Swedish: A comprehensive grammar (review)

Sanzhi Dargwa belongs to the Dargwa (Dargi) languages (ISO dar; Glottocode sanz1248) which form a subgroup of the East Caucasian (Nakh-Dagestanian) language family. Sanzhi Dargwa is spoken by approximately 250 speakers and is severely endangered. This book is the first comprehensive descriptive grammar of Sanzhi, written from a typological perspective. It treats all major levels of grammar (phonology, morphology, syntax) and also information structure. Sanzhi Dargwa is structurally similar to other East Caucasian languages, in particular Dargwa languages. It has a relatively large consonant inventory including pharyngeal and ejective consonants. Sanzhi morphology is concatenative and mainly suffixing. The language exhibits a mixture of dependent-marking in the form of a rich case inventory and head-marking in the form of verbal agreement. Nouns are divided into three genders. Verbal inflection conflates tense/aspect/mood/evidentiality in a rich array of synthetic and analytic verb forms as well as participles, converbs, a masdar (verbal noun), and infinitive and some other forms used in analytic tenses and subordinate clauses. Salient traits of the grammar are two independently operating agreement systems: gender/number agreement and person agreement. Within the nominal domain, modifiers agree with the head nominal in gender/number. Agreement within the clausal domain is mainly controlled by the argument in the absolutive case. Person agreement operates only at the clausal level and according to the person hierarchy 1, 2 > 3. Sanzhi has ergative alignment in the form of gender/number agreement and ergative case marking. The most frequent word order at the clause level is SOV, though all other logically possible word orders are also attested. In subordinate clauses, word order is almost exclusively head-final.

We report two corpus analyses to examine the impact of animacy, definiteness, givenness and type of referring expression on the ordering of double objects in the spontaneous speech of German-speaking two- to four-year-old children and the child-directed speech of their mothers. The first corpus analysis revealed that definiteness, givenness and type of referring expression influenced word order variation in child language and child-directed speech when the type of referring expression distinguished between pronouns and lexical noun phrases. These results correspond to previous child language studies in English (e.g., de Marneffe et al. 2012). Extending the scope of previous studies, our second corpus analysis examined the role of different pronoun types on word order. It revealed that word order in child language and child-directed speech was predictable from the types of pronouns used. Different types of pronouns were associated with different sentence positions but also showed a strong correlation to givenness and definiteness. Yet, the distinction between pronoun types diminished the effects of givenness so that givenness had an independent impact on word order only in child-directed speech but not in child language. Our results support a multi-factorial approach to word order in German. Moreover, they underline the strong impact of the type of referring expression on word order and suggest that it plays a crucial role in the acquisition of the factors influencing word order variation.

A grammatical construction resembling Present-Day English locative inversion has already been found in Old English, with a fronted prepositional phrase prompting V2 word order, both in main and subordinate clauses. It has been demonstrated that several discourse-related factors influence the positioning of objects, fronted locatives, finite verbs and subjects in subordinate clauses. One of the main aims of the present paper is to provide a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the locative inversion construction in Old English subordinate clauses. The Old English data for this study were obtained from the York–Toronto–Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose, and they were analysed using Corpus Studio. The results were compared with those for main clauses, and discourse-related factors such as PP anaphoricity or subject type were analysed in order to find the motivation for the existence of this alternation of word orders. PP anaphoricity proved not to be a determining factor in triggering finite verb inversion, while other factors such as subject weight and subject type do seem to motivate finite verb inversion, thus yielding an embedded PP-V-S word order.

Word order in Old English has some properties in common with those in other Germanic languages, such as V2 in a main clause and Vf-final order in a subordinate clause. However, it had idiosyncratic traits that led to word order changes in the later stages of English. Focusing on the word order of three-verb clusters (modal+have/be+participle) in Old English, this paper argues that the rise of functional projections with the head in its initial position shaped changes in word order in the history of English.

