New Trends in Syntax and Morphology
The following three papers were presented by linguists from the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin.
Artur Bartnik
Correlativization as a relativization strategy in Old English
John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin
This paper argues that Old English free relative clauses should be considered as correlatives. Traditionally, free relatives in Old English fall into two types. The first one is headed because the case of the demonstrative pronoun is that required by the verb in the matrix clause, as in (1) below. The second type of Old English free relatives is headless, as the case of the demonstrative pronoun is clearly assigned by the embedded verb, as shown in (2) and (3) (cf. Allen 1980; Hirschbühler and Rivero 1983). This analysis is questioned by Harbert (1983), who claims that free relatives are uniformly headed. Type 2, exemplified in sentence (2), is the result of inverse attraction, in which the head of a relative clause assumes the case of the following relative pronoun.
This corpus-based study of headless free relatives will show that these analyses cannot explain all the facts. Instead we will argue that these structures behave like correlatives with the following structure:
[correlative clause... relative phrase... ] [main clause... correlate...] (Liptak 2009: 2)
These structures are characterised, among others, by the following properties (cf. Liptak 2009, Allen 1980, Truswell 2008):
1. The relative clause appears in the left periphery.
2. The correlate has to contain a demonstrative (or pronominal) item.
3. The syntactic relation between the two constituents is rather loose though they form one semantic unit.
4. Both the constituents involve movement of the relative and demonstrative/ pronominal element to their surface positions, since the case of these elements is that required by the lower clause.
Although Old English structures are not classic correlatives meeting all the criteria, they still can be subsumed under the family of correlative structures.
(1) ðæt is, ðæt man for-gife, ðam ðe wið hine gegylte
that is that one forgive him-dat. that against him sins
'that is, that one2 forgive him1, who sins against him2'
Ver. 111.170
(2) And ðone ðe ðu nu hæfst, nis se ðin wer
and him-acc. that you now hast not-is he-nom. your husband
'And him who you now have, he is not your husband'
Alc.P.V.37
(3) And swa hwæs swa hie rihtlice biddað for ðinum naman & for ðinum gearningum hig hyt onfoð.
and so what-gen. as they rightly ask for thy name and for thy merit they it receive
'And whatever they ask rightly, for your name and your merit, they receive it.'
30E p.74.4
Selected references:
Allen, Cynthia. 1980. Movement and Deletion in Old English. Linguistic Inquiry 11: 261-323.
Hirschbühler Paul and María-Luisa Rivero. 1983. Remarks on Free Relatives and Matching Phenomena. Linguistic Inquiry 14: 505-520.
Lipták, Anikó. 2009. Correlatives Cross-Linguistically. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Harbert, Wayne. 1983. A Note on Old English Free Relatives. Linguistic Inquiry 14: 549-553.
Taylor, Ann, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Frank Beths. 2003. The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. York: University of York.
Truswell, Robert. 2008. Wh-Correlatives in Early Modern English. Available at: http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~rtruswel/correlatives.pdf.
Anna Dąbrowska
Personal and place names in English and Polish fixed phrases
John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin
This paper focuses on English and Polish fixed phrases involving personal and place names. First, the definition of a name and the distinction between proper and common nouns (Quirk et al., 1985) or proprial lemmas and proper names (Van Langendonck, 2007) are provided, following a short overview of theories that constitute the basis for any discussion related to proper names (Frege, Russell, Mill, Kripke, Peirce, Katz, and Chalmers among others). Next, subcategories and sources of names, together with their linguistic characteristics are presented (Thrane, 1980; Carroll, 1983; Huddleston, 1984; Anderson, 2003). Afterwards, the study is undertaken of personal and place names in fixed phraseological units, surveying a broad list of English and Polish fixed entities that are classified according to five syntactic patterns: phrases with (1) NPs, (2) VPs, (3) PPs, (4) clauses, and (5) similes. Additionally, the biblical, literary, classical, cultural and historical origins of these expressions are pointed out. Finally, in the light of the examined data, the predominance of personal over place names is noticeable, while the items with NPs constitute the vast majority of the phraseological units. Investigating corpus and dictionary evidence, fixed elements typical either of English or only of Polish, or those common to both English and Polish are listed. The most frequent are the units from biblical and mythological sources, while the least popular are the expressions with historical and literary background, as these aspects are unique for each country. With regard to the meaning of the fixed phrases containing proper personal and place names, the data reveal that the units do convey information, recall connotations that arose some time ago in relation to the biblical, mythological, literary, cultural, and historical background, and are still relevant today.
References:
Anderson, J. M. (2003). On the structure of names. Folia Linguistica 37, 347-98.
Carroll, J. M. (1983). Toward a Functional Theory of Names and Naming. Linguistics 21, 341–71.
Chalmers, D. (2006). Two-Dimensional Semantics. In E. Lepore and B. Smith (Eds.), 574–
Frege, G. (1952). On Sense and Reference. In P. Geach, M. Black (Eds.), 56-78. Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. Oxford: Blackwell.
Huddleston, R. (1984). An introduction to the grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In J. M. Anderson (Ed.), 349.
Katz, J. J. (1972). Semantic theory. New York: Harper and Row.
Katz, J. J. (1994). Names Without Bearers. Philosophical Review 103 (1), 1–39.
Kripke, S. (1980). Naming and Necessity. Boston: Basil Blackwell.
