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This article sheds new light on the puzzling phrase structure of complex adjectival phrases which are common in Semitic, specifically in Hebrew, and which are equivalent to Indo-European phrases such as‘swift of foot.’The article draws a clear distinction between these constructions and adjectival compounds such as‘swift-footed’, which are prevalent in major Indo-European languages but are absent from Semitic languages. The Hebrew construction under discussion is a genitival construct consisting of an adjective followed by a modifying noun in genitive status. The adjective is the head of the construction, but agrees in number and gender with a noun outside the construction. This construction has invited controversial analyses by different scholars, most recently in the framework of generative grammar. The present study construction is anchored in the framework of Construction Grammar. It nevertheless advances a morphosyntactic and semantic analysis of its inner composition. Functional aspects and the speaker’s perspectival choice in construing such attributive phrases are taken into account as well.

This article discusses the temporal interpretation of two attributive clause markers in Korean -te-un and -nu-un, which are standardly analyzed as carrying past imperfective and present imperfective meanings, respectively. I show that -te-un and -nu-un carry not only temporal but also modal/evidential meanings and they do so in ways hitherto unnoticed. I claim that -te-un presents an eventuality from a retrospective point of view, providing a window into what I call ‘an evidential past’, whereas -nu-un does so from a projective point of view, providing a window into what I call ‘a metaphysical future’. The findings of this paper suggest that the line between Tense, Aspect, Mood, and Evidentiality can be blurrier in some languages than in others, and that when interpreting attributive clauses, what is construed as the viewpoint holder and in which direction the viewpoint is headed relative to some temporal anchor may matter greatly.

Great Andamanese has a dual semantic system for body part categorization: one that is expressed in various terms for concrete body parts and another more abstract one that is expressed in grammaticalized morphemes represented in seven body division possessive classes that classify body part terms based on the area of the body they occupy. These classes also classify other inalienables, with some semantic connection to the body part system. Further, body part semantics pervade the lexical and grammatical system of the language as this dual system is extended to other form classes, viz. verbs, adjectives and adverbs. The body division class markers occur as proclitics attached to all content word classes. Thus, all content words in Great Andamanese can easily be divided into bound and free, the former necessarily imbued with the semantics of “inherency” and “dependency”. I conclude by proposing that the Great Andamanese conceptualize their world through these interdependencies and hence the grammar of the language encodes this important phenomenon in every part of speech expressing referential, attributive and predicative meaning.

The temporal system of noun-modifying clauses in Korean manifests a three-way aspectual opposition among non-prior imperfective, prior imperfective, and morphologically unmarked perfective, a crosslinguistically common pattern manifested in West African languages, creole languages, Persian, and Lakhota, etc. The semantic and mor-phosyntactic distribution of temporal expressions in noun-modifying clauses in Korean cannot be characterized with the temporal dimension of aspectual distinctions such as completion, ongoingness, inception, duritivity, but with the totality dimension of aspectual distinctions of whether the speaker's viewpoint is within or outside the event frame in which the situation described takes place.

The Japanese "passive" construction with the verb stem formant -(r)are-has dual semantic functions. In some uses it indicates that the action's effects impinge emotively and/or psychologically on the subject, while in other uses the special effective nuance is absent. This distinction of semantic functions is shown to correlate with a distinction in the inherent aspectual character (Aktionsart) of verbally denoted actions, the deed/attribute distinction. A -(r)are- verb denoting a concrete action, or deed, implicates an abrupt change of circumstances having immediate effects on the subject's emotional and/or psychological situation; while processes and other nonconcrete actions, expressed through -(r)are-'s attributive use, implicate less immediate changes of the subject's state. In sum, the manner in which the action proceeds conditions the specific type of affect with which it is associated; both uses of -(r)are- are affective in distinct ways. These findings suggest the need to reconsider prior formal accounts of 'passive' -(r)are- constructions as rule-conditioned alternates of corresponding sentences without -(r)are-.