A quantitative and typological study of Early Slavic participle clauses and their competition

This thesis investigates the semantic and pragmatic properties of Early Slavic participle constructions (conjunct participles and dative absolutes) to understand the principles motivating their selection over one another and over their main finite competitor (jegda-clauses). The issue is tackled by adopting two broadly different approaches, which inform the division of the thesis into two parts. The first part of the thesis uses detailed linguistic annotation on Early Slavic corpora at the morphosyntactic, dependency, information-structural, and lexical levels to obtain indirect evidence for different potential functions of participle clauses and their main finite competitor. The goal of this part of the thesis is to understand the roles of compositionality and default discourse reasoning as explanations for the distribution of participle constructions and jegda-clauses in the Early Slavic corpus. The investigation shows that the competition between conjunct participles, absolute constructions, and jegda-clauses occurs at the level of discourse organization, where the main determining factor in their distribution is the distinction between background and foreground content of an (elementary or complex) discourse unit. The analysis also shows that the major common denominator between the three constructions is that all of them can function as frame-setting devices (i.e. background clauses), albeit to very different extents. In fact, conjunct participles are more typically associated with the foreground constituent of a discourse unit, whereas dative absolutes and jegda-clauses are typically associated with the background content. The second part of the thesis uses massively parallel data, including Old Church Slavonic and Ancient Greek, and analyses typological variation in how languages express the semantic space of English when, whose scope encompasses that of Early Slavic participle constructions and jegda-clauses. To do so, probabilistic semantic maps are generated and statistical methods (including Kriging, Gaussian Mixture Modelling, precision and recall analysis) are used to induce cross-linguistically salient dimensions from the parallel corpus and to study conceptual variation within the semantic space of the hypothetical concept when. Clear typological correspondences and differences with Early Slavic from linguistic phenomena in other languages are then exploited to corroborate and refine observations made on the core semantic-pragmatic properties of participle constructions and jegda-clauses on the basis of annotated Early Slavic data. The analysis shows that 'null’ constructions (juxtaposed clauses such as participles and converbs, or independent clauses) consistently cluster in particular regions of the semantic map cross-linguistically, which clearly indicates that participle clauses are not equally viable as alternatives to any use of when, but carry particular meanings that make them less suitable for some of its functions. The investigation helped identify genealogically and areally unrelated languages that seem typologically very similar to Old Church Slavonic in the way they divide the semantic space of when between overtly subordinated and 'null’ constructions. Comparison with these languages reveals great similarities between the functions of Early Slavic participle constructions and of linguistic phenomena in some of these languages (particularly clause chaining, bridging, insubordination, and switch reference). Crucially, new clear correspondences are found between these phenomena and 'non-canonical’ usages of participle constructions (i.e. coreferential dative absolutes, syntactically independent absolutes and conjunct participles, and participle constructions with no apparent matrix clause), which had often been written off as ‘aberrations’ by previous literature on Early Slavic

A discourse-based approach to verb placement in early West-Germanic

The paper presents a novel approach to explaining word order variation in the early Germanic languages. Initial observations about verb placement as a device marking types of rhetorical relations made on data from Old High German (cf. Hinterhölzl & Petrova 2005) are now reconsidered on a larger scale and compared with evidence from other early Germanic languages. The paper claims that the identification of information-structural domains in a sentence is best achieved by taking into account the interaction between the pragmatic features of discourse referents and properties of discourse organization

Reporting, telling, and showing dreams

Dreams are not real, so when we recount them we prefix an intensional operator like “I dreamed that…”. Linguists will analyze this construction in terms of clausal complementation syntax and possible worlds semantics. But talking about a dream is often more like telling a story, with a potentially complex discourse structure (involving propositional discourse units connected by coherence relations like NARRATION, BACKGROUND, and EXPLANATION) that is hard to fit inside a single syntactically embedded that-clause (or a sequence of independently embedded clauses). I show how we can analyze actual, complex dream report stories using a formal discourse semantics framework. I then explore how to extend this discourse framework to visual dream reporting, like in movies and comics, where it’s not immediately clear that we even have any intensional operators or embeddings to begin with

Coercion for the ages? A thousand years of parallel inchoative histories for the French passé simple and passé composé

This paper investigates the diachronic evolution of so-called aspectual coercion (de Swart 1998, Bary & Egg 2012) in French, with respect to two major tenses, namely the simple past (passé simple) (PS) and compound past (passé composé) (PC); it will more specifically bear on cases of inchoative readings. Throughout a study spanning several diachronic stages and capitalizing on earlier work (Caudal 2015a, Caudal 2015b, Caudal, Burnertt & Troberg 2016), it will be shown that the PC and the PS exhibit striking differences in their acquisition of inchoative coercions, with the PC consistently lagging behind the PS in some respects. Initially, at the Old French period, the PC was totally deprived of any coercive power w.r.t. states, whereas the PS already had a broader and better established inchoative coercive capability. But across subsequent stages of the language, the PS gradually increased its inchoative potential at a steady pace – although it seems to retain some difficulties with certain types of stative utterances, especially those denoting individual-level states, and locative/posture structures. While the PC has often been claimed to have largely replaced the PS, I will here show that even in Modern French, the PC seems to still have a noticeably lesser "inchoativizing power" than the PS. In order words, in spite of nearly a thousand years of parallel evolution and semantic convergence, the initial semantic gap between the two forms still hasn't been bridged. I will suggest that these consistent differences should lead us to consider so-called inchoative coercion as a distinctly conventionalized type of meaning expansion mechanism – rather than a simple matter of overcoming the violation of some aspectual semantic restriction

Paths through meaning and form: Festschrift offered to Klaus von Heusinger on the occasion of his 60th birthday

