General Linguistics Colloquium (SoSe 2024)

It has long been claimed for various levels of linguistic representation that change is essentially determined or at least confined by structure. While in phonology there is general agreement that structural constraints play a role but are by no means pervasive, work on modeling morphological change, especially analogy, often starts from the premise that structure is crucial. As for syntax, the general consensus is that structure is at the very core of change. See for grammaticalization e.g. Lehmann 2015; van Gelderen 2004, but also Eckardt 2012 for the role of compositionality in semantic reanalysis.

It is not the aim of this talk to dismiss the role of structure in language change. However, I intend to show that a-structural change based on the simple extension of surface patterns is equally important and that it occurs at all levels of linguistic representation. To push things one step further, I claim that analogical change may even be anti-structural. Anti-structural analogical change is a type of pattern extension which overrides structural requirements or constraints.The talk illustrates anti-structural change and discusses its consequences for the theory of language change.

In current classifications of semantic change, amelioration and pejoration are treated as major process types, along with generalization, specialization, metaphor, and metonymy. Amelioration and pejoration, however, pose a number of challenges which will be addressed in the paper: Both terms are notoriously ill-defined, there is a lack of sufficient empirical data, and it is not even clear whether both are semantic developments in their own right rather than mere by-products of other mechanisms such as metaphors or euphemisms. On the basis of historical dictionaries and corpora, it will be tried to provide some answers to these questions and to show how both phenomena fit into a broader picture of non-denotational meaning change.

The presentation departs from the observation that in expressing ideas, some languages encode more details than others. It investigates whether languages encode events and objects at a coarse-grained (e.g., put, glass) as opposed to a fine-grained (e.g., lay, wine glass) level systematically. The level of detail is termed granularity, which is viewed as a cline from fine-grained (semantic specificity) to coarse-grained meaning (semantic generality). Four languages are investigated: German, English, Greek, and Turkish. The study draws on elicited data from a naming task. The verbalization of events is based on event and object descriptions in selected semantic domains. The results reveal significant granularity effects between languages and language types (satellite-framed vs. verb-framed)..

In this paper we approach the study of topicalization in a corpus of medieval Spanish texts, with the challenge that prosodic clues are not available for the identification of different informational categories. In order to overcome this limitation, we have developed a diagnostic for the identification of sentence topics from their structural properties alone. This diagnostic allows us to distinguish between topicalization and similar structures that are not topics, such as fronted foci. Our results show that Medieval Castilian and present-day Spanish do not have the same topicalization strategies. Specifically, Medieval Castilian, like Latin, but unlike present-day Spanish, had the possibility of topicalizing the direct object and the indirect object without doubling by a pronominal clitic. The evidence that shows this crucial difference are peripheral sequences in which a direct or indirect object without duplication is the leftmost constituent of a sequence of different constituents and, consequently, cannot be a fronted focus.

A unique feature of Mauritian Creole's Serial Verb Constructions cited in recent literature is concordant subject marking. In Syea (2013), subject marking is shown to have different reflexes (single marking or concordant marking) depending on the status of the subject (referential, or pronominal). Muysken & Veenstra (2017) take it a step further and show that negation may be marked once or concordantly marked, and that this influences concordant subject marking. This work set out to establish more precisely the effects of concordant negation marking on concordant subject marking, both in the context of referential NPs and pronominals. Based on Muysken & Veenstra's (2017) work, as well as Syea's (2013) work, the grammaticality judgements obtained show a general weaking of rules towards consistent concordant marking, as well as a general preference against Serial Verb Constructions. Given the limited demographics of this study (three 25-year-old native speakers), this may show a development amongst the youth towards the non-use of Serial Verb Constructions in general.

This study aimed to generalize cognitive biases for homomorphism (the underlying hierarchical structure of elements in the noun phrase) and to test further typological predictions in syntactic models concerning noun phrase orders. Ten monolingually raised German speakers participated in an artificial language learning experiment. After a learning phase, participants performed a language perception task with the newly acquired artificial language where correctness and reaction times of their responses were recorded. Four distinct noun phrase orders were part of the experiment. They differed in four main factors which included homomorphism, similarity to German, allowed by Abels and Neeleman (no movements without affecting the noun) and allowed by Stabler (movements without affecting the noun allowed). The main hypotheses made the prediction to find less processing cost for homomorphic orders and orders allowed by Abels and Neeleman, while corresponding alternative hypotheses predicted orders that are more similar to German and orders allowed by Stabler to require fewer processing costs. Statistical analyses, however, do not yield significant results in correctness or reaction times. Exploratory analyses reveal individual differences attributable to language proficiency, differences throughout runs and varying item sets as well as significantly lower correctness rates for numerals and demonstratives as disambiguating elements in trials. This study contributes to psycholinguistic research on noun phrase processing by paving the way for further experimental research that explores differences between non-homomorphic, attested and unattested noun phrase orders, such as movement of subtrees that do or do not contain the noun, and for research that further illuminates the difference observed between noun modifiers as disambiguating elements.

The Spanish pronoun usted ‘you (formal)’ is interpreted as second person but appears with third-person verb forms and pronominal clitics. In recent work, Arregi and Nevins (2018) claim that this pronoun is syntactically second person and that third-person agreement is due to postsyntactic impoverishment. Collins and Ordóñez (2021) challenge this analysis and instead defend the view that usted is an imposter like vuestra merced ‘your mercy’, its diachronic source. Based on novel diagnostics, including Person Case Constraint effects and pronoun-noun constructions, I argue in favour of Arregi and Nevin’s account. However, I consider there to be a more intuitive way to capture the interpretation of ustedes ‘you all’ in Latin American Spanish, which is used in both formal and informal contexts. This proposal can inform the analysis of lexicalized honorifics in other languages, such as Catalan vostè ‘you (formal)’ and Portuguese você ‘you’.

In this talk,...

In this talk,...

In this talk,...

In this talk,...

Um eine Entität zu bezeichnen, die aus dem Kontext oder der Gesprächssituation bekannt ist, wird im Deutschen normalerweise ein Personalpronomen gebraucht. Eine solche Entität wird aber im Koreanischen gegebenfalls als Nomen realisiert (Was hast du zu ihm gesagt? vs. nwuna-nun mwue(s)-lako ha-ess-nuntey? ‘ältere.Schwester-TOP was-KONJ sag-PRÄT-Q’; Freuen Sie sich denn gar nicht? vs. thimcangnim-un kippu-cito anh-supni-kka? ‘Abteilungsleiter-TOP froh-ADVL nicht.sein-HON-Q’). In meinem Vortrag möchte ich also zeigen, welche nominalen Entsprechungen der deutschen Personalpronomina im Koreanischen zu finden sind, und in welchen kommunikativen Situationen bzw. unter welchen Bedingungen sie auftreten. Hierfür werden in deutschen und koreanischen Spielfilmen die Verwendung der deutschen Personalpronomina und deren nominalen Entsprechungen im Koreanischen verglichen. Dadurch lässt sich feststellen, dass im Koreanischen zum Ausdruck der bekannten Person in Bezug auf das soziale Verhältnis zum Sprecher ein Eigen- oder Gattungsname gebraucht werden kann.

In this talk,...

In this talk,...