Björn Hansen

Modals in the languages of Europe : a reference work

This book is a collection of papers on modals in the languages of Europe, written by experts in the area of modality. It provides readers with a wealth of data and addresses the issues of under which circumstances modals are borrowed, from which linguistic materials they typically arise in these languages, and whether and how modals form a system which is separate from other word classes.

The German modal verb müssen and the Slavonic languages— The reconstruction of a success story

The following article concerns a particular instance of language contact between German and several Slavonic languages. The German modal verb mussen respectively its Old High German ancestor muozan (Middle High German muezen ) , entered into the Slavonic world and was taken up there by six Slavonic languages: Polish musiec, Czech muset , Slovak musieE , Lower Sorbian musaE , Ukrainian musyty and Belorussian music . As Besters-Dilger (1997) shows, even Russian had a modal verb musit at its disposal from the 17th to the 18th century . This article deals with the situation of the Slavonic exponents of modality at the time of this borrowing from German and the question as to why these languages so readily adopted the German modal mussen . The linguistic literature does not offer any explanations for this phenomenon, except for the hypothesis of the Polish linguist Aleksander Bruckner, who claimed (1927, s.v.) that mussen “was a general borrowing because the anarchic Slavs did not have a word of their own for ‘must’”. 2 Mytropolyt Ilarion (1979–1994, 147f) objects to this statement: “Concerning the Ukrainians we can refute this statement of Bruck-ner’s by the following well-known Polish proverb: “‘Must’ exists only in Russia; in Poland everyone can do what he likes”. 3

Grammatical replication and borrowability in language contact

The volume presents new insights into two basic theoretical issues hotly debated in recent work on grammaticalization and language contact: grammatical replication and grammatical borrowability. The key issues are: How can grammatical replication be distinguished from other, superficially similar processes of contact-induced linguistic change, and under what conditions does it take place? Are there grammatical morphemes or constructions that are more easily borrowed than others, and how can language contact account for areal biases in the borrowing (vs. calquing) of grammatical formatives? The book is a major contribution to the ongoing theoretical discussion concerning the relationship between grammaticalization and language contact on a broad empirical basis.

Yiddish language structures

The book presents ten data-based studies on structural aspects of Yiddish in the light of modern linguistic theories which are of interest to linguists and philologists. The contributions address several levels of the language system including morphology, syntax and lexicology, and put special emphasis on mechanisms of internal and contact-induced language change spanning different epochs and societal and textual strata.

The syntax of modal polyfunctionality revisited: Evidence from the languages of Europe

This paper deals with the semantics and the syntax of modal constructions from a cross-linguistic perspective. It focuses on the syntactic representation of modal polyfunctionality, usually understood as the semantic alternation between root and epistemic readings. This ambiguity is not an idiosyncratic feature of the Germanic languages, as it is also found in other non-related language families. In this contribution, the empirical base is broadened by discussing the data taken from Hansen and de Haan (2009), which covers all major languages spoken in Europe. I discuss the notion of modal polyfunctionality and give a first account of cross-linguistic morpho-syntactic variation among modal constructions in the languages of Europe. The hypothesis is forwarded that there is cross-linguistic evidence for the syntactic relevance of the distinction between epistemic-root polyfunctionality (EPI-ROOT) and alternations within root modality (ROOT). The relative semantic uniformity of modals contrasts with their structural diversity. It will be shown that modals in the languages of Europe vary with respect to two features: (i) the encoding of the subject and (ii) inflectional categories. It is shown that modal constructions are not restricted to canonical subjects, encoded in the default (nominative) case, but also allow for cases other than nominative, or null subjects. Thus, canonical subject constructions appear to be best suited to fully-fledged EPI-ROOT polyfunctionality, whereas quirky or null subjects tend to be restricted to alternations within the semantic domain ROOT. Categories such as the latter need not be marked on the modal itself, but can be assigned to a lexical verb or the copula – a fact which provides evidence for the claim that polyfunctionality is not restricted to ‘modal verbal status’. In the second part of the paper, the following question will be addressed: Which syntactic features are cross-linguistically connected to polyfunctionality? These chapters focus on (a) the distinction between verbs and auxiliaries in modal constructions, (b) raising vs. control status on the modal, and, (c) the coherence of modal verbal complexes. The subsequent analysis presents clear evidence for the tendency towards a loss of inflectional categories, but, on the other hand, does not lend itself to corroboration of the claim that modals form a syntactic category sui generis (cf. Reis 2001). The conclusion is drawn that the distinction raising vs. control is best suited to explain the syntactic prerequisites of polyfunctionality. It will be argued that modals with canonical subjects displaying full EPI-ROOT involve a raising structure, whereas modals with non-canonically case marked subjects displaying only ROOT alternations form control constructions (cf. Abraham 1989, 2001, 2002 on modals in Germanic).

Clitic Climbing, Finiteness and the Raising-Control Distinction. A Corpus–based study

Abstract In the paper, we discuss the phenomenon of clitic climbing out of finite da2-complements in contemporary Serbian. Scholars’ opinions on the acceptability and occurrence of this construction, based on a handful of self-made examples, vary considerably. Expanding on the assumption that the correctness of the phenomenon has often been denied due to its rareness we employ large corpora to examine the problem. We focus on possible constraints arising from the syntactic properties of clause-embedding predicates.

Von der Vielfalt zum Vielzweck: Der Imperativ im Polnischen und im Deutschen

Einer Vielzahl imperativischer Formen in früheren Sprachzuständen steht die Vielzweckverwendung einiger weniger imperativischer Formen im heutigen Sprachgebrauch gegenüber. Dies ist der Befund, der sich bei der näheren Betrachtung zweier doch recht verschiedener Sprachen, des Polnischen und des Deutschen, ergibt. In der vorliegenden Arbeit möchten wir diesen Weg von der Vielfalt zum Vielzweck dokumentieren und versuchen, Motive für den Wandel zu finden. Da es um den Wandel der Funktionen geht und wir die Formen nur betrachten wollen, soweit sie im Dienste der Funktion stehen, stellt sich gleich zu Anfang die Frage, was überhaupt als Imperativ anzusehen ist. Die fruchtbarste Herangehensweise zur Klärung dieses Problems schien uns der typologische Ansatz zu sein, zumal wir ja auch die Verschiedenheit der beiden Sprachen Polnisch und Deutsch zu berücksichtigen haben. Wir werden also zunächst diskutieren, was der Imperativ ist, und dann für beide Sprachen die morphologisierten Paradigmen, sowie jene Formen, die u .E. funktional ebenfalls zum Imperativ gerechnet werden müssen, vorstellen.