Reflexive constructions in the world's languages

Synopsis: This landmark publication brings together 28 papers on reflexive constructions in languages from all continents, representing very diverse language types. While reflexive constructions have been discussed in the past from a variety of angles, this is the first edited volume of its kind. All the chapters are based on original data, and they are broadly comparable through a common terminological framework. The volume opens with two introductory chapters by the editors that set the stage and lay out the main comparative concepts, and it concludes with a chapter presenting generalizations on the basis of the studies of individual languages

A synchronic and diachronic study of Korean modal suffixes.

This functional typological study of the Korean Modal Suffixes intends to establish a rather comprehensive picture of the Korean modal suffixes (hereafter KMS). It employs diachronic and synchronic approaches assuming that synchronic rules reflect the diachronic development of the KMS. It also traces the development of the KMS from the point of view of their interaction with tense and aspect. Chapter one gives a general overview of the whole work. Chapter two surveys previous studies on modality both from a general point of view and with regard to Korean and presents a preliminary account of the KMS. Chapter three deals with the Typological characteristics of the KMS. It establishes the suffixation rule, which presupposes that if there exist morphologically distinctive classes, there should be places of occurrence for the respective items which give automatic clues for their identification. Chapter four is concerned with the semantic features of the KMS. A number of semantic parameters of the system have been accounted for, and definitions of sub-categories and formulations are proposed on a conceptual basis (Palmer 1986). This thesis is also dedicated to the description of the polysemous character of the KMS and to the establishment of the principle which governs the expansion of meanings, the cause and nature of semantic change in terms of a compromise between the two approaches - prototype and componential semantic theories (Bennett 1990; Taylor 1995). In the course of presenting a classification of their meanings, it emphasizes their polysemous nature and gives prominence to the distinction between deontic and epistemic uses. Chapter five explores the historical development of the KMS. The assumption that what might have started as a context-dependent extension acquires the status of an established prototypical sense is applied to a representative set of Middle and Old Korean etymologies. The principles of change are accounted for from a grammaticalization perspective (Hopper & Traugott 1993). Chapter six summarizes the original contributions of this thesis

Text, grammar, and worlds

Bei dieser Dissertation handelt es sich um eine einzelsprachlich typologische Beschreibung des traditionellen narrativen Genres "Kwintu" in Cusco Quechua. Hauptziele der Arbeit sind die Aufstellung eines Wissensmodells (oder einer Textwelt) für das narrative Genre und die Beschreibung diskursgrammatischer Merkmale innerhalb dieses Genres. Neben einer umfangreichen linguistischen Untersuchung ausgewählter Texte werden kulturelle Hintergründe der andinen Erzähltradition, textsemantische und erzähltheoretische Strukturen sowie stilistische Merkmale beleuchtet. Dabei wird, sofern sprachvergleichende Daten vorliegen, auf universale Tendenzen und Quechua-spezifische Merkmale hingewiesen. Die narrative Textwelt des Cusco Quechua ergibt sich aus den „Mittelwerten“ der untersuchten Erzählungen, die als prototypisch für das Genre „Kwintu“ anzunehmen sind. Zudem wird festgestellt, inwiefern sich textsemantische Größen und stilistische Merkmale in linguistischen Strukturen niederschlagen. Die Arbeit soll einen Beitrag zur textbasierten Forschung innerhalb der Kognitiven Linguistik und Sprachtypologie leisten

Motion event encoding in ancient greek. A typological corpus-based study of path and manner expression

