Tense, aspect, and mood are grammatical categories concerned with different notional facets of the event or situation conveyed by a given clause. They are prototypically expressed by the verbal system. Tense can be defined as a category that relates points or intervals in time to one another; in a most basic model, those include the time of the event or situation referred to and the speech time. The former may precede the latter (“past”), follow it (“future”), or be simultaneous with it (or at least overlap with it; “present”). Aspect is concerned with the internal temporal constituency of the event or situation, which may be viewed as a single whole (“perfective”) or with particular reference to its internal structure (“imperfective”), including its being ongoing at a certain point in time (“progressive”). Mood, in a narrow, morphological sense, refers to the inflectional realization of modality, with modality encompassing a large and varying set of sub-concepts such as possibility, necessity, probability, obligation, permission, ability, and volition. In the domain of tense, all Germanic languages make a distinction between non-past and past. In most languages, the opposition can be expressed inflectionally, namely, by the present and preterite (indicative). All modern languages also have a periphrastic perfect as well as periphrastic forms that can be used to refer to future events. Aspect is characteristically absent as a morphological category across the entire family, but most, if not all, modern languages have periphrastic forms for the expression of aspectual categories such as progressiveness. Regarding mood, Germanic languages are commonly described as distinguishing up to three such form paradigms, namely, indicative, imperative, and a third one referred to here as subjunctive. Morphologically distinct subjunctive forms are, however, more typical of earlier stages of Germanic than they are of most present-day languages.
Article
Tense, Aspect, and Mood in Germanic
Thilo Weber
Article
Yiddish
Lea Schäfer
The Yiddish language is directly linked to the culture and destiny of the Jewish population of Central and Eastern Europe. It originated as the everyday language of the Jewish population in the German-speaking lands around the Middle Ages and underwent a series of developments until the Shoah, which took a particularly large toll on the Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewish population. Today, Yiddish is spoken as a mother tongue almost exclusively in ultra-Orthodox communities, where it is now exposed to entirely new influences and is, thus, far from being a dead language.
After an introductory sketch, information on the geographical distribution and number of speakers as well as key historical developments are briefly summarized. Particularly important are the descriptions of the various sociolinguistic situations and the source situation. This is followed by a description of various (failed) attempts at standardization, as well as the geographical distribution and surveys of the dialects. The following section describes the status of Yiddish in the early 21st century, which overlaps with the sociolinguistic situation of Orthodox Yiddish. Finally, the linguistic features of modern Eastern Yiddish (dialects, standard, and Orthodox) are presented. In this context, linguistic levels and structures in which Yiddish differs from other (standard) Germanic languages are also discussed. Since Yiddish, as a language derived from Middle High German, is particularly close to German varieties, the differences and similarities between the two languages are particularly emphasized.
Article
Compounding and Linking Elements in Germanic
Barbara Schlücker
Compounding is a frequent and productive word-formation pattern in all Germanic languages. It is a pattern that links an overtly simple grammatical form to a rich semantic-conceptual structure. Overall, there are rather few restrictions on the formation of compounds, and units of various word classes can serve as constituents in compounds. Both determinative and coordinative compounds exist across Germanic. Nominal compounding is the largest and most productive class in all Germanic languages, in particular noun–noun compounding, followed by adjectival compounding. Verbal compounding, on the other hand, is much more restrained, in particular in West Germanic, whereas it is more common in North Germanic. Linking elements are a typical but not necessary property of Germanic compounds. They occur mainly in noun–noun compounds. The inventory and use of linking elements show differences between the West Germanic languages, on one hand, and the North Germanic languages, on the other hand. Regarding the distribution and use of linking-s, however, there are many similarities between the Germanic languages. Notwithstanding the similarities described here, there are also many differences between the various Germanic compound patterns. These global and specific characteristics are the central subject of the article, taking into account data from German, Luxemburgish, Dutch, West Frisian, English, Afrikaans, and Yiddish (West Germanic) and from Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Faroese (North Germanic).
