Although some characteristics of incorporating verbs and non-incorporating verbs have been proposed in previous studies, little systematic cross-linguistic research has been done on restrictions on... Show moreAlthough some characteristics of incorporating verbs and non-incorporating verbs have been proposed in previous studies, little systematic cross-linguistic research has been done on restrictions on the types of verbs that incorporate nouns. Knowledge about possible verb-based restrictions on noun incorporation may, however, provide important insights for theoretical approaches to noun incorporation, in particular regarding the question to what extent incorporation is a lexical or a syntactic process, and whether and how languages may vary in this respect. This paper therefore investigates to what extent languages restrict noun incorporation to particular verbs and what types of restrictions appear to be relevant cross-linguistically. The study consists of two parts: an explorative typological survey based on descriptive sources of 50 incorporating languages, and a more detailed investigation of incorporating verbs in corpus data from a sample of eight languages, guided by a questionnaire. The results demonstrate that noun incorporation is indeed restricted in terms of which verbs allow this construction within and across languages. The likelihood that a verb can incorporate is partly determined by its degree of morphosyntactic transitivity, but the attested variation across verbs and across languages shows that purely lexical restrictions play an important role as well. Show less
The prehistory of Old Armenian reveals a strong impact of language contact and internal drift resulting in an intricate combination of Indo-European archaisms and inner-Armenian innovations.... Show moreThe prehistory of Old Armenian reveals a strong impact of language contact and internal drift resulting in an intricate combination of Indo-European archaisms and inner-Armenian innovations. The dissertation contributes to the study of such phenomena by examining a set of Old Armenian verbal classes that can be securely connected to their Indo-European prototypes, namely, the so-called nasal classes with a dental nasal phoneme in the affixes marking the imperfective stem of their paradigms. Traditionally, the comparative historical grammar of Old Armenian has been concerned mainly with formal morphological correspondences, whereas the lexico-syntactic categories behind the morphological changes have been largely neglected. In the present dissertation, the evolution of the verbal classes from Proto-Indo-European to Old Armenian is examined according to a set of formal and semantic parameters including the morphological structure of the verbal paradigm, the argument structure, and the aspectual features. In particular, the dissertation describes Proto-Armenian changes of transitivity marking, analogical spread of the verbal suffixes based on aspectual meanings, the direction of root levelling over the verbal paradigm, and paradigmatic types of verbal classes that can be postulated for Proto-Armenian and dialectal Proto-Indo-European. Show less
Aramaic was once the principle language of the Middle East over an area reaching from Egypt into Afghanistan. Stretching back 3000 years, Neo-Aramaic, the modern tongue, is still spoken by mainly... Show moreAramaic was once the principle language of the Middle East over an area reaching from Egypt into Afghanistan. Stretching back 3000 years, Neo-Aramaic, the modern tongue, is still spoken by mainly Jewish and Christian minorities originating in Syria, South East Turkey, Northern Iraq, and Western Iran. Since most have fled the traditional territory in the previous century, their language is highly endangered. The Eastern varieties recently increasingly documented by linguists show exceptional microvariation in alignment. Such grammars rarely treat the clause structure of the language and are not easily accessible to non-specialists. Using typological models in contemporary linguistic theory, I show that a number of alignment types should be analysed differently. Some of them are the only known Semitic languages to evince ergative alignment. Several alignment types in Neo-Aramaic arguably go against functional-typological tendencies. Remarkably, the alignment can differ from dialect to dialect such that one dialect can do exactly the opposite of the other, even though the alignment has been stable in Aramaic for millennia. A common assumption in the literature is that this variation once developed out of a coherently ergative system. My research challenges this view and argues that the historical situation must have been more complex. Show less
The aim of this research was to establish if the semiotactic theory of C.L. Ebeling could be applied to Modern Japanese and mathematical descriptions of Japanese sentences could be made that are... Show moreThe aim of this research was to establish if the semiotactic theory of C.L. Ebeling could be applied to Modern Japanese and mathematical descriptions of Japanese sentences could be made that are consistent, clear and easy to understand. For this purpose example sentences from various sources, containing the most frequently used structures and expressions of Modern Japanese, were analyzed and described. In doing so, new light has been shed on various aspects of the Japanese language. Firstly, the general assumption that particles, also called postpositions, are similar in meaning and function to the prepositions in English proved to be true only for a number of the particles. Furthermore it was found that the traditional definitions for transitivity do not apply for Japanese, and the commonly assumed classification of noun phrases marked by the particle ga as direct objects has been rejected, in favor of the view that all noun phrases marked by nominative ga are subjects. That this method yields a better insight into the structure of the Japanese language is also demonstrated by the fact that, contrary to the classification commonly assumed until now, it was concluded that there are no indirect objects in Japanese. Show less
