Lexical Information from a Minimalist Point of View

Bierwisch, Manfred

doi:10.1515/9783050072173-010

Cited by 29 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…develops an explicit semantic account of medium voice 5 and reflexives on the basis of the Niger-Congo language Fula as well as Classical, Koiné and Modern Greek, and integrates facts of Germanic and Romance languages and Russian. Her analysis is couched in the framework of a two-level semantics involving Semantic Form (SF) and Conceptual Structure (CS) (Bierwisch 1983(Bierwisch , 1997cf. also Fehrmann, Junghanns, and Lenertová this volume).…”

Section: Verb Classesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reflexive passives and impersonals in North Slavonic languages: a diachronic view

Meyer

2010

Russ Linguist

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Reflexive passives and impersonals are present in all modern Slavonic languages, but vary in their synchronic properties. The present paper analyses the diachronic developments that lead to this variation in Czech, Polish, and Russian and includes some background on Old Church Slavonic. It is shown how the former three languages reached their differing positions in a typological hierarchy of passive constructions, by stepwise reanalysis. The diachronic comparative approach furthermore demonstrates the interdependence/independence of some of the empirical features of reflexive passives and impersonals in Slavonic.Аннотация Страдательный залог и неопределенно-личные формы могут выражаться возвратными глаголами во всех современных славянских языках, хотя распростране-ние и эмпирические детали этого феномена различаются. Данная статья анализирует диахроническое развитие, приведшее к таким вариациям в чешском, польском и рус-ском языках, на фоне нескольких разъясняющих замечаний о церковнославянском. Рассматривается, как первые три языка достигли своих разных позиций на типоло-гически обоснованной шкале возвратно-пассивных конструкций путем постепенного переанализа. Сравнительно-диахронический подход позволяет далее доказать взаим-ную зависимость или независимость некоторых свойств возвратных пассивов и им-персоналов в славянских языках.

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Section: Verb Classesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reflexive passives and impersonals in North Slavonic languages: a diachronic view

Meyer

2010

Russ Linguist

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“…The polysemy of the middle arises because the interpretation of the implicit agent is not specified. Adopting the two level approach to meaning developed by Bierwisch (see e.g., Bierwisch, 1983;Bierwisch, 1997;Maienborn, 2001), I assume that information that is unspecified in the semantic form (SF) of a lexical entry has to be provided by contextual or conceptual information on the level of conceptual structure (CS). Depending on the semantic properties of the verb, different strategies are applied at CS in order to arrive at a well-formed interpretation of the implicit agent argument of middle stems.…”

Section: The Conceptual Basis Of Middle Markingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Different suggestions for the exact formulation of the 'Hierarchy Principle' have been made (see e.g Bierwisch, 1997;Kaufmann, 1995;Wunderlich, 1997a)…”

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confidence: 99%

Middle voice

Kaufmann

2007

Lingua

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The middle differs from other argument changing operations in that it leads to different readings, in particular anticausative, reflexive, causative reflexive, and modal (facilitative). The readings depend on the semantic class of the base and the sortal properties of the highest argument. Middle verb forms that correspond to an active verb form generally display a reduced argument structure. Some readings also involve changes in the event structure. On the basis of data from Fula, I argue that the conceptual motivation of middle marking is the existence of actions that can be semantically modelled as involving an agent and a patient argument although in most cases, only one participant is involved in the event. Middle verb forms share the semantic representation of the corresponding active verb form. In contrast to active verb forms, middle verb forms do not project the agent argument into the argument structure. According to this analysis, the different middle readings are due to different interpretation strategies that can apply if the default initiator/controller of an action verb is not projected into the argument position which represents the actual initiator/controller of the event. Finally, the readings of the middle in Fula are compared with readings that can be observed in other languages and a set of parameters that accounts for the distribution is proposed. #

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“…More substantial linguistic theories (e. g. Rauh 1988, Maienborn 1996, Bierwisch 1997 recognize that world knowledge is not part of the grammar or lexicon, but of the conceptual system and thus explicitly dissociate themselves from Jackendoff (e. g. 1987Jackendoff (e. g. , 1990, who postulates one level of representation for conceptual and semantic information. As far as word-formation is concerned, Plag (2003: 109) states that the interpretation of the verb to bottle "requires the existence of the concept of a bottle", and Lieber's (2004) analysis of conversion (and other wordformation processes) makes use of skeletal semantic features which define a set of conceptual categories.…”

Section: A Critical Survey Of Previous Theories On Noun-to-verb Convementioning

confidence: 99%

Reflections on Noun-to-Verb Conversion In English

Baeskow

2006

Zeitschrift Für Sprachwissenschaft

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English denominal verbs formed by conversion adopt complex morphosyntactic and semantic information in a rather mysterious way. For example, the lexical item bottle is unambiguously interpreted as a referential expression in a sentence like John bought a bottle of wine, but how do we account for the event-reading of the same lexical item in a sentence like John bottled the wine? In this study it will be argued that the lexical information of converted denominal verbs is not provided by an unspecified zero-affix, but by conceptual qualia structures, i. e. by modes of explanation, and that these make explicit the implicit knowledge speakers of English have about the referents of nominal bases and determine the interpretation and formation of the corresponding verbs. Moreover, qualia structures yield not only the basic meanings of denominal verbs, but also allow for context-dependent interpretations, which are a result of coercion (e. g. John bottled the spectators). A mapping relation between qualia structures and argument structures, the latter of which are part of the lexical representation of the denominal verbs, will be established by meaning postulates.* I would like to thank Gisa Rauh, Thilo Tappe, Stefan Engelberg, Colin Foskett, PatrickDeegan, the participants of the linguistic colloquium held at the University of Wuppertal and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on this study. Remaining mistakes are however my responsibility. I am particularly indebted to the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung (Cologne), whose financial support enabled me to complete the work on this study, which is part of the project on "Word-Formation and the Lexicon" supervised by Gisa Rauh.

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Lexical Information from a Minimalist Point of View

Cited by 29 publications

References 21 publications

Reflexive passives and impersonals in North Slavonic languages: a diachronic view

Reflexive passives and impersonals in North Slavonic languages: a diachronic view

Middle voice

Reflections on Noun-to-Verb Conversion In English

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