On Core Case Marking Patterns in Two Tibeto‑Burman Languages of Nagaland
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Split-Ergativity in Mäori
SPLIT-ERGATIVITY IN MÄORI __________________________ A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Linguistics in the University of Canterbury by Anna Pucilowski ________________________ University of Canterbury 2006 Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………….................. 1 Abbreviations………………………………...………………………………….. 2 Chapter 1: Introduction..……………………………………………………. 3 1.1 Background………………………………………………………..... 5 1.2 Verbs in Mäori………………………………………………………. 6 1.2.1 Two argument verbs……………………………………… 6 1.2.2 Intransitive verbs…………………………………………. 7 1.3 Passive universals……………………………………………………. 9 Chapter 2: Mäori: accusative or ergative……………………………….... 11 2.1 Introduction…………………………………………………………... 11 2.2 Mäori as an accusative language…………………………………….. 14 2.2.1 Morphological “markedness”…………………………….. 14 2.2.2 Control……………………………………………………. 14 2.2.2.1 Restrictions on the controller……………………... 15 2.2.2.2 Restrictions on the controllee – ki te……………… 18 2.2.2.3 Restrictions on the controllee – hei control………. 20 2.2.2.4 Restrictions on the controllee – participle formation 22 2.2.2.5 Summary of control………………………………. 23 2.2.3 Raising……………………………………………………. 24 2.3 Mäori as an ergative language……………………………………….. 26 2.3.1 Frequency and “basicness”……………………………….. 28 2.3.2 Imperatives……………………………………………….. 28 2.3.3 Raising……………………………………………………. 29 2.3.4 ko-clefting………………………………………………… 29 2.3.5 Relative clauses…………………………………………... 31 2.3.6 The preposition i…………………………………………. 33 2.3.7 Pronominalisation and definiteness………………………. 34 2.4 Accounting for the –Cia suffix………………………………………. 36 2.5 Conclusion…………………………………………………………… 42 Chapter 3: The Split-Ergative Hypothesis………………………………. 43 3.1 Introduction………………………………………………………….. 43 3.2 Morphological split-ergativity……………………………………….. 46 3.2.1 The Transitivity Hypothesis (Hopper & Thompson 1980).. 47 3.2.2 The Transitivity Hypothesis and Mäori………………….. 48 3.2.2.1 Participants………………………………………. -
Quichua-Spanish Language Contact in Salcedo, Ecuador: Revisiting Media Lengua Syncretic Language Practices
QUICHUA-SPANISH LANGUAGE CONTACT IN SALCEDO, ECUADOR: REVISITING MEDIA LENGUA SYNCRETIC LANGUAGE PRACTICES BY MARCO SHAPPECK DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Linguistics in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Hans Henrich Hock, Director of Research Professor Rajeshwari Vijay Pandharipande, Chair Associate Professor Anna María Escobar Professor José Ignacio Hualde Abstract The purpose of the current thesis is to develop a better understanding of the interaction between Spanish and Quichua in the Salcedo region and provide more information for the processes that might have given rise to Media Lengua, a ‘mixed’ language comprised of a Quichua grammar and Spanish lexicon. Muysken attributes the formation of Media Lengua to relexification, ruling out any influence from other bilingual phenomena. I argue that the only characteristic that distinguishes Media Lengua from other language contact varieties in central Ecuador is the quantity of the overall Spanish borrowings and not the type of processes that might have been employed by Quichua speakers during the genesis of Media Lengua. The results from the Salcedo data that I have collected show how processes such as adlexification, code-mixing, and structural convergence produce Media Lengua-type sentences, evidence that supports an alternative analysis to Muysken’s relexification hypothesis. Overall, this dissertation is developed around four main objectives: (1) to describe the variation of Spanish loanwords within a bilingual community in Salcedo; (2) to analyze some of the prominent and recent structural changes in Quichua and Spanish; (3) to determine whether Spanish loanword use can be explained by the relationship consultants have with particular social categories; and (4) to analyze the consultants’ language ideologies toward syncretic uses of Spanish and Quichua. -
Subject and Ergativity in Middle Indo-Aryan
Subject and Ergativity in Middle Indo-Aryan Alessandra Roberta Caviglia University of Pavia, Italy 1. Introduction In literature, a significant attention has been devoted to the problem of subject in Indo-Aryan (henceforth IA) languages (Anderson 1976, Verma 1976, Hock 1986, Peterson 1998, Stroński 2011, Bickel & Yādava 2000). However, despite the numerous studies, Middle Indo-Aryan (henceforth MIA) languages, which represent the crucial stage in the rise of ergativity, have not yet been analyzed in all their complexity. In my paper I will present the data from a MIA language, Jain Māhārāṣṭṛī (henceforth JM). JM is a Middle Indo-Aryan language and the main language of the non-canonical literature of the Śvetambara group of Jainism. The data presented here are based on nine tales written by Devendra in the 11th century AD as a commentary of the Uttarajjhāyā, which is one of the canonical books of Jain literature. The original manuscript is in the British Library and was edited and published by Jacobi in 1886. Table 1: Chronological progression of Indo-Aryan (IA) languages Old Indo-Aryan (OIA) Vedic (until 600BC) Classical Sanskrit (600BC-200 AD) Middle Indo-Aryan (MIA): Pāḷi and Prakrits (200 BC – 1000AD) New Indo-Aryan (NIA): Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati… (1000 AD – present) Since Dixon (1979), the symbols A, S and O have been used to indicate the subject of a transitive clause (A), the subject of an intransitive clause (S), and the object of 46 LSO Working Papers in Linguistics 11: 46-60. Proceedings of WIGL 2014 Subject and Ergativity in MIA a transitive clause (O). -
