Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 27, Issue 2, 2003

This paper studies the correlation between grounding and transitivity in Chinese narratives and conversations based on the ten Transitivity features proposed by Hopper and Thompson (1980), to examine the universality of the correlation across different spoken discourse and different languages. According to the percentages of high-transitivity features vis-à-vis grounding, highly transitive clauses in Chinese narratives, just like English written narratives, tend to be foregrounded. However, such correlation is not borne out in conversational discourse, in that highly transitive clauses are almost equally distributed in foreground and background. As conversations are more pervasive and reflect people’s habitual use of language, it is concluded that grounding is independent of the morphosyntactic and semantic manifestations of transitivity.

This study provides evidence to support the claim that a primary function of the postpositional particle wa in Japanese conversational discourse is to mark a contrast. Wa has been widely studied in research on sentence grammar, which has suggested two separate functions of the particle, thematic and contrastive (Kuno 1973a; 1973b; Shibatani 1990). However, no study seems to have been done on conversation. In my study, analysis of 80 tokens of np-wa in conversation has revealed that wa marks a contrast. Furthermore, this study claims that it is the prior discourse that serves to establish the contrastive function of wa.

This paper undertakes a fine-grained semantic analysis of some of the multiple uses of the polyfunctional verbal prefix ter- in Malay (Bahasa Melayu), the national language of Malaysia. The analysis is conducted within the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework originated by Anna Wierzbicka, supported by examples drawn from a large corpus of naturally occuring Malay texts. The main goals are to accurately describe the full range of meanings, and to decide to what extent apparent differences are contextually-induced as opposed to being semantically encoded. In the end, seven distinct but interrelated lexico-semantic schemas are identified, constituting a network of grammatical polysemy.

Predication focus — a category where the predicate or a part thereof constitutes (or is part of) the sentence focus — is frequently encoded across the Bantu family by inflectional or morphosyntactic means. This phenomenon is associated with another observation which is rather unexpected at first glance. There often exists a formal parallel between marking devices of predication focus on the one hand and of present progressive on the other. This is valid across Bantu for a number of different morphological or syntactic forms. Some cases even suggest that this “isomorphism” can result from a directional grammaticalization change from predication focus toward progressive. As the formal and historical relation between the two categories cannot be viewed as accidental, an explanation is called for. Although progressivity and focus pertain to different functional domains, their relationship can indeed be motivated. The present proposal elaborates the previous hypothesis by Hyman and Watters (1984) that the progressive is an inherently focused verb category. Thus, the paper throws light in particular on the pragmatic import of progressives beyond their semantic aspect of time marking.