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This paper investigates the semantics of an understudied Mandarin numeral construction type, here dubbed da-NumPs (i.e. number word < da ‘big’ < noun). Drawing primarily upon evidence from online Mandarin corpora, we argue for a taxonomy of this construction that comprises two distinct interpretations, based on the scalarity of the morpheme da and its composition with the other constituents within the construction. Specifically, one reading of da-NumPs is a degree superlative reading, in which da relates a domain of comparison, denoted by the nominal argument, to a plural group of entities ranked along the upper bound of a contextually determined scale. Second, da-NumPs have a definite description reading, in which da behaves on a par with a maximality-denoting iota operator, such that the construction refers to the maximal group individual that satisfies the property denoted by the nominal argument. We further show that at the discourse level, both readings encode the way the speaker subjectively construes the situation being described, indicating the speaker’s evaluative attitude towards the significance of said situation. This pragmatic condition distinguishes the use of da-NumPs against that of alternative, truth-conditionally identical numeral construction types. We further propose that in cases where the nominal component includes a degree argument, a process of degree intensification enables the definite description reading to verify the same situation as is licensed under a superlative semantics. We show that this process provides a way to make sense of the systematic ambiguity available to da-NumPs, and allows us to capture its polysemy.

In this paper, some mysteries and asymmetries of the Chinese potential de construction are investigated. It is shown that a morphosytnactic approach is conducive to accounting for these puzzles. First we explore the possibility of taking de and its negative counterpart -bude as functional heads (cf. Tsai 2001; T. Wu 2004). It is proposed that bude could be a functional head with the negative potential (i.e. impossible/impermissible) meaning. This could be evidenced by both empirical data and theoretical deduction. It is argued that bu in V-bu-R, which is distinct from the normal pre-verbal negative morpheme bu, is actually bude. This helps to explain why the negative potential meaning is involved in V-bu-R. Meanwhile, V-de/bude and V-de/bu-R are both assumed to be formed through Morphological Merger (cf. Marantz 1988; Embick & Noyer 2001, 2007, etc.). Meanwhile, we have discussed some asymmetries observed between V-de/bude and V-de/bu-R and some paradigmatic asymmetries between potential V-de construction and its negative potential V-bude construction. It is assumed that these syntactic asymmetries may be due to some morphological operations related to de and bude.

This paper aims to investigate both Fagerli’s (2001) proposal that in serializing languages benefactive and malefactive constructions often involve the morpheme denoting ‘give’, and Radetzky & Smith’s (2010) proposal that East and South Asian languages often involve different morphemes or structures in expressing benefaction or malefaction. Checking the proposals against benefactive and malefactive constructions in Taiwan Southern Min (TSM) which involve optional benefactee and malefactee, this paper shows that both proposals find only partial support from TSM data. TSM uses the morpheme denoting ‘give’, i.e. hoo, in the malefactive construction involving optional malefactee, but not the benefactive construction involving optional benefactee, which involves the use of ka. Moreover, ka can also be used for introducing the malefactive. Even though the hoo malefactive construction and the ka benefactive construction have different structures, the constructions involving ka, no matter whether denoting benefaction or malefaction, have the same syntactic structure.

Recent research has pointed out that certain grammaticalization phenomena originate in substandard varieties and/or colloquial speech styles. However, the potential of insights to be gained from relating grammaticalization and sociolinguistics still remains largely unexplored. The present paper is an attempt at such an approach, discussing grammaticalization processes in contemporary German youth language (Jugendsprache). On a word formation level, the paper deals with nominal and verbal formatives, denominal conversions, and the use of verb stems as lexical morphemes. Syntactic phenomena include the development of the non-inflected negative null and a new intensifier word order pattern. After highlighting the relevant grammaticalization mechanisms for each of these patterns, the paper discusses the relation between slang creation and grammaticalization, emphasizing the role of expressivity as a discourse-pragmatic motivation for linguistic innovations. Finally, the paper draws attention to connections between youth specific language varieties and language change, and tries to account for the fact that some grammaticalization processes in substandard varieties never reach their potential end point.

This paper discusses the phonological properties of words and phrases in two Northern Arawak languages of the Upper Rio Negro, Brazil. These features are h-prosody, vowel harmony triggered by the glottal fricative h, vowel nasalization and vowel diphthongization. A feature that is used to mark a word in one language may mark a phrase in the other. There is a regular interdependence between morphemes and syllables. The most unusual characteristic of the languages is the existence of pausal forms which mark phrase-final and utterance-final boundaries. The phonological character of pause marking devices, viewed cross-linguistically, contradicts a wide-spread assumption about the entirely phonetic realization of pauses.

In Mabaan, a Western Nilotic language, indirect speech is characterised by the following three features. Firstly, verbs are inflected in a special way, having an indirect mode as opposed to the direct mode of direct speech. Secondly, in pronominal morphemes a distinction is made between forms that refer to a third person reported speaker (third person forms) and forms which have other third person referents (fourth person forms), a distinction which is coextensive with the use of the indirect mode. Thirdly, third person pronominal forms are identical to the third person pronominal forms used in direct speech, while fourth person pronominal forms are different and, thus, anti-logophoric. Taken together, these features make Mabaan typologically unusual.

