Udo Klein

The Grammar of Code Switching

The idea that language is a homogeneous code is a massive simplification. In actual fact, we constantly use a wide array of codes, be they other languages, dialects, registers, or special purpose codes (for bank account numbers, book numbers, shoe sizes, and so on). In this paper we provide a formal analysis of code switching.

Notes on Disagreement

Language is generally assumed to be homogeneous inside what is called the language community. This chapter argues that the homogeneity assumption is actually ill-founded. It discusses an example on how misunderstandings can be diagnosed and managed in dialogue. The chapter broadens the scope somewhat showing that not only are differences in semantics partly due to the fact that we have to learn them, but also that the variation is deliberately created and exploited. Pragmatics will have to take some of the burden of explaining which of the many meanings enter the discourse. The chapter provides a theoretical reconstruction of communication in terms of the calculus of judgements. Crucially, the calculus allows to deal with both judgements and announcements, which are the fundamental categories of communication. The chapter shows how the distinctions in meaning from one person to another inform pragmatics. Keywords: calculus; homogeneity assumption; language community; pragmatics

Case in Conflict: Embedded Subjects in Mongolian

In Mongolian the subject of embedded object clauses can occur not only in the morphologically unmarked form, but also in the accusative. Sidestepping the question whether these NPs are raised to object position, we focus here on the conditions underlying this alternation. The results of two questionnaires indicate that the accusative is clearly preferred if the embedded subject is immediately preceded by and more prominent than the matrix subject (otherwise both the unmarked and the accusative forms are possible and there is no clear preference). We explain this by the interaction of three principles: (i) the prominence principle (P1), stating that the most prominent NP in a sequence of NPs is the matrix subject, (ii) the accusative principle (P2), stating that an accusative marked NP is not the matrix subject, and (iii) the first argument principle (P3), stating that the first NP in a sequence of NPs is the matrix subject. If the first NP in a sequence of NPs is followed by a more prominent morphologically unmarked NP, then P1 and P3 conflict, predicting low acceptability judgements. Assuming that case morphology, unlike word order information, overrides the prominence principle, no conflict arises if the second NP is accusative, resulting in better acceptability judgements.

Same Same But Different — An Alphabetically Innocent Compositional Predicate Logic

Compositionality is at the heart of model theoretical semantics, and the most common way of doing truth value semantics for natural language (NL) is to translate a fragment of NL into some extensions of classical predicate logic. Yet, somewhat ironically and strangely enough, predicate logic itself is not compositional, because the truth conditions for quantification as usually stated are not a function of the denotations of its parts but depend on value assignments for variables. That this kind of dependence on value assignments leads to non-compositionality is well-known and will be demonstrated explicitly in section 1.3. One could, as is also well-known, remedy this awkwardness by considering not truth values as denotations of formulas but sets of value assignments for variables. As we will show in 1.4, such a semantics is compositional, but now an additional problem emerges, namely the lack of alphabetical “innocence” (or “invariance”) in that the denotation of P(x) is different from that of P(y) although the formulas are mere alphabetic variants of each other.1 This new problem is related to what Fine (2007), p. 7, calls the “antinomy of the variable”:

The Distribution of two Indefinite Articles: The Case of Uzbek

The aim of this chapter is to show that Uzbek has the crosslinguistically rather unusual property of using two indefinite articles, namely, the expressions bir and bitta. From a synchronic perspective, the two indefinite articles can be shown to compete (at least in certain environments), and from a diachronic perspective, there is evidence that bitta significantly expands to the expense of bir. The in-depth investigation of corpus data and data from an online questionnaire contributes to the discussion of the diachronic development of indefinite articles in general.