Ce travail est une description du dialecte laze d’Arhavi, suivie de textes. Le laze appartient à la famille des langues caucasiques du sud (ou « kartvèles »), comme le mingrélien, le géorgien et le svane. Il est parlé dans le nord-est de la Turquie. Dans le recensement turc de 1965, qui représente la dernière statistique officielle, 85.108 personnes déclaraient parler cette langue.Le laze est une langue non écrite et en danger. Tous les locuteurs sont bilingues laze-turc ; les jeunes comprennent encore la langue mais ne la parlent pas.Jusqu’à présent, le laze nous était connu principalement à travers des descriptions soit anciennes, soit incomplètes. Le présent travail est la première étude approfondie d’un dialecte laze qui ne se limite pas à un aspect particulier de la grammaire.Dans la première partie, les points suivants sont successivement développés : la phonologie, les processus phonologiques et morphophonologiques, le syntagme nominal, les pronoms interlocutifs, démonstratifs et emphatique-réfléchi, les interrogatifs et indéfinis, les postpositions, les adverbes, le verbe fini, le verbe non fini, la phrase simple et la phrase complexe (relatives, circonstancielles, complétives et conditionnelles). Dans le chapitre sur le verbe fini, j’étudie en particulier le système des indices pronominaux, les tiroirs verbaux, les préverbes spatiaux et affirmatifs, les opérations sur la valence (moyen, applicatif, potentiel-déagentif, causatif), les verbes irréguliers et la formation des lexèmes verbaux, et je présente une classification morphologique des verbes. Une hypothèse est proposée pour expliquer l’origine de certains indices pronominaux suffixés. Dans le chapitre sur la phrase simple sont observées les propriétés syntaxiques des arguments nucléaires, en particulier des sujets non canoniques.Dans la seconde partie, je présente dix textes récoltés lors de voyages de terrain.Je situe mon analyse dans le cadre des grammaires à orientation typologique. En conséquence, je m’écarte de la tradition de description des langues caucasiques du sud, calquée sur la grammaire du géorgien, lorsque cela permet de mieux comparer les faits du laze à ce qui a pu être observé dans d’autres langues. / The present work is a grammatical description of the Arhavi dialect of Laz, together with texts. Laz belongs to the South Caucasian (or ‘Kartvelian’) language family, alongside Mingrelian, Georgian and Svan. It is spoken in north-east Turkey. In the 1965 Turkish census, the last official statistic, 85,108 persons identified themselves as speakers of Laz.Laz is an endangered and unwritten language. All speakers are bilingual in Turkish; young people still understand the language, but do not speak it.Up until now, the grammar of Laz has only been known from older or incomplete works. The present study is the first comprehensive description of a Laz dialect.In the first part of this study, the following topics are discussed: the phonology, the phonological and morphophonological processes, the noun phrase, the interlocutive (1st and 2nd person), demonstrative and emphatic-reflexive pronouns, the interrogative and indefinite pronouns, the postpositions, the adverbs, the finite verb, the non-finite verb, the simple sentence and the complex sentence (relative clauses, adverbial clauses, complement clauses and conditional clauses). In the chapter on finite verbs, particular attention is devoted to cross-referencing affixes, tenses, spatial and affirmative preverbs, valency-changing operations (middle, applicative, potential-deagentive, causative), irregular verbs and the formation of verbal lexemes, and a morphological classification of verbs is put forward. A hypothesis is proposed to explain the origin of some cross-referencing suffixes. In the chapter on simple sentences, I examine the syntactic characteristics of core arguments, in particular of non-canonical (dative) subjects.In the second part, I present ten texts which I collected during fieldwork.This study is typologically oriented. As a consequence, it sometimes departs from other works on South Caucasian languages, which are commonly based on traditional Georgian grammar, when it is helpful to compare Laz with what has been observed in other languages.

