Passion (Matthäus-Passion), BWV 244, is one of the highlights of German and European music. It wa... more Passion (Matthäus-Passion), BWV 244, is one of the highlights of German and European music. It was first performed on 11 April 1727 in Leipzig's St. Thomas Church. The text is based on chapters 26 and 27 of the gospel of St. Matthew in the translation by Martin Luther (1483-1546) as well as on texts for arias and chorales by Christian Friedrich Henrici (alias Picander) (1700-1764); several stanzas of the chorales are by Paul Gerhardt (1607-1676). It is possible that even Bach (1685-1750) himself made some changes in the text. According to what can be recovered about these gentlemen, none of them had ever lived in Southern Germany nor had any significant touch with Southern German or Austro-Bavarian dialects. Thus, the language in the St Matthew Passion is at best influenced by Eastern Middle German dialects such as Thuringian, Upper Saxonian, perhaps also Erzgebirgisch etc. On Good Friday, April 14, 2017, I had a chance to hear another performance of Bach's master piece. While listening to this composition is so totally absorbing that one forgets everything else, this time I was nevertheless paying more attention to details of the text than on previous occasions. In the course of this, I detected various constructions that struck me as highly familiar from my native dialect, Bavarian. This inspired my thinking which later on developed into the present chapter. I want to discuss five construction types that can be found in the text of the St Matthew Passion but are usually taken to be typical for the Southern German dialects Bavarian, Austro-Bavarian and to a certain extent also Alemannic: Long wh-movement, pleonastic negation, the lack of zu-infinitives, the lack of adjectival inflection and the apparent absence of the ge-participle. I will close with a sixth construction type, one that is to my knowledge, not found in any other German variety and seems to be exceedingly rare in the languages of the world. Conclusions follow in section 5.
The Bangla discourse particle -to and the German discourse particle doch share a number of syntac... more The Bangla discourse particle -to and the German discourse particle doch share a number of syntactic and semantic properties. Their phonetic similarity suggests a remote historical relation. While the latter part will only be mentioned and must remain for the specialists in Indo-European reconstruction, the present short study will highlight points of convergence between the two languages with respect to these particles along a series of concrete tests. The convergence appears to be more than accidental. * Thanks to Jogamaya Bayer for sharing her intuitions about Bangla, to Heinrich Hettrich, Rosemarie Lühr and Paul Kiparsky for useful historical information and especially to Probal Dasgupta for joint research and discussions of Bangla grammar, as well as to Sibansu Mukhopadhyay for compiling a corpus of Bangla sentences with -to. This article will also be published in: Dan, Mina & Aditi Ghosh (eds.
In his article Three clause-final particles and the syntax of clausal complementation in Dravidia... more In his article Three clause-final particles and the syntax of clausal complementation in Dravidian, K. A. Jayaseelan discusses the role of the question particle-oo, the complementizer ennǝ, and the relativizer-a, which occur in a fixed order in Malayalam, in case they co-occur. He argues that this order can be generated only if we postulate that the complementizer, which is a quotative element derived from the verb 'say', still retains its verbal syntax and projects its own clause. The relativizer-a can then be in the C domain of the clause projected by ennǝ, and the question particle-oo can be in the C domain of the CP complement of ennǝ. A surprising consequence of this analysis is that every embedded finite clause in Dravidian-the 'ennǝ + clause' structure-is in fact bi-clausal. Rahul Balusu's article Fine tuning the Dravidian left periphery: The three 'complementizers' in Telugu picks up on this, now with a focus on the related Dravidian language Telugu. He investigates in detail three left-peripheral morphemes that have been considered at various places in the previous literature as instances of complementizers. According to Balusu, none of these morphemes are typical complementizers. The linearly first left-peripheral morpheme-aa has all the signature properties of a polar question particle and is in many respects similar to its Hindi counterpart kyaa. The second left-peripheral morpheme,-oo, delimits the scope of questions in Telugu. This he attributes to its location in the Spec of CP, where it is basegenerated, and to its semantics, which is essential for interrogative semantics, thus explaining scope delimitations. The third left-peripheral morpheme, the quotative complementizer ani, is analysed as being syntactically and semantically true to its source, a verbum dicendi, the verb say, and its complementizer nature as arising only due to its not putting forth its extended projection (in the spirit of Grimshaw 2005) and instead being merged into the matrix clausal spine at various levels. The third contribution in this section turns to yet another Dravidian