Thomas Stolz

Total reduplication : the areal linguistics of a potential universal

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Monosyllables: From Phonology to Typology

Studia Typologica is the companion series of the journal Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung/Language Typology and Universals (STUF). Studia Typologica publishes scholarly studies of high quality dedicated to promising new topics in the realm of general-comparative linguistics. The series especially welcomes contributions which argue on a solid empirical foundation, have a cross-linguistic orientation and raise new issues which are addressed in innovative ways. The series encourages work on understudied languages and understudied phenomena. Studia Typologica is also interested in areal-typological studies and research on the interface of language contact and language typology. The series is meant as a forum for typologically minded investigations independent of the school of thought the authors adhere to. Monographs as well as collections of articles (sharing a common theme) are published in this series. All manuscripts are peer-reviewed (double blind). The language of publication is English.

Split Possession: An areal-linguistic study of the alienability correlation and related phenomena in the languages of Europe

This book is a functional-typological study of possession splits in European languages. It shows that genetically and structurally diverse languages such as Icelandic, Welsh, and Maltese display possessive systems which are sensitive to semantically based distinctions reminiscent of the alienability correlation. These distinctions are grammatically relevant in many European languages because they require dedicated constructions. What makes these split possessive systems interesting for the linguist is the interaction of semantic criteria with pragmatics and syntax. Neutralisation of distinctions occurs under focus. The same happens if one of the constituents of a possessive construction is syntactically heavy. These effects can be observed in the majority of the 50 sample languages. Possessive splits are strong in those languages which are outside the Standard Average European group. The bulk of the European languages do not behave much differently from those non-European languages for which possession splits are reported. The book reveals interesting new facts about European languages and possession to typologists, universals researchers, and areal linguists.

Morphology in language contact: verbal loanblend formation in Asia Minor Greek (Aivaliot)

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how Turkish verbs are accommodated in Aivaliot, a Greekbased Asia Minor dialect, which belongs to a different typology from the donor language: Aivaliot is fusional, like Greek, while Turkish is agglutinative. The paper demonstrates that loan verbs are adapted to the Aivaliot morphology following specific constraints of the Greek word formation, but they are also affected by features innate to Turkish. In particular, it deals with certain base-driven morphological characteristics, such as stem-based derivation and stem allomorphy, which play a major role in Greek derivation and inflection, and make Aivaliot a good candidate as a case study for languagecontact morphological considerations. Finally, with the help of the Aivaliot data, and in accordance with recent findings in relevant literature, it shows that it is not particularly difficult for verbs to be borrowed, provided that certain structural/morphological conditions are met. 1. Assumptions and premises In language-contact studies, the simplest borrowing is usually considered to be lexical, according to which the lexicon of the recipient language is changed with the addition of the incorporated words (see, among others, Moravçsik 1975, 1978, Thomason 2001, Field 2002, Haspelmath 2008). Haugen (1950) distinguishes three kinds of borrowed lexical items: loanwords, whose form and meaning are copied in the recipient language, loanblends, i.e. words consisting of a copied part and a native part, and loanshifts, where only the meaning is copied. In this paper, I deal with the ‘accommodation’ of loan verbs within a recipient language which is typologically different from the donor. To this end, I examine the verbs of Turkish origin which have been introduced into a Greek Asia Minor dialect, the so∗ The paper is an extended version of a talk which was given at the conference Morphologies in Contact (Bremen: October 1–3 2009). I thank the audience for feedback and most constructive remarks. I am particularly grateful to Metin Bağrıaçık for his assistance with the Turkish data. 1 In this paper, I use the common term ‘borrowing’ to refer to the replication of a lexical item bearing a morphological structure. Note, however, that Johanson (2002) has proposed the term ‘copying’.

Morphologies in contact

This collection of articles takes up the issue of Contact Morphology raised by David Wilkins in 1996. In the majority of contact-related studies, morphology is at best a marginal topic. According to the extant borrowing hierarchies, bound morphology is copied only rarely, if at all, because morphological copies presuppose long-term intensive contact with prior massive borrowing of content words and function words. On the other hand, especially in studies of morphological change, contact is often identified as the decisive factor which triggers the disintegration of morphological systems. However, it remains to be seen whether these two standard treatments of morphology in contact situations exhaust the phenomenology of Contact Morphology. The 14 papers of the present volume shed new light on the behavior of morphology under the conditions of language contact. Fresh empirical data from 40 languages world-wide are presented and new theory-based concepts are discussed. Morphologies in Contact is a first in the history of both morphology and language contact studies. It is meant to mark the beginning of an international research program which explores the entire range of aspects connected to morphologies in contact and thus, paves the way for a full-blown Contact Morphology qua linguistic discipline.

