Definiteness in a Language Without Articles – a Study on Polish
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Load more
Recommended publications
-
Definiteness Determined by Syntax: a Case Study in Tagalog 1 Introduction
Definiteness determined by syntax: A case study in Tagalog1 James N. Collins Abstract Using Tagalog as a case study, this paper provides an analysis of a cross-linguistically well attested phenomenon, namely, cases in which a bare NP’s syntactic position is linked to its interpretation as definite or indefinite. Previous approaches to this phenomenon, including analyses of Tagalog, appeal to specialized interpretational rules, such as Diesing’s Mapping Hypothesis. I argue that the patterns fall out of general compositional principles so long as type-shifting operators are available to the gram- matical system. I begin by weighing in a long-standing issue for the semantic analysis of Tagalog: the interpretational distinction between genitive and nominative transitive patients. I show that bare NP patients are interpreted as definites if marked with nominative case and as narrow scope indefinites if marked with genitive case. Bare NPs are understood as basically predicative; their quantificational force is determined by their syntactic position. If they are syntactically local to the selecting verb, they are existentially quantified by the verb itself. If they occupy a derived position, such as the subject position, they must type-shift in order to avoid a type-mismatch, generating a definite interpretation. Thus the paper develops a theory of how the position of an NP is linked to its interpretation, as well as providing a compositional treatment of NP-interpretation in a language which lacks definite articles but demonstrates other morphosyntactic strategies for signaling (in)definiteness. 1 Introduction Not every language signals definiteness via articles. Several languages (such as Russian, Kazakh, Korean etc.) lack articles altogether. -
Logophoricity in Finnish
Open Linguistics 2018; 4: 630–656 Research Article Elsi Kaiser* Effects of perspective-taking on pronominal reference to humans and animals: Logophoricity in Finnish https://doi.org/10.1515/opli-2018-0031 Received December 19, 2017; accepted August 28, 2018 Abstract: This paper investigates the logophoric pronoun system of Finnish, with a focus on reference to animals, to further our understanding of the linguistic representation of non-human animals, how perspective-taking is signaled linguistically, and how this relates to features such as [+/-HUMAN]. In contexts where animals are grammatically [-HUMAN] but conceptualized as the perspectival center (whose thoughts, speech or mental state is being reported), can they be referred to with logophoric pronouns? Colloquial Finnish is claimed to have a logophoric pronoun which has the same form as the human-referring pronoun of standard Finnish, hän (she/he). This allows us to test whether a pronoun that may at first blush seem featurally specified to seek [+HUMAN] referents can be used for [-HUMAN] referents when they are logophoric. I used corpus data to compare the claim that hän is logophoric in both standard and colloquial Finnish vs. the claim that the two registers have different logophoric systems. I argue for a unified system where hän is logophoric in both registers, and moreover can be used for logophoric [-HUMAN] referents in both colloquial and standard Finnish. Thus, on its logophoric use, hän does not require its referent to be [+HUMAN]. Keywords: Finnish, logophoric pronouns, logophoricity, anti-logophoricity, animacy, non-human animals, perspective-taking, corpus 1 Introduction A key aspect of being human is our ability to think and reason about our own mental states as well as those of others, and to recognize that others’ perspectives, knowledge or mental states are distinct from our own, an ability known as Theory of Mind (term due to Premack & Woodruff 1978). -
Language Contact in Pomerania: the Case of German, Polish, and Kashubian
P a g e | 1 Language Contact in Pomerania: The Case of German, Polish, and Kashubian Nick Znajkowski, New York University Purpose The effects of language contact and language shift are well documented. Lexical items and phonological features are very easily transferred from one language to another and once transferred, rather easily documented. Syntactic features can be less so in both respects, but shifts obviously do occur. The various qualities of these shifts, such as whether they are calques, extensions of a structure present in the modifying language, or the collapsing of some structure in favor the apparent simplicity found in analogous foreign structures, all are indicative of the intensity and the duration of the contact. Additionally, and perhaps this is the most interesting aspect of language shift, they show what is possible in the evolution of language over time, but also what individual speakers in a single generation are capable of concocting. This paper seeks to explore an extremely fascinating and long-standing language contact situation that persists to this day in Northern Poland—that of the Kashubian language with its dominating neighbors: Polish and German. The Kashubians are a Slavic minority group who have historically occupied the area in Northern Poland known today as Pomerania, bordering the Baltic Sea. Their language, Kashubian, is a member of the Slavic branch of Indo-European languages and further belongs to the Pomeranian branch of Lechitic languages, which includes Polish, Silesian, and the extinct Polabian and Slovincian. The situation to be found among the Kashubian people, a people at one point variably bi-, or as is sometimes the case among older folk, even trilingual in Kashubian, P a g e | 2 Polish, and German is a particularly exciting one because of the current vitality of the Kashubian minority culture. -