Article
Prefixation (Nouns and Adjectives) in Romance Languages
Claudio Iacobini
Romance nominal and adjectival prefixes are derivational affixes that are added before lexemes without determining a change in the part of speech of the lexeme with which they combine. The combination between prefixes and lexemes is mostly based on a semantic principle. Prefixes express functional-relational meanings, acting as modifiers of the base lexeme. The most important semantic categories expressed through nominal and adjectival prefixation are localization (within which we include spatial and temporal meanings, as well as hierarchy), negation, evaluation (i.e., augmentation and diminution in quantity and/or quality), multiplicity, union, reciprocity, and reflexivity. The prefixed lexeme is generally a hyponym of the base lexeme; when a prefixed lexeme is a noun, it inherits its gender from the noun base. Romance prefixes do not play any role in inflection.
Nominal and adjectival prefixes do not differ much both from the formal and the semantic point of view in the early 21st-century standard Romance languages (i.e., those that have become the national official languages and developed a high degree of Ausbau). Such homogeneity is only marginally due to the conservation of features stemming from the legacy of a common Latin origin. It is mainly attributable to a re-Latinization of Romance languages through the scholarly transmission of words belonging to the domains of learned academic vocabulary coming from ancient Greek, as well as Classical, Humanistic, and Neo-Latin. The importance and the far-reaching consequences of this homogenizing re-Latinization are shown, on one hand, by the fact that Romance nominal and adjectival prefixation in standard Romance languages is, in the 21st century, more consistent and developed than it was at previous stages and, on the other hand, by the significant differences existing between standard and nonstandard Romance varieties. Standard Romance languages of the early 21st century are characterized by a quite rich inventory of Romance nominal and adjectival prefixes, whereas in nonstandard varieties native nominal and adjectival prefixes are not numerous and almost unproductive, a situation that roughly corresponds to that of the initial phase of Romance languages as a whole.
Nominal and adjectival prefixation is a productive process in standard Romance languages; in the last centuries, both the number of elements and the semantic domains have increased, after a significant decrease undergone in the passage from Latin to Romance languages. Prefixed nouns and adjectives are numerous and frequently used both in current common vocabulary and, even more, in specialized terminologies.
The spread of neoclassical compounding in common vocabulary (especially from the second half of the 20th century) has increased the number of right-headed words whose first element has a modifier function. Such a semantic relationship between the constituents of complex words shared by prefixation and some neoclassical compounds has both favored the diffusion of nominal and adjectival prefixation and determined a fuzzy zone between traditional prefixation and the new complex formations coming from technical and scientific terminology. Another blurred area between compounding and prefixation is due to the uncertain boundaries between nominal compounds with prepositions and nominal prefixation.
Article
Evaluative Morphology in the Romance Languages
Nicola Grandi
The vast majority of evaluative constructions are formed by means of morphological strategies. An evaluative construction must include at least the explicit expression of the standard (by means of a linguistic form that is lexically autonomous and is recognized by the speakers of the language as an actual word) and an evaluative mark. Therefore, in the Italian word gattino ‘kitten, dear little cat,’ the standard is expressed by the lexical morpheme gatt- (which occurs in masculine gatto and feminine gatta), while the evaluative mark is the suffix -ino.
A construction can be defined as evaluative if it satisfies two conditions, one relating to semantics and the other to the formal level. The first condition indicates that an evaluative construction indicates a deviation from a standard (or default) value without resorting to any parameter of reference external to the concept itself. The second condition indicates that an evaluative construction must include the explicit expression of this standard and an evaluative mark.
Among the world’s languages, evaluative morphology has a quite uneven diffusion: Eurasian languages, and Romance languages in particular, show the highest degree of evaluative morphology diffusion, considering the number of word formation processes involved, the word classes they apply to, and the semantic categories they express.
From a historical point of view, evaluative affixes reveal an unstable behavior: they are often subject to a renovation. As a matter of fact, present-day Romance evaluative affixes do not coincide with Latin evaluative affixes: they derive from affixes that in Latin had different functions from ‘evaluation’ or from non-Latin affixes.
From a synchronic point of view, Romance evaluative affixes prototypically exemplify all the cross-linguistically more frequent properties of evaluative morphology: categorial neutrality, insensitivity to the word class of the base, prefix-suffix neutrality, and so forth.
