Talk: (Apparent) extraction of determiners from noun phrases in Old Saxon

Languages differ w.r.t. the optionality of determiners: In German, they are generally not omissible. Singular count nouns must be preceded by a determiner. Contrary to that, Russian allows singular count nouns to stand without a determiner. There is an empirical generalization that these two types of languages show different behavior for the extraction of determiners from noun phrases. Russian allows Left Branch Extraction (LBE) (Bošković, 2005: 15), German does not (Ross, 1967: 207). In my talk, I discuss the status of Old Saxon (OS) w.r.t. these two types of languages. OS has no obligatory determiners, five morphological cases and rich morphological inflection on the noun (Cathey, 2000: 29), which resembles Russian. Theoretical work on the syntax of noun phrases (Blümel, 2024) would therefore predict that determiners can be extracted from noun phrases in OS, which I tested in a corpus study with the Reference Corpus Old German (ReA) (Zeige et al., 2022). I found instances of (apparent) LBE with two types of determiners: wh-determiners and possessives. For the wh-determiners, only phonologically light adverbs and pronouns may intervene between the determiner and the noun, for the possessives, also verbs occur in this position. So LBE is possible in OS, but underlies some restrictions. This might reflect that OS could be on its way from a language of the Russian-type to one of the German-type (analyzed as NP- and DP-languages by Bošković, 2005).

Abstract

Languages differ w.r.t. the optionality of determiners: In German, they are generally not omissible. Singular count nouns must be preceded by a determiner. Contrary to that, Russian allows singular count nouns to stand without a determiner. There is an empirical generalization that these two types of languages show different behavior for the extraction of determiners from noun phrases. Russian allows Left Branch Extraction (LBE) (Bošković, 2005: 15) in (1a), German does not (Ross, 1967: 207) in (1b).

(1a) Kakie(i) čitajet on [ t(i) knigi ] ? (Russian)
'Which books does he read?'

(1b) * Welche(i) liest er [ t(i) Bücher ] ? (German)

In my talk, I discuss the status of Old Saxon (OS) w.r.t. these two types of languages. OS has no obligatory determiners, five morphological cases and rich morphological inflection on the noun (Cathey, 2000: 29), which resembles Russian. Theoretical work on the syntax of noun phrases (Blümel, 2024) would therefore predict that determiners can be extracted from noun phrases in OS, which I tested in a corpus study with the Reference Corpus Old German (ReA) (Zeige et al., 2022). I found instances of (apparent) LBE with two types of determiners: wh-determiners and possessives. For the wh-determiners, only phonologically light adverbs and pronouns like in (2) may intervene between the determiner and the noun, for the possessives, also verbs occur in this position like in (3).

(2) huilic im thar biliði uuarð fon hebanuuanga hêlag gitôgit (Hel_06, 433)
'which holy sign there was shown to them'

(3) nu ik thie hier mînemo scal iungron befelhan (Hel_66, 5614)
'Now I will entrust you to my servant here.'

So LBE is possible in OS, but underlies some restrictions. This might reflect that OS could be on its way from a language of the Russian-type to one of the German-type (analyzed as NP- and DP-languages by Bošković, 2005).

References

Blümel, Andreas (2024). Labeling Theory and the Nominal Phrase. In Jiayi Lu, Erika Petersen, Anissa Zaitsu, and Boris Harizanov (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, pp. 11–21. Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Bošković, Željko (2005). On the locality of left branch extraction and the structure of np. Studia linguistica 59(1), pp. 1–45.
Cathey, James (2000). Old Saxon. München: Lincom Europa.
Ross, John (1967). Constraints on variables in syntax. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Modern Languages and Linguistics. Thesis.
Zeige, Lars Erik, Gohar Schnelle, Martin Klotz, Karin Donhauser, Jost Gippert, and Rosemarie Lühr (2022). Deutsch Diachron Digital. Referenzkorpus Altdeutsch. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. http://www.
deutschdiachrondigital.de/rea/, Access: 24.02.2025.

Info

Day: 2025-05-16
Start time: 11:20
Duration: 00:25
Room: GWZ 2.316
Track: Syntax
Language: en

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