Linguistische Arbeiten

Based on the quantitative analysis of a large corpus of Old and Middle High German prose texts, this volume provides a first extensive overview on the syntactic properties of coordination structures featuring the coordinators inti/und and joh in Old and Middle High German and discusses potential analyses in a generative framework. After introducing the main properties of coordination structures in Modern Standard German in Chapters 1 and 2, the results of the corpus study are presented in Chapters 3-6. Chapter 3 focuses on the coordinators inti/und and joh, showing that coordination structures with both coordinators already exhibit the same characteristic types of ellipsis as well as the same parallelism of the conjuncts as their Modern Standard German counterparts. Chapters 4-6 each discuss one major aspect of diachronic change: verbal agreement with conjoined subject-NPs (Chapter 4), the conditions regarding the omission of referential subject-pronouns in clausal or verbal coordination structures (Chapter 5) and so-called ‘inversion after und’ (Chapter 6). The volume thus provides a deeper understanding of the syntax of coordination structures in both a synchronic and diachronic perspective for researchers and students.

Bavarian syntax is widely known for its productive „Doubly-Filled COMP“ (DFC) property and for the rare phenomenon of inflecting complementizers. It is less widely known that DFC also extends to declaratives. Topicalization out of a preposed CP can leave a gap, with various consequences. DFC is in addition not available as unconditionally as previously thought. Short wh-words seem to blur the traditional division between heads (C) and phrases (wh-XP). As for the inner clausal syntax, Bavarian shows hierarchically organized discourse particles among which the clitic version ‘n of the particle denn plays a distinct role. Various tests as well as empirical investigations suggests that ‘n has lost its semantic residues and has turned into a wh-agreement marker.

The studies presented in this book are relevant for anyone interested in German morpho-syntax and in syntactic theory, linguistic micro-variation, comparative Germanic and historical linguistics. It touches on various questions concerning the licensing of empty categories, the clausal architecture, word order and the consequences of grammaticalization for the synchronic appearance of the language. As such, the book is relevant for students and researchers of syntactic theory, variation, German(ic) syntax, German(ic) dialectology, comparative linguistics and the development of language.

This monograph presents the first in-depth empirical and theoretical study of determiner sharing in German, addressing both its language-specific properties and its comparative syntax. Determiner sharing poses an interesting problem for syntactic theory as it seemingly relies on a parasitic relationship with another form of ellipsis, such as gapping.

The first part provides an empirical basis by presenting three acceptability judgment studies for German. The results reveal the novel generalization that determiner sharing is not uniquely dependent on gapping, but can also occur in stripping contexts.

The analysis that is developed in the second part shows that the apparent parasitism of determiner sharing can be derived by combining two independently available processes, namely a type of ellipsis like gapping, and a type of movement like split topicalization. The analysis thus avoids any construction-specific additions to the syntactic framework.

The findings constitute an argument for approaches to ellipsis that posit an obligatory movement step and thereby contribute to an ongoing debate in the field.

This volume brings together cutting-edge research on the semantic properties of derived words and the processes by which these words are derived. To this day, many of these processes remain under-researched and the nature of meaning in derivational morphology remains ill-understood. All eight articles have an empirical focus and rely on carefully collected sets of data. At the same time, the contributions represent a broad variety of approaches. Several contributions deal with specific problems of the pairing of form and meaning, such as the rivalry between nominalizing suffixes or the semantic categories encoded by conversion pairs. Other articles tackle the more general question of how meaning is organized, e.g. whether there is evidence for the paradigmatic organization of derived words or the reality of the inflection-derivation dichotomy. The contributions feature innovative methodologies, such as representing lexical meaning as word distribution or predicting semantic properties by means of analogical algorithms. This volume offers new and highly interesting insights into how complex words mean, and offers directions for future research in an oft-neglected field.

Effects of morphological structure on phonetic detail present us with two challenges. The empirical challenge is that some predictors have produced inconsistent effects. The theoretical challenge is that it is unclear where morpho-phonetic effects originate from. Do speakers decompose words into morphemes? Or can such effects also originate from non-decompositional structure?

This book investigates the durational properties of English derived words in four large-scale corpus studies. In the decompositional perspective, durations are modeled as a function of frequency and segmentability, prosodic structure, and affix informativeness. In the non-decompositional perspective, durations are modeled with predictors derived from linear discriminative learning networks.

Results show that the decompositional predictors are far less reliable than previously thought. Meanwhile, some non-decompositional predictors model durations successfully. Discriminative learning is shown to be a promising alternative for modeling speech production. However, the book also demonstrates that many investigated predictors are conceptually interrelated. It ultimately cautions against taking the metaphors we use to describe these predictors as final explanations.

Prosody as a system of suprasegmental linguistic information such as rhythm and intonation is a prime candidate for looking at the relation between language and music in a principled way. This claim is based on several aspects:

First, prosody is concerned with acoustic correlates of language and music that are directly comparable with each other by their physical properties such as duration and pitch.

Second, prosodic accounts suggest a hierarchical organization of prosodic units that not only resembles a syntactic hierarchy, but is viewed as (part of) an interface to syntax.

Third, prosody provides a very promising ground for evolutionary accounts of language and music.

Fourth, bilateral transfer effects between language and music are best illustrated on the level of prosody.

Highlighting the first two aspects, this book shows that it is a fruitful endeavor to use prosody for a principled comparison of language and music. In its broader sense, prosody as sound structure of communicative systems may be considered a »meta«-language that formalizes the way of "how music speaks to language and vice versa". Prosody is firmly established within linguistic theory, but is also applied in the musical domain. Therefore, prosody is not just a field of inquiry that shares elements or features between music and language, but can additionally provide a common conceptual ground.

This book makes a theoretical contribution to research on the dynamics and processes of structural language contact and language change resulting from contact. It also provides insights into the syntax of Cimbrian, one of the oldest German-based dialects outside the German Sprachraum, and aims to provide a model for establishing a field of Germanist language contact research.

Nominalised Spanish infinitives are subject to a multitude of syntactic-semantic limitations that have only been studied fragmentarily so far. Based on a classification of form types, this study examines nominalised infinitives in terms of argument realisation, semantic interpretations and their compatibility with verbs from different verb classes. The empirical basis is formed by acceptability judgments collected in a controlled atmosphere.

Much of the literature on modality focuses, at least implicitly, on the occurrence of single modal auxiliaries. However, cross-linguistically, modal auxiliaries can co-occur with one another, but under interesting restrictions. This monograph examines layered modal constructions and the semantic restrictions under which they combine.

The main puzzle addressed in the book is the question of ordering restrictions among modal auxiliaries and whether these have any semantic consequences, and finally, what the conceptual rationale is behind these restrictions. Based on the data from Croatian, the central proposal is that modal restrictions depend heavily on both modal force and flavour, and combine according to a hierarchy that can possibly be extended cross-linguistically since it rests on the basis of the conceptual and logical reality of human language.

The book also offers an in-depth overview of the literature on layered modal constructions as well as a valuable and extensive set of analyzed data which will be of great interest for researchers interested in verbal systems, modality, and Slavic languages.

This study provides a systematic overview of articles and article systems in the world’s languages using a sample of 104 languages. Articles can be classified into 10 types according to their referential functions: definite, anaphoric, weak definite, recognitional, indefinite, presentational, exclusive-specific, nonspecific, inclusive-specific, and referential articles. All 10 types are described in detail with examples from various languages of the world. The book also addresses crosslinguistic trends concerning the distribution and the development of different article types, and it proposes a typology of article systems. The aim of this study is to provide a general crosslinguistic overview concerning the attested properties and distributions of articles. It is geared towards readers with interests in language typology and the nominal domain, and it can serve as a point of reference for language-specific studies of articles or determiners.

Recent research has proven the traditional idea that written language is directly derived from spoken language problematic, postulating in turn a model of intersection, in which spoken and written language are the modalities of an overarching linguistic system. This edited volume enquires into the new insights that can be gained from this kind of perspective.

This monograph provides the first cross-linguistic study of repair strategies in verbal fronting, verb doubling and do-support, addressing both typological properties and theoretical aspects.