Article
Nonverbal Clauses in Wano: A Trans–New Guinea Language
Willem Burung
West Papua has approximately 300 ethnic languages, which are classified into two main families: the Austronesian languages, of the coastal ethnic groups, and the Papuan languages, of the montane native dwellers. Papuan languages are further sub-divided into 43 language families, of which Trans–New Guinea is the largest in terms of number. Wano is a member of the Trans–New Guinea family.
Clauses lacking a verb as a core element in their structures are known as nonverbal clauses, which are intransitive cross-linguistically. Languages like English may grammatically differentiate nonverbal clauses from nonverbal predicates, which is not so in languages like Wano that lack a copula. An English clause, he is my child, for instance, is a verbal clause with a nonverbal predicate, while its equivalent expression in Wano, at nabut ‘he is my child’, with its morphosyntactic structure {he/she/it 1s-child.of male possessor}, is a nonverbal clause with a nonverbal predicate.
Nonverbal clauses in Wano may have the forms of (a) subject-predicate, for example, at nica ‘she is my mother’, with its morphosyntactic structure: {he/she/it 1s-mother}, where the inalienable kin noun, nica ‘my mother’ {1s-mother} is the predicate; and (b) subject-object-predicate, for example, kat an nabua ‘you.sg love me’, with its morphosyntactic structure: {you.sg I 1s-love’}, of which the cognition noun, nabua ‘my love’ {1s-love}, functions as predicate head. How a nonverbal clause could be transitive is a fundamental question that is worth the explanatory definition of Wano nouns in terms of their morphology-semantics-pragmatics interface.
Noun morphology in Wano is straightforward yet may undergo complex semantic-pragmatic coding with respect to morphosyntactic structures. One reason is that in some kin terminologies, the language distinguishes the sex of the possessor, such as the inalienable kin phrase ‘my child’, that is, nabut, which has the morphological structure of {1s-child.of male possessor} or {1s-fatherling:child}; this is applicable only for male possessor, and nayak {1s-motherling:child} is for female possessor. The distinction may lead to semantic-pragmatic complexity for the interpretation of the English possessive phrase our child in Wano, which is either ninyabut ‘our child’ {1p-fatherling:child}, restricted to male possessors, or ninyayak ‘our child’ {1p-motherling:child}, restricted to female possessors. The other reason is the presence of a type of inalienable noun, that is, physiocognition nouns, in nonverbal clauses as predicate elements, for example, an nanop anduk ‘my head is painful’ {I 1s-head 3s-pain}, where the physiology noun anduk ‘his pain’ {3s-pain} is the predicate, and kat at enokweid ‘you.sg think of him’ {you.sg he 3s-mind} is the clause that has the cognition noun enokweid ‘his mind’ as predicate.
Wano divides inalienable nouns into: (2.1) cultural nouns, for example, nayum ‘my netbag’ {1s-netbag}; (2.2) kin nouns, for example, kare ‘your.sg uncle’ {2s-uncle}; (2.3) body part nouns, for example, nanop ‘my head’ {1s-head} for (2.3.1) solid body part nouns and adian ‘his blood’ {3s-blood} for (2.3.2) liquid body part nouns; and (2.4) physiocognition nouns, for example, nabua ‘my love’ {1s-love} for (2.4.1) cognition nouns, and anduk ‘his pain’ {3s-pain} for (2.4.2) physiology nouns. Physiology nouns are found in the subject-predicate structure and cognition nouns in the subject-object-predicate.
