743 research outputs found
Ditransitives in germanic languages. Synchronic and diachronic aspects
This volume brings together twelve empirical studies on ditransitive constructions in Germanic languages and their varieties, past and present. Specifically, the volume includes contributions on a wide variety of Germanic languages, including English, Dutch, and German, but also Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian, as well as lesser-studied ones such as Faroese. While the first part of the volume focuses on diachronic aspects, the second part showcases a variety of synchronic aspects relating to ditransitive patterns. Methodologically, the volume covers both experimental and corpus-based studies. Questions addressed by the papers in the volume are, among others, issues like the cross-linguistic pervasiveness and cognitive reality of factors involved in the choice between different ditransitive constructions, or differences and similarities in the diachronic development of ditransitives. The volumeâs broad scope and comparative perspective offers comprehensive insights into well-known phenomena and furthers our understanding of variation across languages of the same family
The Realisation of syntactic principles in non-standard Afrikaans: the correspondence of Jan Jonker Afrikaner (1820-1889)
This study compares the syntax of nineteenth-century Orange River Afrikaans with Dutch and synchronic Afrikaans varieties, with particular attention to Griqua Afrikaans. It provides an account of the differences that are found between the earliest attestations of an extraterritorial variety of the Dutch language on southern African soil (the so-called Cape Dutch Vernacular) with the present-day outcome. The data collected for this study originate chiefly from an hitherto undisclosed corpus of letters kept in the Namibian State Archives by the so-called Oorlam-Nama, people of mixed descent who lived on the periphery of the nineteenth- century Cape colonial society. This thesis argues that nineteenth-century Orange River Afrikaans is a representative continuation of the earliest developments in the linguistic contact situation that existed at the Cape. The thesis advances that literacy and social class are important factors in the assessment of the written record from the Dutch colony at the Cape. The thesis centers around the letters by one author, Jan Jonker Afrikaner, written over a period of nearly twenty years in the second half of the nineteenth century. This legacy is a unique contribution to the diachronic data concerning the development of Afrikaans. From the data it is shown that this author had the command over different registers, fluctuating between a near perfect metropolitan Dutch and a Hollands that is classified as basilectal Afrikaans. The comparison of the data is set in a framework inspired by the concepts put forward in Generative Grammar. This has precipitated an exciting linguistic comparison of contemporary Afrikaans grammar with the diachronic material. This dissertation challenges the idea that the Khoesan Languages were of no or little influence in the development of Afrikaans. The linguistic analysis of the nineteenth-century data reveal that the developments which took place cannot be attributed to one single origin. It is demonstrated that the innovations and change that can be identified run parallel to regular patterns that are found in other languages generally classified as creole languages. It is argued that the syntax of the Khoesan languages is a major reinforcing factor in the development of the syntactic idiosyncrasies that are identified as un-Germanic characteristics of Afrikaans. Limited to nonstandard varieties of Afrikaans, in the concluding sections the question is raised how these findings are to be addressed in the larger context of language change
Elements, Government, and Licensing: Developments in phonology
Elements, Government, and Licensing brings together new theoretical and empirical developments in phonology. It covers three principal domains of phonological representation: melody and segmental structure; tone, prosody and prosodic structure; and phonological relations, empty categories, and vowel-zero alternations. Theoretical topics covered include the formalisation of Element Theory, the hotly debated topic of structural recursion in phonology, and the empirical status of government.
In addition, a wealth of new analyses and empirical evidence sheds new light on empty categories in phonology, the analysis of certain consonantal sequences, phonological and non-phonological alternation, the elemental composition of segments, and many more. Taking up long-standing empirical and theoretical issues informed by the Government Phonology and Element Theory, this book provides theoretical advances while also bringing to light new empirical evidence and analysis challenging previous generalisations.
The insights offered here will be equally exciting for phonologists working on related issues inside and outside the Principles & Parameters programme, such as researchers working in Optimality Theory or classical rule-based phonology
Acquiring a second language during childhood: a case study of the acquisition of English by a child Kazakh speaker
In this dissertation, we document a child Kazakh speakerâs acquisition of English as her second language. In particular, we focus on this childâs development of the English segments |f, v, Ξ, Ă°, Éč, Ê, ʧ|, and her acquisition of the English copula be, third person singular -s, and past tense -ed. We begin with detailed, longitudinal description of the developmental patterns that the child displayed through her acquisition of each of these segments and morphemes over an approximately two-year period.
Building on our data descriptions, we entertain a feature-based approach to analyze the patterns observed. We analyze the childâs acquisition of English consonants by following the Phonological Interference Hypothesis by Brown (1998), as well as the feature redistribution and recombination theory by Martinez, Goad & Dow (2021).These models highlight the possibilities of maximal transfer of the L1 features, and the possibilities of feature recombination in the course of L2 acquisition. Similarly, we analyze the childâs acquisition of inflectional morphology through the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH) by PreÌvost & White (2000), which highlights both the presence of syntactic features in the childâs interlanguage grammar and the difficulties inherent to the morphological expression of these features in speech.
