Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 27, Issue 1, 2003

Old Spanish had a split auxiliary system in the perfect tense, reminiscent of what is found in Modern French and Modern Italian. In this paper, I trace the progress of the displacement of ser ‘be’ by haber ‘have’ with intransitive and reflexive verbs in the history of Spanish. The data support the hypothesis that predicates that have a more patient-like subject are the last ones to lose their ability to select ser, regardless of their syntactic or morphological make-up. This analysis, I argue, adds to the mounting evidence in favor of a universal semantic account of split intransitivity.

Some languages code that an action was performed unintentionally using evidentials, which in other contexts indicate a speaker’s source of information. Evidentials are only used for indicating nonvolitionality when an action was carried out by the speaker in the past. The evidential marker may carry a quite different meaning in coding nonvolitionality, this may be an extension of its primary meaning, or it may simply be a pragmatic interpretation of the use of a particular evidential in first person contexts. A nonvolitional interpretation can arise with nonvisual evidentials, visual or direct evidentials, inferential evidentials, and nonwitnessed, nonfirsthand or indirect evidentials.

A typology is presented of parameters of variation associated with three main types of demonstratives: nominal (corresponding to demonstrative pronouns and demonstrative adjectives in traditional terminology), local adverbial and verbal. The paper surveys their basis characteristics; forms (including relationship to articles and interrogatives); deictic, syntactic, anaphoric and other functions; and types of reference — spatial, height and stance, visibility, etc. There is a case study of demonstratives in Dyirbal, and an array of questions which can usefully be pursued when investigating demonstratives in a given language.

Chechen exhibits three major strategies for the combination of clauses: coordination, chaining, and subordination. The major formal characteristics of these three traditional categories of clause linking are discussed with reference to their basic syntax and semantics as well as to more particular syntactic characteristics, including constituent order and behaviour with respect to negation and wh-questions. In addition, these clause combining strategies of Chechen are classified with respect to Foley and Van Valin’s (1984) typology of clause linkage. A particularly useful result of this classification is that it permits a straightforward characterization of the use of the preverbal conjunctive enclitic ’a as a marker of cosubordination.