Search

Copyright of Public Health Forum is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

draws a categorial distinction between language-particular terms - terms used in the description of specific languages - and comparative concepts - terms used for crosslinguistic comparison. This seems like a valid distinction for a lot of terminology, but it is also true that there are 'portable' terms that are suitable both for the description of specific languages and for crosslinguistic comparison. This descriptive metalanguage is analogous to the descriptive vocabulary employed in other observational sciences, and its elaboration is an important enterprise for both descriptivist and comparative linguists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Principle of the Uniqueness of Grammatical Relations, which requires that all grammatical relations be distinguishable on morphological and/or syntactic grounds and non-repeatable in a clause, is often assumed to be a universal requirement of language and is a central tenet, explicit or implicit, of many theories of grammar. Upper Necaxa Totonac offers an apparent exception to this principle in that it has clauses with multiple objects that seem grammatically identical, yet do not appear to be adjuncts as they control agreement and are active in processes such as reciprocalization. Extensive testing of the properties of Upper Necaxa objects shows that, while a primary object can be distinguished on the basis of a single diagnostic, any remaining objects are indistinguishable and so must be treated as being governed by the same grammatical relation which is, therefore, non-unique. This data requires a reconsideration of the Uniqueness Principle as an absolute universal, and as an axiom or a necessary tenet of theories of human language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence of restricted or phraseologized complex expressions such as clichéés, collocations, and idioms (collectively known as phrasemes) is well-known and widely accepted in the domain of multi-word expressions. What is not so widely recognized is the existence of the same type of phraseologized expression at the morphological level -- restricted complex morphological expressions, or morphological phrasemes. Morphological phrasemes, found in both derivation and inflection, are governed by the same principles of phraseologization that govern phrasemes at the lexical-syntactic level, and have roughly the same subtypes, including morphological collocations and morphological idioms. In addition to offering clear advantages in terms of useful descriptive practice and formal economy, the recognition of phraseologized morphological expressions makes clear the parallels between linguistic signs at the lexical and morphemic level, this isomorphism falling out from the conventionalized nature of the mapping between linguistic meaning and linguistic form. Contrary to many current approaches to morphological theory that reject the morpheme as a meaning-bearing element in the structure of words, this paper argues that the existence of conventionalized uses of sublexical elements gives strong support to the utility of the morpheme as unit of linguistic analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arbeit is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)