many instances of the diphthong /ai/, due to
Greek vowel raising pronounced [e] at this time, being depicted with both <e> and <a>
in Egyptian texts. This suggests a lower variant for the phoneme in Egypt, perhaps [æ]
(Horrocks 2010: 112). Among other indicators is also underdifferentiation of Greek /y/
as /u/ (Dahlgren forthc.).
For the present study, Egyptian phonological transfer on Greek in Egypt is studied
through the Narmouthis Greek collection (OGN I), combined with a qualitativequantitative comparative analysis of the nonstandard features in Greek usage in Egypt
as a whole. Egyptian phonological impact on Greek will be verified by L1
phonologically-based misspellings of Greek loanwords in Coptic (third ct. A.D.
onward) which follow the mechanism of loanword integration. Loanword adaptations
are partly phonologically and partly phonetically grounded, and represented in the
limitations set by the target language’s phonological system and orthographic
conventions (Dohlus 2005). Supporting evidence for features belonging to Coptic
phonological system are gathered by comparing Greek loanword treatment in Coptic to
the similar treatment of Arabic loanwords in the later periods of Coptic. This will serve
60
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
as reinforcing evidence in separating Coptic phonological integration for loanwords
both Arabic and Greek from the language-specific features of these languages.
References
Dahlgren, Sonja (forthcoming). “Egyptian transfer elements in the Greek of Narmouthis
ostraka” in The Proceedings of the 27th International Congress of Papyrology,
Warsaw 2013. The Journal of Juristic papyrology, Suppl.
Dahlgren, Sonja and Leiwo, Martti (in preparation). ”Confusion of tense and modality?
Impact of L1 phonological transfer on verb semantics.”
Dohlus, Katrin. 2005. "Phonetics or phonology: Asymmetries in loanword adaptations–
French and German mid front rounded vowels in Japanese." ZAS Papers in
Linguistics 42 (2005): 117-135.
Gignac, Francis T. 1976. A Grammar of the Greek Papyri of the Roman and Byzantine
Periods. Volume I: Phonology. Milano: La Goliardica.
Horrocks, Geoffrey C. 2010. Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers.
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Janse, Mark & Bentein, Klaas (eds.) (forthcoming). Linguistic Variation and Change:
Tense, Aspect and Modality in Ancient Greek. Amsterdam Studies in Classical
Philology. Brill 2015.
Leiwo, Martti (forthcoming). “Confusion of Mood and Tense in Greek private letters of
Roman Egypt” in Janse, Mark & Bentein, Klaas (eds.).
Peust, Carsten. 1999. Egyptian Phonology. An Introduction to the Phonology of a Dead
Language. Göttingen: Peust und Gutschmidt.
Vierros, Marja. 2012. Bilingual notaries in Hellenistic Egypt. A study of Greek as a
second language. Collectanea Hellenistica 5. Brussel.
Are dialect features lost in a stable order? A Russian case study
Nina Dobrushina, Michael Daniel and Ruprecht von Waldenfels
(Higher School of Economics, Moscow; Higher School of Economics, Moscow;
University of California)
As a dialect speaking community moves toward the standard, it gradually sheds
dialect features. In this paper we ask whether this happens in a specific order, i.e.,
whether a hierarchy of features can be found, with certain features lost before others on
the level of individual speakers. Such an order is apt to shed light on relevant linguistic
and sociolinguistic factors in the dialect attrition process.
We consider the dynamics of dialect feature loss among the speakers of the
North Russian dialect spoken in Pushkino, a village in the south of Arkhangelskaja
Oblastj (northern Russia). It is based on a systematic study of the speech of the
community as represented in the Ustja River Basic Corpus (URB, Daniel et al.
2013-2015). The URB makes a collection of spontaneous speech samples from a range
of dialect speakers of different ages available with currently more than 0.5 mln tokens.
The speech of the villagers as represented in the corpus is highly heterogeneous
in terms of its assimilation to standard Russian. While the oldest speakers (born in
61
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
1920 to 1940) show a high degree of dialect preservation, those born in 1960 to 1980
have lost the dialect almost completely.
We investigate a number of binary variables that were chosen because they are
well represented in the data and lend themselves to a clear interpretation of dialect
loss. These include [e] for etymological [a] between palatalized consonants; dialectal
realizations of the postfix -sja; dialectal realization of the particle -to; absence of the
initial n­ in oblique forms of the third person pronouns; and others. We analyze and
compare dialectal vs. standard realization of these variables for each speaker and
establish an individual order of loss of dialect features. We then compare this order
across the speakers in our sample. Preliminary results indicate that at least some order
is apparent, with some phonological features being lost first. Generally, non-standard
intonation seems to be the most resilient and is part of a regional variant of standard
Russian. However, whether such an order is to be found across the board is yet to be
seen.
We hypothesize based on preliminary work and informed by borrowability scales
in language contact (e.g., Thomason & Kaufman 1988) that there is a relative order in
which dialect features are lost in the community. We compare feature profiles for
some 20 speakers.
Crucial for testing the hypothesis is the speech of ‘outliers’ ­ speakers who differ
from their generation in terms of feature loss. According to the hypothesis, the speech
of these speakers should exhibit the same relative order of feature loss as other
members of their age cohorts.
Note that our hypothesis contradicts prior findings for dialects of other languages
in a related setup (Hornsby 2006). We expect this work to be relevant not only for
Slavic dialectology and sociolinguistics, where questions of dialect loss have been
hardly addressed, but also for contact and historical linguistics of closely related
languages more generally.
References
M. Daniel, N. Dobrushina, R. v. Waldenfels. 2014-2015. The language of the Ustja
river bassin. A corpus of North Russian dialectal speech. Bern, Moscow.
Available at: www.parasolcorpus.org/Pushkino
D. Hornsby. 2006. The myth of structured obsolescence. Journal of French Language
2/16, 125-146.
S. G. Thomason, T. Kaufman. 1988. Language contact, creolization, and genetic
linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
62
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
The reflexive pronouns in Persian: A diachronic and
grammaticalization account
Shadi Davari and Mehrdad Naghzguy-Kohan
(Islamic Azad University; Bu-Ali Sina University)
The present proposal deals with the emergence of three reflexive pronouns in
Modern Persian namely, xweš, xweštan,and xod (=enclitic pronouns) from possessive
adjectives and adverb of emphasis in Old and Middle Persian. Presenting the corpus
data, this contribution explores the role of possession as an intensive experience of
human in the development, reinforcement and renovation of reflexivity in Old and
Middle Persian in addition to the intensification and veracity meaning in Middle Persian
which extends to reflexivity both in Middle and Modern Persian. We have concentrated,
almost exclusively, on attesting the universal characters of grammaticalization strategies
including metaphorical extension, semantic bleaching, and decategorization. Compiling
the full range of reflexive constructions in Old Persian and based on Kent (1950:67) the
first manifestation of reflection, namely the prefix huvâ- is a possessive-reflexive
adjective of the third person which is found in a few compound words such as:
uvâmaršiyuš “owner of self-death ( dies by his own hands)” and uvâipašiyam “his own
possession”. Further evidence for the assumption that strategies of reflexivization in
Persian develop from the nominal source of an owner comes from the second marker of
reflexivity attested in Early Middle Persian, the possessive- reflexive xweš with the
behavior of possessive adjectives again of the third person (through genitive –eš). Based
upon König and Vezzasoi (2004:230) this supports the typological scale of interaction
with person: 3>2>1. The extant Old and Early Middle Persian texts provide direct
evidence neither on the object (argument) position of transitive verbs filling a valency
position through reflexive pronouns, nor on the adjuncts to some noun phrase not
expressing co-reference or binding but intensification. However, in order to portray
coreferentiality and object position, Late Middle Persian recruits the body term tan in
combination with xweš resulting xweštan “body of his own” which in turn depicts the
cognitive and linguistic processes at work, metaphorical extension, during the
grammaticalization from ‘body’ to a reflexive marker. Furthermore, the findings of the
present analysis indicate that the bleaching of adverbial meaning in the adverb of
emphasis xod “truly” in Late Middle Persian (the process of decategorization) leads to
a purely syntactic meaning, indicating an emphatic reflexive with both adnominal and
adverbial readings. On the basis of New (10th to 13th century) and Modern Persian texts,
the intensifier xod also comes to be used as a reflexive anaphor. We argue that in order
to mark local binding unambiguously in Modern Persian, xod is added to the enclitic
pronouns. This new strategy (the use of xod- compounds) both in object positions and
intensifiers becomes so frequent and ultimately obligatory as a paradigm of inflectional
forms (obligatorification, paradigmaticization) that the older ones narrow to literary and
formal texts. Finally and concerning different periods of Persian, we
propose
the
following grammaticalization schemata for the development of
reflexive pronouns and intensifiers: 1) affixal possessive-reflexive adjective (OP. hva)
> possessive-reflexive adjective (EMP.xweš)>Reflexive pronoun in object position (
xweš +tan “body” ) 2) adverb of emphasis (EMP xod)> a)intensifier, b) reflexive
pronoun> (a)intensifier & b)reflexive pronoun) + enclitic pronouns.
63
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Keywords: reflexive pronouns, grammaticalization, intensifiers, possession, Persian.
Implicit and explicit attitudes towards regional varieties of Italian:
A change in standard language ideology?
Stefano De Pascale, Stefania Marzo and Dirk Speelman
(KU Leuven)
From previous research (Berruto, 2012) it is known that literary standard Italian
has undergone a process of “downward convergence” (Auer & Hinskens, 1996) towards
spoken, regional and informal varieties. These varieties are now moving up to form new
regionally flavored neo-standard Italian varieties (Cerruti & Regis, 2014). Up to now,
neo-standard Italian has been investigated predominantly from a list-type descriptive
perspective. Still, it remains unclear whether (and to what extent) the literary standard
has been losing prestige in favor of these regional varieties. Recently it has been
suggested that, in order to get a comprehensive insight into upgrading and debasing
dynamics in standard language change, language attitudes should be considered the
driving force behind this change (Coupland & Kristiansen, 2011). However, it is under
discussion which kind of attitudes would be able to reveal interesting patterns to predict
behavior (Grondelaers & Van Hout, 2010; Kristiansen, 2011). Generally, a distinction is
made between indirect (implicit) and direct (explicit) methods. In this paper, by
focusing on implicit and explicit measurement of language attitudes, we investigate to
what extent social-psychological factors reflect the abovementioned standardization
dynamics and predict changes in the standard language ideology in Italy.
We defined a theoretical-descriptive and a methodological purpose for our paper.
From the theoretical perspective, we investigated whether attitudinal data of various
kind would reveal the prestige and stigma related to various regional neo-standard
varieties of Italian. We set up an attitudinal study including indirect and direct
measuring techniques, that is, a verbal guise experiment and a free response task. For
the speaker evaluation experiment, we asked a demographically varied sample of
southern Italian participants (n=207) to rate five speech samples. One speech sample
was in standard Italian, while the remaining four samples were representative of the
main regional varieties spoken in Milan, Florence, Rome and Naples. For the free
response task, the informants were asked to give three adjectives they associated with
the Italian language spoken in these four cities. From the methodological perspective
we aimed at the comparability of quantitative data, obtained in the verbal guise
experiment, with qualitative data, represented by the adjectives of the free response
task. Therefore, we used the affective norms (Montefinese, Ambrosini, Fairfield, &
Mammarella, 2014; Warriner, Kuperman, & Brysbaert, 2013), consisting in numerical
scores for valence, arousal and dominance, to enrich our adjective database.
By combining both approaches, we found the typical discrepancies between
implicit and explicit attitudes. On the one hand, the implicit results seem to show an
incipient competition between Milanese Italian and the literary standard for “best
language”, while the own variety of the respondents, c.q. Neapolitan Italian, receives
low prestige scores among the younger respondents. On the other hand, the explicit
64
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
results show a strong division between Milanese Italian, which is described with very
negative adjectives, and the other three varieties. In sum, Milanese Italian is openly
stigmatized but nevertheless enjoys covert prestige, typical characteristics of standard
varieties.
References
Auer, P., & Hinskens, F. (1996). The convergence and divergence of dialects in Europe.
New and not so new developments in an old area. Sociolinguistica, 10, 1–30.
Berruto, G. (2012). Sociolinguistica dell’italiano contemporaneo (2nd [1987] ed.).
Roma: La Nuova Italia.
Cerruti, M., & Regis, R. (2014). Standardization patterns and dialect/standard
convergence: A northwestern Italian perspective. Language in Society, 43, 83–
111.
Coupland, N., & Kristiansen, T. (2011). SLICE: Critical perspectives on language
(de)standardisation. In T. Kristiansen & N. Coupland (Eds.), Standard Languages
and Language Standards in a Changing Europe (pp. 11–35). Oslo: Novus Press.
Grondelaers, S., & Van Hout, R. (2010). Do Speech Evaluation Scales in a Speaker
Evaluation Experiment Trigger Conscious or Unconscious Attitudes? University
of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL), 16(2), 92–102.
Kristiansen, T. (2011). Attitudes, Ideology and Awareness. In R. Wodak, B. Johnstone,
& P. Kerswill (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics (pp. 265–278). Los
Angeles: Sage.
Montefinese, M., Ambrosini, E., Fairfield, B., & Mammarella, N. (2014). The
adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) for Italian.
Behavior Research Methods, 46(3), 887–903.
Warriner, A., Kuperman, V., & Brysbaert, M. (2013). Norms of valence, arousal, and
dominance for 13,915 English lemmas. Behavior Research Methods, 45(4), 1191–
1207.
Contact induced change in the languages of Europe: The rise and the
development of partitive cases and determiners
Merlijn De Smit and Silvia Luraghi
(Stockholm University; University of Pavia)
In recent research, much attention has been paid to parallels between the BaltoFinnic partitive case and the partitive genitive of the Balto-Slavic languages
(Bjarnadóttir & De Smit 2013, Seržants 2015). Even though it morphologically shares
the distribution of case endings, the partitive is quite peculiar, in that it does not fulfill
the typical function of cases, i.e. to indicate the grammatical relation of a NP (Blake
2000). Rather, in Finnish and Estonian the partitive can encode both subjects and direct
objects, and expresses a meaning connected with indefiniteness or unboundedness
(Luraghi & Kittilä 2014). Similarly, in Russian, Latvian and Lithuanian the partitive
genitive can function as direct object or as subject, and indicates indefiniteness (Luraghi
& Kittilä 2014, Paykin 2014, Seržants 2014). Far from being an isolate feature of Balto-
65
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Slavic, this type of multi-functionality is typical of the partitive genitive in many early
Indo-European languages, and may well be a common heritance from Proto-IndoEuropean, as it occurs both in European and in non-European branches of the IE
language family, notably Indo-Iranian (Dahl 2014). It seems plausible to regard the
development of a partitive case out of an ancient ablative (Wickman 1955) in BaltoFinnic as a contact induced change proceeding from IE languages (Larsson 1983). However,
the extension of the partitive genitive in Russian and in Baltic languages does not match
its extension in other IE languages: this points toward bi-directionality of contact, as
typical of linguistic areas. Besides Balto-Finnic languages, Basque also has a partitive
case which is diachronically connected with an earlier ablative (Aritzimuño 2014). In
Basque grammatical descriptions, the partitive is often described as a determiner (de
Rijk 2007), as it shares the distribution of determiners. A parallel can be drawn with the
partitive article of the Romance languages, such as French du/de la /des. This latter item
also developed out of a former marker of a case function (the preposition de), which
later merged with the definite article and presently shares the distribution of determiners
(Carlier 2007). The chronology of the Romance and the Basque developments allows
viewing the latter as a contact induced change as well (remarkably the development of
the partitive article at its onset also involved Ibero-Romance (Carlier and Lamiroy
2014: 502-504)). In our paper we will elaborate on the details of the developments
described above. Issues to be addressed include the extension of a partitive-like case in
other Uralic and IE languages of the Circum-Baltic and neighboring areas (e.g.
Germanic, Mordvin), and patterns of possible syncretism which include the partitive.
We will also discuss putative parallels in Turkic and Mongolic languages (Pakendorf
2007), and argue that they are only apparent. In particular, we show that
misunderstandings are brought about by inconsistent use of the word ‘partitive’, which
indicates both partitivity involving part/whole relations, and partitive case markers as
those described here (Heine & Kuteva 2002), which have nothing to do with part/whole
relations (Kittilä & Luraghi 2014). We conclude by highlighting the peculiarity of
partitive case markers/determiners, which have little parallels outside Europe.
References
Aritzimuño, Borja 2014. The origin of the Basque partitive. In S. Luraghi & T. Huumo
(eds), 323-344.
Bjarnadóttir Valgerður & Merlijn De Smit. 2013. Primary Argument Case-Marking in
Baltic and Finnic. Baltu Filologija 22: 31-65.
Blake, Barry. 2000. Case. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carlier, Anne 2007. From Preposition to Article: The Grammaticalization of the French
Partitive. Studies in Language 31: 1-49.
Carlier, Anne and Lamiroy, Béatrice 2014. The grammaticalization of the prepositional
partitive in Romance. In S. Luraghi & T. Huumo (eds), 477-519.
Heine, Bernd and Tania Kuteva 2002. World Lexicon of Grammaticalization.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Larsson, Lars-Gunnar 1983: Studien zum Partitivgebrauch in den ostseefinnischen
Sprachen. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.
Luraghi, Silvia & Seppo Kittilä 2014. The typology and diachrony of partitives. In S.
Luraghi & T. Huumo (eds), 17-62.
Luraghi, Silvia & Tuomas Huumo (eds.) 2014. Partitive cases and related categories.
Berlin/New York: Mouton De Gruyter
66
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Pakendorf, Brigitte 2007: Contact in the prehistory of the Sakha (Yakuts): Linguistic
and genetic perspectives. Utrecht: LOT.
Paykin, Katia 2014: The Russian partitive and verbal aspect. In S. Luraghi & T. Huumo
(eds), 379-397.
Rijk, de, Rudolf 2008: Standard Basque, a Progressive Grammar. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.'
Seržant, Ilja. 2014. Denotational Properties of the Independent Partitive Gentive in
Lithuanian. Holvoet, Axel and Nicole Nau (eds.), Grammatical Functions and
their Non-canonical Coding in Baltic. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
John
Benjamins. 257-299.
Seržant, Ilja. 2015. Independent partitive as a Circum-Baltic isogloss, Journal
Language Contact 8, 341-418.
Performatives and aspect: A cross-linguistic study
Astrid De Wit, Frank Brisard and Michael Meeuwis
(Université Libre de Bruxelles; University of Antwerp; Ghent University)
Performatives are notionally/conceptually special in that they involve
illocutionary acts that can be performed simply “by uttering a sentence containing an
expression that names the type of speech act” (Searle 1989: 536) (e.g. I cancel the
meeting). A grammatical reflex of this in English is that performatives, unlike canonical
present-time event reports, feature the simple present rather than the present progressive
(cf. *I talk right now versus I promise to quit). Assuming a perfective aspectual value
for the English simple present, this is indeed remarkable: in English as well as crosslinguistically, present-time events cannot normally be reported by means of perfective
constructions (De Wit forthcoming). However, these observations about English
performatives cannot readily be extended to other languages: Slavic languages, for one,
hardly ever use perfective aspect in performative contexts (Dickey 2000).
In this study we unveil the aspectual characteristics of performatives in a
typologically diverse sample of languages. We thereby hypothesize that there is not one
single aspectual construction (e.g., perfectives) that is systematically reserved for
performative contexts. Instead, we assume that with performative utterances, a language
uses the aspectual construction that it generally selects to refer to situations that are
fully identifiable as an instance of a given situation type at the time of speaking. In other
words, this analysis presumes a common epistemic meaning with every use of a certain
aspectual construction. Thus, whatever the exact value of a given aspect marker, if it is
used to mark performatives, then we also expect it to feature in the expression of states
and habits, which have the subinterval property (they can be fully verified on the basis
of any random segment), sports broadcasting, demonstrations and other special
construals of more or less predictable and therefore instantly identifiable events. This
general formulation holds for English, but also for those languages which do not resort
to perfective performative constructions.
Building on Dahl (1985), we have developed a questionnaire that allows us to
determine which aspectual constructions are employed in various types of contexts,
67
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
including performative uses and contexts that share epistemic features with
performatives. In total, we have collected data from 16 divergent languages. The data
have been analyzed using Croft & Poole’s (2008) method of multidimensional scaling,
which enables us to measure to which extent contexts of use (e.g. states, performatives)
are similar in the sense that they often receive the same formal expression.
Our findings confirm our expectation that different languages can use different
aspectual constructions in performative contexts, be they perfective or imperfective. In
addition, most languages show clear signs of “clustering” along the expected lines: in a
large majority of our questionnaire items, the form used for performatives is also the
one used for the expression of present states, habits and other contexts that involve fully
identifiable events. It is the shared epistemic motivation behind each of these uses that
is responsible for the systematic selection of one aspect marker (over others) in such
contexts.
References
Croft, William & Keith Poole. 2008. Inferring universals from grammatical variation:
Multidimensional scaling for typological analysis. Theoretical Linguistics 34.137.
Dahl, Östen. 1985. Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford: Blackwell.
De Wit, Astrid. forthcoming. The Present Perfective Paradox across Languages.
Oxford: OUP.
Dickey, Stephen. 2000. Parameters of Slavic Aspect: A Cognitive Approach. Stanford:
CSLI Publications.
Searle, John. 1989. How performatives work. Linguistics and Philosophy 12.535-558.
The development of split CP in Udmurt embedded clauses
Éva Dékány and Orsolya Tánczos
(RIL HAS)
Rizzi (1997) proposes a split CP: Force>Top>Int>Top>Fin>IP, but suggests that
some languages have a non-split CP. We argue that in the past 2 centuries embedded
clauses in Udmurt (an OV Finno-Ugric language spoken in the Russian Federation, see
Winkler 2001) underwent a structural change TP → non-split CP → split CP.
TP: In the late 18th century all embedded clauses were non-finite (1) and featured
no elements that sit in the CP layer (complementizer, relative operator, etc.). Topics and
foci are in the higher TP-zone (Tánczos 2011), like in Hungarian (É. Kiss 2002), so
there were no elements that unambiguously sat in any projection in
Force>Top>Int>Top>Fin>IP. We suggest that at this stage embedded clauses were
truncated: they lacked CP and were only TPs.
68
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(1) Odig-pol
[lud-kečleś oǯi uśti-ni
kos-äm-zä]
kion
one.time rabbit.ABL such open-INF order-PTC-3sg.ACC wolf
kilzäm
hear.PST.3Sg
‘One time the wolf heard that the rabbit ordered (them) to open (the door) in
such a way.’
(Munkácsi 1887:118)
Non-split CP: Due to Russian influence, finite embedded clauses gradually
appeared in the early 20th century, and OV order became looser. Finite clauses always
have a CP layer, so at this stage CPs emerged in Udmurt. The presence of CP is also
signaled by the appearance of an optional clause-final complementizer, shuysa 'that',
(developed from the converbial form of shuyny 'say', a case of Van Gelderen's 2009
Verbal Cycle), which made the embedded CP phonologically visible.
Split CP: Later in the 20th century, Udmurt borrowed the Russian
complementizer shto 'that', which was used clause-initially and could co-occur with the
clause-final native C shuysa 'that' (2). We argue that this is evidence for the appearance
of split CP in Udmurt: shuysa is a Fin complementizer, while shto is a Force
complementizer. Their position in the clause obeys the Final-Over-Final-Constraint
(Biberauer et al 2014). The same pattern can be observed in conditionals, too, which
may have a clause-initial Russian 'if' and a native clause-final 'if'.
(2)
(I think) [shto
ton bertod
shuysa].
that(Russ.) 2SG come.home.FUT.2SG that(Udmurt)
'that you come home'
Further evidence for the appearance of split CP can be found in relatives.
Originally, Udmurt relatives employed the gap strategy, but lately relative pronouns
have appeared (in finite relatives, but no complementizer is possible in relatives). The
relative pronoun is generally the first element in its clause, but some speakers allow
subject or adjunct topics to precede it (3). We suggest that the Udmurt relative pronoun
is in spec, FinP, and the topics preceding it are in a TopP within a split CP.
(3)
(I know the child)
[Izhkaryn
kudiz
Sashajez
Izhevsk.INESS which.NOM
Sashaa.ACC
uramish
adziz].
street.ABL see.PST.3SG
'who Sasha saw on the street in Izhevsk'
References
Biberauer, Theresa and Anders Holmberg and Ian Roberts. 2014. A syntactic universal
and its consequences. Linguistic Inquiry 45(2): 169–225.
É. Kiss, Katalin. 2002. The syntax of Hungarian. Cambridge: CUP.
Gelderen, Elly van. 2004. Grammaticalization as economy. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
Munkácsi, Bernát. 1887. Votják népköltészeti hagyományok [Udmurt folklore heritage].
Budapest: MTA.
69
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Rizzi, Luigi. 1997 The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery. In L. Haegeman (ed.),
Elements of Grammar. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 281–337.
Winkler, Eberhard. 2001. Udmurt. Lincom: Muenchen.
Tánczos, Orsolya. 2011. Szórendi variációk és lehetséges okaik az udmurtban [Word
order variation and its possible causes in Udmurt]. Nyelvtudományi Közlemények
107: 218–228.
Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibetan) and the “Linguistic Cycle”
Scott DeLancey
(University of Oregon)
A long-standing view of language change, associated though not originating with
Jespersen, holds that language change is subject to universal tendencies, including a
general tendency for periphrastic constructions to undergo phonological reduction
which results in the development of bound morphology, and for morphological
constructions to undergo phonological reduction resulting in the loss of bound
morphology and its replacement by new periphrastic constructions. This view has been
regularly represented in the literature (Hodge 1970, Givón 1971, 2008), and is currently
undergoing something of a revival (van Gelderen 2011, 2013). On this account
complexification and decomplexification are in principle equally likely, so that either
whole languages (Jespersen, Hodge) or particular functional domains (Givón, van
Gelderen) tend to alternate between synthetic and analytic states. Thus analytic
languages will tend to develop synthetic complexity, and morphologically complex
languages will change in the direction of analytic simplicity.
A contrasting view presented by proponents of “sociolinguistic typology” such as
Dahl (2004), Trudgill (2011), and McWhorter (2011), holds that the development or
loss of morphological complexity is responsive to language-external factors associated
with the size of the speech community and with whether the language is frequently used
with strangers or more typically limited to interaction with familiar interlocutors. On
this view the direction of change of a language cannot be predicted simply from its
place on an analytic-synthetic continuum, but rather is dependent on external
sociolinguistic, geographical and historical factors.
The Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibetan) family is a test case for this question, since
the languages and branches show a wide range of variation in morphological structure.
In general, we do not find cyclic behavior for the realms where van Gelderen posits it.
We see no “cycle” of verb agreement, as van Gelderen suggests. The proto-language
had a complex system of verb agreement. In a few branches this is preserved almost
intact down to the present. In others it has disappeared, but we see no evidence of it
reappearing. In Sinitic, in particular, we know that it disappeared at least 3,000 years
ago, and in the intervening millennia we do not see the slightest indication of its
reemergence. In overall structure, the Sinitic branch is notoriously analytic, and has
been so, with no significant drift toward synthesis, over the 3,000 years of its attested
history. On the other edge of the family, the same is true for the Bodo-Garo languages
(DeLancey 2012). In contrast, the rGyalrongic and Kiranti branches have preserved
70
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
original synthetic complexity, and appear to be very close to the proto-language in this
respect.
Recent work (DeLancey 2013, 2014a, b, 2015) shows that these tendencies
correlate with historical sociolinguistic factors, that in this family languages have
become more analytic and transparent as they acquired new speakers, and that the
languages where we see synthetic structure preserved are spoken by communities which
have maintained their isolation from external influence. Thus the predictions of the
cycle hypothesis fail to predict the attested facts of Trans-Himalayan, while these facts
make perfect sense from the standpoint of sociolinguistic typology.
References
Dahl, Östen. 2004. The growth and maintenance of linguistic complexity. Amsterdam &
Philadelphia: Benjamins.
DeLancey, Scott. 2012. On the origins of Bodo-Garo. In: G. Hyslop, S. Morey and M.
Post, eds., Northeast Indian Linguistics IV, 3-20. Delhi: Cambridge.
DeLancey, Scott. 2013. The origins of Sinitic. In Zhou Jing-Schmidt, ed., Increased
Empiricism: Recent Advances in Chinese Linguistics, 73-99. Amsterdam:
Benjamins.
DeLancey, Scott. 2014a. Creolization in the divergence of Tibeto-Burman. In Nathan
Hill and Thomas Owen-Smith, eds., Trans-Himalayan Linguistics: Historical and
Descriptive Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 41-70. Berlin: Mouton.
DeLancey, Scott. 2014.b Sociolinguistic typology in Northeast India: A tale of two
branches. Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 1.1: 59-82.
DeLancey, Scott. 2015. The historical dynamics of morphological complexity in TransHimalayan. Linguistic Discovery 13.2: 37-56.
Givón, Talmy. 1971. Historical syntax and synchronic morphology: An archaeologist’s
field trip. Papers from the Seventh Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society,
394-415. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Givón, Talmy. 2008. The Genesis of Syntactic Complexity. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Hodge, Carleton. 1970. The Linguistic Cycle. Language Sciences 13: 1-7.
McWhorter, John. 2011. Linguistic Simplicity and Complexity: Why Do Languages
Undress? Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Trudgill, Peter. 2011. Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic
Complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
van Gelderen, Elly. 2011. The Linguistic Cycle: Language Change and the Language
Faculty. Oxford University Press.
van Gelderen, Elly. 2013. The Linguistic Cycle and the Language Faculty. Language
and Linguistics Compass 7.4: 233-250.
71
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
How gender systems complexify and/or simplify: A case study in
sociolinguistic typology
Francesca Di Garbo
(University of Helsinki)
Starting from the assumption that languages vary in the complexity of individual
grammatical domains, recent studies have tackled the issue of whether this variation
intersects with socio- ecological factors, such as the size of a speech community, the
number of linguistic neighbors, geography (see, among others, Nettle 2012; Greenhill
2015). Such studies usually examine a set of linguistic variables and use them as
indicators of different degrees of linguistic complexity, which are then correlated with
one (or multiple) ecological variable(s), taken as (an) indicator(s) of different societal
types. The variables under investigation are usually selected from large pre- existing
grammatical, lexical, geographical and sociolinguistic databases. What we miss, so far,
is in-depth studies of individual domains of grammar and/or the lexicon that are
purposely designed to combine cross-linguistic analysis (what types of systems,
structurally; which distribution, frequency-wise; which patterns of development,
diachronically; where, genealogically and areally) with the investigation of language
ecology.
This paper addresses this issue by investigating the complexity of grammatical
gender and its evolution through time. By looking at synchronic distributions
concerning gender systems as attested in sets of closely related languages, I try to infer
how gender systems complexify and/or simplify and how certain patterns of diachronic
development may intersect with aspects of language ecology. The dataset is a
convenience sample of 14 sets of closely related languages, which I selected from
nearly all macro-areas (Dryer 1989). The data have been collected through a
questionnaire, reference grammars and consultation of language experts. Five
diachronic patterns are investigated: loss, emergence, reduction, expansion and
retention of gender. I first examine the extent to which these five patterns represent
instances of complexification/simplification against existing complexity metrics for
grammatical gender (e.g., Audring 2014). Second, I discuss the implications of
these findings for current typologies of gender. Third, I focus on the mapping between
the diachronic patterns featured in the study and a selection of the ecological variables
sampled in my data collection. I show that, in the languages of my sample, this mapping
is not always unidirectional. For instance, contact between gendered and genderless
languages does not only favor the loss of grammatical gender (a phenomenon relatively
well investigated in the literature. See e.g., Koptjevskaja-Tamm & Wälchli (2001);
Karatsareas (2009) for gender loss in Tamian Latvian and Cappadocian Greek,
respectively). Instances of contact-induced gender emergence are indeed rare, but they
do occur in different areas of the world, and as the result of comparable developments,
such as massive borrowing of nouns and adnominal modifiers, which lead to striking
structural similarities at the synchronic level (e.g., minimal gender agreement, optional
gender assignment). The data suggest that, under comparable contact scenarios,
differences in the prestige dynamics between the languages in contact may affect the
direction of change, favoring either loss or rise of gender agreement.
72
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Through the study of gender complexity, the paper seeks to contribute to the
debate over the social determinants of linguistic complexity and to the development of
sociolinguistic typology as a theory and a method of research on linguistic diversity.
References
Audring, Jenny. 2014. Gender as a complex feature. Language Sciences 43. 5–17.
[Special issue: Exploring grammatical gender].
Dryer, Matthew. 1989. Large linguistic areas and language sampling. Studies in
Language 13. 257– 292.
Greenhill, Simon J. 2015. Demographic correlates of language diversity. In Claire
Bowern & Bethwyn Evans (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Historical
Linguistics, 557–578. Abingdon, UK and New York, USA: Routledge Taylor &
Francis Group.
Karatsareas, Petros. 2009. The loss of grammatical gender in Cappadocian Greek.
Transactions of the Philological Society 107. 196–230.
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria & Bernhard Wälchli. 2001. The Circum-Baltic languages:
An areal- typological approach. In Östen Dahl & Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm
(eds.), Circum-Baltic languages, vol.2: Grammarand typology, 615–750.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Nettle, Daniel. 2012. Social scale and structural complexity in human languages.
Philosophical Transations of the Royal Society B 367. 1829–1836.
From a theme-rheme nexus to thematic progressions: The case of
Flight 1549
Martin Drápela
(The Vilém Mathesius Society, Opava)
The concept of thematic progressions has become an inseparable part of studies
dealing with the information structure of language since at least Henri Weil’s (1944
[1978 in English]) pioneering thoughts on this phenomenon, referred to by him then as
the movement of thought (la marche de la pensée). In late 1960s, Daneš (1968 [1974 in
English]) gave it a fresh and expanded conceptual update, and a decade later Svoboda
(1981, 1983) provided so far the most detailed application of the concept within the
framework of the theory of functional sentence perspective (cf. Svoboda 1989, Firbas
1992, 2010, 2013, 2015, Drápela 2015, Dušková 2015).
The usability of the concept of thematic progressions for the study of language
communication has been verified by many scholars e.g. Francis (1990), Nwogu&Bloor
(1991), Fries (1995), Downing (1995, 2001), Ventola (1995), McCabe (1999), most
recently especially by Dušková (2008), Yu (2009), Drápela (2011), and last but not
least also by Herriman (2011) who together with Martinková (2011) provide also
overviews of other contributions to the study of thematic progressions.
Drawing on Firbas’s approach to the study of information structure, Svoboda’s
scale of thematic elements, and Daneš’s typology of thematic progressions, I intend to
present an analysis of thematic progressions appearing in a written recount of a
73
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
breaking news event. Contrary to the common practice of analysing theme-rheme
nexuses and thematic progressions of a single text in its final or published form, I will
attempt to reveal the dynamics of the developing information structure and
information flow of the text during selected phases of its construction: from a single
theme-rheme nexus describing the event shortly after its occurrence, to a complex
network of thematic progressions forming an extended and textually well-structured
description of the event.
Without a direct access to editors’ desks in a newsroom of a news agency, I will
make use of the “View History” function of the Encyclopedia Wikipedia which allows
the reader/editor to track the development of each Wikipedia article. Rarely do
breaking news stories report on significant and at the same time positive happenings of
our lives. Therefore, for this contribution I will use Wikipedia’s English article
referring about Flight 1549 which made the news on January 15, 2009 thanks to
Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger’s successful emergency water landing of Airbus
A320 in which he saved the lives of 150 passengers.
References
Daneš, F. (1968) “Typy tematických posloupností v textu (na materiále českého textu
odborného” [Types of ‘thematic progression’ in text (Based on an analysis of
Czech technical texts)], Slovo a slovesnost 29, pp. 125-141
Daneš, F. (1974) “Functional sentence perspective and the organization of the text” in
F. Daneš (Ed.): Papers on Functional Sentence Perspective, Prague: Academia,
pp. 106-128
Downing, A. (1995) “Thematic layering and focus assignment in Chaucer’s General
Prologue to The Canterbury Tales” in Mohsen Ghadessy (Ed.): Thematic
Development in English Texts, London and New York: Pinter, pp. 145-163
Downing, A. (2001) “Thematic progression as a functional resource in analysing texts”
[online], Círculo de linguística aplicada a la comunicación 5 [cited 2007-09-16],
pp.
23-42.
Available
from
World-Wide
Web:
http://www.ucm.es/info/circulo/no5/downing.htm
Drápela, M. (2011) Aspects of Functional Sentence Perspective in Contemporary
English News and Academic Prose, Brno: Masaryk University
Drápela, M. (Ed.) (2015) A Bibliography of Functional Sentence Perspective 1956-2011
(Czech and Slovak Authors, Firbasian Approach Oriented), Brno: Masaryk
University
Dušková, L. (2008) “Theme movement in academic discourse” in M. Procházka & J.
Čermák (Eds): Shakespeare between the Middle Ages and Modernism. From
Translator's Art to Academic Discourse, Prague: Charles University, pp. 221-248
Dušková, L. (2015) From Syntax to Text: The Janus Face of Functional Sentence
Perspective, Prague: Charles University
Firbas, J. (1992) Functional Sentence Perspective in Written and Spoken
Communication, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Firbas, J. (2010) Collected Works of Jan Firbas. Volume One (1951 - 1967), Brno:
Masaryk University
Firbas, J. (2013) Collected Works of Jan Firbas. Volume Two (1968 - 1978), Brno:
Masaryk University
Firbas, J. (2015) Collected Works of Jan Firbas. Volume Three (1979 - 1986), Brno:
Masaryk University
74
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Francis, G. (1990) “Theme in the daily press”, Occasional Papers in Systemic
Linguistics 4, pp. 51-87
Fries, P. H. (1995) “A personal view of theme” in Mohsen Ghadessy (Ed.): Thematic
Development in English Texts, London and New York: Pinter, pp. 1-19
Herriman, J. (2011) “Themes and theme progression in Swedish advanced learners’
writing in English”, NJES 10/1, pp. 1-28
Martinková, P. (2011) “Thematic progressions in Czech linguistics and abroad”, Czech
and Slovak Linguistic Review 2/2011, pp. 43-71
Nwogu, K. & T. Bloor (1991) “Thematic progression in professional and popular
medical texts” in Eija Ventola (Ed.): Functional and Systemic Linguistics:
Approaches and Uses, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 369-384
McCabe, A. M. (1999) “Theme and thematic patterns in Spanish and English History
texts”, PhD dissertation, Aston University
Svoboda, A. (1981) Diatheme, Brno: Masaryk University
Svoboda, A. (1983) “Thematic elements”, Brno Studies in English 15, pp. 49-85.
Available
from
World-Wide
Web:
https://digilib.phil.muni.cz/bitstream/handle/11222.digilib/104005/1_BrnoStudies
English_15-1983-1_5.pdf
Svoboda, A. (1989) Kapitoly z funkční syntaxe [Chapters from functional syntax],
Prague: Státní pedagogické nakladatelství
Ventola, E. (1995) “Thematic development and translation” in Mohsen Ghadessy (Ed.):
Thematic Development in English Texts, London and New York: Pinter, pp. 85104
Weil, H. (1844) De I'ordre des mots dans les langues anciennes comparées aux langues
modernes, Paris: Joubert
Weil, H. (1978) The order of words in the ancient languages compared with that of the
modern languages, Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Yu, Li (2009) “On the significance of theme and thematic progression in the
development of text”, Sino-US English Teaching 6/2, p. 61-66.
True universals? Cognitive processes, pragmatic motivations, and
social triggers in the perfects of Elizabeth I
Bridget Drinka
(University of Texas at San Antonio)
In the final paragraph of their book, Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca (1994) provide
a broad, abstract interpretation of universals, moving beyond grammatical structures or
processes to the principles behind them:
underlying these cross-linguistic patterns are the true universals,
which are the mechanisms of change that propel grams along these
paths of development.
(Bybee et al. 1994: 302)
75
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
The mechanisms which they posit as universal are primarily cognitive processes,
such as metaphorical extension, inference, generalization, harmony, and absorption of
contextual meaning (1994: 282). As they demonstrate throughout the book, these
mechanisms are clearly instrumental in facilitating change, and are universally
available. What this paper attempts to demonstrate, however, is that this list is not
sufficient for explaining how grammatical change is actualized. Why should it be that
speakers draw the same particular inferences or create the same metaphors, from an
array of possibilities? What I submit (with Johanson 1992, Croft 2000, Enfield 2003,
and others) is that, alongside the cognitive pressures which propel grammatical changes
along their trajectories must also be positioned the triggering effect of social motivation.
Without this social element of actualization, we are left with the model of a multitude of
speakers, each coming to the same conclusion on his or her own, as if in a vacuum.
The essential role of social triggering alongside more abstract cognitive
mechanisms in the implementation of grammatical change is well exemplified in the
growing use of periphrastic perfects in the writing of women of Late Middle and Early
Modern English. In earlier letters by matriarchs of the Plumpton and Oxinden families,
for example, very few perfects are used, but over time, as some women attain an
education and access to Latinate patterns, many more perfects appear. Particularly
noteworthy is the profusion of perfects in the language of social-climbers, such as Lady
Katherine Zouch. Representing an epitome of this trend is Queen Elizabeth I, whose
prolific and significant use of the perfect exceeds that of all other women of her period
in the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME):
1598 (letter to Thomas Edmunds, Queen’s Agent to the French King)
[…]though it were more vnproffitable to his subiects considering how
many of ours, wee haue sacrificed for his sake; and how little wee
haue weighed Vtility, when there hath ben question of his safety.
In this and in many other examples, Elizabeth uses the perfect to draw attention to
her own achievements and to frame events as indicative of her own power and agency.
Such usage points to pragmatic factors like those proposed by Detges (2000: 360):
The basic motivation for the use of resultative II seems to be the
overall strategy of presenting the speaker as the author of an
achievement relevant to the moment of speech. This motivation is
extralinguistic in nature.
Through an analysis of the PPCEME and other data, this paper explores the
coinciding effects of cognitive, pragmatic, and social motivations in the expanding
perfects of Early Modern English and beyond.
References
Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins, and William Pagliuca. 1994. The evolution of grammar:
tense, aspect, and modality in the languages of the world. Chicago/ London:
University of Chicago Press.
Croft, William. 2000. Explaining language change: An evolutionary approach.
Harlow, England/New York : Longman.
76
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Detges, Ulrich. 2000. Time and truth: The grammaticalization of resultatives and
perfects within a theory of subjectification. Studies in Language 24: 345-377.
Elsness, Johan. 1997. The perfect and the preterite in contemporary and earlier
English. Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Enfield, Nick. 2003. Linguistic epidemiology: Semantics and grammar of language
contact in mainland Southeast Asia. London/New York: Routledge Curzon.
Fridén, Georg. 1948. Studies on the tenses of the English verb from Chaucer to
Shakespeare with special reference to the late sixteenth century. Uppsala:
Almqvist & Wiksells.
Johanson, Lars. 1992. Strukturelle Faktoren in türkischen Sprachkontakten. Stuttgart:
Franz Steiner Verlag.
Kohnen, Thomas. 2001. The influence of “Latinate” constructions in Early Modern
English: Orality and literacy as complementary forces. In: D. Kastovsky and A.
Mettinger (eds.). Language contact in the history of English. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter
Lang. 171-94.
Mustanoja, Tauno. 1960. A Middle English Syntax. Part I: Parts of Speech. Helsinki:
Société Néophilologique.
Rainer, Eva Maria. 1989. Das Perfekt im Spätmittel- und Frühenglischen: eine
Frequenz- und Funktionsanalyse anhand von Brieftexten. Innsbruck: Institut für
Anglistik, Universität Innsbruck.
Schwenter, Scott. 1994. “Hot news” and the grammaticalization of perfects. Linguistics
32: 995-1028.
Sørensen, Knud. 1957. Latin influence on English syntax. Travaux du Cercle
Linguistique de Copenhague 11: 131-155.
Trnka, Bohumil. 1930. On the syntax of the English verb from Caxton to Dryden.
Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 3. Prague: Jednota Československych
Matematiku a Fysiku.
Workman, S. K. 1940. Fifteenth century translation as an influence on English prose.
Princeton Studies in English 18. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Wright, Laura (ed.). 2000. The development of Standard English 1300-1800: Theories,
descriptions, conflicts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Non-nominative subjects in Latin
Claudia Fabrizio
(Università di Chieti-Pescara)
The paper attempts to define the alleged subject properties of dative and
accusative arguments in Latin. Recent research has intensively focused on the issue of
non-nominative subjects (also referred to as ‘non-canonical’, ‘oblique’, or ‘quirky’
subjects), both from a typological and a reconstructive perspective. In Barðdal et alii
(2012), in particular, Latin is throughout referred to as a language with dative-subject
patterns, but no relevant examples are provided. I would like to verify whether Latin has
non-nominative subjects, by applying the same criterion recognized by Barðdal et alii
(2012) as the decisive one (and pursued, in fact, in other works on Icelandic and other
77
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Germanic languages: Barðdal 2004, 2009 and Barðdal – Eythórsson 2005), i.e, the
analysis of the syntactic behavior of non-nominative candidates to subjecthood,
according to a range of relevant tests.
After distinguishing between coding properties and behavioural properties of
subjects (following Keenan 1976 and Andrews 1985), and arguing for a cross-linguistic
split of subject properties (along the lines of Falk 2006), I therefore compare Latin
nominative arguments to the dative and accusative ones surfacing with some 3rd
singular person dative-taking predicates (such as placet ‘it pleases’), alterning
predicates (such as decet ‘it is fitting’) and impersonal-like verbs (such as pudet ‘it feels
ashamed’). Partially building upon Dahl (2012), Fedriani (2019) and Fedriani (2014),
the following properties are explored, in order to see whether non-nominative
arguments test out as subjects: word order, agreement, adressee of the imperative, target
of the present participle, reflexivisation, controlled argument, conjunction reduction,
raising to subject and raising to object.
Both coding and behavioural properties associated to Latin nominative subjects
are checked through a corpus-based investigation of Early and Classical Latin texts, in
order to establish whether non-nominative arguments selected by some specific patterns
can work as non-nominative subjects. The hypothesis implies that coding properties are,
strictly speaking, not necessary to identify subjects, in that they imply behavioural ones,
but not the other way round (Haspelmath 2010). My analysis accepts a gradient notion
of subjecthood, whereby (a) some oblique arguments may share some properties of
canonical subjects, and (b) subject properties are actually split between strict
argumental properties and cross-clausal (or pivot-) properties. Some languages do not
provide evidence for the split, while others consistently do. It is also likely that some
peripheral domains of the grammar of a language show some traces of it.
The scrutiny of the data sheds further light on the discrepancies between dative
and accusative arguments in Latin. I hope to show that while accusative arguments of
the pudet-type constructions test out as subjects, at least according to a certain number
of properties, dative arguments are, generally speaking, denied subjecthood. Crucially,
datives can assume some pivot-properties, concerning the cross-clausal continuity, but
they seem to be denied other argumental properties. To sum up, there is no evidence in
Latin for the dative-subject construction, as it is postulated by Barðdal et alii (2012). By
contrast, it is argued that, also from a diachronic point of view, the accusative case, and
not the dative, is by far the better candidate to code non canonical subjects.
References
Adams, James. 2013. Social variation and the Latin language. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Andrews, Avery. 1985. The Major Functions of the Noun Phrase. In T. Shopen (ed.),
Language Typology and Syntactic Description, vol. I: Clause Structure.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 62–154.
Barðdal, Jóhanna. 2009. The Development of Case in Germanic. In J. Barðdal – S.
Chelliah, (eds), The Role of Semantic, Pragmatic and Discourse Factors in the
Development of Case. (Studies in Language Companion Series 108). Amsterdam:
Benjamins, 123–159.
Barðdal, Jóhanna – Eythórsson, Thórallur. 2005. Oblique Subjects: A Common
Germanic Inheritance. Language 81, 824–881.
78
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Barðdal, Jóhanna – Eythórsson, Thórallur. 2012. Hungering and Lusting for Women
and Fleshly Delicacies: Reconstructing Grammatical Relations for ProtoGermanic. Transactions of the Philological Society 110, 363–393.
Barðdal, Jóhanna – Smitherman, Thomas – Bjarnadottir, Valgerður – Danesi, Serena –
Jenset, Gard B. – McGillivray, Barbara. 2012. Reconstructing constructional
semantics. The dative subject construction in Old Norse-Icelandic, Latin, Ancient
Greek, Old Russian and Old Lithuanian. Studies in Languages 36, 511–547.
Bauer, Brigitte. 2000. Archaic Syntax in Indo-European. (Trends in Linguistics. Studies
and Monographs 125). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Bauer, Brigitte. 2009. Word Order’. In Baldi, Ph. – Cuzzolin, P. (eds), New
Perspectives on Historical Latin Syntax. Vol. 1. Syntax of the Sentence. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter, 241–316.
Bayer, Joseph. 2004. Non-nominative subjects in comparison’. In Bhaskararao, P. –
Subbarao, K. V. (eds), Non nominative subjects. (Typological Studies in
Language 60). Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 49–76.
Benedicto, Elena. 1991. Latin long distance anaphora’. In Koster, J. – Reuland, E. (eds),
Long distance anaphora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 171–184.
Bertocchi, Alessandra. 1989. The role of antecedents of Latin anaphoras. In Calboli, G.
(ed.), Subordination and other topics in Latin. (Studies in Language Companion
Series 17). Amsterdam / Philadelphia: Benjamins, 441–461.
Bickel, Balthasar. 2004. The syntax of experiencers in the Himalayas. In Bhaskararao,
P. – Subbarao, K. V. (eds), Non nominative subjects. (Typological Studies in
Language 60). Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 77–111.
Bolkestein, Machtelt. 1983. Genitive and dative possessors in Latin. In Dik, S. (ed.),
Advances in Functional Grammar. (Publications in Language Sciences 2).
Dordrecht: Foris, 55–91.
Cennamo, Michela. 2009. Argument structure and alignment variations and changes in
Late Latin. In Barðdal, J. – Chelliah, S. (eds), The Role of Semantic, Pragmatic
and Discourse Factors in the Development of Case. (Studies in Language
Companion Series 108). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 307–346.
Dahl, Eystein. 2012. Aspetti della morfosintassi del soggetto in latino. Paper delivered
at the University of Naples Federico II. Hand-out.
Danesi, Serena. 2014. Accusative Subjects in Avestan: “Error” or Non-Canonically
Marked Arguments’? Indo-Iranian Journal 57, 223–260.
Drinka, Bridget. 1999. Alignment in Early Proto-Indo-European. In Justus, C. F. –
Polomé, E. C. (eds), Language Change and Typolgical Variation: In Honor of
Winfred P. Lehmann on the Occasion of his 83rd Birthday. Vol. II (The Journal of
Indo-European Studies. Monograph Series 30). Washington, DC: Institute for the
study of Man, 464–500.
Ernout, Alfred. 1935. Morphologie historique du latin. Paris: Klincksieck.
Falk, Yehuda N. 2006. Subjects and Universal Grammar. An Explanatory Theory.
(Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 113). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fedriani, Chiara. 2009. The “Behaviour-before-Coding” Principle: further evidence
from Latin. Archivio Glottologico Italiano 94, 156–184.
Fedriani, Chiara. 2014. Experiential Constructions in Latin. A synchronic and
diachronic study. (Brill’s Studies in Historical Linguistics 3). Leiden: Brill.
Fruyt, Michèle. 1987. Interprétation sémantico-référentielle du réflechi latin. Glotta 65,
204–221.
79
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Haspelmath, Martin. 2010. The Behaviour-before-Coding Principle in Syntactic
Change. In Floricic, F. (ed.), Essais de Typologie et de Linguistique Générale:
Mélanges Offerts à Denis Creissels. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de l'École
Normale Superieure, 541–554.
Keenan, Edward. 1976. Towards a Universal Definition of Subject. In Li, Charles (ed.),
Subject and Topic. New York / San Francisco / London: Academic Press, 303–
322.
Kurzová, Helena. 1993. From Indo-European to Latin. The Evolution of a
Morphosyntactic Type. (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 104). Amsterdam /
Philadelphia: Benjamins.
Lazzeroni, Romano. 2002a. Ruoli tematici e genere grammaticale: un aspetto della
morfosintassi indoeuropea? Archivio Glottologico Italiano 87, 1–17.
Lazzeroni, Romano. 2002b. Il nome greco del sogno e il neutro indoeuropeo. Archivio
Glottologico Italiano 87, 145–162.
Lehmann, Christian. 1985. Ergative and active traits in Latin. In Plank, Frans (ed.),
Relational Typology (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 28). Berlin /
New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 243–255.
Leumann, Manu – Hofmann, Johann B. – Szantyr, Anton. 1965. Lateinische
Grammatik. (Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft II). München: Beck.
Luraghi, Silvia. 1997. Omission of the direct object in Classical Latin. Indogermanische
Forschungen 102, 239–257.
Luraghi, Silvia. 1998. Omissione dell’oggetto diretto in frasi coordinate: dal latino
all’italiano. In: Ramat, P. – Roma, E. (eds), Sintassi storica. Roma: Bulzoni, 183–
196.
Mahajan, Anoop. 2004. On the origin of non-nominative subjects. In Bhaskararao, P. –
Subbarao, K. V. (eds), Non nominative subjects. (Typological Studies in
Language 60). Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 283–299.
Meillet, Antoine. – Vendryes, J. 1960. Traité de grammaire compare des langues
classiques. Paris: Champion 1924 (reprint 1960).
Moravcsik, Edith A. 1978. On the distribution of active and ergative patterns. Lingua
45, 233–279.
Onishi, Masayuki. 2001. Introduction. Non-Canonically Marked Subjects and Objects:
Parameters and properties. In Aikhenvald, A. – Dixon, R. M. W. – Onishi, M.
(eds), Non-Canonical Marking of Subjects and Objects. (Typological Studies in
Language 46). Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1–51.
Panhuis, Dirk. 1984. Is Latin an SOV language? A diachronic perspective.
Indogermanische Forschungen 89, 140–159.
Pieroni, Silvia. 2001. Subject properties, zero-anaphoras and semantic roles. In Moussy,
C. (ed.), De lingua Latina novae quaestiones. Actes du X Colloque International
de Linguistique Latine. (Bibliothèque d’Études Classiques 22). Louvain / Paris /
Sterling: Peeters, 539–552.
Pieroni, Silvia. 2002. First subject’ and clause structure: a morphosyntactic hypothesis
on the control of reflexives. In Bolkestein, M. A. – Kroon, C. H. M. – Pinkster, H.
– Remmelink, H. W. – Risselada, R. (eds), Theory and Description in Latin
linguistics. (Amsterdam Studies in Classical Philology 10). Amsterdam: Gieben,
277–287.
Pieroni, Silvia. 2007. Soggetto e riflessivo. In La Fauci, N. – Pieroni, S.. Morfosintassi
latina. Punti di vista. (Progetti Linguistici 18). Pisa: ETS, 27–39.
80
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Plank, Frans. 1985. The extended accusative / restricted nominative in perspective. In:
Plank, F. (ed.), Relational Typology. (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and
Monographs 28). Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 269–310.
Puddu, Nicoletta. 2005. Riflessivi e intensificatori. Greco, latino e le altre lingue
indoeuropee. (Pubblicazioni della Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia dell'Università di
Pavia 109). Pisa: ETS.
Rovai, Francesco. 2005. L’estensione dell’accusativo in tardo latino e medievale.
Archivio Glottologico Italiano 90, 54–89.
Rovai, Francesco. 2007a. Manifestazioni di sub-sistemi tipologici attivi in latino,
Archivio Glottologico Italiano 92, 51–65.
Rovai, Francesco. 2007b. Tratti attivi in latino. Il caso del genere. PhD Dissertation.
University of Pisa, Pisa.
Rovai, Francesco. 2012. Sistemi di codifica argomentale. Tipologia ed evoluzione. Pisa:
Pacini.
Rovai, Francesco. 2014. Case marking in absolute constructions: further evidence for a
semantically based alignment in Late Latin. Journal of Latin Linguistics, 13, 115–
143.
Sznajder, Lyliane. 1981. Y a-t-il ‘un’ réfléchi en latin? Etude sur les conditions
d’emploi de se et suus. Information grammaticale 10, 17–22.
Touratier, Christian. 1994. Syntaxe latine. (Bibliothèque des Cahiers de l'Institut de
Linguistique de Louvain 80). Louvain-la-Neuve: Peeters.
Traina, Alfonso. 1994. Nascita di un sintagma (me dolet, Prop. 1.16.24)’. Lexis 12, 147.
Tsunoda, Tasaku. 2004. Issues in case-marking. In Bhaskararao, P. – Subbarao, K. V.
(eds), Non nominative subjects. (Typological Studies in Language 60).
Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 197–208.
Polysemous distributed gender: Evidence from Semitic, Berber, and
Romance
Abdelkader Fassi Fehri
(Mohammed V University, Rabat)
A widespread typology/theory sees Gen(der) as (a) essentially a nominal class
marking device, (b) semantically sex-based, and (c) being reflected in gender agreement
through sexed-animate controllers (Kibort & Corbett 2008); Dahl 2000; Kihm 2005),
despite its well-acknowledged complexity. But back to Brugmann (1897) for IndoEuropean, or Brockelmann (1910) for Semitic (to quote few seminal references), Gen
has been shown to express diverse meanings, including individuation, collectivity,
abstractness, quantity, size, throughout historical stages of languages. More meanings
and structures have been identified, including qualitative evaluation, perspectivization
(Leiss 1994), and speech act role modification or performativity (as we will establish).
This polysemy and the differentiated structural multitude are not expected if Gen
is confined only to the n domain, construed as sex, or targeted only by sexed controllers.
Only an inclusive constructional description of Gen is appropriate to take into account
its polysemic nature, and to provide room for more ‘unorthodox’ and distinctively
81
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
distributed syntax. Assuming a Minimalist Distributed Morphology model of Grammar
a la Chomsky (1995) and Halle & Marantz (1993), we depart from the view that Gen is
confined to a dedicated syntactic position (GenP in Picallo (2008), or nP in Kihm
(2005) or Kramer (2014)), and interpreted only as male/female (Percus 2010). Rather,
Gen is distributed over various layers of the DP or CP architecture, in the spirit of
Steriopolo & Wiltschko (2010), Pesetsky (2013), or Ritter (1993), or in SAPs (assuming
Speas & Tenny’s 2003, or Hill’s 2014 cartography). Distinct layers of Gen are then
postulated and motivated: (a) conceptual Gen; (b) n Gen; (c) Cl(assifier) Gen; (d)
Num(ber) Gen, and (e) DP/CP Gen, or even SpeakerP’s Gen. Most of these distinct
positions give sources to unorthodox meanings. Syntactically relevant interpretable Gen
features include not only  fem, but also  indiv,  group,  small/big,  bad/good, 
endearing, etc.
Once it is established that Gen is clearly neither monosemic (it rather expresses a
multitude of senses), nor monofunctional (it is not limited to ‘referential-tracking’
(Heath 1983); it also construes perspectivization or shifts of referents, contributes
expressiveness,
or
modifies
illocutionary/speech
acts),
an
associated
semantics/pragmatics based on the alleged ‘natural’ sex/animacy meaning of Gender
appears to be highly inappropriate. In contrast, our minimalist/distributed treatment is
typically designed to take into account both its polysemy and its polyfunctionality, in a
motivated constructional and integrative approach (barring any homonymic alternative).
Time permitting, and building on various contributions in the literature to account
for regular polysemy and/or sense extension, and its representation or generation, we
explore the hypothesis of a single geometric representation in which Gen is
(distributively) hyperonymic, embracing the diverse and structurally organized and
related meanings, or functions found cross-linguistically, the sex (animate) meaning
being only a hyponym. We build both on insightfully relevant work by Jurafsky (1996),
Dressler & Barbaresi (1994), Körtvélyessy (2014), Grandi & Körtvélyessy (2015) with
regard to the semantic treatment of evaluatives, Lakoff (1987)’s ‘radial’ categorization,
as well as work on neural correlates of semantic ambiguity, offering behavioral and
neurophysiological support for a single-entry model of polysemy (in contrast to
homonymic separate entries), as in Beretta et al (2005), Pylkkänen et al (2006), or
Marantz (2005).
Here are some cross-linguistic illustrative examples (‘feminine’ marked by –at, -t,
or –a):
Arabic
(1) a. naḥl ‘bee’ naḥl-at ‘bee-unit’, “a bee” (singulative)
b. xayyaaṭ “tailor”  xayyaṭ-a ‘tailor-fem’, “group of tailors” (plurative;
Morocc. Arabic)
c. raaḥil “traveller”  raḥḥaal-at ‘traveller + augment+ fem’
i. “an extremely big traveller” (intensive)
ii. “a famous big traveller” (evaluative)
(2) yaa ʔab-at-i!
Oh father-fem-mine
82
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Berber
(3) afus “hand” → t-afus-t “small hand” (diminutive)
(4) ṯamšmaš-t “a single apricot” (individuative)
(5) argaz “man”  t-argaz-t «mannish female» (endearment or contempt)
Hebrew
(6) a. neqam-a “vengeance” (abstract)
b. oni  oniyy-a “a ship” (singulative)
c. daag “a fish”  dagg-a “a collection of fish” (plurative)
Romance
(7) a. kortell-o  kortell-a ‘large kitchen knife’ (augmentative)
b. barco  barc-a ‘small ship’ (diminutive)
c. aceitun-o ‘olive tree’  aceitun-a ‘olive-unit’ (singulative)
References
Beretta, Alan, Robert Fiorentino, & David Poeppel. 2005. The effects of homonymy
and polysemy on lexical access: an MEG study. Cognitive Brain Research 24: 5765.
Brockelmann, Karl. 1910. Précis de linguistlque sémitique. Paris: Geuthner.
Brugmann, Karl. 1897. The Nature and Origin of the Noun Genders in the IndoEuropean Languages. Lecture delivered at Princeton Univ.
Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The Minimalist Program. MIT Press.
Dahl, Osten. 2000. Elementary Gender distinctions. In Barbara Unterbeck et al eds.
Gender in grammar and cognition, 577-593.
Fassi Fehri, Abdelkader. 2015 (to appear). New roles for Gender: Evidence from
Arabic, Semitic, Berber, and Romance. In Laura Bailey & Michelle Sheehan eds.
Order and Structure in Syntax. Language Science Press.
Halle, Morris & Alec Marantz. 1993. Distributed morphology and the pieces of
inflection. In Kenneth Hale & Jay Keyser eds. The View from Building 20, 111176. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Kibort,
Anna
&
Greville
Corbett
2008.
Gender.
http://www.grammaticalfeatures.net/features/ gender.html
Kihm, Alain. 2005. Noun Class, Gender and the Lexicon-syntax-morphology Interfaces:
A Comparative Study of Niger-Congo and Romance Languages. In Guglielmo
Cinque & Richard Kayne eds. The Handbook for Comparative Syntax, 459-512.
Oxford: OUP.
Körtvélyessy, Livia. 2014. Evaluative Derivation. In Rochelle Lieber & Peter Štekauer
eds. The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology, 296-316. Oxford:
OUP.
Marantz, Alec. 2005. Generative Linguistics within the cognitive neuroscience of
language. The Linguistic Review 22.2-4: 429–445.
Pylkkänen, Liina, Rodolfo Llinás, & Gregory Murphy. 2006. The Representation of
Polysemy: MEG evidence. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 18.1: 97-109.
Steriopolo, Olga & Martina Wiltschko. 2010. Distributed Gender Hypothesis. In
Gerhild Zybatow et al. eds. Formal Studies in Slavic Linguistics. Linguistik
International 25: 155-172. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.
83
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
New perspectives on Greek-Latin bilingualism. Evidence from the
Textual Bilingualism in Latin corpus
Chiara Fedriani and Maria Napoli
(University of Eastern Piedmont)
The aim of this talk is to discuss methodological issues and data related to the
construction of a corpus of Latin texts for the study of different phenomena grouped
under the label of “textual bilingualism”, and concerning contact with Greek.
As is well-known, Greek/Latin bilingualism should be regarded as
“dissymétrique” (Biville 2008: 41): whereas Latin always remained a foreign language
for the Greeks, Greek was like a mother tongue for the Romans, especially the educated
ones (Rochette 1997, 2010). Adams’ (2003) landmark book offers the first large-scale
treatment of bilingualism in the ancient Roman world, and has been defined by Calboli
(2008) as “a new frontier of the Latin grammar”. However, Calboli also criticized some
aspects of Adam’s approach, especially the scarce attention devoted to literary texts and
the lack of consideration of philological issues.
In this talk we will illustrate the development of a new corpus which tries to
obviate these needs by providing a more extended amount of data from both a
qualitative and a quantitative point of view, since our material includes various
Classical and Late Latin literary texts and covers a long period of time, from the first
century BC to the seventh century AD.
Firstly, we will discuss our methodology for the linguistic analysis of textual
bilingualism in historical perspective, which guided the development of a multi-layered
tagset specific to contact phenomena.
Secondly, drawing on our corpus we will offer a preliminary reassessment about
the impact of Greek on Latin literary texts pertaining to different genres, including
epistolography, historiography, encyclopedic texts, technical works, grammatical
essays, literary commentaries. Our primary goal in this respect is to assess the relative
“degree of bilingualism” found in each text, providing a comprehensive evaluation of
different contact phenomena, including graphemic, phonological, morphological,
syntactic and lexical ones.
The degree of linguistic “overlap” also gives us some indirect information about
the bilingualism of the speaker/writer: we will substantiate this claim with a case-study
on Macrobius, whose texts are highly interspersed with Greek and show a wide range of
code mixing phenomena, from the level of Phrase (e.g. Latin prepositions governing
Greek nouns in the case required by the Latin head: 1, or Latin nouns modified by
Greek adjectives: 2) to that of sentence and discourse, where Greek can be strategically
exploited to report direct speech in narrative sections (3).
(1) ut extra γυναικωνῖτιν numquam sit egressa (Sat. 1, 12)
‘that she never set foot outside the women’s quarter’
(2) virtute aλλοιωτικῇ in sucum vertente quidquid acceptum est (Sat. 7, 4)
‘the transformative power turning whatever has been ingested into juice’
84
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(3) Pylades hac voce securitatem saltantis castigavit: σὺ βλέπεις. (Sat. 1, 17)
‘Pylades criticized his nonchalance with the remark: “You’re peeking”’
The originality of this research lies on the development of a new resource for
historical sociolinguistics which permits a corpus-based methodology on a wide
selection of ancient texts. Once completed, the corpus will be freely available with the
aim of promoting networking between the scholars interested in corpus-based research
on historical bilingualism.
References
Adams J. N. 2003. Bilingualism and the Latin language, Cambridge.
Biville F. 2008. Situations et documents bilingues dans le monde gréco-romain. In
Biville F., Decourt J.C. and Rougemont G. (éds.), Bilingualisme gréco-latin et
épigraphie, Lyon, 35-53.
Calboli G. 2008. Una nuova frontiera della grammatica latina: a proposito del libro di
James Noel Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin language, Cambridge 2003, in
“Maia” 60 (3): 474-503.
Rochette B. 1997, Le latin dans le mond grec, Brussels.
Rochette B. 2010. Greek and Latin bilingualism. In Bakker E.J. (ed.), A companion to
the Ancient Greek language, Oxford: 281-293.
Frequency and the rise of animacy-based differential object marking
in German
Gertraud Fenk-Oczlon
(Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt)
The main goal of this paper is to demonstrate animacy-based Differential Object
Marking (DOM) in dialectal and colloquial variants of German (i); furthermore the role
of frequency in the emergence of DOM will be discussed (ii).
(i) DOM in German
German is usually not said to be a DOM language. Animacy and definiteness are
prevalent factors determining DOM in many languages. In Standard German, however,
DOM is exclusively conditioned by gender (Fenk-Oczlon & Fenk 2008, Krifka 2009).
In the singular, only masculine direct objects are overtly case marked, regardless of
whether they are animate or inanimate, definite or indefinite. But there is evidence of an
animacy-based DOM in the personal pronouns in dialectal variants (e.g. Berlin dialect,
Bavarian) and colloquial variants of German (Fenk-Oczlon 2015). For animate direct
objects dative pronouns such as ihm, eam/eahm (‘him’) or ihr, ihra (‘her’) tend to be
used instead of the accusative pronouns ihn (‘him’) or sie (‘her’).
Some examples from Austro-Bavarian:
(1)
i siach eam (the man [+animate])
I see him
*i siach eam (the mountain [-animate])
85
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(2)
i siach ihra (the woman [+animate])
I see her
* i siach ihra (the vase [-animate])
(3)
i mog eam (the teacher [+animate])
I like him
* i mog eam (the wine [-animate])
(4)
i mog ihra (the aunty [+animate])
I like her
* i mog ihra (the soup [-animate])
Data and further examples from internet-based communication (chats and blogs)
as well as the results of a questionnaire concerning Austro-Bavarian will be presented.
(ii) The role of frequency in the emergence of DOM
The importance of frequency in the emergence of DOM and also in the choice of
the case that is used to differentiate direct objects becomes apparent when comparing
different languages. For instance: Why is in German variants – as in many other
languages – the dative used to mark animate direct objects, but in Russian the genitive?
In German the dative is a very frequently used case for animates (c.f. Wegener 1985).
Important classes of verbs such as interaction verbs, possession verbs or communication
verbs require the dative. Thus, the use of dative pronouns instead of accusative
pronouns for animate direct objects can be seen as a consequence of their frequent use
and the high familiarity of the association between animacy and dative pronouns. In
Russian, on the contrary, a high number of verbs (of desire, fear, avoidance, etc.)
govern the genitive. And direct objects in the genitive were already frequent and
therefore familiar before the emergence of the genitive-accusative for animate
masculines (Vlasto 1986). In Old Church Slavonic any suitable verb could have
partitive objects in the genitive; and in sentences with objects under negation the
genitive was already in usage.
References
Fenk-Oczlon, Gertraud. 2015. Ich liebe ihm: Belebtheit und differentielle
Objektmarkierung im Deutschen. In U. Valenčič Arh & D. Čuden (eds.), V
labirintu jezika = Im Labrinth der Sprache. Ljubljana: Znanstvena založba
Filosofske fakultete, 83–93.
Fenk-Oczlon, Gertraud & Fenk, August. 2008. Scales and cognitive economy. In V.
Polyakov (ed.), Text processing and cognitive technologies. Cognitive modeling
in linguistics. Proceedings of the Xth Int. Conference. Kazan: Kazan State
University Press, 234–42.
Krifka, Manfred. 2009. Case syncretism in German feminines: Typological, functional
and structural aspects. In P. Steinkrüger & M. Krifka (eds.), On inflection. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter, 141–172.
Vlasto, Alexis P. 1986. A linguistic history of Russia to the end of the eighteenth
century. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Wegener, Heide. 1985. Der Dativ im heutigen Deutsch. Tübingen: Narr.
86
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Some (typological) thoughts on the applicative analysis of Basque (k)i
Beatriz Fernández
(UPV/EHU)
Basque dative clitics are immediately preceded by a morpheme -(k)i known as
dative flag after Trask (1997: 227). Whenever this morpheme -(k)i appears, a dative
clitic also arises in the inflected verbal form. Therefore, (1a) is grammatical as it shows
both the morpheme -(k)i and the first person singular dative clitic -t. On the other hand,
(1b,c) are both ungrammatical, since the former shows the morpheme -(k)i without the
subsequent dative clitic and the latter exhibits the dative clitic without the morpheme (k)i.
(1)
a.
d-a-tor-ki-t
TM-TM-come-KI-1sgDAT
‘(S)he/it comes to me.’
b.
*d-a-tor-ki
TM-TM -come-KI
Intended: ‘(S)he/it comes to me.’
c.
*d-a-tor-t
TM-TM-come-1sgDAT
Intended: ‘(S)he/it comes to me.’
-(K)i is generalized across Basque varieties with considerably morphological
variation. In this talk, we aim at analyzing this morpheme. We will assume this
morpheme -(k)i to be an applicative head (Appl), as suggested by Elordieta (2001) or
Rezac (2006) among others. Moreover, we will propose this applicative to be an
incorporated preposition (P) in the spirit of Trask (1981: 289). Trask claims that -(k)i is
a P, as it always precedes pronominal elements and assigns a particular case, i.e. the
dative. As the matter of fact, -(k)i invariably precedes dative clitics.
The idea of -(k)i being an Appl/incorporated P can be combined with both the
derivational account for applicatives (Baker 1988) and the base-generation analysis
(McGinnis 1988, Pylkkänen 2008 [2002]). The analysis of -(k)i as a P is reminiscent of
the derivational analysis of Basque applicatives. Actually, if -(k)i is an incorporated P,
then it is an Appl too, as proposed by Baker for Bantu languages and extended to
Basque by Albizu (1998) or Ormazabal and Romero (2015) among others. Therefore,
the two hypotheses, i.d., -(k)i as an Appl or as an incorporated P are not necessarily
exclusive of one another, at least from this perspective.
On the other hand, the analysis of -(k)i as an incorporated P seems to be more
difficult to assume in a base-generation analysis of Basque datives, such as Oyharçabal
(2010). In this approach, as the (non derivational) Determiner Phrase nature of datives is
claimed, the presence of a P is harder to explain. Nevertheless, the relationship between
Appl and P is not necessarily denied in this second scenario. In particular, it has been
suggested that P and Appl are the same element, Merged with the object directly and
87
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
then the whole with the verb (that is, P), vs Merged above the verb and selecting the
object in its specifier (Appl) (see Rezac 2006, chapter 3, section 6).
In this talk, we will thus propose that the Appl/incorporated P, in both the
derivational and the base-generation approaches to Basque datives, is on the right track
as far as -(k)i is concerned. Nonetheless, our talk also promotes reflection on the Appl/P
analysis of -(k)i, as it departs considerably from the typological definition of
applicatives and hides some aspects that might be crucial for the proper understanding
of Appls in general and -(k)i in particular.
First of all, the main geographical areas of applicatives are Africa (Bantu),
Western Pacific region (Austronesian) and North and Central America (Salish, Mayan
and Uto-Aztecan), (Polinsky 2013) –although they are attested all over the world, for
instance, in Europe, in some Caucasian languages such as Abaza (O’Herin 2001). The
main generalization identified by Polinsky is that Appls are common in languages with
little or no case marking on noun phrases, but at the same time with verbal inflection
rich enough to mark the Appl construction. With regards to this, Basque does have a
morphologically complex verbal inflection. Nevertheless, Basque is at the same time a
language with rich case morphology, typologically distant from what is observed in
languages such as Kinyarwanda (Dryer 1983).
Second, as discussed in the literature, an Appl can be based on both transitive and
intransitive constructions, but the intransitive base is less common than the transitive
one and even impossible with unaccusatives in some languages (Polinsky 2013). On the
contrary, -(k)i shows no transitivity restrictions as it is attested in both (bivalent)
intransitive (1a) and ditransitive constructions.
Third, an Appl applies an argument, i.e. an object to the construction, and
generally speaking this seems to be the case also in Basque. However, the applied
object in Basque ditransitive constructions is mainly an indirect object and not a direct
one.
Four, the thematic roles of the applied objects are mostly goals and benefactives,
but also locatives, instruments and commitatives. Although goals and
benefactives/malefactives are also common for arguments introduced by -(k)i, locatives,
instruments and commitatives are completely unknown in Basque. In contrast,
arguments introduced by -(k)i can be possessors, experiencers or just affected
arguments. Moreover, -(k)i is attested in both Differential Object Marking (Odria 2014)
–marking themes– and allocutives –introducing non-thematic clitics (Oyharçabal 1993).
Although this paper will not give an alternative analysis to those already
developed in Basque and briefly presented, it aims at raising some questions on the
nature of -(k)i that might have consequences in the general discussion of applicatives.
Abbreviations
Appl = applicative
DAT = dative
sg = singular
P = preposition
TM = tense/mode
1-2-3 = first person
88
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
References
Albizu, Pablo. 1998. “Generalized Person-Case Constraint: A Case for a Syntax-Driven
Inflectional Morphology.” In Myriam Uribe-Etxebarria and Amaia Mendikoetxea
(eds.), Theoretical Issues on the Morphology-Syntax Interface [Supplements of
ASJU XL]. Donostia: Gipuzkoako Foru Aldundia and UPV/EHU, 1-33.
Baker, Mark. 1988. Incorporation: A theory of grammatical function changing.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Dryer, Matthew S.1983. Indirect objects in Kinyarwanda revisited. In David M.
Perlmutter (ed.), Studies in Relational Grammar 1. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 129-140.
Elordieta, Arantzazu. 2001. Verb Movement and Constituent Permutation in Basque.
Utrecht: LOT.
McGinnis, Martha. 1998. Locality in A-movement. Ph.D. Diss. MIT.
Odria, Ane. 2014. Differential object marking and the nature of dative case in Basque
varieties. Linguistic Variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 289-317.
O’Herin, Brian. 2001. Abaza applicatives. Language 77: 477-493.
Ormazabal & Romero. 2015. Historical changes in Basque dative alternations: evidence
for a derivational analysis. Ms., UPV/EHU and Cáceres Univ.
Oyharçabal, Bernard. 1993. Verb Agreement with Non Arguments: On Allocutive
Agreement. In José Ignacio Hualde and Jon Ortiz de Urbina (eds.) Generative
Studies in Basque Syntax. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 89-114.
Oyharçabal, Bernard. Basque Ditransitives. In Maia Duguine, Susana Huidobro and
Nerea Madariaga (eds.), Argument Structure and Syntactic Relations from a
Crosslinguistic Perspective, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 233-260.
Polinsky, Maria. 2013. “Applicative constructions.” In Matthew S. Dryer and Martin
Haspelmath (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max
Planck
Institute
for
Evolutionary
Anthropology.
On
line:
http://wals.info/chapter/109
Pylkkänen. 2008 [2002]. Introducing arguments. Cambridge (Mass.): The MIT Press.
Rezac, Milan. 2006. Basque morphosyntax. Ms., University of Nantes/CNRS.
Trask, Robert L. 1981. Basque Verbal Morphology. In Euskalarien Nazioarteko
Jardunaldiak. IKER 1. Bilbao: Euskaltzaindia. 285-304.
Trask, Robert L. 1997. The history of Basque. London: Routledge.
The instability of the perfect/preterit opposition. Insights from the
romance periphery
Guro Fløgstad
(University of Olso)
The expansion of a Perfect, as in French, where the passé compose has taken on
the functions of the passé simple, is well-known, and has led researchers to define the
perfect as an unstable category: perfects frequently emerge, but easily become
something else (Lindstedt 2000). In grammaticalization theory (Bybee et al. 1994), the
observed development of perfects has led researchers to the identification of cross-
89
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
linguistic paths of developments, such as the presumably well-travelled perfective path:
A possessive construction with auxiliary habere in Romance later develops perfect
function, and eventually past/ past perfective function, as in French. The past/past
perfective – here referred to as a preterit – tends to disappear as a result of the
expansion of a perfect. Examples of such developments are found not only in Romance,
but in a number of non-Indo-European languages, as argued by, e.g., Bybee and
colleagues, who claim that the perfect expands as the current relevance (CR) component
is lost (Bybee et al. 1994: 86-87), assuming that the CR component triggers a more
frequent use of the perfect, on the premise that speakers want to express themselves as
more relevant. This increased frequency leads speakers to use the perfect in contexts
previously not associated with current relevance. This overuse makes the specific
semantics bleach, and the CR component eventually disappears. This line of reasoning
assumes mechanisms valid for all as speakers, and argues that robust cross-linguistic
findings corroborate such a claim, also languages with no genetic or geographical
relation, leading scholars to define the expansion of a perfect as a diachronic universal.
However, there is an increasing awareness that when one looks beyond the wellstudied Indo-European languages, it is in fact the preterit that is gaining terrain; as
confirmed by author (in press) for Argentinean and Uruguayan Spanish, and Howe
(2013) for Peruvian. This study further systematizes the distribution of
perfects/preterits, and shows that the expansion of a preterit is not marginal or rare, or
confined to certain Latin American varieties. This paper shows, however, through a
primary study of Argentinean and Uruguayan Spanish, and a secondary study of 50
Indo-European languages, that the instability both relates to perfects and preterits – and
that either may expand. Clearly, there is a substantial variation in the distribution of the
Perfect and Preterit in a selection of Romance languages.
These findings have important implications. According to Dahl (2004: 275), “past
tenses and perfectives rarely develop into anything else: they seem to be, in a sense, the
stable final point of that development”. In the languages in which the preterit has
expanded, however, it is indeed the past tense; the older, synthetic form—with pastperfective function—that has gained terrain. It appears, then, that both categories may
expand, and that the instability is not only related to the perfect. Detailed insights from
Argentinean and Uruguayan, as well as the overview provided by the secondary study,
thus illustrates how looking beyond the core of sample languages provides new insights
into the presumed regularity of grammatical development of tense and aspect.
References
Author. In press. Preterit Expansion and Perfect Demise in Porteño Spanish and
Beyond. A Critical Perspective on Cognitive Grammaticalization Theory.
Studies in Historical Linguistics. Leiden: Brill.
Bybee, Joan, Revere Perkins, & William Pagliuca. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar:
Tense, Aspect and Modalty in the Languages of the World. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Comrie, Bernard. 1976. Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dahl, Östen. 2004. The growth and maintenance of linguistic complexity. Studies in
Language Companion Series. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Howe, Chad. 2013. The Spanish Perfects. Pathways of Emergent Meaning. Palgrave
Studies in Language Variation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
90
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Lindstedt, Jouko. 2000. The perfect – aspectual, temporal and evidential. In Dahl (ed.),
356-384.
Testing the control hierarchy: On the relationship between semantic
types of experiencer predicates and argument encoding
Diana Forker and Geoffrey Haig
(University of Jena; University of Bamberg)
The formal expression of experiencer constructions across the languages of the
world is very diverse (e.g. Croft 1993, Bossong 1998, Haspelmath 2001, Næss 2007:
185-196, Kutscher 2009). Repeatedly the formal differences have been attributed to
semantic differences in control implied by the various semantic subtypes of
experiencer predicates. Experiencers are normally assumed to lack control over the
experience they have (Primus 2004), but this is clearly a matter of degree. Scholars
have proposed diverging hierarchies correlating the degree of control with special
morphosyntactic properties of experiencers such as non-canonical case marking or
adpositions or differences in behavioral properties (Table 1).
Table 1: The experiencer control hierarchy
Bossong (1998: 261)
perception/cognition > emotion > bodily sensation
Haspelmath (2001: 63)
perception > cognition > bodily sensation > emotion
Ganenkov (2006: 191)
perception / cognition > emotion / volition
Kemmer (1993: 127-142) perception > cognition > emotion
In all hierarchies, the chances for experiencers to bear non-canonical cases,
additional adpositions or for predicates to employ middle marking increases from left
to right, i.e. the degree of non-canonical marking growths with a decrease in control.
For instance, in Russian experiencers of perception verbs such as videt’ ‘see’ are
marked with the nominative whereas experiencers of many emotion and sensation
predicates bear the dative (e.g. byt’ xolodno ‘be cold’).
The aim of the project is to test the control hierarchies in Table 1 on the basis of
cross- linguistic data. We will take into consideration 25-30 predicates from all
semantic subclasses of experiencer predicates that have been established by Verhoeven
(2007), namely bodily sensation, emotion, cognition, volition, and perception.
The first step will be to establish the control properties of the experiencer
predicates through semantic tests. The most common tests are the imperative test,
modification with adverbials expressing intention like deliberately, voluntarily and the
insertion of the experiencer predicates in purposive clauses (Klein & Kutscher 2005;
Verhoeven 2010). This will result in a scale similar to those shown in Table 1 that
represents a hypothesis regarding the universal semantic space of experiencer
constructions with respect to control. In the second step, the scale will be verified by
investigating the more or less non-canonical marking of experiencers in the same
languages, complemented by data from other languages. The investigated sample
91
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
comprises 35 languages from typologically diverse families with a geographical focus
on Eurasia.
The study might prove the validity of the hierarchies given in Table 1. But it
might also show that there is no perfect overlap between the semantic properties of the
predicates in terms of control and the formal marking of experiencers as divergent
from canonical agents.
References
Bossong, Georg. 1998. Le marquage de l’expérient dans les langues de l’Europe. In Jack
Feuillet (ed.), Actance et valence dans les langues de l’Europe, 259–294. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Croft, William. 1993. Case marking and the semantics of mental state verbs. In James
Pustejovsky (ed.), Semantics and the lexicon, 55–72. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Ganenkov, Dmitry. 2006. Experiencer coding in Nakh-Daghestanian. In Leonid
Kulikov, Andrej Malchukov & Peter de Swart (eds.), Case, valency and
transitivity, 179–202. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2001. Non-canonical marking of core arguments in European
languages. In Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, R. M. W. Dixon & Masayuki Onishi
(eds.), Non-canonical marking of subjects and objects, 53–85. Amsterdam:
Benjamins.
Kemmer, Suzanne. 1993. The middle voice. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Klein, Katarina & Silvia Kutscher. 2005. Lexical economy and case selection of psychverbs in German. Ms. Köln/Bochum.
Kutscher, Silvia. 2009. Kausalität und Argumentrealisierung: Zur Konstruktionsvarianz
bei Psychverben am Beispiel europäischer Sprachen. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Næss, Åshild. 2007. Prototypical transitivity. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Primus, Beatrice. 2004. Protorollen und Verbtyp: Kasusvariation bei psychischen
Verben. In Rolf Kailuweit & Martin Hummel (eds.), Semantische Rollen, 377–
401. Tübingen: Narr.
Verhoeven, Elisabeth. 2007. Experiential constructions in Yucatec Maya: A
typologically based analysis of a functional domain in a Mayan language.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Verhoeven, Elisabeth. 2010. Agentivity and stativity in experiencer verbs: Implications
for a typology of verb classes. Linguistic Typology 14. 213–251.
Morphological headedness and negation: Empirical/conceptual
implications
Kazuhiko Fukushima
(Kansai Gaidai University)
This
case
study
involving
Japanese
compound
verbs
reveals
descriptive/conceptual utility of negation. The scope is limited to lexical V1-V2
compounds---a very popular but controversial target of research ([3], [4], [5], [2], [1],
[7]; major ones). Among the controversies is the matter of headedness. Following [6]
92
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(‘right hand head rule’), [3], [7], and many others basically assume that V2 is the head
(1). However, this supposition is problematic: the head is V1 in (2) with V2 acting as an
‘adverbial’ modifier. Also both Vs can be the heads (3). Headedness is not trivial since
the head determines: (i) how the arguments of V1-V2 are ‘matched’ for the whole
compound and (ii) how the case-marking of the inherited arguments is determined. ([3],
[1], and [7] reveal perplexing intricacies.)
(1) right-headed:
a.
Hanako-ga
odori-tukare-ta.
Hanako-NOM
dance-get.tired-PAST
‘Hanako got tired from dancing.’
b.
Tama-ga
koroge-oti-ta.
ball-NOM roll-fall.down-PAST
‘The ball fell down by rolling’
(2) left-headed:
a.
Taroo-ga
gake-o
mi-orosi-ta
b.
Taroo-NOM clif-ACC
look-lower-PAST
‘Taroo looked down the cliff’
Taroo-ga
zi-o kaki-nagut-ta
Taroo-NOMletter-ACCwrite-hit-PAST
‘Taroo wrote letters in unruly fashion’
(3) dual-headed (dvandva):
a.
Ziroo-ga
naki-saken-da.
Ziroo-NOM cry-scream-PAST
‘Ziroo cried and screamed.’
Umi-ga
hikari-kagayai-ta
ocean-NOM shine-glitter-PAST
‘The ocean shined and glittered’
b.
So far, headedness is determined solely based on intuitions of speakers---no
independent criterion. Negation helps. When these compounds appear with negation,
affirmative continuations (4b,c)-(6b,c) display different patterns of contradiction (#)
depending on the compound types. ((5c) is rather irrelevant with non-literal ‘adverbial’
V2). The verb giving rise to contradiction is the head.
(4) a. Hanako-ga odori-tukare-nakat-ta.
‘Hanako did not get tired from dancing.’
b. … demo odot-ta. ‘… but danced’
c. … #demo tukare-ta. ‘… but got tired’
(5) a. Taroo-ga gake-o mi-orosa-nakat-ta.
‘Taroo did not look down the cliff’
b. … #demo mi-ta ‘… but looked’
c. … demo orosi-ta ‘… but lowered’
(6) a. Ziroo-ga naki-sakeba-nakat-ta.(cf.(3a))
‘Ziroo did not cry and scream.’
b. … #demo nai-ta. ‘… but cried’
c. … #demo saken-da. ‘… but screamed’
Also negation is interesting regarding different theoretical/conceptual approaches
to V-V compounds---we find contentious opposition between syntactic ([5]) vs. lexical
(others cited above) accounts. Compare (7) with (4). A regular adverbial modifier
odotte (V+te) gives rise to distinct interpretations: (b)-readings are shared while (c)readings diverge.
(7)
a. Hanako-ga [ADV odotte] tukare-nakat-ta.
b. … demo odot-ta. ‘… but danced’
‘Hanako did not get tired [due to dancing].’ c. … demo tukare-ta. ‘but got tired’
We note that (7c) is possible with a regular adverb---Hanako got tired but not
from dancing (adverb alone negated; impossible in (4c)). A syntactic account would
suppose more-or-less the same syntactic ‘modificational’ structure attributed to regular
adverbs as well as cause/manner V1 in (1)/(4). A lexical (morphological) account is
home free since adverbs and V1 belong to separate domains.
93
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
As demonstrated, negation offers independent criteria empirically and
conceptually, which eventually enable more solid testing/construction of
predictions/hypotheses. Thus negation is not only an intriguing object of research but
also a useful descriptive resource.
References
[1] Fukushima, Kazuhiko. (2005) Lexical V-V compounds in Japanese: lexicon vs.
syntax. Language 81, 568-612.
[2] Himeno, Masako. (1999) Hukugoodooshi-no Kozo-to Imiyoohoo (Structure and
semantic usage of compound verbs). Tokyo: Hitsuji.
[3] Kageyama, Taro. (1993) Bunpoo-to gokeisei (Grammar and word-formation).
Tokyo: Hitsuji.
[4] Matsumoto, Yo. (1996) Complex Predicates in Japanese: a Syntactic and Semantic
Study of the Notion ‘Word’. Stanford: CSLI.
[5] Nishiyama, Kunio. (1998) V-V compounds as serialization. Journal of East Asian
Linguistics 7, 175-217.
[6] Williams, Edwin. (1981) On the notions ‘lexically related’ and ‘head of a word’.
Linguistic Inquiry 12, 245-274.
[7] Yumoto, Yoko. (2005) Fukugodoshi/Haseidoshi-no Imi-to Togo: Mojuru Keitaironkara Mita Nichieigo-no Doshi Keisei (The semantics and syntax of compound
verbs/derived verbs: verb-formation in Japanese and English viewed from a
modular morphological perspective). Tokyo: Hitsuji.
Language change, functional explanations and serendipity
Livio Gaeta
(University of Turin)
Functional explanations are normally modeled on the basis of general factors or
properties tightly connected with the communicative situation in which the speakers are
immersed. Although their role is not equally evaluated in other theoretical approaches to
language change, much attention has been recently drawn on their efficacy in diachronic
explanations even in highly formal(ized) models (cf. Roberts 2015). In this light, no one
can completely disregard the communicative aspects relating to language as a cognitive
tool (in relation both to the speakers’ cognitive understanding of an interpersonal or
social situation and to its communicative dimension). Therefore, the different views are
due to the weight assigned on the one hand to the functional factors of a communicative
situation including the individuals involved and on the other to the formal aspects of
language structure as it is structurally organized.
In this paper, I will discuss a couple of phenomena highlighting the impact of
general synchronic laws on possible evolutionary scenarios while on the other hand
structural aspects of source constructions account for occurring mismatches. This is for
instance the case of the (missing) correspondence between constituent order in syntax
and in compounds (cf. Gaeta 2008). The latter can be explained in terms of possible
developmental stages which systematically vary in dependence of the syntactic change
94
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
and possibly give rise to synchronic mismatches. The latter, however, are not the direct
product of a change, but a sort of side-effect. Accordingly, they are inert, in the sense
that the compounds’ constituent order does not change independently of syntax.
Therefore, the mismatch as a dysfunctional state-of-affairs is not acquired as a
consequence of an active change, but is the byproduct of systematic developmental
stages resulting into synchronic mismatches. In a somewhat complementary way,
unexpected differences in certain domains of grammar are observed which can be
explained by making reference to general functional principles postulated for diachronic
scenarios observed in other languages. This is the case of different productivity rates
displayed by the indicative, the subjunctive and the conditional category in Italian (cf.
Gaeta 2007). This is largely unexpected in the light of the general claim that inflectional
morphology should be fully productive with respect to derivational morphology because
it reflects the full productivity of syntactic rules. However, even if frequency is kept
under control, a substantial difference of the usage rate of the subjunctive and of the
conditional category with regard to the indicative is observed, which can
straightforwardly be explained by making reference to the suppletive effect of a
periphrasis with a modal verb on the subjunctive and the conditional. Therefore, even in
a language in which modals are not normally understood as massively grammaticalized
the same tendency for the modals’ suppletive effect postulated for Germanic languages
can be observed. Besides falsifying the full- productivity-hypothesis of syntactic rules,
the serendipitous character of this finding profiles a possible universal tendency which
is functionally connected with the modals’ peculiar semantics and their capacity of
giving rise to periphrastic verbal sequences.
References
Gaeta, Livio. 2007. On the double nature of productivity in inflectional morphology.
Morphology 17: 181-205.
Gaeta, Livio. 2008. Constituent order in compounds and syntax: typology and
diachrony. Morphology 18: 117-141.
Roberts, Ian. 2015. Formal and Functional Explanations: New Perspective on an Old
Debate. Plenary talk delivered at the 48th Annual Meeting of the Societas
Linguistica Europaea (Leiden, 2.- 5.9.2015).
Phonetics of emphatics in Baṭḥari
Fabio Gasparini
(Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”)
Baṭḥari is one of the six Modern South Arabian languages (henceforth, MSAL)
spoken in Oman and Yemen and belonging to the West branch of the Semitic family.
Although said to be a dead language at the present time (Morris 2005), recent field
studies (Morris, p.c.) revealed the presence of less than 20 proficient elder speakers (all
above 50 years of age) scattered across the Eastern coast of the Dhofar Governorate.
Nonetheless, the evident status of severe endangerment of the language foresees its
95
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
imminent disappearance due to the spread of Arabic in the area. Before this happens, it
is thus important to conduct research on this heavily understudied language.
The present paper aims to show the main outcomes of a preliminary synchronic
study of phonetics of Baṭḥari emphatic consonants, conducted over a so far unpublished
corpus of ethnographic spontaneous texts gathered by Miranda Morris and Khalifa
Hamood al-Bathari for the “Documentation and Ethnolinguistic Analysis of the Modern
South Arabian languages” project, funded by Leverhulme Trust. Baṭḥari, as well as the
other MSAL (Simeone-Senelle 1997), is characterized by glottalic realization of the socalled Semitic “emphatic” consonants, which are usually realized through
pharyngealization by other Semitic languages, e. g. Arabic. In the most recent years the
scientific community has been wondering about the real phonetic status of these
elements (Bendjaballah & Ségéral 2014, Ridouane et al. 2014), which at least in Mehri
undoubtedly imply pharyngealization too (Watson & Bellem 2011; 2014). This
variability is connected both to the position of the segment within the word and its
manner and place of articulation.
