Languages in Contrast - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2000

The serial verb construction (SVC) is a productive syntactic phenomenon in many Asian and African languages and has been the subject of various studies. Many of these studies are, however, mainly based on data from the individual Asian and African languages or language groups (e.g. Jayaseelan 1996 for Malayalam; Schiller 1991 for Khmer; Chang 1990 for Mandarin; Bodomo 1997, 1998 for Dagaare and Akan; and Awoyale 1988 for Yoruba). There is a near lack of comparative studies involving Asian and African languages with regards to SVCs. Given the wide variety of syntactic and semantic manifestations that are characteristic of SVCs, cross-linguistic studies are crucial in developing a clear universal typology of SVCs as a first step towards a universal account of their syntax and semantics. Based on Dagaare (a Gur language of West Africa) and Cantonese (a Yue dialect of Chinese), this paper proposes a semantic typology of SVCs including benefactive, causative (resultative), inceptive, instrumental, and deictic serialization.

To understand the use of a grammatical form in one language, it is sometimes helpful to look at another language. In this paper, I propose that the English bare plural expresses nonbounded quantity in a mental space, just as the Finnish bare partitive does. The different formal means used by English and Finnish thus converge in the cognitive unity of the grammatical structuring of the lexical content. The bare plural is not the plural counterpart of the indefinite singular, that is, it does not express the discourse status of its referent, but rather, it belongs to the quantity domain. One of the basic tenets of cognitive grammar is that grammar is motivated. I propose that the nonbounded semantics of the bare plural is based on a formal-semantic analogy with mass nouns. This same motivation operates on bare singulars as well, for they too can be used to create a cognitive image similar to that of mass nouns.

This paper presents a pilot contrastive investigation of tense in English and Swedish. Tense is regarded as a morphological category, and present and past tense inflections, as well as a number of auxiliary and main verb combinations, have been compared in a small sample of texts from the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC). A generally high degree of correspondence with some variation in the different text types was found. The most striking difference is that present tense inflections in Swedish are frequently translated into past tense inflections in English, especially in narrative texts. It was also found that Swedish tense inflections, especially present tense inflections, are frequently translated into auxiliary and main verb combinations with overtly realised modal features in English, and that English past tense inflections frequently correspond to present tense combinations with overtly realised aspectual features in the Swedish original.

Felicitous translations between English and German show that discourse relators like adversative connectors interact with the basic strategies of discourse linking superimposed upon the grammatical rules of word order. For initial position they compete with elements from the propositional meaning of a sentence, which they precede if the propositional elements are given information; if the elements are new (or resumed) information, discourse relators tend to follow them. Attitudinal expressions like probably and possibly precede or follow propositional elements in the same way, but tend towards a greater degree of explicitness in initial positions of English sentences.

This article looks at a particular type of routine formula, called ‘second-level discourse marker’ (SLDM), which falls within the scope of what is sometimes termed ‘procedural vocabulary’. Having defined and exemplified the notion, I set up a structural typology of SLDMs. I then proceed to discuss the possibility of structural equivalence between English, German and French SLDMs. I conclude by exploring the treatment accorded to SLDMs in some of the major bilingual dictionaries. The language material used for purposes of illustration is drawn from a wide variety of corpora.