This thesis explores the structure of the verb stem in Ojicree, a dialect of Ojibwe. I argue that the surface complexity of the stem structure in this language can be explained if we distinguish between two types of roots: strong roots and weak roots. Strong roots combine with a verbal head to build a full stem. I call these simple stems. Weak roots build a more complex structure. Their combination with a verbal head is not enough to build a complete verb stem and some additional material needs to appear to the left of the root to form a full stem. I refer to these stems as complex stems and to the requirement posed by the weak roots the left edge requirement. In the traditional templatic view of the Algonquian stem weak roots correspond to an element called ‘pre-final’ or the lexical portion of the concrete final. Strong roots fall into the traditional slot ‘initial’. In the first part of the thesis I argue that weak and strong roots build two fundamentally different structures. Complex stems (build from weak roots) are dynamic syntactic constructs, while simple stems (build from strong roots) need to be stored. I bring both syntactic and phonological evidence for this distinction. In the second part of the thesis I explore the nature of the left edge requirement in complex stems, arguing that it is a semantic constraint that has to do with event composition. Weak roots are semantically deficient elements, and the left edge element fills a gap in their semantics and completes event composition. The syntactic composition of the stem reflects event composition. Finally, I extend the idea of the left edge requirement to a certain type of noun incorporation construction. The proposed analysis advances our understanding of the Ojicree morphosyntax by moving away from the traditional templatic view of the stem, situating it within the current syntactic framework of Minimalism and proposing answers to some long standing questions from a new perspective. More broadly, it furthers our understanding of how words are formed in the Algonquian languages and in polysynthetic languages in general.

This thesis explores the structure of the verb stem in Ojicree, a dialect of Ojibwe. I argue that the surface complexity of the stem structure in this language can be explained if we distinguish between two types of roots: strong roots and weak roots. Strong roots combine with a verbal head to build a full stem. I call these simple stems. Weak roots build a more complex structure. Their combination with a verbal head is not enough to build a complete verb stem and some additional material needs to appear to the left of the root to form a full stem. I refer to these stems as complex stems and to the requirement posed by the weak roots the left edge requirement. In the traditional templatic view of the Algonquian stem weak roots correspond to an element called ‘pre-final’ or the lexical portion of the concrete final. Strong roots fall into the traditional slot ‘initial’. In the first part of the thesis I argue that weak and strong roots build two fundamentally different structures. Complex stems (build from weak roots) are dynamic syntactic constructs, while simple stems (build from strong roots) need to be stored. I bring both syntactic and phonological evidence for this distinction. In the second part of the thesis I explore the nature of the left edge requirement in complex stems, arguing that it is a semantic constraint that has to do with event composition. Weak roots are semantically deficient elements, and the left edge element fills a gap in their semantics and completes event composition. The syntactic composition of the stem reflects event composition. Finally, I extend the idea of the left edge requirement to a certain type of noun incorporation construction. The proposed analysis advances our understanding of the Ojicree morphosyntax by moving away from the traditional templatic view of the stem, situating it within the current syntactic framework of Minimalism and proposing answers to some long standing questions from a new perspective. More broadly, it furthers our understanding of how words are formed in the Algonquian languages and in polysynthetic languages in general.

Dissertation Ph. D.--University of California, Santa Barbara, 1999. / Bibliogr. p. 259-265.

This dissertation is an analysis of the morphosyntax of the Turkish causative construction within the framework of Distributed Morphology (DM). It is an attempt to capture a range of different phenomena in a principled way within this framework. Important aspects of DM for the analysis herein include the syntactic derivation of words; the existence of an acategorial Root from which all words are syntactically derived; and the late (post-syntactic) insertion of Vocabulary Items (VIs) into terminal syntactic nodes. A distinction is made between two different levels of causative: Root (or inner) causatives, and productive (or outer) causatives. Root causatives are minimal structures in which a Root phrase (comprising a Root and its nominal complement) is merged with a verbalizing head, little-v (Harley 1995; Chomsky 1995, 2001; Marantz 1997). This domain is the locus of idiosyncratic allomorphy, and it is where the traditionally recognized ‘irregular’ causatives suffixes are found. In addition, another type of idiosyncratic Root-adjacent phenomenon is identified in this study: independent exponence of the verbalizing feature and of the causative feature (CAUS). This is analyzed as CAUS fission: the result of a post-syntactic operation that splits the terminal node [v, CAUS] into two positions of exponence. Productive causatives are larger structures in which a vP is merged with a CAUS head. The identification of the Root causative head as v.CAUS but the productive causative head as simply CAUS is a departure from Harley's (2008) analysis of Japanese causatives, and is a new proposal in this work. Following Pylkkänen (2002, 2008), the external argument is not introduced by either v.CAUS or CAUS, but by a higher projection, Voice. This innovation makes it possible to model syntactic differences between Japanese and Turkish productive causatives. Japanese causatives embed Voice (i.e., they are ‘phase-selecting,’ in Pylkkänen's terminology) while Turkish causatives embed little-v (i.e., they are ‘verb-selecting’). Hence, the former behave as two clauses with regard to a range of diagnostics, while the latter behave as a single clause. Furthermore, it is proposed that productive causatives do not exhibit syntactic recursion, and that cases of causative iteration are actually morphological reduplication.