Forschungsgruppe Koloniallinguistik : Profil – Programmatik – Projekte

Barbara Dewein: Prof. Dr. Stefan Engelberg: Institut fur Deutsche Sprache (IDS), Leiter der Abteilung Lexik, Postfach 10 16 21, D-68016 Mannheim, E-Mail: engelberg@ids-mannheim.de Susanne Hackmack: Wolfram Karg: Birte Kellermeier-Rehbein: Peter Muhlhausler: Daniel Schmidt-Brucken: Christina Schneemann: Doris Stolberg: Thomas Stolz: FB 10: Linguistik, Universitat Bremen, Postfach 330 440, D-28334 Bremen, E-Mail: stolz@uni-bremen.de Prof. Dr. Ingo H. Warnke: FB 10: Deutsche Sprachwissenschaft, Universitat Bremen, Postfach 330 440, D-28334 Bremen, E-Mail: iwarnke@uni-bremen.de Prof. Dr. Stefan Engelberg: Institut fur Deutsche Sprache (IDS), Leiter der Abteilung Lexik, ostfach 10 16 21, D-68016 Mannheim, E-Mail: engelberg@ids-mannheim.de Thomas Stolz: FB 10: Linguistik, Universitat Bremen, Postfach 330 440, D-28334 Bremen, E-Mail: stolz@uni-bremen.de Pr f. Dr. Ingo H. Warnke: FB 10: Deutsche Sprachwissenschaft, Universitat Bremen, Postfach 330 440, D-28334 Bremen, E-Mail: iwarnke@uni-bremen.de