language, namely Tamil. In their article Discourse-driven scrambling to the peripheries in child Tamil, R. Amritavalli and Annu Kurian Mathew argue that the SOV-language Tamil has a pre-verbal focus and postverbal topic position. A subject wh-word must occur in focus, and not in a topic or in a canonical S(ubject) position. This leads to the distribution: *SwhOV, POSwhV, *OVSwh. Utterances from Josef Bayer & Yvonne Viesel 3 children 26-29 months of age are shown to obey these word order restrictions. The authors argue that child scrambling in Tamil moves arguments to criterial positions to check topic/focus features. A possible generalization with Japanese is suggested. A non-focus account of wh-is briefly critiqued. The second section, on Indo-Aryan, continues with the article Clause particles and cleft sentences in Bangla: Some preliminary generalizations by Probal Dasgupta. Intimacy-oriented discourse particles (DiPs), called Modul[ator]s in the Bangla syntax literature normally follow a finite verb or a compact wh-phrase. In his article, Dasgupta surveys interactions between a Modul and Zero Copula Construction (ZCC) in three subtypes of ZCC. He extends the discussion to other contexts now diagnosable as ZCCs-sentences in which a post-verbal constituent hosts either a Modul or some other DiP. He argues that certain sentences with these properties instantiate cleft constructions whose properties are explored here in the context of the study of DiP elements. Some preliminary generalizations are proposed. Section 3 contains two contributions on Japanese. The phenomenon of DiPs, which was introduced in Dasgupta's article, plays a role in the first article here, as well as in Sergio Monforte's article in Section 6, which concludes this volume. Yoshio Endo's article Exploring right/left peripheries: Expressive meanings in questions discusses non-standard questions in Japanese such as rhetorical, surprise, disapproval, exclamative, etc. (Obenauer 2006, Bayer and Obenauer 2011, Bayer 2018) within the framework of the cartography of syntactic structures. After introducing the basic ideas of the cartographic approach, Endo first examines the expressive meanings of some wh-expressions asking for reasons such as what…for, how come, etc. familiar from languages such as English, German, etc. He then turns to the main topic of examining various sentence final particles in the right periphery of the Japanese sentence to show how they contribute to creating expressive meanings in questions. Methodologically, he does this by looking at translations of Peanuts comics. Endo draws comparisons with German, where corresponding particles are placed in clause-medial position, and he speculates about the absence of similar particles in English. The article by Norio Nasu, Adverb-predicate agreement in Japanese and structural reduction, turns to the related topic of sentence adverbs (S-adverbs). In cartographic work, S-adverbs have a high position in the adverb hierarchy. Nasu shows that in Japanese, S-adverbs occur with a particular inflectional form of a predicate. He argues that this phenomenon is a manifestation of the agree relation between the adverb and a functional head. An agree-based analysis correctly predicts that an S-adverb can occur in more than one position as long as it is able to c-command the functional head it agrees with. It also accounts for restrictions on the cooccurrence of more than one S-adverb in a single clause. In Japanese, an epistemic adverb cannot precede an evidential adverb. The illegitimacy of this order is reduced to an intervention effect arising from agree. Nasu's analysis predicts that some S-adverbs in Japanese can occur at the edge of more than one functional projection as long as they enter an agree relation with the appropriate functional head. In this respect, the distribution of Japanese S-adverbs presents a departure from a principal assumption of the cartographic approach, i.e. a constituent appearing on the clausal left periphery is in a one-to-one spec-head relation with the appropriate functional head. The two contributions that appear in Section 4 discuss mainly the head-final language Turkish but also draw comparisons with the partially head-final language German. The article by Tamer Akan and Katharina Hartmann, SOV-X: Syntactic and pragmatic constraints of the postverbal domain in Turkish, sets out to develop a novel syntactic account for the postverbal domain in Turkish, which establishes a tight connection between syntactic and information-structural (IS) properties of the language. The authors first analyze the properties of the Turkish postnominal domain in comparison to the SOV-language German. Turkish is much less restricted than * I wish to thank Katalin Kiss for helpful comments on this paper. I also wish to thank the audience at the conference for an insightful discussion. 'He said (he) would come.' he (Nom.) come-1stP.Sg. say-3rdP.Sg. K. A. Jayaseelan 9 In (5), the complement of ennǝ is just a representation of a sound; there is no C domain here to generate ennǝ in. Even the noun complement construction can have a simple nominal as the complement of ennǝ, cf. (6) "kaakka" enn-a waakkǝ '(the) word "crow"' crow QUOT-REL word What such data show is that ennǝ is still a 'say'-verb, which can take as its complement anything that can be 'said', i.e. uttered; e.g. a sound ('Say "Boo!"'), or a word ('Say "crow"'), or a clause ('Say "Mary is pregnant"'). Though bleached in meaning-in (5), e.g., the machine doesn't 'say' anythingennǝ retains its verbal syntax. 