General Linguistics Colloquium (WiSe 2024-2025)

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This paper aims to contribute to the typological research on clause combining and in particular subordination and insubordination by addressing data from Ancient Greek (AG). It focuses on causal relations, taking into account finite causal clauses introduced by the conjunction epeí (meaning both ‘when’, ‘since’ and ‘because’). In addition to bi-clausal constructions (i.e., matrix and subordinate epeí-clause), AG reference grammars (among others, van Emde Boas et al. 2019: 549) account for instances of ‘independent’ epeí-clauses. In other words, epeí-clauses that do not show syntactic integration. The paper applies the broader categorization of adverbial clauses taken from language typology (among other, Thompson et al. 2007) and addresses issues of syntactic and pragmatic dependency by considering whether the instances of ‘independent’ epeí-clauses should be considered a case of insubordination. Furthermore, the paper discusses the category of conjunction in light of both ancient grammarian definitions and modern linguistic criteria. By means of examples from a corpus of texts from the Classical and the Postclassical periods, the paper shows that in several cases the traditional criteria adopted for defining subordination (i.e., dependency and clausal embedding, cf. Cristofaro 2003: 15–18) are often found lacking in order to describe the different realizations of clause linkage strategies covered by the use of Ancient Greek conjunctions.

Selected references
Cristofaro, S. (2003). Subordination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
van Emde Boas, E., Rijksbaron, A., Huitink, L. and de Bakker, M. (2019). The Cambridge Grammar of Classical Greek. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, S. A., Longacre, R. E. and S.J. Hwang (2007), Adverbial clauses, in T. Shopen (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description (Vol. II: Complex Constructions), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 237–300.

Recent research demonstrates that communication is an inherently multimodal phenomenon. This also applies to information structuring i.e marking information on utterance level for the sake of both serving immediate communicative goals and establishing coherence with previous and upcoming discourse. In German the resources for marking information are mostly prosodic and syntactical [1,3] and recent research has shown that we employ gestural and bodily resources as well to that end [2,6].

Research on information structure is mostly restricted to analyses of context-free single utterances. Utterances are produced within conversational contexts though and comply with the given communicative goals the interactive situation poses. One way to approach context analytically is through the concept of communicative genres i.e habitualized, pre-patterned speaking practices which generate expectations about mutual communicative goals and specific verbal packaging [4,5]. Information structure can be analyzed with regard to the specific affordances of the respective communicative genre where interactants mutually establish local and global coherence and the common communicative goals.

The present study focuses on the ways information is multimodally marked to establish local coherence within two communicative genres (game explanations and story retellings). Data stem from interactions between 45 German preschool children and their caregivers. Findings show that interactants employ prosodic and gestural resources to mark information, with gestures often providing additional referential information to the interaction. Interactants thereby jointly adjust and establish information multimodally to progress the discourse and achieve the goals of the communicative genre.

[1] Dipper, S., Goetze, M., & Skopeteas, S. (2007). Information structure in cross-linguistic corpora : annotation guidelines for phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and information structure (p. 210). Universitätsverlag Potsdam.
[2] Ebert, C., Evert, S., & Wilmes, K. (2011). Focus Marking via Gestures. Sinn & Bedeutung, 15, 1–15.
[3] Fanselow, G. (2016). Syntactic and Prosodic Reflexes of Information Structure in Germanic. In C. Féry & S. Ishihara (Hrsg.), The Oxford handbook of information structure (S. 621–641). Oxford University Press.
[4] Günthner, S. & Knoblauch, H. (1994). "Forms are the food of faith": Gattungen als Muster kommunikativen Handelns. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 46(4), 693–723
[5] Kern, F., Boden, U., Nemeth, A., Koutalidis, S., Abramov, O., Kopp, S., Rohlfing K. J., (in press). Pre-school children’s discourse competence in different genres and their relation to iconic gestures. Journal of Child Language.
[6] Rohrer, P. L., Florit-Pons, J., Vilà-Giménez, I., & Prieto, P. (2022). Children Use Non-referential Gestures in Narrative Speech to Mark Discourse Elements Which Update Common Ground. Frontiers in Psychology, 12.

