From preverbal focus to preverbal “left periphery”: The Ossetic clause architecture in areal and diachronic perspective

Erschler, David

doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2012.01.009

Cited by 16 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…So, schematically So evacuational verb movement into clause internal position can be just a descriptive illusion for Hittite. This is a valid descriptive possibility, and it concords well with cross-linguistic studies stating that in a rigid SOV language only a preverbal dedicated focus position is available, whereas in a rigid SVO language only a postverbal dedicated focus position is available (Kim 1988;Büring 2009;Erschler 2012). This should mean that both positions are only available in a language with not completely rigid word order, displaying both SOV and SVO word orders.…”

Section: Verb Raising Into Clause Internal Position: Information Strusupporting

confidence: 82%

“…In the latter case the verb movement is unconstrained; its freedom, however, is, as noted above, strictly limited to within the verbal complex. From the cross linguistic point of view this is not as surprising as it is from the Hittitological perspective: the constituents occupying the immediately preverbal position are very commonly verb adjacent in other SOV languages (Kim 1988;Büring 2009;Erschler 2012). Moreover, they belong to the class of constituents that are incorporated within the verbal stem in the languages attesting incorporation (Kim 1988).…”

mentioning

confidence: 91%

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Clause Internal and Clause Leftmost Verbs in Hittite

Sideltsev

2014

Altorientalische Forschungen

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The object of the paper is non-canonical, non-final verb position within the clause in genuine Hittite texts. It is demonstrated that, contrary to current standard descriptions, two such positions can be delimited in a Hittite clause: clause internal position and clause leftmost position. Both positions are defined structurally: clause internal position is to the left of the immediately preverbal position and to the right of a direct object. Clause leftmost position is in the left periphery. The difference correlates with two other syntactic features. First, it is the position the verb moves around: when the verb moves into the left periphery, it moves around subject and object; when the verb moves into clause internal position, it moves around the immediately preverbal position. The verb may move into the left periphery around the immediately preverbal position, but only if the subject and object are not fully stressed in the clause. The second difference is in the information structure status: whereas verb fronting into the left periphery is information structure motivated (as contrastive focus etc.), verb movement into clause internal position is not homogeneous: it may be evacuational or unconditioned.The object of the paper is non-canonical verb positions in the clause in genuine Hittite texts 1 of all periods of the history of the language. 2 In canonical word order the verb is rigidly clause final/rightmost. In a very small percentage of cases 3 the verb is not clause final. Non-canonical verb position is standardly described as verb fronting. 4 In movement terms 5 it involves verb raising into the left periphery: 6

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Section: Verb Raising Into Clause Internal Position: Information Strusupporting

confidence: 82%

mentioning

confidence: 91%

Clause Internal and Clause Leftmost Verbs in Hittite

Sideltsev

2014

Altorientalische Forschungen

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“…Generally, non-interrogative focus can be found both pre-and postverbally, while interrogatives and the majority of subordinators are obligatorily preverbal, save for a few special cases described in Erschler (2012). The differences between preverbal and postverbal focus are not entirely clear, but they may be comparable to a similar contrast found in Hungarian (É.…”

Section: Ossetic: General I N F O R M a T I O Nmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…While clause-internal word order of Ossetic is generally free, there is a strongly grammaticalized preverbal position, where most focused constituents (including wh -phrases) and negative pronouns are obligatorily positioned (Erschler 2012). Consider the following question–answer pair, where the interrogative is obligatorily preverbal, while new information given in the answer may be either preverbal or postverbal, but not sentence-initial (bold typeface in the following examples marks focus): zul ba-lχзtː-a ?who bread pv -buy- pst.3sg ‘ Who bought bread?’ zul ba-lχзtː-a Alan bread pv -buy- pst.3sg ‘ Alan bought bread.’ Generally, non-interrogative focus can be found both pre- and postverbally, while interrogatives and the majority of subordinators are obligatorily preverbal, save for a few special cases described in Erschler (2012). The differences between preverbal and postverbal focus are not entirely clear, but they may be comparable to a similar contrast found in Hungarian (É.…”

Section: Ossetic: General Informationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Systematic mismatches: Coordination and subordination at three levels of grammar

Belyaev

2014

J. Ling.

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In this paper, I analyze two clause combining strategies in Ossetic that exhibit mixed properties between coordination and subordination. I argue that the ‘mismatch approach’ proposed by Culicover & Jackendoff (1997) and Yuasa & Sadock (2002) is best suited to account for their properties. However, in order to adequately describe the behavior of these constructions in terms of the mismatch approach, appealing to three levels of grammar is required instead of two levels (syntax and semantics) discussed in previous works. This provides a clear argument in favor of models of grammar such as Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), where the syntactic level is split between constituent structure (c-structure) and functional structure (f-structure). The properties of semantic coordination and subordination that have been proposed in earlier work mostly belong to the level of f-structure, and not semantics proper. I argue that the only substantial semantic difference between coordination and adverbial subordination is that the former introduces discourse relations between speech acts, while the latter introduces asserted predicates that link two propositions within the same speech act. I provide definitions of coordination and subordination at all the three levels of grammar formalized in terms of the LFG framework, and discuss the tests that can be used for each of these levels.

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“…Interrogative-indefinite affinity Ossetic does not allow using interrogative as indefinites in embedded contexts. However, this can in part be explained by syntactic reasons: interrogatives and the majority of subordinators (including conditional kʷə) compete for the preverbal position (Erschler 2012;Belyaev 2014a). The fact that Ossetic has a series of indefinite pronouns based on the combination of negation ni-and interrogatives suggests that it used to license indefinite readings of interrogatives in negative contexts at some point in the past.…”

Section: Iranianmentioning

confidence: 99%