Mill, J. S. (1882). A System of Logic. Ratiocinative and Inductive. Eighth edition; New York: Harper and Brothers. Retrieved on 2nd May 2014 from http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/gutbook/lookup?num=27942
Peirce C. S., (1931-1935). Collected Papers vols. I–VI, (Ed.) P. Weiss and C. Hartshorne, Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press.
Quirk, R., S. Greenbaum, G. Leech, J. Svartvik. (1985). A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
Russell, B. (1905). On denoting. Mind 14, 479-493.
Thrane, T. (1980). Referential-semantic analysis: aspects of a theory of linguistic reference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van Langendonck, W. (2007). Theory and Typology of Proper Names. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Dictionaries:
AHD = The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD). (Fourth Edition. 2000). Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
APSIZ = Borkowski, P. (1988). Angielsko-polski słownik idiomów i zwrotów. An English-Polish dictionary of idioms and phrases. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM.
CBEI = Collins, V. H. (1964). A Book of English Idioms. London: Longmans.
ODCIE = Cowie, A. P., Mackin, R. & McCaig, I.R. (1983). Oxford Dictionary of Current Idiomatic English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ODI = The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms (2nd ed, 2005). (Ed.) Siefring, J. New York: Oxford University Press.
ICWF = Philips, C. (2000). Idioms, collocations and word formations. Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie.
IPA = Wolfram-Romanowska, D.; P. Kaszubski, M. Parker (4th ed. 2013). Idiomy polsko-angielskie. Polish-English Idioms. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN.
SFO = Słownik frazeologiczny (online). In http://frazeologia.pl/index.php last accessed on 2nd May, 2014.
WMSAP-PA = Wielki multimedialny słownik angielsko-polski i polsko-angielski. (2005). PWN-Oxford.
WSFJP = Müldner-Nieckowski, P. (2003). Wielki słownik frazeologiczny języka polskiego. Warszawa: Świat Książki.
Corpora:
COCA = Corpus of Contemporary American English. In http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/ last accessed on 6th May 2014.
NKJP = Narodowy Korpus Języka Polskiego (wyszukiwarka Pecra). In http://www.nkjp.uni.lodz.pl/ last accessed on 6th May 2014.
BNC = The British National Corpus. In http://corpus.byu.edu/BNC last accessed on 6th May 2014.
Magdalena Chudak
Mutation schemas in Irish
John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin
The aim of the presentations is to show that the concept of word schemas, as proposed by Booij (2010), Haspelmath (2010) and Ford, Singh and Martohardjono (1997), helps to account for the alteration of initial segments in Irish. The example of the latter phenomenon is a word for ‘cabbage’, it is realised either as cabáiste, or gabáiste.
The basic assumption of the model is that the structure of the lexicon emerges from the generalisations about the relations between words, which are stored as wholes. As Booji (2010:50) puts it “a lexicon has to be conceived of as a web of words”. Accordingly, morphology is the lexicon and the patterns emerging therein.
The proposal is that mutations are stored in the lexicon in the form of mutation schemas, where the mutated forms and the radical one are interconnected (as evidenced by experiments by Boyce et al. 1987). This manner of storage allows for the immediate retrieval of the mutated and non-mutated forms, but has side effects, the example of which is the variation of the initial segment in the radical forms.
References:
Bochner, H. 1993. Simplicity in generative morphology. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Booij, G. 2010. Construction Morphology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Boyce, S., C.P. Browman and L. Goldstein. 1997. Lexical Organization and Welsh Consonant Mutations. Journal of Memory and Language 26: 419-452.
Bybee, J. 1985. Morphology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Bybee, J. 1995. Regular morphology and the lexicon. Language and Cognitive Processes 10: 425-455.
Bybee, J. 2001. Phonology and Language Use. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
de Bhaldraithe, T. 1945. The Irish of Cois Fhairrge, Co. Galway: a Phonetic Study. Dublin: The Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
Green, A. D. 2003. The Independence of Phonology and Morphology: the Celtic Mutations. ZAS Papers in Linguistics 32, 47-86.
Griffen T. D. 1985. A new Welsh consonant shift, description and implications. PhD dissertation, Gainesville: University of Florida.
Haspelmath, M. & A. Sims. 2010. Understanding Morphology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kelly, D. 1978. Morphologization in Irish and Southern Paiute. Phd Dissertation, University of Texas.
Lukatela, G., Popadic, D., Ognjenovic, P., & Turvey, M. T. 1980. Lexical decision in a phonologically shallow orthography. Memory and Cognition 8: 124-132.
Neuvel, S. and R. Singh. 2001. Vive la difference. What Morphology is really about. Folia Linguistica 35, 314-320.
Ó Dónaill, N. 1977. Foclóir Gaeilge- Béarla. Baile Átha Cliath: Oifig an tSoláthair.
Ó Siadhail, M. 1989. Modern Irish: Grammatical Structure and Dialectical Variation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rumelhart, D. E. and J. L. McClelland. 1986. On learning the past tense of English verbs. In J. L. McClelland, D. E. Rumelhart, PDP Research Group (eds.) Parallel distributed processing, vol. 2, 216-271. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
Singh, R and R. K. Agnihotri. 1997. Modern Hindi Morphology. Delhi: Motilal Banarasidass.
Singh, R. and A. Ford. 2003. In praise of Śakaṭāyana: Some remarks on Whole Word Morphology. In Singh R. and S. Starosta (eds.) Explorations in seamless morphology, 66-76. New Delhi: SAGE Publications.
Photos by Anna Prażmowska
