Search

This paper describes the morphosyntactic behavior of different semantic types of property words in a balanced sample of 36 Oceanic languages. After a brief general introduction to the functional typology of property words, I first discuss diversity in Oceanic property word classes from a family-internal perspective. In the second part of the paper, Oceanic property words are placed in a world-wide typological perspective. Specifically, I test their behavior with regard to two implicational universals proposed in the literature, concerning the relation between the encoding of predicative property words, the presence of grammatical tense, and locus of marking at the clause level. In typological studies, the Oceanic language family has been claimed to display verbal predicative property words, to lack tense, and to be head- or zero-marking, with marginal exceptions. This paper shows that, even though such an overall profile can be discerned, Oceanic property words exhibit more variation than is acknowledged in crosslinguistic research. Moreover, my findings for property word classes are fitted into a larger picture of lexical categorization in Oceanic languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely acknowledged that polarity sensitivity pertains to the lexical nature of NPI minimizers, phrases denoting a minimal quantity, extent or degree. This paper, however, proposes that so-called 'negative polarity' of Mandarin Chinese minimizers ( yi-CL-N 'one.CL+N' and yidian-N 'one.point N') is not lexically determined, but is facilitated by utilizing the existing lian... dou 'including... all' EVEN construction. Specifically, total negation is decomposed into a scalar operator lian, which evokes a set of order ranked alternatives determined in context, and the maximizing/universal operator dou 'all' that quantifies over the contextual alternatives plus the focused minimizer, which is placed at the end of the scale. The scalar minimizer syntactically scopes over the negation to represent the logic of ∀¬. This paper further distinguishes minimizers from lexical NPI renhe 'any' with respect to (i) scoping out of the negation for the former, (ii) being irrelevant to the non-veridical licensing conditions that otherwise license any and NPI- renhe, (iii) a clausemate relation between dou and negation, and (iv) the lack of intervention effects of strong quantifiers between the minimizers and negation. The study lends further support to the claim that scalar EVEN is construed with minimizers. A comparison of Chinese minimizers with those in Hindi and Japanese has an implication for varieties of coding polarity ranging from purely lexical to syntactical means crosslinguistically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to shed some new light on one of the most intricate problems in English morphology, the combinatorial properties of derivational suffixes. In an influential article, Fabb (1988) showed the inadequacy of stratificational models of English suffixation and claimed that "English suffixation is constrained only by selectional restrictions." The present paper shows that Fabb's account, though convincing with respect to the rejection of a stratified lexicon, is itself both empirically and theoretically flawed. On the basis of the analysis of a large amount of data from Lehnert (1971) and the OED2 on CD, an alternative account is proposed, which explains the patterning of the data as a result of base-driven (and not affix-driven, as with Fabb) selectional restrictions, paradigmatic morphological processes, and independent principles and constraints of English derivational morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Unlike the traditional approaches that describe and define antonymy on the basis of semantic properties of antonymous pairs in a language system, antonyms are in this paper considered with reference to their roles in actual language use. Antonymy has traditionally been regarded as a paradigmatic relation, but recent studies of antonym co-occurrence in electronic corpora of English and Serbian have identified two major and four minor functions of antonyms in discourse, with its accompanying lexico-syntactic patterns, matching the results of similar analyses in Japanese, Swedish, and Dutch. This paper aims to investigate the performance of three antonymous patterns in retrieving contrastive terms and the possibility to create the contrastive profile of given seed words in Serbian written discourse by means of those patterns. It also examines whether there is a relation between the markedness distinction between members of the antonymous pair and the position of the chosen seed word (i.e., whether it comes in the X or the Y position in the pattern). Results of the study show that it is possible to create the textual profile of antonyms using these lexico-syntactic constructions, and that the unmarked member has a richer contrastive profile in text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study addresses the extent to which the location of primary stress in Dutch, German, and English monomorphemic words is affected by the syllables preceding the three final syllables. We present analyses of the monomorphemic words in the CELEX lexical database, which showed that penultimate primary stress is less frequent in Dutch and English trisyllabic than quadrisyllabic words. In addition, we discuss paper-and-pencil experiments in which native speakers assigned primary stress to pseudowords. These experiments provided evidence that in all three languages penultimate stress is more likely in quadrisyllabic than in trisyllabic words. We explain this length effect with the preferences in these languages for word-initial stress and for alternating patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables. The experimental data also showed important intra- and interspeaker variation, and they thus form a challenging test case for theories of language variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends Slobin's (2005, Relating narrative events in translation. In Dorit D. Ravid & Hava B. Shyldkrot (eds.), Perspectives on language and language development: Essays in honor of Ruth A. Berman, 115-129. Dordrecht: Kluwer) examination of 10 satellite- and verb-framed translations of a single English text to Chinese, a language considered variously as a satellite-framed language and an equipollently framed language. The Chinese translation is examined in terms of the patterns of manner and path encoding employed in attempting to reproduce the vividness of manner description and degree of detailed path elaboration of the original source text, and in how these compare to the other languages examined in Slobin. Lexical, morphosyntactic, typological and cultural factors contributing to the overall narrative style of Chinese are examined, and an evaluation offered of the place of Chinese on proposed clines of manner and path salience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aspectual properties of English particles still lack a satisfactory account, as neither the standard (Brinton 1985, Verb particles in English: Aspect or aktionsart? Studia Linguistica 39(2). 157-168. doi:10.1111/j.1467- 9582.1985.tb00750.x (accessed 30 January 2015)) nor a more recent (Cappelle and Chauvin 2010, Interprétations aspectuelles des verbes à particule en anglais: Téliques, comparatifs, résultatifs. In Pascale Hadermann, Olga Inkova, Michel Pierrard & Dan Van Raemdonck (eds.), Approches de la scalarité, 249-281. Geneve: Droz) account can be generalized over all aspectual particles. By analyzing aspect in terms of scalarity this paper argues that particles are either scalar or non-scalar, which leads to their different aspectual and syntactic behavior. Scalar particles are marked for scalarity; they can affect the argument structure of the verb root and enforce telicity. In contrast, nonscalar particles are unmarked for scalarity; they do not affect the argument structure and do not enforce telicity. Both scalar and non-scalar particles systematically appear in atelic and telic sentences, depending on the verb root and its arguments. Scalarity, like telicity, is a feature built compositionally and monotonically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an analysis of transparent gerunds in Spanish, as in ¿Qué llegó [silbando ] Juan? 'What arrived [whistling ] Juan?', using a decomposition of Aktionsart in a series of syntactic heads. A traditional analysis of these secondary predicates as adjuncts would undermine well-established syntactic principles restricting movement and extraction. We argue that these transparent gerunds should be analyzed as syntactic constituents merged as part of the syntactic projections associated with Aktionsart. More precisely, they qualify as RhemePs - assuming Ramchand's First Phase Syntax system - thus allowing their arguments to be extracted. Well-attested differences between Spanish and English gerunds will be explained in our analysis by proposing that the Spanish gerund projects as PathP (given it carries a path preposition), whereas English gerunds are simply RhemeP (lacking any sort of preposition). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationships among lexical classes, argument structures, and sin tactic constructions. Focusing on the ditransitive construction in English, Chinese, and Spanish, the author shows that the interpretation of indirect object of certain classes of verbs, such as transference verbs and state-changing verbs, is goal in English, source in chinese, and either goal or source in Spanish. In addition, creation verbs, but not consuming verbs, are permitted in the English ditransitive construction. In contrast, consuming verbs, but not creation verbs, are permitted in the chinese ditransitive construction. Spanish allows both classes. The author attributes the contrast to the interactions between lexical meaning and construction meaning. In particular, the author argues that the default meaning of the ditransitive construction is transference to the referent qj the indirect object in English, transference from the referent of the indirect object in chinese, and simply transference, without a specification for direction, in Spanish. creation verbs, for example, are compatible with the transference-to meaning and are thus acceptable in the English but not the Chinese ditransitive construction; consuming verbs are compatible with the transfrrence-from meaning and are thus allowed in the chinese but not the English ditransitive construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the consequences of unspecified syntactic features for an analysis of Japanese light-verb constructions. In Japanese, θ-assigning nouns (verbal nouns or VNs) combine with the light verb suru `do' to form hundreds of clausal predicates. A VN can appear adjacent to suru and caseless, or be marked with accusative case. In the second instance, the VN may or may not form a constituent with one of its complements. Prior research into the syntax of these constructions has focused on (V whether tile relationship between the VN and tile Jig/it verb is derived in the lexicon or is established in the syntax, and (ii,) if the latter, whether the several construct ions involving VNs are syntactically related. The position adopted here is that VN-plus-suru combinations are syntacticc and further that the extraordinary syntactic behavior of VNs, as well as their ability to generate three superficial structures from a single underlying form, is attributable