First, it brings together data hitherto scattered across the empirical and theoretical literature and adds newly collected data from two African languages. For each of the 47 languages, the properties of verbal fronting are documented in detail. Based on this sample, the empirical part establishes two novel typological generalizations regarding the interaction between the size of the fronted category and the type of repair strategy used. The first of these identifies a systematic typological gap: No language that allows both verb and verb phrase fronting has do-support with the former and verb doubling with the latter. In the theoretical part, it is shown that previous theories of verb doubling/do-support are unable to account for both generalizations. A new approach within the Copy Theory of the Minimalist Framework is developed, that rests on the interaction of head movement, copy deletion, and the properties of different movement types.

The book thus provides the first comprehensive empirical and theoretical overview of repair patterns in verbal fronting.

What is the role of prosody in the generation of sentence structure?
A standard notion holds that prosody results from mapping a hierarchical syntactic structure onto a linear sequence of words. A radically different view conceives of certain intonational features as integral components of the syntactic structure. Yet another conception maintains that prosody and syntax are parallel systems that mutually constrain each other to yield surface sentential form.
The different viewpoints reflect the various functions prosody may have: On the one hand, prosody is a signal to syntax, marking e.g. constituent boundaries. On the other hand, prosodic or intonational features convey meaning; the concept “intonational morpheme” (as e.g. an exponent of information structural notions like topic or focus) puts prosody and intonation squarely into the syntactic representation.

The proposals collected in this book tackle the intricate relationship of syntax and prosody in the encoding of sentences. The contributions build their cases on the basis of solid empirical evidence, adducing data from experiments or from the careful analysis of natural speech. The volume thus represents a state of the art survey of research on the syntax-phonology interface.

Differential argument marking has been a hot topic in linguistics for several decades, both because it is cross-linguistically widespread and because it raises essential questions at multiple levels of grammar, including the relationship between abstract processes and overt morphological marking, between case and agreement, and between syntax and information structure.

This volume provides an introduction into the current state of the art of research on differential case marking and chapters by leading linguists addressing theoretical questions in a wide range of typologically and geographically diverse languages from the Indo-European, Sinitic, Turkic, and Uralic families. The chapters engage with current theoretical issues in the morphology, syntax, semantics, and processing of differential argument marking. A central issue addressed by all the authors is the adequacy of various theoretical approaches in modelling (different varieties of) differential case marking, such as those determined by topicality, those driven by cumulative factors, and those that involve double marking.

The volume will be of interest to students and researchers working on cross-linguistic variation in differential marking and its theoretical modelling.

According to well-established views, language has several subsystems where each subsystem (e.g. syntax, morphology, phonology) operates on the basis of hierarchically organised units. When it comes to the graphematic structure of words, however, the received view appears to be that linear structure is all that matters. Contrary to this view, a sub-field of writing systems research emerges that can be called non-linear or supra-segmental graphematics. Drawing on parallels with supra-segmental phonology, supra-segmental graphematics claims the existence and relevance of cross-linguistically available building blocks, such as the syllable and the foot, in alphabetical writing systems, such as the writing systems of German and English.

This book explores the graphematic hierarchy with a special focus on the unit foot. Structural, experimental and databased evidence is presented in favour of this approach. In addition, analyses within the optimality theory framework are offered.

This work shows that the supra-segmental graphematic approaches are superior to linear ones with respect to explanatory strength and even preciseness of the description. It is thus interesting for academics concerned with writing systems and orthography teaching.

Based on corpus investigations of all historical stages of the German language and new dialect surveys, this volume paints a broad picture of the development and variation of comparative constructions. It reveals a phenomenon of change in the comparative cycle, which is explored between languages and with reference to the theory of language change. Diachronic and dialectical data also cast new light on central syntactic questions.

One of the basic grammatical categories in linguistics is the phonological word. But how are words made up in terms of their sounds? And how is the information on the sound structure of words used in the processing of words? The multidimensionality of the phonological word relates it to semantics, morphology, phonology and syntax. It is nevertheless a category that has only been an object of serious study since the prosodic turn in phonology and thus cannot be considered an established category of grammatical description. This volume brings together scholars interested in the complex relations of the phonological word, applying different empirical approaches.

In asking a question, does the pitch rise at the end of the sentence? Question intonation is more complex than this example might suggest. Alongside a detailed discussion of the significance of intonation in questions, this study presents the results of two production and three perception based experiments. It concludes that intonation serves more to signal the speaker’s questioning attitude than as a binary grammatical function.

Die Verarbeitung morphologischer Informationen wird im Deutschen ausdrucksseitig durch vielfache graphematische und phonologische Mittel unterstützt. Sie dienen nicht nur zur Markierung der morphologischen Grenzen, sondern auch dazu, den "Körper" der Morpheme in Abhängigkeit von ihrer Funktion formal zu differenzieren. Die Beiträge in diesem Sammelband befassen sich unter Anwendung psycholinguistischer, experimenteller und korpuslinguistischer Methoden mit folgenden Fragen: Welche Strategien im Deutschen und Englischen unterstützen die Dekodierbarkeit morphologischer Strukturen? Mit welchen Methoden kann die Sichtbarkeit und Hörbarkeit morphologischer Strukturen ermittelt werden? Welchen sprachdidaktischen/sprachvermittlerischen Vorteil haben solche die Dekodierung unterstützenden Strategien? Können in anderen Sprachen ähnliche oder andere Mittel beobachtet werden? Der Sammelband ist daher wichtig für alle, die sich mit der Ermittlung ausdrucksseitiger Dekodiermittel und ihrer Anwendung in sprachdidaktischen und sprachtypologischen Arbeitsfeldern befassen.

Particles have for the longest time been ignored by linguistic research. School-type grammars ignored them since they did not fit into pre-conceived notions of categories, and since they did not seem to enter into grammatical relations commonly discussed in the genre.

Only in the last century did some publications discuss particles – and even then only from the perspective of their discourse and pragmatic functions, i.e. their dependance on certain previous contexts, and concluded that the function of particles for the grammar of sentences and their interpretation remains obscure.

The current volume presents 11 new articles that take a fresh look at particles: As it turns out, particles inform many aspects of syntax and semantics, too – both diachronically and synchronically: Particles are shown to have fascinating syntactic properties with respect to projection, locality, movement and scope. Their interpretative contributions can be studied with the rigorous methods of formal semantics. Cross-linguistic and diachronic investigations shed new light on the genesis and development of these intriguing – and under-estimated – kinds of lexical elements.

Traditionally, anaphor resolution focused on structural cues of the antecedent. Recently, the interaction between discourse factors and information structure affecting antecedent salience has been more thoroughly explored. This volume depicts selected peer-reviewed research papers that tackle issues in anaphor resolution from theoretical, empirical and experimental perspectives. These collected articles present a wide spectrum of cross-linguistic data (Dutch, German, Spanish, Turkish, Yurakaré) and also offer new results from L1 and L2 acquisition studies. Data interpretation span from typological to psycholinguistic viewpoints and are related to recent developments in linguistic theory. One data analysis puts the issue of anaphor resolution in a historical context. The experimental findings are complemented by reviews of the current literature on the role of discourse units.
This volume gives a comprehensive overview of the state of discussion how the interaction between information structure and contextual discourse affects salience. That's why it will be welcomed by all linguists and psycholinguists who are theoretically and / or experimentally investigating several aspects of anaphor resolution.

In the realm of verbal categories, situational arguments are long-established components of lexical semantic representation. The essays in this volume use a broad range of materials to discuss the extent to which it is also possible to justify the notion of situational arguments in the realm of nominal categories. A focus is placed on deverbal nouns and participles in adjective-type distributions.

This monograph explores the different types of clausal relations in the world’s languages. In the recent literature, there have been claims that the strict dichotomy of subordination and coordination cannot be maintained since some constructions seem to be in between these two categories. This study investigates these constructions in detail.

