Browsing by Author "Biberauer, Theresa"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Factors 2 and 3 : towards a principled approach
    (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona & Institut Interuniversitari de Filologia Valenciana, 2019) Biberauer, Theresa
    This paper seeks to make progress in our understanding of the non-UG components of Chomsky’s (2005) Three Factors model. In relation to the input (Factor 2), I argue for the need to formulate a suitably precise hypothesis about which aspects of the input will qualify as ‘intake’ and, hence, serve as the basis for grammar construction. In relation to Factor 3, I highlight a specific cognitive bias that appears well motivated outside of language, while also having wide-ranging consequences for our understanding of how I-language grammars are constructed, and why they should have the crosslinguistically comparable form that generativists have always argued human languages have. This is Maximise Minimal Means (MMM). I demonstrate how its incorporation into our model of grammar acquisition facilitates understanding of diverse facts about natural language typology, acquisition, both in “stable” and “unstable” contexts, and also the ways in which linguistic systems may change over time.
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    Frightening or englightening? An appraisal of the functions of the military metaphor in the AIDS context
    (Stellenbosch University, Department of General Linguistics, 1996) Biberauer, Theresa
    No abstract available
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    ‘Ja-nee. No, I'm fine’ : a note on YES and NO in South Africa
    (Stellenbosch University, Department of Linguistics, 2017) Biberauer, Theresa; Van Heukelum, Marie; Duke, Lalia
    This paper considers some unusual uses of NO and YES observed in South African English (SAE) and other languages spoken in South Africa. Our objective is to highlight the fundamentally speaker-hearer-oriented nature of many of these elements, and to offer a formal perspective on their use. We also aim to highlight the value of pursuing more detailed investigations of these and other perspectival elements employed in SAE and other languages spoken in South Africa.
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    Negative exclamatives in Afrikaans : some initial thoughts
    (Stellenbosch University, Department of Linguistics, 2017) Biberauer, Theresa; Potgieter, Jean-Marie
    We consider the to date minimally discussed phenomenon of negative exclamatives in Afrikaans. Negative exclamatives superficially seem to be negative, when they are in fact positive exclamations. These structures therefore feature so-called expletive negation. Our goal is to illustrate some aspects of the phenomenon as it manifests in Afrikaans, and to demonstrate that Afrikaans’s negative exclamatives seem well behaved when considered against a broader crosslinguistic backdrop.
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    Nie sommer nie : sociohistorical and formal comparative considerations in the rise and maintenance of the modern Afrikaans negation system
    (University of Stellenbosch, Department of General Linguistics, 2016) Biberauer, Theresa
    This article has three major objectives. Firstly, it aims to describe and account for the peculiarity of the modern Afrikaans negative concord marker nie2 in the familiar Western European context. I appeal to Roberge’s (2000) diachronic proposals as the initial starting point for this oddness, showing how nie2’s putative origins as a discourse-oriented particle are synchronically reflected in the modern language, producing, among other things, what appears to be inertness in the context of Jespersen’s Cycle. This inertness leads to the interface-driven hypothesis that systems in which a structurally very high element becomes grammaticalised as a sentential Negative Concord element will not progress to the next stage of Jespersen’s Cycle, i.e. a structurally very high Negative Concord element will never take over as the “real” negation element. The article’s second objective is to demonstrate, on the basis of data from Brazilian Portuguese, Santomé, and a subset of Bantu languages, that the predictions of this hypothesis appear to be correct. At the same time, I show how crucial it is to distinguish the cyclic negation-reinforcing developments associated with Jespersen’s Cycle from non-cyclic reinforcement developments; as they may draw on the same lexical resources, this can be a challenging task, particularly where less well-studied languages are the object of investigation. The final part of the article broadens the focus, considering Afrikaans’s overall negation profile in the context of negation typology and learnability. The conclusion drawn here is that this system, which owes some of its properties to prescriptive stipulations, is a highly unusual and possibly not even naturally acquirable one.