Article
Review of: Glyn Hicks. 2009. The Derivation of Anaphoric Relations (John Benjamins, Amsterdam)
What prevents pronominals from being locally bound? Does this a) reflect an intrinsic property of pronominals (Chomsky 1981), is it b) a relative (economy) effect, that only shows up where there is a more dedicated competitor (see from different perspectives, Safir 2004, Boeckx, Hornstein and Nunes 2007, Levinson 2000), does it c) have a semantic basis as in Schlenker (2005), or does it d) follow from general conditions on agree based chains, and reflexive predicates (Reuland 2011a)? To help resolve this issue, we investigate Khanty (Uralic, spoken in Northwest Siberia), a language that is reported to allow locally bound pronom- inals (Nikolaeva 1995), and assess whether it in fact does have them, and, which factors come into play when local binding obtains.
The International Yearbook of German language.
The paper gives a brief overview of some authority denotations in Old Frisian, roughly grouped as administrative, judical and ecclesiastical terms. 64 compounds are considered in terms of their constitution and semantic type. Several generic conclusions are drawn, and, which is highly important, they are in line with the conclusions of a larger PhD-project investigating peculiarities of 2,400 Old Frisian nominal compounds -- the research that is yet to be finished.
This dissertation analyzes the reflexivity patterns in Uralic languages from the point of view of a minimalist approach to binding. The languages under consideration are five Uralic languages spoken in the Russian Federation: Meadow Mari, Komi-Zyrian, Khanty, Besermyan Udmurt, and Erzya. The empirical data were compiled during fieldwork, and are used to test and assess current approaches to binding. The main focus of the dissertation is on a number of puzzles posed by these languages, namely the locally bound pronominals in Khanty, as well as the binding domains of what I call semi-reflexives and their ability to take split antecedents in Meadow Mari, Komi-Zyrian, Besermyan Udmurt, and Erzya. The analysis of reflexive strategies proposed in this dissertation is based on a modular approach to binding (see Reuland 2011). It disentangles the various factors playing a role in establishing interpretive dependencies, including properties of predicates and syntactic chains. The puzzling behavior of reflexive strategies under discussion is accounted for in terms of their morphosyntactic composition in tandem with general properties of grammatical computation. The present approach provides a unified basis for verbal and nominal reflexives. Overall, the study shows that cross-linguistic variation is not random. It demonstrates how descriptive fieldwork and theoretical research can be mutually beneficial and how their symbiosis deepens our understanding of the general principles underlying language, and the way these are rooted in our cognitive system.
The etymology of the English boar is a controversial matter, which had long been discussed by linguists. This paper offers a comprehensive critical review of etymological hypotheses and, through the use of Swedish dialects, another possible look at the problem.
This paper is a pilot comparative study on coreference chaining in three languages, namely, Czech, English and Russian. We have analyzed 16 parallel English-Czech newspaper texts and 16 texts in Russian (similar to the English-Czech ones in length and topics). Our motivation was to find out what the linguistic structure of coreference chains in different languages is and what types of distinctions we should take into account for advancing the development of systems for coreference resolution. Taking into account theoretical approaches to the phenomenon of coreference we based our research on the following assumption: the recognition of coreference links for different structural types of noun phrases is regulated by different language mechanisms. The other starting point was that different languages allow pronominal chaining of different length and that coreference chains properties differ for the languages with different strategies for zero anaphora and different systems for definiteness marking. This work reports our first findings within the task of the structural NP types’ distribution comparison in three languages under analysis.
This is the article about the Genesis of the German syllabo-tonic poetry and it is devoted to a problem of influence of Dutch versification on the reformer of the German verse, Martin Opitz (1597 - 1639). With the new lingvo-statistical method adapted for the comparative analysis of meter and prosody, we can see the new aspects of such influence. The Dutch verse influence is observed in rhythmical tendencies of an early German iambic poetry.
A collection of papers "Animals in Germanic and Celtic Languages"
The paper focuses on the paths of grammaticalization of the verb of speech manaš (‘say’, ‘name’) in Eastern Mari. The converb of this verb (manən) is desemantisized, it loses the syntactic properties of the verb of speech and shifts to the category of subordinators. Successive grammaticalization steps of this marker can be observed in Modern Mari: in some contexts it functions as a quotation marker, while in others as a subordinator. We suggest two paths of grammaticalization of this form on the basis of the given analysis: the fi rst path involves the context of verbs of speech, mental and emotive complementtaking predicates, the second path involves the contexts of causation and potential situation (in complementation), purpose and causal adverbial clauses. The argumentation for this grammaticalization pattern is based on the constraints on subordinate predicate encoding (acceptability of non-fi nite clauses with manən), the choice of pronouns [we focus on the choice of the anaphoric vs. deictic strategy of encoding the textual («original» in [Aikhenvald 2008]) speaker and hearer] and the mood of the verb in the complement clause. We show that in Modern Mari the analyzed form can have the following functions: as a quotation marker, as a subordinator in complement and adverbial clauses, as a discourse marker of hesitation and autocorrection, and as a semantically empty subordinator that is used to express negation with the infi nitive.