This paper investigates the structure of phonological word and grammatical word in Brokpa, a Tibeto-Burman (Trans-Himalayan) language of Bhutan. Defining features of a phonological word include stress, tone, and segmental properties. A grammatical word is defined based on conventionalized coherence and meaning, fixed order of morphemes, and its behaviour in relation to derivational and inflectional marking. Grammatical and phonological words in Brokpa coincide in most instances. Typical mismatches include words involving non-cohering compounds and non-cohering reduplication. A formal distinction between phonological and grammatical word is the key to our understanding of the interactions between different parts of grammar in Brokpa, and help resolve potential ambiguities of the term “word” in this language.

Selibu is a Mandarin-Khams Tibetan mixed language with about 900 native speakers in northwest Yunnan, People’s Republic of China. As a Form-Semantics mixed language, it derives most of its lexicon and grammatical morphemes from Southwest Mandarin and borrows its morphosyntactic and semantic structure from Alangu Tibetan. This article examines the contact-induced emergence of a five-category complex evidential system in Selibu with a detailed comparison with its source system in the model language, Alangu Tibetan. Our discussion focuses on the hybrid features of Selibu evidentiality in both forms and functions and also on its structural formation, which does not represent a Form-Semantics mixed type in this particular domain.

Choswateng Tibetan, spoken in the south-eastern corner of the Khams region, has three negative prefixes: /ȵi-/, /ma-/, and /ka-/. The first two are derived from two morphemes which are ubiquitous across Tibetic languages, whereas the third is a newly generated negative prefix found in Choswateng Tibetan as well as its surrounding dialects belonging to the rGyalthang subgroup of Khams and its neighbours. This article describes the morphological feature and use of the prefix /ka-/ in Choswateng Tibetan. Morphologically, the prefix /ka-/ can co-occur with most verbs except for the copulative verb /ˊreʔ/. Pragmatically, the prefix /ka-/ occurs and is restricted in the following ways: (1) expresses ‘definitely not’ for statements regarding the self, and ‘possibly not, judging from the speaker’s knowledge’ for statements regarding others; (2) co-occurs with egophoric and sensory evidentials; (3) is not used for a negation of accomplished aspect; and (4) does not deprive the function of the other two negative prefixes. These two analyzes are mutually related; it is suggested that the reason why /ka-/ cannot co-occur with the copulative verb /ˊreʔ/ is triggered by a contradiction of implied evidentials: /ka-/ is related to egophoric and sensory, whereas /ˊreʔ/ is statemental. Following the description of its use, we discuss the origin of /ka-/, claiming a possible grammaticalization from an interrogative word gar (‘where’ in Literary Tibetan and common throughout the rGyalthang area) in a rhetorical question to a prefix. Referring to several morphological features of /ka-/, we consider its grammaticalization as ongoing, but most advanced in Choswateng Tibetan.

The “dynamic coevolution of meaning and form” of Bybee et al. (1994: 20) has been the subject of significant discussion as regards the languages of Mainland Southeast Asia. However, little work has focused on the mechanisms through which this coevolution occurs when it does surface in these languages. The current work considers phonological reidentification resulting from phonetic reduction in White Hmong (Hmong-Mien, Laos) involving four morphemes, ntshai/ntshe ‘maybe’, saib/seb ‘see if/whether; comp.cfact’, puag/pug ‘locl;ints’, and niaj/nej ‘each, every’. These morphemes exhibit an alternation where a rime is phonologically reidentified in a manner consistent with typical phonetic underarticulation patterns, such that an exemplar-model approach (Pierrehumbert 2001, inter alia) provides a straightforward explanation. Furthermore, the data show that the phonological reidentification patterns found in White Hmong exhibit parallels in other languages in the region, confirming that an areal approach to grammaticalization provides greater descriptive adequacy cross-linguistically as regards this phenomenon.

The present study is a phonological analysis of the segments and tones of the Tawrã language (ISO 69-3: mhu; Glottolog: Diga1241), a Sino-Tibetan language spoken in Arunachal Pradesh, India, and in Tibet, China. This paper, the first collaboration between a Tawrã-speaking non-linguist and a non-Tawrã-speaking linguist, attempts to clear up some confusion in the existing literature. For example, previous studies did not note that stop codas /-p, -k/ are in free variation with glides [-w, -j, ɰ], and that the morpheme, rather than the syllable, is the tone-bearing unit. Acoustic analyses provide justification for the phonemic representation of the vowels and the tones. Finally, the paper is designed to introduce Tawrã speakers to the recently standardized (2020) orthography, and to show how the letters and letter combinations function together as a system.

Syntactic amalgams are innovative phrasal constructions that combine otherwise incompatible subparts of other constructions (Lambrecht 1988; Brenier and Michaelis 2005). We describe pleonastic formations like flavorize in English and ψηλαφ-ίζ(ω) [psilafízo] ‘palpate’ in Modern Greek as functional amalgams at the word level. We examine these formations through the lens of (function-oriented) Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2012), arguing that once we see derivational morphemes as signs, and sign combination as construction-driven rather than head-driven, we can describe such words as coercive combinations that serve a variety of semiotic functions.

