H. de Hoop

Competition and variation in natural languages: the case for case

Publisher Summary This chapter deals with competition and variation among cases and case-marking devices in natural languages. A simple division of case-realizing languages into nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive is insufficient. One cross-linguistic generalization is that the richer the case system, the more specific is the information conveyed by the case. In general, the morphological case reflects all kinds of semantic and pragmatic information—grammatical role being only one of them. This may seem obvious for all kinds of lexical or specific cases, but it holds for the core cases as well. The different uses of case markers are united by their roles in identifying and tracking the relationships among multiple participants involved in an event. A language can have a morphological inflectional-case system that is not completely congruent to its system of syntactic case relationships. Manifestations of case marking in expressions can be motivated in terms of maximization of contrasts to ease comprehension from the point of view of the hearer. If an object has a case separate from that of the subject, it is easier to determine what is what. On the other hand, minimization of the effort from the point of view of the speaker may lead to a reduction of morphological variability, hence a loss of case.Publisher Summary This chapter deals with competition and variation among cases and case-marking devices in natural languages. A simple division of case-realizing languages into nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive is insufficient. One cross-linguistic generalization is that the richer the case system, the more specific is the information conveyed by the case. In general, the morphological case reflects all kinds of semantic and pragmatic information—grammatical role being only one of them. This may seem obvious for all kinds of lexical or specific cases, but it holds for the core cases as well. The different uses of case markers are united by their roles in identifying and tracking the relationships among multiple participants involved in an event. A language can have a morphological inflectional-case system that is not completely congruent to its system of syntactic case relationships. Manifestations of case marking in expressions can be motivated in terms of maximization of contrasts to ease comprehension from the point of view of the hearer. If an object has a case separate from that of the subject, it is easier to determine what is what. On the other hand, minimization of the effort from the point of view of the speaker may lead to a reduction of morphological variability, hence a loss of case.

Person and perspective in language and literature

This special issue investigates the language of literature, focusing in particular on person and perspective, which both play an important part in narrative strategies. Because much of what emerges as literary meaning is the outcome of ordinary everyday language, the challenge is to find a way to model the interaction between linguistic and other sources of information (context, culture) that yield literary interpretation. The questions we address in this special issue concern the linguistic means by which perspective or narrative point of view is realized in literary texts. Since linguistic elements steer the understanding of a text, linguistic research into the use and interpretation of person and perspective markers is very relevant for literary studies. Moreover, the investigation of literary texts can shed new insight on the mechanisms of language and communication as well. Perspective and related notions such as focalization (Genette 1980) and orientation (Toolan 2001) refer to the point of view from which the events in a narrative are described or perceived. Whose perspective is taken is usually seen as a matter of answering (one of) two possible questions, i.e., ‘who speaks?’ or ‘who describes?’ and ‘who sees?’ or ‘who perceives?’ (Genette 1980, Rimmon-Kenan 1983, Toolan 2001). These questions and their answers diverge when an omniscient first person narrator tells a story (‘who describes’) taking the perspective of a third person character (‘who sees’). In the case of a first person narrator who is also a character in the story, the two questions and answers usually converge, while a retrospective first person narrator entails double focalization (RimmonKenan 1983). An important determinant of perspective is thus formed by the use of personal pronouns.

Conflicting constraints: An introduction to optimality theory

In this introductory article we sketch out some of the general principles and merits of Optimality Theory, and provide a background to the articles contained in this special Lingua issue that centers around the concept and consequences of conflicting constraints within this framework.

Typical and atypical type-shifts in animacy

First of all, we would like to thank the commentators for their illuminating and inspiring comments, and for the thought-provoking issues they raise. Below we will only briefly address some of these issues, and happily leave the rest to future research. All commentators agree that animacy matters in language, while there is also consensus that languages differ widely from one another in their lexical and grammatical manifestations of animacy distinctions. Our main thesis was that – irrespective of what counts as animate or inanimate or something in between, either in the real world or in our conception of it – in the end everything that is gradient or continuous has to be mapped onto discrete features in language. This means that there is no one-to-one mapping from conceptual animacy to linguistic phrasing in production, nor the other way around in interpretation. As Ida Toivonen puts it, a person may consider a spider less animate than a cat, while at the same time they love their car so much that they think of it as being almost animate. Referents can thus be conceptually represented by varying degrees of animacy. Yet, when mapped to language, lexical and grammatical choices have to be made, and these choices are always binary and discrete. In English a speaker can for instance refer to a spider with it, to their cat with he, and perhaps even to their car with she. The hearer will use this type of discrete linguistic information to arrive at a certain interpretation, but again the mapping is not one-to-one, because not only the linguistic phrasing, but also world knowledge and contextual clues contribute to the interpretation. Thus, the conceptual degree of animacy a hearer obtains for a certain referent may vary across contexts, across languages, and even across individuals. Also, the speaker’s and hearer’s conceptual representations of animacy do not have to be identical. However, we agree with Andrej Malchukov that a general animacy scale on which humans outrank animates which in turn outrank inanimates is crosslinguistically valid, as it is a generalization over patterns from individual languages. In an experimental study, Mashal et al. (2014) find evidence for a

On the interpretive effects of double perspective in genitive constructions

The question we address is whether the use of genitive constructions such as her husband, in which both the possessor and the possessed may refer to characters in a literary story, affects readers’ degree of identification or empathy with one of the two characters or their immersion in the story. We report on a corpus analysis of a poly-perspective novel that makes use of this construction in a meaningful way, as well as on a reading experiment investigating the relation between the genitive construction and the shift in perspective elicited by the use of this construction. The results of the experiment indicate that the genitive construction indeed gives rise to a shift in perspective, which may in turn affect readers’ narrative engagement.

Introduction: Current issues in optimality theoretic syntax

Abstract 1. Introduction to OT syntax General tendencies that hold in or across languages are easy to find. For example, sentences in English usually have a subject. The subject often is the first element in the sentence. In many cases, the subject is the agent of the action expressed by the verb. Crucially, these statements are mere tendencies, not absolute laws. It is very difficult to find observable properties that hold without exception across languages. If we were to formulate these general statements as rules, these rules would often have to be broken because of a number of exceptions. In standard generative syntax, constraints are assumed to be inviolable, i.e., they must be satisfied in a grammatical sentence. In order to “save” generalizations (rules) from apparent violations (counterexamples) in the linguistic data, generally three strategies are applied: 1. assume empty structure to satisfy the constraint (invisibly); 2. assume an abstract level at which the constraint is satisfied (invisibly); 3. modify the constraint, making it less general, so that it is satisfied by the data.