Regularity, sub-regularity and irregularity in French acquisition

We review our studies and others on French acquisition of morphosyntax that refer to regular and irregular rules. Data on French past participle and adjective production and elicitation reveal that children distinguish regular, irregular and sub-regular rules. Children are sensitive to distinctions between verb conjugation classes even when they occur infrequently in the corpus. We propose that for morphological processes to become regular rules during language acquisition, they must show productivity and morphophonological consistency. 1. Psycholinguistic models of language processing and language acquisition The question of regularity and irregularity in morphology is an issue often addressed models of language acquisition, as regular morphological paradigms benefit from a privileged status in acquisition. Linguists and other cognitive scientists have proposed a number of models to account for systematized behaviour in language acquisition and the acquisition of irregular and sub-regular rules. Most models fall into one of two camps: singleor dual-route. According to the East-Coast linguistic school, children are endowed with a language acquisition device (LAD) that enables them to use language acquisition rules. The LAD is innate and pre-wired (Chomsky 1986). According this approach, all morphologically complex forms are processed via linguistic rules, or “operations over variables” (Marcus 2003: 34), whether or not they are regular. Other single-route approaches in the psycholinguistic tradition also propose single mechanisms for language acquisition, based on general pattern-based probabilistic cognitive processes. Linguistic “rules” are thought to be by-products of emergent properties of the system (Marchman & Bates 1994), and pattern frequency (i.e., rule frequency) is an important mediating factor for Royle, Beritognolo & Bergeron 2 schemata acquisition (Bybee 1995). However, other researchers propose that at least two cognitive mechanisms come into play: children learn language using both general cognitive mechanisms for item-based learning and morphologically-based word construction and analysis to develop linguistic rules (Bartke et al. 1995; Clahsen 1996; Clahsen & Rothweiler 1993; Clahsen et al. 2002; Marcus et al. 1995; Pinker 1999). 1.1. Arguments in favour of dual-route models The proposed arguments for the dual route include differences in productivity, differential transparency effects, different overregularization rates for different conjugation classes, and sensitivity to internal word structure. Productivity is a linguistic feature that can be used to measure the automaticity of a linguistic process. If an inflectional process is productive, it can be applied to all possible forms in the language. On the other hand, if it is found only for certain word classes (in French, irregular vs. regular verbs), it is considered less productive or unproductive. Indications of productivity are the integration of loanwords (chatter ‘to (web-)chat’), neologisms (tchorer ‘to steal’), the creation of derived forms such as denominals (fumer ‘to smoke’) and onomatopoeia (ronronner ‘to purr’). These four examples show that the first French verb conjugation (-er verbs) is productive, unlike the third class, which shows no productivity. Moreover, these examples support the notion that the first conjugation is the default (see the section below on French verbs). It has also been shown that children acquire the more morphologically transparent inflections more efficiently. Thus, they master regular better than irregular forms in English (Berko 1958), Spanish (Clahsen et al. 2002) and French (Royle 2007). However, children often produce irregular verbs with erroneous stems. For example, in German, a child might produce *gewinn for gewonnen ‘won’ or *gebind for gebunden ‘bound’ (Clahsen & Rothweiler 1993). Another indication that children acquire productive linguistic rules is overregularization. Only productive rules are overregularized. In English, children show overregularization of irregular verbs (approx. 4% of the irregulars in a corpus of 11,521 utterances) and 8.5% of noun plurals (range 0–22%) (e.g., foots for ‘feet’) (Marcus et al. 1992). Overregularizations are also found in German-speaking children for verbs where the regular -t participle is used instead of the -en participle (*gebt for gegeben ‘given’, *gefalt for gefallen ‘fallen’ *weggereitet for wegeritten ‘ridden away’) (Clahsen & Rothweiler 1993), and in noun plurals where -s plurals are used in neology (lumlum-s ‘balloons’, puppa-s ‘dolls’, aua-s ‘booboos’) and -n and -s plurals in overregularization (*mann-s for Männer ‘men’, *loper-s for Pullover ‘sweaters’, *mutter-s for Mütter ‘mothers’, *pferden for Pferde ‘horses’ and *auten for Autos ‘cars’) (Clahsen et al. 1992). Overregularization is also observed in Spanish children at the early acquisition stages (ages 1;7–4;7). This process tends to respect the verb conjugation group. That is, Regularity, sub-regularity and irregularity 3 the child uses a regular pattern within the verb’s conjugation class (*sabo for sé ‘I know’, or *pusí for puse ‘I put-past’) (Clahsen et al. 2002). In French, children typically overregularize into the first conjugation at ages as young as 3;0 (Grégoire 1937; Guillaume 1927[1973]; Hiriartborde 1973; Royle 2007), as illustrated in (1): (1) Je l’ai *batté [bat-e]/battu [baty] I 3sCL-AUX beat-PP ‘I beat him’ = ‘I won’ (personal data 4;6) Furthermore, children are sensitive to the morphological structure of words, which influences how they process them in terms of inflection patterns. For example, verb forms that are homophonous to irregulars, or derived from them, can be integrated into regular patterns. When producing past tense forms of denominal verbs that are homophonous to irregular verbs (such as ‘flie’ in the sense of ‘to cover a board with flies’), pre-school and school-aged children tend to use regular verb patterns (flied) more than irregular ones (flew), while at the same time preferring irregular forms for the non-derived meaning (for further details, see Kim et al. 1994). These authors present similar data for pluralization in compounds with exocentric (e.g., proper nouns based on irregulars, or Bahuvrihi compounds, Batman, snaggletooth) and endocentric (e.g., fat man, shark tooth) nouns. Children tend to use irregular plurals with endocentric compounds, whereas exocentric compounds allow both types of plurals (regular and irregular). 1.2. Arguments in favour of single-route pattern-based models A number of researchers have proposed that these distinctions between different conjugation or pluralization patterns in acquisition do not result from morphological sensitivity or processing. For instance, the regular–irregular distinctions observed have been attributed to a number of linguistic and psychological properties of language. One appeals to type frequency in the corpus (and therefore input to the child) and the other appeals to patterns found in regular and other verb inflection patterns. Some researchers propose that the regularity effects (especially better mastery of some patterns) stem from the type frequency of these patterns. For example, regular verbs would be mastered better than irregular verbs simply due to the higher type frequency in the corpus (thereby pushing the pattern to the forefront) (Bybee 1995). This accounts well for English data, as the regular pattern is predominant in any corpus. Connectionist models have been developed that can implement this frequency effect through a learning algorithm in which rule-based learning does not appear to be required to produce the appropriate outputs (Rummelhart & McClelland 1986). 1 All personal data were obtained from the first author’s son, a French-dominant bilingual. Royle, Beritognolo & Bergeron 4 However, not all regular patterns are the most frequent in a given corpus (see e.g., Clahsen et al. 1992 and Marcus et al. 1995, for a discussion on German plurals). Moreover, as we discuss below, some less frequent verb conjugations in the input or output can nevertheless be productive, according to the above-mentioned criteria. Cognitive scientists who believe that morphological structure is unnecessary for word and structure acquisition do not see this as a problem. In fact, connectionist models can apparently implement even low (type) frequency patterns with “hidden” layers, and “sensitivity” to phonological sub-regularities in the pattern (Seidenberg 1997), as found in sing-sang-sung (termed gang effects, Bybee & Moder 1983). Therefore, it remains an open question whether children’s language acquisition models need to refer to morphological sensitivity to account for learning patterns, especially regarding sensitivity to regular verb patterns and overregularization. We present a review of recent data on French language acquisition in the aim of making a relevant contribution to this debate. We first present studies on verb inflection and then introduce data on adjective acquisition in French-speaking children. 2. Studies on French verb acquisition Hiriartborde (1973) established that French children as young as 3;6 can productively produce the passé compose (a compound tense used to denote perfective aspect) on regular highand low-frequency verbs in experimental settings. Her study of 13 children aged 3;5 to 3;7 showed that they could produce real and novel regular passé composé forms, but only if their spontaneous speech corpus contained at least four regular types. Nicoladis et al. (2007) studied the acquisition of past tense morphology by English-French bilingual and Frenchor English-speaking monolingual children to determine the role of input frequency in the differentiation between regular and irregular verbs. They hypothesized that the acquisition of verb inflection patterns is determined by both corpus type and token frequency. That is, children must hear not only many different verbs

