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The article offers the authors's response on comments made to their article on typical and atypical type-shifts in animacy. They argue that there is one-to-one mapping from conceptual animacy to linguistic phrasing in production. They say that a conceptual animacy hierarchy is not reflected in a linguist animacy hierarchy. They also explain the relation between animacy and semantic roles.

We examine the effects of morphosyntactic marking and selectional restrictions of predicates on conceptual and grammatical animacy. We argue in favour of animacy as an ontological category with human, animate and inanimate entities representing discrete subtypes in the domain of entities. We distinguish between conceptual animacy, which is a gradient notion, and grammatical animacy, for which discrete, binary oppositions are needed. The main aim of this paper is to argue for a distinction between overt and covert type shifts in animacy. On the one hand, overt shifts are linguistic solutions to type mismatches in the grammar. Crucially, these type shifts do not involve a shift in conceptual animacy. Covert animacy shifts, on the other hand, brought about by selectional restrictions or by the linguistic context in general, do involve a proper type shift in conceptual animacy. By making explicit the relation between the gradience of conceptual and the discreteness of grammatical animacy, and by exploring the distinction between covert and overt type shifts that involve animacy, we hope to gain a deeper understanding of animacy and its effects on language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse particles are notoriously difficult to acquire for second language learners. It has been argued that this difficulty is caused by a lack of equivalent concepts in the learner's native language. In this article we compare the acquisition of the German particle doch by speakers of Dutch and speakers with a native language other than Dutch. Like German, Dutch has a rich inventory of discourse particles and one of them can be considered the cognate of doch: toch. We performed our investigation by means of an online cloze test among 85 Dutch students of German and 76 learners of German with a first language other than Dutch. We tested five different functions of doch, some of which overlapped with the functions of Dutch toch and some which did not. Our results indicate that it is beneficial to have similar particles in one's mother tongue but we did not find evidence that it is extra beneficial to have formmeaning equivalents between the L1 and L2. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a uniform motivation for subject case alternations that align with distinctions in tense and aspect and those that align with a distinction between stage- and individual-level predication. We argue that both follow from an economical use of case marking that is made possible by grounding. If the argument function of an event participant can be determined on the basis of information available in the here and now, the use of case marking can be judged redundant and suspended because of economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including free indirect discourse, linguistic characteristics of person and perspective marking in literary data, and semantic analysis of free indirect discourse.

For this study we investigated all occurrences of Dutch second person pronoun subjects in a literary novel, and determined their interpretation. We found two patterns that can both be argued to be functionally related to the de-velopment of the story. First, we found a decrease in the generic use of second person, a decrease which we believe goes hand in hand with an increased distancing of oneself as a reader from the narrator/main character. Second, we found an increase in the use of the descriptive second person. The increased descriptive use of second person pronouns towards the end of the novel is very useful for the reader, because the information provided by the first person narrator himself becomes less and less reliable. Thus, the reader depends more strongly on information provided by other characters and what these characters tell the narrator about himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses the pronoun interpretation of different person forms of different languages.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Joost Zwarts on the hierarchy of configuration distinctions, one by Dmitry Ganenkov on the basic configuration distinctions in Nakh-Daghestanian languages and one by Marina Pantcheva on the common phenomenon of syncretism between Place and Goal directionality.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue including one by Stella Gryllia regarding the topicality interaction and order of words in Greek, one by Lisa Brunetti about Spanish and Italian language, and one by Mark de Vries on various types of left and right dislocation in Dutch language.

In optimality theory (OT) the essence of both language learning in general (learnability) and language acquisition (the actual development children go through) entails the ranking of constraints from an initial state of the grammar to the language-specific ranking of the target grammar. This is the common denominator in all OT studies on language acquisition and learning. There are many unsettled issues, however. Are the constraints innate or do they emerge during acquisition (nature-nurture)? And if they emerge, where do they come from? What is the initial state? Does the (re)ranking of constraints only involve the demotion of markedness constraints, the promotion of faithfulness constraints, or can it be achieved by both the demotion and the promotion of constraints? Another issue is whether comprehension and production are mediated by the same grammar or whether there is one grammar for comprehension and another for production. This article reviews the current state of affairs in language acquisition studies in OT and ends with some critical remarks and speculations on how the field is likely to develop. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we investigate topics in NGT (Sign Language of the Netherlands). NGT is a topic-prominent language in which sentences start with the topic(s) and the remainder of the sentence is interpreted as a comment about that topic. Topics are identifiable in NGT first and foremost by their prosody: they always form a separate prosodic unit. We show that NGT has different types of topics that can precede the rest of the sentence: argument topics and spatio-temporal topics. Both types of topic occur sentence-initially, but when both are present in one sentence, argument topics precede spatio-temporal topics. The main aim of our article is to argue that all types of topics can be referred to by sentence-final indexes, contra Bos (Pronoun copy in Sign Language of the Netherlands: 1–3, Signum, 1995) who claimed that copied sentence-final indexes always refer to subjects. We will analyze these clause-final anaphoric pronouns as an instantiation of topic agreement. Thus, we argue that NGT has topic agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]