Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 37, Issue 4, 2013

While differential object marking seems to be widespread and is well represented in the linguistic literature, differential subject marking appears to be much less common. Burmese is one example of a language that marks some, but not all subjects, depending on a number of pragmatic factors. This phenomenon is widespread in Tibeto-Burman languages, but Burmese apparently differs from these in not having an underlying ergative alignment or an agentive source of the subject marker, suggesting that there are other sources for DSM than the ones identified in the literature. This study looks at the functions of the marker ká with subjects in colloquial Burmese and discusses factors favoring its occurrence and possible paths of its development.

The paper discusses the morphological status and the function of Spanish nominal endings -o and -a (ciel+o ‘sky’ vs. caj+a ‘box’); it is shown that both endings, plus the endings -e and -Ø, are inflectional suffixes that mark, however, not the values of an inflectional category (like nominal number or verbal tense), but the values of a feature of the syntactics of the noun — the nominal gender. The ‘nominal gender’ is defined as a cluster concept based on eight properties; it is a particular case of ‘agreement class’ opposed to ‘noun class.’ Some particularities of Spanish nominal gender are examined: its interaction with diminutive suffixes, gender conversion, and its “non-prototypical” character (a parallel is drawn between Spanish nominal genders and noun classes in Fula).

The Fijian language has long been believed to include no dedicated reflexive marker. This paper takes a close look at reflexive contexts within Fijian to arrive at the conclusion that the language, in fact, contains three distinct reflexive types, designated here as short (PRO), mid (PRO-ga), and long (PRO-ga-vakai-PRO) according to their morphological form. Moreover, different verbs in Fijian reflexive constructions are found to exhibit a certain degree of selective preference for specific reflexive types. The syntactic, semantic, and lexical characteristics of these three reflexive constructions are investigated in detail. The results of this research contribute to our general understanding of anaphora, binding requirements, and systems of coreference.

Temporality in Thai and other Southeast Asian languages has traditionally been analyzed as based on pre-established European notions of tense and aspect, thus yielding problematic analyses. This paper offers an alternative way of analyzing and explaining temporality in Thai in its own terms. It focuses on the basic motion verbs paj and maa and shows that they can specify states of affairs in different domains, such as space, time, and attributes. Their usage relies on the close association of linguistic and pragmatic contexts. In the domain of time, Thai paj and maa display characteristics of both tense and aspect, showing that tense/aspect systems are substantially more diverse than has traditionally been assumed. The concept of reference plays an important role even in a tenseless language such as Thai.

In this study, we address the semantics of the present progressive constructions in French and English by looking into their present-day uses and their diachronic evolution. Corpus data show that both constructions are frequently used in contemporary English and French to stress the atypical nature of situations. This suggests that these constructions share an epistemic core meaning, which we define as “contingency in immediate reality”. However, in terms of concrete usage types which elaborate this meaning in context, the two progressive constructions differ significantly: the French progressive occurs in fewer types of context than its English counterpart and it is, overall, less frequently used and not obligatory for referring to present-time events, as is usually the case in English. We argue that these differences can be systematically related to the different diachronic evolutions that have shaped the present-tense paradigms in both languages.