Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 17, Issue 1, 1993

Four operations of nominal concretization are crucial for presenting a typology of classifier languages: individualization, classification, relationalization (possession), and referentialization. The first three of these operations are at work in the Hmong classifier system. The development of classifiers is described in connection with the degree of grammaticalization which will be measured by the three parameters of [± exact], [± entity], and cohesion. These parameters will be arranged in a three-dimensional continuum (cf. Fig. II.) which leads to the following evolutional steps of increasing grammaticalization: nouns, class nouns, quantifiers, intrinsic quantifiers (to be defined in the present article), and classifiers.

Two synchronic tense-marking auxiliaries in Panare are derived etymologically from demonstrative pronouns. The original pronouns differed in spatial deixis, one marking proximate ('this'), the other distal ('that'). They came to be required between predicate noun and subject in predicate nominal clauses, and thus evolved into copulas. As copulas, the deixis of the pronouns shifted to time, with proximal becoming present or immediate future and distal becoming past (but also sometimes interprétable as distant future). These copulas then evolved further to become tense auxiliaries for a new generation of main clause verbs.

The temporal system of noun-modifying clauses in Korean manifests a three-way aspectual opposition among non-prior imperfective, prior imperfective, and morphologically unmarked perfective, a crosslinguistically common pattern manifested in West African languages, creole languages, Persian, and Lakhota, etc. The semantic and mor-phosyntactic distribution of temporal expressions in noun-modifying clauses in Korean cannot be characterized with the temporal dimension of aspectual distinctions such as completion, ongoingness, inception, duritivity, but with the totality dimension of aspectual distinctions of whether the speaker's viewpoint is within or outside the event frame in which the situation described takes place.

The historian of linguistic thought, who wants to contribute to the instruction of the practicing linguist of today and not simply cater to a specialist readership outside linguistics proper, may find him/herself in a quandry: On the one hand, s/he is motivated to render seemingly 'dated' theories accessible to the modern linguist; on the other, s/he feels him/herself constrained by his/her professional ethos to present them as objectively as possible, i.e., within their original intellectual context. In describing and analyzing past theories, the historiographer may find him/herself in a dilemma: either depicting them in the light of current research interests (and thus distorting them to the extent of engaging in presentism), or practicing an antiquarian activity which interests no one (because s/he may be engaging in an excessive historicism). Central to the historiographer's task is the careful treatment of the terminology past authors have employed to articulate their theories, i.e., their metalanguage. After presenting three instances where the issue of metalanguage has not been treated adequately — the use of Saussurean terminology in the description of medieval French linguistic usage, the application of our modern understanding of the term to the medieval concept of 'etymologia', and the misleading use of Praguean phonology in the interpretation of a medieval treatise discussing orthographic problems in Icelandic — the paper, while arguing in favour of a measured approach, makes it clear that the historian of linguistics must become more acutely aware of the potential pitfalls of his/her work if the question of metalanguage is not attended to properly.

Cross-linguistically unusual though it is for active clauses with reflexive pronouns as objects to be passivizable, German does permit such passives. Passives with reflexives, widely neglected in German grammar, are examined against the backdrop of purportedly general constraints on the control of reflexive pronouns and on relational interchanges in passivization. As to control, reflexive pronouns in passives appear to be under split control, with semantic and morphosyntactic controllers (active subjects and passive dummy subjects, respectively) not coinciding. As to relational interchanges, passives with reflexive pronouns are prone to lack exemplary subjects despite the presence of potentially subjectivizable objects in corresponding active constructions, with case marking and verb-agreement not necessarily operating in tandem.

In recent years more attention is being paid to the quality of language samples in typological work. Without an adequate sampling strategy, samples may suffer from various kinds of bias. In this article we propose a sampling method in which the genetic criterion is taken as the most important: samples created with this method will reflect optimally the diversity of the languages of the world. On the basis of the internal structure of each genetic language tree a measure is computed that reflects the linguistic diversity in the language families represented by these trees. This measure is used to determine how many languages from each phylum should be selected, given any required sample size.