Evidence will be shown that also Baṭḥari emphatics share this double realization.
Acoustic analysis of the data was made using PRAAT. Temporal and non-temporal
measurements were taken into account to determine which processes are involved for
each token. What emerges is the following: ḳ is more likely to be realized as a real
ejective, while ṭ may involve creaky voice or pharyngealization, depending from the
speakers. As to emphatic fricatives, they usually involve pharyngealization only.
References
Bendjaballah, S. & Ségéral, P. (2014). The Phonology of “Idle Glottis” Consonants in
the Mehri of Oman (Modern South Arabian), in Journal of Semitic Studies 59 (1),
161-204.
Johnstone, T. M. (1975). The Modern South Arabian languages, in Afro-Asiatic
Linguistics 1(5).
Morris, M. (2005). The pre-literate, non-Arabic languages of Oman and Yemen, in
Journal of the British–Yemeni Society 15 (12).
Ridouane, R., Gendrot, C. & Khatiwada, R. (2014). Mehri ejective fricatives: an
acoustic study, Proceedings of ICPhS 2015.
Simeone-Senelle, M-C. (1997). The Modern South Arabian Languages, in Hetrzron, R.
(ed.), The Semitic Languages, London: Routledge, 378-423.
Watson, J. C. E. & Bellem, A. (2011). Glottalisation and neutralisation in Yemeni
Arabic and Mehri: an acoustic study, in B. Heselwood & Z. Hassan (eds), Arabic
Instrumental Phonetics, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 436-456.
___ (2014). Backing and glottalization in three SWAP language varieties. In: M. E. B.
Giolfo (ed.), Arab and Arabic linguistics: Traditional and new theoretical
approaches. OUP: Oxford, 169–207.
96
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Voicing disagreement: Interviewee questions in broadcast news
interviews
Lena Gialabouki and Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou
(Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
Unlike everyday conversation, television news interviews, as most types of
institutional interaction, are characterized not only by a special turn-taking system built
around question- answer sequences (Clayman & Heritage 2002, Drew & Heritage
1992), but also by “turn-type pre-allocation” (Atkinson and Drew 1979), in which the
activities of asking and answering (or responding to) questions are pre-allocated to the
roles of interviewer and interviewee. This type of organization is generally viewed as
the ‘canonical’ or ‘prototypical’ interactional format of news interviews. However,
there are cases in which this format is breached and participants’ interactional roles are
reversed: interviewees ask questions and interviewers respond (or fail to respond) to
them. One reason why interviewees resort to the activity of questioning is to express
disagreement, embodying disaffiliation with interviewers’ preceding talk (cf. Robinson
& Bolden 2010). It is such instances that the present study examines.
Drawing upon earlier work in Conversation Analysis (Clayman & Heritage 2002,
Schegloff 2007, and, for Greek, Pavlidou 2014, Pavlidou & Karafoti 2015), the present
paper aims to investigate how interviewees design their questions so as to voice
disagreement. The data are drawn from 17 interviews with political representatives,
broadcast on four Greek television stations (three private ones and one public) between
2011 and 2015.
The results of the analysis show that interviewees carefully design both the
placement and the format of their questions in order to mark them as ‘doing’
disagreement. They draw upon a specific gamut of question formats that includes, for
example, why- interrogatives, which hold interviewers accountable for their views or
the presuppositions of their own questions (e.g., Why is it bad for a political party to
have trends, to have strands, to have views?) and hypothetical interrogatives, which, in
essence, question the possibility of alternatives (e.g., Uh, and what would Mr. Schäuble
say to me now?). Moreover, the disaffiliative character of such questions is further
enhanced with practices such as prefacing questions with the particle μα (meaning
‘but’) and the use of address terms (Clayman 2010).
What these results point to is a blurring of institutional boundaries, at least on the
part of interviewees, as they do not hesitate to step out of their interactional roles and
not only explicitly disagree with their interlocutors, but, through the question design of
their turns, put interviewers on the spot and force them to account for or elaborate on
what they say. This, in turn, suggests that broadcast news interviews can become more
adversarial not only on the part of interviewers (Clayman & Heritage 2002), but on the
part of interviewees as well.
References
Atkinson, J. Maxwell and Drew, Paul. 1979. Order in Court: The Organization of
Verbal Interaction in Judicial Settings. London: Macmillan.
Clayman, Steven. 2010. Address terms in the service of other actions: the case of news
interviews. Discourse & Communication 4(2): 161-183.
97
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Clayman, Steven & Heritage, John. 2002. The News Interview: Journalists and Public
Figures on the Air. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Drew, Paul and Heritage, John. 1992. Analyzing talk at work: an introduction. In: P.
Drew & J. Heritage (eds.), Talk at Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 3-65.
Pavlidou, Theodossia-Soula. 2014. Replying with the freestanding ‘we’ in Greek
conversations. In: Pavlidou Th.-S. (ed.), Constructing Collectivity: ‘We’ across
Languages and Contexts. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 159-184.
Pavlidou, Theodossia-Soula & Karafoti, Eleni. 2015.The freestanding interrogative
γιατί (‘why’) and its functions in Greek talk-in-interaction [in Greek: Το
αυτόνομο ερωτηματικό γιατί και οι λειτουργίες του στη γλωσσική διεπίδραση]
.In: Pavlidou Th.-S. (ed.), Greek Language and Spoken Communication [in
Greek]. Thessaloniki: Institute of Modern Greek Studies, 81-97.
Robinson, Jeffrey & Bolden, Galina. 2010. Preference organization of sequenceinitiating actions: the case of explicit account solicitations. Discourse Studies
12(4): 501-533.
Schegloff, Emanuel. 2007. Sequence Organization: A Primer in Conversation Analysis.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Towards a syntax of counter-expectational surprise questions
Alessandra Giorgi
(Ca' Foscari University of Venice)
The issue
In this work I analyze a particular kind of surprise yes-no questions in Italian, i.e.
those introduced by the adversative particle ma (but) – where ma (but) expresses a
counter-expectational value, according to the terminology of Vicente (2010) – and
compare them with minimally different counter-expectational exclamative sentences.
Even if recently similar issues have been addressed in theoretical linguistics – see
Delfitto & Fiorin (2014a, 2014b), Munaro & Obenauer (2012), Obenauer (2004),
Poletto & Zanuttini (2013), Zanuttini & Portner (2003), among the others – still the
phenomena considered here have not been extensively discussed before.
The goal is to provide a syntactic representation to capture their properties and,
on the other hand, to highlight the connections between this kind of expressions and
discourse and discourse grammar.
The data I consider are the following:
Scenario I. Mary calls me on the phone and tells me that she has a fine new red dress to
wear at tonight’s party. When I meet her at the party, I see that she has a blue gown. I’m
surprised and say:
(1)
(Ma) non era rosso? (But) not was-IMPF red ‘(But) wasn’t it red?’
98
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Scenario II. Mary informs me that she is going to buy her wedding dress. Later she
shows me her purchase and I see that it is a red gown, an unusual color. I react by
saying:
(2)
(Ma) è rosso! (But) it’s/IND red!
These sentences are in both cases associated with a characteristic intonation and
are introduced – or can be introduced – by the particle ma, which in normal cases
cannot introduce main clauses or interrogatives.
Towards a theoretical account
I consider some semantic and syntactic properties of these constructions: their
unavailability in embedded contexts; the optionality of ma; the impossibility of
contrastive focus; the (constrained) availability of Clitic Left Dislocation; the
availability of Hanging Topic; presence/absence of negation; presence/absence of an
imperfect verbal form, among the others.
On the basis of this analysis, I propose that these phenomena must be dealt by
means of a grammar including discourse syntax, besides sentence syntax. Following a
suggestion in Cinque (2008), I propose that the particle ma is the head of a discourse
projection, dubbed DISCOURSE (DIS):
[ … [ maDIS [ non era rosso ]]]
The head DIS can also remain silent. The dots under the specifier actually
represent the expected, but silent, portion of the construction, namely in this case, the
expectation for the dress to be, or to be not, red. In the talk, I’ll extend the analysis to
constructions such as macchè (lit: but-that) and ma sì/ ma no – cf. Poletto & Zanuttini
(2013).
I’ll conclude by showing that the approach sketched here presents some
advantages with respect to an approach not including heads such as DIS, also with
respect to other syntactic domains.
(3)
References
Cinque,G., (2008), Two Types of Nonrestrictive Relative Clauses. In: Empirical Issues
in Syntax and Semantics 7. Paris. 99-137.
Delfitto D. & G. Fiorin (2014a), Exclamatives: Issues of syntax, logical form and
interpretation, Lingua, 152, pp.1-20.
Delfitto D. & G. Fiorin (2014b), Negation in Exclamatives, Studia Linguistica, 68, 3,
pp.284-327.
Munaro, N. & H.-G. Obenauer (2002) “On the semantic widening of underspecified
wh-elements”. In: Current Issues in Generative Grammar,165-194.
Obenauer, H.-G. (2004) “Nonstandard wh-questions and alternative checkers in
Pagotto”. In: Syntax and Semantics of the Left Periphery, Interface Explorations
9, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 343-384.
Poletto, C. & R. Zanuttini (2013), Emphasis as reduplication: Evidence from si
che/no che sentences, Lingua 128, pp.124-141.
Portner, P. & R. Zanuttini (2003): Exclamative Clauses: At the Syntax-Semantic
Interface. Language 79 (1), pp. 39-81.
99
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Vicente L. (2010), On the syntax of adversative coordination, Natural Language and
Linguistic Theory, 28, 2, pp.381-415.
Preverbal subjects and information structure marking in Romanian
Ion Giurgea
(The “Iorgu Iordan – Alexandru Rosetti” Institute of Linguistics
of the Romanian Academy, Bucharest)
Like other null-subject languages (especially Spanish and Greek), Romanian has a
robust free-inversion property, allowing postverbal subjects with any type of argument
structure, the choice between VS and SV orders being largely due to information
structural reasons. The most widespread account of this fact is that subjects are caselicensed in their thematic position, which is postverbal, and the preverbal placement is
due to information-structural reasons, viz. topicalization or focalization (Dobrovie-Sorin
1987, Cornilescu 1997, Alboiu 2002). However, leaving aside focalization (which is
easily recognizable by intonation), it has been shown that there is an asymmetry
between SV orders and XV(S) orders with X a topic: (i) in typically presentational
contexts, SVX is sometimes allowed, besides VSX (Dobrovie-Sorin 1987, Soare 2009,
Giurgea & Remberger 2009); (ii) nominals that do not semantically qualify as topics,
such as non-specific indefinite pronouns, may occur as preverbal subjects
(Motapanyane 1994). (1) shows the contrast for sentences with neutral intonation (no
narrow focus); (1)a is possible with non-specific cineva; (1)b is only acceptable with
verum focus, in which case it represents an instance of quantifier contrastive
topicalization (see Giurgea 2015); (2) shows the contrast with modified bare nouns in
presentational environments (bare nouns can be topicalized only when discourse-given,
which is not the case in (2)); (3) shows that non-specific cineva can be a preverbal S but
cannot undergo long-distance topicalization:
(1) a. Cineva îi
aduce flori
somebody 3S.DAT brings flowers
(2) a. Valuri uriaşe loveau
stâncile
waves giant were-hitting rocks-the
(3) [out-of-the-blue context]: Cineva
somebody
cineva
aşteaptă de fiecare data
somebody waits
every
time
b. # Câmpuri întinse lumina
luna
fields
wide threw-light-on moon-the
(#cred
că)
taie
lemne
think.1SG that)
is-cutting woods
b. # Pe
OBJ
On the other hand, it is known that focus-fronted and wh-constituents that lack an
overt restriction disallow an intervening preverbal subject (*Wh/Foc S V), whereas a
preceding S (S Wh/Foc V) has all the properties of a topic (cf. {Ion/*Cineva} când a
vrut să ne facă rău? ‘When did Ion/somebody want to harm us?’). As there is no
evidence that in the Wh/Foc V S order the V raises above the preverbal S position (cf.
Cornilescu 1997), we may conclude that Wh/Foc and non-topical preverbal S compete
for the same position (a ‘multifunctional’ SpecIP, hosting A-bar moved items but also
subjects, has been proposed for other Romance languages by Zubizarreta 1998, Zagona
2002, Sheehan 2007, Gallego 2007, and for Romanian by Giurgea & Remberger 2009,
2012a,b); based on the fact that VSX orders in sentences without narrow focus are
100
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
restricted to certain types of predications, those that allow a thetic/presentational
construal (see (4)), Giurgea & Remberger further proposed that this multifunctional
position (called SpecFin in G&R 2012b) also hosts topics and is present in all
sentences, the Fin head always having an attracting probe: in VS orders such as (4a), a
null adverbial STAGE, functioning as a Stage-topic, satisfies this probe (see Gundel
1974, Erteschik-Shir 1997, 2007 for the characterization of thetic sentences as sentences
involving a salient spatio-temporal location functioning as a Topic, the ‘Stage-Topic’).
(4) a. Face Maria o prăjitură (episodic; context: situation placed in a contextmakes Maria a cake
given spatio-temporal location)
b. # Este cartea
interesantă (I-level predicate)
is book-the interesting
c. # Construiesc castorii
baraje (generic)
build.3PL beavers-the dams
Noticing that with certain types of predicates there is a bias for VS vs. SV in
presentational contexts (see (5)), G&R (2012a) proposed that the SV orders with nontopical S arise as the result of a Last Resort mechanism when there is no suitable
+About goal, the null adverbial STAGE failing to be projected.
(5) Latră
is-barking
un câine / # Un câine latră
(out-of-the-blue, non-partitive indefinite)
a dorg
a dog is-barking
I will present new data concerning the conditions which allow preverbal nontopical S, which will lead to a rejection of the idea of a Last Resort mechanism: the
examples which clearly disallow non-topical S have the V in clause-final position;
adding another constituent after the V brings a clear improvement (note also the
presence of such an element in (1)-(3)):
(6) Ia uite! O muscă a intrat
look
a fly
has entered
# (pe
geam) (out-of-the-blue)
through window
I explain the ban on V-final presentationals by conflicting prosodic requirements:
(i) a VP that is new must bear a primary stress; (ii) V must form a prosodic phrase with
an adjacent XP, in which XP bears the main prominence (cf. English, where (i) does not
hold but (ii) does: A DOG’s barking = Ro. (5); the Vs that disallow SV in Ro.
presentationals are strikingly similar to those that are unstressed in English thetic SV
clauses, on which see Rochemont 2013).
Further evidence that non-topical preverbal S is just optional, rather than a Last
Resort, comes from the allowance of non-topical S in environments where another
argument X is able to satisfy the [about]-probe:
(7) Cartea, (cineva) a dus-o
book-the somebody has brought-it
(cineva)
somebody
la
to
bibliotecă
library
Having established the information structural (IS) conditions of pre- and
postverbal subjects, I will compare Giurgea & Remberger’s (2012a,b) proposal of an
always active probe on Fin with an alternative account, that relies on a post-syntactic
mechanism of assignment of IS-features (cf. López 2009). In this approach, the topic
101
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
orientation of Romanian (as opposed to languages such as English) is captured by the
requirement in (8), and presentationals, both with SV and VS orders, are covered by (9):
(8) In the absence of a peripheral Top head, the [top] feature must be assigned at the FinP-level, to
either SpecFin or an element of the Infl-complex (the whole IP or a head in Infl)
(9) If [top] is not assigned to an overt element, the spatio-temporal location of the event is
interpreted as the topic
This account allows us to dispense with the null adverb STAGE. In the orders
Foc/Wh-V-S, the sentence topic can be considered the ‘remnant’, the constituent from
which Wh/Foc has been extracted – indeed, partial interrogatives presuppose that
x.P(x), where x replaces the wh-item, sentences with focalization imply givenness of
the background; (8) assigns [top] to the whole IP.
Finally, I will show how the two accounts deal with V-initial orders with narrow
focus S, in which the type of predicate does not allow a presentational construal:
(10)
Ştie
şi ION matematică
knows also Ion maths
For this case, both accounts assume that the topic is represented by the
background constituent, the VP, and the V itself moved to Infl, as the head of this
constituent, is marked with the [top] feature that spreads to the whole VP.
References.
Alboiu, G., 2002. The features of movement in Romanian. Bucharest: Editura
Universităţii din Bucureşti.
Cornilescu, A., 1997. The double subject construction in Romanian. Notes on the
syntax of the subject. Revue Roumaine de Linguistique, 42, 3-4, 101-147.
Dobrovie-Sorin, C., 1987. Syntaxe du roumain. Chaînes thématiques. PhD Diss.,
Université Paris 7.
Erteschik-Shir, N. 1997. The Dynamics of Focus Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Erteschik-Shir, N., 2007. Information Structure. The Syntax–Discourse Interface.
Oxford: OUP.
Gallego, À. J. 2007. Phase Theory and Parametric Variation, PhD. Dissertation,
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Giurgea, I. 2015. Bare Quantifier Fronting as Contrastive Topicalization. Bucharest
Working Papers in Linguistics 17, 2, 23-38.
Giurgea, I., Remberger, E. 2009. Postverbal subjects in Romance null-subject
languages. Information-structural conditions and variation. Paper presented at
Going Romance, Nice, December 3-5.
Giurgea, I., Remberger, E. 2012a. Zur informationsstrukturellen Konfiguration und
Variation postverbaler Subjekte in den romanischen Null-Subjekt-Sprachen.
Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 31, 43-99.
Giurgea, I., Remberger, E. 2012b. Verum Focus and Polar Questions. Bucharest
Working Papers in Linguistics XIV (2), 21-40.
Gundel, J. K., 1974. The role of topic and comment in linguistic theory. PhD diss.,
University of Texas.
López, Luis. 2009. A Derivational Syntax for Information Structure. Oxford: OUP.
102
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Motapanyane, V. 1994. On preverbal positions in Romanian. Revue Canadienne de
Linguistique / Canadian Journal of Linguistics 39, 15-36.
Rochemont, M. 2013. Discourse new, F-marking, and normal stress. Lingua 136, 38-62.
Sheehan, Michelle. 2007. The EPP and null subjects in Romance. PhD Dissertation,
Newcastle University.
Soare, Gabriela. The Syntax-Information Structure Interface: A Comparative View from
Romanian. PhD diss., University of Geneva.
Zagona, Karen. 2002. The syntax of Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Zubizarreta, María Luisa. 1998. Prosody, focus and word order. Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press.
Code-mixing in the speech of the young generation of the Old Believers
in Poland
Michał Głuszkowski
(Nicolaus Copernicus Univeristy, Toruń)
The paper refers to the phenomenon, when one speakers’ speech contains
elements of two languages. After P. Auer we will use the term CS (code-switching) for
“those cases in which the juxtaposition of two codes (languages) is perceived and
interpreted as a locally meaningful event by participants” (Auer 1999: 309; 1991: 410).
These are intersentential switches and functionally meaningful intrasentential switches,
e.g. between clauses or phrases in a clause.
The changes of code without functional meaning, observed in simpler units, word
forms inclusive, are here considered as CM (code-mixing).
The differentiation of CS and CM instances is especially complex in a contact of
cognate languages (Muysken 2000: 1-5). In the present research I am going to apply P.
Muysken theory of CM, who has differentiated three types of CM: insertional (an
element from L1 language in L2 sentence – see ex. 4), alternational (full shift from L1 to
L2 in a single speech act – see ex. 5) and congruent lexicalisation (largely or completely
shared structure, lexicalised by elements of either language; Muysken 2000: 3-5). In the
contact of cognate languages we can observe a lot of lexis which can belong to L1 as
well as to L2 and these congruently lexicalized elements are often the “switch points”
(see ex. 6).
103
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
The Old Believers in Poland live in a language island, which had been formed by
the Russian migrants – people who had not accepted the reforms in the Russian
Orthodox Church in the 2nd half of the 17th century. Most of the community members
are bilinguals. Although they acquired the language of the dominant group (Polish), it is
still important for them to preserve the language of their ancestors (Russian dialect from
Pskov-Novgorod group). Their bilingualism is connected with diglossia (Głuszkowski
2009), which affect also language choice and the phenomenon of CS and CM
(Głuszkowski 2010). The social and economic conditions of the Old Believers’
community has been intensively changing, especially for the last 25 years (after the
system transformation in Poland) and it strongly affects the language situation of the
group. On the basis of the language material recorded during 13 expeditions (over 300
hours) in the years 1999-2014, I am going to characterize the phenomena of CS and CM
in the speech of the Old Beliver youth (<30 y.o.), with special attention to the following
questions:
a) To what extent do the sociolinguistic factors (Weinreich’s non-structural
factors; 1963: 64-65) affect CS and CM?
b) What are the features of an ideal (i.e. prototypical; cf. Franceschini 1998:
53) code-switcher in the given community?
c) Which code is marked and in what social circumstances? How does it affect
language choice?
References
Auer, Peter. 1991). Italian in Toronto. A preliminary comparative study on language use
and language maintenance. Multilingua 10: 403-440.
Auer, Peter. 1999. From code-switching via language mixing to fused lects: Toward a
dynamic typology of bilingual speech. The International Journal of Bilingualism
3: 309-332.
Franceschini, Rita. 1998. Code-switching and the notion of code in linguistics.
Proposals for a dual focus model, In P. Auer (ed.), Code-switching in
conversation. Language, interaction and identity. London-New York: Routledge,
51-75
Głuszkowski, Michał. 2009. Dyglosja w społeczności staroobrzędowców regionu
suwalsko-augustowskiego. Socjolingwistyka 22-23: 115-131.
Głuszkowski, Michał. 2010. Typy przełączania kodu w rosyjsko-polskiej
dwujęzyczności staroobrzędowców regionu suwalsko-augustowskiego. Slavia
Orientalis LIX/1: 81-98.
Muysken, Peter. 2000. Bilingual speech. A typology of code mixing. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
104
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Weinreich, Uriel. 1963(1953). Languages in contact. Findings and problems. The
Hague: Mouton.
Re-autonomization in the system of the Dutch modals: A diachronic
investigation
Henri-Joseph Goelen and Jan Nuyts
(University of Antwerp)
Goal
Earlier diachronic research (Nuyts 2013) has revealed that the Dutch core modals
moeten ‘must’, mogen ‘may’ and kunnen ‘can’ are currently involved in a process of
syntactic re-autonomization (a considerable increase of uses without a main verb
elsewhere in the clause), arguably a case of systematic degrammaticalization. This
process started in the course of the New Dutch period. The new autonomous uses are
grammatically very different from the original main verbal uses from which the
auxiliary uses of these modals have developed (in the Middle Ages). And the process is
not accompanied by a return to more ‘objective’ meanings (in Traugott & Dasher’s
2002 sense) – on the contrary, it appears to ‘focus’ on highly ‘subjectified’ meanings,
the deontic one in particular. The present paper extends this investigation to the less
central Dutch modals zullen ‘shall, will’, willen ‘will, want’, and (be)hoeven ‘need’, and
it also looks at durven ‘dare’, not generally considered a modal in Dutch (unlike its
cognate in German e.g.) but closely related. The question is: do these verbs show the
same developments, with the same timing (historically), and the same or comparable
grammatical and semantic properties?
Method
For the sake of comparability, this investigation uses the same method as the
earlier study of the three core modals. We analyze the properties of the different verbs
in corpus data from four different time periods: Old Dutch, Early Middle Dutch, Early
New Dutch and Present Day Dutch. For each period we use a random sample of 200
instances of each verb (for PDD we use two separate sets of 200 instances, one with
written and one with spoken language), selected from the available materials according
to criteria such as representativity (e.g. in terms of text genres and regional spreading)
and comparability across the periods.
Analysis
The analysis reveals some interesting similarities, but also some clear differences,
with the developments in the core modals. To some extent this may be due to
grammatical and/or semantic differences in the original forms from which the present
verbs have emerged, but there are also clearly factors emerging in the course of the
evolutions (e.g. the development of an important temporal meaning in zullen) which
affect the re-autonomization process in some of these forms. As such the results throw
new light on the earlier findings regarding the core modals, and lead to further reflection
on the question to what extent the re-autonomization process in the Dutch modals is a
105
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
matter of ‘group dynamics’, and on which factors play a role in it (e.g. analogy). We
will situate the discussion in the context of the debate about the status of
grammaticalization (Hopper and Traugott 2003) relative to other mechanisms and
factors of language change.
References
Hopper, P. & E. Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Nuyts, J. 2013. De-auxiliarization without de-modalization in the Dutch core modals: A
case of collective degrammaticalization? Language Sciences 36: 124-133.
Traugott, E. & R. Dasher. 2002. Regularity in Semantic Change. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Tag questions in a cross-linguistic perspective
María de los Ángeles Gómez González
(Universidade de Santiago de Compostela)
This study compares and contrast the patterns of variation exhibited by canonical
tag questions (CTQs) in English (e.g. That’s enough, isn’t it?) Spanish (Es suficiente,
¿no?/¿verdad?) and Portuguese (É suficiente, não é?/não?) (Lakoff, 1975; Algeo
1988, 1990, 2006; Holmes 1983, 1984, 1986, 1995; Coates 1989, 1996; Kimps 2007;
Stenström, 1997, 2005; Briz, 1998; Briz et al 2008; Christl, 1996; Rodríguez Muñoz,
2009; Cruz Ferreira, 1981; Moniz et al. 2011). Tag variation is observed with regard to
five parameters in order to provide previously lacking comparative statistics: (i)
frequencies, (ii) formal features, (iii) functional characteristics, (iv) distribution across
a variety of spoken genres, and (v) the gender and age of tag question users.
The sample consists of 2,473 tag questions extracted from the International
Corpus of English – Great Britain (Nelson, Wallis & Aarts, 2002) and the equivalent
Spanish and French subcorpora of the Integrated Reference Corpora for Spoken
Romance Languages (Cresti & Moneglia, 2005). It will be shown that English CTQs
are less frequent than their analogous constructions in Spanish and particularly in
Portuguese. In addition, a “tag/polarity-based” scale will be proposed in which, while
Spanish only allows for invariant tags, both English and Portuguese admit both
invariant and variant tags, but it is the latter language that displays the widest array of
tag types. It will also be argued that English CTQs have less distributional and
functional flexibility than the analogous constructions in the two Romance languages
under analysis (Axelsson 2011; Gómez González 2014).
Keywords: (non) (canonical) tag questions, (in)variant questions tags, British
English/Peninsular Spanish/European Portuguese.
References
Axelsson, K. 2011. “A Cross-linguistic Study of Grammatically Dependent Question
Tags: Data and Theoretical Implications”. Studies in Language 35(4):793–851.
106
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Algeo, J. 1988. “The Tag Question in British English: It's Different i’n’it?” English
World-Wide 9:171-191.
Algeo, J. 1990. “It’s a Myth, innit? Politeness and the English Tag Question”. In The
State of the Language, C. Ricks and L. Michaels (eds), 443-450. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Algeo, J. 2006. British or American English? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Briz, A. 1998. El español coloquial en la conversación. Barcelona: Ariel.
Briz, A., Pons Bordería, S. and Portolés, J. 2008. Diccionario de Partículas
Discursivas del Español [on line]. Available at http://www.dpde.es/.
Christl, J. 1996. “Muletillas en el español hablado”. In El español hablado y la cultura
oral en España e Hispanoamérica, T. Kotschi, W. Oesterreicher and K.
Zimmermann (eds), 117-143. Madrid: Vervuert.
Coates, J. 1989. “Gossip Revisited: Language in All-Female Groups”. In Women in
their Speech Communities, J. Coates and D. Cameron (eds), 94-122. London:
Longman.
Coates, J. 1996. Women Talk. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
Cresti, E., & Moneglia, M. (2005). CORALROM. Integrated Reference Corpora for
Spoken Romance Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Cruz Ferreira, M. 1981. “Tag Questions in Portuguese: Grammar and Intonation”.
Phonetica 38:341-352.
Holmes, J. 1983. “The Functions of Tag Questions”. English Language Research
Journal 3:40–65.
Holmes, J. 1984. “Hedging your Bets and Sitting on the Fence: Some Evidence for
Hedges as Support Structures”. Te Reo 27:47-62.
Holmes, J. 1986. “Functions of you know in Women’s and Men’s Speech”. Language
in Society 15:1-21.
Holmes, J. 1995. Women, Men and Politeness. White Plains, NY: Longman.
Gómez-González, M. Á. 2014. Canonical Tag Questions in English, Spanish and
Portuguese. A Discourse-Functional Study. Languages in Contrast: 14:1. 93-126.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.doi 10.1075/lic.14.1.06gom
Kimps, D. 2007. “Declarative Constant Polarity Tag Questions: A Data-Driven
Analysis of their Form, Meaning and Attitudinal Uses”. Journal of Pragmatics
39(2):270-291.
Lakoff, R. 1975. Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper and Row.
Moniz, M., Batista, F., Trancoso, I. and Mata, A.I. 2011. “Analysis of Interrogatives in
Different Domains”. In Proceedings of the Third COST 2102 International
Training School Conference on Toward Autonomous, Adaptive, and Contextaware Multimodal Interfaces: Theoretical and Practical Issues, A. Esposito et
al. (eds), 134-146. Berlin: Springer Verlag.
Nelson, G., Wallis, S., & Aarts, B. (2002). Exploring Natural Language: The British
Component of the International Corpus of English. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Pons Bordería, S. 1998. Conexión y conectores. Estudio de su relación en el registro
informal de la lengua. Anejo XXVII de Cuadernos de Filologia. Valencia:
Universitat de Valencia.
Rodríguez Muñoz, F.J. 2009. “Estudio sobre las funciones pragmadiscursivas de ¿eh?
¿no? en el español hablado”. Revista de lingüística teórica y aplicada 47(1):83101.
107
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Stenström, A.-B. 1997. “Tags in Teenage Talk”. In Studies in English Corpus
Linguistics, U. Fries, V. Müller and P. Schneider (eds), 139-147. Amsterdam:
Rodopi.
Stenström, A.-B. 2005. “Teenagers’ Tags in London and Madrid”. In Contexts Historical, Social, Linguistic. Studies in Celebration of Toril Swan, K.
McCafferty, T. Bull and K. Killie (eds), 279-291. Bern: Peter Lang.
Frequency effects in the diachronic constructional analysis of Latin
secundum NP
Caterina Guardamagna
(Lancaster University/University of Liverpool)
This paper presents a corpus-based analysis the evolution of the Latin
construction secundum NP over 800 years, instantiating the grammaticalisation path
FOLLOW > ACCORDING TO pointed out in Heine & Kuteva (2002). Based on a
sample of 890 occurrences drawn from the 6M word prose section of the Latin Library
corpus (890 occurrences), my analysis focuses on the changes in the organisation of the
secundum NP constructional network over time (post-constructionalisation
constructional changes, Traugott & Trousdale 2013).
The observation of token frequencies allows one to identify the central category in
the network (conformity, then limitation) as well as trace the emergence and expansion
of some sub-constructions (e.g. co-variation, conformity-reportative) and the
obsolescence and disappearance of others (e.g. space, time, beneficiary). Type
frequency counts are applied to discover the productivity and schematisation of the
construction, by looking at the host-class expansion of the arguments of secundum and
the syntactic expansion of the constituents modified by secundum NP. Alongside type
frequency, my analysis also relies on Baayen’s category-conditioned degree of
productivity index (2009) applied to the construction as a whole and the conformity and
limitation sub-constructions. Finally, my analysis lends support to Barðdal’s (2008)
model of productivity, stressing the inverse relation between coherence and type
frequency, thus allowing us to account for an otherwise unexpected increase of
productivity of secundum NP between Classical (BC 106 - AD 17) and Silver Latin
(100-258).
Whilst pointing out some shortcomings of the interpretation of the measures
adopted, this paper highlights the substantial contribution of quantitative analysis for the
study of language change from a constructional point of view. Overall, my data suggest
that the evolution of secundum NP over time occurs mostly gradually and along
multiple directions, instead of unfolding along a rigidly linear pathway (Hilpert 2013).
My study adds to a limited body of studies on Latin from a cognitiveconstructionist perspective and to the developing field of Latin Corpus Linguistics.
Beyond facts of Latin, it has implications for Diachronic Construction Grammar, in
which more studies in language other than English have recently been encouraged
(Boas & Gonzàlvez Garcìa 2014).
108
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
References
Baayen, R.H. (2009). “Corpus Linguistics in Morphology. Morphological
Productivity.” In Lüdeling, A. & Kytö, M. (eds.) Corpus Linguistics. An
international handbook. Volume 2. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, p. 899-919.
Barðdal, J. (2008). Productivity: Evidence from case and argument structure in
Icelandic. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Boas, H.C. & Gonzálvez-García, F. (2014) (eds). Romance Perspectives on
Construction Grammar. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Heine, B. & Kuteva, T. (2002). World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hilpert, M. (2013). “Corpus-Based approaches to Constructional Change.” In
Hoffmann, Th. & Trousdale, G. The Oxford Handbook of Construction Grammar.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 458-476.
Traugott, E.C. & Trousdale, G. (2013). Constructionalisation and Cosntructional
Changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Unmasking the workplace bully with author identification tools
Victoria Guillén-Nieto
(University of Alicante)
This paper investigates the language of mobbing and shows the way some of its
distinctive features are unveiled in a case of author identification (Rudman 2006: 611617; Juola 2007: 119-13; Stamatatos 2009: 538-556; and Chaski 2012: 489-503). Since
the destructive phenomenon of mobbing, also known as moral harassment, workplace
bullying and psychological terrorism, emerged in the 1990s, it has been the subject of
scientific and legal attention, particularly in Europe and more recently in the United
States and Canada. Ethologists (Lorenz 1963) and evolutionary psychologists (Leymann
1990) have extensively studied workplace bullying. However, the language of mobbing
has not received much attention in the field of forensic linguistics to date.
Mobbing refers to the systematic succession of acts of hostile and unethical
communication, which one or a few individuals maliciously direct over a significant
period towards a targeted person, designed to secure the removal from the organisation
of the victim, who experiments a profound sense of shame and powerlessness. Article
31 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union provides the source of
Community-wide action against moral harassment. Despite the fact that at present moral
harassment is a crime by law in many countries, the mobbing behaviour is present with
increasing frequency in the organisational world and in the workplace. Psychological
terrorism can be elusive and has many subtle ways. More often than not, the victim does
not know the language of mobbing, or it may even be difficult for legal practitioners to
prove that the case they have in their hands is of moral harassment rather than a simple
workplace conflict.
The main research questions that this paper attempts to answer are as follows: Is it
possible to categorise mobbing in linguistic terms? If so, which distinctive language
markers may serve to differentiate it from other types of language? The investigation
109
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
draws on an authentic case of refined mobbing in a Spanish governmental institution
starting in 2012 and giving rise to a case of author identification, specifically a case of
resemblance between two sets of texts in 2014. In it, the language expert is asked to
determine, whether or not, the author of a set of 28 known texts (39,881 words) may
have jointly written a set of 15 questioned texts (16,654 words) with various individuals
for the purpose of directing acts of discreditable communication against the victims. In
total, a corpus of 56,535 words is analysed, and the sets of known and questioned texts
compared and contrasted. The qualitative analysis (descriptive linguistics) and statistics
performed (t-tests, ANOVA tests and Chi-square tests) indicate a number of formal and
functional language elements featuring the victim’s humiliation, devaluation,
discrediting and degradation. These distinctive markers are mainly found at the wordlevel (function words, content words, and word collocations), and the text-level (text
functions, interactional meta-discourse markers, and discourse strategies).
Author identification linguistic tools prove adequate not only to identify the
author of the 15 questioned texts but also to reveal distinctive language markers of a
bully.
References
Chaski, Carole E. 2012. Author identification in the forensic setting. In Peter M.
Tiersma & Lawrence M.. Solan (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language and
Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 489-503.
Juola, Patrick. 2007. Future trends in authorship attribution. In Ph. Craiger & Sujeet
Shenoi, (eds.), Advances in Digital Forensics III. IFIP International Federation for
Information Processing, 242: 119-132. DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-73742-3_8
Leymann, Heinz. 1990. Mobbing and psychological terror at workplaces. Violence and
Victims 5(2): 119-126.
Lorenz, Konrad. 1963. On Aggression. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace.
Rudman, Joseph. 2006. Authorship attribution: statistical and computational methods.
Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Oxford: Elsevier, 1: 611-617.
Stamatatos, Efstathios. 2009. A survey of modern authorship attribution methods.
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60(3):
538-556.
Attitudinal copulas in Odia, an Indo-Aryan language
Foong Ha Yap and Anindita Sahoo
(The Hong Kong Polytechnic University; Amity University, Noida)
In this paper, we examine the use of copulas as auxiliary verbs that encode not
only tense (Pustet 2003) but also person-agreement marking in Odia, an Indo-Aryan
language spoken in the eastern state of Odsha in India. In addition, we also examine
how copulas in Odia are preposed to either clause-medial or clause-initial position to
serve as focus particles, the latter type often interpretable as an attitudinal focus particle
with negative valence. Data for our analysis come from a 3-hour database of videorecorded Odia conversations among family and friends.
110
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
In terms of form, our analysis reveals that Odia has a systematic paradigm of
copulas for past, present and future tense, with more phonological variants for copulas
in the present tense (see Table 1). In terms of function, the Odia copulas serve 3 major
types of functions: (i) as linking verbs for identificational, specificational and attributive
predicates; (ii) as auxiliary verbs; and (iii) as focus particles (see Table 2).
We also address the question of how these various functions of the copulas are
related to each other. As illustrated by past tense copula thilā in (1), copulas in Odia
occur in clause-final position. These copulas are also often recruited as postverbal
auxiliary verbs, as in (2a-b); this syntactic strategy allows the main verb to encode
aspectual distinctions (e.g. perfective vs. imperfective) while the auxiliary copula
assumes the responsibility of encoding tense and agreement marking. When a copula is
preposed to clause-medial position, it functions as a focus marker that highlights the
subject NP, as in (3a); on the other hand, when it is preposed to clause-initial position, it
has scope over the entire clause and can focus on new information provided by the
predicate, as in (3b). Being in a periphery position, the clause-initial focus marker is
also favorably situated to host the speaker’s subjective prosody, and in Odia the
attitudinal valence is often a negative one.
The present tense copulas provide additional insights into the relationship
between degree of grammaticalization of the copulas and their use/non-use as focus
markers with attitudinal readings. As seen from Table 2, among the present tense
copulas, the retroflex plosive aT- variants can only be used as copula verbs and focus
markers for subject NPs, but not as postvebal auxiliary verbs, while their palatal
affricative ach- counterparts can additionally serve as focus markers that highlight new
information in the predicate, and also differ in having developed an auxiliary copula
function. This asymmetrical distribution of functions across the two types of present
tense copulas in Odia suggests a possible correlation between availability of auxiliary
copulas and extendability of focus copulas from the clause-medial to clause-initial
position, and through this left periphery position to also express the speaker’s subjective
stance, which our data from Odia conversations reveal is often associated with a
negative attitudinal overtone.
Table 1. Copula forms in Odia in past, present and future tense
1
2N
2H
H
3N
H
2H
H
3H
Past
SG
PL
thi-l-i thi-l-u
thi-l-u thi-l-a
thi-l-a
thi-l-ā thi-l-e
thi-l-e
Present
SG
PL
aT-e ~ ach-i
aT-u ~ ach-u
aT-u ~ ach-u
aT-a ~ ach-a
aT-a ~ ach-a
aT-e ~ ach-i
aT-anti ~ ach-anti
aT-anti ~ ach-anti
Future
SG
PL
thi-b-i
thi-b-u
thi-b-u
thi-b-a
thi-b-a
thi-b-a
thi-b-e
thi-b-e
Note: The copulas are italicized, and the tense suffixes are in bold font. The agreement
markers that encode information about person, honorificity level and number, but not
gender.
111
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Table 2. Functions of Odia copulas in present tense
Functions of copulas
Types of
copulas
Retroflex plosive
aT-e, aT-u, aT-a, aT-anti
Linking verb between for:
-- identificational predicate
-- specificational predicate
-- attributive predicate
Auxiliary verb
Clause-medial focus
particle for highlighting the
subject NP
Clause-initial focus particle
for highlighting new
information
Palatal affricative
ach-i, ach-u, ach-a, achanti
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
√
Examples
(1)
se
baḍa badmaas thi-l-ā
3NH.SG big naughty COP-PST-3NH.SG
‘S/he was a naughty child.’
(2) a. ritā
gatakāli bhāta khāi
thi-l-ā
Rita-NOM yesterday rice eat-PFV AUX-PST-3NH.SG
‘Rita had eaten rice yesterday.’
b. ritā
gatakāli bhāta khā-u
thi-l-ā
Rita-NOM yesterday rice eat-IMPF AUX-PST-3NH.SG
‘Rita was eating rice yesterday.’
(3) a. se
thi-l-ā
baḍa
badmaas 3NH.SG FOC.COP-PST-3NH.SG
big naughty ‘S/he was a naughty child.’
(Lit. ‘S/he was a very naughty one.’)
b. thi-l-ā
se
baḍa
badmaas FOC.COP-PST-3NH.SG 3NH.SG
big naughty ‘S/he was a naughty child (I’m
afraid).’
References
Pustet, Regina. 2003. Copulas: Universals in Categorization of the Lexicon. Oxford,
UK: Oxford University Press.
112
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
The information structure of the sentence and semantics of negation
Eva Hajičová
(Charles University in Prague)
Our analysis is based on the understanding of the underlying syntactic structure
comprising i.a. the information structure of the sentence and the partition of the
sentence into its T(opic) and F(ocus) (Sgall et al. 1986); we look for the possible
relation between the information structure and (the scope of ) negation.
The dichotomy of T and F is understood as an ABOUTNESS relation: in positive
sentences, F holds about T. In the prototypical case of negative sentences, F does not
hold about T; in a secondary case, the negative sentence is about a negated T and asserts
something about this T.
(1) John didn’t come to see me (but to meet my mother). → he came
Prototypically, (1) is about John (T) and it holds about John, that he didn’t come
to see me (negated F). However, there may be a secondary interpretation of (1), e.g. in a
context of (2).
(2) John didn’t come to see me, because he fell ill. → he didn’t come
On one of the interpretations, (2) is about John’s not-coming (T) and it says about
this negated event that is happened because he fell ill (F).
These examples indicate that the T-F distinction is relevant for the determination
of the scope of negation: if the negated event is in the T part, the scope of negation ends
at the T-F boundary, else it covers the whole F. Schematically,
(1’) Topic / NegVerb Focus %
(2’) Topic NegVerb % / Focus
Next step of our analysis concerns the relation between information structure,
negation scope and entailments. In the classical Strawsonian (1952) analysis of the
entailment relation, presupposition is considered as a kind of entailment entailed both
by the positive and the negative sentence. Thus both (3)(a) and (3)(b) entail (3)(c),
which can be characterized as a presupposition of (3)(a). On the other hand, (4)(b) as
the negation of (4)(a), may appear in a context (4)(c) as well as in (4)(d), i.e both (3)(c)
and (3)(d) may have occurred.
(3) (a) Our victory was caused by JOHN.
(b) Our victory was not caused by JOHN.
(c) We won.
(d) We lost.
113
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(4) (a) John caused our VICTORY.
(b) John didn’t cause our VICTORY.
(c) He didn’t play well this time, but other players were good and helped us
to win.
(d) Though he played well as usual, other players were very weak (and we
lost).
The noun group our victory in (3)(a) and (3)(b) is included in T, it is outside the
scope of negation and triggers a presupposition, the negative verb being in F; the same
noun group in (4)(a) and (b) together with the negated verb is included in F. As the
continuations in (4)(c) and (4)(d) suggest, a specific type of entailment has to be taken
into consideration called allegation (Hajičová 1984; Hajičová et al. 1998): an allegation
is entailed by the positive sentence but neither entailed nor negated by the negative
sentence.
References
Hajičová, Eva. 1984. Presupposition and allegation revisited. Journal of Pragmatics
8:155- 167
Hajičová, Eva, Partee Barbara H. and Petr Sgall. (1998). Topic-Focus Articulation,
Tripartite
Structure, and Semantic Content. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic
Publishers.
Sgall Petr, Hajičová, Eva and Jarmila Panevová. 1986. The Meaning of the Sentence in
Its Semantic and Pragmatic Aspects. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Strawson, P. F. 1962. Introduction to Logical Theory. London: Methuen.
The conundrum of accusative marking in existential-like constructions
in Modern Hebrew and beyond
Rivka Halevy
(Hebrew University)
In nominative-accusative languages there is no need in one-place predications to
disambiguate the sole obligatory argument through case marking (or 'flagging'). The
hallmark of the EXT (existential) construction including 'be'-POSS (possession)
construction in MH (Modern Hebrew), and in many IE languages, is the discrepancy
tolerated in the patterning a grammatical zero/non- personal S morpheme (incorporated
in Hebrew into the verb form in neutral 3.M.SG) and an alleged argument deprived of
coding properties of a 'canonical' S. In the presentational and 'coerced' instances (or
metaphorical-structural extensions) of the EXT construction the associate NP may
refer to an individual which is known both to the speaker and the hearer, but is
reintroduced/newly introduced into the domain of discourse. In MH a definite direct
object is as a rule flagged by DOM 'et.
114
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
In Hebrew both EXT and 'be'-POSS constructions consist of the EXT
particle/verboid yeš/neg. 'en (in the past and future in the suppletive forms of 'be') + an
NP denoting the existee/possessee (the the possessor is preceded by l 'to'). When the
NP is definite it is commonly flagged by the DOM particle 'et (also in the pronominal
form), alongside ignoring agreement between the predicate and the NP, e.g.
While in prototypical EXT and 'be'-POSS constructions the incongruent ACC
flagging is already conventionalized, the type-shifting instances of the construction
show variability depending on the speaker's intuition, type of predicate, and the
discourse function of the construction.

Examples of 'coerced' instances of the EXT construction in spoken MH,
French, Spanish and Swedish:
Main arguments
- It is not to be understood as an ergative alignment
- The construction in Hebrew is not to be accounted as "subject inversion"
- There is no "act of predication" here (i.e., the NP is not the 'predication base')
- The construction in question qualifies as a "block predication"
Research questions
(i) Is there any subject in the constructions at stake?
115
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(ii) What is the motivation for the atypical ACC flagging of the sole thematic
NP?
References
Bolinger, Dwight. 1977. Meaning and Form. London & New York: Longman.
Goldenberg, Gideon. 2013. Semitic Languages: Features, Structures, Relations,
Processes, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Halevy, Rivka. 2013. Syntax: Modern Hebrew. Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and
Linguistics. 2013. G. Khan (ed.). Vol.3. 707-722. Leiden: Brill.
Lambrecht, Knud. 2000. When subjects behave like objects: An analysis of the merging
of S and O in sentence-focus constructions across languages. Studies in Language,
24.3: 611–682.
Lazard, Gilbert. 1994. L'actant H: sujet ou objet?. Bulletin de la société de linguistique
de Paris 89.1: 1- 28
Ziv, Yael. 1982. On so-called existentials: a typological problem. Lingua 56, 261-281.
Paradigmatic word formation
Camiel Hamans
(Adam Mickiewicz University Poznan)
This paper is a contribution to a workshop that explores the difference between
paradigms in inflectional and derivational processes. The specific aim of this paper is to
show how paradigms may function in derivational morphology and how they may give
rise to productive processes of word formation. This will be done by discussing a few
types of examples from English, Dutch and French.
Traditionally paradigms are considered to be an inherent part of inflectional
morphology. Within inflectional paradigms only paradigmatic levelling is a major
instance of language change. However, in derivational morphology paradigmatic word
formation and language change go hand in hand, especially when it comes to processes
which so far were seen as uncommon and irregular, such as clipping on –o or lib fixing
(Zwicky 2010). A few examples may show how the processes work. Clipping ending in
–o:
(1) French
aristo < artistocrate
ado <adolescent
Sarko<Sarkozy
provo<provocateur
(2) English
psycho <psychopath
dipso <dipsomaniacl
nympho<nymphomaniac
(3) Dutch
aso < asociaal
Indo <Indonesisch
According to Zabrocki (1980) speakers recognised a common part in these
paradigms, a confusivum, –o. Subsequently this ─o may be ‘suffixed’ after other clipped
forms:
116
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(4) proll+o <proletarien
metall+o< metallurgist
(5) journ+o<journalist
garb+o < garbage man
(6) frust+o<gefrustreerd
real+o <realist
A following step in this productive pattern is ‘suffixing –o after non clipped
forms’, whereby the suffix refers to humans:
(7) follo< foux/folle ‘mad’
(8) dumbo<dumb
(9) lullo< lul ‘penis’
Via lib fixing, or secretion (Jespersen 1922:384), an element of a non complex
form is ‘liberated’. At the moment the libfix becomes part of a new paradigm it may
become a productive derivational segment, most often a suffix-like segment. An
example from English will show how this process works.
(10) entertainment
In this form speakers recognize a part enter, which also appears as a confusivum
in the verb enter, since entertainment and enter are part of a list, or paradigm of forms
starting with enter.
(11) enter
entertainment
enterprise
Since the words of this list share a common part enter, speakers may think that
entertainment and enterprise are complex forms, which means that –tainment and -prise
also must have a status. So –tainment could start a career as a libfix in a paradigm such
as
(12) docutainment
edutainment
musitainment
relitainment
militainment
Lib fixing not necessarily has to start with a list of forms with a common
confusivum. Reanalysis of opaque forms as if they were complex forms, also is a source
for new libfixes. However, a libfix only becomes productive when it may be used in a
derivational paradigm. See for instance the opaque French form panorama, which has
been reanalysed as consisting of two parts pan and ─(o)rama
(13) panorama
(13a) diorama
cyclorama
etc.
Another source for new libfixes comes from the reanalysis of successful blends:
117
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(14) daycation
staycation
graycation
praycation
from day + vacation
(14a) girlcation
mancation.
It will be clear that the difference with example (12) is not self-evident. However,
wat both examples show is that paradigmatic language change leads to new derivational
processes.
Testing subjecthood in Croatian
Björn Hansen
(University Regensburg)
Traditionally, in Croatian grammar books the subject is understood in a narrow
sense as a noun phrase marked for nominative case which is in a relation of agreement
with the predicate (see e.g. Katičić 1986, 72; Silić & Pranjković 2007, 294f). Since the
seminal work Keenan (1976), however, researchers have recognized that subjecthood
involves a multitude of factors which encompasses not only so-called coding properties
as case marking, but also semantic and behavioural properties. Semantic properties are
autonomous existence of the referent, agency, selectional restrictions etc. whereas
behavioural properties involve control of reference of other argument expressions.
Cross- linguistic research has shown that „[n]ot all criteria listed [...] are relevant to
every language. And there are of course other criteria which are language specific. In
general, the importance of each criterion differs from language to language.“ (Onishi
2001, 8/9).
Kučanda (1998, ff) was the first to apply this multi-factor model of subjecthood to
Croatian. He tries to show is that Croatian has no non-canonically case marked (or
quirky) subjects comparable to e.g. the datives in Icelandic. Building on Kučanda’s first
observations, we would like to discuss select behavioural properties relevant for
Croatian. Our analysis is based on data extracted from the huge tagged web corpus
hrWaC 2.0 which allows for specific search queries testing our hypotheses. In our paper
we claim that Croatian subjects show three cross-linguistically attested behavioural
properties. First, the subject controls the reference of reflexive pronouns. It has to be
pointed out that this holds for reflexives in argument positions opened by the predicate
as in ex. (1), but not for reflexives within NPs as in ex. (2).
118
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(1)
(2)
[Šef
rusk-e
držav-e]i
obavijesti-o
je
chief.NOM
Russian-GEN.F
state-GEN
inform-PTCP.M
AUX.3SG
[ministr-e]j
o
[svomi/*j
telefonsk-om
razgovor-u]
s
minister–ACC.PL about REFL.POSS.LOC.M telephone-LOC.M conversation-LOC with
američk-im
predsjednik-om
George-om
Bush-om. (glasistre.hr)
American-INS.M president-INS
George-INS
Bush-INS
‘The head of the Russian state informed the ministers about his telephone conversation with the
American president.’
[Narativn-o
narrative-NOM.N
nud-i
offer-3SG.PRS
znanj-e]i
knowledge-NOM
Øj upoznavanj-e
liječnic-ima
physician-DAT.PL cognition-ACC
i
pacijenat-a. (akademija-art.hr)
I
sebe*i/j
svojih*i/j
And
REFL.GEN and
REFL.POSS.GEN.PL patient-GEN.PL
‘Narrative knowledge offers physicians to introduce themselves and their patients.’
Second, the subject and only the subject controls the reference of the non-overt
first argument of adverbial participles.
(3) [PROi
Žele-ći
da
se
want-CVB COMP REFL
ov-e
this-GEN.F
mas-e],
mass-GEN
njegov
sin
izdign-e
3SG.M.POSS.NOM son.NOM stand.out.3SG
Nikuj
Niko.ACC
u
Padov-u
da
to
Padua-ACC COMP
je
AUX.3SG
NP[otac
father.NOM
Jere] i
Jere.NOM
iz
from
posla-o
send-PTCP.M
studir-a
prav-o […] (slobodnadalmacija.hr)
study-3SG.PRS
right-ACC
‘As his father wanted him to stand out from the crowd he sent him to Padua to
study law.’
Third, Croatian shows an obviation effect in final adjunct clauses; i.e. the subject
cannot co-refer with the overt pronoun in the final clause (ex. 4).
(4)
Zato
therefore
jer
because
predaj-e
surrender-3SG.PRS
kod
with
stvaranj-a
creation-GEN
držav-e,
state-GEN
narodi
people.NOM
dio
part.ACC
svoga
suverenitet-a
vladar-uj
REFL.POSS.GEN.
sovereignty-GEN ruler-DAT
M
da
bi
na
područj-u
on*i/j
COMP
COND
on
territory-LOC
3SG.M.NOM
držav-e
uve-o
red […].(slobodnadalmacija.hr)
state-GEN
introduce-PTCP.M
order.ACC
‘Because with the creation of the state the people surrender part of their sovereignty to the ruler
who is supposed to introduce the order in the state.’
In contrast, non-overt pro can be controlled either by the subject or the object, as
shown in the following examples (5) and (6):
(5)
Sustavi
system.NOM
korist-i
use-3SG.PRS
optičk-i
optical-ACC.M
laserj
laser.ACC
kako
which
bi
COND
nadgleda-o
promet
cijel-o
vrijem-e. (www.vkh.hr)
monitor-PTCP.M
traffic.ACC
whole-ACC.N time-ACC
‘The system uses an optical laser in order to continuously monitor traffic.’
proi/*j
119
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(6)
Zatim
je
proi
pozva-o
Zlatković-aj
da
pro*i/j
Then
AUX.3S
call-PTCP.M
Zlatković-GEN COMP
pomogne G
pridržava-ti
slik-u. (Perković, cit. in Katičić 1986, 258)
help.3SG.PRS hold-INF
picture-ACC
‘Then he called Zlatković to help him to hold the picture.’
mu
3SG.M.DAT
Our claim concerning this obviation effect is corroborated by the experimental
study by Miličević & Kraš (2013) who tested Croatian sentences containing null and
overt pronouns in forward and back ward anaphora contexts.
References
Katičić R. 1986 Sintaksa hrvatskoga književnog jezika. Nacrt za gramatiku. [Syntax of
Croatian] Zagreb Keenan, E. 1976. Towards a universal definition of “subject”.
in: Li, C.N. (ed.), Subject and topic. New York, 303-333
Kučanda, D. 1998 Rečenični subjekt u hrvatskom i engleskom jeziku [The clause
subject in Croatian and in English]. Doktorska disertacija, Sveučilište u Zagrebu.
Kučanda D. 1999 O logičkom subjektu [On logical subject]. In: Filologija 32, 75-90
Miličević, M. & Kraš, T. 2013 An experimental investigation into antecedent
preferences of null and overt subject pronouns in Serbian and Croatian.
Presentation at SLE 2013, Split.
Onishi, M. (2001) Introduction: Non-canonically marked subject and objects. In:
Aikhenvald, A.Y., Dixon, R.M.W. & Onishi, M. (eds) Non-canonical marking of
subjects and objects, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1-51.
Silić J. & Pranjković I. 20072 Gramatika hrvatskoga jezika [Grammar of Croatian].
Zagreb hrWaC 2.0 http://nl.ijs.si/noske/wacs.cgi/first_form
The grammar-lexicon divide – A function-based, psycholinguistic
production study of grammatical vs lexical words
Peter Harder, Violaine Michel Lange and Maria Messerschmidt
(University of Copenhagen)
The grammar-lexicon divide is understood in widely different ways in current
linguistic theories. Especially in relation to psycholinguistics, discussions have tended
to focus on grammatical rules as opposed to lexical words, whereas grammatical words
have received comparatively little attention. If we look at production studies, most have
dealt either with single words or with errors (based on corpus investigation); there are
few experimental studies of multi-word production.
The paper seeks to fill this empirical gap, while at the same time throwing light on
a recent theoretical development. The theory underlying the experimental design, cf.
Boye & Harder (2012), is functionally based, and claims that grammatical elements are
definable in terms of their function in the division of labour between elements in
complex linguistic expressions, arguing that grammatical elements have two crucial
properties: they are ancillary and thus dependent in relation to lexical items – and
120
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
accordingly they have background status and by convention do not convey the primary
content of an utterance.
Predictions derived from this theory motivated the experimental design:
Grammatical elements would be predicted to be put on hold pending the production of
the lexical host expressions on which they depend, and this should be reflected in
patterns of reaction times (RTs) for lexical as opposed to grammatical variants. On the
other hand, the fact that grammatical elements, as background elements, are light while
lexical elements with potentially focal content are heavy, should give rise to effects
going in the opposite direction. The assumption that lexical elements take priority over
grammatical elements is familiar from psycholinguistic theory (cf Garrett, 1975; Bock,
1987). A recent speech production study by Bürki et al. (2015) supported this
hypothesis using electroencephalography in a picture naming task on determiner
production. Nevertheless, up to now there has been no agreed-upon theoretical
foundation for it.
We report two experiments which investigate this contrast with production of
lexical verb vs. grammatical verb messages (Exp.1) and lexical determiner vs.
grammatical determiner messages (Exp. 2). The aim was to capture two properties
(dependency/lightness) we attribute to grammatical elements and see whether these
could account for potential differences in processing as reflected by RTs.
First, the fact that they depend on a lexical host should be reflected by a planning
cost in the initial phase of the preparation of the message (retention). This should be
captured by longer RTs corresponding to the planning phase before articulation
initiates.
Second, the fact that grammatical elements should be lighter/easier to process at a
later stage (once their lexical host has been at least partially specified) should be
reflected in a later processing stage which might correspond to the articulation of the
message. To investigate this hypothesis, we measured duration of the articulation of the
messages across conditions.
As predicted, we report longer RTs but shorter duration/articulation times for
grammatical elements relative to lexical elements. The combination of reaction times
and duration measures allowed us to capture the contrast between grammatical and
lexical words as predicted by psycholinguistic models of speech production and
function-based linguistic theories.
References
Bock, K. (1987). Exploring levels of processing in sentence production. In G. Kempen
1020 (Ed.), Natural language generation (pp. 351–363). Boston: Martinus Nijhoff
1021 Publishers
Boye, K. & Harder, P. (2012). A usage-based theory of grammatical status and
grammaticalization. Language, 88(1), pp.1–44.
Bürki, A., Sadat, J., Dubarry, A.-S., & Alario, F.-X. (2016). Sequential Processing
During
Noun
Phrase
Retrieval.
Cognition,
146,
90-99.
doi : 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.09.002
Garrett, M. F. (1975). "The analysis of sentence production.". In Gordon H Bower. The
Psychology of learning and motivation. Volume 9 : advances in research and
theory. New York: Academic Press, pp. 133–177. ISBN 978-0-12-543309-9.
OCLC 24672687.
121
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Compound constituents or affixoids? An exploration of German
compound landscapes
Stefan Hartmann
(University of Hamburg)
The notion of ‘affixoids’ has been subject to considerable debate in linguistic
morphology (cf. e.g. Schmidt 1987; Ascoop 2005; Stevens 2005). However, the concept
has gained much currency in recent constructionist approaches to word-formation (e.g.
Booij 2010; Battefeld 2014; Norde & Van Goethem 2014). According to Booij (2010:
57), affixoids are “not yet affixes because they correspond to lexemes [...], but their
meaning differs from that when used as independent lexemes.” In a diachronic
perspective, some affixoids tend to develop into full-fledged affixes, while others fall
out of use (cf. e.g. the discussion of English -dom and -ræden in Traugott & Trousdale
2013).
As the boundaries between ‘lexemes’, ‘affixoids’, and ‘affixes’ are necessarily
blurred, the heuristic value of the notion of ‘affixoid’ has been questioned (e.g. Schmidt
1987). In Construction Grammar, the gradual development of free lexemes into bound
morphemes can be recast in terms of constructionalization (Traugott & Trousdale
2013). Specific instantiations of compound con–struc–tions develop into partially filled
constructions, i.e. non-compositional pairings of form and mea–ning, in their own right.
While previous studies such as Traugott & Trousdale (2013) and Hüning & Booij
(2014) are more qualitatively-oriented, the present paper discusses the question which
insights can be gained from the quantitative investigation of emergent compound
constructions. As an example, I discuss German compounds with the second
constituents -welt ‘world’ and -landschaft ‘landscape’, e.g. Hochschullandschaft
‘university landscape’, Lebenswelt ‘life-world’. While the status of these constituents as
affixoids is at least debatable, a diachronic analysis of data from the German Text
Archive (Deutsches Textarchiv, DTA) and the Core Corpus of the Digital German
Dictionary (Digitales Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache, DWDS) shows that over the
past century, these items have been combined with ever more first constituents,
expanding their semantic scope from literal to highly metaphoric uses. All 1,340
instances of -landschaft in the DTA and the DWDS and all 3,657 instances of -welt in
the DTA were manually annotated for the concept type of their first constituent.
For -landschaft, it can be shown that abstract concept become more predominant. In the
case of -welt, metaphoric uses are prevalent already at the beginning of the period in
question. Nevertheless, a shift regarding the predominant concept types can be shown:
away from philosophical and religious notions (Ideenwelt ‘world of ideas’, Götterwelt
‘world of Gods’) to institutions or person collectives (Theaterwelt ‘world of the
theater’, Gelehrtenwelt ‘world of scholars’).
In addition, the compound constructions are compared with their syntactic
counterparts Welt des/der N ‘world of N’ and Landschaft des/der N ‘landscape of N’
using distinctive collexeme analysis (Gries & Stefanowitsch 2004). In line with Hilpert
(2013), who demonstrates that quantitative corpus studies can be used to identify the
right level of abstraction at which constructions (as independently stored units) can be
posited, I will argue that statistical methods, combined with careful qualitative analysis,
can also give valuable clues to the degree of ‘bondedness’ (Lehmann 1995) of a
122
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
morphological construction. In the case at hand, collostructional analysis allows for
comparing compounds with -welt and -landschaft as last constituents with free uses of
Welt and Landschaft in syntactic constructions like Welt des Theaters ‘world of theater’.
This in turn is highly relevant for word-formation theory in general, as it allows to
account for patterns of competition between morphological constructions and their
syntactic counterparts in a data-driven way. These comparisons can also inform
discussions about the status of compound constituents (as “free” constituents vs.
“bound” affixoids) and thus help us come to terms with the notoriously difficult
phenomenon of gradualness in word-formation by anchoring linguistic description in a
bottom-up analysis of empirical data.
References
Ascoop, Kristin. 2005. Affixoidhungrig? Skitbra! Status und Gebrauch von Affixoiden
im Deutschen und Schwedischen. Germanistische Mitteilungen 62. 17–28.
Battefeld, Malte. 2014. Konstruktionsmorphologie sprachübergreifend: Perspektiven
eines Vergleichs von “Affixoiden” im Deutschen, Niederländischen und
Schwedischen. Germanistische Mitteilungen 40(1). 15–29.
Booij, Geert E. 2010. Construction Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hilpert, Martin. 2013. Constructional Change in English: Developments in Allomorphy,
Word Formation, and Syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hüning, Matthias & Geert Booij. 2014. From Compounding to Derivation: The
Emergence of Derivational Affixes Through “Constructionalization.” Folia
Linguistica 48(2). 579–604.
Lehmann, Christian. 1995. Thoughts on Grammaticalization. München: LINCOM.
Norde, Muriel & Kristel Van Goethem. 2014. Bleaching, productivity and debonding of
prefixoids. A corpus-based analysis of “giant” in German and Swedish.
Linguisticae Investigationes 37(2). 256–274.
Schmidt, Günter Dietrich. 1987. Das Affixoid: Zur Notwendigkeit und Brauchbarkeit
eines beliebten Zwischenbegriffs der Wortbildung. In Gabriele Hoppe, Alan
Kirkness, Elisabeth Link, Isolde Nortmeyer, Wolfgang Rettig & Günter Dietrich
Schmidt (eds.), Deutsche Lehnwortbildung, 53–101. (Forschungsberichte Des
Instituts Für Deutsche Sprache Mannheim 64). Tübingen: Narr.
Stevens, Christopher. 2005. Revisiting the Affixoid Debate: On the Grammaticalization
of the Word. In Torsten Leuschner, Tanja Mortelmans & Sarah Groodt (eds.),
Grammatikalisierung im Deutschen, 71–84. (Linguistik - Impulse Und Tendenzen
9). Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Graeme Trousdale. 2013. Constructionalization and
Constructional Changes. (Oxford Studies in Diachronic and Historical Linguistics
6). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
123
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Insubordination in some North Arawak languages
Steffen Haurholm-Larsen and Tammy Stark
(University of Bern; University of California Berkeley)
Insubordination is defined as "the conventionalized main clause use of what, on
prima facie grounds, appear to be formally subordinate clauses". Insubordinate clause
uses span broadly including interpersonal coercion (commands, threats, warnings),
modality, tense and discourse relations (Evans 2007, 367).
In the languages of South America, nominalization is a common subordination
strategy. However, deverbal nouns also make up a common main clause type in this
area. According to Gildea (2008), these insubordinate clauses are the result of a
diachronic process where the main clause of complex clauses grammaticalized into
auxiliaries giving way to insubordinate clauses with new tense-aspect distinctions.
In the Arawak language family, among the largest of South America,
nominalization is also a common subordination strategy (Aikhenvald 1999) and in a
number of languages of the North Arawak branch, deverbal nouns account for a large
portion of main clauses as well. One such language is Garifuna, now spoken along the
Caribbean coast of Central America; examples of an unpossessed deverbal noun, a
possessed deverbal noun and two insubordinate clauses are given in (1a-c).
(1)
a.
bwidu
owchaha-ni
fedu-rugu
good to.fish-NMLZ
feast-LOC
‘the fishing is good around Christmas’
b.
t-idan
aban w-owchaha-n
3.F-in
one 1.PL-to.fish-NMLZ:POSS
‘on one of our fishing (trips)’
c.
aban l-owchaha-n
aban
l-adígi-n
aban gusúna
CONJ 3.M-to.fish-USPEC CONJ 3.
M-to.catch-USPEC one tripletail
‘then he fished and he caught a tripletail’
Insubordinate clauses like the one in (1c) are formally identical to possessed
deverbal nouns like the one in (1b) and are used in contexts where the information
structure does not require specification of tense and aspect, i.e. most contexts in natural
language usage.
Based on existing published sources as well as data collected by the authors, the
present paper will explore the extent of insubordination involving a reflex of the
nominalizing suffix -NI in a selection of North Arawak languages. Those languages
which display this type of insubordination likely employ it for different functions and
those functions will be described and compared.
One preliminary finding indicates that in Wapishana (spoken in Guyana) the
subordinator -n has grammaticalized further and is now found as a marker of indicative
mood (Santos 2006). This suggests a possible grammaticalization path for -NI in
Wapishana: nominalizer > subordinator > marker of indicative mood.
124
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
It is hoped that our exploratory work will uncover the possible paths of
grammaticalization that have brought about wide spread insubordination for a variety of
purposes in the (North) Arawak language family.
References
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 1999. “The Arawak Language Family.” In The Amazonian
Languages, 65–106. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Evans, Nicholas. 2007. “Insubordination and Its Uses.” In Finiteness: Theoretical and
Empirical Foundations, edited by Irina Nikolaeva, 366–431. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Gildea, Spike. 2008. “Explaining Similarities between Main Clauses and Nominalized
Phrases.” Amerindia, no. 32: 57–73.
Santos, Manoel Gomes dos. 2006. “Uma Gramática Do Wapixana (Aruák) – Aspectos
Da Fonologia, Da Morfologia E Da Sintaxe.” Phd, Campinas, SP: Univ.
http://libdigi.unicamp.br/document/?code=vtls000384136.
Databases for a ‘new Historical Linguistics’? An expert-led database
of cognacy in basic vocabulary across Indo-European
Paul Heggarty and Cormac Anderson
(Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena)
Traditional comparative/historical language data are increasingly being used as
input to a set of highly sophisticated computational analysis tools. Most were
originally devised for the biological sciences, but languages too ‘descend with
modification’ from a common ancestor. So where appropriately adapted, these
techniques are breathing new life into the long-standing debates with which linguistics
first began, not least the Indo-European question. Bayesian phylogenetics, in
particular, has catapulted the origins and divergence histories of major language
families back into leading journals such as Language (Chang et al. 2015) and even
Science (Gray et al. 2009 and Bouckaert et al. 2012).
Results have been controversial and contradictory, however, not least because
linguistics has not kept pace in devising accessible and reliable language database
resources, (re)structured and compiled to new policies to ensure that we make the most
out of the new quantitative toolkit — and avoid certain potential pitfalls. Swadesh lists,
for example, the type of data-set most commonly used, allow multiple (near)synonymous lexemes for a single meaning. The linguistic justification is ill thought
out, for what is only a tiny sample data-set in any case, and where the real imperative
is cross-linguistic consistency. Under normal Bayesian phylogenetic models, excessive
synonymy in practice only introduces new distortions, far worse than those they were
intended to remedy.
This paper reports on a project to develop a new model database structure for
encoding cognacy relationships in basic vocabulary across any given language family,
designed to maximise utility for qualitative as well as quantitative research purposes.
125
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Our first implementation is to Indo-European. Our new database follows in part
the relational structure of the existing IELex database used by many recent
publications, but makes critical changes and extensions. The actual data in IELex,
moreover, originated in Dyen, Kruskal & Black (1992), inappropriately revised,
and have long been identified by many linguists as highly unreliable and seriously
inconsistent, as well as incomplete and insufficient for many other desired research
applications. The IELex website (ielex.mpi.nl) also lacked much-needed functionality,
especially for efficient data entry.
We also devise a new reference list of 200 comparison meanings, combined out
of the Swadesh 100, Swadesh 200 and Leipzig-Jakarta 100 lists (Tadmor 2009), but
freed of those meanings found in practice to be most widely open to serious coding
inconsistencies, especially in languages of radically different structural types or spoken
in different cultures and contexts.
Corresponding lexeme lists for each language are compiled by a consortium of
specialist authors by language or sub-branch of Indo-European, then cross-checked
and reconciled with a second expert opinion. All experts work to a new and very
explicit set of lexeme selection guidelines and precisely (re)defined target meanings.
Entries are given in native orthography, Roman transliteration where necessary,
phonemic and IPA phonetic (major allophone) transcriptions, all searchable and
linked to leading published sources on etymologies. All lexemes entered are assigned
into cognate sets, explicitly defined by a shared root (or ‘loanword event’, where
applicable). These break down further into cognate subsets, which share their root but
differ in other respects (e.g. presence/absence of s-mobile, derivation from different
case or tense forms, ablaut grades, etc.), to allow more precise analyses, both
quantitative and qualitative.
References
Bouckaert, R., Lemey, P., Dunn, M., Greenhill, S.J., Alekseyenko, A.V., Drummond,
A.J., Gray, R.D., Suchard, M.A., & Atkinson, Q.D. 2012. Mapping the origins
and expansion of the Indo-European language family. Science 337(6097): p.957–
960. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1219669
Chang, W., Cathcart, C., Hall, D. & Garrett, A. 2015. Ancestry-constrained
phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis. Language
91(1): p.194–244. www.linguisticsociety.org/files/news/ChangEtAlPreprint.pdf
Dyen, I., Kruskal, J.B. & Black, P. 1992. An Indoeuropean classification: a
lexicostatistical experiment. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
82(5). www.wordgumbo.com/ie/cmp/iedata.txt
Gray, R.D., Drummond, A.J. & Greenhill, S.J. 2009. Language phylogenies reveal
expansion pulses and pauses in Pacific settlement. Science 323(5913): p.479.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1166858 Tadmor, U. 2009. Loanwords in the
world’s languages: findings and results. In M. Haspelmath & U. Tadmor (eds)
Loanwords in the World’s Languages:
A Comparative Handbook, 55–
75. Berlin: de Gruyter. www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/41172
126
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Focus affinity and degrees of event specification: An experimental
study on Spanish postverbal constituents
Steffen Heidinger
(University Graz)
Introduction and research questions
Almost every part of a sentence can be focus – i.e., indicate the presence of
relevant alternatives (Krifka 2007) – given the right context. It is assumed, however,
that different syntactic functions do not have the same affinity to focus. For example,
objects are better candidates for focus than subjects (Bossong 1984, Firbas 1992,
Lambrecht 1994, Du Bois 2003). In this paper we address two questions arising from
the assumption that syntactic functions have different focus affinities:
1) How are postverbal syntactic functions ranked with respect to focus affinity?
2) How can one account for the ranking?
Method
The language under study is Spanish. The syntactic functions we consider are
direct object (dO), subject-oriented depictive (DEP), instrumental adjunct (INST) and
locative adjunct (LOC). In a forced choice experiment (Nov 2015, Cáceres (Spain), 36
participants, each participant judged 28 written stimuli), we conducted the pairwise
comparisons of syntactic functions in (1).
(1)
dO×DEP, dO×INST, dO×LOC, DEP×INST, DEP×LOC, INST×LOC
To determine which syntactic function of a pair has a stronger affinity to focus,
we presented sentences of the type S-NEG-V-A-B and asked participants to choose
between two paraphrases. The paraphrases differed w.r.t. the explicitly negated element
(A or B). The choice between the paraphrases indicates whether A or B is interpreted as
the narrow focus (cf. (2)). The method relies on the close relation between focus of
negation and information structural focus (Huddleston & Pullum 2002).
(2)
Juan no bailó disfrazado en la sala.
Juan NEG danced disguised in the living.room
o
Juan bailó disfrazado, pero no en la sala.
Juan danced disguised, but not in the living.room
o
Juan bailó en la sala, pero no disfrazado.
Juan danced in the living.room, but not disguised
Answer to Research question 1
The results of the pairwise comparisons are given in (3); the ranking which
follows is given in (4). The depictive has the strongest focus affinity, followed by the
instrument, the locative, and the direct object.
(3)
(4)
dO<DEP, dO<INST, dO<LOC, DEP>INST, DEP>LOC, INST>LOC
DEP>INST>LOC>dO
127
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Answer to Research question 2
Our account of the ranking in (4) is based on Grice's (1975) Maxim of Quantity
(MoQ)): an utterance should not be more informative than necessary. Although all
syntactic functions contribute to the specification of an event, syntactic functions differ
with respect to their degree of event specification. E.g. a depictive gives more specific
information than a direct object: it describes the state of a participant during the event,
while the direct object solely denotes a participant. Being focus is one way to license
the presence of very specific information in an utterance. The more specific the
information expressed by a syntactic function, the higher the necessity to license its
presence in the face of MoQ. Hence, if there is a choice to license one of two syntactic
functions by means of focus – and that is the premise of the experiment – , the one with
the higher degree of event specification that is interpreted as focus. We therefore
assume that the ranking in (4) mirrors the ranking of the syntactic functions w.r.t. event
specification: if two syntactic functions are candidates for focus, the more specific one
is interpreted as focus.
References
Bossong, Georg. 1984. Wortstellung, Satzperspektive und Textkonstitution im IberoRomanischen, dargestellt am Beispiel eines Textes von Juan Rulfo. Iberoromania
(19). 1–16.
Du Bois, John W. 2003. Argument structure: Grammar in Use. In Du Bois, John W,
Lorraine E. Kumpf & William J. Ashby (eds.), Preferred argument structure:
Grammar as architecture for function, 11–60. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John
Benjamins Pub. Co.
Firbas, Jan. 1992. Functional sentence perspective in written and spoken
communication. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Grice, H. P. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole & Jerry L. Morgan (eds.),
Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts, 41–58. New York, London: Academic
Press.
Huddleston, Rodney D. & Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the
English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Krifka, Manfred. 2007. Basic notions of information structure. In Féry, Caroline,
Gisbert Fanselow & Manfred Krifka, (eds.), The Notions of Information Structure,
volume 6 of Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure, 13–55.
Universitätsverlag Potsdam: Potsdam.
Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information structure and sentence form: Topic, focus, and the
mental representations of discourse referents. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press.
128
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
When an antipassive isn’t an antipassive anymore?
Charlotte Hemmings
(SOAS, University of London)
Philippine languages are known for their systems of verbal morphology, which
have been variously analysed as marking ‘symmetrical’ voice (Himmelmann 2005);
nominalisation (Kaufman 2009); case (Rackowski & Richards 2005) and transitivity
(Aldridge 2004). This can be illustrated for Tagalog:
(1) b<in>ili
ng babae
ang isda
<UV>buy
PT
woman
SUBJ fish
‘The woman bought the fish’
(2) k<um>ain
ang babae
ng
<AV>eat
SUBJ woman
PT
‘The woman ate (a) fish’ (Alridge 2004)
isda
fish
Both (1) and (2) appear transitive, with two core nominal arguments. However, it
has been argued that (2) is an antipassive construction, in which the undergoer is
demoted to an oblique, on the basis of semantic similarities between (2) and
antipassives cross-linguistically (Aldridge 2012). In particular, the undergoer of a clause
like (2) is typically indefinite, non-specific and non-presuppositional.
In this talk, I present an analysis of a similar structure in Kelabit, a Western
Austronesian language of Northern Sarawak, which has been described as transitional
between the more conservative languages of the Philippines and languages like
Indonesian that are argued to have accusative alignment (Aldridge 2008):
(3) k<in>an
la’ih sineh
<UV.PRF>eat man DEM
‘That man ate pineapple’
buaq kaber
fruit pineapple
(4) ne-k<um>an
buaq kaber
la’ih sineh
PRF-<AV>eat
fruit pineapple man DEM
‘That man ate pineapple’ (elicited example)
The constructions in (3) and (4) are similar to (1) and (2) and employ cognate
morphological markers: -in- and -um-. However, I propose that (4) is not analysable as
an antipassive in the same sense as (2), though it can be argued to have developed from
such a construction.
To illustrate, this paper applies morphosyntactic, semantic and discourse tests for
identifying antipassives to a corpus of traditional narratives collected during fieldwork
(Polinsky 2013, Gívon 1994, Cooreman 1994). The results are compared with studies of
Philippine languages. Neither (2) nor (4) have the typical morphosyntactic properties of
antipassives, since both can be shown to contain two core arguments. However,
discourse and semantic tests provide mixed results. Whilst they identify (2) as having
129
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
the typical features of antipassives, for (4) they show split properties – sometimes
antipassive-like and sometimes active-like.
Semantically, verbs like that in (4) are often used when the undergoer is omitted,
indefinite or discourse-new, which are key properties of antipassives cross-linguistically
(Cooreman 1994). However, it is also grammatical to have a highly definite undergoer,
as in (5):
(5) neh
nieh
muwer
ieh
PT=3SG
AV.butcher
3SG
‘Then she butchered it [the yellow-throated marten]’ (text example)
DEM
Moreover, clauses like (4) and (5) are more frequent in discourse, which is
typologically unusual for an antipassive, and have the topicality measures of an active
clause in the sense of Gívon (1994). Thus, constructions like (4) would appear to
represent a transitional stage, where the construction is in the process of becoming an
active clause-type but preserves some of the semantic characteristics of the antipassive.
Hence, Kelabit AV may represent a mid-stage in the development from antipassive to
active clause.
References
Aldridge, Edith. 2004. Ergativity and word order in Austronesian languages. Doctoral
Dissertation, Cornell University.
Aldridge, Edith. 2008. Phase-based account of extraction in Indonesian. Lingua
118:1440- 1469.
Aldridge, Edith. 2012. Antipassive and Ergativity in Tagalog. Lingua 192-203.
Cooreman, Ann. 1994. A Functional Typology of Antipassive. In Barbara Fox & Paul J.
Hopper (eds.) Voice: Form and Function, 49-88. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Givón, Talmy. 1994. Voice and Inversion. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2005. The Austronesian Languages of Asia and Madagascar:
Typological Charactersistics. In A. Adelaar and N. P. Himmelmann (eds.) The
Austronesian Languages of Asia and Madagascar, 110-181. London: Routledge.
Kaufman, Daniel. 2009. Austronesian Typology and the Nominalist Hypothesis. In
Alexander Adelaar and Andrew Pawley (eds.) Austronesian historical linguistics
and culture
history: A festschrift for Robert Blust. Pacific Linguistics.
Canberra: ANU Press.
Polinsky, Maria. 2013. Antipassive Constructions. In: Dryer, Matthew S. &
Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online.
Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online
http://wals.info/chapter/108, Accessed on 2015-09-29.)
Rackowski, Andrea and Norvin Richards. 2005. Phase edge extraction: A Tagalog case
study. Linguistic Inquiry 36:565-599.
130
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Diachronic and varietal variation of polar questions: Forms and
functions in written Estonian
Tiit Hennoste, Helle Metslang and Külli Habicht
(University of Tartu)
The topic of our research is the variation of formats and functions of polar
questions in written Estonian from the 17th century until today. We have two research
questions. Firstly, which question forms are used to fulfill different functions in
different varieties of Estonian: religious and didactic-moralizing texts of the 17th -18th
century, modern-day printed media and fiction, and computer-mediated comments and
instant messaging (IM). Secondly, which intra- and extra-linguistic factors influence
polar question form-function relations in different periods and text varieties.
Our data (600 questions) come from the Corpora of the University of Tartu. We
combine qualitative interactional linguistics and quantitative methods in our analysis
(cf. Nevalainen et al. 2008).
In Estonian, polar questions are marked by sentence-initial particles (kas ‘lit:
whether’, ega ‘lit: ‘nor’ etc: Kas sa oled abielus? ‘KAS you are married?’), sentencefinal particles and tags (jah ‘yes’, või ‘lit: or’, eks ‘right’ etc: Sa oled abielus või? ‘You
are married VÕI?’), inversion (Oled sa abielus? ‘Are you married?’), or have
declarative form (Sa oled abielus? ‘You are married?’). The use of different formats has
changed from the 17th century to the present day (Metslang et al. 2011).
Polar questions perform several functions in texts. They are requests for
information, other-initiations of repair, requests for confirmation, assessments,
directives, rhetorical questions etc (Stivers, Enfield 2010). We concentrate on two main
functional variants in our presentation: requests for information and requests for
confirmation.
We show that there is a difference between the formats of requests for information
and requests for confirmation in all modern-day text varieties. Requests for information
prefer sentence-initial particles and avoid other formats. Requests for confirmation
prefer declaratives in all text varieties. In instant messaging, sentence-final või emerges
as a new frequent marker.
We argue that the changes and variation in the form-function relations of polar
questions are influenced by the following groups of factors:
1. Language-internal factors: grammaticalization (rise of the sentence-final
particle või from the conjunction või ‘or’ during the 20th century); system
force (the language gives rise to new question markers or formats belonging
to the existing types, e.g. developing new particles positioned in the
sentence periphery); neutralization of the polarity of particles (kas has
developed from a positive polarity item into a neutral one);
2. Register context: different registers have specific distributions of question
formats. Fiction and instant message dialogues are influenced by colloquial
spoken Estonian.
3. Language contacts, areal phenomena. The features of SAE (such as verbinitial polar questions) are mediated primarily by German influence during
the past centuries. Sentence- initial particles are peculiar to the
Circum-Baltic area (Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Wälchli 2001). Variation in the
131
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
expression of polar questions reveals the position of Estonian in the mutual
sphere of influence of Finnic, SAE, and Circum-Baltic languages.
4. Effects of standardization and regulation on different registers: avoiding või
as colloquial and requiring kas to fulfill different functions in formal
registers in the 20th–21st century.
References
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria & Bernhard Wälchli 2001. The Circum-Baltic languages. An
areal- typological approach. – Östen Dahl & Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm (eds.),
The Circum- Baltic Languages, vol. 2. Grammar and Typology (Studies in
Language Companion Series 55.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins,
615−750.
Metslang, Helle, Külli Habicht & Karl Pajusalu 2011. Developmental paths of
interrogative particles: the case of Estonian. – Folia Linguistica Historica 32,
149–188.
Nevalainen, Terttu, Irma Taavitsainen, Päivi Pahta & Minna Korhonen (eds.) 2008. The
dynamics of linguistic variation: corpus evidence on English past and present.
(Studies in language variation 2.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Publishing Company.
Stivers, Tanya & N. J. Enfield 2010. A coding scheme for question−response sequences
in conversation. – Journal of Pragmatics 42, 2620−2626.
Does go prime be going to but not vice versa? An experimental
approach to the asymmetric priming hypothesis
Martin Hilpert and David Correia Saavedra
(Neuchâtel)
In a programmatic paper, Jäger and Rosenbach (2008) appeal to the psychological
phenomenon of asymmetric priming in order to explain why semantic change in
grammaticalization is typically unidirectional, from more concrete and specific
meanings towards more abstract and schematic meanings. This paper aims to evaluate
their proposal on the basis of experimental evidence.
Asymmetric priming is a pattern of cognitive association in which one idea
strongly evokes another, while that second idea does not evoke the first one with the
same force. For instance, given the word 'paddle', many speakers associate 'water'. The
reverse is not true. Given 'water', few speakers associate 'paddle'. Asymmetric priming
would elegantly explain why many semantic changes in grammar are unidirectional. For
instance, expressions of spatial relations evolve into temporal markers (English be
going to), and expressions of possession evolve into markers of completion (the English
have‐perfect); the inverse processes are unattested (Heine and Kuteva 2002). The
asymmetric priming hypothesis has attracted considerable attention (Chang 2008,
Eckardt 2008, Traugott 2008), but as yet, empirical engagement with it has been
limited.
132
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Methodologically, this paper relies on reaction time measurements from a maze
task (Forster et al. 2009). The experiments test whether asymmetric priming obtains
between lexical forms and their grammaticalized counterparts, i.e. pairs such as 'keep
the light on' (lexical keep) and 'keep reading' (grammatical keep). On the asymmetric
priming hypothesis, the former should prime the latter, but not vice versa. The stimuli
that are presented to readers are sentences such as the following:
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
The student keptlexical the light on to keepgrammatical reading.
The student turnedunrelated the light on to keepgrammatical reading.
The student keptgrammatical checking facebook to keeplexical up to date.
The student wasunrelated checking facebook to keeplexical up to date.
The asymmetric priming hypothesis predicts that grammatical keep should be
processed faster in (1) than in (2). Crucially, no difference is expected between (3) and
(4), since grammatical keep should not facilitate the subsequent processing of lexical
keep.
We gathered experimental data from 200 native speakers of American English via
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. All participants were exposed to 40 sentences
with different pairs of lexical and grammatical forms (keep, go, have, etc.). We used
mixed-effects regression modeling (Baayen 2008) to assess the impact of priming,
lexical/grammatical status, and text frequency on speaker’s reaction times. Contrary to
the prediction described above, we observe a negative priming effect: Speakers who
have recently been exposed to lexical keep are significantly slower to process
grammatical keep. We interpret this observation as a horror aequi phenomenon
(Rohdenburg and Mondorf 2003). Crucially, this negative priming effect is not
observed when grammatical keep precedes lexical keep. The priming effect that we
observe is thus asymmetric. Our discussion will target the question whether and how the
asymmetric priming hypotheses can be reconciled with these results.
References
Baayen, R. Harald 2008. Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to
Statistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chang, Franklin. 2008. Implicit learning as a mechanism of language change.
Theoretical Linguistics 34/2, 115-123.
Eckardt, Regine. 2008. Concept Priming in Language Change. Theoretical Linguistics
34/2, 123-133.
Forster, Kenneth, Christine Guerrera, and Lisa Elliot. 2009. The maze task: Measuring
forced incremental sentence processing time. Behavior Research Methods 41/1,
163–171.
Heine, Bernd and Tania Kuteva. 2002. World lexicon of grammaticalization. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press
Jäger, Gerhard and Anette Rosenbach. 2008. Priming and unidirectional language
change. Theoretical Linguistics, 34/2, 85-113.
Rohdenburg, Günter and Britta Mondorf (eds.) 2003. Determinants of Grammatical
Variation in English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2008. Testing the hypothesis that priming is a motivation for
change. Theoretical Linguistics, 34/2, 135-142.
133
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Modelling the semantics of object prepositions inside Spanish NPs
Henrik Høeg Müller
(Copenhagen Business School)
This paper presents a cognitive semantic framework for understanding the
principles that govern the use of object prepositions inside NPs with event
nominalizations (Grimshaw 1990) as heads, cf. (1).
(1)
Comenza-ron
begin-PST.3PL
[el
the
ataque de/a/hacia/contra
attack of/on/towards/against
la
the
ciudad] en la noche.
city
in the night
Following Langacker’s (1991: 282) conceptualization of the unmarked transitive
sentence as “[…] an action chain (which) traces the flow of energy from the initial
energy source to the ultimate energy sink.”, it is argued that this mental (so-called
billiard-ball) model can be applied to the NP-level in the sense that the Agent is
conceptualized as a source which may or may not transfer or project the notional
content of the event nominalization on to the Patient. On this basis it is claimed that
object prepositions, in fact, encode a fundamental distinction between proximity and
distance in terms of how the Agent and the Patient relate to each other (see, e.g.,
Vandeloise 1991 for a thorough description of spatial prepositions). The preposition de
(of) induces a static, proximity relation where no transfer of energy between the
participant roles takes place, while the other prepositions signal distance between the
roles and at the same time frame a dynamic situation, in which the activity performed
by the Agent is transferred to the Patient. The proximity vs. distance assumption is
corroborated by the linguistic evidence given in (2), which indicates that directional
participles are incompatible with objects introduced by de, but fully consistent with the
other object prepositions. This is an expected consequence of the fact that these
participles precisely encode a distance and, subsequently, transfer of the notional
content of the nominalization from Agent to Patient (here the subject argument does not
surface in syntax, but is inferred from the argument structure of the nominalization).
(2)
El
the
ataque dirigido/lanzado *de
attack directed/launched of
la
the
ciudad // a/hacia/contra
la ciudad.
city
// on/towards/against the city
The static vs. dynamic distinction is rendered plausible by (3), which shows that
inherently dynamic verbo-nominal predicates (for a definition see, e.g., Baron &
Herslund 1998) of the type realizar un ataque (make an attack) and lanzar críticas
(launch critics) only license object prepositions different from de.
(3)
El
grupo realiz-ó
un
ataque a/hacia/contra los
the group make-PST an
attack on/towards/against the
// *de
los servidor-es.
// of
the server-PL
servidor-es
server-PL
Moreover, the choice between a/hacia and contra is motivated by value polarity.
The use of contra indicates focus on the potential resistance of the Patient towards
transfer of the semantic content of the nominalization, while a/hacia exclusively
134
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
activates the interpretation of transfer, i.e. without taking into consideration a possible
negative reaction or attitude from the Patient. Empirical backup for this assumption is
provided by the fact that nominalizations with a positive semantic content such as
elogio (praise), homenaje (homage) and apoyo (support) are incompatible with contra
introducing the Patient. The system in its simplest form (the paper builds on a larger
body of empirical evidence and, consequently, a greater variation within object
prepositions) can be schematized in the following way:
SITUATION (Nominalization + Arguments)
PROXIMITY [Static] (de)
DISTANCE [Dynamic] (a, hacia, contra)
POSITIVE TRANSFER (a, hacia)
NEGATIVE TRANSFER (contra)
References
Baron, I & M. Herslund.1998. Support Verb Constructions as Predicate Formation. In:
Olbertz, H., Hengeveld, K and Sánchez García, J, The Structure of the Lexicon in
Functional Grammar, John Benjamins, SLC 43, 99-116.
Grimshaw, J. 1990. Argument Structure. MIT Press, Cambridge.
Langacker, R.W. 1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. Vol. II. Descriptive
Application. Stanford University Press, Stanford.
Vandelois, C. 1991. Spatial Prepositions: A case study from French. University of
Chicago Press, Chicago and London.
The effect of differential stress patterns on age-of-acquisition ratings in
English
Klaus Hofmann and Andreas Baumann
(University of Vienna)
This paper discusses the possibility of a functional role for differential stress
patterns in English nouns and verbs. By applying rigorous statistical methods to a large
dataset of age-of-acquisition (AoA) ratings, the study pursues the question whether
distinctive stress patterns might serve as phonological cues helping first language
learners to syntactically categorise and store new words.
Formal accounts of English stress (Chomsky & Halle 1968; Burzio 1994) have
pointed out that nouns and verbs adhere to different regularities regarding the position
of primary stress. In broad terms, this asymmetry consists in “primary stress in English
nouns [being] farther to the left than primary stress in English verbs” (Ross 1973: 173).
Thus, regular polysyllabic nouns receive primary stress on syllables closer to their left
135
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
edges, while primary stress in regular verbs is further to the right, even if nouns and
verbs display parallel phonological structures:
(1) rétail, vénison, cónstruct (N)
(2) contáin, elícit, constrúct (V)
Dictionary studies confirm that the noun-verb dichotomy is indeed a pervasive
feature of the English vocabulary, although considerable numbers of items in both
categories also deviate from the expected patterns (Kelly & Bock 1988; cf. Kelly 1992).
Given this regular prosodic difference between the two word classes, the question
suggests itself whether it fulfils any functional role, in particular with regard to
language acquisition. Word prosody in general seems to be of major importance for
lexical development: infants rely on word stress for identifying word boundaries in the
speech stream (Jusczyk 1999; Thiessen & Saffran 2003, 2007). Kelly (1992) suggests
that phonological cues including stress may also serve a similar function when it comes
to syntactic categorisation. Specifically, it has been proposed that such cues make it
easier for first language learners to form hypotheses about the lexical category of newly
encountered words and to store them in memory (Wright Cassidy & Kelly 2001;
Fitneva et al. 2009).
One hypothesis that follows from these findings is that both noun and verb types
should, on average, have lower AoA-ratings if they conform to their preferred stress
patterns compared to types with deviating patterns. In order to test this hypothesis, the
present study draws on a large dataset recording the AoA-ratings for more than 30,000
words (Kuperman et al. 2012), enriched with phonological information from the Irvine
Phonotactic Online Dictionary (Vaden et al. 2009). Box-Cox transformed (Box & Cox
1964) AoA-ratings represent the output variable in the statistical analysis, which
includes various relevant factors besides the position of stress, such as word length,
syllable structure and token frequency. Two different modelling methods (generalized
mixed models, Faraway 2005; and generalized additive models, Wood 2006) will be
applied and compared with regard to their analytical value.
