Non-Hierarchicality in Grammar (NonGram)

Karte von Süd- und Südostasien sowie Australien mit den markierten Standorten von Kera'a, Sanskrit, Warlpiri und Waima'a, jeweils in roten Textfeldern.

Emmy-Noether-Forschungsgruppe der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)

Start: 01.02.2019

Duration: 5 years

Lead: Prof. Dr. Uta Reinöhl

Project team: Kirsten Culhane, Naomi Peck, Maria Vollmer, and Simon Fries

T. Mark Ellison is accompanying the project as a Mercator Fellow.

Affiliation: Department of Linguistics at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg; previously at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (FB 05, Department of English and Linguistics, Language Typology)

Fries, Simon. accepted for publication. Why and how do new tense formations arise? – On the emergence of the Vedic so-called periphrastic tā́-future, Historische Sprachforschung.
Vollmer, Maria. accepted for publication. The mysterious clitic =ju/=ji in Warlpiri: Topic marker, definiteness marker, or something else?, in C. O’Shannessy, J. Gray, and D. Angelo (eds.), Projecting Voices: Studies in Language and Linguistics in Honour of Jane Simpson, Canberra: Asia-Pacific Linguistics.
Casaretto, Antje & Uta Reinöhl. Identifying discourse functions without formal clues – Secondary predicates and related functions in Vedic Sanskrit. submitted for publication.
Reinöhl, Uta, Kirsten Culhane, Simon Fries, Naomi Peck, & Maria Vollmer. Serial verbs and ‘flat’ nominal expressions – Pushing the boundaries of information packaging?, in prep.
Schnell, Stefan, Geoffrey Haig, Nils Norman Schiborr, & Maria Vollmer. 2023. Are referent introductions sensitive to forward planning in discourse? Evidence from Multi-CAST, in A. Barotto and S. Mattiola (eds.), Discourse Phenomena in Typological Perspective [Studies in Language Companion Series 227], pp. 231–268, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Vollmer, Maria. 2024. Comparing zero and referential choice in eight languages with a focus on Mandarin Chinese, Studies in Language, 48(2).351–389, doi: 10.1075/sl.21072.vol.
Culhane, Kirsten. 2022. The phonology and typological position of Waima’a consonants, Oceanic Linguistics, 61(1). 528-559, doi: 10.1353/ol.2021.0025.
Haig, Geoffrey, Maria Vollmer, & Hanna Thiele. 2022. Northern Kurdish (Kurmanji) DoReCo dataset. In Frank Seifart, Ludger Paschen, & Matthew Stave (eds.), Language Documentation Reference Corpus (DoReCo) 1.1, Berlin & Lyon: Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft & Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage (UMR5596, CNRS & Université Lyon 2), doi: 10.34847/nkl.ca10ez5t.
Louagie, Dana & Uta Reinöhl (eds.). 2022. Typologizing the Noun Phrase, special issue of Linguistics, 60(3).
Louagie, Dana & Uta Reinöhl. 2022. Typologizing nominal expressions: The noun phrase and beyond. In Dana Louagie & Uta Reinöhl (eds.), Typologizing the Noun Phrase, special issue of Linguistics, 60(3). 659-714.
Reinöhl, Uta. 2022. Locating Kera’a (Idu Mishmi) in its linguistic neighbourhood: Evidence from dialectology. In Mark Post, Stephen Morey, and Toni Huber (eds.), Ethno-linguistic Prehistory of the Eastern Himalaya. 232–263, Leiden: Brill.
Fries, Simon. 2021. Sandhi and syntax: Is there prosodic marking of morpho-syntactic relations in Old Indo-Aryan?, Die Sprache, 53(2). 153-227.
Kaland, Constantijn, Naomi Peck, T. Mark Ellison, & Uta Reinöhl. 2021. An initial exploration of the interaction of tone and intonation in Kera’a, Proc. 1st International Conference on Tone and Intonation (TAI). 132–136, doi: 10.21437/TAI.2021-27.
San, Nay, Martijn Bartelds, Mitchell Browne, Lily Clifford, Fiona Gibson, John Mansfield, David Nash, Jane Simpson, Myfany Turpin, Maria Vollmer, Sasha Wilmoth, & Dan Jurafsky. Leveraging pre-trained representations to improve access to untranscribed speech from endangered languages,Proc. 2021 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU), doi: 10.1109/ASRU51503.2021.9688301.
Peck, Naomi. 2020. “Kera’a (Arunachal Pradesh, India): Language snapshot,” Language Documentation and Description, 19. 26–34.
Reinöhl, Uta. 2020. Continuous and discontinuous nominal expressions in flexible (or ‘free’) word order languages: Patterns and correlates, Linguistic Typology, 24. 71–111.
Reinöhl, Uta. 2020. What are and what aren’t complex nominal expressions in flexible word order languages?, Language Typology and Universals, 73. 57–79.
Vollmer, Maria. 2020. Warlpiri ELAN Dictionary, online resource. [Available upon request from maria.vollmer@linguistik.uni-freiburg.de]

