Dothraki, one of the fictional languages that features in HBO’s Emmy-award winning TV series Game of Thrones, resembles a natural language in many ways. This thesis is an empirical syntactical...Show moreDothraki, one of the fictional languages that features in HBO’s Emmy-award winning TV series Game of Thrones, resembles a natural language in many ways. This thesis is an empirical syntactical investigation into one of the language’s more idiosyncratic features, namely its double marking of negation. A corpus of 46 negative Dothraki sentences was analysed to determine the position of negation with in a sentence. These results were discussed in reference to a number of theories on the syntax of negation in natural languages. This was done with the ultimate aim of discovering whether negation in Dothraki adheres to the syntactical patterns of natural languages, or whether it is constructed differently and in that way evidence of the language’s artificiality. This thesis ultimately concludes that the double marking of negation in Dothraki can be accounted for by existing theories based on negation in natural languages, arguing that Dothraki resembles languages like Berber in that NegP is the left-most phrase in the split-IP, with the subject in the specifier of TopP.Show less
In the study of the left periphery, the syntax of exclamatives is often overlooked. Although research on exclamatives exists (You 2014; Villa-García 2015), comparative research, such as that of Ono...Show moreIn the study of the left periphery, the syntax of exclamatives is often overlooked. Although research on exclamatives exists (You 2014; Villa-García 2015), comparative research, such as that of Ono & Lasnik (2006), is still even more sparse. In this paper, the left periphery of English and Spanish exclamatives will be explored. By comparing and contrasting data from the two languages, this thesis seeks to further expand upon our knowledge of the left periphery of exclamatives. Using the split CP hypothesis, first proposed by Rizzi (1997), as a framework, this paper specifically focuses on how complementizers are distributed within the left periphery of the exclamative. It explores the identification of exclamatives using the clause type’s syntactic and semantic properties as defined in Zanuttini & Portner (2003). In addition, this paper establishes that A-bar movement occurs in both English and Spanish exclamatives, while head movement occurs only in the latter. I construct data consisting of wh-exclamatives with various word orders and use native speaker input to determine whether these examples are grammatical. Based on these results I analyse the distribution of the constituents that undergo movement. The paper concludes that the syntactic structure of Spanish exclamatives can allow for topicalization and focalization, whereas that of English exclamatives cannot, and it proposes that the complementizers of English exclamatives are positioned higher than those of Spanish exclamatives without the emphatic particle que.Show less
Research master thesis | Linguistics (research) (MA)
open access
This thesis investigates the structure keep V-ing in English and the grammaticalization process of keep in this construction from a diachronic perspective. In Present-Day-English, this structure...Show moreThis thesis investigates the structure keep V-ing in English and the grammaticalization process of keep in this construction from a diachronic perspective. In Present-Day-English, this structure conveys a continuative aspectual meaning when the V-ing is characterized by an atelic Aktionsart (activities and states) and an iterative aspectual meaning when the V-ing is telic (accomplishments and achievements). This thesis was written from a Functional Discourse Grammar perspective (Hengeveld & Mackenzie 2008). Within this framework, grammaticalization is seen as the combination of contentive and formal change. Using corpus data from two historical English corpora, COLMOBAENG and COHA, comprising the Late Modern English and Present Day English periods, two stages of the grammaticalization process were observed: i. Location → Continuation, ii. Continuation → Iteration. On the contentive side, the second phase shows an increase in scope from an operator expressing phasal aspect at the layer of the Configurational property to an operator of event quantification at the layer of the States-of-Affairs. On the formal side, it has been observed that it has a very high degree of grammaticaliy based on Keizer’s criteria (Keizer 2007). Diachronically, the most relevant formal change is the combination with -ing verbs.Show less