Animacy, Definiteness, and Case in Cappadocian and Other
Animacy, definiteness, and case in Cappadocian and other Asia Minor Greek dialects* Mark Janse Ghent University and Roosevelt Academy, Middelburg This article discusses the relation between animacy, definiteness, and case in Cappadocian and several other Asia Minor Greek dialects. Animacy plays a decisive role in the assignment of Greek and Turkish nouns to the various Cappadocian noun classes. The development of morphological definiteness is due to Turkish interference. Both features are important for the phenom- enon of differential object marking which may be considered one of the most distinctive features of Cappadocian among the Greek dialects. Keywords: Asia Minor Greek dialectology, Cappadocian, Farasiot, Lycaonian, Pontic, animacy, definiteness, case, differential object marking, Greek–Turkish language contact, case typology . Introduction It is well known that there is a crosslinguistic correlation between case marking and animacy and/or definiteness (e.g. Comrie 1989:128ff., Croft 2003:166ff., Linguist List 9.1653 & 9.1726). In nominative-accusative languages, for in- stance, there is a strong tendency for subjects of active, transitive clauses to be more animate and more definite than objects (for Greek see Lascaratou 1994:89). Both animacy and definiteness are scalar concepts. As I am not con- cerned in this article with pronouns and proper names, the person and referen- tiality hierarchies are not taken into account (Croft 2003:130):1 (1) a. animacy hierarchy human < animate < inanimate b. definiteness hierarchy definite < specific < nonspecific Journal of Greek Linguistics 5 (2004), 3–26. Downloaded from Brill.com09/29/2021 09:55:21PM via free access issn 1566–5844 / e-issn 1569–9856 © John Benjamins Publishing Company 4 Mark Janse With regard to case marking, there is a strong tendency to mark objects that are high in animacy and/or definiteness and, conversely, not to mark ob- jects that are low in animacy and/or definiteness. -
Romani Syntactic Typology Evangelia Adamou, Yaron Matras
Romani Syntactic Typology Evangelia Adamou, Yaron Matras To cite this version: Evangelia Adamou, Yaron Matras. Romani Syntactic Typology. Yaron Matras; Anton Tenser. The Palgrave Handbook of Romani Language and Linguistics, Springer, pp.187-227, 2020, 978-3-030-28104- 5. 10.1007/978-3-030-28105-2_7. halshs-02965238 HAL Id: halshs-02965238 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-02965238 Submitted on 13 Oct 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Romani syntactic typology Evangelia Adamou and Yaron Matras 1. State of the art This chapter presents an overview of the principal syntactic-typological features of Romani dialects. It draws on the discussion in Matras (2002, chapter 7) while taking into consideration more recent studies. In particular, we draw on the wealth of morpho- syntactic data that have since become available via the Romani Morpho-Syntax (RMS) database.1 The RMS data are based on responses to the Romani Morpho-Syntax questionnaire recorded from Romani speaking communities across Europe and beyond. We try to take into account a representative sample. We also take into consideration data from free-speech recordings available in the RMS database and the Pangloss Collection. -
Book of Abstracts
2 June 5 – 7 2014 Palacký University, Olomouc, Czech Republic http://olinco.upol.cz Book of Abstracts Contents: Invited speakers (p. 17-21) Bas Aarts Investigating spoken English syntax and usage David Adger Constraints on Phrase Structure Ocke-Schwen Bohn L2 speech learning: Do cross-language phonetic relationships provide a full account? Noam Chomsky Problems of Projection: Extensions Linda Polka The development of phonetic perception: a journey guided by speech input and intake. 3 Oral presentations (p. 22-200) Víctor Acedo-Matellán and Cristina Real-Puigdollers Locative prepositions and quantifier scope: evidence from Catalan Sascha Alexeyenko Adverbs as PPs and the Semantics of –ly Manuela Âmbar and Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández Subjunctives: How much left periphery do you need? Maria Andreou and Ianthi Maria Tsimpli Character Reference: A Study of Greek-German and Greek-English Bilingual Children Amir Anvari Remarks on Bridging Pilar P. Barbosa Pseudoclefts: (echo) questions and answers Jitka Bartošová and Ivona Kučerová Against a unified NP-deletion analysis of pronouns: Evidence from demonstratives in Czech Lucie Benešová, Michal Křen, and Martina Waclawičová ORAL2013: representative corpus of informal spoken Czech Štefan Beňuš, Uwe D. Reichel, and Katalin Mády Modelling accentual phrase intonation in Slovak and Hungarian Lolita Bérard and José Deulofeu On the limit between relative and “consecutive clauses”: the case of [NP Det [- def] N que X] construct in spoken French: a corpus based analysis. Theresa Biberauer Towards a theory of syntactic categories: an emergentist generative perspektive 4 Theresa Biberauer and Ian Roberts Conditional Inversion and Types of Parametric Change Veronika Bláhová and Filip Smolík Early comprehension of verb number morphemes in Czech: evidence for a pragmatic account Anna Bondaruk Three types of predicational clauses in Polish and constrains on their use Karolina Broś Polish voicing assimilation at the phonetics-phonology interface Elena Castroviejo and Berit Gehrke Manner–in–disguise vs. -