A pilot study on a restricted subset suggests that, contrary to expectation, both
nouns and verbs have lower AoA-ratings if they follow the stress patterns typical of
regular nouns. This casts doubt on the relevance of words stress for syntactic
categorisation and word acquisition.
References
Baayen, R. Harald. 2008. Analyzing linguistic data: a practical introduction to statistics
using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Box, George; Cox, David. 1964. An analysis of transformations. Journal of the Royal
Statistical Society Series B 26(2), 211–252.
Burzio, Luigi. 1994. Principles of English stress. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Wright Cassidy, Kimberly; Kelly, Michael. 2001. Children’s use of phonology to infer
grammatical class in vocabulary learning. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 8(3),
519–523.
Chomsky, Noam; Halle, Morris. 1968. The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper
and Row.
136
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Faraway, Julian. 2005. Extending the linear model with R: generalized linear, mixed
effects and nonparametric regression models. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
Fitneva, Stanka; Christiansen, Morten; Monaghan, Padraic. 2009. From sound to
syntax: phonological constraints on children’s lexical categorization of new
words. Journal of Child Language 36(5), 967–997.
Jusczyk, Peter. 1999. How infants begin to extract words from speech. Trends in
Cognitive Science 3(9), 323–328.
Kelly, Michael. 1992. Using sound to solve syntactic problems: the role of phonology in
grammatical category assignments. Psychological Review 99(2), 349–364.
Kelly, Michael; Bock, J. Kathryn. 1988. Stress in time. Journal of Experimental
Psychology 14(3), 389–403.
Kuperman, Victor; Stadthagen-Gonzalez, Hans; Brysbaert, Marc. 2012. Age-ofacquisition ratings for 30,000 English words. Behavior Research Methods 44(4),
978–990.
Thiessen, Erik; Saffran Jenny. 2003. When cues collide: use of stress and statistical cues
to word boundaries in 7- to 9-month-old infants. Developmental Psychology
39(4), 706–716.
Thiessen, Erik; Saffran Jenny. 2007. Learning to learn: infants’ acquisition of stressbased strategies for word segmentation. Language Learning and Development
3(1), 73–100.
Vaden, K. I.; Halpin, H. R., Hickok, G. S. 2009. Irvine Phonotactic Online Dictionary,
Version 2.0. [Data file]. Available from http://www.iphod.com.
Wood, Simon. 2006. Generalized additive models: an introduction with R. Boca Raton:
CRC Press.
Weight effects and heavy NP shift
Ingunn Hreinberg Indriðadóttir and Jóhannes Gísli Jónsson
(University of Iceland)
Various studies on Heavy NP Shift (HNPS) in English converge on the
conclusion that the frequency of HNPS is not only determined by the heaviness of the
displaced object, measured in the number of words. The relative heaviness of the object
vs. the word string between the main verb and the object plays a significant role as well
(Hawkins 1994, Wasow 1997, Stallings & MacDonald 2011). For instance, the heavier a
verb-modifying PP is, the less likely it is that a direct object of a fixed length is shifted to
the right of the PP (cf. The radio listeners accepted without doubt the whole story about
the defects in the new Mazda vs. The radio listeners accepted without doubt or any bit of
concern the whole story about the defects in the new Mazda).
In this talk, we will discuss relative weight effects with HNPS in Icelandic. A
study of this kind has not been undertaken before, although HNPS in Icelandic was first
described more than 30 years ago by Rögnvaldsson (1982). Our conclusions are based
on a series of pilot studies, including various production tests where participants read
sentences with HNPS affecting subjects, direct objects and indirect objects, and an
acceptability test where 409 speakers evaluated sentences on the scale of 1-5. All the
137
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
sentences with HNPS contained a heavy NP immediately preceding a PP (or a direct
object) and the relative length of NP vs. PP was controlled. In the production tests the
beginning of the sentence including the main verb appeared in the middle of the screen
and the NP and PP appeared above and below it in a randomized order. The speakers
were asked to construct the sentences in the way they thought best and read them out
loud.
Our results suggest that the frequency of HNPS is significantly higher when the NP
exceeds the PP in length by at least three words. HNPS rarely occurs when the NP and
the PP are equally long. HNPS was found to occur very infrequently with indirect
objects. Finally, our results show that HNPS is used by all speakers but with great
variation in frequency.
References
Hawkins, J. A. (1994). A performance theory of order and constituency. Cambridge,
England: Cambridge University Press.
Rögnvaldsson, E. (1982). Um orðaröð og færslur í íslensku. Master’s Thesis, University
of Iceland. Reykjavik.
Stallings, L. M., & MacDonald, M. C. (2011). It’s not just the “heavy NP”: relative
phrase length modulates the production of heavy-NP shift. Journal of
Psycholinguistic Research 40:177-187.
Thráinsson, H. (2007). The syntax of Icelandic. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. Wasow, T. (1997). End-weight from the speaker's perspective. Journal of
Psycholinguistic Research 26: 347-361.
The complement structure of the causative constructions in French
Xiaoshi Hu
(Université Paris 7)
Diagnosing the internal structure of French causative constructions turns out to be
a harduous task. Which position does the Causee subject occupies in (1), Does the
sequence VInf+DO forms a phrasal unit or not?
(1) Jean fera lire Guerre et Paix à Marie.
(2) Max fera parler Julie de cinéma.
1. Some derivational options
Adopting Kayne (2004)'s insight that causatives with à preceding the Causee are
bi-clausal structures, where faire selects a defective TP with EA (Causee) and IA
(Object) merged as coarguments of Vinf. Several options can be considered to derive the
VOS order of the complement:
1.1 Smuggling (cf. Collins 2005)
(3) [vP Causer v* [VP faire [TP [VP Vinf IA ] T [vP EA v VP ]]]]
138
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
1.2 Object Shift
(4) [vP Causer v [VP faire [TP [T Vinf ] [vP IA [vP EA v [ V IA ]]]]]]
1.3 Subject Raising
(5) [vP Causer v [VP faire [TP T [vP EA v [VP Vinf IA]]] [ à EA]]]
By using binding and quantifier scope interactions, this talk tries to determine the
relevant position of Causee by selecting between these options. The conclusion differs
partially from previous works (cf. Ippolito 2000, Torrego 2010, Rouveret 2015,
Constantini 2010, etc.) in that Object Shift combined with V preposing is sufficient for
the properties of causative constructions.
2. Binding interactions
(6) ?*L'éditeur a fait réécrire les articles l'un de l'autre à Pierre et Paul.
(7) ?L'éditeur a fait réécrire soni chapitre à chaque auteuri.
(8) L'éditeur a fait réécrire chaque chapitrej à son auteurj.
The case in (6) suggests that the à-phrase is c-commanded by IA. If Subject
Raising was involved, one would expect (7) to be better than (8). If Smuggling adopted,
the VInf+OBJ phrase should be reconstructed at LF in (7), but we have to account for the
impossible reconstruction in (8). Hence V preposing + Object Shift seems not to meet
with these difficulties.
3. Scope interactions
(9) a. Au moins un professeur a fait lire chaque livre à Marie et Lucie. >, *>
b. Au moins un professeur a fait lire ce livre à chaque étudiant
>, *>
c. Ce professeur a fait lire au moins un livre à chaque étudiant.
>, >
EA and IA can scope over each other (cf. (9c)), while no scope interaction is
observed between the Causer and the EA/IA. Following the idea of Roberts (2010) that
the embedded vP is a defective phase without PIC effect, we propose that the IA is
shifted to SpecFP, headed by à.
(10) … causer … v*causative faire [TP v-T [FP IA à [vP EA v IA]]]
Assume that F is the locus of uninterpretable features and qualifies as a phase
head and SpecFP (FP=ApplP) is neutral as to the A/A' divide, the shifted objectQP can
be interpreted in this edge position, whereas EAQP can either remain in SpecvP (cf.
Brüning 2001) or move to an additional SpecFP. Scope interaction between the
embedded IA and EA is thus expected (cf. (11)). However, due to the presence of the
matrix v*P, neither IA nor IA can scope over the causer.
(11) a. … causer … v*causative faire [TP v-T [FP IA à [vP EA v IA]]]
b. … causer … v*causative faire [TP v-T [FP EA [FP IA à [vP EA v IA]]]
139
IA>EA
EA>IA
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Comparing to the case of laisser, the EA QP can scope over the causer if the EA
precedes the IA (cf. (12)), and this is also true in Italian causatives. This shows that
Object Shift should be responsible for the freezing scope between the causer and the
internal arguments in the causatives.
(12) Au moins un professeur a laissé chaque étudiant lire ce livre.
>, >
Finally, we will show that our proposal can also account for the contrast of
obligatory/optional clitic climbing in French and Italian causatives.
Intonation of English intransitive sentences: Challenge for focus
projection
Yujing Huang
(Harvard University)
It has been observed that the prosody of English intransitive sentences can vary in
a broad focus context, i.e., some sentences can have their sentential focus realized on
the subject only while others need to put accents on both the subject and the verb. Some
linguistic analyses explain the variation by the difference in the unaccusaitivity of the
intransitive verbs. The proposal is that because the subject of an unaccusative verb
originates from the object position and leaves a trace at the base position, realizing the
focus on the subject licenses F-marking of trace (that is, the interval argument of the
verb) and therefore licenses F-marking the verb phrase (Selkirk, 1995). This proposal
has been revised under the Minimalist framework with phase theory (Kratzer and
Selkirk, 2007). However, whether the variation in focus realization is due to
unaccusativity is controversial. Although some empirical research agreed with such an
observation (Hoskins 1996, Irwin 2011), some studies failed to find a difference driven
by unaccusativity (Hirsch and Wagner, 2011). These studies differ in their
measurements, experimental tasks and the control of potential confounds. Therefore, it
is hard to interpret the inconsistency. This paper reexamines the focus pattern of
intransitive sentences under a broad focus. Based on a phonetic analysis and a qualitative
transcription of the prosody, I found that the variation in the intranstive sentences is
different from the impressionistic observation. Moreover, it cannot be explained by the
unaccusativity of the verbs.
In this study, 34 test sentences were elicited by the question “what’s up” for a
broad focus. The F0 and duration of the subjects and verbs were measured. No
significant difference is found between the unaccusative condition and the unergative
condition. Different mixed effect models (with verb type as the main effect, sentence,
participants, presentational order and number of sylla- ble of the verb as random effect,
F0 of the subject, F0 of the verb, duration of the subject, and final lengthening as the
respective dependent variables) show that there is no main effect of verb type on peak F0
of the subject (p = 0.64), peak F0 of the verb (p = 0.67), duration of stressed syllable of
the subject (p= 0.88) or the boundary (p = 0.62).
140
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Because unaccusative sentences and unergative sentences can have accents on both
the subject and the verb and there is no predicted difference in this prosodic pattern
between the two verb types, one can argue that the difference in focus pattern between
unaccusative sentences and unergative sentences is washed off by averaging. If this is
true, we expect that unaccusative sentences can have two prosodic pattern and unergative
sentences can only have predicate prominence (Selkirk, 1995). The TOBI analysis shows
that this prediction is not borne out. 39% of the unaccusative sentences have subject
only prominence while 28% of the unergative sentences have subject only prominence
(Fisher’s Exact Test p = 0.29).
References
Hirsch, Aron, and Michael Wagner. 2011. Patterns of prosodic prominence in English
intransitive sentences. In Generative Linguistics in the Old World Colloquium,
volume 34, 28–30.
Hoskins, Steve. 1996. A phonetic study of focus in intransitive verb sentences. In
Spoken Lan- guage, 1996. ICSLP 96. Proceedings, Fourth International
Conference on, volume 3, 1632–1635. IEEE.
Irwin, Patricia. 2011. Intransitive sentences, argument structure, and the syntax-prosody
interface. In Proceedings of the 28th West Coast Conference on Formal
Linguistics (WCCFL), 275–284.
Kratzer, Angelika, and Elisabeth Selkirk. 2007. Phase theory and prosodic spellout: The
case of verbs. The Linguistic Review 24:93–135.
Selkirk, Elisabeth. 1995. Sentence prosody: Intonation, stress, and phrasing.
(The) fact is … /(Die) Tatsache ist … – A comparative corpus-based
study of variable article use in English and German focalisers
Marianne Hundt and Rahel Oppliger
(University of Zurich)
In English and German, nouns like fact and Tatsache can be used sentenceinitially with copular be/sein, either as the subject in a matrix clause with a thatcomplement or simply as an element in the left periphery of a main clause. Regardless
of the precise structure and grammatical function of these noun-copular collocations,
the use of a definite article appears to be variable in both languages:
(1) EN: (The) fact is (,) (that) the success of the project depends on it receiving
sufficient funding.
DE: (Die) Tatsache ist (die), dass der Erfolg des Projektes von der
Verfügbarkeit ausreichender finanziellen Ressourcen abhängt/der Erfolg des
Projekts hängt von der Verfügbarkeit ausreichender finanzieller Ressourcen
ab.
Preliminary evidence from the study of a parallel subtitle corpus (Tobler 2014)
indicates that variable article use is determined by the choice of the shell noun: the
141
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
article is regularly omitted with Tatsache and Fakt in German but less so in English,
whereas truth is common without the article in English while Wahrheit requires the use
of a determiner in German.
The constructions – referred to as “overtures” (Biber et al. 1999), “utterance
launchers” (Schmid 2000) or “focalisers” (Aijmer 2007)– are of interest from the point
of view of variable article use but also with respect to ongoing discussions about the
(left) periphery and variation with respect to syntactic position (e.g. Traugott 2015).
Occasionally, focalisers are also found in the right periphery:
(2) “We do good working together, truth is.” (Cornwell, Patricia. 2014. Flesh and
Blood. Harper Collins, p. 119.)
We use parallel corpora of English and German (such as the Europarl corpus) as
well as monolingual corpora to test hypotheses on variable article use in overtures in the
two languages, using regression analysis and testing for the relative weight that factors
such as ‘premodification’, ‘shell noun’ or ‘syntactic function’ play. These results
are then placed within the wider context of grammaticalisation theory and more recent
developments that link grammaticalisation and constructionalisation.
References
Aijmer, Karin. 2007. The interface between discourse and grammar: The fact is that. In
Agnes Celle and Ruth Huart, eds. Connectives as Discourse Landmarks.
Amsterdam: Benjamins, 31-46.
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward
(1999). Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson
Education.
Huddleston, Rodney & Geoffrey Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the
English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2000. English Abstract Nouns as Conceptual Shells. From Corpus
to Cognition. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Tobler, Franziska. 2014. The Use of Bare Noun Phrase Subjects: A Parallel CorpusBased Study of English and German. Unpublished MA Thesis, University of
Zurich, English Department.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2015. Investigating ‘periphery’ from a functionalist
perspective. Linguistics Vanguard 1(1): 119-130.
142
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Distributive vs. collective functions of Finnish quantifiers: The case of
moni ‘many’
Tuomas Huumo
(University of Turku/University of Tartu)
Finnish quantifiers such as moni ‘many’, usea ‘several’ or muutama ‘a few’ are
inflected for number and case. Their singular forms quantify a noun in the singular but
designate a plurality of referents (e.g. moni mies [many.NOM man.NOM]; cf. the English
many a man). Some of these singular forms favor a distributive reading while others
favor a collective reading in ambiguous contexts. In my presentation I use a Cognitive
Grammar (e.g., Langacker 2008) approach to account for the distributive vs. collective
oppositions between the (functional) singular nominative forms of two quantifiers: moni
and usea.
While usea is a regular nominative, moni has two distinct forms that share the
function of the nominative: the regular nominative moni and the morphologically
partitive form mon-ta [many.SG-PAR] which however has been generalized to contexts
where it has a function similar to the nominative of cardinal numerals (Branch 2001;
Länsimäki 1995; Nyman 2000), e.g., Tä-ssä on mon-ta ~ kaksi kirja-a [here-INE
be.PRES.3SG many-PAR ~ two.NOM book-PAR ‘Here are many ~ two books’ (note that
Finnish numerals select the quantified noun in the singular partitive). In contexts where
numerals alternate between nominative and partitive, an NP with monta is ambiguous.
For example, in O arguments a nominative numeral marks culminating aspect and a
partitive numeral non-culminating aspect, as in Lu-i-n kaksi kirja-a [read-PST.1SG
two.NOM book-PAR] ‘I read two books (completely)’ vs. Lu-i-n kah-ta kirja-a [readPST.1SG two-PAR book-PAR] ‘I read two books (not completely) ~ I was reading two
books’. In such contexts monta has become ambiguous: Lu-i-n mon-ta kirja-a [readPST.1SG many-PAR book-PAR] ‘I read many books’ does not tell whether the aspect
culminates [a partitive proper] or not [a functional nominative]. This is why moni has
developed a pleonastic “double partitive” mon-ta-a [many.SG-PAR-PAR], which is used
in contexts where numerals are likewise in the partitive.
In sum, moni has two forms that share the functions of the nominative: the regular
moni and the nominativized partitive monta. In my presentation I give an account of the
distributive vs. collective meaning oppositions between moni and monta by comparing
them with the regular nominative of the quantifier usea ‘several’. I use both actualusage data gathered from the Internet as well as self-constructed minimal pairs (as a
native speaker). I demonstrate that moni is unambiguously distributive, usea allows
both distributive and collective readings, while monta is collective only. For example,
in the ambiguous context Tä-hän häkki-in mahtu-u X norsu(-a) [this-ILL cage-ILL fit3SG X elephant(-PAR)] ‘This cage fits X elephant(s)’, the nominative moni is distributive
(the cage fits many elephants one at a time [i.e. only smaller ones]), monta is collective
(the cage fits many elephants at the same time) and usea is ambiguous.
References
Branch, Hannele 2001. Branch, Hannele. 2001. ”Montaa” kielivirheenä: näkymättömän
käden jäljillä. Virittäjä 105 (2): 193–215.
143
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. Cognitive Grammar. A Basic Introduction. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Länsimäki, Maija 1995. Montaa-partitiivi. Kielikello 2/1995. Available at:
http://www.kielikello.fi/index.php?mid=2&pid=11&aid=264
Nyman, Martti 2000. Näkymätön käsi ja kielitieteen epistemologia. Virittäjä 104: 46–
70.
Antipassive in Middle Welsh: The ym-VERB ac-construction
Britta Irslinger
(University of Freiburg i. Br.)
Antipassive constructions are common in ergative languages. In this type of
construction, the object is ‛demoted’ from its characteristic direct-object case into an
oblique case. The demotion of the patient indicates its low affectedness, while shifting
topicality to the agent. Givón (2001, 171) argued that this device can also be found in
nominative languages, at least under certain conditions, and gave the following
examples from English:
a.
b.
Transitive
Antipassive intransitive
He shot the deer.
He shot at the deer.
more affected patient
less affected patient
Middle Welsh displays an equivalent strategy. While in ex. (1), the unprefixed
verb gwarandaw 'to hear, listen' is used transitively with the direct object uiui, ex. (2)
has the same verb prefixed with ym-. Ymwarandaw occurs with the indirect
(prepositional) object a llef ‛with cry’, introduced with the prepostion a, ac ‛with’.
(1) “Arglwyd,” heb
y gwr o
’r
got, “pei guarandawut iui”
lord
say.PRT.3SG ART man from ART bag if hear.IPF.2SG PRON.1SG
“Lord,” said the man from the bag, “if you would hear me” (PKM 1, 17.15-16)
(2) Ac
and
ef
ual
as
byd
yn
be.PRS.HAB.3SG PT
ymwarandaw a llef
PREV.hear.VN with cry
yr
erchwys,
ART pack
a
gylwei
llef
erchwys
arall.
PRON.3SG PT hear.IPF.3SG. cry
pack
other
‛As he listened out for the cry of the pack he heard the cry of another pack’ (PKM 1, 1.11f.)
In Middle and Modern Welsh, ym-verbs, i.e. verbs compounded with the prefix
ym-, constitute an important sub-group of the verbal inventory. The Geiriadur
Prifysgol Cymru lists almost 500 ym-verbs from
all periods of Welsh. The Middle
Welsh verbal prefix ym- has been studied previously mainly as a marker of reciprocity
and reflexivity, while the ym-VERB ac-construction has been identified as the
discontinuous reciprocal construction, cf. ex. (3) from English and ex. (4) from Middle
Welsh. The latter is very frequent and found with most reciprocal verbs (Vendryes
1927).
144
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(3)
a. reciprocal
John and Maria argued.
b. discontinuous reciprocal John argued with Maria.
(4)
a. ac a
dechreuwyt gwiscaw amdanunt, ac ymlad
a wnaethant.
and PT start.PRT.IPS arm.VN about-3PL and PREV.kill.VN PT do.PRT.3PL
‛they started to arm them, and they fought (with each other).’ (PKM 4, 73.14)
b. Nyt ymladwn
ac wynt, ac ny
bydwn
yn Lloygyr ballach.
NEG PREV.fight.PRS.1PL with PRON.3PL and NEG be.HAB.PRS.1PL in England
long.COMP
‛We will not fight with them, and we will not remain in England any longer.’ (PKM
3, 55.1)
The present paper is based on the corpus of Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi (PKM) from
the White Book of Rhydderch which comprises 23,576 words. This text contains
144 verbal ym-forms (tokens), from 58 different verbs (types). The ym-VERB acconstruction occurs with 49 tokens / 25 types. It could be demonstrated that the
discontinuous reciprocal construction has the dicourse- pragmatic function of demoting
untopical participants of reciprocal events thus shifting the topicality to the agent.
(5)
a. Intrans. and trans.
b. Intransitive reciprocal
c. Intrans. discontinuous reciprocal
lladd ‛to kill’
ymladd ‛to fight with each other’
ymladd ac ‛to fight with so.’
The antipassive reading of the ymVERB ac-construction is much rarer and only
found with some verbs. It seems to have evolved from the discontinuous reciprocal
construction through reananylsis. Possible candidates for a reanalysis could be verbs
like ymgolli ‛to lose each other’, where the reciprocal semantics is rather unexpected
and less common. In this case, ymgolli a’i gedymdeithon was at some time perhaps not
correlated with the intransitive reciprocal verb (6b.), but directly with the transitive
simple verb colli y gedymdeithon ‛to lose his companions’ 6a.). The resulting
correlation between (7a.) and (7c.) is not the demotion of a participant but the demotion
of the patient. This relation was extended analogically to the pair in (8), which can be
analysed only as demoting the patient.
(6)
a. Intrans. and trans.
b. Intransitive reciprocal
c. Intrans. discontinuous reciprocal
colli ‛to lose’
ymgolli ‛to lose each other’
ymgolli ac ‛to get separated from’
(7)
a.
c.
colli y gedymdeithon ‛to lose his companions’
ymgolli a’i gedymdeithon ‛to get separated from
his companions’
gwarandaw llef ‛to hear a cry’
ymwarandaw a llef ‛to listen out for a cry’
(8)
Transitive
Antipassive intransitive
a. Transitive
b. Intransitive antipassive
References
Givón, Talmy 2001: Syntax. An introduction. Vol. II. Amsterdam/Philadephia:
Benjamins. GPC: Bevan, Gareth et al. (eds.). 1950 –: Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru.
A dictionary of the Welsh language. Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru.
http://geiriadur.ac.uk/gpc/gpc.html
PKM: Williams, Ifor (ed.) 1931: Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi. Caedydd: Gwasg Prifysgol
Cymru.
145
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Vendryes, Joseph 1927: Les verbes composés avec ym- dans les Mabinogion. In
Mélanges bretons et celtiques offerts à M. J. Loth. Rennes & Paris: Plihon et
Hommay, 49-62 (Annales de Bretagne : Hors série).
Syntax-intonation “mismatches” in Romance
Johannes Kabatek
(University of Zurich)
In intonation languages, the relationship between intonation patterns and sentence
types is, on the one hand, a parallel one (in the etymological sense of prosody): a
question is generally marked by question intonation, an exclamation by the
corresponding exclamation intonation. On the other hand, this default relationship is a
starting point for variation: marked intonation patterns may be neutralized for several
reasons (e.g. question intonation is redundant when questions are marked syntactically
or when a list of questions is presented and context helps to identify the sentence type,
cf. Kabatek 1996, 207). Furthermore, there exists the possibility of “mismatches” or
dislocations between syntax and intonation, when the intonation patterns contradict the
syntactic type of the utterance. A commonly known case is the so-called “rhetorical
question”, when a question is pronounced as a statement and the pragmatic effect is an
anticipation of the hearer’s answer. Waltereit (2005), recalling Lepschy (1978),
describes the pragmatic effect of the opposite type, when a declarative sentence is
marked by question intonation. If we have a closer look at the possible mismatches
between syntax and intonation, we can identify a whole system of theoretically possible
combinations, as in the following scheme, where x, y are variables for sentence types
(declarative, interrogative, exclamatory…) that can be linked to syntactic structures, on
the one hand, and to intonational patterns, both combining in different ways (default or
“unmarked”: x-x; y-y; “dislocated” or “marked”: x-y; y-x).
The aim of our presentation is a) to verify the range of possibilities of such
combinations in two Romance languages, namely French and Spanish and b) to describe
the pragmatic effect of dislocation types and their respective degree of
conventionalization. We will base our observations on an acceptability experiment with
146
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
16 different stimuli (combinations of four sentence types in French and Spanish uttered
with four different intonation patterns, cf. Milano 2015).
The results show that syntax-prosody dislocation allows, in both languages, for
much more than only the rhetorical question, that they are part of the inventory of our
linguistic competence and that some of the combinations are more conventionalized
whereas others lead to more spontaneous interpretations. In addition, we can see that
certain clearly syntactically coded functions (such as the French est-ce que-questions)
do not allow for all types of intonational combinations and that generally Spanish is
(due to its different prosodic configuration) more flexible than French.
References
Escandell Vidal, María Victoria. 2011. Prosodia y pragmatic. Studies in Hispanic and
Lusophone Linguistics 4, (1): 193–207.
Kabatek, Johannes. 1996. Die Sprecher als Linguisten. Interferenz- und
Sprachwandelphänomene dargestellt am Galicischen der Gegenwart. Tübingen:
Niemeyer.
Lepschy, Giulio C. 1978. Saggi di linguistica italiana, Bologna: Il Mulino.
Milano, Alessandra. 2015. “Dislocaciones” prosódicas. Una comparación entre el
español y el francés mediante un estudio empírico, M.A. Thesis: University of
Zürich.
Waltereit, Richard. 2005. La polifonía prosódica: Copiar un patrón entonativo. Revista
Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana 6, 137-152.
Hebrew’s fledging future perfect constructions
Danny Kalev
(Tel Aviv University)
Hebrew‟s verbal templates pa’al and yif’al designate past and future tenses 2
respectively.
However, new future anterior constructions, based on verbs with past tense
morphology, are now emerging. I here address three such constructions and outline a
grammaticalization cline.
Future anterior constructions occur in temporal clauses whose matrix refers to the
future:
(1) todi‟i
li
ke-she-higa’at (Bar 2003: 97)
Inform.IMPERATIVE.2.SG.F
DAT.1.SG when-COMP-arrive.PST.2.SG.F
„Let me know when you reach (lit. reached) [the staircase landing]‟
An anterior is an event E that precedes a point of reference R (Reichenbach 1947).
higa’at in (1) thus conveys future anteriority, despite its past tense morphology:
2
pa’al and yif’al refer here to Hebrew‟s suffixed forms (“past tense”) in all of the seven verbal templates
(binyanim). This naming convention is adopted from Bar 2003.
147
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(2) S‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒E‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒‒R→
Present
Daughter‟s arrival
Daughter‟s informing
Future anteriors probably paved the way to future resultatives:
ecle-nu: 900. xasaxta:
300 (Mobile operator‟s ad, July 2012)
DEF-price at-1.PL 900 save.PST.2.SG.M 300
„Our price: 900. Your saving will be (lit. you saved): 300‟
(3) ha-mexir
(4) shalosh pirsomot
ve-xazarnu
Three commercials and-return.PST.1.PL
„We‟ll be right back after three commercials‟ (lit. „three commercials and we
returned‟)
xasaxta in (3) conveys a future state stemming from spending 900 shekels, since
this creates an alleged saving of 300. This interpretation forms part of the explicit
content, while the contextually infelicitous literal meaning („you saved‟) is suppressed.
Similarly, xazarnu in (4) conveys a future state. Future resultatives differ from future
anteriors such as (1) in two respects:
 They indicate a state (De Swart 2007)
 They lack an overt temporal clause
A third use, the Military Imperative Construction, consists of pa’al in second
person and a temporal upper-bound. It communicates commands with a resultative
interpretation:
(5) shloshim shniyot
hikaftem
et
ha-ma‟ahal!
thirty seconds
encircle.PST.2.PL.M
ACC DEF-encampment
„Run around (lit. you ran around) the encampment in 30 seconds!‟
(6) shloshim shniyot
nagatem
ba-gader
ve-xazartem!
thirty seconds
touch.PST.2.PL.M
LOC.DEF-fence and-return.PST.2.PL.M
„Run (lit. you touched) to the fence and be back (lit. you returned) in thirty seconds!‟
The three constructions present a conundrum. Although they use past tense
morphology, they refer to future events exclusively. Nonetheless, this choice is
motivated, I argue: Hebrew, a non-habere language (Tobin 1997: 1856), lacks the
auxiliary to have. Speakers have therefore recruited past tense forms to communicate
future anteriority, i.e., Future Perfect. I propose that these constructions have
grammaticalized through a sequence of changes to the core meaning of pa’al. Initially,
pa’al lost its „absolute past‟ meaning through its use as a relative past marker.
Such uses were accompanied by inferences of immediacy3 and anteriority. Future
anteriors enabled future resultative uses. 4 Finally, certain resultative constructions
acquired modal (imperative) meanings as well:
(7) Absolute past→ relative past→ future anterior→ future resultative→ modal resultative
3
4
E often “leads up to” R (Declreck 2006: 125). Hence, the possible inference of immediacy.
Both involve an event and a subsequent reference point (Hengeveld 2011: 13).
148
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
The layering hypothesis predicts that older forms and meanings may very well
persist alongside newer forms and meanings synchronically (Hopper and Traugott 2003:
124). Indeed, every reconstructed stage in (7) is contemporarily productive in Hebrew.
Bybee et al. (1994: 81-87) and Hengeveld (2011: 17) propose a unidirectional
grammaticalization path: resultative→ anterior→ tense. However, Hebrew‟s anterior
constructions must have evolved in the opposite direction. I therefore propose a
bidirectional grammaticalization path whereby tense markers can become anteriors as
well.
References
Bar, Tali. 2003. If, conditional sentences in contemporary Hebrew: Structure, meaning,
and usage of tenses. Munich: Lincom Europa.
Bybee, Joan L., Revere Perkins, & William Pagliuca. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar:
Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages in the World. Chicago: Chicago
University Press.
Declerck, Renaat. 2006. In Bernd Kortmann and Elizabeth C. Traugott, eds., The
grammar of the English verb phrase volume 1: The grammar of the English tense
system. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
De Swart, Henriëtte. 2007. A cross-linguistic discourse analysis of the Perfect. Journal
of Pragmatics 39:2273-2307.
Hengeveld, Kees. 2011. The grammaticalization of tense and aspect. In Heiko Narrog
and Bernd Heine, eds., The oxford handbook of grammaticalization. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 580-594.
Hopper, Paul. J. and Elizabeth Closs Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization (2nd ed.).
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reichenbach, Hans. 1947. Elements of symbolic logic. New York: Free Press.
Tobin, Yishay. 1997. Same versus different crosslinguistically: articles in English,
Spanish and Hebrew. In Raymond Hickey and Stanisƚav Puppel, eds., Language
History and Linguistic Modelling: Language history. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter,
1831-1857.
Does audiovisual contextualization of L2 idioms enhance students’
comprehension and retention?
Monica Karlsson
(Halmstad University, Sweden)
The positive effect of a supportive written context on comprehension and
retention when faced with a previously unknown idiomatic expression is today an
indisputable fact, especially if relevant clues are given in close proximity of the item in
question (Nation 2001) . Research has also shown that giving learners a chance of
visualizing the meaning of an idiom by offering them its source domain and/or by
elaborating etymologically, i.e. providing a mental picture in addition to the
spoken/written form (referred to as dual coding), seems to enhance comprehension and
149
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
retention even further, especially if the idiom is of a more transparent kind (Boers,
Demecheleer & Eyckmans 2004).
The present study aims to discuss whether contextualization of an audiovisual
kind could help increase comprehension and retention of L2 idioms. 40 Swedish firstterm university students studying English as part of their education to become middleschool teachers participated in the investigation, which tested 24 idioms, all of which
were ascertained to be previously unknown to the informants. While half of the learners
were subjected to a test in which they were asked to watch scenes from various TV
programmes, each scene including one idiomatic expression in a supportive context, the
remaining 20 students, as a point of reference, were only offered written contexts,
though equally supportive. Immediately after these sessions, both groups were given the
same idioms in a decontextualized form and asked to give their meaning. After three
weeks, finally, the students were subjected to yet another decontextualized
comprehension test.
Since research has shown that mastery of idioms in one’s L1 correlates to a great
extent with a person’s ability to comprehend idioms in an L2, all the informants were
also asked to take a test focusing on idioms in their L1. The result on this test is thus
seen to indicate each student’s potential for understanding and memorizing various
idiomatic expressions from a more general perspective.
Preliminary results clearly show that audiovisual contextualization indeed has a
positive effect on learners’ retention. In addition, preliminary results also show that
those learners’ who were able to recall most meanings were those who had a propensity
for idiom comprehension in their L1.
References
Boers, F., Demecheleer, M. & Eyckmans, J. (2004) ’Etymological elaboration as a
strategy for learning idioms.’ In Bogaards, P. & Laufer, B. (eds.) Vocabulary in a
second language. Selection, acquisition and testing. Philadelphia: John Benjamins
Publishing Company.
Nation, I. S. P. (2001) Learning vocabulary in another language. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Italian c’è-clefts and French il y a-clefts: Distribution and information
structure
Lena Karssenberg and Daniela Guglielmo
(KU Leuven; University of Salerno)
1. Introduction
In this study we wish to provide a comprehensive insight into the use, distribution
and information structure articulations of clefts in French and Italian.
Both French il y a ‘there is’ clefts (Lambrecht 1988/1994/2001; Léard 1992;
Willems & Meulleman 2010; Choi-Jonin & Lagae 2005) and Italian c’è ‘there is’ clefts
(Berretta 1995; Berruto 1986; Marzo & Crocco 2015) have been classified as
‘presentational’ constructions that express all-focus (1).
150
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(1)
a. Il y a le téléphone qui sonne!
there has the phone that rings
b. C’è il gatto che ha fame.
there.is the cat that has hunger
‘The phone is ringing!’ (Lambrecht 1988)
‘The cat is hungry.’
(Berretta 1995)
However, the frequency of occurrence of these clefts may differ in the two
languages, because in Italian all-focus can also be achieved by means of subject-verb
inversion (Lambrecht 1988/1994). Furthermore, il y a-clefts have also been claimed to
be able to express a focus-background articulation, in which the relative clause
expresses a discourse-given variable for which the clefted element provides a value (2)
(Lambrecht 2001; Léard 1992). However, this focus-background articulation has not
been mentioned in the Italian literature on c’è-clefts and we therefore do not know
whether it exists.
(2)
[“Who wanted to have some more meat?”]
(Lambrecht 2001:506-507)
‘Y avait André qui voulait encore de la viande, y avait Bertrand, mais Claude il
en voulait pas.’
‘André wanted some more meat, Bertrand did, but Claude didn’t want any.’
2. Research questions
(i) What is the distribution of il y a-clefts and c’è-clefts in spoken and written
corpora? (French: Le Monde 1998 (written), CFPP2000 (spoken); Italian: La
Stampa 1998 (written), BADIP (spoken). (Section 3)
(ii) To what extent do focus-background and all-focus clefts occur throughout the
different corpora? (Section 4)
3. Distribution data
A comparison of the two French corpora reveals that the il y a-cleft is much more
frequent in spoken French (429 clefts/million words) than in the journalistic corpus (3
clefts/million words).
As for Italian, c’è-clefts also occur more frequently in spoken Italian than in the
journalistic corpus. We found 127 clefts in a corpus of 500.000 words, which is
however less frequent than the occurrence of il y a-clefts in CFPP. La Stampa
surprisingly contains more clefts than Le Monde, viz. 9 clefts/million words. A
plausible explanation for this unexpected difference is that there is a big register
difference between informal and journalistic French, whereas the Italian journalistic
register is evolving towards a more dynamic register that integrates several structures
from spoken language and differs substantially from formal literary Italian (Antonelli
2011).
4. Information structure
A large majority of the clefts in both languages are of the all-focus type (cf. [1]).
However, focus-background il y a-clefts (2) do occur in both French corpora, albeit in
smaller numbers (25%). The Italian c’è-cleft also proves to be able to express focusbackground, although again not as often as all-focus.
151
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
References
Antonelli, Giuseppe. 2011. Lingua. In A. Afribo & E. Zinato (eds.), Modernità italiana.
Cultura, lingua e letteratura dagli anni settanta a oggi. Rome: Carocci.
Berretta, M. 1995. Come inseriamo elementi nuovi nel discorso/1: 'C'è il gatto che ha
fame'. Italiano e Oltre 53. 79-105.
Choi-Jonin, Injoo & Véronique Lagae. 2005. Il y a des gens ils ont mauvais caractère. A
propos du rôle de il y a. In A. Murguía (ed.), Sens et références. Mélanges
Georges Kleiber, 39-66. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information structure and sentence form: Topic, focus and the
mental representations of discourse referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Lambrecht, Knud. 2001. A framework for the analysis of cleft constructions. Linguistics
39(3). 463-516.
Léard, Jean-Marcel. 1992. Les gallicismes. Étude syntaxique et sémantique. ParisLouvain: Duculot.
Marzo, Stefania & Claudia Crocco. 2015. Tipicità delle costruzioni presentative per
l'italiano neostandard. Revue Romane 50(1). 30-50.
Willems, Dominique & Machteld Meulleman. 2010. "Il y des gens ils viennent acheter
des aspirines pour faire de l'eau gazeuse". Sur les raisons d'être des structures
parataxiques en il y a. In Marie-José Béguelin, Mathieu Avanzi & Gilles
Corminboeuf (eds.), La parataxe. Tome 2: structures, marquages et exploitations
discursives, 167-184. Bern: Peter Lang.
Articulatory corpus of native Polish and Polish-accented English
speech
Dziubalska-Kołaczyk Katarzyna, Grzegorz Krynicki, Jarosław Weckwerth, Grzegorz
Michalski, Kamil Kaźmierski, Barbara Maciejewska and Bożena Wiskirska-Woźnica
(Adam Mickiewicz University; Poznan University of Medical Sciences)
This paper describes the design, collection and characteristics of the database of
native Polish, native English and Polish-accented English speech. The database contains
articulatory information obtained by means of electropalatography (EPG) and
optopalatography (OPG). This information is time-aligned with audio and automatically
generated phonemic transcription (Rosenfelder et al. 2011).
The subjects that contributed at this stage to the corpus were 4 natives of English
and 8 advanced Polish learners of English. The corpus includes approx. 80 hrs of read,
guided and spontaneous speech. The scripts were phonetically balanced Polish
sentences, phonetically balanced English sentences (Harvard Sentences 2013), TIMIT
Database prompts (TIMIT 2013), press articles and book excerpts. Native English data
were recorded during the preparation of a practical course on English pronunciation for
advanced Polish learners. Polish and Polish-accented English data were recorded during
the warm-up phase preceding each of 20 classes in a 3-month conducted on the basis of
this course. The content of the course was designed to cover English consonants, vowels
152
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
and clusters that were deemed amenable to instruction by means of EPG/OPG and that
cause particular problems for Polish students.
The EPG/OPG systems used in conducting the course and recording the corpus
were EOS (from German Elektro-Optische Stomatographie) by Birkholz and Preuß
(Preuß et al. 2013, Preuß and Birkholz 2015) and Linguagraph by Rose-Medical (Kelly
et al. 2000). EOS was used with the original artificial palate containing 124 tongue-topalate contact sensors arranged in grid layout (c.f. Wrench 2007: 6), 5 optical distance
sensors along the midsagittal palate contour, 1 optical distance sensor measuring upper
lip movement. The EOS palate is delivered in one of two sizes to better match the size
of the palate of the speaker. The Linguagraph multiplexer was used with a specially
designed artificial palate similar to the original one in that it followed the anatomically
normalized electrode layout dating back to the Reading Electropalatograph (Hardcastle
and Roach 1979) and different in that it was not made from acrylic but from two layers
of vacuum-thermoformed foil with contact sensors embedded between them.
The resulting corpus is
– the largest corpus of articulatory data containing Polish-accented English
(c.f. Święcicki 2013; 4 speakers each saying 10 Polish and 10 English words;
3-dimensional electromagnetic articulography – EMA with audio);
– one of the largest corpora of articulatory data containing native Polish (c.f.
Lorenc and Święcicki 2012; 20 speakers; EMA, audio and video);
– the largest database of EPG data for Polish (c.f. Guzik and Harrington 2007;
3 speakers, each producing 160 word pairs; EPG with audio);
– the only database containing OPG for Polish or Polish-accented English
speech.
Comparable corpora in other languages include,
(1) for native speech:
a. MOCHA-TIMIT (Wrench and Hardcastle 2000) contains
electromagnetic midsagittal articulometry (EMA), laryngographic,
EPG and acoustic data from 40 speakers of English, each reading a
460 sentence subset of the TIMIT;
b. EUR-ACCOR (Marchal and Hardcastle 1993): laryngographic, EPG
and acoustic data from 5-10 speakers per language including Catalan,
English, French, German, Irish Gaelic, Italian and Swedish; each
speaker reading a combination of nonsense items, real words and short
sentences;
(2) for accented speech:
a. EMA corpus for Mandarin-Accented English (Ji et al. 2014);
b. EMA corpus for Dutch-accented English (Wieling et al. 2015).
The potential applications of the corpus include phoneme classification for native
and accented speech, training robust automatic speech recognition systems, silent
speech interfaces, creating models for articulatory speech synthesis, study of language
transfer and phonological analysis.
We believe that combining the potential of EPG and OPG will bring the revival of
interest in these techniques, increase their availability and widen their applications.
153
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
References
Hardcastle, William. J. – Peter J. Roach. 1979. An instrumental investigation of
coarticulation in stop consonant sequences. In H.H. and P. Hollien (eds.) Current
Issues in the Phonetic Sciences. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 533-550.
Harvard Sentences. 2013. URL: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~hgs/audio/ harvard.html,
Last access: 30-11-2015.
Guzik, Karita - Harrington, Jonathan. 2007. The quantification of place of articulation
assimilation in electropalatographic data using the similarity index (SI). Advances
in Speech–Language Pathology 9: 109 – 119.
Ji, An - Jeffrey J. Berry - Michael T. Johnson. 2014. The Electromagnetic
Articulography Mandarin Accented English (EMA-MAE) corpus of acoustic and
3D articulatory kinematic data. Proc. 39th Int.Conf. Acoust. Speech Signal
Process. Florence, 7719-7723.
Kelly, Steve - Alison Main - Graham Manley - Calum McLean. 2000.
Electropalatography and the Linguagraph system. Medical Engineering & Physics
22, 47–58.
Lorenc, Arleta - Radosław Święciński. (In print). Articulatory Studies of the Polish
Sound System. Logopedia.
Marchal, Alain – William J. Hardcastle, 1993. Instrumentation and database for the
cross-language study of coarticulation, Language and Speech 36: 2, 3: 137-153.
Preuß, Simon - Christiane Neuschaefer-Rube - Peter Birkholz. 2013. Prospects of EPG
and OPG sensor fusion in pursuit of a 3D real-time representation of the oral
cavity. In Wagner P (ed.) Studientexte zur Sprachkommunikation: Elektronische
Sprachsignalverarbeitung. TUDPress: Dresden, 144-151.
Preuß, Simon - Peter Birkholz. 2015. Fortschritte in der Elektro-Optischen
Stomatographie. In Wirsching G (ed.) Studientexte zur Sprachkommunikation:
Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung. TUDPress: Dresden, 248-255.
Rosenfelder, Ingrid - Joe Fruehwald - Keelan Evanini - Yuan Jiahong. 2011. FAVE
(Forced
Alignment
and
Vowel
Extraction)
Program
Suite.
http://fave.ling.upenn.edu.
Święciński, Radosław 2013. An EMA study of articulatory settings in Polish speakers
of English. In Waniek-Klimczak, Ewa; Shockey, Linda R. (eds.) Teaching and
Researching English Accents in Native and Non-native Speakers. Heidelberg:
Springer Publications, 73-82.
TIMIT. 2013. URL: http://web.mit.edu/course/6/6.863/share/nltk_lite/ timit/sentences,
Last access: 30-11-2015.
Wieling, Martijn - Pauline Veenstra - Patti Adank - Andrea Weber - Mark Tiede. 2015.
Comparing L1 and L2 speakers using articulography. In Proceedings of ICPhS in
Glasgow: International Phonetic Association.
Wrench, Alan - William Hardcastle. 2000. A multichannel articulatory speech database
and its application for automatic speech recognition, Proc. 5th SSP, Kloster Seeon,
305–308.
Wrench, Alan 2007. Advances in EPG palate design. Advances in Speech-Language
Pathology, 9(1): 3-12.
154
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
And that’s a fact: Concerning the nature of facts as an evidential
category
Seppo Kittilä
(University of Helsinki)
Evidentiality refers to the source of information the speaker has for his/her
statement. For example, the statement ’John is running in the park’ can be based on the
visual observation, or the speaker may have hearsay evidence for this. Many studies
have discussed evidentiality in and across languages and shown that languages tend to
mark certain evidence types explicitly including sensory evidence, inference,
assumption and hearsay (see, e.g., Aikhenvald 2004).
In this paper, an evidence type that has received much less attention in studies of
evidentiality, namely facts, will be discussed (see, however, e.g. Loughane 2009 and
Plungian 2010 for notes on facts). Facts are defined as pieces of information with the
following criteria:
1. Facts are parts of the speaker’s established world view; the speaker has
absolute subjective certainty about their truth value.
2. The speaker can refer to a fact without any kind of external evidence.
3. The original source of information does not need to be specified, and the
differences between different sources of information have been
neutralized.
According to the definition above ‘2 plus 2 is 4’ is a fact, but ‘John is walking in
the park’ is not, because we need some kind of external evidence for the latter
statement. It should also be noted that for the linguistic coding of facts it is relevant that
the speaker believes something to be a fact regardless of its non-linguistic facthood. For
example, ‘Sydney is the capital of Australia’ may be a fact to the speaker, even though
this is not a fact non-linguistically.
I will also propose a formal-functional typology of fact coding based on the
element languages use for their coding (the element used is usually the most direct
evidential of the given language). First, languages may code facts by a dedicated factual
evidential, as in Wutun. Second, there are languages that code facts by an egoevidential, which is attested, e.g., in Okspamin. Third, facts may formally resemble
visual/direct evidentials, as in, e.g., Tucano. And finally, languages may leave facts
formally non-coded, which is the case in, e.g., Finnish. The data for the typology has
not been collected systematically, because the coding of facts is not always discussed in
grammars. Therefore I will not present any statistical frequencies.
The linguistic coding of facts manifests both their special nature and their
common features with other evidence types. The first type underlines the peculiarity of
facts in according them distinct formal coding. Type 2, in turn, stresses the personal
nature of facts in treating them formally in the same way as ego-evidence. In Type 3,
the feature in common is the high degree reliability; it is very hard to deny a fact or
something we have actually seen. This also applies to Type 4, because zero coding
occurs for all types of direct evidence in Finnish. Moreover, Type 4 also emphasizes the
peculiar nature of facts; no existing evidential is compatible with the semantics of facts,
because of which they are left non-coded.
155
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
References
Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Loughnane, Robyn. 2009. A grammar of Oksapmin. Doctoral dissertation, University of
Melbourne.
Plungian, Vladimir. 2010. Types of verbal evidentiality marking: an overview. In
Gabriele Diewald & Elena Smirnova (eds.), The Linguistic realization of
evidentiality in European languages, 15-58. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Postulates and perspectives for methods in Forensic Linguistics
Hannes Kniffka
(Bonn University)
If we understand ”linguistics” as the science of how language works, (a) as a
system in itself and (b) as a system of human communication - (a) referring to “pure
linguistics” and (b) to various fields of “applied linguistics” - what is frequently named
“forensic linguistics” (henceforth: FL) must comprise those perspectives and features
that concern the “pure linguistics” ingredients of FL and those that concern the
“applied linguistics” ingredients of FL. What are they in an empirical definition? Which
elements would a preliminary extensional definition of FL contain? How could those
make up an intensional definition of FL in a first approximation?
Two postulates seem indispensable from the perspective of a practising forensic
linguist:
(A) ALL THAT IS
(CONTAINED) IN LINGUISTICS MUST BE
(CONTAINED) IN FORENSIC LINGUISTICS, and vice verse, ALL
THAT IS CONTAINED IN FORENSIC LINGUISTICS MUST BE
CONTAINED IN LINGUISTICS. There is no new field FL in this sense.
(B) To arrive at EMPIRICAL GENERALIZATIONS for FL analysis it seems
feasible to use a very old-fashioned linguistic distinction as an analytical
grid to examine the (1) OBSERVATIONAL ADEQUACY, (2)
DESCRIPTIVE ADEQUACY, (3) EXPLANATORY ADEQUACY of the
linguistic analysis. This paper gives a heuristic illustration of (1), (2) and (3)
on the basis of authentic data of expert testimony given by the author in/for
German Courts in the last 40 years or so.
In focus will be the discussion of one area of FL-work, AUTHORSHIP
ANALYSIS of ANONYMOUS INCRIMINATED TEXTS. Within this area, special
attention will be given to the questions (a) of so-called multiple authorship of a text
and (b) of structural differences in the status of text types in FL-analysis. It is
hypothesized that these two (in my opinion under-researched domains of questions)
may show the relevance of quantitative methods for FL-analysis.
Literature
Chaski, C.E., 2001, Empirical Evaluations of Language-based Author Identification
Techniques, in: Forensic Linguistics: International Journal of Speech, Language ,
and the Law, 8(1):1-65.
156
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Corder, S.P.1971, Idiosyncratic Dialects and Error Analysis, in: International Review of
Applied Linguistics 9:147-159.
—, 1973. Introducing Applied Linguistics. Harmondsworth.
James, C., 1998, Errors in Language Learning and Use: Exploring Error Analysis.
Harlow: Longman.
Kniffka, H., 1981 Der Linguist als Gutachter bei Gericht. Überlegungen und
Materialien zu einer "Angewandten Soziolinguistik". In: Peuser, G. & S. Winter
(eds.) 1981. Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft. Grundfragen - Bereiche Methoden. Bonn, Bouvier Verlag H. Grundmann, 584-634.
—, 2007, Working in Language and Law. A German Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan.
Basingstoke.
Sapir, E. ,1927. “Speech as a Personality Trait”. American Journal of Sociology 32,
1927, 892-905. Reprinted as Sapir, E. “Speech and Personality”. In: N. Markel,
ed., 1969. Psycholinguistics. An Introduction to the Study of Speech and
Personality. Homewood. Ill. 1969, 44-56.
Antipassive in South Eastern Huastec (Maya, Mexico)
Ana Kondic
(Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena)
Antipassivization is one of the valency decreasing operations in South Eastern
Huastec (Ethnologue code HSF). In the HSF antipassive construction the logical object
of a transitive predicate appears as an adjunct or a non-core argument. The example (1a)
is a transitive construction where subject is marked ergatively and the object is an
argument. In (1b) the subject is the only argument, marked absolutively, while the
logical object is adjunct (an oblique NP introduced by preposition ti):
(1a) u txuk-y-al
an kwaa’txim.
E1 sew-TS-INC DEF cloth
‘I sew clothes.’
(AmE4-36)
(1b) in
A1
txuk-ux
ti
kwaa’txim.
sew-AP(INC) PREP cloth
‘I sew clothes.’
(AmE4-36)
The HSF antipassive is typologically interesting for the following reasons:
 there are three different dedicated antipassive markers with the same
semantics
 HSF Reciprocal marker is a grammaticalised antipassive form
 HSF antipassive is not used for Agent extraction like in other languages
of the family
 an indefinite object is not demoted to oblique in an antipassive
construction (differential object marking)
157
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
The South Eastern Huastec antipassive has all the features of an antipassive
construction of ergative languages (Hopper & Thompson 1980, Cooreman 1994, Dixon
& Aikhenvald 2000, Polinsky 2005 and 2015): there is a dedicated verbal marker (even
three of them, as mentioned above); detransitivisation takes place (subject is the only
argument of a HSF antipassive construction : the underlying agent becomes subject of
the antipassive construction and is marked absolutively.); the logical object of a
transitive verb is demoted (by the preposition ti), deleted or incorporated (bare object).
The most interesting fact about the HSF antipassive is the differential object
marking: a definite underlying object is demoted to an oblique NP (1c) in an AP
construction, while an indefinite underlying object remains unmaked (1b). In both (1b)
and (1c) examples subject is the only argument of the clause and is marked absolutively
(the absolutive marker is zero for third person singular and plural). The example (1a)
illustrates a HSF transitive construction.
(1a) an
olom in k´ap-uw
DEF pig E3 eat-TS(COM)
‘The pig ate the maize cob.’
an
way
DEF maize.cob
(1b) an
olom k’ap-uumath juun i
way
DEF pig eat-AP.PERF one NM maize.cob
‘The pig has eaten a maize cob.’
(1c) an
olom
k’ap-uumath
an ti
way
DEF pig
eat-AP.PERF
DEF PREP maize.cob
‘The pig has eaten the maize cob.’ (AmE5-68)
Differential object marking is one of the effects of the definiteness hierarchy that
operates in HSF. The author will discuss in detail the above described features of the
HSF antipassive.
South Eastern Huastec (Ethnologue code HSF) is an endangered Mayan language
spoken in northern Veracruz, Mexico. The data for this study come from the fieldwork
the author has undertaken in the village of San Francisco Chontla, Veracruz.
References
Abraham, W., Leisio, L. 2006. Passivization and typology: form and function.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Aissen, J. 1990. Una teoría de voz para idiomas Mayas. In: Lecturas sobre la lingüística
maya. England N. & Elliott, S.R. (eds.), 399-419. Guatemala: CIRM.
Alexiadou, A., Schäfer, F. 2013. Non-canonical passives. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bricker, V. 1978. Antipassive constructions in Yucatec Maya. In: Papers in
Mayan Linguistics, Nora C. England (ed.), 3–24. Columbia: Museum of
Anthropology, Columbia University.
Campbell, L. 2001. Valency Changing Derivations in K'iche”, in Changing Valency:
Case Studies in Transitivity, R.M.W. Dixon and A. Aikhenvald (eds.), 236–281.
Cambridge: CUP.
Cooreman, A. 1993. A Functional Typology of Antipassives. In: Voice. Form and
Function. B. Fox, P. Hopper (Eds.), J. Benjamins.
Dayley, J. 1981. Voice and ergativity in Mayan languages. Journal of Mayan
Linguistics 2: 3-82.
158
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Grinevald,C., Peake, M. 2011. Ergativity and voice in Mayan Languages: a functionaltypological approach. In: Ergativity, Valency and Voice, Haude, K. & Authier, G.
(eds), Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 15-50
Janic, K. 2010. Typology of Antipassive Constructions in Slavonic Languages, proc.
of Polyslav XIII, University of Hamburg, Germany, 25-27 September 2009 ,
Bente-Fischer, K., Lazar, M., Krumbholz,
G. & Rabiega-Wiśniewska, J.
(eds), Verlag Otto Sagner, München - Berlin 2010, 40/13, pp. 62-69, Beiträge
Der Europäischen Slavisitschen Linguistik (Polyslav).
Klaiman, M.H. 1991. Grammatical voice. Cambridge University Press.
Kondic, A. 2012. A Grammar of South Eastern Huastec, a Mayan language from
Mexico. PhD dissertation, University of Sydney, Australia /Université Lyon 2,
France.
Smith-Stark, Th. 1978. Mayan Antipassive: some Facts and Fiction. In: Papers in
Mayan Linguistics, Nora England (ed.), 169–187. Columbia: Museum of
Anthropology, Columbia University.
Stiebels, B. 2006. Agent Focus in Mayan languages. Natural Language & Linguistic
Theory 24: 501-70.
Zavala, R. 1997. Functional Analysis of Akatek Voice Constructions. In: IJAL 63:
439–74.
Agglutination in North Germanic
Kristina Kotcheva
(Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg)
Danish, Norwegian and Swedish constitute the Mainland Scandinavian subset of
North Germanic. These languages share a number of morphological characteristics,
which set them apart from the Insular Nordic languages Faroese and Icelandic. One
important difference between the two subsets of North Germanic is based on
morphological typology: whereas Insular Nordic exhibits rich inflectional morphology
with several different categories marked in nouns and verbs, these features are lacking
in Danish, Norwegian or Swedish.
Among the Mainland Scandinavian languages, Swedish is often characterized as
displaying conspicuously agglutinative features (e.g. Askedal (2002); Braunmüller
(2007)). This claim is usually backed by citing examples of inflected nominal forms
such as bänk-er-na-s (stem–number– definiteness–case) 'of the banks' or verbal forms
like köp-te-s (stem–tense–voice) 'was/were bought'. In the examples above the
morphemes bearing the relevant grammatical categories can easily be separated, which
is strongly reminiscent of separability in Turkish or Finnish, cf. Turkish köy-ler-im-in
(stem–number–possessive–case), Finnish talo-i-ssa-ni (root–house–number–case–
possessive) 'in my houses'. The typological distinction between agglutinative vs.
fusional morphology has been investigated since the beginning of comparative
linguistics, recently also by e.g. Plank (1999), Haspelmath (2009) or Bickel & Nichols
(2013).
159
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
A comparative survey of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish nominal and verbal
inflection was carried out based on criteria proposed by Haspelmath (2009).
Haspelmath's survey is based on 30 languages, none of which is North Germanic. The
criteria employed are based on differentiating between a) cumulation vs. separation of
morphological categories coded in a given morpheme; b) stem alternation vs.
invariance; c) affix alternation vs. invariant affixes; and d) affix suppletion vs.
uniformity.
The data comprised borrowed and inherited nouns and verbs in Danish,
Norwegian and Swedish. The results demonstrate that with regard to the criteria cited
above, agglutinative morphology is especially noticeable in recently borrowed or
recently formed verbs while inherited verbs are less agglutinative. Both inherited and
recently borrowed or recently formed nouns occupy a position between these two poles.
With regard to the criteria stem alternation and affix suppletion, Danish, Norwegian and
Swedish display scores placing them near the agglutinative pole of the agglutinative–
fusional scale. With respect to the criterion cumulation of grammatical categories,
Danish and Swedish nominal inflectional places these languages even clearly at the
agglutinative pole. The opposite is true for both Norwegian and for the verbal inflection
of Danish and Swedish who in this case belong clearly near the fusional pole of the
agglutinative–fusional scale. Thus while Danish is no less ‘agglutinative’ than Swedish,
the same is not true for Norwegian. This indicates a typological split not only between
Mainland und Insular Scandinavian but even among the Mainland Scandinavian
languages.
References
Askedal, John Ole. 2002. The typological development of the Nordic languages II:
Morphology and Syntax. In O. Bandle et al. (eds.) The Nordic languages: An
international handbook of the history of the North Germanic languages, vol. 1.
Berlin: de Gruyter, 1872–1886.
Bickel, Balthasar, and Joanna Nichols. 2013. Exponence of selected inflectional
formatives. In M. S. Dryer and M. Haspelmath (eds.) The World Atlas of
Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary
Anthropology.
Braunmüller, Kurt. 2007. Die skandinavischen Sprachen im Überblick. Tübingen: Narr,
3rd edition.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2009. An empirical test of the Agglutination Hypothesis. Studies
in Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 76:13–29.
Plank, Frans. 1999. Split morphology: How agglutination and flexion mix. Linguistic
Typology 279–304.
Wolfe, Sam. 2015. The nature of Old Spanish Verb Second reconsidered. Lingua 165:
132–155.
160
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Aspect and modality in Malabar Indo-Portuguese
Ana Krajinović
(Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Language contact established in the 16th century during Portuguese colonialism
in India gave rise to the formation of the Indo-Portuguese creoles, including Malabar
Indo-Portuguese (MIP). Despite its long-standing vitality in a wide stretch of the
Malabar Coast, this language entered a phase of obsolescence and nowadays is given
practically as extinct, counting no more than a few speakers in Cannanore. The earliest
linguistic analysis of MIP was carried out by Schuchardt (1882, 1889a, 1889b).
Recently, fieldwork-based documentation undertaken by Hugo Cardoso since 2006
provides us with modern data of MIP. These include interviews with four speakers from
Cannanore and the last speaker from Cochin and they constitute the source of linguistic
data analysed in this work. Our aim is a semantic description of aspectual and modal
marking and their interface in MIP.
MIP is an SOV language with predominantly preverbal TMA markers and a
smaller set of postverbal markers. Many markers combine temporal and aspectual
values. The preverbal imperfective marker tæ, for instance, has the present form tæ and
the past form tinha, which contrasts with the past perfective marker ja. Tæ can also
appear in the postverbal position as a perfect marker. A detailed description of the
semantics of tæ will be provided in this paper, by contrasting its functions in different
morphosyntactic positions or forms and comparing it with other markers available in
those positions.
Regarding modality, our main focus will be the preverbal irrealis marker lɔ,
whose functions are related to the expression of a potential situation, mostly within the
dynamic modality, i.e. with conditioning factors internal to the relevant individual
(Palmer 2001: 9–10). Temporal reference of verbs marked by lɔ depends solely on the
context (e.g. adverbial expressions), that can trigger a past, present or future
interpretation. Whenever a lɔ-marked verb is situated in the past or present, its
interpretation is imperfective, or more precisely, gnomic (universal) or habitual
(repetition of an action over time) (Bertinetto & Lenci 2010). In contrast to the
imperfective tæ, lɔ cannot mark an action as progressive. Given that progressive actions
take place at the moment of speech, there is no doubt that they refer to real situations;
thus, tæ should be classified as realis and the following classification can be made for
MIP:
161
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
TMA value
Realis/irrealis distinction in
MIP
present progressive
realis (tæ)
past progressive
realis (tinha)
past perfective
realis (ja)
gnomic and habitual
present
realis (tæ) or irrealis (lɔ)
gnomic and habitual past
realis (tinha) or irrealis (lɔ)
future reference
irrealis (lɔ)
Potential
irrealis (lɔ)
The connection between the realm of irrealis and imperfectivity has been explored
by many authors (van Gijn & Gipper 2009, Fleischman 1995, Givón 1994: 270, 322)
and the typological tendency for that overlap will be revisited in this paper. Moreover,
possible effects of language contact on MIP will be considered. We will argue that the
notion of potential found in gnomic and habitual, and not for instance in present
progressive, is responsible for the close relationship between irrealis and some aspects
of imperfective.
References
Bertinetto, Pier M. & Lenci, Alessandro. 2010. Iterativity vs. habituality (and gnomic
imperfectivity). Quaderni del Laboratorio di Linguistica della SNS 9(1). 1–46.
Fleischman, Suzanne. 1995. Imperfective and Irrealis. In: Bybee, Joan & Fleischman,
Suzanne (eds). Modality in Grammar and Discourse. Amsterdam, Philadelphia:
Benjamins. 519–551.
Givón, Talmy. 1994. Irrealis and the subjunctive. Studies in Language 18:2. 265–337.
Palmer, Frank R. 2001. Mood and Modality. 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Schuchardt, Hugo. 1889a. Beiträge zur Kenntnis des kreolischen Romanisch. V.
Allgemeineres über das Indoportugiesische (Asioportugiesische). Zeitschrift für
Romanische Philologie 13. 476–516.
Schuchardt, Hugo. 1889b. Beiträge zur Kenntnis des kreolischen Romanisch. VI. Zum
Indoportugiesischen von Mahé und Cannanore. Zeitschrift für Romanische
Philologie 13. 516–524.
Schuchardt, Hugo. 1882. Kreolische Studien II. Über das Indoportugiesische von
Cochim. Sitzungsberichte der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu
Wien (Philosophisch-historische Klasse) 102. 799–816.
van Gijn, Rik & Gipper, Sonja. 2009. Irrealis in Yurakaré and other languages: On the
cross-linguistic consistency of an elusive category. In: Hogeweg, Lotte & de
Hoop, Helen & Malchukov, Andrej (eds). Cross-linguistic Semantics of Tense,
Aspect and Modality. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins. 155–178.
162
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
European perceptions of L1 and L2 Englishes: A multivariate analysis
Gitte Kristiansen and Dirk Geeraerts
(Universidad Complutense de Madrid; University of Leuven)
In this paper we present the results of a multifactorial analysis of the statistics of
the first European large-scale study on the social perceptions of English as a Lingua
Franca. In the experiment 12 varieties of English (8 L2 and 4 L1 accents) were
evaluated on a semantic differential scale involving eight dimension (and in a second
step spatially identified) by panels of over 100 listeners at 8 European universities. The
8 L2 linguistic varieties represent the main language groups in Europe: Spain and
France (Romance), Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland (West
Germanic, exhibiting national variation in both Dutch and German), Denmark (North
Germanic) and Poland (Slavic). The 4 L1 varieties were General American, Southern
Standard British English, Australian and Scottish. The 12 speech fragments were
selected by native listeners on the basis of prototypicality judgments from a pool of over
100 30-second recordings of the same text. The experiment was also run at the
University of Canterbury, New Zealand, to allow for an overseas bird’s eye perspective.
While basic statistics had been performed on the data, this is the first time that
regression analyses are applied to include the sociolinguistic variables retrieved as part
of the experiment, to throw light on the extent to which interactions and mixed effects
play a significant role in the results. For instance, while the Duncan test proved that the
West Germanic language groups (Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany and
Switzerland) proved to be the best identifiers (though not the best identified) when
compared to the Romance or Slavic or North Germanic languages, the extent to which
sociolinguistic variables correlate with values pertaining to correct identification or
relative evaluation on psychological attributes had so far not been sufficiently explored.
Keywords: cognitive sociolinguistics, lectal perception, attitudes, English as a lingua
franca.
The clusivity of the null subject pronoun in the Polish -NO/-TO
construction
Małgorzata Krzek
(Newcastle University)
This paper is concerned with the interpretation of the null subject pronoun found
in the -NO/-TO construction, in (1), and the contribution it can make to the discussion
on the Context-linked grammar (Sigurðsson 2014).
(1)
Chciał
żeby tego
nie
kupowano.
wanted.2SG that this.ACC
NEG bought.IMP
‘He wanted for one/them not to buy it.’
163
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
The construction in (1) uses an uninflected verb form with a -NO/-TO suffix and
can only refer to the past. It has been classified as ‘active indefinite’ (Kibort (2004);
Dziwirek (1994); Śpiewak (2000)), and not passive. The reason for this is that it occurs
with a full thematic Agent and with accusative case on the direct object argument. The
construction in question is ungrammatical with a passive auxiliary and a passive byphrase (Lavine 2005).
The null subject of the -NO/-TO construction can only have a human reference. It
triggers masculine plural marking on adjectival and nominal predicative complements,
suggesting that the null subject is specified as 3PL.MASC. The constructions with 3PL
arbs are said to always exclude the speaker. However, as the example below illustrates,
this exclusion seems to be a matter of perspective (see Malamud (2013) for a similar
observation) rather than reference. Therefore, the null subject in the -NO/-TO
construction can be used with reference to participants other than masculine, plural or
speaker and addressee exclusive (Kibort 2004).
(2)
Mówiono
o
tym wyżej.
talked.IMP
about this higher
‘[One] discussed this above.’ (meaning: ‘As I/we said above’)
(adapted from Siewierska 1988: 284, footnote 19)
In the light of this observation, it is interesting to note that (a) the null subject
pronoun consistently fails tests for inclusivity (as proposed by Kratzer (2000)), showing
that the null subject pronoun does not license a predicative NP related to the subject in
the main clause. (This licensing problem may have to do with the fact the null subject in
the -NO/-TO cannot be bound by another DP. In this respect, it behaves like an Rexpression); and (b) contrary to the null pronoun of the Italian SI construction
(D’Alessandro 2007: 173), the pronoun of the - NO/-TO is not logophoric, meaning that
it does not refer back to the reporting speaker. Therefore, contrary to the Italian SI, it
cannot receive its inclusive interpretation from the logophoric features present in the
higher layers of the CP.
In order to account for this, I propose that the interpretation of the null subject of
the - NO/-TO construction will depend on a matching relation with the null Familiar
Topic (Frascarelli & Hinterhölzl 2007), that is merged in the C-domain and is a Dlinked constituent. Specifically, it will assign a value to the referential index on D. The
null pronoun, merged as a complement of D, is a complex variable (Harley & Ritter
2002), consisting of descriptive privative features. It is similar to 3rd person pronouns
that do not have a participant subfeature in their featural make-up and as such they can
only be bound by topics and not by logophoric features.
References
D’Alessandro, R. 2007. Impersonal si constructions. Agreement and interpretation.
Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Dziwirek, K. 1994. Polish Subjects. New York: Gardland.
Frascarelli, M & R. Hinterhölzl. 2007. Types of topics in German and Italian. In S.
Winkler & K. Schwabe (Eds.), On information structure, meaning and form.
Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 87-116.
164
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Harley, H., and Ritter, E. 2002. Person and number in pronouns: a feature-geometric
analysis. Language 78(3): 482-526.
Kibort, A. 2004. Passive and passive-like constructions in English and Polish. Ms.,
Cambridge: University of Cambridge.
Kratzer, A. 2000. German Impersonal Pronouns and Logophoricity. Paper presented at
the Generic pronouns and logophoricity conference, Sao Paolo.
Lavine, J. E. 2005. The morphosyntax of Polish and Ukrainian -NO/-TO. Journal of
Slavic Linguistics 13(1): 75-117.
Malamud, S. 2013. (In)definiteness driven typology of arbitrary item. Lingua 126: 131. Siewierska, A. 1988. The passive in Slavic. In Shibatani, M. (ed.), Passive
and Voice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 243-289.
Sigurðsson, H. A. 2014. Context-linked grammar. Language Sciences 46: 175-188.
Śpiewak, G. 2000. The Lexical-Conceptual Structure of Nominativeless Constructions
in Polish. Towards a Unified Account. Doctoral Disseration. Lublin: M. CurieSkłodowska University.
Understanding the alternative - Negation and degrees of abstraction
in the acquisition of contrast relations in German
Milena Kuehnast, Victoria Bartlitz, Dagmar Bittner and Thomas Roeper
(Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) Berlin; Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS)
Berlin; Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) Berlin; University of Massachusetts
Amherst)
Contrast relations always imply negative polarity as they trigger the conventional
implicature that two adversatively conjoined propositions should not hold together
(Blakemore 2002, Evers-Vermeul & Sanders 2009). Therefore, overt negation in the
previous context is expected to affect the feasibility of adversatives relations in the
upcoming discourse. Moreover, the construal of contrast between discourse entities
crucially depends on the type and the accessibility of a superordinate concept, the
common integrator (Lang 1984) defining them as members of a set. Thus the common
distinction between Semantic Opposition (SO) and Denial of Expectation (DoE)
appears to be contingent on the level of abstraction of the common integrator, e.g.
object, action, epistemic state or assumption.
In this talk we address the role these two contextual properties play in the
acquisition of adversative meanings marked by the general adversative connective
aber (but) in German. In particular, we investigated the effect of negation interpreted
in a given situation model on the accessibility of a contrast relation and on the
probability for this relation to be situated on the content (SO and Correction), or on the
epistemic level (DoE).
Applying a picture-aided sentence continuation task, we conducted 3
experimental studies with 3- to 6-year-old monolingual German children (N = 254)
and adults (N = 72). Participants were presented with short stories about every day
activities carried out by several protagonists. Each story contained two intransitive
(slide & swing) and two transitive predicates (collect chestnuts or leaves). We used
165
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
positive and negative prompts with the connective aber (but), e.g. Tina is / isn’t
collecting chestnuts but … . Studies 1 and 2 focussed attention on observable
alternatives on the same or different level of abstraction, (object/object or
object/action). In Study 3, we advanced the construal of epistemic contrasts by using a
modal verb construction and pointing at an observer, e.g. There comes Thea. She wants
/ doesn't want to collect chestnuts but … .
Logistic regression analyses showed a significant effect of negation on the
production of well-formed adversative sentences and a significant interaction with age
group. Compared to the negative conditions positive conditions increased the
probability of missing responses and of syntactically and semantically deficient
responses. This effect was strongest in the group the 3-year-olds and decreased with
age. With respect to interpretation, we found an overall preference for contrasts on the
content level based on comparison and substitution of alternatives of the same type either objects or actions. This preference was replicated in Study 3, designed to
support epistemic contrasts. Although the production of epistemic contrasts in positive
contexts increased with age, the performance of the 6-year-olds still did not reflect the
adult preferences for DoE.
We discuss these findings with respect to the modulating effect of negation on
the level of abstraction of the common integrator, which eventually determines the
likely interpretation of an adversative utterance as SO or DoE. Further we address the
mapping of meaning types onto the syntactic structure of adversative sentences and the
effects of the functional differentiation of adversative connectives in German.
References
Blakemore, D. (2002). Relevance and Linguistic Meaning. The Semantics and
Pragmatics of Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Evers-Vermeul, J., & Sanders, T. (2009). The emergency of Dutch connectives; how
cumulative cognitive complexity explains the order of acquisition. Journal of
Child Language, 36(4), 829–854.
Lang, E. (1984). The Semantics of Coordination. Studies in Language Companion
Series 9. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Allocutivity in Indo-Aryan languages: On the relationship between
addressee-oriented agreement marking and politeness
Abhishek Kumar Kashyap and Foong Ha Yap
(The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
This paper examines the pragmatic uses of the verbal inflections in three IndoAryan languages, namely, Hindi, Bajjika and Maithili, the latter two spoken in the
northeastern state of Bihar in India as well as in Nepal. These three languages exhibit
different person-agreement systems, with Hindi using only a single agreement slot
within its verbal morphology, as in (1), while Bajjika and Maithili use two and three
agreement slots respectively, as in (2) and (3).
166
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(1) Hindi:
(2) Bajjika:
(3) Maithili:
(NPNOM/ERG) (NPNNOM) V-TNS-AGR1NOM/ERG
(NPNOM)
(NPNNOM) V-TNS-AGR1NOM (-AGR2NNOM)
(NPNOM)
(NPNNOM) V-TNS-AGR1NOM (-AGR2NNOM)
(-AGR3NNOM.3H)
Unlike the single-agreement paradigm for Hindi, where the person-agreement
marker (AGR1) co-indexes with either the subject or object NP, as in (1), the doubleagreement paradigm of Bajjika deploys an additional person-agreement marker (AGR2)
that signals the social status of either the addressee or a third person referent, as in (2)
and (4), with implications for the expression of politeness in Bajjika conversational
discourse. The triple-agreement paradigm of Maithili deploys yet another personagreement marker (AGR3) to show deference to an honorific third person referent, as in
(3), exemplified in (5).
(4)
rohan-ø
toh-ar beṭā ke
parhāw-al-aw
ram-NOM 2H-GEN son ACC teach-PRS.3NH.NOM-2H.NNOM
‘Rohan teaches your son.’
(5)
ham-ø to-rā
kaniyā-ke dekh-au-l-i-au-nh .
1-NOM 2H-DAT bride-DAT see-CAUS-PST-1NOM-2NH/MH.NNOM3H.NNOM
‘I showed you the bride.’
(Bickel et al. 1999: 482)
In this paper, we will examine how allocutivity phenomena (i.e. addresseeoriented agreement marking) are realized in spontaneous conversations in these three
Indo-Aryan languages. Hindi represents a language lacking allocutivity markers, while
the two Bihari languages (Bajjika and Maithili) represent languages with allocutivity
markers (Kashyap & Yap, in press). Using a discourse analysis and interactional
linguistics framework (Selting & Couper-Kuhlen 2001), our study reveals how native
speakers of Bajjika and Maithili deploy allocutivity markers as social status markers
that contribute to the negotiation of face-needs of discourse referents, and in this way
serves as a powerful resource for politeness work in interactive talk.
Comparison with Hindi, which lacks allocutivity markers, further sheds light on
variations in how face-needs and politeness work are managed in allocutive and nonallocutive languages. The findings from this study have implications for a pragmatic
typology of politeness strategies across languages. The findings from this
crosslinguistic study may also contribute to research on the genetic relations among
Indo-Aryan languages, with divergences in the
person-agreement systems
between the Hindi (< Sanskrit) lineage and Bajjika/Maithili (< Bihari < Prakrit)
lineage providing insights into bifurcations in the Indo-Aryan family relationships.
References
Bickel, B., W. Bisang & Y.P. Yādavā. 1999. Face vs. empathy: the social foundation of
Maithili verb agreement. Linguistics 37(3): 481–518.
Kashyap, A.K. & F.H. Yap. (in press). Epistemicity, social identity and politeness
marking: A pragmatic analysis of Bajjika verbal inflections. Linguistics.
Selting, M. & E. Couper-Kuhlen. 2001. Studies in Interactional Linguistics.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
167
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
French il y a-clefts, existential sentences and the Focus Marking
Hypothesis
Karen Lahousse and Lena Karssenberg
(KU Leuven)
1. Introduction
Il y a-clefts (1a) and existential sentences (1b) are usually said to express an allfocus articulation (see Lambrecht 1988/1994/2001; Léard 1992, Choi-Jonin & Lagae
1997; Bentley 2014).
[Context: What’s happening?]
a. Il y a Sarah qui chante. ‘Sarah is singing.’ (lit. ‘There’s Sarah who’s
singing’)
b. Il y a un chat dans le jardin. ‘There’s a cat in the garden’
(1)
Clefts in general as well as existentials have been argued to signal to the hearer
that the referent they introduce is not a topic but rather a focus, i.e. the Focus Marking
Hypothesis (‘FMH’) (Lambrecht 1994/2001; Erteschik-Shir 2007). However, this
hypothesis has been discredited w.r.t. it clefts and c’est clefts, which often introduce
topics, not foci (Dufter 2006/2009; Prince 1978).
2. Goal
Three corpora (formal and informal written and spoken French: Le Monde,
YCCQA, CFFP2000) are consulted to verify whether il y a-clefts always introduce a
focus constituent or whether they can also introduce topics. They turn out to express
three information structure articulations, which are shown to be on a par with three
types of existentials. It will be argued that the FMH should be retained for il y a-clefts
and existentials.
3. Articulations of il y a-clefts
75% of the il y a-clefts have an all-focus articulation (1a), 24% have a focusbackground articulation (2) and 6 all-focus tokens contain a double contrast (3).
(2)
Focus-background
[A: ‘With which freeware programs can I open video files encoded in MP4?’]
B: (…) En ce qui concerne la lecture de mp4 il y a VLC qui les ouvre très bien.
‘(…) As for opening mp4 files, there’s VLC that opens them very well.’
(YCCQA)
(3)
Double contrast
[‘And Salman says: “(...) There’s the establishment that hates me. There’s all
those assholes who think I just made publicity with the fatwa.]
Mais il y a le peuple qui, lui, a toujours été formidable avec moi. (Le Monde)
‘But there’s the people who, them, have always been fantastic to me.’
168
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
4. Similarities between il y a-clefts and existentials
Firstly, in both all-focus il y a-clefts (1a) and regular existentials (1b), the whole
sentence has been claimed to be predicated of a stage topic (Erteschik-Shir 2007;
Leonetti 2014…). Secondly, focus-background il y a-clefts (2) are shown to be on a par
with ‘list existentials’ (4) (Rando & Napoli 1978; Abbott 1997; Bentley 2014; Leonetti
2008/forthc).
(4)
A: - How many people know about this?
B: - There’s me and there’s you. That’s all.
(Rando & Napoli 1978:308)
Lastly, in (5), just like in (3), il y a introduces a contrastive pronoun, with respect
to which the following clause (you have...) provides a comment.
(5)
She said there were people struggling for their lives and then there's you -- you
have all these opportunities and you're throwing it all away. (www)
References
Abbott, Barbara. 1997. Definiteness and existentials. Language 73(1). 103-108.
Bentley, Delia. 2014. Subject canonicality and definiteness effects in Romance theresentences. Language 89(4). 675-712.
Choi-Jonin, Injoo & Véronique Lagae. 2005. Il y a des gens ils ont mauvais caractère. A
propos du rôle de il y a. In A. Murguía (ed.), Sens et références. Mélanges
Georges Kleiber, 39-66. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag.
Dufter, Andreas. 2006. Kompositionalität und Konventionalisierung: Satzspaltung mit
c'est im Französischen der Gegenwart. Romanistisches Jahrbuch 57. 31-59.
Dufter, Andreas. 2009. Clefting and Discourse organization - comparing Germanic and
Romance. In Andreas Dufter & Daniel Jacob (eds.), Focus and Background in
Romance languages, 83-121. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Erteschik-Shir, Nomi. 2007. Information Structure. The Syntax-Discourse Interface.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lambrecht, Knud. 1988. Presentational cleft constructions in spoken French. In John
Haiman & Sandra A. Thompson (eds.), Clause combining in grammar and
discourse, 135-179. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information structure and sentence form: Topic, focus and the
mental representations of discourse referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Lambrecht, Knud. 2001. A framework for the analysis of cleft constructions. Linguistics
39(3). 463-516.
Léard, Jean-Marcel. 1992. Les gallicismes. Étude syntaxique et sémantique. ParisLouvain: Duculot.
Leonetti, Manuel. 2008. Definiteness effects and the role of the coda in existential
constructions. In Henrik Høeg Müller & Alex Klinge (eds.), Essays on Nominal
Determination: From morphology to discourse management, 131-162.
Leonetti, Manuel. to appear. Definiteness effects: the interplay of Information Structure
and pragmatics. In Susann Fischer, Tanja Kupisch & Esther Rinke (eds.),
Definiteness: Bilingual, typological and diachronic variation. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
169
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Prince, Ellen F. 1978. A Comparison of Wh-Clefts and it-Clefts in Discourse. Language
54(4). 883-906.
Rando, Emily & Donna Jo Napoli. 1978. Definites in there-sentences. Language 54(2).
300-313.
Variability in predicate agreement with conjoined subjects in
Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian
Nedžad Leko, Nermina Čordalija, Ivana Jovović, Lidija Perković, Nevenka
Marijanović, Midhat Šaljić, Dženana Telelagić and Amra Bešić
(University of Sarajevo)
Following Marušič et al. (2015) we will show that Bosnian/ Croatian/ Serbian
(BCS), like Slovenian, has three distinct strategies of subject-predicate agreement when
the subject consists of conjoined noun phrases. Gender and number agreement forms of
participles in the predicate may be computed in three different ways depending on the
features of conjoined noun phrases in the subject. Participles may agree in gender and
number with the subject phrase as a whole (that is agreement with the maximal
projection - Boolean Phrase), or with the conjunct which is closest to the participle, or
with the conjunct which is hierarchically the highest conjunct.
In order to prove this claim, we performed a controlled experimental study of the
morphosyntax of agreement between conjoined subjects and participles in BCS. We
conducted two types of studies: written and spoken elicitation, and in both we registered
variability in elicited production. We will present results of our experiments
documenting the existence of three distinct grammars of conjunct agreement in BCS.
We first investigated possible patterns of participial agreement with uniform
gender conjuncts when both conjuncts are plural, and when uniform gender plural
subjects occur both preverbally and postverbally. Such subjects largely elicit participial
agreement that corresponds to the gender of the two conjuncts. However, default
masculine agreement occurs even when both conjuncts are the same gender (feminine,
or neuter), demonstrating that the ‘resolution rule’ (Corbett 1983) of masculine
agreement is attested even in uniform gender conjunctions.
The default masculine agreement is more prominent when both conjuncts are not
of the same gender, but rather of mixed gender – feminine and neuter. The total number
of elicited examples, both written and oral, with [Neut + Fem] and [Fem + Neut]
conjuncts in preverbal position was 655. The dominant form of agreement was the
default masculine agreement (327 examples, or (roughly) 50%), then the agreement
with the closest conjunct (260 examples, or (roughly) 40%), and the least represented
was the agreement with the highest conjunct (68 examples, or (roughly) 10%). The
percentage of 10% is not small, so these examples cannot be treated as performance
errors, and therefore we conclude that agreement with the highest conjunct is the third
strategy of agreement used by native speakers. This contradicts the claim by Bošković
(2009) that highest conjunct agreement in preverbal position is not possible in BCS.
Then we investigated possible patterns of participial agreement with [Fem + Neut]
and [Neut + Fem] conjuncts in postverbal position. The total number of elicited
170
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
examples, both written and oral, with [Neut + Fem] and [Fem + Neut] conjuncts in
postverbal position was 670. The dominant form of agreement was the agreement with
the nearest conjunct (637 examples, or (roughly) 95%), then the default, masculine
agreement (19 examples, or (roughly) 3%), and the least represented was the agreement
with the furthest conjunct (14 examples, or (roughly) 2%). The percentage of 2% is too
small and therefore these examples should be treated as performance errors rather than a
separate agreement strategy. So our results confirm the claim by Marušič et al. (2015)
that a postverbal conjunction will not allow agreement with the second/ last/ farthest
conjunct.
References
Bošković, Željko. 2009. Unifying first and last conjunct agreement. NLLT 27: 455–
496.
Corbett, Greville. 1983. Hierarchies, Targets and Controllers. Agreement Patterns in
Slavic. London: Croom Helm.
Marušič, Lanko, Andrew Nevins, and William Badecker. 2015. The Grammars of
Conjunction Agreement in Slovenian. Syntax 18.1: 39–77.
Absolute or relative tense-marking in Russian triclausal constructions?
Alexander Letuchiy
(National Research University Higher School of Economics)
In Russian, embedded clauses are said to differ in the strategies of tense-marking.
As Barentsen (1995) and Schlenker (2003) show, there is a clear tendency to absolute
tense-marking in adjunct clauses (1):
(1)
Polin-a
vernu-l-a-s’
Polina-SG.NOM
return-PST-SG.F-REFL
kogda vs-e
užina-l-i /#užinaj-ut.
when everyone-PL
dine-PST-PL / *dine-PRS.3PL
‘Polina returned when everyone were having dinner.’
In argument clauses, according to Xrakovskij (2009) relative tense-marking is
very often possible, though absolute one is also widespread (2) (see Barentsen 1995 for
some cases where one or another variant is preferred):
(2)
Ja
I.NOM
vyxod-it
go.out-PRS.3SG (relative)
‘I saw him leave the building.’
vide-l-Ø
kak
on
see-PST-SG.M
how he.NOM
/vyxodi-l-Ø
iz
zdanij-a.
/ go.out-PST-SG.M (absolute)
from building-SG.GEN
171
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
In my abstract, I focus on a special case when the sentence includes three clauses
organized in a chain like C1 [C2 [C3]].
Consider the following pair of sentences:
Ja
zna-l-Ø
čto
on
vsta-et
I.NOM
know-PST-SG.M tha he.NOM wake.up-PRS.3SG
t /*xote-l-Ø
rano
potomu_čto
xoč-et
porabota-t’.
early
because
want-PRS.3SG
/*want-PST-SG.M work-INF
‘I knew that he woke up early because he wanted to work a bit.’
(3)
Ja
zna-l-Ø
čto
on
vstava-l-Ø
I.NOM
know-PST-SG.M
that he.NOM
wake.up-PST-SG.M rano
potomu_čto
xote-l-Ø
/*xoč-et
porabota-t’. early
because
want-PST-SG.M
/*want-PRS.3SG
work-INF
‘I knew that he woke up early because he wanted to work a bit.’
(4)
In this context, in C2, either relative tense-marking (vstaet ‘wakes up’) or absolute
one (vstaval ‘woke up’) is possible. However, it turns out that the verb form in C3, with
the verb xotet’ ‘want’, must be the same as in C2.
This formal identity between C2 and C3 cannot be analyzed in terms of absolute /
relative tense-marking. The possibility of the variant with past tense in C2 and C3 is
predictable from the general tendency both in C2 and C3 past tense is interpreted
absolutely, as marking precedence to the speech act.
At the same time, the variant with present tense in C2 and past in C3 is
ungrammatical, though it could be possible: in this case, tense in C2 is interpreted
relatively, typically for argument clauses (the event in C2 vstaet ‘wakes up’ includes the
time of the event in C1), while C3 contains absolute tense, which is typical for adjunct
clauses (the event xotel ‘wanted’ precedes the speech act).
The general tendency also predicts that the variant in (3) with present tense forms
in C2 and C3 shouldn’t be possible, at least in the interpretation under analysis. (3) can
mean that both events are simultaneous to the event in C1 and precede the speech act.
In this case, both C2 and C3 contain tense forms with the relative interpretation, which
is in general impossible for C3 as an adjunct clause.
I propose that what makes variants with identical forms in C2 and C3 possible and
with different forms impossible is an independent principle:
(5)
If an adjunct clause denotes an event, simultaneous to the event in
the matrix clause, the verbs denoting these events must be designated
by verbs in the same grammatical form.
In the talk, I will check whether this principle is valid for all type of Russian
adjunct clauses and whether it is valid for argument clauses.
The principle in (5) allows us to think of re-interpretation of what we call
‘absolute tense marking’. While usually it is understood as marking the temporal
localization of the event with respect to the speech act, perhaps, it is more adequate to
think of tense-marking in (1) as in (6):
172
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(6)
Absolute tense-marking is marking simultaneity of events by using
identical verb forms.
This formulation covers both (1) (and the second variant of (2) with absolute
tense- marking) and triclausal constructions like (3) and (4). Of course, relative tense
assignment, as in the first variant of (2), does not follow the same strategy: though the
two events are simultaneous, the verb forms in the main and the embedded clause are
different.
References
Barentsen, Adrian. 1995. Shifting points of orientation in Modern Russian. Tense
selection in ‘reported perception’. In A. J. M. Janssen, W. van der Wurff (eds),
Reported speech: form and functions of the verb, 15-55. Amsterdam;
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Schlenker, Philippe. 2003. A Plea For Monsters. Linguistics and Philosophy 26. 29-120.
Xrakovskij, Viktor S. (ed.). 2009. Tipologija taksisnyx konstrukcij [Typology of taxis
constructions]. Мoscow: Znak.
Inter- and intra-typological variation in the expression of motion:
Evidence from elicited narratives
Wojciech Lewandowski
(University of Copenhagen)
According to Talmy (2000), the world’s languages can be classified as either
satellite-framed (SL; e.g., Slavic and Germanic) or verb-framed (VL; e.g., Romance). In
SLs, the Manner component is allowed to be encoded in the verbal root, whereas the
Path remains as a satellite. By contrast, in VLs, the Path is encoded in the verbal root,
whereby the Manner component is not typically allowed to be conflated with the motion
verb. Slobin (1991, 1996) observes that these differences are directly reflected in the
rhetorical style. In particular, S-framed speakers provide more dynamic descriptions of
motion events, which contain expressive details about Path and Manner, while Vframed speakers tend to provide static descriptions with less information about Manner
and Path.
However, as observed by Ibarretxe 2004, Sugiyama 2005, Croft et al. 2010,
among others, languages from the same group vary in the ways they make use of their
predominant pattern, thus leading to intra-typological variation. Following this line of
research I analyze the expression of motion in two SLs, namely German and Polish, and
two VLs, namely Spanish and Portuguese therefore providing evidence for both interand intra-typological variation (inter- and intra-genetic, i.e., German vs. Polish, and
Spanish vs. Portuguese). Unlike most previous studies, based on the widely exploited
frog story, my database comprises oral narratives elicitated on the basis of a 4 ½ min.
extract from Chaplin’s City Lights, a stimulus dynamically representing wellcontextualized human motion (cf. Pourcel 2005). My main hypothesis is that, in
173
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
general, inter-linguistic variation in the expression of motion can be attributed to the
availability of morpho-syntactic and lexical resources for encoding Path and Manner in
a given language (cf. Beavers, Levin and Tham 2010). For example, although narratives
in SLs contain much more information about Manner and Path than VLs, German
provides more dynamic Path elaborations than Polish because it has a richer inventory
of Path satellites (prefixes, PPs, adverbial particles, double particles, etc.) which do not
vary in terms of telicity, thus giving rise to many different morpho-syntactic Path
frames. By contrast, (i) Polish directional elements are not so diversified, and (ii)
prefixes differ from other Path resources as for aspect in the sense that only prefixes can
make an event telic and that is why they are the only means capable of encoding
bounded events. Moreover, Slavic prefixes are more lexicalized than Germanic
particles: since each prefixed verb constitutes a separate bounded event, multiple
satellites are by far more restricted in Polish than in German (and English). As for intragenetic variation, one of the observations that arises from the comparison of Spanish
and Portuguese is that the former provides more Manner information than the latter,
mainly by means of subordinated clauses headed by a gerund. This is most probably
due to the fact that the position in the clause of the Portuguese equivalent of the gerund
(“a + infinitive”), in the cases that are relevant for the present study, is more fixed than
the syntactic distribution of the gerund in Spanish.
References
Beavers, J., B. Levin, and S. Tham. (2010). The typology of motion expressions
revisited. Journal of Linguistics. 46, pp. 331-377.
Croft, William et al. (2010). Revising Talmy’s typological classification of complex
event constructions. In H. Boas (ed.), Contrastive Studies in Construction
grammar, pp. 201-236. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ibarretxe, Iraide. (2004). Motion events in Basque narratives. In S. Strömqvist and L.
Verhoeven (eds.), Relating events in narrative: Typological and contextual
perspectives, pp. 89-111. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Pourcel, S. (2005). Relativism in the linguistic representation and cognitive
representation of motion events across verb-framed and satellite-framed
languages. Doctoral thesis, University of Durham, UK.
Slobin, D. I. (1996). Two ways to travel: verbs of motion in English and Spanish. In M.
Shibatani & S.A. Thompson (eds.). Grammatical constructions. 195-219. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Sugiyama, Y. (2005). Not all verb-framed languages are created equal: The case of
Japanese. In Proceedings of the Thirty-first Annual Meeting of the Berkeley
Linguistics Society, 299-310.
Talmy, L. (2000). Toward a cognitive semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
174
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Polarity emphasis in Cebuano and Kavalan
Dong-yi Lin
(Ghent University)
Research on the syntax of polarity emphasis has revealed consistent structural
differences between two types of emphatic polarity markers (EPM): high and low
(Batllori & Hernanz 2013; Breitbarth & Haegeman 2014; Kandybowicz 2013). A high
EPM is base-generated in the CP left periphery, whereas a low EPM occupies an inner
focus/emphasis projection between TP and VP. The present paper investigates the
morphosyntax of EPMs in two Austronesian languages: tinuod in Cebuano and maqen
in Kavalan. It is argued that they are merged as a functional head below vP/VoiceP and
induce restructuring only when affixed with the patient voice (PV) marker.
Both tinuod and maqen exhibit morphosyntactic properties of a verb in that they
occupy the clause-initial position and can be affixed with tense/aspect markers and the
patient voice (PV) marker (1 & 2). PV should be analyzed as v or Voice in Syntax due
to its ability to assign an external argument (Lin 2015). The contrast between (3a) and
(3b) suggests that the PV marker on the two EPMs is also associated with argument
structure, esp. an external argument. They are merged as a functional head below
vP/VoiceP.
