Beiträge:
Grammatiktheorie
Joachim Jacobs, Wozu Konstruktionen?
Morphologie
Doreen Georgi, A Distributed Morphology Approach to Argument Encoding in Kambera
Thomas Becker, Zum generischen Maskulinum: Bedeutung und Gebrauch der nicht-movierten Personenbezeichnungen im Deutschen
Syntax
Eric Fuß, Multiple agreement and the representation of inflection in the C-Domain
Rezensionen:
Konstantin Krasukhin: Werner Abraham & Larisa Leisiö (Hg.), Passivization and Typology: Form and Function
Alena Witzlack-Makarevich: Robert D. Van Valin Jr., Exploring the Syntax-Semantics Interface
Informationen und Hinweise:
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Hinweise für Autoren
Abstracts
Grammatiktheorie
Wozu Konstruktionen?
Joachim Jacobs
Discussing several examples from German I argue that grammars that aim at a full coverage of the data without the use of ad hoc analyses will have to make use of both construction-based and projection-based (or lexicalist) strategies of grammatical analysis.
Morphologie
A Distributed Morphology Approach to Argument Encoding in Kambera
Doreen Georgi
In the Malayo-Polynesian language Kambera definite arguments are encoded on the verb via clitics whose form varies between person, number and case. These markers show many instances of syncretism below the clitic level. The aim of this article is to derive the distribution of the homonymous inflection markers and thereby to motivate that syncretic forms do not appear accidentally, as stated in the Syncretism Principle in Müller (2004). The main insight is that we find a correlation between the items’ specificity, that means the number of features they realize, and their sonority – a principle called iconicity by Wiese (1999) – that has until now exclusively been stated for some Indo-European languages. This fact strengthens the hypothesis that iconicity qualifies as a meta-grammatical principle for the architecture of morphological systems.
Morphologie
Zum generischen Maskulinum: Bedeutung und Gebrauch der nicht-movierten Personenbezeichnungen im Deutschen
Thomas Becker
The so-called "generic masculine" nouns in German are personal nouns that appear to be ambiguous having one reading that refers to male persons only and another that refers to both sexes. Only the first usage is regarded to be politically correct. The second usage often is taken to be a case of neutralization of the masculine noun with a corresponding feminine noun suffixed by "in". The present article relates this much-discussed topic to the findings of L. Horn (1984), which point to a description of that assumed ambiguity as a case of "autohyponymy" triggered by a conversational implicature. Under that analysis the politically incorrect generic reading, which is supposed to be charmed away, turns out to be the unique lexical meaning of those nouns, the other reading being an implicature.
Syntax
Multiple agreement and the representation of inflection in the C-domain
Eric Fuß
This paper argues for a post-syntactic analysis of complementizer agreement in Germanic. It is shown that the realization of inflectional features in the C-domain is subject to a set of restrictions that exhibit a decidedly phonological character including adjacency effects, sensitivity to sluicing and deletion of the finite verb in comparatives. This is taken to indicate that complementizer agreement is established by post-syntactic operations. Moreover, the fact that C may not carry inflection if the finite verb has been deleted suggests that complementizer agreement does not involve a dependency between C and the subject, but rather between C and the finite verb. Based on these observations, it is argued that inflectional features present in the C-domain are added post-syntactically via the insertion of an agreement morpheme which adjoins to C at the level of Morphological Structure. The observed restrictions on complementizer agreement are then analyzed in terms of constraints on this insertion procedure.