2, 3 5 Clausal complementation in Dravidian What we have said has serious implications for the syntax of clausal complementation in Dravidian. When 'say' takes an object complement-irrespective of whether it is a sound, word, or clause-it goes without saying that it is outside that complement. Now consider a sentence where ennǝ takes a finite clause as its complement: (7) John [ Mary wannu ennǝ ] paRaññu 'John said that Mary has come.' John Mary came QUOT said We can now see that the correct analysis of (7) is that ennǝ is outside its CP complement; it is not in the C domain of the embedded clause at all. The 'say'-verb projects its own clause, which is nonfinite but can have its own C domain. The structure we postulate for (7) is (8) (abstracting away from word order): 4 2 Do we wish to entertain a "squishy" account of ennǝ, saying that it has been reanalyzed as a complementizer when it takes a clausal complement, but that it is still a 'say'-verb when it takes a nominal expression as its complement? Such a "two ennǝ's" analysis would be unsatisfactory for several reasons. First of all, note that ennǝ occurs indifferently with assertive and interrogative matrix verbs, showing an insensitiveness to the matrix predicate which is unexpected in a complement but is quite in keeping with an adjunct: (i) John [ Mary wannu ennǝ ] paRaññu 'John said that Mary has come.' John Mary came QUOT said (ii) John [ Mary wannu-oo ennǝ ] coodiccu 'John asked whether Mary has come.' John Mary came-Q QUOT asked Again, where do we generate ennǝ in the C domain? Suppose we generate it as the head of Finiteness Phrase. Then, in a sentence like (ii) above (or like (4)), the question particle-oo-and by implication ForceP-will have to be below the Finiteness Phrase; and a "low ForceP" will make Dravidian a typological oddity. 3 Readers unfamiliar with Dravidian languages might ask: Is ennǝ confined to the complements of 'verbs of saying'? It is not. The matrix verb can be any verb that takes a clausal complement, cf. (i) Mary [ John kaLLan aaNǝ ennǝ ] wiśwasiccu/ samśayiccu/ aaroopiccu Mary John thief is QUOT believed/ suspected/ alleged 'Mary believed/ suspected/ alleged that John is a thief.' But there is one restriction that needs to be noted on what ennǝ can take as its...
In this chapter, it will be shown that in the grammar of German, discourse as well as focus parti... more In this chapter, it will be shown that in the grammar of German, discourse as well as focus particles are part of the functional structure of the clause, and that in the unmarked case both types of particles take scope exactly where they are merged. Their scope must not be changed in the ongoing derivation. In other words, they are "frozen in place". A challenge comes from those cases in which particles form constituents with sub-sentential phrases such as my bike or in which village, i.e. phrases which do not qualify as scope domains. While co-constituency with sub-sentential phrases is a widely known property of focus particles, corresponding constellations with discourse particles are less widely known and therefore more challenging. Due to this, the focus of the chapter will be on discourse particles. In part 1, I will present what I take to be the current base-line of a syntactic-semantic representation of discourse particles (in German and hopefully beyond). Part 2 develops an account of discourse particles in wh-questions and their dependence on interrogative force. Part 3 shows how discourse particles can directly combine with wh-phrases, and how the movement of phrases that are composed in such a way and their scope properties can be integrated into the account developed in part 2. Importantly, I will show that their scope freezes in a position lower than the position seen in surface structure. This finding defines the goal of our consideration of focus particles. Part 4 integrates focus particles and shows that the analysis gets close to a unified account of focus particles and discourse particles. The perspective and advantage of a unified theory of particles is commented on in section 5. Section 6 draws some conclusions.
Circle", the dominant view was that natural language is in principle incapable of serving as a la... more Circle", the dominant view was that natural language is in principle incapable of serving as a language of science, and that as a consequence semantic investigation should rest on a constructed syntactic system. The following quote from Carnap's (1947: 234) Meaning and Necessity certainly expresses one of the more moderate views: Nobody doubts that the pragmatical investigarion of natural languages is ofgreatest importance for an understanding both of the behavior of individuals and of the character and development of whole cultures. On the other hand, I believe with the majority of logicians today that for the special purpose of the development of logic the construction and semantical investigation oflanguage systems is more important.