to their categorial features [N] or [V] remaining unspecified in the lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on three explicitly defined types of VO sequences in Chinese: (1) words, (2) idiom phrases, and (3) dual status -- words and phrases (Huang 1984; Her 1992, 1993), this paper argues for a lexicalist synchronic account of this variation. Diachronically this variation is the consequence of two competing processes, lexicalization and ionization (Her 1993); synchronically, however, the two process-oriented solutions, lexicalization and ionization, both deft generalization and complicate the grammar, leaving lexical listing a better alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a broad consensus that native speakers' knowledge of the grammatical system of their language is predominantly implicit, i.e., unconscious and acquired incidentally rather than intentionally. Word meaning, in contrast, is regarded as the paradigm case of explicit, or declarative, knowledge (although some aspects of lexical knowledge, e.g. collocations and grammatical features, may be implicit). This paper presents evidence that knowledge of word meanings can also be implicit. 63 undergraduate students were given a self-evaluation task in which they were asked to assess their own knowledge of low frequency words, followed by a multiple-choice test providing an objective measure of their knowledge of the same words; they were asked to guess if they did not know the meaning of a word. Results indicate that even when participants claimed to be guessing, their performance was significantly above chance, indicating the existence of implicit knowledge by the guessing criterion (Dienes 2008). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore from a synchronic perspective the GET construction of Modern Irish and the GET construction in the contact language Irish English. These productive GET constructions have two core senses ('HAVE' and 'BECOME'). There are no morphosyntactic indicators to identify either sense yet a language user of Irish or Irish English will have no difficulty unpacking the correct meaning. There is a constructional indicator. One sense is that of a simple recipient construction (non-passive) whereas the other is more passive-like in that the subject=undergoer of the construction undergoes a change of state. A result state is an outcome of the verbal action but it is not always expressed with a resultative adjective. The state is elaborated by the second argument of the verb. In functional models of grammar we expect the verb to project an argument structure and reflect an associated semantics based on the verb's lexical entry but we provide instances where a constructional perspective seems best to explain the behavior of this particular GET verb and its meaning in a clausal construction. We claim that the GET construction of Irish English and the GET construction of Modern Irish are related within a synchronic perspective, reflecting a unique cognitive perspective on bilingual lexicon architecture and the role of constructions. We provide an account of both language constructions and argue that a characterization grounded within functional account (Van Valin 2005) with a robust lexical constructional perspective (Goldberg 1995; Michaelis 2006; Van Valin 2005; Nolan 2011c), that mediates the relationship between lexicon and construction, best explains the relationship between these constructions across the two languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an overview of the history and usage of the Estonian verb saama 'to get'. We take the grammaticalization approach which posits that, diachronically, the language unit undergoing grammaticalization becomes more and more abstract, both semantically and functionally. Here we present the grammaticalization story of what was originally a motion verb, which becomes a modal and future auxiliary through various transitional stages. Among the lexical meanings of the verb saama, succeed, possess, and become are the most important in modern Estonian. Among the grammatical functions, the modal uses stand out: the auxiliary verb saama together with the da-infinitive ( inf1) of the main verb are used in constructions expressing both participant-internal and participant-external possibility and necessity as well as in epistemic constructions. Furthermore, the present article addresses the resultative-passive constructions of saama with the active past participle ( app/- nud) and passive past participle ( ppp/- tud). We present the process of grammatical replication that took place during the period of older Estonian (16th to 19th century) under the influence of German as a contact language. In the translations of religious texts from this period, the verb saama was introduced into written Estonian as a fully grammaticalized auxiliary verb expressing future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Complementary distribution stems .from two sources. The first is a consequence of static lexical regularities such that two sounds never appear in the same context. The second is from dynamic alternations induced by morphological derivation. In this paper I provide evidence from New York English, Akan, Madurese, and Malay that these two sorts of relationship among sounds possess distinct phonological properties. Sounds engaged in a static complementary relationship remain nonalternating upon reduplication/truncation, thus maintaining identity between a base and its relation. By contrast, dynamic phonotactic constraints induce identity defeating alternations, provided the triggering context is present upon reduplication/truncation. These observations show that approaches that posit base-reduplicant/truncatum identity constraints miss the proper