Beiträge:
Spracherwerb
Tanja Kupisch, Determinative, Individual- und Massennomen im Spracherwerb des Deutschen: Diskussion des Nominal Mapping Parameters
Semantik
Björn Rothstein, Anmerkungen zur Referenz- und zur Topikzeit
Historische Semantik
Werner Abraham, Wie ist die historisch spezifische Ausgliederung der Modalitäten bei den deutschen Modalverben denkbar?
Morphologie
Andreas Opitz, Case and Markedness in Tlapanec
Rezensionen:
Carola Trips: Laurel J. Brinton & Elizabeth Traugott, Lexicalisation and Language Change
Markus Steinbach: Joachim Jacobs, Spatien. Zum System der Getrennt- und Zusammenschreibung im heutigen Deutsch
Annette Becker: Jan Blommaert, Discourse. A Critical Introduction
Informationen und Hinweise:
LB-Info
Abstracts
Spracherwerb
Determinative, Individual- und Massennomen im Spracherwerb des Deutschen: Diskussion des Nominal Mapping Parameters
Tanja Kupisch
The Nominal Mapping Parameter gave rise to an acquisition model, which makes clear and falsifiable statements about the acquisition of articles in German. It claims that children acquiring a Germanic language omit articles for a longer period of time than children acquiring a Romance language, as they have to decide for each noun separately whether it is count or mass. Thus, article drop in the acquisition of Germanic languages is considered to be a lexical learning problem. This study presents a critical discussion of this model on the basis of data from ten children acquiring German. Although these children pass through a protracted period of article omissions, omissions are unrelated to the count/mass distinction.
Semantik
Anmerkungen zur Referenz- und zur Topikzeit
Björn Rothstein
The paper compares two important approaches to tense. Both Reichenbach (1947) and Klein (1992 and subsequent work) assume a point of speech at which an utterance is made and an event time at which the eventuality described takes place. Reichenbach proposes as a third point the reference time that is generally understood as the point in time relative to which the event time is located. According to Klein this third point is topic time and has to be defined as the time for which the particular utterance makes an assertion. The paper argues that both the topic time and the reference time are problematic.
Historische Semantik
Wie ist die historisch spezifische Ausgliederung der Modalitäten bei den deutschen Modalverben denkbar?
Werner Abraham
Morphologie
Case and Markedness in Tlapanec
Andreas Opitz
This paper provides an analysis of the typologically unusual patterns of case assignment in Tlapanec. The proposal challenges some idiosyncratic aspects of former descriptive analyses (i.e. zero-marked ergative and a novel case ‘pegative’) and provides a theoretically and typologically more adequate analysis instead. The theoretical approach relies on the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM). According to this theory the output of syntax can be impoverished before the lexical insertion of concrete vocabulary items takes place. This framework is modified in the account proposed here, insofar as the step of impoverishment of morpho-syntactic features is designed as an optimality theoretic competition. I will show that all of the constraints that are crucial for this competition emerge from independently established prominence scales by a modified version of harmonic alignment. Thereby the process of impoverishment is given a typologically/conceptually more plausible base.
