Stavros Skopeteas

Comparison and gradation

1. Preliminary notions All the languages of the world have at their disposal different means to express comparison and gradation, but not every language expresses them through morphology. In recent years some relevant works on the typology of comparison were published (Stassen 1985; Xerberman 1999; but see already Jensen 1934), and the semantics of comparative constructions is being investigated by semanticists. A reliable survey on comparison and gradation, however, still needs detailed research in several theoretical domains, including morphology (see, for instance, the short entries by Andersen 1992 and Crookston 1994). In the present article, then, comparison and gradation will be treated to the extent that morphology is involved, and a classification of the means employed for its expression will be sketched. Viewed conceptually, both comparison and gradation presuppose an entity that some property, state or, more rarely, a more or less dynamic state of affairs applies to. They also presuppose that this state of affairs varies on some scale on which it may, in principle, be measured; i.e. it is a parameter. Gradation (German Abstufung) then is the stepwise modification of the extent to which the parameter applies to the entity, while comparison (German Vergleich) assesses this extent with respect to some standard. Taken as a grammatical category, comparison (German Steigerung) is the formal modification of some predicative word – most often an adjective – representing a parameter of gradation or comparison, according to the extent to which it applies to its argument, relative to some standard. Similarly, gradation may be manifested in a structural category, in particular of adjectives and verbs. In a comparative construction four elements are identifiable:

Postverbal argument order in Yucatec Maya

Summary This paper presents experimental data on postverbal argument order in Yucatec Maya. Yucatec Maya is a verb initial language which according to previous analyses displays verb-agent-patient as its canonical order. The data presented in this paper were obtained in an experiment on interpreting ambiguous sentences. The experiment evaluated hypotheses about the impact of animacy, definiteness, verbal aspect and pragmatic preferences on Yucatec Mayan postverbal orders. The participants of the experiment showed considerable instability in role choice for postverbal arguments, sometimes preferring the agent-patient and sometimes the patient-agent order. The role choice is predominantly determined by pragmatic inferences which are supported by inherent properties of the postverbal NPs like animacy and definiteness.

Encoding spatial relations: language typology and diachronic change in Greek*

While motion verbs in some languages display selectional restrictions for their spatial complements, motion verbs in other languages freely combine with any type of spatial complement. In the course of Greek history, two inter-related typological transitions take place: In Classical Greek, selectional restrictions emerge in the subcategorization frames of motion verbs as a result of reanalysis; in Post-Classical Greek, prepositions, cases, and adverbs abandon the distinction between static and dynamic spatial relations.

Morphologie : ein internationales Handbuch zur Flexion und Wortbildung

Morphology is the study of linguistic forms, more precisely, of the inflected forms and stems of words. Consequently it is that part of grammar whose rules refer to units of at most word level. At the same time, it is also a part of the lexicon to the extent that complex stems are not formed regularly. The handbook informs the reader equally on fundamental concepts and theoretical approaches of the discipline and on morphological structures of diverse languages. Presupposing the current state of the art in morphology its goal is to represent this in a comprehensive fashion at a general level and to illustrate it with a sufficient number of examples. Priority is given to thorough explanation of established concepts and insights, complemented, if necessary, by an unbiased report on alternate problem solutions. Demonstration of contemporary trends and innovative approaches is more backgrounded.

Licensing Focus Constructions In Yucatec Maya1

An important challenge in the study of focus constructions is teasing out the properties of the layers of linguistic structure that are involved, in particular identifying which interpretational properties are associated with the syntactic operation at issue, which properties arise through inferential processes, and which properties can be deduced on the basis of the prosodic structure. This article undertakes this challenge in a language with a structurally identifiable left-peripheral position which is employed for the expression of focus, namely, Yucatec Maya. This syntactic configuration comes with a focus interpretation and we show that the occurrence of this construction is not restricted to a subtype of focus corresponding to a truth-conditionally relevant operator. The properties of the syntax–prosody mapping indicate that focus fronting is a syntactic operation that places the material in focus in the maximally prominent partition of the prosodic constituent that contains the predicate.

The interaction between topicalization and structural constraints : evidence from Yucatec Maya

Abstract This article deals with the syntactic and pragmatic properties of left dislocated constituents in Yucatec Maya. It has been argued that these constituents are topics, which implies that a particular structural configuration, namely left dislocation displays a 1:1 correspondence to a particular discourse function. We present evidence that the discourse properties of left dislocation are not uniform: only a subset of the left dislocated constituents qualify as topics in the strict sense, while other instances of left dislocation are better explained if we assume a structural constraint that bans the postverbal occurrence of subject constituents in a particular syntactic configuration. Our empirical findings show that though the occurrence of word order possibilities in discourse is not random, it is not necessarily determined by a unique licensing condition.

Studies on Grammaticalization

Grammaticalization theory has played a major role in the developments in language typology and functional linguistics during the last three decades. The contributions in this book discuss the major theoretical issues of grammaticalization theory, illustrate the current trends in this field, and present evidence for grammaticalization from several familiar as well as little studied languages.

Lexical, morphological and syntactic symbolization

Languages offer a variety of means of expression, especially for grammatical notions. Morphology, which is concerned with the combination of meaningful units into words, can only be fully understood in the context of the complete array of expression and combination types. In this article, similarities and differences among the major expression types or symbolization types syntactic, free grammatical, inflectional, derivational, compositional and lexical are described in terms of a series of continua with both diachronic and cognitive motivation (cf. 2). These continua involve phonetic, morphophonemic, grammatical and semantic criteria (cf. 3-6). The relation between the formal and semantic criteria is non-arbitrary, and thus part of the discussion will be directed toward explaining which meanings are expressed by which symbolization type (cf. 7).

Contrasts and Positions in Information Structure: Left-peripheral arguments and discourse interface strategies in Yucatec Maya

Constituents in the left periphery are often assumed to bear information structural functions such as topic and focus. Yucatec Maya provides the empirical basis for a challenging case study in this respect, since it provides a distinction between a sentence-initial position that is characterized by a series of enclitics and is labeled ‘topic position’, and an immediately preverbal position that is labeled ‘focus position’. This paper addresses the issue where do the interpretational properties of the left peripheral constituents come from and considers two alternative hypotheses: (a) the left peripheral constituents occupy the Specifier positions of functional projections that bear information structural features such as ‘topic’ and ‘focus’ and (b) the syntactic positions in the left periphery are underspecified with respect to information structure. The data presented in this paper support the view of hypothesis (b) and show that the interpretational properties of the left peripheral positions can be accounted for through the interaction of discourse principles that are independent from syntax with the properties of prosodic phrasing, that indirectly refer to constituent structure.

Projective vs. interpretational properties of nuclear accents and the phonology of contrastive focus in Greek

Abstract Nuclear accents have two interesting properties. First, they have a projective property, i.e., they may refer to a focus domain that encompasses a higher syntactic projection. Second, at least for some languages, nuclear accents may have an interpretational property, i.e., they may have alternative realizations that reveal particular interpretations, such as contrast, correction, surprise, etc. The present article examines the interaction between the projective and the interpretational properties of nuclear pitch accents. Based on an experimental study on Greek, we show that the nuclear accent that is interpreted as ‘contrastive’ refers to a local focus domain, i.e., it is not projected to higher layers of the constituent structure. Furthermore, our experimental findings show that these properties interact with syntactic and prosodic markedness, in a way that the canonical word order and the unmarked accentual structure are felicitous in a larger array of contexts than the marked syntactic and accentual configurations.