Matti Marttinen Larsson: korte voorstelling doctoraatsproject

On the morphosyntactic variation in adverbial locative phrases in Spanish diatopic and sociolinguistic varieties

 

Melissa Farasyn: langere presentatie

Position-dependent agreement in the Middle Low German plural verbal paradigm

 

This study focuses on a special kind of verbal ending in Middle Low German (MLG) arising in the first and second person plural (1^st and 2^nd p.pl.). In inversion contexts, the regular unitary inflection ending in the plural (-et/-en) alternates with an ending –e, missing the final consonant (cf. (1a) and (2a) for inversion without and (1b) and (2b) with a topic) (Lasch 1974²:227).

(1) a. late wy ene ‘Let us leave him alone‘ (Buxtehuder Evangeliar)

b. Nu bekenne wi […] ‘Now we confess […]‘ (Buxtehuder Evangeliar)

(2) a. Wylle gij na dessem leuende myt vrowden syn

‘Do you want to be joyful after this life?‘ (Marienklage)

b. Nu schulle gy horen vnde merken rechte […]

‘Now you will hear and learn truly […]‘ (Buxtehuder Evangeliar)

 

A corpus study of 13,500 finite clauses shows that this alternation is robustly attested in all main dialect areas in Middle Low German (i.e. in 95.15% of all inversion cases). Subjunctive and indicative mood are equally affected. As MLG deletion is thus virtually omnipresent, it is difficult to trace whether the alternation originated in one specific environment. Therefore, a closer look at temporarily overlapping or related languages might shed a light on the origin of the structure.

 

Another difficulty tracing the origins of the structure is that the predecessor of MLG, Old Saxon (OS), has no occurrences of deletion at all (Sehrt 1925). One might argue that deletion is not visible due to the smaller amount of data, and that OS might have had sparse examples of deletion that coincidentally not show up in the small amount of available texts. This hypothesis has been tested statistically by comparison with the OE data: the results showed that the datasets show no significant correlation and thus are completely differently concerning deletion. This could mean that the alternating inversion ending in OS only developed after the 9^th century during the time in which there is an attestation gap in which Latin was the writing language in the area, but could also support the criticized position of the attested OS text fragments as representative for the spoken predecessor language of MLG. The last idea is supported by the fact that the closely related Ingvæonic languages Old Frisian (cf. Hoekstra 2001, overlapping in time with MLG) and OE (providing the oldest examples of deletion) do have deletion and by the fact that MLG has it in such a great extent, even in the earliest texts. In other West Germanic languages like Old and Middle Dutch, and Old and Middle High German, deletion happens far less frequent and much later than in OE. The alternating ending in OE in particular suggests that it is a much older phenomenon, which has been present in Ingvæonic even before the the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain.

 

The large amount of OE data, in which deletion is common – though not as common as in MLG –, can (indirectly) shed a light on the origin and spread of the deletion. I designed queries to search through all clauses with a finite verb followed by a 1^st or 2^nd p.pl. pronoun in inversion in the YCOE (Taylor et al. 2003). The output shows that person and mood have a statistically significant influence on the possibility of deletion. The deletion clearly spreads from the 2^nd p.pl. present tense, probably from the subjunctive mood.

 

Questions to be addressed for the analysis are (i) why another verb form arises, (ii) why deletion exclusively takes place in inversion, (iii) why it happens only ever in the first and second person plural and (iv) why the ending of the imperative is not affected.

 

I propose a change that originates in the prosodic phrase of 2^nd p.pl. verb in the subjunctive mood followed by the 2^nd p.pl. pronoun, following Ackema & Neeleman (2003) who propose deletion to occur within phonological phrases in which readjustment rules can apply. The difference between clauses with inversion and subject initial ones is that subject and verb belong to the same prosodic phrase in inversion (3a), whereas they belong to a different prosodic phrase in clauses without inversion (3b). This results from the fact that the verb takes a different position in inversion (Zwart 1993). In languages with a left-alignment property, the right edges of XP’s correspond to the right boundaries of prosodic phrases (cf. (3a) and (3b)).

