Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 39, Issue 1, 2015

We investigate Differential Subject Marking in Nepali imperfective constructions. No previous accounts were satisfying in explaining under what conditions the ergative marker is preferably used. Building on a probabilistic approach to syntactic variability, we conducted statistical analyses on the basis of corpus data, which compared and evaluated the influence of the predictor variables on the ergative marking. We found evidence for the influence of four factors: Animacy, Pronominality, Honorificity, and Tense/Aspect. Animacy appeared to yield the strongest effect. We argue that these factors can be classified into two classes pertaining to two functions of the ergative marker: emphasis of the agent role combined with disambiguation of the patient and the relation of ergativity with verb semantics.

There is a functional overlap between motion towards the deictic center and (di-)transitive events directed at speech act participants. Grammatical evidence for this comes from verbal morphemes that are used in motional clauses like ‘come to me!’ and ditransitive clauses like ‘give (it) to me!’ While the literature suggests that such syncretic markers develop through extension from a cislocative (venitive/ventive) to a speech act participant index, the evidence presented here indicates that this development has gone the other way in Karbi (Tibeto-Burman). This suggests that neither cislocative nor non-subject speech act participant indexation is more primary, but that they share an equally basic idea of orientation towards and therefore impact on the deictic center.

This paper examines how hearsay evidential markers in Korean are used within the pragmatic domain to serve a wide range of epistemic and politeness functions. In particular, we focus on a new paradigm of hearsay evidential markers — more specifically, the V-ta ha-X > V-ta-X type, among them -tako, -tamye, -tamyense, -tanun, and -tanta (see Ahn & Yap 2014) — and using data from the Sejong Contemporary Spoken Corpus, we examine the extended uses of these hearsay evidential markers in natural conversations, and show how these ‘say’-derived evidential markers contribute to the expression of different shades of speaker stance. Special attention is also given to their distinctive roles in modulating the strength — as well as pragmatic nuance — of an epistemic claim. This study also examines the role of main-clause ellipsis, in particular its contribution to the reanalysis of the (quoted) complement clause as a stand-alone ‘new main clause’, and the concomitant reinterpretation of the erstwhile ha ‘say’ complement-taking matrix clause as a sentence final particle that often retains an evidential reading but also captures the pragmatic nuance of its discourse context. The findings of this study contribute to a fuller understanding of how ‘say’-derived evidential constructions in Korean (and potentially also in other languages) extend their semantic scope to develop into markers of speakers’ subjective and intersubjective/interpersonal stance.

In many languages, terms denoting the human body and its parts constitute a closed subclass of nouns with special grammatical properties. Many if not all parts of the human body may acquire dimensions of meanings with ethnographic importance. I focus on a tri-partite division of visible and invisible parts of a human and their attributes in Manambu, a Ndu language spoken in the East Sepik province of Papua New Guinea. The trichotomy of ‘body’ (səp), ‘mind’ (mawul) and ‘spirit’ (kayik) in Manambu reflects a culturally embedded conceptualization of what a human is. Each of the three taxonomic units has specific grammatical properties. The physical and mental profile of a human being in Manambu (as in many other languages) cannot be appreciated without understanding the grammar. Conversely, a structural analysis of a language is incomplete unless it makes reference to the system of belief and concepts encoded in it.

Negation seems to be a universal linguistic category, yet languages differ vastly in how they express it. Tungusic languages show several interesting and typologically rare phenomena. The paper offers a typological description of negation within the whole language family from an onomasiological perspective. But some remarks on the etymology of certain negators are made as well. There are three main patterns of “standard negation”. The historically oldest type (A) employs a negative verb similar to the Uralic languages, the second pattern (B) is a grammaticalized version of the first (possibly influenced by Nivkh) and the third type (C) is an innovation influenced by Mongolian, in which the negative existential replaced the negative verb. Some preliminary proposals are made for the development of a “conceptual space”, which also includes non-standard negation such as negative copulas, negative existentials, and prohibitives. The discussion contains examples from more than 35 languages.

This paper analyses the adnominal use of personal pronouns in a sample of 75 Australian languages. We develop two arguments. First, we argue that in all of the adnominal uses examined, the personal pronoun has a determiner-like function, showing both the functional properties and some of the behaviour of more typical determiner categories like demonstratives or articles. We support this analysis with evidence from positioning tendencies, semantics and discourse functions, and indications of grammaticization in some languages. Secondly, we show that this phenomenon is relatively widespread in Australia, occurring in about half of the languages examined here. We identify five potential geographic clusters, one or two of which can be analyzed as areally determined groupings around a centre with incipient grammaticization. From a typological perspective, these data present new evidence for a somewhat under-studied pathway to nominal determination, in addition to better-studied pathways involving demonstratives, numerals or adjectives.

This paper examines the divergent evolutions of the Absolute Construction (AC) in the history of the Germanic languages, with a focus on English and Dutch, and provides an explanation of why only the English AC retained its frequency and productivity rate. Three language-internal factors are appealed to in order to account for this divergence: (i) increased with-augmentation of ACs results in fuzzy boundaries with the more frequently used gerunds as well as (regular) prepositional postmodifying constructions; (ii) the overall higher frequency in English of constructions with -ing-forms (gerunds, free adjuncts, and progressives) invites structural priming; and (iii) a possible typological shift of English from strictly bounded construal to a mixture of bounded and unbounded construal. An additional language-external factor is found in different prescriptivist traditions. English never really opposed the use of ACs whereas prescriptivism in other Germanic languages emphatically did.

Like other areas of linguistic study, toponymy as a domain of analysis does not present itself as being overly reflective of its own assumptions. I ask whether a sub-category or sub-analysis dedicated to toponymy is required at all if we analyse toponyms, landscape terms, and geographical names within the scope of general linguistic analysis (lexical semantics, morphosyntax, and phonology). Or put succinctly: Is toponymy necessary? Data from a longitudinal study of Norfolk Island and Kangaroo Island toponymy indicate there are no marked aberrancies in either sets of data which cannot be accounted for by either more general Norf’k (the Norfolk Island language) or English rules. I conclude by suggesting future studies in landscape terminology should be more mindful of the requirements of the linguistic study of toponymy, especially within lexical, morphosyntactic, and phonological concerns, rather than just within the semantic domain.