(1)
(2)
(3)
tinuod-on
ni
dodong
really-PV.FUT
ERG
Dodong
‘Dodong WILL read the book.’
maqen-an-na=ti
ni
really-PV-3ERG=PFV ERG
‘Imuy DID buy the house.’
a.
b.
ug
basa ang
read ABS
LNK
imuy m-Rasa
Imuy AV-buy
maqen=ti m-laydaw ti-abas
really=PFV AV-sad
NCM-Abas
‘Abas WAS sad.’
*maqen-an-na=ti
ni
really-PV-3ERG=PFV
ERG
ya
ABS
libro
book
lepaw
house
abas m-laydaw
Abas AV-sad
The distributional contrast between tinuod/maqen and epistemic markers also
supports the analysis of such EPMs as a low EPM below vP/VoiceP. Firstly, while
tinuod/maqen can take voice affixes, epistemic markers, e.g., Kavalan qawman
‘certainly’, cannot. Moreover, tinuod/maqen can be suffixed with the imperative
marker, whereas qawman is incompatible with imperative mood. When maqen and
qawman co-occur in a clause, qawman must precede maqen. All these differences can
be attributed to the hierarchical difference between the two EPMs and epistemic
markers. An epistemic marker is merged above vP/VoiceP in the TP domain (Cinque
1999), whereas tinuod/maqen is merged below vP/VoiceP.
Another piece of evidence for the low structural position of the two EPMs is that
they do not exhibit Main Clause Phenomena (MCP), as opposed to a high EPM in CP
175
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(Haegeman 2012). They can occur in subordinate clauses that resist MCP, e.g.,
conditional clauses and restrictive relative clauses.
Although both PV-marked and non-PV-marked tinuod/maqen exhibit properties
of a low EPM, their complements differ in structural complexity. When tinuod and
maqen are affixed with PV, tense/aspect markers and pronominal clitics must be
attached to them. Moreover, the lexical verb in this construction must occur in its
default, infinitive form and its theme argument must move to the matrix clause for the
absolutive case. In contrast, without PV on tinuod and maqen, the lexical verb following
them is able to take tense/aspect markers and pronominal clitics. The differences
indicate that only the PV-marked forms trigger restructuring and take an infinitive VP
as a complement.
References
Batllori, Montserrat, and M. Lluïsa Hernanz. 2013. Emphatic polarity particles in
Spanish and Catalan. Lingua 128.9-30.
Breitbarth, Anne, and Liliane Haegeman. 2014. The distribution of preverbal en in
(West) Flemish: Syntactic and interpretive properties. Lingua 147.69-86.
Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Haegeman, Liliane. 2012. Adverbial clauses, main clause phenomena, and the
composition of the left periphery. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kandybowicz, Jason. 2013. Ways of emphatic scope-taking: From emphatic assertion in
Nupe to the grammar of emphasis. Lingua 128.51-71.
Lin, Dong-yi. 2015. The syntactic derivations of interrogative verbs in Amis and
Kavalan. In New advances in Formosan linguistics, eds. by Elizabeth Zeitoun,
Stacy F. Teng, and Joy J. Wu, 253-289. Canberra: Asia-Pacific Linguistics.
Singular THEY in Asian Englishes
Lucía Loureiro-Porto
(University of the Balearic Islands)
Singular (also called epicene) they is a label which refers to the use of they (and
its inflectional forms) with a singular antecedent whose gender is not known or not
necessary, as illustrated by the often quoted example a journalist should never be forced
to reveal their sources. This use has been widely studied in British and American
English (Green 1977, Bodine 1990, Gastil 1990, Meyers 1990, Zuber & Reed 1993,
Balhorn 2004, 2009, Paterson 2011a, 2011b, Parini 2013, among others), and two main
motivations have been proposed for its birth and spread. The origin of singular they can
be traced back to Chaucer, who used it often with antecedents including the quantifier
every, which are grammatically singular but notionally plural (Balhorn 2004). This
medieval use of singular they is, therefore, semantically justified, and has survived to
present-day. The spread of singular they is, nevertheless, due to a recent social demand,
namely a wish to make language more democratic by avoiding the use of generic he
when the antecedent refers to a human being whose sex is unknown or not relevant (cf.
176
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Leech et al. 2009: 263, Farrelly & Seoane 2012). Despite the fact that prescriptive
grammars have warned against it (as shown in Curzan 2003: 76 ff.), singular they is
nowadays acknowledged as an acceptable form in Standard English (e.g. Huddleston &
Pullum et al. 2002: 494). Outer-circle varieties of English (Kachru 1985) are,
nevertheless, still unexplored in this respect. For this reason, the aim of this paper will
be to examine this grammatical feature in three Asian Englishes, namely those spoken
in Hong Kong, India and Singapore. These varieties are comparable because (i) they
share British English as superstratum, and (ii) their substrate languages have a genderneutral pronoun (at least in the nominative form). The approach will be corpus-based
and different text-types included in the ICE corpora will be examined, both from the
written and the spoken component. The results will be compared to those found in other
studies on inner-circle varieties, focusing mainly on the type of antecedent (with
every/any quantifiers and without them) and on genre, which has been found to be a
crucial factor conditioning the use of singular they in Standard English (e.g. Balhorn
2009, Paterson 2011a, Parini 2013). A preliminary analysis of the private conversations
included in the ICE corpora reveals that Hong Kong takes the lead as far as frequency
and type of antecedent are concerned. India comes next, and Singapore exhibits a very
low frequency of singular they. This ranking is quite unexpected, as India ranks lowest
when other democratized linguistic variables are considered (e.g. replacement of modal
must with semi-modals such as have to and need to, and replacement of titles such as
Mr, Mrs, Doctor, etc. with the use of proper names). The analysis proposed here will
help shed some light on the status of singular they in these Asian varieties of English, as
well on the role played by democratization as a potential driving force of language
change.
References
Balhorn, Mark. 2004. The Rise of Epicene They. Journal of English Linguistics vol. 32
no. 2: 79–104.
Balhorn, Mark. 2009. The epicene pronoun in contemporary newspaper prose.
American Speech 84(4): 391–413.
Bodine, Ann. 1990. Androcentrism in prescriptive grammar: Singular ‘they’, sexindefinite ‘he’, and ‘he or she’. In Deborah Cameron (ed.), The Feminist Critique
of Language. London: Routledge, 166–186.
Curzan, Anne. 2003. Gender Shifts in the History of English. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Farrelly, Michael & Elena Seoane. 2012. Democratisation. In Terttu Nevalainen &
Elizabeth Closs Traugott (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of English,
ed. by. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 392–401.
Gastil, John. 1990. Generic pronouns and sexist language: The oxymoronic character of
masculine generics. Sex Roles 23 (11/12): 629–643.
Green, William. 1977. Singular pronouns and sexual politics. College Composition and
Communication 28: 150–153.
Huddleston, Rodney & Geoffrey K. Pullum et al. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of
the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
International Corpus of English (ICE), available at http://ice-corpora.net/ice/ (accessed
12 June 2015).
177
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Kachru, Braj B. 1985. Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: The English
language in the outer circle. In Randolph Quirk & Henry Widdowson (eds.),
English in the world: Teaching and learning the language and literatures.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 11–36.
Leech, Geoffrey, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair & Nicholas Smith. 2009. Change in
Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: CUP.
Meyers, Miriam W. 1990. Current Generic Pronoun Usage: An Empirical Study.
American Speech 65: 228–237.
Parini, Alejandro. 2013. Epicene pronominal forms in written English: variation across
genres. Documentos de Trabajo (Universidad de Belgrano) 289, available online
at http://repositorio.ub.edu.ar:8080/xmlui/handle/123456789/2454 (accessed 15
September 2015)
Paterson, Laura Louise. 2011a. Epicene pronouns in UK national newspapers: A
diachronic study. ICAME Journal 35: 171–184
Paterson, Laura Louise. 2011b. The Use and Prescription of Epicene Pronouns: A
Corpus-based Approach to Generic he and Singular they in British English.
Zuber, Shanon & Ann M. Reed. 1993. The politics of grammar handbooks: Generic ‘he’
and
Syntactic and lexical active accomplishments with Old English verbs of
motion
Javier Martín Arista
(Universidad de La Rioja)
Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin and LaPolla 1997; Van Valin 2005;
Van Valin 2014) distinguishes between expressions like Sue ran in the park and Sue ran
to the park by means of the feature [±telic], in such a way that the active
accomplishment Aktionart (Sue ran to the park) constitutes the telic version of the
activity (Sue ran in the park). In a recent work, Van Valin (2014) has proposed a
general revision of accomplishments that pays heed to the problem of the incrementality
of processes and includes an incremental theme into the logical structures of motion
verbs like run, so that the logical structure of an active accomplishment with run can be
paraphrased as ‘x runs and simultaneously effects a process of covering distance y, both
of which terminate, and this leads to the result that x is located at the endpoint of a path
of length y’. Cortes Rodríguez (2014) draws a further distinction between lexical active
accomplishments and syntactic active accomplishments, which are interpreted with
respect to the phrases that belong to the core of the clause. This sets up the possibility of
classifying languages in terms of whether telicity is primarly a lexical property of verbs
or primarily a phrasal property (Van Valin 2014). Against this background, the aims of
this paper are to identify the types of active accomplishments with motion verbs that
can be found in Old English and to determine if this historical language opts for
syntactic or lexical active accomplishments in the expression of motion. The data of
analysis include the main Old English verbs of motion (Weman 1967; Ogura 2002) as
attested in The Dictionary of Old English Corpus. Meaning definitions have been
178
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
provided by the standard dictionaries of the language, cited in the reference section.
After presenting some aspects of the semantics of motion (Goddard 1997, 2011), this
presentation describes the active accomplishments with motion verbs as to semantic
role, constituent structure and morphological case, and discusses the question of
incrementality with respect to the selection of preposition. In spite of the existence of
verbs like feolan ‘to make one´s way into’ and brecan ‘to break into’, which are
instances of lexical active accomplishments and others like nealæcan ‘to come near’
and gretan ‘to approach’, which may constitute lexical activities, the main conclusion of
the paper is that telicity is a phrasal property in Old English motion constructions.
References
Bosworth, J. and T. N. Toller. 1973 (1898). An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Clark Hall, J. R. 1996 (1896). A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Toronto: University
of Toronto Press.
Cortés-Rodríguez, F. 2014. Aspectual features in Role and Reference Grammar: A
layered proposal. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada 27: 23–53.
Goddard, C. 1997. The semantics of coming and going. Pragmatics 7(2), 147-162.
Goddard, C. 2011. Semantic Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Healey, A. diPaolo, ed., with J. Price Wilkin and X. Xiang. 2004. The Dictionary of Old
English Web Corpus. Toronto: Dictionary of Old English Project, Centre for
Medieval Studies, University of Toronto.
Ogura, M. 2002. Verbs of Motion in Medieval English. Oxford: Brewer.
Sweet, H. 1976 (1896). The student’s Dictionary of Anglo-Saxon. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Van Valin, R., Jr. 2005. Exploring the syntax-semantics interface. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Van Valin, R., Jr. 2014. Some questions concerning accomplishments. Lecture delivered
at the 2014 Symposium on Verbs, Clauses and Constructions, held at the
University of La Rioja.
Van Valin, R., Jr. & R. LaPolla. 1997. Syntax: structure, meaning and function.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weman, B. 1967. Old English Semantic Analysis and Theory. With Special Reference to
Verbs Denoting Locomotion. Nedeln: Kraus Reprint Limited.
179
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Antipassives in Australian languages: A modal analysis
Jessica Mathie
(University of Toronto)
I consider two functions of the antipassive construction in some Australian
Aboriginal languages that are unexpected for both functional-typological and formal
reasons. The first type involves a transitive-antipassive alternation in which the
antipassive expresses higher volitionality on the part of the agent, as observed by
Tsunoda 1988. This function is responsible for a recurrent pattern in Australian
languages in which the same verb root is interpreted as ‘find’ in a transitive construction
but ‘look for’ in an antipassive (1). In other languages the antipassive attributes desire to
the agent (2). In both cases the highly volitional agent is correlated with an unaffected
object, presenting a challenge to Hopper and Thompson’s 1980 Transitivity Hypothesis
which claims that antipassives signal low transitivity cross-linguistically, and that a low
transitivity feature (unaffectedness) should not be correlated with a high transitivity
feature (volitionality).
(1) KALKATUNGU
a. Jaa-ka
lhuu nganthamayi
jaa juruyan-ka kuntu
ngarrpa-thu-ka
here-
INT find
here echidna- not
other-ERG-
jaa lhuu
jipa-yi.
here INT
this-ERG
‘He found the echidna, no one else did. He found it himself.’ (TR) (Blake 1979a:96)
b. Pirla-pirla
mathu-unyji-ya-ku
nganthamayi-nha panyjayi-nha.
child-REDUP
mother-his-LIG-DAT
look.for-PAST
very-PAST
‘The child searched very hard for his mother.’ (AP) (Blake 1979a:109)
(2) PITTA PITTA
a. Nga-thu
thaji-ka
i-nha-ka
1SG-ERG
eat-PAST
3SG.M-ACC-HERE
‘I ate the meat.’ (TR) (Blake 1979b:207)
kathi-nha.
meat-ACC
b. Nganyja
thaji-li-ya
kathi-ku.
1SG.NOM
eat-DETR-PRES
meat-DAT
‘I want to have a feed of meat. (AP) (Blake 1979b:207)
The second type involves what seems to be universal quantification over the
object (3), creating a non-individuated but fully affected reading (Bani and Klokeid
1976:278, Comrie 1981:18), again correlating transitivity features that are low (nonindividuated) and high (fully affected). A quantified object is also unexpected under
model-theoretic semantic analyses within the generative literature, which propose that
the object of an antipassive clause denotes a property rather than an individual, which is
existentially closed at the VP level (Wharram 2003, Deal 2008, cf. Van Geenhoven
1998, Van Geenhoven & McNally 2005, Partee et. al. 2012). These proposals account
for the indefinite and obligatory narrow-scope (non-specific) interpretation of the object
in languages such as West Greenlandic. If the object in (3) is in fact headed by a
180
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
quantifier, then it should be able to escape the VP domain to receive a specific, widescope reading, losing the major generalisation of the property-type analysis.
(3) KUKU YALANYJI
a. Kangkal-da
kaya
kuni-ny.
own.child-ERG
dog.ABS
hit-PAST
‘My child hit the dog.’ (TR) (Patz 2002:64)
b. Yinya
karrkay
kaya-nda
kuni-n-kuni-ji-y.
that.ABS child.ABS
dog-LOC:PT
hit-n-REDUP-DETR-NPAST
‘That little one is hitting all the dogs (around here).’ (AP) (Patz 2002:153)
I show that these functions can be accounted for by fully exploiting the tripartite
structure provided by a modal analysis of the antipassive operator, such as that proposed
by Deal 2008. In Deal’s proposal, the antipassive operator introduces universal
quantification over teleologically accessible worlds; that is, worlds which are
compatible with the agent’s intentions regarding the outcome of an event. This approach
accounts for (1). I suggest that, just as with other modals, alternate accessibility
relations are also possible. The relevant relation for (2) seems to be a bouletic relation,
which restricts quantification to those worlds compatible with the agent’s desires. In
both cases, the apparent high volitionality arises not through features associated with the
subject argument but rather indirectly through the modal restrictor that is located low in
the clause.
In (1) and (2), the property-type object is located in the nuclear scope of the
modal. I propose that in cases like (3) it is located in the restrictor, following Kratzer’s
2016 situation semantics approach. Thus in (3b), the antipassive operator quantifies
over all situations that contain a dog, and asserts that in each situation there is an event
of the child hitting the dog contained in that situation. The effect of object quantification
is achieved parasitically through quantification over situations, thus creating the
unexpected interpretation of the object which is both non-individuated but fully
affected. This approach also ensures that the existential operator related to the object
remains trapped under the universal modal layer, retaining the desired scope relation. I
further show how this approach can extend to more familiar cases involving
habitual/generic situations and imperfectives. Exploiting the compositionality of a
modal approach explains how such a variety of antipassive functions is possible while
also providing a unifying underlying structure that accounts for the use of the same
morphological construction to realise the different surface functions.
References
Bani, E & TJ Klokeid. 1976. Ergative switching in Kala Lagau Langgus. In Peter
Sutton (ed.), Languages of Cape York, 269-82. Canberra: Australian Institute of
Aboriginal Studies.
Blake, Barry J. 1979a. A Kalkatungu grammar. Canberra: Australian National
University Press.
Blake, Barry J. 1979b. Pitta Pitta. In R.M.W. Dixon & Barry J. Blake (eds.), Handbook
of Australian Languages, 183-242. Canberra: The Australian National
University.
181
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Comrie, Bernard. 1981. Ergativity and grammatical relations in Kalaw Lagaw Ya
(Saibai dialect). Australian Journal of Linguistics 1. 1-42.
Deal, Amy Rose. 2008. Property-type objects and modal embedding. In Grønn, Atle
(ed.) Proceedings of SuB12, 92-106. Oslo: ILOS.
Hopper, Paul L & Sandra A Thompson. 1980. Transitivity in grammar and discourse.
Language 56. 251-299.
Kratzer, Angelika. 2016. Situations in natural language semantics. In Edward N. Zalta
(ed.), Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Spring 2016 edn.)
http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2016/entries/situations-semantics/ (28 March,
2016.)
Partee, Barbara H, Vladimir Borschev, Elena Paducheva, Yakov Testelets & Igor
Yanovich. 2012. The role of verb semantics in genitive alternations: Genitive of
negation and genitive of intensionality. In A Grønn & A Pazelskaya (eds.), The
Russian Verb. Oslo Studies in Language 4(1). 1-29.
Patz, Elisabeth. 1991. Djabugay. In R.M.W. Dixon & Barry J. Blake (eds.), Handbook
of Australian Languages, 244-347. Canberra: The Australian National
University.
Tsunoda, Tasaku. 1988. Antipassives in Warrungu and other Australian languages. In
Masayoshi Shibatani (ed.), Passive and voice, 595-649. Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Van Geenhoven, Veerle. 1998. Semantic incorporation and indefinite descriptions.
Stanford: CSLI.
Van Geenhoven, Veerle & Louise McNally. 2005. On the property analysis of opaque
complements. Lingua 115. 885-914.
Wharram, Douglas. 2003. On the interpretation of (un)certain indefinites in Inuktitut
and related languages. PhD Dissertation, University of Connecticut.
Reflexives in Even and theories of Binding
Dejan Matić
(University of Graz)
Most theories of intrasentential anaphora come in one of three brands – purely
syntactic (the standard generative stance), pragmatic (Levinson 1987), or semantic
(Jackendoff 1972) approaches. The present paper aims to test the validity of these
approaches by investigating the reflexives in Even, a North Tungusic language spoken
in north-eastern Siberia.
The reflexive expressions in Even – the independent pronoun meːn and the
possessive suffixes -i (sg.) and -wur (pl.) – are specified for number and underspecified
for person; in addition to the standard functions of reflexives, the possessive suffixes
can be attached to converbs, indicating the identity of the subject of the converb with
that of the main predicate. The canonical situation includes full number agreement
between the antecedent and the reflexive. However, there are cases in which the
relevant features do not match. An antecedent which is both formally and semantically
182
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
singular may trigger plural marking on the reflexive expression, with a partially
coreferential reading of the anaphoric relation:
(1) Hurkeni meːn-uri+j
awad-da-ni.
boy(sg) refl-pl
wash-nonfut-3sg
‘The boyi washed themi+j (e.g. himself together with his younger siblings).’
The use of a non-reflexive pronoun results in a disjoint reading:
(2) Hurkeni nọŋar-bu-tanj
awa-da-ni.
boy(sg) 3pron-acc-3pl
wash-nonfut-3sg
‘The boyi washed themj (e.g. his younger siblings, but not himself).’
The contrast between the partially coreferential and disjoint readings transfers to
converbal uses of possessive reflexives, too:
(3) Nọŋa-ni
irit-ti-ni
dʒeb-de-wuri+j.
3pron-3sg
cook-past-3sg eat-purp.conv-poss.refl.pl
‘Hei cooked so that theyi+j would eat (i.e. he and the others will eat).’
(4) Nọŋa-ni
irit-ti-ni
dʒeb-de-tenj.
3pron-3sg
cook-past-3sg eat-purp.conv-3.pl
‘Hei cooked so that theyj would eat (i.e. he will not eat).’
It will be demonstrated that purely syntactic accounts of binding, based on the
transfer of abstract referential indices constrained through the relation of control, are
incapable of accommodating the mismatch of referential features exemplified by the
Even data. Cross-linguistic evidence shows that many languages (including English)
with a similar set of features encoded by the reflexives do not allow for this type of
structure. This evidence thus militates against purely pragmatic approaches, as it implies
a certain degree of grammatical conventionalisation in some, but not all languages.
Purely semantic hierarchies do not predict this kind of binding either. The paper will
therefore argue for an eclectic account in which syntactically mediated semantic
representations determine the possible binding configurations; in particular, the
similarity of partially coreferential reflexives to associative plurals will be emphasised.
It will be argued that, especially on the interpretative side, a certain amount of
pragmatic reasoning has to be allowed for as well, in order to obtain the full picture of
reflexivisation phenomena. The paper ends with an attempt to detect the features a
language must have in order to allow for the partially coreferential reading of reflexives.
Abbreviations
aln – alienable
convb – converb
desig – designative
in – inclusive
nonfut – non-future
183
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
past – past
pl – plural
poss – possessive
pron – personal pronoun
purp – purposive
refl – reflexive
sg – singular
References
Jackendoff, Ray. 1972. Semantics in Generative Grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Levinson, Stephen. 1987. Pragmatics and the grammar of anaphora. Journal of
Linguistics 23: 379–434.
The semantic domain of pluractional constructions
Simone Mattiola
(University of Pavia/University of Bergamo)
The aim of this talk is to present the preliminary results of my PhD project that
concerns with a large scale typological study of pluractional constructions, based on a
variety/convenient sample of 240 languages.
Pluractional constructions mark event plurality through morphological strategies
that apply to the verb (e.g. affixes, reduplication, stem alternation). Cross-linguistically,
the core functions encoded by pluractional constructions are: (1) plurality of events; (2)
multiple events that take place in different locations; (3) multiple actions performed on
or by different participants.
(1) Squamish (Bar-el 2008:34)
Chen kwel-kwelesh-t
ta
sxwi7shn
1S.SG RED-shoot-TR
DET deer
“I shot the deer several times/continuously”
(2) Barasano (Jones & Jones 1991:101)
gahe-rũ̶bũ̶ bota-ri
kea-kudi-ka-bã
idã
other-day post-PL
chop-ITER-FAR^PST-3PL
3PL
“The next day they went from place to place chopping down posts (for the new
house)”
(3) Central Pomo (Corbett 2000:244)
háyu š-čé-w
/
š-čé-t̯ -ʔ
dog hooking_catch-PFV
/
hooking_catch-PL-PFV
“He tied up the dog/dogs”
184
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Pluractional constructions, however, can encode some other additional functions
that do not fall within the domain of event plurality, but are recurrent in the languages
of the world and show almost always a semantic connection with the notion of plurality.
(4) Habituality, Sandawe (Steeman 2012:188):
mindà-tà-nà=sì̥ hík’ì̥ -wà
field-in-to=1SG go:SG-PL2
“I go to the field.”
(5) Reciprocity, Jóola Karon (Sambou 2014:149-150):
a.
Sana ni
Faatu
ka-cuk-ool-a
Sana and Fatou 3PL-see-RECP-ACC
“Sana and Fatou saw each other”
b.
Lopeel
a-muus-ool-a
Robert
3SG-pass-PLCT-ACC
“Robert went and came back”
(6) Intensity, Yimas (Foley 1991:319)
ya-mpu-nanaŋ-tacay-ckam-tuk-mpun
V-PL-O.3PL-A.DUR.see(RED: tay-)-show.RM-PAST.3PL-D
“They were showing those to them very well.' (and they stared at those)”
Pluractional constructions have been described as belonging to different preestablished categories, such as aspect (cf. Corbett 2000) or aktionsart (cf. Dressler 1968,
Cusic 1981, Wood 2007). These proposals seem to be not completely satisfactory in a
cross-linguistic perspective because they are not able to explain why all these functions
are recurrent in the languages of the World.
In order to give a comprehensive account of pluractional multifunctionality, I will
propose a semantic map that covers the semantic domain of this phenomenon.
Pluractional core functions are posited in the center of the map. The vertical line
points out the intersection with the ‘participant parameter’ (i.e. nominal number). In
addition, the plural part of the map (from event internal plurality to imperfectivity)
shows some interesting linguistic correlations: e.g., a higher degree of
grammaticalization and a progressive generalization of the meaning.
185
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
The result of this analysis is that semantic functions of pluractional constructions
are better described adopting the Radical Construction Grammar approach (cf. Croft
2001) which considers grammatical categories as language- and construction-specific
rather than universal instances (cf. also Haspelmath 2007, Cristofaro 2009).
In addition, this map has the merit to show the geometric disposal of the recurrent
functions of pluractional constructions in the languages of the world, thus making it
possible to better understand the semantic relation that exists between them.
References
Bar-el, Leonora. 2008. Verbal Number and Aspect in Skw̠kw̠ú7mush, Recherches
Linguistiques de Vincennes 37: 31-54.
Corbett, Greville G. 2000. Number. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cristofaro, Sonia. 2009. Grammatical categories and relations: universality vs. language
specificity and construction-specificity. Language & Linguistics Compass 3(1):
441-479.
Croft, William. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar: syntactic theory in typological
perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cusic, David. 1981. Verbal plurality and aspect. Stanford, CA: University of Stanford
doctoral dissertation.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. 1968. Studien sur verbalen Pluralität: Iterativum, Distributivum,
Durativum, Intensivum in der allgemeinen Grammatik, in Lateinischen und
Hethitischen, Wien: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf.
Foley, William A. 1991. The Yimas Language of New Guinea, Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2007. Pre-established categories don’t exist: consequences for
language description and typology. Linguistic Typology 11(1): 119–32.
Jones, Wendell & Paula Jones. 1991. Barasano Syntax. Dallas, TX: SIL & University of
Texas at Arlington.
Sambou, Pierre. 2014. Relations entre les rôles syntaxiques et les rôles sémantiques
dans les langues jóola. Dakar: Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar doctoral
dissertation.
Steeman, Sander. 2012. A grammar of Sandawe: a Khoisan language of Tanzania.
Leiden: Universiteit Leiden doctoral dissertation.
Wood, Esther. 2007. The semantic typology of pluractionality. Berkeley, CA:
University of California at Berkeley doctoral dissertation.
Modeling the acquisition rate of verb vocabulary in Russian children
Jekaterina Mažara, Sabine Stoll and Jean-Pascal Pfister
(University of Zurich; University of Zurich; ETH Zurich/University of Zurich)
Longitudinal corpora of child language acquisition give good insights into the
linguistic development of children, but even high density corpora cannot claim to fully
capture the diversity of production. Rare phenomena have a high chance of being
missed in corpora (Tomasello & Stahl 2004). For certain parameters of the description
186
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
of development, it is therefore necessary to construct models that can capture progress
better than mere empirical observations.
In this paper we focus on the growth of the inventory of full verb forms (lemma +
inflection) of five Russian children in the age range of 1;8 and 4;11 who were recorded
in weekly sessions of 60 minutes, yielding roughly 450 hours of material comprising
1.9 million words. Verbs were chosen, because of their central role in language
acquisition. We present the increase in verb vocabulary over time in three different
modes: i) increase of forms in the observed data per recording session; ii) increase in
new forms per number of produced forms; iii) a break point analysis of the growth
curve and the changes in slope over time.
An analysis of the actual growth of new forms in the recording sessions shows a
very slow increase in the early session and much faster growth later on (see Figure 1).
There are, however, several problems with this representation. Firstly, low verb
production rates, as observed in younger children, combined with the restriction to
certain contexts of use lead to a high chance of missing some newly used forms.
Secondly, there seem to be “gaps” in the data, which reflect the absence of new forms in
those particular sessions. Since the relation to the amount of verbs uttered is missing,
however, these gaps do not necessarily reflect a drop in the actual acquisition rate.
Conversely, the later increase in forms seems inflated.
Figure 1: Growth of verb vocabulary of child 1 per session
To counteract this, we normalized the x-axis by plotting the number of new forms
as a function of the number of verbs produced by each child (see Figure 2). This lets us
plot the increase in new forms independently of the session they appeared in. In this
representation, the acquisition rate appears much more even throughout, even though
differences in acquisition rate can be seen more clearly once we zoom in on particular
regions of the plot (e.g. the first 500 newly used forms, see Figure 3).
187
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Figure 2: Growth of verb vocabulary of child 1 per number of uttered verb tokens
Figure 3: Growth of the first 500 types of verb vocabulary of child 1 per number of
uttered verb tokens
The rate of acquisition can be calculated from the slope of the curve. To
determine the change in the rate, the curve is partitioned into sections via break-point
analysis, which lets us calculate the rate of acquisition at different ages.
References
Tomasello, Michael & Daniel Stahl. 2004. Sampling children’s spontaneous speech:
how much is enough? Journal of Child Language 31. 101–121.
188
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Ditransitive syntax: Teaching, asking (questions) and asking (favours)
in the Circum-Baltic area
Lidia Federica Mazzitelli
(University of Bremen)
In this paper, I present some preliminary observations about argument encoding in
‘teach’, ‘ask (questions)’ and ‘ask (favours)’ in six languages of the Circum-Baltic area
(Dahl and Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2001).
Though not being core ditransitives as ‘give’ (Malchukov et al. 2010), these verbs
show a ditransitive structure featuring three obligatory arguments - Agent (A),
Recipient (R), always animate, and Theme (T), always inanimate. Table 1 shows the
possible encodings of R and T (A is always nominative); the data derive from corpora
analyses:
Teach
Russian učit'
Polish uczyć
Lithuanian mokyti
Latvian mācīt
Finnish opettaa
Estonian õpetama
Ask questions
Russian sprašivat'
Polish pytać
Lithuania klausti
Latvian jautāt
Finnish kysyä
Estonian küsima
Ask favours
Russian prosit’
Polish prosić
Lithuanian prašyti
Latvian lūgt
Finnish pytää
Estonian norima
R
T
Accusative
Accusative
Accusative
Dative
Allative
Dative
Genitive
Genitive
Accusative
Partitive
(a) Accusative
Accusative
(b) u ‘from’ +
Genitive
u + Genitive
Accusative
Accusative
Dative
Ablative
o ‘about’ + Locative
Accusative (rarely)
Accusative
(a) Accusative
o + Locative
(b) u + Genitive
Accusative
Genitive
Accusative
Ablative
Accusative
o + Locative
Genitive
Accusative
Partitive
Table 1
189
o + Locative
o + Locative
Genitive
Accusative
Partitive
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
In the Slavic and Baltic languages of my sample, these verbs originally governed
a double accusative, which, over time, tended to be replaced with new encoding
possibilities (Holvoet 1995; Kry’sko 1992). My hypothesis is that the resulting
encoding not only motivated by a distinctive necessity, but it also reflects the semantics
of the arguments of the different predicates – as in the neighbouring Finnish and
Estonian, which I also included in my analysis.
All three verbs fall into Goldberg’s (1995) subclass of ‘verbs of communicated
message’. However, in ‘teach’, R is a quite passive and Patient-like endpoint of the
transfer of the message (T). Its structure resembles the transitive A/P/P, with P(R)
outranking P(T) in animacy. The P-like traits of R are highlighted in the Russian, Polish
and Lithuanian ACC encoding. Latvian and Finnic prefer to underline the animacy of R,
assigning the P encoding to T, and assigning to R the DAT/ALL encoding reserved to
animated Goals and typically animated participants as Experiencers.
In ‘asking questions/favours’ R has a much more active role. The message (T)
ideally comes back as an answer/favour from R to A: thus, R is expected to be also
Source (or even A). This is well captured in the Finnic and Russian (b) ABL encoding
of R. In ‘asking questions’, the Latvian DAT also highlights the non-P role of R. On the
other hand, the more active role of R is seen as a greater involvement and results in its
encoding as a highly affected participant in Polish, Lithuanian (‘asking questions’),
Latvian (‘asking favours’) and Russian (a).
The newer encoding possibilities that have replaced the original accusative in
Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and Russian are not only motivated by the distinction
necessity, but they also reflect the semantic scenarios of the predicates. The convergent
patterns of Latvian and Russian with Finnic languages may be the result of a replica
from the latter: however, they are also semantically motivated and not just mere
syntactic replications.
Sources
Estonian:
Balanced
corpus
http://www.cl.ut.ee/korpused/grammatikakorpus/
Finnish:
The
Tampere
bilingual
corpus
of
https://www12.uta.fi/tambic/JTambic.html
Latvian: Latvian corpus: http://www.korpuss.lv
Lithuanian:
Corpus
of
the
contemporary
http://tekstynas.vdu.lt/tekstynas/
Polish: National Corpus of Polish: http://nkjp.pl
Russian: Russian National Corpus: http://ruscorpora.ru
of
Finnish
Estonian:
and
Lithuanian
English:
language:
References
Dahl, Östen and Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Marija. 2001. The Circum-Baltic Languages:
Introduction to the volume, in: Dahl, Östen and Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Marija
(eds.), Circum-Baltic languages. Volume 1: Past and Present, AmsterdamPhiladelphia: John Benjamins, xv-xx.
Goldberg, Adele. 1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument
structure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2015. Ditransitive constructions. Annual Review of Linguistics, 1,
19-41.
190
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Holvoet, Axel. 1995. On the avoidance of the double accusative in Latvian. Res Baltica
1995, 89-97.
Kry’sko, Vadim. 1992. Dvojnoj ob’’ektnyj vinitel’nyj i tranzitivnye vozvratnye glagoly
v balto-slavjanskich jazykach. Linguistica Baltica 1, 11-24.
Malchukov, Andrej; Haspelmath, Martin and Comrie, Bernard. 2010 (eds). Studies in
Ditransitive Constructions: A Comparative Handbook, Berlin/New York: De
Gruyter.
The (ir-)relevance of typological constraints in language contact
Robin Meyer
(Oxford)
The notions of ‘typological markedness’ or ‘typological distance’ are frequently
considered a factor which influences the borrowability of linguistic matter or patterns
(e.g. GIVÓN 1979:26); phonologically or syntactically ‘marked’ patterns, viz. L2
patterns which are unusual or complex relative to L1, for instance, are thought to be less
readily borrowed than less ‘marked’ ones (cf. THOMASON 2003:692). Particularly as
regards syntactic pattern replication, however, this correlation has been called into
doubt, either owing to ill-defined terminology (HASPELMATH 2006; THOMASON &
KAUFMAN 1988:52–3), or resulting from the fact that where pattern replication does
occur, this typological constraint is more often violated than not (e.g. adpositions and
word order in Ma’a, cf. THOMASON 1983; relative clauses and agglutinative
morphology in Asia Minor Greek, cf. JANSE 2002).
On the basis of three case studies of contact-induced partial alignment change,
this paper argues that metatypy (as per ROSS 2007:124) and other types of pattern
replication are in general not constrained by typological compatibility. These three
studies refer to languages normally exhibiting accusative alignment, which through
contact with Iranian languages have replicated a participle-based ergative past tense:
this is the case for the qṭyl l- construction in Imperial Aramaic and Syriac modelled on
the Old Persian mana kr̥tam construction (CIANCAGLINI 2008); the periphrastic perfect
of Classical Armenian based on the Parthian past tense (MEYER 2016); and the simple
past of North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA), which was influenced by Sorani Kurdish
(KHAN 2004:10).
Although occurring at different times and under varying circumstances, all three
contact situations have certain commonalities: long duration and intensity of contact;
the type of pattern borrowed; a lack of systemic alignment change; and indeed adoption
of nominative-accusative alignment in the replicated, formerly ergative patterns.
In partial agreement with MYERS-SCOTTON (2002:219–20), this paper accordingly
suggests that typological considerations are synchronically largely irrelevant for
determining pattern borrowability in language contact situations. Since individual
historical and social factors determine degree and intensity of borrowing, any linguistic
matter or pattern can be replicated in principle (THOMASON 2008).
191
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Yet in diachrony, typological considerations (e.g. morphosyntactic alignment,
word order, animacy hierarchies, etc.) play a significant role in establishing whether
replicated patterns are maintained, adapted, or eventually ousted.
It is argued here that the stability of replicated patterns relies on three essential
factors: frequency of pattern use; continuous contact with donor language; and
typological fit with inherited patterns. In the cases studied, individual factors, or
combinations thereof, are shown to result in the alignment change of replicated ergative
patterns to better fit inherited accusative constructions (Classical Armenian; NENA)
and the near-ousting of an infrequently used pattern (Imperial Aramaic).
Typology, it is proposed, does therefore not influence pattern replication, but
rather retention of such patterns once replicated, and may therefore, in combination with
the other factors mentioned, aid in predicting the stability of such patterns.
References
Ciancaglini, C.A. (2008) Iranian Loanwords in Syriac. Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig
Reichert.
Givón, T. (1979) “Prolegomena to any sane creology”, in I.F. HANCOCK (ed.), Readings
in creole studies, Ghent: Story-Scientia, 3–35.
Haspelmath, M. (2006) “Against markedness (and what to replace it with)”, Journal of
Linguistics 42 (1), 25–70.
Janse, M. (2002) “Aspects of Bilingualism in the History of the Greek Language”, in
J.N. Adams, M. Janse, & S. Swain (eds), Bilingualism in Ancient Society
Language Contact and the Written Word, Oxford/New York: Oxford University
Press, 332–392.
Khan, G. (2004) The Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Sulemaniyya and Ḥalabja. Leiden:
Brill.
Meyer, R. (2016) “Morphosyntactic Alignment, Pattern Replication, and the Classical
Armenian Periphrastic Perfect”, in S.W. JAMISON, C.H. MELCHERT and B. VINE
(eds), Proceedings of the 26th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference: Los
Angeles, October 24th and 25th, 2014, Bremen: Hempen, 117–133.
Myers-Scotton, C. (2002) Contact Linguistics. Bilingual Encounters and Gramma-tical
Outcomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ross, M. (2007) “Calquing and Metatypy,” Journal of Language Contact 1 (1), 116–
143.
Thomason, S.G. (2008) “Social and Linguistic Factors as Predictors of Contact-Induced
Change”, Journal of Language Contact 2 (1), 42–56.
Thomason, S.G. (2003) “Contact as a Source of Language Change”, in B.D. JOSEPH &
R.D. JANDA (eds), The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 687–712.
Thomason, S.G. (1983) “Genetic relationship and the case of Ma’a (Mbugu)”, Studies
in African Linguistics 14, 195–231.
Thomason, S.G., & Kaufman, T. (1988) Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic
Linguistics, Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford: University of California Press.
192
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Semantics and pragmatics of aspectual markers – A game-theoretic
model
Roland Mühlenbernd and Dankmar Enke
(Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München; Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen)
It is a well-known typological observation that languages without a distinct
progressive (PROG) morphology realize the communicative function of the PROG
through the imperfective (IMP) aspect (if morphologically instantiated). This primarily
motivates to treat the PROG as a subdomain of the IMP (cf. Comrie 1976). In Russian,
the imperfective form licences a PROG interpretation, while the same form refers to a
habitual/generic (HAB/GEN) situation. In languages which have both aspects, the IMP
often does not licence a PROG reading, such as in English. In languages such as
German, an optional PROG is innovated. Furthermore, there is a crosslinguistically
robust generalization in the diachrony of such markers: functional elements restricted to
PROG reading semantically generalize to licence IMP readings such as the HAB/GEN
or the stative. This generalization has been attested according to data from, e.g., Turkish
(Göksel & Kerslake 2005): the PROG is expanding to semantically overlap with the
domain of the IMP Aorist morphology, thus instantiating the PROG-to-IMP shift (cf.
Bybee et al. 1994).
All these typological data motivate a cyclic diachronic process (Table 1): this cycle
starts with the language having only one broad IMP form covering all imperfective
meanings, (a). Then an optional PROG form is innovated, (b); it becomes obligatory for
PROG meanings, (c); and at the last stage, (d), it generalizes and takes the semantic
place of the old broad-IMP form. Note that (a) and (d) are identical except for their
formal exponents.5
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
label
Ximp
(Yprog), Ximp
Yprog, Ximp
Yimp
type
zero-PROG
emergent-PROG
categorical-PROG
generalized-PROG
sample languages
Russian, Arabic
German, Dutch
English, Swahili
Turkish, Tigre
Table 1: The PROG-to-IMP historical cycle with representative languages.
The four states (a-d) can be intuitively regarded as distinct strategies for
communicating phenomenal and structural sub-meanings (Goldsmith &
Woisetschlaeger 1982) within the IMP domain. In systems with two forms, namely
emergent-PROG and categorical-PROG, the choice of form helps the hearer to correctly
identify the speakers intended sub-meaning. The zero-PROG and generalized-PROG
strategies use a single form while relying on the hearers understanding of contextual
cues for successful communication. Importantly, PROG induces a cycle through (a-d),
but HAB, though also being more specific than the broad IMP, does not eventually
5
Note that an explicit progressive marker (c.f. emergent-, categorical-PROG) is restricted to nonstative
verbs (see Comrie 1976, page 35), and its expansion to stative verbs is part of the generalization process
(to generalized-PROG).
193
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
generalize to IMP (Deo 2015). In other words, there is no (d)-type stage for HAB, and
therefore no HAB-to-IMP cycle (Figure 1a).
Our talk concerns the following research question: which assumptions conduce to
the PROG-to-IMP cycle, and at the same time rule out theoretically possible other paths
- such as the HAB-to-IMP cycle - that are not empirically observed in human
languages? To address this issue we use a synthetic approach: First, we apply a gametheoretic model that bases on speaker-hearer interaction – the signaling game (Lewis
1969) – and extend it to the ‘Imperfective game’, which enables us to describe the
different systems (c.f. zero-PROG, categorical-HAB, etc.) as formal sender/receiver
strategies. Second, we embed this model in a computational framework: a population of
agents that interact repeatedly and pairwisely by playing the Imperfective game,
whereby agents i) update their communicative behavior by an update rule called RothErev reinforcement learning (Roth & Erev 1995), and ii) are alive for a particular
number of simulation steps. Accordingly, agents have an age level, and ‘old’ agents are
posthumously replaced by ‘young’ agents.
Figure 2: The expected diachronic development includes next to the cycling PROG-to-IMP
path its alternative deadlock HAB-to-IMP path (a). The results of our synthetic approach
reveals: with particular implemented assumptions like childhood input asymmetry we were
able to reproduce the expected paths (b).
With this approach we tested possible hypotheses that suggest assumptions that
might support or mitigate the emergence of this cycle. As a general result, we were able
to reconstruct the observed cycle by adding three assumptions to the basic model: (1)
reduced access to contextual cues (note: the Imperfective game involves context
information to participants of the Imperfective game) from the hearer by 10%; (2) a
gradually increasing symmetric cost for having a two-form system (such as emergent
and categorical systems); and (3) agents as hearers were mostly presented with
phenomenal statements in the childhood, vindicating a conjecture by Deo (2015). All in
all, the results support Deo’s (2015) conjecture, namely that being more exposed to
PROG-type meanings in childhood induces the PROG-to-IMP, and rules out the HABto-IMP, development (Figure 1b). We thus effectively provide microfoundations for
Deos macro model of the PROG-to-IMP cycle. As a final remark, note that the
reconstruction of the observed cycle requires a speaker/hearer asymmetry, which in our
experiment is induces by the childhood-input asymmetry, but it might also be induced
by other factors.
References
Bybee, J., R. Perkins and W. Pagliuca (1994). The Evolution of Grammar. Tense,
Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago, IL: Chicago
University Press.
194
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Comrie, B. (1976). Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Deo, A. (2015). The semantic and pragmatic underpinnings of grammaticalization
paths: The progressive to imperfective shift. Semantics and Pragmatics 8, 1-52.
Göksel, A. & C. Kerslake (2005). Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar. London:
Routledge.
Goldsmith, J. & E. Woisetschlaeger (1982). The logic of the English progressive.
Linguistic Inquiry 13(1), 79-89.
Lewis, D. (1969). Convention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Roth, A. & I. Erev (1995). Learning in extensive-form games: Exerimental data and
simple dynamic models in the intermediate term. Games and Economic Behaviour
8, 164-212.
From kin term to discourse marker: The case of bâbâ “father” in
Modern Persian
Mehrdad Naghzguy-Kohan and Shadi Davari
(Bu-Ali Sina University; Islamic Azad University)
The issue addressed in this article concerns the synchronic variations and
diachronic development of bâbâ “father” as a discourse marker in Modern Persian
which reflexively comments on the utterance and thus supports the interpretation
thereof. Based on empirical analysis of spoken colloquial Persian, web-interactions and
written texts, we aim to examine the current use of bâbâ not just as a concrete,
referential kin term but as an interjection functioning as a discourse marker being
highly grammaticalized and to discuss the relationship between issues of
grammaticalization and pragmaticalization. We argue that the present
multifunctionality of bâbâ can be traced back to its pragmatic function, encoding
positive politeness style of mitigation which within Iranian society is pervasive in
intimate conversation. In this way, addressing a stranger by a kin term, interpreted as an
opener and endearment, can be polite by stressing in-group affiliation. Through this
semantic-pragmatic change, it is illustrated that how a propositional meaning evolves
toward a pragmatic and intersubjective use while losing part of conceding meaning but
still preserving original meaning potentials. In the next step, bâbâ develops to a
discourse marker with a procedural meaning, operating on the discourse organizational
level and contextualizing the reading of the successive utterance in relation to the
foregoing interaction. On the basis of a conversational corpus study, this paper reveals
the emergence of a highly grammaticalized category of discourse marker through a
kinship term displaying a range of functions which signal heightening the intensity of
responsive markers, lowering the intensity of meaning, exclamation, utterance initiation
and strengthening the meaning of the verb, all representing some type of not arbitrary
relation, which in this case is intimacy. The development from a concrete referential
meaning to an interpersonal marker of politeness and then to an expressive, subjective
and metatextual meaning with a wider scope and a greater speaker-oriented perspective
can be determined by being located on grammaticalization cline extending from a
195
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
content word to a fully-fledged discourse marker which is characterized by related
unidirectional shifts of decategorization, increase of pragmatic function and scope (from
sentential to extra-sentential, discourse and speech act level), persistence (finding
features of traditional meaning which in this case is the intimacy emotion of a kinship
term), fixation (semi-fixed position which leads to inserting the discourse marker bâbâ
just in initial or final positions) and erosion (phonological reduction of bābā to bā).
Furthermore, we show that the cline of referential kin term> marker of politeness>
discourse marker copes with gramaticalization from the point of view of pragmatics.
However, we propose that the tapering domain of grammaticalization, based on
semantic and morphosyntactic criteria on the sentence- syntactical level may follow
pragmaticalization, the process encompassing the emergence of discourse/ pragmatic
markers on discourse-pragmatic level. The high frequency of this type of usage in
Persian conversation can be seen as a reflection of Iranian cultural values, which place a
premium on maintaining the appearance of an intimate, hospitable and cooperative
behavior.
Key words: kin term, discourse marker, positive politeness, grammaticalization,
Persian.
Exhaustiveness and contrast in focused elements and their Structural
positions
Koichiro Nakamura
(Meio University)
It is well known in cartographic investigations that the structural positions
determine types of focus. As is discussed in É.Kiss (2014), Hungarian focus elements in
the left periphery designate exhaustive identificational focus (EI focus), while those in
postverbal focus positions do not. This paper argues that the same applies to Japanese.
Namely, we claim that in Japanese, sentence initially scrambled focus elements specify
EI focus, while the ones within vP domain signify contrastive focus (CF). The latter
effect appears when particles are given a focal stress. We propose the articulated
structure with Topic Phrase (TopP) and Focus Phrase (FocP) for both CP domain and
vP domain. Let us present the following examples.
(1) a. Gakusei-tachi-wa nani-o
kat-ta-no?
student-PL-Top what-Acc buy-Past Q
‘As for students, what did they buy?’
b. Gakusei-tachi-wa (CD-de-wa naku) hon-O
kat-ta
student-PL-Top (CD-Cop-Top-Neg) book-CF buy-Past
‘They bought books (, not CDs).’
196
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
c. Hon-O
gakusei-tachi-wa kat-ta
book-EI focus student-PL-Top buy-Past
‘It is books that students bought.’
d. Demo karera-wa ronbun-mo kat-ta
but
they-Top paper-Also buy-Past
‘But they bought papers, too.’
(1b), an answer to (1a), shows contrast, not exhaustivity. We can more or less
easily continue (1d) to (1b). In contrast, in (1c), with the scrambled element with focally
stressed o, shown in the upper case, the EI focus interpretation shows up. (1d) cannot
follow (1c).
Next, let us give the paradigm with focus elements within vP domain.
(2) a. Suguni gakusei-tachi-ga hon-o
yon-da
quickly student-PL-Nom book-Acc read-Past
‘The students quickly read books.’
b. Suguni gakusei-tachi-ga (ronbun-de-wa-naku) hon-O
yon-da
quickly student-PL-Nom (paper-Cop-Top-Neg) book-CF read-Past
‘The students quickly read books (, not papers).’
c. Suguni gakusei-tachi-wa hon-wa yon-da
quickly student-PL-TT
book-CT read-Past
‘As for students, they quickly read books. But I don’t know whether they read
something else.’
d. Iya, karera-wa syohyoo-mo yon-da
no, they-TT
review-also read-Past
‘But they read reviews, too.’
These sentences are assumed to be within vP because the VP adverb suguni
appears at the beginning. (2a) merely states the thing students read, while in (2b), the
focally stressed o-marked DP designates CF. We can continue (2d) to both (2a) and
(2b), which indicates that (2b) does not have EI focus effect. When we replace gamarked phrase with wa-marked phrase, shown in (2c), the first wa-marked phrase is
interpreted as Thematic Topic (TT), in the sense of Tomioka (2010). Generally, when a
sentence has two wa-marked phrases, the first one is considered TT, which defines what
the sentence is about, while the second one is considered Contrastive Topic, (CT). This
implies that there should be both TopP and FocP in vP domain. With Rizzi (1997), let
us schematize the following Japanese phrase structure and furthermore the structures for
(1b&c) and (2c).
(3) a. [TopP [FocP [TopP [TP [vP [VP ….]]]]]: CP periphery
b. [TopP [FocP [TopP [vP [VP ….]]]]: vP periphery
197
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(4) a. [TopP Gakusei-tachi-wa [FopP hon-O [TopP[TP tSubj [vP tsubj [VP tobj kat]]ta]]]] (for
(1b))
b. [TopP [FocP hon-O [TopP gakusei-tachi-wa [TP tSubj [vP tsubj [VP tobj kat]]ta]]]] (for
(1c))
c. [TopP Suguni [TopP gakusei-tachi-wa [FocP [TopP ronbun-wa [vP tsubj [VP tobj
yonda]]]]]]
(for (2c))
The theoretical implication is that we can confirm Miyagawa’s (2010) claim that
Japanese scrambling is triggered by focus.
References
É Kiss, Katalin (2014) “Identificational Focus revisited: The issue of exhaustivity,”
paper presented at CLS 50.
Miyagawa, Shigeru (2010) Why agree? Why move? Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rizzi, Luigi (1997) “The fine structure of the left periphery,” in Haegeman, Liliane ed.,
Elements of Grammar, 281-337. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Tomioka, Satoshi (2010) “Contrastive topic operates on speech act,” Information
Structure: Theoretical Typological, and Experimental Perspective, eds., by
Zimmerman, Malte and Caroline Féry, 111-138. Oxford University Press, New
York.
The diachronic development of German degree modifiers: A corpusbased study
Jakob Neels and Stefan Hartmann
(University of Leipzig; University of Hamburg)
The development of degree modifiers has been a recurrent theme in diachronic
construction grammar (cf. e.g. Traugott & Trousdale 2013). While most studies have
focused on English constructions such as [a bit of X], the present paper presents a
diachronic corpus-based analysis of German quantifier/degree-modifier constructions
(QDM constructions for short) throughout the New High German period (1650 until
today). Focusing on the two most frequent QDM constructions ein wenig and ein
bisschen, we investigate three major questions:
a) Does the grammaticalization path of the younger construction ein bisschen
follow the scenario proposed by Traugott (2008) for their English
counterparts (pre-partitive > partitive > quantifier > degree modifier > free
adverb)?
b) How do the two competing constructions under investigation interact with
each other?
c) How can the observed developments be explained in a bottom-up, datadriven way?
To address these questions, all instances of both constructions were extracted
from the German Text Archive (http://deutschestextarchiv.de/) and the HIST archive of
198
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
the
German
Reference
Corpus
(available
via
https://cosmas2.idsmannheim.de/cosmas2-web/). All attestations were handcoded for the part of speech of
the modified item. All instances in which the modificatum is a noun were coded for the
concreteness of the noun. In addition, different types of determiners (e.g. das bisschen
'the bit', solch bisschen 'such bit') as well as modifiers inserted in-between determiner
and bisschen or wenig (e.g. ein klein bisschen 'a little bit') were taken into account.
As for research question a), the data suggest that the grammaticalization path of
ein bisschen follows Traugott's scenario quite closely. At first, the construction
combines almost exclusively with concrete nouns – in these cases, ein bisschen is used
as partitive or quantifier. However, the array of possible modificata quickly extends to
abstract nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Occasionally, free adverb uses are attested in the
corpus as well.
While the distribution of nouns, verbs, and adjectives combined with ein wenig
remains remarkably stable, the parts of speech selected by ein bisschen are subject to
considerable change. Intriguingly, these changes lead to a distribution very similar to
that observed for ein wenig. Regarding question b), this suggests that the older
construction serves as an attractor (cf. e.g. Bybee & Beckner 2015) to which the newer
construction aligns. This conclusion is further backed by the observation that the formal
variability of bisschen decreases: Uses with determiners other than ein fall out of use, as
do uses with modifiers other than klein.
Addressing question c), we therefore argue that language users abstract away a
higher-level meso-construction from individual QDM constructions, which entails a
significant degree of alignment among the individual micro-constructions belonging to
the same superordinate schema. These alignment processes also entail a high degree of
internal homogeneity of the pattern, which in turn makes it easily extensible to new
expressions like [ein Quäntchen X] 'a quantumDIM of X' and [ein Tick X] 'a tick X'.
In sum, these observations stress the crucial role that network links between
constructions play in grammaticalization processes, thus providing valuable insights
into mechanisms and motivations driving language change.
References
Bybee, Joan & Beckner, Clay. 2015. Emergence at the cross-linguistic level. Attractor
dynamics in language change. In MacWhinney, Brian & O’Grady, William (eds.),
The Handbook of Language Emergence, 183–200. Malden: Wiley.
Grimm, Jacob & Grimm, Wilhelm (1854). Deutsches Wörterbuch, Vol. 3. Available
online via www.woerterbuchnetz.de.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2008. The Grammaticalization of NP of NP Patterns. In
Alexander Bergs & Gabriele Diewald (eds.), Constructions and Language
Change, 23–45. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Graeme Trousdale. 2013. Constructionalization and
Constructional Changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
199
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Indexical scenarios as a breeding ground for linguistic change
Peter Juul Nielsen
(Åbo Akademi University)
In composite linguistic structures, one element may point to the presence of
another, and such indexical scenarios may form the basis of structural changes.
Analysing the semiotics of allomorphy and plural formation in West Germanic and of
the development of insubordinate complement clauses in Scandinavian, the paper
presents a general model for the description of such change in morphology and syntax.
The main thesis is that this type of changes should be analysed as a semiotic shift from
indexical to symbolic function based on reanalysis (Andersen 1980, 2008). The
theoretical foundation is a semiotic structural-functional approach to language
(Nørgård-Sørensen et al. 2011; Nielsen forthc.), and data is sampled from different
Germanic languages at different historical stages.
Expression variants such as allomorphs can have indexical function (Anttila 1975;
Carstairs-McCarthy 2001); in English the allomorph /sæn/ of the adjective stem sane
indexes derivation, as in sanity. However, the index function may also be a feature of
invariant elements (Andersen 1980: 5). Based on the general concept of entailed
knowledge of co-occurrence (Nielsen forthc.), the paper argues that all dependent
elements are indexes of their governor, and that they index their presupposed contexts
with varying degrees of indexical strength, a concept that plays an important role in the
semiotic shift described in the paper.
The paper suggests the following pattern of semiotic change:
I. A dependent element X indexes a required element Y and its content C
II. X is associated with the content C to such a degree that X incorporates this
content
III. The required element Y becomes functionally superfluous
IV. X is reanalysed as a symbol of C
The shift from index to symbol is exemplified in morphology with the change in
the properties of i-umlaut in Germanic from indexing of a formal feature of a following
desinence via indexing of plural inflection to the role as a symbolic expression of plural,
e.g. in the development from Proto-Germanic (nom.sg. vs. nom.pl.) *fōs-*fōtiz via *fōt*fōti, *fōt-*fȫti, fōt-fēt to present English foot-feet (Wurzel 1980; Hogg & Fulk 2011;
Wright & Wright 1923; Campbell 1959).
In syntax, the shift is exemplified with the development of emotive clauses
through insubordination of erstwhile subordinate complement clauses (D’Hertefelt &
Verstraete 2014; Evans 2007). The subordinate clause marked by the complementizer at
in (1) indexes its governing verb and the emotive speaker attitude semantics of the main
clause. In its independent use in (2), the at-clause is reanalysed as the symbolic bearer
of the emotive meaning.
(1)
jeg forstår ikke at noget så katastrofalt kan ende så godt
I comprehend.PRES not COMP something so catastrophic can.PRES
end.INF so well
‘I can’t believe that something so catastrophic can end so well’
200
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(2)
at noget så katastrofalt kan ende så godt!
COMP something so catastrophic can.PRES end.INF so well
‘[I can’t believe] that something so catastrophic can end so well!’
The paper unites descriptions of change from various domains of grammar and
offers a general explanation of the semiotics behind the process.
References
Andersen, H. (1980). Morphological change: towards a typology. In J. Fisiak (ed.).
Recent Developments in Historical Morphology. The Hague: Mouton, 1–50.
Andersen, H. (2008). Grammaticalization in a speaker-oriented theory of change. In Th.
Eythorsson (ed.). Grammatical change and linguistic theory. The Rosendal
papers. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 11-44.
Anttila, R. (1975). The Indexical Element in Morphology. Innsbrucker Beiträge zur
Sprachwissenschaft,Vorträge 12.
Campbell, A. (1959). Old English Grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Carstairs-McCarthy, A. (2001). Umlaut as signans and signatum: synchronic and
diachronic aspects. In G. Booij & J. van Marle (eds). Yearbook of Morphology
1999. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1-23.
D’Hertefelt, S & J-C Verstraete (2014). Independent complement constructions in
Swedish and Danish. Journal of Pragmatics 60, 89-102.
Evans, N. (2007). Insubordination and its uses. In I. Nikolaeva (ed.). Finiteness.
Theoretical and Empirical Foundations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 366431.
Hogg, R.M. & Fulk, R.D. (2011). A Grammar of Old English. Vol. 2: Morphology.
Wiley-Blackwell
Nielsen, P.J. (forthcoming). Functional Structure in Morphology and the Case of
Nonfinite Verbs. Theoretical Issues and the Description of the Danish Verb
System. Leiden: Brill.
Nørgård-Sørensen, J., L. Heltoft & L. Schøsler (2011). Connecting grammaticalisation.
The role of paradigmatic structure. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Wright, J. & Wright, E.M. (1923). An Elementary Middle English Grammar. Oxford
UP.
Wurzel, W.U. (1980). Ways of morphologizing phonological rules. In J. Fisiak (ed.).
Recent Developments in Historical Morphology. The Hague: Mouton, 443-462.
201
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
No simple agreement markers: Distribution of Spanish dative clitics in
two reverse psych verb constructions
Chiyo Nishida
(University of Texas-Austin)
It has been widely claimed that Spanish dative clitics have undergone a
grammaticalization process, transforming from unstressed pronouns into functional
elements. This process, assumed to have begun around the 16th century, clearly has not
completely reached its final stage, yielding complex distributional patterns of dative
clitic doubling (datCLD hereafter) in modern Spanish. For instance, with reverse psych
verbs like gustar ‘to like/appeal’, importar ‘to care/matter’, etc., the canonical word
order is [IO V S] and datCLD is assumed to be obligatory (A la gente LE/*Ø gustaba
la obra ‘(The) people liked the play.’ However, data from Peninsular Spanish corpus
CREA show that datCLD is optional in the non-canonical [S V IO] word order,
exhibiting variation (La obra LE/Ø gustaba a la gente. ‘The play appealed to (the)
people’) also attested with the recipient IO (Juan LE/Ø entregó la carta a Pedro ‘Juan
gave the letter to Pedro’).
The objective of the current paper is to explicate two issues on the largely
unrecognized variation in psych verb sentences:
A: Why does the distribution of datCLD differ in the [IO V S] and the [S V IO]
order?
B: What governs the occurrence of datCLD in sentences in the [S V IO] order?
Regarding Question A, we propose that the two word orders represent two
semantically distinct constructions. In the [IO V S] construction, the IO is an
experiencer. In contrast, the [S V IO] construction roughly means: “xSUBJECT HAVE a
property P to yIO”, where the yIO specifies “to whom/what” – call it a RELATIVIZER – the
judgment made (S having P) holds. Note that this IO is commonly unrealized: La obra
gustaba. ‘The play was appealing’. The experiencer vs. relativizer semantic difference
is the basis for the datCLD variation in two constructions. Jaeggli (1982) explains that
datCLD becomes obligatory when the preposition a ‘to’ alone cannot assign a proper θrole to the IO; otherwise datCLD is optional. An experiencer (or possessor, etc.) IO falls
into the first case and a relativizer (or recipient) IO into the second.
Regarding Question B, we examined possible correlations between the occurrence
of datCLD and some referential hierarchies (van Lier 2012). The findings of statistical
analysis (Multiple Logistic Regression) applied to 1,347 tokens of the [S V IO]
construction (extracted from the on-line modern Spanish corpus CREA, encompassing
13 verbs) were the following: a. [Pronominal] IOs always required datCLD; b. of non
pronominal IOs, while higher referential values like [Animate], [Individual], and
[Singular] significantly favored datCLD, their lower counterparts [inanimate], [non
individual] (collective&mass), and [plural] disfavored datCLD. Definiteness and
referentiality achieved no significance in a quantitative analysis. Nonetheless, a
qualitative analysis indicated that the presence of a clitic obliges a specific-set reading
with an IO comprising a quantifier like todo el mundo ‘everyone’, nadie ‘no one’, etc.
Similar referential effects have been reported for the recipient IO (Aranovich 2011,
Nishida 2012; inter alia).
202
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
The Spanish dative clitics have been commonly defined as IO agreement markers
(Suñer 1988, Franco 2000, Company Company 2001; inter alia) primarily due to the
assumption that datCLD is (quasi) obligatory, thus, free of constraints. This definition
indeed is adequate in cases involving non- proto-typical IOs, for which datCLD is
obligatory. However, in cases involving proto-typical IOs (recipient and relativiser), for
which datCLD is still largely optional, a dative clitic apparently assumes a more
substantive role than marking grammatical agreement; it restricts the referential
properties of the co-occurring IO by requiring it to be highly individuated. This dual
nature of datCLD makes it untenable to give datCLD a uniform analysis in both
obligatory and optional contexts.
References
Aranovich, Roberto. 2011. Optional Agreement and Grammatical Functions: A Corpus
Study of Clitic Doubling in Spanish. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of
Pittsburg.
Company Company, Concepción 2001. Multiple dative-marking grammaticalization:
Spanish as a special kind of primary object language. Studies in Language 25:1,
1-47.
Franco, Jon 2000. Agreement as a continuum. In F. Beukema and M. Den Dikken (eds.)
Clitic Phenomena in European Languages, 147-189.
Amsterdam: John
Benjamins.
Jaeggli, Osvaldo. 1982. Topics in Romance Syntax. Dordrecht: Foris Publications.
Nishida, Chiyo. 2012. A Corpus Study of Mexican Spanish Three-participant
constructions with and without clitic doubling. In E. van Lier (Ed.), Referential
Effects on the Expression of Three- participant Events Across Languages.
Linguistic Discovery 10,3, 208-240.
Suñer, Margarita. 1988. The role of agreement in clitic-doubled constructions. Natural
Language and Linguistic Theory 6, 3, 391-433.
van Lier, E. 2012. Referential Effects on the Expression of Three-participant Events
Across Languages-An Introduction in Memory of Anna Sierwierska. Linguistics
Discovery Volume10, 3, 1-16.
Corpus de Referencia de Español Actual (CREA). Real Academia Española.
http://corpus.rae.es/creanet.html
From terrific, monstrous looking creatures to terrific, funny guys: On
the semantic development of the polysemous adjective terrific
Paloma Núñez-Pertejo
(University of Santiago de Compostela)
‘(A)melioration’, ‘elevation’ or ‘improvement of meaning’ can be defined as the
lexical semantic change by means of which originally negative words come to express
positive meanings (cf. Traugott 1996; Culpeper 1997; Schendl 2001; Moessner 2003;
203
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Trask 2007). Such an ‘(a)melioration’ process has affected the English evaluative
adjective terrific, the item with which this presentation is specifically concerned.
A preliminary analysis of data retrieved from different sources reveals that terrific
can express three main basic meanings, arranged here in chronological order of
appearance:
(i) ‘terrible, frightful’ (clearly negative);
(ii) ‘of great size’, ‘tremendous’ (more neutral);
(iii) ‘excellent, amazing’ (clearly positive).
In order to trace the variables controlling the development of these senses from
the beginning of the 18th century to the end of the 20th century, I will provide evidence
from The Corpus of Late Modern English Texts (CLMET3.0; cf. De Smet, Diller &
Tyrkkö 2011) and the British National Corpus (BNC) for British English, and from the
Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) for American English. The analysis
will consider the frequency, function (attributive vs predicative), meaning(s) and main
collocations of this adjective, as also dialect variation (British vs American usage).
My results so far indicate that as late as the beginning of the 19th century terrific
was still rather uncommon, which is not surprising, given its status as a loanword from
French, first attested in 1667 according to the OED. Thus, in the CLMET3.0 corpus, a
total of 237 tokens were found, and only 4 of them belong to the first sub-period (17101780), which clearly shows that terrific was a low-frequency adjective in British
English during most of the 18th century used in its negative meaning of ‘terrible,
frightful’ (e.g. the terrific emblems of wolves and lions, of dragons and eagles). During
the latter part of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century (1780-1850),
terrific greatly increases its frequency, and starts to be used more often in sense (ii)
above (‘of great size’, ‘tremendous’; e.g. at a terrific discount). The first examples of
terrific with a clear positive meaning (‘amazing’, ‘excellent’) are not attested until the
19th century (e.g. Figs’s left made terrific play during all the rest of the combat), and we
have to wait until well into the 20th century for this meaning to become widespread,
giving rise to what Mair calls “an all-purpose positive evaluator” (2006: 47). The
increasing ability of terrific to occur on its own as an emotive manifestation of approval
(e.g. “I love them because they know they’re being swept away”. “Oh, terrific.”)
represents a further step in its evolutionary cline. The analysis will examine these
various changes in relation to the development of other evaluative adjectives, such as
awesome (cf. Robinson 2010), bare, brutal, massive and wicked.
References
Culpeper, Jonathan. 1997. History of English. London & New York: Routledge.
Davies, Mark. (2008-). The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA): 400+
million words, 1990-present. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
Davies, Mark. (2010-). The Corpus of Historical American English: 400 million words,
1810−2009. Available online at http://corpus.byu.edu/coha/
De Smet, Hendrik, Hans-Jürgen Diller & Jukka Tyrkkö. 2011. The Corpus of Late
Modern English Texts, version 3.0 (CLMET3.0). More information:
https://perswww.kuleuven.be/~u0044428/clmet3_0.htm
Mair, Christian. 2006. Twentieth Century English. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Moessner, Lilo. 2003. Diachronic English Linguistics. An Introduction. Tübingen:
Gunter Narr.
204
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
OED (Oxford English Dictionary). 3rd edn. in progress: OED Online, March 2000-, ed.
John A. Simpson. <www.oed.com>
Robinson, Justyna. 2010. “Awesome insights into semantic variation”. Eds. Dirk
Geeraerts, Gitte Kristiansen & Yves Peirsman. Advances in Cognitive
Sociolinguistics. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter. 85-109.
Schendl, Herbert. 2001. Historical Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition). 2007. Distributed by
Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. URL:
http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
Trask, Robert Lawrence. 2007. Historical Linguistics. 2nd edition. London: Arnold.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1996. “Semantic Change: An Overview”. Glot International,
vol. 2, issue 9/10: 3-7.
Microparametric syntax of the Igbo D-system
Jeremiah Anene Nwankwegu
(Ebonyi State University, Abakaliki)
This study, microparametrically examines the D(eterminer)-system of Igbo,
paying particular attention to expression of ‘definiteness’ (or ‘familiarity’) in some of
the dialects, in relation with Standard Igbo (SI). The overarching claim in the literature
is that Igbo has no definite determiners (Emenanjo 1978, 2015, Mbah 1999, 2012). On
the contrary, this work shows that in Izhi and Uburu, for instance, definiteness or
familiarity is expressible, using a D-element ọbụ, as illustrated in (1a-b) as against the
SI data in (2), corresponding with (1a) only.
1. a)
b)
2. Ọ
Ọ
3sg
Ọ
3sg
gbu-wa-rụ
kill-perf-past
gbu-wa-rụ eghu
kill-perf-past
eghu
‘He has killed a goat’
goat
ọbụ
‘He has killed the goat’
goat Det (def)
‘He has killed á goat’
gbu-go ewu
3sg kill-perf goat
The analysis of obu in (1b) as a determiner, stems from the fact that, like other
Igbo determiners with which it is paradigmatically related, it only occurs at the rightmost edge of the DP and mutually excludes other determiners:
3. a)
b)
Nwoke
Man
a
Det
‘This man’
*Nwoke
Man
a obu
Det Det
*’The this man/this the man‘
205
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
The incompatibility of obu and the other element a suffices to show that both of
them have the same D-position and D-function; hence, their co occurrence in (3b)
amounts to the D-position being doubly-filled, resulting in ungrammaticality. All other
Igbo nominal modifiers, like adjectives, permit determiners.
In (1b), the use of ọbụ makes definite or familiar the objects eghu (introducing a
presupposition that the discourse referent is present in the common ground between
speaker and hearer), either because it had been mentioned earlier or assumed in the
discourse. As (2) shows, SI has no lexical means of encoding such definiteness or
familiarity as in (1b) in its D-system. This does not imply that SI has no means of
expressing familiarity in discourse; it has, albeit, through relative constructions.
The significance of the findings of this study is that it introduces a dialectal
perspective to investigating the Igbo D-system and counters the claims that Igbo does
not express definiteness by D-projection. The claims and theoretical proposals made in
this study are capable of expanding the space of thinking in the conceptualisation of
Igbo determiner phrase. The study explores the minimalist framework in analysing the
data.
References
Emenanjo, E. N. (1978). Element of modern Igbo Grammar. Ibadan: University Press.
Emenanjo, E. N. (2015). A grammar of contemporary Igbo. Port Harcourt: M&J Grant
Orbit.
Mbah, B. M. (1999). Studies in syntax: Igbo phrase structure. Nsukka: Prize Publishers.
Mbah, B. M. (2012). GB syntax: A minimalist theory and application to Igbo (3rd
edition). Enugu: CIDJAP Press.
The green, green, green grass of home. Basic colour terms and
categories in Irish
Gareth O’Neill
(Leiden University)
Berlin & Kay's (1969) seminal work on basic colour terminology found
universal restrictions on the number and types of basic colour terms and how they
were used across languages. Their research resulted in an implicative hierarchy of
colour terms which reflected the development of colour terms in a language. The
colour terms denoted general colour categories with defined boundary colours but also
prototypical focal colours according to the Munsell colour system. Their results argued
that the perceptual system restricted colour categorisation and inspired further research
on many languages.
Up to now there has been relatively little work done on colour categorisation in
Irish. Our research aims to fill this gap and draw up the colour space in Irish based on
experimental psychological testing. Our research was part of the Evolution of
Semantic Systems project (EoSS) at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics,
Nijmegen (Majid, Jordan & Dunn 2010). For our colour data, we established basic
colour terms in Irish, and then subjected 20 native informants to a colour naming task
206
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(using 84 Munsell colour chips), a focal colour task (using a palette of the same 84
Munsell colours), and a standard colour blindness test.
After ruling out two possible colour-blind informants, we were able to establish
the basic colour terms, focal colours, colour boundaries, and modal colour space in
Irish (as in Figure 1).
Figure 1: Modal Colour Space in Irish
Our results suggest that Irish has 11 main colour terms, namely bán 'white', liath
'grey', dubh 'black', bándearg 'pink', dearg 'red', oráiste 'orange', donn 'brown', buí
'yellow', glas 'green/grey', gorm 'blue', and corcra 'purple', along with several lesser
used colour terms. These include rua 'red' which is only used for hair colour and uaine
which is often used for '(artificial) green'. There are also several English colour terms
in use, such as green and purple, which is not surprising seeing as Irish is a minority
language and English is the dominant language in Ireland. Alongside words in English
for existing colour terms in Irish, there is also variety in the use of individual colour
terms, such as glas which may be used for 'green' but also 'grey' (having completely
lost its hue). Furthermore, the focal colours show varying degrees of agreement
between speakers (with bán 'white' being the only focal colour with complete
agreement), and there are interesting interactions at the colour boundaries (the colour
boundaries are not always completely delineated and contiguous in some cases). In our
presentation we will go into more detail on our results and place colour categorisation
in Irish within the general colour debate.
References
Berlin, Brent & Paul Kay (1969) Basic Colour Terms. Their Universality and
Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Majid, Asifa, Fiona Jordan & Michael Dunn (2010) Evolution of Semantic Systems.
Procedures Manual. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen.
Morphological complexity and hierarchical agreement in Anal
(Tibeto-Burman, Manipur, India)
Pavel Ozerov
(University of Cologne)
The Kuki-Chin branch of Tibeto-Burman languages, spoken on both sides of the
Indo-Myanmar border, has been recently discussed in the literature in the context of
morphological complexity and hierarchical agreement (DeLancey 2013, 2015). Many
of these languages have remarkably elaborate systems of verbal argument indexation,
207
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
and especially hierarchical alignment, whereby the verbal forms mark only Speech Acts
Participants (SAP) and ignore third person referents (“SAP>3”-hierarchy). If the SAP
has the patient-like role against the presumable hierarchy, disambiguation of the
semantic roles is performed by an ‘inverse’ marker. Moreover, one of the functional
proposals for the development of such a system is sociopragmatic effects of the
importance of SAP in discourse. An additional support for this view comes from the
variety of diachronic sources for frequently irregular SAP markers in ‘local’ scenarios
(1-person > 2-person or vice versa) that involve avoidance/politeness strategies: SAP
singular forms in Kuki-Chin are often traced to originally 1-person inclusive forms or
impersonal constructions. This study presents new data for this phenomenon from an
undocumented endangered language Anal, spoken in Manipur (India).
Transitive paradigms show both the archaic suffixal person marking, traced to
Proto-Tibeto-Burman, and the prefixal indexes, traced to Proto-Kuki-Chin innovation
of nominalising constrctions. Some of the tenses have hierarchical alignment with
prefixal SAP marking only in SAP:Patient-forms, and the archaic suffixes marking
SAP:Agents in 3:Patient-forms (1). However, most of the tenses use a purely prefixal
paradigm, while the peculiar inverse marker is the vowel length of the prefixal person
index (2). ‘Local’ SAP-scenarios have double indexation (thus, there is no
straightforward hierarchy between the SAP’s), whereby the P-argument is marked by
the prefixal index, and the A-argument is indexed by a suffixal form (3). In addition,
SAP-forms present another complexity: in some paradigms these forms lose the
indexing suffixes, leaving behind a trace of vowel length and a rising tone on the stem
(4). These verbal paradigms offer previously undocumented scenarios of morphological
complexity and hierarchical alignment, contributing to the typology of hierarchical
systems and suggesting a possibility of diachronic expansion of the relevant markers
across paradigms (cf. the archaic Tibeto-Burman suffix in (1a) vs. the innovative KukiChin prefix (2a)).
Finally, personal prefixes suggest intriguing scenarios of relation between
sociopragmatic effects and the development of SAP markers. Prefixal person-markers
in Anal verbs are cognates with other Kuki- Chin prefixal indexing forms, reconstructed
to Proto-Kuki-Chin (VanBik 2009) (Table 1) (noticeably, the 1 inclusive dual/plural
forms show a remarkable variability across the branch, suggesting diverse sources with
different sociopragmatic scenarios).
1
1DL
2
3
Proto-KukiChin
*ka
?
*na
*a
Table 1
Anal
ka
na
a
va
However, except of the first person prefix ka-, the parallel Anal forms have a
different indexation compared to the proto-forms: na- – 1DL.INCL; a- – 2; and
innovative va- – 3. This suggests a development of na- as ‘*2 > 1DL.INCL’ (opposite
to the development of ‘plural/dual inclusive > SAP singular’, found in other Kuki-Chin
languages (DeLancey 2013)) and of a- ‘*3 > 2’. Both scenarios appear to be related to
politeness/avoidance strategies.
208
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Examples
(a)
(b)
(1) tʰi-̀ siń -nɯ́
nàː-tʰi-̀ nɯ́
1DL/INV-see-PAST
‘He saw us (both).’
see-1DL-PAST
‘We (both) saw him.’
(2) nà-tʰi-̀ vàl
1DL.INCL-see-PERF
‘We (both) have seen him’
(3) kà ː-tʰi-̀ và l-ti ́
1/INV-see-PERF-2
‘You see me.’
(4) àː-tʰiː̌ -nɯ́
2/INV-see/1-PAST
‘I saw you.’
nàː-tʰi-̀ vàl
1DL.INCL/INV-see-PERF
‘He has seen us (both)’
à ː-tʰi-̀ và l-niŋ́
2/INV-see-PERF-1
‘I see you.’
àː-tʰi-̀ nɯ́
2/INV-see-PAST
‘He saw you.’
References
DeLancey, Scott. 2013. Argument indexation (verb agreement) in Kuki-Chin. presented
at the 46th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics,
Dartmouth College.
DeLancey, Scott. 2015. The Historical Dynamics of Morphological Complexity in
Trans-Himalayan. Linguistic Discovery 13.2:37-56
VanBik, Kenneth 2009. Proto-Kuki-Chin: A Reconstructed Ancestor of the Kuki-Chin
Languages. (STEDT Monograph 89). Berkeley: Sino-Tibetan Etymological
Dictionary and Thesaurus Project, University of California.
Verbal deponency in the Chibchan family: The case of Bribri
Sara Pacchiarotti
(University of Oregon)
Traditionally, deponency refers to a restricted class of verbs in Latin which were
morphologically marked by passive voice suffixes but appeared in active syntactic
contexts (Baerman 2007: 1). Baerman broadened the definition of deponency to
situations which do not exactly reflect that of Latin, but are extensions of the core
defining feature of deponency, that is, a mismatch between form and function. Within
the Chibchan family, cases of verbal deponency have been noted in Rama (Chibchan,
Nicaragua) (Baerman et al. 2006).
Based on data from oral tradition texts and elicitation, this paper argues that a
mismatch between verbal form and syntactic function also occurs in Bribri (Chibchan,
Costa Rica). In this language, there exists a lexically-specified set of verbs which are
morphologically intransitive, bearing the intransitivizing –r suffix (with allomorphs –n
209
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
and -ɾ), but can appear in constructions with two overt core syntactic arguments. Within
Bribri Deponent Verb Constructions (DVC), two types of marking of the non-absolutive
argument can be found: in DVC Type 1 (1), the non-absolutive argument is marked by
an ergative postposition (1); in DVC Type 2 (2), it is marked by a locative postposition
lexically determined for each verb.
(1)
sibö́ =tö
Bribri–wak tsakí–n–ẽ
S.=ERG
Bribri–clan be.born–DETRANS–PFV
‘Sibo created the Bribrisʼ (lit: Sibo was born the Bribris)
(2)
yeʼ=kĩ
kápi kiá–n–ẽ
1SG=over coffee
want–DETRANS–PFV
‘I wanted coffee’ (lit: over me coffee was wanted)
In both DVC types, the non-absolutive argument retains overt and covert
properties that are typical of ergative phrases, including ergative case marking of the A
argument, control of co-reference under coordination, complete and incomplete Subjectto-Object raising, and control of co-reference of a third person anaphoric pronoun in a
following possessive NP. These properties indicate that when a deponent verb occurs in
a construction with two core arguments, the construction is syntactically transitive,
despite the presence of intransitivizing verb morphology on the deponent verb form.
This syntactic behavior confirms previous observations that verbs bearing the
intransitivizing –r suffix in Bribri behave as syntactically transitive verbs (DickemanDatz 1985). In addition, some deponent verbs are undergoing a formal retransitivization process, by which the intransitivizing –r suffix becomes lost. This
occurs by analogy to active voice verb forms which display the same infinitive endings
as deponent verbs.
From an evolutionary perspective, verbal deponency is a change in which
seemingly-unsuited forms (intransitive morphology) are selected for non-matching
functions (transitive syntactic situations). As such, a question arises as to whether
deponency could be ‘explained’ by resorting to exaptation (von Mengden 2016).
References
Baerman, Matthew. 2007. Morphological typology of deponency. Proceedings of the
British Academy, vol. 145, pp. 1-19. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Baerman, Matthew, Greville G. Corbett, Dunstan Brown & Andrew Hippisley. 2006.
Surrey Cross-linguistic Database on Deponency. University of Surrey.
http://dx.doi.org/10.15126/SMG.15/2
Dickeman-Datz, Margaret. 1985. Transitivity and indefinite voice in Bribri. IJAL 51/4:
388-390.
von Mengden, Ferdinand. 2016. Functional shifts and (meta-) linguistic evolution.
Norde, Muriel & Van de Velde, Freek (eds.) Exaptation and language change,
121-62. Amsterdam/Philadelphia : John Benjamins.
210
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
The information status of post-verbal noun phrases in thereconstructions
Soyoon Park
(Lancaster University)
The restriction on the post-verbal position in there-existentials dates back to the
formalist
approach
given
by Milsark
(1974,
1977).
Drawing
on
quantification/cardinality, Milsark posited that noun phrases with strong determiners
(i.e., determiners with a quantificational meaning, e.g., syntactically definite and
universal quantifiers) are prohibited in the post-verbal position in there-existentials
under the rubric ‘definiteness-effect’. See the examples below (Milsark, 1977, p.4, p.6).
(1) a. *There is the wolf at the door.
b. *There was everyone in the room.
However, there are cases unaccounted for in the formalist approach, leading to the
importance of contextual information. In cognitive and pragmatic accounts (see e.g.,
Lakoff, 1987; Ward & Birner, 1995; Birner & Ward, 1998) what sanctions the postverbal position in there-existentials is the information status of NPs (i.e., hearernewness), not their formal characteristics given by determiners. Based on the
relationship between the post-verbal NP and its context, Birner & Ward (1998) carried
out a corpus-based study, classifying five types of there-existentials with formally
definite NPs: (i) hearer-old entities treated as hearer-new (i.e., reminders); (ii) hearernew tokens of hearer-old types; (iii) hearer-old entities newly instantiating a variable
(i.e., list); (iv) hearer-new entities with individuating descriptions; (v) false definites.
Considering the nature of language mode, I hypothesized that certain types (i.e.,
reminders, list, and false definites) emerge as most frequent in writing and speech
respectively. I compared the frequencies of adverbs (e.g., firstly, secondly) and found
that ‘listing’ in general is more common in written language than in speech. Thus, I
assumed that this holds true for there-constructions.
As for ‘reminders’ one can think of the nature of conversation. For a hearer,
especially in a long stretch of discourse, it is more likely that they will forget what was
mentioned earlier. Since we may construe speakers as to some extent accommodating to
the perceived needs of hearers (see the pragmatics research paradigm established by
Grice, 1975,1989), this type was expected to be more frequent in speech than writing
where, as a reader, one can easily trace things back.
The data was based on two samples of 1,000 examples of there-sentences,
randomly collected from the written and spoken sections of the British National Corpus.
I manually analysed these examples according to the five types.
It turned out that in speech, the most frequent type was ‘hearer-old entities treated
as hearer-new’ (i.e., reminders) given in (2a), while in writing the ‘list’ type was most
frequent as in (2b).
(2) a. There's that black driver again. (BNC KDY 1783)
b. Third, there is the statistical modeling. (BNC B1G 63)
211
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
The analysis supports the assumption that language mode affects, to some extent,
frequency of certain types of NPs with definite descriptions in there-existentials. It also
extends existing insights on different discourse strategies in written and spoken
language (Chafe, 1982; Biber et al., 1999) by giving empirical evidence.
References
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999). Longman
grammar of spoken and written English. New York: New York : Longman.
Birner, B. J., & Ward, G. L. (1998). Information status and noncanonical word order in
English. Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Publishing Co.
Chafe, W. L. (1982). Integration and Involvement in Speaking, Writing, and Oral
Literature. In D. Tannen (Ed.), Spoken and written language : exploring orality
and literacy (pp. 35-52). Norwood, N.J.: Ablex.
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and Conversation. In P. e. Cole & J. L. Morcan (Eds.),
Syntax and semantics, vol.3 : speech acts. N.Y.: Academic Pr.
Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the way of words: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard
University Press.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things : what categories reveal about
the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Milsark, G. (1974). Existential sentences in English. (PhD), MIT, Cambridge.
Milsark, G. (1977). Towards an explanation of certain peculiarities of the existential
construction in English. Linguistic Analysis, 3, 1-29.
Ward, G., & Birner, B. J. (1995). Definiteness and the English Existential. Language,
71(4), 722-742.
Carving places out of the interactional space: εδώ (‘here’) in Greek
talk-in-interaction
Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou
(Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)
In the aftermath of Fillmore’s (1997 [1971]) Lectures on Deixis, the indexical
term ‘here’– prototypical of spatial deixis – attracted the attention of many scholars (cf.
e.g. Klein 1978, Levinson 1983, Ehrich 1992, Sidnell 2009). Despite some differences
in the approaches taken, the meaning of ‘here’ is always considered to involve the
speaker’s location in one way or another. More recently, however, the importance of
studying ‘here’ in real interaction was underscored (Sidnell 2009). It is in this direction
that the present paper seeks to contribute by investigating the use of εδώ (‘here’) in
Greek ordinary conversations. The leading research question is: given the vagueness of
‘here’ (cf. Fillmore 1997[1971]: 64f) how is it to explain that participants do not
problematize its occurrence in interaction (cf. Schegloff 1972: 87)?
Employing the theoretical framework of Conversation Analysis and my earlier
work on place reference (Pavlidou 2015), I examine εδώ in its spatial (as opposed to its
temporal, metapragmatic, etc.) uses in 40 face-to-face conversations among friends
and/or relatives and 140 telephone calls (drawn from the Corpus of Spoken Greek at the
212
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Institute of Modern Greek Studies). More specifically, I focus on the co-occurrence of
εδώ with individual or collective self-reference, i.e. the double-grounding in the
speaker’s deictic center, which already puts some restrictions on the referential scope of
εδώ (the 1st pers. singular foregrounding a speaker’s location, while the 1st pers. plural
foregrounds a speaker’s AND others’/participants’ location).
However, as the analysis reveals, other factors play a role as well, for example:
the position of εδώ in its sequential environment (locally initial vs. subsequent position,
cf. Schegloff 1996), the co-occurrence of additional spatial terms (referring to places
unique to speaker or common to all participants) with εδώ, etc. It is therefore not just
the “subject matter” of discourse that delimits the referential scope of ‘here’, as
Fillmore 1997[1971] would have it. Moreover, the interplay of such factors indexes
inclusion/exclusion of other participants and allows speakers to carve places (i.e. spaces
imbued with human experience, social meaning, etc.; cf. Scollon & Scollon 2003,
Johnstone 2010) out of the interactional space.
The theoretical implication of this analysis is that ‘here’ is better construed as a
referential index or shifter (Silverstein 1976), whose semantic/referential meaning can
indeed be described as proposed by Sidnell (2009) on the basis of the figure-indexical
ground distinction (cf. Hanks 1992), while its pragmatic/indexical meaning derives
from the relation of the region referred to (through the use of ‘here’) to the interactional
space.
References
Ehrich, Veronika. 1992. Hier und Jetzt. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Fillmore, Charles J. 1997 [1971]. Lectures on Deixis. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
Hanks, William. 1992. The indexical ground of deictic reference. In A. Duranti & C.
Goodwin (eds), Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 43-76.
Johnstone, Barbara. 2010. Indexing the local. In N. Coupland (ed.), The Handbook of
Language and Globalization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 386-405.
Klein, Wolfgang. 1978. Wo ist hier? Präliminarien zu einer Untersuchung der lokalen
Deixis. Linguistische Berichte 58: 18-40.
Levinson, Stephen. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pavlidou Th.-S. 2015. Place and collective identities in everyday conversations [in
Greek]. In Th.-S. Pavlidou (ed.), Greek Language & Spoken Communication.
Thessaloniki: Institute of Modern Greek Studies, 249-263.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1972. Notes on a conversational practice: formulating place. In
D. Sudnow (ed.), Studies in Social Interaction. New York: MacMillan, The Free
Press, 75-119.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1996. Some practices for referring to persons in talk-ininteraction: a partial sketch of a systematics. In B. A. Fox (ed.), Studies in
Anaphora. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 437-485.
Scollon, Ron & Scollon Wong, Suzie. 2003. Discourses in Place: Language in the
Material World. London/New York: Routledge.
Sidnell, Jack. 2009. Deixis. In J. Verschueren & J.-O. Östman (eds), Key Notions for
Pragmatics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 114-138.
Silverstein, Michael. 1976. Shifters, linguistic categories, and cultural description. In K.
Basso & H. A. Selby (eds), Meaning in Anthropology. Albuquerque, NM:
University of New Mexico Press, 11-55.
213
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Expressivity in grammaticalization: A moving target
Peter Petré
(University of Antwerp)
This talk examines the nature of the interplay of the conventional and the
unconventional in the grammaticalization of progressive aspect in the [BE Ving]construction and [BE going to] (cf. Traugott 2015 for an overview). The language
system, whether considered the mental grammar within an individual, or an abstract
object emergent in the speech community, essentially consists of conventionalized
symbols or constructions. While the individual to a large extent adopts this system of
conventions, they also have an urge to stand out in the crowd. This urge has been
identified as a possible source of grammar change, termed extravagance or expressivity
(Haspelmath 1999, Hopper & Traugott 2003: 73, Keller 1994). We analyse this duality
in data from a new large-scale longitudinal corpus of 50 individuals born in the 17th
century (Petré et al. 2016), based mainly on texts from Early English Books Online.
While the progressive function of [BE Ving] was established in Early Modern
English, it was initially largely limited to past tense adverbial clauses. At the turn of the
17th century, language users arguably started exploiting the expressive power of the
construction in the present, where it increasingly carried the implicature of
progressivity, while its older stative adjectival meaning still persisted. Evidence that
progressive meaning was not yet routinely present comes from the ubiquitous cooccurrence of the time adverb now, which coded ongoingness properly. It is argued that
their combined ‘extravagance’ served to make utterances about ongoing situations stand
out. This same expressive use of [BE Ving] may have incited language users to employ
[BE going to] for emphasizing motion-with-a-purpose. Samuel Clarke (1599-1682), for
instance, almost exclusively uses [BE going to] to encode powerful ego-centered
statements, such as this dramatic announcement by Christ:
(1) I am now going to be sacrificed. (Samuel Clarke, 1660)
Note that motion is still present in (1), as Christ is walking from prison to the cross.
Also note that the presence of now, while enhancing overall expressivity, also hampers
further expansion of [BE going to] to non-imminent futures. When in the 17th century
the progressive function of [BE Ving] also conventionalized in the present, and its
extravagant character was gradually lost, the presence of now also decreased. This shift
of progressiveness to [BE Ving] in turn opened up possibilities of extending [BE going
to] to new unexpected uses, where ongoing motion is absent, and only the idea of a
future situation is evoked:
(2) For ought I see, I am going to be the most constant Maudlin. (John Dryden, 1668)
Sentences like these remained exceptional and conspicuous in the present tense
until 1700.
In sum, the extravagant quality of [BE going to] turns out to be a moving target.
This dynamics of the unconventional turning into the conventional and paving the way
for new unconventional uses, might help explain the directionality of grammatical
214
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
constructionalization. More generally, to understand language change, it seems essential
to combine the (socially driven) individual and the (more cognitive) systemic side of
language.
References
Haspelmath, Martin. 1999. Why is grammaticalization irreversible? Linguistics 37,
1043–68.
Keller, Rudi. 1994. On language change: The invisible hand in language. London &
New York: Routledge.
Petré, Peter, Lynn Anthonissen, Sara Budts, Enrique Manjavacas & Oscar Strik. MindBending
Grammars
Corpus.
University
of
Antwerp
(https://www.uantwerpen.be/mind-bending-grammars/).
Hopper, Paul J. & Elizabeth C. Traugott. 2003 [1993]. Grammaticalization. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Traugott, Elizabeth C. 2015. Toward a coherent account of Grammatical
Construcionalization. In Jóhanna Barðdal, Elena Smirnova, Lotte Sommerer and
Spike Gildea Diachronic Construction Grammar (Constructional Approaches to
Language 18), 51-80. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Syntactic alternations of Dutch psych verbs. A corpus study
Dirk Pijpops and Dirk Speelman
(University of Leuven/Research Foundation Flanders; University of Leuven)
Psych verbs, i.e. verbs expressing some mental state or event, are known for their
wide range of syntactic variation in and between languages (Croft 1993; Kitis 2009;
Verhoeven 2010), and Dutch is no exception. Particularly interesting about the Dutch
psych verbs is that two argument realizations may be possible for a single verb. Below,
the verb ergeren (‘to annoy’) is shown to realize its experiencer, i.e. the participant that
experiences the mental state, in both object (1) and subject (2) position.
(1)
(2)
Transitive argument construction:
Maar iets
ergert medefirmant
Melkert
But something annoys business_partner Melkert
‘But something annoys business partner Melkert.’
Reflexive argument construction:
Hij ergert zich
aan de besluiteloosheid van kabinet
He annoys
himself
to the indecisiveness of the cabinet
het
‘The indecisiveness of the cabinet annoys him.’
(ConDiv corpus)
(ConDiv corpus)
Drawing from data of the ConDiv corpus of written Dutch (Grondelaers et al.
2000) and the Corpus of Spoken Dutch (Oostdijk et al. 2002), we have investigated the
factors driving this alternation for the verbs ergeren (‘to annoy’), interesseren (‘to
215
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
interest’), storen (‘to disturb’) and verbazen (‘to amaze’). The statistical work horse
technique was logistic regression.