This article explores the expression and conceptualisation of emotions in Anindilyakwa (Gunwinyguan, north-east Arnhem Land). Fundamental to the emotional lexicon of this language is the widespread use of body parts, which frequently occur in figurative expressions. In this article I examine the primary body parts that occur in emotion descriptions in both literal (physical) and figurative expressions. Particular attention is given to yukudhukudha / -werrik- ‘chest’, the body part conceptualised as the primary site of emotion in Anindilyakwa and the most productive body-related morpheme used in emotion compounds. I consider the role of the chest and other productive body parts that occur in emotion compounds, and examine the metonymic and metaphorical devices that contribute to the expression of these emotional states. In doing so, I propose a number of overarching and widespread tropes that hold across different body-part compounds, and briefly contextualise these in relation to the emotion description systems of other closely-related (Gunwinyguan) languages.

The present study examines cases of the Japanese copula da used in the utterance-final position in naturally occurring conversations. The morpheme da in Japanese is typically categorized as a type of copula in linguistic studies, but da also functions as an utterance-final expression, especially in the spoken form of Japanese. The examined recordings of naturally occurring conversations for the present study contained 120 cases of utterance-final da, and 89 (74.2%) of them were uttered immediately following statements of subjective evaluation. In addition, of these 89 cases of utterance-final da that followed statements of evaluation, 87 were determined to follow statements in which the speaker expressed his or her negative attitude toward the evaluated matter. The data analysis also showed that 26 cases (21.7%) of utterance-final da in the examined recordings were uttered immediately after the speaker discovered a new piece of information. Based on the findings from the data analysis, the present study argues that utterance-final da is considered to be one of the expressions in Japanese that can signal both discovery of new information and the speaker’s negative attitude toward a stated matter. In addition, the present study also argues that da marks the speaker’s emotional exclamatory reaction when it is used in the utterance-final position.

This paper compares the expression of Source and Goal in German and Polish, on the basis of descriptions elicited with a series of video clips. As satellite-framed languages (Talmy 1985, 2000), both German and Polish mainly rely on grammatical morphemes to encode Path of motion with respect to Source and Goal. Nevertheless, despite this shared typological feature, these languages also display fine morphosyntactic and semantic differences. Our study reveals that the expression of Source and Goal is more asymmetrical in German than in Polish, both in types of linguistic resources and in semantic distinctions. We show that German speakers tend to combine Path satellites with Path verbs – including both deictic satellites and deictic verbs – more frequently in Source-oriented events, depicting them with finer semantic distinctions than Goal-oriented events. In the expression of the Ground, however, they tend to make finer distinctions in the expression of Goals as compared to Sources, by using a greater variety of prepositions. Polish speakers, by contrast, tend to express Source and Goal in a more symmetrical fashion. These cross-linguistic differences are discussed in the light of language-specific characteristics and their role in the expression – symmetrical or asymmetrical – of Source and Goal.

This paper aims to study a kind of interrogative in Yi which surfaces as an AA form commonly viewed as AA/Reduplicative Question. It explores the interrogative motivation, question type, generative mechanism and syntactic derivation of AA Question. We first assume that (i) AA question in Yi is a kind of alternative question, which is reduced successively from A-or-not-A and A-not-A question and (ii) the [+Q] feature of AA question does not result from reduplication but from other reasons. To justify these two assumptions, we use tests including adverb tests, modal tests, tag question tests, SFP tests, Q & A tests, and cross-language investigation and sociolinguistic survey. The findings include (i) the [+Q] feature of AA question results from the existence of an abstract interrogative morpheme, (ii) the phenomenon of reduplication is just a kind of byproduct with the syntactic derivation of AA question and (iii) AA question, diachronically speaking, is essentially a kind of alternative question, which is reduced successively from A-or-not-A and A-not-A question to meet the economic principle of language.

This paper examines word formation strategies in initial SLA, with particular regard to the implicit processing of the distributional properties of the input. Learners with various L1s and no experience of the target language (n=163) took a 14-hour L2 Polish course under controlled input conditions. In an oral production task, these learners were asked to describe properties of human referents who had never appeared in the input by stating their nationality or profession. In their output, the learners most often referred to the target referents by attaching a -k(-) sound cluster to a lexical morpheme borrowed from a known language. Quantitative analysis shows that indeed, within the input considered, the same -k(-) cluster is characteristic of most words referring to human entities. The study concludes that learners can analyse the morphological structure of target words even after minimal exposure to the input, identifying at first the derivational formants characterised by the strongest association to the intended meaning.