Small clauses involve a structure which includes a predicate XP predicated of a subject-like DP. Prototypically, such structures are illustrated in the so-called secondary predication constructions. Jiménez-Fernández & Spyropoulos (2013) have observed that languages like Greek, Spanish, Russian, etc., allow for the reordering of the small clause constituents so as to facilitate the information structure, while languages like English, French, etc., do not do so, exhibiting a rigid DP XP order. In the latter, information structure is solely expressed by phonological means.

In order to account for this difference Jiménez-Fernández & Spyropoulos (2013) have adopted Miyagawa’s (2010) theory of agreement and movement unification in terms of both φ- and discourse (δ-) features, according to which languages are classified with respect to the way they materialize these features in expressing argument relations and clausal functions in the syntactic configuration. In Miyagawa’s system, languages like English rely on the φ-features to define ‘subjecthood’ in terms of EPP satisfaction, movement and agreement, whereas languages like Japanese facilitate the so-called discourse features and deliver a discourse configurational system, based on exactly the same operations of probing and movement. In particular for the small clauses in the V-complement domain, Jiménez- Fernández & Spyropoulos (2013) claim that this system of features also operates in the v-V domain, and propose a typology of languages based on which features are facilitated to function as probes so as to satisfy the Edge Feature of the relevant phase: (a) Languages like English, utilize the φ-features, which target the most local constituent, i.e., the DP, rendering it the element that satisfies the Edge Feature requirement of the v-V phase; the result is a rigid DP XP order. (b) Languages like Greek, which utilize both the φ- and the δ-features to target the relevant constituent to satisfy the Edge Feature requirement of the v-V phase; the result is a constituent reordering depending on the discourse function of the relevant elements.

However, Jimenez & Spyropoulos (2013) do not discuss the third possibility of the typology, namely a language that solely utilizes the δ-features. In this paper, we address this issue, by examining Japanese, a language, which, in Miyagawa’s system is solely a δ-feature language. Since, both Greek and Japanese utilize δ-features, we will attempt a full comparison of the ordering of small clause constituents depending on the information structure of the utterance. We will show, that while Greek offers a good deal of flexibility in the ordering of the constituents, also facilitating operations such as (clitic) dislocation, Japanese exhibits a rather rigid order of the small clause constituents, similar to languages like English. We will discuss the derivation of these orders and we will show that this rigidity derives from the way the licensing of the relevant features operates in the relevant languages.

References
Jiménez-Fernández, Á.L. & V. Spyropoulos. 2013. Feature inheritance, vP phases and the information structure of small clauses. Studia Linguistica 67: 185-224.
Miyagawa, S. 2010. Why Agree? Why Move? Unifying Agreement-Based and Discourse- Configurational Languages. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

This paper aims to lay a base for the analysis of the distributional domain of the borrowed morpheme “un” in Chamorro and to provide an examination of how Spanish, the language of origin of the morpheme, influences the article in Chamorro in terms of its usage and distribution in its according linguistic environment. A collection of fables in Chamorro was used as the textual corpus for this endeavor, given the scarcity of other written documents in the language.

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The talk reviews various source expressions for the notion of ‘deceit’, among which one finds ‘to exchange, swap’, notably one’s physical appearance (cf. Toch. mäsk- ‘to disguise oneself’, PIE *mei- ‘to exchange’, Germ. Mein-eid ‘false oath’, probably also Ved. māyā- ‘(divine) power’), ‘to catch, ensnare’ (as in Lat. decipio, the ancestor of PDE to deceive, from capio ‘I catch’, Egypt. grg meaning both ‘to entrap’ and ‘lie (n.)’) and ‘to bend, curve’ (e.g. ON lúta ‘to bend; fall’ and Goth. lutōn ‘to deceive’), related to the idea of truth and justice being ‘straight’ and ‘upright’. The last two cases are based on conceptual metaphors transferring physical notions to the cognitive sphere, in the first case that of immobility, in the second that of crookedness. The number of attested instances of these shifts in historical corpora may allow the assumption that other cases might fall under the same rubrics. This is argued for the (semi-)divine Germanic trickster figures Wieland and Loki.

This comparative study investigates the prosodic marking of focus in complex noun phrases (NPs) in Estonian, Finnish and Hungarian. In production, the prosody of focus in comparable target sentences across the languages was tested. In perception, the functional load of the pattern found for Hungarian was judged by native speakers. Both production and perception show that the left edge of the NP carries main phrasal prominence, partly independent of focus. In addition, focus on later elements in the NP causes a secondary prominence.

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