Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 40, Issue 3, 2016

This paper has three main points. First, contrary to what is often stated, negative concord is not all that frequent and certainly not the most frequent strategy to express single clausal negation in a clause with an indefinite noun phrase or adverbial in the scope of the negation. Second, the subtype of negative concord called ‘strict negative concord’ is much more frequent than the subtype of ‘non-strict negative concord’. These two claims are based on a worldwide sample of 179 languages. Third, it is argued that non-strict negative concord shows too much variation for it to be seen as the one choice of a two-way split between strict and non-strict negative concord. Given the relative rarity of non-strict negative concord, this claim is not based on the worldwide sample, but on a survey of the research literature.

Shiwilu (Kawapanan, Peru) exhibits a prolific applicative system that comprises seven constructions involving distinct affixes. The present article offers the first account of this feature. In so doing, it seeks to expand our typological knowledge of linguistic systems with multiple applicative constructions and shed light onto the ways applicative constructions relate to word derivation.

The suffix -tu is particularly intriguing. It modifies the verb valency by either adding or suppressing an object, depending on the base to which it attaches. Comparable affixes that perform these seemingly opposite functions are found in other languages of the world (see instances of applicative / antipassive polysemy, Malchukov, ms.). What makes Shiwilu special is that -tu is also required in certain types of applicative constructions simultaneously to the dedicated applicative. This double derivation strategy has not been reported for other languages of the region and is unattested in Shawi, Shiwilu’s only sister language.

Based on data from a range of geographically and genealogically diverse African languages this article describes a little recognized strategy for expressing focus. It is based on marking all material of an utterance as background except for the single focus constituent. This kind of “maximal backgrounding” thus renders focus without overt focus marking, called accordingly “indirect focalization”. It is argued that the recognition of this strategy has several repercussions for the general modeling of focus, and information structure in general.

This article offers a diachronic analysis of the concept of “cyclic” time in Russian, more specifically of temporal adverbials such as utrom ‘in the morning’ and vesnoj ‘in the spring’ that refer to the diurnal and annual temporal cycles in nature. It is argued that evidence from diachrony bears on important theoretical questions: Is the sensitivity to “cyclic” time in language due to cultural factors? How does the external factor of culture interact with language internal factors in the formation of temporal concepts? The proposed analysis indicates that the linguistic development in Russian does not mirror changes in cultural practices and values. Instead, the main burden of explanation is placed on a language internal factor, namely the general drift towards more analytic constructions in Russian, which I argue paved the way for the concept of “cyclic” time as reflected in the grammar of the Russian language today.

The last decade has witnessed a flurry of research into variation in the use of the Pretérito Perfecto Compuesto (PPC) and the Pretérito Perfecto Simple (PPS). Researchers have posited a resemblance between the Argentinian (ARG) and the Mexican PPC in its encoding of durative past situations extending into the present. Close inspection of 30 hours of talk-in-interaction data with 68 speakers of Argentinian River Plate Spanish provides no support for these claims. Instead, in this paper I argue that the vernacular ARG PPC is specialising to encode indefinite past. The past-referring character of the ARG PPC is visible in the discontinuity between the situation encoded by the PPC and the present. The ARG PPC’s specialised function of indefinite past temporal marking and its similarity to Chinese aspectual marker -guo pose an interesting case of functional parallelism across typologically unrelated languages.