722 SEER, 79, 4, 200I TEI standards for this type of work a question already implied by the enormous and ever-growingextension file that it requires. Particularlyinterestingto readerswith a backgroundin the humanities are the articleswhich approach the subjectfrom the other side, from the point of view of the computer scientist. Dobreva is right to stress the necessity of adheringto establishedproceduresinproductdevelopment;sheandM.Jordanova also drawattentionto a numberof practicalissues,notablytheproblems caused by entering data in transcription. They could be more forceful in drawing the necessary conclusion that data should be entered in the originalcyrillicand converted automaticallyto SGML entities, which are the only standardfor text encoding and interchange.This can be done easilywith the existing technology. The various transcriptionselaborated by R. Lazov then become redundant or, if required for any purpose, can be generated from the SGML. The editing of such a disparatevolume must have been a taxing exercise, and though there are some lapses there arereferenceson pp. 97 and I 76 to a non-existent Appendix i, and a number of proper names appearin unusual forms it has been accomplished remarkablywell by a team only one of whom has Englishas his native language. The book is a usefuladdition to the small but growing literatureon the subject.It is particularlyto be hoped that it will come to the attention of those engaged in computer applicationsin the humanitiesoutsidethe field of medieval Slavonic manuscripts. University ofPortsmouth R. M. CLEMINSON Herrity, Peter. Slovene. A Comprehensive Grammar. Routledge, London and New York,2000. xii + 372 pp. Bibliography.Index. / 25.00 (paperback). HALF a century has elapsed since R. G. A. de Bray's Guideto theSlavonic Languages (London, I95I) gave us the firstEnglishdescriptionof the rudiments of Slovene grammar.It was the only thing of itskind, untilJ. Toporisic'sZakaj nepo slovensko. Slovene byDirectMethod(Ljubljana, 1970) eventually made it really possible for English-speaking students to learn the language. Since Slovenia became an independent state in I99I severalmore useful textbooks in English have been published, most notably W. W. Derbyshire's A Basic Slovene Reference Grammar (Columbus, OH, I993), but the appearancenow of a new grammar by ProfessorPeter Herrity is an event of exceptional importance . It describes itself as 'the firstcomprehensive grammar of the language to be published in English', a reasonable claim in view of its 372 pages, compared to Derbyshire's 154. The structureof Herrity'swork is traditional and straightforward.It consists of thirteen chapters: i. phonology; 2. nouns; 3. adjectives;4. pronouns; 5. numerals;6. verbs; 7. adverbs;8. prepositions; 9. conjunctions; io. particles; ii. interjections; 12. word order; I3. word formation. Each chapter is divided and subdivided into individual features and rules,which are cogently expounded and amplyillustratedby well-chosen examples. Apart from the chapter on word order, syntax is not presented separatelybut dealt with throughout as and when necessary. The chapter on word formation is brief, this too having already appeared to a large extent in REVIEWS 723 the previous chapters.The tried and tested method of interweavinginflexion, derivation, and syntax, especially in chapters two to seven, works well. In chapter two, for example, noun declensions are followed by explanations of the use of the cases. This system works well in chapter six too, where conjugationsprecede explanationsof verbalsyntax.It may be as a resultof an oversightthat on pp. I78-79 the formation of the 1-participlecomes afterthe rulesfor its agreement. The explanation of the modal verbs (a difficultarea)is particularlyoriginal(pp. I99-202), but glossingthe modal adverblahko; as 'to be able, can', as if it were a verb (and it certainly appears in translationsof English 'can'),is going too far.I was surprisednot to findEnglish'must'in the gloss for modrati (it does occur in the examples) or 'must not' in the gloss and examples of nesmeti.A specific warning should have been given about the pitfallsattendingthe negation of 'must'and 'can'. Not surprisingly in a text of such length and density, there are a few infelicitousturnsof phrasehere and there.In a discussionof nouns of common gender, the words 'the gender of the person referredto is determined by the context' (p. 29) presumably do not mean what they say, whilst the heading 'The pronunciation of vowels in the spoken language' (p. I 2) may make...

This article critically assesses Lightfoot's (1991, 2006) ‘degree-0 theory’ of language change, specifically the use that Lightfoot makes of empirical data from Old English (OE) and Middle English (ME). This is followed by the presentation of a recent analysis of word order in a variety of OE and ME sources. It is argued that data from these periods do not support the ‘degree-0 theory’. Rather, the data demonstrate that verb-final and object–verb order were less dominant in OE subordinate clauses than previously assumed, and that the shift to SV order was fairly gradual. There is also little in the data to suggest that subordinate clauses and main clauses developed in radically different manners or at radically different speeds. The article highlights the importance of careful data usage, both with respect to type and scope of material, and the interpretation of data collected and categorised by others.

The Function of the Viewpoint in Čechov's “Griša”

This paper presents an analysis of the phenomenon of doubling in the context of Wolof-French codeswitching where the French subordinating conjunction comme “as” and its Wolof counterpart ni, often appear in succession. More specifically, the paper analyses the different patterns underlying the structure of these two conjunctions in the mixed sentence. The first observation is that doubling occurs either in the sentence initial position or between the independent clause and subordinate one. This suggests that each double corresponds both languages’ word order in the sense that in both Wolof and French, subordinating conjunctions can occupy the initial and middle position of the sentence. The study also indicates that the Wolof conjunction ni always occurs at the beginning of the subordinate clause, otherwise, the sentence becomes ungrammatical. For this reason, we claim that the Wolof conjunction (and not the French one) combines the subordinate clause to the independent one. Also, this is why the French conjunction comme may be dropped from the mixed sentence while the omission of the Wolof ni makes it ungrammatical. Using the Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model to explain the indispensability of the Wolof conjunction, it is shown that this subordinating conjunction is a bridge system morpheme. Like outsider system morphemes, earlies and bridges also come from Wolof, the matrix language in Wolof-French codeswitching.