Demonstratives provide an important link between gesture, discourse and grammar due to their communicative function to coordinate the interlocutor’s focus of attention. This underlies their frequent cross-linguistic development into a wide range of function words and morphemes (Diessel 1999). The present study provides evidence for a link between gesture and grammar by tracking diachronic development of a relative clause marker in Israeli Sign Language (ISL) restrictive relative clauses, which starts as a gestural locative pointing sign, and grammaticalizes into a relative pronoun connecting relative and main clauses and agreeing with referent loci, and then into an invariant relativizer. Diachronic changes are inferred from the data collected from three generations of signers. The results reveal that the behavior of demonstratives in the data varied with the signers’ ages according to four diagnostic criteria of grammaticalization (e.g., Hopper & Traugott 2003): increased systematicity, distributional and morphological changes, and phonetic reduction.

This paper examines the count-mass distinction in Terena (Aruák, Brazil) by focusing on plural marking availability, numeral and quantifier distribution and cardinal versus volume interpretation in quantity judgment tests. The data collected from the initial research of these features in Terena reveals the relevancy of the count-mass distinction in the language with some signature properties: (i) only count nouns can be directly combined with numerals; (ii) only count nouns can be used with the quantifier êno with the interpretarion of many individuals rather than a large quantity; and finally, (iii) only count nouns can express cardinality of individuals in a comparative sentence such as John has more N than Peter. Plural morpheme distribution is unsuitable for distinguishing count from mass nouns (such as in English) since mass nouns can be pluralized in Terena, provided noun denotations have individuals to allow for number rather than volume quantity interpretation.

In this paper I present a description of number in Panará, with singular, dual and plural, and discuss the mass-count properties of Panará nouns. I also describe an until now unattested instance of omnivorous dual in Panará, where one dual morpheme can map to one or more arguments.

The aim of this paper is to provide a preliminary investigation into the nominal system of Wapishana, focusing on the count vs. mass distinction, which is grammatically encoded in this language. Evidence for this distinction can be identified in the constraints imposed by the presence of numerals, number marking, and quantifiers. Nouns such as wyn ‘water’ do not combine with numerals, whereas other words such as baydkury ‘jaguar’ do. The suffixation of the morpheme -nau/-nhau to express plurality seems to be optional and may even be blocked by the presence of numerals. The language exhibits specialized quantifiers for count, liquid, and non-liquid mass nouns.

Pazar Laz (pl) has a rich set of spatial prefixes, which encode path information as separate morphemes. However, unlike satellite-framed languages, pl spatial prefixes are incompatible with manner of motion verbs, which do not inherently encode path information, but they can only be used with directed motion verbs where the path information is available in the lexical semantics of the verb. Given this pattern, complementing Acedo-Matellán (2016)’s classification of weak vs. strong satellite-framed languages, we argue that verb-framed languages are also of two types. While languages like Romance are strong verb-framed languages encoding Path directly in the verb root, pl constitutes an example of a weak verb-framed language, where Path is affixal and forms a single word with the verb. We argue that spatial prefixes spell out the underassociated Path projection of the verb à la Ramchand (2008b).

The diachronic development of morphemes meaning ‘wait’ has not been well documented. This paper describes multiple functions of the ‘wait’ verb dang2 in Hong Kong Cantonese: (a) a verb meaning ‘be in need of’, (b) a permissive verb meaning ‘let’, (c) a causative verb meaning ‘cause’, (d) a temporal marker meaning ‘at, when’, (e) a particle for giving notice of a coming event, and (f) a subordinating conjunction signifying someone’s surprise. Four development paths are proposed to account for the multifunctionality: ‘wait’ > (a); ‘wait’ > (d); ‘wait’ > (b) > (e); and ‘wait’ > (c) > (f). This case draws attention to the potential of ‘wait’ morphemes to be employed to express various other abstract concepts and, furthermore, highlights the role of indirect sources in the theory of grammaticalization.

Komo (Koman) of Ethiopia has an obligatory paradigm of deictic directional (dd) verb morphology that, among its functions, indicates direction of motion relative to a deictic reference point, associated motion and grammatical aspect when collocated with verb roots of different semantic classes. The semantic components of a motion event underlie the Komo dd system and the grammatical aspect of a predicate can be directly mapped to the bounded/unbounded path profile. The Associated Motion function contains a bounded path which entails arrival at or departure from a reference point and, as a result, imparts aspectual telicity to the predicate. The Direction function by contrast, contains an unbounded path that expresses motion towards a reference point and does not impart aspectual telicity. Further, some morphemes express exchoativity, or the ‘exiting’ of a state, a rare if unattested grammatical category.

The Xinkan, Jicaquean, and Lencan language families are isolates. However, they show similarities in their vowel co-occurrence restrictions within morphemes. This paper compares and contrasts the harmonic patterns in each of these language families and concludes that similarities are likely due to contact between their speakers. This suggests that Xinkan, Jicaquean and Lencan speakers existed in a sort of micro-language area, a small-scale scenario of contact that shows unique indications of contact near or within the more dispersed scenarios of contact and borrowing acknowledged throughout Mesoamerica.

