Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 23, Issue 3, 1999

Tariana, a North Arawak language from northwest Amazonia, has a complex system of serial verbs and a certain amount of verb compounding. Serial verbs in Tariana provide important evidence in favour of the existence of cross-linguistically valid defining properties of serial verbs. Verb serialisation and verb compounding are independent grammatical processes, each with a grammaticalisation path of its own, and with distinct functions. Their coexistence in one language is consistent with the principle of iconic motivation: the closer the elements are in surface structure, the more they are grammaticalised or lexicalised.

In Mabaan, a Western Nilotic language, indirect speech is characterised by the following three features. Firstly, verbs are inflected in a special way, having an indirect mode as opposed to the direct mode of direct speech. Secondly, in pronominal morphemes a distinction is made between forms that refer to a third person reported speaker (third person forms) and forms which have other third person referents (fourth person forms), a distinction which is coextensive with the use of the indirect mode. Thirdly, third person pronominal forms are identical to the third person pronominal forms used in direct speech, while fourth person pronominal forms are different and, thus, anti-logophoric. Taken together, these features make Mabaan typologically unusual.

Most Nyulnyulan languages (non-Pama-Nyungan, Western Australia), show an unusual clause type, the medio-active, with the case-frame of a transitive clause, but the verbal agreement of an intransitive clause; there is no formal registration in the verb. This paper provides a detailed description of the structural and semantic properties of this clause type in each language that exhibits it, identifying shared features and differences. Evidence is presented that it represents a distinct construction, of intermediate transitivity, and a grammatical analysis is proposed in terms of roles. The medio-active shows, however, few characteristics prototypical of the passive, and is not a voice option.

The letters S, A, and O have been used heuristically for distinguishing ergative-absolutive languages from nominative-accusative languages. This schema, however, has serious disadvantages for the understanding of individual grammars and even more for broad typological work, because it obscures the incommensurable ways in which participants may be related to events or states. Three of these ways are described here and their incommensurability demonstrated. One is the starting point function, reflected in grammatical subjects; another consists of the semantic roles that are reflected in grammaticized agent-patient marking; the third is immediacy of involvement, reflected in absolutive marking. These relations may be cognitively available to speakers of all languages, and are often grammaticized in different parts of the grammar of a single language. Now that more is known about ways in which languages vary, it is time to sharpen our tools so that we may move on to understanding the forces that shape the grammatical structures we find.

This paper provides an Optimality-Theoretic account of the Japanese case system within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar [RRG] (Van Valin 1993; Van Valin and LaPolla 1997). It is shown that a particular ranking of universal constraints may accommodate not only the regular case marking patterns of Japanese, but the irregular ones displayed by inversion, causative, and a variety of double-nominative constructions. Finally, it is suggested that characterizing case systems in terms of the way universal constrainst are ranked opens up a way to a principled typology of case systems.