Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 35, Issue 1, 2011

This study advocates the investigation of soliloquy as a new approach in pragmatics research. The primary function of language is arguably to communicate with others, but language is also used to think. Thoughts constantly emerge in confluent streams of images, concepts, and ideas within the mind; to grasp and manage them, we need language. An analysis of soliloquy can open a window to a better understanding of our mental activities. Based on experimentally obtained soliloquy data in Japanese, three issues are considered: gendered language, the sentence-final particles ne and yo, and the ko-so-a demonstratives. It is demonstrated that soliloquy can shed new light on these widely studied topics. The conclusions reached include that (a) Japanese gendered language is more gendered than recent studies in the field claim, (b) ne and yo are used to monitor and control the speaker’s internal information processing, and (c) the deixis-anaphra distinction is not clear-cut.

In this article we discuss the discourse functions of the alternative linearizations of Spoken Hebrew sentences, as reflected in the possessive sentence pattern. We begin by presenting the available variants of possessive sentences in Hebrew. Next, we address the issue of markedness in our discussion of the discourse functions of the different word orders. The discourse functions demonstrated are contrast, parallelism, side-sequencing, emotive and argumentative discourse. The study is based on corpora of naturally occurring speech. Previous studies of possessive sentences in Hebrew have focused mainly on grammatical issues. These studies have not addressed the field of discourse functions, nor have they used naturally occurring speech. The current study fills this gap.

In this article, we examine two word order inversion constructions in Mbuun, a Bantu language which lacks a true morphological or periphrastic passive. Mbuun uses both an ‘OSV construction’ and an ‘impersonal 3PL construction’ as functional passives. We demonstrate that the pre-posed object in both constructions is more than a mere topic in a syntactically adjoined position. It can be considered a syntactic argument and even displays certain properties which are generally associated with grammatical subjects. Hence, both constructions involve more than the pragmatic topicalization of the object. They are more than just functional passives. They have to some extent also evolved grammatically towards passiveness. Comparing the two Mbuun functional passives from a pragmatic point of view, the impersonal 3PL construction comes closest to passive prototype, because it obligatorily deletes the AGENT. In the related OSV construction, the AGENT is maintained in pre-verbal position, thus retains substantial topicality, and can even receive new information focus.

This paper presents a detailed analysis of reflexive nominal compounds like self-assessment in English and their counterparts in nine other languages, whose number and use has strongly increased in these languages over the last several decades. The first component of these compounds is shown to be related to intensifiers like selbst in German and its cognate form self- in English, whose multiple uses also underlie different semantic types of reflexive compounds (self-help vs. self-control), whereas the second component typically derives from transitive verbs. Among the central problems discussed in this paper are the question of the productivity of these compounds and the possibility of deriving their meaning in a compositional fashion. The parameters of variation manifested by the sample of languages under comparison in this pilot study concern inter alia the form of the intensifier (native or borrowed, one or two), the semantic type, and the lexical category of the resultant compound.

ya33ya33giveFurthermore, the existence of two distinct constructions for the benefactive and the malefactive in Jinghpo conforms to Radetzky & Smith’s claim (2010: 116) that this is an areal feature comprising the Indian subcontinent, Southeast and East Asia, and thus contrasts strongly with the conflation of both types of construction in many European languages.ya33ya33giveThe present analysis is based on the variety of Jinghpo spoken in Luxi County, Yunnan Province, China, using, in the main, natural discourse data collected in the field.

In some (numeral) classifier languages, a classifier may occur “bare” (i.e. with a noun but without a numeral) and the nominal expression receives a definite interpretation. On the basis of evidence from Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese, Cheng and Sybesma (1999) hypothesize that classifier languages exhibit either the bare classifier or the bare noun pattern for definite reference, but not both. To evaluate this hypothesis against more typologically diverse languages, a parallel elicitation study of three non-Sinitic languages was conducted — Vietnamese, Hmong and Bangla — as well as two geographical varieties of Cantonese, focusing on the definite interpretation of bare classifier and bare noun patterns. The results show that although the use of bare classifier patterns for definite reference is a cross-linguistically connected phenomenon, there is more variation than previously described in the alternation between definite bare classifier and bare noun patterns, and that the preference for one pattern over another may receive functional/ pragmatic explanations.

This study, which builds on previous work on the grammaticalization of lexemes into affixes (affixization), is devoted to the evolution from adjective to affix (prefix or suffix) in Dutch and French. By means of several case studies (oud- ‘old’, dol- ‘mad’, nouveau- ‘new’, -vriendelijk ‘friendly’) which are assessed against grammaticalization parameters such as de- or resemanticization and decategorization, I show that the affixization of adjectives is more productive and more advanced in Dutch than in French. To account for these differences, I argue that the affixization process strongly interacts with the different word order patterns of both languages. According to this hypothesis, the Dutch modifier-head structure would favour the grammaticalization of adjectives into prefixes and suffixes, whereas the French head-modifier structure impedes the affixization process.