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This study analyses the structure of lexical roots in the Lamalamic languages of Cape York Peninsula, in the northeast of Australia. The analysis shows how Lamalamic roots are shaped diachronically by processes of erosion and expansion, leading to root forms that are unusual by Australian standards. Erosion processes include the loss of initial consonants, resulting in vowel-initial roots, and the loss of entire initial syllables, resulting in monosyllabic roots. Expansion processes include leftward expansion through the addition of meaningless VC prefixes, and rightward expansion through morphological augmentation and subsequent semantic bleaching. The analysis describes the basic processes involved for the languages, using historical-comparative and phonotactic evidence, and brings out two points of more general relevance. First, the analysis proposes an analogy-based mechanism to explain loss of initial vowels, which complements the classic account in terms of gradual initial weakening. Second, the analysis also suggests that erosion and expansion processes may be functionally related, in that there is some evidence that expansion processes could originate in a mechanism to counterbalance the development of monosyllables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines whether Australian languages generally lack clear noun phrase structures, as has sometimes been argued in the literature. We break up the notion of NP constituency into a set of concrete typological parameters, and analyse these across a sample of 100 languages, representing a significant portion of diversity on the Australian continent. We show that there is little evidence to support general ideas about the absence of NP structures, and we argue that it makes more sense to typologize languages on the basis of where and how they allow 'classic' NP construal, and how this fits into the broader range of construals in the nominal domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the adnominal use of personal pronouns in a sample of 75 Australian languages. We develop two arguments. First, we argue that in all of the adnominal uses examined, the personal pronoun has a determiner-like function, showing both the functional properties and some of the behaviour of more typical determiner categories like demonstratives or articles. We support this analysis with evidence from positioning tendencies, semantics and discourse functions, and indications of grammaticization in some languages. Secondly, we show that this phenomenon is relatively widespread in Australia, occurring in about half of the languages examined here. We identify five potential geographic clusters, one or two of which can be analyzed as areally determined groupings around a centre with incipient grammaticization. From a typological perspective, these data present new evidence for a somewhat under-studied pathway to nominal determination, in addition to better-studied pathways involving demonstratives, numerals or adjectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This study analyses the semantics of English deontic adjectives like essential and appropriate, and uses this to refine traditional definitions of deontic modality, which are mainly based on the study of modal verbs. In a first step, it is shown that the set of meanings associated with deontic adjectives is quite different from the set of meanings identified in the literature on modal verbs. Adjectives lack the directive meanings of obligation or permission, which are traditionally regarded as the core deontic categories, and they have semantic extensions towards non-modal meanings in the evaluative domain. In a second step, the analysis of adjectives is used to propose an alternative definition of deontic modality, which covers both the meanings of verbs and adjectives, and which can deal with the different extensions towards modal and non-modal categories. This is integrated into a conceptual map, which works both in diachrony – defining pathways of change – and in synchrony – accommodating refinements within each set of meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper is a cross-linguistic study of counterfactuality in simple clauses, as in the English construction The police should have intervened. On the basis of a representative sample of languages, we investigate (i) how counterfactuality is most commonly marked, and (ii) what these patterns of marking can tell us about the nature and origins of counterfactuality. We first show that counterfactuality is most frequently marked by a combination of elements that have other functions in other contexts, rather than by one single ‘dedicated’ marker. Contrary to popular belief, neither past tense nor imperfective aspect is a universal feature in the combinations of markers used to signal counterfactuality: the only type of element that is found in every combination is a modal element marking some type of potentiality, which can be combined (i) with past-tense markers, (ii) with a combination of past tense and aspectual (perfect or perfective) markers, or (iii) just with aspectual markers. On the basis of these findings about the marking of counterfactuality, we argue that counterfactuality typically originates as a semanticization of pragmatic information, more specifically an implicature derived from the compositional meaning of a combination of a modal element and a past, perfect or perfective element. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study argues that constructions of purpose, reason and intended endpoint have a special status in typologies of complex sentences, because they combine features of the adverbial domain and the complement domain. The feature they share with adverbial clauses is that they do not function as the object of the predicate of the main clause, but instead elaborate on its circumstances. The feature they share with complement clauses is that unlike other adverbial clauses they specify the mental state of some participant in the main clause, typically the agent. Evidence for this special status comes from two sources. On the one hand, it is shown that the recognition of a mental state relation is necessary in semantic terms, to distinguish the three constructions from semantically similar types in the adverbial domain, and to explain their exceptional behavior in terms of presupposition. On the other hand, it is also shown that the presence of such a mental state relation is crosslinguistically reflected in the formal make-up of the three construction types, specifically in the use of mood markers in the dependent clause, and in the use of conjunctions that are shared with the domain of represented speech. From a theoretical perspective, the intermediate status of constructions of purpose, reason and intended endpoint is important because it provides structural evidence for layered models of clause structure, specifically for the distinction between a description-related and an interaction-related layer of organization, and for a further subdivision of the interaction-related layer in terms of modal and illocutionary features. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the semantic development of the adjectives essential and crucial in deontic meaning. The authors emphasize that the two adjectives are considered loan words in the Romance origin. The dynamic modality demands indications of abilities, possibilities, and necessities which inherent the agents of actions or in situations like agent-internal and situation-internal dynamic expressions. The semantic permeability of the relational nouns involved in the meaning of the adjective essential is expressed. Moreover, some factors that drive the various semantic changes of the adjectives are also discussed.

This paper argues for a constructional approach to the analysis of coordination in English, with comparative evidence from a number of other Germanic languages. The analysis of coordination proposed here is functionally based on the notion of illocutionary force and formally reflected in the behavior of the basic clause types (declarative-imperative-interrogative) in the clauses that make up the coordinate construction. On the one hand, it is argued that this approach can help to explain why traditional syntactic criteria like clause order and word order can be used to distinguish coordinate constructions from subordinate ones, and that it can easily handle cases where one conjunction allows both coordinate and subordinate construal. On the other hand, it is argued that this approach also allows one to make a subdivision within the coordinate category depending on the presence or absence of restrictions in illocution type for the second member of the coordinate construction, and that this subdivision allows for a principled account of other features which subdivide the coordinate domain, like subject ellipsis and use in conjoining non-clausal categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]