Many theoretical frameworks deal with the argument variation of psych verbs
through some form of the agentivity hypothesis, which by and large claims that more
agentive participants are more likely to take up subject position (Hopper and Thompson
1980; Grimshaw 1990; Dowty 1991; Langacker 1991; Croft 1993; Pesetsky 1995;
Vanhoe 2002). However, we will claim that it is important to distinguish between the
type and token level agentivity hypotheses, which are often conflated, yet have
fundamentally different theoretical implications (Dowty 1991: 579–581; Goldberg 1995:
220–221; Levin and Grafmiller 2012:220–221).
The type level compares the preference for argument constructions between verbs
(Van de Velde 2004). Among the verbs under scrutiny, it was found that those verbs
whose lexical meaning implies a more agentive experiencer, did not more often realize
this experiencer in subject position. Meanwhile, the token level concerns differences
within the occurrences of a single verb. Using the operationalization of Levin and
Grafmiller (2012), we did observe that the participant that causes the mental state was
more likely to appear in subject position if it was animate, and hence more capable of
agentive action.
Other hypotheses were tested as well. The pronominality of the participants
turned out to be an even better predictor of the employed argument construction than
animacy, while the etymology of the verbs was not shown to provide critical
information to predict the dominant construction (cf. Klein and Kutscher 2005: 41–45).
To conclude, we believe that our failure to confirm the agentivity hypothesis at
the type level indicates that caution may be in order when predicting the dominant
argument construction of a verb based on its lexical meaning. However, the
confirmation of the agentivity hypothesis at the token level can be taken to show that
argument constructions do add meaning to the utterance, on top of the lexical meaning
of the verb (Goldberg 1995; Colleman and De Clerck 2009). Perhaps most importantly,
by not confirming the agentivity hypothesis at the type level while confirming it at the
token level, this study may serve as an example of the importance to distinguish
between both.
References
Colleman, Timothy and Bernard De Clerck. 2009. “Caused motion”? The semantics of
the English to-dative and the Dutch aan-dative. Cognitive Linguistics 20(1). 5–42.
Croft, William. 1993. Case marking and the semantics of mental verbs. In James
Pustejovski (ed.), Semantics and the Lexicon, 55–72. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Dowty, David. 1991. Thematic proto-roles and argument selection. Language 67(3).
547– 619.
Goldberg, Adele Eva. 1995. Constructions: a construction grammar approach to
argument structure. Chicago: University of Chicago press.
Grimshaw, Jane. 1990. Argument structure. Cambridge: MIT press.
Grondelaers, Stefan, Katrien Deygers, Hilde Van Aken, Vicky Van den Heede and Dirk
Speelman. 2000. Het CONDIV-corpus geschreven Nederlands [The CONDIVcorpus of written Dutch]. Nederlandse Taalkunde 5(4). 356–363.
216
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Hopper, Paul and Sandra Annear Thompson. 1980. Transitivity in Grammar and
Discourse. Language 56(2). 251–299.Kitis, Eliza. 2009. Emotions as discursive
constructs: The case of the psych-verb “fear.” In Barbara LewandowskaTomaszczyk & Katarzyna Dziwirek (eds.), Studies in Cognitive Corpus
Linguistics, 147–172. Frankfurt am Main: Lang.
Klein, Katarina and Silvia Kutscher. 2005. Lexical Economy and Case Selection of
Psych- Verbs in German. Working papers of the SFB 282, Theory of the Lexicon
[Arbeitspapiere des SFB 282 Theories des Lexicons] Nr. 122.
Langacker, Ronald W. 1991. Foundations of cognitive grammar: descriptive
application. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Levin, Beth and Jason Grafmiller. 2012. Do you always fear what frightens you? In
Tracy Holloway King & Valeria de Paiva (eds.), From Quirky Case to
Representing Space: Papers in Honor of Annie Zaenen, 21–32. Stanford: CSLI
Publications.
Oostdijk, Nelleke, Wim Goedertier, Frank Van Eynde, Louis Boves, Jean-Pierre
Martens, Michael Moortgat and Harald Baayen. 2002. Experiences from the
Spoken Dutch corpus project.
Pesetsky, David. 1995. Zero Syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Vanhoe, Henk. 2002. Aspects of the syntax of psychological verbs in Spanish: a lexical
functional analysis. In Miriam Butt & Tracy H. King (eds.), Proceedings of the
LFG02 Conference, 373–389. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Velde, Freek Van de. 2004. De Middelnederlandse onpersoonlijke constructie en haar
grammaticale concurrenten: semantische motivering van de argumentstructuur.
Nederlandse Taalkunde 9(1). 48–76.
Verhoeven, Elisabeth. 2010. Agentivity and stativity in experiencer verbs: Implications
for a typology of verb classes. Linguistic Typology 14(2-3). 213–251.
Cognitive rhetoric of effect: Humility idea in Western and Ukrainian
leaders’ ceremonial speeches
Serhiy Potapenko
(Nizhyn University)
The presentation links ancient ethos regarded as a speaker’s self-representation to
cognitive rhetoric of effect dealing with a favourable image of any referent in any type
of discourse. The novelty of the approach consists in incorporating the main tools of
cognitive rhetoric – image schemas (Turner 1991: 239) and force dynamics (Oakley
2005: 444) – into the rhetorical stages of text-building: invention, disposition, elocution
and performance combining the ancient canons of memory and delivery. Consequently,
the suggested procedure of revealing the textual implementation of a speaker’s intended
effects consists of four stages. The first – inventional – one draws on the dictionary
definitions of the names of particular effects to reconstruct their canonical, i.e.
characteristic of all language speakers, conceptualization in terms of image schemas
(Johnson 1987: 116) and force-dynamics (Talmy 2000: 413). The second – dispositional
– stage reveals the effects’ representation in the textual structure. The third –
217
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
elocutionary – stage explains their indication by the linguistic units evoking imageschematic and force-dynamic relations. The fourth – performative – stage focuses on the
social background for the speakers’ attention to particular effects.
The application of the suggested procedure is exemplified by exploring the way
the humility effect is created in President Obama’s 2009 inaugural ("I stand here today
humbled by the task"), in Queen Elizabeth’s 2012 Christmas broadcast ("It was
humbling that so many chose to mark the anniversary"), and in the 2010 inaugural by
former Ukrainian President Yanukovych ("What do I feel taking presidential oath?
Responsibility and humility").
The inventive analysis reveals that force-dynamically the unit humble represents a
speaker’s internal tendency to rest while image-schematically it reflects a fall in his
salience indicated in the semantic feature ‘showing you do not think’ (OALD 2000: 635)
by negation related to the BLOCKAGE schema and by the semantic feature ‘you are as
important as other people’ (ibid) indicating individuals’ equal status relative to the
VERTICALITY schema.
The dispositional analysis shows that the conceptual structures underlying the
impression of humility are evoked throughout the whole speeches by Western leaders
and in the introduction of the Ukrainian president’s inaugural.
The elocutionary analysis unravels two ways of creating the humility effect by
Western leaders: canonical and specific. The canonical one, characteristic of all English
speakers, consists in the scarcity of self-reference evoking perceptual BLOCKAGE and
in the focus on God overshadowing the speakers. The specific feature of the Queen’s
broadcast is an abundant reference to social groups evoking the COLLECTION schema
while President Obama turns to the country’s history associated with the BACK
schema, positions himself as a target of external forces and as a trajector moving BACK
and DOWN. Conversely, the Ukrainian president transforms the promised humility
effect into that of responsibility by the units denoting salience and force.
The performative stage reveals that the specificity of presenting the humility
effect results from different ways of public support for the leaders within particular
political systems: implicit for a sovereign and explicit for the presidents.
References
Johnson, M. (1987). The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning,
Imagination, and Reason. Chicago; L.: The Univ. of Chicago Press.
Oakley, T. (2005). Force-dynamic dimensions of rhetorical effect. From Perception to
Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics. B., N.Y.: Mouton de Gruyter,
444–473.
OALD (2000). Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. Oxford etc.: Oxford University
Press.
Talmy, L. (2000). Force Dynamics in Language and Cognition. Concept Structuring
Systems. Cambridge (Mass.): The MIT Press. Vol. 1, 409-470.
Turner, M. (1991). Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive
Science. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press.
218
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Karelian and Veps: Plurilingualism and language revitalization in two
Finnic language communities
Ulriikka Puura and Outi Tanczos
(University of Helsinki)
This paper examines language revitalization strategies in Veps and Karelian
language communities. A central question is whether plurilingualism and its
manifestations, such as code-switching, are seen as a possibility or a threat.
Karelian and Veps are Finno-Ugric languages spoken in North-Western Russia.
Veps is seriously endangered with some thousands of speakers (3613 speakers
according to the 2010 census). The Karelian language is spoken by a larger group (2010
census: 25 605). Today the languages are in a very similar sociolinguistic situation
despite the fact that Karelian is the titular language of the Karelian Republic, whereas
Veps has a different status as a minority language in a partly overlapping area. In both
communities language shift has rapidly taken place. Practically all Karelian and Veps
speakers are bilingual, many of them dominantly Russian speakers. Use of resources
from several languages is frequent in everyday life, but multilingualism and minority
languages are poorly supported in the society.
This double standard of societal monolingualism and individual plurilingualism
challenges minority languages. Language revitalization efforts emerged among Karelian
and Veps communities in the beginning of the 1990s. Our preliminary results show that
the two communities differ in attitudes, especially in issues of plurilingualism vs.
monolingualism and new standardized language vs. traditional vernacular. These
differences seem to be rooted in the sociolinguistic differences: the size and vitality of
the community, the status of the language and contacts to other Finnic language
communities, most importantly the contacts of Karelian with Finnish and also Finnish
as a model for standardization in both languages. The research for this study was carried
out on recent sociolinguistic interviews and survey data (produced in the ELDIAproject). The study combines discourse analysis with statistical data on language
attitudes.
References
Karjalainen, Heini - Puura, Ulriikka - Grünthal, Riho - Kovaleva, Svetlana 2013:
Karelian in Russia. ELDIA Case Specific Report. Studies in European Language
Diversity
26.
Mainz:
ELDIA.
Available
online:
http://phaidra.univie.ac.at/o:314612.
Puura, Ulriikka - Karjalainen, Heini - Zajceva, Nina - Grünthal, Riho 2013: The Veps
language in Russia: ELDIA Case-Specific Report. Studies in European Language
Diversity
26.
Mainz:
ELDIA.
Available
online:
https://phaidra.univie.ac.at/view/o:315545.
Puura, Ulriikka - Tánczos, Outi 2016: Division of responsibility in Karelian and Veps
language revitalization discourse. In: Reetta Toivanen & Janne Saarikivi (eds)
New and old language diversities - linguistic genocide or superdiversity?
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
219
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Zamyatin, Konstantin 2014: An Official Status for Minority Languages? A Study of
State Languages in Russia's Finno-Ugric Republics. Helsinki: Uralica
Helsingiensia 6.
The effect of physician’s gender on closing phase in Iranian medical
interactions
Fariba Ramezani Sarbandi, Giti Taki and Pakzad Yousefian
(Sistan and Baluchestan University)
Conversation analysis stresses a format in sequential structures of medical
interactions. According to Woods (2006), it is possible to identify different stages or
phases of communication in the course of medical interview. An ideal sequence of
medical interaction might consist of opening, complaint, examination or test, diagnosis,
treatment or advice and closing. The purpose of this study was to investigate the closing
phase in Iranian medical interactions. The closing is the final phase of the sequencing of
doctor- patient interactions. Future arrangement, medicine instruction, advice and
treatment, summarizing session, patient‘s reaction and agreement, physician‘s empathy,
saying goodbye and calling the name of the next patient usually happen in the closing
phase of consultations. In this paper, there were two main questions: how is the closing
phase designed in Iranian medical interactions? And whether there is any relationship
between closing phase and physician‘s gender? To answer the questions, fieldwork was
conducted in clinics and hospitals of Rafsanjan city in Iran. One- hundred physicianpatient consultations were audiotaped in the physicians’ offices during 2011-2012 by
ten physicians (5 male and 5 female). Analyzing of the data revealed that Iranian
physicians applied almost the same closing phase, but the frequencies were different in
male and female ones. Male physicians tended more to close their consultations by
medicine instruction 18%, and advice and treatment 23%. Female physicians tended
more to close their consultations by advice and treatment 20%, patient‘s reaction and
agreement 14%, and physician‘s empathy 9%. The finding also indicated that closing in
medical interactions is a crucial phase for doctor and patient to make an effective
conversation, and a failed closing leads physicians to reopen the previous phases as
exchanging information, diagnosis and forward planning.
Keywords: physician – patient interaction, closing phase, physician‘s gender.
References
Bagheri, H, Ibrahim, N. A. & H. Habil. 2015. The Structure of Clinical Consultation: A
Case of Non-Native Speakers of English as Participants. Global Journal of Health
Science,. 7 (1): 249-260.
Byrne PS, Long BEL. 1976. Doctors Talking to Patients.UK: Exeter: RCGP.
Robinson, J. D. 1999. The Organization of Action and Activity in Primary-Care,
Doctor-Patient Consultations. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of
California, Los Angeles.
220
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Robinson Jeffrey D, John Heritage. 2004. Physicians’ opening questions and patients’
satisfaction. Patient Education and Counseling, 60 (3): 279–285.
Tsai, M. H. 2005. Opening stages in triadic medical encounters in Taiwan.
Communication and Medicine .2: 53-68.
Woods, Nicola. 2006. Describing Discourse, London: Hodder Arnold.
DR & MRS VANDERTRAMP on holiday: Auxiliary alternation in
spoken Montréal French (1971-2016)
Béatrice Rea
(University of Oxford)
My paper investigates the auxiliary alternation in spoken Montréal French between
avoir “have” and être “be” with the twenty or so verbs prescriptively requiring the latter
(tomber “to fall”, partir “to leave”, rester “to stay”, etc.):
(1) J’ai tombé (AVOIR) vs Je suis tombé
(ÊTRE) I fell/have fallen
After analysing the Sankoff-Cedergren Montréal Corpus (1971), Ledgeway (in
press, section 3.2.2.4) observed that linguistic structure had little to do with the
variation, and Sankoff &Thibault (1977: 107) concluded that greater exposure to the
standard would slow down avoir-extension. With a pilot study (2013) and a trend study
(2016), I attempt to determine whether their prediction came true. I will also explore
such variation within pronominal constructions because they have not been studied by
Sankoff and Thibault:
(2) Je m’ai fait mal (AVOIR) vs Je me suis fait mal
(ÊTRE) I (have) hurt myself
Interestingly, this levelling phenomenon has been documented in virtually all the
French-speaking communities of North America: in Ontario, Canada (Canale, Mougeon
& Bélanger 1978; Béniak & Mougeon 1989; Willis 2000), the Maritime Provinces,
Canada (Haden 1973; King & Nadasdi 2005; Balcom 2008), Vermont, USA (Russo &
Roberts 1999), New England, USA (Stelling 2011), and Louisiana, USA (Papen &
Rottet 1997). However, since avoir-extension can be observed in some varieties of
popular European French (Ledgeway 2012) and since Anglophone students in French
immersion do not generalise avoir more frequently than Francophone ones (Knaus &
Nadasdi 2001), it would appear that auxiliary alternation has been recorded chiefly in
North America not because of structural borrowing from English, but rather because of
the lack of exposure to Standard French within the community (Poplack 2015).
In 2013, I recorded 12 native speakers of Montréal French (and recorded an
additional 36 in spring 2016) and transcribed the compound tense tokens of the verbs
that had shown alternation in Sankoff & Thibault (1977, 1980), as well as those of the
pronominal verbs that arbitrarily surfaced during the sociolinguistic interviews. The
221
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
speakers have subsequently been grouped according to gender, age, years of schooling,
socioeconomic class, linguistic market index, and English proficiency.
A comparison of my preliminary results (2013) with those of Sankoff & Thibault
(1977, 1980) reveals that the auxiliary alternation observed in intransitive verbs has
overall significantly decreased in Montréal French. Être-retention correlates with a
younger age, the completion of higher educational degrees, upper socioeconomic
classes, greater insertion in the linguistic market, and English bilingualism: thus
substantiating the conclusions drawn by Sankoff & Thibault. My data also show that
avoir-generalisation in the compound tenses of pronominal verbs is highly socially
marked. The decline of avoir- extension in Montréal French, a realignment with
Standard French, appears to evolve in the opposite direction of a trend displayed by
many Romance varieties to use a single auxiliary, namely “have”, in the compound
tenses of active verbs (Ledgeway 2012).
References
Balcom, Patricia. 2008. On the learning of auxiliary use in the referential variety by
speakers of New Brunswick Acadian French. Canadian Journal of Linguistics
53.1: 7–34.
Béniak, Édouard & Raymond Mougeon. 1989. Recherches sociolinguistiques sur la
variabilité en français ontarien. In E. Béniak & R. Mougeon (eds), Le français
canadien parlé hors Québec: Aperçu sociolinguistique. Québec: Les Presses de l’
Université Laval, 69–104.
Canale, Michael, Raymond Mougeon & Monique Bélanger. 1978. Analogical leveling
of the auxiliary être in Ontarian French. In M. Suñer (ed.), Contemporary Studies
in Romance Linguistics. Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 41–61.
Haden, Ernest F. 1973. French dialect geography in North America. In T. A. Sebeok
(ed.), Current Trends in Linguistics. Vol 10: Linguistics in North America. The
Hague: Mouton.
King, Ruth & Terry Nadasdi. 2005. Deux auxiliaires qui voulaient mourir en français
acadien. In P. Brasseur & A. Falkert (eds), Français d ’ Amérique: approches
morphosyntaxiques. Paris: L’Harmattan, 103–11.
Knaus, Valerie & Terry Nadasdi. 2001. Être ou ne pas être en Immersion French.
Canadian Modern Language Review/La Revue canadienne des langues vivantes
58, n° 2: 287–306.
Ledgeway, Adam. 2012. From Latin to Romance. Morphosyntactic Typology and
Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ledgeway, Adam. in press. From Latin to Romance Syntax: The Great Leap. In P.
Crisma & G. Longobardi (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Diachronic and
Historical Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Papen, Robert A. & Kevin J. Rottet. 1997. A Structural sketch of the Cajun French
spoken in Lafourche and Terrebonne Parishes. In A. Valdman (ed.), French and
Creole in Louisiana. New York: Plenum Press, 71–108.
Poplack, Shana. 2015. Norme prescriptive, norme communautaire et variation
diaphasique. In K. Jeppesen Kragh & J. Lindschouw (eds), Travaux de
linguistique romane. Sociolinguistique, dialectologie, variation : Les variations
diasystématiques et leurs interdépendances dans les langues romanes.
222
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Proceedings of the Colloque DIA II (Copenhagen, Nov. 19-21 2012), Strasbourg:
Éditions de linguistique et de philologie, 293–319.
Russo, Marijke & Julie Roberts. 1999. Linguistic change in endangered dialects: The
case of alternation between avoir and ê tre in Vermont French. Language
Variation and Change 11, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 67–85.
Sankoff, Gillian & Pierrette Thibault. 1977. L’alternance entre les auxiliaires avoir et
être en français parlé à Montréal. Langue française 34: 81–108.
— 1980. The alternation between the auxiliaries avoir and être in Montréal French. In
G. Sankoff (ed.), The Social Life of Language, Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 311–345.
Stelling, Louis E. 2011. The effects of grammatical proscription on morphosyntactic
change: Auxiliary variation in Franco-American French. Arborescences : revue d’
études françaises, n° 1.
Willis, Lauren. 2000. “ Être ou ne plus être? ” Auxiliary alternation in Ottawa-Hull
French. Master’s thesis, Ottawa: Université d’Ottawa.
Production vs. Comprehension – An experimental perspective on
Estonian spatial demonstratives
Maria Reile, Nele Põldver and Kristiina Averin
(University of Tartu)
In recent years, there has been an increase of studies on the use of spatial
demonstratives, such as this and that in English, and their affective factors. Based on the
studies of Indo-European languages, two factors influence the use of spatial
demonstratives: distance and visual saliency/accessibility (Coventry et al., 2014, Jarbou,
2010). Yet, the latter presents contradictory results (Vogels et al., 2012). For Estonian –
a Finno-Ugric language with three demonstrative pronoun systems – visual saliency has
lesser influence over the production of demonstratives, which could be explained by
means of the flexibility of the pronoun systems (submitted).
The aim of this study is to test the proposed affective factors – distance and visual
saliency – on the comprehension of demonstratives in Estonian. Standard Estonian
features two possible demonstrative pronouns – see (this) and too (that) (Pajusalu,
2009), but too is mostly used in Southern parts of Estonia. Thus, the study’s goal is also
to compare the comprehension of demonstrative pronouns dependent on participants’
regional variation.
We designed an experiment with varying distance and visual saliency stimuli
using eye-tracking and reaction time (RT) measurements. In the experiment, pictures
with three target objects are shown to the participants while they hear an auditory input
sentence, featuring different use of demonstratives, after which the participants have to
choose a target object most suited to the heard sentence. The difference of
comprehension of demonstrative pronouns is expected to manifest itself in eyemovements and RTs in choosing the target object. The expected results would show
incongruency between selected target objects and input sentences regarding
223
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
demonstratives in saliency stimuli i.e. far and not salient object would be selected when
input sentence with proximal demonstrative is heard. We also expect slower RTs for
demonstrative too for the participants from Northern Estonia.
References
Coventry, Kenny R., Debra Griffiths, Colin J. Hamilton 2014. Spatial Demonstratives
and perceptual space: Describing and remembering object location. Cognitive
Psychology 69: 46-70.
Jarbou, Samir Omar 2010. Accessibility vs physical proximity: An analysis of
exophoric demonstrative practice in Spoken Jordanian Arabic. Journal of
Pracmatics 42: 3078-3097.
Pajusalu, Renate 2009. Pronouns and reference in Estonian. Sprachtypologie un
Universalienforschung 62: 122-139.
Vogels, Jorrig, Emiel Krahmer, Alfons Maes 2013. Who is where referred to how, and
why? The influence on visual saliency on referent accessibility in spoken
language production. Language and Cognitive Processes 28: 1323-1349
Demonstratives in the translating mirror. An approach to the
translation of demonstratives from Catalan into English
Josep Ribera
(Universitat de València)
Demonstratives are usually described as prototypical situational space deictics,
but corpus analysis shows that situational deixis is not the most frequent function that
they perform. This fact has been widely attested by Halliday & Hasan (1976) and Ariel
(1990) with respect to different textual typologies and various genres, including
narratives of fiction.
Our previous research on the use and translation of demonstratives in narratives
from English into Catalan (cf. Cuenca & Ribera, 2011; Ribera & Cuenca, 2013)
confirms that non-situational uses are more frequent and that their translation cannot be
explained only considering the features of the deictic systems of the languages
involved. In fact, this research led to establish four translation strategies, namely,
maintenance, shift, neutralization and overmarking, following different systemic,
discourse-pragmatic and syntactic factors.
This paper aims at determining to what extent the situation differs when Catalan is
the source language. The analysis is based on a corpus consisting of the novels Mirall
trencat by Mercè Rodoreda and Camí de sirga by Jesús Moncada and their translation
into English. By means of both qualitatively and quantitatively cross-linguistic analysis,
we try to shed some light in the following questions:
(i) Are the same general translation patterns established in our previous
research followed or not?
(ii) Do the differences or similarities observed derive from the features of the
respective deictic systems or from other factors such as the syntactic
position of the demonstrative and discourse-pragmatic constraints?
224
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(iii) Non-situational text-deictic demonstratives tend to be neutralized in the
translation from English into Catalan. Therefore, may overmarking, i.e.
the opposed strategy, be expected in the reverse direction?
The results show that non-situational demonstratives are also more frequent than
situational ones. However, a higher amount of hybrid demonstratives is found due to the
interior monologue and free indirect style which characterize both novels. These
stylistic techniques enhance a more frequent use of distal demonstratives, which tend to
be maintained, according to the systemic deictic coincidences of both languages to mark
distance. On the other hand, non-situational uses of Catalan demonstratives are also
mainly maintained, instead of neutralized; this result is consistent with the syntactic fact
that English is a full-subject language. Furthermore, as expected, overmarking by means
of English non-situational demonstratives proves to be the preferred overall strategy.
In sum, our analysis confirms that the use and translation of demonstratives in
narratives of fiction cannot be explained only in terms of the deictic systems, but
different language-specific syntactic and discourse-pragmatic factors should be taken
into account. Moreover, stylistic features affecting the narrative voice play an important
role as well, as they imply a shift of the deictic center.
References
Ariel, Mira (1990). Accessing Noun-phrase Antecedents. London: Routledge.
Cuenca, Maria Josep & Josep Ribera (2011). “Deictic neutralization and overmarking:
demonstratives in the translation of fiction (English-Catalan)”, in M. L. Carrió
Pastor & M. Ángel Candel Mora (eds.), Actas del III Congreso Internacional de
Lingüística de Corpus.Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones:
Presente y Futuro en el Análisis de Corpus, València, Universitat Politècnica de
València, 7-9 Abril 2011
http://www.upv.es/pls/obib/sic_publ.FichPublica?P_ARM=6032
Halliday, Michael A.K & Ruqaiya Hasan (1976). Cohesion in English. London-New
York: Longman.
Ribera, Josep & Maria Josep Cuenca (2013). “Use and translation of demonstratives in
fiction: A contrastive approach (English-Catalan)”. Catalan Review 27: 27-49.
Typology and evolution of palatal and palatalised consonants in the
languages of northeastern European Russia
Michael Rießler and Rogier Blokland
(University of Freiburg; Uppsala University)
Palatal consonants are characterised by their palatal place of articulation;
palatalised consonants have a primary place of articulation elsewhere but are
secondarily modified (coarticulated) by means of palatalisation. Palatal articulation and
palatalisation are thus straightforwardly distinct phonetic phenomena, although these
concepts are often blurred in synchronic and diachronic linguistic descriptions of Uralic
languages and in Russian, one of the main contact languages of Uralic (cf. the
225
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
discussion in Stadnik 2002). The aims of our paper are 1) to provide the first systematic
description of inventories of palatal and palatalised consonants (incl. relevant
synchronic-phonological processes) in the Saamic, Finnic, Permic, Samoyedic (all
Uralic) languages as well as in Russian (Indo-European), and 2) to describe changes in
these inventories through time, taking into account language contact, especially but not
only with Russian.
The Uralic languages in question can be divided into three types according to the
occurrence of palatal and/or palatalised consonants in their phonological systems: The
first type consists of languages exhibiting palatalisation but missing palatals (except /j/),
as in several Finnic languages. Languages of the second type lack palatalisation but
exhibit a whole set of palatal consonants. This is the Uralic prototype, continued, e.g. in
North Saami or Komi. In the third type of languages, both palatalised and palatal
consonants occur, as e.g. in Kildin Saami. Russian, on the other hand, has only
palatalised consonants (in addition to palatal /j/).
Kildin Saami, for example, has a strikingly high number of consonant phonemes,
because most voiced and voiceless plain consonants have a palatalised counterpart.
Such large consonant systems are not typical of Uralic and scarcely occur in other
languages of northern Eurasia. Another typologically uncommon feature in Kildin
Saami phonology is the opposition between the plain nasal and lateral dentals /n, l/,
their palatalised counterparts /nʲ, lʲ/ and the nasal and lateral palatals /ɲ, ʎ/. It is plausible
that these two typological peculiarities in Kildin Saami phonology result from the rise
of palatalisation, which is sometimes explained as a borrowing from Russian (e.g.
Stadnik 2002: 34, 165; Kert 1994: 111), but it is more likely to be contact-independent
development (Blokland & Rießler 2011: 16–17). The opposition between e.g. palatal /ɲ/
and palatalized /nʲ/ has led to the genesis of minimal triplets with the contrasting
phonemes /n/, /ɲ/ and /nʲ/.
Russian influence, however, is likely in the change of palatals to palatalised
consonants as can be seen e.g. in the recent history of Udmurt (Pozdeeva 1986: 49;
Winkler 2011: 20).
References
Blokland, Rogier and Rießler, Michael. 2011. Komi-Saami-Russian contacts on the
Kola Peninsula. In Hasselblatt, C. et al. (eds). Language contact in times of
globalization. Amsterdam, 5–26.
Kert, Georgij M. 1994. Saamsko-russkie jazykovye kontakty. In Zajkov, P. (ed).
Pribaltijsko-finskoe jazykoznanie. Petrozavodsk, 99–116.
Kuz'menko [Kusmenko], Jurij K. and Rissler [Rießler], Michael. 2012. K voprosu o
tverdyx, mjagkix i polumjagkix soglasnyx v kol'skom saamskom. In Kuznecova,
Natalia. V. et al. (eds). Fenno-Lapponica Petropolitana 1. Sankt-Peterburg, 20–41.
Pozdeeva, I. P. 1986. Osobennosti fonetičeskoj interferencii v russkoj reči udmurtov. In
Vahrušev, V. M. et al. (eds). Voprosy fonetiki i grammatiki udmurtskogo jazyka.
Ustinov, 45–54.
Stadnik, Elena. 2002. Die Palatalisierung in den Sprachen Europas und Asiens.
Tübingen.
Winkler, Eberhard. 2001. Udmurtische Grammatik. Wiesbaden.
226
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Subjectification is driven by sceptic listeners
Nikolaus Ritt and Eva Zehentner
(University of Vienna)
We investigate the mechanisms involved in diachronic subjectifications, which
we define, on the phenomenological level, as developments in which the meanings of
words or constructions “tend to become increasingly based in the SP[eaker]/W[riter]’s
subjective belief state or attitude to what is being said and how it is being said”
(Traugott 2003: 125).
We acknowledge that subjectifications represent a frequent type of semantic
change, but think that the role of listeners in bringing them about has received too little
consideration. Our paper attempts to redress that imbalance and deliberately departs
from the established view of subjectification as a mechanism by which “meanings are
recruited by the speaker to encode and regulate attitudes and beliefs” (Traugott
2010:35), or which “provide[s] for the locutionary agent’s expression of himself”
(Lyons 1982: 102).
Epistemologically speaking, our paper is an exercise in abduction. It starts from a
set of empirically attested phenomena and explores the set of possible explanations. Its
general message is that that set is larger than so far acknowledged. Specifically, we
demonstrate that the facts of diachronic subjectification can be derived just as
stringently (and, we suspect, more plausibly) from listener interest as from speaker
interest. Thus, we pursue the possibility that subjectifications reflect pragmatically
motivated inferences that listeners draw about the attitudes and beliefs of speakers even
when such inferences are not invited by the latter. The subsequent semanticization of
more subjective readings then reflects the response of speakers, who come to anticipate
the ways in which they are ‘second guessed’.
The hypothesis is based in evolutionary pragmatics (Scott-Phillips 2014) and
inspired by studies of animal communication (Dawkins & Krebs 1984). Since it predicts
the same phenomena as established accounts of subjectification, we test its soundness
not by empirical data analysis but by modelling it in terms of evolutionary game theory.
Our model assumes interlocutors who may intend or interpret a message as either
objective (about external reality) or subjective (about beliefs etc.). They may be
cooperative or uncooperative but always act rationally, i.e. in their own self-interest.
Co-operative speakers are honest, uncooperative ones lie. Co-operative listeners are
credulous, uncooperative ones disregard the encoded message, but try to infer speaker
beliefs. The evolutionary dynamics of the interlocutor population is modelled as an
asymmetric role game (Hofbauer & Sigmund 1998: 122ff.) with two positions (speaker
and listener) and two strategies (subjective and objective), yielding four different
behaviour types (subjective speaking & subjective listening; objective speaking &
subjective listening, etc.). This yields a 4-by-4 game with 16 different encounter types.
Payoffs resulting from interactions are divided into four ordinal categories (no
benefit/loss, small benefit/loss, medium benefit/loss, and large benefit/loss).
Information about external reality is taken to be more valuable when true (and more
harmful when false) than information about intentional states. For each combination of
cooperative or uncooperative individuals choosing one of the available strategies payoff
227
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
is determined heuristically and weighted according to the assumed proportions of
cooperative and defective players.
An analysis of the dynamics predicted by our model reveals that, if the proportion
of cooperative players does not exceed a certain threshold, the behaviour type ‘objective
speaking & subjective listening’ is the only evolutionarily stable strategy combination.
We take this to suggest that subjectification may just as plausibly be driven by listener’s
interest in (possibly deliberately hidden) beliefs and intentions of speakers as by
speakers’ desire to express themselves.
References
Hofbauer, J. & K. Sigmund. 1998. Evolutionary games and population dynamics.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Krebs, J. R. & R. Dawkins. 1984. Animal signals: mind reading and manipulation. In J.
R. Krebs & N. B. Davies (eds.), Behavioural ecology: An evolutionary approach,
380–402. Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer Associates.
Lyons, J. 1982. Deixis and subjectivity: Loquor ergo sum? In Robert Jarvella &
Wolfgang Klein (eds.), Speech, place and action: studies in deixis and related
topics, 101–124. New York: Wiley.
Scott-Phillips, T. C. 2014. Speaking our minds: human communication and the
evolutionary origins of language. London: Palgrave MacMillan.
Traugott, E. C. 2003. From subjectification to intersubjectification. In R. Hickey (ed.),
Motives for Language Change, 124–139. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Traugott, E. C. 2010. (Inter)subjectivity and (inter)subjectification: A reassessment. In
Kristin Davidse, Lieven Vandelanotte & Hubert Cuyckens (eds.), Subjectification,
Intersubjectification and Grammaticalization, 29–74. Berlin, New York: De
Gruyter Mouton.
Transitivity in the light of Event related potentials
Stéphane Robert
(LLACAN, CNRS/Labex EFL)
As a contribution to the controversy over the purely formal nature vs. semantic
dimension of syntactic constructions, in a joint work with neuroscientists, we
conducted an experiment using electrophysiology (Event Related Potentials) in order to
determine (1) whether the semantic aspects of language are processed (by the brain)
independently or in interaction with the syntax, (2) what contribution the transitive
construction makes to the meaning of the sentence.
To test these points, we manipulated both the syntactic and semantic components
in transitive constructions in French, using « transitive coercion » (a transitive
construction was applied to an intransitive verb such as 'to conspire' or 'to lunch') and
manipulating the semantic component by applying an object that was semantically
either congruent (L’ennemi a conspiré un complot ‘The enemy conspired a scheme’) or
incongruent (L’ennemi a déjeuné un complot ‘The enemy lunched a scheme’) with the
228
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
semantics of the verb. We hypothesized that if semantic information is used on-line
during sentence comprehension and interacts with syntax, the strong semantic
relationship between the verb and direct object in L’ennemi a conspiré un complot (The
enemy conspired a scheme) may override the problem posed by the syntactic
incongruity. In order to maximize the semantic congruence of the sentence context,
strong semantic associations were present not only between the verb and the object (an
internal object, as is a ‘scheme’ for the verb ‘conspire’), but also between the subject
and the verb (e.g. the noun ‘enemy’ is a prototypical subject for ‘conspire’).
In our linguistic experiment, two main electrophysiological components were at
work: the N400, classically considered to reflect difficulties in semantic processing, and
the P600, supposed to reflect difficulties in syntactic processing. The analysis of the
ERPs elicited by the different types of SVO sentences (with vs. without syntactic
coercion, combined with semantic congruence vs. incongruence) in our experiment
clearly indicated that the processing of semantic information influences syntactic
processing: in line with our hypothesis, the ERP’s results showed that the brain does not
detect the syntactic violation (no P600 component) when the sentence makes sense. We
then give a linguistic account of these results based on Construction Grammar and
Frame Semantics (Fillmore 1982, Fillmore 2012, Goldberg 1995), and argue for
constructionist approach to 'coercion' (Michaelis 2004).
Moreover, to further examine the respective contribution of the subject-verb and
verb-object relationships, in a second experiment we reduced the subject-verb semantic
associations: the prototypical subject of the sentences was replaced by a semantically
neutral proper name (e.g., Thomas), while keeping the same semantic associations
between the verb and the object. Remarkably, the syntactic incongruity in the verbobject relation was detected this time, revealing an interesting graduality of the overall
semantic context, with threshold effects.
References
Fillmore, Charles. 1982. Frame Semantics. In Linguistic Society of Korea (ed.),
Linguistics in the Morning Calm. Seoul: Hanshin, 111-138
Fillmore, Charles, J., R. Lee-Goldman, and R. Rhodes. 2012. The FrameNet
Construction. In I. A. Sag & H. C. Boas (eds.), Sign-based Construction
Grammar. Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information (The
University of Chicago Press), 309-372.
Goldberg, Adele. 1995. Constructions. A construction grammar approach to argument
structure. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.
Michaelis, Laura A. 2004. Type-shifting in Construction Grammar: An Integrated
Approach to Aspectual Coercion. Cognitive Linguistics 15(1): 1–67.
229
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
From an adverbial meaning to a discursive function: The Spanish
formula en plan (de) throughout time
Paula Rodríguez Abruñeiras
(Universidad de Valencia)
In the introduction to their 2010’s edition, Loureda Lamas and Acín Villa (2010:
7) comment on how relative time may be. In certain situations, a time lapse of twenty
years may mean nothing, but it may be extremely significant when it comes to the
evolution of a language. In this volume, all the articles deal with the development of one
particular language area: discourse markers in Spanish. However, in spite of how recent
this volume is, none of them considers one of the most important markers in presentday Spanish, namely en plan (with its variant en plan de), and in fact few are the works
devoted to date to the study of this marker (see Norde 2006, Jørgensen and MartínezLópez 2007, Jørgensen 2009 and Palacios-Martínez 2014). This formula has become
almost ubiquitous in the speech of Spanish teenagers, but before acquiring this
discursive function, the expression en plan (de) had other uses. Thus, in this paper I will
propose a classification of the functions carried out by the formula from their earliest
uses until nowadays. In general terms, the construction shows a progressive change
from an adverbial function (expressing either manner –as exemplified in (1) below- or
purpose) to a more discursive one (introducing reported speech, examples or
reformulations, or functioning as a filler -cf. (2)-).
(1) ¿Qué ha pasado? -pregunta en plan madre, mitad protectora mitad histérica.
(CREA, 1981)
(2) Y nada en plan pero así llevan dos meses vale / (COLAM, MAORE2J01)
This paper will also consider some characteristics that show that en plan (de) is
not yet fully grammaticalized. On the one hand, the formula may be used with or
without the final preposition de in some of the functions mentioned above, although
with some restrictions. Moreover, some examples allow the addition of an intensifier
before that preposition (cf. 3)), which emphasizes the optional status of de in the
formula. Finally, I will also comment on the peculiarity of combinations of en plan with
a noun: in Spanish, nouns tend to be modified by adjectives. Therefore, the unmarked
pattern would be for en plan (which consists of a preposition followed by a noun) to
combine with an adjective (as in (4) below) and not with a noun (as in (1) above).
Nevertheless, combinations of en plan with a noun are more common than
combinations with an adjective. The data for this study are taken from three corpora: the
Corpus Diacrónico del Español (CORDE), the Corpus de Referencia del Español
Actual (CREA), and the Corpus Oral del Lenguaje Adolescente de Madrid (COLAM).
These three corpora provide a total of 1261 examples which will be the basis for the
analysis of en plan (de) proposed here.
(3) (…) comentarán que vieron el otro día a su mujer (o a su marido) con uno (o
con una), y no en plan precisamente de amigos. (CREA, 1994)
(4) Estaba en plan negativo, por lo tanto encontraría respuesta para todo. (CREA,
1985)
230
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
References
Jørgensen, Annette Myre. 2009. En plan used as a hedge in Spanish teenage language.
Anna-Brita Stenström and Annette Myre Jørgensen (eds.), Youngspeak in a
Multilingual Perspective. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing
Company.
Jørgensen, Annette Myre and Juan Antonio Martínez López. 2007. Los marcadores del
discurso del lenguaje juvenil de Madrid. Revista virtual de estudos da linguagem
5(9). 1-19.
Loureda Lamas, Óscar and Esperanza Acín Villa (eds.). 2010. Los estudios sobre
marcadores del discurso en español, hoy. Madrid: Arco/Libros.
Norde, Magni. 2006. En plan en plan científico. Las funciones de en plan en el lenguaje
juvenil de Madrid: Estudio descriptivo. Unpublished MA thesis. Romance
Department. Bergen University.
Palacios Martínez, Ignacio Miguel. 2014. The quotative system in Spanish and English
youth talk. A contrastive corpus-based study. Miscelánea: A journal of English
and American studies 49. 95-114.
A new grammaticalization path from Sáliban: Postural verbs > deictic
roots
Jorge Emilio Rosés Labrada
(University of British Columbia)
The grammaticalization of place deictics—defined here as including both place
adverbs and nominal demonstratives—into different grammatical items (e.g., third
person pronouns, definite articles, temporal adverbs, among others) is a widely-spread
and widely-known phenomenon (see examples and sources in Diessel (1999:115-155)).
However, there is no available evidence for place deictics having grammaticalized from
some other (lexical) item, which has led Diessel (1999, 2011) to posit that place deictics
constitute an exceptional closed (i.e., grammatical) word class. In this presentation, I
focus on the Mako deictic roots b-, ʤ- and h- and show that they have a lexical (more
specifically verbal) origin. Support for this claim comes from 1) the function of the
second component of the place adverbs as adverbial-clause markers, 2) the
nominalizing function of classifiers, and 3) the use of two of these three roots as lexical
verbs. All the data comes from the author’s primary fieldwork.
The deictic roots b- ‘PROX’, ʤ- ‘DIST1’ and h- ‘DIST2’ are used in Mako, a Sáliban
language spoken in Venezuela by ~1,200 people, to form both place adverbs and
nominal demonstratives: place adverbs are formed by adding one of four endings to a
deictic root (see Table 1). Nominal demonstratives are formed by adding a classifier to a
deictic root (see Table 2).
231
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
TABLE 1 Place adverbs
ENDING→
ROOT↓
b- ‘PROX’
ʤ- ‘DIST1’
h- ‘DIST2’
-ena
-emi
-ai
-elɨ
bena bemi bai belɨ
ʤena ʤemi ʤai ʤelɨ
hena hemi #hai helɨ
TABLE 2 Sample of Nominal Demonstratives
CLASSIFIER
-ɨdɨ
-ˀwo
DEMONSTRATIVES
PROX
DIST1
DIST2
b-ɨdɨ
ʤ-ɨdɨ
h-ɨdɨ
b-iˀwo
ʤ-iˀwo
h-aˀwo
SAMPLE NOUNS
ohʷe ʦ-ɨdɨ ‘small river’
ukʷa-ˀwo ‘belly’
Given that -ena, -emi, -ai, or -elɨ are verb suffixes that serve to form adverbial
clauses (see (1)), the place adverbs can be analyzed as adverbial clauses and the deictic
roots as verb roots. The use of classifiers as deverbal nominalizers as in (2) also support
the analysis of the deictic roots as verb roots. But can these deictic roots occur with
verbal morphology? Two of these roots, namely b- and h-, do in fact take verbal
morphology and have the meanings ‘sit’ (3) and ‘stand’ (4).
(1)
dokʷa
iha
atabapo-be
ahaʤi-nɨ
HOW1
COP.PST
Atabapo-ALL
first-NON.SUBJ
‘how was it when you went to Atabapo for the first time?’
(2)
ile
pʰuʦ-aw-ãˀʤũ
manioc
sweep-MID-CL
‘broom for cassava-making’
(3)
awiɾi-ma
apʰude-nɨ
dog-TOP?
door-NON.SUBJ
‘the dog is watching sitting by the door’
(4)
iʦ-uhu
DUMMY_ROOT-CL:FEM
b-ãn-ɨ
sit-DUR-NON.FIN
h-ãn-ɨ
stand-DUR-NON.FIN
kʷĩ-ˀʤ-ĩn-ena-ma
2SG-go-PST-ADV1-TOP?
Ø-ed-an-in-obe
3SG.MASC-see-DUR-PROG-TAM
h-ed-an-in-obe
3SG.FEM-see-DUR-PROG-TAM
‘the woman is looking standing’
The above suggests that the Mako deictic roots have a lexical source and that
place deictics in this language are the result of a grammaticalization process. Using
Piaroa and Sáliba data, I show that this grammaticalization process must have taken
place at the Proto-Sáliban stage. This presentation contributes to our understanding of
how place deictics may originate by providing evidence in favour of place deictics
having lexical origins in the same way that other grammatical elements do—a
phenomenon thus far unattested (Diessel, 1999:150).
References
Diessel, Holger. 1999. Demonstratives: form, function, and grammaticalization.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
232
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
—. 2011. Deixis and demonstratives. In Semantics: An International Handbook of
Natural Language Meaning [Volume 2], eds. Klaus von Heusinger, Claudia
Maienborn and Paul Portner, 2407-2432. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Epistemic qualifications of the English marker likely and its
equivalents in Lithuanian
Anna Ruskan
(Vilnius University)
In the recent decade there have been a number of cross-linguistic studies dealing
with the formal and functional comparison of evidential and epistemic markers. Much
attention has been devoted to the modal verb must (Mortelmans 2010; Šinkūnienė and
Van Olmen 2012), the verb seem (Johansson 2001; de Haan 2007; Aijmer 2009;
Usonienė and Šinkūnienė 2013), English epistemic and evidential adverbials (van der
Auwera et al. 2005; Mortensen 2006; Simon-Vandenbergen and Aijmer 2007; Usonienė
and Šolienė 2010) and their correspondences in Germanic, Romance, Baltic and Slavic
languages. The current study focuses on the epistemic qualifications realized by the
English adjective and adverb likely and its equivalents panašu and tikėtina in
Lithuanian, which etymologically relate to the semantic domain of comparison and
belief. Although these markers have been investigated in both English (Quirk et al.
1985; Biber et al. 1999; Bamford 2005; Mindt 2011) and Lithuanian (Tekorienė 1990;
Akelaitis 2011; Ruskan 2012), little attention has been paid to their formal and
functional features cross-linguistically in different types of discourse.
The aim of the present study is to identify functional similarities and differences
of likely and its Lithuanian equivalents panašu and tikėtina within the category of
epistemicity (Boye 2012) in journalistic and academic discourse. The markers will be
compared in terms of their frequency, syntactic features (Complement-TakingPredicates (CTPs) followed by that or to-complement clauses, adverbials), functions,
collocational profile and type of discourse. The English data have been drawn from the
academic and newspaper sub-corpora found in the Corpus of Contemporary American
English (COCA). The Lithuanian data have been obtained from the news sub-corpus of
the Corpus of the Contemporary Lithuanian Language (CCLL) and the Corpus of
Academic Lithuanian (CorALit).
The preliminary results of the study show that likely and tikėtina primarily mark
the likelihood of the proposition. However, in contexts with explicit evidence and
argumentation, they may acquire evidential functions in a similar manner to the modal
verbs must and may (Fetzer 2014). The Lithuanian CTP panašu primarily expresses
inferences based on perceptual or conceptual evidence, and thus it is qualified as an
evidential marker. However, in contexts of insufficient or less reliable evidence, it may
denote the author’s reduced commitment and acquires the function of an epistemic
modifier. The present study contributes to a better understanding of the evidential use of
epistemic markers and the epistemic use of evidential markers. It aligns with the view
that the evidential reading of a marker is triggered by the retrieval of the source of
information from the micro or macro linguistic context (Wiemer and Kampf 2012: 15–
233
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
17). Functional similarities and differences of likely, panašu and tikėtina may be
explained by their syntactic features (complementation type, adverbial use),
collocational and lexical semantic properties.
References
Aijmer, Karin. 2009. Seem and evidentiality. Functions of Language 16 (1): 63–88.
Akelaitis, Gintautas. 2011. Panašu – naujas modalinis žodis? Gimtoji kalba 11, 3–10.
Bamford, Julia. 2005. Subjective or objective evaluation? Prediction in academic
lectures. Strategies in academic discourse. Elena Tognini-Bonelli and Gabriella
Del Lungo Camiciotti, eds. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing
Company. 17–29.
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan,
eds. 1999. Longman grammar of spoken and written English. London: Longman.
Boye, Kasper. 2012. Epistemic meaning: a crosslinguistic and functional-cognitive
study. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.
de Haan, Ferdinand. 2007. Raising as grammaticalization: the case of Germanic SEEMverbs. Rivista di Linguistica 19 (1), 129–150.
Fetzer, Anita. 2014. Foregrounding evidentiality in (English) academic discourse:
Patterned co-occurrences of the sensory perception verbs seem and appear.
Intercultural Pragmatics 11 (3), 333–555.
Johansson, Stig. 2001. The English verb seem and its correspondences in Norwegian:
What seems to be the problem. A wealth of English. Studies in honour of Göran
Kjellmer. Karin Aijmer, ed. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. 221–
245.
Mindt, Ilka. 2011. Adjective complementation: An empirical analysis of adjectives
followed by that-clauses. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing
Company.
Mortelmans, Tanja. 2010. Epistemic must and its Cognates in German and Dutch. The
Subtle Differences. Unpublished manuscript. Antwerp: University of Antwerp.
Mortensen, Janus. 2006. Epistemic and evidential sentence adverbials in English and
Danish: A comparative study [PhD dissertation]. Roskilde: Roskilde University.
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik. 1985. A
comprehensive grammar of the English language. London, New York: Longman.
Ruskan, Anna. 2012. Evidential adjectives in Lithuanian academic discourse. Kalbotyra
64 (3), 103–123.
Simon-Vandenbergen, Anne-Marie and Karin Aijmer. 2007. The semantic field of
modal certainty. A corpus-based study of English adverbs. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Šinkūnienė, Jolanta and Daniel Van Olmen. 2012. Modal verbs of necessity in academic
English, Dutch and Lithuanian: Epistemicity and/or evidentiality? Darbai ir
Dienos 58: 153–181.
Tekorienė, Dalia. 1990. Bevardės giminės būdvardžiai. Vilnius: Mokslas.
Usonienė, Aurelija and Audronė Šolienė. 2010. Choice of strategies in realizations of
epistemic possibility in English and Lithuanian: A corpus-based study.
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 15 (2), 291–316.
234
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Usonienė, Aurelija and Jolanta Šinkūnienė. 2013. A cross-linguistic look at the
multifunctionality of the English verb seem. English modality: Core, periphery
and evidentiality. Juana I. Marín-Arrese, Marta Carretero, Jorge Arús Hita and
Johan van der Auwera, eds. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 281–316.
van der Auwera, Johan, Ewa Schalley and Jan Nuyts. 2005. Epistemic possibility in a
Slavonic parallel corpus – a pilot study. Modality in Slavonic languages. New
perspectives. Björn Hansen and Petr Karlík, eds. München: Sagner. 201–217.
Wiemer, Björn and Veronica Kampf. 2012. On conditions instantiating tip effects of
epistemic and evidential meanings in Bulgarian. Slověne: International Journal of
Slavic Studies (2), 5–38.
Expressing large quantities in a rhetorical way. The epistemic largequantity construction in Italian: [non so quant_ + N/V] (I don’t know
how many/much + N/V)
Valentina Russo
(Università degli studi Suor Orsola Benincasa)
This paper deals with a poorly studied construction, Italian [non so quant +
N(oun)/V(erb)] (I don’t know how many/much + N/V), used to express indefinite (large
or exaggerated) quantities in a rhetorical way by conveying one’s own commitment
toward it.
It is argued that [non so quant + N(oun)/V(erb)] can be analyzed as a semiidiomatic (Antonopoulou/Nikiforidou, 2011) quantity construction – i.e. [neg-know
Q(quantifier)]Q + [N/V] – with distinct syntactic, semantic and pragmatic features of its
own that make it different from the homonym complementation construction [negknow]M(atrix) V(erb) + [Q + N/V] Compl (s. Russo/Dittmar, 2014), as exemplified below:
[Non so]MV [[quanti]Q [chili]NP [ha perso]VP]Compl
I do not know how many kg he has lost
[[Non so quanti]Q [chili]N]NP [ha perso]VP
I know that he has lost many kilos, probably more
than I expected, but I don’t know exactly how
many
The paper raises the following questions: what makes the two constructions
different? Which morpho-syntactic, textual and prosodic constrains enable a different
segmentation of the “non so quant_” sequence, i.e. [neg-Know+Q+NP/VP]? Can we
disentangle the factors that contribute to make the epistemic rhetorical reading
“conventional and psychologically entrenched in the speech community” (Langacker,
2005: 140) by comparing it with functionally similar expressions (also in other
languages) basing on the same conceptual ground (something is so huge that it can not
even be conceptualized)?
I will address these questions relying on the notion of “constructions” (Goldberg,
1995; Croft, 2001), accounting for those aspects that characterize the epistemic semisubstantive quantity construction in oral and written usage. The analysis is based on real
corpus data, consisting of spontaneous oral interactions (LIP, Lablita), written literature
(DiaCoris) and Web occurrences. Results will bring evidence of a variety of functional
235
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
and formal features that apply to both oral and written uses such as: tense, mood and
person of the verb know; mood of the following verb; syntactic and semantic
restrictions; informational status and other constrains.
I will finally focus on other idioms and constructions sharing aspects of form or
function with the investigated one in order to sketch a network of related (s.
Goldberg/van der Auwera, 2012) parents and peers (s. Norde 2014) constructions.
References
Antonopoulou, Eleni/Nikiforidou, Kiki (2011), “Construction grammar and
conventional discourse: A construction-based approach to discoursal
incongruity”. In: Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011), 2594–2609.
Croft, William (2001), Radical Construction Grammar, Oxford: Oxford University
Press. DiaCORIS. http://dslo.unibo.it/coris_ita.html
Goldberg, Adele E. (1995), Constructions: A Construction Grammar approach to
argument structure. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Goldberg, Adele E./van der Auwera, Johan (2012), “This is to count as a construction”.
In: Folia Linguistica (Acta Societatis Linguisticae Europaeae, 46), 109-132.
LABLITA: Cresti, Emanuela (2000), Lablita. Corpus di Italiano Parlato, voll. I-II, CDROM. Firenze: Accademia della Crusca.
Langacker, Ronald W. (2005). “Construction grammars: Cognitive, radical, and less
so”. In: Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibanez & M. Sandra Pena Cervel (eds.).
Cognitive linguistics: Internal dynamics and interdisciplinary interaction. Berlin:
de Gruyter, 101-159.
LIP = DE MAURO, Tullio, MANCINI, Federico, VEDOVELLI, Massimo &
VOGHERA, Miriam. 1993. Lessico di frequenza dell’italiano parlato. Milano:
Etaslibri
(http://www.parlaritaliano.it/index.php/visualizzacorpus?path=/Napoli/NA4&wordform=fine)
Norde, Muriel (2014). “On parents and peers in constructional networks”. Plenary
lecture at Coglingdays 6, University of Ghent, December 12, 2014.
Russo, Valentina/Dittmar, Norbert (in press), “Konstruktionen konversationeller
Vagheit in deutschen und italienischen Gesprächen”. In Selig /
Dittmar/Morlicchio (eds.), Gesprächsanalyse zwischen Syntax und Pragmatik.
Deutsche und italienische Konstruktionen, Tübingen: Stauffenburg Verlag.
236
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
The dual anomalous trajectories of the Latin sequence –MIN– into
Spanish: A proposal involving both full syncope and weakening
John M. Ryan
(University of Northern Colorado)
Already evident in the Appendix Probi of the 3rd or 4th century CE, one of the
earliest phonological changes that began to take hold between Latin and early Romance
was syncope, or complete loss of post-tonic vowels, particularly in the environment of a
liquid (e.g., VETULUS NON VETLUS). Traditional analysis has suggested that this
same process continued beyond this initial stage to today in varying degrees among the
Romance languages, with: 1) Northern Italian proposed to be among the least radical
with its retention of many original unstressed Latin vowels (e.g., FEMINA ‘woman’ >
[fe’-m:i-na]); 2) Neapolitan occupying a middle ground with weakening to schwa (e.g.,
FEMINA > [fe’-m:ə-na]); and 3) Spanish, among the most radical, extending the early
trend of syncope in post tonic vowels beyond the realm of liquids to other such
environments as nasals (FEMINA > [hem’-bra]), as in (1):
LATIN
______Intermediate Ibero Romance
(1) FEMINA ‘woman’
> (a) FEMNA > (b) FEMRA
Modern Spanish
> (c)
hembra
This traditional analysis of full syncope in (1) (a) for the trajectory of Latin –
MIN- to Spanish –mbr- has further necessitated the proposal by traditional scholars for
other subsequent phonological processes in order to ultimately explain the present-day
form –mbr-, namely, dissimilation of nasals M and N via rhotacization as in (1) (b), and
epenthesis of /b/ as in (1) (c). Dissimilation in (1) (b) was problematic for scholars like
Menéndez Pidal (1950) or Lloyd (1987) because the natural result of syncope between
M and N would have been assimilation of the two nasals, as evidenced by the
trajectories of DOMINA to dueña and the already existing –MN- sequence of
AUTUMNUS to otoño. Traditional scholars attribute this discrepancy to historical
memory of the previously existing vowel (Menéndez Pidal, 1950) or an imperfectly
formed new consonantal sequences (Lloyd, 1987).
This paper argues how weakening can better explain the anomaly presented by the
two historically different outcomes in Spanish of Latin –MIN- in words like FEMINA
on the one hand which resulted in –mbr-, and DOMINA/ AUTUMNUS on the other
which resulted in –ñ-. Empirical support is provided with examples of words attested
from early Ibero Romance documents such as muebele ‘furniture’ from MOBILIS > or
comperare ‘buy’ from COMPARARE that appear to have first undergone a period of
vocalic instability before ultimately achieving full syncope in Spanish. The study asserts
that words like FEMINA might not have actually sounded quite like what we think, that
is, not a fully reduced FEMNA with full post tonic vocalic loss, but rather an
intermediate variety, such as is exhibited by Neapolitan femmena [fe’-m:ə-na], with a
weakened version of the post tonic vowel. If this hypothesis is correct, the resultant
early sequence of phonemes in words like FEMINA would not have been –MN, but
rather -MəN-. Consequently, the mere reduction to interconsonantal ə might have been
sufficient to break the sequence -MN-, block assimilation, and prohibit the otherwise
237
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
expected path to palatalization (-MN- > -NN- > ñ) as experienced by DOMINA or
AUTUMNUS. Figure 1 shows these proposed alternate trajectories.
The notions put forth in this paper harken back to principles proposed in
Vennemann’s (1988) Preference Laws for Syllable Structure in which the motivation of
language change is the avoidance of bad structures.
Figure 1. Proposed alternate trajectories of FEMINA (weakening) and
DOMINA/AUTUMNUS (syncope)
References
Castellani, Arrigo E. 1976. I testi più antichi italiani. Bologna: Patron.
Corominas, Joan & Pascual, J. A. (1980-91). Diccionario crítico etimológico castellano
e hispánico. 6 vols. Madrid: Gredos.
Cravens, Thomas. 2002. Comparative Historical Dialectology: Italo-Romance Clues to
Ibero-Romance Sound Change (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory). Amsterdam:
Benjamins.
Dworkin, Steven. 2012. A History of the Spanish Lexicon: A Linguistic Perspective.
Oxford University Press.
Lapesa, Rafael 1959. Historia de la lengua española. Las Américas Publishing.
Loporcaro, Michele. 2011. Syllable, segment and prosody in The Cambridge History of
the Romance Languages. Vol. I. Cambridge University Press.
Lloyd, Paul. 1987. From Latin to Spanish: Vol. 1: Historical Phonology and
Morphology of the Spanish Language. Memoirs Series, American Philosophical
Society.
Menéndez Pidal, Ramón. 1950. Orígenes del español. Estado lingüístico de la
Península Ibérica hasta el siglo XI, (3rd. Ed.) Madrid.
Probus, Marcus Valerius. 3rd-4th Century AD. Appendix Probi.
Real Academia Española. Corpus diacrónico del español (CORDE). http://www.rae.es/.
Ruiz Asencio, José María. 2010. Los becerros gótico y galiciano de Valpuesta. Real
Academia Española y el Instituto Castellano y Leonés de la Lengua.
238
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Ryan, John. In press. Glimpses of Proto-Ibero-Romance in Neapolitan and other
southern Italian mainland vernaculars. In Colomina-Almiñana, Juan (Ed.),
Theoretical Developments in Hispanic Linguistics. Ohio State University Press.
Seco, Manuel. Ed. 2003. Léxico hispánico primitivo. Madrid: Espasa Calpe.
Stahl, Fred A., & Scavnicky, Gary E. A. 1973. A Reverse Dictionary of the Spanish
Language. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Vennemann Theo. 1988. Preference Laws for Syllable Structure and the Explanation of
Sound Change. Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter.
Functions and norms of the ACC/DAT-alternation with German twoway prepositions
Jonah Rys
(Ghent University)
A little-known alternation in German morphosyntax is the accusative-dative
alternation with two-way prepositions where both cases can be used in reference to the
same event (e.g. Das Flugzeug prallte auf dieACC/derDAT Wasseroberfläche auf ‘The
plane crashed down on the water surface’). It has hitherto been assumed (e.g., Leys
1989, Smith 1995, Willems 2011) that the alternation serves a general, unitary function
(e.g. emphasizing the path (ACC) or endpoint (DAT) of a movement, cf. Smith 1995).
Recent corpus analysis (Rys et al. 2014, Willems et al. to appear), however, has shown
that the functionally motivated use of the alternation can only partially account for the
observed variation and even in case of functional use, it proves difficult to delimit a
general, overarching function that explains all of the variation. This indicates that i) the
alternation may serve different ‘local’ functions, i.e. relevant for only one or a small set
of related verbs, that cannot be generalized to a single, overarching function and ii) case
marking is not necessarily functional, but often guided by conventional usage norms.
The presence of both non-generalizable functions and non-functional conventionalized
case marking tendencies call for a differentiated empirical approach that enables one to
go beyond defining the alternation in general semantic terms.
This approach is illustrated by means of a corpus-driven case study of the
ACC/DAT alternation with 19 German contact verbs (including aufprallen, landen,
einschlagen, anstoßen etc.). First, for each verb, a sample of 300 sentences (extracted
from the Deutsches Referenzkorpus Mannheim) was analyzed qualitatively to determine
potential morphosyntactic, semantic and lexical factors that exhibit a preference for
either case. Second, the effect of these factors was tested quantitatively using bivariate
(chi square, fisher’s exact) and multivariate (classification tree analysis) analyses.
Finally, the corpus data were compared with acceptability judgments from native
speakers.
The results were as follows: i) The alternation is motivated by a wide variety of
semantic and lexical factors, and is much more predictable than has hitherto been
acknowledged. ii) Despite overarching tendencies (e.g., the DAT preference for the ‘X
lands on Y’ sense of verbs such as aufsetzen, niedergehen, landen), case marking may
also be governed by verb-specific factors (e.g., the quasi-obligatory use of ACC for the
239
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
‘X crashes down on Y’ sense of niedergehen). iii) For several verbs (e.g., landen,
niederkommen), no case variation occurs, although such variation is to be expected
based on observed variation with near-synonymous verbs (e.g. aufsetzen, niedergehen).
iv) Although in general, judgment rates correlate positively with corpus tendencies, the
acceptability test bears witness to contrasting intuitions among individual speakers, with
speakers also regularly dismissing highly frequent occurrences as incorrect.
In summary, the study confirms that syntactic alternation research benefits from a
lager focus on verb-specific particularities (alongside generalized regularities) and
individual (alongside collective) preference norms.
References
Leys, O. 1989. „Aspekt und Rektion räumlicher Präpositionen“. Deutsche Sprache 17:
97–113.
Rys, J., Willems, K., De Cuypere, L. 2014. “Akkusativ und Dativ nach
Wechselpräpositionen im Deutschen. Eine Korpusanalyse von versinken,
versenken, einsinken und einsenken in”. In I. Doval and B. Lübke (eds.)
Raumlinguistik und Sprachkontrast. Neue Beiträge zu spatialen Relationen im
Deutschen, Englischen und Spanischen. München: Iudicium Verlag.
Smith, M. B. 1995. “Semantic motivation vs. arbitrariness in grammar: toward a more
general account of the dative/accusative contrast with German two-way
prepositions.” In: I. Rauch and G. Carr (eds.) Insights in Germanic linguistics I:
Methodology in transition. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Willems, K. 2011. “The semantics of variable case marking (Accusative/Dative) after
two-way prepositions in German locative constructions. Towards a constructionist
approach”. Indogermanische Forschungen 116: 324–366.
Willems, K., Rys, J., De Cuypere, L. “Case alternation in argument structure
constructions with prepositional verbs. A case study in corpus-based
constructional analysis”. To appear in: H. C. Boas and A. Ziem (eds.):
Constructional approaches to argument structure in German. Berlin/New York:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Towards typology of etymologies (on the basis of Indo-European and
Uralic)
Janne Saarikivi
(University of Helsinki)
My research project combines the perspectives of two major research traditions in
linguistics, linguistic typology and historical-comparative linguistics, and investigates
the general tendencies of word development in history (polysemy, semantic change,
phonematic and morphological variation as well as grammaticalization). The material
derives from 20 languages representing the Indo-European and Uralic language families
and focuses on particular fields of lexicon much studied in the etymological literature
(for instance, body parts, metallurgy, deity names, color names, spatials, local flora and
fauna etc.). The result of the project will be the first account on historical-comparative
240
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
lexical linguistic typology, i.e. a minimal typology of etymologies (hopefully paving the
way for a more thorough study of the same kind). The project is based on the research
traditions of lexical typology, polysemy and semantic change (Vanhove 2008, Traugott
2002; DatSemShifts, Koptjevskaja-Tamm, etc.), typology of borrowing (Haspelmath &
Tadmor 2008), grammaticalization (Heine & Kuteva 2002) and etymology of individual
languages under investigation. The main goal is to strengthen the methodological
foundations of etymology, particularly the theory of semantic shifts, and thus introduce
a historical perspective to the lexical typology.
In my paper, I first give an overview of my project that is based on the analysis of
the etymology and polysemy of a sample of 150 basic vocabulary items (chosen on the
basis of the Leipzig Max Planck Institute WOLD project sample). I then exemplify my
methodologies and hypotheses by investigating the origin and polysemy of vocabulary
related to color terms, body parts and metals in the sample languages.
My findings suggest that the names for body parts mostly derive from early
protolanguages but attain new meanings through metaphorization. They thus turn to
both new grammatical as well as to new abstract meanings in many languages of the
sample (cf. English hand → at hand, handle). The vocabulary related to metallurgy, in
turn, represents mainly cultural borrowings that spread horizontally in trade networks.
These types of borrowings have a very different areal spread pattern to those
borrowings denoting to local flora and fauna (that tend to be locally confined substrate
borrowings), for instance. The vocabulary related to color terminology shows
surprisingly great variation. For instance, in Finno-Ugrian languages most color terms
are only confined to one branch of the language family only. They typically develop on
the basis of different metaphors, and associate with both the vocabulary related to
emotions as well as the vocabulary related to body parts.
References
DatSemShift = Database of the semantic shifts in the languages of the world. Maria
Bulakh et al. (http://semshifts.iling-ran.ru/)
Haspelmath, Martin & Tadmor, Uri 2009: The loanwords in the world’s languages. A
comparative handbook. De Gruyter Mouton.
Heine, Bernd & Kuteva, Tania 2002: World lexicon of grammaticalization. Cambridge
University Press.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Dasher, Richard B. 2002: Regularity in semantic change.
Cambridge University Press.
Vanhove, Martine (ed.) 2007: From polysemy to semantic change. John Benjamins.
On the co-occurrence of wh-phrases and foci in the left-periphery of
Italian
Vieri Samek-Lodovici
(UCL)
Ever since the seminal work of Rizzi (1997), wh-phrases and contrastive foci have
been assumed to not co-occur in the left-periphery of Italian clauses. Rizzi himself,
241
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
however, noticed that co-occurrence is possible in subordinate clauses, see (1) (Rizzi
1997:330, 2001). This talk will show that co-occurrence is also possible in root clauses,
see (2) (main, emphatic, stress in capitals).
(1) Mi domando a GIANNIF, che cosawh abbiano detto (non a Piero).
(I) to-myself wonder to JOHN, that what (they) might-have said (not to Piero)
‘I wonder what they might have said to JOHN (not to Piero).’
(2) Sappiamo a chi sono stati rubati i soldi ieri, ma a chiwh OGGIF sono stati rubati di
nuovo?
(we) know to whom are been stolen the money yesterday, but to whom TODAY are
been stolen of again?
‘We know who was robbed of his money yesterday, but who was robbed again
TODAY?
These and other similar data show that the widely held analysis that contrastive
foci and wh-operators compete for the same left-peripheral position is untenable.
Restricting the analysis to root clauses, as proposed in Rizzi (2001), enables the
subordinate case in (1), but it still incorrectly predicts the (second) root clause in (2) and
other similar data to be ungrammatical. Note that the second clause in (2) cannot be
subordinated to the initial verb ‘sappiamo’ – whether directly or by ellipsis – since this
would yield the incorrect interpretation “we know who was robbed again today”.
The data presented in this talk will be shown to support Samek-Lodovici’s (2006,
2015) analysis, where the clause immediately following a left-peripheral focus always
has right-dislocated status. If this is correct, we expect the post-focus clause to be
discourse-given, since right dislocation requires givenness. Sentence (2) meets this
prediction, as ‘sono stati rubati’ is mentioned in the previous clause (as also confirmed
by ‘di nuovo’, meaning ‘again’). This requirement also explains the ungrammaticality
of Rizzi’s original 1997 data. Since they were presented without a context making the
post-focus clause discourse-given, right dislocation of the post-focus clause was
unlicensed, and therefore the entire sentence was inevitably ungrammatical.
Two additional predictions also follow. First, if wh-phrases do co-occur with leftperipheral foci, they should also co-occur with in-situ foci. This is correct, see (3). The
same sentence is instead predicted ungrammatical under Rizzi’s analysis, since at LF
the focused object would move into the position already occupied by the wh-phrase.
(3) Chiwh ha incontrato MARCOF (non Piero)?
Who has met MARK (not Piero)?
‘Who has met MARK (not Piero)?’
Second, co-occurrence should remain ungrammatical even in subordinate clauses
whenever the post-focus right-dislocated clause is clitic-doubled, since clitics turn
dislocated phrases into islands (Cecchetto 1999 big-DP analysis), which in turn blocks
wh-extraction. This, too, is correct: compare the ungrammatical (4) with (1).* Me loclitic
domando a GIANNIF, che cosawh abbiano detto (non a Piero).
(I) to-myself it ask to JOHN, that what (they) might-have said (not to PIero)
242
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
A discussion of the considerable significance of these findings for an accurate
model of the left-periphery of Italian will conclude the talk.
References
Cecchetto, Carlo. 1999. A Comparative Analysis of Left and Right Dislocation in
Romance. Studia Linguistica 53(1): 40–67.
Rizzi, Luigi. 1997. The Fine Structure of the Left Periphery. In Liliane Haegeman
(ed.), Elements of Grammar: Handbook in Generative Syntax. Dordrecht:
Kluwer, 281–337.
Rizzi, Luigi. 2001. On the Position Int(errogative) in the Left Periphery of the Clause.
In G. Cinque and
G. Salvi, (eds), Current Studies in Italian Syntax Offered to Lorenzo Renzi.
Amsterdam: Elsevier, 70–107.
Samek-Lodovici, Vieri. 2006. When Right Dislocation Meets the Left-Periphery: A
Unified Analysis of Italian Non-Final Focus. Lingua 116(6): 836–873.
Samek-Lodovici, Vieri. 2015. The Interaction of Fcus, Givenness, and Prosody.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Multiple aspect marking in Wutun
Erika Sandman
(University of Helsinki)
Wutun is a distinct local form of Northwest Mandarin spoken by ca. 4000
speakers in Qinghai Province, P.R. China. Due to long-term linguistic contact with
neighboring non-Sinitic languages (notably Amdo Tibetan), Wutun has adopted many
non-Sinitic grammatical features and it can be characterized as a Tibetanized variety of
Chinese. Wutun has a rich system of aspect marking that distinguishes between
imperfective, perfective, progressive, resultative, prospective, incompletive and
completive aspect. A striking feature in Wutun aspect marking system is that it allows
encoding of multiple aspects at once by marking several different bounds of the same
situation. The example (1) illustrates multiple aspect marking:
(1)
nga
tin-di-lio
1SG.OBL (be) ill-PROGR-PFV
‘I was suffering from illness.’ (field notes)
In (1) the suffix -lio refers to a perfective event with clear endpoint. Therefore, on
the level of whole sentence (1) is perfective. However, the progressive -di has a
function here, too: it indicates that the perfective event has an internal structure of a
process. The outer perfective dominates the inner progressive and I therefore refer to it
as the primary aspect, while the progressive offers further specification of the internal
structure of the perfective and I therefore refer to it as the secondary aspect.
243
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
In my talk, I will discuss Wutun primary and secondary aspect in terms of
boundedness. Following Lindstedt (1995, 2001), I will make a distinction between two
types of bounds: temporal bound and material bound. Temporal bound expresses that
the speaker spent some time on the activity and then did something else, while material
bound marks the situation as completed: the speaker finished the work s/he was doing
and/or the action totally affected the object. Material bound always implies temporal
bound, but not vice versa. For example, I wrote a letter for an hour is temporally
bounded, while I wrote a letter in an hour is both temporally and materially bounded.
Example (2) illustrates temporal and material boundedness in Wutun:
(2) a.
b.
ngu cu yegai-ge xai-lio
1SG yesterday letter-REF write-PFV
‘I did some letter-writing yesterday.’ (field notes)
je
huaiqa-ha
ngu kan-gu-lio
this book-NAGT.TOP 1SG read-COMPL-PFV
‘As for this book, I have finished reading it.’ (field notes)
In (2), (2a) with perfective -lio is temporally, but not materially bounded, while
(2b) with completive -gu and perfective -lio is both temporally and materially bounded.
As illustrated by (2b), the results of my study show that in multiple aspect marking
structures aspect markers occurring in the primary aspect slot are related to temporal
boundedness, while aspect markers occurring in the secondary aspect slot in between
the verb stem and the primary aspect marker are related to material boundedness. In
(2b), the perfective -lio marks the situation as temporally, but not necessarily materially
bounded. If the completive -gu is added before the perfective -lio, the situation is
viewed as both temporally and materially bounded. In (1) with perfective -lio and
progressive -di, on the other hand, the perfective marks the situation as temporally
bounded, while the progressive emphasizes that the situation is materially unbounded
process with no clear outcome.
The data for my study comes from first-hand fieldwork among the Wutun
speakers in between 2007 and 2013 and it includes descriptive and narrative texts,
conversational data, as well as elicited sentences and grammaticality judgements.
References
Lindstedt, Jouko 1995. Understanding perfectivity – understanding bounds. In Pier
Marco Bertinetto, Valentina Bianchi, Östen Dahl & Mario Squartini (eds.)
Temporal Reference, Aspect and Actionality. Vol 2: Typological Perspectives.
Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 237-247.
Lindstedt, Jouko 2001. Tense and aspect. In Martin Haspelmath (ed.) Language
Typology and Language Universals: An International Handbook, Vol 1. Berlin,
New York: Walter de Gruyter, 768-783.
244
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Fricated realisations of /t/ in Dublin English
Marion Schulte
(Universität Bielefeld)
Fricated realisations of plosives have been observed in casual speech styles in a
number of different languages, e.g. British English (Jones & Llamas 2008), Australian
English (Jones & McDougall 2009) or Greek (Nicolaidis 2001). In Irish English,
fricated /t/, or slit-/t/, as it is often called, is a common feature that can even be seen as
“an indicator of Irish English” (Hickey 2007: 323). Previous studies on fricated
realisations of /t/ in Dublin English come to different results regarding the distribution
of this feature across speech styles. While Hickey (1984: 237) claims that “in formal
styles, such as reading a text aloud, Irish English speakers only have a stop realization
of /t/”, Jones & Llamas (2008: 435) assume that “frication of /t/ does seem to have some
characteristics indicative of a more rule-governed phenomenon”, as they find this
phenomenon in highly formal styles.
The present study provides an account of word-final realisations of /t/ in Dublin
English across various speech styles. The data come from 10 sociolinguistic interviews
with young adults and compare realisations in informal conversation, a read text
passage, and an elicitation of test words in carrier sentences. The last of these contexts
is comparable to the elicitation used by Jones & Llamas (2008), and the classification of
tokens is also based on that study. We can therefore investigate the differences between
speech styles for the same speaker, and also compare the results to previous studies. As
the data come from sociolinguistic interviews, it is also possible to connect the results
of the acoustic phonetic analysis with a sociolinguistic analysis. First results suggest
that for some speakers, an increased level of formality leads to more standard
realisations of word-final /t/ as plosives, as reported by Hickey (1984). Similarly to the
results obtained by Jones & Llamas (2008), other speakers realise word-final /t/ as
fricatives across all styles, however. In the present study, such differences are correlated
with a sociolinguistic analysis of the qualitative interview data in order to explore the
connection between identity construction and language production.
References
Hickey, Raymond (1984). Coronal segments in Irish English. Journal of Linguistics 20,
233-250.
Hickey, Raymond (2007). Irish English. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
Jones, Mark, Llamas, Carmen (2008). Fricated realisations of /t/ in Dublin and
Middlesbrough English: An acoustic analysis of plosive frication and surface
fricative contrasts. English Language and Linguistics 12, 419-443.
Jones, Mark, McDougall, Kirsty (2009). The acoustic character of fricated /t/ in
Australian English: A comparison with /s/ and /ʃ/. Journal of the International
Phonetic Association 39, 265-289.
Nicolaidis, Katerina (2001). An electropalatographic study of Greek spontaneous
speech. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 31, 67-86.
245
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Towards a typology of German polar-interrogatives embedding
predicates
Kerstin Schwabe
(ZAS Berlin)
The talk will present a typology of German ob-predicates, that is, of predicates
that embed ob- clauses. It will also include the logical forms of constructions with
embedded ob-clauses. The typo- logy, which is based on the ZAS data base of clause
embedding predicates that contains about 1750 synchronical German predicates and
amongst them 613 ob-predicates, is more exhaustive and elaborated than Wunderlich's
(1976) and Karttunen's (1977) characterizations. It will be shown that the majority of
ob-predicates denote eventualities that are located on a 'route' from an individual's
question state to her or his answer state, see (1) and (2) below. There are two epistemic
routes and one deontic one. The first epistemic route is interactive and includes a
question act and a response act. Question acts are denoted by predicates like fragen 'ask'
or nachhaken 'ask further questions'. A response act is either an answer act – the
addressee of the question act believes to render the true answer – or it is a non-answer
act – an act where the addressee reacts, but does not render the 'true' answer. Answer
acts are denoted by verbs like ankündigen 'announce' or gestehen 'confess'. Non- answer
acts are related to by predicates like egal sein 'do no care' or nicht sicher sein 'be not
sure',
(3) and (4). The second epistemic route contains research acts of the question state
holder and potential result states. Research acts are denoted by predicates like abwägen
'ponder' or einteilen 'group'. Result states are related to by predicates like herausfinden
'find out'. Depending on whether the question state holder believes the true answer
given by the answer act or result state, she or he is in an answer state. Events and states
on a deontic route are denoted by predicates like bitten 'ask', bestimmen 'determine', and
verantworten 'account for'.
Additionally, there are predicates that denote indirect speech acts or attitudes
towards indirect statements (often supported by modal particles). Indirect speech acts
are related to by predicates like vorschlagen 'propose', verspotten 'mock', and bitten
'ask'. Attitudes towards indirect statements are denoted by verbs like fürchten 'fear', or
eingestehen 'admit'.
(1) a.
b.
... die Gesundheitsbehörden müssen stets argwöhnen, ob sich eine neue
Epidemie anbahnt. DWDS TS 2003
'The health authorities always have to suspect whether a new epidemic is
looming.'
verb (σ  σ)
246
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(2) a.
b.
(3) a.
b.
(4) a.
b.
An jeder Stelle weiß man, ob es ernst oder sarkastisch gemeint ist. DWDS BZ
2005
'One knows at any point whether it is meant honestly or sarcastically.'
[(verb dass σ)  (verb dass σ)] & [(verb dass σ) ⇔ σ]
(cf. Hintikka 1976)
Es ist mir egal, ob ich berühmt bin oder nicht. DWDS BZ 2005
'I do not care if I'm famous or not.'
[σ ⇒ verb dass (σ)]  [σ ⇒ verb dass (σ)]
Ich bin mir nicht sicher, ob das ausschließlich an unserer eigenen
Anspruchshaltung liegt ... DWDS die Zeit
'I'm not sure whether our own mentality of entitlement is the reason for
this.'

(verb dass σ)   (verb dass σ)] or [(verb dass σ)  (verb dass σ)])
References
Hintikka, Jaakko. 1976. The Semantics of Questions and the Questions of Semantics.
Acta Philo- sophica Fennica 28/4.
Karttunen, Lauri. 1977. Syntax and Semantics of Questions. Linguistics and Philosophy
1, 3-44. Wunderlich, Dieter. 1976. Studien zur Sprechakttheorie. Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp.
Affix borrowability: A full-scale empirical test
Frank Seifart
(University of Amsterdam/University of Cologne)
Borrowing affixes may be rare compared to lexical borrowing, but it is not
random, i.e. some affixes are more borrowable than others. Previous claims on
differential borrowability of affixes include, e.g., derivation > inflection (e.g. Weinreich
1953), inherent inflection > contextual inflection (Gardani, Arkadiev & Amiridze
2015), and some more specific ones such as plural > case (Matras 2007:42; 2009:215).
The current study empirically tests such claims using the largest database ever used for
such purposes. It uncovers further, hitherto unnoticed regularities and challenges a
number of previous claims, in particular regarding inflectional categories.
For this purpose, a database of borrowed affixes was build that includes sets of
borrowed affixes in 101 pairs of languages (consisting of a donor and a recipient
language), with a total of 650 borrowed affixes. Information is taken from published
sources and includes estimates of reliability. Affixes were identified as borrowed based
on evidence that cognate forms are present in language related to the donor language
but absent in language related to the recipient language. Furthermore, affixes were
considered as borrowed only if they are attested on native stems, i.e. not confined to
complex loanwords build from likewise borrowed stems. Subsequently, affixes were
247
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
coded for functional categories (e.g., case, tense, diminutive) and subcategories (e.g.
dative case, ablative case, future tense) as well as for the larger categories derivation vs.
contextual inflection vs. inherent inflection. Sets of borrowed affixes in individual
languages were also coded for their morphosyntactic interrelatedness, as, e.g. three
borrowed affixes that belong to a paradigm of case markers.
Raw counts on the frequency of borrowing affix categories (e.g. 5/101 language
borrow passive affixes vs. 10/101 that borrow tense-aspect-mood affixes) are gauged
against the “availability” of a given affix category, i.e. the likelihood that potential
donor languages have a relevant affix (e.g. 43% for passive vs. 85% for tense-aspectmood), providing a more realistic assessment of borrowability (as, e.g., about equal for
passive and tense-aspect-mood).
Results confirm that derivational affixes are more borrowable than inflectional
affixes, and within these, inherent inflection is more borrowable than contextual
inflection. However, inflectional affixes are far more borrowable than previously
thought: borrowing affixes of all major nominal and verbal inflectional categories,
including case markers and argument indexes, is well attested. Regarding the former,
case markers are just as borrowable as plural markers, unlike previously claimed.
Nominal categories are far more frequently borrowed than verbal categories.
Additionally, it is shown that sets of borrowed affixes tend to consist of interrelated sets
of forms (as hypothesized by Seifart 2012), e.g. forming paradigms, rather than being
isolated forms from different morphosyntactic subsystems, in particular for the more
tightly integrated inflectional subsystems. The frequency and systematicity by which
inflectional affixes are borrowed calls for a re-consideration of the role of inflection in
models of language contact (e.g. Myers-Scotton 2002) and suggests that inflectional
borrowing should be accounted for within such models (Thomason 2015) rather than
treating it as a rare exception that is left unaccounted for (Matras 2015).
Methodologically, the current study contributes to ‘objectifying’ language contact
research, overcoming claims based on anecdotal data collections.
References
Gardani, Francesco, Peter Arkadiev & Nino Amiridze. 2015. Borrowed morphology: an
overview. In Francesco Gardani, Peter Arkadiev & Nino Amiridze (eds.),
Borrowed Morphology, 1–23. (Language Contact and Bilingualism 8). Berlin,
Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Matras, Yaron. 2007. The borrowability of structural categories. In Yaron Matras &
Jeanette Sakel (eds.), Grammatical borrowing in cross-linguistic perspective, 31–
73. (Empirical Approaches to Language Typology 38). Berlin, New York:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Matras, Yaron. 2009. Language contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Matras, Yaron. 2015. Why is the borrowing of inflectional morphology dis-preferred?
In Francesco Gardani, Peter Arkadiev & Nino Amiridze (eds.), Borrowed
Morphology, 47–80. (Language Contact and Bilingualism). Berlin, New York: De
Gruyter Mouton.
Myers-Scotton, Carol. 2002. Contact Linguistics. Bilingual Encounters and
Grammatical Outcomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Seifart, Frank. 2012. The Principle of Morphosyntactic Subsystem Integrity in language
contact: Evidence from morphological borrowing in Resígaro (Arawakan).
Diachronica 29(4). 471–504.
248
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Thomason, Sarah G. 2015. When is the diffusion of inflectional morphology not
dispreferred? In Francesco Gardani, Peter Arkadiev & Nino Amiridze (eds.),
Borrowed Morphology, 27–46. (Language Contact and Bilingualism). Berlin,
Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.
Weinreich, Uriel. 1953. Languages in Contact. New York: Linguistic Circle of New
York.
Variation as a window to the past: On the origins of Standard Average
European
Guido Seiler
(LMU Munich)
Research question: European languages constitute a linguistic area where crosslinguistically rather exotic linguistic features are concentrated and shared among
genetically only loosely related languages (Standard-Average-European, henceforth
SAE). Whereas relevant SAE-features have been identified by areal typology already
(Haspelmath 2001, Stolz 2006, Cysouw 2011), the age and origin of SAE are still
mysterious. Most likely, there are several historical sources for different SAE-features.
We argue that studying variation within SAE-languages helps us decide between
competing hypotheses on the origins of individual SAE-features.
Approach: The idea of a European linguistic area has been established mainly on
the basis of codified standard varieties. Whereas Heine & Nomachi (2010) strongly
emphasize that nonstandard varieties must be taken in consideration, too, Murelli &
Kortmann (2011) even go a step further. They suspect that SAE-ness is less articulate at
the level of spoken vernaculars: including nonstandard varieties into typological
comparison is not just a matter of granularity, but it may create a qualitatively different,
perhaps more realistic picture of Europe’s position in typological space. If it turns out
that at least some subset of SAE-characteristics is present only in codified standard
varieties but absent in vernaculars this would be strong evidence for these features being
an artefact of common strategies of codification -- a relatively recent sociolinguistic
phenomenon rather than the result of long-term adstratal convergence. We refer to such
features as ‘from-above’-Europeanisms. By contrast, other SAE-features which are
diachronically stable and likewise prevalent in standard as well as nonstandard varieties
must be much older, perhaps going back to intensive language contact after the
Migration Period (Haspelmath 2001, Van der Auwera 2009) (‘indifferent’Europeanisms). The third logically possible kind of SAE-characteristics is ‘frombelow’-Europeanisms: features that are more prevalent in the vernacular as compared to
the standard language. These features are youngest since they did not (yet) reach the
standard, which is notoriously conservative, once codified.
Method and data: As a starting point, we selected German for a pilot study because
standard German is a core SAE language, has been attested in diachronic depth, has a
long tradition of codification, and facts about the structure of dialects are relatively
easily accessible. We tested phonological and morphosyntactic SAE-features (taken
from existing collections by Haspelmath 2001, Stolz 2006) for their presence in
249
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
standard German, Old High German, and Alemannic (south-western) dialects. We
introduced scalar instead of binary distinctions where necessary (relative prominence
instead of sheer presence/absence of the feature). We used existing grammatical
descriptions as well as a large electronic corpus of spoken Alemannic.
Results/discussion: Overall, standard German is more SAE than both OHG and
Alemannic. Whereas the greatest proportion of putative SAE-features is ‘indifferent’,
the majority of those features displaying a standard-vernacular asymmetry is ‘fromabove’ (e.g. vowel inventories, negation, pro-drop, relativisation), yet a few ‘frombelow’ features do exist, too (have-perfect, article systems, case systems). The results
suggest that codification clearly has a SAE-ising effect, but only for a subset of features.
Some but not all ‘from-above’-features can be attributed to the influence of Latin as a
model for codification strategies.
References
Cysouw, Michael (2011): Quantitative explorations of the worldwide distribution of
rare characteristics, or: the exceptionality of northwestern European languages. In:
Simon, Horst J./Wiese, Heike (eds.): Expect the Unexpected: Exceptions in
Grammar. (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 216.) Berlin / New
York: de Gruyter. 411-32.
Haspelmath, Martin (2001): The European linguistic area: Standard Average European.
In: Haspelmath, Martin / König, Ekkehard / Oesterreicher, Wulf / Raible,
Wolfgang (eds.): Language Typology and Language Universals, vol. 2.
(Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science.) Berlin/New York: de
Gruyter. 1492-1510.
Heine, Bernd & Motoki Nomachi (2010): Is Europe a Linguistic Area? In: Nomachi,
Motoki (ed.): Grammaticalization in Slavic Languages: From Areal and
Typological Perspectives. Hokkaido: SRC. 1-26.
Murelli, Adriano/Kortmann, Bernd (2011): Non-standard Varieties in the Areal
Typology of Europe. In: Kortmann, Bernd /van der Auwera, Johan (Hgg.): The
Languages and Linguistics of Europe: A Comprehensive Guide. Berlin/New
York: Mouton de Gruyter. 525-544.
Stolz, Thomas (2006): Europe as a linguistic area. In: Brown, Keith (ed.): Encyclopedia
of Language and Linguistics, Vol 4, Oxford: Elsevier. 279-295.
Van der Auwera, Johan (2009): Deutsch als eine/die durchschnittseuropäische Sprache.
In: Stolz, Christel (ed.): Unsere sprachlichen Nachbarn in Europa: die
Kontaktbeziehungen zwischen Deutsch und seinen Grenznachbarn. Bochum:
Brockmann. 175-187.
250
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Code-switching in Italian-English bilingual children:
An exploratory study on acceptability judgements and actual practice
Dino Selvaggi, Antonella Sorace and Anna Franca Plastina
(University of Calabria; The University of Edinburgh; University of Calabria)
Bilingual families have their own intra-familial language with varying patterns of
parental input and children’s language use in the household context (cf. De Houwer
2007). Children show sensitivity to their familial linguistic environment, for example, in
the early practice of code-switching, supporting the hypothesis of early grammatical
differentiation (Meisel 2004). However, code-switching variables, as the amount and
type of parental language input, type of education, simultaneous vs. successive
acquisition, children’s output and the cumulative length of exposure need to be
considered (cf. Romaine 1999; Pearson, 2007; Sorace & Serratrice 2009; Unsworth
2013).
In this light, this study focuses on the acceptability and production of codeswitching in Italian-English bilingual children by addressing two main research
questions: 1) Does the amount of input in each language determine different patterns
and frequency of code-switching acceptability judgements across bilingual children? 2)
Is code-switching an actual conversational device used by bilingual children?
While most code-switched strings fall under the acceptable-unacceptable
categories, “a significant number of sentences fall somewhere in between in a grey area
of partial acceptability” (Sprouse 2007: 118).
The experimental study was framed by a mixed psycholinguistic (Nelson et al.
1976; Grosjean 2001), developmental linguistic (Sorace et al. 2009) and lexicalistminimalist (MacSwan 1999) methodology. 17 Scottish-Italian children (aged 5-11)
were selected under the condition of their regular daily use of Italian and English and no
known history of language impairment. The number of qualified participants ensured an
adequate description of acceptability (Cowart 1997 indicates eight or more informants
for a minimum reasonable experiment).
Parents were interviewed using the Utrecht Bilingual Language Exposure
Calculator questionnaire (UBiLEC) (Unsworth 2013) to provide detailed information
about their children’s age of onset, years of exposure, amount of input and the daily
time of usage of the two codes. Participants were presented off-line code-switched
cartoon dialogues on a laptop to reduce formal negative attitudes towards codeswitching (Aguirre 1985) and for more natural decision tasks. Ratings on eight types of
intrasentential and intersentential switches were performed using a five-point “smiley
face” and flags scale (Ambridge et al. 2008) as symbolic cues of acceptability. Actual
CS production data were also taken into account by using pictorial stimuli (the
description of a cartoon of children’s own choice) to test a possible correlation with
acceptability findings.
Findings from the decision tasks detected the highest acceptability ratings (>0.5,
from 0 = completely inacceptable to 1 = totally acceptable) in simultaneous bilinguals;
transcripts from the pictorial production task confirmed these outcomes, with codeswitching performed only by simultaneous bilinguals. Typical developmental errors
(Sorace et al. 2009) were also observed. Early successive bilinguals, instead, assigned
251
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
lower ratings, whereas late successive bilinguals high-rated only two intrasentential and
two intersentential switches, thus showing a clear impact of the age of acquisition.
In terms of the educational method, the one-parent-one-language children (OPOL)
accepted all the conditions with higher mean ratings than the minority-language-athome children (ML). The both-languages-at-home children (BL) showed how their
intermediate stage of variable input in both Italian and English was clearly reflected in
their judgements of acceptability.
References
Aguirre, A. 1985. An experimental study of code alternation. International Journal of
the Sociology of Language, 53, 59-81.
Ambridge, B., Pine, J. M., Rowland, C. F., & Young, C. R. 2008. The effect of verb
semantic class and verb frequency (entrenchment) on children's and adults' graded
judgements of argument-structure overgeneralization errors. Cognition, 106(1),
87-129.
Cowart, W. 1997. Experimental syntax: Applying objective methods to sentence
judgements. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
De Houwer, A. 2007. Parental language input patterns and children's bilingual use.
Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 411-424.
Grosjean, F. 2001. The bilingual's language modes. In J. Nicol (ed.). One Mind, Two
Languages: Bilingual Language Processing. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 1-22.
MacSwan, J. 1999. A minimalist approach to intrasentential code switching. New York:
Garland Press.
Meisel, J. 2004. The Bilingual Child. In T.K. Bhatia & W. C. Ritchie (eds.). The
Handbook of Bilingualism. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, pp. 91-113.
Nelson, D. L., Reed, V. S., Walling, J. R. 1976. Pictorial Superiority Effect. Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 2, 523-238.
Pearson, B. Z. 2007. Social factors in childhood bilingualism in the United States.
Applied Psycholinguistics, 28, 399-410.
Romaine, S. 1999. Bilingual language development. In M. D. Barrett (ed). The
Development of Language. Hove, UK: Psychology Press, pp. 251-275.
Sorace, A., and Serratrice, L. 2009. Internal and external interfaces in bilingual
language development: beyond structural overlap. International Journal of
Bilingualism, 13(2), 195-210.
Sorace, A., Serratrice, L., Filiaci, F., and Baldo, M. 2009. Discourse conditions on
subject pronoun realization: testing the linguistic intuitions of older bilingual
children. Lingua, 119(3,) 460–477.
Sprouse, J. 2007. Continuous Acceptability, Categorical Grammaticality, and
Experimental Syntax. Biolinguistics, 1, 123-134.
Unsworth, S. 2013. Assessing the role of current and cumulative exposure in
simultaneous bilingual acquisition: The case of Dutch gender. Bilingualism:
Language and Cognition, 16, 86-110.