generalization regarding reduplicative and truncatory patterning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ingush (Nakh-Daghestanian, Caucasus) offers a variety of contexts with contrast, variation, or speaker choice between agreement and non-agreement and between overt and null arguments, which provide speakers many opportunities to manipulate agreement and argument marking. Ingush discourse is therefore a good test case for the plausible hypothesis that agreement and overt arguments are in complementary distribution. I survey referential density in a corpus of about 5000 words and find no evidence of either straightforward complementarity or expected incidental effects of such complementarity, and some evidence going against it. Some additional, orthogonal distributions were evident, showing that the corpus is large enough to reveal discourse effects if they were present. Ingush agreement is in gender, not person, and there is an arbitrary and strictly lexical bifurcation of verbs into those that do and those that do not have gender agreement; these typological points raise comparative and theoretical issues of interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the development of verbs in the early periods of lexical and syntactic development (from 13 to 25 months) in children acquiring Korean as their first language. Specifically, it investigates three topics: the developmental pattern of verbs in the early lexicon, the morphological properties of early verbs, and the syntactic role of early word combinations. The data show that verbs constitute a significant proportion of the early lexicon in Korean and form a distinct morphological class. Verbs are also productive in multiword combinations from the beginning and occupy a consistent position in utterances. Syntactic analyses show that transitive and intransitive verbs participate in distinct argument structures. Thus, contrary to claims that verbs are universally acquired later than nouns, children learning Korean acquire verbs from the earliest stages of language production and accord them consistent and systematic morphological and syntactic treatment. The paper explores several language-specific characteristics of the input that could explain the early acquisition of verbs in Korean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How children learn the category "verb" as a grammatical construct has been the focus of much research over the past two decades. However, less attention has been paid to acquisition of smaller categories within the verb category. This paper uses data concerning the acquisition of causatives in Inuktitut to address the question of how smaller categories of verbs are learned Inuktitut has one class of verbs that permits only a morphological causative, and a second class that permits either a morphological or a lexical causative depending on the semantics of the situation. Data from eight Inuktitut-speaking children aged 1;0 through 3;6 indicate that the distinction between these classes is acquired in three stages. During the first stage, the children use only lexical causatives and there is no evidence that they understand that these structures have a causative meaning component. During the second stage, they use the morphological causative indiscriminately across verb categories to issue commands. In addition, they begin to show productivity in their use of lexical causatives in that they alternate between intransitive and lexical-causative uses of the same verb root. By stage three, children have begun to distinguish the two classes of verbs with respect to causative constructions. Across the three stages outlined above, children apparently learn to use linguistic indicators of causation first in a situation-based way (i.e. for issuing commands) and later verb-by-verb, rather than employing a class-based approach to category formation. These results are analyzed in terms of similar studies in English and Hebrew, and in terms of a general phasal approach to cognitive and linguistic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a brief discussion of the issues related to the lexical classification of Mandarin verb complements, this paper discusses the functions of the verb complements in grammar: (a) they expand the meaning of the head verb of the V- V compound and consequently change the Aktionsart of the VP from activity to simple change and complex change; (b) the different stresses on markedness with the simple verb emphasizing the process of the action and the V- V compound emphasizing the result of the action reflect the fundamental ways of viewing situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subject-verb (SV) and verb-subject (VS) structures differ where agreement is concerned. The question to be answered is why languages display less verbal agreement in VS structures than in SV structures. Within a government-binding framework, the problem has been accounted for (e.g. by Koopman and Sportiche 1991) by arguing that there is a real Spec-Head agreement relationship in SV structures (with the subject in the specifier position and the verb in the head of a functional projection) but a government relationship in VS structures (with the moved verb governing the subject position). In this paper, 1 explain the different agreement patterns in Arabic, Kirundi/Kinyarwandi, and Belfast English through a modification of the minimalist framework (cf. Chomsky 1992). I argue that in VS structures, expletives are responsible for the agreement (and the "breakdown" of agreement). Expletives, which may for instance be specified for singular number, are inserted and check some of the phi features. The other features are checked after the NP moves at LF. "Dividing tip" the agreement (or phi) features accounts