Possessive Constructions in Modern Low Saxon
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
POSSESSIVE CONSTRUCTIONS IN MODERN LOW SAXON a thesis submitted to the department of linguistics of stanford university in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts Jan Strunk June 2004 °c Copyright by Jan Strunk 2004 All Rights Reserved ii I certify that I have read this thesis and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts. Joan Bresnan (Principal Adviser) I certify that I have read this thesis and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts. Tom Wasow I certify that I have read this thesis and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a thesis for the degree of Master of Arts. Dan Jurafsky iii iv Abstract This thesis is a study of nominal possessive constructions in modern Low Saxon, a West Germanic language which is closely related to Dutch, Frisian, and German. After identifying the possessive constructions in current use in modern Low Saxon, I give a formal syntactic analysis of the four most common possessive constructions within the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar in the ¯rst part of this thesis. The four constructions that I will analyze in detail include a pronominal possessive construction with a possessive pronoun used as a determiner of the head noun, another prenominal construction that resembles the English s-possessive, a linker construction in which a possessive pronoun occurs as a possessive marker in between a prenominal possessor phrase and the head noun, and a postnominal construction that involves the preposition van/von/vun and is largely parallel to the English of -possessive. In the second part of this thesis, I report the results of a corpus study on the range of use of the four possessive constructions analyzed in the ¯rst part. I show that the four constructions constitute a case of syntactic alternation and try to determine the prototypical contexts in which they are used. I sample a reasonable number of instances of each of the four constructions and annotate them with information about morphosyntactic, semantic, and functional factors in order to obtain an objective picture of the typical uses of the four constructions. v Acknowledgments I would like to thank my advisor Joan Bresnan for all the help and advice in the writing of this thesis, for helping me come to Stanford in the ¯rst place and for the friendly atmosphere during my whole year at Stanford University. I would also like to thank Tom Wasow and Dan Jurafsky for reading this thesis. The friendliness and excellence of the students and faculty at the Linguistics department have made my year at Stanford a wonderful experience. Other linguists that I would like to thank very much for giving valuable advice and helping me with the research for this thesis are Anette Frank, Rui Chaves, Lisa Mays, and especially Anette Rosenbach. A special thanks goes to my informants Reuben Epp, Reinhard F. Hahn, Eldo Neufeld, Friedrich W. Neumann, Helge Tietz, and Shirley Wyatt who have provided a lot of valuable data for this thesis and never grown tired of answering my strange questions. Last but not least, I have to thank my family and friends for their wonderful support at home and during my year here at Stanford and especially for being so patient with me during the last weeks before the completion of this thesis when I did not have much time to talk to them. vi Contents Abstract v Acknowledgments vi 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Aims and Goals . 1 1.2 Possession . 3 1.3 Low Saxon . 7 1.4 The corpus . 10 1.5 Lexical Functional Grammar . 12 1.6 Overview of the thesis . 18 2 Syntactic analysis 19 2.1 Identi¯cation of possessive constructions . 19 2.2 The possessive pronoun construction . 34 2.3 The possessive linker construction . 57 2.4 The s-possessive . 99 2.5 The prepositional possessive construction . 132 2.6 Further issues . 152 3 A corpus study 155 vii 3.1 Syntactic variation . 155 3.2 Sampling of the corpus data . 160 3.3 Relevant factors . 167 3.3.1 Morphosyntactic factors . 168 3.3.2 Semantic factors . 170 3.3.3 Animacy and concreteness . 172 3.4 Predictions . 173 3.4.1 Morphosyntactic factors . 173 3.4.2 Semantic factors . 175 3.4.3 Animacy and Concreteness . 176 3.4.4 Summary of predictions . 177 3.5 Coding of the data . 178 3.6 Range of use of the four constructions . 185 3.6.1 Morphosyntactic factors . 185 3.6.2 Semantic factors . 195 3.6.3 Animacy and concreteness . 200 3.7 Summary . 