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Manfred Sailer and Nicolas Lamoure (Frankfurt a.M.) presented a paper on “Superlative 'ever' in Dutch, French, German, and Spanish" at the 30th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar 2023.  Manfred and Nicolas look at the use of English ever in emphatic superlatives as in (1) in two Germanic and two Romance languages:

(1) a. nl: de beste opmerking ever 'the best comment ever'
       b. de: bestes Bild ever 'best picture ever'
       c. fr: la meilleure idée ever 'the best idea ever'
       d. es: la mejor foto ever 'the best picture ever'

They propose a three stage borrowing process:

• First, a constructional borrowing, which may include English adjectives and nouns.
• Second, a blend between the matrix language construction and the English construction, which still conserves ever as an English word.
• Third,  the word ever turns into a lexical borrowing and is, then, freely compatible with all constructions that allow matrix language emphatic superlative expressions such as German aller Zeiten 'of all times.'

The analysis is expressed within the modelling of social meaning proposed in Asadpour et al. 2022. It is a further develpment of Manfred and Nicolas' presentation at a DGfS workshop structural borrowing earlier this year.

Links

• Abstract of the paper: https://www.english-linguistics.de/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Sailer_Lamoure-Abstract.pdf
  (note: the analysis sketched in the abstract differs considerably from the one in the slides)
• Slides: https://www.english-linguistics.de/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/SailerLamoure_HPSG23_Slides.pdf
• HPSG 2023: https://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~fabiolah/hpsg23/index.html

References

Asadpour, Hiwa & Hassan, Shene & Sailer, Manfred. 2022. Non-wh relatives in English and Kurdish: Constraints on grammar and use. Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar 6–26. (doi:10.21248/hpsg.2022.1) (https://proceedings.hpsg.xyz/article/view/898)

Sascha Bargmann’s dissertation is now available from the university library server.
In his book, Sascha develops an argument for a consequent lexical treatment of idioms, whenever such a treatment is possible. To do this, he looks at data that have not been taken into account systematically in the previous literature.

Reference

Bargmann, Sascha. 2019. Chopping up idioms: Towards a combinatorial analysis. Frankfurt a.M.: University Library.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.21248/gups.73455

The 45th Annual Conference of the German Society of Linguistics (DGfS 2023) hosted a workshop on “Coexistence, competition and change: Structural borrowing and the dynamics of asymmetric language contact.” The workshop was organized by Hiwa Asadpour, Carolina Plaza Pust, and Manfred Sailer and is part of the activities of the initiative DALC (the Dynamics of Asymmetric Language Contact).

The workshop covered a number of very different language contact situtations, including the contact between sign-languages and spoken languages.

The workshop was not only organized by members of the IEAS, but also included two presentations and two posters by the organizers:

• Hiwa gave a presentation on “Flagging-drop typology and contact-induced change“. In this presentation, Hiwa looked at the occurrence of bare noun phrases as post-verbal TARGET arguments in typologically diverse languages Northwest Iran which have been in longterm contact. (slides)
• Hiwa was also involved in two posters: one on “Contact-induced change and structural variation in the passive constructions of Nayini” with Roohollah Mofidi (Qazvin), …
• … and one on “Contact-induced change and passivization in low-resourced languages of Iran“, with Soudabeh Eslami (Zanjan), Mansoureh Delaramifar (Sistan & Baluchestan) & Masoumeh Zarei (Tehran).
• Manfred presented joint work with Nicolas Lamoure (Frankfurt a.M.) on “Superlative “ever”: A cross-linguistic lexically anchored structural borrowing“, in which they adopt the analytic tools of Asadpour et al. 2022 to borrowing. (slides)

Links

• DALC blog: https://blog.studiumdigitale.uni-frankfurt.de/dalc/
• DGfS 2023 webpage: https://dgfs2023.uni-koeln.de/en/
• Workshop program with links to the abstracts: https://blog.studiumdigitale.uni-frankfurt.de/dalc/preliminary-program/

Gert Webelhuth’s paper on “C-command constraints in German: A corpus-based investigation” has been published ahead of print in Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft.

In the paper, Gert addresses the role of c-command constraints in the grammar of three phenomena in German: relative quantifier scope, quantificational binding, and negative polarity. He presents the results of a large corpus study that demonstrate empirically that scope of one quantifier over another, quantificational binding, and the licensing of negative polarity items in German are systematically possible in structural configurations where surface c-command cannot reasonably be assumed to obtain. Further corpus evidence shows that the non-c-commanding quantifiers in the examples typically occur in contexts where the set they quantify over is discourse-old or easy to accommodate. The overall picture that emerges from the empirical evidence is that topicality motivates wide scope, and scope rather than c-command licenses negative polarity items and bound pronouns.

The paper is published as open access and can be downloaded from https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/zfsw/0/0/html

Reference and link

Webelhuth, Gert. 2022. C-command constraints in German: A corpus-based investigation. Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 41( 2), 339-392.
https://doi-org.proxy.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/10.1515/zfs-2022-2001