The Value Relevance of Sentiment

It is generally accepted that excessive exuberance or gloom in investor sentiment contributes to booms and crashes in share prices. However, views differ on the merits of active policy intervention due to gaps in our understanding of the transmission mechanism. To fill this gap we apply a fully ex ante valuation model in which an index of investor sentiment is included along with earnings and growth fundamentals to explain value. The outcome is a precise indication of the value relevance of sentiment. We employ the investor sentiment indicator proposed by Baker and Wurgler (2007). Valuation, and implied permanent growth, based on the inclusion of standard fundamentals is compared with that obtained when sentiment is added. The resulting ratio produces an index of ’the valuation effects of sentiment’ that can be assessed with statistical significance. Out-of-sample fit is also examined. For the Dow index the valuation effects of sentiment are significant and as large as 40% of market value at the peak of the ’dot-com’ bubble. The index we propose identifies conditions, detectable in advance and under the control of policy makers, that are conducive to the creation of asset bubbles. It is easy to construct, timely, robust and can be used improve our understanding of what leads to bubbles and crashes and to inform policy.Bubbles, fundamental valuation, sentiment, early warning indicators

Conjunction particles in Nakh-Daghestanian: topic, focus or something else?

Nakh-Daghestanian (Caucasus, Russia) languages make heavily use of conjunction particles. In this talk, I focus on two languages from different subbranches, Hinuq (particle = n(o)) and Sanzhi Dargi (= ra). The data comes from natural texts collected by myself

Person marking and information structure in Nakh-Daghestanian

[Extract] What is the function of person indexing? - reduplicating 'redundant' information - reference tracking in discourse - highlighting the grammatically privileged participant Characterization of person indexing: - trigger of the person indexing - position of person indexing Person indexing in Nakh-Daghestanian: - Nakh-Daghestanian (or East Caucasian or North-East Caucasian) languages are spoken in Northern part of the Caucasus (Russia, Azerbaijan, Georgia) - salient grammatical feature: gender/number agreement on verbs, partially on adjectives, adverbs - person indexing is not very frequent in Nakh-Daghestanian - overviews: Helmbrecht (1996), Schulze (2007a) - among the languages that have it are: Dargi, Lak, Tabasaran, Batsbi, Udi, and to a lesser extend Hunzib, Akhvakh and two Avar dialects - generally viewed as a relatively young category (in contrast to the pervasive and probably older gender/number indexing) - only one person is indexed (with the exception of Tabasaran) - indexing is regulated by various hierarchies - in Dargi, Lak, and Udi (Harris 2002: 44-63) person makers express term focus - focus (Dik et al. 1981) "what is relatively the most important or salient information in the given setting" - term focus (or constituent focus or argument focus): whenever the scope of focus is not on the predication as a whole, but on some part of it - two types of term focus: - completive (or presentational or information focus): the focus fills a gap in the pragmatic information of the addressee; new information (e.g. answers to WH-questions) - contrastive (or identificational): a reply to the addressee's contrary belief of information (e.g. correction by replacing, restricting or expanding), characterized by exhaustiveness (i.e. it implies that the predication holds only for the focused element out of a set of elements given in the context) (e.g. cleft constructions, prosodic prominence, focus particles

Elevation as a category of grammar: Sanzhi Dargwa and beyond

Nakh-Daghestanian languages have encountered growing interest from typologists and linguists from other subdiscplines, and more and more languages from the Nakh-Daghestanian language family are being studied. This paper provides a grammatical overview of the hitherto undescribed Sanzhi Dargwa language, followed by a detailed analysis of the grammaticalized expression of spatial elevation in Sanzhi. Spatial elevation, a topic that has not received substantial attention in Caucasian linguistics, manifests itself across different parts of speech in Sanzhi Dargwa and related languages. In Sanzhi, elevation is a deictic category in partial opposition with participant-oriented deixis/horizontally-oriented directional deixis. This paper treats the spatial uses of demonstratives, spatial preverbs and spatial cases that express elevation as well as the semantic extension of this spatial category into other, non-spatial domains. It further compares the Sanzhi data to other Caucasian and non-Caucasian languages and makes suggestions for investigating elevation as a subcategory within a broader category of topographical deixis

Complexity and Its Relation to Variation

This paper is concerned with the relationship between complexity and variation. The main goal is to lay out the conceptual foundations and to develop and systematize reasonable hypotheses such as to set out concrete research questions for future investigations. I first compare how complexity and variation have synchronically been studied and what kinds of questions have been asked in those studies. Departing from earlier surveys of different definitions of complexity, here I classify the majority of complexity studies into two broad types based on two ways of defining this concept. The first type determines and measures linguistic complexity by counting numbers of items (e.g., linguistic forms or rules and interactions between forms). The second type makes use of transparency and the principle of One-Meaning–One-Form. In addition, linguistic complexity has been defined by means of concepts from information theory, namely in terms of description length or information content, but those studies are in the minority. Then I define linguistic variation as a situation when two or more linguistic forms have identical or largely identical meaning and it is possible to use either the one or the other variant. Variation can be free or linguistically or socially conditioned. I argue that there is an implicational relationship between complexity of the first type that is defined in terms of numbers of items and variation. Variation is a type of complexity because it implies the existence of more than one linguistic form per meaning. But not every type of complexity involves variation because complexity defined on the basis of transparency does not necessarily imply the existence of more than one form. In the following I discuss extralinguistic factors that (possibly) have an impact on socially conditioned variation and/or complexity and can lead to an increase or decrease of complexity and/or variation. I conclude with suggestions of how to further examine the relationship between complexity and variation