Compounding in Namagowab and English: (exploring meaning creation in compounds)

This essay investigates compounding in Namagowab and English, which belong to two widely divergent groups of languages, the Khoesan and Indo-European, respectively. The first motive is to investigate how and why new words are created from existing ones. The reading and data interpretation seeks an understanding of word formation and an overview of semantic compositionality, structure and productivity, within the broad context of cognitive, lexicalist and distributed morphology paradigms. This coupled with history reading about the languages and its people, is used to speculate about why compounds feature in lexical creation. Compounding is prevalent in both languages and their distance in terms of phylogenetic relationships should allow limited generalizing about these processes of formation. Word lists taken from dictionaries in both languages were analyzed by entering the words in Excel spreadsheets so that various attributes of these words, such as word type, compound class (Noun, Verb, Preposition, Adjective and Adverb) and constituent class could be counted, and described with formulae, and compound and constituent meaning analyzed. The conclusion was that socio historical factors such as language contact, and aspects of cognition such as memory and transparency, account for compounding in a language in addition to typology

Inquiries into the lexicon-syntax relations in Basque

Index:- Foreword. B. Oyharçabal.- Morphosyntactic disambiguation and shallow parsing in computational processing in Basque. I. Aduriz, A. Díaz de Ilarraza.- The transitivity of borrowed verbs in Basque: an outline. X. Alberdi.- Patrixa: a unification-based parser for Basque and its application to the automatic analysis of verbs. I. Aldezabal, M. J. Aranzabe, A. Atutxa, K.Gojenola, K, Sarasola.- Learning argument/adjunct distinction for Basque. I. Aldezabal, M. J. Aranzabe, K. Gojenola, K, Sarasola, A. Atutxa.- Analyzing verbal subcategorization aimed at its computation application. I. Aldezabal, P. Goenaga.- Automatic extraction of verb paterns from “hauta-lanerako euskal hiztegia”. J. M. Arriola, X. Artola, A. Soroa.- The case of an enlightening, provoking an admirable Basque derivational siffux with implications for the theory of argument structure. X. Artiagoitia.- Verb-deriving processes in Basque. J. C. Odriozola.- Lexical causatives and causative alternation in Basque. B. Oyharçabal.- Causation and semantic control; diagnosis of incorrect use in minorized languages. I. Zabala.- Subject index.- Contributions

Inquiries into words, constraints and contexts : Festschrift in the honour of Kimmo Koskenniemi on his 60th birthday

Peer reviewe

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism)

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar

Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) is a constraint-based or declarative approach to linguistic knowledge, which analyses all descriptive levels (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics) with feature value pairs, structure sharing, and relational constraints. In syntax it assumes that expressions have a single relatively simple constituent structure. This volume provides a state-of-the-art introduction to the framework. Various chapters discuss basic assumptions and formal foundations, describe the evolution of the framework, and go into the details of the main syntactic phenomena. Further chapters are devoted to non-syntactic levels of description. The book also considers related fields and research areas (gesture, sign languages, computational linguistics) and includes chapters comparing HPSG with other frameworks (Lexical Functional Grammar, Categorial Grammar, Construction Grammar, Dependency Grammar, and Minimalism)

-ish / Ish: Aspects of a suffix turned free morpheme

The topic of the dissertation is the Germanic morpheme -ish / Ish, which forms adjectives and attaches to a variety of base words in its bound form (-ish). Recently, it has detached from host words, now also occurring as a free morpheme (Ish). The suffix is a cognate to German -isch and is recorded in the English language since Old English. These three aspects of -ish / Ish motivate a tripartite distinction of the thesis which investigates them with respect to the following questions: 1)How did the suffix -ish develop historically and how has its semantics changed to account for its present-day polysemy? 2a.) How has it developed into a free morpheme Ish and how can that development be described? 2b.) What is the status of the independent morpheme? 3a) Which position does the suffix take in a cohort of other adjective-forming English suffixes, and in which respects to the German counterparts of these suffixes differ? Can they be described as rivals? These questions guide the three parts of the thesis and they are based on several basic hypotheses. First, in early work suffixes have been analysed with respect to their function of transposition into other word classes, but recent work has recognised their semantic contribution to their base words. In order to show that suffixes have meaning, a lexical-semantic analysis is conducted which bases the development of the suffix with different bases on a diachronic corpus analysis. The analysis shows how the suffix gradually develops meaning components which explains its present-day polysemy. In doing so, a novel lexical-semantic feature is proposed, which serves to complement and extend work by Lieber (2004, 2007, 2016b). Second, the development of the free morpheme is shown to be gradual by classifying its properties on the basis of a corpus analysis. It has been described in the literature with respect to two opposing processes, grammaticalisation and degrammaticalisation and the present investigation points to the latter. Connected to the process is the question of their status and grammaticalisation is frequently considered the process of emergence of discourse markers. Their properties and functions are contrasted with the comparable elements of hedges and the identified properties of Ish align it more convincingly with the latter. Third, similar adjective-forming suffixes are frequently described as rivals which are in competition with each other and which share a common meaning. I show that the previously identified lexicalsemantic feature can also be felicitously applied to the English and German comparative suffixes, which highlights their subtle meaning differences and which identifies semantic niches for each, despite some overlap. A comparative corpus analysis sheds light on their respective frequencies and distribution

