Functions of Language - Volume 23, Issue 1, 2016

The work of Geoff Thompson, who until his death was an editor of Functions of Language, has had an international reach for over 40 years. He has contributed to advances in Systemic-Functional Linguistics, in particular extending theories of interaction and evaluation in discourse. His Introducing Functional Grammar is an indispensable guide to the field.

Loose appositional constructions consist of coreferring adjacent nominals. The relation between the nominals is different from complementation and modification, and shows some intriguing syntactic, semantic and pragmatic characteristics. To model them we employ the framework of Sign-Based Construction Grammar, enriching its inventory of constructions with a highly abstract one that models supplementation in general, and a more specific one that models the loose appositional construction.

In this paper we report on a historical corpus study of English multiple, an adjective which underwent a process of grammaticalization starting from lexical uses with the meaning ‘composite’, e.g. HR 3617 is a multiple star, to grammaticalized uses as individualizer, paraphrasable as ‘different’, e.g. She has to perform multiple tasks at the same time, and as quantifier ‘several’, e.g. I have multiple friends in high society. Multiple is just one of several adjectives going down this path of grammaticalization. However, as we show in this paper, the trajectory of each adjective includes different micro-processes of change. New diachronic case studies on the grammaticalization of individual items thus remain crucial to further advancing our understanding of the potential environments and changes underlying grammaticalization processes. The case of multiple shows that, firstly, not only attributes, but also classifiers can serve as input for grammaticalization, and that, secondly, grammaticalization and lexicalization processes can have non-adjacent functions in the noun phrase as their input and output.

This paper provides a detailed comparison of the referential behaviour of noun phrases and nominal and verbal gerunds from Middle to Late Modern English. It will be shown that in earlier stages of English, nominal and verbal gerunds to a large extent resemble prototypical noun phrases in their referential functioning, but also exhibit ‘non-nominal’ uses that depend on clausal rather than nominal grounding strategies. It is argued that the study of (diachronic changes in) the semantic and functional behaviour of nominal and verbal gerunds in Middle and Modern English should take into account that these are functionally hybrid constructions, showing referential traits of both prototypical noun phrases and clauses. This functional hybridity, then, was gradually sorted out, with nominal gerunds specializing to nominal reference and verbal gerunds continuing to adhere to the functional apparatus associated with subordinate clauses.

This paper examines the history of the ACC-ing gerundive, a subtype of verbal gerund differing formally from both bare gerundives (I enjoyed reading the paper) and POSS-ing gerundives (I was surprised at Jane’s arriving late) in having an overt subject argument either in the common case, if it is a full noun phrase (Two people worrying about each other, with no external diversion, brews a deadly atmosphere) or in the accusative case, if it is a personal pronoun (You can’t prevent me telling the truth). Findings from a corpus-based study show that early instances of ACC-ing gerundives most often functioned as preverbal sentential subjects and served as arguments to causative predicates such as brew, make and oblige. Based on this evidence, it is argued that ACC-ing gerundives have emerged as an intersection of a number of pre-existing constructions, most especially a subtype of absolute participle, now obsolete, that encoded causative (factive) semantics and preceded its superordinate clause. The development of the new gerundive subtype from this participial source, which proceeded as a succession of small discrete steps, can be fruitfully accounted for as a case of constructional change, along the lines proposed in Hilpert (2013) and Traugott & Trousdale (2013).

Essentially, noun phrases are beams of formal features, like case or arbitrary gender, and semantic features, like number, animacy, or biologically-based gender. This means that when such nominal elements are embedded in the structure of the sentence, their features interact with that structure in many ways. The main purpose of this work is to explore some of those interactions psycholinguistically, as well as to provide a set of explanatory principles that account for a substantial number of results reported in the psycholinguistic literature. It will focus mostly on agreement. Towards that goal, firstly a distinction will be made between the storing of nominal features and the computation of those features; secondly a comparison of the features of number and gender will be made; thirdly, it will be seen how the processing and the production of featural information interacts with the strength of a language’s morphological component; fourthly, the cross-linguistically different degrees of semantic interfacing (such as agreement ad sensum) will also be seen to correlate with morphological strength; finally, it will be argued that processing systems behave quite opportunistically when it comes to using either the formal information or the conceptual information coded in their NPs. This opportunism very often translates into a timing strategy: use first whatever information is available first.