Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 25, Issue 2, 2001

A component of the universal evolution model of color terms is that blue-yellow and red-green color terms should not exist in the world’s languages. This is because such terms would confound opponent colors (Hering 1920, Hurvich & Jameson 1955). However, some relativist scholars, namely Saunders and van Brakel (1997) and McNeill (1972), maintain that some languages do have such terms. This paper considers these claims and shows that they are unfounded: Either an alleged blue-yellow term is actually a yellow-green-blue term; one or more basic color terms have undergone semantic extension; a term’s basic meaning is ‘pale or faded’; or the data were not properly analyzed.

The syntactic properties of applicatives have received a large amount of attention. Despite this there have been almost no attempts to explain the reasons behind the choice of an applicative coding of an argument when there is an grammatical oblique coding strategy available. This study focuses on dynamic applicative constructions in Tukang Besi, an Austronesian language of central Indonesia, and examines a large corpus for reasons why applicative coding is chosen over oblique coding. Factors such as semantic role information and animacy are as important as textual prominence in the coding decision.

English verbs of the believe type, which display variation between that-complements and infinitival complements, more often combine with infinitives as passives than as actives. Though there are good information/thematic structural reasons for this (Noël 1998b), the higher frequency of passive matrices could also be a concomitant of a grammaticalization process as a result of which (some of) these matrices are turning into auxiliary-like evidentials. Anderson’s (1986) four-part definition of true (grammaticalized) evidentials is used to establish whether they can qualify as such. The fact that passives are more tolerant of lexical (even dynamic) infinitives than actives (which prefer be and statives) is adduced as evidence of grammaticalization. Individual instances of the passive pattern are differentiated using three criteria of grammaticalization: frequency, expansion and intraparadigmatic variability.

This article discusses the evidential uses of the Future, Conditional and Indicative Imperfect in various Romance languages (mostly French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish) and the semantic factors that underlie the choice between them. The Romance data are used as a background for an evaluation of proposed taxonomies of evidentiality (Willett 1988; Frawley 1992; Botne 1997). It is shown that Willett’s model, based on the primary distinction direct vs. indirect type of evidence, is better suited to account for evidentiality in Romance, while the notion of source should be considered as independently interacting with the type of evidence/mode of knowing.