The first part is concerned with clause chaining constructions, while the second is concerned with different cases of asymmetric coordination in English. In both parts, it is shown that the different tests to distinguish clausal relations indeed yield different results for the specific constructions. This poses a severe challenge for the established theories of clausal relations. However, as it is argued, recent analyses of coordination provide for the possibility to map a subordinate structure onto a coordinate one by means of regular transformational rules. It is shown that a single movement step derives all the peculiar properties of the phenomena in question.

This book thus provides the first comprehensive solution for a long-standing problem in theoretical syntax.

This study investigates whether it is possible to use multiple question elements in a single interrogative sentence in French and Italian (as in the English, Who ate what?). In both languages, limitations can be demonstrated in formulating sentences with multiple question elements. These limitations are theoretically examined in the context of formal semantic and syntactic theories of interrogative sentences.

A dish may be delicious, a painting beautiful, a piece of information justified. Whether the attributed properties "really" hold, seems to depend on somebody like a speaker or a group of people that share standards and background. Relativists and contextualists differ in where they locate the dependency theoretically. This book collects papers that corroborate the contextualist view that the dependency is part of the language.

Echo questions differ formally from interrogative sentences, yet they consistently have a questioning character. What is the source of this questioning character? Is the echo question an interrogative sentence, a unique sentence form, or a special kind of illocution? This study offers a survey of the features and analysis of echo questions, and classifies them as focus-generated questions with a pragmatically enhanced reproductive element.

Parenthesis has recently seen a considerable surge in interest. This volume presents the – often contrasting – theoretical positions on parenthetical verbs and examines them from different analytical perspectives. It covers parenthetical verbs in English as well as in several other languages. Methodologically, the volume is marked by its empirical orientation: Most contributions are based on data from experiments or corpora.

Medieval French, usually analyzed as a null subject language, differs considerably from modern Romance null subject languages such as Spanish in the availability of non-expressed subject pronouns; specifically, it shows characteristics reminiscent of non-null, rather than null subject languages, such as the expression of expletive subject pronouns. The central goal of this book is to put forward an account of these differences. On the basis of the analysis of an extensive, newly established data corpus, the development of the expression of both expletive and referential subject pronouns until the 17th c. is determined. Following a thorough discussion of previous approaches, an alternative approach is presented which builds on the analysis of Medieval French as a non-null subject language. The non-expression of subject pronouns, licit in specific contexts in non-null subject languages, is shown to be restricted to configurations generally involving left-peripheral focalization. These configurations – and, concomitantly, non-expressed subject pronouns – are finally argued to be eventually lost for good in the wake of the initial observation by 17th c. writers of pertinent instructions campaigned for in highly influential works of language use.

This book explores nominal dislocations in simultaneous bilingual French and German language acquisition in early childhood. The study shows that this process involves a grammatical area that is not vulnerable to language influence. In addition, empirical analyses provide evidence that postverbal, non-resumptive subjects are dissociated elements in French as spoken by children.

This book presents an empirical study of syllable structure and phonotactic restructuring in six Caribbean creoles with Dutch, English and French as main lexifier languages. It is shown that, although some structures are more commonly permitted than others, there is considerable cross-creole variation, especially with respect to word-final structures. The findings provide support for recent SLA approaches to the emergence of creole phonology.

This work discusses the relationship between word formation, syntax, and lexicon based on an examination of adjective-noun compounds and phrases in German and in German-Dutch comparison. It describes the semantic and morphosyntactic features of such compounds from a construction grammar perspective. The analysis specifically focuses on the ways that these compounds are related to each other and how they are represented in the mental lexicon.

This volume seeks to reevaluate the nature of tone-segment interactions in phonology. The contributions address, among other things, the following basic questions: what tone-segment interactions exist, and how can the facts be incorporated into phonological theory? Are interactions between tones and vowel quality really universally absent? What types of tone-consonant interactions do we find across languages? What is the relation between diachrony and synchrony in relevant processes?
The contributions discuss data from various types of languages where tonal information plays a lexically distinctive role, from ‘pure’ tone languages to so-called tone accent systems, where the occurrence of contrastive tonal melodies is restricted to stressed syllables. The volume has an empirical emphasis on Franconian dialects in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, but also discusses languages as diverse as Slovenian, Livonian, Fuzhou Chinese, and Xhosa.

An important aspect of the analysis of written language is to explain its relationship to spoken language. The volume focuses on how morphology influences forms of spelling. It brings together 8 papers, including a review of the historical development of German and Dutch orthography, a paper about the possibilities for marking morphological structure that exist in German spelling, and about the effects of such marking on the process of reading.

The contributions to this volume address the model of diachronic language comparison that has emerged from the field of contrastive linguistics. The volume's aim is to use language comparison to derive principles of language change that allow for generalizations that go beyond single languages. Indeed, the phenomenon of change observed in a particular language is thrown into sharper relief when compared to comparable developments in other languages. Such a comparison also facilitates the identification of change that is highly specific to a single language. The articles in the volume illustrate the relevance of these concepts for phonological, morphological, and syntactic changes.

The 16 papers contained in this volume address a variety of phonological topics from different theoretical perspectives. Combined, they provide an excellent showcase for the diversity of the field. Topics considered include the place of allomorphy in grammar; Dutch clippings; the status of recursion in phonology; the role of contrast preservation in the Grimm-Verner push chain; the phonological specification of Dutch ‘tense’ and ‘lax’ monophthongs; the distribution of English vowels in a Strict CV framework; a dependency-based analysis of Germanic vowel shifts; a Radical CV Phonology approach to vowel harmony; emergentist vs. universalist perspectives on frequency effects in vowel harmony; the representation of Limburgian tonal accents; durational enhancement in Maastricht Limburguish high vowels; constraint conjunction in Mandarin Chinese; lexical tone association in Harmonic Serialism; a constraint-based account of the McGurk effect; a case study of the acquisition of liquids in early L1 Dutch; and the learnability of segmentation in Tibetan numerals.

This volume brings together novel analyses of verbal plurality and distributivity. The contributions draw on a wide range of new empirical data from languages as diverse as Arabic, Cusco Quechua, European Portuguese, Hausa, Karitiana, Modern Hebrew and Russian. The introductory chapter gives an overview of the central issues that underlie much recent research on the semantics of event plurality. The papers on verbal plurality explore the interaction between verbal plurality and plural arguments in Arabic and European Portuguese, the semantics of additive particles in Modern Hebrew, the semantics of a range of pluractional markers in Cusco Quechua and the morphological variability of pluractional markers cross-linguistically. The papers on distributivity examine the syntax and semantics of reduplicated numerals in Karitiana and adnominal distributive markers. This volume will be of interest to researchers and students in syntax, formal semantics, and language typology.

When and why are direct objects in Spanish marked with an “a”? This study investigates this question by considering inanimate objects that are normally unmarked, but require marking when combined with a small, stable class of verbs. Presenting an analysis of semantic roles, the author shows that diffential object marking in Spanish is determined not only by nominal individualization properties such as animacy and definiteness but also by the verbal action that is expressed.

This monograph argues for a novel approach to split topicalization and quantifier float in German, based on the premise that syntactic structure-building proceeds solely via free application of Merge. Following recent developments in the pursuit of a more principled theory of syntax, it is argued that the stipulative notion of ‘projection’ ought to be dispensed with: syntactic objects created by Merge are not headed, and endocentricity arises due to a simple search algorithm. When this algorithm fails, specifically in symmetric {XP,YP} structures, an unlabeled constituent results; where a label is required, such structures are locally unstable. It is argued that both split topics and floated quantifiers are the result of this kind of local instability: when an exocentric predication structure is merged in argument or adjunct position, XP must be displaced at the phase level to allow for determination of a label. It is this symmetry-breaking movement that yields the ‘split constituent’ in surface form. Based on careful empirical scrutiny of two recalcitrant problems for syntactic theory, the present work adduces substantial support for a ‘minimalist’ grammatical architecture devoid of phrase-structural residue.