Aims: Verb morphology, arguably, is identified as an area of exceptional challenge for the language development of both young typically-developing children, and children with language difficulties (Leonard, 2014a; Rice & Wexler, 2001). The developmental patterns of verb acquisition are found to be strongly governed by the typological properties of the ambient language; often language errors found in fusional languages (e.g. English and German) are significantly different from those found in agglutinative languages (e.g. Turkish and Tamil) (cf. Phillips, 2010). Therefore, the purpose of the study was to explore the developmental trends in the acquisition of verb morphology in Bangla, a language with agglutinative features. The first objective was to examine the morphosyntactic development of typically-developing (TD) Bangla-speaking children with regard to three verb forms, namely the Present Simple, the Present Progressive and the Past Progressive. A second objective was to examine the development of the three verb forms among a group of children with language impairment (LI). Rationale: Since Bangla is spoken by a large population, the acquisition data of Bangla represents a significant number of people, and the findings from the acquisition studies, when considered for intervention purposes, serve a considerably large population. Also, given that the normative data of language acquisition is unavailable for Bangla which leads to the absence of a language-specific assessment and intervention for LI children, the present study is expected to have importance for Bangla-speaking contexts. Method: Before the main study commenced, a pilot study was conducted with 19 Bangla-speaking TD children aged between two and four (years) in order to explore the developmental characteristics of the verb forms and to evaluate the research instruments identified for the actual study. The main study included 70 TD children between 1;11 and 4;3 years who were recruited from six daycare centres of Dhaka, Bangladesh. The children participated in three elicitation tasks, each to elicit one verb form, and a 20-minute play session that yielded a spontaneous language sample from each child. The researcher scored children’s performances on the three tasks, and transcribed the language samples using transcription software (Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts). The elicitation tasks were used to determine children’s mastery of the forms, whereas the language samples were used to calculate a set of language measures associated with morphological development. The study also included a group of nine children with LI between 3;11 and 9;4 years who participated in the same set of tasks as the TD children. These children were recruited from a special school in Dhaka. Findings: The results revealed that, for both TD and LI children, the Present Simple form was acquired with highest accuracy which was followed by the scores in the Present Progressive and the Past Progressive forms respectively. The error patterns indicated a qualitative progress even in children’s errors, which was consistent with the accuracy rates of the target forms. Based on the TD children’s performance on the three tasks, a developmental sequence for the three Bangla verb forms was proposed. Results also identified that Mean length of Utterance (MLU) did not have stronger associations with the tasks scores than did Age. Among the determinants tested, Bound Morpheme Type (BMT) was identified to have the strongest associations with the task scores. Analyses of the data from the LI children revealed a significant difference between the TD and the LI children on all three tasks and the other language measures. When compared against the proposed developmental stages, the children within the LI group were found to different in terms of their morphosyntactic capacities. A sub-group of LI children also did not conform to any stages of typical development. Conclusions: Results of the present study offer directions for future investigations in a wide range of areas of Bangla morphosyntax that need to be examined with both TD and LI children. Moreover, factors associated with language development that the present study did not examine (e.g. the role of input) also need to be addressed in future studies. Above all, there is a strong need for ongoing investigations in order to identify a comprehensive picture of morphosyntactic development of Bangla-speaking TD children, which can then lead to the assessment of a range of language impairments in Bangla.

Zugl. Kurzfassung von: Jena, Univ., Habil.-Schr., 2005

Freiburg i. Br., Univ., B.A.-Arbeit, 2008.

