Linguistische Berichte Heft 242

This paper addresses the question of whether pronominal clitics are encoded either in syntax, as minor lexical categories, or in morphology, as inflectional affixes. We examine French varieties, Standard Italian, European Portuguese and Friulian. We propose a violable constraint, the Feature Realization Constraint (FRC). According to the FRC, a feature whose realization is required by some paradigm must always be realized, regardless of contextual conditions. We hypothesize that, in the languages examined, clitic pronominals may violate this constraint, while inflectional affixes do not. Testing this hypothesis against Subject and Object clitics confirms the classic distinction between clitics and affixes. We conclude that there is no empirical justification for locating the items classically considered as clitics in morphology rather than in syntax.

Recursion, understood as a fundamental feature of natural languages, does not occur uniformly at all linguistic levels. Moreover, there are important cross-linguistic differences as to the extent to which recursive structures are allowed at a given level. A good example for this is compounding. When considering a set of two languages that have compounding as a means of enlarging their lexicons, it may well be the case that one of them resorts to this word-formation process recursively, whereas the other is reluctant to construct compounds consisting of more than two simple immediate constituents.In recent years, several proposals have been made to account for such differences. A quick glance at these proposals reveals as possible reasons for the lack of recursion: left-headedness, word-stress rules, (absence of) linking elements, parsing problems, and semantic constraints. Unfortunately, many relevant contributions to this topic display a blatant gap between strong explanatory ambition and insufficient empirical foundation. In other words, restrictions effective in a limited set of languages are often claimed to exist in many other languages and are presented as (potential) universals.The present paper gives an overview of the possibilities and constraints concerning recursion in N-N compounds, which represent the most representative type of compounds in many languages. Its aim is to evaluate the well-foundedness of recent contributions to the topic, with data coming primarily from Indo-European languages (especially Germanic, Romance, Greek and Slavonic) as well as Hungarian, Japanese and Turkish. It advocates for a holistic approach, wherein the (non-)availability of recursive compounds must not be considered isolated from other means of depicting stable concepts in a language. Naturally, all conclusions must remain provisional as only a small sample of the world's languages is under scrutiny.

Vietnamese is a tonal language, while German is a stress-timed one. A hypothesis based on this difference is that the Vietnamese săc2- and năng2-tone patterns may have an influence on the melodic performance of Vietnamese learners in German closed syllables. This study investigates the hypothesis by comparing the F0-contours in 15 closed syllables, each produced by 16 Vietnamese learners of German, with those produced by 10 native German speakers. Results show that the Vietnamese learners perform significantly different F0-contours from those of the German group. Further comparisons within the Vietnamese group between the F0-contours in the German syllables and the Vietnamese săc2- or năng2-tones, produced by the same learners, reveal striking similarities and thus, indicate a probable interference of these tone patterns. A discussion of the linguistic factors that motivate the Vietnamese learners to transfer these săc2- and năng2-tones suggests that the coda-tone-restriction in Vietnamese and the word stress in German play a crucial role in the melodic performance in closed syllables of Vietnamese learners.