252
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Modality and evidentiality in Old Catalan. Grammaticalization and
subjectification of the modal verb poder ‘can/may’
Andreu Sentí
(Universitat de València)
Goals
Studies on grammaticalization of modal verbs have revealed some cross-linguistic
paths of semantic change (Bybee et al. 1994, Traugott & Dasher 2002). Some of them
have shown that a historical perspective helps understanding the uses of modal verbs in
modern language. Within this framework, our piece of research aims to shed some light
grammaticalization of modality and evidentiality in Old Catalan. More specifically, we
look into the process of grammaticalization of the modal periphrasis <poder +
INFINITIVE> in Medieval Catalan and the connections between the meanings it develops
with the semantic network of other Catalan periphrases featuring such modal verbs as
deure, haver de, tenir de (‘must’) (Sentí 2012, Sentí 2015a, 2015b).
State of the art
Up to the present time, studies on grammaticalization of the verb poder ‘can/may’
in Old Catalan have been limited to specific texts. For instance, Schmid (2012)
documents such meanings as capacity (or so-called ‘internal possibility’6), permission
(or deontic external possibility) and epistemic possibility for each of the following
examples:
1) Emperò lo prom pres d’aquella moneda e donà-li’n tanta com portar ne pogué
(Curial e Güelfa)
2) Senyora, axò yo no us pusch dir, car a mi és defès (Curial e Güelfa)
3) oynt aquestes paraules, caygué-li en lo cor que açò poria ésser enveja (Curial
e Güelfa)
From the semantic point of view, the connection between modality and
evidentiality has not been analysed with any satisfactory result. In Romance languages,
meanings derived from deontic modality (Catalan verbs deure i haver/tenir ‘must’ and
their equivalents in other Romance languages) were considered epistemic modality by
some authors (Bybee et al. 1994), while others analysed them as inferential evidentiality
(Squartini 2008, Cornillie 2007, 2009, Sentí & Cornillie in press).
Data, methodology and approach
This piece of research is a corpus study, in which the data from CICA (Corpus of
Old Catalan) were used. The analysis provided for the instances of the verb poder
‘can/may’ will allow us to validate or to amend already determined universal
grammaticalization patterns (Bybee et al. 1994).
In cognitive linguistics framework (Traugott & Dasher 2002) and more
specifically, in Cognitive Grammar framework (Langacker 1987, 1991, 1999, 2006;
6
The terms and types of modality in brackets follow the proposal by van der Auwera & Plungian
(1998:82).
253
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Pelyvás 2000, 2006), we will try to describe semantic change and grammaticalization in
terms of force attenuation and progressive subjectification.
Expected results and hypothesis
Grammaticalization of the periphrases featuring Catalan modal verbs deure ‘must’
and poder ‘can/may’ leads to the rise of more subjective inferential evidential meanings
(this also happens to modal verbs in other languages). The process can be explained as a
result of interaction of attenuating forces and a greater subjectification (Sentí 2012,
Sentí 2015a). We aim to compare the process already analysed for other periphrases
with the results obtained during the analysis of the periphrasis <poder + Infinitive>, in
order to explain the rise of new epistemic meanings.
Moreover, according to our hypothesis, epistemic meanings of the verb poder
‘can/may’ do not result from cognitive processes based on observation of the external
evidence. That is to say, in contrast with the new meanings of the verbs deure and haver
de ‘must’ that we qualified as inferential evidential meanings (Sentí & Cornillie in
press), the new meanings of the verb poder ‘can/may’ could be qualified as epistemic
modal meanings. Contrasting the semantic networks of these three periphrases may
offer a more accurate semantic map of modality and evidentiality in Old Catalan.
References
Bybee, Joan L., Revere Perkins & William Pagliuca (1994): The Evolution of
Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago /
London: University of Chicago Press.
CICA = Corpus Informatitzat del Català Antic (CICA). Joan Torruella (dir.), juntament
amb Manuel Pérez-Saldanya, Josep Martines i Vicent Martines. http://cica.cat.
CIMTAC = Martines, Josep & Martines, Vicent (dir.): Corpus Informatitzat Multilingüe
de Textos Antics i Contemporanis, ISIC-IVITRA.
Cornillie, Bert (2007): Evidentiality and epistemic modality in spanish (semi)auxiliaries: a cognitive-functional approach. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Cornillie, Bert (2009): «Evidentiality and epistemic modality. On the close relationship
between two different categories», Functions of Language 16: 1, pàg. 44-62.
Langacker, Ronald W. (1987): Foundations of Cognitive Linguistics, vol. I. Theorical
Prerequisites. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Langacker, Ronald W. (1991): Foundations of Cognitive Linguistics, vol. II.
Descriptive Application. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Langacker, Ronald W. (1999): Grammar and Conceptualization. Berlin / New York:
Mounton de Gruyter.
Langacker, Ronald W. (2006): «Sujectification, Grammaticization, and Conceptual
Archetypes», en Angeliki Athanasiadou, Costas Canakis & Bert Cornillie (eds.),
Subjectification: Various Paths to Subjectivity. Berlin / New York: Mounton de
Gruyter, pàg. 17-40.
Pelyvás, Péter (2000): «Metaphorical extension of may and must into the epistemic
domain», en Antonio BARCELONA (ed.), Metaphor and metonymy at the
crossroads. Berlin / New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pàg. 233-250.
Pelyvás, Péter (2006): «Subjectification in (expressions of) epistemic modality and the
development of the grounding predication», en Angeliki Athanasiadou, Costas
Canakis & Bert Cornillie (eds.), Subjectification: Various Paths to Subjectivity.
Berlin / New York: Mounton de Gruyter, pàg. 121-150.
254
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Schmid (2012): “Un aspecto sintáctico del Curial e Güelfa : Las perífrasis modales”. En
Ferrando, Antoni (ed), Estudis lingüístics i culturals sobre Curial e Güelfa, John
Benjamins.
Sentí, Andreu & Antolí, Jordi (2014): «La inferència en l’aflorament dels valors
evidencials en català antic», Caplletra: Revista Internacional de Filologia, núm.
56.
Sentí, Andreu (2012): «Gramaticalització i subjectivització del verb modal haver (a/de)
en català antic. Un estudi de corpus segons la gramàtica cognitiva»,
eHumanista/IVITRA 2, pp. 85-117.
Sentí, Andreu & Cornillie, Bert (en premsa): “The rise of the evidential readings of the
Catalan periphrasis deure + infinitive”, En Pusch, Claus; Garachana, Mar;
Montserrat, Sandra (ed.) From Composite Predicates to Verbal Periphrases in
Romance Languages, John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Sentí, Andreu (2015a): “Subjectification and attenuation in the conceptual schema of
the Catalan modal verb deure with evidential meaning”, eHumanista/IVITRA 8.
Universitat de Califòrnia, Santa Barbara (EUA)
Sentí, Andreu (2015b): “Modal verbs, future and grammaticalization in Old Catalan. A
Cognitive approach”, Catalan Journal of Linguistics, 15, Universitat Autònoma de
Barcelona.
Squartini, Mario (2008): «Lexical vs. grammatical evidentiality in French and Italian»
Linguistics 46:5, pàg. 917-947.
Traugott, E. C. & R. B. Dasher (2002): Regularity in Semantic Change, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press.
van der Auwera, Johan; Plungian, Vladimir A. (1998): “Modality's semantic map”.
Linguistic Typology 2: 79-124.
Ferdinand de Saussure and his intellectual environment
Pieter Seuren
(MPI Nijmegen)
The present paper paints the intellectual environment in which Ferdinand de
Saussure developed his ideas about language and linguistics during the fin de siècle. It
sketches his dissatisfaction with that environment to the extent that it touched on
linguistics, and shows the new course he was trying to steer on the basis of ideas that
seemed to open new and exciting perspectives, even though they were still vaguely
defined. As Saussure himself was extremely reticent about his sources and intellectual
pedigree, his stance in the lively European cultural context in which he lived can only
be established through textual critique and conjecture against the backdrop of extensive
research into the intellectual climate of his day. On this basis, it is concluded that
Saussure, though relatively uninformed about its historical roots, essentially aimed at
integrating the rationalist tradition current in the sciences in his day into a new,
‘scientific’ general theory of language. In this, he was heavily indebted to a few
predecessors, such as the French philosopher-psychologist Victor Egger, and
particularly to the French psychologist, historian and philosopher Hippolyte Taine, who
255
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
was a major cultural influence in nineteenth-century France, though now largely
forgotten. The paper thus rejects John Joseph’s contention that Taine had no influence
and that, instead, Saussure was influenced mainly by the romanticist Adolphe Pictet.
The issue has implications for the positioning of Saussure in the history of linguistics. Is
he part of the non-analytical, romanticist and experience-based European strand of
thought that is found in art and postmodernist philosophy and is sometimes called
structuralism, or is he a representative of the short-lived European branch of specifically
linguistic structuralism, which was rationalist in outlook, more science-oriented and
more formalist, but lost out to American structuralism? The latter seems to be the case,
though phenomenology, postmodernism and art have lately claimed Saussure as an
icon.
Attributive modification in depictives
Masaharu Shimada and Akiko Nagano
(University of Tsukuba; Tohoku University)
Introduction
Depictive modifiers in English are often assumed to be in a predicate relation with
subjects or objects. For example, the adjective raw in (1a) has a predicative
interpretation with the object the meat, paraphrased as in (1b):
(1) a. John ate the meat raw.
b. The meat was raw.
However, even adjectives resisting a predicative use can occur as depictives (cf.
Maruta (1995)):
(2) a. I drink my coffee Irish.
b. *My coffee is Irish.
Whisky’)
(under the intended reading of ‘laced with Irish
The question addressed here is why non-predicative adjectives can function as
depictives and how the depictives in (1) and (2) can be analyzed uniformly.
Proposals
The main idea is that depictives involve attributive modification. On the surface,
Irish in (2a) looks like a predicate. Actually, it is not. Rather, adjectival elements
constituting depictives attributively modify an empty semi-lexical noun in the sense of
Emonds (2000), Corver (2008), among others. It conveys an abstract meaning which
can be expressed by thing, state, style, type, and so on. Based on Miyata’s (2002)
insight that depictives describe how someone does something, we claim that (2) has a
structure in which the empty semi-lexical noun STYLE is modified by Irish:
(3) I drink my coffee [Irish STYLE]
256
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
The complex structure [Irish STYLE], but not Irish, is a depictive modifier. Irish
itself prenominally modifies the semi-lexical noun STYLE. The depictive in (1) is
explained in a similar way.
Attibutive structures of depictives are supported by the following examples:
(4) a. The salesman visited all the houses in this town door-to-door.
b. The comedian performed stand-up.
c. I bought these stocks over-the-counter.
(Maruta (1995))
What should be noted here is that the depictives are written in a hyphenated form.
This style is exclusively adopted for attributive modifiers, but not predicates. Depictives
thus involve attributive structures. In addition, the ungrammaticality of the following
examples provided by an anonymous reviewer supports the view that the hidden semilexical noun has the meaning related to ‘style.’
(5) a. ?*I like my treats Dutch
b. ?*I prefer my summers Indian
c. *I drink my rum Jamaica.
The depictives in (5) never describe a way of preferring or drinking.
Slavic languages like Russian also provide the evidence for the attributive analysis.
Russian adjectives show different agreement patterns according to whether they are in
prenominal use or in predicative use. Long agreement forms are realized in the former
case, while short forms are realized in the latter case. Babby (2010) observes that
depictive adjectives in Russian exhibit long forms, but not short forms, which strongly
suggests that they are prenominal modifiers:
(6) Anna ljubit tancevat’ pered
zerkalom golaja/*gola
Anna loves to-dance in-front-of the-mirror naked (LF)/naked (SF)
‘Anna loves to dance in front of mirror naked.’
One of the differences between depictives and resultatives provides us a further
support. Resultative adjectives can be reanalyzed with main verbs to form a kind of
complex predicate:
(7) John bleached the shirt white. ⇒ John [bleached white] the shirt.
In contrast, depictives and transitive verbs cannot be adjacent unless the object is
a heavy DP:
(8) John ate the meat raw. ⇒ *John [ate raw] the meat.
This indicates that main verbs and depictives cannot be reanalyzed into a
predicate. The failure of the reanalysis can be explained under the proposal. If the
depictive raw is embedded in the nominal structure, the local relationship between raw
and ate is not established, and the reanalysis fails.
257
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Related issues: predicative use of relational adjectives
Our proposal is an extension of the analysis of the peculiar behavior of relational
adjectives (RAs) like wooden, nuclear, and so on. They are usually in attributive use,
rather than in predicative use. However, in some case, they can be used predicatively,
especially when such an extension modifier as 75 % appears (cf. Fábregas (2014)):
(9) 75 % of French electricity is nuclear.
Note that (9) can be roughly paraphrased as 75 % of French electricity is of
nuclear origin. This suggests that we can maintain the generalization that relational
adjectives only occur prenominally, with empty semi-lexical nominals like THING
modified by nuclear:
(10) 75% of French electricity is [nuclear THING].
This analysis is cross-linguistically supported. First, as observed in Babby (2010:
example (50a)), Russian RAs in predicative use show long agreement forms. Second,
Japanese shows the overt realization of semi-lexical categories. In Japanese, nominals
attached with the particle -no has a function of RAs. Such an RA as Neapolitan is thus
translated as napori-no ‘(lit.) Naples-Prt,’ only used prenominally. However, the
expression napoli-fuu-no ‘(lit.) Naples-STYLE-Prt’, where the semi-lexical category fuu ‘STYLE’ overtly occurs, can be used predicatively.
References
Babby, Leonard H. 2010. The syntactic differences between long and short forms of
Russian adjectives. In P. B. Cabredo Hofherr and O. Matushansky (eds.), Adjectives:
Formal analysis of syntax and semantics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 53-84.
Emonds, Joseph. 2000. Lexicon and Grammar: The English Syntacticon. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Fábregas, Antonio. 2014. Adjectival and adverbial derivation. In R. Lieber and P.
Štekauer (eds.),
The Oxford handbook of derivational morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
276-295.
Maruta, Tadao. 1995. The semantics of depictives. English Linguistics 12: 125-146.
Subjects with Icelandic weather verbs
Sigríður S. Sigurðardóttir and Thórhallur Eythórsson
(Ghent University; University of Iceland)
Weather verbs in Icelandic have generally been considered to be “no argument
predicates”, devoid of subject arguments (Sigurðsson 1989:215ff., Thráinsson
2007:267, Nygaard 1905:6–7). In this talk we aim to debunk this myth and show that
weather verbs can occur with subject NPs throughout the history of Icelandic.
Furthermore, we claim that the real mystery is the fact that weather verbs can occur
258
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
without an overt subject in modern Icelandic, which otherwise has only very restricted
argument-drop (Thráinsson 2007). We argue that this is an archaic feature which is
preserved in Modern Icelandic.
In accordance with the usual view, weather verbs can occur without an NP subject
both in Old and Modern Icelandic.
(1) Þá lægði heldur og við röltum sandinn í ágætis veðri
then calmed-down rather and we strolled the-sand in fine weather
‘Then it became a bit more calm and we strolled on the sand in fine
weather’
An important diachronic distinction within Icelandic is that while Old Icelandic
was an argument drop language (Sigurðsson 1989, Kinn 2014, Kinn, Rusten &
Walkden 2016), Modern Icelandic is not. Therefore an unexpressed argument with
weather verbs is expected in Old Icelandic and not in Modern Icelandic. Second, in
Modern Icelandic, weather verbs occur with the element það ‘it’, which is is only found
in initial position in certain clause types; it is purely a “placeholder” and not an
argument (e.g. Sigurðsson 1989).
As we demonstrate, both Old and Modern Icelandic weather verbs can be
accompanied by NPs, either in nominative, dative or accusative case, as in (2). It can be
argued that both the nominative and the oblique NPs are syntactic subjects.
(2) Þá lægði storminn og komu þeir heilir til lands.
then calmed-down the-storm.ACC and came they whole on land
‘Then the storm calmed down and they came unscathed to shore.’
We claim that the occurrence of subject NPs was original in Old Icelandic with
weather verbs like lægja ‘calm down’. This NP could then be left unexpressed, first in
connection to pro-drop in Old Icelandic and then due to a shift in the encoding of
weather events. As proposed in a typological study by Eriksen et al. (2010, 2012),
weather events can be encoded in three different ways, depending on which element
realizes the weather event, i.e. predicate type (where the weather event is encoded by a
single verb), argument type (where the weather event is encoded by a weather noun and
a semantically vague verb) and argument-predicate type (where both the noun and the
verb encode the weather event). The development of Icelandic weather verbs suggests
that an argument type, e.g. containing an accusative NP (2), could change into a
predicate type, containing a single verb (1). Whereas subjectless weather verbs accord
with the grammatical structure of Old Icelandic, they are synchronically out of place in
Modern Icelandic, having been preserved as an archaic feature.
In conclusion, our research shows that contrary to standard assumptions weather
verbs in Old and Modern Icelandic can occur with overt NP subjects. We attribute the
fact that verbs like lægja ‘calm down’ can occur without a visible subject to argumentdrop in Old Icelandic, followed by a shift in coding of weather events. This feature is
preserved with weather verbs in Modern Icelandic.
259
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
References
Eriksen, P., S. Kittilä and L. Kolehmainen. 2010. The linguistics of weather: crosslinguistic patterns of meteorological expressions. Studies in Language 34(3):565610.
Eriksen, P., S. Kittilä and L. Kolehmainen. 2012. Weather and Language. Language
and Linguistic compass 66(6):384-402.
Kinn, K. 2014. The cognitive status of null subject referents in Old Norse and their
Modern Norwegian counterparts. In Information Structure and Syntactic Change
in Germanic and Romance Languages. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Chapter. p. 173 - 200.
Kinn, K., K. Rusten & G. Walkden. 2016. Null subjects in early Icelandic. Journal of
Germanic Linguistics 28(1):31-80.
Nygaard, M. 1905. Norrøn syntax. H. Aschehoug, Oslo [Christiania].
Sigurðsson, H.Á. 1989. Verbal Syntax and Case in Icelandic. In a Comparative GB
Approach. Doctoral dissertation, Lund University, Lund. [Reprint 1993 Institute
of Linguistics, University of Iceland.]
Thráinsson, H. 2007. The Syntax of Icelandic. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Epistemic modality and commitment phenomena through the study of
the Romanian adverb « poate » and epistemic future « o fi »
Elena Siminiciuc
(University of Oxford)
Among the Romance languages, Romanian modality markers have benefited from
less systematic studies either from a diachronic or from a synchronic perspective. My
paper aims to provide a description of the semantic and enunciative function of the so
called epistemic future (or presumptive) from a diachronic and a synchronic
perspective throughout a comparative study with the modal adverb « poate » (maybe)
with which it shares the same modal meanings. A previous quantitative research
conducted on a newspaper corpus of 4 MIO words has shown that these two modal
forms convey most frequently an epistemic and a concessive meaning. More precisely
among the 250 futures forms (presumptive), 190 forms convey an epistemic meaning
and 60 a concessive meaning. As far as the adverb « poate » is concerned, the
concessive meaning is less frequent than the epistemic one (28 of the 1325 occurrences
of this adverb convey a concessive meaning). Although these two forms share the same
modal values (epistemic, concessive), their diachronic evolution have not been the
same. My paper will provide an insight into the contemporary modal values of the
investigated forms through a diachronic quantitative analysis.
260
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Ex. epistemic meaning
Poate i s-a întîmplat ceva de nu a ajuns încă acasă. De obicei este punctuală.
Something may have happened if she hasn’t come back home yet. She is always
punctual.
O fi acasă la ora asta.
She should be at home at this time.
Ex concessive meaning
Poate e româncă, dar nu-i place să gătească.
She may be Romanian, but she doesn’t like to cook.
O fi e româncă, dar nu e o bucătăreasă desăvîrşită.
She may be Romanian, but she is not a very good cooker.
The above mentioned quantitative observations have led to a more indepth
analysis of the enunciative function of the interrogated forms (Rossari et al.
forthcoming). One common assumption (Iliescu 2000) in the literature is that the so
called epistemic future (presumptive) has undergone a weak grammaticalisation path
resulting in its specialisation as a mood and in the progressive bleaching of its temporal
meaning. Another common assumption (Popescu 2013, Reinheimer-Rîpeanu 2000,
Romanian Academy Grammar 2008, Zafiu 2009), is that nowadays the romanian
presumptive conveys an attitude of uncertaincy (non-commitment) of the speaker
towards the propositional content conveyed.
Using the enunciative pragmatics framework developed by Rossari et al.
(forthcoming), these two assumptions will be tested on a corpora of 10 MIO words
(contemporary newspapers) by using the interrogation platform sketchengine in order
to extract the modal adverb « poate » and the presumptive (future forms). An old
romanian (from the 16th to the 18th century) corpus of 4 MIO words and a modern
romanian (19th and 20 th century) corpus of 4 MIO words will allow us to conduct a
diachronic analysis in order to draw more accurately the diachronic grammaticalization
path of the epistemic future and identify the parameters at stake in this process.
References
Iliescu M., 2000, « Grammaticalisation et modalités en roumain : le futur déictique et
épistémique », in Coene, M., de Mulder, W., Dendale, P., D’Hulst, Y. (eds.),
Traiani Augusti vestigia pressa sequamur. Studia linguistica in honorem Liliane
Tasmowski, Padova, Unipress, 429-441.
Mihoc T., 2014, « The Romanian Future-and-Presumptive Auxiliary », in McGill
Working Papers in Linguistics, 24.1, 64-80.
Popescu, C.-M., 2013, Viitorul si condiționalul în limbile romanice, Editura
Universității, Craiova.
Reinheimer-Rîpeanu S., 2000, « Le présomptif roumain : marqueur évidentiel et
épistémique », in Coene, M., De Mulder, W., Dendale, P., D'Hulst, Y. (ed.),
Traiani Augusti Vestigia Pressa Sequamur. Studia Linguistica in honorem
Lilianae Tasmowski, Padova, Unipress, 481–491.
Rossari, C., 2014b, « How Does a Concessive Value Emerge? », in Ghezzi, C. &
Molinelli, P. (eds.), Pragmatic markers from Latin to the Romance languages,
Oxford, Oxford University Press Series Diachronic and Historical Linguistics,
237-259.
261
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Rossari et al. (forthcoming) « Les valeurs rhétoriques du futur en français, italien et
roumain », in Le futur dans les langues romanes, Bern, Peter Lang.
Saussure, L. de, 2014, « Verbes modaux et enrichissement pragmatique », in Langages
193/1, 113- 126.
Squartini, M., 2004, « Disentangling evidentiality and epistemic modality in Romance
», in Lingua 114, 873-895.
Zafiu, R., 2009, « Interpretări gramaticale ale prezumtivului », in Zafiu, R., Croitor, B.,
Mihail, A.-M., (eds.), Studii de gramatică. Omagiu Doamnei Profesoare Valeria
Guţu Romalo, Bucureşti, Editura Universităţii din Bucureşti, 2009, 289-305.
Subjectification as onomasiology: The semantic redistribution of
Spanish copular verbs
John Charles Smith
(University of Oxford)
Subjectification — the process of semantic/pragmatic change whereby ‘meanings
tend to become increasingly situated in the speaker’s subjective belief state or attitude
toward the proposition’ and ‘meanings with largely propositional (ideational) content
can gain either textual (cohesion-making) and expressive (presuppositional, and other
pragmatic) meanings, or both’ (Traugott 1982; 1989; Traugott & Dasher 2001), leading
to ‘strengthening of the expression of speaker involvement’ (Traugott & König
1991:191) — has normally been approached from the point of view of semasiology: the
object of study has been the meaning of individual words. In this paper I suggest that
subjectification may also be approached fruitfully from an onomasiological perspective:
here, the object of study is the word that is the exponent of a particular meaning. I
present a case study from Spanish which suggests that onomasiological subjectification
is a significant mechanism of linguistic change.
Spanish has two copular verbs, ser and estar. The distinction between them is
complex, but is often defined in terms of individual-level predicate vs. stage-level
predicate, essential vs. contingent properties, or characteristic vs. state (for a detailed
recent survey, see Camacho 2012) — compare:
(1) Eres joven ‘You are young’ (ser)
(2) Estás joven ‘You are young-looking; you look young’ (estar).
However in several varieties of Spanish, chiefly in the New World — Mexico
(Cortés Torres 2004; Gutiérrez 1992; Juárez-Cummings 2014), Cuba (Alfaraz 2012),
Costa Rica (Aguiar-Sánchez 2012), Venezuela (Díaz-Campos & Geeslin 2011), Puerto
Rico (Ortiz López 2000), New Mexico (Salazar (2007), and Los Angeles (SilvaCorvalán 1986) — but also in Spain itself (Icardo Isasa 2014, Guijarro Fuentes &
Geelin 2006), the use of estar is encroaching on that of ser. This development is often
ascribed to contact with languages which have only a single copula — English (SilvaCorvalán 1986) or Basque (Icardo Isasa 2014) — or which have two copular verbs
which are etymologically the same as those of Spanish, but which have a different
262
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
distribution (Galician: Guijarro Fuentes & Geelin 2006). Nonetheless, it is far from
clear that language contact is at work in all instances of this widespread phenomenon.
Moreover, the language-contact hypothesis fails to explain why estar (the marked term
of the opposition: see Leonetti 1994) should replace ser, rather than the contrary. I
claim that, regardless of language contact, this change hinges on the use of estar in
evaluative contexts (compare (1) and (2) above). The verb which encodes salience of
speaker-attitude is preferred to the alternative; a more ‘subjective’ item replaces a more
‘objective’ item.
Onomasiological subjectification yields different surface effects from
semasiological subjectification: individual lexical items appear to extend their meaning
into less subjective contexts. However, this is an epiphenomenon: underlyingly, in both
processes, semantic change shifts in the direction of speaker-attitude. In a tentative
outline of future work, I shall suggest that onomasiological subjectification may account
for a number of other changes, such as the extension of the definite article in Romance,
the replacement of the preterite by the present perfect in several languages, and the
conventionalization of some diminutive nouns and frequentative and inchoative verbs in
Late Latin.
References
Aguiar-Sánchez, Jorge. 2012. Formal instruction and language contact in variation: the
case of ser and estar + adjective in the Spanishes of Limón, Costa Rica. In
Kimberly Geeslin & Manuel Díaz-Campos (eds.), Selected Proceedings of the
14th Hispanic Linguistics Symposium. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press, 9-25.
Alfaraz, Gabriela G. 2012. The status of the extension of estar in Cuban Spanish.
Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 5: 3-25.
Camacho, José. 2012. Ser and estar: the individual/stage-level distinction and
aspectual predication. In José Ignacio Hualde, Antxon Olarrea & Erin O’Rourke
(eds.), The Handbook of Hispanic Linguistics. Chichester: Wiley–Blackwell,
453-476. .
Cortés-Torres, Mayra. 2004. Ser or estar? Linguistic and social variation of estar plus
adjective in the Spanish of Cuernavaca. Hispania 87: 788-795.
Díaz-Campos, Manuel & Kimberly L. Geeslin. 2011. Copula use in the Spanish of
Venezuela: Is the pattern indicative of stable variation or an ongoing change?
Spanish in Context 8: 73-94.
Franco, Fabiola & Donald Steinmetz. 1983. Ser y estar + adjetivo calificativo en en
español. Hispania 33: 176-184.
Guijarro-Fuentes, Pedro & Kimberly L. Geeslin. 2006. Copula choice in the Spanish
of Galicia: the effects of bilingualism on language use. Spanish in Context 3: 6383.
Guitiérrez, Manuel J. 1992. The extension of estar: a linguistic change in progress in
the Spanish of Morelia, Mexico. Hispanic Linguistics 5: 109-141.
Guitiérrez, Manuel J. 2003. Simplification and innovation in US Spanish. Multilingua
22: 169-184.
Icardo Isasa, Ane. 2014. Ser and estar variation in the Spanish of the Basque Country.
Studies in the Linguistic Sciences: Illinois University Working Papers 39: 1-20.
Juárez-Cummings, Elizabeth. 2014. Tendencias de uso de ser y estar en la Ciudad de
México. Indiana University Linguistics Club Working Papers 14: 120-137.
263
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Leonetti, Manuel. 1994. Ser y estar: estado de la cuestión. Pliegos de la Ínsula
Barataría 1: 182-205.
Ortiz López, Luis A. 2000. Extensión de estar en contextos de ser en el español de
Puerto Rico: ¿evaluación interna y/o contacto de lengua? Boletín de la Academía
Puertorriqueña de la Lengua Española 28: 99-118.
Salazar, Michelle L. 2007. Está muy diferente a como era antes: ser and estar +
adjective in New Mexico Spanish. In Kim Potowski & Richard Cameron (eds.),
Spanish in Contact: policy, social and linguistic inquiries. Amsterdam &
Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 343-353.
Silva-Corvalán, Carmen. 1986. Bilingualism and language change: the extension of
estar in Los Angeles Spanish. Language 62: 587-608.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1982.
From propositional to textual and expressive
meaning: some semantic-pragmatic aspects of grammaticalization. In Winfred P.
Lehmann & Yakov Malkiel (eds.), Perspectives on Historical Linguistics.
Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 245-271.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 1989. On the rise of epistemic meanings in English: an
example of subjectification in semantic change. Language 65: 31-55.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Richard B. Dasher. 2001. Regularity in Semantic Change.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Ekkehard König. 1991. The semantics-pragmatics of
grammaticalization revisited. In Elizabeth Closs Traugott & Bernd Heine (eds.),
Approaches to Grammaticalization: Volume I, Focus on Theoretical and
Methodological Issues. Amsterdam & Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 189218.
Infixes, endoclitics and the word domain in Indo-European
Florian Sommer and Paul Widmer
(University of Zurich)
The present study sets out to investigate several morphological phenomena in IndoEuropean that can be considered crucial for establishing the morphological profiles of this
language family with respect to wordhood. Since our work is coached in a historicalcomparative framework, we will concentrate on the oldest attested stages of the single
subphyla, which will be Balto-Slavic, Celtic and Indo-Iranian. We will limit ourselves to
verbal morphology for practical reasons. Both the grammatical and the phonological word
have been shown to be highly problematic notions (Haspelmath 2011; Schiering,
Bickel, and Hildebrandt 2010), which by now have led to more cautious approaches to
word domains.7 We will expand on and further develop such approaches by looking at
(endo-)clitization and infixation in the branches of Indo-European mentioned above,
phenomena that can serve as touchstones for any model of morphology in these
languages.
7
See e.g. van Gijn and Zúñiga 2014 for South American languages.
264
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Indo-European as a language family shows rather strict constraints on violation of
stem and especially root integrity, allowing, strangely enough, for a single infix only (the
nasal infix). 8 This infix is in itself subject to morphological change as it shows
apophony. It may even attract the morphonological vowel (as in yu<ná>j-mi ex. (1)) that
in the non-infixed stems exclusively occurs immediately after the onset, cf. yoj- (*yauj-)
in ex. (1).
Insular Celtic makes ample use of argument infixation into compound verb stems,
vi- olating stem integrity, cf. the Old Irish ex. (2b). Old Irish object infixation is
entrenched up to the point where – almost exclusively in non-3sg forms – noncompound verb stems are extended with a semantically empty compounding element no
(cf. 2b) in order to make available a stem that contains a convenient slot for object
argument infixation.
For Lithuanian we will discuss a special type of endoclisis with compound verbs,
see example (3), where the reflexive morph -si- is inserted after the preverb pa-, which
definitely is part of the stem, and before the emphatic -gi-:
While such structures have been argued not to represent instances of endoclisis
(cf. Nevis and Joseph 1993), such decisions have been made on the basis theoretical
pre- conceptions which do not allow for a more fluid conception of clitization, affixation
and wordhood.
We argue that cases like infixation and non-edge cliticization are in fact crucial to
the study of the word in (ancient) Indo-European. Our presentation will set up a
descriptive typology of the phenomena in question, show their mutual relatedness and
explain the restrictions the languages impose on these structures.
8
For recent work on infixation see Yu 2007.
265
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
References
Endzelin, Jan (1923). Lettische Grammatik. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
Haspelmath, Martin (2011). “The indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of
morphology and syntax”. In: Folia Linguistica 45.1, pp. 31–80.
McCone, Kim (1997). The Early Irish verb. 2nd ed. Maynooth: An Sagart.
Nevis, Joel E. and Brian D. Joseph (1993). “Wackernagel affixes: evidence from BaltoSlavic”. In: Yearbook of Morphology 1992, pp. 93–111.
Schiering, René, Balthasar Bickel, and Kristine A. Hildebrandt (2010). “The prosodic
word is not universal, but emergent”. In: Journal of Linguistics 46, pp. 657–709.
Van Gijn, Rik and Fernando Zúñiga (2014). “Word and the Americanist perspective”.
In: Morphology 24, pp. 135–160.
Yu, Alan C. L. (2007). A natural history of infixation. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.
Abbreviations
1 = first person
2 = second person
3 = third person
act = active
emph = emphatic (particle)
mp = mediopassive
pfv = perfective
pl = plura
prs = present
pst = past
refl = reflexive
sg = singular
Discourse functions of antonymy in French
Marie Steffens
(University of Liège)
To define the discourse functions of antonymy in French, we adopted an inductive
approach by establishing and operating a corpus from the newspaper Le Monde (19872006 and 2009-2011). From this 500 million words corpus, with help of a CQP search
engine, we proceeded to the automatic extraction of sentences in which the two
members of an antonymic pair, listed as such by the Grand Robert (2001), are used
together. Our analysis of these co-presences shows that the semantic and syntactic roles
of co-present antonyms are closely linked to their semantic-referential functions.
Based on the work of Jones (Jones, 2002, Jones et al. 2012) and our corpus
analysis, we identified five major semantic-referential functions of the antonymic copresence:
1) the ancillary function (in a narrow sense): antonyms are used to contrast two
other lexemes (Bloch abandonne l’aventure et Potez la poursuit);
266
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
2) the sub-ranking function: antonyms are used to dichotomize a referential
category (les bons et les mauvais élèves);
3) the (negative) exhaustiveness function: antonyms are used to express the
totality of a referential category (tous les enfants, riches et pauvres – aucun
enfant, ni riche ni pauvre);
4) the reclassification function: antonyms are used to reclassify a referent in
an opposite category (Petite rivière deviendra grande);
5) the double classification function: two pairs of antonyms are used to
express a correlation (Une majorité est éliminée, une minorité est
sélectionnée).
In this paper, we will show that these functions are underlied by the primary
function (predicate, argument or actualizer, see Mejri 2011 and Gross 2012) that the
antonyms fulfill. Each of the five semantic-referential function corresponds to a single
dependency scheme that can be described in terms of relationships between the
predicative antonyms and their arguments/actualizers, or between the antonyms and
their predicates. The distinction between the different syntactic schemata is based on
the referential identity or difference between the arguments of co-present antonyms or
between the predicates they depend on. For example, if all the arguments of the
antonyms have the same referent, the antonymic co-presence exert a reclassification
function (the river in Petite rivière deviendra grande), but if these arguments are
referentially different, the antonymic co-presence exert an ancillary function (Bloch
and Potez in Bloch abandonne l’aventure et Potez la poursuit). The correspondence
between the syntactic schemata and the semantic-referential functions of antonymy is
formalized so as to be compatible with the natural language processing.
References
Grand Robert de la langue française. 2001. Paris: Sejer.
Gross, Gaston. 2012. Manuel d'analyse linguistique : approche sémantico-syntaxique
du lexique.
Villeneuve-d'Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion.
Jones, Steven. 2002. Antonymy : A Corpus-based Perspective. Londres: Routledge.
Jones, Steven et alii. 2012, Antonyms in English. Construals, Constructions and
Canonicity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mejri, Salah. 2011. Présentation de la discussion sur le figement linguistique et les trois
fonctions primaires (prédicats, arguments, actualisateurs). Neophilologica 23: 914.
267
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Standards for educational training in Forensic Linguistics
Dieter Stein, Victoria Guillén Nieto, Angela Almela Sanchez-Lafuente and Carole E.
Chaski
(Heinrich Heine Universitat; Universidad de Alicante; Universidad Politécnica de
Cartegena - Centro Universitario de la Defensa; Institute for Linguistic Evidence)
One of the most salient developments in the current linguistics scene in a number
of European countries is a clearly visible interest in language in the law domain as a
highly constrained context. Apart from the scientific interest in the field related to its
specific constraints of language use, there is a role for linguists in the development of
investigations and evidence, a field known as "forensic linguistics". As forensic
linguists, linguists can be faced with questions that will determine life or death, freedom
or imprisonment, heavy fines or minimal court costs. This paper focuses on the role of
the linguist as expert witness in the legal setting, and the standards for educational
training in forensic linguistics that enable a linguist to provide linguistic evidence that
can actually be admitted into trial testimony by meeting both legal standards for
scientific evidence and scholarly standards for linguistics.
In our view, it is obvious that this professional activity with its extraordinary
degree of practical judicial consequences requires a very substantial and higher-thanordinary amount of linguistics and technical methodology as entry qualifications.
Further, the development and practical use of reliable methods in forensic linguistics
require a specific paradigm that meets both scientific rigor in linguistics and legal
standards for scientific evidence.
Based on the historical record of cases in Europe and the USA, this paper
addresses the following research questions: Why are some, but not all, linguistic
methods admitted as testimony? Given that some methods are restricted or excluded as
testimony, what degrees and training should linguistic experts have?
First, we present the obligatory --and often internationally accepted-- standards in
law and forensic science, namely Frye, Daubert, US Federal Rules of Evidence, NIST
OSACs, as well as the evidentiary standards in Europe. Second, we present how these
legal standards have affected the ability of linguistic methods to be admitted or
excluded as the testimony of expert witnesses. In particular, we focus on linguistic
methods that have been admitted. These admissible linguistic methods use a particular
paradigm for research and development of methods in forensic linguistics (known as the
ILE paradigm). Third, based on this paradigm's ability to produce linguistic evidence
that can be admitted as trial testimony, we present the paradigm's training
characteristics and areas of training, e.g. linguistics (theory and methods), experimental
design and practice, statistical analysis, scholarly ethics, legal ethics, legal evidence
rules, report writing and testimony. We present actual case examples in which each area
of training has played a major role in the judicial decision to admit linguistic testimony,
and where the lack of such training has played a major role in the judicial decision to
exclude or restrict the linguist's testimony.
Key words: Standards, Educational training, Forensic linguistics, Linguistics as a
forensic science, ILE paradigm, ILE standards.
268
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
References
Chaski, Carole E. 2013. Best Practices and Admissibility of Forensic Author
Identification. Journal of Law and Policy XXI:2, pp. 333-376.
Chaski, Carole E. 2012. Author Identification in the Forensic Setting. In Tiersma &
Solan, 489-503.
Cheng, Edward. 2013. Being Pragmatic about Forensic Linguistics. Journal of Law and
Policy XXI:2, pp. 541-550.
Tiersma, Peter M., and Lawrence Solan (eds.) 2012. The Oxford Handbook of
Language and Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
How to study the acquisition of verbal morphology in languages of
different complexity?
Sabine Stoll and Jekaterina Mazara
(University of Zurich)
Morphology is one of the biggest challenges for the language-learning child since
it includes substantial parts of grammatical information and at the same time can
occlude the identity of lexical roots. Language learning critically depends on the rapid
identification and memorization of constant and re-usable units. Any variation in these
units makes the acquisition process harder. We focus on two dimensions of
morphological complexity: the number of elements in a form (degree of synthesis) and
the variability in the expression of these elements (exponence patterns, allomorphy,
etc.). We propose a number of quantitative measures to describe cross- linguistic
differences in morphological complexity and their acquisition over time. We first
examine the input structure of languages with radically different morphologies:
English, an analytic language, and Chintang, a polysynthetic language (Sino-Tibetan).
Second, we explore the verbal development of children compared to the surrounding
adult's distributions.
For these analyses we use longitudinal corpora. The Chintang corpus comprises
1,840 different verb forms that a single stem can occur in. These forms are composed of
120 grammatical affixes. In addition there are 28 V2 stems (verb stems that select for
another verb stem), which extend the number of recorded affix/V2 combinations within
verb forms to 4,745 unique combinations. By contrast, the English verbal paradigm
consists of 3 affixes, which cannot be combined among themselves.
Distributions of forms in the input of the two languages differ extremely (using
normalized corpora of 96'279 verb forms). Chintang children encountered 23,888
different types, English children 1,449. Frequency distributions of these forms also
differ strongly. In English, only 37% of the forms were hapax legomena, in Chintang
by contrast only 66% of the forms occurred only once in the corpus.
This is also reflected in the deviations of the two distributions from theoretical
Zipfian curves (Zipf, 1932, 1935). English has a steeper-than-predicted slope implying
a smaller inventory of types with higher rates of repetition and facilitated learnability.
Chintang has a flatter-than-predicted slope implying a more diverse inventory of types
and lower rates of repetition.
269
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Morphological learning in Chintang and English children was assessed by two
methods. First, we used growth rates to measure the actual number of new forms
encountered over time. Chintang children add several hundred new forms to their verb
inventory every month with a strong increase in their inventory between the ages of 2
and 4 (with a peak between age 3 and 3;6). The increase in verb forms is due to joint
lexicon and grammar learning, with grammar taking the lead from age 2;6 onward. To
explore this difference further, we also measured children's command of the two
domains -- lexical stems and affix combinations -- with Shannon entropy (Moscoso del
Prado Martin et al. 2004) and compared results to the input. Results confirm the growth
rate analysis and show that, children's development in Chintang is initially mainly
driven by lexical learning and later by grammatical learning (affix/V2 combinations),
before both are integrated to reach adult performance levels. This temporal distributed
learning strategy might explain why Chintang children reach adult performance
approximately around the same time as English children despite the extreme difference
in target complexity.
References
Moscoso del Prado Martin, F., Kostic, A., and Baayen, R. H. (2004). Putting the bits
together: an information theoretical perspective on morphological processing.
Cognition, 94:1–18.
Zipf, G. K. (1932). Selected studies of the principle of relative frequency in language.
Harvard University Press.
Zipf, G. K. (1935). The psycho-biology of language. An introduction to dynamic philology.
M.I.T. Press.
Spatial interrogatives: Cross-linguistic aspects of an understudied
paradigm
Thomas Stolz and Nataliya Levkovych
(University of Bremen)
The bulk of the studies dedicated to the grammar of space (Svorou 1993) focus on
the linguistic representation of spatial relations in declarative sentences. On this basis,
hypotheses are formulated as to the conceptual organization of space-related cognitive
systems of human beings (Stolz/Lestrade/Stolz 2014). Universals are postulated and/or
typological differences are assumed. Given that the declarative-borne insights are
cognitively rooted, it is tempting to assume that all parts of grammar which make
reference to spatial categories are organized according to the same principles, i.e. the
distinctions made in the context of declaratives must also hold for other sentence
modalities.
To test the tenability of this idea, it is necessary to look at a different sentence
type - for instance, interrogative clauses (Siemund 2001). The talk reports on the
preliminary results of a cross-linguistic project which started in 2015 and investigates
the properties of spatial interrogatives with special focus on general location. Spatial
interrogatives are content questions in the sense of Cysouw (2007). In somewhat
270
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
antiquated English, the ternary set which involves the spatial interrogatives where?,
whither?, and whence? is an example of the paradigms which are scrutinized in the
project. As the contributions to Chisholm/Milic/Greppin (1984) show spatial
interrogatives are still largely a linguistic terra incognita. In our project, it is tested
whether or not the distinctions made within the paradigm of spatial interrogatives
correspond to those which are typical of spatial relations in declarative sentences. The
languages of our sample are classified according to the patterns of correspondence of
the distinctions in declarative and interrogative sentences. These findings are evaluated
further in terms of a theory of space in language.
The sample consists of 450 languages from all continents, all language families
and all major language types. The perspective is predominantly synchronic. Although
the occasional piece of historical evidence is presented as well. The data are taken from
(a) al large parallel literary corpus, (b) descriptive and prescriptive grammars, and (c)
additional sources such as collections of traditional stories etc. The data are evaluated
both qualitatively and quantitatively. The methodological framework for this research is
that of Canonical Typology (Corbett 2005).
References
Chisholm, William & Milic, Louis T. & Greppin, John A. C. (eds.). 1984.
Interrogativity: A colloquium on the grammar, typology and pragmatics of
questions in seven diverse languages. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Corbett, Greville G. 2005. The canonical approach in typolygy. In Zygmunt
Frajzyngier, Adam Hodges & David S. Rood (eds.), Linguistic diversity and
language theories. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 25-49.
Cysouw, Michael. 2007. Content interrogatives in Asénica Campa: corpus study and
typological comparison. International Journal of American Linguistics 73 (2),
133-163.
Siemund, Peter. 2001. Interrogative constructions. In Martin Haspelmath et al. (eds.),
Language Typology and Language Universals. Volume 2, 1010-1028. Berlin,
New York: Walter de Gruyter.
Stolz, Thomas & Lestrade, Sander & Stolz, Christel. 2014. The crosslinguistics of zeromarking of spatial relations. (= Studia Typologica 15). Berlin, Boston: De
Gruyter Mouton.
Svorou, Soteria. 1993. The Grammar of Space. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: Benjamins.
The evolution of the marker of motion-cum-purpose in Nanai: A case
of cyclical change?
Natalia Stoynova
(Russian Academy of Sciences)
Tungusic languages have a verbal suffix with the meaning of motion-cumpurpose (‘to go to do V’). In Nanai its form is -nda/-ndə. The data of the Nanai
language is of interest from the point of view of grammaticalization mechanisms.
271
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
The suffix -nda/-ndə (as its cognates in other Tungusic languages) goes back
presumably to the verb ‘go’ (ənə- in modern Nanai), cf. [Sunik 126].
Its typical use is illustrated in (1): the verb ičə- ‘see, look’ marked by -ndə gives
the resulting meaning ‘to come to look’.
(1) ičə-ndə-su-j-pu
əusi əmuə-kəm-bə
see-PURP-IPFV-NPST-1PL here cradle-DIM-ACC
‘We come here to look at the cradle’. (sds_110812_ns_luljka.009)
One another way of expression of the same meaning is attested – the analytic
construction which consists of the converb marked by -nda/-ndə and the finite verb of
motion. The same verb ičə- ‘see, look’ with the marker -ndə is used in (2) in the form of
the converb (‘while going to look’) and the finite verb of the clause is ənəxəni (‘he
went’):
(2) Kaa mapa kaanto-i
ičə-ndə-gu-mi
ənə-xə-ni
Каа oldman trap-REFL.SG see-PURP-REP-CVBSIM.SG
go-PST-3SG
‘Kaa the oldman went to check his trap’, lit. ‘went while going to check the trap’.
(texts [Avrorin 1986: 67])
The following evolution path can be proposed for the markers of motion-cumpurpose:
stage 1 (hypothetical): the analytic construction with the verb ‘go’;
stage 2: the verb ‘go’ in the syntactic construction is reduced into the affix
which marks the finite verb;
stage 3 (attested in Nanai): the pleonastic converbial construction with the verb
of motion develops: the old semantically bleached morphological
marker is optionally reinforced by the overtly expressed verb of motion;
stage 4 (hypothetical), ≈stage 1: the new analytic converbial strategy
completely replaces the morphological strategy, the old affix of motioncum-purpose loses the meaning of motion and it is reinterpreted as a
purpose marker (supine).
Therefore the diachronic development of motion-cum-purpose expressions seems
to be cyclical and the picture observed in Nanai presents its most interesting
intermediate stage.
Cyclical changes are sometimes mentioned as one of fundamental mechanisms of
grammaticalization, cf. Gelderen 2011. However only a few semantic domains – such as
negation (the Jespersen cycle, cf. e.g. Auwera 2009) – are discussed in detail in this
perspective. The data on diachronic development of markers of motion-cum-purpose
sheds new light on this problematics. Particularly it contributes to a more general
question of the possible range of meanings that are likely to be involved in cyclical
changes in languages of the world.
The field elicitation data and the data of text uses will be discussed. The following
parameters that allow to estimate the degree of expansion of the analytic strategy in
modern Nanai are taken into account: a) the frequency of the synthetic strategy and the
pleonastic analytic one, the differences between them – b) in argument structure, c) in
the deictic interpretation (‘to go to’, ‘to come to’). Some dialectal differences in the
272
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
distribution of the strategies and similar data of other Tungusic languages will be also
examined briefly.
Abbreviations
1, 2, 3 – 1, 2, 3 person
ACC – accusative
CVBSIM – simultaneous converb
DIM – diminutive
IPFV – imperfective
NPST – non-past
PL – plural
PST – past
PURP – motion-cum-purpose
REFL – reflexive
REP – repetitive
SG – singular
References
Auwera, J. van der. 2009. The Jespersen cycles // Gelderen, E. van (Ed.) 2009. Cyclical
change. Amsterdam–Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Avrorin, V.A. 1986. Materialy po nanajskomu jazyku I foljkloru [Nanai language and
folklor]. L: Nauka.
Gelderen, E. van. 2011. The Linguistic Cycle. Language change and the language
faculty. Oxford: OUP.
Sunik, O.P. 1962. Glagol v Tunguso-Manjčžurskih jazykah: morfologičeskaja struktura
I sistema form glagoljnogo slova. [Verb in Tungusic languages: morphological
structure and the system of verb forms.] M.–L.: Nauka. 1962.
Intersubjective identity-building through stancetaking
Hiroko Takanashi
(Japan Women’s University)
This study takes the approach of qualitative discourse analysis and presents how
speech participants’ identities are dynamically (re)produced in intersubjective language
interaction. I will particularly focus on playful speech activity evolving around speech
participants’ own identities or personae. Theoretically building on the notion of
“stancetaking” (Du Bois 2007), I discuss that identity is a sociocultural phenomenon
which is intersubjectively co-constructed through the dialogic act of stancetaking.
Traditionally, identity in sociolinguistics and its related fields was regarded as a
set of relatively static social attributes shared by the members of a certain social
category such as region, class, gender, and ethnicity. In the last few decades, however,
identity has come to be understood in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology as an
entity that is more fluid, dynamically constructed in the context of language use (e.g.,
De Fina et al. 2006, Duranti 1992, Irvine 1989[1974]). To fully understand such a
273
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
dynamic nature of identity, it is crucial to take intersubjectivity into account, as claimed
by Bucholtz and Hall (2004), because the dynamic co-construction of identity in
language interaction necessarily involves alignment of speech participants’ subjectivity
vis-à-vis the object of their stance. The process of such intersubjective alignment is well
illustrated in the mechanism of the “stance triangle,” which underlies the “stancetaking”
act (Du Bois 2007).
Naturally occurring Japanese conversational data between friends are examined
for qualitative analysis. (1) below is an example, where A first expresses her stance
toward her own persona, here framing it in a playful manner with smiling (<> ~
</>) and laughing (<@> ~ </@>) voice quality.
(1)
1 A;
2
3
(H)]
4 B;
5 A;
6 B;
7 A;
8 B;
9 A;
10 B;
11
12 A;
(1.3) (H) Atashi toka,
mo sugu <> okocchatte,
mou #– <A> taihen[na n da ke </> <@> do </@> </A> @@@@
[@@@@ (H) @]
<@> mada na[2 nka </@>]，
[2 (H) @]
(H) <@> mada sono [3 hen </@>]，
[3 (H)]
<@> amai [4 rashiku tte </@>]．
[4 <@> %– sore </@>] —
<> mada nin[5 gen rashii n da yo kitto ne </>]?
[5 @ <@> soo soo] soo soo </@>．
[English free translation]
1-3
A; I easily get upset (with customers) and have difficulty in
controlling myself.
4
B; [laughter]
5
A; well, (I’m) still,
6
B; [laughter]
7
A; still in that point,
8
B; [inhalation]
9
A; I guess I’m not professional yet (as a clerk).
10-11
B; That probably means you’re more humanlike (than your coworkers), don’t you think?
12
A; Exactly.
Upon A’s completion of her self-disclosure in line 9, B, who was laughing
hitherto, gives a remark in lines 10-11 which shows alignment to A’s stance toward her
persona but further provides B’s positive interpretation of A’s seemingly negative
identity trait, which reshapes the intersubjective understanding of A’s identity.
Providing some more data, I argue that through the dialogic activity of stancetaking,
identity is not only mutually recognized but also reinterpreted and reshaped, which
innovates interpersonal and social relationships.
274
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
References
Bucholtz, Mary and Kira Hall. 2004. Language and identity. In A. Duranti (ed.), A
Companion to Linguistic Anthropology. Malden: Blackwell, 369-394.
De Fina, A., Deborah Schiffrin, and Michael Bamberg (eds.). 2006. Discourse and
Identity: Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Du Bois, John W. 2007. The stance triangle. In R. Englebretson (ed.), Stancetaking in
Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins,
139-182.
Duranti, Alessandro. 1992. Language in context and language as context: The Samoan
respect vocabulary. In A. Duranti and C. Goodwin (eds.), Rethinking Context:
Language as an Interactive Phenomenon. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 77-99.
Irvine, Judith T. 1989[1974]. Strategies of status manipulation in the Wolof greeting. In
R. Bauman and J. Sherzer (eds.), Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 167-191.
The dual role of shell nouns in information packaging
Jarmila Tárnyiková
(Palacky University, Olomouc)
This paper, theoretically anchored in functional and systemic grammar, focuses on
a relatively marginal type of focus formulas with shell Nouns (FFSNs), referred to by
Schmid (2001) as ‘N-be-that-constructions’ or constructions with shell-Nouns (cf. The
trouble/problem... is that people have short memories.) When using corpus data (BNC
and COCA) to verify the role of FFSNs in information packaging, I was faced with
two seemingly diverse manifestations of these FFSNs: they occurred either as relatively
stable utterance-initial templates (cf. The point is that none of those was accompanied
by an earthquake.) or as looser configurations, co-occurring with various left-periphery
discourse markers (DMs), as in Right, erm, ah, I think the best thing we can do is look
at the rate book.).
Six most frequent shell Nouns identified in previous literature (Schmid, 2001), i.e.
problem, thing, truth, fact, trouble and point, were selected for a qualitative analysis
based on the activation of the paradigmatic axis of possible alternations of shell Nouns
within the FFSN template, and the syntagmatic axis of variability of other components
within the template. Grids visualizing the dynamism of constants and variables for each
shell N in a well-defined contextual setting were then considered for the potential
evidence of partial pragmaticalization of the FFSN construction.
The following research questions reflect the data-based findings: (1) why is it that
the base form of the FFSNs expected to be a good guide to information packaging, i.e. a
kind of a fixed focalising template, occurs in the data with so many structural and
lexico-semantic variables, and (2) how the co-occurrence of FFSNs with discourse
markers, which either precede the FFSN or are interlaced into it, contributes to a
pragmatic enrichment of the role of FFSNs in discourse. My working hypothesis is that
275
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
in the latter case, namely when interlaced into clusters of DMs (cf. Well the thing is I
mean he plays for England.), the FFSNs tend to adapt to the communicatively
regulative (Leech, 1984) roles of the surrounding DMs, and enrich their focalising
function by an additive role, i.e. to participate in overt language manifestations of a
number of pragmatically-based communicative strategies associated with facework.
My aim is twofold: to contribute to a more ‘delicate’ delimitation of the status,
form, and function(s) of the selected FFSNs, and – by tracing their interplay with DMs
in the data – to contribute to new insights into the interface between discourse and
grammar (Aijmer 2007).
References
Aijmer, Karin. 2007. The Interface between Discourse and Grammar: The Fact Is that.
In A. Celle, and R.A. Huart,. (eds.), Connectives and Discourse Landmarks.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 31-46.
Leech, Geoffrey N. 1984. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
Schmid, Hans-Jȍrg. 2001. Presupposition can be a bluff: How abstract nouns can be
used as presupposition triggers. Journal of Pragmatics 33, 1529-1552.
BNC – The British National Corpus, version 3 (BNC XML Edition). 2007. Distributed
by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium.
URL:http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk
Davies, Mark.2008. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA):
400+Milion Words, 1990-present. URL: http://www.americancorpus.org.
Constructionalization of OUT- as a prefix in English
Stefan Thim
(University of Vienna)
This paper discusses changes which have taken place in the history of the
English system of verbal prefixation and explores the ways in which they can be
viewed as instances of gradual constructionalization (cf. Traugott & Trousdale
2013). Although some of the prefixes, in particular those arising in Proto-Germanic
and pre-Old English, follow paths of development amply described in the literature,
it will be shown that others had better be seen as the result of analogical changes
which use partly schematic constructions as a basis for analogical formation of
(potentially instantaneous) micro-constructions.
As in all older Germanic languages, Old English prefixes typically derive
from free adverbial particles which develop into bound affixes via juxtaposition and
fusion. The concomitant morphonological and semantic changes have been well
described in traditional historical studies of word formation, also from wider
comparative-historical and typological perspectives (e.g. Lehmann 1982, Rousseau
1995). With regard to English, it is well-known that like much of the derivational
morphology of Old English many of the native prefixes undergo radical semantic
weakening and phonetic attrition, up to a point where the majority of the older
276
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
prefixes is lost well before the end of the Middle English period (Thim 2012).
The Middle English period also witnesses the rise of a number of new native
verbal prefixes, in particular DOWN-, OUT-, UP-. Following Marchand (1969)
these are normally treated as verbal compounds in the literature on historical word
formation, but their phonological, morphological and semantic properties clearly
show that at least some of them become prefixes in post-Conquest English (cf.
OED3 s.vv.).
Even before a systematic investigation of the mechanisms of this process was
carried out it seemed clear that the configurational properties of English at the time
of their emergence and their initial prevalence in conceptually written domains
made it highly unlikely that these new prefixes developed along the same paths of
change as the older ones. It will be shown in this paper that this development is in
fact driven by analogical changes making use of the existence of older verbal
affixes whose relations to semantically related and etymologically identical free
forms are similar to the ones between these new prefixes and the older adverbial
forms from which they derive. Finally, building on previous work on the history of
OUT and related forms (De Smet 2010, Méndez-Naya 2014), reasons will be
suggested for the replacement of synonymous older elements.
References
De Smet, Hendrik. 2010. Grammatical Interference: Subject Marker for and the
Phrasal Verb Particles out and forth. Elizabeth Closs Traugott & Graeme
Trousdale, eds. Gradience, Gradualness and Grammaticalization. Amsterdam
and Philadelphia: Benjamins. 75-104.
Lehmann, Christian. 1995. Thoughts on Grammaticalization. Revised and expanded
version; 1st published version [draft version from 1982]. München: LINCOM
Europa.
Marchand, Hans. 1969. The Categories and Types of Present-day English Wordformation: A Synchronic-Diachronic Approach. 2nd ed., completely revised
and enlarged. München: Beck.
Méndez-Naya, Belén. 2014. Out of the spatial domain: ‘Out’-intensifiers in the
history of English.
Folia Linguistica Historica 35: 241-274
Rousseau, André, ed. 1995. Les Préverbes dans les Langues d’Europe: Introduction
à l’Étude de la Préverbation. Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion.
Thim, Stefan. 2012. Phrasal Verbs: The English Verb-Particle Construction and its
History. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Graeme Trousdale. 2013. Constructionalization and
Constructional Changes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
277
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
A grammaticometric approach to the Slavic aspect
Beata Trawiński
(IDS Mannheim)
According to the East-West Theory of the Slavic aspect, there is a broad east-west
isogloss dividing the Slavic languages into an eastern group and a western group. There
are also two transitional zones in the north and the south, which share some properties
with each group (Dickey 2000; Barentsen 1998, 2008). The East-West Theory uses
concepts from cognitive grammar and is based on semantic parameters of variation such
as habituality, factuality, coincidence and others. The purpose of this paper is to
challenge the cognitive semantic approach to the Slavic aspect by comparing the
perfective and imperfective verbal aspect on the basis of purely grammatical cooccurrence patterns (see also Janda and Lyashevskaya 2011). The study focuses on
three Slavic languages: Russian, which, following the East-West Theory, belongs to the
eastern group, Czech, which belongs to the western group, and Polish, which is
considered as transitional in its aspectual patterning.
Drawing on the so-called Distributional Hypothesis, stating that linguistic entities
(conventionally words) that occur in the same contexts tend to have similar meanings /
functions (Wittgenstein 1953, Firth 1957, Harris 1954) and using corpora of Russian,
Polish and Czech (here, the original texts from the parallel corpus InterCorp, Čermák
und Rosen 2012, were used as a data source), we determined the distribution (in terms
of relative frequencies) of the perfective and imperfective forms in the respective
language in the following grammatical contexts: singular and plural, first, second and
third person, feminine, masculine and neuter, past and non-past, imperative and
infinitive. This distributional information was collected for each language in a context
vector. We compared the perfective and imperfective forms across Russian, Polish and
Czech by comparing the respective context vectors in a single multidimensional vector
space. The similarities or distances between the vectors were calculated and evaluated
by single numbers computed by using different similarity or distance measures (such as
cosine or Euclidian distance). Based on these metrics, hierarchical cluster analyses
have been performed in order to cluster the perfective and imperfective aspects in
Russian, Polish and Czech according to the degrees of (dis)similarity and to identify
systematic relationships between the co-occurrence contexts.
The results of our study support the semantic hypothesis by situating the Polish
aspect between the Russian and the Czech ones. However, a closer look at the
distributional patterns and the cluster analyses indicates that the distance between Polish
and Czech is smaller than the distance between Polish and Russian. This hierarchical
relationship seems to correlate with the differences between Russian, on the one hand,
and Polish and Czech, on the other hand, concerning the distribution of the perfective
and imperfective forms with the non-past, the masculine gender, the second person and
the infinitive.
References
Barentsen, Adrian (1998). Признак ‹‹секвентая связь›› и видовое противопоставление в русском языке. In М.Ю. Черткова (ed.), Типология вида:
проблемы, поиски, решения, pp. 43–58. Москва: Языки русской культуры.
278
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Barentsen, Adrian (2008). Выражение последовательности действий при повторяемости в прошлом в современных славянских языках. In Dutch
Contributions to the Fourteenth International Congress of Slavists, Ohrid:
Linguistics, pp. 1–36. Amsterdam / New York: Rodopi.
Čermák, František und Rosen, Alexandr. 2012. The case of InterCorp, a multilingual
parallel corpus. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 17(3), S. 411–427.
Dickey, Stephen M. 2000. Parameters of Slavic Aspect: A Cognitive Approach.
Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Firth, John R. 1957. Papers in Linguistics 1934–1951. London: Oxford University
Press.
Harris, Zellig. 1954. Distributional structure. Word 10(2-3), S. 146–162.
Janda, Laura and Olga Lyashevskaya (2011). Grammatical Profiles and the Interaction
of the Lexicon with Aspect, Tense and Mood in Russian. Cognitive Linguistics
22(4), pp. 719-763.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1984. Philosophische Untersuchungen. Werkausgabe. Bd. 1,
Suhrkamp.
The relevance of syncretisms in the context of null subject licensing
Ewa Trutkowski
(Goethe University Frankfurt/Main)
As is well known, the presence of null subjects in a given language is often related
to the richness of its inflectional paradigms (see e.g. Roberts & Holmberg 2010). In my
talk I will show that the distinctness of morphological endings is only one factor with
respect to the licensing (and identification) of null subjects. In particular, I will explain
how null subjects are licensed by (seemingly) syncretic verbal inflectional endings.
First, consider the following pair:
The above null subjects are interpreted as referring to the 1st person. However, the
licensing in (1)/(2) could be due to a ‘default-antecedent effect’ – only the presence of
coordinated (and hence non-salient/non-inferable) antecedents (cf. Cole 2009) as in
(3)/(4) ensures that no default is present:
(3)/(4) thus show that the distribution of null subjects in German and Spanish is
different although the distribution of syncretisms (in the singular) is the same, cf. (5):
279
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
I.e., syncretisms between the 1st and the 3rd person “do not matter” in German.
However, in a pro- drop language like Spanish the same syncretism is crucial and blocks
null subjects (in the Spanish Imperfect paradigm) when the discourse does not provide a
(default) antecedent. The supposed reason for the different behaviour of pro-drop
languages and German is that 1st/3rd person syncretisms in German are neutralised by
another construction, namely by topic drop (= antecedent-dependent argument omission
in sentence initial position of verb-second clauses). Due to the fact that pro-drop
languages do not have topic drop, they license null subjects of all persons in the same
way – by discrete inflectional endings. In German, however, only 1st/2nd person null
subjects are licensed by discrete inflectional endings, whereas 3rd person null subjects
are exempted from an inflection- dependent licensing mechanism. Thus, I argue that
syncretic forms do not influence the licensing of a particular phenomenon as long as two
identical forms belong to different grammatical domains. As will be shown, the
application of this principle can explain the occurrence of null subjects across different
languages and language types (cf. Trutkowski 2016). Moreover, I will demonstrate that
for null subject licensing it does not matter whether syncretisms are systematic or not.
Instead, what is crucial is solely the domain-specific distribution of (possibly identical)
inflectional morphemes.
References
Cole, Melvyn. 2009. Null subjects: a reanalysis of the data, Linguistics 47(3), 559–587.
Roberts, Ian & Anders Holmberg. 2010. Introduction: parameters in minimalist theory.
In: Biberauer, Teresa et al. Parametric Variation. Cambridge. CUP.
Trutkowski, Ewa. 2016. Topic Drop and Null Subjects in German. Berlin. De Gruyter.
Deprivation of liberty or imprisonment? Metaphors in the Criminal
Code of the Republic of Lithuania and their translation into English
Justina Urbonaitė and Inesa Šeškauskienė
(Vilnius University)
Legal discourse, like any other professional discourse dealing with abstract
thought, abounds in metaphors. As noted by Johnson (2002: 951ff), as a result of
empirical cognitive research into legal reasoning, it has turned out to be embodied,
situated and imaginative. Researchers working on different legal genres and different
branches of the law have identified such metaphors as pirate- predator-parasite
(Loughlan 2006), fight (Chiu & Chiang 2011), object and person (Twardzisz 2013,
Šeškauskienė & Stepančuk 2014). Presumably, the metaphoric variation is culture-,
genre- and register-specific (Semino 2008, 2011). Cultural specificity is usually best
revealed in cross- linguistic studies or translation. With a number of works dealing with
metaphor in translating different text types (for example, Miller & Monti 2014, St.
280
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Andre 2010), legal translation has so far largely escaped the attention of metaphor
researchers.
The present investigation focuses on identifying metaphors in collocations with
the Lithuanian word laisvė ‘freedom, liberty’ in the Criminal Code of the Republic of
Lithuania and their rendering into English. The research aims at 1) interpreting the
meaning of those collocations in the framework of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory
and its later development (Lakoff & Johnson 1980/2003; Winter 2001; Deignan 2005),
2) identifying their equivalents in English and 3) the strategy of translation, i.e. a)
keeping the metaphor in both the source text (ST) and the target text (TT) or b) keeping
the metaphor in the ST and discarding it in the TT (Abdullah & Shuttleworth 2013:
613-614). The methodology of research involves the AntConc programme (2014),
employed in locating the word in question and its immediate co-text in the Code and its
translation, the main principles of the Metaphor Identification Procedure (Steen et al.
2010) and metaphorical pattern analysis (Stefanowitsch 2004, 2006).
The results suggest that all Lithuanian collocations with the word laisvė are
interpretable as linguistic metaphors pointing at the underlying conceptual metaphors,
mainly the metaphors LAW IS AN OBJECT and LAW IS A PERSON. At the level of linguistic
expression, the word laisvė in 568 cases of its usage mainly collocates with the verbs or
deverbal nouns derived from apriboti ‘restrict’ or atimti ‘deprive’. These collocations
point at the object metaphor. Several collocations with ginti ‘defend’ help realize the
metaphor of law as a person in war.
In the English translation, the majority of the collocations were rendered with the
help of the word liberty, or, much less frequently, freedom, thus preserving in the TT
the same metaphors and the same linguistic expression as in the ST. However, in more
than half of the cases when rendering the collocations apriboti laisvę ‘restrict
freedom/liberty’ or atimti laisvę (‘deprive sb of freedom/ liberty’) into English, the
object metaphor has not been preserved. Those cases were concerned with the
deprivation of liberty as (just) punishment. The translator chose to render the
collocations by non-metaphorical expressions custodial sentence, imprisonment or
detention, leaving out freedom and liberty altogether. When reference was made to
unlawful deprivation of a person’s liberty, the metaphorical expression with
(deprivation/restriction of) liberty was preserved. Presumably, the translation strategy is
determined by culture-specific conceptualization, language resources and sometimes
also by the legislator’s intention.
References
Abdullah, Sharmini & Mark Shuttleworth. 2013. Metaphors in the translation of English
technical texts into Malay: a preliminary study. Journal of Asian Scientific
Research 3 (6): 608–629.
Anthony, Lawrence. 2014. AntConc (Version 3.4.1) [Computer Software]. Tokyo,
Japan: Waseda University. Available from http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/.
Accessed March 2014.
Chiu, Sheng-hsiu & Wen-yu Chiang. 2011. Fight metaphors in legal discourse: what is
unsaid in the story? Language and Linguistics 12 (4): 877–915.
Deignan, Alice. 2005. Metaphor and Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Publishing.
Johnson, Mark L. 2002. Law incarnate. Brooklyn Law Review 67 (4): 949–962.
281
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Lakoff, George & Mark Johnson. 1980/2003. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Loughan, Patricia. 2006. Pirates, parasites, reapers, sowers, fruits, foxes… The
metaphors intellectual property. Sydney Law Review 28 (2): 211-226.
http://sydney.edu.au/law/slr/slr28_2/Loughlan.pdf Accessed 10 May 2013.
Miller, Donna R. & Enrico Monti (eds) 2014. Tradurre Figure/ Translating Figurative
Language. Bologna: CeSLiC.
Semino, Elena. 2008. Metaphor in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
—. 2011. The adaptation of metaphors across genres. Review of Cognitive Linguistics
9 (1): 130–152.
St. André, James. (ed.) 2010. Thinking through Translation with Metaphors.
Manchester: St Jerome Publishing.
Steen, Gerard J., Aletta G. Dorst, J. Berenike Herrmann, Anna A. Kaal,
& Tina
Krennmayr. 2010. Metaphor in usage. Cognitive Linguistics 21 (4): 765–796.
Stefanowitsch, Anatol. 2004. Happiness in English and German: a metaphorical pattern
analysis. In: M. Achard & S. Kemmer (eds) Language, Culture, and Mind.
Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. 137–149.
—. 2006. Words and their metaphors. In: A. Stefanowitsch & S. Th. Gries (eds)
Corpus-Based Approaches to Metaphor and Metonymy. 63–105.
Šeškauskienė, Inesa & Julija Stepančuk. 2014. The evidence speaks for itself:
metaphors
in
courtroom
hearings.
Filologija
19:
102-120.
http://su.lt/bylos/mokslo_leidiniai/filologija/2014_19/seskauskiene_stepancuk.pd
f Accessed December 2015.
Twardzisz, Piotr. 2013. Metaphors in commercial contracts. In: N.-L. Johannesson & D.
C. Minugh (eds) Selected Papers from the 2008 Stockholm Metaphor Festival.
207–220.
Echo constructions in Eurasia: The areal distribution of distinctive
reduplicative patterns
Aina Urdze
(Universität Bremen)
Echo word formation can be considered a non-prototypical case of total
reduplication, since the echo word is not an identical copy of the base lexeme but differs
in a specific, systematic way: typically the onset of the base is replaced by a certain
sound sequence (Stolz 2008: 108) or even the whole initial syllable is replaced by
another one (Abbi 1992: 20). There may be a limited set of sound sequences that are
used for the formation of echo words in a language. Regarding the functional side echo
constructions, i.e. the combinations of base lexeme and echo word, meet the criteria
postulated for reduplication: there is a difference in meaning between the two
expressions.
Until now a survey of the global distribution of echo constructions is yet missing.
There have been studies dedicated to some linguistic areas, one of them is the Eurasian
282
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
area where Turkic languages are spoken. In my presentation I will focus on a certain
type of echo construction that is quite prominent among the Turkic languages and seems
to have spread into neighbouring languages of different genetic affiliation as well. This
type employs echo words that are typically formed with a labial consonant as a fixed
onset. The echo words do not bear a meaning on their own, they only serve as part of
the echo construction; here, they add a meaning of “generic plurality” to the meaning
expressed by the base lexeme, see examples (1) from Turkish and (2) from Russian with
the echo constructions highlighted in bold face:
(1) Doktor önce hastanin gözüné mözüné bakti, sonra sorunu anlamadiğini
söyledi.
‘The doctor first checked the patient's eyes, etc., then said that s/he didn't
understand the problem.’ (Göksel & Kerslake 2005: 99)
göz-ün-e
möz-ün-e
eye-PX3SG-DAT
X-PX3SG-DAT
(2) Tam xolodno – naden’ kakuju nibud’ fufajku-mufajku.
ʻIt is cold there – put on some padded jacket or the like.ʼ (Belikov 1990: 82)
fufajk-u=mufajk-u
padded_jacket-ACC=X-ACC
My aim for a future research project is to localise the areal distribution of this
special type of echo construction which has not yet been thoroughly investigated. For
one, although it is often mentioned that this kind of echo construction is a typical Turkic
feature, there is no proof that it actually does occur in every Turkic language. Previous
studies (e.g. Grannes 1996) indicate that the phenomenon has spread into the Balkans
and Caucasus area, there is evidence in Mongolian languages as well. Based on
grammars and other descriptive literature I have found evidence in 42 languages from a
sample of 57, spreading from the far East of Eurasia to the Balkans.
In the talk I would like to address some interesting and critical aspects of my pilot
study: the formal variety of echo words (besides labials there apparently occur other
onsets), the distribution of competing echo patterns (like the Yiddish šm-echo words)
and the question of derogatory attenuation which seems to prevail if the phenomenon is
borrowed (see Russian example).
References
Abbi, Anvita (1992): Reduplication in South Asian languages. An areal, typological,
and historical study. New Delhi: Allied Publishers.
Belikov, Vladimir N. (1990): Produktivnaja model‘ povtora v russkom jazyke (variant
dlja obsuždenija). In Russian Linguistics 14 (1), 81–86. DOI:
10.1007/BF02743719.
Göksel, Aslı; Kerslake, Celia (2005): Turkish. A comprehensive grammar. London:
Routledge.
Grannes, Alf (1996): Le redoublement de type turc à M-initial dans les langues des
Balkans et du Caucase. In J. I. Press & F. E. Knowles (eds.): Papers from the
fourth World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies. Harrogate, July
1990 : language and linguistics. London: Queen Mary and Westfield College,
University of London, 129–154.
283
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Stolz, Thomas (2008): Total reduplication vs. echo-word formation in language contact
situations. In P. Siemund & N. Kintana (eds.): Language contact and contact
languages. International Colloquium on Language Contact and Contact
Languages. Hamburg, 06.-08.07.2006. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 107–132.
Authorship attribution across topic, time, and medium
Hans van Halteren
(Radboud University Nijmegen)
It is well known that the strength of quantitatively based conclusions about the
authorship of a text is always influenced by the amount of reference text that is
available for the study, both text from the investigated author and text from other
authors. And only in special cases, such as literary works or business communications,
can we expect large amounts of reference text. At least, this used to be the case. Since a
few years, a substantial percentage of the population is producing text on the so-called
social media, which could be used as reference text.
However, it is also well known that language use changes with, among other
factors, communicative situation and topic. The question is, therefore, to which degree
authorship features learned from social media text still apply to different types of
writing, or even to social media text covering different topics. Finally, as language use
on social media could be prone to fast evolution, it is also uncertain whether learned
features apply to similar texts in a later time period. In this paper, I investigate these
questions on the basis of a corpus of Dutch tweets, in its entirety spanning several
million authors and more than four years. From the corpus, I select samples of more
prolific authors, first overall, then writing in specific topic areas (school work, public
transport, football, politics, and personal grooming).
I start with a sample of 850,000 authors who produced more than 6,000 words of
tweets, from which I take a random sample of tweets totaling around 1,000 words as test
material, and bootstrap ten more 1,000 word samples from the remaining tweets, to be
used as training material. With this material, I conduct an authorship attribution
experiment, using an improved version of Linguistic Profiling (van Halteren, 2004), in
order to determine to which degree authorship attribution is possible with this type of
text and this size of sample, and which (types of) recognition features are of worth. In
addition, I try to correlate the attribution quality to distance measurements between
individual 1,000 word text samples. First tests show an attribution quality that is much
higher than that reported for blogs by Narayanan et al. (2012) and for English tweets by
Castro and Lindauer (2012).
Next, I progress to a sample of 10,000 authors who produced more than 2,000
words on each of at least two of the selected topics. For these authors, I measure the
constancy of features across topics and time, and determine to which degree I can still
draw conclusions about authorship when using cross-domain features. Finally, I
investigate how well the Twitter-based features apply to non-Twitter texts. At least 250
of the 10,000 authors from the previous stage also write blogs (and provide the blog’s
284
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
URL in their tweets) and I compare the language use in the blogs with that in the tweet
samples.
References
Castro, Antonio, & Lindauer, Brian. 2012. Author Identification on Twitter.
Narayanan, Arvind, Paskov, Hristo, Gong, Neil Zhenqiang, Bethencourt, John,
Stefanov, Emil, Shin, Eui Chul Richard & Song, Dawn. 2012. On the feasibility
of internet-scale author identification. In 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and
Privacy. IEEE. 300-314.
van Halteren, Hans. 2004. Linguistic profiling for author recognition and verification. In
Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Meeting on Association for Computational
Linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics.
The historic present tense in Latin historiography: A cognitive
approach
L. W. van Gils and C. H. M. Kroon
(Universiteit van Amsterdam)
The use of the present tense for referring to past events (‘historic’ or ‘narrative’
present) is a common device in both substandard and literary Latin. In Pinkster’s recent
Oxford Latin Syntax (2015: 401-409) a useful distinction is made between historic
presents which create the impression of a vivid eyewitness account (appropriate to texts
characterized by a lot of detail, in which the present tense has the special effect of
‘nearness’), and historic presents which are merely used to report events in the most
economical way (the so-called ‘annalistic’ use of the present).
However, an analysis of historic presents in a particular corpus of
historiographical Latin texts shows a variation in contexts of use which does not seem
to be fully captured by this dichotomous description. This paper addresses those
contextual variations (isolated use versus series; short or complex sentences; position of
the verb; reference to visual details; type of discourse; position in the narrative
structure; embedded viewpoint; narrator’s comment) in a corpus of 50.000 words (Livy
and Tacitus). The results of our analysis point at four rather than two different uses of
the historic present in Latin historiography, and raise the question how these four
different uses may be related to one single cognitive explanation.
The theoretical object of this paper is to relate the various uses of the historic
present to common ground management, more in particular to what Clark 1996 calls the
Personal Common Ground. This theoretical section is partly inspired by the work of a
number of linguists working in the field of Cognitive Grammar (Brisard 2002,
Verhagen 2005, Langacker 2011, Chovanek 2014) with a focus on temporal deixis.
Temporal deixis is considered as a phenomenon through which the speaker or writer
positions a text with respect to his audience. Within this view the present tense is
considered to indicate that the addressee has (or is supposed to have) direct access to the
information transmitted by the speaker, on account of her cultural or personal
copresence with the speaker.
285
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
By making use of this cognitive approach, we are able to relate the use of the
present tense to a high degree of epistemic certainty and ‘givenness’, and also a high
degree of immediacy, where the notion of ‘immediacy’ refers to the (pretended)
unmediated character of the knowledge that is expressed by the present tense. When
using the present tense for referring to past events in Latin historiography or other
narrative texts, the speaker intentionally codes the message with respect to the
anticipated time and place of its reception by the addressee. As such the present tense
seems to function as a kind of intersubjective element (Verhagen 2005), the use of
which may serve various communicative aims.
For all four types of use of the historic present in Livy and Tacitus we will argue
that this cognitive approach is valid as an analytical tool, and helps to assess the
rhetorical force of these influential works of ancient historiography.
References
Brisard, F. (2002),The English present. In: Brisard, F. (ed.), Grounding. The Epistemic
Footing of Deixis and Reference. Berlin/New York, 251-297.
Chovanek, J. (2014), Pragmatics of Tense and Time in News. From canonical headlines
to online news texts, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.
Clark, H.H. (1996), Using Language, Cambridge.
Langacker, R.W. (2011), The English present: Temporal coincidence vs. epistemic
immediacy. In: Patard, A. & F. Brisard, Cognitive Approaches to Tense, Aspect,
and Epistemic Modality. Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 45-86.
Pinkster, H. (2015), The Oxford Latin Syntax, Oxford.
Verhagen, A. (2005) Constructions of Intersubjectivity. Discourse, Syntax, and
Cognition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Want-constructions in South American languages
Rik van Gijn
(University of Zurich)
The indigenous languages of South America form a complex patchwork with
many small language families and isolates. In spite of the impressive genealogical
diversity of the continent, scholars have noted structural similarities between languages,
across family boundaries (cf. e.g. Dediu & Levinson 2013). One of the areas where
similarities seem to occur rather frequently is the area of multi-event constructions (Van
Gijn et al. 2011, Muysken et al. 2014).
In this paper I look at one particular type of multi-event constructions across a
sample of South American languages: the encoding of want-constructions. South
American languages employ many different strategies to encode want constructions,
like complement clause constructions (1a), nominalizations (1b), paratactic
constructions (1c) and also morphological structures (1d).
286
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(1)
a.
b.
c.
d.
Mosetén [MOSETENAN]
Sakel 2004: 431
yae rai’s-e-’
paj añe-i-’
1SG want-VI-3F.O
that rain-VI-F.S
‘I want it to rain.’
Pilagá [GUAYCURUAN]
Vidal 2001: 36
se-take
da’ y-onta-naʕak
setA.1-want
CMP 1POS-work-NMLZ
‘I want to work.’
Baure [ARAWAK]
Danielsen 2007: 420
noka
pi=ki’ino-wo
ni=kotoko=pi
NEG
2SG=want-COP
1SG=catch=2SG
‘You don’t want me to touch (lit. catch) you.’
Kamaiurá [TUPÍ-GUARANÍ]
Seki 2000: 132
a-ha-potat
1SG-go-DES
‘I want to go.’
For same-subject want-constructions, it has been noted that South American
languages particularly favor morphological constructions, involving a bound
desiderative morpheme (Müller 2014), but to my knowledge no study exists that
includes the areal distribution of other types of want-structures in South America.
In this paper I survey the cross-linguistic variation in desiderative constructions in
Amazonian languages, using a construction-based comparative technique (Van Gijn et
al. 2015, Van Gijn & Hammarström, in prep.). Constructions are classified according to
the following variables:
Verbality: Which verbal categories can be marked on the element expressing
the desired event or situation compared to an independent verb in the
language?
Nominality: Which nominal categories can be expressed compared to a noun in
the language?
Integration: To what extent are categories marked for the construction as a
whole?
Flagging: Is there any marker of subordination or dependency?
Linearization: The relative order of elements.
This approach creates a multi-dimensional variation space in which the different
construction types can be situated. This allows for a fine-grained comparison in which
(subtle) areal and genealogical signals can be picked up with more accuracy.
References
Danielsen, S. 2007. Baure: An Arawak Language of Bolivia. Leiden: CNWS.
Dediu, D. & S. Levinson. 2012. Abstract profiles of structural stability point to
universal tendencies, family-specific factors, and ancient connections between
languages. PLoS One. 2012;7(9):e45198.
Müller, N. 2014. Language internal and external factors in the development of the
desiderative in South American indigenous languages. In: L. O'Connor and P.
Muysken (eds.) The native languages of South America: origins, development,
typology. Cambridge: CUP: 203-222.
287
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Muysken, P., H. Hammarström, J. Birchall, R. van Gijn, O. Krasnoukhova and N.
Müller. 2014. Linguistic areas: bottom-up or top-down? The case of the GuaporéMamoré. In: B. Comrie and L. Golluscio (eds.) Language contact and
documentation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter: 201-233.
Sakel, J. 2004. A grammar of Moseten. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Seki, L. 2000. Gramática do Kamaiurá - língua tupi-guarani do Alto Xingu. Campinas:
Editora Unicamp.
Van Gijn, Rik, Ana Vilacy Galucio and Fernanda Nogueira. 2015. Subordination
strategies in Tupi languages. Boletim do MPEG 10 (2): 297-324.
Van Gijn, R. and H. Hammarström. In prep. A construction‐based approach to
measuring distances between languages: subordination strategies in South
America. Ms.
Van Gijn, R., K. Haude and P. Muysken. 2011. Subordination in South America: an
overview. In: R. van Gijn, K. Haude and P. Muysken (eds.) Subordination in
native South American languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins: 1-24.
Vidal, A. (2001) Pilagá grammar (Guaykuruan family, Argentina). PhD Dissertation
University of Oregon.
Instruments as semantic and syntactic phenomena
Koen Van Hooste
(Sonderforschungsbereich 991/Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf)
The notion of instrument is found throughout the literature, yet it is often illdefined. Instruments are commonly only treated peripherally in the relevant theory or
framework. The instrument is usually considered a thematic relation, along the lines of
patient, agent and the like. Because, for many scholars, thematic relations are primitive
notions that are not further reflected upon the precise status of the instrument remains
vague at best. The matter is complicated by the fact that the instrument notion seems to
entail a form of mediated causation. This implies that instruments are simultaneously
acted upon and act on another participant, calling a simple, unique thematic relation into
question. Often, instruments are treated similar to agents (or even as subtypes of agents;
e.g. Schlesinger 1989, Grimm 2013) because of their ability to function as subjects (the
Instrument-Subject Alternation or ISA). Consider examples (1-2).
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
(8)
John cut the bread with the knife.
The knife cut the bread.
John picked up the potato with the fork.
*The fork picked up the potato.
Jan sneed het brood met het mes.
*Het mes sneed het brood.
Jean a coupé le pain avec un couteau.
*Le couteau a coupé le pain.
288
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Problematic, however, is the fact that some instruments cannot undergo this
alternation ((3-4)). This has given rise to a myriad of explanations such as cutting up the
instrument role into several smaller ones (e.g. Kamp & Rossdeutscher 1994, Alexiadou
& Schäfer 2006). A widely neglected fact in the literature, however, is that this
alternation is not equally productive in every language. In Dutch ((5-6)) and French ((78)), the example would be ungrammatical. Dutch and French do allow for some level of
ISA, but the Slavic languages seem to be very restrictive (e.g. Russian informants reject
all ISA-like constructions). German, on the other hand, seems to superficially allow for
ISA-like structures. However, such constructions usually come with an interpretation of
ability: The instrument has the ability to perform the action described by the verb.
Furthermore, German puts strong constraints on these ability-constructions. For
instance, they can only occur in the present tense and are more acceptable when
demonstratives are used (rather than, say, indefinite articles). Consider:
(1) Dieser/??Ein
Schlüssel öffne-t
DEM/??INDEF key
open-PRS.3SG
die Tür.
DEF door
English, on the other hand, is much more liberal. In this presentation, I will go
through explanations that have been proposed for instruments and ISA in particular,
including their strengths and shortcomings. I will then present a Role & Reference
Grammar-based (Van Valin & LaPolla 1997, Van Valin 2005) solution to both
aforementioned problems. Specifically, I will argue that the Dowty-based system of
lexical decomposition used by RRG is able to handle both phenomena by assigning the
instruments to different positions in the decomposition: One subtype of instrument is
embedded in a causal chain, allowing it to undergo ISA. However, cross-linguistic
variation ((3-9)) presents an added complexity, which I will capture by refining the
notion of the causal operators in the decomposition and the arguments they have scope
over. The ability to occupy the positions in the decompositions is determined by the
strength of the causal operator correlating to the verb and to the animacy of the
instrument’s referent.
References
Alexiadou, A., & Schäfer, F. (2006). Instrument Subjects are Agents or Causers. In D.
Baumer, D. Montero, & M. Scanlon (Eds.), Proceedings or the 25th West Coast
Conference on Formal Linguistics (pp. 40–48). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla
Proceedings Project.
Grimm, S. (2013). The Bounds of Subjecthood: Evidence from Instruments.
Proceedings of the 33rd Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistic Society, 1–12.
Kamp, H., & Rossdeutscher, A. (1994). Remarks on Lexical Structure and DRS
Construction. Theoretical Linguistics, 20 (2/3), 97–164.
Schlesinger, I. M. (1989). Instruments as agents: on the nature of semantic relations.
Journal of Linguistics, 25(1), 189–210.
Van Valin, Jr., R. D. (2005). Exploring the Syntax-Semantics Interface. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Van Valin, Jr., R. D., & LaPolla, R. (1997). Syntax: Structure, meaning and function.
(S. R. Anderson, J. Bresnan, B. Comrie, W. Dressler, C. Ewen, R. Huddleston, …
H. Vincent, Eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
289
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Subject-complement asymmetry in copular clauses: Investigating the
realization of the ‘general’ NP across different copular types
Wout Van Praet, Kristin Davidse and Lieven Vandelanotte
(UNamur; KU Leuven; UNamur)
Ordinary ‘non-equative’ copular clauses are characterized by a difference in
lexicosemantic and/or referential generality between subject and complement (Lyons
1977; Heycock and Kroch 1999; Mikkelsen 2005). The aim of this paper is to investigate
the nature of the hyp(er)onymical relation by looking at the form-function correlation of
the ‘general’ NP across different copular types.
An analysis of 1,200 examples from Wordbanks will compare specificational vs.
ascriptive clauses, on the one hand, and definite vs. indefinite clauses (i.e. based on the
(in)definiteness of the ‘general’ NP), on the other, resulting in a cross-classification into
4 types (300 examples each):
(1) In those days, a popular remedy was laudanum. (WB)
(2) I wondered if German efficiency was really a myth. (WB)
(3) The purpose of a school is to make people inquisitive. (WB)
(4) Wyness was the founder […] of The Olympic Club. (WB)
[indef. specificational]
[indef. ascriptive]
[def. specificational]
[def. ascriptive]
All examples will be analyzed for the semantics of the general NP’s head noun
and – if any – its modifiers. A first distinction will be made between ‘abstract’ vs.
‘concrete’ head nouns (i.e. denoting concepts relatively remote from perception vs.
physical objects resp. (Cruse 2004)).
Secondly, if the general NP contains premodification, a quantitative analysis will
determine the number of premodifiers used in each example; a qualitative analysis will
sort the premodifiers according to Feist’s (2012) functional premodifier types (i.e.
‘reinforcers’, ‘eptithets’, ‘descriptors’ and ‘classifiers’), which reflect an abstract-toconcrete continuum (Feist 2012).
Thirdly, in case of postmodification, the length of the postmodifier zone will be
measured based on word count, so as to determine the lexicosemantic/referential
specificity of the ‘general’ NP (with longer postmodifiers being more restrictive than
shorter ones).
Finally, an analysis of the syntactic category of the ‘specific’ XPs will allow me
to determine the typical categories and degree of variation associated with each copular
type. A distinction will be drawn between ‘nominal’ categories (nouns, pronouns) and
more ‘relational’ categories (‘inf.’, ‘wh-clauses’, ‘that-clauses’, etc.). This will provide
an insight into the referential specificity of the ‘general’ NP, as a larger degree of
syntactic variation is more likely to result in a higher frequency of ‘relational’
categories, which – unlike ‘nominal’ categories – typically do not denote concrete
entities and, therefore, typically have more abstract meaning.
To conclude, this paper will look into the realization of the ‘general’ NP across
different copular types, looking into (i) the meaning of the head noun, (ii) its potential
premodifiers, (iii) its potential postmodifiers and (iv) the nature and degree of syntactic
variation of the ‘specific’ XPs with which it is linked. The lexicosemantic/referential
290
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
analysis of the ‘general’ NP will, in turn, allow me to investigate how the ‘asymmetric’
relation between the subject and the complement is construed in different copular types.
Keywords: copular clauses, subject-complement asymmetry, (in)definiteness,
lexicosemantic/referential meaning, specification/ascription.
Linguistic fields: Syntax, Cognitive-Functional Linguistics, Pragmatics.
References
Cruse, Allan. 2004. Meaning in Language: An Introduction to Semantics and
Pragmatics. Oxford: OUP. Feist, Jim. 2012. Premodifiers in English. Their
structure and significance. Cambridge: CUP.
Heycock, Caroline & Anthony Kroch. 1999. “Pseudocleft Connectivity: Implications
for the LF Interface.” Linguistic Inquiry 30(3): 365-397.
Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics. Cambridge: CUP.
Mikkelsen, Line. 2005. Copular Clauses: Specification, Predication and Equation.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Coding cognition: A case-study of Dutch-Turkish and DutchMoroccan Arabic language mixing
Bram Vertommen
(Universiteit Antwerpen)
A well-documented topic in studies on multilingualism (Bakker & Mous 1994;
Auer 1999; Meakins 2011) is the origin of mixed languages or so-called “fused lects”.
A transition towards a fused lect typically starts when speakers in language contact
situations “code-switch” from one language to another due to a change of extralinguistic
contextual factors (Gumperz 1982; Myers-Scotton 1993; Auer 1998). Such alternations
are not systematic in that they merely reflect local stylistic or strategical choices. Only
in subsequent stages of language alternation they may become an intrinsic and
distinctive part of the (mixed) variety bilinguals use amongst peers. From that moment
on, switches occur with higher intensity and become increasingly constrained by
grammatical rules.
This paper focuses on language alternations which are diachronically situated in
between code-switching and fused lects. The increasing consistency and intensity of
alternations at this stage primarily reflects a shift in the type of meanings they evoke:
from aspects of the local extralinguistic context to so-called “functional specializations”
(Auer 1999: 323). Concerning these specializations we make the following hypothesis:
one reason why bilinguals at this stage might opt to utter a sentence in one or the other
language is the type of conceptual scene that this sentence expresses. Corpora
representative of two bilingual (Dutch-Turkish and Dutch-Moroccan Arabic)
communities in the Netherlands (Nortier 1990; Backus 1996; Boumans 1998; Eversteijn
2012) illustrate that, when people of these communities are amongst peers, they use a
291
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
mixed variety characterized by transitions from sentences with a Turkish or Moroccan
Arabic syntactic structure to sentences with a Dutch syntactic structure (see (1)), or vice
versa:
(1) ON-DAN SONRA ŞEY-E
GIT-TI-M,
arbeidsbureau'-YA
GIT-TI-M.
that-ABL after thing-DAT go-PAST-1SG employment.office-DAT go-PAST-1SG
‘After that, I went to the thing, to the employment office.’
Die opleiding kost,
ja, bijna tweeduizend gulden.
that program cost.PRS.3SG yeah almost two.thousand guilders
‘That [educational] program costs, yeah, almost two thousand guilders.’
(© Tilburg Cafe data sample (Backus 1996: 53-54))
The corpus analysis covers a large sample of the two corpora (16 interactions, 20
speakers) for which we divided every interaction into (complex) sentences (4246 in
total). We further labeled these sentences according to the language that defines their
syntactic structure and to the conceptual scene that they express. With respect to the
latter we distinguished the following basic scenes: (i) association scenes (e.g.,
permanent states), (ii) change of association scenes (e.g., telic events of creation or
assignment), (iii) occurrence scenes (e.g., atelic activities, temporary states) and
(iv) change of occurrence scenes (e.g., atelic events of motion, resultative events). The
results of the analysis suggest that, across the different speakers, the formal contrast
between Dutch and Turkish/Moroccan Arabic reflects a basic conceptual contrast
between scenes that denote temporally unbounded states on the one hand, and scenes
that represent events or temporally bounded states on the other. In that way, the paper
demonstrates how multilingual data can offer further empirical support for the
pervasiveness of this contrast in language.
