Functions of Language - Volume 32, Issue 2, 2025

Abstract

This paper contributes to the study of actualization through a case study on the development of the Chinese NP1+bǎ+NP2+VP construction. Actualization is the process following syntactic reanalysis in which new linguistic structures diffuse and extend their usage. Data are sourced from The Centre for Chinese Linguistics (CCL) Corpus. Multiple Correspondence Analysis is employed to explore the dynamic relationships among several subconstructions, and Multidimensional Scaling is adopted to visualize the continuity of their meanings. The findings indicate that: (1) the subconstructions form a continuum from expressing disposition meanings to causative meanings; (2) over time, the manipulation of NP1 to NP2 decreases, while the affectedness of NP2 increases; (3) evidence of actualization is observed in the expansion of both semantic and syntactic distributional contexts. These results challenge prevalent claims regarding the high affectedness of the argument marked by bǎ and present further evidence for the ongoing debate over directionality in language change. These findings lend support to the gradualness (Traugott & Trousdale 2010) and diffusion hypotheses (De Smet 2016) of language change, and supplement these hypotheses by proposing that the actualization process can be influenced by the token frequency of existing patterns.

Abstract

This article explores the possibility of developing the attitude spectrum (Martin & White 2005) into a comprehensive one for analyzing the evaluation of institutions in institutional discourse. Specifically, it considers explicit evaluation (via inscribed lexis) and implicit evaluation (via lexical metaphor, nested inscribed lexis, flagging cues, attribution resources and factual account) as contributing to the construction of institutional identity and grades these on a scalar cline. The identification and grading of evaluative strategies is concretized by comparing the clarity of attitudinal stance, the distance the reader needs to range across the text for evaluative interpretation and the amount of co-textual/extra-textual information required for evaluative inference. To make possible the unitization and quantification of implicit evaluation, this article further explores variations of lexical metaphor, flagging cues and attribution resources in invoking positive/negative assessments of institutions, and proposes a focus on material processes in analyzing the evaluativeness of ‘factual accounts’. From a theoretical perspective, this article suggests the possibility of positioning evaluative strategies on a scalar cline by following specific principles. It also offers methodological contributions by specifying how to approach implicit evaluation in empirical studies of institutional identity.

Abstract

This paper gives a unified account of noun incorporation in Present-Day English from a constructional and typological perspective. We first investigate how productive it really is, given the contrasting statements in the literature. Using data from the WordBanks Online corpus, we show that the process is remarkably productive: it is highly extensible, with high type frequency and a broad variety of possible semantic relations between the incorporated noun and its incorporating verb. It is also a regular process, with noun incorporated verbs found in all possible forms, including finite ones. Second, since noun incorporation is productive in English, we investigate how it fits in existing typologies of noun incorporation, more specifically the one proposed by Mithun (1984). We show that types I (lexical compounding) and II (case manipulation) are uncompromisingly available in English, while type III (discourse manipulation) is restricted; type IV (classificatory incorporation) is attested even if not resulting in a fully-fledged nominal classification system. We argue that these differences relate to the typological profile of English, viz. as an analytic language with overtly expressed arguments, contrary to the polysynthetic languages studied by Mithun. The availability of types II-IV incidentally further substantiates the productivity of the process, since these types typically develop later than type I. More generally, this study contributes to our understanding of noun incorporation and its characteristics in more analytic languages, which are understudied in this respect, and provides one of the few detailed, corpus-based studies of noun incorporation in an Indo-European language, where it is overall rare.

This article reviews System in Systemic Functional Linguistics978 17 817 9902 4