As we will see, however, feature-based analyses do not enable an account for all of the facts. The data highlights the need to consider other factors, including language-specific âsurfaceâ knowledge. Concerning segmental development, we show the need to consider phonetic features, which define the precise motor articulations required in the production of speech sounds. Likewise, concerning morphological development, we show the need to consider of language-specific aspects of morphological expressions in spoken forms, in relation to the underlying syntactic knowledge
Machine Learning Algorithm for the Scansion of Old Saxon Poetry
Several scholars designed tools to perform the automatic scansion of poetry in many languages, but none of these tools
deal with Old Saxon or Old English. This project aims to be a first attempt to create a tool for these languages. We
implemented a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) model to perform the automatic scansion of Old Saxon
and Old English poems. Since this model uses supervised learning, we manually annotated the Heliand manuscript, and
we used the resulting corpus as labeled dataset to train the model. The evaluation of the performance of the algorithm
reached a 97% for the accuracy and a 99% of weighted average for precision, recall and F1 Score. In addition, we tested
the model with some verses from the Old Saxon Genesis and some from The Battle of Brunanburh, and we observed that
the model predicted almost all Old Saxon metrical patterns correctly misclassified the majority of the Old English input
verses
Approximation in Morphology
This Special Issue "Approximation in Morphology" has been collated from peer-reviewed papers presented at the ApproxiMo 'discontinuous' workshop (2022), which was held online between December 2021 and May 2022, and organized by Francesca Masini (Bologna), Muriel Norde (Berlin) and Kristel Van Goethem (Louvain)
The Negative Existential Cycle
In 1991, William Croft suggested that negative existentials (typically lexical expressions that mean ânot exist, not haveâ) are one possible source for negation markers and gave his hypothesis the name Negative Existential Cycle (NEC). It is a variationist model based on cross-linguistic data. For a good twenty years following its formulation, it was cited at face-value without ever having been tested by (historical)-comparative data. Over the last decade, Ljuba Veselinova has worked on testing the model in a comparative perspective, and this edited volume further expands on her work. The collection presented here features detailed studies of several language families such as Bantu, Chadic and Indo-European. A number of articles focus on the micro-variation and attested historical developments within smaller groups and clusters such as Arabic, Mandarin and Cantonese, and Nanaic. Finally, variation and historical developments in specific languages are discussed for Ancient Hebrew, Ancient Egyptian, Moksha-Mordvin (Uralic), Bashkir (Turkic), Kalmyk (Mongolic), three Pama-Nyungan languages, Oâdam (Southern Uto-Aztecan) and Tacana (Takanan, Amazonian Bolivia). The book is concluded by two chapters devoted to modeling cyclical processes in language change from different theoretical perspectives. Key notions discussed throughout the book include affirmative and negative existential constructions, the expansion of the latter into verbal negation, and subsequently from more specific to more general markers of negation. Nominalizations as well as the uses of negative existentials as standalone negative answers figure among the most frequent pathways whereby negative existentials evolve as general negation markers. The operation of the Negative Existential Cycle appears partly genealogically conditioned, as the cycle is found to iterate regularly within some families but never starts in others, as is the case in Bantu. In addition, other special negation markers such as nominal negators are found to undergo similar processes, i.e. they expand into the verbal domain and thereby develop into more general negation markers. The book provides rich information on a specific path of the evolution of negation, on cyclical processes in language change, and it show-cases the historical-comparative method in a modern setting
A Role and Reference Grammar Description of TupinambĂĄ
TupinambĂĄ is the first attested language of the TupĂ-GuaranĂ family and it has a story that one can follow from its first attestation to the present through its descendants. Making use of RRG, a linguistic theory that is informed by cross-linguistic diversity, I present the first typologically adequate description of TupinambĂĄ. This description introduces the main aspects of TupinambĂĄ grammar, including phonology, morphology, syntax, and information structure, accounting for the interface between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics
Gender variation across the oromo dialects: a corpus-based study*
This study aims to (1) demonstrate the position of the Oromo gender system in Corbett's (1991) typology of gender; (2) illustrate major syntactic gender variation across the Oromo dialects; (3) identify factors that contributed to the gender variation, and (4) illustrate the morphosyntax of the Oromo gender system. The data obtained from the Oromo Speech Corpus shows a high degree of lexical and syntactic variation between the Western-Northern dialects on the one hand, and the Eastern-Southern dialects on the other hand. The Western and Northern dialects have shifted from the historically Cushitic phonology-based gender assignment pattern to the semantic-based assignment pattern. This shift has resulted in a widespread neutralization of feminine gender markers. The contact between Oromo and the neighboring non-Cushitic languages contributed to these changes. The study also argues that Kramer's (2015) morphosyntactic approach can be extended to the analysis of Oromo gender system
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