Arthur Holmer

The place of Swedish in word order typology

Abstract This paper outlines the basic facts of Swedish clause-level word order, in particular the distribution of the verb-second (V2) phenomenon. A sample of other (Germanic and non-Germanic) V2 languages is discussed, and possible correlates of embedded V2 are explored. Finally, it is claimed that cross-linguistic facts suggest that embedded V2 does not involve recursion of a discrete category C (the prototypical complementizer position), but rather that what is referred to as C in the generative V2 literature is a trivial clustering of syntactic features onto a single (unlabelled) head.

Diachronic Atlas of Comparative Linguistics (DiACL)—A database for ancient language typology

Feature stability, time and tempo of change, and the role of genealogy versus areality in creating linguistic diversity are important issues in current computational research on linguistic typology. This paper presents a database initiative, DiACL Typology, which aims to provide a resource for addressing these questions with specific of the extended Indo-European language area of Eurasia, the region with the best documented linguistic history. The database is pre-prepared for statistical and phylogenetic analyses and contains both linguistic typological data from languages spanning over four millennia, and linguistic metadata concerning geographic location, time period, and reliability of sources. The typological data has been organized according to a hierarchical model of increasing granularity in order to create datasets that are complete and representative.

A Parametric Grammar of Seediq

Seediq is an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan. It has several characteristics which are typologically unusual but typical for Austronesian languages. VOS word order, subject-focus (i.e. a multipolar voice distinction which does not imply valency reduction) and cliticisation of subject pronouns. This dissertation comprises a surface description of the grammar of the language presented in the same form as traditional grammars, which is included to allow the reader to get acquainted with the surface facts of the language. This is followed by a GB analysis of the syntax. Due to the valency-neutral properties of subject-focus, it is proposed that focus does not imply a change in Case-marking within VP, but rather that it functions as agreement reflecting movement which has taken place for discourse reasons. The consequence of this is that movement in Seediq evidently can and does take place from one Case-position to another. It is furthermore proposed that this is exactly what also takes place in Western passives which imply a valency reduction, the difference being that Austronesian languages have a Case-marked SpecVP whereas Western languages do not. Each parametric value given for Seediq is then compared with languages sharing this value and languages having the opposite value. This concerns both pure word order parameters and parameters which in some way affect movement. The purpose of this is to show how cross-linguistic variation of a given set of parameters can cause important syntactic differences between both related and unrelated languages. This is followed by an analysis of the verbal morphology of Seediq, where a markedness-based model is illustrated which can account for the non-cooccurrence of certain morphemes (such as the active -m- and the imperative -i) and the portmanteau status of other morphemes. The dissertation concludes with a template-based analysis of the morphophonology of Seediq, where the inflection morphemes treated in the preceding section are projected onto a word structure template of the shape CVCVC. This accounts for the rather complex morphophonemic variations in Seediq. (Less)