Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 30, Issue 3, 2006

This paper aims to investigate the mechanism of semantic change in the grammaticalization of Chinese verbs. It demonstrates with diachronic and synchronic evidence that subjectification affects every stage of semantic change in the grammaticalization of Chinese verbs, a somewhat different pattern from that found in Indo-European languages. It argues that this difference is derived from the typological difference between the structure of Chinese and that of some Indo-European languages, such as Old English.

This study undertakes a cross-linguistic examination of several distinct usage types of demonstratives as “filler words” in the context where speakers encounter trouble in formulating a word during spontaneous speech production. The study documents the range of forms and functions of these demonstratives across diverse languages, and explores theoretical issues that arise from the empirical observation, including the question of why demonstratives, among all linguistic items, are utilized as a tool to deal with word-formulation trouble. By investigating the hitherto neglected usages of demonstratives in social interaction, our study contributes both to typological studies of demonstratives and to interactional studies of grammatical phenomena.

In this paper I analyze ergative patterns and the antipassive construction in Matses, a Panoan language spoken in western Amazonia. The Matses antipassive appears initially to be fairly typical, but is unique in that, in addition to the cross-linguistically typical indefinite Patient reading, it can also be used to code an unmentioned first-person Patient. Furthermore, only verbs specifying human O’s can take the antipassive suffix, and only verbs coding significantly affected Patients can have an indefinite reading. This is exactly the opposite of what one would expect of an antipassive construction. This atypical distribution of the Matses antipassive is explained by a combination of interacting factors, including a first-person empathy phenomenon and accommodation to a competing functionally similar object omission construction.

Within standard generative phonology, the distribution of the allomorphs of the Italian masculine definite article has been related strictly to features of the initial segment/cluster of the lexical item following the article. Two main drawbacks characterize such analysis. First, they crucially depend on abstract principles, which are not applied in a very insightful and empirically convincing fashion. Second, they cannot explain the (inter- and intra-) individual variation in the selection of the allomorphs or the changes in their distributional pattern. Conversely, an analysis based on the usage-based framework proposed by Bybee (2001) allows for a more straightforward and unified account of the distribution of the allomorphs and offers new insight to the issues of change and individual variation.