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Non-Hierarchicality in Grammar (NonGram)

Key information

Emmy-Noether Research Group funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)

Start: February 1, 2019

Duration: 5 years

Head: Prof. Dr. Uta Reinöhl

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

T. Mark Ellison is associated with the project as a Mercator Fellow.

Location: Department of General Linguistics, University of Freiburg; previously at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz.

The Project

The NonGram Project will result in the first detailed investigation of the phenomenon of non-hierarchical syntax across languages and semantic categories. “Non-hierarchical” syntax is found when lexemes of the same syntactic category are combined into complex constructions without any further linguistic adaptation such as the addition of formal marking or prosodic integration into compounds. Studying non-hierarchical syntax across languages and semantic categories will allow new insights into what is perhaps the most basic syntactic mechanism of human speech, the formation of larger wholes from individual building blocks. How are complex constructions formed from multiple Ns or Vs? Is there no hierarchicality found at all? What semantic structures do we find? How are elements assigned their syntagmatic slots?

Non-hierarchical constructions are mostly absent from major European languages, including English. In such languages, complex constructions normally consist of lexemes from different word classes, e.g. the entity warm days consists of an adjective and a noun, and the event runs fast of a verb and an adverb. Such sub-divided word class systems have stood at the centre of over half a century of syntactic theorising, where it is often taken for granted that an NP is projected from a single element N, or a VP from a single V. However, in Wooi (Austronesian, Indonesia), several “verbal” elements can be concatenated in a serial verb construction to express a single event, e.g. huo mai thau ‘lift come put’. In other languages like Warlpiri (Pama-Nyungan, Australia), several “nominal” elements may be combined to denote a single entity, e.g. kurdu-ngku wita-ngku ‘child.ERG small.ERG’, translatable idiomatically as either ‘small child’ or ‘childish small thing’. These findings challenge the notion of hierarchical syntax that NPs or VPs are always projected from and thus dependent on single Ns or Vs. They imply that some languages may organise their verbal or nominal material in a non-hierarchical way.

As non-hierarchicality has only been marginally explored across languages and semantic categories,  project members are examining this issue in depth using a corpus from their selected language to gauge whether phenomena are category-specific, language-specific or more commonly attested. Entity-denoting constructions are undergoing investigation in Vedic Sanskrit (Indo-European, India) by Prof. Dr. Uta Reinöhl and Simon Fries, and in Warlpiri (Pama-Nyungan, Australia) by Maria Vollmer, while event-denoting constructions are being studied in Waima’a (Austronesian, Timor-Leste) by Kirsten Culhane and in Kera’a (Sino-Tibetan, India) by Prof. Dr. Uta Reinöhl and Naomi Peck.

Project-related publications and conference talks

Publications

Conference talks

  • Peck, Naomi. 2024. Language Documentation and Archiving.
  • Vollmer, Maria. 2023. How word order does (not) change: Warlpiri flexible word order and contact with English. Talk given at the Australianist Workshop, University of Cologne, 14-15 August.
  • Vollmer, Maria. 2023. A corpus-based study of flexible word order, language contact and language change in Warlpiri. Talk given at the conference Grammatical Relations in Spoken Corpora (GRelSpoC), Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (INALCO), Paris, 15-16 June 2023. [Slides]
  • Vollmer, Maria. 2022. Language change in the flexible word order language Warlpiri. Talk given at the 1st International Emerging Research in Australian Studies Workshop, University of Cologne, 16 September 2022.
  • Vollmer, Maria. 2022. The diversity of left dislocation and its discourse functions in Warlpiri. Talk given at the 55th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea, Workshop Disentangling topicality effects, University of Bucharest, 26 August 2022.
  • Vollmer, Maria. 2022. Language contact, language change and flexible word order in Warlpiri. Talk given at the 25th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, University of Oxford, 1-5 August 2022.
  • Reinöhl, Uta, Kirsten Culhane, Simon Fries, Naomi Peck, and Maria Vollmer. 2022. Emmy Noether group paper: One New Idea Constraint and flat multi-word expressions. Talk given at the Emmy Noether Workshop of the “Non-Gram” Group, University Freiburg, 11 April. 
  • Vollmer, Maria. 2022. Discourse structure in Warlpiri and the clitic =ju. Euphony, topic, focus, or definiteness? Talk given at the Emmy Noether Workshop of the “Non-Gram” Group, University Freiburg, 11 April.
  • Reinöhl, Uta, Kirsten Culhane, Simon Fries, Naomi Peck, and Maria Vollmer. 2021. Serial verbs and 'flat' nominal expressions – Pushing the boundaries of semantic packaging? Oral presentation at CCLS Lecture Series, Universität zu Köln, 05.07.2021.
  • Vollmer, Maria. 2021. Word order variation in Warlpiri. Oral presentation at Corpus Linguistics Summer School 2021, Centre for Corpus Research at the University of Birmingham, UK, 7 July 2021.
  • Reinöhl, Uta, Kirsten Culhane, Simon Fries, Naomi Peck, and Maria Vollmer. 2021. 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, 10.06.2021. [All authors after the first author ordered alphabetically.]
  • Vollmer, Maria. 2021. 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, May 17-20, 2021, Yale University. Slides.
  • Peck, Naomi, Kirsten Culhane, and Maria Vollmer.1 2021. 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, 23-26 Feb 2021, Freiburg. 1Second and third author ordered alphabetically. Slides.
  • Peck, Naomi. 2020. The phonetics and phonology of Mindri, a dialect of Kera'a (Idu). Oral presentation at ICSTLL53, University of North Texas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQdzfjKntxc
  • Vollmer, Maria. 2020. Language contact and change in Warlpiri. Oral presentation at 16. Sprachwissenschaftliche Tagung für Promotionsstudierende, Wien.
  • Reinöhl, Uta and Maria Vollmer. 2020. NonGram – Construction formation without word class distinction (in Warlpiri). Poster presentation at CoEDL Fest 2020, 2-7 February, University of Queensland.
  • Schnell, Stefan, Geoffrey Haig, Nils Schiborr, and Vollmer, Maria. 2020. Discourse: Introducing new referents: A corpus-based cross-linguistic perspective. Talk held at the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europea (SLE), online, 26 August to 1 September. Online available under https://osf.io/jwbn9/.
  • Vollmer, Maria. 2020. A re-assessment of the rate of zero arguments in Mandarin Chinese. Talk held at The MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney University, 20 February 2020.
  • Peck, Naomi. 2019. Problematising the typology of comparison: the lexicalisation of implicit comparison. Poster presentation at the 13th Conference of the Association of Linguistic Typology, University of Pavia.
  • Vollmer, Maria. 2019. 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, September 26-27, 2019.