This series addresses theoretical issues in the language sciences that bear on traditional questions of philosophy. Possible topics are the foundations of linguistics as a science, syntactic ...theories, the syntax-semantics interface, theoretical issues in semantics, pragmatics, and phonetics.
Pomeranian is the West Germanic language spoken by European emigrants who went from Farther Pomerania (present-day Poland) to Brazil in the period 1857-1887. This language is no longer spoken in ...cohesive societies in Europe, but the language has survived and is in remarkably good shape on this language island in the tropical state of Espirito Santo. This monograph offers the first synchronic grammar of this language. After a historical introduction, the book offers a systematic description of its phonology, morphology and syntax.
This is the first book on the acquisition of the German case system by foreign language learners. It explores how learners in their interlanguage progress from the total absence to the presence of a ...case system. This development is characterized by an evolvement from marking the argument's position to marking the argument's actual function. Theoretically couched within Processability Theory, the book deals with the feature unification and the mapping processes involved in case marking, and critically examines previous findings on German case acquisition. Empirically, the book consists of longitudinal data of 11 foreign language learners of German, which was collected over a period of 2 years. This book will be useful to anyone interested in the acquisition of German and in the acquisition of case systems in general.
This essay is essentially a list of phenomena taken from the two large dialect areas of what is called Upper German (for German Oberdeutsch, South German (SG henceforth), comprising Austrian and ...Bavarian dialects as well as High Alemannic). The author himself speaks natively (base and high school) Viennese Austrian and the dialect of the Montafon, Vorarlberg, as samples of these two dialect areas. Although the critical assumptions of micro-linguistics (cf. Poletto 2000; Kayne 2013; Abraham & Leiss 2013) form the bottom seed, no theoretical discussions are entertained as consequences to the empirical data body. Wherever known to me, however, I included the pertinent bibliographical information that leads to advanced and farther reaching conclusions and generalizations particularly in the spirit of Universal grammar.
This study describes the 1200-year history of German quantifying expressions like nîoman anderro > niemand anderer 'nobody else', analyzing the morpho-syntactic developments within the generative ...framework. The quantifiers examined arose from various lexical sources/categories (nouns, adjectives, and pronouns) but all changed to adjectival quantifiers. These changes are interpreted as a novel type of upward reanalysis from head to specifier, which we associate with degrammaticalization driven by analogy. As for the quantified phrases, most appeared in the genitive in Old High German, indicating a bi-nominal structure. During the Early New High German period, most quantified nouns and adjectives changed to agreement with the quantifier. By Modern German, only quantified DPs and pronouns remain in the genitive. These changes involve downward reanalysis of the quantified elements, being integrated into the matrix nominal depending on the structural size of the quantified phrase. Overall, we conclude that diachronically quantifying expressions may have different syntactic analyses.
This monograph explores some consequences of the abandonment of phrase-structure grammar in favor of a Merge-based syntax, which dispenses with the notion of 'projection.' This reduced architecture ...is shown to shed new light on two long-standing problems in syntactic theory: split topicalization and quantifier float are analyzed as deriving from underlying exocentric (label-less) constituents in argument or adjunct position, which necessitate symmetry-breaking displacement. The analysis developed in this work thus constitutes an important step towards a more minimal syntax. Dennis Ott, University of Groningen, The Netherlands.
Ein auffallendes Merkmal in den deutschen Basisdialekten stellt die sogenannte "Negationskongruenz" oder auch "doppelte Negation" dar. Umso erstaunlicher ist es, dass bisher nur selektiv zu einzelnen ...Dialekten geforscht wurde, nicht jedoch eine mikrotypologisch angelegte, korpusbasierte Arbeit zu diesem Phänomen vorliegt. Diese Forschungslücke schließt Ann-Marie Moser: Sie identifiziert zwei verschiedene Typen der Negationskongruenz und legt dar, dass diese Negationskonstruktionen unterschiedlich im Raum verteilt sind. Die Negationskongruenz ist nicht obligatorisch, sondern optional – während Ansätze aus dem Minimalismus nur beschränkt mit der Optionalität umgehen können, bietet sich eine Analyse im Rahmen der Optimalitätstheorie an. Eine qualitativ angelegte Datenerhebung im oberdeutschen Raum bestätigt, dass sich Sprecherinnen und Sprecher des Alemannischen und Bairischen in der Wahl der Negationskonstruktion und auf pragmatischer Ebene unterscheiden. Schließlich geht Moser der Frage nach, warum im Standarddeutschen die Negationskongruenz nicht möglich ist, in allen deutschen Dialekten hingegen schon.
This volume focuses on the grammaticalization of the definite article in German. It contains eight empirically-based papers which examine individual stages of the grammaticalization path from its ...beginnings as a demonstrative to the definite article and beyond. Focusing on cognitive, pragmatic, semantic and syntactic factors, the contributions not only address the development from pragmatic to semantic definiteness, but also deal with functional and formal changes starting as soon as the linguistic unit has acquired the function of marking semantic definiteness. Based on corpora spanning the entire history of the German language, from Old High German (750-1050) to present-day German, the analyses challenge the traditional linear model of grammaticalization and provide alternative pathways. What all the contributions have in common is the idea that the main grammaticalization path is accompanied or crossed by several side roads which lead to different destinations such as preposition-article-clitics, generic usages or onymic articles.
What do you know, if you know that a language has 'Object Verb' structure rather than 'Verb Object'? Answering this question and many others, this book provides an essential guide to the syntactic ...structure of German. It examines the systematic differences between German and English, which follow from this basic difference in sentence structure, and presents the main results of syntactic research on German. Topics covered include the strict word order in VO vs word order variation in OV, verb clustering, clause union effects, obligatory functional subject position, and subject-object asymmetries for extractions. Through this, a cross-model and cross-linguistic comparison evolves, highlighting the immediate implications for non-Germanic OV languages, and creating a detailed and comprehensive description of the syntactic differences that immediately follow from an OV type in contrast with a VO type like English. It will be of interest to all those interested in syntax and Germanic languages.
This book explores the dynamics of language and social change in central Europe in the context of the end of the Cold War and eastern expansion of the European Union. One outcome of the profound ...social transformations in central Europe since the Second World War has been the reshaping of the relationship between particular languages and linguistic varieties, especially between 'national' languages and regional or ethnic minority languages. Previous studies have investigated these transformed relationships from the macro perspective of language policies, while others have taken more fine-grained approaches to individual experiences with language. Combining these two perspectives for the first time--and focusing on the German language, which has a uniquely complex and problematic history in the region--the authors offer an understanding of the complex constellation of language politics in central Europe.
Stevenson and Carl's analysis draws on a range of theoretical, conceptual and analytical approaches - language ideologies, language policy, positioning theory, discourse analysis, narrative analysis and life histories - and a wide range of data sources, from European and national language policies to individual language biographies. The authors demonstrate how the relationship between German and other languages has played a crucial role in the politics of language and processes of identity formation in the recent history of central Europe.
