Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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Inquiry into the formal and functional development of the Latin nominal suffix -ēla, including a collection of all relevant literary forms. First, it contains an overview of existing scholarship on...Show moreInquiry into the formal and functional development of the Latin nominal suffix -ēla, including a collection of all relevant literary forms. First, it contains an overview of existing scholarship on -ēla. Secondly, a descriptive account is given of -ēla's synchronic features, most notably its distribution throughout Latinity, its various morphological bases and its semantics. Thirdly, an explanation is sought for three distinct unsolved problems. For the first, -ēla's spelling alternation with -ella, a specific scenario entailing confusion with the the diminutive suffix -ellus is defended. Regarding the question whether the suffix is originally deverbal or denominal, an original deverbal character for -ēla is defended. Lastly, two distinct origins for -ēla are proposed. On the one hand, an inner-Latin source is put forward, establishing a connection between -ēla and the pre-Latin suffix *-slo-/-sla-. On the other hand, comparison with the Greek suffix -ωλή allows for the consideration of PIE origins for -ēla.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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The aim of this thesis was to propose an account for the different uses of the Greek particle μή with an intersubjective approach (Verhagen 2005). The main finding is that the analyzed...Show moreThe aim of this thesis was to propose an account for the different uses of the Greek particle μή with an intersubjective approach (Verhagen 2005). The main finding is that the analyzed constructions (complement clauses, main clauses, conditional clauses) show family resemblances for 3 characteristics: expressing undesirability, negation and/or giving the addressee responsibility. The most prototypical constructions show all three characteristics, less prototypical constructions show less (cf. Geeraerts 1997).Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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The aim of this thesis is to provide a novel account for the linguistic phenomenon that is commonly referred to as ‘fragments’. I will provide a novel account, utilising the syntax-prosody...Show moreThe aim of this thesis is to provide a novel account for the linguistic phenomenon that is commonly referred to as ‘fragments’. I will provide a novel account, utilising the syntax-prosody interface, to account for the fact that fragments appear to be derived from a larger structure. I aim to deal with some of the inadequacies of previous syntactic analyses, and to provide an account that may be better reflected in the data. The analysis that I will detail in this thesis will treat the deletion we find in fragments as prosodic deletion: such an approach has not been attempted so far. Importantly, whilst the main focus of this thesis is investigating the deletion in fragments, we will see that we may also be able to account for further cases of ellipsis, such as sluicing, right node raising and gapping.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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This thesis aims to give a syntactic account of the inflected infinitive in five Romance languages: European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Galician, Sardinian and Old Neapolitan. In these...Show moreThis thesis aims to give a syntactic account of the inflected infinitive in five Romance languages: European Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Galician, Sardinian and Old Neapolitan. In these languages, infinitives agree with their nominative subject, but lack tense, mood or aspect morphology. The analysis is based on the idea that φ-features originate on C (Chomsky 2004) and can be kept on C, shared with T or inherited by T (Ouali 2008). It is argued, however, that T in infinitival clauses is defective and therefore cannot inherit the φ-probe; this probe is instead located on another functional head (cf. Miyagawa 2010). Which functional head exactly is determined by the semantics selected for by the matrix verb. The difference in locus of the φ-probe accounts for the different word orders attested.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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Syncope, or the dropping of vowels from within a word, is one of the most distinctive features of the Lycian languages within the Anatolian branch. The exact conditions for this syncope have long...Show moreSyncope, or the dropping of vowels from within a word, is one of the most distinctive features of the Lycian languages within the Anatolian branch. The exact conditions for this syncope have long evaded linguists. This study aims to clarify the rules and restrictions regarding syncope in Lycian. The first chapter will briefly describe the Lycian language, as well as Lycia, the country where it was spoken. The second chapter will define the place of Lycian within the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. Before