The minimalist notion of a phase has often been investigated with a view to the interfaces. ‘Phases’ provides a strictly syntax-internal perspective.
If phases are fundamental, they should provide the grounds for a unifying treatment of different syntactic phenomena. Concentrating on displacement, the book argues that this expectation is borne out: there is an empirical clustering of properties, whereby the phrases that undergo pied-piping are also the phrases that host intermediate traces of cyclic movement. The same phrases also host partial and secondary movement. Finally, the immediate complements within these phrases never strand the embedding heads. The phrases that show this behaviour are the phases (CP, vP, DP, and PP).
To account for the cluster of properties, phases are claimed to have two special properties: their complement is inaccessible to operations outside, the Phase Impenetrability Condition; their heads may be endowed with unvalued features that are neither connected to the categorical status of the phase nor interpreted on it. It is shown how the cluster of empirical properties flows naturally from these two assumptions, supporting the idea that phases are indeed a fundamental construct in syntax.

This diachronously and synchronously oriented study focuses not only on the creation of the “dass” sentence but also on non-canonical subordinate-clause constructions such as argumental and relative clauses with main-clause word order and correlative adverbial clauses. In this way, the book addresses the relationship between the formal and interpretative properties of subordination, a much discussed issue in recent scholarship.

This book addresses recent developments in the study of tense from a cross-paradigm and cross-linguistic point of view. Leading international scholars explore challenging ideas about tense at the interfaces between semantics and syntax as well as syntax and morphology. The book is divided into three main subsections: 1) Tense in tenseless languages; 2) Tense, mood, and modality, and 3) Descriptive approaches to some tense phenonema. Although time is a universal dimension of the human experience, some languages encode reference to time without any grammatical tense morphology of the verb. Some of these exceptional “tenseless” languages are investigated in this volume: Kalaallisut, Paraguayan Guaraní and Movima. Modal verbs are polyfunctional in the sense that they express both tense and modality. In this volume, an untypical modal is analyzed, a modal analysis of imperatives is argued for, and sentential mood, which is closely related to modality, is analyzed. It is always interesting to look at the expression of tense in understudied languages, which is done here for Scottish Gaelic, Austronesian Rukai and German dialects. The volume can be used for graduate and undergraduate level teaching

In word formation, the French suffixes -ment and -age have similar meanings (e.g. gonflement - swelling, gonflage - inflating). This book analyses the abstract meaning of the two suffixes and shows their systematic differences at an abstract semantic level. As its starting point it considers the speaker's knowledge and the criteria by which these suffixes are used to form derivations.

This volume addresses several claims about the two prominence patterns found in English nominal compounds in a rigorously empirical way. Listener proficiency to identify these patterns is investigated, and the acoustic properties that distinguish the patterns are identified. These properties are used to predict statistically the prominence pattern of any given compound. The book further analyzes the semantic and structural factors influencing the distribution of the prominence patterns, and addresses the extent of within- and across-speaker variability in English compound stress assignment.

This monograph on the verb have in the function of a full verb asserts that have-constructions in the syntactic analysis are to be placed in relationship with absolute with-constructions (cf. Mit den Füßen auf dem Tisch erwarte ich meine Schwiegereltern [Literal translation: With my feet on the table I expect my parents-in-law]). Furthermore, the study also contributes to a better understanding of the syntax and semantics of adjectives. The findings are interpreted within the context of generative and optimal theoretical models.

How do new ways of encoding valence alternations emerge, how and why do they spread, and what are the consequences of their emergence and spread for already existing patterns? This book discusses these questions on the basis of a concrete example of valence alternation, the French causative-anticausative alternation. The main focus of the proposed analysis is the anticausative member of the alternation and the relation between the two formal types of anticausative verbs in French, the reflexive and the unmarked anticausative (La branche s'est cassée vs. La branche a cassé 'The branch broke'). The emergence and spread of the reflexive anticausative, the consequences of these processes for the unmarked anticausative and the semantic relation between reflexive and unmarked anticausatives are analyzed on the basis of several corpus studies.

This book explores the view that impoverishment and Agree operations are part of a single grammatical component. The architecture set forth here gives rise tocomplex but highly systematic interactions between the two operations. This interaction is shown to provide a unified and general account of apparentlydiverse and unrelated intances of eccentric argument encoding that so far haveremained elusive to a unified theoretical account. The proposed view of the grammatical architecture achieves an integration of these phenomena withinbetter-studied languages and thus gives rise to a more general theory of caseand agreement phenomena. The empirical evidence on the basis of which the proposal is developed drawsfrom a wide range of typologically non-related languages, including Basque, Hindi, Icelandic, Itelmen, Marathi, Nez Perce, Niuean, Punjabi, Sahaptin, Selayarese, Yukaghir, and Yurok . The proposal has far-reaching consequences for the study of grammatical architecture, linguistic interfaces, derivational locality in apparently non-local dependencies and the role of functional considerations in formal approaches tothe human language faculty.

Tonal accents in Norwegian: Phonology, morphology and lexical specification breaks from the traditional and contemporary analyses of word accent in North Germanic with the goal of providing a more simplex and unified morphophonological analysis of word accents in North Germanic. It gives the facts of accent distribution in Standard East Norwegian, discusses how three of the more recent and most important analyses of accent assignment in Norwegian and Swedish deal with these facts and provides an alternative analysis. Given that many Accent 1 words are loans, the book also discusses how loanword incorporated in East Norwegian and other North Germanic dialects and the question of why loans predominantly bear Accent 1.
Although the focus of the book is word accent assignment in Standard East Norwegian, it also refers to Central Swedish and Old Norse. In this way, it accounts for many aspects of accent assignment, the true nature of which might have gone undetected had only one of the North Germanic language been taken into consideration.
The book also dedicates one chapter to the phonetics of the tonal contrast. Addressing the question of how perceptually salient the tonal contrast is.

Linking simple sentences to complex units is an elementary process which all languages use to bridge the gap between the structure of the simple sentence and that of texts. This volume is a collection of articles which explore this theme from different perspectives: system-related, history of the language, comparative linguistics, discourse-related, corpus linguistics.

This collective volume contains a selection of research contributions, presented at the 30th Deutscher Romanistentag [German Conference on Romance languages and literatures] in 2007 in Vienna in the section “Mood and Modality in Romance”. The Romance languages studied here include Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, Catalan and French. All contributions thematically explore the status and importance of modality and mood and their reciprocal relationships with reference to theoretical approaches.

Metonymy, apart from metaphor, represents an additional important cognitive mechanism used in our everyday language. One can assume that such a mechanism does not remain without any effects on the related structures in the discourse. To study this hitherto rather neglected discursive dimension of metonymy, excerpts from a French news magazine were analyzed with respect to the interaction of metonymy with its discursive environment.

This monograph is an investigation of cliticization processes attested throughout Otfrid von Weissenburg's Old High German Evangelienbuch. Its central argument may be simply stated: attestations such as meg ih (< mag ih) 'I am able to,' theiz (< thaz iz) 'that it,' and wolt er (< wolta er) 'he wanted' comprise a host and clitic and are all manifestations of one unified process of cliticization. Establishing the crucial elements of the argument, however, requires that we reach beyond a phonological and prosodic account of the cliticization process. In order to show that attested clitic groups are actively produced, as opposed to lexically listed or grammaticalized, this work examines Otfridian clause structure, an analysis that provides an alternative to the more traditional treatment of clitics within the framework of grammaticalization theory. Finally, as the Evangelienbuch is a work of poetry, the effect of the meter on cliticization patterns is also addressed.

Linguistic constructions such as the English ‘Mary is cleverer than/as clever as John’ reveal a number of non-trivial problems, particularly if one includes Italian, which the present study resolves with the aid of a new grammatical model. What is new for Italian is the extension of the perspective beyond the comparative to other types of comparative construction, which are examined here systematically and in detail for the first time. It is shown that apparently differing constructions can actually be described on the syntactic level in a unitary manner.

