SLE Summer School on Linguistic Methodology
Seminar: Syntactic theory and usage frequency
Martin Haspelmath, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Precondition:
Interest in world-wide comparative syntax (i.e. not just European languages), basic knowledge of syntax
Course Outline:
In this course we will look at several syntactic domains and see how frequency asymmetries can shape syntactic structures, providing us with a powerful explanatory tool. We will briefly discuss different ways of doing theoretical syntax, and move soon to the practical question of how to test predictions made by a frequency-based functional approach to syntax. The participants will do small corpus studies on a language of theeir choice, and we will discuss potential problems and possible solutions. The phenomena that we will look at will come from diverse areas of syntax: verbal argument marking, valency-changing morphology, adnominal possessive marking, and coreference marking.
Course Organization:
Monday. Introduction: Usage frequency and some core issues in syntactic theory
Tuesday. Indefinite/definite objects and inanimate/animate objects
Wednesday. Alienable vs. inalienable possessive constructions
Thursday. Reflexive and reciprocal constructions
Friday. Causatives and anticausatives
It will be useful if you read the following articles before the course:
References:
Aissen, Judith. 2003. "Differential object marking: Iconicity vs. economy." Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 21.3: 435-83. (sections 1-4) [download ms.]
Haspelmath, Martin. 1993. "More on the typology of inchoative/causative verb alternations." In: Comrie, Bernard & Polinsky, Maria (eds.) Causatives and transitivity. (Studies in Language Companion Series, 23.) Amsterdam: Benjamins, 87-120.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2004. "Does linguistic explanation presuppose linguistic description?" Studies in Language 28.3: 554-579
Haspelmath, Martin. 2006. "Frequency vs. iconicity in the explanation of grammatical asymmetries." Ms. [download ms.] |
