Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 28, Issue 2, 2004

The notion of image schema has received a great deal of attention in cognitive linguistics. In this paper, image schemas are applied to an analysis of case assignment in Russian temporal adverbials. My focus will be on prepositional phrases headed by v ‘in’ followed by a noun phrase in the accusative or the second locative case. This approach, it is argued, facilitates the formulation of simple generalizations. While the paper focuses on data from a single language, the proposed analysis has wider ramifications for the study of case, since it is argued that that image schema-based analyses have quite general advantages over those couched in terms of distinctive features.

This study examines two types of -ing subjects in English: the Late Modern English pattern the deceiving him was easy and constructions such as by trying to make her mother happy proved unlucky for Paul, which are becoming frequent among American undergraduates. It is argued that the presence of the and by in both structures is prompted by the desire to provide explicit grammatical marking for clauses that, because of their role as pre-verbal subjects, are cognitively very complex. The paper discusses the ongoing grammaticalization of by Xing sequences and outlines the historical developments leading to the emergence of the pattern with an introductory the, for which it proposes an analysis in terms of Lass’s (1990, 1997) concept of exaptation.

In Meithei, a Tibeto-Burman language of Northeast India, the noun pí ‘grandmother’ has undergone divergent paths of semantic change, developing on the one hand into a productive nominalizer and on the other into suffixes whose meanings are derived through metonymical extensions (SMALLER VERSION, BEST EXEMPLAR, SALIENT CHARACTERISTIC, PROJECTION, INSTRUMENT and AGENT). The Meithei data illustrate the role of culture in metonymic change and the role of metonymic change in creation of productive and lexicalized morphology.

Suppletion is where the word-forms of the same lexeme have phonologically distinct stems. A study of thirty languages shows it to be surprisingly widespread, suggesting resistance to the pressure of paradigmatic levelling. While a major factor in its preservation appears to be the high frequency of the items that display it, two other factors are in operation, the type of inflectional category involved and the nature of the distribution of stems.