Meaning and Grammar of Nouns and Verbs

The papers collected in this book cover contemporary and original research on semantic and grammatical issues of nouns and noun phrases, verbs and sentences, and aspects of the combination of nouns and verbs, in a great variety of languages. A special focus is put on noun types, tense and aspect semantics, granularity of verb meaning, and subcompositionality. The investigated languages and language groups include Austronesian, East Asian, Slavic, German, English, Hungarian and Lakhota. The collection provided in this book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students specialising in the fields of semantics, morphology, syntax, typology, and cognitive sciences

Analyzability and semantic associations in referring expressions : a study in comparative lexicology

This thesis is a sample-based typological study of formal and semantic patterns in terms for a selection of referring ("nominal") meanings. Languages differ considerably in that in some, unanalyzable, monomorphemic terms dominate in the lexicon while in others analyzable items formed by language-specific means of word-formation (which one this is is a typological variable in itself) abound. The thesis attempts to establish the variation and limits in this variable and to explain why languages vary. Another major concern are semantic associations found in analyzable items as well as in the conflation of several meanings into one lexical item, both from an areal as well as a universal point of view.LEI Universiteit LeidenMax Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, GermanyDescriptive and Comparative Linguistic

Důležitá slova. Podklady ke kolokačnímu švédsko-českému slovníku základních sloves

Basic verbs, i.e. very common verbs that typically denote physical movements, locations, states or actions, undergo various semantic shifts and acquire different secondary uses. In extreme cases, the distribution of secondary uses grows so general that they are regarded as auxiliary verbs (go and to be going to), phase verbs (turn, grow), etc. ese uses are usually well-documented by grammars and language textbooks, and so are idiomatic expressions (phraseologisms) in dictionaries. ere is, however, a grey area in between, which is extremely difficult to learn for non-native speakers. is consists of secondary uses with limited collocability, in particular light verb constructions, and secondary meanings that only get activated under particular morphosyntactic conditions. e basic-verb secondary uses and constructions are usually semantically transparent, such that they do not pose understanding problems, but they are generally unpredictable and language-specific, such that they easily become an issue in non-native text production. In this thesis, Swedish basic verbs are approached from the contrastive point of view of an advanced Czech learner of Swedish. A selection of Swedish constructions with basic verbs is explored. e observations result in a proposal for the structure of a machine-readable Swedish-Czech...Základní slovesa (basic verbs), tj. frekventovaná významová slovesa, jež zpravidla popisují fyzický pohyb, umístění, stav, nebo děj, procházejí řadou sémantických posunů, díky kterým se používají k vyjádření druhotných, přenesených významů. V krajních případech se dané sloveso stává pomocným, způsobovým, nebo fázovým slovesem a přestávají pro ně platit kolokační omezení, jež se vztahují na sloveso užité v jeho primárním (tj. doslovném) významu. Tato užití sloves bývají většinou dobře dokumentována v gramatikách i učebnicích, stejně jako kvalitní slovníky podávají podrobnou informaci o užití těchto sloves v ustálených frazeologických spojeních. Mezi plně gramatikalizovaným užitím na jedné straně a idiomatickým, frazeologickým užitím na druhé straně však existuje celá škála užití základních sloves v přenesených významech, jejíž zvládnutí je pro nerodilého mluvčího značně obtížné: užití v přeneseném významu, jež mají omezenou kolokabilitu. To jsou především verbonominální konstrukce někdy nazývané analytické predikáty (light verb constructions), ale také užití, která za určitých omezených morfosyntaktických podmínek (např. pouze v negaci) aktivují abstraktní sémantické rysy u jiných predikátů, např. zesilují význam, nebo implikují, že daný děj již trvá dlouho, a podobně. Tato druhotná užití významových sloves...Institute of Germanic StudiesÚstav germánských studiíFilozofická fakultaFaculty of Art