Revisiting be supposed to from a diachronic constructionist perspective

postprin

Raising: Dutch between English and German

As a complement to C. B. van Haeringen's classic comparative study (1956) that positioned the grammar of Dutch in between the grammars of English and German, this study compares the productivity of three kinds of "raising" patterns in these languages: Object-to-Subject, Subject-to-Object, and Subject-to-Subject raising. It establishes the extent to which Dutch, as well as English and German, have evolved from the old West Germanic starting point these languages are assumed to have shared in this area of grammar. The results are a test case for Hawkins' (1986) case syncretism account of the difference in "explicit-ness" between the grammars of English and German. © Society for Germanic Linguistics 2011.published_or_final_versio

Diachronic Approaches to Modality in World Englishes: Introduction to the Special Issue

postprin

Revisiting postverbal standard negation in the Jê languages = Revisitando a negação padrão pós-verbal nas línguas Jê

In the Jê languages standard negators tend to take a post-verbal position. This paper asks why this should be the case and therefore discusses earlier accounts relating Jê standard negators to either negative verbs or privative postpositions. We argue that these accounts do not have to exclude each other. In particular, we propose that an existential negator can be reanalyzed as a privative one. We also argue that if the origin of the standard negator is a verb with the meaning ‘finish’, we may be dealing with a scenario that is similar to the ‘Negative Existential Cycle’. In both, the existential negator denies the existence of a state of affairs and then turns into a standard negator. But whereas in the Negative Existential Cycle the non-existence of a state of affairs is modelled on the non-existence of an object, in the ‘new’ scenario the non-existence of a state of affairs derives from the fact that a process or event has come to an end.Horizon 2020(H2020)Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant No 895548Descriptive and Comparative Linguistic

Negation in Kulina: a double polarity swap

This study reconstructs the development of a negative existential and a negative pro-sentence in the Arawan language Kulina (Brazil-Peru). We demonstrate that the two elements forming the negative existential construction nowe (hi)ra- are involved in a double polarity swap: (i) an originally neutral lexical item (the dynamic verb nowe ‘show’) has become negative through contamination, and (ii) an originally negative element (hi)ra-, which was responsible for the contamination, is bleaching into a semantically neutral auxiliary. This lexeme nowe, with the auxiliary used only optionally, also functions as a negative pro-sentence now. Thus, synchronically we have a negative pro-sentence that has its origin in a semantically-neutral lexical item. Neither the source of the negative pro-sentence nor this diachronic path has surfaced in the literature on negation so far and thus they are instructive from diachronic and typological perspectives. The hypothesis enriches the literature on both the Jespersen Cycle and the Negative Existential Cycle. FGW – Publications without University Leiden contrac

Standard negation in Chibchan

This paper surveys the form and the position of the negators of declarative verbal main clauses in the Chibchan languages. It attempts to describe the similarities and the differences, and it ventures hypotheses about the diachrony, primarily with an appeal to the Jespersen and Negative Existential Cycles. It sketches if and how the negators fit more general areal patterning, in particular, the Columbian Central American linguistic area.FGW – Publications without University Leiden contrac

How to do words with ‘things’: Multiple grammaticalization from ‘thing’ in Tupi-Guarani

In the Tupi-Guarini languages the ancestral ‘thing’ word has developed a fair number of grammatical uses, either on its own or together with other material. The paper surveys these uses and their diachronies, with respect to both general issues of grammaticalization from a ‘thing’ source or to debates specific to Tupi-Guarani languages. We first survey pronominal uses (indefinite, interrogative, and negative) and discourse particle uses. Then we turn to morphological functions serving incorporation, intransitivization and nominalization. We also deal with negative and privative functions.Descriptive and Comparative Linguistic

Zaparoan negation revisited

The paper revisits negation in the Zaparoan languages Arabela, Iquito and Záparo. For Iquito, which exhibits single, double as well as triple negation, we adopt a Jespersen Cycle perspective and find it to have explanatory force. For Záparo and Arabela another Cycle hypothesis proves enlightening, i.e., the Negative Existential Cycle. We hypothesize that both in Iquito and Záparo there is a diachronic link between the formal expression of negation and of the concept for ‘leave’/‘go’. We addressed the internal subclassification of the Zaparoan languages, showing that, at least for the structural feature of negation, the position of Arabela is closer to Záparo than to Iquito. FGW – Publications without University Leiden contrac

Performance analysis of a parallel, multi-node pipeline for DNA sequencing

Post-sequencing DNA analysis typically consists of read mapping followed by variant calling and is very time-consuming, even on a multi-core machine. Recently, we proposed Halvade, a parallel, multi-node implementation of a DNA sequencing pipeline according to the GATK Best Practices recommendations. The MapReduce programming model is used to distribute the workload among different workers. In this paper, we study the impact of different hardware configurations on the performance of Halvade. Benchmarks indicate that especially the lack of good multithreading capabilities in the existing tools (BWA, SAMtools, Picard, GATK) cause suboptimal scaling behavior. We demonstrate that it is possible to circumvent this bottleneck by using multiprocessing on high-memory machines rather than using multithreading. Using a 15-node cluster with 360 CPU cores in total, this results in a runtime of 1 h 31 min. Compared to a single-threaded runtime of similar to 12 days, this corresponds to an overall parallel efficiency of 53%

Standard negation: the curious case of South America

This study compares standard negation in the indigenous languages of South America to the rest of the world. We show that South American languages not only prefer postverbal negation to preverbal negation and negative morphology to syntax, but postverbal morphological negation to any other negation strategy. The predominance of this strategy makes South America distinct from other macro-areas. The study also considers the areal distribution of negation on the South American continent. It shows that negation strategies each have their own concentration area. Postverbal morphological negation, which is the dominant strategy, turns out to be concentrated in the northwest of the continent, with the highest density around the boundaries between Colombia, Peru and Brazil. We suggest that the preference for postverbal morphological negation in South America is likely to be the result of language-internal mechanisms of negation renewal, coupled with language contact.Horizon 2020(H2020)Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant No 895548Descriptive and Comparative Linguistic