In this paper, we scrutinize a rare classifier system in an isolating language. Weining Ahmao, a ... more In this paper, we scrutinize a rare classifier system in an isolating language. Weining Ahmao, a Miao-Yao language spoken in western Guizhou Province in the PRC, inflects each of its noun classifiers in twelve basic forms and stands in stark contrast to other ...
ASPECT IN EAST AND MAINLAND SOUTHEAST ASIAN LANGUAGES A FIRST STEP Walter Bisang1 Abstract The ... more ASPECT IN EAST AND MAINLAND SOUTHEAST ASIAN LANGUAGES A FIRST STEP Walter Bisang1 Abstract The present paper has two intentions. It wants to sketch a typological basis for describing aspect in individual languages and for cross-linguistic comparison and it ...
Grammaticalization and the areal factor the perspective of East and mainland Southeast Asian la... more Grammaticalization and the areal factor the perspective of East and mainland Southeast Asian languages Walter Bisang University of Mainz Walter Bisang Department of English and Linguistics University of Mainz Jakob-Welder-Weg 18 D-55099 Mainz Germany ...
Late Archaic Chinese is a precategorial language, ie, a language whose lexical items are not prec... more Late Archaic Chinese is a precategorial language, ie, a language whose lexical items are not preclassified in the lexicon for the syntactic functions of N and V. This will be shown on the basis of structural-conceptual criteria as those devel-oped by Croft (2000) and Sasse (1993b) ...
Dative and Other Cases. Between Argument Structure …, 2006
The application of some standard tests for syntactic categories like the subject relation to Japa... more The application of some standard tests for syntactic categories like the subject relation to Japanese, Chinese and Tagalog reveals the following two problems:(i) some constructions in Japanese and Chinese lack subject/object asymmetry;(ii) in Tagalog, the primary factor ...
From an integrative perspective, research on language typology and research on areality understoo... more From an integrative perspective, research on language typology and research on areality understood in terms of contact-induced convergence are mutually dependent. Typologists need to be aware that their generalizations are as reliable as they manage to integrate effects of contact into their statistics. Contact linguists need to be aware that typological findings may not qualify as independent evidence for their field. Thus, typologists and contact linguists both need to have certain information concerning each other's field. For that reason, this article covers both fields under one title. The article is divided into three main sections. The first deals with language contact and its structural effects. Geographical consequences of structural convergence is the topic of the second main section. Instead of the problematic concept of linguistic area, the more open concept of zone of structural convergence is suggested. The typological part is treated in a third main section.
The intention of this study is to give a precise description of verbserialization in Jabêm, an Au... more The intention of this study is to give a precise description of verbserialization in Jabêm, an Austronesian language spoken in New Guinea. Since the verb calls for a compulsory expression of person and time-aspect in Jabêm this language shows several phenomena realised at the ...
Semantic role universals and argument linking: …, 2006
From meaning to syntax-semantic roles and beyond Walter Bisang 1. Introduction If semantic roles ... more From meaning to syntax-semantic roles and beyond Walter Bisang 1. Introduction If semantic roles are supposed to be more than a" thinly disguised wild card to meet the exigencies of syntax"(Jackendoff 1987: 371) their identification cannot be based on meaning alone. It is ...
Linguistic areas: Convergence in historical and …, 2006
The concept of linguistic area or Sprachbund has triggered many discussions among linguists deali... more The concept of linguistic area or Sprachbund has triggered many discussions among linguists dealing with language contact. Even though various suggestions for its exact definition and numerous papers dealing with the question of whether a certain geographic area really is a linguistic area have been published in the years since the introduction of that term by Trubetzkoy (1930) it still remains unclear what is in fact a linguistic area. As I would like to show in this chapter, this does not come as a surprise if one starts looking more closely at the problems inherent in this concept, which is based on an idealization that takes for granted too much of structural and social homogeneity across potential linguistic areas. In fact, almost all of the criteria discussed in the literature for a more clear-cut and homogeneous definition of what makes a linguistic area turn out to be either arbitrary or difficult to apply. In addition, the correlations between structural changes and their potential social and historical background seem to be of such a general and rather abstract nature that too much rigour in defining linguistic areas may obstruct the finding of potential regularities from the outset. It is for reasons like these that I shall introduce the concept of zones of contact-induced structural convergence (abbrevated to zones of convergence) as a more open concept comparable to geographic dialect continua (see section 3.3).
