Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Gesture and Language (2001)
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TRANSITIVITY in FLATHEAD Sarah Thomason & Daniel Everett
317 318 TRANSITIVITY IN FLATHEAD ANTIPASSIVE suffix -( elm (usually called "middle" in the Salishalliiterature); transitives with the BACKGROUNDED AGENT suffix -( elm (often called "passive/indefinite agent" Sarah Thomason & Daniel Everett in the literature); DERIVED TRANSITIVES in m; TRANSITIVE CONTINUATIVES in -( e)m; University of Pittsburgh transitives detransitivized by lexical suffixes; and transitives detransitivized by the reflexive suffix -cut. These nine constructions do not, of course, exhaust the list of relevant patterns; our work is at a preliminary stage, and we have not yet explored ABSTRACT all the constructions that have some connection with transitivity. We omit a few Flathead, a Salishan language spoken in northwestern Montana, has a ver detransitivizing constructions, notably the reciprocal, because they behave basically bal system that seems at first glance to distinguish transitive constructions like reflexive forms with respect to transitivity. We do not consider unaccusatives. from intransitive ones in a quite straightforward way: transitive verbs have a We also omit discussion of the so-called "intransitive reflexives". A more significant transitive suffix and a characteristic set of subject and object markers, while omission is the lack of any specific consideration of interactions between control and intransitive verbs lack the transitive suffix and have a completely different set transitivity (see e.g. Thompson 1985); we have as yet too little information on control of subject markers. In addition, the two constructions differ systematically in features in Flathead to comment on them here. Another major transitivity-related topic their marking of adjunct (or argument) noun phrases. Initial appearances are that is largely omitted from our account is the patterning of the various constructions deceiving, however. -
Tungusic from the Perspective of Areal Linguistics : Focusing on the Bikin Dialect of Udihe
Title Tungusic from the Perspective of Areal Linguistics : Focusing on the Bikin Dialect of Udihe Author(s) 白, 尚燁 Citation 北海道大学. 博士(文学) 甲第12069号 Issue Date 2016-03-24 DOI 10.14943/doctoral.k12069 Doc URL http://hdl.handle.net/2115/61556 Type theses (doctoral) File Information Baek_Sangyub.pdf Instructions for use Hokkaido University Collection of Scholarly and Academic Papers : HUSCAP Tungusic from the Perspective of Areal Linguistics: Focusing on the Bikin Dialect of Udihe (地域言語学的観点から見たツングース諸語―ウデヘ語のビキン方言を中心に) By Sangyub BAEK A Thesis Submitted to Graduate School of Letters, Hokkaido University In Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor in the field of History and Area Studies Table of Contents List of Figures .................................................................................................................................... i List of Tables ................................................................................................................................... iii List of Maps ..................................................................................................................................... vi Preface ........................................................................................................................................... viii Acknowledgement ............................................................................................................................ ix List of Abbreviations ....................................................................................................................... -
When Dependent Case Is Not Enough
When dependent case is not enough András Bárány, [email protected] SOAS University of London Michelle Sheehan, [email protected] Anglia Ruskin University 9 May 2019, GLOW 42, University of Oslo Our claims • Even if dependent case exists, we need case-assignment via Agree • CPs can be case competitors, but do not get case-marking • Agreement-based case splits in Romance, Kashmiri and elsewhere suggests a closer link between φ-features and case than in dependent case theory • It is possible to adapt both Agree and dependent case to these patterns but we argue that Agree is often more parsimonious 1 The dependent case approach (1) Dependent case theory Morphologically marked cases (acc/erg/dat) result from a relationship between two DPs rather than from a relationship between a head and a DP. There are many different versions of this general approach, e.g. Anderson (1976), Yip, Maling & Jackendoff (1987), Marantz (1991), Bittner & Hale (1996), McFadden (2004), Baker & Vinokurova (2010), M. C. Baker (2015), Levin & Preminger (2015), Nash (2017). • M. C. Baker (2015) argues that dependent cases are determined at the phase level and as- signed at the transfer to spell-out bárány & sheehan — dep. case — GLOW 42 (2) Dependent case by c-command (M. C. Baker 2015: 48–49, our emphasis) a. If there are two distinct NPs in the same spell out domain such that NP1 c-commands NP2, then value the case feature of NP2 as accusative unless NP1 has already been marked for case. b. If there are two distinct NPs in the same spell out domain such that NP1 c-commands NP2, then value the case feature of NP1 as ergative unless NP2 has already been marked for case. -
