Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics

Acknowledgements

2018-02-11T21:37:51+00:00

Introduction

2018-02-11T21:40:21+00:00

A note on the periphrastic past in Afrikaans

2018-02-09T12:11:20+00:00

The periphrastic past tense of Afrikaans, involving the auxiliary het, is compared with its ancestor construction in Dutch. I argue that the situation in Afrikaans provides support for the analysis of Germanic verb clusters in Zwart (2017), where periphrastic verb forms occupy cells in morphological paradigms, and enter the syntax only after the syntactic derivation has run its course.

The secret nominal life of Afrikaans intransitive adpositions

2018-02-09T12:11:20+00:00

Languages like Afrikaans are sometimes said to feature a class of adpositions that can be described as “intransitive” (e.g. binne “inside”, bo “upstairs”, agter “in the back”, buite “outside”, onder “downstairs” voor “in the front”). It is argued that such elements in fact instantiate a “hybrid” category – the locative noun category – which is not missing a Ground external argument but is actually lexicalising the nominal structure associated with that Ground argument itself. Such locative nouns pattern with R-pronouns and home-class nouns and therefore probably share a similar internal structure with these better-studied elements of language.

Negative exclamatives in Afrikaans: some initial thoughts

2018-02-21T21:29:08+00:00

We consider the to date minimally discussed phenomenon of negative exclamatives in Afrikaans. Negative exclamatives superficially seem to be negative, when they are in fact positive exclamations. These structures therefore feature so-called expletive negation. Our goal is to illustrate some aspects of the phenomenon as it manifests in Afrikaans, and to demonstrate that Afrikaans’s negative exclamatives seem well behaved when considered against a broader crosslinguistic backdrop.

Movement in the Afrikaans left periphery: a view from anti-locality

2018-02-09T12:11:20+00:00

It has been convincingly argued that the so-called “left periphery” of the sentence makes available multiple positions which host topicalised and focalised phrases, among other elements. Projections in the C-domain have been shown to have a fixed ordering, the violation of which results in ungrammaticality. Rizzi (1997) provides a template that specifies this ordering. Botha and Oosthuizen (2009) examine this template’s ability to account for ordering phenomena in the Afrikaans left periphery and make certain necessary adjustments to Rizzi’s
template to account for their data. This short paper takes Botha and Oosthuizen’s observations regarding the (im)possibility of a certain ordering in the Afrikaans CP as a case in point. Broadly put, the paper’s premise is that although the template provided for the Afrikaans CP may be descriptively adequate, in that it can accommodate and predict possible orderings, it falls short in that it does not account for why such a template should exist. That is, the template itself does not explain why certain orderings are permissible and others are not. It is the paper’s modest aim to test the ability of one theoretical perspective, namely Grohmann’s (2003) theory of anti-locality, to account for the illegality of a particular ordering in the Afrikaans CP. Antilocality’s ban on ‘too local’ movement is shown to predict the illicitness of this ordering. Due to the paper’s limited scope, the analysis is not extended to other constructions. Its aim is toprompt further efforts to account for the observed ordering in the CP domain, and it offers the theory of anti-locality as a possible starting point for these efforts.

Die slag toe slim sy baas gevang het

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The day when the clever arguments misfired. Some very interesting observations can be made in describing the history of the standardising of Afrikaans. It is possible that the plans that Lord Milner had in mind for the establishing of an exclusive English language in South Africa during the early years of the twentieth century could be the starting point of Afrikaans as an official language some two decades later.

Afrikaans was a well-known spoken language by 1910. It started with the Khoi, using their language as a base, and then adapting the language of the seafarers on the Dutch ships, which they construed as a new trade language: Afrikaans. This language later became one of the main languages of the central parts of South Africa. The sheep and cattle farmers from the interior spoke a language that was far removed from Dutch as well. These two Afrikaans dialects were not used for higher functions, and they influenced each other to a great extent.

