Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub <p>Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics has merged with Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus and is no longer accepting submissions.</p><p>Please visit the <a title="Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus" href="http://spilplus.journals.ac.za/pub/index">SPiL Plus</a> website to register and submit your manuscript or to read the latest issues.</p> en-US Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:<br /><ol type="a"><li>Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution License</a> that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.</li><li>Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.</li><li>Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See <a href="http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html" target="_new">The Effect of Open Access</a>).</li></ol> scholar@sun.ac.za (Kate Huddlestone) scholar@sun.ac.za (SUNJournals support team) Fri, 09 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000 OJS 3.1.2.4 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 60 Acknowledgements http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/297 Alex Andrason, Theresa Biberauer Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/297 Sun, 11 Feb 2018 21:32:24 +0000 Introduction http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/275 Theresa Biberauer, Alexander Andrason Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/275 Fri, 09 Feb 2018 11:36:48 +0000 A note on the periphrastic past in Afrikaans http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/276 <p>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.</p> Jan-Wouter Zwart Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/276 Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:00:18 +0000 The secret nominal life of Afrikaans intransitive adpositions http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/277 <p>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.</p> Erin Pretorius Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/277 Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:02:29 +0000 Negative exclamatives in Afrikaans: some initial thoughts http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/278 <p>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.</p> Theresa Biberauer, Jean-Marie Potgieter Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/278 Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:03:55 +0000 Movement in the Afrikaans left periphery: a view from anti-locality http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/279 <p>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 <br />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.</p> Robyn Berghoff Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/279 Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:05:19 +0000 Die slag toe slim sy baas gevang het http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/280 <p>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.</p><p><br />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.</p><p><br />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 <br />mother-tongue speakers of Afrikaans’ education in their mother tongue.</p><p><br />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.</p><p><br />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.<br /><br />The direct outcome of this arrangement is discussed here, as well as some of the <br />consequences following from it.</p> Christo van Rensburg Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/280 Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:06:32 +0000 'Ja-nee. No, I'm fine': a note on YES and NO in South Africa http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/281 <p>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.</p> Theresa Biberauer, Marie van Heukelum, Lalia Duke Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/281 Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:07:32 +0000 Poetry in South African Sign Language: what is different? http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/282 <p>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 <em>Soweto</em> 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.</p> Anne Baker Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/282 Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:08:17 +0000 A preliminary look at negative constructions in South African Sign Language: Question-Answer clauses http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/283 <p>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.</p> Kate Huddlestone Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/283 Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:09:07 +0000 Nominal marking in Northern Tshwa (Kalahari Khoe) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/284 <p>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.</p> Anne-Maria Fehn, Admire Phiri Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/284 Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:09:59 +0000 The name of the fourth river: a small puzzle presented by a fragment of Kora, for Johan Oosthuizen http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/285 <p>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.</p> Menán du Plessis Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/285 Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:10:48 +0000 The "exotic" nature of ideophones - from Khoekhoe to Xhosa http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/286 <p>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.</p> Alexander Andrason Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/286 Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:11:37 +0000 Cognate objects of weather verbs in African languages of South Africa – from synchronic variation to a grammaticalization path http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/287 <p>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.</p> Alexander Andrason, Marianna Visser Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/287 Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:12:22 +0000 NPE, gender and the countable/mass distinction http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/288 <p>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.</p> Tarald Taraldsen Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/288 Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:13:19 +0000 There is room at the bottom for small linguistic stuff http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/289 <p>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.</p> Norbert Corver Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/289 Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:14:15 +0000 A note on root projection and labelling http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/290 <p>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.</p> Jochen Zeller Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/290 Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:15:07 +0000 Decomposing V2 http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/291 <p>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.</p> Roland Hinterhölzl Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/291 Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:15:54 +0000 Fronting and exhaustive exclusion in Biblical Hebrew http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/292 <p>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.</p> Christo van der Merwe Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/292 Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:16:49 +0000 At the interface of syntax and prosody: differentiating Left Dislocated and Tripartite Verbless Clauses in Biblical Hebrew http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/293 <p>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).</p><p><br />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.</p> Jacobus Naudé, Cynthia Miller-Naudé Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/293 Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:17:43 +0000 Grammatical polysemy and grammaticalization in cognitive and generative perspectives: finding common ground in inter-generational corpora of ancient languages http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/294 <p>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.</p> Christian Locatell Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/294 Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:18:24 +0000 Collapse of genitive and benefactive case in Ecuadorian Quechua? http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/295 <p>In Ecuadorian Quechua the markers for genitive and benefactive case have become indistinguishable in form: both are basically <em>-pak</em>. 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.</p> Pieter Muysken Copyright (c) http://spil.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/295 Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:19:10 +0000