Areality, grammaticalization and language typology: on the explanatory power of functional criter... more Areality, grammaticalization and language typology: on the explanatory power of functional criteria and the status of Universal Grammar WALIER BISANG To Ekkehard Konig on his 60th birthday. 1. Basic idea of the paper The question of language universals is presently ...
Two auditory ERP studies examined the role of animacy in sentence comprehension in Mandarin Chine... more Two auditory ERP studies examined the role of animacy in sentence comprehension in Mandarin Chinese by comparing active and passive sentences in simple verb-final (Experiment 1) and relative clause constructions (Experiment 2). In addition to the voice manipulation (which ...
... (4), Chinese: ... As will be shown in Section 3.3, asymmetrical SVCs are not the source ofgra... more ... (4), Chinese: ... As will be shown in Section 3.3, asymmetrical SVCs are not the source ofgrammaticalization but rather its result. ... more appropriate to assume that the productive juxtaposition of verbs that are open-class elements can potentially lead to grammaticalized SVCs ...
... ti 55 also occurs in this six-way paradigm compounding with the ... classifier system was gen... more ... ti 55 also occurs in this six-way paradigm compounding with the ... classifier system was generated in a complex process of grammaticalization, whichinvolvedanaugmentativeandadiminutive prefix ... PhD 1990 on verb serialization in Chinese, Hmong, Vietnamese, Thai and Khmer ...
Grammaticalization without coevolution of form and meaning: The case of tense-aspect-modality in ... more Grammaticalization without coevolution of form and meaning: The case of tense-aspect-modality in East and mainland Southeast Asia Walter Bisang 1. Introduction Theories on grammaticalization generally assume unidirectional processes in which a development from more concrete ...
Abstract: Four operations of nominal concretization are crucial for presenting a typology of clas... more Abstract: Four operations of nominal concretization are crucial for presenting a typology of classifier languages: individualization, classification, relationalization (possession), and referentialization. The first three of these operations are at work in the Hmong classifier ...
In this paper, we scrutinize a rare classifier system in an isolating language. Weining Ahmao, a ... more In this paper, we scrutinize a rare classifier system in an isolating language. Weining Ahmao, a Miao-Yao language spoken in western Guizhou Province in the PRC, inflects each of its noun classifiers in twelve basic forms and stands in stark contrast to other ...
ASPECT IN EAST AND MAINLAND SOUTHEAST ASIAN LANGUAGES A FIRST STEP Walter Bisang1 Abstract The ... more ASPECT IN EAST AND MAINLAND SOUTHEAST ASIAN LANGUAGES A FIRST STEP Walter Bisang1 Abstract The present paper has two intentions. It wants to sketch a typological basis for describing aspect in individual languages and for cross-linguistic comparison and it ...
Grammaticalization and the areal factor the perspective of East and mainland Southeast Asian la... more Grammaticalization and the areal factor the perspective of East and mainland Southeast Asian languages Walter Bisang University of Mainz Walter Bisang Department of English and Linguistics University of Mainz Jakob-Welder-Weg 18 D-55099 Mainz Germany ...
Late Archaic Chinese is a precategorial language, ie, a language whose lexical items are not prec... more Late Archaic Chinese is a precategorial language, ie, a language whose lexical items are not preclassified in the lexicon for the syntactic functions of N and V. This will be shown on the basis of structural-conceptual criteria as those devel-oped by Croft (2000) and Sasse (1993b) ...
Dative and Other Cases. Between Argument Structure …, 2006
The application of some standard tests for syntactic categories like the subject relation to Japa... more The application of some standard tests for syntactic categories like the subject relation to Japanese, Chinese and Tagalog reveals the following two problems:(i) some constructions in Japanese and Chinese lack subject/object asymmetry;(ii) in Tagalog, the primary factor ...