The tradition among speakers of Afrikaans of using Dutch whenever the written functions of Dutch were required was one of the main deterrents for broadening the scope of Afrikaans. Dutch was used in the public schools with little success, largely due to Dutch not being a home language for the Afrikaans scholars attending those schools. In fact, Dutch was hardly a spoken language in South Africa, but it was a language with well-established higherfunctions, which Afrikaans lacked. In this context, the use of Dutch in schools prevented
mother-tongue speakers of Afrikaans’ education in their mother tongue.

Emphasising the need for Afrikaans as a medium of instruction for Afrikaans-speaking pupils,Langenhoven used some clever arguments to gain the support in 1914 of the Dutch-oriented South African Academy for Language, Literature and Art (Zuid-Afrikaansche Akademie voor Taal, Letteren en Kunst) for his plan to introduce Afrikaans as a language of choice in the public schools where Dutch was taught as well. Rather unexpectedly, the Academy supported his plan.

It appears that Langenhoven struck a deal with the pro-Dutch language association, the ZuidAfrikaansche Taalbond, beforehand, which left the Afrikaans language commission no other option but to use Dutch spelling rules to spell Afrikaans.

The direct outcome of this arrangement is discussed here, as well as some of the
consequences following from it.

'Ja-nee. No, I'm fine': a note on YES and NO in South Africa

2018-02-11T21:48:27+00:00

This paper considers some unusual uses of NO and YES observed in South African English (SAE) and other languages spoken in South Africa. Our objective is to highlight the fundamentally speaker-hearer-oriented nature of many of these elements, and to offer a formal perspective on their use. We also aim to highlight the value of pursuing more detailed investigations of these and other perspectival elements employed in SAE and other languages spoken in South Africa.

Poetry in South African Sign Language: what is different?

2018-02-09T12:11:20+00:00

Poetry in a sign language can make use of literary devices just as poetry in a spoken language can. The study of literary expression in sign languages has increased over the last twenty years and for South African Sign Language (SASL) such literary texts have also become more available. This article gives a brief overview of the linguistic devices sign language poetry can make use of, in particular those specific to the visual-spatial modality. As an illustration of these devices an analysis is then presented of the SASL poem Soweto by Modiegi Moime. This poem illustrates well the multi-layered meaning that can be created in sign language poetry through the use of the two hands and the non-manual components.

A preliminary look at negative constructions in South African Sign Language: Question-Answer clauses

2018-02-09T12:11:20+00:00

How negation is expressed by means of manual and/or non-manual markers has been described in a wide range of sign languages. This work has suggested a split between sign languages requiring a manual negative element in negative clauses (manual dominant sign languages) and those where a non-manual marker only can be used (non-manual dominant sign languages) (Zeshan 2006; 2004). To date there is only one published study on negation in SASL which describes SASL as a non-manual dominant language (De Barros and Siebörger 2016). However, Oomen and Pfau (2017) have recently indicated that such a typological split is too radical. They show that larger data sets are necessary to identify the range of expressions used within one sign language to express negation. This paper will contribute to this typological debate by considering some preliminary data from South African Sign Language (SASL), highlighting a particular construction, known as a polar Question-Answer clause, which is not generally mentioned in the literature on negation in sign languages. The paper will conclude with a reflection on the implications of these observations for a typology of negation in sign languages.

Nominal marking in Northern Tshwa (Kalahari Khoe)

2018-02-09T12:11:20+00:00

Languages of the Khoe family have a complex pronominal system that distinguishes three categories each for person, gender, and number. However, while languages of the Khoekhoe branch and the western subgroup of Kalahari Khoe obligatorily or optionally mark nouns and nominal classifiers for gender and number, the nominal marking system in eastern Kalahari Khoe appears to be undergoing serious reduction. This article discusses data on personal pronouns and nominal gender-number marking in four little-known Northern Tshwa varieties, including data from Tjwao, a severely endangered language spoken by fewer than ten individuals in western Zimbabwe. We analyse personal pronoun use, case distinctions and nominal marking, focussing on characterising features and commonalities shared across the cluster. Our findings show a high degree of uniformity within Northern Tshwa, and at the same time suggest a more complex nominal marking system than was previously assumed for varieties of the Eastern Kalahari Khoe subgroup.

