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From Utterances to Speech Acts

By Mikhail Kissine

"Kissine offers a new theory of speech acts which is philosophically sophisticated and builds on work in cognitive science, formal semantics, and linguistic typology. This highly readable, brilliant essay is a major contribution to the field."

--François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod

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Academic Paper


Title: Strong-Verb Paradigm Leveling in Four Germanic Languages: A Category Frequency Approach
Author: Antje Dammel
Institution: Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Author: Jessica Nowak
Institution: Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Author: Mirjam Schmuck
Institution: Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Linguistic Field: Syntax
Subject Language: Dutch
English
German
Swedish
Abstract: We investigated strong-verb paradigm leveling in German, Dutch, English, and Swedish, and found significant differences in ablaut leveling and class change towards the weak conjugation. Swedish favors ablaut patterns retaining a difference between the preterite and the past participle, while German, Dutch, and English favor a common vowel for both forms. In change from the strong to the weak conjugation in Swedish, the preterite is more resistant than the past participle, while in the other languages it is the reverse. We provide a unified explanation for these facts based on differences in category frequency due to the prominence or lack of an aspectual distinction between preterite and perfect.

CUP at LINGUIST

This article appears in Journal of Germanic Linguistics Vol. 22, Issue 4, which you can read on Cambridge's site or on LINGUIST .



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