Volume 23, Spring 2001

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Browsing Volume 23, Spring 2001 by Department "Linguistics"

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    Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 23, Spring 2001
    (University of Calgary, 2001-05) Dobrovolsky, Michael; Mezhevich, Ilana; Sheedy, Cory; Thormoset, David; Thrift, Erica
    The editors of this volume, Cory Sheedy, Ilana Mezhevich, Erica Thrift, David Thormoset, and Michael Dobrovolsky are pleased to present the twenty-third issue of the Calgary Working Papers in Linguistics published by the department of linguistics at the University of Calgary. The papers contained in this volume represent works in progress and as such should not be considered in any way final or definitive.
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    Experiencers and goals in German unaccusatives
    (University of Calgary, 2001-05) Borik, Olga; Brandt, Patrick
    So-called 'Psychological Predicates' have prov.en particularly problematic for a mapping from lexical argument structure to positions in syntactic structure if one adopts the view that: (I) this mapping should be uniform. (II) the inventory of 'thematic roles' should be kept to a minimum. Drawing heavily on data from German, it is argued, here, that the experiencer role in truly unaccusative structures may well correspond to a locative (source or goal) role. Therefore, the verbs of this class have a truly different thematic structure from the other experiencer verbs, thus avoiding problems with the uniformity of linking from the beginning.
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    Locative insertion, definiteness, and free word order in Russian
    (University of Calgary, 2001-05) Mezhevich, Ilana
    In this paper, I examine Russian data in terms of definiteness versus indefiniteness and locative inversion. The latter is investigated in Bresnan (1994). She presents an analysis of locative inversion in English and Chichewa and discusses the restrictions on locative inversion in these languages. In particular, she shows that, in English, locative inversion is permitted with many intransitive verbs and passivized transitive verbs (taking into account the by-phrase restriction), but is disallowed with transitive verbs. This generalization applies to Russian verbs as well. The notion of definiteness, however, requires clarification. As a starting point I adopt the definition proposed by Kramsky (1972:30): "By the term "determinedness" we understand the fact that nouns are classified according to whether the content expressed by the noun is clear and identifiable in a concrete way or not". This definition is vague and, therefore not very helpful. In the course of this paper, I will attempt to achieve a more precise formulation of definiteness.
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    Malay blends - CV or syllable template?
    (University of Calgary, 2001-05) Dobrovolsky, Michael
    1be subject of this paper is the structure and representation of blends in modern Malay. In the first part of the paper, I present a survey of blend forms that I have collected from a number of consultants, and present their phonological structure taxonomically. In part 2, I will consider the formal question of whether these structures are best represented as derived from a CV-template or through a syllable-template process.
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    Topicalization and topic drop in Dutch
    (University of Calgary, 2001-05) Thrift, Erica
    Topic drop is a frequently overlooked phenomenon in Dutch syntax. However, its investigation provides valuable insight into the intricate interaction between syntax and pragmatics. This paper endeavours to bring together the results of a speech corpora study (Jansen 1981) and grammaticality tests to determine the restrictions on the distribution of null arguments in topic position. An earlier analysis (Balkenende 1995) is applied and extended to explain the data presented. The restrictions on topic drop will be shown to fall out from broader constraints on topicalization in Dutch.