Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 33, Issue 1, 2009

Previous studies on Preferred Argument Structure have suggested (Du Bois 1987, 2002) and accepted (e.g. Goldberg 2004) specific cognitive motivations for PAS, namely that the general restriction of lexical arguments and new referents to the S and O roles facilitates the conceptually onerous task of referent introduction. In this paper, conversation data from English and Portuguese are analyzed. The data are generally inconsistent with the putative cognitive motivations for PAS presented in the literature. They suggest instead that PAS is most likely epiphenomenal and due to basic semantic and pragmatic factors, for example the correlation between human referents and given/non-lexical arguments, and the correlation between human referents and the A role.

This essay analyzes the grammatical category of inalienable possession by examining the interaction of morphosyntatic forms, semantic features, pragmatic functions, and discourse frequencies. Using data from Q’eqchi’-Maya, it is argued that inalienable possession may be motivated relative to two dimensions: (1) whatever any person is strongly presumed to possess (identifiability); (2) whatever such personal possessions are referred to frequently (relevance). In regards to frequency, inalienable possessions are compared with possessed NPs, and possessed NPs are compared with all NPs, in regards to grammatical relation, information status, animacy rank, and semantic role. In regards to identifiability, it is argued that inalienable possessions are like deictics and prepositions in that they guide the addressee’s identification of a referent by encoding that referent’s relation to a ground; and inalienable possessions are different from deictics and prepositions in that the ground is a person and the referents are its parts or relations.

Causal clauses introduced by yīnwèi in Chinese can have either an initial position or a final position with regard to the main clause. While traditional grammars have treated the initial sequence as the default form, numerous discourse-based studies have shown just the opposite. However, few have attempted to explain why both sequence orders exist and why they have skewed distribution patterns across discourse registers. In this paper we use a telephone conversation corpus and a written Chinese corpus as data and provide a comprehensive analysis of the usage patterns. Our main findings are that final and initial causal clause sequences are ostensibly two different linguistic constructions, functioning as an interactional device and an information-sharing device, respectively. Quantitative distributional disparities are seen as a function of the discourse utilities of the linguistic devices in question and the communicative demands of different registers. From a cross-linguistic perspective, our findings raise questions about the ways in which universal and language-specific properties of clause sequencing can be better understood.

This paper develops a semantic approach to the study of “reciprocity” — an area increasingly seen as central to linguistic typology. “Reciprocal” and “reflexive-reciprocal” constructions from five languages — English, Russian, Polish, French and Japanese — are analyzed in considerable detail. The different, though interrelated, meanings of these constructions are explicated, and the proposed explications are supported with linguistic evidence. The paper challenges current approaches which tend to lump formally and semantically distinct constructions under one arbitrary label such as “RECIP”, and it seeks to show how linguistic typology can be transformed by joining forces with rigorous cross-linguistic semantics. It also challenges the Nijmegen School approach, which privileges extensionalist “video-clipping” over conceptual analysis. The analysis presented in the paper demonstrates the descriptive and explanatory power of the NSM methodology. The results achieved through semantic analysis are shown to be convergent with hypotheses about “shared intentionality” put forward by Michael Tomasello and colleagues in the context of evolutionary psychology, and to throw new light on social universals (“human sociality”).

Using diachronic corpus data, this article examines the grammaticalization of three Korean aspectual markers, progressive ‑ko iss‑, resultative ‑e iss‑, and anterior ‑ess‑. It demonstrates that the three Korean aspectual markers emerged from the same source ‑e is(i)‑, which in the 15th C expressed both resultative and progressive meanings. This finding goes against Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca’s (1994) proposition that perfective and imperfective markers follow separate grammaticalization paths. In addition, the finding confirms that Shirai’s (1998) proposal about the murky distinction between perfective and imperfective domains also holds true in the diachronic development of aspectual markers.