for a number of "breakdowns" in agreement in the other two languages as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevailing approach to understanding the syntactic mapping of arguments and argument alternations is to assume that verbs are organized into semantically distinct verb classes and that class membership determines the grammatically of argument alternations. This paper presents syntactic evidence that verb-class membership cannot explain the causative and locative alternations, and that alternate mappings are based on the characteristics of the particular event the predicate denotes rather. than on the verb's semantics. Once argument mapping is understood properly as implicating event structure, verb classes become superfluous, and one need not posit alternation operations that create a derived form from a more bask lexical item. I further argue against universal mapping principles based on semantic roles, such as Baker's (1988) UTAH, and for universal event-based mapping principles. Finally, I show that a theory of event-structure mapping has broad implications for acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the issue of the relative "naturalness" of affixation and stein change as the expression of morphological categories. According to some accounts, affixation involves symbolic rules that are stored separately from lexically represented morphemes to which they are applied, and that thus enjoy a processing and acquisition advantage over stem changes. By a lexical account, inflected words are stored as lexical units, regardless of whether the inflection is by affixation or stem change, nicking the two morphological processes equally easy to acquire and generalize. We argue that the reason stein changes are less common in the languages of the world is that the grammaticization process by which morphological processes are created forms affixes more readily than stein changes. Stem changes are more difficult for children to acquire because they typically have lower type frequency. When type and token frequency were controlled in an experiment in which subjects learned plural morphology in an artificial language, we found that while type frequency affected the likelihood that suffixes would be generalized to new instances, overall suffixes and stein changes were equivalent in generalizability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions of English word formation include a category of neoclassical compounds to deal with formations such as geology and telephone. This type is claimed to show behavior that makes it clearly distinct from both affixation and compounding. A close examination of actual words suggests that this picture is oversimplified. Rather than there being a discrete class of neoclassical compounds, there is a range of types of lexical enrichment, and every category has a fuzzy boundary. Accordingly, it is suggested here that it may be useful to view English words as being formed within a conceptual space defined b three dimensions: a simplex-compound dimension, a native-foreign dimension and an abbreviated-nonabbreviated dimension. Neoclassical compounding is a label given to one small section within this three-dimensional space, but actual words diverge from the prototype considerably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A key parameter in received classifications of language types is the expression of pronominal subjects. Here we compare variation patterns in conversational data of English – considered a non-null-subject language – and Spanish – a well-studied null-subject language. English has a patently lower rate of expression (approximately 3% unexpressed 1sg and 3sg human subjects vs. 60% in Spanish). Despite the stark difference in rate of expression, the same probabilistic constraints are at work in the two languages. Contrary to popular belief, VP coordination is neither a discrete nor a distinguishing category of English. Instead, a shared constraint is linking with the preceding subject, a refinement of accessibility to include, alongside coreferentiality, measures of structural connectedness – both prosodic and syntactic. Other shared constraints on unexpressed subjects are coreferential subject priming (a tendency to repeat the form of the previous mention) and lexical aspect (reflecting the contribution of a temporal relationship to subject expression). Where the languages most differ is in the envelope of variation. In English, besides coreferential-subject verbs conjoined with a coordinating conjunction, unexpressed subjects are limited to prosodic initial-position in declarative main clauses, a restriction that is absent in Spanish. We propose that the locus of cross-language comparisons is the variable structure of each language, defined by the set of probabilistic constraints but also the delimitation of the variable context within which these are operative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This corpus-driven computational study addresses the question of why some verbs in some languages participate in the causative alternation while their counterparts in other languages do not. The results of this study suggest that the lexical property that underlies this variation is the probability of external causation. Alternating verbs are distributed on a scale of increasing probability for an external causer to occur. The probability of external causation can be empirically assessed in two ways, among others: first, by observing the typological distribution of causative and anticausative morphological markings across a wide range of languages; second, through the frequency distribution of causative and anticausative uses of the alternating verbs in a corpus of a single language. Our study reveals that these two measures