Article
Nominal Inflectional Morphology in Germanic: Pronouns
Stefan Rabanus
Pronouns are words that represent morphosyntactic features of nominal referents located somewhere else in the sentence or the context. They display the highest degree of morphosyntactic exponence in the nominal domain, including features of person, gender, number, case, animacy, and social relationship. The Germanic languages make use of a common set of pronoun roots in order to form the paradigms of demonstrative, personal, reflexive, interrogative, and indefinite pronouns. Selection and inflection are language specific: for example, the Germanic demonstrative pronoun root *þat developed to the uninflected distal demonstrative that in English, while in German it forms part of the inflectional paradigm of the proximal demonstrative der, die, das. Reciprocal, relative, and possessive pronouns do not have autonomous roots; their forms are derived from the previously mentioned classes; compare the English relative pronouns that (< demonstrative), what, who, whose, which (< interrogative). Suppletion occurs in many paradigms, especially with person features, for example, English first person I, second person you. The 13 Germanic standard languages, Icelandic, Faroese, German, Luxembourgish, Yiddish, Danish, Swedish, Bokmål, Nynorsk, Dutch, Frisian, English, and Afrikaans, form a continuum in which Icelandic is closest to the Germanic roots and has most distinctions while Afrikaans has the least. Often the paradigm structure mirrors the geographical subdivision in Scandinavian and West Germanic. However, in some aspects German (and Luxembourgish, Yiddish) cluster with Insular Scandinavian while Mainland Scandinavian is structurally closer to the rest of the West Germanic languages. Adnominal usage of pronouns and their usage as independent constituents is only in rare cases morphologically distinguished, for example, English adnominal possessive your versus independent pronouns yours.
Article
Abstract Nouns in the Romance Languages
Philipp Burdy
Abstract words such as Fr. livraison ‘delivery’, It. fedeltà ‘faithfulness’, Sp. semejanza ‘resemblance’, belong to the word class of nouns. They do not possess materiality and therefore lack sensory perceivability. Within the spectrum of nouns, abstract nouns are located on the opposite side of proper names; between them, there are common nouns, collective nouns, and mass nouns. Abstract nouns are in part non-count and not able to be pluralized.
In terms of meaning, there is typically a threefold division in groups: (a) Action/result nouns (e.g., Fr. lavage ‘washing’, It. giuramento ‘oath’, Sp. mordedura ‘bite’); (b) Quality nouns (e.g., Fr. dignité ‘dignity’, It. biancore ‘whiteness’, Sp. modestia ‘modesty’); and (c) Status nouns (e.g., Fr. episcopat ‘episcopate’, It. cuginanza ‘cousinhood’, Sp. almirantazgo ‘admiralship’). From a purely morphological standpoint, a classification of abstract nouns according to derivation basis appears suitable: (a) (primary) denominal abstract nouns (e.g., Fr. duché ‘dukedom’, It. linguaggio ‘language’, Sp. añada ‘vintage’); (b) (primary) deadjectival abstract nouns (e.g., Fr. folie ‘madness’, It. bellezza ‘beauty’, Sp. cortesía ‘courtesy’); and (c) (primary) deverbal abstract nouns (e.g., Fr. mouvement ‘movement’, It. scrittura ‘writing’, Sp. venganza ‘revenge’). Other abstract nouns arise from conversion, for example, Fr. le devoir ‘duty’, It. il freddo ‘coldness’, Sp. el cambio ‘change’.
In light of this, the question of how far the formation of abstract nouns in Romance languages follows Latin patterns (derivation with suffixes) or whether new processes emerge is of particular interest. In addition, the individual Romance languages display different preferences in choosing abstract-forming morphological processes. On the one hand, there is a large number of Latin abstract-forming suffixes whose outcomes preserve the same function in the Romance languages, such as -ía (astrología ‘astrology’), -ura (scriptura ‘writing’), -ĭtia (pigrĭtia ‘sloth’), -io (oratio ‘speaking’). Furthermore, there is a group of Latin suffixes that gave rise to suffixes deriving abstract nouns only in Romance. Among these are, for example, -aticu (Fr. péage ‘road toll’, Sp. hallazgo ‘discovery’), -aceu (Sp. cuchillazo ‘knife thrust’), -aria (Sp. borrachera ‘drunkenness’, It. vecchiaia ‘old age’). On the other hand, suffixless processes of abstract noun formation are coming to full fruition only in Romance: The conversion of past participles (e.g., Fr. vue ‘sight’, It. dormita ‘sleep’, Sp. llegada ‘arrival’) is of special importance. The conversion of infinitives to nouns with abstract meaning is least common in Modern French (e.g., penser ‘thought’) and most common in Romanian (iertare ‘pardon’, durere ‘pain’, etc.). Deverbal noun formation without suffixes (Fr. amende ‘fine’, It. carica ‘charge’, Sp. socorro ‘help’, etc.), in contrast, is known to have developed a broad pan-Romance geographic spread.