The study questions the semantic difference postulated by research between the various constructional types of psychverb. The difference which is assumed in causal structure is refuted using logico-philosophical and linguistic arguments together with findings from psychological and neurological research into emotion. It is shown that in their causal semantics psychverbs differ characteristically from action verbs. Psychverbs display a bi-directional causal relation, which occasions a variety of intralingual and supralingual constructions. Based on cognitive-semantic considerations of the supralingually widespread polysemy of psychverbs and a functionalist syntactic model, the study demonstrates by what other mechanisms, if not by differences in the role and causal structure, the syntactic realisation of psychverb arguments is determined. The basis is an empirical study of psychverb constructions in five genetically and typologically different European languages: German, Estonian, Turkish, Laz and Basque.

This book is the most comprehensive study to date of the development of the three suffixes -hood, -dom and -ship in the history of English. Based on data from annotated corpora it provides an in depth investigation from Old English to Modern English and shows that structurally the three suffixes developed from syntactic heads (nouns) via morphological heads in compounds to morphological heads in derivations. Being an instance of morphologisation the rise of suffixes clearly shows that word formation is not part of the syntactic module. This development is triggered by semantic change, more precisely, by the semantics of the elements which keep their salient meanings and develop further meanings through metonymic shifts, finally leading to underspecified meanings. The findings are analysed in a revised version of Lieber's (2004) framework to account for the diachronic facts and have far-reaching consequences for morphological theory since they show that derivational suffixes bear meaning and hence contribute to processes of lexicalisation which is clear evidence for sign-based models and against, for example, Separationist assumptions.

Standard spoken German is not uniform. The standard pronunciation as codified for example in the Duden Dictionary of German Pronunciation is at best realised by trained speakers (e.g. newscasters). This study of speakers from the state of Baden-Wurttemberg shows how deviations from the norm occur in practice. Interviews are analysed with subjects from a total of eleven towns and cities. In addition, the study traces diachronic developments by comparing data gathered from 2001 to 2003 with data from 1961 and 1992.

Whereas the phonic features of dialects have been studied for a long time, it is only recently that attention has turned to the analysis of typical regional intonations (sentence melodies). The present study provides a review of research on the subject and then turns to an analysis of Cologne German using data from spontaneous speech. It provides a sound formal analysis of typical Cologne intonation patterns and in addition shows how these are used by speakers in their linguistic interactions.

While writing a word, everybody will have paused for a moment to think about the correct spelling. It is just this behaviour which the present book studies using modern technology. As schoolchildren were writing, the position of their pens was recorded 100 times per second. By checking where and in which words hesitations and possibly errors occurred, it was possible to determine the level of the children’s orthographic knowledge – conscious and unconscious.

This study presents an application of distributed morphology to Spanish verb inflections. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the whole system of both the regular and the irregular verbs of Spanish and aims to provide insights into the relation between the features of involved flective endings, the syntactic structure and the attendant morpho(phono)logical processes. The bare phrase structure model of generative grammar is used as the syntactic framework for holding the distributed morphology .

Punctuation is normally perceived as a system of handed-down norms that is complicated and difficult to manage. This study shows that it is actually a simple, transparent system that serves the reader more than the writer. This study orients itself on formal features of individual characters and the situations in which they appear. Through doing so, it provides a new and manageable classification of the entire system and its functions as well as offers a number of applications for punctuation instruction.

This collected volume contains most of the papers delivered to the section on Language Change and Geographical (Dis-)Continuity at the XXIX German Conference of Romance Studies. Interest is focussed on examining the commonalities and differences in the development of different Romance languages and/or dialects, with a consideration of the problems surrounding spatial and temporal continuity and/or discontinuity always being taken as the starting point. At the same time, this allows a weighing up of the relationship between internal and contact-determined language change.

This collected volume presents papers dealing with the language behaviour of advanced learners of a foreign language. In recent decades, research into second language acquisition has concerned itself principally with the early stages. In contrast to these early stages, the language behaviour of advanced learners is far more difficult to analyse, as this behaviour is determined by a complex of widely differing factors. Using the methods developed by corpus linguistics which have been the subject of much discussion in recent years, it is possible to furnish a precise description of the regularities of the behaviour.

The study uses a broad empirical database to clarify the variable time reference and modal reading ("unreal"/"potential") of non-past related (i.e. temporally refunctioned) forms such as 'wäre gekommen' [would have come] (e.g. 'Morgen wäre sie gekommen' [She would have come tomorrow]) and differences in meaning compared with forms such as 'käme/würde kommen' [would come]. The study concludes with a survey of the temporal refunctioning of the past subjunctive back into the 16th century.

In the first part of his study, the author describes the rules for hyphenating German words in such a way that the surprisingly complex interaction between the rules becomes clear; in this, his account differs from the official rules. It elaborates a characteristic feature of hyphenation rules, namely that a distinction has to be made between ‘stronger’ and ‘weaker’ rules. In the second part, he presents empirical studies which firstly – and for the first time – analyse readers’ eye movements when reading hyphenated words, and secondly analyse how primary school pupils hyphenate.

This book explores a relatively little investigated area of creole languages, word-formation. It provides the most comprehensive account so far of the word-formation patterns of an English-based creole language, Sranan, as found in its earliest sources, and compares them with the patterns attested in the input languages. One of the few studies of creole morphology based on historical data, the book discusses the theoretical problems arising with the historical analysis of creole word-formation and provides an analysis along the lines of Booij’s (2005, 2007) Construction Morphology in which the assumed boundaries between affixation, compounding and syntactic constructions play a very minor role. It shows that Early Sranan word-formation is characterised by the absence of superstrate derivational affixes, the use of free morphemes as derivational markers and of compounding as the major word-formation strategy. The emergence of Early Sranan word-formation involved multiple sources (the input languages, universals, language-internal development) and different mechanisms (reanalysis of free morphemes as derivational markers, adaptation of superstrate complex words, transfer from the substrates and the creation of innovations). The findings render untenable theoretical accounts of creole genesis based on one explanatory factor, such as superstrate or substrate influence.

Dagmar Frohning presents a corpus-based analysis of ten causal markers in German. Her study uses written texts and is based on the correlations between the causal markers and numerous contextual features which help delineate the individual markers. It uses a cognitive-pragmatic orientation and integrates various approaches
from the functionally oriented tradition. The author presents a multi-factorial approach which uses four parameters to give systematic answers to the question of why which marker is preferred in the contexts in which it occurs.

The study employs an autosegmental-metrical model of intonation to propose an intonational grammar of Swabian and Upper Saxon German, respectively. The analysis is guided by the assumption that each dialect exhibits a specific distinct intonation. The phonological analysis is comparative in nature: the implementation of accents are compared between the dialects in terms of tonal alignment and excursion. In fact, the phonetic data present evidence for the phonological analysis in that the individual tonal categories differ significantly from each other. In addition, a functional analysis of the intonation contours provides further evidence for the phonological analysis. Based on the assumption that nuclear contours convey intonational meaning, these meanings are analysed and compared. A certain meaning can be attributed to intonation contours that differ phonologically between the two dialects. However, the general shape of contours and its association with meaning has been proved to be identical in the two dialects and compared to a similar analysis of intonational meaning of British English. This comprehensive study of dialect intonation contributes to improve our understanding of intonational phonology.

The study proposes a comprehensive classification of action types in German. It revolves crucially around the distinction of three classes of state verbs. Actional features relate to the temporal structure of the denotation expressed by the verb. Unlike aspectual distinctions, they are shown to be part of the semantics of the verbs in question. The investigation of actional features takes account of word-formation-morphological and syntactic regularities as well as pragmatic factors, drawing upon a broad range of examples to do so. Widely held but fallacious assumptions on the relationship between action type and grammar (e.g. the formation of the perfect, the passive) are corrected.

Doubts about whether to write words separately or together in German are frequently grammatical in nature. Here various combinations are discussed (noun-verb combinations, adjective-verb combinations, various combinations with adjectives and participles) to establish whether the examples in question are complex words or syntagmas. In the process, criteria are identified for words and non-words (syntagmas) and drawn upon to propose rules for writing words separately or together. At the same time it leaves a degree of latitude, as tolerance in doubtful cases is appropriate to the system.

