Drawing upon recent insights into the role of Goal preference as reflector of cross-linguistic differences, this paper investigates the factors affecting the realization of Goals in motion event descriptions. In particular, it examines the interplay between the lexicalization pattern of a language, on the one hand, and grammatical viewpoint aspect, on the other – factors which have commonly been treated in isolation. In so doing, three typologically distinct languages were examined: English, German and Greek. The ...

The grammatical categories of our language can influence how we concep-tualize situations and events (Slobin 1996). A variety of studies have investigated the influence of grammatical aspect on event conceptualization and found language-specific perspectivation strategies (Stutterheim 2012): Speakers of languages with grammaticized aspect preferentially focus on dynamic event components, while speakers of non-aspect languages conceptualize events holistically by including an inferable resultant state in their ...

This study investigates the memorization of complex lexical items from a cross-linguistic perspective and in the context of the debate about the demarcation between morphology and syntax. For this purpose, we conducted an experimental study in which German, French and English adjective-noun/noun-adjective combinations (e.g. Jungtourist, jeune touriste, YOUNG tourist, young TOURist) were tested with respectto how well they were memorized. Using existing nouns (e.g. Architekt, architecte, architect) as a baseline, we ...

Adjective order restrictions on attributive adjectives (AORs) have been subject to debate in modern linguistic research for a long time. Most generally, the question whether AORs can be located in grammar as such in rule-based fashion is still unsettled. In the current paper, we largely argue against this view and claim that several of the core data to be explained are preferences based on norms rather than rules. A pragmatic explanation is offered to account for marked or apparently ungrammatical examples. First, ...

This paper aims at a unified analysis of the different interpretations which constructions involving the German name-mentioning modifier soge-nannt‘so-called’ can adopt. In contrast to nouns like Sepsis‘sepsis’, a noun like Hotel ‘hotel’, as insogenanntes Hotel, gives rise to a “distanced” interpretation of the construction rather than one informing about a concept’s name. After a thorough investigation of the lexical-semantic properties, we propose the reading of the construction to emerge from an interplay between ...