Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 35, Issue 2, 2011

Periphrasis, the use of two independent word forms to serve the function of a single inflected word, is usually associated with verbal systems. However, it occurs also in nominal systems. Using the canonical approach to formulate the criteria for nominal periphrasis, I analyse instances of periphrasis in three Samoyedic languages (Tundra Nenets, Forest Enets and Nganasan) where it approaches the canonical ideal, and compare these to the case systems of Romanian, Armenian and Archi where the periphrasis is further away from the canonical centre. An important advantage of the canonical approach is that it provides an instrument to investigate periphrastic realisations in finer detail, and takes periphrasis as an integral part of the morphological and syntactic systems of an individual language.

In a substantial number of languages negation of non-verbal predicates diverges from standard negation. In this paper I approach this phenomenon from a typological perspective, and claim that non-standard negation of non-verbal predicates can be described through a generalization I refer to as DNA (Direct Negation Avoidance), which means that the non-verbal predicates avoid being in the direct scope of negation. DNA can be subcategorized into various DNA strategies, and in the first half of the paper I list and describe these strategies. In the second half I argue how the DNA generalization may be extended to also include languages with standard negation of their non-verbal predicates, and that further research might reveal DNA to be a language universal.

This paper investigates the morphosyntactic encoding of involuntary agent constructions (IACs), where a patient is affected by an involuntarily acting agent, using a sample of 150 languages. In contrast to what has been argued in earlier work, I show that the difference between IACs and their volitional, transitive counterparts is rarely situated on the level of agent case marking only. Instead, a much more common strategy for the marking of IACs involves the verb: IACs often have an anticausative instead of a regular transitive verb. I argue that anticausative verbs are used in IACs in order to represent the event as an uncontrolled event for which the involuntary agent is not responsible. Because these anticausative verbs happen to be intransitive, IACs can end up being intransitive as well. I argue, however, that this is not the result of a direct link between involuntary agents and reduced transitivity.

This study analyzes semantic constraints affecting the order of motion morphemes in Mandarin Chinese multi-morpheme motion constructions (MMMCs, e.g. zǒu-jìn fángjiān ‘walk into the room’ (lit.) ‘walk-enter room’ vs. *jìn-zǒu (lit.) ‘enter-walk’). We classify Chinese motion morphemes into four types based on recent study on “scale structure”. Then, we propose an implicational scalar hierarchy formed by the four types of morphemes that can be used to predict the order of motion morphemes in Chinese MMMCs. Our corpus studies demonstrate that the hierarchy can explain the morpheme order of MMMCs for a comprehensive range of existing natural Chinese data. We anticipate that our scalar hierarchy may be extensible to serial-verb motion constructions in other languages as well.

This paper explores the use of demonstratives in non-embedded clausal nominalisations. We present data and analysis from three Papuan languages of the Timor-Alor-Pantar family in south-east Indonesia. In these languages, demonstratives can apply to the clausal as well as to the nominal domain, contributing contrastive semantic content in assertive stance-taking and attention-directing utterances. In the Timor-Alor-Pantar constructions, meanings that are to do with spatial and discourse locations at the participant level apply to spatial, temporal and mental locations at the state or event level.

It is usually believed that non-accusative alignment systems are very rare in Africa. A thorough study of the verbal systems of the Southwestern Mande languages (Looma, Mende, Kpelle) has shown that this group is an exception. The Ergative/Absolutive types of argument coding and semantic alignment are observed in these languages mainly in the personal marking on the verbs. In the Liberian dialects of Looma, only stative verbs (belonging to a closed class) show non-accusative encoding, which can be interpreted as an S-split. In Mende, an Active/Stative type of argument indexing is attested on the verbs of an open class. All the verbs in the stative/resultative/perfect construction in Northern Looma and in the stative/resultative/intensive construction in Kpelle display Ergative/Absolutive alignment.