Linguistische Berichte Heft 192

This paper deals with a special technique of nominal classification, viz. classification by verb. Languages which use their verb stems or verbal affixes to classify subjects of intransitive verbs or objects of transitive verbs according to specific characteristics on a semantic basis are predominantly found in North America. Although this technique bears some resemblances to selectional restrictions, a subsystem of classificatory verbs must conform to certain criteria, which do not apply to selectional restrictions. In languages with classificatory verbs, the verb stem always serves a double purpose because it consists of one element which contains the classification and one element which contains the predication. There are considerable interlinguistic differences as far as the morphological variation of this phenomenon is concemed. The languages to which this paper confines itself are Navaho, Klamath, Cherokee, and Diegueiio. In Navaho both elements form one inseparable unit, i.e. they always appear as one morpheme, in Cherokee both elements are sometimes realized as one morpheme sometimes as two morphemes, and in Klamath and Diegueiio the classifying can be separated from the predicating element. A comparison with other techniques of nominal classification (especially numeral classification) shows that classification by verb should be treated as a technique of its own.

Other-initiated self-repair is analyzed as a type of largely routinized activity by which discourse participants effectively treat conversational trouble as "unproblematic problems" (Berger & Luckmann 1966). By performing repairs, participants succeed - most of the time - in maintaining the character of ongoing conversations as everyday non-problematic routines. From the point of view of the outside observer, this means that repairs, and repair initiations in particular, are not only of interest insofar as they are structural phenomena on the level of sequential discourse organization. They are also interpreted as cues by which participants, in order to overcome perceived trouble, display intentions and interpretations by making them manifest to their co-participants. lt is emphasized, however, that intentionally making a certain mental state ( e.g., experiencing a certain problem of understanding) manifest is independent of actually "being in" that mental state. A second main goal of this paper is to develop a typology of repairs that is based on correlations between specific linguistic and non-linguistic means of repair initiation, on the one hand, and particular types of manifest interactional trouble, on the other hand.

While object coreference structures are possible in English, the equivalent German construction is marginal, and additionally seems not to obey Binding Condition B. Work on this thorny problem has been hindered by a Jack of agreement about which structures are and are not grammatical, and by the unpredicted nature of some contrasts. We applied the methodology of magnitude estimation (Bard et al 1996) to produce replicable grammaticality data as a basis for further work and to test competing accounts. The data reveals that none of the previous accounts we consider is wholly adequate. We show that the phenomena can be economically accounted for by a range of violable grammatical constraints on surface structure such as the Law of Increasing Members together with a violable form of Binding Condition B. We argue that the most adequate way of allowing these constraints to interact is in a constraint weighting model (Keller 2000), and show how such a model can be tightly constrained by deriving the constraint weightings directly from the experimentally obtained judgements.