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This study examines asymmetries between so-called inherent and contextual categories in relation to the morphological complexity of the nominal and verbal inflectional domain of languages. The observations are traced back to the influence of adult L2 learning in scenarios of intense language contact. A method for a simple comparison of the amount of inherent versus contextual categories is proposed and applied to the German-based creole language Unserdeutsch (Rabaul Creole German) in comparison to its lexifier language. The same procedure will be applied to two further language pairs. The grammatical systems of Unserdeutsch and other contact languages display a noticeable asymmetry regarding their structural complexity. Analysing different kinds of evidence, the explanatory key factor seems to be the role of (adult) L2 acquisition in the history of a language, whereby languages with periods of widespread L2 acquisition tend to lose contextual features. This impression is reinforced by general tendencies in pidgin and creole languages. Beyond that, there seems to be a tendency for inherent categories to be more strongly associated with the verb, while contextual categories seem to be more strongly associated with the noun. This leads to an asymmetry in categorical complexity between the noun phrase and the verb phrase in languages that experienced periods of intense L2 learning.
This chapter focuses on the formation of adverbs from a corpuslinguistic perspective, providing an overview of adverb formation patterns in German that includes frequencies and hints to productivity as well as combining quantitative methods and theoretically founded hypotheses to address questions that concern possible grammaticalization paths in domains that are formally marked by prepositional elements or inflectional morphology (in particular, superlative or superlative-derived forms). Within our collection of adverb types from the project corpus, special attention is paid to adverbs built from primary prepositions. The data suggest that generally, such adverb formation involves the saturation of the internal argument slot of the relation-denoting preposition. In morphologically regular formations with the preposition in final position, pronominal forms like da ‘there’, hier ‘here’, wo ‘where’ as well as hin ‘hither’ and her ‘thither’ serve to derive adverbs. On the other hand, morphologically irregular formations with the preposition – in particular: zu ‘to’ or vor ‘before, in front of’ – in initial posi-tion show traits of syntactic origin such as (remnants of) inflectional morphology. The pertaining adverb type dominantly saturates the internal argument slot by means of universal quantification that is part and parcel as well of the derivation of superlatives and demonstrably fuels the productivity of the pertaining formation pattern.