Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 26, Issue 3, 2002

This study investigates the Mandarin temporal system in ordinary conversations. It is found that during the dynamic time course of interaction, Mandarin speakers tend to rely more heavily on certain underlying principles, rather than on overt markers, to convey temporal location: In a narrative context, temporal reference is almost always established at the beginning of the story and is not subsequently changed, provided that there is a continuity of action across the verbs. In contexts where turn-by-turn talk is at work, speakers tend to establish the time reference through the inherent semantics of the verbs being employed. The data also suggest that other factors, such as shared knowledge and discourse co-text, appear to play a significant role in helping disambiguate the temporal standpoint of utterances which otherwise have potentially competing temporal anchors.

One of the design features of language is its systematicity: to a considerable extent, the rules of grammar relate not to the world outside, but only to other rules. They exist in autonomy from external motivations. Subject-verb inversion in the Germanic languages as a marker of interrogatives is a well-known example of such an externally unmotivated rule. The notion of systematization implies a process whereby such rules have evolved from pre-systematic externally motivated origins. In this particular case: Greenberg’s constituent order universal #11 proposed that only those languages with sentence-initial interrogative words will ever allow subject-verb inversion in questions. There is, however, an obvious functional basis for fronting question words: Jespersen’s principle of actuality. Moreover, of the languages which front question words, many demarcate focussed from presupposed material by a focus-marking flag. In other languages, it may be that the verb itself may function as such a flag, that is, subject-verb inversion may be the functional analog of a demarcative focus marker. The best evidence for the functional unity of focus marking and subject-verb inversion is their complementary distribution, sometimes within the same language. The genuine systematicity of subject-verb inversion may then be the outcome of functional external motivations, and a series of analogical steps. More generally, it may be that other aspects of the autonomization or emancipation of language can be explained by reference to processes that are attested in observed language change. Analogy leads to systematization (and possibly even to recursiveness), as ritualization leads to displacement, and its linguistic aspects (sound change and grammaticalization) lead to arbitrariness, discreteness, and double articulation.

Many languages have copula systems involving more than one copula. In such languages, the functional scopes of the participating copulas vary. This kind of typological variation has not yet been studied in great detail. In Sgaw Karen, three copulas exist, and the functional differences among these can be defined at the semantic as well as at the pragmatic level. For instance, the contrast between the copulas mewæþ and kʔ seems to be coextensive with the notional difference between nouns and adjectives as postulated by theorists such as Croft, Langacker, and Wierzbicka.

In this article I investigate the strategies for encoding events with three participants in an Oceanic language. I look at three-place predicates featuring three syntactic arguments but also and particularly at the functional alternatives to such constructions. Besides ditransitive clauses and clauses featuring two arguments plus an adjunct, Saliba speakers productively use two further strategies to express three-participant events. One strategy makes use of possessive classifiers to express a beneficiary, the other features directional suffixes to express a recipient or goal. In both cases pragmatic implicature plays a role in encoding the third participant. There is evidence though that the three-participant reading is beginning to grammaticalize and in investigating these constructions we are looking at the gray area between morpho-syntax and pragmatics.

While the intonation unit (IU) has been characterized as a cognitive unit in earlier research, recent studies have revealed its interactional aspects as well. Using data from spoken Korean, this study presents evidence which shows that the IU is motivated both cognitively and interactionally, and proposes an interpretation of the IU that incorporates both of these bases, arguing that the IU serves as an interactional resource that speakers and listeners may rely on in organizing their talk, while it is the cognitive nature of the IU itself that allows the IU to serve as such a resource.