Article
Clause Types (and Clausal Complementation) in Germanic
Julia Bacskai-Atkari
Clauses can fulfill various functions in discourse; in most cases, the form of the clause is indicative of its discourse function. The discourse functions (such as making statements or asking questions) are referred to as speech acts, while the grammatical counterparts are referred to as clause types (such as declarative or interrogative). Declarative clauses are canonical (that is, they are syntactically more basic than non-canonical ones): they are by default used to express statements, and they represent the most unmarked word order configuration(s) in a language. Other clause types, such as interrogatives, can be distinguished by various means, including changes in the intonation pattern, different (non-canonical) word orders, the use of morphosyntactic markers (such as interrogative words), as well as combinations of these, as can be observed across Germanic. The explicit marking of clause types is referred to as clause typing, and it affects both the syntactic component of the grammar and its interfaces.
Apart from main clauses, which can correspond to complete utterances, there are also embedded clauses, which are contained within another clause, referred to as the matrix clause: matrix clauses can be either main clauses or embedded clauses. Embedded clauses may be argument clauses, in which case they are selected by a matrix element (such as a verb), but they can also be adjunct clauses, which modify some element in the matrix clause (or the entire matrix clause).
Embedded clauses fall into various clause types. Some of these can also be main clauses, such as declarative clauses or interrogative clauses. Other embedded clause types do not occur as main clauses, as is the case for relative clauses or comparative clauses. Clause typing in embedded clauses has two major aspects: embedded clauses are distinguished from matrix clauses and from other embedded clause types. Main clauses can be typed in various—syntactic and non-syntactic—ways, but Germanic languages type embedded clauses by morphosyntactic means intonation plays little, if any, role. These morphosyntactic markers fall into various categories according to what roles they fulfill in the clause. Germanic languages show considerable variation in morphosyntactic markers, depending on the clause type and the variety, and in many cases, such markers can also co-occur, resulting in complex left peripheries.
Article
Conversion in Germanic
Martina Werner
In Germanic languages, conversion is seen as a change in category (i.e., syntactic category, word class, part of speech) without (overt) affixation. Conversion is attested in all Germanic languages. The definition of conversion as transposition or as derivation with a so-called zero-affix, which is responsible for the word-class change, depends on the language-specific part-of-speech system as well as, as often argued, the direction of conversion. Different types of conversion (e.g., from adjective to noun) are attested in Germanic languages, which differ especially semantically from each other. Although minor conversion types are attested, the main conversion types in Germanic languages are verb-to-noun conversion (deverbal nouns), adjective-to-noun conversion (deadjectival nouns), and noun-to-verb conversion (denominal verbs). Due to the characteristics of word-class change, conversion displays many parallels to derivational processes such as the directionality of category change and the preservation of lexical and grammatical properties of the underlying stem such as argument structure. Some, however, have argued that conversion does not exist as a specific rule and is only a symptom of lexical relisting. Another question is whether two such words are related by a conversion process that is still productive or are lexically listed relics of a now unproductive process. Furthermore, the direction of conversion of present-day Germanic, for example, the identification of the word class of the input before being converted, is unclear sometimes. Generally, deverbal and deadjectival nominal conversion in Germanic languages is semantically more transparent than denominal and deadjectival verbal conversion: despite the occurrence of some highly frequent, but lexicalized counterexamples, the semantic impact of conversion is only sometimes predictable, slightly more in the nominal domain than in the verbal domain. The semantics of verb formation by conversion (e.g., whether conversion leads to causative readings or not) is hardly predictable. Overall, conversion in Germanic is considered a process with multiple linkages to other morphological phenomena such as derivation, back-formation, and inflectional categories such as grammatical gender. Due to the lack of formal markers, conversion is considered non-iconic. The different kinds of conversions are merely based on language-specific mechanisms, but what all Germanic languages share at least is the ability to form nominal conversion, which is independent of their typological characteristics as isolating-analytic versus inflectional-fusional languages. This is surprising given the crosslinguistic prevalence of verbal conversion in the languages of the world.