 

(3) a. [CP [C bidde [IP [DP gy] […]] → {bidde gy} (phrasing in MLG)

 

b. [IP [DP gy] [I bidden] […]] → {gy}{bidden} (phrasing in MLG)

 

The change in the phrase is initially phonologically triggered by adjacency of the consonant in the coda of the verb and the initial velar of the pronoun, accelerated by analogy to the 1^st and 3^rd sg. (f.i. bidde ick, lit. ‘pray I’). Deletion analogically extends to 1^st p.pl., but not to 3^rd, as it is blocked by the longer coda –nð, which pre-existed quite long – only in the present, where the change starts – until changing to the Einheitsplural (Gallée 1891:246). Similarly, The old ending -nt can still be found in Westphalian texts from the 13^th and 14^th century (Lasch 1974²:227). The deletion spreads to other moods and tenses by analogical levelling. It remains a feature specific to 1^st and 2^nd p.pl., even when –nð in the 3^rd person is completely lost, consolidating the Einheitsplural. Because of this, the structure early developed a systematic character, as a different ending in 1^st and 2^nd p.pl. corresponds to a distinction between regular plural markings (3^rd p.pl.) and speech act participant markers (participant (Prt)/addressee (Adr)). In this way, the phonological change gets reinterpreted as a systematic one.

 

The allomorphic rule behind the new systematic change in MLG means that the common morphosyntactic features that are carried by the verb and the pronoun and which are normally only spelled out by the pronoun will be spelled out by the verb as well in this specific environment, if the verb and the pronoun holding a common plural feature are in the same phonological phrase. In non-inversion contexts, only the plural feature is spelled out, resulting in the regular endings of the Einheitsplural.

 

(5) a. {[V Pl] … [D Pl, Prt]} → {[V Pl, Prt] … [D Pl, Prt]}

 

b. {[V Pl] … [D Pl, Prt, Add]} → {[V Pl, Prt, Add] … [D Pl, Prt, Add]}

The result of this change is that the modern Low German dialects and the related Eastern Dutch dialects still show this alternation. One particular dialect even distinguishes all persons and numbers in the present tense in its agreement morphology (again), but solely in inversion.

 

Selected references Ackema, P. / A. Neeleman. Context-sensitive spell-out. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 21, 4 (2003):681-735. Gallée, J.H., ed. Altsächsische Grammatik. Vol. 1. Niemeyer, 1891. Hoekstra, J. Zu einem Problem der Frisistik: der Übergang der Präs. Plur.-Endung-ath zu-a. Vulpis Adolatio. Festschrift für Hubertus Menke zum 60 (2001):341-61. Hogg, R.M. / R.D. Fulk. A grammar of Old English, volume 2: Morphology. John Wiley & Sons, 2011. Höhle, T. Vorangestellte Verben und Komplementierer sind eine natürliche Klasse. Sprache im Fokus. Festschrift für Heinz Vater zum 65 (1997):107-120. Lasch, A. Mittelniederdeutsche Grammatik. Vol. 9. De Gruyter, 1974². Sanders, W. Altsächsische Sprache. Niederdeutsch. Sprache und Literature. Eine Einführung. Ed. J. Goossens. Bd. 1: Sprache. (1973):28-65. Neumünster. Sehrt, E.H. Vollständiges Wörterbuch zum Heliand und zur altsächsischen Genesis. Johns Hopkins, 1925. Taylor et al. The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. University of York (2003). Zwart, C.J.W.. Dutch syntax: A minimalist approach. PhD diss., Universiteitsdrukkerij, 1993.

Dialect contact, spatial variation, and language change in the morphology of the Basque auxiliary verb (Aaron Ecay, Ghent University)

In this talk, I will focus on two loci of morphological variation among Basque dialects. Basque verbs agree with arguments in the absolutive, ergative, and dative cases; both loci of variation considered in this talk concern the distribution of these morphemes in the auxiliary verb “izan” (to be/to have).

