Nominal Constituents Research Articles

Toward a grammaticalization and typological account of the ka-possessive in southern Nguni

Bantu languages are quite homogeneous as regards structural devices to encode attributive possession. They have recourse to one major strategy in this functional domain. A marker a preceded by a concord agreeing with the class of the modified noun is found throughout the family taking care of the majority of constructions where nominal constituents are attributed to a head noun in an endocentric syntagm including possessive relations. In contrast to this situation, Zulu and Xhosa, which are subsumed here under the convenient cover term southern Nguni, possess an additional major strategy which due to its function and form will be called the ka-possessive. The paper is concerned with its grammaticalization development and possible typological significance.

A MINIMALIST APPROACH TO CONCORD IN NOUN PHRASES

This article presents an analysis of the structure of DPs in Germanic within the Minimalist theory of Chomsky (1993). Under this framework, parametric variation between languages is conditioned purely by functional morphology. The rich nominal morphology of German is argued to be responsible for many of the differences between German and other languages with respect to the distribution of nominal constituents. Particular attention is paid to the prenominal positioning of proper nouns and attributive adjectives. Both elements are shown to attain their surface position by raising operations, which are triggered by independent morphological features

Non-Projecting Nouns and the Ezafe: Construction in Persian

With the advent of functional as well as lexical structure within the noun phrase, there exists much syntactic structure that appears to be unused. While there has been discussion as to which inflectional categories project structure, the question of whether lexical categories project has not been raised. In this paper it is claimed that common nouns in Persian do not project to maximal categories, i.e. do not appear with a complement and a specifier position. Several facts follow as a consequence. First, we explain an intriguing property of the Ezafe construction in Modern Persian, namely that all modifiers of nouns must be heads themselves. We also have an explanation for the presence of the Ezafe vowel itself, which is analyzed as a linker affixed to X0s at PF to identify elements forming a nominal constituent. Finally, we explain why only one possessor is possible within Persian noun phrases. Since nouns cannot project complement and specifier positions, the only position available for a possessor is [SPEC, DP].

Grammatical Relations in Tariana

This article deals with the marking of grammatical relations in Tariana, North-Arawakan, and how this marking interrelates with topicality, definiteness and other discourse characteristics of nominal constituents. The following four case-marking systems are distinguished in Tariana: (i) a subject vs object case system, used with personal pronouns with animate reference; (ii) a case system characterized by an enclitic -nuku for marking topicalized and referential non-subjects, used with all types of nominal constituents; (iii) an ergative case-marking used with all types of nominal constituents under emphasis in A function, the ergative case marker being the same as instrumental; (iv) a system of peripheral cases – locative and instrumental, used with all types of nominal constituents, but obligatory only with pronouns. The overt case-marking in Tariana is related to such parameters as topicality, definiteness and emphasis, and consequently is dependent on the structure of discourse. I will argue that the unusual case-marking patterns in Tariana corroborate cross-linguistic generalizations on a dependency between case-marking and topical properties of NPs in languages with an opposition between marked and unmarked case forms.

Changes in Basic Word Order in Mayan Languages

1. Basic word order. As Brody (1984) amply demonstrates, the definition of basic word order is quite problematic. Different criteria are used by different linguists, languages differ greatly in the ease with which a basic word order can be established, and there has been relatively little discussion of the assumptions that underlie the idea of basic word order. Brody lists criteria that have been suggested for establishing basic word order under the general categories of simplicity, least markedness, reciprocally affecting verb, disambiguation, full nouns for nominal constituents, and frequency. She then shows that while all possible orders exist in Tojolab'al, none fulfills all of the criteria that have been suggested for basic word order. It seems necessary to specify the assumptions I hold about basic word order before discussing further the situation in Mayan. The "major constituents" that are usually considered for the establishment of basic word order are the verb and its subject and object, used here in a standard or traditional sense. These are the arguments that are usually in a direct relationship to a transitive verb. They are also the

Modern Aztec grammatical sketches Edited by Ronald W. Langacker (review)

