Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 31, Issue 4, 2007

In a usage-based analysis of four syntactic reflexives in Czech, this paper examines the question of representing speakers’ knowledge of polyfunctional grammatical categories. I argue that the reflexives form a prototype-based network of partially overlapping grammatical patterns, organized by the pragmatic concept of unexpected referential status in agent–patient relations. This concept is manifested in four distinct communicative functions: marking referential identity between agent and patient roles; distancing discourse participants from their involvement in the reported event; recasting a transitive event as a spontaneous change of state; expressing an attitude toward the reported event. Each function is shown to conventionally co-occur with a set of properties involving various combinations of the following: preferences in aspect and transitivity; semantic and/or pragmatic constraints on agents and patients; verb semantics; shifts in modality and pragmatic force; morphosyntactic constraints. Overall, the analysis supports the view that grammatical categories cannot be properly defined outside of broader grammatical context, thus arguing for a constructional approach to linguistic structure and for re-interpreting the principle of isomorphism in terms of ‘constructions’ in the sense of Construction Grammar.

All languages have words, such as English hot and cold, hard and soft, rough and smooth, and heavy and light, which attribute qualities to things. This paper maps out how such descriptors can be analysed in the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) framework, in terms of like and other semantic primes configured into a particular semantic schema: essentially, touching something with a part of the body, feeling something in that part, knowing something about that thing because of it, and thinking about that thing in a certain way because of it. Far from representing objective properties of things “as such”, it emerges that physical quality concepts refer to embodied human experiences and embodied human sensations. Comparisons with French, Polish and Korean show that the semantics of such words may differ significantly from language to language.

This paper presents data on the Azoyú Tlapanec reference tracking system. The system is analyzed according to a procedure where default rules for how the system works are formulated and deviations are interpreted as being licensed by different levels of grammar organization along the lines of the local-global parameter proposed by Comrie (1989). The system is compared to its closest common typological congeners, obviation and switch-reference. Although it bears more resemblances to obviation, the system is neither clearly one of switch-reference, nor, indeed, of obviation.

The replication of concrete formal-structural material (morpho-phonological forms with attached meanings) from one language in another is universally understood to instantiate grammatical and lexical ‘borrowing’ (we follow mainstream usage here and attach no value judgement to the word ‘borrowing’ itself, which is obviously just a metaphor). More controversial is the interpretation of contact-induced structural change that does not involve such replication of forms, but is manifested rather through shift in meaning, distribution, or organisation of inherited material, inspired by an external model. Such changes are sometimes referred to as ‘convergent developments’, and are often typical of linguistic areas. We explore the position of language convergence of this kind in the overall context of contact-induced change. Taking into consideration recent work on language convergence in the context of grammaticalisation theory (Heine & Kuteva 2005), we address the mechanism that is involved when language-internal resources are employed to replicate an external model. We attempt to trace this mechanism to its roots at the level of the organisation of communicative discourse in multilingual settings.