Search

An underdescribed sound change in Germanic is the shift of initial kl and gl to tl and dl respectively. Though not widely known, KL > TL has occurred more than once in the history of Germanic. Relevant phonetic factors include coarticulation and perceptual similarity. A third structural factor in Germanic and elsewhere is a pre-existing TL gap. KL > TL gives rise to common TL clusters, though, under many phonological analyses, TL clusters are disfavored or marked. Typological comparison suggests that TL clusters are not marked, but that contrasts between KL and TL are disfavored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Differential R Marking (DRM) – i.e., the effects of animacy on the encoding of goals (R), as in ‘a linguist sent a book to the phonetician/to the town’ – from a crosslinguistic perspective. The phenomenon comprises three types, which are distinguished based on whether R can be marked in the same way as the transitive Patient or not (animate Rs usually allow this, while inanimate Rs usually surface as obliques). Even though DRM shares common features with Differential Object Marking (DOM), the two phenomena cannot be explained by the same functions. The findings of this article support the view that differences in object coding (comprising both DRM and DOM) are best explained by affectedness rather than ambiguity avoidance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1. Typology as a discipline In the past century, typology was mostly used as an alternative method of pursuing one of the same goals as generative grammar: to determine the limits of possible human languages and, thereby, to contribute to a universal theory of grammar. The paradigm result was the absolute universal law that would rule out as linguistically impossible what would seem logically imaginable, e.g., a language with a gender distinction exclusively in the 1st person singular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the issue of the different status that typology has in American linguistics as opposed to European linguistics. The historical roots of the difference lie in both structural and generative linguistics, in the contrasts between post-Bloomfieldian structuralism in the US vs. Praguean structuralism in Europe, and in the extent of the influence of generative grammar on the two continents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]