Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 22, Issue 1, 1998

This paper deals with noun incorporation data from Northern Athapaskan languages, which have not hitherto been analyzed formally. Based on semantic characteristics of noun incorporation and on incorporation from oblique and subject positions, we claim that this phenomenon does not obey the syntactic rules posited by Baker (1988). A theory which seeks to constrain noun incorporation in terms of grammatical relations is not adequate for explaining it in Northern Athapaskan. A functional approach (Givón 1984, 1985), which is sensitive to the semantics and pragmatics of incorporation, is found to be more adequate. We argue that noun incorporation is a functionally motivated process at the interface of morphology and syntax that changes linguistic coding from independent and salient to dependent and nonsalient.

The Tukang Besi language does not appear to display a clear distinction between transitive and intransitive clauses, as transitive verbs are freely able to appear without any overt object and degrees of intransitivity are to be found in the language. The ground between transitive and intransitive contains several points of interest in that eight different degrees of transitivity can be morphologically defined in the one language, allowing us to test the relative rankings of Hopper and Thompson's criteria for transitivity.

On the basis of data from both genetically and geographically remote languages the present paper builds a case for the existence of ACTION NARROWLY AVERTED (ANA) as a cross-linguistically identifiable gram involving the meaning was on the verge of V-ing but did not V.The paper proposes the methodology of recent grammaticalization theory as a theoretical tool which enables us to describe the specificities of linguistic behavior (nuances of meaning, contextual distribution, etc.) of ANA and related grams in terms of the particular grammaticalization path along which they may develop.The present treatment challenges structuralist-oriented approaches which tacitly assume that in juxtaposing grammatical structures from different languages we face only two situations: either full identity or idiosyncrasy.

In the study of the syntactic category EXPERIENTIAL, it has been known that the experiential is mainly concerned with indefinite (or nonspecific) situations. However, a comparative study of the experiential in Chinese, Japanese and Korean reveals that there exists another type of experiential which is concerned with definite (or specific) situations. All three languages share the semantic properties of repeatability, uniqueness, discontinuity and relevant duration for the experiential. The distinction between the indefinite and definite experiential is supported by syntactic as well as semantic evidence.