are correlated. Moreover, we demonstrate that the corpus-based measure is applicable to a wide range of verbs. Extending the corpus-based investigation comparatively across two languages, English and German, we find that the frequencies of crosslinguistic realizations of lexical causatives are modulated by the probability of external causation, an underlying parameter assigned to verb types. Finally, we propose a probabilistic graphical model that clusters verbs based on the relation between the crosslinguistic distribution of their causative and anticausative realizations and the probability of external causation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the longstanding problems in linguistic analysis is to identify, describe, and analyze the lexical aspect classes allowed in natural language. Recent developments on this issue have raised two interrelated questions: how many event classes there are and how they are derived from a minimum of primitives. In this article, we identify a class of predicates denoting the maintenance of a situation through which 13 tests can be shown to display mixed properties between states and activities, challenging the existing taxonomies of aspectual classes. We furthermore argue that the existence of this class is expected by any theory that treats aspectual classes as epiphenomena of the combination of a restricted set of primitives, and propose an analysis where they contain a central coincidence preposition selected by an eventive layer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coercion is a much-discussed topic in the linguistic literature. This article expands the usual range of cases at the most subtle and the extreme end: it demonstrates how coercion extends into semantic flexibility on the one hand and into idiomaticity on the other. After discussing a broad variety of coercion cases in syntax and morphology and briefly reviewing the equally diverse literature, we identify three mechanisms - selection, enrichment, and override - that have alternatively been proposed to account for coercion effects. We then present an approach that combines all three mechanisms, arguing that they can be unified along a single axis: the degree of top-down influence of complex structures on lexical semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present survey of the uses of the Norwegian verb få 'get' is based on its converse relationship to the three-place achievement predicate gi 'give', which combines with an agentive subject, a recipient indirect object and a direct object. The syntactic constructions in which få appears and their relative frequency of occurrence are described on the basis of a corpus consisting of 779 examples from works of present-day Norwegian fictional and nonfictional prose. About 60% of the examples have NP or PP arguments only and about 40% show, in addition or only, a nonfinite verb form. The former group of constructions comprises numerous examples representing syntactically complex lexical predicates. The latter group consists of four different construction types that show grammaticalization features: causative with an infinitive with the marker å ( å-infinitive); modal with the bare infinitive; 'recipient passive' with a passive past participle; and 'resultative active' with an active past participle. In addition, there is an 'infinitival relative' construction where an å-infinitive is adjoined to the object of få. These various types of constructions are investigated with regard to the extent to which the arguments of få reflect or deviate from the semantic properties of gi in the basic use of this verb as a three-place achievement predicate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article delineates the internal structure of mensural classifiers in Manda-rin Chinese by arguing that each mensural classifier in Mandarin Chinese contains a silent semantic primitive SCALE, which can be modified by a restricted set of gradable adjectives. Viewing this silent scalar element as a grammatical object explains away a set of puzzles in Chinese linguistics, including the restricted use of adjectives before mensural classifiers, the seem-ingly free distributional patterns of verbal measure phrases, and the number indeterminacy in the verb reduplication construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses definitions of grammaticalization, pragmaticalization and (inter)subjectification in order to clarify the relations between these terms. While grammaticalization is defined as a functionally motivated, complex type of language change, (inter)subjectification is shown to be a specific type of semantic change. Pragmaticalization, finally, is argued to represent a subclass of grammaticalization, which displays essential core features of grammaticalization processes, but is distinguished from other subtypes of grammaticalization processes by specific characteristic traits (concerning function and domain as well as syntactic integration). This is demonstrated by a survey of the diachronic development of several modal particles in German (among them aber, eben, ruhig). The more general theoretical stance taken here is that the notion of grammar and hence grammaticalization has to be conceived broad enough in order to encompass this type of discourse functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a critical assessment of previous claims that complement-taking mental predicates (CTMPs) like I think, I suppose, etc. are instances of grammaticalization. In so doing, it calls attention to the main problems one encounters when applying commonly agreed-upon grammaticalization criteria to CTMPs. It is demonstrated that the syntactic mobility of CTMPs is crucial to their decategorialization while being at odds with the