L'objet de ce travail de thèse est la description linguistique de la modalité interrogative en conversation spontanée et en synchronie. Il s'agit d'abord de relever et d'évaluer tous les indices morphosyntaxiques qui permettent de faire état de l'information transmise. Puis, l'objectif est de mesurer l'implication dialogique du locuteur. On considère, à l'instar de [Damourette, 1911], qu'un énoncé interrogatif n'est complet que lorsqu'une réponse est apportée. Un locuteur formule sa question en fonction d'une image de réponse qu'il a présente à l'esprit et qui véhicule l'informalion-réponse tout autant qu'un contexte interactif et argumentatif. On peut émettre l'hypothèse que l'intentionnalité d'un locuteur se mesure en se fondant sur la réponse qu'il escompte, c'est-à-dire sur celle qu'il considère être non seulement la plus plausible au sein de sa représentation du monde, mais aussi la plus adéquate à la situation énonciative et dialogique. À partir de cette hypothèse, l'analyse a permis, de procéder à une description modélisée de l'interrogation en fonction de trois axes complémentaires. Cette description modélisée de l'interrogation a ensuite fait l'objet d'une confrontation à des données attestées de deux natures. Un premier corpus de Système de Questions/Réponses a permis de tester la modélisation tandis qu'un second corpus de SMS a permis de valider les modifications apportées. Cette ultime version du modèle a autorisé une description de l'interrogation en conversation spontanée dans la totalité des pratiques langagières observées. / The purpose of this thesis is the linguistic description of the interrogative modality in spontaneous conversation and in synchrony. First, the aim vvas to identify and evaluate all morphosyntactic clues that report the information transmitted. Then, the objective is to measure the dialogic involvement of the speaker. We consider, like [Damourette, 1911 ], an interrogative sentence is only complete when a response is made. A speaker formulates his question based on the image of a response in his mind, vvhich carries the information-response as well as an interactive and argumentative context. One can speculate that the intentionality of a speaker is measured based on the response he expects ; that is to say on that he considers not only the most plausible within its representation of the vvorld, but also the most appropriate to the dialogic utterance. According to this assumption, the analysis allowed to proceed to a modeled description, which based on three complementary dimensions. After a modeled descriplion, a confrontation with evidence of two kinds has been proposed. A first corpus derived from a Questions/Answers System vvas used to test the modeling while a second SMS corpus was used to validate the changes. This latest version of the model has allowed a description of the interrogation, in spontaneous conversation and in all observed utterances.

Some proverbs, idioms, nominal compounds, and slogans duplicate in form and meaning between several languages. An example of these between German and English is Liebe auf den ersten Blick and “love at first sight” (Flippo, 2009), whereas, an example between Kiswahili and English is uchaguzi ulio huru na haki and “free and fair election.” Duplication of these strings of words between languages that are as different in descent and typology as Kiswahili and English is irregular. On this ground, Kiswahili academies and a number of experts of Kiswahili assumed – prior to the present study – that the Kiswahili versions of the expressions are the derivatives from their English congruent counterparts. The assumption nonetheless lacked empirical evidence and also discounted other potential causes of the phenomenon, i.e. analogical extension, nativism and cognitive metaphoricalization (Makkai, 1972; Land, 1974; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980b; Ruhlen, 1987; Lakoff, 1987; Gleitman and Newport, 1995). Out of this background, we assumed an academic obligation of empirically investigating what causes this formal and semantic duplication of strings of words (multiword expressions) between English and Kiswahili to a degree beyond chance expectations. In this endeavour, we employed checklist to 24, interview to 43, online questionnaire to 102, translation test to 47 and translationality test to 8 respondents. Online questionnaire respondents were from 21 regions of Tanzania, whereas, those of the rest of the tools were from Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam, Pwani, Lindi, Dodoma and Kigoma. Complementarily, we analysed the Chemnitz Corpus of Swahili (CCS), the Helsinki Swahili Corpus (HSC), and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) for clues on the sources and trends of expressions exhibiting this characteristic between Kiswahili and English. Furthermore, we reviewed the Bible, dictionaries, encyclopaedia, books, articles, expressions lists, wikis, and phrase books in pursuit of etymologies, and histories of concepts underlying the focus expressions. Our analysis shows that most of the Kiswahili versions of the focus expressions are the function of loan translation and rendition from English. We found that economic, political and technological changes, mostly induced by liberalization policy of the 1990s in Tanzania, created lexical gaps in Kiswahili that needed to be filled. We discovered that Kiswahili, among other means, fill such gaps through loan translation and loan rendition of English phrases. Prototypical examples of notions whose English labels Kiswahili has translated word for word are such as “human rights”, “free and fair election”, “the World Cup” and “multiparty democracy”. We can conclude that Kiswahili finds it easier and economical to translate the existing English labels for imported notions rather than innovating original labels for the concepts. Even so, our analysis revealed that a few of the Kiswahili duplicate multiword expressions might be a function of nativism, cognitive metaphoricalization and analogy phenomena. We, for instance, observed that formulation of figurative meanings follow more or less similar pattern across human languages – the secondary meanings deriving from source domains. As long as the source domains are common in many human\'s environment, we found it plausible for certain multiword expressions to spontaneously duplicate between several human languages. Academically, our study has demonstrated how multiword expressions, which duplicate between several languages, can be studied using primary data, corpora, documentary review and observation. In particular, the study has designed a framework for studying sources of the expressions and even terminologies for describing the phenomenon. What\'s more, the study has collected a number of expressions that duplicate between Kiswahili and English languages, which other researchers can use in similar studies.