References
P. Auer (ed.), Code-switching in conversation: language, interaction and identity.
London, New York, Routledge, 1998.
P. Auer, ‘From codeswitching via language mixing to fused lects: toward a dynamic
typology of bilingual speech,’ International journal of bilingualism 3 (1999), 309332.
A. Backus, Two in one: bilingual speech of Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands.
Tilburg, Tilburg University Press, 1996.
P. Bakker, M. Mous (eds.), Mixed languages: 15 case-studies in language intertwining.
Amsterdam, Institute for Functional Research into Language and Language Use
(IFOTT), 1994.
L. Boumans, The syntax of codeswitching: analyzing Moroccan Arabic/Dutch
conversations. Tilburg, Tilburg University Press, 1998.
N. Eversteijn, “All at once”: language choice and code switching by Turkish-Dutch
teenagers. Saarbrücken, Lap Lambert Academic Publishing AG & Co. KG, 2012.
J.J. Gumperz, Discourse strategies. Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University
Press, 1982.
F. Meakins, Case-marking in contact: the development and function of case-marking in
Gurindji Kriol. Amsterdam, Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 2011.
C. Myers-Scotton, Duelling languages: grammatical structure in codeswitching.
Oxford, Clarendon, 1993.
292
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
J. Nortier, Dutch-Moroccan Arabic code switching. Dordrecht, Foris Publications,
1990.
BLIND and DEAF: Towards a lexical typology9
Olga Vinogradova and Egor Kashkin
(National Research University Higher School of Economics; V. V. Vinogradov Russian
Language Institute of RAS)
Our talk deals with the lexical typology of words that refer to being unable to see
or hear something (BLIND, DEAF). We take into consideration both their literal and
figurative meanings. No vast cross-linguistic studies of this domain have been
conducted so far. However, it lies at the crossroads of two important theoretical fields.
The first one deals with the morpho-syntactic and semantic typology of caritive
adjectives (i.e. those describing absence of a feature, see Zimmer 1964; Tolstaya 2008;
Tagabileva et al. 2013; Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Miestamo 2015). The second one is linked
to how the sensory lexicon is organized (Viberg 1983; Sweetser 1991; Maslova 2004
Majid, Levinson 2011; Rakhilina et al. 2012; San Roque et al. 2015; KoptjevskajaTamm 2015), at the same time focusing not on the lexicalization of different senses but
on their metaphors.
We adopt the frame-based approach to lexical typology (Rakhilina, Reznikova
2013, 2016, see also Koptjevskaja-Tamm et al. 2015), clustering the lexemes and the
extralinguistic situations they refer to with the help of the collocational analysis. Our
sample includes 12 languages at the moment (Russian, Polish, English, German,
French, Estonian, Moksha, Nenets, Tatar, Chinese, Hebrew, Khmer). The main data
source is a typological questionnaire filled in by native speakers. Some material was
gathered in dictionaries and observed in corpora.
The meanings in question can be primary and can be expressed with primary
lexemes, but sometimes such adjectives can be either morphological caritives, like
Nenets sæws’i ‘blind’ (lit.: eyeless), or semantic derivatives from other meanings, e.g.
Estonian pime ‘dark’.
The main dichotomies within literal meanings are the ability/inability to collocate
with sense organs or with special objects for the blind/deaf, the extent of the feature
(full inability to see/hear or low vision/hearing) and its permanent/temporary character
(e.g. Nenets xas’i ‘deaf’ impossible in contexts like Why do we go temporarily deaf
when yawning?)
The metaphors of both BLIND and DEAF refer to something closed or hidden, cf.
Russian gluxaja st’ena (lit.: deaf wall) with its English equivalent blind wall.
Interestingly, they overlap with the metaphors of DUMB, a domain adjacent to DEAF.
Both DEAF and BLIND metaphorically describe unwillingness to pay attention to
9
The work of O. Vinogradova has been implemented in the framework of the Basic Research Program at
the National Research University Higher School of Economics (a Research Team Project Competition,
project № 16-05-0057). The work of E. Kashkin has been supported by Russian Fund for the Humanities,
grant № 14-04-00476.
293
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
something (deaf to appeals, blind to faults). However, BLIND here productively
develops a much wider range of metaphors with a shade of something overwhelming
(blind love, hatred, faith, desire, passion, rage, obedience), or sometimes expresses
incompetence (Chinese jìshùmáng ‘incompetent in technology, lit.: technology-blind’).
As regards other specific extensions of both domains, DEAF when describing sounds
shows two cross-linguistically opposite directions: a low sound (Russian gluxoj zvuk)
vs. a very loud sound (Khmer sɒmle:ŋ thlɒŋ about voice). BLIND, on the other hand,
refers to something faint (German blinder Spiegel ‘tarnished mirror’), accidental
(French fortune aveugle ‘blind fortune’), or false (German blinder Alarm ‘false alert’).
Overall, the visual concept of BLIND develops metaphors more productively than
the auditory concept of DEAF, which seems to support the claim that visual perception
has a linguistic primacy over the other perception types (Viberg 1983; San Roque et
al. 2015).
Some of the shifts we have observed lose the transparent semantic connection to
visual perception and sometimes undergo constructional changes, see blind as adverbial
modifier in blind drunk or as intensifier with negative polarity items (a blind bit of
notice/ difference/attention/interest). These data contribute to studies of complex
semantic shifts involving morpho-syntactic alternations, cf. Rakhilina et al. 2010;
Reznikova et al. 2012.
References
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria. (ed.). 2015. Linguistics of temperature. Amsterdam/
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria, Miestamo, Matti. 2015. Antonyms and derivational
negation: a pilot study of cross-linguistic variation. In ALT 2015 (11th Conference
of the Association for linguistic typology). Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA.
Abstract booklet. P. 85-86, http://www.unm.edu/~alt2015/abstractbooklet.pdf
(accessed on 12.01.2016)
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria, Rakhilina, Ekaterina, Vanhove, Martine. 2015. The
semantics of lexical typology. In N. Riemer (ed.). The Routledge Handbook of
Semantics. Routledge, 434–454.
Majid, Asifa, Levinson, Stephen (eds.). 2011. The senses in language and culture.
[Special Issue]. Senses and Society 6(1), 2011.
Maslova, Elena. 2004. A universal constraint on the sensory lexicon, or when ‘hear’ can
mean ‘see’? In A. P. Volodin (ed.), Tipologicheskie obosnovanija v grammatike: k
70-letiju professora Xrakovskogo V. S. [Typological explanations in grammar: to
the 70th anniversary of Prof. V. S. Khrakovskij]. Moscow: Znak, 300–312.
Rakhilina, Ekaterina, Reznikova, Tatiana., Karpova, Olga. 2010. Semanticheskie
perehody v atributivnyh konstrukcijah: metafora, metonimija i rebrending
[Semantic shifts in attributive constructions: metaphor, metonymy and
rebranding]. In E. V. Rakhilina (ed.), Lingvistika konstrukcij [Construction
linguistics]. Moscow, 398–455.
Rakhilina, Ekaterina, Reznikova, Tatiana., Kjuseva, Maria., Ryzhova, Daria. 2012.
Tonkij zapah, nezhnyj vkus: o lingvisticheskoj ierarhii perceptivnyh kanalov
[‘Subtle smell’, ‘soft taste’: on the linguistic hierarchy of perceptive channels]. In
The fifth International conference on cognitive science. Abstracts. Kaliningrad,
597–598.
294
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Rakhilina, Ekaterina, Reznikova, Tatiana. 2013. Frejmovyj podhod k leksicheskoj
tipologii [A frame-based approach to lexical typology]. Voprosy jazykoznanija
2, 3–31
Rakhilina, Ekaterina, Reznikova, Tatiana. 2016. A Frame-based methodology for
lexical typology. In P. Juvonen, M. Koptjevskaja-Tamm (eds.). The lexical
typology of semantic shifts. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter (see the preprint at
http://www.hse.ru/data/2015/02/12/1092528126/18LNG2014.pdf, accessed on
12.01.2016)
Reznikova, Tatiana, Rakhilina, Ekaterina, Bonch-Osmolovskaya, Anastasia. 2012.
Towards a typology of pain predicates. Linguistics 50-3: 421–465.
San Roque, Lila, Kendrick, Kobin H., Norcliffe, Elisabeth, Brown, Penelope,
Defina, Rebecca,
Dingemanse, Mark,
Dirksmeyer, Tyko,
Enfield, Nick,
Floyd, Simeon, Hammond, Jeremy, Rossi, Giovanni, Tufvesson, Sylvia, Van
Putten, Saskia, Majid, Asifa. 2015. Vision verbs dominate in conversation across
cultures, but the ranking of non-visual verbs varies. Cognitive Linguistics 26: 31–
60.
Sweetser, Eve. 1991. From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural
Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tagabileva, Maria, Kholkina, Lilia, Kiryanov, Denis. 2013. Semantic domains “full”
and “empty”: a cross-linguistic study // ALT 2013 (10th Conference of the
Association for linguistic typology). Leipzig, Germany. Abstracts,
https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/conference/2013_ALT10/pdf/abstracts/abstract_0
62_SemanticDomainsFullAndEmpty.pdf (accessed on 12.01.2016)
Tolstaya, Svetlana. 2008. Prostranstvo slova, Leksicheskaja semantika v
obshcheslavjanskoj perspektive [Word space. Lexical semantics from the Slavic
perspective]. Moscow: Indrik.
Viberg, Åke. 1983. The verbs of perception: A typological study. Linguistics 21: 123–
162.
Zimmer, Karl. 1964. Affixal negation in English and other languages: An investigation
of restricted productivity. New York: William Clowes and Sons Limited.
Quantifying mutual understanding
Carl Vogel
(Trinity College Dublin)
Quantificational interaction analysis is receiving increasing scholarly attention.
Such meth- ods have been applied to the problem of assessing engagement in
communication, and both ver- bal and non-verbal communication are amenable to these
approaches. However, in some contexts only textual communication records –
transcripts – are available. One method represents tran- scripts as partially ordered
sequences of speaker ”turns” (where temporal information reveals overlap, then the
turns are not totally ordered): actual dialogue is compared with a number of de- rived
dialogues in which each of the derivatives has the turns of the original randomly re-
295
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
ordered (Vogel & Behan, 2012; Vogel, 2013). Regarding engagement, the null
hypothesis is that, on av- erage, dialogues with turns randomly ordered have at least as
much turn to turn repetition as the actual dialogues on which the randomizations are
based. Therefore, if the null hypothesis may be rejected, one may say that there is
sufficiently organized repetition in the actual dialogue to claim positive evidence of
engagement, and mutual understanding to that extent. The null hypothesis that
interlocutors have not understood each other is arguably the most appropriate
hypothesis in contexts in which individuals have been interrogated outside their native
language.
Similar approaches have also been applied to non-verbal signals in conversation
(Ram- seyer & Tschacher, 2010). In quantifying mutual understanding, the metric
compared between ”actual” and ”random” dialogues is the amount of lexical and
phrasal repetition (in some cases, the items are abstracted, so that lexeme stems rather
than inflected forms are considered, or, still more abstractly, part of speech symbols
may be used). Natural distributions of words entail that repetition between turns is
likely. Where the speaker’s self repetition or repetition of others’ last turns (allorepetition) exceeds that which appears on average under randomization, one can infer
that the repetition exceeds chance: the repetition reveals engagement, and to the extent
that engagement presupposes mutual understanding, one can quantify mutual
understanding. Using related methods, others have shown that success in task-oriented
dialogues correlates with levels of linguistic repetition across turns (Reitter & Moore,
2007). Conversely, where levels of actual self- and allo-repetition do not exceed random
counterparts, one cannot reject the null hypothesis that conversants have not understood
each other.
The null hypothesis that conversants have not understood each other fits exactly
situations in which an individual has been interrogated outside their first language.
This presentation re- views cases in which, for example, appeals were based on the
claim that during original trials, the defendant did not understand the interactions
sufficiently. The quantificational method used to accept or reject the null hypothesis
that insufficient levels of engagement are in evidence in the transcripts to support the
conclusion that the individual in question has understood the rel- evant proceedings is
described. The results of applying the method to the transcripts available in cases
reviewed are compared with assessments derived from close reading of the transcripts.
The method is thus shown to have face validity. Generalizations of the method to
render it more robust are presented and evaluated.
References
Ramseyer, F. & Tschacher, W. (2010). Nonverbal Synchrony or Random Coincidence?
How to Tell The Difference. In Esposito, A., Campbell, N., Vogel, C., Hussain,
A., & Nijholt, A. (Eds.), Development of Multimodal Interfaces: Active Listening
and Synchrony, pp. 182–196. Springer, LNCS 5967.
Reitter, D. & Moore, J. (2007). Predicting Success in Dialogue. In Proceedings of the
45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, pp. 808–815.
Association for Computational Linguistics.
Vogel, C. (2013).
Quantifying Interaction Synchrony as Evidence of Mutual
Understanding. Cortex. Accepted – to appear.
296
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Vogel, C. & Behan, L. (2012). Measuring Synchrony in Dialog Transcripts. In Esposito,
A., Es- posito, A. M., Vinciarelli, A., Hoffmann, R., & Mu¨ller, V. C. (Eds.),
Cognitive Behavioural Systems, pp. 73–88. Springer, LNCS 7403.
Smelling is not like seeing and hearing: Aspects of perception in Baltic,
Slavic and sundry European languages in parallel texts
Ruprecht von Waldenfels and Bernhard Wälchli
(University of Berkeley; Stockholm University)
Modern Slavic and Baltic languages, Gothic, Swedish, Hungarian, Georgian, and
Ossetic distinguish between what we call specific and non-specific perception verbs,
e.g., Russian uvidet’ / videt’ ‘see [PFV/IPFV]’, Lithuanian (pa)matyti, Gothic
(ga)saihwan or Swedish få se / se.
We define “(non-)specific” pretheoretically as an opposition of verbs for basic
perception events, one of which is typically prefixed and thus marked in a way that
would in other contexts signal telicity (see also Arkadiev 2015). While the distinction in
Slavic largely coincides with the aspectual perfective-imperfective opposition,
languages without verbal aspect also exhibit similar contrasts, which calls a primarily
aspectually motivated treatment into question. An investigation of a worldwide
convenience sample of 100 languages shows that this distinction is cross-linguistically
not common.
The two main research questions addressed in the paper are:
To what extent do specific perception verbs differ across languages and
how does specific perception relate to aspect and the lexicon across
Slavic and beyond?
Do different sense modalities behave alike when it comes to verb pairs,
and what are the qualitative and quantitative dimensions underlying
“specific”?
Starting with lexical typology and the typology of tense-aspect systems, we
pursue a typological and corpus-linguistic approach with a focus on parallel texts,
informed by research in semantics and the psychology of perception. Data collected
from parallel texts is analyzed quantitatively with explorative statistical visualization
techniques (MDS and NeighborNets).
The analysis of parallel texts (three novels with different source languages taken
from ParaSol [von Waldenfels 2011] and a New Testament corpus) shows that
specificity constitutes a cline rather than a neat semantic distinction where domainspecific factors such as conditions for and exposure to perception are as important as
aspect. These observations are of great theoretical relevance since it has been argued
that Russian aspect in perception verbs reflects a distinction between states and
inceptive achievements (e.g., Croft 2012: 120). If the opposition is different across
areally and genetically related languages this calls for revisiting the analysis of the
temporal semantics of perception verbs.
The patterns emerging in a parallel text investigation from twelve Slavic and
Baltic languages show that Russian is closer to Lithuanian than to Czech and South
297
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Slavic, which does not coincide with the well-known differences between western and
eastern Slavic languages for such features as habitual, historical present, and verbal
nouns (Dickey 2000). In some South and West Slavic languages ‘see’ and ‘hear’ are
traditionally considered to be ‘biaspectual’ (indifferent to aspect). However, parallel
texts reveal that all Slavic languages have at least some use of perfective verbs in the
‘see’ and ‘hear’ domains, thus, perception verbs cannot be explained away as trivial
irregularities.
In respect to ‘smell’ the patterns found in ‘see’ and ‘hear’ are not corroborated.
Specific ‘smell’ in Baltic does not reflect the same semantic distinction as specific ‘see’,
whereas aspect in East Slavic languages, which lack dedicated verbs for ‘smell’, is
aspectually more consistent across perception verbs. We explain the different behavior
of ‘smell’ in terms of psychological differences of the different sense modalities.
References
Arkadiev, Peter. 2015. Areal'naja tipologija prefiksal'nogo perfektiva (na materiale
jazykov Évropy i Kavkaza). Moskva: Jazyki slavjanskoj kul'tury.
Croft, William. 2012. Verbs. Aspect and Causal Structure. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Dickey, Stephen M. 2000. Parameters of Slavic Aspect. A cognitive approach.
Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.
von Waldenfels, Ruprecht. 2011. Recent developments in ParaSol: Breadth for depth
and XSLT based web concordancing with CWB. In: Daniela M., and Garabík, R.
(eds.), Natural Language Processing, Multilinguality. Proceedings of Slovko
2011, Modra, Slovakia, 20–21 October 2011. Bratislava, 156-162
Wälchli, Bernhard. In prep. Specific and non-specific perception verbs in Baltic
languages seen through lexical typology and ecological psychology. Submitted to
Baltic Linguistics.
Explaining third language phonological acquisition from the
Natural Phonology perspective
Magdalena Wrembel and Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kołaczyk
(Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań)
In the contemporary world multilingualism appears to be the default state of
human condition and language competence, therefore we need to be able to account for
the process of multilingual acquisition. Third Language Acquisition has recently
emerged as a separate subfield of inquiry, offering new insights into language learning
that go beyond those stemming from investigations into L1 or L2 (Flynn et al. 2004).
This contribution aims to shed light on L3 phonological acquisition and offer an
explanatory framework for generated data (Wrembel 2015). It pursues a holistic
approach combining different methodologies of data collection and analysis. Three
series of studies were conducted in parallel on four groups of multilingual participants
(N=128) with complementary language combinations (i.e. Polish, English, French and
German as L1/L2/L3). The studies involved (1) accentedness ratings; (2) voice onset
298
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
time acoustic measures, (3) introspective and retrospective oral protocols. They
examined three measures of L3 phonetic performance, i.e. perceived global accent,
VOT and metaphonological awareness.
The results show that it is difficult to provide a unified account for the sources of
cross-linguistic influence (CLI) in L3 as the process is dynamic and complex. Further,
the nature of the attested combined CLI appears to be gradual and structure-dependent
rather than absolute. A question appears whether the acquisition of L3 phonology
deserves a separate explanatory model since the proposed general multilingual models
(Cumulative-Enhancement Model by Flynn et al. 2004; L2 Status Factor Model by
Bardel and Falk 2007; Typological Primacy Model by Rothman 2010) fail to provide
satisfactory accounts of this process (Wrembel 2015).
We aim to interpret the empirical evidence produced so far within the framework
of Natural Phonology (e.g. Stampe 1979, Donegan & Stampe 2009, Dressler 1984,
1996, Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 2002, 2009, 2012). NP offers considerable advantages over
other phonological theories with respect to its applicability to models of language
acquisition (Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 1990). It provides an often missed link between
phonology and phonetics by claiming that phonological systems are phonetically
motivated. Moreover, NP offers a functionalist position embracing communicative and
cognitive orientation of language and conditioning impact of extralinguistic factors. For
instance, particular linguistic choices are seen as results of goal-oriented linguistic
behavior of language users, as in the learner’s choice of epenthesis vs. reduction as a
repair for second language clusters (cf. Dressler & Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 1994).
We claim that in L3 acquisition, just as in L2 and L1 acquisition, phonological
“processes reflect real constraints on speaker abilities” (Donegan & Stampe 2009: 15),
affecting both perception and production. However, the learners have already acquired
the limitations on universal processes specific for L1 and L2; for L3, some new
limitations are needed, while some need to be undone (stemming either from L1 or L2).
The system-internal criteria, such as complexity and markedness of representations
obtained by processes, will co-determine the difficulty of perception, production and
eventually acquisition of L3 sounds. Equally importantly, the social context of
acquisition and the amount of language use of L1, L2 and L3 will greatly influence the
path of acquisition of L3 phonological representations.
References
Bardel, Camilla and Falk, Ylva. 2007. The role of the L2 in L3 acquisition: the case of
Germanic syntax. Second Language Research 23(4): 459-484.
Donegan, Patricia J. and Stampe, David. 2009. Hypotheses of natural phonology,
Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 45.1: 3–31.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. 1984. Explaining Natural Phonology. Phonology Yearbook 1.
29-50.
Dressler, Wolfgang U. 1996. Principles of naturalness in phonology and across
components. In B. Hurch & R. Rhodes (eds.). Natural phonology: The state of the
art. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 41-52.
Dressler, Wolfgang. U. and Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Katarzyna. 1994. Functional analysis
in the study of second language acquisition. Functions of Language 1, 2. 201-28.
Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Katarzyna. 1990. A Theory of Second Language Acquisition
within the Framework of Natural Phonology. Poznań: Adam Mickiewicz
University Press.
299
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Katarzyna. 2002. Beats-and-Binding Phonology. Frankfurt am
Main: Peter Lang. s. 331.
Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Katarzyna. 2009. NP extension: B&B phonotactics. Poznań
Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 45(1). 55-71.
Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, Katarzyna. 2012. Modern Natural Phonology and phonetics. in:
Cyran, E., H. Kardela and B. Szymanek (eds.). Sound, Structure and Sense.
Studies in Memory of Edmund Gussmann. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL. 199-210.
Flynn, Suzanne, C. Foley and I. Vinnitskaya. 2004. The Cumulative-Enhancement
Model for Language Acquisition: Comparing Adults’ and Children’s patterns of
Development in L1, L2 and L3 acquisition of Relative clauses. The International
Journal of Multilingualism 1(1): 3-16.
Rothman, Jason. 2010. On the typological economy of syntactic transfer: Word order
and relative clause attachment preference in L3 Brazilian Portuguese.
International Review of Applied Linguistics 48(2-3): 245-273.
Stampe, David. 1979. A Dissertation on Natural Phonology. New York: Garland.
Wrembel, Magdalena. 2015. In search of a new perspective: Cross-linguistic influence
in the acquisition of third language phonology. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe
UAM.
Reconsidering the typology of motion expressions: Focusing on
differences between Italian, English, and Japanese
Yuko Yoshinari, Fabiana Andreani and Miho Mano
(Gifu University; Naruto University of Education; Naruto University of Education)
This study clarifies the features of Italian motion expressions beyond the
typological categories in comparison with English and Japanese. Based on the wellknown linguistic typology of motion events (Talmy 2000), Italian and Japanese are
classified as “verb-framed” languages (V-language) wherein Path components are
encoded in the main verb. In contrast, English is a “satellite-framed” language (Slanguage) that encodes them outside of the main verb. Recent studies noted that Italian
tends to behave as S-language in the description of motion events (Imbert 2012),
especially for caused motions (Yoshinari in press). However, it remains unclear whether
or not Italian speakers actually use the S-language pattern in any caused motion types
such as ballistic motion and conveyed motion. It is also unclear what is determining the
encoding pattern.
We collected data from 15 Italian, 22 Japanese, and 23 English speakers through a
production experiment using movies as the stimuli to compare their typological
tendencies. We investigated INTO-path scenes of different types of caused motion
events: (a) someone carries a chair into the pavilion, (b) someone puts a book into the
bag, and (c) someone kicks a ball into the pavilion. In addition, we investigated KICKmanner scenes with different types of path components such as TO, UP, and INTO.
By comparing the description of three different caused motion events, we found
that English and Japanese behaved in a typical typological pattern, i.e. English as Slanguage (e.g. She put the book into the bag.) and Japanese as V-language. Italian
300
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
coding patterns, however, changed into the English (S-language) pattern in all caused
motion events, that is, causative verb entailing Manner was used as the main verb and
Path was expressed in the adnominal position as shown in (1). Moreover, this trend was
verified in KICK-manner scenes regardless of Path types.
(1) Il
ragazzo
calcia
la
palla dentro
The
man
kicks
the ball into
‘The man kicks the ball into the pavilion.’
il
the
gazebo.
pavilion
We conclude that this difference between Japanese and Italian is caused by
language-specific encoding pattern to express Path components. Japanese uses causative
verbs entailing Path such as ireru ‘put in’ as the main verb even in caused motions.
Moreover, these causative verbs can make compound verbs with Manner verbs such as
keri-ireru ‘kicking-put in’. Italian, however, does not have such lexical causative verbs
expressing Path. We claim that this leads to the frequent use of S-language patterns in
caused motion description by Italian speakers. In order to preserve the V-language
pattern, syntactic causative construction with fare ‘make’ (e.g. fare entrare ‘make
enter’) should be used, but it seldom occurred in our data.
This demonstrates that Italian shows mixed patterns in subjective and caused
motion events, which necessitates a reconsideration of the typology of motion event
descriptions by taking lexical and syntactic properties of individual languages and also
motion types into consideration. (500 words)
References
Imbert, Caroline. 2012. Path: Ways typology has walked through it. Language and
Linguistics Compass 6(4), 236-258.
Mosca, Monica. 2012, “Italian motion constructions: different functions of ‘particles’”,
L. Filipovic and K. M. Jaszczolt (eds.), Space and Time in Languages and
Cultures. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 373-393.
Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a cognitive semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Yoshinari, Yuko. in press. Itariago niokeru Idoo-hyoogen (Motion expressions in Italian
language). In Y. Matsumoto (ed.) Idoo-hyoogen-no ruikeiron. Tokyo: Kurosio
Publishers.
On constructionalisation in Middle English ditransitives
Eva Zehentner
(University of Vienna)
This paper discusses the role of constructionalisation in the history of ditransitive
verbs and their complementation patterns in English (Traugott & Trousdale 2013).
More specifically, the development of the prepositional ditransitive pattern involving to
(to-POC) as an alternative to the resident double-object construction (DOC) will be
dealt with. Furthermore, the paper will assess the relationship between this process and
other changes in this context (such as the semantic narrowing of the DOC).
301
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
As is well known, ditransitive verbs in Present-Day English can typically occur in
two formally distinct constructions, the DOC (1a) on the one hand, and the to-POC (1b)
on the other hand; together, these patterns form the well-known ‘dative alternation’.
(1)
a. John gave the rabbitRECIPIENT a carrotTHEME.
b. John gave a carrotTHEME to the rabbitRECIPIENT.
However, this alternation was largely absent from Old English (with some
exception, cf. De Cuypere 2015), and is commonly taken to have been established only
at the turn to Middle English, when prepositional phrases in general became
increasingly frequent (Allen 1995; Fischer 1992).
Based on a quantitative study of all occurrences of DOCs and to-POCs, as well as
paraphrases involving prepositions other than to in the PPCME2 (Penn-Helsinki Parsed
Corpus of Middle English), the paper then proposes the following scenario for the
development of the constituents involved in the dative alternation during Middle
English:
First, changes to both the semantics and the formal side of [to-NP]-sequences –
originally expressing allative goals – led to the emergence of a new prepositional
recipient construction. This pattern then increased in token frequency, extended to a
number of verbs not immediately connected to the preposition’s original spatial
semantics, and came to show a different syntactic behaviour than the older, more
prototypically adjunctival PP.
Since there was a great overlap in the semantics of the innovative to-POC and the
resident DOC, a progressively closer association between the constructions developed
concomitantly. This development in turn had an effect on the semantics of the DOC: the
stronger the link became, the narrower the construction’s meaning got. Accordingly, a
number of sub-senses not denoting successful transfer, such as verbs of dispossession
(ex. 2), were progressively lost (see e.g. Barðdal, Kristoffersen & Sveen 2011;
Colleman & De Clerck 2011).
(2)
For dronkenesse bireveth hymDEPRIVEE the discrecioun of his witTHEME.
‘*for drunkenness robs him the discretion of his wit’
(c1390; Chaucer Parson’s Tale)
It is argued that these changes affected each other in a series of feedback loops,
with the semantic widening of the one construction (to-POC) influencing the
specialisation of the other (DOC), and vice versa. This co-evolutionary development
resulted in the symbiotic, paradigmatic relationship between the DOC (as the stronger
variant) and the to-POC (as the weaker variant) that we can observe in PDE, i.e. the
constructions today exhibit a stable distribution in which the choice of one or the other
pattern is determined by discourse-pragmatic/semantic factors (cf. e.g. Bresnan et al.
2007; Perek 2015).
References
Allen, Cynthia. 1995. Case marking and reanalysis: grammatical relations from Old to
Early Modern English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
302
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Barðdal, Jóhanna, Kristian E. Kristoffersen & Andreas Sveen. 2011. West Scandinavian
ditransitives as a family of constructions: with a special attention to the
Norwegian V-REFL-NP construction. Linguistics 49(1): 53–104.
Bresnan, Joan, Anna Cueni, Tatiana Nikitina & Harald Baayen. 2007. Predicting the
dative alternation. In G. Boume, I. Kraemer & J. Zwarts (eds.), Cognitive
foundations of interpretation. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of
Science, 69–94.
Colleman, Timothy & Bernard De Clerck. 2011. Constructional semantics on the move:
on semantic specialization in the English double object construction. Cognitive
Linguistics 22(1): 183–209.
De Cuypere, Ludovic. 2015. The Old English to-dative construction. English Language
and Linguistics 19(1): 1–16.
Fischer, Olga. 1992. Syntax. In N. Blake (ed.), The Cambridge history of the English
language. Vol.II, 1066-1476. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 207v408.
Perek, Florent. 2015. Argument structure in usage-based construction grammar:
experimental and corpus-based perspectives. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
PPCME2 = Kroch, Anthony & Ann Taylor. 2000. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of
Middle English, 2nd edition. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCME2RELEASE-3/index.html.
Traugott, Elizabeth C. & Graeme Trousdale. 2013. Constructionalization and
constructional
changes.
Oxford:
Oxford
University
Press.
303
POSTER PRESENTATIONS
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
How did Biak acquire prepositions, and is that always what they are?
Xavier Bach
(University of Oxford)
Biak (Austronesian, South-Halmahera West-New-Guinea) has been described as
having three main prepositions, all associated with locational meanings: ro 'at, in', ra
'alongside' and ve or be 'to' (van den Heuvel 2006:110-11810; Mofu 2009: 139). Related
to these prepositions are verbs with similar meanings, which take subject agreement: yaro 'I am at (a place)', ya-ra 'I go' and ya-ve 'I want' (van den Heuvel 2006:118-119).
Because they express locational meanings, ro, ra and ve often follow a verb of motion
or position.
In this presentation, I analyse the syntactic status of these items based on
fieldwork conducted on different dialectal varieties than the ones already described
(Steinhauer 2005 for the Sowek variety, Supiori island; van den Heuvel 2006, for
Wardo, West Biak island). I use data elicited from short video clips showing people in
various positions and locations, performing various activities, and people moving; data
elicited using the Pear film; and sentences taken from Mofu & Dalrymple's (2010)
online corpus.
In the westernmost dialects of Biak, spoken in the Raja Ampat, whenever these
prepositions follow a verb of motion or position, there is an intonation break after the
preposition: the preposition is prosodically part of the intonational phrase containing the
verb, rather than forming an intonation phrase with its complement. This fact goes
against the general assumption that intonation phrases closely parallel syntactic phrases
or constituents.
In this presentation, I argue that in the Raja Ampat construction verb + ro/ra/ve,
the 'prepositions' are in fact verbs forming part of a serial verb construction (SVC). In
these varieties, the following NP is often closed by what can be analysed as a
postposition. I further argue that this analysis provides an explanation for the origin of
prepositions in Biak, namely grammaticalisation from verb to preposition via an SVC, a
pathway attested for many Oceanic languages (Lichtenberk 1991; Hamel 1993). In
Biak, there is a type of dependent serialisation that requires the first verb to express
movement or position. Subject agreement is only marked on the first verb, the following
verb(s) being bare roots:
(1) Imrán
pambar
wai ine.
i-mrán
pambar
wai i-ne
3SG-walk
turn.over canoe
3SG-this
'He turned over this canoe by walking against it.' (van den Heuvel 2006:196)
The SVC forms an intonation phrase, as in the following examples showing the
'preposition' ro in an SVC:
10
Van den Heuvel also describes a number of other prepositions, less frequently used. As not all of these
seem to exist in the other dialects under consideration here, they will not be included in my analysis.
305
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(2) bin-ya
d-enf
roro |
paput-na bori
woman-DET.SG 3SG-sleepat
grass-DET.PL on
'The woman is sleeping on the grass' (own field notes)
Dialectal variation shows different stages in the grammaticalisation of
prepositions, from verbs in a serial verb construction to full prepositional use. The
western dialects show both uses, which calls into question the categorisation of these
items as prepositions.
References
Hamel, Patricia. 1993. Serial verbs in Loniu and an evolving preposition. Oceanic
Linguistics 32:111-132.
Heuvel, Wilco van den. 2006. Biak: description of an Austronesian language of Papua.
Utrecht: LOT.
Lichtenberk, Frantisek. 1991. Semantic change and heterosemy in grammaticalisation.
Language 67:474-509.
Mofu, Suriel Semuel. 2009. Biak morphosyntax. DPhil Thesis, University of Oxford.
Mofu, Suriel Semuel & Mary Dalrymple. 2010. Online documentation for Biak.
http://biak.clp.ox.ac.uk.
Steinhauer, Hein. 2005. Biak. In Alexander Adelaar & Nikolaus P. Himmelmann (eds.),
The Austronesian Languages of Asia and Madagascar, 793–823. (Routledge
Language Family Series). London, New-York: Routledge.
A limited set of nominal semantic categories for French
Lucie Barque, Pauline Haas, Richard Huyghe and Delphine Tribout
(Université Paris Nord; Université Paris Nord; Université Paris Diderot; Université
de Lille)
We present an ongoing study about noun classification in French. Our aim is
threefold: i) to develop a limited set of semantic classes for nouns; ii) to build a lexicon
of French nouns described according to these general semantic classes iii) to provide
corpus annotations associated with this description. We believe that such a resource
could be very useful to French Natural Langage Processing (NLP) applications that
imply access to meaning, like Machine Translation and Question-Answering systems.
While a number of studies propose coarse-grained semantic descriptions based on a preexisting sense inventory (namely the English WordNet sense inventory, see Buitelaar
1998, Navigli 2006, Palmer et al. 2007), we intend to define a ‘resource independent’
set of general semantic classes supported by linguistic tests. In addition to reducing
ambiguity, the use of a small set of semantic classes allows for lexical generalizations
and limits the annotation effort. We focus here on the definition of the nominal semantic
categories.
Our set includes 14 semantic classes (Animate, Artefact, Event, State, Property,
Content, etc.), plus a ‘joker’ Other label for residual lexical meanings. Each semantic
306
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
class is explicitly defined in correlation with proper linguistic tests. For instance, a noun
is classified as Event, i.e. dynamic eventuality, if it satisfies one of the two following
tests (Godard & Jayez 1996, Arnulphy et al. 2011):
1. {Ce/le N} {a eu lieu/s’est produit} {à tel endroit/à tel moment}.
‘{This/the N} {took place/happened} {in that place/at that moment}’
2. Il {a effectué/a procédé à/a accompli} un N.
‘He {made/proceeded/performed} a N’
A given noun can be attributed several classes, whether it is homonymy,
polysemy or facet phenomenon (Apresjan 1974, Copestake & Bricoe 1995, Pustejovsky
1995, Cruse 2004).
We provide a preliminary assessment of the set coverage, as far as senseinventory is concerned. We randomly selected 50 French nouns. Two experts (also
authors of the papers) separately labelled each noun with the appropriate number of
meanings. The annotators labelled 82 meanings for the 50 Ns, which indicates an
average polysemy rate of 1,64 meaning per word. The noun épisode ‘episode’ illustrates
a case of total agreement: both annotators labelled it as Event (e.g. un triste épisode de
sa vie ‘a sad episode in his life’) and Content (e.g. télécharger le dernier épisode
‘download the latest episode’). The noun ancêtre ‘ancestor’ illustrates a case of
disagreement: both annotators labelled it as Animate but only one of them also used the
joker label to account for the ‘form in which something first existed’ meaning. Overall,
annotators agreed for 64 meanings, and disagreed for 18.
This first assessment of our semantic classification reveals several interesting
problems, both on the methodological and linguistic levels. Lexical meanings that are
not easily captured by ontological semantic classes (e.g. relational meanings in
relational nouns) is the most striking of them.
References
Apresjan, J. 1974. Regular Polysemy. Linguistics, 142, 5-32.
Arnulphy, B., Tannier, X. and Vilnat, A. (2011). Un lexique pondéré des noms
d’événements en français. In Actes de TALN 2011, p. 51-56.
Buitelaar, P. 1998. CoreLex: Systematic Polysemy and Underspecification. Ph.D. thesis,
Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
Copestake, A & Briscoe T. 1995. Semi-productive polysemy and sense extension.
Journal of Semantics 1, 15-67.
Cruse, D. 1995. Polysemy and related phenomena from a cognitive linguistic viewpoint.
In Computational Lexical Semantics, P. St Dizier, E. Viegas (éds), Cambridge :
Cambridge University Press, 33-39.
Godard, D. & Jayez, J. (1996). Types nominaux et anaphores: le cas des objets et des
événements. In De Mulder, W., Tasmowski-De Ryck, L. & Vetters, C. (éds),
Anaphores temporelles et (in-)coherence, Cahiers Chronos 1, Amsterdam:
Rodopi, p. 41-58.
Navigli, R. 2006. Meaningful clustering of senses helps boost word sense
disambiguation performance. Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the
Association for Computational Linguistics joint with the 21st International
307
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-ACL, Sydney, Australia).
105–112.
Palmer, M., Dang, H., & Fellbaum, C. 2007. Making fine-grained and coarse-grained
sense distinctions, both manually and automatically. Natural Language
Engineering, 13(2) 137–163.
Pustejovsky, J. 1995. The Generative Lexicon. Cambridge Mass. : The MIT Press.
Simulating hypothetical language stages: A new method for testing
hypotheses in diachronic linguistics
Andreas Baumann, Christina Prömer and Nikolaus Ritt
(University of Vienna)
This paper presents a systematic method for testing hypotheses about
phonological changes and their potential interdependencies in diachronic linguistics.
Specifically, we are creating hypothetical language stages, whereby we are simulating
the effects of changes which created sub-optimal linguistic outputs regarding universal
or language specific constraints on corpus data. In a next step, this hypothetical
language stage is compared to the actually attested language in order to identify
potential therapeutic responses to such changes. In particular, we operationalise
suboptimality and compare estimated suboptimality scores in both stages in order to
detect statistically significant improvements.
We demonstrate our method exemplarily by illustrating the influence of Middle
English schwa loss on the domain of word-final consonant cluster phonotactics. Schwa
loss produced a multitude of clusters in final position, which is problematic (or
suboptimal) in two respects: (a) coda-clusters are dispreferred in terms of articulation
and perception (cf e.g. Maddieson 2013, Clements & Keyser 1983), and (b) formerly
distinct sequences merged into one single cluster, which created ambiguities in the
phonotactic representation of morphological word structures (1).
(1) Lexical
Past tense/participle
/ndə/ → /nd/:
/nəd(ə)/ → /nd/ː
honde ‘hand’ /hɔndə/̛̛̛̛ → /hɔnd/
brennede ‘burnt’ /brɛnnədə/ → /brɛnd/
Coda clusters might be tolerated, however, if they fulfil morphological signalling
functions, such as /md/ in seemed, which occurs exclusively in complex forms
(Dressler & Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 2006). To increase the signalling function of
ambiguous clusters such as /nd/ in (1), they propose that clusters spanning a morpheme
boundary will behave differently from morpheme-internal ones in diachronic
developments. Considering the examples in (1) we would expect selecti<ve repair
processes either in (a) complex items to increase their signalling function, or (b) lexical
items (e.g. deletion of final consonants).
To test whether these hypothetical repair processes have actually been effected,
we conducted a study using the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpora of Middle and Early
308
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Modern English (Kroch et al. 2000, 2004). We applied our method to monosyllabic11
items ending in sequences of sonorant + dental stop, including schwas in final or
syllable-internal position (e.g. /nd/, /ləd/, /rtə/) (Table 1).
The results show that for most clusters, the actual language stage is significantly
less ambiguous than the hypothetical stage after schwa loss (confidence-interval
comparison of estimated ϕ- coefficients). Morphologically complex past tense and
participle items in the actual language stage were significantly stronger effected by
final devoicing than lexical items, which resulted in a higher signalling function for
these items. Final devoicing of /d/ 1 /t/ might therefore represent a therapeutic repair
process, in that it established a new form-function correlation: final sonorant + /t/
sequences signal complexity, while final sonorant + /d/ sequences signal lexicality.
The results therefore not only corroborate our hypotheses but also prove the successful
implementation of our theory.
References
Clements, G.N.; Keyser, S.J. 1983. CV phonology: A generative theory of the syllable.
Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.
Dressler, W.U.; Dziubalska-Kołaczyk, K. 2006. “Proposing morphonotactics”. Wiener
Linguistische Gazette 73, 69-87.
Kroch, A.; Taylor, A. 2000. The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English
(PPCME2). Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania. CD-ROM,
second edition, (http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/).
Kroch, A.; Santorini, B.; Delfs, L. 2004. The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early
Modern English (PPCEME). Department of Linguistics, University of
Pennsylvania. CD-ROM, first edition, (http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/).
Maddieson; I. 2013. “Syllable structure”. In Dryer, M.S. & Haspelmath, M. (eds.). The
world atlas of language structures online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/12,
[2016-01-13])
11
Monosyllabic after schwa loss.
309
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Transparent vowels as triggers of vowel harmony
Laura Becker
(Leipzig University)
Overview
Transparent vowels are “skipped” in vowel harmony processes. In this talk, I will
show that transparent vowels can nevertheless participate as triggers in case other
triggers are absent. Evidence supporting this claim will be taken from Uyghur (Turkic).
Background
Transparent vowels have been discussed in previous research for challenging the
locality of vowel harmony (e.g. Bakovic & Wilson 2000, Gafos & Dye 2001, Kiparsky
& Pajusalu 2003, Casali 2008).
This talk will focus on another question that has received much less attention:
what happens if transparent vowels are the only vowels in the trigger position.
Different previous analyses (e.g., Calabrese 1995; Halle, Vaux & Wolfe 2000,
Nevins 2010) implement a strict non-participation of transparent vowels. Nevins (2010)
argues against participation of transparent vowels even as sole triggers and assumes the
insertion of a default vowel in the target position. This predicts two types of outputs: (i)
either the default vowel shares its value for the harmonic feature with the transparent
vowel and is harmonic, (ii) or they differ and are disharmonic.
Problem
Since the inserted default vowel does not depend on the transparent vowel, both
types should be equally attested cross-linguistically. However, the first type is much
more frequent, while the second type does not seem to be attested as a major pattern in a
given language.
Another problem arises with data from Uyghur (backness harmony; transparent /i/
in the stem occurring with the default back vowel in the affix) given in Nevins (2010) to
illustrate the second “disharmonic” type (1a), where the default vowel does not
harmonize with the transparent vowel. This, however, is not the major strategy in
Uyghur. In many other cases, a front vowel is inserted in the target position (1b):
(1) a. til-lar ‘tongue-PL’
b. kiʃi-gɛ ‘person-DAT’
(Nevins 2010: 78)
(Tömür 2003: 62)
Analysis
In this talk, I argue for transparent vowels to be able to trigger harmony with no
other participating vowel as trigger. This is implemented in an Optimality Theoretic
account, which can deal with the contextual violation of the constraint against
participation (triggering of harmony) of a transparent vowel. Participation of transparent
vowels rather than default insertion is supported by the cross-linguistic lack of
convincing cases of systematic disharmony.
The variation in Uyghur can be accounted for by an underlying contrastive
[±back] specification of [i] (/ɨ/ vs. /i/) lost on the surface, leading to the transparency in
target positions but also to its ability to trigger [+back] vowels if no other trigger is
310
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
present. Evidence for that comes from Uyghur velar and uvular consonants, which cooccur with front and back vowels, respectively. In the case of a sole transparent trigger,
they show the same distribution as [+back] and [-back] target vowels due to the
underlying specification of /i/:
(2) a. qiʃ-qa ‘winter-DAT’
b. kiʃi-gɛ ‘person-DAT’
(Tömür 2003: 62)
Conclusion
Transparent vowels participate in harmony if no other trigger is present. Cases of
disharmony between a transparent trigger and the target vowel are cross-linguistically
rare and can be accounted for by an underlyingly contrastive specification of the
transparent vowel.
References
Bakovic, Eric & Colin Wilson. 2000. Transparency, Strict Locality, and Targeted
Constraints. WCCFL 19 Proceedings, ed. Billerey and Lillehaugen, 43-56.
Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
Calabrese, Andrea. 1995. A constraint-based theory of phonological markedness and
simplification procedures. Linguistic Inquiry 26, 373-463.
Casali, Roderic F. 2008. ATR Harmony in African Languages. Language and
Linguistics Compass 2/3, 496– 549.
Gafos, Adamantios & Amanda Dye. 2011. Vowel harmony: opaque and transparent
vowels, in: The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, eds: van Oostendorp, Marc;
Ewen, Colin; Hume, Beth & Keren Rice. Wiley- Blackwell, 2164-2189.
Halle, Morris; Vaux, Bert & Andrew Wolfe. 2000. On feature spreading and the
representation of place of articulation. Linguistic Inquiry 31, 387-444.
Kiparsky, Paul & Karl Pajusalu. 2003. Towards a typology of disharmony. The
Linguistic Review 20, 217– 241.
Nevins, Andrew. 2010. Locality in vowel harmony. (Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 55)
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Tömür, Khāmit. 2003. Modern Uyghur Grammar (Morphology). Istanbul: Yıldız.
Phonological adaptation of consonant-final loanwords borrowed into
Italian
Olga Broniś
(Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw)
In Italian, the number of loanwords used on everyday basis is massive.
Borrowings are employed not only in specialist jargons, but also to describe everyday
items, such as brioche ‘Danish pastry’, fon ‘hairdryer’ or eyeliner ‘eyeliner’. Given the
fact that Italian is a language which disfavors consonant-final words (eg. Thornton
1996, Krämer 2009).
It is interesting to see what happens to recent loanwords borrowed into Italian
with an unpreferred consonant at the word end.
311
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
There are two opposing views on how consonant-final loanwords are adapted into
Italian. On the one hand, there are sources which say that at least some varieties of
Italian adapt consonant-final loanwords with a vocalic element added at the word end.
To illustrate the point, a common Italian rendition of the English word weekend is
[wiˈkɛndə]. The first such accounts date back to Lepschy and Lepschy (1981) and
Hurch and Tonelli (1982). The topic is also brought up by Bertinetto (1985), Repetti
(1993) and Thornton (1996).
On the other hand, Devoto (1960), Klajn (1972) and Krämer (2009) assume that
most consonant-final loanwords are adapted into Italian without a vowel inserted at the
word end. A similar stance is taken by Passino (2008), who argues that speakers of
Standard Italian tend to adapt consonant-final loans without inserting a vowel in their
underived forms. In Passino’s view, loanword-final vowel epenthesis does occur, but it
is restricted to regional and socially low varieties of Italian. It might be thus concluded
from Passino’s work that an average speaker of Standard Italian not belonging to a
lower social class would not apply vowel epenthesis in loan adaptation. Instead, such a
speaker is expected to pronounce words such as weekend without an epenthetic vowel,
that is, as [wiˈkɛnd]. A similar conclusion is drawn by Repetti (2012), who says that
vowel insertion operating at the end of some consonant-final loanwords is
phonologically irrelevant.
In light of the facts mentioned above, it appears that a researcher wishing to
examine vowel epenthesis in consonant-final loans has two choices: they can either
arbitrarily take one side or another, or decide to carry out a field study which will
produce new data, allowing for a detailed phonological analysis of the process.
In order to establish the frequency and the pattern of the word-final vowel
occurrence in recent Italian loanwords, the author of this presentation set up a field
study, which examined the vowel occurrence in the Roman variety of Standard Italian.
38 informants were recorded and considered for the evaluation, 23 male and 15 female,
in the age ranging from 15 to 50 (the mean = 26). Most of the participants were students
or people with a degree (ca.75%). The field research was next followed by a phonetic
study, both impressionistic and acoustic, which yielded 450 items with or without a
vowel inserted word-finally. The data were next submitted to a quantitative analysis
carried out in Excel pivot tables, and a thorough phonological examination.
The goal of this paper is to present the methodology of the research and to discuss
its results, which show that vowel insertion is a wide-spread and a regular process,
operating irrespective of the social class of the speakers of Roman Italian. The poster
also includes a theoretical interpretation of the data, couched in the framework of
generative phonology.
References
Bertinetto, P. M. (1985). A Proposito di Alcuni Recenti Contributi alla Prosodia
dell’Italiano. Annali della Scuola Superiore di Pisa 15, 581-643.
Devoto, G. (1960). Profilo di Storia Linguistica Italiana. Florence: La Nuova Italia.
Hurch, B. & L. Tonelli (1982). Zur Konsonantenlänge im Italienischen. Wiener
Linguistische Gazette 29, 17-38.
Klajn, I. (1972). Influssi Inglesi nella Lingua Italiana. Firenze: Olschki.
Krämer, M. (2009). The Phonology of Italian. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lepschy, G. C. & A. L. Lepschy (1981). La Lingua Italiana. Storia, Varietà dell’Uso,
Grammatica. Milano: Bompiani.
312
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Passino, D. (2008). Aspects of Consonantal Lengthening in Italian. Padova: Unipress.
Repetti, L. (1993). The Integration of Foreign Loans in the Phonology of Italian. Italica
70, 182-96.
Repetti, L. (2012). Consonant-final Loanwords and Epenthetic Vowels in Italian.
Catalan Journal of Linguistics 11, 167-188.
Thornton, A. M. (1996). On Some Phenomena of Prosodic Morphology in Italian:
Accorciamenti, Hypocoristics and Prosodic Delimitation. Probus 8, 81-112.
Can culture vocabularies replace or supplement basic vocabulary lists
for measuring linguistic diversity? A study on the Indo-European and
Tupí language families
Gerd Carling and Chundra Cathcart
(Lund University)
The current presentation will focus on vocabularies used for studying linguistic
diversity. The method of using fixed lists with low borrowability (Swadesh, LeipzigJakarta lists) is frequent in all quantitative historical and evolutionary linguistics. A
prerequisite is the identification of “core” vocabularies, representing stable, universal,
lexical meanings, which are different from “culture” vocabularies, representing easily
replaceable lexical meanings, i.e., items that are borrowed together with a word for it
(cf. Haspelmath 2008, 46ff., Zenner et al 2014).
Here, we will take a different perspective: based on the Wörter und Sachen-theory
(see van Epps 2014), we believe linguistic exograms (cultural artifacts) to be important
in the creation of linguistic diversity and therefore useful for measuring this diversity,
using quantitative methods (see Carling 2016, Carling et al 2016).
In the presentation, we will present a method for compiling culture vocabulary
lists for quantitative analysis. The method is founded in the notion of cultural
complexes, and creates vocabulary lists based on a semantic taxonomy of lexical
meanings based on an identification of system of sustainability in combination with
linguistic affinity (see Carling et al 2016). First, we identify languages as belonging to
1) geographic areas, 2) cultural complexes, 3) language families. Culture vocabulary
lists are identical for languages belonging to one family, similar to families belonging to
a cultural complex and overlapping for languages belonging to a geographic area. Lists
are then organized into three hierarchical levels, Main Category, Subcategory, and
Lexical Meanings. Semantic main categories (e.g., ENVIRONMENT, SUBSISTENCE) are
same for all lists, just as Subcategories (e.g., ACTIVITIES, IMPLEMENTS). Variation is
found at the level of Lexical meanings (e.g., PLOUGH, POT, BEE, APPLE), which are
different due to system of sustainability and language family. Here, meanings are
selected according to 1) geography/ecology, 2) relevance to subsistence system, 3)
cultural function of affordance, 4) occurrence in reconstructed vocabulary.
We will look more carefully at the families Indo-European and Tupí and present
some results based on compiled culture vocabulary lists. First, we will compare the
results of a culture list with an ordinary Swadesh-100 list, both including and excluding
loans, by means of an ancestry-constrained phylogenetic model (Chang et al 2015).
313
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Second, we will look at internal relations within culture lists, partitioning data sets into
Subcategories as well as Lexical meanings (see figure below). Using various statistical
methods, such as PCA biplots, we will pose several research questions, such as degree
of borrowability or frequency of cognates, depending on Subcategory or Lexical
meaning. Here, we will make similar tests on both families, Indo-European and Tupí.
Ultimately, we will try to answer the following research questions:
 Can vocabularies be regionally and culturally adapted and still have
general validity?
 If the answer is yes, how can this validity be measured?
 Can culture vocabulary lists replace or complement basic vocabulary lists
in investigating linguistic diversity?
Fig. 4. Correspondence analysis biplot of individual subcategories in the Indo-European
culture vocabulary data set with the average position of inherited, loaned or uncertain
origin marked in the biplot. Bubble size indicates average number of cognates per
category. From Carling et al (2016)
References
Carling, Gerd 2016. Language: the role of culture and environment in protovocabularies. In: Sonesson, Göran & David Dunér (ed.): Human Lifeworlds: The
Cognitive Semiotics of Cultural Evolution. Peter Lang.
Carling, Gerd, Sandra Cronhamn, Rob Farren, Niklas Johansson, Joost van de Weijer
2016.
314
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
The Cultural Lexicon of Indo-European in Europe: Quantifying Stability and Change.
In: Guus Kronen & James Mallory (2016) Talking Neolithic. Special issue Journal
of Indo-European Studies. Washington: Institute for the Study of Man.
Chang, Will, Chundra Cathcart, David Hall & Andrew Garret 2015. Ancestryconstrained phylogenetic analysis supports the Indo-European steppe hypothesis.
Language 91, 194-244.
Epps, Patience 2014. Historical linguistics and socio-cultural reconstruction. In:
Bowern, Claire & Bethwyn Evans (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Historical
Linguistics, 579-597.
Haspelmath, Martin 2008. Lexical borrowing: Concepts and issues. In: Haspelmath,
Martin & Uri Tadmor (eds.) Loanwords in the World’s Languages. Berlin – New
York: DeGruyter.
Zenner, Eline, Dirk Speelman & Dirk Geeraerts 2014. Core vocabulary, borrowability
and entrenchment. A usage-based onomasiological approach. Diachronica 31:1,
74-105.
Person and a case of indexicalization in Brazilian Portuguese
Danniel Carvalho
(Federal University of Bahia)
The aim of this work is to show the pronominalization process of lexical items
such as a bicha (the faggot) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP). From a parallel with the wellknown BP pronoun a gente, I assume that a bicha is a case of an indexical in such
language. Thus, I will offer an analysis in which this type of lexical item suffer a kind of
“personalization”, i.e., referential expression used as speech participants, sometimes as
the first person, like in (1), sometimes as the second person, like in (2) and (3).
(1) A bicha1sg foi ver o boy mas ele era uó.
The faggot1sg was to.see the boy but he was awful
“I (emphatic) went to see him but he was awful”
(2) A bicha2sg tá fazendo o quê tão quietinha?
The faggot2sg is doing the what so quiet.DIM?
“What are you (emphatic) doing so quietly?”
(3) Eu vim só ver a bicha2sg e ela me
trata assim.
I came only to.see the faggot2sg and she Cl.1.sg treat like.that
“I came only to see you (emphatic) and you treat me badly”
This phenomenon is very productive in the male homosexual community, as
pointed out in a previous study in a Sociolinguistics perspective of male homosexuals in
Salvador, Bahia, in Northeastern Brazil (Carvalho, 2016). In such survey one could
observe the use of the referential expression a bicha in different syntactic positions
(subject and complement in the examples in (1-3) above). Besides representing an
315
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
individual who belongs in the observed homosexual community as a noun and an
adjective, bicha (faggot) performs the role of a pronominal and functions like a real
personal pronoun. From this finding, I assume that a bicha is a case of a pronominal
system implementation in the speech of the homosexual community. Thus, I consider
treating this lexical item as a pronoun, in the terms of Forchheimer (1953) and
Benveniste (1971). Based on Gruber (2013)’s analysis for the indexical man in English,
I assume that the category person is derived and not a primitive. Thus, I propose that a
bicha is an indexical pronoun and, from its syntactic configuration, can function either
as first or second persons, besides its free referential interpretation. This assumption
finds support on the widespread idea that a pronominal is internally complex (see
Postal, 1966; Abney, 1987, Cardinaletti and Strake, 1999; Déchaine and Wiltschko,
2002, Haley and Ritter, 2002, among many others) and on the DP structure proposed by
Gruber (2013), in which relational heads AT and pro-SIT are components of such
projection. Pro-SIT is a pronominal situation variable, ultimately representing the
utterance location. The head-feature ±AT is a relational feature in the sense of Ritter and
Wiltschko (2009), putting the content of its complement in relation to the content of its
specifier (pro-SIT). Independent evidence for the existence of such structure in our data
comes from the 1st and 2nd personal pronouns themselves. Such pronouns can either be
or not related to the Utterance Location (see Gruber, 2013; D’Alessandro, 2013), as
shown in (4), in which the reading of você (you.sg) can either be second person or
generic depending on the spatiotemporal relation of this speech person and the
proposition (see Carvalho, 2008).
(4) Você
acha que está fazendo a coisa certa, mas no fim você não está.
You/Someone thinks that is doing the thing right but in.the end you not is
“One thinks to be doing the right thing but in the end is not”
“You think you are doing the right thing but in the end you are not”
Thus, the designation for person depends on the spatiotemporal relation denoted
by the syntactic structure. Pro-SIT determines the deictic relation of the referential
element and carries the features which define its interpretation ([Speaker] and
[Addressee], in our proposal). Pro-Sit, thus, codifies the features of the geometry
(Harley and Ritter, 2002). So, a bicha1sg\2sg would have the following configuration in
BP:
316
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
References
Abney, Steven. The English noun phrase in its sentential aspect. Doctoral Dissertation,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., 1987
Benveniste, Emile. 1971. The nature of pronouns. In: Problems in general linguistics.
Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, pp. 217-222, 1971.
Cardinaletti, A; M. Starke. The typology of structural deficiency. In: Van Riemsdijk,
H. (ed.). Clitics and other functional categories in European languages. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 145-233, 1999.
Carvalho, D.S. A estrutura interna dos pronomes pessoais em português brasileiro.
Tese de Doutorado – Univesidade Federal de Alagoas, 2008.
Carvalho, D.S. A língua na diversidade: um estudo sociolinguístico de gays
soteropolitanos. Relatório de pesquisa. Salvador, BA, 2016, 30 p.
Déchaine, R-M.; Witschko, M. Decomposing Pronouns. Linguistic Inquiry, v.33, n.3,
pp. 409-442, 2002.
Forchheimer, P. The category of person in language. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1953.
Gruber, Bettina. The Spatiotemporal Dimensions of Person. A Morphosyntactic
Account of Indexical Pronouns. Doctoral dissertation, Utrecht University, 2013.
Harley, Heidi & Elizabeth RITTER. Person and number in pronouns: a featuregeometric analysis. Language, pp. 482-526, 2002.
Postal, Paul. 1966. On so-called pronouns in English. In Report of the 17th Annual
Round Table Meeting on Languages and Linguistics, ed. Francis Dinneen.
Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1966, pp. 177-206.
Ritter, Elizabeth, and Martina WILTSCHKO. Varieties of INFL: TENSE,
LOCATION, and PERSON. In Alternatives to cartography, ed. Hans Broekhuis,
Jeroen van Craenenbroeck, and Henk van Riemsdijk. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter,
pp. 153–202, 2009.
The structure of third person pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese
Fernanda Cerqueira and Danniel Carvalho
(FAPESB/UFBA; Federal University of Bahia)
The syntax of the pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) shows a diverse behavior
from other Romance languages (see GALVES, 2001), such as European Portuguese
(EP), Spanish (ES), French (FR) and Italian (IT), for instance, since BP legitimates
pronominal full forms as complement of the verb, as show in (1).
(1)
a. João disse que encontrou ele.
b. João disse que encontrou *ele.
c. Juan dijo que encontró *el.
d. Jean a ditqu’ila recontré *il.
e. Giovanni há detto há trovato lui
“John said that pro found he”
317
BP
EP
ES
FR
IT
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Under the vision that the pronominal (de)composition in atomic elements differs
from the traditional view of φ-features as crystalized bundles, a geometric view for
features (see HARLEY; RITTER, 2002; COWPER; HALL, 2002; BÉJAR, 2003;
CARVALHO, 2008 among others) seems more appropriate to the understanding of the
phenomenon of realization of the 3rd person pronouns in the accusative position in
Brazilian Portuguese (BP), since a pronominal item can either show or not the variety of
features that categories such as person, number and gender can entail in its inventory.
Such approach propitiates the underspecification condition, condition in which such an
element does not show all features available in its categorical inventory, even though
they are available in the language parametrically. Although one can verify that the 3rd
person express a higher level of underspecification than the 1st and the 2nd, we assume,
following Cowper and Hall (2002), Schulte (2003) and Carvalho (2008), that personal
pronouns show in their feature inventory syntactically required semantic and pragmatic
features, such as [definite], [specific], [local], [distal], [animate], among others, which
would have been grammaticalized diachronically. Thus, this work aims to show the path
for the feature composition of 3rd person singular pronoun ele/ela (he/she) in the
accusative position in Brazilian Portuguese under a φ-theory (Harley; Ritter, 2002;
Cowper; Hall, 2002; Béjar, 2003; Carvalho, 2008). Thus, we investigate the relevance
of [definite], [specific] and [animate] for the syntax of the studied pronoun and question
what the conditions for underspecification of the 3rd person are and its possible similarity
to demonstratives. Our hypothesis is that the 3rd person full pronoun form is licensed as
the verb complement by the presence of [definite] and [specific] in its feature
composition, i.e., this pronoun form needs a definite and specific reading so its occurrence
can be grammatical, otherwise other morphological strategies is chosen, such as the null
complement (pro). To develop the analysis, we resort to syntactic and semantic tests to
check the level of grammaticality of the distributionality of the 3rd person pronoun. Based
on the tests results, we found that: i. the 3rd person pronoun must have obligatorily the
features [definite] and [specifc] in its notation for it to be licensed in the accusative
position; ii. differently from Cyrino (1994), we found that animacity is not relevant to the
accusative licensing of ele/ela (he/she), since syntax is not sensitive to this feature, but
seems only to be LF-related; iii. 3rd person pronouns cannot have arbitrary reading
since they are conditioned by the presence of the node [participant] and the features
[definite] and [specific], which entail [D]; iv. Case distribution can be explained as a
mechanism of φ agreement, as assumed by Carvalho (2008); v. 3rd person pronouns can
be interpreted as an underspecification of the demonstrative due to binding and
agreement conditions, which makes them to have a differentiated distribution.
References
Béjar, S. Phi-syntax: a theory of agreement, 2003. Tese (Doutorado em Linguística) –
University of Toronto, Ontário.
Carvalho, D. S. A Estrutura interna dos pronomes pessoais em português brasileiro,
2008. Tese (Doutorado em Letras e Linguística) – Faculdade de Letras, UFAL,
Alagoas.
Cowper, E.; Hall, D. C. The syntactic manifestation of nominal feature geometry. In:
Proceedings of the 2002 Annual Conference of the Canadian Linguistic
Association. Montréal: Cahiers Linguistiques de l’UQAM, 2001, p. 55-66.
318
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Cyrino, S. M. L. O objeto nulo no português do Brasil: um estudo sintático diacrônico.
Tese de Doutorado, UNICAMP, Campinas: 1994.
Galves, C. M. C. Pronomes e Categorias Vazias em Português do Brasil. Cadernos de
estudos linguísticos, Campinas: UNICAMP, 1984, v.7.
Harley, H.; Ritter, E. Person and number in pronouns: a feature-geometric analysis.
Language, 2002, v. 78. p. 482-526. Schutze, K. Pragmatic relevance as cause for
syntactic change: The emergence of prepositional complementizers in Romance.
In: Blake Barry; Burridge, Kate. Historical Linguistics. J. Bejamins: Amsterdam,
2003, p. 378 – 394.
Bi-aspectual verbs in Czech: Bi-aspectual or aspectless?
Jan Chromý, Štěpán Matějka and Jakub Dotlačil
(Charles University; Charles University; University of Groningen)
As other Slavic languages, Czech distinguishes both grammatical (perfective and
imperfective) and lexical aspect (cf. Schmiedtová – Flecken, 2008). Aside from
perfective (Pf) and imperfective (Ipf) verbs, there is a specific group of so-called biaspectual (BA) verbs which can be classified as both perfective and imperfective
(Komárek, 2002) because they can occur in contexts that are not compatible either with
Pf verbs (e.g. combination with a phasal verb), or Ipf verbs (e.g. combination with až
‘when’) (cf. Veselý, 2008).
The main hypothesis we will present in the poster is that the bi-aspectual verbs are
in fact aspectless, i.e. there is no real evidence that they do have grammatical aspect.
This hypothesis is supported by four self-paced reading experiments we conducted so
far. In the main experiment, we examined the differences in reading times (RTs) of
sentences that were distinguished only by their main clause verb. Every verb appeared
in one of three forms: a BA verb (e.g. modifikovat ‘to modify’), or its Pf equivalent (e.g.
pozměnit ‘to modify’), or its Ipf equivalent (e.g. pozměňovat ‘to modify’). The verbs
were followed by dokud ‘until’ which is not compatible with Pf verbs.
(1) Automobilový návrhář modifikoval/pozměnil/pozměňoval návrhy osobního
car
designer modified
plans passenger
vozu,
car,
dokud
until
automobilka požadovala luxusnější
car factory wanted
more luxurious
design.
design.
In the experiment, we used 12 sentences with durative BA verbs (or their
equivalents) and 12 sentences with punctual/iterative BA verbs (or their equivalents) as
experimental items and 72 filler sentences. All the verbs were transitive, they were in
past tense and had plural object. In other words, our experiment tested the compatibility
of 4 types of predicates with dokud: BA durative, and BA punctual/iterative, Pf verbs,
Ipf verbs. Our main question was if there is a difference in RTs of different predicate
types. Altogether, we tested 82 subjects.
319
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Based on linear mixed-effects model, we found significantly higher RTs on dokud
in sentences with Pf verbs than Ipf or both types of BA verbs. These findings suggest
that BA verbs are processed differently than Pf verbs. In the other two experiments, we
found that there are differences between processing of punctual/iterative BA verbs and
Ipf verbs. The fourth experiment is focused on processing of BA, Pf and Ipf verbs used
in sentences with až ‘when’ clause which is not compatible with Ipf verbs.
On the basis of the experiments, it seems that BA verbs in Czech do not behave
the same as Pf or Ipf verbs. BA verbs can be used in contexts in which Pf and Ipf verbs
cannot. It seems that from the processing point of view, it makes sense to count them as
grammatically aspectless. A less strong claim would be that they are aspectually
underspecified. This is in accordance also with the fact that there are no structural
constraints for using BA verbs and that most BA verbs are borrowings which tend to
become either imperfective, or perfective in their later evolution (Jindra, 2008).
References
Jindra, Vojtěch. 2008. Vývojová dynamika obouvidových sloves cizího původu na
základě korpusových dat. Slovo a slovesnost 69: 192–210.
Komárek, Miroslav. 2002. Ke vztahu mezi videm a tzv. způsoby slovesného děje. In Z.
Hladká, P. Karlík (eds.), Čeština – univerzália a specifika 4. Praha: Nakladatelství
Lidové noviny, 135–140.
Schmiedtová, Barbara, and Monique Flecken. 2008. Aspectual concepts across
languages: Some considerations for second language learning. In S. De Knop, T.
De Rycker (eds.), Cognitive Approaches to Pedagogical Grammar. Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter, 357–384.
Veselý, Luboš. 2008. Testy pro zjišťování vidové hodnoty vidového paradigmatu
slovesa (indikátory slovesného vidu). Slovo a slovesnost 69: 211–220.
Language variation in a Basque valley: The loss of an epenthesis after
high vowel
Irantzu Epelde and Oroitz Jauregi
(CNRS; University of the Basque Country)
In language contact situations it is very common to have the less prestigious
language being influenced by the most prestigious one, but the contrary is also attested
(Heine & Kuteva 2005). Basque is considered a 'vulnerable' language (Moseley 2010),
one that lives in a diglossic situation with respect to two of the world's most powerful
languages: Spanish and French. Nowadays, all Basque speakers are bilingual with either
French or Spanish, and this language contact situation makes Basque very prone to
borrowings from these two languages.
The case of phonetic features is of a special relevance in externally-induced
variation and change phenomena, given that it is widely assumed that, in cases of
language contact, phonetic features are amongst the easiest ones to borrow (SilvaCorvalán 2001). In this paper, we will focus on the loss of an epenthetic pre-palatal
320
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
glide after i in the Southern Basque valley of Bidasoa-Txingudi, traditionnaly a
geographical and cultural unit located in the border with France.
In our data, the emergence of this innovation appeared to be associated with
differences in age. We will focus on three age groups: young speakers (-30), middleaged (40-60) and octogenarians (+80) from the valley of Bidasoa-Txingudi. All of the
informants (35) have the Basque language as their mother tongue and home language,
but the older ones received education only in Spanish and use Spanish in formal (and
often informal) situations, in oral and in written communication. The data come from
recorded interviews —individual as well as in-group— held in Basque, and from
specific questionnaires and word lists used in the project LOIDI. A sample of data is
analysed perceptually and acoustically with the Praat speech analyzing program in order
to study the production of the pre-palatal glide after i.
Language variation can mark stable class differences or stable sex differences in
communities, but it can also indicate instability and change. When it marks change, the
primary social correlate is age (Chambers 2002), and the change reveals itself
prototypically in a pattern whereby some minor variant in the speech of the oldest
generation occurs with greater frequency in the middle generation and with still greater
frequency in the youngest generation. If the incoming variant truly represents a
linguistic change (Labov 1994, Trudgill 1974), as opposed to an ephemeral innovation
as for some slang expressions or an age-graded change, it will be marked by increasing
frequency down the age scale, as it occurs with the youngest generation in this
community.
References
Chambers, J. K. 2002. Patterns of Variation including Change. In The Handbook of
Language Variation and Change. Oxford: Blackwell. 349-372.
Heine, B. & Kuteva, T. 2005. Language Contact and Grammatical Change. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hualde, J. I. & J. Ortiz de Urbina. 2003. A Grammar of Basque. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Hualde, J. I. 1991. Basque Phonology. Routledge: London.
Labov, W. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change: Internal Factors. Oxford: Blackwell.
Ladefoged, P. & I. Maddieson. 1996. The Sounds of the World’s Languages. Oxford &
Malden: Blackwell.
Moseley, C. 2010. Atlas of the world’s languages in danger. Paris: UNESCO.
Silva-Corvalán, C. 2001. Sociolingüística y pragmática del español. Washington:
Georgetown University Press.
Trudgill, P. 1974. Linguistic change and diffusion: description and explanation in
sociolinguistic dialect geography. Language in Society 3: 215-246.
321
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
The ‘subject’ of the Actor-Emphatic construction and what it means
for the case-system of Māori
Aoife Finn
(Trinity College Dublin)
This paper explores the actor-emphatic construction in Māori and its importance
in categorizing the Māori case-system. The actor-emphatic construction belongs
exclusively to Māori and fellow Eastern Polynesian languages, see Harlow (2007: 175).
The purpose of the construction “as its name suggests, emphasizes the actor”, Bauer
(1997:501). It is must be emphasized that the actor-emphatic is both recognizably
different and distinct in meaning and structure from the various focus and topic
constructions in Māori, as well as the passive voice and the canonical transitive
constructions. For further reading on the actor-emphatic, see Bauer (1993: 223 - 229),
Biggs (1974), Chung (1977), Otsuka (2011), Sinclair (1976), Waite (1990) et al. In
canonical transitive constructions the conventional Māori VSO marking is observed.
For example, see 0 where the actor Pani occupies the post-verbal subject position. By
contrast in the actor-emphatic construction, the actor Pani is fronted and preceded by
the tense-marked possessive particle nā, the verb and patient Hera follow, see example
0. Both examples 0 and 0 are taken from Bauer (1997: 40-43).
(1)
āwhina
a
Pani i
a
Hera
help
ART Pani UND ART Hera
“Pani is helping Hera”
Kei te
CANONICAL TRANSITIVE
TNS
(2)
Nā
a
ACT.POSS
Pani i
āwhina
Pani TNS help
“Pani helped Hera”
ART
Hera
Hera
ACTOR-EMPHATIC
Differentiating between the predicate and its arguments in the actor-emphatic has
proven problematic. The actor, the verb and a predicate within a subordinate clause
have all been proposed as possible predicates. Also, the reflexive form of actoremphatic constructions further complicates matters by dint of what can and cannot
qualify as an antecedent, thus obscuring the line between predicate and referring
argument to a greater extent. Moreover, the uncharacteristic double tense-marking as
seen in the possessive particle and also on the verb adds further intrigue. While the
predicate and arguments remain undetermined it is not possible to accurately identify a
subject in actor-emphatic constructions. Furthermore, in having an ill-defined subject,
the actor-emphatic proves difficult to classify in terms of an accusative or ergative casesystem. Therein lies the problem, while the actor-emphatic is elusive, it is not possible
to correctly classify Māori as ergative or accusative. In this paper, the functional Role
and Reference Grammar model is applied to the actor-emphatic to identify its subject,
see Van Valin (2005). The linking algorithm will be applied, and the denotation of
predicates and arguments in the actor-emphatic constructions will be examined. In
addition, a wider view of case-system and ergativity will be taken into account, see
Levin (1995) and Dixon (1994). This will be considered alongside the general
tendencies of the other so-called ergative-like structures of Māori. The data in is from
322
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Māori informants, Māori language media and from the reference grammars of Bauer
(1993, 1997), Biggs (1969) and Harlow (2007) et al.
One construction may not seem significant in itself, however as one of many
ergative-like constructions in Māori, it is an important part of the puzzle. The
consistency and patterns of a ‘subject’ are fundamental for the classification of the casesystem of the language. Not only will a clearer and more elegant account of the actoremphatic will be provided, but the results of this paper also hold significance as will
shed light on the Māori case-system at both intra- and inter-clausal level. They will help
to clarify the ambiguity around other ergative-like structures in Māori and other
Polynesian languages. Moreover, they contribute to the wider understanding of casesystem classification.
Abbreviations
ACT:actor
ART:article
POSS:possessive
TNS:tense
UND:undergoer
References
Bauer, Winifred, W. Parker, et al. 1993. Māori. London: Routledge.
Bauer, Winifred. 1997. The Reed Reference Grammar of Māori. Auckland: Reed
Publishing.
Biggs, Bruce. 1969. Let’s Learn Māori (Revised ed). Auckland: Auckland University
Press.
Biggs, Bruce. 1974. Some Problems of Polynesian Grammar in The Journal of The
Polynesian Society. Volume 83, Auckland: Polynesian Society.
Chung, Sandra. 1977. Māori as an Accusative Language in The Journal of The
Polynesian Society. Volume 86, Auckland: Polynesian Society.
Dixon, R. M. W. 1994. Ergativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Harlow, Ray. 2007. Māori: a linguistic introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Levin, Beth. 1995. Unaccusativity: A functional-typological introduction. Volume II.
Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Otsuka, Yuko. 2011. Neither accusative nor ergative: An alternative analysis of case in
Eastern Polynesian in Topics in Oceanic Morphosyntax. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
Sinclair, M.B.V. 1976. Is Māori an Ergative Language? in The Journal of the
Polynesian Society. Volume 85. Auckland: Polynesian Society.
Van Valin, Robert D. 2005. Exploring the syntax-semantics interface. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Waite, Jeffrey. 1990. Another Look at the Actor-Emphatic in Journal of the Polynesian
Society. Volume 99, Auckland: Polynesian Society.
323
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Denominal adjectives with an essive interpretation
Bernard Fradin
(CNRS/University Paris Diderot)
Denominal adjectives (DAs) are adjectives that are morphologically correlated
with a noun, identified here as their base-noun (bse-N). The presentation limits itself to
the attributive use of DAs, which is the only one shared by all types of denominal
adjectives. Attributive adjectives can be used to describe, to specify or to classify the
referent of their head-noun (hd-N) (Warren, 1988; Rainer, 2013). Attributive DAs carry
out all three functions. The presentation focusses on a subtype of the DAs exhibiting a
classifying interpretation, namely those expressing an essive relation- ship whereby the
hd-N is equated with the bse-N through an ascriptive predication (Huddleston &
Pullum, 2002, p. 266) e.g. fra ville portuaire = ‘town which is a port’. This
interpretation is rarely mentioned in studies devoted to DAs. The aim of the presentation
is to shed some light on the conditions that create it. The study investigates French DAs
through examples that have been collected from Frantext, frWaC and the Web.
Two conditions need to be fulfilled in order for the essive relation to occur. First,
it is necessary that both the bse-N and the hd-N denote entities that are somehow
similar, for instance two domains of activity e.g. industry/fishing in pêche industrielle
‘industrial fishing’, or two entities belonging to the same kind e.g. port / town in ville
portuaire ‘portuary town’ or revolution / uprising in soulèvement révolutionnaire
‘revolutionary uprising’. Second, the likelihood of the relationship seems to depend on
the possibility of an ascriptive predication of the form DEF hd-N is INDEF bse-N,
where the copula corresponds to the isa operator used in semantic networks to match an
individual to a class. The hypothesis is that e.g. ville portuaire is fine because cette ville
est un port ‘(this) town is a port’ is meaningful and attested, whereas ville côtière
‘coastal town’ does not have an essive interpretation because cette ville est une côte
‘this town is a coast’ is meaningless and unattested: ville côtière has only a locative
interpretation.
Parameters triggering these meaning shifts and finer-grained
interpretations are discussed in detail.
According to McNally & Boleda (2004), the interpretation of DAs can be given
an intersective account (except for the adverbial ones e.g. occasional biker) if they are
conceived of as introducing a relationship between arguments denoting kinds and
objects. However, this approach does not tells us anything of the actual semantic
relation existing between the DA and the head-N it modifies and should therefore be
supplemented by mechanisms capable of establishing this relation. In this perspec- tive,
a compositional analysis of several examples is given, showing how the essive relation
is triggered and gets integrated into the general intersective analysis of DAs. The
presentation also replaces the essive interpretation within the general picture of the
meanings associated with DAs in French (Fradin, (to appear)). It gives a brief
discussion of the competition between N1 DA2 constructs and N1 N2 compounds e.g.
ville portuaire vs. ville-port.
References
Fradin, Bernard. (to appear). The multifaceted nature of denominal adjectives. Word
Structure, 9(2), 000–000.
324
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Huddleston, Rodney, & Pullum, Geoffrey K. (eds). 2002. The Grammar of the English
Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McNally, Louise, & Boleda, Gemma. 2004. Relational adjectives as properties of kinds.
Pages 179–196 of: Bonami, Olivier, & Cabredo Hofherr, Patricia (eds), Empirical
Issues in Formal Syntax and Semantics, vol. 5. Paris: CNRS & Université de
Paris 7.
Rainer, Franz. 2013. Can relational adjectives really express any relation? An
onomasio- logical perspective. SKASE. Journal of Theoretical Linguistics, 10(1),
12–40.
Warren, Beatrice. 1988. Ambiguity and vagueness in adjectives. Studia linguistica,
42(2), 122–172.
Prohibitives in Paraguayan Guaraní and the typology of negation12
Dmitry Gerasimov
(Institute for Linguistic Studies)
Paraguayan Guaraní ( < Tupí-Guaraní < Tupí) has three primary means of
expressing optations and commands, which all interact with negation in different ways.
They are, from the less to the more grammaticalized:
- preverbal optative particle hi’ã (1);
- optative/imperative prefix t(V)- that attaches to all person-number forms,
preceding personal prefixes (2);
- specialized 2nd person imperative prefix that only attaches to active verbs
and occupies the same slot as personal prefixes: e- for 2SG (3), pe- for 2PL;
the latter is identical to corresponding 2PL active prefix for the indicative, so
that [Goussev 2013: 150], relying on data from [Gregores & Suárez 1967],
treats them as the same form; we provide additional morphosyntactic
arguments in favor of this analysis.
The particle hi’ã can also express meaning of probabilistic belief and is able to
introduce an argument (4). It combines with standard clausal negation (5), which
testifies to its deverbal origins. We claim that the present functions of hi’ã have
developed from an homonymous verb meaning ‘to stand, to be in a vertical position’,
which has not survived in Paraguayan Guaraní but is attested in closely related Mbya
[Dooley 2006: 3]. The verb mo’ã ‘to think, to believe’, which has further
grammaticalized into an irrealis suffix [Tonhauser 2009], is then its causative
counterpart.
The optative/imperative t(V)-forms, on the other hand, are not compatible with
standard clausal negation. Instead, they are negated by means of a caritive suffix (6),
also used for negation of various types of dependent clauses. This suggests that these
forms are originally non-finite. However, the exact diachronic scenario is not clear:
while imperative-optative clauses could develop from purpose constructions via
insubordination [Evans 2007], the data are also compatible with the hypothesis recently
12
This study has been supported by the Russian Science Foundation, grant No. 14-18-03406.
325
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
put forward in [Rose 2015], according to which both types of clauses have evolved
independently via two different grammaticalization paths of the same motion verb.
Finally, the true imperative is not compatible with either negation marker.
Commands are negated using a preverbal prohibitive particle ani (7), which dates back
to a free negative response word [Jensen 1998: 549; Chousou-Polydouri et al. 2015]. It
appears that e-imperatives in Guaraní disallow both head negation and adverbial
negation, thus challenging the typology presented in [Zanuttini 1996; 1997]. We will
discuss consequences of this fact for the study of negation within the Tupí-Guaraní
family.
While asymmetric negation of commands is widespread among the world’s
languages [van der Auwera 2006; 2010], the construction with ani is notable in that it
not only differs formally from positive imperative, but also has a much wider use. It
combines with all persons and has a number of non-imperative uses, like, e.g. negation
of purpose clauses (8). It thus behaves rather like a counterpart to the t(V)-optative,
which however has its own set of regular negative forms. Similar distributions have
been reported for a number of African languages, [Carlson 1994: 586-587; Randall
1998: 249; inter alia]. Such data suggest that linguistic typology should treat prohibitive
as a cross-linguistic phenomenon on its own right, something more than just a negative
counterpart to imperative. Important questions are, what is the actual range of functions
of the “prohibitive” in a given language, and what are relevant cross-linguistic
constraints on polysemy? Existing theoretical and typological works [Zanuttini 1997;
Birjulin & Xrakovskij 2001; van der Auwera & Lejeune 2005; van der Auwera 2006,
2010; Aikhenvald 2010; Gusev 2013; Alcázar & Saltarelli 2014] et al. largely overlook
these matters, primarily focusing on the issues raised by (in)compatibility of (true)
imperatives with standard negation.
Examples
(1)
Hi’ã-nte niko
pe-pytu’u-mi
ha ja-portiju-raẽ.
OPT-RESTR EMPH
2PL.A-rest-DIM
and 1PL.INCL.A-have.a.bite-PRIOR
‘But first let you rest a bit and us have a bite together’.
(2)
Ha t-o-pyta
pe nde-rekove
otro
jyva ári
and OPT-3A-stay DEM 2SG-life
another
arm on
‘And let your life remain to flourish in another man’s arms’.
(3)
E-poi-mí-nte-na
che-hegui,..
IMP-release-DIM-RESTR-RESP
1SG-ABL
na-che-tie-'ỹ-mo'ã-vé-i-ma-ko
araka'e-ve.
NEG-1SG-shame-CAR-IRR-CMPR-NEG-IAM-EMPH
when-NEG
‘Please, just let me go, now I will never behave impudently any more’.
(4)
Hi’ã ché-ve
pé-va
pé-icha
ñane-mbo-juru-he’ẽ-ta
OPT 1SG-OBL
DEM-REL DEM-MNR 1PL.INCL-CAUS-mouth-sweet-PROSP
o-hó-vo
ja-so
peve...
3A-go-SIM 1PL.INCL.A-loosen
until
‘It seems to me that this one will flatter us while we have money...’
326
ta-'i-poty.
OPT-3-bloom
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(5)
Ñande-rapicha
mba’é-va
na-hi’ã-i
1PL.INCL-person
thing-REL
NEG-OPT-NEG
‘Let’s not misuse what belongs to our neighbours’.
(6)
Losánto
t-o-sẽ-ve-’ỹ-nte
Mbatoví-gui
Losanto
OPT-3A-exit-CMPR-CAR-RESTR
Matovi-ABL
‘Let Losanto not leave the confines of Matovi any more’.
(7)
Aní-nte-ke-na
nde-resai-ete
ore-he.gui
PROH-LIM-EMPH-RESP
2SG-forget-AUG
1PL.EXCL-ABL
ha
nde-reko-há-gui.
and
2SG-live-NMR-ABL
‘Only, please, do not forget us and your home village’.
(8)
Viru-mi
niko
money-DIM
EMPH
ani
hagua
jai-puru-vai.
1PL.INCL.A-use-bad
ai-kotevẽ
1SG.A-need
a-ha
po-nandi-ete.
PROH
PURP
1SG.A-go
hand-bare-AUG
‘I need some money, lest I should go empty-handed’.
Abbreviations
1, 2, 3 – person
A – cross-reference marker of the active series
ABL – ablative
AUG – augmentative
CAR – caritive
CAUS – causative
CMPR – comparative/continuative
DEM – demonstrative
DIM – diminutive
EMPH – emphatic
EXCL – exclusive
IMP – imperative
INCL – inclusive
NEG – negation
NMR – nominalization
OBL – oblique
OPT – optative
PRIOR – priorative
PROSP – prospective
PURP – purpose
REL – relativization
RESP – respective
RESTR – restrictive
SG – singular
SIM – simultaneity
327
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
References
Aikhenvald, Alexandra. 2010. Imperatives and Commands. New York: Oxford
University Press.
Alcázar, Asier & Mario Saltarelli. 2014. The Syntax of Imperatives. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Birjulin, Leonid & Viktor Xrakovskij. 2001. Imperative sentences: theoretical problems.
In V. S. Xrakovskij (ed.), Typology of Imperative Constructions. München:
Lincom Europa, 3–50.
Carlson, Robert. 1994. A Grammar of Supyire. [Mouton Grammar Library 14].
Berlin/NY: Mouton de Gruyter.
Chousou-Polydouri, Natalia, Lev Michael, Zachary O’Hagan, Noé Gasparini & Françoise
Rose. 2015. Phylogenetic analysis of morphosyntactic data: A case study of
negation in Tupí-Guaraní. Paper presented at the 48th Annual Meeting of the
Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE 48). Leiden, September 2–5, 2015.
Dooley, Robert A. 2006. Léxico Guaraní, dialeto Mbyá com informaçoes úteis para o
ensino médio, a aprendizagem e a pesquisa lingüística. Cuiabá: Summer Institute of
Linguistics.
Evans, Nicholas. 2007. Insubordination and its uses. In I. Nikolaeva (ed.), Finiteness:
Theoretical and Empirical Foundations. New York: Oxford University Press, 366–
431.
Gregores, Emma & Jorge A. Suárez. 1967. A Description of Colloquial Guaraní. The
Hague/Paris: Mouton & Co.
Goussev, Valentin. 2013. Tipologija imperativa [Typology of Imperative]. Moscow:
YaSK.
Jensen, Cheryl . 1988. Comparative Tupí-Guaraní morpho-syntax. In D. Derbyshire, G.
Pullum (eds.), Handbook of Amazonian Languages, Vol. IV. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter, 487–618.
Randall, Scott. 1998. A grammatical sketch of Tennet. In G. Dimmendaal (ed.), Surmic
Languages and Cultures. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 219–272.
Rose, Françoise. 2015. Reconstructing two functionally related Tupí-Guaraní ta-clauses.
Paper presented at the international workshop Diachronic Morphosyntax of South
American Lanhuages (DiaSAL). Lyon, Institut des Sciences des Homme, May 28–
30. 2015.
Tonhauser, Judith. 2009. Counterfactuality and future time reference: The case of
Paraguayan Guaraní mo’ã. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 13, 527–541.
van der Auwera, Johan. 2006. Why languages prefer prohibitives. Journal of Foreign
Languages 1, 2–25.
van der Auwera, Johan. 2010. Prohibition: Constructions and markers. In D. Shu,
K. Turner (eds.), Contrasting Meaning in Languages of the East and West.
Tübingen: Günter Narr Verlag, 443–475.
van der Auwera & Ludo Lejeune (with Valentin Goussev). 2005. The prohibitive. In
M. Haspelmath, M. Dryer, D. Gil, B. Comrie (eds.), The World Atlas of Language
Structures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 290–293. [http://wals.info/chapter/71]
Zanuttini, Raffaella. 1996. On the relevance of tense for sentential negation. In A. Belletti,
L. Rizzi (eds.), Parameters and functional heads: Essays in comparative
syntax. New York: Oxford University Press, 181–207.
328
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Zanuttini, Raffaella. 1997. Negation and Clausal Structure: The comparative study of
Romance languages. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Substitutions of Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Iranian affricates and
sibilants in Uralic loanwords
Sampsa Holopainen
(University of Helsinki)
My poster intends to solve some problems of sound substitutions of Indo-Iranian
loanwords in the Uralic languages and discuss how the evidence from loanwords might
influence some disputed points of Proto- Uralic reconstruction. My research questions
are: 1) what are the correct substitution patterns for sibilants and affricates in ProtoIndo-Iranian and Proto-Iranian loans in Proto-Uralic and 2) how can the results of this
research be used to settle some problems in the reconstruction of Proto-Uralic *ć and
*č, especially in word-initial position. My research material consists of the Indo-Iranian
loanwords in Uralic, and my hypothesis is that it is possible to establish more regular
substitution patterns that fit the current views on Uralic historical phonology.
The Indo-Iranian loanwords in Uralic languages is a topic with an impressive
research history (see eg. Joki 1973, Rédei 1986, Koivulehto 2001a & b). Koivulehto
(2001b: 247–257) has established a stratification of different Proto-Indo-Iranian and
Proto-Iranian loanword layers based on the substitutions of the reflexes of Proto-IndoEuropean palatal stops in Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Iranian. Koivulehto has argued
that the Proto-Iranian *ć was substituted by Proto-Uralic *ś, and in later, Proto-Iranian
loans (which have a more limited distribution in the Western Uralic languages) the
affricates *c and *ʒ were substituted by Uralic *s in Anlaut and by the cluster *ks in
Inlaut. Examples: PII *ćata- > PU *śïta > eg. Finnish sata ‘hundred’, PI *cuxta ‘burnt’
(cf. Avestan upa-suxta-) > PU *čukta > eg. Finnish huhta ‘burnt clearing’. Koivulehto
has also postulated a “later Proto-Iranian” layer in which Proto-Uralic *č serves as the
sole substitute of Proto-Iranian affricates.
However, Koivulehto’s conclusions are based on a small number of etymologies
and on outdated reconstructions. Aikio (2015: 4–6) has recently argued that Finnic h can
only result from PU *š and not *č, and Petri Kallio has in an unpublished presentation
modified the picture of the Proto-Iranian substitution rules based on this new model.
According to his view the Proto-Iranian *c was substituted by Uralic *š in Anlaut and
by *č in Inlaut (eg. *cukta > *šukta > Finnish huhta). However, the reconstruction of
some of the words with initial *š in Proto-Uralic is problematic, since their potential
Hungarian cognates point rather to word-initial *č, and in some Uralic languages, such
as Mari, the reflexes of *č are difficult to distinguish from those of *š (cf. Fancsaly &
Dobó 1987).
Another problem involves the substitution of PII *ć by Uralic *ś. Both *ć and *ś
are usually reconstructed for Proto-Uralic, and Koivulehto has argued that the
substitution *ć > *ś is due to phonotactics: there was no opposition between word-initial
*ć and *ś in Proto-Uralic. Zhivlov (2014: 114, footnote 3) has recently proposed that
329
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
not only in Anlaut but also in Inlaut there was no opposition *ć: *ś but only *ć should
be reconstructed. I will review this question on the basis of the loanword material.
References
Aikio, Ante (Luobbal Sámmol Sámmol Ánte) 2015: Studies in Uralic etymology IV:
Ob-Ugric etymologies. LinguisticaI Uralica 1/2015. 1–20.
Fancsaly, Éva & Dobó, Attila 1987: Wortanlautende Sibilanten und Affrikaten im
Tscheremissischen. Rédei, Károly (ed.): Studien zur Phonologie und
Morphonologie der uralischen Sprachen. Wien: Verband der Wissenschaftlichen
Gesellschaften Österreichs. 255-264.
Joki, Aulis J. 1973: Uralier und Indogermaner. Mémoirés de la Société FinnoOugrienne 151; Helsinki: Société Finno-Ougrienne.
Kallio, Petri 2015: Arjalaiskontaktit (“Aryan contacts”). Unpublished presentation.
1.4.2015.
Koivulehto, Jorma 2001a: Zum frühen iranischen und indoiranischen lexikalischen
Einfluss auf das Finnisch-Ugrische. Vidyārṇavavandanam: essays in honour of
Asko Parpola. Edited by Klaus Karttunen & Petteri Koskikallio. Studia Orientalia
94; Helsinki: Finnish Oriental Society. 2001. 359– 378.
Koivulehto, Jorma 2001b: The earliest contacts between Indo-European and Uralic
speakers in the light of lexical loans. Early Contacts between Uralic and IndoEuropean: linguistic and archaeological considerations. Edited by Christian
Carpelan, Asko Parpola & Petteri Koskikallio. Mémoirés de la Société FinnoOugrienne 242; Helsinki: été Finno-Ougrienne. 235–264.
Rédei, Károly 1986: Zu den indogermanisch-uralischen Sprachkontakten.
Veroffentlichungen
der
Kommission
fur
Linguistik
und
Kommunikationsforschung; Heft 16; Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften
Zhivlov, Mikhail 2014: Studies in Uralic vocalism III. Journal of Language
Relationship. No 12. 113– 148.
The meaning of Hebrew vɛ ‘and’: Evidence from asyndetic clause
linkage
Anna Inbar
(Tel Aviv University)
The Hebrew particle vɛ (usually translated as ‘and’) is commonly regarded as a
prototypical coordination marker. Coordination is one of the most studied fields in
linguistics, but despite decades of intensive examination, theoretical accounts differ
significantly, and there is no consensus on the best analysis. In this paper I will show
that revealing the range of relations between states of affairs that cannot be
communicated by conjoining two sentences with vɛ could shed light on the meaning of
this word and contribute to current debates on the notion of coordination in grammar.
330
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Herb Clark was (as noted by Gazdar 1979: 44) probably the first person to point
out that there are relations that can be communicated by the use of juxtaposed sentences
but which do not seem to be communicated when these same sentences are conjoined by
‘and’. Since then, a number of semantic, pragmatic, and cognitive explanations were
proposed as to why ‘and’ appears not to allow certain sorts of connections between its
conjuncts (e.g., Ariel 2012; Bar-Lev & Palacas 1980; Carston 2002). In the present
paper I will suggest a different account, which is based on Sperber & Wilson’s (1995)
term of interpretive resemblance.
