Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 37, Issue 2, 2013

In this article, Ancient Greek is shown to allow two word orders, Focus-Verb and Verb-Focus, independently of whether the verb is in focus or in the presupposition. Relying on the behavior of postpositives and Lambrecht’s Principle of Accent Projection, I argue that such word orders are integrated into prosodic constituents where the main sentence accent falls to either the left (Focus-Verb) or the right (Verb-Focus) of the verb. Such an alternation is suggested to be due to a binary iconic contrast whereby the more prominent the focus is, the earlier it is placed.

This paper responds to in Newmeyer (2004, 2005), who gives argument defending the traditional six-way word order typology that classifies languages as SOV, SVO, etc. against arguments in Dryer (1997) in favour of an alternative typology which classifies languages according to two more basic typological parameters, VO vs. OV and VS vs. SV. The paper provides both updated and new data that is relevant to the issues. Although some of the new data actually supports some of the empirical claims made by Newmeyer, I argue that these do not provide any argument in favour of the six-way typology and that Newmeyer misconstrues the issues distinguishing the two typologies.

This paper takes a strictly empirical approach to the encoding of spatial notions in the four ancient Indo-European languages Ancient Greek, Latin, Gothic and Old Church Slavonic. By generating semantic maps on the basis of parallel corpus data, without any semantic pre-analysis, we use methods well tested in typology to study the basic divisions in the spatial domain in the four closely-related languages, and to determine the finer subdivisions within the Source domain. We find that the four languages are similar, but clearly independent of each other, each carving up the spatial domain in different ways. We also find substantial encoding overlaps between the Source and Location domains.

The use of generic verbs of speech in functions not related to their primary meaning, such as to introduce complements or adjuncts, is cross-linguistically widespread; it is also characteristic of some languages of Siberia. However, the distribution of non-canonical functions of generic verbs of speech among the languages of Siberia is very uneven, with striking differences even between dialects of one language. In this paper we attempt to elucidate whether shared inheritance, parallel independent developments, or areal convergence are the factors determining this distribution, using fine-scaled investigations of narrative data from a large number of Siberian languages and dialects. This enables us to uncover a wide range of non-canonical functions that the generic verb of speech has acquired in some of the languages investigated, as well as to highlight the very complex historical processes at play.