Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 35, Issue 4, 2011

Great Andamanese has a dual semantic system for body part categorization: one that is expressed in various terms for concrete body parts and another more abstract one that is expressed in grammaticalized morphemes represented in seven body division possessive classes that classify body part terms based on the area of the body they occupy. These classes also classify other inalienables, with some semantic connection to the body part system. Further, body part semantics pervade the lexical and grammatical system of the language as this dual system is extended to other form classes, viz. verbs, adjectives and adverbs. The body division class markers occur as proclitics attached to all content word classes. Thus, all content words in Great Andamanese can easily be divided into bound and free, the former necessarily imbued with the semantics of “inherency” and “dependency”. I conclude by proposing that the Great Andamanese conceptualize their world through these interdependencies and hence the grammar of the language encodes this important phenomenon in every part of speech expressing referential, attributive and predicative meaning.

This article proposes a new categorization of confirmation-seeking question tags, based on how the use of such tags is restricted in relation to the preceding clause, the anchor. The focus is on a category labelled grammatically-dependent question tags (GDQTs). Earlier research has claimed that almost only English has such question tags, but this article presents and compares data on GDQTs from more than ten languages, and suggests a hierarchy for features of grammatical dependence in question tags: polarity < tense < number/person < (semantic) gender (possibly also < verb substitution). The GDQT structures vary in different ways: all GDQT languages have negative GDQTs, but not all have positive GDQTs; verb substitution is not always applied and constant polarity instead of reversed polarity is also found.

Most frameworks of linguistic analysis tend to highlight phenomena of language use and/or language knowledge such as sentence and word structure, while backgrounding or ignoring other phenomena that are interpreted as being of more marginal interest for the linguist. The main goal of this paper is to argue that some phenomena that have previously been treated as being more peripheral play an important role in the organization of linguistic discourse, and that the latter operates in at least two different domains, namely that of sentence grammar and of thetical grammar. Each of the two domains has its own internal structure, and the two tend to be separated from one another syntactically, prosodically, and semantically. Building on recent research, the paper aims at defining the main characteristics of thetical grammar.

Afitti is part of the Eastern Sudanic branch of the Nilo-Saharan language family. It features dual and plural forms as part of its kinship terminology that have not been attested elsewhere in the language family. Kinship terminology in which possessive pronouns have merged with kinship terms is also known for a series of Eastern Sudanic languages. Nyimang, Afitti’s closest linguistic neighbor, features a dual form but it is limited to its verbal system. The dual in Nyimang supports the suggestion that Afitti’s kinship terminology with a dual form has a historical basis, since a regional influence of the Arabic system of duals can be largely ruled out. Morphological data on Afitti should further the analysis of its kinship terms in future studies.