This work is based on the analysis of juxtaposed clauses that were selected from
The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH). The examples were firstly divided into
two categories: (1) the examples in which the insertion of vɛ as a linking element is
optional; (2) the examples in which the insertion of vɛ is impossible or could cause the
meaning change. This division was based on judgment tests. Afterward, the
classification of the examples from the second category was suggested, based on their
discourse functions and semantics.
This corpus-based study reveals a range of relations between two juxtaposed
sentences that are precluded when they are conjoined with vɛ in Modern Hebrew, e.g.,
reformulation, correction, summary, exemplification, and specification. Analyzing such
juxtaposed sentences in terms of interpretive resemblance between propositional, or
conceptual, representations leads to the conclusion that the relationship between them
must be hold at the level of communicated thought. In other words, there is a sense in
which they can be interpreted as sharing the same set of contextual implications. I
would say that, on the most general level, both of them refer to the same thought.
In the following example, the second utterance should be understood as a
correction of the first one:
(1) vɛ axʃav jɛʃ
lanu
zɛhut
isʁaɛlit ||
and now there_is to_us
identity Israeli ||
nixpɛta alɛjnu zɛhut isʁaɛlit ||
forced on_us identity Israeli ||
“And now we have Israeli identity. We were forced into Israeli identity.”
The speaker communicates not two distinct thoughts but a single one, and the
reformulation in the second utterance is simply the more accurate or more explicit
representation of that thought. It will be suggested that the particle vɛ cannot occur
between two utterances that share the same referent or the same thought, because vɛ
indicates the existence of plural referents or plural thoughts. Furthermore, it will be
shown how different functions of the particle vɛ in discourse are connected to this
meaning.
References
Ariel, M. 2012. Relational and independent ‘and’ conjunctions. Lingua 122/14: 1692–
1715.
Bar-Lev, Z. & Palacas, A. 1980. Semantic command over pragmatic priority. Lingua
51: 37–46.
Carston, R. 2002. Thoughts and utterances: The pragmatics of explicit communication.
Oxford: Blackwell.
331
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Gazdar, G. 1979. Relevance: Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition, and Logical
Form. New York: Academic Press.
Sperber, D. & Wilson, D. 1995. Relevance: Communication and cognition (2nd edn; 1st
edn. 1987). Oxford: Blackwell.
Adaptation towards a target language – The potential of improving
intercomprehension of Polish for Czech readers
Klára Jágrová, Irina Stenger, Tania Avgustinova and Roland Marti
(Saarland University)
This study addresses the question whether the intelligibility of a Polish text can be
increased for a Czech reader, who might intuitively be aware of the relatedness of the
two languages, if an established set of recurring orthographic correspondences between
Polish and Czech (Fischer et al.) is used to stepwise adapt the source to the target
spelling by increasing the orthographic transparency. Even among those sub-groups of
Slavic orthographies that use either the Cyrillic or the Latin alphabets, the individual
systems can differ a lot. Polish uses the Latin alphabet in combination with a set of
diacritical signs. In addition, its orthography uses a high share of digraphs and longer
combinations to represent sibilants. This makes it challenging for non-Polish readers to
identify even cognate vocabulary. Czech uses the Latin alphabet, too, but with a
different set of diacritical signs and without recourse to digraphs (with the exception of
ch). Yet, there is a number of regularities between the Czech and Polish spelling
systems. Our hypothesis is that the Czech reader's awareness of regular Polish
orthographic units and how to decode them increases intelligibility. This means that
there is a certain potential for improving the intercomprehension between these two
languages, which might not be that prominent in other language combinations. For
instance, our analysis of RU-BG orthographic correspondences resulted in only 48
correspondences (vs. 81 for Czech-Polish). Thus, the potential to adapt e.g. Bulgarian
towards Russian only by orthographic means can be assumed to be lower.
Replacing individual orthographic units from an unknown language might not be
the most effective way for successfully decoding information. Machine translation
offers other easily applicable solutions, such as replacing closed class words, and also
inflectional affixes. We want to define this potential for increasing intelligibility both
theoretically and empirically. The following three kinds of adaptations from Polish
towards Czech are applied to a Polish sample sentence: (i) orthographic
correspondences, (ii) closed class words, and (iii) morphological units
(1) Example: adaptations of orthography (orth), closed class words (closed), and
morphological units (morph) (without combinations) from Polish towards Czech.
Cells with grey background are identical with the target text.
332
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Polish original
Po
orth
Po
closed
Po
morph
Po
target (pseudo-Czech) P o
kó
ko
kó
kó
ko
j
j
j
j
j
d zienny
d enný
d zienny
d zienní
d enní
jest
jest
je
jest
je
miejsc
mí jst
miejsc
miejsc
mí st
e m,
e m,
e m,
e m,
e m,
w
v
v
w
v
kt
kt
kt
kt
kt
ó
e
e
ó
e
r
r
r
r
r
ym
ým
ém
ém
ém
swo
sv o
sv o
swo
sv o
ją
jí
jí
jí
jí
hist
hist
hist
hist
hist
or
or
or
or
or
ią
iou
ią
ií
ií
dzi eli
d ě lí
dzi eli
dzi elí
d ě lí
sz
š
sz
š
š
się
s a
s e
się
s e
z
i n n y m i.
s
i n n ý m i.
s j i n ý m i.
z
i n n ý m i.
s j i n ý m i.
diff.
26
10
15
20
0
Each adaptation method is applied individually and in every combination, as well
as all three adaptation methods at once. The change in Levenshtein distance is
calculated for each variant. This is the theoretical part. In the experimental part, each of
the variants of the Polish text will be presented to Czech readers who will be asked to
translate the text. We are ultimately interested in identifying the mechanisms by which
languages encode information. The experiments are designed to provide insight about
the information conveyed by the three categories of units that were substituted. The
same procedure can be applied to other language combinations. The potential for
approaching a related language in such a way, resulting from the theoretical and the
empirical measures, can thus be expressed by a concrete numerical value for each
language combination.
References
Bidwell, Charles E. 1963. Slavic Historical Phonology in Tabular Form. The Hague:
Mouton & Co.
Carlton, Terence R. 1991. Introduction to the Phonological History of the Slavic
Languages. Columbus, OH: Slavica.
Fischer, Andrea, Klára Jágrová, Irina Stenger, Tania Avgustinova, Dietrich Klakow, and
Roland Marti. 2015. An orthography Transformation Experiment with CzechPolish and Bulgarian-Russian Parallel Word Sets. In B. Sharp, W. Lubaszewski,
R. Delmonte (eds.), Natural Language Processing and Cognitive Science 2015
Proceedings. Liberia Editrice Cafoscarina, Venezia, 115-126.
Gooskens, Charlotte. 2013. Methods for Measuring Intelligibility of Closely Related
Language Varieties. In Robert Bayley, Richard Cameron, and Ceil Lucas C.
(eds.),
The
Oxford
Handbook
of
Sociolinguistics.
http://www.let.rug.nl/gooskens/pdf/publ_handbook_of_sociolinguistics_2013.pdf
[retrieved: 14.01.2016]
Kusiak, M. 2011. The Role of Phonological Awareness in Beginning Reading: A CrossLinguistic Perspective. In Arabski, J., Wojtaszek, A. (eds.), The Acquisition of L2
Phonology. Second Language Acquisition: 55. Multilingual Matters,
Bristol/Buffalo/Toronto, 77-92.
Žuravlev, Anatolij F. (ed.). 1974-2012. Etimologičeskij slovar' slavjanskich jazykov.
Praslavjanskij leksičeskij fond. Vyp. 1-37.
http://www.ikea.com/pl/pl/catalog/categories/departments/living_room/
[retrieved:
14.01.2016].
333
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Sardinian word-initial geminates
Rosangela Lai
(Università di Firenze)
I will show that Southern Sardinian displays phonological contrasts between
simplex and geminate obstruents in word-initial position (on word-initial geminates, see
Topintzi 2010).
The purpose of this work is, first, to identify the word-initial geminates with the
tools offered by the CVCV theory (Lowenstamm 1996; Scheer 2004 and following
works) and, second, to show how these geminates interact with the whole of the
Sardinian phonological system (Cf. Scheer 2014).
The issue of geminates in Sardinian is controversial: their existence wordinternally has often been called into question. Distinctive consonant length is restricted
only to certain consonants, namely /r/ - /rr/, /n/ - /nn/, /l/ - /ll/ (Wagner 1941; Virdis
1978; Contini 1987). In Sardinian, word-internal obstruents do not have a short
counterpart, unlike in Italian or Japanese, where minimal pairs of length are observed:
(1) Italian
bako ‘silkworm’
bakko ‘Bacchus’
bruto ‘brute’
brutto ‘ugly’
(2) Japanese (from Tsujimura 2007)
saka ‘hill’
sakka ‘author’
kata ‘shoulder’
kata ‘won’
In Sardinian, no length contrast is observed in obstruents (De Iacovo and Romano
2015; Cf. Ladd and Scobbie 2004). An obstruent is usually pronounced long but
alternative short realisations (for the same segment in the same context) are also
acceptable. For example, the word maccu ‘fool’ (from Latin MACCU(M)) can be
pronounced either [makku] and [maku]. Obviously, consonantal duration is
phonologically meaningless. Thus, phonetics cannot be of help in determining the
nature of a segment. One must thus resort to other tools.
In Sardinian, a small group of segments (s, ʃ, ʧ, ɖ, r) behaves unusually in external
sandhi (Bolognesi 1998; Lai 2015). Tables (3) and (4) list examples with the alveolar
fricative and the palato-alveolar affricate.
(3) Voiceless alveolar fricative in intervocalic position in Sardinian
a. Items affected by lenition
[sɔrri]
[sa zɔrri]
‘the sister’
[sɛɖɖa]
[sa zɛɖɖa]
‘the saddle’
b. Items that resist lenition
[suɣu]
[su suɣu]
‘the neck’
[sukuritu]
[su sukuritu]
‘the hiccup’
As one can see, /s/ surfaces in intervocalic positions with two different outputs. In
(3a) /s/ undergoes lenition while in (3b) does not. Words with word-initial /s/ that resist
lenition are uncommon: the expected behaviour is that in intervocalic position the
voiceless alveolar fricative should surface as voiced. The same situation can be
334
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
observed with the voiceless palato-alveolar affricate (Cf. Bolognesi 1998). Some words
respond to lenition, while others do not:
[ʧiða]
[ʧɛna]
[ʧentru]
[ʧellulari]
(4) Voiceless palato-alveolar affricate in intervocalic position
a. Items affected by lenition
[sa ʤiða]
‘the week’
[sa ʤɛna]
‘the dinner’
b. Items that resist lenition
[su ʧentru]
‘the centre’
[su ʧellulari]
‘the mobile phone’
Also for the voiceless palato-alveolar affricate, the common output in intervocalic
position is the lenis one, in which the voiceless affricate surfaces as voiced. An
analogous bipartition can be found in post-consonantal position:
[sɔrri]
[sɛɖɖa]
[suɣu]
[sukuritu]
(5) Voiceless alveolar fricative in post-consonantal position
a. Items affected by lenition
[is sɔrris]
‘the sisters’
[is sɛɖɖas]
‘the saddles’
b. Items that resist lenition
[izi suɣus]
‘the necks’
[izi sukuritus]
‘the hiccups’
(6) Voiceless palato-alveolar affricate in post-consonantal position
a. Items affected by lenition
[ʧiða]
[duaʃ ʃiðas]
‘two weeks’
[ʧɛna]
[iʃ ʃɛnas]
‘the dinners’
b. Items that resist lenition
[ʧentru]
[izi ʧɛntrus]
‘the centres’
[ʧellulari]
[izi ʧellularis]
‘the
mobile
phones
I argue that the structural identity of an initial segment in Sardinian can be
detected by taking into account its environment. In fact, Sardinian retains a number of
phonological processes in external sandhi that reveal the kind of segment we are dealing
with. Therefore, by looking at these phonological processes through the lens of CVCV
theory, one can identify the structural representation of word-initial segments and
clusters.
References
Bolognesi, R. 1998. The Phonology of Campidanian Sardinian. Dordrecht: HIL.
Contini, M. 1987. Etude de Géographie Phonétique et de Phonétique Instrumentale du
Sarde. Alessandria: Dell’Orso.
De Iacovo, V. and A. Romano. 2015. “Durations of Voiceless Stops in a Sardinian
Variety”. Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences.
University of Glasgow.
335
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Ladd, D. R., and J. Scobbie. 2004. “External Sandhi as Gestural Overlap? CounterEvidence from Sardinian”. Phonetic Interpretation: Papers in Laboratory
Phonology VI, ed. by J. Local, R. Ogden, and R. Temple, 164-182. Cambridge
UP.
Lai, Rosangela. 2015. “Word-initial geminates in Sardinian”. Quaderni di linguistica e
studi orientali. 1, 37-60. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13128/QULSO-2421-722016515
Lowenstamm, J. 1996. “CV as the Only Syllable Type”, in Current Trends in
Phonology Models and Methods ed. by J. Durand. European Studies Research
Institute, 419-442.
Scheer, T. A Lateral Theory of Phonology. What is CVCV and Why Should it be?
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004.
Scheer, T. 2014. “Muta cum liquida in the Light of Tertenia Sardinian Metathesis and
Compensatory Lengthening Latin tr > Old French Vrr.”, in Variation within and
across Romance Languages ed. by M-H Côté, and E.Mathieu, 77-100.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Topintzi, N. 2010. Onsets Suprasegmental and Prosodic Behaviour. Cambridge UP.
Tsujimura, N. 2007. An Introduction to Japanese Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Virdis, M. 1978. Fonetica del dialetto sardo campidanese. Cagliari: Ed. Della Torre.
Wagner, M. L. 1941. Historische Lautlehre des Sardischen. Halle: Niemeyer.
The material presented here is from Lai, Rosangela (2015).
For a more complete account and references, I refer the reader to the abovementioned work.
Data are from Tertenia Sardinian (Campidanese Sardinian - Ogliastra area).
Gauging the effects of a constructive type of Cognitive Linguisticsbased Processing Instruction in EFL classrooms
Yuda Lai
(Providence University)
This study aims to evaluate the potential impact of Cognitive Linguistics-based
Processing Instruction (CLPI, Lai, 2011) and its feasibility with a constructivism-based
course design in the context of EFL classrooms in Taiwan. With its natural explanations
for form-meaning relations accompanied with PI’s structured practices (VanPatten,
1996), CLPI, compared with traditional PI (TOPI), is argued to be able to provide L2
learners with the linguistic input that could better fit the cognitive structure of learners’
“processor”. In line with Lai (2011), we further propose a constructive type of CLPI
designed to link dispersed linguistic phenomena with the same CL principle(s) in an
instruction sequence that goes “from concreteness to abstraction”. To evaluate the
potential effects of the constructivism-based CLPI in relation to TOPI, two topics were
examined: (a) the discourse functions of the English participle construction and (b) the
pragmalinguistic strategies for making requests/invitations. The teaching procedures for
both CLPI and TOPI were identical (i.e., the explicit grammatical explanation first and
the structured practices later), except that the explicit explanation in CLPI was couched
336
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
in the discussion of how the two seemingly unrelated learning targets could be
motivated by the same general principle of iconicity in a unified cognitive linguistics
account. The effectiveness of the constructive type of CLPI was empirically supported
by the preliminary findings that suggested earlier introduction of the CL principle of
iconicity to the CLPI learners in learning the discourse functions of English participle
could enable them to yield better and more durable performances than those TOPI
learners in learning the pragmalinguistic downgrading strategies for request/invitation
making in English. The pedagogical implications were discussed in light of the above
findings and in the context of how the constructivism-based CLPI could render
“building blocks” to L2 learners for scaffolding their interlanguage structures in
different stages (Niemeier, 2008) by taking another two topics that are traditionally
dealt with separately in EFL classrooms as an example: (a) mass-count noun use and
interpretations and (b) the aspectual use (i.e., perfective –ed and imperfective –ing) for
verbs of different lexical aspects and interpretations.
References
Lai, Y.-D. (2011). A cognitive linguistics approach to language teaching: processing
instruction of iconicity in EFL classrooms. English Teaching and Learning, 35,
43-90.
Niemeier, S. (2008). The notion of buoundedness/unboundedness in the foreign
language classroom. In F. Boers & S. Lindstromberg (Eds.), Cognitive Linguistic
Approaches to Teaching Vocabulary and Phraseology (pp. 309-327). Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
VanPatten, B. (1996). Input processing and grammar instruction: Theory and research.
Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Word size in spoken and written Mandarin Chinese
James Myers
(National Chung Cheng University)
Although Chinese characters represent monosyllabic morphemes and word
boundaries are not marked orthographically, Chinese words actually tend to be
disyllabic. Since this is the size of a metrical foot, a prosodic explanation seems
plausible (Duanmu 2007). The prosody hypothesis thus predicts a modality effect
(speech vs. writing) on word size, both for word coinage and for word selection. These
predictions were tested in the spoken (half million word tokens) and written (ten million
word tokens) subcorpora of the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus (Chen et al. 1996).
Disyllabic (two-character) words predominate both in speech (13,669 types) and
in writing (97,899 types). However, as shown in Figures 1 and 2, modality affects
potential word coinage, as extrapolated by Generalized Inverse Gauss-Poisson (GIGP)
Large-Number-of-Rare-Events (LNRE) modeling (Evert and Baroni 2007): while in
speech the predicted increase in types as a function of larger token samples is steepest
for disyllables, in writing it is steepest for three-character words.
337
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
As for word selection, thousands of Chinese lemmas (syntactic/semantic lexical
entries) are “elastic” in size, with speaker/writers free to realize them as either mono- or
disyllabic (e.g., zhuō(zi) ‘table’, dì(di) ‘younger brother’, (dà)gē ‘(big) elder brother’,
dōng(fāng) ‘east(ern direction)’, (xī)guā ‘(water)melon’). In a picture naming
experiment, Perry and Zhuang (2005) found that the probability of choosing the
disyllabic form of elastic lemmas increased when the picture set included objects with
non-elastic disyllabic names. To see if prosodic priming also occurs naturally, we
selected elastic nouns (with the help of Duanmu and Dong forthcoming) used
consistently as nouns, in both forms, in the spoken (146 lemmas) and written (990
lemmas) subcorpora.
We then computed the log ratio of disyllabic (two-character) to monosyllabic
(one-character) words within a ten-word window preceding the elastic word target, used
effect coding to indicate the absence/presence of this same lemma (in either form) in
this window, and crossed these predictors (rescaled to z scores) in a by-lemma mixedeffects logistic regression model predicting disyllabic form choice for the target elastic
words. As shown in Figures 3 and 4, the modalities showed similar patterns: the greater
the disyllabic ratio in the preceding words, the more likely speakers were to choose the
disyllabic/two-character form (βspeech = 0.37, βwriting = 0.39), and while there was an
interaction with lemma repetition (βspeech = 0.22, βwriting = 0.14), word length priming
was also significant without repetition (βspeech = 0.30, βwriting = 0.35) (all ps < .0001).
Since modality matters, and LNRE models take Zipf’s law into effect, the
preference for disyllabic words in speech seems genuinely prosodic; the preference for
longer words in written Chinese may reflect the more complex concepts and
polysyllabic borrowings in a more formal register. The similar degree of priming of
disyllabic/two-character words across modalities suggests either that word selection (as
opposed to word coinage) remains subject to prosodic priming even in writing, or that
word lengths “clump” in natural language for non-prosodic reasons.
Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3
Figure 4
References
Chen, Keh-Jiann, Chu-Ren Huang, Li-Ping Chang, Hui-Li Hsu. 1996. Sinica Corpus:
Design methodology for balanced corpora. Proceedings of the 11th Pacific Asia
Conference on Language, Information, and Computation, Seoul, Korea, pp. 167176.
Duanmu, San. 2007. The Phonology of Standard Chinese. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Duanmu, San, and Yan Dong. Forthcoming. Elastic words in Chinese. In S.-W. Chan
(ed.) Routledge Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language. London: Routledge.
338
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Evert, Stefan, and Marco Baroni. 2007. zipfR: Word frequency distributions in R.
Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational
Linguistics, Posters and Demonstrations Sessions, 29-32, Prague, Czech Republic.
Perry, Conrad and Jie Zhuang. 2005. Prosody and lemma selection. Memory and
Cognition 33: 862-870.
Dominant roles of the negative value in processing emotional messages
and emoticons: ERP evidence
Yunju Nam
(Konkuk University)
In on-line and mobile communication environments, messages typically include
both texts and emoticons (Walther & D’Addario, 2001). To investigate how these two
media interact with each other, this study tried to figure out whether one is more
powerful than the other and how emoticon contributes to the emotional evaluation of
the communication messages using an ERP technique.
We constructed 4 experimental conditions by manipulating the emotional types
of text (Positive/Negative) and emoticon (Positive/Negative) as well as 2 types of
filler condition consisting of a neutral text with a positive or negative emoticon. All
items were normed by an emotion rating task before the ERP experiment, as described
in Table 1. Total 540 text-emoticon pairs were presented to 27 Korean speakers (16
male) in RSVP. Brain responses were recorded at the emoticon and participants
judged the emotional value of the preceding text-emoticon pair 500ms after the
emotion offset.
As ERP results, N400 was elicited only at the positive emoticons following
negative texts (NT-PE) compared to the negative emoticons following positive texts
(PT-PE) in 250-500ms, whereas the early P600 in 350-600ms was elicited at the
negative emoticons following positive texts (PT-NE) compared to the both negative
conditions (NT-NE). This result indicates that the negative value (especially in text)
plays a pivotal role in processing emotional messages (Lo, 2008). When a negative
emoticon is following a positive text, people detect emotional incongruence between
the two, resulting in the N400. From the emotional category judgment task shown in
Table 1, we can infer that people tend to retain the negative emotion in mind in the
NT-PE condition. Meanwhile, when a negative emoticon is given after a positive text,
people rather integrate the emotional value of two messages synthetically, and the
emotional value of the whole message is even changed into the negative one. Such an
integrating and revising load of the emotional value is reflected in P600. This in turn
implies that once the emotional value is determined from a negative text, people
hardly change its value even if a positive emoticon follows.
339
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
References
Walther, P. J., & D’Addario, P. K. 2001. The impacts of emoticons on message
interpretation in computer-mediated communication. Social Science Computer
Review, 19(3), 324-347.
Lo, S. K. 2008. The nonverbal communication functions of emoticons in computermediated communication. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 11(5), 595-597.
Verb-based and noun-based languages
Johanna Nichols
(University of California, Berkeley)
In some languages, nouns are mostly basic and verbs derived; in others, vice
versa; and some languages are split or mostly flexible. Base part of speech, defined on
derivational paradigms, proves to be revealing for deep prehistory and robustly
independent of most other typological variables, hence a new arena for typology and an
excellent historical tracer. It is entirely separate from the question of whether there
exist acategorial words or languages.
Method: To create a consistent, rigorously codable, fine-grained typology, a 60item wordlist was compiled (from pilot studies on longer lists), lexicosemantically and
syntactically diverse and cross-linguistically variable as to base PoS (i.e. excluding
words for natural kinds, e.g. 'raven', 'tree', typologically uninformative because almost
always basic nouns; and excluding actions on objects such as 'strike', 'lift', etc., almost
always basic verbs) and surveyed across a worldwide sample of 50 languages (more
underway), genealogically and geographically diverse, with a denser survey of several
language families. For each item in each language I determine its internal
morphological structure and that of derivationally related words, establishing the
derivational paradigm of the word; then determine the base of that derivational
paradigm and its word class in its underived form (word class judged by the languagespecific morphological criteria set out in grammars). Languages can then be
340
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
typologized by the percent of items whose derivational bases are nouns or verbs (also
adjectives, flexible, etc., not discussed here). Families and areas can be typologized by
their mean percentages, and by bias calculation (Bickel 2013).
Extreme verb-based languages include Salish languages, where even words for
body parts and natural kinds (cross-linguistically usually basic nouns) are nominalized
or instrumentalized predicates: e.g. Thompson Salish 'tongue' təł-eʔ (predicate: 'stick
out (round flexible object)', 'mother' s-/kíx-zeʔ (nominalized), 'moon' máʕ=xe-tn
(light:up=foot-INSTR),
'eagle'
ʔes-/kwl-oʔ=qin
(predicate:
STATyellow=LEX:SUFF:'head') (Thompson 1996). Similarly Wakashan and Iroquoian
languages. An extreme noun-based language is Lezgi (Nakh-Daghestanian), where
simplex verbs are a closed class and even events and agentive actions (crosslinguistically usually basic verbs) are light verb constructions based on nouns: 'cough'
ühu jaghun (cough strikes), 'fly' luw gun (wing give), 'push' rum gun (push give), 'know'
čir xun (knowledge comes) (Talibov 1992). Similarly Hausa (Chadic).
Results: Typological correlations are few: verb-based with head marking,
polysynthesis, and perhaps exocentric compounds; noun-based with light verb
constructions and converbial chaining. Independent of base types, a number of
individual lexemes can be identified as cross-linguistically preferring verb-based or
noun-based derivation (e.g. body parts mostly noun-based, but 'tooth' commonly verbbased). Base PoS is quite stable in families and diffuses slowly but regularly in areas.
Consequently there are large-scale geographical correlations: eastern Siberia and
(especially) North America are mostly verb-based, western Eurasia (especially
Southwest Asia) noun-based.
Most interesting are the historical implications. Lexical stability is type-specific:
words of the dominant base type (verbs in verb-based languages, nouns in noun-based
languages) are diachronically more stable, the opposite type less stable. Using this
finding I suggest likely and unlikely sisters for Indo-European and geographical origins
for some Eurasian families, and show how typological stratification in base PoS over
large areas might be used to track the history of language movements.
References
Bickel, Balthasar. 2013. Distributional biases in language families. In Balthasar Bickel
et al., eds., Language Typology and Historical Contingency, 415-444.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Talibov, Bukar Bekirovich. 1992. Russko-lezginskij slovar’. Maxachkala:
Daguchpedgiz.
Thompson, Laurence C. and M. Terry Thompson. 1996. Sketch of Thompson, a
Salishan language. Ives Goddard, ed., Handbook of North American Indians:
Languages, 609-643. Washington: Smithsonian.
341
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Grammatical status of aspect in Nanai
Sofia Oskolskaya
(Institute for Linguistic Studies, RAS)
The existence of the verbal category of aspect in Nanai (Tungus-Manchu) is under
the question. Aspectual meanings are regularly expressed by various items: by
derivational suffixes (e.g. suffix -či is used for expressing imperfective meanings) or by
special verb forms (e.g. an analytic verb form which consist of non-past participle and
past form of verb bi- ‘be’ is used for expressing habitual meaning in past). On the other
hand, there isn’t an obvious aspect system so that every use of any verb could be
characterized with one or another aspectual value (e.g. perfective or imperfective).
Logically, two different situations are possible: a) an aspect system does exist in Nanai
but it is rather complicated that is why scholars have not observed it yet; b) an aspect
system is not fully grammaticalized in Nanai, but still, some aspectual meanings have
regular expression.
The aim of this research is to investigate ways of expressing aspectual meanings
in Nanai and to find out whether the grammatical category of aspect exists in Nanai. I
follow a bidimensional approach: I consider lexical aspect (actional meanings which are
inherent for verbs) and grammatical aspect (aspectual meanings which are inherent for
inflectional forms) to be of different levels and to interact with each other. A
bidimensional approach is presented in the works [Comrie 1976], [Smith 1991] and
others. In the present research, the grammatical aspect in Nanai is investigated in the
ground of the TAM questionnaire made by Ö. Dahl [Dahl 1985]. The study of lexical
aspect in Nanai is based on methods developed by S. G. Tatevosov [Tatevosov 2015].
These methods were modified according to particular characteristics of Nanai. The data
of the research is based on the material collected during my fieldwork in the Far East of
Russia. The base of the data are questionnaires while some research were also made
with the help of oral texts.
In the talk, I am going to describe the structure of tense-aspect system in Nanai
and the actional verbal classes. The preliminary results manifest that there is a set of
inflectional verbal forms which have aspectual semantics. However, the basic and most
frequent form of past tense turns out to be neutral in respect of aspect. As for the lexical
aspect, Nanai verbs can be divided into three large groups: perfective, imperfective and
neutral. Perfective verbs can have only perfective interpretation in such forms as past,
imperfective verbs can have only imperfective interpretation, neutral verbs can have
either perfective or imperfective interpretation depending on context.
It seems that quite a large amount of verbal uses turns out to be neutral in respect
of aspect. Although the amount is less than a half of all uses, it is enough to claim that
Nanai does not possess a fully grammaticalized aspect system.
References
Comrie, B. Aspect. Cambridge: CUP, 1976.
Dahl, Ö. Tense and Aspect Systems. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985.
Smith, C. The Parameter of Aspect. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991.
342
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Tatevosov, S. G. Actionality in Vocabulary and Grammatics. Moscow: Jazyki
slavjanskoj kul’tury, 2015. [Akcional’nost’ v leksike i grammatike]
On the top down direction of complementizer borrowing: Evidence
from Cimbrian and other languages
Andrea Padovan, Alessandra Tomaselli, Ermenegildo Bidese and Ricardo Etxepare
(University of Verona; University of Verona; University of Trento; IKER)
Cimbrian a German(ic) minority language spoken in the area between the
Province of Trento and the Veneto Region in Northeast Italy belonging to the group of
Southern Bavarian-Austrian dialects. It has long been in contact with Romance
varieties which have affected its (functional) lexicon. As for declarative subordination,
Cimbrian is characterized by a double pattern of complementizers (cf. Grewendorf &
Poletto 2009, Padovan 2011, Bidese, Padovan & Tomaselli 2012, Kolmer 2012):
(1) I bill az-to net geast ka Tria
I want that-you.CL not go to Trento
(2) I boaz ke du geast net ka Tria
I know that you go not to Trento
In (1) the autochthonous complementizer az requires the embedded word order
(cf. the preverbal negation), whereas in (2) the borrowed complementizer ke triggers a
root word order (cf. the postverbal negation). The difference in word order finds a
reasonable explanation assuming that the native az is in complementary distribution
with the finite verb, since both compete for the same structural position (i.e. Fin0 in a
split-CP approach à la Rizzi 1997), while ke realizes the topmost projection of the CP
layer.
This twofold pattern prompts the following question: Do borrowed
complementizers always enter the COMP layer from the topmost projection?
Observing typologically similar situations a comparable pattern emerges: A
strong argument which hints in this direction comes from Udmurt, a OV Uralic
language in contact with Russian. In this language the borrowed complementizer čto
co-occurs with the native complementizer šuiza. While the first one introduces the
subordinate clause, the native complementizer occurs in the final position, coherently
with the OV typology (cf. Tánczos 2013):
(3) Mon malpaśko, čto ton bertod šuiza
I think that you come-home that
The linear order characterized by the complementizer bracket [ čto … suiza] is in
line with our hypothesis. According to the Final-Over-Final-Constraint (Biberauer et al
2007), the borrowed complementizer occurring clause-initially must be structurally
higher than the autochthonous one occurring clause-final. In fact, FOFC predicts that:
343
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
i) a head-initial phrase can never be dominated by a head-final one, ii) a head-final
phrase can be dominated by both a head-final and a head-initial one.
In our talk, we will provide further evidence of ‘complementizer borrowing’ and
extend our generalization to a different class of introductory clause-initial elements
like speech-act particles. In fact, it has already been pointed out (Stolz 2005: 48-58)
that Italian particles such as allora, 'then/since' and però, ‘yet, but’ infiltrate Slavic
minority languages in contact situations, taking on a more conjunction-like behavior.
(4) Lor ka si bila taka ndelidžend
(Molise Croatian dialect)
Since you then have become so smart
The syntactic behavior of both borrowed Comps and speech-act particles
emphasize the crucial role of the clausal periphery and reinforce our generalization
pointing to a basic principle of linguistic contact: the borrowing of a functional element
always infiltrates the highest layer of the clausal structure.
References
Biberauer, Theresa, Anders Holmberg, and Ian Roberts (2007). Disharmonic wordorder systems and the Final-over-Final-Constraint (FOFC). In Bisetto, A. and F.
Barbieri (eds.), The proceedings of XXXIII Incontro di Grammatica Generativa,
86–105.
Bidese, Ermenegildo; Padovan, Andrea & Tomaselli, Alessandra (2012). A binary
system of complementizers in Cimbrian relative clauses. In Working Papers in
Scandinavian Syntax 90, 1– 21.
[Online: http://project.sol.lu.se/uploads/media/Bidese_et_al_WPSS90_02.pdf]
Kolmer, Agnes (2012). Pronomina und Pronominalklitika im Cimbro. Untersuchungen
zum grammatischen Wandel einer deutschen Minderheitensprache in
romanischer Umgebung. Stuttgart: Steiner.
Grewendorf, Günther and Cecilia Poletto (2009). The hybrid complementizer system of
Cimbrian. In Moscati, V. and E. Servidio (eds.), Proceedings XXXV Incontro di
Grammatica Generativa. Siena: Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi Cognitivi sul
Linguaggio, 181–194.
Padovan, Andrea (2011). Diachronic Clues to Grammaticalization Phenomena in the
Cimbrian CP. In Putnam, M. (ed.), Studies on German-Language Islands, John
Benjamins
Rizzi, Luigi, (1997). The fine structure of the left periphery. In Haegeman, L. (Ed.),
Elements of Grammar. Kluwer, Berkeley, pp. 281–337
Stolz, Thomas (2005). Italianisierung in den alloglotten Sprachen Italiens. In Bidese, E.;
Dow, J. and S t o l z , Th., Das Zimbrische zwischen Germanisch und Romanisch ,
Bochum Universitätsverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer
Tánczos, Orsolya (2013). A mixed-headed CP layer in Udmurt from a historical
perspective. Paper presented at the Workshop on European languages and
diachronic linguistics (April 10, 2013), Newcastle University.
344
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Morphologically conditioned breathiness spreading in Western Magar
Marie-Caroline Pons
(University of Oregon)
In the variety of Magar spoken in Nibuwakharka (Syangja; Nepal), a non-tonal
language of the Central-Himalayan branch of Tibeto-Burman (Bradley 1997), a
phenomenon of breathiness spreading is attested. This process is specific to verb roots
of CV1.HV1(C) structure, and conditioned by the type of affixation (prefix, suffix, and
circumfix). This root structure, whose initial consonant is voiced and non-breathy,
features an intervocalic glottal gesture that has three freely alternating surface variants:
voiced fricative, voiceless fricative, and approximant. When a root of this type is
affixed, it undergoes a change in pitch, as well as a reduction of its syllable structure
where the vowel is deleted. In the mean time, the breathiness that arises from the glottal
gesture spreads to either the initial consonant of the new stem (as in 1), or to the
following consonant, whether root-final (2) or suffix-initial (3). The prominent
combination of laryngeal features and pitch has been widely discussed in the context of
the emergence of tone systems, a.k.a tonogenesis (Matisoff 1973, 1999; Haudricourt,
1954b, 1961, 1965), in modern Tibeto-Burman languages, such as Tamang (Mazaudon
1977, 1978), Chepang (Caughley 1970), Khaling (Michailovsky 1975), or Kham
(Watters 2003). The analysis of the alignment of these two independent features,
laryngeal gesture and pitch, may represent a synchronic illustration of a transitional
stage in reconstructed scenarios of Proto-Tibeto-Burman tonogenesis, contributing to a
better understanding of such pathways.
(1)
(2)
Verb prefixed with the Negation morpheme mama-CV.HV
[ma.jʱà̤ .ke.rʌ.ma.ʧʰa.na]
ma-jaɦa-ke-rʌ
ma-ʧʰan-a
NEG-give-COMPLZ-EMP NEG-become-PST
‘Not to give was not good.’
ma-CV.HVC
[ku.ʧe.rʌ.ma.wʱà̤ r.mʌ.le]
ku-s-ʧʌ-e-rʌ
INT-DEF-REL-ERG-EMP
‘No one understands.’
ma-waɦar-mʌ-le
NEG-understand-PROG-IMPF
Verb suffixed with the Past morpheme -a
CV.HVC-a
[mɛt.du.mʱà̤ ]
met
duɦum-a
greens
finish-PST
‘The vegetables are finished.’
345
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(3)
Verb suffixed with the Imperfective morpheme -le
CV.HV-le-aŋ [ŋɔ.e.lɔ.lʱá̤ ŋ]
ŋa-e
loɦo-le-aŋ
1SG-ERG throw-IMPF-1SG
‘I’m going to throw [it].’
References
Bradley, D. 1997. Tibeto-Burman languages and classification. In Bradley, D. (ed.),
Papers in Southeast Asian Linguistics 14: Tibeto-Burman Languages of the
Himalayas, 1-72.
Canberra: Australian National University.
Caughley, R. 1970. Pitch, intensity and higher levels in Chepang. Tone systems of
Tibeto-Burman languages of Nepal.
Haudricourt, A-G. 1954b. De l'origine des tons en vietnamien, Journal Asiatique
242:69-82.
—, 1961. Bipartition et tripartition des systèmes de tons dans quelques langues
d'Extrême-Orient, Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 56.1:163-180.
—, 1965. "Les Mutations Consonantiques des Occlusives Initiales en Môn- khmer".
Bulletin de La Société de Linguistique de Paris (160–172).
Matisoff, J. 1973. "Tonogenesis in Southeast Asia". Larry M. Hyman, (ed.), Consonant
Types
and Tone, 71-95. Southern California Occasional Papers in
Linguistics, No. 1. Los Angeles: UCLA.
—, 1999. Tibeto-Burman tonology in an areal context. In S. Kaji (Ed.), Proceedings of
the Symposium: Cross-Linguistic studies of Tonal Phenomena, Tonogenesis,
Typology, and related topics (pp. 3-32). Tokyo: ILCAA.
Mazaudon, M. 1977. Tibeto-Burman Tonogenetics. LTBA, 3(2), 1-123.
—, 1978. Consonantal mutation and tonal split in the Tamang subfamily of TibetoBurman. Kailash 6: 157-179.
Michailovsky, B. 1975. Notes on the Kiranti Verb (East Nepal). LTBA 2: 183-218.
Watters, D. (2003). Kham. In R. LaPolla & G. Thurgood (Eds.), The Sino-Tibetan
Languages (pp. 683-704). London/New York: Routledge.
From spandrel to signal: The emergence of the English {/z/} suffix
from an evolutionary perspective
Christina Prömer
(University of Vienna)
This paper accounts for the emergence of the -s suffix marking plural, genitive
case and 3rd singular present in terms of cultural evolution. The Modern English {/z/}
suffix derives from Early Middle English {/əs/}, which is surprising, as final voicing is
typologically rare due to greater articulatory difficulties (cf. Blevins 2006, Stampe 1979,
Westbury & Keating 1986). Thus, extant accounts of the voiced suffix in terms of
sporadic voicing (cf. Pinsker 1974, Ringe 2003) are questionable. Our account proposes
a two-stage evolutionary process with {/z/} and {/s/} as competing replicators (see
346
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Croft 2000, Ritt 2004 for a discussion on potential linguistic replicators). We show that
the development of the suffix follows Gould & Lewontin’s pathway of evolution as the
exaptation and selection “of parts present for reasons of architecture, development or
history” (1979:593, see Lass 1980 on linguistic exaptation).
In the first stage final [z] emerged as a linguistic ‘spandrel’ (cf. Gould and
Lewontin 1979) in the wake of schwa loss, which deleted unstressed vowels both in
word-final and checked positions, yielding word-final clusters (1):
(1)
ME
a. [katəs] catt-es ‘cats, pl.’
b. [godəs] god-es ‘gods, pl’
EModE
[kæts]
[gɒdz]
→
→
While the post-schwa-loss plural in (1a) retains the voiceless [s] of the Middle
English ancestor as expected, the suffix surfaces as voiced [z] in plurals of the type in
(1b). At this stage, however, [z] represents merely a by-product of an articulatory
constraint on obstruent sequences, which requires them to agree in voicing. It is only at
a second stage that [z] comes to be re-functionalised, or ‘exapted’, as a potential lexical
underlier {/z/} of the plural suffix, and likewise of the genitive and 3rd person singular
present suffixes.
We argue that the ultimate selection of innovative {/z/} over resident {/s/} reflects
speakers’ preferences for linguistic transparency. As pointed out by Mayerthaler (1981),
many-to-one meaning-signal mappings – i.e. ambiguous structures – are dispreferred
and avoided in favour of indexical structures, i.e. one form fulfilling one function. This
raises the possibility that the innovative {/z/} suffix was selected because it was
morphonotactically less ambiguous, and signalled the complexity of plural, genitive and
3rd person singular present forms more reliably than the resident {/s/} suffix, as
illustrated in Table 1 below:
Table 1. Meaning-signal mappings for /z/ and /s/ plurals
plural {/-s/}
plural {/-z/}
sin-s
(complex)
[sɪns]
[sɪnz]
since
(lexical)
[sɪns]
[sɪns]
Ambiguity
Yes
No
Clearly, however, the argument works only if the number of simple word forms
ending in a sonorant or vowel followed by /s/ (such as since or peace) exceeds the
number of simple forms ending in a sonorant or vowel followed by /z/ (such as cleanse
or rise). We demonstrate, by means of a statistical analysis of historical corpus data, that
this was indeed the case in the relevant period.
We therefore conclude that the innovative suffix {/z/} satisfied the requirements
for efficient communication – one form fulfils one function – much better than the
resident {/s/} variant, and significantly decreased the ambiguity between complex and
simple word form tokens, and was selected, or ‘exapted’, for that reason.
References
Blevins, Juliette. 2006. “A theoretical synopsis of Evolutionary Phonology”. Theoretical
Linguistics 32(2), 117–166.
347
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Croft, W. (2000). Explaining language change: An evolutionary approach. Harlow:
Longman.
Gould, S.J., & Lewontin, R.C. (1979). The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian
paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme. Proceedings of the Royal
Society of London, Series B, 205, 581-598.
Lass, R. 1980. On explaining language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Mayerthaler, W. 1981. Morphologische Natürlichkeit. Wiesbaden: Athenaion.
Pinsker, H.E. (1974). Historische Englische Grammatik. München: Hueber.
Ringe, D. (2003). Internal reconstruction. In B. D. Joseph and R. D. Janda (Eds.), The
handbook of historical linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell. 244-261.
Ritt, N. (2004). Selfish sounds and linguistic evolution. Cambridge: University Press.
Stampe, D. 1979. A dissertation on natural phonology. New York: Garland.
Westbury, J.; Keating, P. 1986. “On the naturalness of stop consonant voicing”. Journal
of Linguistics 22, 145-166.
Self-repaired questions in Estonian Spoken interaction: Between social
economics and epistemic stance
Andra Rumm and Tiit Hennoste
(University of Tartu)
The topic of our presentation is self-repaired questions in Spoken Estonian, where
one type of the question (e.g. Wh-question) is immediately followed and replaced by
another type of the question (e.g. polar question) (What are you drinking? Chamomile
tea?). Those questions have not been extensively studied in the literature.
Our research question is which types of self-repaired questions are used in spoken
Estonian and what factors influence the use of different question types.
The data come from the Corpus of Spoken Estonian of the University of Tartu (2
million transliterated tokens). Our approach is functional and user-based (interactional
linguistics and pragmatics). The method we use is conversation analysis.
S. Levinson has created a model of the social economics of questions (Levinson
2012: 23). The model makes a number of predictions: (1) „questioners will never ask a
Wh-question where a polar question would do“; (2) „speakers should ask for the
smallest informational increment they think they need.” Levinson presents an
informational scale: Wh-Qs > polar Qs > presumptive tag Qs. (3) „If speakers can ask a
question without being on record as doing so, they will do so“, i.e. they exploit
questions in declarative form (queclaratives). Therefore, if the questioner replaces one
question type with another then (s)he replaces Wh-questions by polar questions
(Levinson 2012: 30) and not vice versa.
The findings of our study indicate that in addition to this type there are other
patterns in Spoken Estonian:
348
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(1) Polar question > presumptive tag question
Kas
see
laev sõida-b
siis
Q-particle
this
ship sail-3SG then
‘Is this ship then sailing at night, right?’
nagu eksole
like Q-tag
(2) Polar question (inversion) > Wh-question
Õpi-d
sa
või
mis
sa
Study-2SG
you or
what
you
‘Are you studying or what are you doing?’
(3) Queclarative > presumptive tag question
Siin
on
piimakombinaat ole-mas
Here
is
dairy plant
be-SUP
‘Here is a dairy plant perhaps or it isn’t?’
ööse-l?
night-ADE?
tee-d?
do-2SG?
vist
perhaps
või
or
ei
not
ole
be
vä?
Q-tag?
The last two variants are counter to the social economics model as they actually
raise the social cost of the question.
We argue that those cases could be explained by the epistemic stance model of J.
Heritage (Heritage 2012). Heritage shows that the different formats of the polar
question represent different epistemic stance. Interrogative polar questions (and also
Wh-questions) express an “unknowing” epistemic stance while tag questions and
declarative questions express more „knowing“ stance.
If questioners replace a polar question with a Wh-question, or a declarative
question with a polar question, then they try to coordinate the question format to their
epistemic stances. Thus, it can be seen that they have estimated their epistemic stances
wrongly at first.
The “values” of those two models (low cost - high cost and „knowing“ stance „unknowing“ stance) are reverse. Low social cost of the question refers to the
questioner’s „knowing“ stance, while high cost implies the questioner’s „unknowing“
stance. We argue that the epistemic stance takes precedence over the social cost.
Abbreviations
Q question particle/tag
2 second person
3 third person
SG singular
ADE adessive
SUP supine
References
Levinson, Stephen C. 2012. Interrogative intimations: on a possible social economics of
interrogatives. – Jan P. de Ruiter (ed.) Questions. Formal, Functional and
Interactional Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 11–32.
Heritage, John 2012. Epistemic in Action. Action Formation and Territories of
Knowledge. – Research on Language and Social Interaction, 45, 1–29.
349
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Number marking in Moksha numeral constructions
Maria Sidorova
(Lomonosov Moscow State University)
This paper deals with number marking in numeral constructions in Moksha
Mordvinian (Finno- Ugric). We define a numeral construction as a construction
including a numeral and a noun and having quantitative semantics. I discuss not only
constructions with cardinal numerals, but also those with distributive and
“approximative” numerals (in addition focusing on some points of how the latter ones
are derived).
My data comes from the fieldwork in the Temnikov district of Mordovia (Russia)
in 2015. The material mostly contains elicitated examples. Some data comes from the
texts collected in the expedition.
Moksha adopts two different strategies of number marking in numeral
constructions. Small numerals (1-10) take a plural noun, whereas large ones (beginning
from 11) take a singular noun (see also preliminary data in Shmatova 2013).
Moksha distributive numerals are morphological genitives of cardinal numerals
and can be either reduplicated or not. This demonstrates a typologically rare mixed
strategy of their derivation, see Gil 1982 “Approximative numerals” are derived from
cardinal numeral stem with the comparative affix -ška/-čka. My research has provided
some clarifications in indicating the status of the latter class in the system of Moksha
numerals. While in traditional descriptions (e.g.
Lipatov, Alyamkin 1988, Tsygankin 1980) they are usually involved in a
complementary opposition with the other numerals, I will show that the approximative
marking is compatible not only with cardinal numerals, but also with collective and
distributive ones (3). So “approximative” numerals have proved to form a different
dimension in the system of Moksha numerals.
Morpho-syntactically, distributive numerals and cardinal numerals with
approximative semantics similarly differ from the properties of cardinal numerals. They
both require a singular noun irrespective of whether their value is small or large (4-5).
350
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
As is known from typological studies, distributive expressions generally correlate
with plural semantics and can serve as sources of plural markers (Corbett 2004: 116),
see also (Gil 1982: 159) showing that singular nouns in agentive NPs often block
distributivity. Therefore, the Moksha data do not fit in this semantic pattern.
Interestingly, plural marking becomes acceptable in constructions with large
cardinal numerals, distributive numerals and “approximate” numerals if there are
syntactic dependents (adjectives and demonstrative pronouns) between a numeral and a
noun.
References
Corbett (2004): Greville G. Corbett. 2004, Number. Cambridge, United Kingdom:
Cambridge textbooks in linguistics, Cambridge University Press
Gil (1982): David Gil. 1982, Distributive numerals. University of California, Los
Angeles
Lipatov, Alyamkin (1988): Chislitelnoje v mokshanskom literaturnom jazyke i
dialektakh i problemy jego orfografii. Aktualnye voprosy mordovskogo
jazykoznanija. Saransk: Mordovian Publishing House [The numeral in literary
Moksha and in dialects and the problems of its orthography]
Tsygankin D. (1980): Grammatika mordovskikh jazykov: fonetika, grafika, orfografija,
morfologija. Saransk: Ogarev Mordovian State University [Grammar of Mordvin:
phonetics, script, orthography, morphology]
WALS (The World Atlas of Language Structures Online): David Gil. 2013, Distributive
Numerals. In: Dryer, Matthew S. & Haspelmath, Martin (eds.) Leipzig: Max
Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at
http://wals.info/chapter/54, Accessed on 2016-01-15.)
351
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Property nominals in contemporary Italian: A quantitative analysis
of a mixed category
Luigi Talamo
(University of Bergamo/University of Pavia)
In Croft’s conceptual map for lexical categories (or parts-of-speech: Croft 2001),
de-adjectival nouns are described as property concepts with referential function. With
respect to lexical categories such as noun, verb and adjective, nouns resulting from the
nominalizations of property concepts (‘property nominals’) are cross-linguistically more
marked; in the same way of other lexical categories such as de-verbal nouns (action
nominals: Comrie 2011) or adjectivaled verbs (participles), property nominals are often
morphologically complex nouns, such as Italian ner-ezza ‘black-NMLZ.F.SG:
blackness’ or adjectives employed with different syntactic func- tion i.e., nominal
function, for instance Italian i neri-0 ‘the black-NMLZ.M.PL’. Moreover, since it
participates of different lexical categories such as adjective and noun, the category of
property nominals shows a blend of morpho-syntactic and semantic parameters.
Elaborating on parameters described in the Leipzing Questionnaire on
Nominalizations and mixed categories (Malchukov et al. 2008), I have been conducting
a quantitative study on a thousand of Italian property nominals taken from a large
corpus of contemporary Italian, the La Repubblica corpus (380M of tokens: Baroni et
al. 2004). The study takes into account:
 two different marking strategies: morphological suffixation, such as gelos-ia
‘jealous- NMLZ.F.SG: jealousy’ and zero-affixation, such as i gelosi-0 ‘the
jealous-NMLZ.M.PL (people)’;
 forty basic property concepts ofseven semantic types(see Dixon’s works on
the adjectival category: Dixon 2004): COLOUR, such as rosso ‘red’,
HUMAN PROPENSITY, such as geloso ‘jealous’, PHYSICAL
PROPERTY, such as puro ‘pure’, DIMENSION, such as grande ‘big’,
SPEED, such as veloce ‘quick’, VALUE, such as buono ‘good’ and AGE,
such as nuovo ‘new’;
 seven morpho-syntactic parameters, including adjectival parameters, such as
gradation and adjective position (Bhat 1994, Wetzer 1996, Beck 2002) and
nominal parameters, such as definiteness (Lyons 1999) and number;
 four semantic and lexical parameters, such as referent animacy and semantic
type of lexical nominalization (Comrie and Thompson 2007).
By performing quantitative analysis on collected data, my aim is to show that the
category of property nominals not only configures itself in contemporary Italian as a
mixed category (Malchukov 2004), but also displays an internal variation, consisting of
nominalization patterns each described by correlated strategies and morpho-syntactic
and semantic parameters. More specifically, my preliminary results show evidence for
the following patterns of property nominals:
 the ‘abstract property’ pattern, which mainly employs suffixation as
marking strategy and characterizes nominals displaying an higher degree of
adjectival parameters i.e., nouns can be normally graded or support
argument structure and a lesser degree of nominal parameters i.e., nouns are
352
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts

mostly definite and seldom inflects for plural. Semantically, the pattern
defines abstract, non-argument nouns that are stable in the lexicon (example
(1));
the ‘property bearer’ pattern, which employs as marking strategy both
suffixation and zero-affixation. The pattern describes nominals with a lesser
degree of adjectival parameters i.e., nouns are seldom graded and do
generally not support argument structure, and an higher degree of nominal
parameters i.e., nouns can be definite and either specific or non specific and
inflect for plural. Semantically, nominals are argument nouns with either
abstract or concrete referents; suffixed nouns are quite unstable in the
lexicon and are often restricted to a particular language variety (example
(2)), while zero-affixed nouns are stable entries in the lexicon, though
limited to certain property concepts belonging to specific semantic types,
most notably, HUMAN PROPENSITY and PHYSICAL PROPERTY
(example (3)).
Italian (La Repubblica corpus)
1. Fermata in un gesto che esprime tutta la sua pur-ezza.
impressed in a gesture that expresses all the her pure-NMLZ:F.SG
Impressed in a gesture that expresses all her purity.
2. Ha fatto le sue scelte e le
ha comunicate alle fortunate tra
sbigottimenti
has made the his choices and them has announced to_the lucky_ones between
consternations
pianti e ross-ori
improvvisi.
cries and red-NMLZ:M.PL sudden
He has made his choices, announcing them to the lucky ones between consternations,
cries and sudden blushing.
3. Oppure che i deboli-0, i poveri-0,
e questo mi piace pensarlo,
or that the weak-NMLZ.M.PL the poor-NMLZ-M.PL and this I:DAT. like think
hanno alla fine più inventiva.
have at_the end more creativity
Or that the weak, the poor (people), and I like to think so, after all have more creativity.
References
Baroni, Marco et al. 2004. “Introducing the la Repubblica corpus: A large, annotated,
TEI(XML)- compliant corpus of newspaper Italian.” In: Proceedings of LREC
2004. Lisbon: ELDA, pp. 1771–1774.
Beck, David. 2002. The Typology of Parts of Speech Systems: The Markedness of
Adjectives. New York and London: Routledge.
Bhat, D.N. Shankara. 1994. The adjectival category. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Comrie, Bernard. 2011. “Action nominals between verbs and nouns.” In: Rivista
di linguistica / Italian Journal of Linguistics 23.1, pp. 7–20.
353
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Comrie, Bernard and Sandra A. Thompson. 2007. “Lexical nominalization.” In T.
Shopen (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Grammatical
Categories and the Lexicon (Second Edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press., pp. 334–381.
Croft, William. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological
Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dixon, Robert. 2004. “Adjective classes in Typological Perspective”. In R. Dixon and
A. Aikhenvald (eds.), Adjective Classes: A Cross-Linguistic Typology. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Lyons, Christopher. 1999. Definiteness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Malchukov, Andrej. 2004. Nominalization, verbalization: constraining a typology of
transcategorial
operations.
Lincom
Europa.
Malchukov, Andrej. et al. 2008. Leipzig Questionnaire on Nominalizations and
mixed
categories.
Url:
http://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/tools-atlingboard/questionnaire/nominalizations_ description.php.
Ossetic verbal paradigms
Arseniy Vydrin
(Institute for Linguistic Studies)
Ossetic is an Eastern Iranian language which has been existed in full isolation
from other Iranian languages. It is generally known that Ossetic has been heavily
influenced by neighbouring languages of the Caucasus. However, contact-induced
features within the Ossetic verb has never been a subject of a separate study.
Ossetic verb has three tenses (Present, Past and Future) and five moods
(Indicative, Conjunctive, Optative, Counterfactive and Imperative). Only Indicative is
marked by tense. The tense and mood forms are expressed by the combination of one of
the two verbal stems and the person-number flexion.
In the talk, I will show that the Ossetic verbal paradigms have some peculiarities
atypical of other modern Iranian languages. Here I will mention just a few of them.
While most of other Iranian languages have a few sets of person/number markers,
Ossetic uses at least 5 special sets. There is a typologically rare verbal category of
subject Impersonal in Ossetic which inflects for all tenses and moods (it can be analyzed
as verbal forms unmarked by person and number). Ossetic has morphological Future
tense expressed by the suffix -zǝ/-zɜn/-zɜ and the personal endings. Most of modern
Iranian languages either do not have Future tense or it is conveyed lexically, e.g. by
particles or auxiliaries.
Typically in modern Iranian languages some tense-aspect forms are expressed by
auxiliaries. E.g. Tajik language uses the following auxiliaries for Perfect, Future and
Present tenses: istodan ‘stand’, hastan ‘be (present tense only)’, budan ‘be’ and xostan
‘want’. Persian employs the auxiliary dāštan ‘have’ to form Present and Past
Continuous. Ossetic does not use auxiliaries to express tense or aspect (the only possible
exclusion is the prospective-intentional construction with the auxiliary wɜvǝn ‘to be’).
354
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Another important Ossetic peculiarity is the absence of Perfect tense which is attested in
most of the modern and some of the extinct Iranian languages.
In the talk, I will briefly consider the historical development of the verbal
paradigms in Ossetic, and will make an attempt to find a clue to the specificities of the
Ossetic verbal paradigms. The most natural hypothesis which could explain the Ossetic
atypicality of other modern Iranian languages is the influence of the languages of the
Caucasus on Ossetic and its full geographical isolation from other Iranian languages.
On the discourse uses of the adverb bara ‘again’ in Izhma Komi
Aigul Zakirova
(Moscow State University)
Additives have been claimed to fulfill a range of functions in the world’s
languages, one of them being contrastive topic marking.
One instance of such an additive marker is the Komi bara. In my talk I will
provide the data on its polysemy and suggest its possible explanation. The data was
gathered during my fieldwork in the village of Samburg (Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous
District, Russia) in 2015. Besides, I investigated texts in the same dialect found in
(Subbota 2008) and in the archive of the broadcasting company Yamal-Region. Both
sources, mainly consisting of personal narratives, yield 253 instances of bara.
The primary meaning of bara is ‘again’. In the Izhma dialect of Komi, which is in
our focus, it is also used as an additive marker (1) and contrastive topic marker (2):
(1)
pet’a I
vas’a bara l’ubit-enys
čer’i kyj-ny
Peter and Basil again love-PRS.3PL
fish catch-INF
‘Peter and Basil also love fishing, as their father does.’
(2)
tavo
bara bur-a
təəj-isnys
no məjmi
l’ok-a
təəj-isnys
this.year again good-ADV spend.winter-PST.3PL but last.year bad-ADV
spend.winter-PST.3PL
‘This year we have had a good winter, and last year we had a bad winter.’
aj-nys
moz
father-POSS.3PL as
Following (Klein 2001), I explain the emergence of these uses of ‘again’ as a
metaphor: sequence in discourse (as in (3)) is perceived as sequence in time:
(3)
2 is a prime number, 3 is again a prime number.
In (4), for the last two elements of sequence the same property is asserted, so
again corresponds to an additive particle. As the predicate does not change, again
becomes the focus of the sentence (just as bara does) and is stressed:
(4)
(Left context: 4 is not a prime number, 5 is a prime number) 7 is AGAIN a prime
number
355
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
In (5), the last element is asserted to have the same property as a previous one but
not the one immediately preceding, so again (as well as bara) receives the interpretation
of a contrastive topic marker. As the predicate is different, it becomes the focus and is
stressed:
(5)
(Left context: 5 is a prime number, 6 is not a prime number) 7 is again a PRIME
number
Curiously, bara may be followed by the particle že (borrowed from Russian), but
only as an additive marker. I suggest that bara že functions as a stressed variant of bara.
As in the function of a contrastive topic marker bara cannot be stressed, it cannot be
followed by že.
Additive and contrastive uses of bara ‘again’ seem to be restricted to the Izhma
dialect and have not been observed in texts in other dialects (Uotila 1995), (Rédei
1978), (Timushev 1971). Interestingly, they have been attested in Samoyedic languages
such as Tundra Nenets ((Tereshchenko 1965), (Nikolaeva 2014), (Koshkareva et al.
2010)), which has contact influence on Izhma Komi. The corresponding particles in
Samoyedic seem to be common in at least some dialects and have gone a farther way on
the grammaticalization scale. I therefore conclude that the semantic developments of
bara considered above might be a contact-induced phenomenon.
References
Klein W. 2001. Time and again. In Caroline Féry and Wolfgang Sternefeld (eds.),
Audiatur vox sapientiae: A festschrift for Arnim von Stechow. Studia grammatica,
52. 267-286. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Koshkareva, N. B. (ed.). 2010. Dialektologicheskij slovar’ neneckogo jazyka [A
dialectological dictionary of Nenets.] Ekaterinburg: Basko.
Nikolaeva, I. 2014. A Grammar of Tundra Nenets. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Rédei, K. 1978. Syrjänische Chrestomathie mit Grammatik und Glossar 1. Wien:
Verband der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaften Österreichs.
Subbota K. A. 2008. Glagol v izhemskom dialekte komi jazyka: grammaticheskie
kategorii i slovoobrazovanija (na materiale kazymskogo govora). diss-…k.f.n.
[The verb in the Izhma dialect of Komi: Grammatical categories and derivations
(based on the Kazym subdialect).] Syktyvkar.
Tereshchenko, N. M. 1965. Nenecko-russkij slovar’. [Nenets-Russian dictionary.]
Moscow: Sovetskaja Enciklopedija
Timushev, D. A. & T. I. Zhilina, V. A. Sorvacheva, 1971. Obrazcy komi-zyrjanskoi
rechi. [Samples of Komi-Zyryan speech.] Syktyvkar: Akademija Nauk SSSR
Komi filial.
Uotila, T. 1995. Syrjänische Texte. Ober-Vychegda Dialekt. Helsinki: SuomalaisUgrilaisen Seuran Toimituksia.
356
WORKSHOP PRESENTATIONS
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
WORKSHOP
Ad-hoc categories and their linguistic construction.
Typology, diachrony and use
Caterina Mauri and Andrea Sansò
(University of Pavia; Insubria University)
A large bulk of psycholinguistic research (Barsalou 1983, Smith & Samuelson
1997, among many others) has shown that the traditional view of categories as
fundamentally stable objects is untenable in various respects. Categories, instead, as
Croft & Cruse (2004: 92) put it, “are inherently variable, and created on-line as and
when needed”.
Languages have overt strategies that make the online construction of categories
“visible” and explicitly allow the hearer to identify some relevant exemplars as the
starting point for an abstraction process leading to the on-line construction of a
contextually relevant category.
(i) so-called list constructions or general extenders (e.g. Engl. “central
Iowa and stuff” as a strategy to construct on-line the ad-hoc category
“RURAL AREAS OF THE USA”),
(ii) associative or similative plural constructions (cf. (1) see Moravcsik
2003), by which speakers may extend the reference of a given noun to
include some individual or entities typically associated with the referent of
that noun,
(iii) derivational collective morphology (cf. (2)), which can be used
productively to create new lexical labels for ad hoc categories,
(iv) nonce compounds (cf. (3)), which can be created to refer to a specific,
context-relevant category, for which no label is available in the language,
(v) so-called representative (Haspelmath 2007) or non-exhaustive
connectives (cf.(4)), i.e. connectives that specifically encode that the two
(or more) items that they connect are just members of a category including
other similar elements,
(vi) reduplication (cf. (5)), which in some may be used with such a function,
etc.
(vii) exemplifying constructions, namely strategies indicating that a given
phrase has to be interpreted as being merely a potential exemplar of a
higher-level category (e.g. Engl. “Why don’t we meet at the pub tonight?”
vs. “Why don’t we meet at let’s say the pub tonight?”, whereby the pub
has to be taken as an instance of a place where one can have a beer)
(1)
Dogon – similative plural marker mbe (Corbett 2000: 111)
ibɛ
ya-ɛ-w
yo, isu mbe nie mbe bawiɛ
market
go-AOR-2SG
if
fish PL oil PL buy.IMP.2SG
‘if you go to the market, buy fish, oil AND OTHER SUCH THINGS’
359
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(2)
Italian – derivational suffix –ame
dire
che la
Boldrini è
uguale al
say.INF
COMP
ART.F
B. be.PRS.3SG
equal to+ART
figlio di
Bossi
o
al
berluscon-ame è
son of
B. or
to.ART
Berlusconi & co. be.PRS.3SG
una
violenza ideologica,
INDEF.ART.F violence ideological
‘to say that Boldrini is the same as Bossi’s son or as ALL THOSE PERSONS
HAVING TO DO WITH BERLUSCONI (INCLUDED BERLUSCONI
HIMSELF) / BERLUSCONI & CO. is an ideological violence’
(3)
"I doubt whether even the breathless, gosh-gee-whiz-can-all-this-be-happeningto-me TV-celebrity-author himself could cap this shlock classic with another."
(Pauline Kael, The New Yorker, 1970)
(4)
Japanese – non-exhaustive connective ya
watashi
no heya ni
wa,
konpyūtā ya sutereo
ga
I
DET room in
TOP
computer and stereo
SBJ
oite
arimasu
place-SUSP
be-POL.NPST
‘In my room there is a computer, a stereo AND OTHER SIMILAR THINGS.’
(5)
Turkish (Göksel and Kerslake 2005: 91-92)
Eve çat kapi bir alici geldi, odalarí modalarí dolaşti.
‘Today a potential buyer came without notification, and looked at the
ETC.’
ROOMS,
The on-line construction of categories is thus much more pervasive in grammar
than one might assume, involving such diverse grammatical domains as number and
plurality, lexical derivation, connectives and more transparent constructions such as
general extenders. All these construction types share a common function but differ as to
the way the category is abstracted away from the given exemplars.
This workshop aims to provide a unified approach to these constructions and to
their common abstracting function, by gathering together studies that explicitly deal
with the strategies that languages use to construct ad hoc categories on-line. We
welcome cross-linguistic studies, taking into account more than one language, as well as
studies dealing with the diachrony of these constructions and with their patterning in
discourse and interaction, based on corpus data.
Possible phenomena to be investigated include:
- exemplifying constructions (meaning ‘for instance’, ‘such as’, etc.)
- general extenders (e.g. ‘or something’, ‘and stuff’, etc.)
- connectives and their exemplifying functions
- associative and similative plurals
- nonce compounds
- reduplication leading to a ‘X and so on’ reading
- collectives and their relation to the construction of categories
- derivational strategies leading to contextually dependent categories or sets
360
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
- …
Possible topics include:
- cross-linguistic studies on constructions used to build ad hoc categories
- diachronic studies
- corpus-based research on the referential continuity of the exemplars and the
category
- analyses of the discourse relevance and discourse phenomenology of ad hoc
categories
- the cooperation of speaker and hearer in the construction of ad hoc
categories in interaction
- psycholinguistic evidence for how these constructions are processed and the
ad hoc catego-ries construed
- semantics and pragmatics of exemplification
- …
References
Barsalou, L W. (1983) “Ad hoc categories” Memory and Cognition 11/3, 211-227.
Corbett, G. (2000) Number, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Croft, W. & A. D. Cruse. 2004. Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: CUP.
Haspelmath M. (2007). Coordination. In: T. Shopen (ed.), Language typology and
syntactic description, vol. II: Complex constructions, 1-51, Cambridge: CUP.
Moravcsik, E. (2003). “A semantic analysis of associative plurals”, Studies in Language
27/3: 469-503.
Smith, L. B. & L. K. Samuelson. 1997. Perceiving and remembering: category stability,
variability and development. In: K. Lamberts & D. Shanks (eds.). Knowledge,
concepts and categories, 161–95. Hove: Psychology Press.
Evoking higher-level categories using or constructions
Mira Ariel
(Tel Aviv University)
The essence of or constructions is the verbalization of alternatives, i.e.,
paradigmatic opposites (Mauri, 2008). But what count as paradigmatic opposites in
discourse? I propose that for 'X' and 'Y' to constitute paradigmatic alternatives they must
be construable as members of a single, discourse-relevant higher-level category.
Consider (1):
1.
a. DIANE: Who was the king or queen? (SBC: 023)
b. PATTY: Was that World War Two,
or World War One. (SBC: 023)
'King' and 'queen' are members of the higher-level category 'monarch', and 'World
War Two' and 'World War One' are members of 'World Wars'. Not all higher-level
categories are pre-established (Barsalou, 1983):
361
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
2.
a. CYNTHIA:
b. LAJUAN:
… Where everyone can come and just,
share their memories of growing up,
or,
(H) world war whatever, (SBC: 054)
Did she tell your dad or did you tell your dad. (SBC: 044)
In order for (2) to be discourse relevant 'growing up' and 'world war whatever'
must be construed as members of an ad hoc higher-level category ('personal events dear
to the teller'), as must 'she told your dad' and 'you told your dad' ('how your dad found
out you were gay').
But then, once a higher-level category is evoked, speakers can introduce or
constructions not to focus on the specific members they mentioned, but rather, in order
to refer to the higher-level category itself. 1(b) and 2(b) are Member-focus
constructions, where the speakers elicit a choice between the explicit members. But 1(a)
and 2(a) are Category-focus constructions, where the speakers instruct the addressees to
construct relevant higher-level categories, because it is those categories, rather than the
specific members per se, that they wish to profile. 1(a) asks for the identity of the
monarch, not caring about their sex. 2(a) asserts that people are invited to share any
memories of personal events, not at all limited to the options listed explicitly.
Surprisingly, Higher-level category (as in 1(a) and 2(a)) is the most common
reading of or constructions in the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English
(251/1053, 23.8% Ariel and Mauri, 2015). Various arguments, such as the acceptability
of a "yes" response to such questions (based on questionnaires) and the propensity to
occur within a single Intonation Unit (based on SBC transcripts) support the analysis
that multiple explicit members often constitute a single discourse entity which stands for
a higher-level category. Quite often, these are ad hoc categories, which are not easily
lexicalizable or even definable by the interlocutors. Other or constructions do not
manifest this discourse profile. They cannot be responded by a mere "yes", and they
span over more than one Intonation Unit much more often.
References
Ariel, Mira and Caterina Mauri. 2015. Why use or? Unpublished Ms., Tel Aviv
University, University of Pavia.
Barsalou, Lawrence W. 1983. Ad hoc categories. Memory and Cognition 11:211-227.
Mauri, Caterina. 2008. Coordination relations in the languages of Europe and beyond.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
362
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
The role of exemplification in the on-line construction of
categories: Evidence from Japanese
Alessandra Barotto
(University of Pavia/University of Bergamo)
The aim of this paper is to analyse the role of exemplification in the on-line
building of conceptual categories. Specifically, we investigate the functions of Japanese
exemplifying constructions, i.e., linguistic constructions that indicate the status of
example of one or more noun phrases or verbal phrases. Japanese shows a rich
inventory of exemplifying constructions ranging from dedicated non-exhaustive
connectives to synthetic general extenders. For the purpose of this paper, we examine
using a corpus-based approach the following strategies: ya, toka, tari, nado.
In the past decades, recent developments in categorization studies (e.g., Barsalou
1983, Smith & Samuelson 1997, Croft & Cruse 2004) have challenged the notion of
categories as well-defined, context-independent and pre-stored in memory, opposing a
view of category structure as dynamic, context-dependent and computable within a
given situation. Such a dynamic construal approach highlights the existence of
categories lacking a specific label but having some conceptual reality (cf. “covert
categories” in Cruse 1986 or “ad hoc categories” in Barsalou 1983), laying the
foundations for a criticism to Rosch’s concept of stable association between categories
and labels.
In this paper we will focus on exemplification as the main strategy that speakers
use to anchor the category to a specific context. Example (1) illustrates this function.
(1)
Koe-ya
ugoki-wa,
dokusha-no
sōzō-no
Voice-YA movement-TOP reader-GEN
imagination-GEN
hanchū
da (LCC).
category COP
“Voices, movements and so on are categories of the readers’ imagination”.
In (1), the speaker is complaining that the transposition of novels into comics
takes away the pleasure of imagining some features of the characters. She uses a
dedicated non-exhaustive connective (i.e., ya) to refer to a more or less abstract category
“features that a reader can still imagine while reading comics” providing what she
considers to be prototypical exemplars of it (Taylor 1995). According to a context-based
similarity reasoning, it is possible to infer other potential instances, leading to the
construction of the category.
Using data gathered through the LCC Japanese plain text and Co-occurrences
corpus (based on online newspaper articles), we analyse 200 occurrences for each
Japanese exemplifying construction, for a total of 800 occurrences. For each occurrence,
we consider i) the presence of overt labels for the categories of which the exemplar(s)
are taken to be representative, ii) syntactic type of the labels, iii) how the labels are
linked to the mentioned example(s), iv) the number of examples, v) syntactic function
and semantic nature of the example(s), vi) the discursive function of the example(s).
We will show that the role of exemplification changes depending on the presence
or the absence of a category label. We argue that 1) exemplification can be used to
363
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
contextualize lexicalized categories, 2) exemplification is the cognitive strategy
systematically chosen by speakers whenever the label of the category is lacking or fails
because it is regarded as insufficient for the communicative purpose, 3) there are some
correlations between the abstraction process leading to the on-line construction of a
category and the structural level.
References
Barsalou, L. W. (1983). “Ad hoc categories”. In Memory and Cognition 11/3, 211-227.
Croft, W. A. & Cruse, D. A. (2004). Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Cruse, D. A. (1986). Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Smith, L. B. and Samuelson, L. K. (1997). “Perceiving and remembering: category
stability, variability and development”. Knowledge, concepts and categories, ed.
Koen Lamberts and David Shanks, 161–95. Hove: Psychology Press.
Taylor, J.R. (1995). Linguistic Categorization. Prototypes in Linguistic Theory. Second
edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Ad hoc categorization in Russian and multifunctional general
extenders
Valentina Benigni
(Università Roma Tre)
This study aims to investigate the different strategies used in Russian to construct
ad hoc categories.
Categories are often created online at discourse level to fill a lexical gap, –as in
the “non-lexicalized categories” identified by Overstreet (1999: 42) or to mask the
speaker's disfluency in cases where the language displays a category label, but the
speaker cannot say it.
In Russian ad hoc categorization involves different resources, which include both
morphosyntactic constructions (in the sense of CxG) and pragmatic means, which are
all listed below. Some of the categorizing patterns are interlinguistically very common,
others are more language-specific, but despite their structural diversity, they all share
the same generalizing function and they are often used together and reinforce each other
(all data are extracted from the Russian National Corpus):
—
paradigmatic list constructions, whose members are held together by a relation
of synonymy, co-hyponymy, co-meronimy, or, more simply, by the same
semantic frame (Fillmore 1985: 223), as in the open list (1), whose members
illustrate the ad hoc category THINGS THAT YOU MUST PROVIDE THE
SCHOOL WITH:
364
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(1) My – roditeli, dolžny škole vsë: vznosy, remonty, oborudovanie, forma,
podarki…
We, parents, must (provide) the school with everything: contributions,
repairs, equipment, uniforms, presents...
—
markers of exemplification (naprimer ‘for example’) and approximation (tipa
‘such as’, vrode ‘like’). They suggest that the phrase they have in their scope may
be interpreted as an example of a superordinate concept:
(2) […] on “tipa privatiziroval” v ličnoe pol’zovanie […] Vrode gosdaču ili čtoto podobnoe, sejčas uže ne pomnju, no čto-to solidnoe.
He has kind of privatized for personal use […] a kind of state dacha | or
something like that, now I don’t remember, but something solid.
—
general extenders (Overstreet 1999, 2005). Often used after list constructions,
they serve to induce a more abstract and generic meaning from a concrete and
specific one, as in (3), where i t.d. ‘and so on’ gives the list a non-compositional
meaning and recalls the category LARGE WORK VEHICLES:
(3) Na noute ljubit, čtob ja vključala video raznye na jut’jube, pro musornye
mašiny, parovozy, èkskavatory i t.d.
He (i.e. my child) wants that on the computer I play videos on youtube about
garbage trucks, locomotives, excavators and so on.
—
derivational collective morphology, which can be used contextually to create
new category labels. In (4) bumagotnja ‘paperwork’ is formed by the noun
bumaga ‘paper’ plus the colloquial collective suffix -otnja (the concept is also
illustrated by the exemplifying list and by the general extender i t.d. ‘and so on’
that follows the noun).
(4) Mne ne nravitsja škol’naja «bumagotnja»: otčëty, pisul’ki, programmy, plany
i t.d.
I do not like school paperwork: relations, notes, programs, plans, and so on.
—
co-compounds (Wälchli 2005), a traditional type of compounding, which was
characteristic of folk literature (gusi-lebedi ‘geese and swans’, chleb-sol’
‘hospitality’, lit. ‘bread-salt’), but is still productive in colloquial speech to refer to
hypernyms for which no label is available in the language. As in list constructions,
the constituents of the co-compound are linked by a paradigmatic relation of
cohyponymy (5a) or synonymy (5b):
(5) a. […] pensionerov, kotorye chodjat za gribami-jagodami […].
[...] retirees who go looking for mushrooms and berries (lit. mushroomsberries) [...].
b. Čto že tam, v duše-to tvoej, delaetsja? Kakaja pečal’-toska tebja s’’edaet?
(V. Astaf’ev, Zatesi, 1999)
What is happening there, in your soul? Sadness-anguish is eating you
away!
365
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Starting with a case study of the general extender i vse takoe ‘and so on’ (lit. ‘and
all such (things)’), I will explore in greater detail the link between categorization,
vagueness (Channell 1994) and linguistic economy principle: this form has in fact
undergone a semantic shift and developed a new meaning of non-exhaustiveness from
its original similative and approximative functions via metaphorical extension.
The analysis will also attempt to illustrate the pragmaticalization process of the
general extender, which results in the development of subjective and intersubjective
functions (Traugott 2010):
as a hedge on informativeness (Overstreet 2014), signalling the attitude of
the speaker towards the degree of information in the utterance;
as an indicator of positive politeness, to claim common ground between the
speaker and the addressee (Brown & Levinson 1987).
The Russian data will be compared with data from Italian and English extracted
from the multilingual parallel corpus InterCorp.
References
Brown, Penelope, Levinson, Stephen C. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language
Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Channell, Joanna. 1994. Vague Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fillmore, Charles J. 1985. Frames and the semantics of understanding. Quaderni di
Semantica 12: 222-254.
Overstreet, Maryann. 1999. Whales, Candlelight, and Stuff Like That: General Extenders
in English Discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Overstreet, Maryann. 2005. And stuff und so: Investigating Pragmatic Expressions in
English and German. Journal of Pragmatics 37: 1845-1864.
Overstreet, Maryann. 2014. The role of pragmatic function in the grammaticalization of
English general extenders. Pragmatics 24, 1: 105-129.
Traugott, Elizabeth C. 2010. Revisiting subjectification and intersubjectification. In K.
Davidse,
L.
Vandelanotte,
H.
Cuyckens
(eds.),
Subjectification,
Intersubjectification and Grammaticalization. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 29-71.
Wälchli, Bernhard. 2005. Co-compounds and Natural Coordination. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
A case of ad hoc categorization: The [[X]NP genre [Y]CLAUSE]
construction in French
Pierre Chauveau-Thoumelin
(Université Lille 3)
The aim of this study is to investigate structures as in examples (1–3) in which the
French noun genre is used as a quotative marker (Fleischman & Yaguello, 2004; Doyen
& Davidse, 2009) connecting a noun phrase ([X]NP) with one or more quoted utterances
([Y]CLAUSE), be they spoken, thought or written. The data analysed consist of internet
users’ messages collected from online forums. Such data have the advantage of
366
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
presenting new uses usually well established in the spoken language but rarely found in
other types of written discourse (e.g. newspapers).
(1) Place un petit texteX genre "Meilleurs vœeux pour la nouvelle année"Y en
couleur, ou en blanc avec une police de caractère type "neige". ‘Put a short
text like “Best wishes for the New Year” in color or in white with a snow-like
typeface.’
(2) Avez-vous eu une quelconque réponseX de sa part entre votre départ et le
paiement de la caution? (genre "je suis en train de faire faire des travaux pour
réparer vos dégâts, je vous rembourse quand tout sera fini" etcY) ‘Have you
got any reply from him between your leaving and the payment of the security
deposit? (like “I am having works done to repair your damage, I’ll pay you
back when everything is done”, etc.)’
(3) j'ai un accès de chez moi, mais lorsque j'essaye du bureau, apparait une
fenêtre qui dit un trucX genre: "le proxy actuel ne permet pas d'accéder à cette
page, contactez l'administrateur pour changer de proxy."Y ‘I’ve got access
from home, but every time I try from the office, a window pops up saying
stuff like “the current proxy does not allow you to access this page, contact the
administrator to change proxy.”’
The analyses will be carried out within the framework of construction grammar
(Goldberg, 1995, 2006; Croft & Cruse, 2004). I will show that the construction’s
interpretation is mainly exemplifying, as in (1), where [Y]CLAUSE instantiates one or
more members of the category denoted by [X]NP. The list is usually left open, hence the
presence of general extenders (Jefferson, 1990; Overstreet & Yule, 1997) in this
interpretation (e.g. ellipsis, etc., ou autre ‘or any other’). Example (2) shows a variant of
this interpretation. By providing examples of possible replies, the construction triggers a
pragmatic effect: what is actually relevant is not the content of the answers but the
impact on the recipient, i.e. a reassuring attitude showing that the person is willing to
help. Exemplification is less apparent in example (3) in which the noun truc ‘thing,
stuff’ is vague in regards to categorization. It is therefore the whole construction that
actually builds up the implicit ad hoc category MESSAGE D’ERREUR ‘error message’
(Barsalou, 1983) on the basis of [Y]NP. This function is consistent with other related
constructions (e.g. [[X]NP genre [Y]NP]; Chauveau-Thoumelin, 2016).
References
Barsalou, L. W. (1983). “Ad Hoc Categories”. In: Memory & Cognition 11, p. 211–227.
Chauveau-Thoumelin, P. (2016). “De l’exemplification à la catégorisation
approximative : étude de la construction [[X]NP genre [Y]NP]”. In: Actes du 5e
Congrès Mondial de Linguistique Française (CMLF 2016).
Croft, W. & Cruse, D. A. (2004). Cognitive Linguistics. Cambridge University Press.
Doyen, E. & Davidse, K. (2009). “Using e-data for the study of language change: a
comparative study of the grammaticalized uses of French genre in teenage and
adult forum data”. In: Alegria, I., Leturia, I., & Sharoff, S. (eds). Proceedings of
the Fifth Web as Corpus Workshop (WAC5). San Sebastián: Elhuyar Fundazioa, p.
17–25.
367
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Fleischman, S. & Yaguello, M. (2004). “Discourse markers across languages”. In:
Moder, C. L. & Martinovic-Zic, A. (eds). Discourse Across Languages and
Cultures. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, p.
129–147.
Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions: A Construction Grammar Approach to Argument
Structure. Chicago University Press.
Goldberg, A. (2006). Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in
Language. Oxford University Press.
Jefferson, G. (1990). “List construction as a task and resource”. In: Psathas, G. (ed.).
Interaction Competence. Washington : IIECA / University Press of America, p.
63–92.
Overstreet, M. & Yule, G. (1997). “On Being Inexplicit and Stuff in Contemporary
American English”. In: Journal of English Linguistics 25(3), p. 250–258.
Representative plurality: Typologizing heterogeneous plurals
Michael Daniel
(HSE/MSU)
Across literature, various types of plurality are discussed that deviate from the
regular additive pattern. In additive plurals, one adds up similar items to form a set of
the same kind. These plurals are referentially homogeneous, in that they explicitly
refer to each element of the set – the wordform tables explicitly refers to each element
of the designated set. There are, on the other hand, various non-additive, referentially
heterogeneous plurals found across the languages of the world. Some of these, widely
discussed, are pronominal, associative and similative plurals; see discussion in
(Corbett 2000, Moravcsik 2003, Cysouw 2003); but they also include less known
phenomena like open coordination or classificatory kinship plurals. I will use
representative plural as a cover term for all these types of plurality. In all these cases,
one element is representative of the other elements of the set. From the addressee’s
viewpoint, it serves as a referential mediator through which other (associated) elements
of the set are referred to by the speaker and become accessible to the hearer. The links
between the mediator and the associated elements are often left implicit and up to the
addressee to establish. A clear example of establishing such links online is discourse
interpretation of plural personal pronouns ‘we’ or ‘you (plural)’, and often ‘they’.
Thus, representative plurals may be considered an exemplary adhoc category.
Typically, both the mediator and the associated referents are humans. However,
interesting extensions of the representative reference mechanism are found in an early
discussion of associative plurals in (Corbett, Mithun 1996) who discuss, along with
other associative plurals in Yup’ik, the use of the plural of ‘boat’ for designation of
‘(the boat and) the rowmen’. Cf. also the plurals of placenames that designate
inhabitants of the village (reported in East Caucasian). Similar usages of the plural are
found when both the mediator and associated elements are inanimate. Thus, in
Nganasan (Samoyedic), one may use a plural of ‘bow’ to refer to the ‘bow and arrows’
or a plural of ‘shaman’s tambourine’ to refer to shaman-ware in general. Unlike
368
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
associative plurals, these uses seem to be lexicalized. To the best of my knowledge, the
only type of representative plurals that is regularly formed from inanimates are
similative plurals. But even when lexically constrained, these cases may represent
adhoc categories. Thus, depending on the situation, shaman-ware may include or not
shaman’s special clothes etc.
The difference between various kinds of representative plurals is the nature of
the link between the representative element and associated elements; they specify the
path the hearer should follow to reconstruct the non-explicit elements of the set. Types
of representative plurals are functionally different while sharing the same referential
template. The present paper is an attempt to integrate various types of representative
plurals into one domain, supplementing Moravcsik’s typology and indicating the types
of links characteristic of, functional differences between and, eventually, formal
properties natural for them.
References
Corbett, Greville. 2000. Number, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Corbett, Greville, and Marianne Mithun. 1996. Associative forms in a typology of
number systems: evidence from Yup’ik. Linguistics, 32.
Cysouw, Michael. 2003. The Paradigmatic Structure of Person Marking. Oxford
University Press.
Moravcsik, Edith. 2003. A semantic analysis of associative plurals, Studies in Language
27/3.
General extenders, minority languages, and stuff: List constructions in
language contact situations
Ilaria Fiorentini and Eugenio Goria
(University of Insubria; University of Pavia)
The present contribution aims to describe relevant aspects of list constructions in
language contact situations, with a particular focus on general extenders (henceforth
GE). Through the comparison of two different bilingual corpora we mean to identify
common patterns in the use of GE, as well as stressing specific features of the two
datasets. Our data concern on the one hand Ladin. a minority language spoken in the
officially trilingual (Italian, German, and Ladin) region of Trentino-South Tyrol (Italy),
on the other hand the post-colonial situation of Gibraltar, where local Spanish is
spoken alongside with standard English. Both corpora include recordings of
spontaneous and semi-spontaneous speech. The Ladin data consist of 12 hours (60.000
words) from 20 male and 38 female bilingual/trilingual speakers, 19–86 years old. The
data collected in Gibraltar consist of 20 hours of recordings from 54 informants (from
under 30 to over 60 years old).
GE appear to be a relevant phenomenon in both datasets, and several different
forms are easily retrievable. The most common ones are: in Ladin coscì/coscita (38
tokens, Fassa Ladin variety; see examples 1 and 2 below), with or without the
conjunctions e ‘and’ and o ‘or’ (cf. Overstreet 1999); in Gibraltar y todo, y eso, o algo
369
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
(see example 3 below), o eso for Spanish and (and) things like that, (and) stuff like that,
or anything, or whatever for English (100 tokens overall).
The two corpora allow a contrastive analysis of GE and other exemplifiers: in
both cases the use of GE seems to pattern in the same way and with the same functions
described in works such as Overstreet (1999) and Cheshire (2007). More interestingly,
in both situations different types of discourse and pragmatic markers can occur in
bilingual utterances (cf. Matras 2009 for an overview on discourse markers in language
contact situations), but this occurs to a lesser extent with GE: in Gibraltar their
frequency in bilingual speech is crucially lower than with other categories of extraclausal constituents (Dik 1997), and in the Ladin data they seem to occur only in
monolingual or almost-monolingual contexts. Therefore, the final aim of the paper is to
investigate whether structural aspects of the construction, or extralinguistic factors can
motivate this specific behaviour.
Examples
Fassa Ladin data:
(1) l'à amisc da Milan coscita
‘he has friends from Milan [or] something’
(2)
endana la paussa e coscita i rejona biot talian
‘during the break and stuff they speak only Italian’
Gibraltar data:
(3) they stopped the Welsh language for a period of a hundred and fifty years o
argo’ [Gibraltar Spanish ‘or something’]
References
Cheshire, Jenny (2007). Discourse variation, grammaticalisation and stuff like that. In
Journal of Sociolinguistics 11/2, 155-193.
Dik, Simon
(1997). The Theory of Functional Grammar. Vol II Complex and
Derived Constructions. Dordrecht: Foris.
Matras, Yaron (2009). Language contact. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Overstreet, Maryann (1999). Whales, Candelight, and Stuff like That. New York:
Oxford University Press.
The encoding of ad hoc categories in Sanskrit: A synchronic and
diachronic analysis of “compounds” with -ādiUlrich Geupel and Guglielmo Inglese
(Philips-Universität Marburg; Università di Pavia/Università di Bergamo)
In Classical Sanskrit, the noun ādi- ‘begin’ is involved in different kinds of
nominal compounds, as commonly observed in reference grammars of the language (cf.
Monier-Williams 1876, Wackernagel 1905, Withney 1924, Renou 1961). When ādioccurs as the first member of a determinative compound, it basically functions as an
370
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
adjective modifying a nominal head, and it is translated as ‘first’, as in example (1).
Instead, when occurring as the second member, it is usually translated as ‘etcetera’, as
in example (2), and the resulting compound is traditionally classified as an attributive
bahuvrīhi compound lacking an external lexical head. Remarkably, whereas in the
former case the meaning of ādi- within the compound is entirely predictable from its
base meaning, in the latter case the meaning of the compound cannot be
compositionally derived from its individual components, so that these compounds are
described as non-prototypical at best.
Based on these premises, our aim is to provide a deeper investigation of the
second class of ādi-compounds in Sanskrit. Drawing from a significant sample of
occurrences of ādi-compounds, we provide a full description their synchronic status, by
focusing on their structural features as well as on their semantics, and we demonstrate
that they indeed serve to code ad hoc categories (Barsalou 2010). In particular, we
question the widespread view that ādi-compounds should be analyzed as attributive
compounds, and suggest that in Classical Sanskrit -ādi- synchronically behaves as a
full-fledged derivational morpheme. Also, we discuss the typological classification of
this strategy to encode ad hoc categories among the types discussed by Mauri (2014),
and argue that different classifications are available depending on one’s description of
these forms either as true compounds or as outcomes of a derivational process.
Finally, by investigating the origin of ādi-compounds, we hope to enrich the
diachronic typology of ad hoc category markers, which has to date received
comparatively less attention. In particular, we show how in the oldest phase of the
language, that is, Vedic Sanskrit, ādi- displays a peculiar behavior which is of primary
importance in understanding the diachronic developments by which ādi-compounds as
marker of ad hoc categories came about. As we discuss, such change should be
subsumed under the heading of grammaticalization (cf. Hopper & Traugott 2003), or
better constructionalization (Hüning & Booij 2014).
References
Barsalou, L. 2010. Ad hoc categories. In The Cambridge encyclopedia of the language
sciences, P.C. Hogan (ed.), 87-88. Cambridge: CUP.
Hüning, M. & Booij, G. 2014. From compounding to derivation. Folia Linguistica 42
(2): 579-604.
Hopper, P. J. & Traugott, E. C. 2003. Grammaticalization (2nd ed.). Cambridge: CUP.
Mauri, C. 2014. What do connectives and plurals have in common? The linguistic
expression of ad hoc categories. In Linguistic papers dedicated to Jacques
Moeschler, J. Blochowiak, S. Durrlemann-Tame, C. Grisot & C. Laenzlinger
(eds.). Genève: University of Geneva Publication.
Monier Williams, M. 1876. A practical grammar of the Sanskrit language. Oxford:
Clarendon.
Renou, L. 1961. Grammaire Sanscrite. Paris: Jean Maisonneuve.
Wackernagel, J. 1905. Altindische Grammatik. Einleitung zur Wortlehre,
Nominalkomposition. II,1. Göttingen:Vandenhoeck & Rupricht.
Withney, W. D. 1924. A Sanskrit Grammar Including both the Classical Language, and
the older Dialects, of Veda and Brahmana. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.
371
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
Examples
(1) ādi.devaḥ
begin.god:NOM
“The first god.”
ādi.rājasya
begin.king:GEN
“Of the first king.”
(2) tad
bhavatāṃ vinodāya kāka.kūrma.adīnāṃ
vicitrāṃ
kathāṃ
thus
lord:GEN.PL delight:DAT crow.turtle.etc:GEN.PL wonderful:ACC.F tale:ACC.F
kathayiṣyāmi
tell:FUT.1SG
“Thus, for the delight of the lords, I will tell a wonderful story about crows, turtles, and
similar beasts.” (Hitop. 1, 2.1)
Alternative relations and higher-level categories
Itai Kuperschmidt
(Tel-Aviv University)
Alternative relations are one of the main relation types between states of affairs
(Giacalone Ramat & Mauri, 2011), and disjunctions are the dedicated morphosyntactic
constructions used for encoding them (Mauri, 2008). While Ariel and Mauri (2015)
have dealt mainly with disjunctions in spoken English, a study based on the Hebrew Old
Testament reveals similar findings: Higher-level category (HLC) cases, whose function
is to introduce the higher-level category constructed on the basis of the explicit
alternatives, is a very common reading (67/258, 26%). An interesting question is how
those HLCs are constructed. Consider (1)-(3):
1. "If there is found among you… a man or woman who does what is evil in the
sight of the Lord your God… On the evidence of two witnesses or of three
witnesses he… shall be put to death… not… on the evidence of one witness."
(Deuteronomy 17, 2-6, RSV)
2. "If a man steals an ox or a sheep, and kills it or sells it, he shall pay five oxen
for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep… If the stolen beast is found alive in his
possession… he shall pay double." (Exodus 21, 37 – 22, 3, RSV)
3. "Thus says the Lord: “As the shepherd rescues from the mouth of the lion two
legs, or a piece of an ear, so shall the people of Israel… be rescued…" (Amos
3, 12, RSV)
In (1), the HLC 'more than one witness' (as Ralbag interprets) is based on the
explicit numbers, and constructed in contrast to the explicit "one witness". The HLC 'not
found alive' in (2) is also based on the contrastive co-text that follows, the disjuncts
being verbs this time. In (3), nouns are used to construct the HLC 'small, inferior parts',
in a different, metaphorical way. Note that in all these cases the HLC is the only
relevant entity in the discourse.
We can find support for the analysis of specific disjunctions by comparing the
biblical text, in its Masoretic version being analyzed here, to old translations. This is
372
SLE 2016 Book of Abstracts
especially helpful when the Masoretic text is not absolutely clear. Consider the
Masoretic version in 4(a) and the Samaritan version (Tal & Florentin 2010, my
translation) in 4(b):
4. a. "If you meet your enemy’s ox or his ass going astray, you shall bring it
back to him." (Exodus 23, 4, RSV).
b. "If you meet your enemy’s ox or his ass or any of his beasts going
astray…" (Exodus 23, 4, my translation).
As suggested by Brin (1982) and Fishbane (1988), the adde