A major study has been released on the emergence in East Asia of the logographic, or logo-syllabic, writing systems inherited from Chinese writing, attending primarily to the adaptations and innovations implemented in Korea, Vietnam, Japan and by speakers of the Tai languages of Southern China and Northern Vietnam. It contributes to our understanding of the fundamental mechanisms, of how speakers of different languages transformed the character script. The book points to overarching research problems concerning the relationship between language and writing, how aspects of this relationship are based on universal principles of learning exemplified in bilingual literacy. The research questions presented by the author will ultimately help us better understand literacy learning and the nature of reading and writing ability in general.

This paper sheds a new light on the notion of zero morphemes in inflectional paradigms: on their formal definition (§ 1), on the way of counting them (§ 2–3) and on the way of conceptualizing them at a deeper, mathematical level (§ 4). We define (zero) morphemes in the language of cartesian set products and propose a method of counting them that applies the lexical relations of homophony, polysemy, allomorphy and synonymy to inflectional paradigms (§ 2). In this line, two homophonic or synonymous morphemes are different morphemes, while two polysemous and allomorphic morphemes count as one morpheme (§ 3). In analogy to the number zero in mathematics, zero morphemes can be thought of either as minimal elements in a totally ordered set or as neutral element in a set of opposites (§ 4). Implications for language acquisition are discussed in the conclusion (§ 5).

This paper discusses the origins and possible grammaticalization pathways of three agent demoting prefixes in Katripul Puyuma, ki-, m-u- and kur-. All three morphemes can attach to both nominal and verbal stems. When they attach to nominal stems, they denote the meaning of ‘get’, ‘go’, and ‘reflexive’, respectively, and when they attach to verbal stems, they express situation types that are often associated with the middle domain (Kemmer 1993). Working from the perspective of grammaticalization, this paper traces the origins and possible development of the three named morphemes, with supporting evidence drawn from cognates of other Formosan languages.

In Athabascan languages, verbal morphological structure does not follow the cross-linguistically more common and stable ‘layered’ order: derivational and lexical affixes are not necessarily closer to the stem than inflectional affixes. While the emergence of the Athabascan order is understandable through different layers of grammaticalization (Mithun 2011), the question of why this order is relatively stable in the language family has not yet been satisfactorily answered. The distributional properties of cognate Athabascan morphemes reveal historical tendencies for fusion and reordering that suggest that affixes remain in or change their position depending on the semantic relevance to other affixes, not necessarily to the stem alone, as Bybee’s (1985) morphological theory would predict. An additional factor for the stability of non-layered structure of morphemes is the high degree of semantic generality found in affixes between the stem and other lexical and derivational affixes.

Politeness strategies using specific word forms and morphemes are well known in Tibetan, in whichhonorificexpressions are in the majority. However, for Amdo Tibetan the politeness register is less well known. In this paper, the humilific politeness system of Mabzhi Amdo Tibetan is discussed in terms of ten morphologically-formed types, eight types of noun suffixes (/-ŋən/, /-tɕhəl/, /-tɕhəχ/, /-choχ/, /-ɦdəx/, /-ʈʋ̩/, /-rgen/, and /-ʂti/), and two adjective types (/ʔa xha ma/ and /nɖanɖa/), as well as suppletion. In addition, the article discusses both the use and misuse of humilifics providing case examples from natural conversation settings as well as a crosstalk (kha shags) performance to illustrate how humilifics are deployed, treated, and evaluated in the contemporary world of Mabzhi Tibetans.

Pyu, an extinct Sino-Tibetan language once spoken in what is now Upper Burma, remains barely explored beyond the level of transliterating texts and the identification of individual words. Knowledge of Pyu grammar has advanced little over the past century. This article (1) presents a methodology for discovering the syntax of Pyu, (2) identifies five word classes and their combinatorial properties, (3) lists all known grammatical morphemes with notes on usage, (4) formulates rules of word order, and (5) demonstrates how all of the above can elucidate the meaning of a previously undeciphered Pyu inscription. Over 200 examples are provided.

Previous research suggests that while free morpheme identification during visual word recognition is position-independent, suffixes are activated only when they occur after the stem. Surprisingly, prefix position coding has not yet been assessed. This point is important given that some experimental studies demonstrated clear processing differences between prefixes and suffixes. In this study we examined whether Spanish suffixes and prefixes are recognized independently of their position by adapting the Crepaldi, Rastle, and Davis’s (2010) experimental paradigm. We observed that morphologically structured nonwords in which the affix occurs in its typical position (e.g., curiosura, disgrave) are rejected more slowly and less accurately than their matched orthographic controls (e.g., curiosula, dusgrave). Crucially, such morpheme interference effect is completely absent when the morphemes are inverted (i.e., uracurios and gravedis are rejected as easily as ulacurios and gravedus). Our data provide strong support to the hypothesis that all affix processing is sensitive to position.

