Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 20, Issue 2, 1996

Turkana has a set of particles expressing attitudes on the part of the speaker towards the propositional content of utterances in which such markers are used. Attitude markers in Turkana form a closed set whose distributional behavior partly follows from syntactic principles of the language. The absence of these attitude markers from certain syntactic positions follows from their lexical meaning and from pragmatic structure. Their current meaning is argued to have emerged through metonymic extension in certain lexical items, and through conventionalisation of their conversational implicatures. In addition some methodological issues are discussed concerning the interaction between grammar and culture-specific language use, by means of a comparison with similar markers in a number of other languages.

Unlike most Caribbean English-based creoles, Saramaccan has two predicate negator allomorphs, á and ná. While aspects of their distribution suggest that the former is simply a phonologically eroded reflex of the latter, synchronic, diachronic, and comparative evidence indicate that á actually resulted from a phonological coalescence of a resumptive pronominal and the following original negator, in the context of topic-comment constructions. This account explains predicate negator occurrences in the grammar which are otherwise anomalous. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrates that caution must be applied in the tendency to view Saramaccan as a repository of ontoge-netically primary creole features, or as an instantiation of Universal Grammar on view. Finally, the account leads to various conclusions about the role that topic-comment constructions play in diachrony, particularly relating to the various reanalyses that resumptive pronominals will undergo depending upon the grammar in question.

Linguists have often invoked the concept of contrast in attempting to explain the use of certain constructions without explicitly defining this term. The present paper proposes an operational definition of contrast which can be applied to naturally occurring data so as to provide a more precise account of the relationship between form and function. The specific problem addressed is word order in Biblical Hebrew and Chinese. It is shown that contrast is one factor affecting deviations from canonical word order in these languages, but that the effect of contrast differs in a number of respects in the two languages, and many deviations from canonical word order cannot be accounted for by reference to contrast.

Estival and Myhill (1988) propose the passive construction as the (only) source for morphological ergativity, and hypothesize a unidirectional path of change which appears crucially to pass through a stage which they label deep ergative, but which has been called discourse ergative by a number of linguists working in the field of discourse analysis. This paper begins by addressing the synchronic issue of whether or not Indonesian may be considered discourse ergative. An examination of discourse determinants of voice in Indonesian shows that it cannot be considered ergative on a discourse level. However, Indonesian developed out of Early Modern Malay, which has been identified as discourse ergative (Hopper, 1979a, 1979b, 1983, 1986). This analysis of Indonesian has serious diachronic implications for Estival and Myhill's (1988) hypothesis, which must be revised either by allowing for bidirectional change, or by eliminating the discourse ergative stage.

Current works on grammaticalisation have discussed the tendency for older, lexically-based meanings to continue to adhere to the grammaticalising item in a situation described as 'retention' (Bybee & Pagliuca, 1987), and for these meanings to impose semantic constraints affecting the grammatical distribution of the item in some present-day environments. The present study will examine the restrictions on the use of the modal will (represented in its backshifted form would) in the hypothetical predicates of the verb wish, and, using a small sample of native-speaker informants, statistically-based suggestions will be proposed regarding the distributional limits on the grammaticalisation of the modal as a future auxiliary.