461 search hits
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Capturing particulars and universals in clause linkage: a multivariate analysis
(2010)
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Balthasar Bickel
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Absolute and statistical universals
(2007)
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Balthasar Bickel
- Language universals are statements that are true of all languages, for example: “all languages have stop consonants”. But beneath this simple definition lurks deep ambiguity, and this triggers misunderstanding in both interdisciplinary discourse and within linguistics itself. A core dimension of the ambiguity is captured by the opposition “absolute vs. statistical universal”, although the literature uses these terms in varied ways. Many textbooks draw the boundary between absolute and statistical according to whether a sample of languages contains exceptions to a universal. But the notion of an exception-free sample is not very revealing even if the sample contained all known languages: there is always a chance that an as yet undescribed language, or an unknown language from the past or future, will provide an exception.
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Dulong texts : seven fully analyzed narrative and procedural texts
(2001)
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Randy J. LaPolla
- Dulong is a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Gongshan Dulong and Nu Autonomous county in Yunnan, China, by members of the Dulong nationality (pop.: 6,000), and part of the Nu nationality (roughly 6,000 people).
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Degraded acceptability and markedness in syntax, and the stochastic interpretation of optimality theory
(2004)
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Ralf Vogel
- The argument that I tried to elaborate on in this paper is that the conceptual problem behind the traditional competence/performance distinction does not go away, even if we abandon its original Chomskyan formulation. It returns as the question about the relation between the model of the grammar and the results of empirical investigations – the question of empirical verification The theoretical concept of markedness is argued to be an ideal correlate of gradience. Optimality Theory, being based on markedness, is a promising framework for the task of bridging the gap between model and empirical world. However, this task not only requires a model of grammar, but also a theory of the methods that are chosen in empirical investigations and how their results are interpreted, and a theory of how to derive predictions for these particular empirical investigations from the model. Stochastic Optimality Theory is one possible formulation of a proposal that derives empirical predictions from an OT model. However, I hope to have shown that it is not enough to take frequency distributions and relative acceptabilities at face value, and simply construe some Stochastic OT model that fits the facts. These facts first of all need to be interpreted, and those factors that the grammar has to account for must be sorted out from those about which grammar should have nothing to say. This task, to my mind, is more complicated than the picture that a simplistic application of (not only) Stochastic OT might draw.
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Correspondence in OT syntax and minimal link effects
(2004)
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Ralf Vogel
- The aim of this paper is the exploration of an optimality theoretic architecture for syntax that is guided by the concept of "correspondence": syntax is understood as the mechanism of “translating” underlying representations into a surface form. In minimalism, this surface form is called “Phonological Form” (PF). Both semantic and abstract syntactic information are reflected by the surface form. The empirical domain where this architecture is tested are minimal link effects, especially in the case of "wh"-movement. The OT constraints require the surface form to reflect the underlying semantic and syntactic representations as maximally as possible. The means by which underlying relations and properties are encoded are precedence, adjacency, surface morphology and prosodic structure. Information that is not encoded in one of these ways remains unexpressed, and gets lost unless it is recoverable via the context. Different kinds of information are often expressed by the same means. The resulting conflicts are resolved by the relative ranking of the relevant correspondence constraints.
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Remarks on the architecture of OT syntax grammars
(2003)
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Ralf Vogel
- This paper argues for a particular architecture of OT syntax. This architecture hasthree core features: i) it is bidirectional, the usual production-oriented optimisation (called ‘first optimisation’ here) is accompanied by a second step that checks the recoverability of an underlying form; ii) this underlying form already contains a full-fledged syntactic specification; iii) especially the procedure checking for recoverability makes crucial use of semantic and pragmatic factors. The first section motivates the basic architecture. The second section shows with two examples, how contextual factors are integrated. The third section examines its implications for learning theory, and the fourth section concludes with a broader discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed model.
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Weak function word shift
(2004)
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Ralf Vogel
- The fact that object shift only affects weak pronouns in mainland Scandinavian is seen as an instance of a more general observation that can be made in all Germanic languages: weak function words tend to avoid the edges of larger prosodic domains. This generalisation has been formulated within Optimality Theory in terms of alignment constraints on prosodic structure by Selkirk (1996) in explaining thedistribution of prosodically strong and weak forms of English functionwords, especially modal verbs, prepositions and pronouns. But a purely phonological account fails to integrate the syntactic licensing conditions for object shift in an appropriate way. The standard semantico-syntactic accounts of object shift, onthe other hand, fail to explain why it is only weak pronouns that undergo object shift. This paper develops an Optimality theoretic model of the syntax-phonology interface which is based on the interaction of syntactic and prosodic factors. The account can successfully be applied to further related phenomena in English and German.
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Free relative constructions in OT syntax
(2001)
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Ralf Vogel
- This paper is part of a research project on OT Syntax and the typology of the free relative (FR) construction. It concentrates on the details of an OT analysis and some of its consequences for OT syntax. I will not present a general discussion of the phenomenon and the many controversial issues it is famous for in generative syntax.
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Sprachliche Innovationen als Ready-made : zur Soziologie und Semantik sprachlicher Varianten
(2008)
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Beate Henn-Memmesheimer
- Im vorliegenden Artikel geht es um sprachliche Elemente, die in einer Sprache bereits vorhanden sind, als Nonstandard gelten bzw. nicht in anerkannter verbindlicher Weise standardisiert sind und nun in verändertem Gebrauch differenzierend genutzt werden. Der neue Gebrauch hat ein oder mehrere initiale Ereignisse, die – systemorientiert formuliert – an einer oder mehreren Stellen eines Sprachraums auftreten und in einer evolutionären Drift häufiger werden oder verschwinden, bzw. – handlungsorientiert formuliert – von unterschiedlichen Sprechern übernommen, mit neuen Semantiken versehen werden oder unbeachtet bleiben.
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Wortgeschichten: Driften im semantischen Raum
(2006)
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Beate Henn-Memmesheimer
- Die Driften der Wörter in öffentlichen Räumen sind vielfältig. Neue Wortentwicklungen belegen unterschiedliche Interessen, "chillen" und "dissen" andere als das in der konservativen Züricher Zeitung zuerst erschienene "share-holder-value". Im Folgenden soll eine sinnbezoge Verallgemeinerung unternommen werden, die die Handlungen der Akteure mit der strukturellen Ebene verbindet. Die Veränderungen in den Verwendungen sollen zu strukturellen sozialen und sprachlichen Rahmenbedingungen in Bezug gesetzt werden. Wie werden Neuerungen und Änderungen der Anwendungsbedingungen von Wörtern vor dem Hintergrund des Wissens um die traditionelle Standardsprache und deren soziale Funktion wahrgenommen? Welche Funktionen haben Neologismen in Abgrenzung zu diesem Standard?