Determining Language Contact Effects in Ancient Contact Situations Sarah
Determining language contact effects in ancient contact situations Sarah Thomason University of Michigan Proving the existence of ancient language contacts is easy; proving the existence of ancient contact-induced language change is much more difficult, by compari- son to analyses of modern contact situations. This paper surveys some ancient contacts and their effects on the languages. The main conclusion is that the historical methods used for analyzing better-documented contact situations can be applied to ancient contact situations as well. But the chances for success are likely to be more limited, because gaps in the available information may make it impossible to satisfy the prerequisites for proposing contact-induced changes. 1. Introduction. Language contact is almost as old as humankind. It has surely been a constant feature of human culture for as long as humans have spoken more than one language|which, if we assume a monogenetic origin for humans and therefore for human language, would presumably have been somewhere from several hundred to several thousand years after the beginning, depending on when the earliest speech community broke up into two or more subcommunities or separate communities. Evidence of language contact, however, is much more recent. To a certain extent we can infer the existence of language contacts from known population movements and cultural practices. So, for instance, the amount of linguistic diversity in New Guinea, with its thou- sand or so languages, must have taken many millennia to develop (even before Austronesian speakers arrived a few thousand years ago to settle around the island's coast), and there is no reason to suppose that the intensive language contact that characterizes the island is a modern phenomenon. -
Philosophy Newsletter Fall 2012.Indd
Michigan Philosophy News Fall 2012 for friends, alumni, alumnae of the Department of Philosophy, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor INSIDE THIS ISSUE • Graduate and Undergraduate Program News • Field Reports: PENGUIN, Science Fiction and Philoso- phy, Philosophy Movie Night, The Reference Book, and The Science of Ethics Project • Recent Graduates • Contributions Dear Friends of Michigan Philosophy, Loyal readers of the Michigan Philosophy News will recognize a new format this year. Instead of a single extended centerpiece in the form of a faculty article developing a research theme, we feature a number of shorter “fi eld reports,” meant to convey the range of departmental goings-on this year. This range includes (but is not limited to!) undergraduate course development, the co-curricular innovation of Philosophy Movie Night at the Michigan Theater, “The Science of Ethics” project, and PENGUIN, a graduate student initiative to teach philosophy in the Detroit public schools. Also in this year’s MPN, the Directors of Undergraduate and Graduate Studies report directly on their spheres. The only task this leaves the Department Chair is to deliver an overview of events and developments since the last MPN, and to express thanks to all of those who help to make philosophy at Michigan what it is. This I proceed to do. Faculty and Staff News Although we have no new full-time faculty to introduce, we have two “dry” appointments to announce, two visiting professors to welcome, and two faculty returning in newly elevated positions to celebrate. “Dry” appointments are faculty working full-time in other units, but ready and able to contribute to Departmental life, for instance by teaching cross-listed courses, advising graduate students, or initiating collaborative exchanges. -
Bilingualism and Contact-Induced Language Change Sarah Thomason
Bilingualism and contact-induced language change Sarah Thomason University of Michigan March 2005 This paper explores the relationship between bilingualism and contact-induced language change, focusing on the question of which contributions might be expected from children and which from adults. The issue is reflected in debates among historical linguists as to whether internally-motivated language change is initiated by children during first-language acquisition or by adults|or by both. In language contact studies, it is possible to identify changes, usually temporary ones, that are initiated by children, and it is also possible to identify changes that are initiated by adults. The conclusion, therefore, is that both adults and children are responsible for contact-induced changes, although perhaps not for the same kinds of changes: shift-induced interference, which is due to imperfect learning of a target language by members of a speech community, is likely to be exclusively an adult phenomenon, or at least not primarily initiated by young children during first-language acquisition. I will not address in detail the question of the role of adults vs. the role of children in the initiation and spread of linguistic changes more generally, but some implications of the results from contact-induced change will be discussed in the concluding section. After laying some preliminary groundwork ( 1), I will outline briefly the debate about x agents of change in historical linguistics and then consider innovations introduced by children and adults in contact situations in which both child learners and adults have full effective access to the source language(s) ( 2). -
