Shopping cartBrill's Annual of Afroasiatic Languages and Linguistics
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Contents of Volume 1 (2009)
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Editorial Foreword
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Arabic Silent Pronouns, Person, and Voice
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In consistent null subject languages (= NSL; including Arabic, Italian, or Irish), silent subject pronouns are interpreted as exclusively referential, while a third person singular pro is exclusively generic in non-consistent NSL (e.g. Finnish or Hebrew). A third person singular generic is available in consistent NSL, but only with a specific voice, e.g. Passive. The article provides a minimalist treatment of the referential/generic correlations and distributions in these two classes of languages. It is proposed that referential pro in consistent NSL merges as a topic specifier of T, and generic pro as specifier of Voice. Pronominal deficiency is argued to be the core property of the 'impersonal' Passive. The subject status of expletives in Arabic is questioned, and they are rather construed as 'backgrounding' topics.
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Reverse Engineering: Emphatic Consonants and the Adaptation of Vowels in French Loanwords into Moroccan Arabic
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On the basis of two large corpora of French (and Spanish) loanwords into Moroccan Arabic, the paper documents and analyzes the phenomenon noted by Heath (1989) in which a pharyngealized consonant is introduced in the adaptation of words with mid and low vowels such as moquette > [MokeT] = /MukiT/ 'carpet'. It is found that French back vowels are readily adapted with pharyngealized emphatics while the front vowels tend to resist this correspondence. The implications of the phenomenon for general models of loanword adaptation are considered. It is concluded that auditory similarity and salience are critical alternative dimensions of faithfulness that may override correspondences based on phonologically contrastive features.
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A Unified Approach to Reflexivization in Semitic and Romance
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The paper proposes a unified analysis of reflexivization, applicable equally to Semitic languages and to Romance languages. We contrast our account with previous ones that have distinguished between reflexivization of the sort found in Semitic, which is clause-bound, can be the input to nominalization, and is sensitive to the semantics of the verb, and reflexivization of the sort found in Romance which applies across clauses, is not the input to nominalization and is insensitive to the semantics of the verb. These analyses take reflexivization of the Semitic type to be a "lexical" operation, and Romance reflexivization to be a "syntactic" operation, though in both cases, reflexivization is characterized as an operation applying to the thematic roles of the verb. Consonant with the view that all valence changing operations apply to a uniform domain, we argue that reflexivization in Semitic and in Romance can be given a uniform analysis as an operation of exactly the same type in exactly the same local domain. The "syntactic" residue found in Romance can be shown not to be reflexivization at all, but to be better analyzed as anaphoric binding. The confusion is due to the syncretism between reflexive morphology and reflexive anaphors, in turn the result of a language change whereby pronouns morphologize. We address the issues which have precluded Romance reflexive clitics from being analyzed as anaphors.
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Individuating and Measure Readings of Classifier Constructions: Evidence from Modern Hebrew
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Classifier constructions in English such as three glasses of water are ambiguous between an individuating reading, in which the DP denotes plural objects consisting of three individual glasses of water, and a measure reading, in which the DP denotes quantities of water which equal the quantity contained in three glasses. A plausible semantic account of the contrast has been given in Landman 2004. In this account, on the individuating reading, the nominal glasses is the head of the noun phrase and has its expected semantic interpretation, while in the measure reading, three glasses is a modifier expression modifying the nominal head of the phrase water. However, there is little direct syntactic evidence for these constructions in English. Modern Hebrew, however, provides support for Landman's analysis of the dual function of classifier heads. There are two ways to express three glasses of water in Modern Hebrew. The first is via the free genitive construction where a nominal head in absolute form takes a prepositional phrase complement as in šaloš kosot šel mayim, and the second using the construct state as in šaloš kosot mayim. The first has only the individuating reading, while the second is ambiguous between the individuating and measure readings. We show that only in the construct state are the syntactic conditions fulfilled which allow the classifier + numeral to be interpreted as a (complex) modifier of the syntactically embedded noun.
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Information Structure in Somali. Evidence from the syntax-phonology interface
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The correspondence between grammatical categories and prosodic events is widely acknowledged in the literature and a number of recent works have investigated the syntax–prosody interface and its relation to information structure. In this area of research, this paper provides an analysis of broad and narrow Focus constructions in Somali, based on a corpus of semi-spontaneous conversations between three native speakers of Somali.
Evidence is thus provided for a partition of the utterance into two major domains, one including the so-called Verbal Complex and the other the left periphery of the sentence – two interpretive domains that basically correspond to the vP- and CP-phase, consistent with Minimalist claims (Chomsky 2008). From a cartographic viewpoint, prosodic investigation supports the existence of a hierarchical organization of discourse-grammar categories in the C-domain. However, some internal refinement is required. In particular, functional heads concerning Focus and (different types of) Topic are shown to be fully part of the C-domain, while Fin(iteness)P – the functional projection connected with tense and agreement specifications (cf. Rizzi 1997) – belongs to the clausal domain. A reconsideration of what counts as the Complement of C (used as a cover term of the CP-phase) is therefore needed. Finally, intonation strongly supports a cleft-like analysis of narrow Focus constructions in languages like Somali. In particular, evidence is given for a predicative merge of the focused DP in a Small Clause construction and for the topicalized status of the (presupposed) relative DP. Attention is also paid to the intonation of yes-no questions, showing the necessity of different functional projections to activate interrogative force, according to scopal requirements.