The first locus of variation is called “Differential Object Marking” (DOM). In DOM, what would in non-DOM dialects (including the standard) be an absolutive-marked (direct) object

is marked with dative case and agreement is marked on the verb using a dative-agreement

suffix rather than an absolutive-agreement prefix. The second variable is Dative Displacement (DD), which refers to the use of an absolutive-agreement prefix to mark agreement with a dative (indirect) object. From a the point of view of verbal morphology, then, DD and DOM are exact inverses of each other (they do differ in the effect they have in other morphosyntactic domains such as case-marking).

The talk explores the spatial distribution of varaints of DOM and DD through data from the “Morfologia del verbo auxiliar vasco” dialect atlas. Based on similarity to a Spanish

morphological phenomenon (also called DOM), Basque DOM has usually been analyzed as a

borrowing from that language. The data confirms this analysis and further indicates that there

are two areas in which DOM has been borrowed, apparently independently, into Basque – one

in the West and one in the Southeast.

DD has perhaps a less regular spatial distribution: in addition to a large area of DD dialects in the central northern area (i.e. the province of Lapurdi), it has been noticed in several other seemingly unconnected localities as well. Analysis of the data reveals that these latter occurrences are associated with contact between DOM and non-DOM dialects. In addition to offering an explanation of the distribution of DD, this observation lends support to the

hypothesis that linguistic innovation is (or can be) triggered when learners are faced with

inconsistent or variable input in situations of language contact.

I will also discuss how data on diatopic variation can inform morphosyntactic analysis. Forms that might appear problematic (or at least in need of a specific theoretical explanation) in “syntopic” data can turn out to be an epiphenomenon of variation and change. Finally, Basque displays a variety of morphological patterns beyond those discussed in the bulk of the talk. The data in Basque dialect atlases is a rich source of fine-grained detail on the behavior of these patterns in space and (to some degree) in time. I will briefly point out other areas of the data that (potentially) interact with DD and DOM, and which might give rise to other interesting discoveries.

(download the abstract)

Simon Aerts (BOF): “A synchronic and diachronic systemic functional ‘three-dimensional’ approach to tense and aspect in the writings of Caesar and Gregory of Tours”

Koen Bostoen (ERC Consolidator Grant): “The First Bantu Speakers South of the Rainforest: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Human Migration, Language Spread, Climate Change and Early Farming in Late Holocene Central Africa”

Abstracts:

A synchronic and diachronic systemic functional ‘three-dimensional’ approach to tense and aspect in the writings of Caesar and Gregory of Tours

Simon Aerts (Universiteit Gent)

My research deals with the verbal categories of (relative) tense & aspect in a corpus of Latin historiographical texts: the writings of Caesar (first century BC) and Gregory of Tours (sixth century AD). The framework is a Systemic Functional model (with cognitive and other influences), especially in Bache’s (2008) version. The texts are divided in narrative episodes and marked for discours mode (Smith 2003), and then subjected to a close reading on three levels of meaning, or metafunctions: ideational/representational (e.g. temporal deixis, grammatical aspect in the sense of terminativity), textual/presentational (e.g. foreground-background, discours cohesion, anticipation) and interpersonal (e.g. internal/external perspective, focalization). It is an important aspect of my investigation to see texts (and verb tenses) as having a metafunctionally diverse meaning potential, of which some meanings are emphasized or excluded by, for instance, the context. Accordingly, Latin examples are never given without the broader context.

By means of this close reading, the texts are annotated for multiple variables in a new database, of which the correlation with the use of the narrative tenses will be statistically computed. In this way, I hope to contribute to the discussion on Latin tense and aspect as the basic meaning of the infectum and perfectum stems, by conducting a modern and comprehensive research. It is, however, important not to take a stance in the debate from the start, as many linguists seem to have done in the past.