Title the Kilen Language of Manchuria
The Kilen language of Manchuria: grammar of amoribund Title Tungusic language Author(s) Zhang, Paiyu.; 张派予. Citation Issue Date 2013 URL http://hdl.handle.net/10722/181880 The author retains all proprietary rights, (such as patent Rights rights) and the right to use in future works. ! ! ! THE KILEN LANGUAGE OF MANCHURIA: GRAMMAR OF A MORIBUND TUNGUSIC LANGUAGE ZHANG PAIYU Ph.D. THESIS UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG February 2013 Abstract of thesis entitled The Kilen Language of Manchuria: Grammar of a moribund Tungusic language Submitted by Zhang Paiyu For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Hong Kong in February 2013 This thesis is the first comprehensive reference grammar of Kilen, a lesser known and little studied language of the Tungusic Family. At present, Kilen is a moribund language with less than 10 bilingual speakers in the eastern part of Heilongjiang Province of P.R.China. Since the language does not have a writing system, the examples are provided in IPA transcription with morpheme tagging. This thesis is divided into eight chapters. Chapter 1 states the background information of Kilen language in terms of Ethnology, Migration and Language Contact. Beginning from Chapter 2, the language is described in the aspects of Phonology, Morphology and Syntax. This thesis is mainly concerned with morphosyntactic aspects of Kilen. Chapters 6-8 provide a portrait of Kilen syntactic organization. The sources for this description include the work of You Zhixian (1989), which documents oral literature originally recorded by You himself, a fluent Kilen native speaker; example sentences drawn from previous linguistic descriptions, mainly those of An (1985) and You & Fu (1987); author’s field records and personal consultation data recorded and transcribed by the author and Wu Mingxiang, one of the last fluent native speakers. -
The Concept of Intentional Action in the Grammar of Kathmandu Newari
THE CONCEPT OF INTENTIONAL ACTION IN THE GRAMMAR OF KATHMANDU NEWARI by DAVID J. HARGREAVES A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of Linguistics and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 1991 ii APPROVED: Dr. Scott DeLancey iii An Abstract of the Dissertation of David J. Hargreaves for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Linguistics to be taken August 1991 Title: THE CONCEPT OF INTENTIONAL ACTION IN THE GRAMMAR OF KATHMANDU NEWARI Approved: Dr. Scott DeLancey This study describes the relationship between the concept of intentional action and the grammatical organization of the clause in Kathmandu Newari, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken primarily in the Kathmandu valley of Nepal. In particular, the study focuses on the conceptual structure of "intentional action" along with the lexical, morphological, and syntactic reflexes of this notion in situated speech. The construal of intentional action consists of two distinct notions: one involving the concept of self-initiated force and the other involving mental representation or awareness. The distribution of finite inflectional forms for verbs results from the interaction of these two notions with a set of evidential/discourse principles which constrain the attribution of intentional action to certain discourse roles in situated interaction. iv VITA NAME OF AUTHOR: David J. Hargreaves PLACE OF BIRTH: Detroit, Michigan DATE OF BIRTH: March 10, 1955 GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE -
9 Argument Structure and Argument Structure Alternations Gillian Ramchand
9 Argument structure and argument structure alternations Gillian Ramchand 9.1 Introduction One of the major scientific results of Chomskian syntactic theory is the understanding that the symbolic representations of natural language are structured, by which I mean that symbols are organized in hierarchical constituent data structures, and are not simply linearly ordered strings or lists of memorized items. The semantic ‘arguments’ of predicates are expressed within natural language data structures, and therefore also form part of structured representations. This chapter is devoted to exam- ining the major theoretical results pertaining to the semantics of verbal predicate argument relations and their systematic patterning in lan- guage. However, we will see that even isolating the logical domain of inquiry will involve certain deep questions about the architecture of grammar, and the relationship between listedness and compositional semantics. Historically, the most important results in argument structure have come from those studying the properties of the Lexicon as a module of grammar, for a number of rather natural reasons as we will see. While this chapter will aim to give the reader a clear historical and ideological con- text for the subject matter and will document major influential strands of research, it will primarily concentrate on extracting the generalizations that I judge to be the lasting results of the past fifty years, and then secondarily, draw attention to the (still unresolved) architectural and theoretical issues that are specific to this domain. Section 9.2 gives the perspective on the issues from the vantage point of the Lexicon, i.e. the practical problem of deciding how much and what kind of information is necessary for the listing of verbal lexical entries. -