“Paths through meaning and form. Festschrift offered to Klaus von Heusinger on the occasion of his 60th birthday” umfasst 60 Beiträge von Kolleginnen und Kollegen, die mit Klaus von Heusinger in seiner wissenschaftlichen Laufbahn zusammengearbeitet haben. Die in den einzelnen Beiträgen behandelten Themen gehen auf Prominenz, Referentialität, Quantifikation, Kasus, Spracherwerb und experimentelle Psycholinguistik ein

Cappadocian kinship

Cappadocian kinship systems are very interesting from a sociolinguistic and anthropological perspective because of the mixture of inherited Greek and borrowed Turkish kinship terms. Precisely because the number of Turkish kinship terms differs from one variety to another, it is necessary to talk about Cappadocian kinship systems in the plural rather than about the Cappadocian kinship system in the singular. Although reference will be made to other Cappadocian varieties, this paper will focus on the kinship systems of Mišotika and Aksenitika, the two Central Cappadocian dialects still spoken today in several communities in Greece. Particular attention will be given to the use of borrowed Turkish kinship terms, which sometimes seem to co-exist together with their inherited Greek counterparts, e.g. mána vs. néne ‘mother’, ailfó/aelfó vs. γardáš ‘brother’ etc. In the final part of the paper some kinship terms with obscure or hitherto unknown etymology will be discussed, e.g. káka ‘grandmother’, ižá ‘aunt’, lúva ‘uncle (father’s brother)’ etc

Events states and times

This monograph investigates the temporal interpretation of narrative discourse in two parts. The theme of the first part is narrative progression. It begins with a case study of the adverb ‘now’ and its interaction with the meaning of tense. The case study motivates an ontological distinction between events, states and times and proposes that ‘now’ seeks a prominent state that holds throughout the time described by the tense. Building on prior research, prominence is shown to be influenced by principles of discourse coherence and two coherence principles, NARRATION and RESULT, are given a formally explicit characterization. The key innovation is a new method for testing the definitional adequacy of NARRATION and RESULT, namely by an abductive argument. This contribution opens a new way of thinking about how eventive and stative descriptions contribute to the perceived narrative progression in a discourse. The theme of the second part of the monograph is the semantics and pragmatics of tense. A key innovation is that the present and past tenses are treated as scalar alternatives, a view that is motivated by adopting a particular hypothesis concerning stative predication. The proposed analysis accounts for tense in both matrix clauses and in complements of propositional attitudes, where the notorious double access reading arises. This reading is explored as part of a corpus study that provides a glimpse of how tense semantics interacts with Gricean principles and at-issueness. Several cross-linguistic predictions of the analysis are considered, including their consequences for the Sequence of Tense phenomenon and the Upper Limit Constraint. Finally, a hypothesis is provided about how tense meanings compose with temporal adverbs and verb phrases. Two influential analysis of viewpoint aspect are then compared in light of the hypothesis

“Russians are very sweet and nice”:a corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis of the representation of people in online travel reviews about Moscow

The paper explores how guests and hosts are represented in online travel reviews about Moscow. Tourism provides an opportunity to get acquainted with the sociocultural background of other nations and potentially to improve international relations. Moscow, the capital of Russia, is sometimes viewed as an unfriendly or unsafe destination and the Russian Government aims to increase the popularity of the city. However, there are concerns that modern tourism discourse contributes to the maintenance of asymmetrical guest-host power relations. Guests are often accused of consumerism while hosts are frequently backgrounded or represented as servants or cultural markers. Such representation can lead to client-servant attitude and even cause discrimination against hosts. While online travel reviews are considered an important genre of tourism discourse, most studies analyse the representation of people in promotional or media discourse. Considering that multimodality is an integral feature of tourism discourse and that the analysis of discourse patterns allows exploring the meanings widely shared by the society, the study utilizes a corpus-assisted multimodal approach by analysing the representation of people in headlines, texts, images and image captions of a corpus of online travel reviews. The analysis corroborates previous conclusions that guests tend to be represented as consumers enjoying themselves while hosts are perceived as friendly servants. However, the study provides evidence that tourists can background not only hosts but also themselves or other tourists. Moreover, the results reveal that in contrast to promotional and media discourse, guests can also portray themselves as active, solving problems while sometimes representing guests as rude or unwelcoming. The results also show that the representation of people can vary across the modes of the same document. The study concludes that user-generated tourism discourse reveals a complex picture and can express resistance to the dominant institutional imagery

Discourse structure as the scaffolding of stance structure : developments of a central concept in a central site of discursive interaction in bioethics

This study explored how a major concept and principle in the interdisciplinary area of bioethics, respect for autonomy, changed across the first and the seventh editions of the textbook Principles of Biomedical Ethics by Beauchamp and Childress, a period covering 33 formative years in the institutionalization and growth of bioethics. The question explored by the study was: what can the structure of the stance interactions between authors reveal about institutional changes and the relative position of different academic disciplines in bioethics over this period? A new, relational method of content analysis that draws on methods developed in applied linguistics, concerning evaluative or stance-taking language and on the discourse or rhetorical structure of expository texts, was used in pursuing an answer to the question. Between the first and seventh editions, the core of Beauchamp and Childress's concepts of respect for autonomy and informed consent did not change significantly, though additions and refinements were added in the seventh edition. Philosophy retained a prominent place in the discussion across editions, but medicine, combined with other biomedical sciences and professions, slightly overtook philosophy's place of prominence. The interactions between these disciplines were, on balance, cooperative, and some division of labor was evident in the seventh edition, with philosophers used mostly for conceptual analysis and biomedical disciplines used mostly for technical and empirical support of the concepts. The overall number of disciplines represented in the bioethics discourse on autonomy grew exponentially.Includes bibliographical references