The Term Declension, the Three Basic Qualities of Latin Nouns, That
Chapter 2: First Declension Chapter 2 covers the following: the term declension, the three basic qualities of Latin nouns, that is, case, number and gender, basic sentence structure, subject, verb, direct object and so on, the six cases of Latin nouns and the uses of those cases, the formation of the different cases in Latin, and the way adjectives agree with nouns. At the end of this lesson we’ll review the vocabulary you should memorize in this chapter. Declension. As with conjugation, the term declension has two meanings in Latin. It means, first, the process of joining a case ending onto a noun base. Second, it is a term used to refer to one of the five categories of nouns distinguished by the sound ending the noun base: /a/, /ŏ/ or /ŭ/, a consonant or /ĭ/, /ū/, /ē/. First, let’s look at the three basic characteristics of every Latin noun: case, number and gender. All Latin nouns and adjectives have these three grammatical qualities. First, case: how the noun functions in a sentence, that is, is it the subject, the direct object, the object of a preposition or any of many other uses? Second, number: singular or plural. And third, gender: masculine, feminine or neuter. Every noun in Latin will have one case, one number and one gender, and only one of each of these qualities. In other words, a noun in a sentence cannot be both singular and plural, or masculine and feminine. Whenever asked ─ and I will ask ─ you should be able to give the correct answer for all three qualities. -
Polyvalent Case, Geometric Hierarchies, and Split Ergativity
[For Jackie Bunting, Sapna Desai, Robert Peachey, Chris Straughn, and Zuzana Tomkova (eds.), (2006) Proceedings of the 42nd annual meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, Chicago, Ill.] Polyvalent case, geometric hierarchies, and split ergativity JASON MERCHANT University of Chicago Prominence hierarchy effects such as the animacy hierarchy and definiteness hierarchy have been a puzzle for formal treatments of case since they were first described systematically in Silverstein 1976. Recently, these effects have received more sustained attention from generative linguists, who have sought to capture them in treatments grounded in well-understood mechanisms for case assignment cross-linguistically. These efforts have taken two broad directions. In the first, Aissen 1999, 2003 has integrated the effects elegantly into a competition model of grammar using OT formalisms, where iconicity effects emerge from constraint conjunctions between constraints on fixed universal hierarchies (definiteness, animacy, person, grammatical role) and a constraint banning overt morphological expression of case. The second direction grows out of the work of Jelinek and Diesing, and is found most articulated in Jelinek 1993, Jelinek and Carnie 2003, and Carnie 2005. This work takes as its starting point the observation that word order is sometimes correlated with the hierarchies as well, and works backwards from that to conclusions about phrase structure geometries. In this paper, I propose a particular implementation of this latter direction, and explore its consequences for our understanding of the nature of case assignment. If hierarchy effects are due to positional differences in phrase structures, then, I argue, the attested cross-linguistic differences fall most naturally out if the grammars of these languages countenance polyvalent case—that is, assignment of more than one case value to a single nominal phrase. -
Chapter 6 Mirativity and the Bulgarian Evidential System Elena Karagjosova Freie Universität Berlin
Chapter 6 Mirativity and the Bulgarian evidential system Elena Karagjosova Freie Universität Berlin This paper provides an account of the Bulgarian admirative construction andits place within the Bulgarian evidential system based on (i) new observations on the morphological, temporal, and evidential properties of the admirative, (ii) a criti- cal reexamination of existing approaches to the Bulgarian evidential system, and (iii) insights from a similar mirative construction in Spanish. I argue in particular that admirative sentences are assertions based on evidence of some sort (reporta- tive, inferential, or direct) which are contrasted against the set of beliefs held by the speaker up to the point of receiving the evidence; the speaker’s past beliefs entail a proposition that clashes with the assertion, triggering belief revision and resulting in a sense of surprise. I suggest an analysis of the admirative in terms of a mirative operator that captures the evidential, temporal, aspectual, and modal properties of the construction in a compositional fashion. The analysis suggests that although mirativity and evidentiality can be seen as separate semantic cate- gories, the Bulgarian admirative represents a cross-linguistically relevant case of a mirative extension of evidential verbal forms. Keywords: mirativity, evidentiality, fake past 1 Introduction The Bulgarian evidential system is an ongoing topic of discussion both withre- spect to its interpretation and its morphological buildup. In this paper, I focus on the currently poorly understood admirative construction. The analysis I present is based on largely unacknowledged observations and data involving the mor- phological structure, the syntactic environment, and the evidential meaning of the admirative. Elena Karagjosova. -