A leading hypothesis in the study of the L2 acquisition of aspect-related verbal morphemes is the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH) (Andersen, 1989,1991;Andersen & Shirai, 1994) which claims that learners’ use of these forms is determined by the lexical properties of events. Reviews of major studies reveal that data from one single task, usually an open-ended oral task, have often been used to support this hypothesis. I discuss copious evidence from the acquisition of Spanish to argue that when studies use a ‘mixed methods’ approach (e.g. combining oral production and experimentally elicited data) they are able to test existing hypotheses such as the LAH more reliably and can offer more valuable insights. Existing evidence from the SPLLOC project (Domínguez, Tracy-Ventura, Arche, Mitchell, & Myles, 2013;Mitchell, Domínguez, Arche, Myles, & Marsden, 2008) is used as supporting evidence for this approach and to raise questions about the appropriateness of some research methods widely used in our field.

In addition to plurality, creole plural morphemes impart an additional meaning of definiteness or specificity to the nominal expressions they mark. As of yet, there is no precise characterization either empirical or theoretical of the semantic/pragmatic dimensions they convey. Furthermore, the question of whether this added meaning is largely fixed across distinct creoles and plural morphemes, or subject to variations has never been examined. With the goal of bringing new insights intothese questions, this paper reports the results of a comparativestudy of the properties of two creole plural morphemes in two distinct French-lexifier creoles, Haitian Creole (HC) and Mauritian Creole (MC). Besides relying on native speaker intuitions, a detailed comparative qualitative and quantitative study of the uses of these plural morphemes was conducted in a textual corpus in two adaptations of the story of the Little Prince by Antoine De St Exupery, in Haitian Creole and in Mauritian Creole respectively. The results of this comparative investigation clearly demonstrate that the use of plural morphemes in the two creoles, though similarin a number of respects, also differ quite systematically. We observe that the distinctions noted closely mirror the uses of the singular definite marker ‘la’ bv’ also argued to subtly diverge in these two creoles (Wespel 2008, Déprez 2016, in preparation). The paper analyzes this mirroring effect as a consequence of the positions that the plural morphemes come to occupy in the nominal structure and of the way the structure building operations are constrained in the different creoles. Concretely it is argued that the plural morphemes come to derivationally occupy the position of definite articles in each of the languages, and that this derivational process is obligatory in Haitian Creole due to the pronominal nature of its plural morpheme, but remains optional in Mauritian.

Udi is a Nakh-Daghestanian (Lezgic) language spoken in northern Azerbaijan, which has undergone many contact-induced changes due to the influence of unrelated languages of the eastern Caucasus (Indo-European, Turkic). A recent change is the borrowing of the conditional enclitic=safrom Azerbaijani (Turkic). In Udi, this marker can combine with finite indicative tenses, resulting in a series of derived ‘realis’ conditional mood forms. The clitic is also used to create an indefiniteness marker, which derives indefinite pronouns from interrogative ones. Prior to the borrowing of the Azerbaijani morpheme there was no comparable marker in Udi available to fulfil these functions, while other Lezgic languages employ their own native grammatical means for the same functions (conditional clitics or auxiliaries). The acquisition of the borrowed clitic has thus made Udi more and not less structurally isomorphic with respect to the other languages of the Lezgic branch. This paper develops a description of functions related to the domain of conditional mood on various stages of the history of Udi, and suggests a diachronic scenario for the borrowing of the Azerbaijani marker=sa.

Since the 1970s, findings from Morpheme Order Studies (MOS) have suggested that the emergence of morphemes follows a predictable order in L2 English. In this paper we show how the tools and practices in Learner Corpus Research (LCR) offer a richer descriptive basis, which is achieved with Interlanguage Annotation (ILA), a manual, fined-grained, purpose-oriented type of annotation. Additionally, we use a standardised placement test, since proficiency level has been overlooked in most previous MOS. Both of these practices provide a more detailed description of morpheme accuracy order across different levels. We analyse four proficiency levels (A1-B2) in a subcorpus of L1 Spanish-L2 English secondary-school learners from the CORpus of English as a Foreign Language (COREFL). Our results partially confirm findings from previous MOS, but also reveal key findings that had gone previously unnoticed regarding the role of proficiency level and the subtype of errors, which are relevant factors for SLA research.

Standard etymological dictionaries agree that Modern English some, same and their Old English cognate sam- ‘half’ descend from the same etymon. However, while explaining their phonological development from the same proto-form is unproblematic, their divergent meanings make the reconstruction of their semantic evolution more challenging. The paper examines the historical semantic connection between these three morphemes from a cognitive perspective and attempts to provide an explanation of how they are conceptually linked to each other. Based on a cognitive semantic analysis of the meanings of these forms, we propose that all three concepts are understood on the basis of and embedded in one and the same image schematic domain – comprised by the general unity/multiplicity schema – and derive from entailments of its subschemata. Such an image schematic account of the conceptual connections between these meanings provides an explanation for the various paths of semantic development from the original etymon leading to the established later meanings. This approach will also facilitate the semantic reconstruction of the ancestral Proto-Indo-European form and help identify the exact cognate relationships between some, same and sam-.