The investigation also includes a diachronic element: the language of Caesar is compared to the that of Gregory of Tours, in order to provide an interesting starting point for studies of Romance languages. This excursion is, however, planned for a later phase of my project.

 The First Bantu Speakers South of the Rainforest: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach to Human Migration, Language Spread, Climate Change and Early Farming in Late Holocene Central Africa

Koen Bostoen (Universiteit Gent)

The Bantu Expansion is not only the principal linguistic, cultural and demographic process in Late Holocene Africa. It has also become one of the most controversial issues in African History. Several generations of linguists, archaeologists, anthropologists, palaeoenvironmentalists, geneticists and many more have tried to answer the question of how the relatively young Bantu language family (ca. 5000 years) could spread over disproportionally large parts of Central, Eastern and Southern Africa, but have almost always done so from a discipline-specific base.

The prevailing synthesis is a model in which the Bantu language dispersal is conceived as resulting from a single migratory macro-event driven by agriculture. However, many basic questions about the movement and subsistence of ancestral Bantu speakers are still completely open and can only be addressed through genuine interdisciplinary collaboration as proposed here. Through this project, researchers with outstanding expertise in Central African archaeology, archaeobotany and historical linguistics will form a unique cross-disciplinary team to carry out together evidence-based frontier research on the first Bantu-speaking settlements south of the equatorial rainforest.

Archaeological fieldwork will be undertaken in parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo and Angola that are as yet still unexplored by archaeologists in order to determine the timing, location and archaeological signature of the earliest Bantu-speaking settlers in that region and to establish how they interacted with autochthonous hunter-gatherers. To get a better idea of their subsistence, diet and natural habitat, special attention will be paid to archaeobotanical and palaeoenvironmental proxies, whose study is still in its infancy within Central African archaeological contexts. Historical linguistic research will be pushed beyond the boundaries of vocabulary-based phylogenetics that currently prevails in Bantu classification studies and open up new pathways in the field of lexical reconstruction, especially with regard to the subsistence and land use strategies of ancestral Bantu speakers. Through external interuniversity collaboration with expert teams archaeozoological, palaeoenvironmental and genetic data as well as phylogenetic modelling will be brought into the cross-disciplinary approach.

In this way, scholars working on different datasets will collaborate directly and tackle together challenging research questions in order to acquire a new transversal view on the interconnections between human migration, language spread, climate change and early farming in Late Holocene Central Africa and to transform the current thinking on the Bantu Expansion.

Dialing talk: Fayssal Tayalati en Lieven Danckaert (Université de Lille 3), “Multiple subjects across categories: Evidence from Modern Standard Arabic”

In this talk we focus on a particular type of tough-construction in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), illustrated in (1)-(2). In these examples we see a DP (bracketed), followed by an adjective (underscored) and a deverbal noun. Attached to this last element is a resumptive pronoun (glossed as ‘RP’) which corefers with the bracketed DP.
(1) [hāḏā l-kitābu]i mumtiʿun qirāʾatu-hui
this the-book.ᴍ.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ pleasant.ᴍ.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ read.f.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ-ʀᴘ.ᴍ.sɢ
‘This book is pleasant to read.’ (= predicative reading, root clause)
(2) [[al-ʿimāratu]i [ṣ-ṣaʿbu bayʿu-hāi]] bīʿat ʾaẖīran
the-building.f.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ the-difficult.ᴍ.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ sell.ᴍ.sɢ.ɴᴏᴍ-ʀᴘ.f.sɢ was.sold finally
‘[The building which is difficult to sell] was finally sold.’ (= attributive reading, DP)
A key property of these structures concerns the agreement morphology on the adjective. In MSA, attributive and predicative adjectives canonically agree with their head noun or subject. However, as can be deduced from (2), the adjective in tough-constructions does not agree in number, gender or case with the lefthand DP, but rather it appears with ‘default’ nominative masculine singular morphology.
We will propose a unified analysis of (1)-(2), which crucially incorporates the idea that the relevant structures contain two distinct subject positions. First, to account for the observed lack of agreement between the DP and the adjective, we adopt Mohammad’s (1990, 2000) suggestion that the ‘default’ agreement which can be observed in a number of (impersonal) constructions in MSA is due to the presence of a (phonologically null) expletive subject. We take this expletive pronoun to be located in SpecTP, where it agrees with the adjectival predicate. Next, having discarded the hypothesis that the initial DP sits in an A-bar position, we propose that it occurs in Cardinaletti’s (2004) SubjP, i.e. a high subject position which is associated with an ‘aboutness’ reading. Interestingly, there is independent evidence that in MSA (as well as in many other languages) two clause-mate subject positions can be filled simultaneously by non-coreferring XPs: this is the case in the ‘broad subject’ pattern discussed in e.g. Alexopoulou et al. (2004).