The Relative Order of Foci and Polarity Complementizers
1 2 3 4 The Relative Order of Foci and Polarity Complementizers: 5 1 6 A Slavic Perspective 7 8 9 Abstract 10 11 According to Rizzi & Bocci’s (2017) suggested hierarchy of the left 12 periphery, fronted foci (FOC) may never precede polarity 13 14 complementizers (POL); yet languages like Bulgarian and Macedonian, 15 where POL may also follow FOC, seem to provide a counterargument to 16 17 such generalization. On the basis of a cross-linguistic comparison of ten 18 Slavic languages, I argue that in the Slavic subgroup the possibility of 19 20 having a focus precede POL is dependent on the morphological properties 21 of the complementizer itself: in languages where the order FOC < POL 22 23 is acceptable, POL is a complex morpheme derived through the 24 incorporation of a lower functional head with a higher one. The order 25 26 FOC < POL is then derived by giving overt spell-out to the intermediate 27 copy of the polarity complementizer rather than to the highest one. 28 29 30 Keywords : Left Periphery, Fronted Foci, Polarity Questions, 31 Complementizers, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Word Order. 32 33 34 I. Introduction 35 36 37 In this article, I will be concerned with accounting for cross-linguistic variation in the 38 relative distribution of two types of left-peripheral elements. The first are polarity 39 40 complementizers (POL), namely complementizers whose function is that of introducing 41 embedded polarity questions; the second are fronted types of constituents in narrow focus. 42 43 I provide an example of a configuration containing both elements in (1), from Italian; in 44 (1), the polarity complementizer “se” (=if) is marked in bold, whereas the fronted focus -in 45 this case, a PP- is in capitals. -
Serial Verb Constructions Revisited: a Case Study from Koro
Serial Verb Constructions Revisited: A Case Study from Koro By Jessica Cleary-Kemp A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Associate Professor Lev D. Michael, Chair Assistant Professor Peter S. Jenks Professor William F. Hanks Summer 2015 © Copyright by Jessica Cleary-Kemp All Rights Reserved Abstract Serial Verb Constructions Revisited: A Case Study from Koro by Jessica Cleary-Kemp Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics University of California, Berkeley Associate Professor Lev D. Michael, Chair In this dissertation a methodology for identifying and analyzing serial verb constructions (SVCs) is developed, and its application is exemplified through an analysis of SVCs in Koro, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea. SVCs involve two main verbs that form a single predicate and share at least one of their arguments. In addition, they have shared values for tense, aspect, and mood, and they denote a single event. The unique syntactic and semantic properties of SVCs present a number of theoretical challenges, and thus they have invited great interest from syntacticians and typologists alike. But characterizing the nature of SVCs and making generalizations about the typology of serializing languages has proven difficult. There is still debate about both the surface properties of SVCs and their underlying syntactic structure. The current work addresses some of these issues by approaching serialization from two angles: the typological and the language-specific. On the typological front, it refines the definition of ‘SVC’ and develops a principled set of cross-linguistically applicable diagnostics. -
The Production of Lexical Tone in Croatian
The production of lexical tone in Croatian Inauguraldissertation zur Erlangung des Grades eines Doktors der Philosophie im Fachbereich Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaften der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität zu Frankfurt am Main vorgelegt von Jevgenij Zintchenko Jurlina aus Kiew 2018 (Einreichungsjahr) 2019 (Erscheinungsjahr) 1. Gutacher: Prof. Dr. Henning Reetz 2. Gutachter: Prof. Dr. Sven Grawunder Tag der mündlichen Prüfung: 01.11.2018 ABSTRACT Jevgenij Zintchenko Jurlina: The production of lexical tone in Croatian (Under the direction of Prof. Dr. Henning Reetz and Prof. Dr. Sven Grawunder) This dissertation is an investigation of pitch accent, or lexical tone, in standard Croatian. The first chapter presents an in-depth overview of the history of the Croatian language, its relationship to Serbo-Croatian, its dialect groups and pronunciation variants, and general phonology. The second chapter explains the difference between various types of prosodic prominence and describes systems of pitch accent in various languages from different parts of the world: Yucatec Maya, Lithuanian and Limburgian. Following is a detailed account of the history of tone in Serbo-Croatian and Croatian, the specifics of its tonal system, intonational phonology and finally, a review of the most prominent phonetic investigations of tone in that language. The focal point of this dissertation is a production experiment, in which ten native speakers of Croatian from the region of Slavonia were recorded. The material recorded included a diverse selection of monosyllabic, bisyllabic, trisyllabic and quadrisyllabic words, containing all four accents of standard Croatian: short falling, long falling, short rising and long rising. Each target word was spoken in initial, medial and final positions of natural Croatian sentences.