206 4 Conclusions 209 A List of abbreviations 210 B Additional statistics 212 viii Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Aims and Goals The goal of this thesis is to give a comprehensive description and analysis of nomi- nal possessive constructions in modern Low Saxon from two perspectives of modern linguistic analysis that are not often discussed together. First, I propose a formal syntactic analysis of the di®erent constructions within the framework of Lexical Func- tional Grammar (Kaplan and Bresnan 1982). I then go on to analyze the actual usage of these constructions in a large corpus of Low Saxon text and determine to what degree they can be said to alternate and how they di®er in their ranges of use. These two general approaches { the formal analysis of syntax and the quantitative analysis of corpus data { often seem to be regarded as radically di®erent and maybe even incompatible views on natural language. In my opinion, however, an in-depth study of any area of grammar would be incomplete if it limits itself to just one of these per- spectives and neglects the other. I believe that grammar and usage cannot be neatly separated and that usage preferences of today can become hard grammatical facts which are usually modeled by formal theories of syntax and semantics tomorrow (cf. 1 2 CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION Hawkins 2004, chapter 1). Moreover, as Bresnan et al. (2001) have stated \soft con- straints mirror hard constraints", i.e. usage preferences in one language correspond to hard constraints in other languages so that a combination of both perspectives should allow us to get a better picture of cross-linguistic facts and tendencies (see also Hawkins 2004, chapter 1). In accordance with this view, I will limit my formal syntactic analysis to determining the structure of the constructions and defer all dis- cussion of constraints on the use of the constructions { be they hard constraints or stronger or weaker preferences { to the second part of the thesis. This also has the advantage that any constraints that I posit are tested on ac- tual corpus data instead of only on intuitive judgments of a small number of native speakers. For the present study, intuitive judgments are di±cult to evaluate because there is no standard variety of modern Low Saxon and this study deals with data from a large number of di®erent dialects. This raises the issue whether it is sensible at all to undertake a study like this on such diverse data. Apart from the fact that even standardized languages show the same kinds of variation to a lesser degree, I believe that the existence of largely similar possessive constructions in the Germanic languages suggests that the structure of such constructions in di®erent dialects of Low Saxon can be expected to be very similar (if not identical). In the quantitative study, I will code the examples for the factor regional dialect in order to allow comparisons between the whole sample and subsamples from major dialects. Nevertheless, I will use intuitive judgments of native speakers as additional data in order to clarify ques- tions that come up and that cannot be answered by the data available in the corpus. Corpus data alone can of course never be used to determine the ungrammaticality of a construction because the absence of examples in a corpus { however large that corpus might be { is not su±cient evidence for the lack of grammaticality of a construction but only for its relative rarity. Throughout this thesis, I will make reference to other languages (mostly other 1.2. POSSESSION 3 Germanic languages) which use similar constructions to express possession. It is my hope that this analysis of Low Saxon possessive constructions might also shed some more light on related constructions in these languages. I chose to write my thesis on the topic of nominal possessive constructions because it is my perception that the syntax of nominal phrases is still much less studied than the syntax on the level of the clause. I hope to show that nominal syntax is a very fascinating area of study that should receive more attention from modern linguistics. 1.2 Possession As this thesis is about possessive constructions, I would ideally like to have a de¯nition of possession that can be used to identify all relevant constructions in Low Saxon that have possessive meaning. Such a de¯nition is indeed very hard to ¯nd (cf. also Rosenbach 2002, pp. 27{27). Most studies of possessive constructions give an extensional de¯nition of the relevant constructions based on traditional classi¯cations, i.e. they list the constructions they are interested in without further justi¯cation (e.g. Torp 1973; Hawkins 1981; Altenberg 1982; Plank 1992; Barker 1995; Norde 1997; Rosenbach 2002). More general treatments of possession such as Seiler (1983), Langacker (1991, chapter 4.3.2), and Langacker (1999, chapter 6.3), try to give intensional de¯nitions but the resulting de¯nitions are necessarily quite vague because as remarked by many authors, e.g.