Trees and Fields and Negative Polarity

The paper takes as its point of departure a comparison between two kinds of approaches to clause structure, namely tree analyses like the generative analysis and field analyses like the sætningsskema analysis of Danish of Diderichsen (1946) and many others (or like the topologische Modell analysis of German of Drach 1937 and many others).The particular difference between the two kinds of analyses which I explore in this paper concerns c-command, which is a relationship between different constituents in a clause. I shall try to show how useful and indispensable c-command is when it comes to accounting for negative polarity items in English, Danish and German, both the more straightforward aspects and the more complex ones, e.g. the so-called NPI-verbs as well as the interaction between NPI-elements and because-clauses

Sætningsstruktur og strukturelle flertydigheder

There is agreement across different approaches that although sentences consist of words, they are much more than strings of words: They also have structure. Section 1 shows how clause structure is analysed very differently across different approaches. The rest of the paper addresses ambiguity: lexical ambiguity in section 2, morphological structural ambiguity in section 3, and syntactic structural ambiguity in section 4. Subsections 4.1-4.2 analyse the ambiguity arising when a constituent, e.g. a PP, is interpretable either as the sister of one constituent or of another constituent. Subsection 4.3 argues that the ambiguous examples analysed in all of section 4 cannot be accounted for within approaches that do not recognise a constituent that contains a verb and its complement (i.e. a VP)

Tempus som tre uafhængige træk

Zum einen möchte ich dafür argumentieren, dass acht Tempusformen für die Analyse von Tempus in der Sprache relevant sind, besonders in Hinblick auf die temporalen Relationen, die von den Tempusformen ausgedrückt werden. Zum anderen will ich mit Ausgangspunkt in Reichenbach (1947) versuchen zu zeigen, dass es angemessen ist, für jede Tempusform nicht nur einen Äußerungszeitpunkt und einen Ereigniszeitpunkt anzunehmen, sondern darüber hinaus zwei verschiedene Referenzzeitpunkte. Erst diese Analyse erlaubt es, eine vollständige Korrespondenz zwischen morphologischen und semantischen Eigenschaften für jede Tempusform herzustellen

Possessorens status inden for nominalgruppen

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Den engelske verbalfrases omfang og struktur

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Verbalpartikelvariation i de germanske sprog

I have two goals in this paper, namely (1) a more global one: to present (and try to account for) the variation concerning verb particles across the Germanic languages, and (2) a more “local” one: to use some of this variation data to support my analysis that Yiddish is an SOV-language like German and Dutch and not an SVO-language like English and the Scandinavian languages. Yiddish is similar to German as far as verb particles are concerned, and this follows from an analysis of Yiddish as SOV, but not from a hypothetical SVO-analysis