This paper surveys the forms of dual and plural pronouns across the Tibeto-Burman languages, and offers a reconstruction of the non-singular pronouns, and a general account of how various branches and languages have diverged from this original system. We can certainly reconstruct two, perhaps three, person-number portmanteaus: #i1pl, or perhaps 1pl.inc, #ni2pl, and, less certainly, #ka1pl.exc. We also reconstruct #tsidualwhich combined with singular pronouns to make dual forms. This construction was the model on which most daughter languages have innovated an analytic system of person and number marking, with distinct person and dual and/or plural morphemes combining to make the morphologically complex but semantically transparent compositional forms found in the majority of languages.

The principle of directionality is an important part of the comparative method: in order to arrive at a reconstruction, historical linguists need a robust theory that informs them in what direction linguistic change is likely to proceed. But any such theory will have exceptions. How are these to be spotted? I examine one case in which a counter-directional change, degrammaticalization, can be reconstructed by invoking the phonotactics of the proto-language. The degrammaticalized form is the Sirva 3sg pronoun be, and the proto-language is Proto-Sogeram. After making this reconstruction, I also demonstrate that it can be used to enhance our understanding of degrammaticalization. Be spawned a small family of related forms, which shows us that degrammaticalized forms can become polygrammaticalized in the same way as other grammatical morphemes.

The relationship between the Songhay and Mande language families has fascinated West Africanists. The typological similarities run deep, but the respective lexicons are noncognate. I focus here on a typological rarity, a bidirectional case marker (BCM), namely Proto-Songhay *nà and its descendants, and argue that it was most likely borrowed from Mande as part of the adoption by Songhay of the equally typologically rare Mande-type S(‑infl)‑O‑V‑X syntax, which reduces to S‑O‑V‑X when there is no post-subject inflectional morpheme (predicative marker). Apparently Songhay had little choice but to borrow the morpheme on the grounds that it did not previously possess the S(‑infl)‑O‑V‑X construction of which it is a key component, especially since a buffer between S and O prevents real-time mis-parsing of two adjacent NPs as possessor-possessum. The medial (‘caught in the middle’) position of the morpheme in the S‑BCM‑O sequence favored the borrowing, in spite of its abstract relational function which in some theoretical models should block borrowing.

Several recent studies devoted to French clefts involving a pronominal/adverbial morpheme such as pour ça (for that), là (there), ainsi (like this), alors (then) and comme ça (like this) demonstrate that these are likely to behave in two distinct ways, one of them being somewhat “non-prototypical” in comparison with the most commonly described narrow focus clefts. The subject of our article is to deepen the examination of c’est comme ça que sequences (lit: it is like this that, “this is how”), since they have not yet received detailed attention as to their use in modern French. The 8,600,000 word corpus which was used indicates that such forms are considerably more frequent in spoken than in written data. After recalling some of the major syntactic characteristics of clefts, we will suggest that two distinct types of c’est comme ça que sequences must be identified: the first type corresponds to the most prototypical clefts endowed with a “contrastive” effect related to the expression of manner; the second type, which will be described in greater detail, cannot be viewed as a cleft but rather as a specific discourse connector, which speakers mostly use in narrative texts, in order to introduce a consequence of the set of facts previously mentioned.

In this paper, we propose that in Stau (Rgyalrongic, Sino-Tibetan) there is a system of four vowel pairs (/i/-/ə/, /e/-/ɛ/, /æ/-/ɑ/, /u/-/o/) that undergo regressive vowel harmony. This system of vowel harmony produces root morpheme forms such as [æCæ] and [ɑCɑ], whereas forms like [æCɑ] or [ɑCæ] are remarkably absent. Vowel harmony is also observed when combining morphemes to create complex words. Unambiguous cases show that the vowel of the first morpheme assimilates to the vowel of the second (e.g. /æCɑ/ → [ɑCɑ]), if the vowels of the two morphemes belong to the same vowel pair set (e.g. /æ/-/ɑ/). At the same time, there are several situations where vowel harmony is consistently not observed. Notable among these blocking mechanisms are lexemes that contain semantically-heavy first syllables. In this situation, we observe the interplay of semantics and phonology. Analysis of the vowel harmony system in Stau yields a way to measure the distance between morphemes.

“Induced Creaky Tone (ICT)” is a grammatical tone in Burmese. It is the result of a process by which Low or High tone is changed into Creaky tone. This alternation is multifunctional, and one of its functions is possessor marking. This paper demonstrates several well-distinguished conditions of different nature and different domain for this tonal alternation. ICT is primarily induced by syntax, varies due to pragmatic factors, occurs only on the shared right boundary of phrases and stem forms, and its phonological condition has a domain stretching to the left boundary of the prosodic word. A comprehensive account of such conditions provides the basis for a grammatical analysis which tests the theoretical options for representing a tonal morpheme in the morpho-syntactic structure of a sentence. It also sheds light on other issues such as the interfaces between phonology and grammar, and between tonal morphology and tonal syntax.