This collection provides an overview of present-day research on copulative clauses and copulative verbs. They center on the classification of copulative clauses, the various meanings and the diachronic development of copulative verbs, and quasi-copulative constructions in German and their equivalents in English, Hungarian, German sign language, Alemmanic dialects, Romance languages, and old Indo-Germanic languages. The detailed analyses produce insights into the realization potentials listed for copulative clauses in one-language grammars.

What effect does the fundamental distinction between object and action concepts have on psycholinguistic processes like the processing and acquisition of nouns and verbs and susceptibility to error in that connection? In an attempt to answer this question the study (a) describes experiments and empirical studies involving children and adults with and without language disturbances, and (b) compares acquisition processes in German, Korean, Turkish, and English. The findings indicate differential processing and acquisition sequences for nouns and verbs. This outcome serves as the basis for a discussion of the status of parts of speech in human cognition.

While it is commonly assumed that languages epenthesize context-free default vowels, this book shows that in loanword adaptation, several strategies are found which interact intricately. Large loanword corpora in Shona, Sranan, Samoan and Kinyarwanda are analyzed statistically, and the patterns are modeled in a version of Optimality Theory which introduces constraints on autosegmental representations. The focus of this book is on English loans in Shona, providing an in-depth empirical and formal analysis of epenthesis in this language. The analysis of additional languages allows for solid typological generalizations. In addition, a diachronic study of epenthesis in Sranan provides insight into how insertion patterns develop historically. In all languages analyzed, default epenthesis exists alongside vowel harmony and spreading from adjacent consonants. While different languages prefer different strategies, these strategies are subject to the same set of constraints, however. In spreading, feature markedness plays an important role alongside sonority. We suggest universal markedness scales which combine with constraints on autosegmental configurations to model the patterns found in individual languages and at the same time to constrain the range of possible crosslinguistic variation.

This volume is a collection of articles reconstructing the connections between the German writing system and its acquisition, beginning with the individual letters of the alphabet and proceeding from there to syllable- and morpheme-based spelling rules and the syntactic regularities underlying capitalization (or otherwise), separation, and non-separation. The consequences for modern spelling instruction deriving from these analyses are outlined in some of the articles. There are a number of historically motivated complications that have bedeviled the systematic coverage of the orthographic system and its acquisition. These have had a detrimental effect on systematic spelling instruction, and various articles take a closer look at them.

This book addresses students and researchers of phonetics/phonology, and the semantics and pragmatics of discourse. It employs an autosegmental-metrical model of intonation to investigate the marking of aspects of information structure, concentrating on the Given-New dimension. The empirical evidence provided here is based on German. It shows that the dichotomy of 'accented' versus 'uncaccented' corresponding to 'New' versus 'Given' information is inadequate. In fact, there is evidence that a range of pitch accent types can be mapped onto the gradient scale of Givenness degrees, with the pitch height on the accented syllable being the determining factor.

This study pursues two objectives, a) to describe the distribution of the extraction of prepositional attributes, and b) to propose a theory explaining it. The description of the phenomenon indicates that, though it is primarily governed by grammatical principles, it is also influenced by contextual - and hence pragmatic - factors. In the framework of Optimality Theory a successful attempt is made to capture these apparently irreconcilable factors in a unified model. The study thus contributes to a better understanding of the interaction between grammatical and pragmatic principles.

Ever since antiquity conceptual hierarchies have been an indispensable element in western thinking on knowledge structures. They are also considered to be a central principle in the organization of lexis. The cognitive salience of the base level discovered in the last few decades has caused doubts to be raised about the dominance of logical inclusion relations in everyday language. With reference to French, Spanish, and lexical data from other languages, the study demonstrates that there are numerous linguistic features supporting the view that the structure of ordinary vocabulary is rooted in the base level rather than in logical hierarchies.

This volume brings together articles that are focused on segmental, syllabic and morphological aspects of creole words, thus contributing to the ongoing debates about the nature of phonology and morphology and their role in emergence and development of these languages. The papers cover a wide range of creole languages with different lexifier languages and address empirical, typological, historical and theoretical issues, drawing our attention to hitherto unknown phenomena or offering interesting new analyses of established facts. With contributions from: Parth Bhatt, Alain Kihm, Thomas Klein, Emmanuel Nikiema, Ingo Plag, Marina Pucciarelli, Jean-Louis Rougé, Eric Russel-Webb, Shobha Satyanath, Emmanuel Schang, Mareile Schramm, Norval Smith, Marleen van de Vate and Tonjes Veenstra.

This study is an application of Chomsky's minimalist program (1995) to the universally relevant phenomenon of auxiliarity, restricted here to verb auxiliarity. It provides detailed minimalist analyses of auxiliary verb constructions in two Romance languages (Italian and Sardinian). The theoretical framework is supplied by Generative Grammar, and in the course of the book a number of modifications to this framework are proposed. Approaches based on grammaticalization theory also play a role in the analysis and interpretation of auxiliary verbs.

The issue of how inflection morphology is to be adequately dealt with in theoretical terms and how inflected words are to be represented has triggered almost unparalleled controversy both in theoretical linguistics and in psycho/neurolinguistics and the cognitive sciences in general. The aim of this study is to integrate morphological theories and psycho- and neurolinguistic findings to form an overall picture of the mental and neuronal representation of inflection. As such it contributes to our understanding of inflection as a grammatical operation located in the brain.

The study proposes a compositional derivation of the meaning of copular sentences featuring noun and adjective complements. Copular sentences in Russian are compared with their counterparts in Spanish, German, and English. Russian and Spanish display a number of morpho-syntactic alternations that render the interaction between syntax and semantics in copular sentences more transparent, thus providing insights into range of typologically parameterized expression options accorded to copular sentences by single-language grammars.

Since entering the stage, Davidsonian event arguments have taken on a central role in linguistic theorizing. Recent years have seen a continuous extension of possible applications for them, not only in semantics but also in syntax. At the same time questions concerning the ontological status of events have received renewed attention. This collection of articles provides new evidence for the virtually ubiquitous presence of event arguments in linguistic structure and sheds new light on their nature. The volume is organized into four sections: Events - states - causation; Event nominals; Events in composition; Measuring events.

Graphematics is the part of a theory of writing systems that refers to the relationship between written forms and sound forms. Essentially, the point at issue is how written forms can be represented in sound. Accordingly, the study examines the phonetic correspondence potential of all the letters of the German alphabet, as well as the lengthening and sharpening phenomena reflected in the system of written German. The study formulates essential requirements for an analysis of orthography and provides relevant arguments for debates on spelling and other reforms.

The study discusses theoretical and applied aspects of lexical semantics with reference to Italian verbs. The theoretical section evolves a process typology for Italian verbs. The study focuses centrally on the discussion of such concept hierarchies and their value for semantic descriptions. In addition, the possible readings of the 1,000 most common Italian verbs are allocated to a process hierarchy. The theoretical basis and the empirical section are evaluated by a disambiguation programme displaying selection restrictions in terms of concept hierarchies and selecting contextually correct readings of the verbs.

The study proposes a theory of proper names that can explain and describe both the distribution of the definite article in proper names and its relationship to generic names. One central assumption is that, in semantic terms, proper names display a complex structure requiring them to be analyzed as context-independent expressions. Further, in connection with the DP hypothesis and minimalist assumptions, proper names are conceived of as inherently definite. In other words, proper names display the feature [+definite].

Language change is operative at all levels of a language. Alongside the effects of general linguistic change phenomena, word formation displays a species of change all its own. A central concern of this study is to delimit and describe this specific species. A theoretical definition of the subject addressed by the study leads on to an evaluation of authentic language material. It transpires that word-formation change is centrally determined by changes in linguistic productivity, empirically substantiated here by the analysis of newspaper texts from the 17th to the 20th century.

One of the conspicuous characteristics of the northern dialects of Britain and Ireland is variation in verbal agreement, especially the use of plural verbal -s. Once a mark of a consistent, categorical grammatical system in the traditional dialects of the area, today verbal -s appears in highly complex, hybrid variation patterns in the modern vernaculars. This corpus-based study explores continuities and discontinuities between the dialects involved, and discusses the implications of such hybrid variable sytems for a usage-based theory of grammatical competence.