Die Vorstellungen über die Natur und den Sinn von Sprache divergieren auch nach Jahrzehnten aufge... more Die Vorstellungen über die Natur und den Sinn von Sprache divergieren auch nach Jahrzehnten aufgeklärter Forschung immer noch heftig. Eine Sicht geht von einer kognitiven Basis aus, die irgendeinem Typ von apriorischer Sprache entspricht, gekoppelt mit einem konzeptuellen System, das ontologische Kategorien zur Verfügung stellt. Diese apriorische Sprache kann als formale Sprache im Sinne einer Logiksprache aufgefasst werden. Die Vorstellung einer Sprache der Gedanken (Language of Thought, wie bei J.A. Fodor) müßte so etwas sein. Sprache im konkreten Sinn einer natürlichen Einzelsprache ist dann eine konventionsgeleitete, möglicherweise durch eine Wahl fester parameter-getriebener Enkodierung der a priori vorgegebenen Bausteine. Letztere sind ihrer Natur nach außersprachlich, da sie der Spezies eigen sind und daher universell sein sollten. Der Idealtyp eines solchen Modells ist so, dass jeder syntaktische Prozeß einem semantischen Prozeß entspricht, d.h. dass es eine konsistente Abbildung von Bedeutung auf Form geben sollte. Syntaktisch ausgedrückt wird das, was in der Sprache der Gedanken sowieso schon vorhanden ist. Die vorgegebene Sprache der Gedanken muss ja nur "kodiert" werden. 1 Selbstverständlichen wissen wir, dass es in der Wirklichkeit immer ein wenig anders zugeht. Inkongruenzen existieren. Wie soll man sie erklären? Es gibt viele Wege: historische Verschiebungen, falsche Generalisierungen, Verarbeitungsprobleme, semantische Illusionen, soziale Normen, Zwänge, Konventionen ohne tieferen Sinn usw. Es gibt daneben eine zweite, nicht unbedingt gänzlich distinkte Gedankenlinie, die danach fragt, wie die generative Maschine im Inneren der Sprache den Restriktionen der beiden Schnittstellen (interfaces) zur Semantik/konzeptuellen Struktur und Phonologie/Motorik/Akustik gerecht werden kann. Diese Linie nähert sich Chomskys klassischer Frage, in der es zunächst keine apriorische Festlegung gibt. Die Überlegungen kommen hier eher von innen, also aus dem generativen Algorithmus, der den Erzeugungsprozess treibt und gleichzeitig die Schnittstellen in optimaler Weise zufrieden stellen muss. Wie muss das generative System aussehen, so dass es den externen Anforderungen gerecht wird, also eine Robustheit hat, die sowohl den Anforderungen einer mentalen Repräsentierbarkeit entspricht als auch den simultanen Anforderungen einer Projektion der Sprache in die verlaufende Zeit und die Exekution durch die Sprechwerkzeuge und in das auditive oder sonstige "periphere" System? 1 Es mag überraschen, aber ich rate dazu, einmal darauf zu achten, wie oft im linguistischen wissenschaftlichen Diskurs die Kodierungsmetapher auftaucht. In der Typologie bestimmt am allerhäufigsten.
b. * All-e Marias Büch-er sind nass geworden 1 all-PL Maria's book-PL are wet become 'All Maria's... more b. * All-e Marias Büch-er sind nass geworden 1 all-PL Maria's book-PL are wet become 'All Maria's books got wet' Notably, this contrast is absent in English (2) a. All her books got wet b. All Mary's books got wet English and German look the same with pronominal possessors but different with nominal possessors. Where does this difference come from? 3. Agreement Consider now the following German "possessor doubling" construction that differs formally but not semantically from the one in (1b). (3) All-e de-r Maria ihr-e Büch-er sind nass geworden all-PL the-DAT Maria her-PL book-PL are wet become 'All Maria's books got wet' This construction is historically older than the Saxon genitive and survives especially in Southern German dialects but also in all kinds of spoken varieties. The name Maria appears decorated with the definite determiner der. The fact that this determiner can hardly be dispensed with may have to do with the fact that the possessor here is in dative Case, and that there are strong reasons in German to license dative Case by means of overt morphology. 2 Since proper names have given up overt Case morphology, assistance from outside is called for. Since pronouns and determiners etc. retain overt Case in the language, this assistance comes from the determiner. Assume nowfollowing standard proposals about the German DPthat in the pos-1 Notice that the examples in (1) can also appear with the plural-e lacking: All Marias Bücher …. The reason seems to be a mainly phonological one. There is a rule of schwadeletion which might kill the final vowel. The issue is not trivial as seen by the deviance of missing-e in all* (-e) Bücher von Maria (all-(PL) books of Maria). I have to leave this issue aside. 2 Various argument for that can, for example, be found in Bayer, Bader and Meng (2001) .
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In this work I consider the properties of Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) and Hanging Topic (HT) i... more In this work I consider the properties of Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) and Hanging Topic (HT) in Italian. Rizzi (1997) proposed that the syntactic space pertaining to the complementizer must be conceived of as a layer, i.e. as a set of hierarchically ordered projections, including those for contrastive focus and topics. In the literature following this hypothesis, a focused phrase is argued to be moved, whereas topics such as CLLD and HT are analyzed as base generated in the left periphery. Here I argue that their unmoved status follows from their very special syntax, given that the heads projecting the phrases where they are hosted belong to a peculiar category, i.e. they are prosody-oriented heads. Prosodyoriented heads are not associated to a lexical content, but to a phonological one, i.e. are read off at the interface with phonology as instructions for the assignment of prosodic values. The properties and distribution of CLLD and HT will be shown to follow from this hypothesis.
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