Languages of the Middle Andes in Areal-Typological Perspective: Emphasis on Quechuan and Aymaran
Languages of the Middle Andes in areal-typological perspective: Emphasis on Quechuan and Aymaran Willem F.H. Adelaar 1. Introduction1 Among the indigenous languages of the Andean region of Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, northern Chile and northern Argentina, Quechuan and Aymaran have traditionally occupied a dominant position. Both Quechuan and Aymaran are language families of several million speakers each. Quechuan consists of a conglomerate of geo- graphically defined varieties, traditionally referred to as Quechua “dialects”, not- withstanding the fact that mutual intelligibility is often lacking. Present-day Ayma- ran consists of two distinct languages that are not normally referred to as “dialects”. The absence of a demonstrable genetic relationship between the Quechuan and Aymaran language families, accompanied by a lack of recognizable external gen- etic connections, suggests a long period of independent development, which may hark back to a period of incipient subsistence agriculture roughly dated between 8000 and 5000 BP (Torero 2002: 123–124), long before the Andean civilization at- tained its highest stages of complexity. Quechuan and Aymaran feature a great amount of detailed structural, phono- logical and lexical similarities and thus exemplify one of the most intriguing and intense cases of language contact to be found in the entire world. Often treated as a product of long-term convergence, the similarities between the Quechuan and Ay- maran families can best be understood as the result of an intense period of social and cultural intertwinement, which must have pre-dated the stage of the proto-lan- guages and was in turn followed by a protracted process of incidental and locally confined diffusion. -
Subjects, Objects and Relativization in Japhug Guillaume Jacques
Subjects, objects and relativization in Japhug Guillaume Jacques To cite this version: Guillaume Jacques. Subjects, objects and relativization in Japhug. Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 2016, 44 (1), pp.1-28. 10.1353/jcl.2016.0005. halshs-01287472 HAL Id: halshs-01287472 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01287472 Submitted on 13 Mar 2016 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. Subjects, objects and relativization in Japhug1 Guillaume Jacques March 13, 2016 Published version: Jacques, Guillaume. 2016. Subjects, objects and relativization in Japhug. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 44:1–28. Abstract: Japhug is a language with ergative alignment on NP argu- ments and direct-inverse verbal indexation. However, this article, through a detailed description of relativizing constructions in Japhug, shows the existence of accusative pivots and proposes an unambiguous definition of ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ in this language. Keywords:Japhug, Relativization, Subject, Object, Syntactic pivot 提要:茶堡话有作格格局的格标记,同时在动词上有正向/反向类型的 人称范畴。虽然在动词和名词形态上没有主格/宾格格局,但通过对关系句 的仔细考察可以证明茶堡话有非常清楚主格/宾格格局的句法枢纽,在这些 枢纽的基础上可以提出对“主语”和“宾语”明确不含糊的定义。 关键词:茶堡话,关系句,主语,宾语,句法枢纽 1 Introduction The present article deals with relative clauses in Japhug, and how these constructions provide evidence for the existence of syntactic pivots in this language. -
Overview of Ergativity
Chapter 2 Ergativity Chapter 2 Overview of Ergativity Ergativity is a term that refers to a certain pattern that some languages show in treating arguments of a verb. Generally, arguments are classified into three types: the subject of a transitive verb, the object of a transitive verb and the subject of an intransitive verb. Adopting Dixon’s (1979) terminology, we will refer to them as A, O, and S, respectively. If a language treats A and S in the same way, distinguishing O, the pattern is called accusative. In contrast, in an ergative pattern, S and O are treated as equivalent, while A is treated differently. The notion of ergativity is often used with regard to case marking. In an ergative case system, S and O appear in the same case, absolutive and A appears in a special case, ergative. An ergative pattern of case marking is referred to as morphological ergativity. Ergativity is not merely a morphological phenomenon. Some languages treat S and O as equivalents in some syntactic operations such as coordination and relativisation. An ergative pattern found at the level of syntax is referred to as syntactic ergativity. It should be noted that morphological ergativity does not entail syntactic ergativity. A language may have an ergative case marking without showing syntactic ergativity. However, a language that shows syntactic ergativity necessarily has an ergative case system. Syntactic ergativity is incompatible with accusative case marking. In other 13 Chapter 2 Ergativity words, there seems to be some correlation between morphological ergativity and syntactic ergativity. This leads to a hypothesis that ergative case marking is associated with syntactic configuration. -