The study examines the natural progression in the acquisition of an essential aspect of German sentence structure - verb positioning - by elementary-school native speakers of Turkish and Russian. With reference to four long-term studies, the author shows how the learners form hypotheses on the complex input of German as a target language and the role played by their knowledge of their mother tongue in the evolution of interim grammars. A theoretical section describes contemporary theories of second language acquisition and discusses their explanatory power in the light of the empirical findings produced by the study.

El libro propone una muestra de trabajos de distintos enfoques teóricos y metodológicos en el estudio de la variación sintáctica contribuyendo a una reflexión plural sobre la relación dialéctica entre explicación teórica y descripción empírica. En la primera parte se presentan reflexiones sobre el uso de corpus en el estudio de la variación sintáctica. El resto del volumen presenta avances en algunos temas controvertidos. La segunda parte se concentra sobre el orden de palabras, la estructura informativa y su realización prosódica. En la tercera parte se toca la codificación variable de las funciones sintácticas.

With reference to extensive material, the study shows that the linking behaviour of French and Italian verbs of feeling is rule-guided. The crucial factor here is neither non-accusativity nor causativity but the distinction between episodic and non-episodic feelings. The former require a subject EXPERIENCER, the latter an object EXPERIENCER. After an initial demarcation of the boundaries of the topic, a large number of classes of verbs of feeling are established, followed by an analysis of verbs of "annoyance", "liking", and "astonishment" as instances of a negative, positive, and neutral feeling, respectively.

The intonational diversity of regional varieties provides a challenge to both traditional and autosegmental theories of intonation, which mostly derived from the study of national standard languages. The ten chapters in this book give an overview of current research covering regional varieties of English, German, Italian and Greek. While all contributions share a general autosegmental perspective, they represent different approaches and use different types of data ranging from experimental speech data to spontaneous conversational speech.

The present book provides the most comprehensive account so far of gender differences in syntax. It is an in-depth corpus-based study of syntactic variation in the use of adverbial clauses and tag questions. Written in a broadly functional framework, it pays due attention to the interaction of gender with other internal (semantics, syntax, prosody) and external (style, power, surreptitiousness, group composition) determinants. This volume is essential reading for those interested in language and gender and in how functionalism can be brought to bear in illuminating language structure and use.

Under the framework of the Minimalist Program, this book attempts to clarify that greedy movement in Japanese fulfills locality and is driven by checking theta roles as well as Case, categorial features, and so on as formal features. The findings are as follows: the Spec of TP and an uninterpretable [+V] feature make successive cyclic verb raising possible, thus producing a complex verb (Multiple Predicate Formation). MPF and the [+ Spec TP] parameter attribute nonobligatory controlled PRO in the subject position of the adjunct to checking the nominative Case at the Spec of TP within the adjunct. Overt verb raising beyond the nonfinite clause boundary enables the long distance A-movement in the control constructions. The derivational difference among ni direct passives, ni indirect passives, and ni yotte direct passives is due to the three corresponding types of checking theta roles and Case. The impossibility of scrambling ni indirect passives is predicted by the exhaustion of the theta roles. The semantic difference between o-causatives and ni-causatives is caused by dative NP's checking Case and theta roles. No passives of noncoercive causatives are produced because of the exhaustion of theta roles at TP. The passivization in double object constructions are limited by the functions of dative markers in Case and theta role checking.

Unlike other diatheses, medium can display different versions. The study proposes a unified analysis for all versions of medium, in which these versions result not from a change in semantic representation but from the interaction of the argument structure with the semantics of the base verb and the event structure. The analysis is developed for medium and applied to reflexive constructions. There is also discussion of the changes undergone by the interpretation of medium in ancient and modern Greek.

Writing systems avoid characters that are mirror images of one another (like b and d). The reasons for this are bound up with the way our brains work. The present study examines 41 sets of characters and signs in diachronic and contrastive terms. The results of the examination indicate that long-established, functional writing systems are subject to tensions between aesthetically motivated symmetry and the reduction of such symmetry in the interests of improved readability. Invented writing systems where readability is not a criterion (e.g. secret codes) normally draw upon symmetrical characters to extend the number of signs at their disposal.

Nominalized infinitives are generally considered to be bona fide event nouns that, unlike result nouns, inherit the argument structure of the base verbs in an almost unrestricted way. The empirical study presented here reveals this assumption to be a prejudice. Grammaticality verdicts from 180 native speakers indicate that there are (in some cases hitherto unidentified) restrictions governing the lexical and syntactic features of nominalized infinitives. The interaction between the restrictions is simulated in a competitive model that takes account of the grammaticality verdicts elicited via empirical testing.

This study is the first to make a systematic attempt to relate the universal theories of Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) and Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) to one another. On the basis of a critical functional analysis of systems theory and semiotic theory, a newly designed semiotic system is proposed that displays a higher resolution and recombination potential than the individual disciplines involved. The theoretical results can be used as a foundation for dealing with concrete linguistic, literary, or sociological problems. In addition, the book can be read as an introduction to the thinking of Luhmann and Peirce.

In this study, free indirect speech (erlebte Rede) in German and Polish is regarded not only as a way of rendering speech or thought, but essentially as a textual phenomenon. The main focus is on spatial and temporal reference (temporal adverbs, location adverbs referring to position and dimension, tense and aspect). To explain sentences like Morgen war Weihnachten (Tomorrow was Christmas Day), the approach advocated suggests that in free indirect speech the deictic origo can be established with the aid of linguistic means alone. The use of tenses is discussed largely from the perspective of tense transposition.

The study centers on the question of how recipients of domain-bound expressions decide between anaphoric (text-based) and deictic (extralinguistic) readings. After a thorough discussion of the history of the relevant concepts extending back to antiquity, it proposes a classification model for the description of anaphora and deixis as markers of domain-bound reference that can be distinguished not absolutely but only in degree. Attention is also given both to conflicts between anaphoric and deictic readings (e.g. in text-image relations) and to indirect reference.

Recent developments of linguistics have given innovative impulses to historical semantics. For the Romance study of words, the time has come to establish a dialogue between theorists and historians of language. As far as structural semantics are integrated into cognitive concepts of historical semantics, it remains attractive for the lexical analysis of older language levels and relevant for the linguistics of semantic change/change in meaning. Cognitive models are undergoing new accentuations towards a pragmatic historical semantics, which are open to/receptive to language-historical questions in particular.

Although adjectives (or their semantic equivalents) figure in many languages (including German and Korean) as independent parts of speech in their own right, language-specific morphosyntactic differences have hitherto militated against referring to adjectives as a universal part of speech. Proceeding from a semantic-cum-functional adjective definition as the foundation for a possibly universal category 'adjective', the study elaborates functional categories explaining language-specific phenomena as instances of parametric variation, thus contributing to a universalist description of sentence structure.

The volume assembles studies on the morphology and syntax of reflexive verbs from a variety of theoretical perspectives (including minimalism and optimality theory), with reference to a number of languages, and focusing on different syntactic domains (clause, NP, AcI). As such, it presents a cross section of present-day research on the field in question.

That English has no diminutives is a common myth. The present study shows, however, that English does possess diminutives, and not only analytic but also synthetic diminutive markers. Analytic markers include, first and foremost, little, as well as other adjectives from the same word field, whereas the inventory of synthetic markers comprises suffixes as, for instance, -ie, -ette, -let, -kin, -een, -s, -er, -poo and -pegs. These markers are examined from a grammatical and a pragmatic perspective in an integrative formal-functional framework. The grammatical perspective involves phonological, morphological and semantic features, while the pragmatic perspective involves pragmalinguistic as well as sociopragmatic features on the levels of the speech act and larger interactive units in dialogue. The findings reveal that English diminutive suffixes are, in fact, among the most productive suffixes of the English language. While the suffixes share a number of features, each has developed its own profile, specifically regarding semantic and pragmatic features. In everyday conversation, there is a division of labour between the synthetic and the analytic type of formation concerning the communicative functions of diminutives and their distribution in discourse. The choice of formal device and its function depend crucially on pragmatic factors, notably on the illocution, the interactive status, the realisation strategy, and the politeness value of the utterances in which diminutives are employed, and also on the relationship between the interlocutors.