Conference Talks

N. Peck, Language Documentation and Archiving, 2024.
M. Vollmer, “How word order does (not) change: Warlpiri flexible word order and contact with English,” talk given at Australianist Workshop, University of Cologne, 14–15 Aug. 2023.
M. Vollmer, “A corpus-based study of flexible word order, language contact and language change in Warlpiri,” talk given at Grammatical Relations in Spoken Corpora (GRelSpoC), Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), Paris, 15–16 June 2023. [Slides]

M. Vollmer, “Language change in the flexible word order language Warlpiri,” talk given at 1st International Emerging Research in Australian Studies Workshop, University of Cologne, 16 Sept. 2022.
M. Vollmer, “The diversity of left dislocation and its discourse functions in Warlpiri,” talk given at 55th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Workshop Disentangling Topicality Effects, University of Bucharest, 26 Aug. 2022.
M. Vollmer, “Language contact, language change and flexible word order in Warlpiri,” talk given at 25th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, University of Oxford, 1–5 Aug. 2022.
U. Reinöhl, K. Culhane, S. Fries, N. Peck, and M. Vollmer, “Emmy Noether group paper: One New Idea Constraint and flat multi-word expressions,” talk given at Emmy Noether Workshop of the ‘Non-Gram’ Group, University Freiburg, 11 Apr. 2022.
M. Vollmer, “Discourse structure in Warlpiri and the clitic =ju: Euphony, topic, focus, or definiteness?,” talk given at Emmy Noether Workshop of the ‘Non-Gram’ Group, University Freiburg, 11 Apr. 2022.
U. Reinöhl, K. Culhane, S. Fries, N. Peck, and M. Vollmer, “Serial verbs and ‘flat’ nominal expressions – Pushing the boundaries of semantic packaging?,” oral presentation at CCLS Lecture Series, Universität zu Köln, 5 July 2021.
M. Vollmer, “Word order variation in Warlpiri,” oral presentation at Corpus Linguistics Summer School 2021, Centre for Corpus Research, University of Birmingham, UK, 7 July 2021.
U. Reinöhl, K. Culhane, S. Fries, N. Peck, and M. Vollmer, “Serial verbs and ‘flat’ nominal expressions – Pushing the boundaries of semantic packaging?,” oral presentation at Vortragsreihe der Freiburger Sprachwissenschaften [Lecture Series of Freiburg Linguistics]: Language and Communication, 10 June 2021.
M. Vollmer, “Understanding morphosyntactic variation in a temporally and spatially representative Warlpiri corpus: A preliminary report on word order in clauses,” oral presentation at First Global Australian Languages Workshop, Yale University, 17–20 May 2021. [Slides]
N. Peck, K. Culhane, and M. Vollmer, “Comparing cues: A mixed methods study of intonation unit boundaries in three typologically diverse languages,” oral presentation at AG 10a Prosodic Boundary Phenomena at the 43rd Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society, Freiburg, 23–26 Feb. 2021. [Second and third author ordered alphabetically; Slides]
N. Peck, “The phonetics and phonology of Mindri, a dialect of Kera’a (Idu),” oral presentation at ICSTLL53, University of North Texas, 2020. [Online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQdzfjKntxc
M. Vollmer, “Language contact and change in Warlpiri,” oral presentation at 16. Sprachwissenschaftliche Tagung für Promotionsstudierende, Wien, 2020.
U. Reinöhl and M. Vollmer, “NonGram: Construction formation without word class distinction (in Warlpiri),” poster presentation at CoEDL Fest 2020, University of Queensland, 2–7 Feb. 2020.
S. Schnell, G. Haig, N. Schiborr, and M. Vollmer, “Discourse: Introducing new referents: A corpus-based cross-linguistic perspective,” talk given at 53rd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE), online, 26 Aug.–1 Sept. 2020. [Online: https://osf.io/jwbn9/
M. Vollmer, “A re-assessment of the rate of zero arguments in Mandarin Chinese,” talk given at The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, 20 Feb. 2020.
N. Peck, “Problematising the typology of comparison: The lexicalisation of implicit comparison,” poster presentation at 13th Conference of the Association of Linguistic Typology, University of Pavia, 2019.
M. Vollmer, “Warlpiri – Project work and PhD topic,” oral presentation at Non-hierarchicality in Grammar. Construction formation without word class distinction across categories and languages. 1st Workshop, 26–27 Sept. 2019.