From an integrative perspective, research on language typology and research on areality understoo... more From an integrative perspective, research on language typology and research on areality understood in terms of contact-induced convergence are mutually dependent. Typologists need to be aware that their generalizations are as reliable as they manage to integrate effects of contact into their statistics. Contact linguists need to be aware that typological findings may not qualify as independent evidence for their field. Thus, typologists and contact linguists both need to have certain information concerning each other's field. For that reason, this article covers both fields under one title. The article is divided into three main sections. The first deals with language contact and its structural effects. Geographical consequences of structural convergence is the topic of the second main section. Instead of the problematic concept of linguistic area, the more open concept of zone of structural convergence is suggested. The typological part is treated in a third main section.
The intention of this study is to give a precise description of verbserialization in Jabêm, an Au... more The intention of this study is to give a precise description of verbserialization in Jabêm, an Austronesian language spoken in New Guinea. Since the verb calls for a compulsory expression of person and time-aspect in Jabêm this language shows several phenomena realised at the ...
Semantic role universals and argument linking: …, 2006
From meaning to syntax-semantic roles and beyond Walter Bisang 1. Introduction If semantic roles ... more From meaning to syntax-semantic roles and beyond Walter Bisang 1. Introduction If semantic roles are supposed to be more than a" thinly disguised wild card to meet the exigencies of syntax"(Jackendoff 1987: 371) their identification cannot be based on meaning alone. It is ...
Linguistic areas: Convergence in historical and …, 2006
The concept of linguistic area or Sprachbund has triggered many discussions among linguists deali... more The concept of linguistic area or Sprachbund has triggered many discussions among linguists dealing with language contact. Even though various suggestions for its exact definition and numerous papers dealing with the question of whether a certain geographic area really is a linguistic area have been published in the years since the introduction of that term by Trubetzkoy (1930) it still remains unclear what is in fact a linguistic area. As I would like to show in this chapter, this does not come as a surprise if one starts looking more closely at the problems inherent in this concept, which is based on an idealization that takes for granted too much of structural and social homogeneity across potential linguistic areas. In fact, almost all of the criteria discussed in the literature for a more clear-cut and homogeneous definition of what makes a linguistic area turn out to be either arbitrary or difficult to apply. In addition, the correlations between structural changes and their potential social and historical background seem to be of such a general and rather abstract nature that too much rigour in defining linguistic areas may obstruct the finding of potential regularities from the outset. It is for reasons like these that I shall introduce the concept of zones of contact-induced structural convergence (abbrevated to zones of convergence) as a more open concept comparable to geographic dialect continua (see section 3.3).
Areality, grammaticalization and language typology: on the explanatory power of functional criter... more Areality, grammaticalization and language typology: on the explanatory power of functional criteria and the status of Universal Grammar WALIER BISANG To Ekkehard Konig on his 60th birthday. 1. Basic idea of the paper The question of language universals is presently ...
Two auditory ERP studies examined the role of animacy in sentence comprehension in Mandarin Chine... more Two auditory ERP studies examined the role of animacy in sentence comprehension in Mandarin Chinese by comparing active and passive sentences in simple verb-final (Experiment 1) and relative clause constructions (Experiment 2). In addition to the voice manipulation (which ...
... (4), Chinese: ... As will be shown in Section 3.3, asymmetrical SVCs are not the source ofgra... more ... (4), Chinese: ... As will be shown in Section 3.3, asymmetrical SVCs are not the source ofgrammaticalization but rather its result. ... more appropriate to assume that the productive juxtaposition of verbs that are open-class elements can potentially lead to grammaticalized SVCs ...
... ti 55 also occurs in this six-way paradigm compounding with the ... classifier system was gen... more ... ti 55 also occurs in this six-way paradigm compounding with the ... classifier system was generated in a complex process of grammaticalization, whichinvolvedanaugmentativeandadiminutive prefix ... PhD 1990 on verb serialization in Chinese, Hmong, Vietnamese, Thai and Khmer ...
Grammaticalization without coevolution of form and meaning: The case of tense-aspect-modality in ... more Grammaticalization without coevolution of form and meaning: The case of tense-aspect-modality in East and mainland Southeast Asia Walter Bisang 1. Introduction Theories on grammaticalization generally assume unidirectional processes in which a development from more concrete ...
Abstract: Four operations of nominal concretization are crucial for presenting a typology of clas... more Abstract: Four operations of nominal concretization are crucial for presenting a typology of classifier languages: individualization, classification, relationalization (possession), and referentialization. The first three of these operations are at work in the Hmong classifier ...
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