When acquiring Spanish object pronouns (OP), English-speaking second language (L2) learners must learn the variety of forms available, word order, and case distinctions. The acquisition of case distinctions in particular is an aspect that has not been thoroughly investigated.Zyzik (2006)showed, through production tasks, that English-speaking L2Spanish learners overgeneralize the dative form to accusative contexts when the referent is animate. This study investigates how L2learners use animacy (human, animal, and inanimate object) instead of case marking as cues to interpret and produce L2Spanish object pronouns. Data from an interpretation task and a fill-in-the-blank production task were collected from 121 intermediate to advanced levels of Spanish learners. Results from linear mixed effects models reveal that learners show effects of the influence of animacy on object pronoun distinction in comprehension as well as production. A key new finding is that learners use the dative form with human referents, reserving accusative forms for animals and inanimate referents. These results provide evidence that animacy cues strongly influence L2Spanish learners in the formation of their OP paradigm, especially at lower-proficiency levels. As proficiency increases, L2learners begin to rely on case cues to distinguish Spanish OPs.

This paper identifies a micro-cue correlating to verb second word order (V2) in two closely related Medieval Romance languages. As V2 is asymmetrically distributed in main rather than subordinate clauses, an asymmetry would be expected in phenomena assumed to relate to V2, such as subject inversion, null subject and enclisis. The loss of that asymmetry should therefore indicate the loss of the V2 word order rule. These assumptions are tested here by a quantitative analysis of a treebank of calibrated data covering the crucial period of change (from the 14th to the 16th century) for Medieval French and Venetian. The hard quantitative evidence provided demonstrates that the main versus embedded asymmetry is indeed a micro-cue of V2 structure, and of its loss in one of the two investigated languages.

Low German with a Swedish twist - Contact-induced word order transfer in the 15th century

Bruce Mitchell has observed that is not always possible to say with certainty whether clauses introduced by words such as jber, ba, and bonne are principal or subordinate. The problem arises more often in poetry, where element order is a less certain guide than it is in prose.1 In prose feature of element order that usually sorts out clause-initial adverbs from conjunctions is position of finite verb. When finite verb immediately follows a clause-initial kcr, ka, or konne, initial word usually makes better sense as an adverb than as a conjunction. When one or more words intervene between clause-initial word and finite verb, kcr, ka, or konne often makes better sense as a conjunction, and S. 0. Andrew therefore termed this the conjunctive word order.2 Elisabeth Traugott concurs with Mitchell's reservations about element order, writing that while differences in word order after these initial words often be used to distihguish a subordinate clause introduced by a conjunction from a main clause introduced by an adverb, . . . distinction was never rigid, and can be regarded only as a tendency.... It certainly cannot be used as a sure test of main vs. subordinate clause status.3

This is the first full-scale reference grammar of Classical Greek in English in a century. The first work of its kind to reflect significant advances in linguistics made in recent decades, it provides students, teachers and academics with a comprehensive yet user-friendly treatment. The chapters on phonology and morphology make full use of insights from comparative and historical linguistics to elucidate complex systems of roots, stems and endings. The syntax offers linguistically up-to-date descriptions of such topics as case usage, tense and aspect, voice, subordinate clauses, infinitives and participles. An innovative section on textual coherence treats particles and word order and discusses several sample passages in detail, demonstrating new ways of approaching Greek texts. Throughout the book numerous original examples are provided, all with translations and often with clarifying notes. Clearly laid-out tables, helpful cross-references and full indexes make this essential resource accessible to users of all levels.

This chapter investigates pre- and postverbal subject placement in Spanish, as in la rana entró ~ entró la rana (‘the frog entered’), in a corpus of Spanish spoken by 24 monolingual children in Mexico, ages six to eight. The results show that the postverbal position was likelier when the subjects 1) were lexical rather than pronominal, 2) occurred in subordinate clauses, and 3) introduced new referents into the discourse. In contrast, change of location verbs, like llegar ‘arrive,’ salir ‘leave,’ and ir ‘go,’ as a group did not favor VS word order. Nevertheless, the more frequent the change of location verb lexeme, the likelier the postverbal subject in the children’s data. The results support the conclusion that patterns of morphosyntactic variation emerge with high-frequency items before expanding to low-frequency items.

Word classes (‘parts-of-speech’, ‘syntactic categories’, ‘lexical categories’) are the fundamental building blocks of linguistic expressions in all natural human languages. They have been investigated since antiquity and continue to play a central role in modern linguistics. Today an increasingly important role is assigned to the information that is specified in the lexical entry of a word in the lexicon (including, of course, information about its category membership), both in formal and in functional approaches to grammar. Furthermore, there is a growing awareness that the traditional set of word classes is biased towards the better studied European languages and needs to be revised to accommodate unfamiliar word classes in nonEuropean languages.