Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 33, Issue 4, 2009

Although Basque’s case-marking pattern has conventionally been regarded as ergative, I argue in this article that it is not straightforward to determine whether this pattern is actually ergative or rather semantically-based. Several factors make this one a complex issue. Perhaps the most important factor among these, and one which has gone largely unnoticed in the literature, is the fact that there are clear dialectal differences regarding the behavior of lexically-simple unergative verbs. Another complication comes from establishing the specific contrast underlying the putative semantic split among Basque intransitives. With these questions in mind, I propose that the case-marking system of Western Basque should be considered semantically aligned instead of ergative. This system is based on a contrast patientive / non-patientive. Conversely, Eastern and Central Basque may be considered to have an ergative case-marking system, but one which differs in some respects from that of the most typical ergative languages and which is not too different from a semantic system.

The aim of this paper is to examine Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Balearic Catalan. While definiteness and animacy can explain the distribution of DOM in other varieties of Catalan, in Balearic, the split between marked and non-marked objects is not dependent on inherent or referential properties of the object noun phrases, but determined by topicality. A preposition is consistently used to mark a subset of topical objects, namely those occurring in clitic left- and right-dislocation structures, which correspond to two kinds of hearer-known topics: shifting topics and continuing topics. The preposition does not occur, however, with hanging topics, which introduce discourse-new topical entities. In this way, a correlation can be found between formal properties and well-motivated discourse functions that explains the distribution of DOM in Balearic. Similar patterns can be found in other Romance varieties as well, thus suggesting that topicality is relevant to account for both intra- and interlinguistic variation in DOM.

Traditionally, grammaticalisation has been described as being based on phenomena specific to language such as metaphorical extension or reanalysis. This characterisation is somewhat in contrast to claims that grammaticalisation is involved in the much more general process of the initial emergence of language. In this article, we provide a unified analysis of both the metaphor-based and the reanalysis-based account of grammaticalisation which is grounded in the cognitive mechanisms underlying ostensive-inferential communication. We are thus able to show that the process of grammaticalisation is an instantiation of a domain-general pre-linguistic phenomenon.

In the study of word order typology, the SOVX word order pattern of Mande is often viewed as exceptional and explained diachronically as a “type in transition”. This paper argues against that view based on analysis of the sentence structure of Wan (Southeastern Mande). I show that the SOVX word order of Wan is a consequence of an unusual syntactic behavior of postpositional arguments, which do not form a syntactic constituent with their verb but instead appear in a fixed position outside of the VP. The analysis has typological implications, suggesting that the SOVX pattern of this kind should be treated separately from types where PP arguments are syntactically dependent on their verb.

“Words” may be independently defined and identified in Galo (Tibeto-Burman > Western Tani) in terms of relatively consistent and functionally well-motivated sets of phonological and grammatical criteria. However, these criteria very often fail to converge upon identification of the same formal unit; instead, we frequently find phonological “words” which consist of two grammatical “words”, and grammatical “words” which consist of two phonological “words”, etc. The resulting “mismatch” between “phonological words” and “grammatical words” in Galo is argued to be theoretically non-trivial, in that its existence is capable of explaining a variety of otherwise seemingly disparate facts in the synchronic and diachronic organization of Galo grammar. The facts from Galo thus support a view of language in which “word” is independently defined in phonological and grammatical terms, and in which neither type of “word” necessarily corresponds to (or is projected by) the other. Although there might be said to exist a very generalized functional pressure towards “unification” of “phonological words” and “grammatical words”, such a pressure would not be expressible as a formal constraint on language grammar.