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Research Interests: Sociology, Linguistics, Nominalism, Deception, American Linguistics, and 4 moreNoun, Self Deception, Bending, and NOM
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Abstract Eskimo languages, as is well known, are ergative-absolutive .with respect to the case marking of the nominal terms of the clause: there is a special morphological case that marks the agent of a transitive clause, while the object... more
Abstract Eskimo languages, as is well known, are ergative-absolutive .with respect to the case marking of the nominal terms of the clause: there is a special morphological case that marks the agent of a transitive clause, while the object of the transitive and the subject of an intransitive are in a different case. The case of the transitive agent is traditionally called the relative in Greenlandic studies (following Kleinschmidt 1968 (1851)), but I will refer to it as the ergative, since that is the term that is now more generally used in typological studies. The case of the transitive object and intransitive subject is the absolutive.
Research Interests: History and Linguistics
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Context-free phrase structure grammar (henceforth PSG) is capable of describing infinite languages consisting of finite strings drawn from a finite vocabulary and associating with each string of the target language a division into... more
Context-free phrase structure grammar (henceforth PSG) is capable of describing infinite languages consisting of finite strings drawn from a finite vocabulary and associating with each string of the target language a division into immediate constituents that can be represented as a labeled tree. This much, it would seem, is the least that we can expect of any grammar that would pretend to adequacy as a scheme for describing languages of the kind spoken by human beings. PSG has several advantages over competing systems of grammatical description. In particular: PSG is a conceptually simple formalism. Because PSG describes only a single level of analysis, movement rules and the constraints on them and triggers for them are eliminated. The ramifications of a postulated PSG rule are ordinarily immediately obvious and immediately testable against fact. PSG is completely formalizable. A finite set of rules and a finite vocabulary fully defines a PSG. The formal properties of such systems can be studied, and in fact there is a considerable formal literature on the subject. (See, for example Partee, et al. 1990 and the references it contains.). There are numerous interesting results concerning the classes of string sets and the classes of tree sets that PSGs are capable of specifying. PSG is computationally tractable. Quite efficient algorithms exist for parsing expressions in terms of PSGs. Though the parsing time of the best of these is still an exponential function of the length of the string, it is less disastrously so than for other formal grammar types.
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Research Interests: Computer Science, Spanish, English, German, Word order, and 15 moreFrench, Romance Languages, Negation, OR, Linear Order, Position, And, What, Ray, George, Component, C command, Modular Design, R, and Principles and Parameters
It is argued that no quantitative measures, nor any simple structural distinctions, can accurately separate languages that we would impressionistically count as polysynthetic from those that we would not. Rather, our intuitions are... more
It is argued that no quantitative measures, nor any simple structural distinctions, can accurately separate languages that we would impressionistically count as polysynthetic from those that we would not. Rather, our intuitions are influenced by the type of morphology a language presents, by the phonological and lexical facts associated with its morphology, and by the degree to which its morphology does the work of syntax. Disregarding such features, it can be argued that biblical Hebrew is more synthetic than the Inuit language Kalaallisut, a conclusion that I, and perhaps most typologists would reject. I conclude that a thorough description of the morphology of language and its relation to the other components of grammar is superior to any method of placing that language on a scale of syntheticity.
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Languages with articles indicating the definiteness or indefiniteness of noun phrases sometimes allow certain forms to occur without articles. In several such cases that are examined here, the expressions without articles are neither... more
Languages with articles indicating the definiteness or indefiniteness of noun phrases sometimes allow certain forms to occur without articles. In several such cases that are examined here, the expressions without articles are neither definite nor indefinite in and of themselves, but can be interpreted either way in one context or another. One case from Old Norse and two cases from English that work this way will be discussed. But the direct correlation between the presence of an overt article and an indication of (in)definiteness, and the absence of an article and the lack of such an indication cannot be maintained. Proper names without an article are definite, and count noun plurals and mass noun singulars are indefinite without an article.
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Research Interests: Psychology, Horn, Cognition, Linguistics, Figurative language, and 10 moreMetonymy, Kennings, Morgan, Morphemes, Semantic change, S, M, N, L, and G
1. Acknowledgements 2. List of contributors 3. Introduction (by Yuasa, Etsuyo) 4. Almost forever (by Horn, Laurence R.) 5. Sadock and the Performadox (by Lycan, William G.) 6. Expressing regret and avowing belief: Sadock's expositive... more
1. Acknowledgements 2. List of contributors 3. Introduction (by Yuasa, Etsuyo) 4. Almost forever (by Horn, Laurence R.) 5. Sadock and the Performadox (by Lycan, William G.) 6. Expressing regret and avowing belief: Sadock's expositive adverbials, Moore's Paradox, and performative and quasi-performative verbs (by Atlas, Jay D.) 7. A story of Jerry and Bob (by Rogers, Andy) 8. Conventionalization in indirect speech acts: Evidence from autism (by Beals, Katharine) 9. Pseudo-apologies in the news (by Gruber, M. Catherine) 10. Towards an intonational-illocutionary interface (by Bagchi, Tista) 11. Atkan Aleut "unclitic" pronouns and definiteness: A multimodular analysis (by Woodbury, Anthony C.) 12. Nominalization affixes and multi-modularity of word formation (by Sugioka, Yoko) 13. No more phology!: West Greenlandic evidence against a morphological tier of linguistic representation (by Neuvel, Sylvain) 14. Wait'll (you hear) the next one: A case for an enclitic preposition and complementizer (by Smessaert, Hans) 15. Aleut case matters (by Merchant, Jason) 16. English derived nominals in three frameworks (by Newmeyer, Frederick J.) 17. Out of control: The semantics of some infinitival VP complements (by Abbott, Barbara) 18. An automodular perspective on the frozenness of pseudoclefts, and vice versa (by Ross, Haj) 19. Negation as structure building in a home sign system (by Franklin, Amy) 20. Constraining mismatch in grammar and in sentence comprehension: The role of default correspondences (by Francis, Elaine J.) 21. Evidence for grammatical multi-modularity from a corpus of non-native essays (by Higgins, Derrick) 22. Autolexical Grammar and language processing: Mismatch and resolution in the cognitive representation of syntactic and semantic knowledge (by Luka, Barbara) 23. Topic index 24. Name index
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Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic, iso‐639‐3 kal) is an Inuit language spoken in Greenland and is the official language of the country. In this presentation we discuss a collaborative project initiated by the Greenland Language Secretariat... more
Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic, iso‐639‐3 kal) is an Inuit language spoken in Greenland and is the official language of the country. In this presentation we discuss a collaborative project initiated by the Greenland Language Secretariat (Oqaasileriffik) to create a bilingual Kalaallisut‐English dictionary, aimed at two groups of users, Kalaallisut speakers who are learning English and English speakers learning Kalaallisut. We discuss the content and format of the dictionary, the underlying principles upon which it is being created, and the collaborative process itself. This collaborative project involves researchers from Greenland and the US. The dictionary, intended to include something in the order of 25,000‐35,000 entries, aims to provide the necessary information for both sets of users to both comprehend and produce both languages. The two languages are typologically distinct and there is limited correspondence between what counts as a word in each language. Kalaallisut is highly...