REVIEWS211 Gravius, Daniel. 1661. Het heylige evangelium Matthei en Johannis ... overgeset inde Formosaansche tale, voor de inwoonders van Soulang, Mattau, Sinckan, Bacloan, Tavokan, en Tevorang. Amsterdam. Happart, Georgius. 1650. Woord-boek der Favorlangsche taal. [Translated in Campbell.] Klaproth, Julius Heinrich. 1822. Sur la langue des indigènes de l'île de Formose. Journal Asiatique 1.193-202. Li, Paul Jen-Kuei. 1972. On comparative Tsou. Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sínica, 44.311-38. ------. 1977. The internal relationships of Rukai. Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sínica, 48:1.1—92. Ogawa, Naoyoshi, and Erin Asai. 1935. Myths and traditions of the Formosan native tribes [in Japanese]. Taipei: Taihoku Imperial University. Pawley, Andrew, and Lawrence A. Reíd. 1976. The evolution of transitive constructions in Austronesian. Working Papers in Linguistics, University of Hawaii, 8:2.51-74. Stanley, Patricia. 1974. Syntax of Tsou verbs: Implications for comparative studies. Paper presented at the First International Conference on Comparative Austronesian Linguistics, Honolulu. Tung, T'ung-ho, et al. 1964. A descriptive study of the Tsou language, Formosa. (Institute of History and Philology, Special publication 48.) Taipei: Academia Sínica. Wolff, John U. 1973. Verbal inflection in Proto-Austronesian. Parangal Kay Cecilio Lopez, ed. by Andrew Gonzales (Philippine Journal of Linguistics, Special monograph 4), 71-91. Quezon City. [Received 20 March 1980.] Modern Aztec grammatical sketches. Edited by Ronald W. Langacker. (SIL publications in linguistics, 56; Studies in Uto-Aztecan grammar, 2.) Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics and University of Texas at Arlington, 1979. Pp. x, 380. Reviewed by Una Canger, University of Copenhagen This work, the second ofa set ofthree volumes edited by Langacker, contains sketches of four modern Aztec dialects, prepared by participants in a SIL UtoAztecan workshop held under Langacker's direction from January through April 1976 at Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo, Mexico. The four sketches are on Tetelcingo , by David H. Tuggy; North Puebla Náhuatl, by Earl Brockway; Huasteca Náhuatl, by Richard and Patricia Beller; and Michoacán Nahual, by William R. Sischo. No map is given to show the geographical location of the four dialects. Volume 3 will contain sketches of five other Uto-Aztecan languages. In the foreword, L states that 'the purpose of these sketches [in volumes 2 and 3] is to provide Uto-Aztecan scholars, linguists generally, and other interested people with reasonably comprehensive basic information about a variety of Uto-Aztecan languages.' He continues: 'To facilitate understanding and comparison, we have adopted fairly uniform transcriptions, abbreviations, and formats.' Langacker 1977 (reviewed by Miller 1979) presents his overview in a format which L has developed over the years in working with Uto-Aztecan languages; and this format is used in the present volume. Thus grammatical 212LANGUAGE, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 1 (1981) information is organized in the following larger units: 'Introduction', 'Phonology ', 'Syntax of simple sentences', 'Derivational morphology', 'Nominal constituents ', 'Complex sentences', 'Subordination', and 'Text'. Most of these units are further divided into labeled sections; e.g., under 'Verbs', we find 'Stems', 'Incorporation', 'Syntactic marking', 'Non-syntactic affixation', and 'Over-all verb structure'. In each article the authors' task has been to fill in the given sections with material from the one dialect they have studied. Thus the main part of the sketches naturally consists of examples with translations, with little or no comment. The analysis of the examples must be deduced from the segmentation , morpheme translations, and titles of the sections under which the examples are entered. Thus, in the section on 'Verb morphology', Tuggy (42), under adj +X = V, has '-¡.wl-iew become adj' with the example cicil-iew-i (red-VR-iNTRNs) 'reddens': we are to understand that verbs are derived from adjectives with the suffix -iW-ietv-i. The sketches are thus like organized inventories of forms and constructions; and in uncontroversial cases this may be sufficient. But there is no discussion of the many problems which the authors must have faced in filling the sections with appropriate examples. In Aztec it is often difficult to determine whether a stem or root is a noun, an adjective, or a verb. On p. 43, Tuggy again uses 'red' in an example: under X + Y...

Finnish Syntax in Text: Methodology and Some Results of a Quantitative Study

The Paper contains a report on the theory and methodology used in a project on finnish syntax as investigated in (some genres of written) text. 123 texts containing 10,149 clauses (5016 graphical sentences) were analyzed according to a syntactic coding frame containing 63 variables. The variables include sentences structure, clause structure, clause type, clause function, clause length, surface word order, constituent structure, the text semantic and referential properties of nominal constituents, and some movement and deletion transformations. The theoretical considerations behind the selection of the variables are discussed in detail, as are the principles for syntactic sampling. The usefulness of the computer for certain low-level tasks is demonstrated, such as finding correlations between variables. The relevance of quantitative data to ‘qualitative’ syntactic description is stressed.