Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 34, Issue 3, 2010

The English possessive ’s (POSSLS) is widely regarded as a clitic which attaches at the right edge of noun phrases. The so-called “group genitive”, where POSSLS attaches after a postmodifier (the man in the corner’s hat), is crucial to theoretical accounts. We evaluate both theoretical and descriptive treatments. We then describe the actual use of POSSLS in the spoken component of the British National Corpus, with particular attention to postmodified possessors, demonstrating that the crucial pattern is surprisingly marginal and that at least one other pattern has been missed entirely. This leads to discussions of grammaticality versus usage, of postmodification, and of the factors that condition the use of possLs and their relevance to theory.

This paper is a cross-linguistic investigation of meteorological expressions (such as it is snowing or the wind blows). The paper proposes a three-fold typology of meteorological constructions according to the element primarily responsible for the coding of weather. In the predicate type, a predicate expresses the meteorological event, while an argument has other functions. In the argument type, an argument is responsible for expressing weather, while any eventual predicate is semantically rather vacuous. In the argument-predicate type, finally, both a predicate and an argument are involved. All types include subtypes, depending on the syntactic valency and the parts of speech of the elements involved. Building upon the typology of constructions, a typology of languages is also proposed based on the coding of precipitation and temperature.

In this paper we present data from Korean in which the core arguments (subject and direct object) of a transitive clause may be suffixed with oblique postpositional markers rather than the usual nominative or accusative case markers. Unlike familiar cases of oblique arguments, such as dative subjects, we argue that the oblique case marking surveyed here does not indicate a particular thematic role, but rather brings out something different: other semantic properties of the argument in one instance, and a special interpretation imparted to the whole clause in the other. We present a description of the data against a background of current theoretical approaches to case marking, and conclude with some consequences for grammatical theory.

The paper investigates conflicts that arise in syntactic description and the resolutions of these conflicts. I will identify four logical possibilities of resolving conflicts and will cite examples from the syntactic literature for each. It will further be suggested that conflict resolution is a common goal of otherwise different linguistic theories in and outside syntax, and that it goes a long way towards motivating argumentation both in other sciences and in everyday discourse. The basic theme of the paper is that just as the study of languages provides a window into human cognition, so does the study of metalanguages — the conceptual apparatus employed by linguists in describing languages. Partonomy (whole-part relations) and taxonomy (type-subtype relations) will be represented as shared tools across various domains of human thought, with both relations serving a shared goal: resolving conflicts.