undertaking the description of a certain feature in a certain language, it is wise to first narrowly define that feature. This will be done in the third chapter. The fourth chapter will first give an overview of the previous scholarship on syncope in Lycian, after which a detailed analysis will be attempted. This analysis will shed light on the stress patterns of Lycian and show that syncope had worked in a specific period in the past of the language, but that it had since ceased to operate. The fifth and last chapter will summarise the conclusions. This study found that verbs were stressed on the root, or on the suffix, and that nouns were stressed penultimately. Both pre- and post-tonic syllables were syncopated if they were short at the time that syncope took place. In many cases syncope was reversed by paradigmatic levelling.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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Deze scriptie richt zich op de vraag welke factoren de opkomst en de verspreiding van het gebruik van als in plaats van dan hebben beïnvloed in comparatiefconstructies en in de betekenis van ...Show moreDeze scriptie richt zich op de vraag welke factoren de opkomst en de verspreiding van het gebruik van als in plaats van dan hebben beïnvloed in comparatiefconstructies en in de betekenis van ‘behalve’. Hoewel uit onderzoek naar het hedendaagse Nederlands naar voren komt dat het gebruik van als in comparatiefconstructies beïnvloed wordt door de regionale en sociale achtergrond van de taalgebruiker en de betekenis waarin het voegwoord wordt gebruikt (comparatief of uitsluitend), is het onduidelijk welke factoren de opkomst en de verspreiding van het gebruik van deze variant beïnvloed hebben. Daarom wordt in deze scriptie nagegaan welke factoren hierop van invloed zijn geweest. Het onderzoek wordt uitgevoerd op het gebied van de historische sociolinguïstiek, wat inhoudt dat ervan uitgegaan wordt dat de keuze voor als of dan samenhangt met genrevariatie, regionale variatie, klassevariatie, gendervariatie en leeftijdsvariatie. Ook wordt de rol van de betekenis van het voegwoord nagegaan.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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In the southern Italian dialect of Airola (Campania) feminine plural and masculine plural are distinguished by means of two phonological processes: metaphony and Raddoppiamento Fonosintattico (RF...Show moreIn the southern Italian dialect of Airola (Campania) feminine plural and masculine plural are distinguished by means of two phonological processes: metaphony and Raddoppiamento Fonosintattico (RF henceforth). They appear to be in complementary distribution and to create gender distinction in the plural of nouns; in fact, metaphony takes place in masculine plural forms, while RF marks feminine plural ones. Therefore, two distinct phenomena, one being phonological, namely metaphony, and one being phono-syntactic, namely RF, happen to interact within plural noun formation. These two processes, which developed separately, acquired, synchronically speaking, a value of gender distinction. Metaphony is a well-known phenomenon of Italian dialects, which consists in the raising or diphthongization of a stressed vowel under the influence of a non-adjacent following high vowel (Rohlfs 1966, Fanciullo 1994, Ledgeway 2009, Maiden 2010). In the dialect of Airola, it only affects mid vowels, namely /ɔ, o, e, ɛ/, and its attestation is not limited to the nominal class; it occurs, in fact, in various word categories, such as adjectives, verbs and possessive pronouns. RF is an external sandhi phenomenon which consists in the gemination of a word-initial consonant under the influence of a preceding word (Rohlfs 1970, Leone 1984, Loporcaro 1997, Borrelli 2002). In Airolano RF is lexically triggered, differently from the RF attested in Standard Italian, which occurs to be stress-induced. The aim of this thesis is to describe the two phenomena, metaphony and RF, in Airolano and to give an analysis of them in order to explain their division of labor. To do so, the processes are first analyzed separately. Then, a unified analysis is elaborated aiming to shed some light on the difference between genders in the plural of nouns. The analysis of the two phenomena will be based on data from Airolano that were collected in December 2013 and April 2014 by the author.Ten informants were selected, which were classified into four different age groups. All the recordings were, subsequently, transcribed in IPA and they appear in this form in the text. The full set of data is stored in the Italian Dialect archive of Leiden University.