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Two Kinds of Degree-denoting Relatives: Hebrew versus Romanian
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This paper conducts a contrastive study of Hebrew and Romanian, with supporting data from additional languages, which pursues both descriptive and theoretical goals. On the descriptive level, it draws attention to a hitherto unnoticed and unanalyzed construction that has so far been detected in Romanian and Albanian only, and which although superficially similar to a kind of degree-denoting relative construction that is widely attested cross-linguistically (and thus, in both Hebrew and Romanian), nonetheless differs from it in subtle semantic and pragmatic ways, as well as in a more restricted range of expressive options. Observationally, the rare construction differs from the more common one in lacking the definite determiner that characterizes the latter, and is labeled for this reason 'B(are) D(egree-denoting) R(elative) C(lause) C(onstruction).' On the theoretical level, this paper offers explicit compositional semantic analyses of the two constructions, which hopefully capture both the similarities and the differences between them. The constructions are examined against the background of an up-dated variety of the typology of RCCs proposed in Grosu & Landman (1998).
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The Absence of Intervention Effects in Amharic: Evidence for a Non-Structural Approach
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Underlying much of the research on intervention effects, in which a quantificational or focusing element preceding a wh-phrase leads to degradedness, is the assumption that these effects are universal, and should therefore follow from basic properties of the grammar. This paper shows that unlike any other language documented until now, Amharic does not generally exhibit intervention effects. It is nevertheless empirically possible and theoretically preferable to retain the idea that these effects are derivative, rather than to consider their presence vs. absence a parameterized feature. Accordingly, two existing approaches to intervention effects are assessed vis-à-vis their ability to account for the exceptionality of Amharic: a hierarchical analysis, following Beck (2006), and an information structural-prosodic analysis based on Tomioka (2007a,b), whereby the effect is read off the linear string. The latter is claimed to better explain the data and correlate with independent aspects of Amharic, thus providing a general argument in favor of nonstructural approaches to intervention effects. This analysis is also extended to alternative questions, in which an intervener preceding a disjunctive phrase removes the alternative question reading, allowing the sentence to be interpreted only as a yes/no question. In the process, many hitherto unknown properties of Amharic syntax, information structure, and prosody are brought to light.
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When Do Universal Preferences Emerge in Language Development? The Acquisition of Hebrew Stress
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When children have to select one of two structures, do they start with the universally unmarked structure or with the one preferred by the ambient language? This question is directly relevant to metrical systems, which often employ either iambs or the universally unmarked trochees. We argue that children start with the universally unmarked trochaic foot, unless their ambient language provides them with sufficient data to arrive at the language-specific preferred foot prior to the onset of speech. We show that Hebrew-acquiring children, unlike French ones, are exposed to ambiguous data, which do not allow them to determine the type of foot the language's stress system employs. Our quantitative data provide evidence that in such a case, children adhere to the trochaic foot during the very early stage of acquisition (in the case study presented here, the early stage of acquisition refers to the first 100 cumulative target words). Later on, children follow the frequency-based preference in Hebrew, where final stress, and thus the iambic foot is employed in about 75% of the nouns.
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Hebrew Idioms: The Organization of the Lexical Component
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The paper argues that the empirical domain of idioms can shed light on the architecture of the mental lexicon and the nature of its building blocks whether roots or words. A corpus-based study of the distribution of various diatheses in verb phrase idioms in Hebrew was conducted. Its results reveal an intriguing discrepancy between the behavior of unaccusatives, transitives and adjectival passives on the one hand and verbal passives one the other. The findings are straightforwardly accounted for if the lexicon includes actual verbs – words not merely roots – under which verb phrase idioms are stored as sub-entries.
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Variation and Change in Possessive noun Phrases: The Evolution of the Analytic Type and Loss of the Synthetic Type
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The main objective of this article is to outline an account of the evolution of the analytic (Free State) type of possessive noun phrases in Spanish Arabic and the loss of the synthetic (Construct State) type in Shamaliya Arabic, two relatively unknown varieties that are historically related. Possessive noun phrases can vary at the level of Syntax, PF or the Lexicon. Variation at the level of Syntax yields the distinction between the synthetic type and the analytic type. These have the same underlying structure but different derivations determined by the values of an EPP feature associated with Num, the DP-equivalent of clausal T. When Num has the [+EPP] value, it triggers subject-raising of the possessor to Spec, Num leading to the derivation of the synthetic type. When Num has the [−EPP] value, the possessor remains in-situ and consequently triggers the appearance of the genitive preposition. The evolution of the analytic type involves the acquisition of the [−EPP] value and the loss of the synthetic type the loss of the [+EPP] value. Variation at PF involves deletion or not of the definiteness feature/article of the head noun or the possessor in the synthetic type, which yields three logical patterns: [N the-N], [the-N N] and [the-N the-N]. Spanish Arabic had all three patterns, while Moroccan Arabic and other varieties have only the first pattern. Finally, variation at the level of the Lexicon accounts for differences relating to which preposition is used in possessive noun phrases. The Maghreb/Western varieties make use of the genitive preposition, while the Mashreq/Eastern varieties tend to make use of the dative preposition instead.
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