The name of the fourth river: a small puzzle presented by a fragment of Kora, for Johan Oosthuizen

2018-02-09T12:11:20+00:00

This squib is a brief venture into the minor sub-branch of Linguistics known as Toponomastics, or the study of the meanings and sources of place names. The topic is suggested by a previously unpublished fragment in the Khoekhoe variety once spoken by the Korana Khoi of South Africa, in which four rivers (haka ǃgariku) were mentioned by Piet Links. While the names of three of the four are easily established, it is the identity and the original Khoekhoe name of the fourth river that is sought here. Various early records are consulted and compared for the purpose, and the original Khoekhoe names of three major rivers within the Vaal-Gariep system are proposed. In conclusion, the identity and name of the fourth river most likely to have been intended by Piet Links is arrived at.

The "exotic" nature of ideophones - from Khoekhoe to Xhosa

2018-02-09T12:11:20+00:00

The present paper analyzes the exoticness of Khoekhoe-sourced ideophones as a possible factor that stimulated the introduction of certain phonological novelties to the sound system of Xhosa. Having analyzed Khoekhoe-sourced ideophones of Xhosa for five exotic features postulated crosslinguistically (aberrant sounds and configurations of sounds, length, tones and harmony), the author concludes the following: due to their intense phonological exoticness and the crosslinguistic propensity for unaltered borrowing, Khoekhoe-sourced ideophones may have played a relevant role in the Khoekhoe-Xhosa transfer. The efficiency of this transfer seems to be correlated with the frequency of a given exotic feature in the donor Khoekhoe lexemes.

Cognate objects of weather verbs in African languages of South Africa – from synchronic variation to a grammaticalization path

2018-02-09T12:11:20+00:00

The authors argue that the synchronic variation of cognate objects of weather verbs exhibited in six African languages of South Africa (Sepedi, Sesotho, Tshivenda, isiXhosa, Xitsonga, and isiZulu) has a diachronic explanation, and may be represented as a grammaticalization path. This path gradually leads from prototypical cognate objects that disallow object agreement (pronominalization) and promotion to subjects in passive constructions to prototypical objects where both agreement (pronominalization) and promotion are grammatical. This provides further support for the modelling of cognate objects, adjuncts and arguments in terms of a continuum and for a gradient view of syntactic categories, in general.

NPE, gender and the countable/mass distinction

2018-02-09T12:11:20+00:00

The main purpose of this paper is to present arguments for the existence of a certain relation between formal gender features and the semantic notions ‘count noun’ and ‘mass noun’. In particular, facts relating to how NP ellipsis operates in indefinite DPs in Dutch and Afrikaans are taken to provide evidence for the proposed relation.

There is room at the bottom for small linguistic stuff

2018-02-09T12:11:20+00:00

This article is concerned with the possibility that syntactic structure may feature “small stuff” not just at the very top of the clause, but also lower down, in the domain that would usually be regarded as the lexical domain. The analysis is based on a range of (dialectal) Dutch and Frisian data, suggesting an initial analysis for the relevant morphosyntactic facts in terms of which a “smaller” higher category -what superficially looks like the definite and indefinite article in the relevant systems - seems to be located at the bottom of a nominal structure.

A note on root projection and labelling

2018-02-21T13:30:16+00:00

This paper identifies a problem with a hypothesis put forward in Chomsky (2013) in relation to his labelling algorithm. Chomsky suggests that category-neutral roots do not qualify as labels and cannot project. However, I provide evidence that the derivation of particle verbs involves the projection of a category-neutral root, which has merged with (a projection of) the particle. It follows that Chomsky's hypothesis has to be rejected.

Decomposing V2

2018-02-09T12:11:20+00:00

The paper outlines a new approach to the phenomenon of Verb Second (V2) in West Germanic that does better justice to the historical facts and also accounts for the variation between V2 and V3 orders in modern varieties like Kiezdeutsch and West Flemish. The account proposes a decomposition of the V2 rule, the core of which consists of (i) the Phase Condition, a lexicalization requirement on the phase head, and (ii) an interface condition that fixes the phase head in languages that allow for a flexible phase edge.

