Eva Schultze-Berndt

Why a folder lies in the basket although it is not lying: the semantics and use of German positional verbs with inanimate figures.

Abstract In this paper we will investigate the meaning and use of positional verbs in colloquial Standard German. Positional verbs are defined as those verbs which may appear in the basic construction that functions as an answer to a “where”-question, the so-called Basic Locative Construction (BLC). Within this class of verbs, we focus on those positionals which are used to describe the configuration of inanimate movable objects. We will demonstrate that German exhibits the characteristics of a positional (or “multiverb”) language, i.e., a language that uses a comparatively large set of verbs in the BLC. The ten positionals used most frequently in our data are stehen ‘stand’, liegen ‘lie’, hängen ‘hang’, lehnen ‘lean’, stecken ‘be in tight fit, be stuck’, klemmen ‘be stuck, be jammed’, kleben ‘stick by means of glue’, haften ‘adhere’, schwimmen ‘be afloat in liquid’, and schweben ‘be afloat’. We will identify the conditions under which the positional verbs are used and provide a semantic characterization for each of them, paying particular attention to alternative categorizations, fuzzy boundaries and prototype effects.

Preverbs as an open word class in Northern Australian languages: synchronic and diachronic correlates.

Preverbs constituting a distinct part of speech are found in languages of different genetic affiliation throughout Northern Australia. In a large part of the linguistic area defined by the presence of preverbs, they are used to form complex predicates which at first sight bear striking similarities to the separable complex verbs of Germanic languages: the preverb is an uninflecting element which takes primary stress if it appears in preverbal position, but its position with respect to the inflecting verb is variable. Its meaning may be of a spatial or aspectual type. Thus, the Jaminjung examples in (1) and (2) have straightforward translation equivalents in English1.

Constraints on noun phrase discontinuity in an Australian language: The role of prosody and information structure

Abstract Discontinuous noun phrases have posed a long-standing challenge for syntactic analysis. While there exists increasing evidence that discontinuous NPs are associated with specific information structure constellations crosslinguistically, Australian languages continue to be presented in the literature as radically non-configurational, with unlimited freedom of word order. We argue for Jaminjung, an Australian language of the Mirndi family, that once true NP discontinuity is carefully distinguished from other, superficially similar constructions, it is in fact highly constrained and can be described in terms of very specific information structure categories. The first of these, contrastive argument focus on an NP containing a given element, is widely attested crosslinguistically. The second, sentence focus, has only rarely been associated with noun phrase discontinuity in the literature. We show that the two types can be distinguished on prosodic grounds. Our account of both types challenges some previous analyses which rely on different information structure values for the parts of the discontinuous NP. The findings underscore the importance of taking into account prosodic information and discourse context in the syntactic analysis of spoken language.

Pluractional Posing as Progressive: A Construction between Lexical and Grammatical Aspect

This paper proposes an analysis of an aspectual construction in Jaminjung, a non-Pama-Nyungan Australian language of the Mirndi family. At first sight, this looks like construction conveying grammatical aspect, specifically progressive, since it bears both formal and functional resemblances to typical progressive constructions. At closer investigation, however, the two morphemes crucially involved in the construction, a grammatical morpheme = mayan and a ‘semantically light’ inflecting verb, in their combination can be shown to convey lexical rather than grammatical aspect:=mayan, which occurs in a wider range of contexts, can be analysed as a marker of iterativity, and the inflecting verbs -yu ‘be’ and -ijga ‘go’ signal atelicity of different flavours, and are selected as classificatory verbs in analogy to other closed-class verbs in complex predicates in Jaminjung. The findings support a distinction made in the literature between event-internal and event-external pluractionality. Of all pluractionals, only event-internal iterative expressions (which include not only complex predicates but also iterated direct speech) are overtly marked as atelic in Jaminjung, and only those exhibit the functional overlap with a progressive. The study of this construction thus provides an insight into the pathway of grammaticalization between lexical and grammatical aspect.

Shared vs. Primary Epistemic Authority in Jaminjung/Ngaliwurru

Abstract This paper contributes to the typology of complex perspective markers by presenting an in-depth analysis of a system of epistemic authority marking which functionally overlaps with, but has no exact parallels in, similar systems attested cross-linguistically; it is also the first analysis of grammaticalised marking of epistemic authority in a language of Australia. Jaminjung/Ngaliwurru, a language of the Mirndi family, distinguishes between primary and shared epistemic authority by means of two non-obligatory clitics. By employing the first clitic, speakers claim privileged (asymmetrical) access to evidence informing their utterance; the holder of epistemic primacy shifts to addressees in questions. The second marker, which is transparently related to a 1st+2nd person minimal pronoun, indicates shared (symmetrical) epistemic access, but is further constrained in its distribution in that the evidence has to be accessible at the time of discourse and in that the encoded situation itself is not yet part of the common ground. In the light of the proposed analysis as well as cross-linguistic findings, it will be argued that epistemic authority markers more generally can be considered as part of a single functional domain with evidentials, and that this domain also includes egophoricity.

The semantics of Moroccan Arabic dar 'do' in typological perspective

Abstract This paper is a case study in the exploration of the semantic range of single a high-frequency lexical item on the basis of a corpus of spoken language, in this case Moroccan Arabic. Generalised action verbs (‘do’ verbs) are an interesting object of study because cross-linguistically, they can exhibit a wide range of functions including that of causative verb, verb of creation, verb in agentive collocations, verbaliser with loan words and mimetic expressions, quotative verb, and even a copula-like use with property predicates (Schultze-Berndt 2008). Against this typological background, the range of functions of Moroccan Arabic dar ‘do’ is investigated.