Polysynthetic Structures of Lowland Amazonia
OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – REVISES, Sat Aug 19 2017, NEWGEN Chapter 15 Polysynthetic Structures of Lowland Amazonia Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald 15.1 Lowland Amazonian languages: a backdrop The Amazon basin is an area of high linguistic diversity (rivalled only by the island of New Guinea). It comprises around 350 languages grouped into over fifteen language families, in addition to a number of isolates. The six major linguistic families of the Amazon basin are as follows. • The Arawak language family is the largest in South America in terms of its geographical spread, with over forty extant languages between the Caribbean and Argentina. Well- established subgroups include Campa in Peru and a few small North Arawak groupings in Brazil and Venezuela. Arawak languages are spoken in at least ten locations north of the River Amazon, and in at least ten south of it. European languages contain a number of loans from Arawak languages, among them hammock and tobacco. • The Tupí language family consists of about seventy languages; nine of its ten branches are spoken exclusively in Amazonia. The largest branch, Tupí- Guaraní, extends beyond the Amazonian Basin into Bolivia and Paraguay. Loans from Tupí-Guaraní languages include jaguar and jacaranda. • Carib languages number about twenty five, and are spoken in various locations in Brazil and Venezuela in northern Amazonia, and in the region of the Upper Xingu and adjacent areas of Mato Grosso in Brazil south of the River Amazon. The place name ‘Caribbean’ and the noun cannibal (a version of the ethnonym ‘Carib’) are a legacy from Carib languages. • Panoan languages number about thirty, and are spoken on the eastern side of the Andes in Peru and adjacent areas of Brazil. -
Studies on Sentence Production and Comprehension in Tagalog and German
PDF hosted at the Radboud Repository of the Radboud University Nijmegen The following full text is a publisher's version. For additional information about this publication click this link. http://hdl.handle.net/2066/176833 Please be advised that this information was generated on 2019-01-10 and may be subject to change. The role of voice and word order in incremental sentence processing Studies on sentence production and comprehension in Tagalog and German Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen op gezag van de rector magnificus prof. dr. J. H. J. M. Krieken, volgens besluit van het college van decanen in het openbaar te verdedigen op dinsdag 10 october 2017 om 16.30 uur precies door Sebastian Sauppe geboren op 23 maart 1987 te Borna (Duitsland) Promotoren Prof. dr. Stephen C. Levinson Prof. dr. Robert D. Van Valin, Jr (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Duitsland & University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Verenigde Staten) Copromotor Dr. Elisabeth Norcliffe (Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen) Manuscriptcommissie Prof. dr. Antje S. Meyer Prof. dr. Nikolaus P. Himmelmann (Universität zu Köln, Duitsland) Prof. dr. T. Florian Jaeger (University of Rochester, Verenigde Staten) Copyright: Sebastian Sauppe, 2017. All rights reserved. Cover graphic generated using http://qrohlf.com/trianglify/ Printed and bound by Ipskamp Printing, Enschede ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A great number of people helped me the one way or the other during my time as a PhD student. Even if I don’t mention all of them here to keep it short, they can be assured that I am grateful to all of them. -
Ergativity: Argument Structure and Grammatical
ERGATIVIT Y ARGUMENT STRUCTURE AND GRAMMATICAL RELATIONS a dissertation submitted to the department of linguistics and the committee on graduate studies of stanford university in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of philosophy Christopher D Manning December c Copyright by Christopher D Manning All Rights Reserved ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it is fully adequate in scop e and in quality as a dissertation for the degree of Do ctor of Philosophy Joan Bresnan Principal Adviser I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it is fully adequate in scop e and in quality as a dissertation for the degree of Do ctor of Philosophy Ivan A Sag I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it is fully adequate in scop e and in quality as a dissertation for the degree of Do ctor of Philosophy Peter Sells I certify that I have read this dissertation and that in my opinion it is fully adequate in scop e and in quality as a dissertation for the degree of Do ctor of Philosophy Mary Dalrymple Approved for the University Committee on Graduate Studies iii Abstract This dissertation considers the prop er treatment of syntactic ergativity arguing for a framework that decouples prominence at the levels of grammatical relations and argument structure The result is two notions of sub ject grammatical sub ject and argument structure sub ject as in Schachter and Guilfoyle Hung and Travis and a uniform analysis of syntactically ergative and Philippine -
