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Besides English, Afrikaans is considered “the [Germanic] language which deviates grammatically the farthest from the others” (Harbert 2007: 17). But how exactly do we measure “grammatical deviation”, and how deviant is Afrikaans really if we compare it not just to other standard languages but also to non-standard varieties? The present contribution aims to address those questions combining functional-typological and dialectometric perspectives. We first select data for 28 Germanic varieties showing vastly different speaker numbers, grades of standardisation and amounts of language contact. Based on 48 (micro)typological variables from syntax, morphology and phonology, we perform cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling and present ways of visualizing and interpreting the results. Inter alia, the analyses show a major divide between Continental West Germanic and North Germanic (as might be expected) and they also identify a number of outliers, including English and pidgin and creole languages such as Russenorsk or Rabaul Creole German. Afrikaans appears to cluster with the other West Germanic languages rather than the outliers. Within West Germanic, however, it does indeed emerge as rather deviant and, according to our metric, it is, for example, typologically closer to other high-contact varieties such as Yiddish than it is to Dutch.
Tense, aspect, and mood are grammatical categories concerned with different notional facets of the event or situation conveyed by a given clause. They are prototypically expressed by the verbal system. Tense can be defined as a category that relates points or intervals in time to one another; in a most basic model, those include the time of the event or situation referred to and the speech time. The former may precede the latter (“past”), follow it (“future”), or be simultaneous with it (or at least overlap with it; “present”). Aspect is concerned with the internal temporal constituency of the event or situation, which may be viewed as a single whole (“perfective”) or with particular reference to its internal structure (“imperfective”), including its being ongoing at a certain point in time (“progressive”). Mood, in a narrow, morphological sense, refers to the inflectional realization of modality, with modality encompassing a large and varying set of sub-concepts such as possibility, necessity, probability, obligation, permission, ability, and volition. In the domain of tense, all Germanic languages make a distinction between non-past and past. In most languages, the opposition can be expressed inflectionally, namely, by the present and preterite (indicative). All modern languages also have a periphrastic perfect as well as periphrastic forms that can be used to refer to future events. Aspect is characteristically absent as a morphological category across the entire family, but most, if not all, modern languages have periphrastic forms for the expression of aspectual categories such as progressiveness. Regarding mood, Germanic languages are commonly described as distinguishing up to three such form paradigms, namely, indicative, imperative, and a third one referred to here as subjunctive. Morphologically distinct subjunctive forms are, however, more typical of earlier stages of Germanic than they are of most present-day languages.
Morphophonological asymmetries in affixation concern systematic correlations between morphological properties of affixes (e.g. combination with bound versus free stems, position relative to stem (suffixes versus prefixes)) and their phonological properties (e.g. stress behaviour). The arguably most insightful approach to capturing relevant asymmetries invokes a notion of affix coherence, first introduced by Dixon in connection with his work on Yidiɲ, a nearly extinct language spoken in Northern Australia. This notion is based on a categorical division of affixes into ones that integrate into the phonological word of the stem and ones that do not. The integration of affixes is envisioned as being fully determined by phonological and morphological structure in a given language and verifiable by diagnostics relevant to phonological word domains (primarily the syllable and the foot structure). The assumption of two types of prosodic domains characterized by integrated versus non-integrated affixes is manifest in consistent asymmetries that pertain to morphophonological, phonological, and phonetic rules. This consistency constitutes compelling evidence for the structure-based analysis of the impact of various affixes on derived words, as opposed to alternative approaches to capturing these effects by associating affixes with diacritics (morpheme versus word boundary, class 1 versus class 2, stratum 1 versus stratum 2). The present entry aims to demonstrate, mostly on the basis of data from Germanic languages, the breadth of the empirical evidence in support of a fundamental role of affix coherence. Moreover, it aims to draw attention to the various implications of affix coherence for modeling relevant generalizations, in particular the necessary reference to a level of phonological representation characterized by a specific degree of abstractness (‘phonemic’).
Recent years have seen a growing interest in grammatical variation, a core explanandum of grammatical theory. The present volume explores questions that are fundamental to this line of research: First, the question of whether variation can always and completely be explained by intra- or extra-linguistic predictors, or whether there is a certain amount of unpredictable – or ‘free’ – grammatical variation. Second, the question of what implications the (in-)existence of free variation would hold for our theoretical models and the empirical study of grammar. The volume provides the first dedicated book-length treatment of this long-standing topic. Following an introductory chapter by the editors, it contains ten case studies on potentially free variation in morphology and syntax drawn from Germanic, Romance, Uralic and Mayan.
This paper analyses the variation we find in the realization of finite clausal complements in the position of prepositional objects in a set of Germanic languages. The Germanic languages differ with respect to whether prepositions can directly select a clause (North Germanic) or not and instead need a prepositional proform (Continental West Germanic). Within the Continental West Germanic languages, we find further differences with respect to the constituent structures. We propose that German strong vs. weak prepositional proforms (e.g. drauf vs. darauf) differ with respect to their syntax, while this is not the case for the Dutch forms (ervan vs. daarvan). What the Germanic languages under consideration share is that the prepositional element can be covert, except in English. English shows only limited evidence for the presence of P with finite clauses in the position of prepositional objects generally, but only with a selected set of verbs. This investigation is a first step towards a broader study of the nature of clauses in prepositional object positions and the implications for the syntax of clausal complementation.
Im ’Minimalistischen Programm’ (Chomsky 1995) werden A-Bewegungen (’A- movements’, d.h. N-Hebung, V-Hebung usw.) und A’-Bewegungen (’A-bar- movements’, d.h. Extraposition, VP-Adjunktion, ’scrambling’ usw.) als sehr ungleichwertige Operationen behandelt. Der vorliegende Aufsatz untersucht die distinkten Eigenschaften von A-Bewegungen und A’-Bewegungen anhand von drei Gruppen von Argumenten, nämlich Topikalisierung (Abschnitt 2), Verschiebung schwacher Pronomina (Abschnitt 3) und Verb-Zweit unter der Symmetrie-Annahme (Abschnitt 4). Die Konklusionen daraus sind, daß die hier vertretene Analyse eine Möglichkeit bietet, A-Bewegungen und A’- Bewegungen zu unterscheiden, ohne letztere aus dem Zuständigkeitsbereich der Grammatik zu verbannen.