Elisabeth Witzenhausen: If not ≠ unless – Exceptive clauses in Continental West Germanic

In this talk, I address the difference between negative conditionals (1a) and exceptive clauses (1b).

(1) I will come and help you …

a) if I don‘t fall into a river

b) unless I fall into a river

It has long been claimed that exceptives and negative conditionals share the same underlying semantic structure, with differences only in the surface structure; however, Geis (1973) and those following him have presented challenges for this view, suggesting rather that the two constructions have different semantics. I present data from Middle Dutch (MD), Middle High German (MHG) and Middle Low German (MLG) that support an analysis of two different semantic structures. In doing so, I discuss some observations regarding conditionals more generally in the modern Germanic languages that are relevant to understanding the historical data from my corpus study. In particular, in MD, MHG and MD, exceptive adverbial clauses appear as subjunctive V2-clauses without any complementizer (2). In the early stages, the preverbal clitic ne is used which expressed sentential negation in Old Saxon (OS) and Old High German (OHG).

(2) dhe scal ome sin wulle loen gheuen he ne hebbe it uerboret mit bosheit

DEM shall him his demanded wage give he NE have.SUBJ it forfeited with mischief

‘who shall give him his demanded wage, unless he has forfeited it with mischief.’

(Westphalian: 1492)

I will provide arguments for analysing MD, MLG and MHG exceptives as peripheral adverbial clauses, while their related OHG and OS structures are central adverbial clauses.

Prof. Dr. Alexander Francis-Ratte (Furman University): “New evidence for the common origin of the Japanese and Korean languages”

Download the abstract here.

Prof. dr. Nathan Hill & Johann-Mattis List (School of Oriental and African Studies/CNRS):

The reconstruction of proto-Burmish: a case study in the computational implementation of the comparative method

The use of computational methods in comparative linguistics increases ever in popularity. Nonetheless, the fruits of such methods have so far been meagre when compared to the results the traditional comparative method. This paper explores a dataset of Burmish languages as a case study in improving the methodology of computational reconstruction. In particular are aim is not replace or modify the comparative method, but rather to implement the traditional method using computational tools.

Our database comprises 400 concepts and their translational counterparts in a dozen Burmish langauges. Concepts are linked to the Concepticon (List et al. 2016), languages are linked to Glottolog. The primary data comes from Huáng et al. (1992.), as digitized by STEDT (Matisoff 2011), but we supplement this with other sources. We employ an iterative workflow combining the absolute rigor of a computer with the insightful intuitions of trained historical linguists. After providing all of the data with unambiguous phonetic interpretations, including the explicit encoding of underdetermined segments, the computer provides a preliminary alignment and reconstruction. These reconstructions are then adjusted with an eye to the relevant literature on proto-Burmish. The adjustments are made inside of the workflow system so that the algorithm and general methodology will be enhanced and made more robust.