Role and Reference Grammar
Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session Volume 37 Article 5 1993 Role and reference grammar Robert D. Van Valin Jr. Follow this and additional works at: https://commons.und.edu/sil-work-papers Part of the Linguistics Commons Recommended Citation Van Valin, Robert D. Jr. (1993) "Role and reference grammar," Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session: Vol. 37 , Article 5. DOI: 10.31356/silwp.vol37.05 Available at: https://commons.und.edu/sil-work-papers/vol37/iss1/5 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by UND Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session by an authorized editor of UND Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ROLE AND REFERENCE GRAMMAR Robert D. Van Valin, Jr. State University of New York at Buffalo 1 Introduction 2 Historical background 3 Central concepts of the theory 3. I Clause structure 3.2 Semantic structure 3 .3 FOCUS structure 3. 4 Grammatical relations and linking 4 Some implications of RRG 1 Introduction* Role and Reference Grammar [RRG] (Van Valin 1993a) may be termed a "structural-functionalist theory of grammar"; this locates it on a range of perspectives from extreme formalist at one end to radical functionalist at the other. RRG falls between these two extremes, differing markedly from each. In contrast to the extreme formalist view, RRG views language as a system of communicative social action, and consequently, analyzing the communicative functions of morphosyntactic structures has a vital role in grammatical description and theory from this perspective. -
The Languages of the Andes - Willem F
Cambridge University Press 052136275X - The Languages of the Andes - Willem F. H. Adelaar Frontmatter More information THE LANGUAGES OF THE ANDES The Andean and Pacific regions of South America are home to a remark- able variety of languages and language families, with a range of typologi- cal differences. This linguistic diversity results from a complex historical background, comprising periods of greater communication between dif- ferent peoples and languages, and periods of fragmentation and individual development. The Languages of the Andes is the first book in English to document in a single volume the indigenous languages spoken and for- merly spoken in this linguistically rich region, as well as in adjacent areas. Grouping the languages into different cultural spheres, it describes their characteristics in terms of language typology, language contact, and the social perspectives of present-day languages. The authors provide both historical and contemporary information, and illustrate the languages with detailed grammatical sketches. Written in a clear and accessible style, this book will be a valuable source for students and scholars of linguistics and anthropology alike. . is Professor of Amerindian Languages and Cul- tures at Leiden University. He has travelled widely in South America and has conducted fieldwork in Peru on different varieties of Quechua and minor languages of the area. He has also worked on the historical- comparative reconstruction of South American languages, and since 1991 has been involved in international activities addressing the issue of lan- guage endangerment. His previously published books include Tarma Quechua (1977) and Het Boek van Huarochir´ı (1988). . is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Nijmegen. -
The Role of Pronominal Suffixes in Punjabi
M. Butt: Pronominal Suffixes in Punjabi 1 The Role of Pronominal Suffixes in Punjabi Miriam Butt Universit¨at Konstanz [email protected] DGfS Workshop Evolution syntaktischer Relationen Mainz, February 25–27, 2004 1 Preliminaries on Syntactic Relations The theoretical assumptions of this talk are grounded in Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG). LFG assumes that grammatical functions (GF) are part of the basic inventory of human languages: subject, object, objectθ, obliqueθ, adjunct. As such, one cannot really speak of the “evolution of syntactic relations” in an LFG setting. However, discourse functions (DF) interact with grammatical relations and languages may place more or less importance on GFs vs. DFs (pick one or the other as syntactic “pivot”). My belief: this makes it look like some languages may not have grammatical functions in place, when in fact they do (if one looks closely). Discourse Functions in LFG • One school of thought integrates discourse functions such as topic and focus with the grammatical functions at the same level of representation (e.g., Bresnan 2001). • Another school of thought seeks to represent them at an independent level (e.g., King 1997), modeling the interactions in a more complex way. This talk follows the latter position (King 1997) and furthermore assumes that discourse considerations have a profound effect on the morphosyntax of a language. Though gram- matical relations are not taken to evolve over time, valency and discourse clearly interact in a manner that as yet remains to be properly understood. Topic of this talk: Pronominal incorporation in interaction with valency and discourse. 2 Language Background Punjabi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken in South Asia.