Morphologies in contact: form, meaning, and use in the grammar of reference

It was once thought that in situations of language contact, substance is always borrowed before structure. More recent work, however, has been demonstrating that even under conditions of language maintenance, structure can be copied without substance, as multilinguals replicate categories and distinctions from one language in another. Such replication can be difficult to spot when it is accomplished with native forms. This paper examines contact effects on some fundamental morphological categories and patterns, most without substance, among some languages indigenous to Northern California. The focus is on grammar involving referents and reference: pronominal categories, core argument structure, coreference, and referential continuity across clauses and sentences.

All or Nothing

We are currently experiencing a boom in all kinds of areally-minded linguistic studies. It will suffice to mention the international project EUROTYP and its many spin-offs, which scrutinize the linguistic geography of various regions worldwide, such as, for example, the Mediterranean (MEDTYP) and so on (Ramat and Stolz 2002). Perhaps less well-known is the recent genesis of another research paradigm that has only partly been inspired by EUROTYP, namely Eurolinguistik, whose proponents aim at establishing some kind of pan-European transnational philology (Reiter, 1999). What all these approaches have in common is their interest in the interface-like character of areal linguistics, although this may not be unique to this linguistic subdiscipline. If one studies the linguistic properties of languages located in the same region, the expertise of various disciplines is called for. Areal linguists must be versed not only in contact linguistics, but also in linguistic typology and universals research; cultural history (of the particular region under scrutiny); descriptive grammar and national philology of the individual languages involved; diachronic grammar, both general and language-specific; and, last but not least, the principles of dialectology/linguistic geography. This is, of course, a rather challenging and demanding combination for the individual researcher, who is therefore well advised to associate with a team of like-minded fellow researchers. On a teamwork basis, one may tackle the frequently asked questions of contact linguistics.

Europe as a Linguistic Area

The article addresses the issue of whether Europe deserves to be classified as a distinct linguistic area. The history of ideas of the topic at hand is briefly discussed before various more recent contributions to the areal linguistics of the European continent are discussed in some detail. Special emphasis is put on methodological problems connected with the notions of Sprachbund and linguistic area. Standard Average European (SAE) is closely scrutinized by way of discussing the possibility of postulating a competing area (‘non-Standard Average European’). With a view to establishing the relationship between the two supposedly coexisting areas, a selection of phenomena are reviewed as to their geolinguistic distribution.