Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 28, Issue 1, 2004

Many schools of modern linguistics generally adopt a rigid approach to categorisation by not allowing degrees of form class membership, degrees of resemblance to a prototype or overlaps between categories. This all-or-none conception of categorisation (Bolinger 1961) goes back to Aristotle, and has been pervasive and influential, especially in formal linguistics. The alternative view, prevalent amongst descriptive and cognitive linguists, is to posit grammars which pervasively display categorial vagueness, more usually called gradience. In this article I will begin by briefly tracing some of the ideas on gradience in linguistics and philosophy. I will then argue, firstly, that gradience should have a role to play in language studies (both descriptive and theoretical). Secondly, I will show that two types of category fluidity should be distinguished. One type I will call Subsective Gradience (SG). It is intra-categorial in nature, and allows for members of a class to display the properties of that class to varying degrees. The other type is called Intersective Gradience (IG). This is an inter-categorial phenomenon which is characterised by two form classes ‘converging’ on each other. Thirdly, I will argue that while the two types of gradience are grammatically real, IG is not as widespread as is often claimed. Finally, in this article I will attempt to be more precise about the vague phenomenon of gradience. To this end I will devise a formalisation of SG and IG, using a number of case studies mainly from English. The formalism makes use of morphosyntactic tests to establish whether an item belongs to a particular class or to a ‘bordering’ one by weighing up the form class features that apply to the item in question. This article can be seen to argue for a midway position between the Aristotelian and the cognitivist conceptions of categorisation in that I will defend a position that allows for gradience, but nevertheless maintains sharp boundaries between categories. The ideas put forward in this article have wider implications for the study of language, in that they address the problem posed by the existence of a tension between generally rigidly conceived linguistic concepts and the continuous phenomena they describe.

This paper examines the relation between gender and declension in Norwegian. Traditionally, one has assumed that genders are the basis for predicting declensions in that language. More recently, it has been suggested that declensions are the basis for predicting genders — in all languages that have both. Diachronic data examined in this paper indicate that the relation between gender and declension is complex: For most Norwegian nouns, declension is predicted on the basis of gender. For a few nouns, viz. those in which the plural is more token-frequent than the singular, declension is the basis on which gender is predicted. The paper also illustrates the relevance of frequency, local markedness, ‘morphology by itself’ and the principle of contrast.

The article analyzes the expression of understood objects in Somali. There is no object pronoun of 3rd person in Somali; this gap is usually interpreted as a “full Ø”, which saturates the valency of a transitive verb and forces a reading with an anaphoric object. The article shows that this is empirically incorrect: in certain configurations, Somali transitive verbs admit either an anaphoric or a generic reading even in the absence of either an object NP or a non-null pronoun. In order to ensure a generic-object reading, Somali has further recourse to noun incorporation. The article explores the productivity of this strategy as a detopicalizing, backgrounding mechanism and argues that the overall generality of the anaphoric reading is the result of the obligatoriness of focus marking.

In this article, I argue that ergative case-marking predicates in Japanese, which take two non-canonically case-marked arguments, are best described as transitive predicates having subjects and direct objects, rather than as intransitive predicates without any direct objects — contrary to Shibatani’s recent proposal (Shibatani 1999, 2001a, b, Shibatani and Pardeshi 2001). More specifically, ergative case-marking predicates are argued to be transitive, as originally conceived by Kuno (1973) and others, on the basis that outer dative/nominative phrases display subject properties, while inner nominative phrases exhibit positive object properties. Furthermore, it is argued that ergative case-marking constructions do not constitute a sub-type of double subject construction by showing that they are licensed in a different way.

Infinitives in Lusaamia (J.34, Kenya and Uganda) appear in two different forms, one having the reflex oxu- of the common Bantu class 15 verb prefix, and one having the prefix oo-. This paper describes and exemplifies the use of these two infinitival forms, proposing that the distinction represents a contrast in specificity and that the innovated oo- form developed via reinterpretation of grammatical distinctions borrowed from Dholuo.

When local adpositions, whatever their own sources, are metaphorically extended to the domain of numerical approximation (as in ‘around five bottles’), as they not uncommonly are, and when such expressions are then admitted to grammatical relations otherwise reserved for noun phrases, such as subject and direct object, as is only natural, a conflict is bound to arise: the internal structure of such expressions is that of an adpositional phrase, headed by the ex-local adposition, but their external distribution is that of a noun phrase. German and several other languages demonstrate that repair is inevitable in this dilemma, unless wholly different ways of expressing numerical approximation were to be resorted to. By necessity, such approximative numerical expressions will gradually be reanalysed from being adpositional phrases to being noun phrases for many, most, or indeed all external and internal purposes, such as subcategorization, verb agreement, case assignment, and determination. Instead of new grammar emerging as in grammaticalization, the old grammar of phrase types is reasserting itself in such reanalyses.