Possessive pronouns in Russian-German language contact: variation or change?

Norwegian Possessive Pronouns: Phrases, Words or Suffixes?

In Norwegian, possessive pronouns can be prenominal (min bil 'my car') or postnominal (bilen min 'car.DEF my'). In the Principles and Parameters literature, the standard assumption is that possessive pronouns are prenominal in underlying structure, while the postnominal position is a result of N-movement. This paper takes a different approach. The focus is the grammatical differences between th...

Possessive Pronouns as Determiners in Japanese-to-English Machine Translation

Possessive pronouns are used as determiners in English when no equivalent would be used in a Japanese sentence with the same meaning. This paper proposes a heuristic method of generating such possessive pronouns even when there is no equivalent in the Japanese. The method uses information about the use of possessive pronouns in English treated as a lexical property of nouns, in addition to cont...

Language Change and Language Contact

The Frobenius anatomy of word meanings II: possessive relative pronouns

Within the categorical compositional distributional model of meaning, we provide semantic interpretations for the subject and object roles of the possessive relative pronoun 'whose'. This is done in terms of Frobenius algebras over compact closed categories. These algebras and their diagrammatic language expose how meanings of words in relative clauses interact with each other. We show how our ...

Language Contact and Deliberate Change

Historical linguists have always known that some linguistic changes result from deliberate, conscious actions by speakers. But the general assumption has been that such changes are relatively trivial, confined mainly to the invention or borrowing of new words, changes in lexical semantics, and the adoption of a few structural features from a prestige dialect. The goal of this paper is to show t...