Object markers (OMs) in Bantu languages have long been argued to be either incorporated pronouns or agreement morphemes, distinguished mainly by their ability (or not) to co-occur with (i.e. double)in situobjects. Lubukusu appears to be an instance of OMs-as-incorporated pronouns, as OMs in neutral discourse contexts cannot doublein situobjects in a broad range of syntactic contexts. As we show, however, certain pragmatic contexts in fact do license OM-doubling; we demonstrate that OM-doubling in Lubukusu is licit only on a verum (focus) interpretation. We analyze OM-doubling within a Minimalist framework as the result of an Agree relation between the object and a verum-triggering Emphasis head (Emph°). The non-doubling OM results from an incorporation operation. We therefore claim that Lubukusu displays two distinct syntactic derivations of OMs (generating doubling and non-doubling) with the interpretive effects of OM-doubling arising from the semantic/pragmatic properties of Emph°.

Ikema is defined as ‘definitely endangered’ by UNESCO (2009). The study examines an evaluative morpheme -gama used by old Ikema speakers aged 64 to 86 when speaking between Ikema speakers and when speaking Standard Japanese with outsiders. Descriptive grammar of Ikema (Hayashi 2010; Hayashi 2013 inter alia) has treated -gama as diminutive morpheme, representing smallness such as tui-gama ‘small bird’ or showing the affections to the base noun. The observations on naturally occurring data, however, revealed that the Ikema speakers barely used -gama by means of describing smallness: the most frequent use of -gama was found to be non-supplementary (Shetter 1959) and carries various socio-pragmatic functions. The related meanings/functions of -gama are presented in radial category (Lakoff 1987).

German Sign Language (DGS) displays variation in the simple plural, the form of which is conditioned by classes of phonological features within the lexicon. As a consequence, the overt realization of the plural marker is restricted to a small set of nouns specified for the appropriate phonological features, while the rest are left bare (Pfau & Steinbach 2005, 2006; Steinbach 2012). Pfau & Steinbach (2005) report a number of ‘alternative pluralization strategies’ available as repairs for this underspecification, including classifier constructions, spatial localization, and number and quantifier phrases. I propose a previously undescribed mechanism for plural marking, the ‘classifier-based plural morpheme’ (CLP), grammaticalized from the classifier system into a morpheme in the grammars of individual DGS signers. Elicitation data show that this morpheme attaches only to nouns which are specified for phonological features that restrict the realization of the canonical plural marker, adding a new option to the range of pluralization strategies available.

The article presents a morphemic account of transcategoriality, with detailed illustrations (e.g. English but and even, French encore, tout, meme, Latin to French morpheme /tant/) of the approach. After making explicit the paradigmatic differences between exoskeletal and endoskeletal approaches, and showing that ultimately it can be summarized in terms of existence or not of grammar-free morphemes becoming lexemes through grammatical and contextual insertion, it turns to the issue of knowing what an exoskeletal non-categorial meaning can be. It introduces at this stage the notion of fractality, before making explicit and detailing the method which allows isolation of a morpheme’s indicational semantics. The whole approach is finally illustrated with the study of the whole distribution of French /tant/, first semantically in synchrony before extending the tests to Latin data, showing that polysemy, transcategoriality and plurisemy are various forms of the same issue.

We report on a visual masked priming experiment designed to explore the role of morphology in Maltese visual word recognition. In a lexical decision task, subjects were faster to judge Maltese words of Semitic origin that were primed by triconsonantal letter-strings corresponding to their root-morphemes. In contrast, they were no faster to judge Maltese words of non-Semitic origin that were primed by an equivalent, but non-morphemic, set of three consonant letters, suggesting that morphological overlap, rather than simple form overlap, drives this facilitatory effect. Maltese is unique among the Semitic languages for its orthography: Maltese alone uses the Latin alphabet and requires that all vowels are written, making such triconsonantal strings illegal non-words to which Maltese readers are never exposed, as opposed to other Semitic languages such as Hebrew in which triconsonantal strings often correspond to real words. Under a decomposition-based account of morphological processing, we interpret these results as suggesting that across reading experience Maltese readers have abstracted out and stored root-morphemes for Semitic-origin words lexically, such that these morphemic representations can be activated by exposure to root-letters in isolation and thus prime morphological derivatives.

With a close examination of the characteristics of Chinese monosyllables, i.e., the base morphemes that form the disyllabic verbs, this article discusses the morphological traits these characteristics bring to disyllabic compound verbs. The two distinctive characteristics of the Chinese monosyllables, namely, being morphologically independent and highly polysemous, give rise to unusual phenomena in disyllabic verbs, most representatively the headedness of coordinative compound verbs. The Chinese language not only has various possible forms of headedness, but also allows the same compound verbs to be both endocentric and exocentric.

This article proposes that the divergent pattern of verb argument marking found in object focus clauses in the Tuparian branch of the Tupian family comes from the reanalysis of an object nominalization in a cleft construction. Based on the distribution of free and bound person markers, the major alignment pattern can be characterized as nominative-absolutive in simple clauses, with free pronouns expressing the nominative, whereas bound person markers express the absolutive. However, object focus clauses show a distinct alignment pattern: the ergative, and not the absolutive, is indexed by the bound markers on the verb. We present arguments for identifying the object nominalization as the source of this grammar in the object focus clause, showing also how this reanalysis resulted in the nominalizer morpheme and the person markers gaining new functions.