The seven articles of this volume take up crucial aspects of information structure and grammatical form. Special attention is paid to the definition of topic, focus and contrast, to the language specific devices for expressing different types of these information structural notions, and to the typological characterisation of languages as to discourse configurationality. The investigation of grammatical relations includes the interplay between syntactic functions, morphological case and thematic structure, and the study of the functional and formal complexity of passive in Germanic languages.

The articles in this volume are revised versions of papers presented at an international colloquium in Munich in 2001. With special reference to French, the authors attempt a cognitive interpretation of language features and texts from a decidedly historical viewpoint. Implicit in the project is the hope that 'cognitive history' will be able to establish itself as a third approach alongside external history (largely event-based) and internal history (derived from the structuralist model). Among the topics addressed are schematization, conceptualization, lexical variation, and enunciation.

Two research traditions dominate the phonological description of rhythm. One is the typology of syllabic and accentual languages, the other metrical phonology. The first of these approaches determines rhythmic quality in temporal terms, the second in terms of accent. The present monograph sets out to show that both these approaches are problematical for a universal phonology of rhythm seeking to place equal emphasis on time and accentual prominence and supported by evidence culled from phonetics, psycholinguistics, and a poetological approach to metre.

Arguing against a broad typological and comparative background, the author provides evidence suggesting that in German there exists a grammatical category 'respect' as an expression of grammaticalized politeness. To bear this out, the study traces the diachrony of polite German forms of address from the earliest stages up to the present and the associated tensions between pragmatics and grammar. Analyses of the morphology and syntax of pronouns and verbs in present-day standard German and in Bavarian dialect point up the differences between Sie (2nd person honorific) and sie (3rd person plural).

According to the Dual Mechanism Model (Pinker 1999) the distinction between regular and irregular inflection determines the way in which complex word forms are represented and processed. The German plural system, exhibiting multiple allomorphs and subregularities, provides an appropriate test case for this model. Experimental results lead to an extended and refined Dual Model operating on two different levels of lexical processing, in which the dual distinction between storage and computation does not only hold for an inflectional system as a whole, but also within subsystems, e.g. -n plural forms.

This volume provides the reader with an update on the ongoing research in creole studies. The papers represent several lines of research in the study of Creole languages. Central issues in phonology, semantics, lexicon and syntax are addressed in various creole languages. These include Cape Verdean Creole, Haitian Creole, Lesser Antillean Creoles, Kriol, Saramaccan, and Sranan.

The volume gives an account of two psycholinguistic studies capturing and comparing judgments by German and English native speakers on the decomposability of English idioms. To explain the findings, a model of dual idiom representation is formulated, taking account not only of the lexical but also of the conceptual level and able to image differences and commonalities in the L1 and L2 lexicon. The book integrates linguistic, psycholinguistic and cognitive aspects of idioms.

This study investigates a model of syntactic derivations that is based on a new concept of dislocation, i.e., of 'movement' phenomena. Derivations are conceived of as a compositional process that constructs larger syntactic units out of smaller ones without any phrase-structure representations, as in categorial grammars. It is shown that a simple extension of this view can account for dislocation without gap features, chains, or structural transformations, and for many basic generalizations that transformational theories express in terms of X-bar-Theory and various constraints on movement.

Originating from papers presented at an international colloquium, the 18 articles in this volume reflect the different aspects of modality: general, lexical, temporal and modal. There is no one single definition or methodological approach to the study of modality. This is borne out by the range of these articles, with perspectives extending from different manifestation forms of modality to its different implications or values (alethic, deontic, epistemic, radical, etc.) and from modality in specific genres to contrastive and historical perspectives on the phenomenon.

Issus de communications présentées dans un colloque international, les dix-huit textes de ce recueil reflètent la modalité sous ses différents aspects: général, lexical, temporel, modal. Il n'y a ni une définition ni une approche méthodologique de la modalité. En témoignent les articles, qui adoptent des perspectives de la modalité allant des formes d'apparition de la modalité à ses différentes acceptions ou valeurs (aléthique, déontique, épistémique, radicale etc.), de la modalité dans des genres spécifiques à la modalité contrastive et historique.

This study is devoted to the micro- and macro-structural facets of emotional expression in speech. Central aspects are the semiotic status of this phenomenon, the perspective from which its description is undertaken, the specific features of emotional meaning, and the potential scope for a methodologically scrupulous access to the whole problem. The main focus, however, is on the way this discursive practice manifests itself. The instruments used to achieve this are, on the one hand, a description of the potentially affective forms and structures of (spoken) French, and, on the other, an analysis of the functionality of emotional expression. The surface-oriented and interactive view of emotions is supported by a methodological approach geared to linguistic conversation analysis.

With reference to problems of lexis and grammar in the Romance languages and of metalinguistics in general, the articles collected in this volume demonstrate that in their complementarity the onomasiological and semasiological perspectives represent indispensable points of reference in any form of linguistics regarding itself as 'cognitive'. With some slight differences in perspective, the articles discuss issues posed by synchronic and diachronic lexicology and grammar, analyzing selected conceptual and functional areas in detail and casting light on problems of grammatology and the conceptualization of language.

The monograph contains two case studies dealing with the phonetics and phonology of affricates and laryngeals from a survey of 281 languages. The empirical findings go counter to a number of assumptions in the literature, e.g.: (1) affricates are exclusively stops from the perspective of phonology; (2) laryngeals are properties of the prosodic domains onset, nucleus, and coda; (3) phonetic strategies (affrication, laryngeal phasing) serve to make phonological specifications acoustically more salient. Theoretical discussions include questions of phonological representation (featural contours, prosodic licensing etc.) and the phonology-phonetics interface.

The study engages with the theory that verb position change in most Romance languages is traceable to the (near total) loss of what was originally a strict, universally valid >verb-comes-second< rule. This assumption is refuted here on the basis (a) of a critical discussion of traditional and generative studies on the question and (b) of an empirical study by the author based on a diachronic comparison of Bible translations. These investigations reveal that, contrary to previous suppositions, the Romance languages (with the exception of Rhaeto-Romanic) should invariably be analyzed as non-"verb-second" languages.

Correlates are a special feature of German grammar. They and their subordinate clauses can be described as correlative links within the broader context of subordination. This book takes a unified view of correlative links; syntactic, semanto-pragmatic, and stylistic aspects are discussed in terms of how they interact. In the foreground of interest is the question of the extent to which correlates are obligatory/optional, an essential point for the teaching of German as a foreign language.

This collection of articles deals with phonetic and phonological aspects of the prosodic concepts 'syllable cut' and 'tonal accent'. Syllable cut refers to the way in which a vowel is modified ('cut') by the consonant following it. As such, the concept of syllable cut is a prosodic approach representing a viable alternative to more segmentally defined concepts like vowel quantity or quality. Tonal accents establish lexical/phonological contrasts at word level with the help of contrasting intonation curves. The volume presents new findings on syllable cut and tonal accents from the following research fields: historical phonology and graphemics, dialectology, auto-segmental phonology, acoustical phonetics, language typology.

Is there such a thing as progressive in German? Basing its arguments on the evaluation of various corpora, the study discusses potentially progressive constructions (am/beim/im V sein, dabei sein zu V) and the so-called absentive (e.g. schwimmen sein) and contrasts them with Dutch on the one hand and English on the other. With the exception of the absentive, all these constructions can be regarded as representatives of the progressive category, especially the most strongly grammaticalized form with am. However, they fulfill partly different functions.

French prepositions figure as obligatory markers of syntactic functions, verbalize semantic oppositions, and are an ingredient of complex expressions that are sometimes all but indistinguishable from free syntagmas. Proceeding from the classification problems posed by these facts, the study proposes new generative approaches and integrates them into a framework defined in terms of grammaticalization theory. The aim is to achieve an accurate model of the transitions between P (preposition) and neighbouring lexical categories on the one hand, and between P and the functional category K (case marker) on the other.