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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This thesis aims to present a new critical edition of the first section (anuvāka) of book (kāṇḍa) 17 of the Atharvaveda Paippalāda, a corpus of religious hymns and magical incantations dated to the...Show moreThis thesis aims to present a new critical edition of the first section (anuvāka) of book (kāṇḍa) 17 of the Atharvaveda Paippalāda, a corpus of religious hymns and magical incantations dated to the late second millenium BCE, which furnish the second-oldest body of Vedic Indian literature to survive to the present day. This thesis focuses on the first section of book 17, consisting of a great praise hymn addressed to the earth. It strives to improve the previous Indian edition (Bhattacharya 2011), by collating additional manuscript sources, providing a rigorous critical apparatus that includes all the variants found in the manuscritps, as well as an edited text based on established text-critical criteria. In addition, an analysis of the poetic meter of each verse is also provided next to each stanza, as well as a translation and detailed commentary in which I discuss the interpretation of each stanza with notes on its ritual, literary and linguistic context. Given the limited extension of the extant corpus of Vedic texts, the edition of a new text is of extreme importance, as it not only adds new information to our knowledge of the Vedic language, but also furnishes new precious linguistic material for the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European and the study of the history of its Indo-Iranian branch. Moreover, the acquisition of a philologically reliable version of such a text is a fundamental step towards any future anthropological or religious study on ancient Vedic India.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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Different speech variants can exist of one word, but how much information of these variants is actually stored in the mental lexicon of the speaker? I hypothesise that dialect makes for different...Show moreDifferent speech variants can exist of one word, but how much information of these variants is actually stored in the mental lexicon of the speaker? I hypothesise that dialect makes for different reduction patterns in the consonant cluster /st/ and that consequently, phonetic detail of reduced word forms is stored in the mind of the speaker. This was tested by a production experiment in which spontaneous speech and read speech are compared and a perception experiment in which participants had to perform a lexical decision task. Results showed that different dialects indeed show different frequencies and patterns of cluster reduction. Specifically, the Ede dialect reduced and deleted /s/ more frequently than the dialect Roosendaal. Reaction times of the third experiment showed that reduced word forms are not stored next to the canonical form. However, response data revealed that phonetic detail was influential when recognising reduced forms. I propose a hybrid model of the episodic and abstract model of storage of word forms in that phonetic detail of variants is stored next to the canonical form.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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This thesis aims to adduce new arguments to the discussion concerning the Italo-Celtic hypothesis from the nominal derivational morphology of the relevant languages. This is achieved by...Show moreThis thesis aims to adduce new arguments to the discussion concerning the Italo-Celtic hypothesis from the nominal derivational morphology of the relevant languages. This is achieved by systematically comparing the derivational morphology of the Italic and Celtic languages (predominantly Latin and Old Irish) with the aim of identifying morphological innovations that are possibly exclusive to Italic and Celtic. These shared innovations could then serve as arguments supporting the idea of an Italo-Celtic linguistic unity.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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The main objective of this thesis is to tackle the key questions that arise when one becomes aware of the omnipresence and seemingly unrestricted polysemy of the Czech reflexive marker se/si. Do...Show moreThe main objective of this thesis is to tackle the key questions that arise when one becomes aware of the omnipresence and seemingly unrestricted polysemy of the Czech reflexive marker se/si. Do all its different functions have something in common? And why are its equivalents in languages like English and Dutch exploited to a much lesser degree? Building on insights and solutions offered both by Czech structural grammarians and scholars working within different functionally oriented frameworks of present-day linguistics such as linguistic typology and Construction Grammar, the thesis attempts to draw a coherent picture of the semantic network underlying the different functions of the marker and to set this picture in a historical and crosslinguistic context.