References
Hammarström, Harald & Forkel, Robert & Haspelmath, Martin & Bank, Sebastian (2015): Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology (Available onlie at http://glottolog.org. Accessed on 2016-03-15).
Huáng Bùfán 黄 布 凡 et al. eds. (1992). Zàng-Miǎn yǔzú yǔyán cíhuì 藏缅语族语言词汇. Běijīng: Zhōngyāng mínzú xuéyuàn chūbǎnshè 中央民族学院出版社.
List, Johann-Mattis & Cysouw, Michael & Forkel, Robert (eds.) 2015. Concepticon. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (Available online at http://concepticon.clld.org, Accessed on 2016-03-15.)
Matisoff, James (2011): STEDT. The Sino-Tibetan Etymological Dictionary and Thesaurus. University of California at Berkeley (available online at: http://stedt.berkeley.edu).

ΔiaLing talk by dr. Ángel Jiménez-Fernández (University of Sevile): Subtraction from Datives and Differential Object Accusatives

Subextraction from Datives and Differential Object Accusatives

Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández

University of Seville

ajimfer@us.es

1. Introduction, the problem and our goal. In current research on the structure of DPs in Differential Object Marking and Dative Clitic Constructions, there has been an explosion of proposals suggesting that the preposition a present in both accusative and dative objects is not a true P in Spanish, but a morphological marker (Demonte 1995; Cuervo 2003; Ormazabal & Romero 2013; Pineda 2013, a.o.). Adopting the idea that this P does not project into a PP but rather occupies the K(ase) head above DP, in this talk I analyse subextraction out of both accusative and dative prepositional DPs in psych constructions in Spanish Wh-questions, as illustrated in (1).

(1) a. ¿De qué edificio dices que no conoces [a ningún vecino]?

‘Of what building do you say that you don’t know any neighbours?

b. ¿De qué partido crees que no les ha gustado [a muchos votantes] la nueva normativa?

‘Of what party do you think many voters didn’t like the new regulations?’

However, the Spanish data are far from clear in that by assuming that a P is opaque for extraction (Abels 2003), the prediction follows that Experiencers introduced by P a should induce island effects, contrary to facts. To solve this problem, in line with Haegeman et al. (2014), I argue that island effects in objects introduced by a in Spanish are multifactorial. I extend their analysis by suggesting that one of the factors mitigating islandhood is the functional character of some prepositions (Riemsdijk 1978), and that the P a in dative and accusative DPs is a functional preposition which heads a Kase Phrase, motivated by the case properties of P. Being endowed with an Edge Feature, this KP is a weak phase which allows subextraction.

Keywords: subextraction, dative clitic constructions, Differential Object Marking, Kase Phrase, phases

Selected References

Bianchi, Valentina and Cristiano Chesi. 2014. “Subject Islands, Reconstruction, and the Flow of the Computation.” Linguistic Inquiry 45 (4): 525–569.

Haegeman, Liliane, Ángel L. Jiménez-Fernández and Andrew Radford. 2014. “Deconstructing the Subject Condition in Terms of Cumulative Constraint Violation.” The Linguistic Review 31(1): 73–150.

Jiménez-Fernández, Ángel L. 2009. “On the Composite Nature of Subject Islands: A Phase-Based Approach.” SKY Journal of Linguistics 22: 91–138.

Ormazabal, Javier and Juan Romero. 2013. “Differential Object Marking, Case and Agreement.” Borealis 2 (2): 221–239.

Pineda, A. 2013. “Double Object Constructions in Spanish (and Catalan) Revisited.” In Sergio Baauw, Frank Drijkoningen, Luisa Meroni and Manuela Pinto (eds.), Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2011, 193–216. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Riemsdijk, Henk C. van. 1978. A Case Study in Syntactic Markedness: The Binding Nature of Prepositional Phrases. Lisse: The Peter de Ridder Press.

ΔiaLing presentation by dr. Roland Pooth (Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History): “Proto-Indo-European alignment: reasons for a change”. 

Download the abstract here.