2015 - 2016This dissertation is a corpus-based study of motion encoding in Ancient Greek. Among the conceptual components of motion identified in the relevant literature, the focus is on Path, i.e. the trajectory traced by the Figure during its displacement, and Manner, i.e. the mode of motion. Based on a fine-grained analysis of five Ancient Greek texts belonging to the historical and dramatic genres, and dating back to the 5th century BC, this study investigates the lexical, grammatical and constructional strategies involved in motion expression, as well as the distribution of the spatial information across five morphosyntactic and functional categories, namely the verb, the noun, the modifier, the satellite, and the adnominal. Exploiting the conceptual tools and theoretical premises of the functional-typological approach, the data analysis shows that, regardless of the traditional attribution of Ancient Greek to the Satellite-Framed type (cf. Talmy 1991; 2000) based on its rich inventory of directional preverbs and verb particles, several lexicalization patterns coexist in the language, and prevail over one another depending on the features of the motion event. Such patterns form a cline proceeding from a more overt to a more covert type of encoding. As far as Path is concerned, the hypothesis on the existence of an asymmetry between Source and Goal (cf., inter alia, Ikegami 1987; Stefanowitsch & Rohde 2004) is confirmed. [edited by author]XV n.s

Coordinate structures: constraint-based syntax-semantics processing

Tese de doutoramento em Línguística (Linguística Computacional), apresentada à Universidade de Lisboa através da Faculdade de Letras, 200

Diachrony of differential argument marking

While there are languages that code a particular grammatical role (e.g. subject or direct object) in one and the same way across the board, many more languages code the same grammatical roles differentially. The variables which condition the differential argument marking (or DAM) pertain to various properties of the NP (such as animacy or definiteness) or to event semantics or various properties of the clause. While the main line of current research on DAM is mainly synchronic the volume tackles the diachronic perspective. The tenet is that the emergence and the development of differential marking systems provide a different kind of evidence for the understanding of the phenomenon. The present volume consists of 18 chapters and primarily brings together diachronic case studies on particular languages or language groups including e.g. Finno-Ugric, Sino-Tibetan and Japonic languages. The volume also includes a position paper, which provides an overview of the typology of different subtypes of DAM systems, a chapter on computer simulation of the emergence of DAM and a chapter devoted to the cross-linguistic effects of referential hierarchies on DAM

Chinese DE constructions in secondary predication: Historical and typological perspectives

This dissertation investigates the history of Chinese DE [tə] constructions in light of the typology of secondary predication. A secondary predicate, such as hot in He drank the tea hot, is a predicate that provides subsidiary information to a substructure (the participant tea) of the more salient primary event (drank). Mandarin DE features in two strategies: (i) a DE-marked primary event elaborated by a predicate following it, and (ii) a DE-marked secondary predicate preposed to the primary predicate. Focusing on Late Medieval Chinese (7th to mid-13th c.), the study examines the evolution of the DE-marked strategies from three distinctive constructions: resultative [V DE1 VP] by DE1 (得), nominal modification by DE2 (底/的), and secondary predication by DE3 (地). The first theme concerns the interactions between DE2-marked nominalization and DE3-marked secondary predicate constructions. Results show that DE2 and DE3 developed from opposite poles of the attribution vs. predication continuum, overlapping in categories intermediate between prototypical restrictive modification and secondary predication. Their distinctive information-packaging functions are consistently mapped to different construals of a property’s time-stability, which are reflected in their collocational preferences. The second theme of the study deals with the merger of DE1 and DE2 constructions and the creation of the [V DE Pred] topic-comment schema, where [V DE] represents an event as the topic, and Pred makes an assertion about a substructure of V. The discussion focuses on the structural and semantic changes of the [V DE1 VP] construction that facilitate its alignment with the DE2-marked topic-comment construction. The development of DE constructions mirrors semantic shifts between temporally anterior vs. simultaneous relations and conceptual fluidity between event- vs. participant-orientation, parameters that feature in the encoding of secondary predication crosslinguistically (Verkerk 2009, Himmelmann and Schultze-Berndt 2005, van der Auwera and Malchukov 2005, Loeb-Diehl 2005). The findings also suggest a reevaluation of the typology. Notably, semantic orientation is not crucial to whether a semantic relation is encoded by a DE construction, or which DE construction is selected. Instead, it is information-packaging functions, construals of time-stability, and iconic principles that play a dominant role