This project investigates the range of variation in non-hierarchical syntax through cross-linguistic and cross-categorical comparison. “Non-hierarchical syntax” describes the phenomenon where lexemes of the same kind—i.e., the same word class—are combined into complex syntactic constructions without further modifications (such as special morphological marking or compound formation). For example, in the Austronesian language Wooi, it is possible to combine several “verbal” lexemes within one sentence, e.g., huo mai thau (‘lift come put’), a phenomenon known as “verb serialization.” In other languages, such as the Australian Warlpiri, multiple “nominal” lexemes can be combined, e.g., kurdu-ngku wita-ngku (child.ERG small.ERG), which can be translated as either ‘small child’ or ‘childlike small thing.’

Non-hierarchical constructions of this kind are largely absent in European languages, where complex expressions typically consist of lexemes from different word classes (in the absence of additional adjustments). For example, warm days consists of an adjective and a noun, and runs fast consists of a verb and an adverb. Such more strictly subcategorized word-class systems have been central to syntactic theory for over half a century, with it often taken for granted that, for instance, a noun phrase is projected from a single N element or a VP from a single V.

But how are constructions structured that consist of multiple Ns or multiple Vs? Is there perhaps no hierarchical structure at all in such cases? What semantic patterns occur? And which factors determine which element takes which syntagmatic position? Research into non-hierarchical syntax across languages and categories promises new insights into what may be the most fundamental syntactic mechanism of human language: the construction of complex structures from individual building blocks. This project represents the first detailed investigation of the variation spectrum of non-hierarchical syntax. Important theoretical foundations include work on flexible word classes, verb serialization, non-configurationality, and the encoding of entities versus actions.

Four language corpora are examined by the project team to identify which structures are category- or language-specific and which may be general features of non-hierarchical syntax. The focus on a small number of languages follows directly from the state of research: since this topic has so far been little explored in depth, detailed qualitative studies are initially required. The chosen languages are Vedic Sanskrit (Indo-European, studied by Prof. Dr. Uta Reinöhl and Simon Fries) and Warlpiri (Pama-Nyungan, studied by Maria Vollmer) for expressions describing entities, and Waima’a (Austronesian, studied by Kirsten Culhane) and Kera’a (Sino-Tibetan, studied by Naomi Peck) for those expressing actions.