Fronting and exhaustive exclusion in Biblical Hebrew

2018-02-09T12:11:20+00:00

Biblical Hebrew scholars struggle to account for about one third of instances of fronting in the Hebrew Bible in terms of a coherent semantic-pragmatic model. I hypothesize that considering fronting as a construction (i.e. a form-meaning pair) that could encode various semantic-pragmatic functions, including “exhaustive exclusion”, could be one of the solutions to this challenge.

At the interface of syntax and prosody: differentiating Left Dislocated and Tripartite Verbless Clauses in Biblical Hebrew

2018-02-09T23:34:31+00:00

The so-called tripartite verbless clause in Biblical Hebrew consists of two nominal phrases and a pronominal element. Three analyses of the pronominal element have been advanced, each with implications for understanding the structure of the sentence. A first approach has been to view the pronominal element as a copular constituent, which serves only to link the two nominal constituents in a predication (Albrecht 1887, 1888; Brockelman 1956; and Kummerouw 2013). A second approach has been to view the pronominal element as the resumptive element of a dislocated constituent (Gesenius, Kautzsch and Cowley 1910; Andersen 1970; Zewi 1996, 1999, 2000; Joüon-Muraoka 2006). A third approach combines the first and second approaches and is represented by the work of Khan (1988, 2006) and Holmstedt and Jones (2014). A fourth approach views the pronominal element as a “last resort” syntactic strategy—the pronominal element is a pronominal clitic, which provides agreement features for the subject (Naudé 1990, 1993, 1994, 1999, 2002). The pronominal element is obligatory when the nominal predicate is a referring noun phrase—the pronominal clitic is used to prevent ambiguity in the assignment of subject and predicate (see Doron 1986; Borer 1983).

As is well-known in the linguistics literature, cross-linguistically left dislocation involves a “gap” at the boundary between the dislocated constituent and the matrix sentence. In spoken language, this gap may be realized by a small pause or an interjection (Berman and Grosu 1976). In this paper we consider the prosodic evidence that is available from the Masoretic accentual tradition. The Masoretes were Jewish scribes who attempted to preserve the precise reading tradition of the biblical text through the addition of a complex system of “accents” which were superimposed on the traditional Hebrew text between the sixth and the tenth centuries CE. Although the accentual system also was used for cantillation purposes, its complex system of conjunctive and disjunctive accents provides important evidence for prosodic phrasing, which can be utilized for differentiating the role of the pronoun in these two types of sentences which are otherwise structurally identical.

Grammatical polysemy and grammaticalization in cognitive and generative perspectives: finding common ground in inter-generational corpora of ancient languages

2018-02-09T12:11:20+00:00

Cognitive and generative approaches to linguistics have taken a different perspective on grammatical polysemy and grammaticalization. While the former see polysemy as a core characteristic of language and a necessary result of grammaticalization within idiolects, the latter see it as a less interesting phenomenon peripheral to linguistics proper. Grammaticalization is seen as a phenomenon of language acquisition which does not disturb the homogeneity of idiolects. These differing perspectives have generated much debate between the two approaches and are even in large part responsible for the different programmatic focuses of each. While the disagreement over grammatical polysemy between these two approaches to language is rooted in entrenched commitments on each side that are perhaps irreconcilable, at least some common ground does seem to be possible. Specifically, when it comes to intergenerational corpora, it seems that both cognitive and generative approaches to linguistics can agree that the universal phenomenon of grammaticalization would result in polysemy at least at the language community level. This can serve as a common ground on which both generative and cognitive linguists can join efforts in describing and explaining usage profiles of grammatically polysemous forms at the corpus level according to prototypicality, even if disagreement persists on the nature of the idiolect.

Collapse of genitive and benefactive case in Ecuadorian Quechua?

2018-02-09T12:11:20+00:00

In Ecuadorian Quechua the markers for genitive and benefactive case have become indistinguishable in form: both are basically -pak. This squib discusses the issue whether there has also been a merger in the underlying representation, or whether they should be kept apart at the level of the grammatical system.