parameter of positional fixation. In addition, CTMPs' ability to occur both in adverb-like, parenthetical positions, and in verb-like, clause-initial position, suggests that their decategorialization is incomplete. The possibility to reactivate productive verbal properties in expressions that display a high degree of formulaicity is explained in terms of grammatical persistence. Another challenge facing the grammaticalization of CTMPs is the existence of variation in terms of tense, aspect and modality. The aforementioned obstacles are documented by present-day spoken British English corpus data. It is argued that, rather than regarding them as pragmaticalized or lexicalized as has alternatively been suggested, CTMPs should be approached from the usage-based perspective of constructional grammaticalization, which is concerned with the grammaticalization of schematic constructions that are part of a wider taxonomy rather than being isolated sequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews research on English past-tense acquisition to test the validity of the single mechanism model and the dual mechanism model, focusing on regular-irregular dissociation and semantic bias. Based on the review, it is suggested that in L1 acquisition, both regular and irregular verbs are governed by semantics; that is, early use of past tense forms are largely restricted to achievement verbs — regular or irregular. In contrast, some L2 acquisition studies show stronger semantic bias for regular past tense forms (Housen, The development of tense-aspect in English as a second language and the variable influence of inherent aspect, John Benjamins, 2002). It is argued that L1 acquisition of the past-tense morphology can be accounted for adequately — without assuming dual mechanisms — by relying on connectionist-like input-based prototype formation as a mechanism for the development of tense-aspect morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Akan (Kwa, Niger Congo) has a rich inventory of lexical items for the purposes of signaling information structure. This article examines the communicative role of a number of these markers. The focus marker na singles out the constituent within its scope as the only new information in the utterance in which it is contained. Two inclusive markers are identified; they are (n)so and mpo. (N)so is an additive focus marker which indicates that the utterance to which it is attached has to be interpreted in a context parallel to that of the immediately preceding utterance. Mpo is a scalar marker; the entity within its scope is considered quite low on a pragmatically given scale. Exclusive markers in the language include the restrictive nko and the multifunctional ara. The latter combines with features of the context to communicate restriction, simultaneity, continuity, or it may cause the accompanying utterance to receive a scalar reading. Finally, the traditional analysis associated with the information structural marker de is shown to be untenable. Thus, an alternative analysis is proffered, based on critical examination of its discourse function, using attested data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two connectionist networks, DISLEX and DevLex-II, were used in this study to model the acquisition of lexical and grammatical aspect. Both models use multi-layered self-organizing feature maps, connected by associative links trained according to the Hebbian learning rule. Previous empirical research has identified a strong association between lexical aspect and grammatical aspect in child language, on the basis of which some researchers argue for innate semantic categories or prelinguistic predispositions. Our simulations indicate that such an association can emerge from dynamic self-organization and Hebbian learning in connectionist networks, without the need of a priori assumptions about the structure of innate knowledge. Our modeling results further attest to the utility of self-organizing neural networks in the study of language acquisition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses the problem of the linguistic encoding of the locative roles of Goal and Source of motion. After discussing the typological patterns of marking static locations, goals, and sources of motion, I analyze data from Wan, a Southeastern Mande language that often does not encode the distinction between sources and goals either outside of the verb (by adpositions or case) or in the verb's argument structure. In addition to a class of specialized verbs that subcategorize for a particular type of locative argument (“source verbs” and “goal verbs”), Wan has a number of verbs that do not restrict their argument to either sources or goals. I show that the two verb classes contrast with respect to the amount of information about the direction of motion that is entailed by the verb's lexical meaning. In encoding the role of the locative argument, the two verb classes rely on different strategies: the semantic role is either encoded in the verb's argument structure, or inferred from the interaction of contextual information and the verb's lexical entailments. I demonstrate how the lexical entailments of motion verbs influence their subcategorization pattern and discuss crosslinguistic evidence that supports this analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article gives a diachronic account of adnominal modification from Proto-Indo-European to present-day Dutch. The main conclusion is that through the ages, noun phrases appear to “fold out”: they acquire their layered structure for different lexical modifiers over time. The latest stage in this process is the fairly recent development of a specific slot for interpersonal modification of the whole noun phrase. The different stages in the diachronic development are described with the layered and modular representation of functional discourse grammar (FDG). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Romance data corroborating a multifarious account of evidentiality in which different dimensions connected to the source of information are distinguished. It will be demonstrated that the diverse distributional patterns of lexical items as opposed to grammatical forms in the domains of inferential and reportative evidentiality can hardly be accounted for unless a distinction is made between the source of evidence, intended as the locus where the information is acquired (internal or external source with respect to the speaker), and the mode of knowing, i.e., the process leading to the acquisition of the information (directly visual, indirectly through inferences, reports). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares and contrasts cophonology theory and indexed constraint theory, the dominant current proposals to morphologically conditioned phonology. In cophonology theory, morphologically conditioned phonology is captured by associating each morphological construction or lexical class with its own phonological grammar, or cophonology. All constraints within a given cophonology are purely phonological; no constraint directly refers to morphological context. By contrast, indexed constraint theory assumes a single fixed constraint ranking for the entire language, and captures morphologically conditioned phonology by indexing individual constraints to specific morphological contexts. The article raises three arguments in favor of cophonology theory: greater formal parsimony, the ability to handle free variation, and more accurate predictions about the scope of morphologically conditioned phonological effects. It also evaluates and rejects the primary argument for indexed constraint theory, i.e., Grammar Dependence, the claim that indexed constraint theory is more restrictive in the degree of language-internal diversity allowed. Cophonology theory and indexed constraint theory are equivalent in the range of language-internal diversity they allow; it is argued that the upper limit on language-internal diversity should not be a matter for formal grammar, but instead requires extra-grammatical explanation in terms of the factors influencing language change and variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I discuss the semantics and syntax of a phenomenon often called "lexical subordination" and here called "conflation," in which a VP with a single verb expresses both an activity and a result predication, although only the former is licensed by the verb's permanent lexical entry. Alongside standard cases such as resultatives and particle verbs, I discuss what I call "event-path structures" in English and German. In these, an activity is argued to conflate with a predication expressing a (sometimes metaphoric) "path" of the activity. These little-known data challenge many argument-structure theories because the path expressions sometimes disallow the linking of the verb's normal object. They require a theory where the lexical verb does not contribute arguments in conflation structures, a conclusion motivated empirically. I present a theory of syntax -- semantics mapping which relies on VP shells with meaningful light verbs which constrain the interpretations of their specifiers and complements. Conflation is treated as compounding of a verb root to one of the light verbs. This accounts simply for the argument-structural patterns of resultatives and event-path structures. None of the argumentation appeals to operations at a lexical-semantic level between conceptual structure and syntax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part II of the article deals with deep-syntactic and surface-syntactic actants. A deep-syntactic actant slot is defined by its correspondence to a semantic actant slot; a deep-syntactic actant of a lexical unit L either fills a deep-syntactic slot of L or corresponds to a surface-syntactic actant of L. The article discusses the numbering of deep-syntactic actant slots, some problematic cases of such numbering, restrictions on the surface realizations of deep-syntactic actant slots, and the ways to change the active deep-syntactic valence of a given lexical unit. Surface-syntactic actants are defined inductively--by bundles of relevant syntactic properties that a clause element shares with an established surface-syntactic actant, such as the subject or the direct object. The problem of "actants vs. circumstantials" is considered, including the DO SO test. The correspondence between semantic, deep-syntactic, and surface-syntactic actant slots of a lexical unit is characterized, with special attention to the four cases of discrepancy between them. The concept of government pattern of a lexical unit L is introduced and illustrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the question why sentences like John didn't wake up until nine are grammatical while their positive counterparts are not: John woke up until nine. It adduces evidence against the two existing analyses (the one claiming that not is a durative predicate, the other that there is a negative polarity item until that collocates with punctual predicates). The analysis that is offered here rests on the claim that not until is an instance of integrated lexicalization, whereby two different semantic elements (roughly, the meaning of temporal at and that of an exclusive focuser like German erst or only) are fused into a single (but complex) lexical item. The author adduces a great many pieces of evidence supporting this analysis and points out some interesting theoretical consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]