Word Order in American Danish Declaratives with a Non-Subject Initial Constituent
journal of language contact 11 (2018) 413-440 brill.com/jlc Word Order in American Danish Declaratives with a Non-Subject Initial Constituent Karoline Kühl University of Copenhagen [email protected] Jan Heegård Petersen University of Copenhagen [email protected] Abstract The paper investigates the placement of subject and finite verb in topicalized, i.e. non-subject initial declarative main clauses in North American Danish. European Danish adheres to the V2-rule and thus requires inversion, while North American Danish allows for non-inversion, i.e. [X]sv word order. Based on a sample of approx. 1700 tokens of topicalized declarative clauses produced by 64 speakers, we observe a general stability of V2 in North American Danish. In order to explain the instances of non-V2, we employ both linguistic and sociolinguistic factors. Keywords North American Danish – syntax – topicalization – V2 – non-inversion 1 Introduction The non-inversion of subject and verb in non-subject initial declarative main clauses (topicalized clauses) is a recognized feature in Germanic heritage languages in North America. This paper adds to the field of research a cor- pus-based study of this phenomenon in American Danish. Standard Danish, a typical V2 language, strictly adheres to the so-called V2 rule, whereby the finite verb is in second position and the preceding field is filled by exactly one © Karoline Kühl and Jan Heegård Petersen, 2018 | doi 10.1163/19552629-01103003 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the prevailing cc-by-nc license at the time of publication. Downloaded from Brill.com10/02/2021 01:10:58AM via free access <UN> 414 Kühl and Petersen constituent (xvs). -
Vowel Harmony in Two Even Dialects Dialects
400 220 Natalia Aralova Natalia Aralova Natalia Aralova Vowel harmony in two Even Vowel harmony in two Even dialects dialects Production and perception Production and perception This dissertation analyzes vowel systems in two dialects of Even, an endangered Northern Tungusic language spoken in Eastern Siberia. The data were collected during fieldwork in the Bystraia district of Central Kamchatka and in the village of Sebian-Küöl in Yakutia. The focus of the study is the Even system of vowel harmony, which in previous literature has been assumed to be robust. The central question concerns the number of vowel oppositions and the nature of the feature underlying the opposition between harmonic sets. The results of an acoustic study show a consistent pattern for only one acoustic parameter, namely F1, which can harmony in two Even dialects Vowel be phonologically interpreted as a feature [±height]. This acoustic study is supplemented by perception experiments. The results of the latter suggest that perceptually there is no harmonic opposition for high vowels, i.e., the harmonic pairs of high vowels have merged. Moreover, in the dialect of the Bystraia district certain consonants function as perceptual cues for the harmonic set of a word. In other words, the Bystraia Even harmony system, which was previously based on vowels, is being transformed into new oppositions among consonants. ISBN 978-94-6093-180-2 Vowel harmony in two Even dialects: Production and perception Published by LOT phone: +31 30 253 6111 Trans 10 3512 JK Utrecht e-mail: [email protected] The Netherlands http://www.lotschool.nl Cover illustration: Even reindeer herder Anatoly Afanasyevich Solodikov, Central Kamchatka. -
Ditransitive Constructions Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig (Germany) 23-25 November 2007
Conference on Ditransitive Constructions Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig (Germany) 23-25 November 2007 Abstracts On “Dimonotransitive” Structures in English Carmen Aguilera Carnerero University of Granada Ditransitive structures have been prototypically defined as those combinations of a ditransitive verb with an indirect object and a direct object. However, although in the prototypical ditransitive construction in English, both objects are present, there is often omission of one of the constituentes, usually the indirect object. The absence of the indirect object has been justified on the basis of the irrelevance of its specification or the possibility of recovering it from the context. The absence of the direct object, on the other hand, is not so common and only occur with a restricted number of verbs (e.g. pay, show or tell).This type of sentences have been called “dimonotransitives” by Nelson, Wallis and Aarts (2002) and the sole presence in the syntactic structure arises some interesting questions we want to clarify in this article, such as: (a) the degree of syntactic and semantic obligatoriness of indirect objects and certain ditransitive verbs (b) the syntactic behaviour of indirect objects in absence of the direct object, in other words, does the Oi take over some of the properties of typical direct objects as Huddleston and Pullum suggest? (c) The semantic and pragmatic interpretations of the missing element. To carry out our analysis, we will adopt a corpus –based approach and especifically we will use the International Corpus of English (ICE) for the most frequent ditransitive verbs (Mukherjee 2005) and the British National Corpus (BNC) for the not so frequent verbs.