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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This thesis investigates the structure and uses of ideophones, sound-symbolic words evoking sensory imagery, in Katuena (Tunayana), an Amerindian language spoken in the Amazon basin. The Katuena...Show moreThis thesis investigates the structure and uses of ideophones, sound-symbolic words evoking sensory imagery, in Katuena (Tunayana), an Amerindian language spoken in the Amazon basin. The Katuena language has a large number of ideophones, and these are used both in story-telling and in daily conversation. The first part of this study provides an introduction to the Katuena people, their history and their language, as well as an overview of the literature on ideophones. The second part uses a corpus of Katuena and interviews with speakers to provide a comprehensive analysis of the phonological and morphological structures of Katuena ideophones, as well as their syntactic characteristics. This is followed up by an analysis of the meanings and uses of ideophones, including the ways iconicity contributes to their meanings, and the gestures which frequently accompany these sound-symbolic words.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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Discourse markers and tag questions have garnered much attention in present-day discourse analysis, but research into their ways in the past has only been conducted recently. The present study...Show moreDiscourse markers and tag questions have garnered much attention in present-day discourse analysis, but research into their ways in the past has only been conducted recently. The present study looks at discourse markers and tag questions from a socio-historical perspective, with as its focus the Late Modern English period. The study investigates five discourse markers (oh, ah, well, why, and you know) and tag questions by analyzing their distribution across four variables (gender, social class, intimacy, and setting). The corpus was created by the author by way of a selection of Jane Austen’s fictional works during a twenty-five year period (1792–1817) and has been analyzed by manual text-based analysis and by lexical analysis software. The findings indicate that there are significant correlations regarding discourse marker use and the variables gender (i.e. female speakers) and social class (i.e. lower-middle class). Furthermore, the analysis of the tag questions has demonstrated that the function of tag questions differ regarding the gender of the speaker. The study also discovered that the use of both discourse markers and tag questions are particularly a feature of the speech of silly or manipulative characters.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
2014-08-31T00:00:00Z
This thesis investigates the word order and adjectival agreement patterns in French- Dutch code switched DPs. It examines the predictions made by two theoretical frameworks: the Minimalist Program ...Show moreThis thesis investigates the word order and adjectival agreement patterns in French- Dutch code switched DPs. It examines the predictions made by two theoretical frameworks: the Minimalist Program (MP) (MacSwan 2009) and the Matrix Language Framework (MLF) (Myers-Scotton and Jake 2009) and compares these predictions to data gathered in an elicitation task and a grammaticality judgment task. This thesis is the first study investigating the adjectival agreement in code switched DPs. The results of the experiments show no unambiguous confirmation of the predictions of either framework. However, statistical analysis of the data collected in the grammaticality judgment task showed that the MP is a better predictor for the grammaticality judgments, as sentences predicted to be grammatical by the MP were rated higher than sentence predicted to be ungrammatical by the same model. This difference was statistically significant to the 5% level. There was no significant difference in rating for the predictions of the MLF. This results of the judgment task in combination with the results of previous research highlight the importance of an integration of data from both naturalistic and experimental settings. Furthermore, the lack of unambiguous results from the grammaticality judgment task argues for an integration of other experimental methodologies, such as psycho- and neurolinguistic ones.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
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This thesis carries out a linguistic survey of the ANA epigraphic material from Tayma conventionally known as Taymanitc. The following will consist of three main parts. The first part will include...Show moreThis thesis carries out a linguistic survey of the ANA epigraphic material from Tayma conventionally known as Taymanitc. The following will consist of three main parts. The first part will include a general introduction to ANA and the development of our knowledge of Taymanitic; the issue of literacy in the society of Tayma and the significance of writing will be discussed, as well as some theoretical issues concerning phylogenetic linguistic classification. The second part will be a grammatical sketch based on all the attested linguistic features in the Taymanitic corpus. Following the grammatical sketch will be a discussion of the linguistic features of Taymanitic that are relevant to classification in order to establish Taymanitic’s position in the Semitic family tree and within the subgroup of ANA. To make the texts easily accessible and to give insight into the analysis underlying the grammatical sketch, an appendix will be added containing the philological commentaries on the longer narrative texts that formed the basis of the presented grammatical sketch.Show less
