Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 41, Issue 1, 2017

This paper critically explores the question of what it means for a construction to be grammatical. The paper engages with some of the observations made in the grammaticalization literature, that elements in grammatical constructions undergo morphologization, and aims to show that grammatical status and morphologization need not be aligned. A number of parameters along which the grammatical status of a multiword expression can vary are proposed and data illustrating different aspects of these parameters are discussed in detail. The data are used to argue that grammatical status is complex and multifaceted and linked not only to the formal properties of a construction, but also to its semantics and the relationship it has with other grammatical forms (e.g. inflected forms) in a given language.

Egophoricity is a cross-linguistically rare grammatical phenomenon. While numerous descriptive studies have substantially improved our synchronic understanding of the category in recent years, we are still largely ignorant of the diachronic origins of egophoricity systems. In this article, we address this gap and discuss a diachronic process that transforms person agreement markers into egophoricity markers. Based on evidence from three Tibeto-Burman languages, we reconstruct the diachronic transformation and argue that the process starts out in reported speech clauses once the direct construal of the predicate is generalized. This generalization allows for the functional reanalysis of first and third person markers as egophoric and allophoric markers, while second person markers become functionally obsolete. Once person markers have undergone an epistemization in reported speech clauses, the innovative epistemic system is extended to simple declarative and interrogative clauses, where it gradually replaces the conservative person agreement system.

The paper presents a description and an analysis of the nominal complex, a peculiar construction which includes a noun and its modifiers, in West Circassian, a polysynthetic language of the Northwest Caucasian family. The nominal complex shows properties of a single word and tends to follow the template proposed for the word in West Circassian. However, its parts may themselves have a complex structure based on a similar template. This is argued to result from a principle that requires these subparts to be interpreted without appealing to a broader morphological context. In addition, the nominal complex may contain complex syntactic constituents as its proper parts. It is shown that the nominal complex in West Circassian is currently undergoing demorphologization and syntacticization.

This article deals with clausal constituent order and dislocation constructions in Berta, a Nilo-Saharan language with indicative clauses being verb-second. The preverbal slot is occupied by either an unmarked NP which may have any or no grammatical relation to the verb, a focus constituent, or a particular function word. This slot may be empty, but in that case it implies a zero third person referent. In addition to left-dislocated NPs, which are clause-external and which are resumed pronominally clause-internally, in some cases by zero, Berta also has a construction in which an NP is right-dislocated but remains inside the clause. This “antitopic” is marked by a preposition, and it has a clause-internal pronominal antecedent which may be zero and which is either a subject, an object or an adverbial. The clause-internal status of the antitopic is evidenced by the fact that it may be followed by certain other clause-internal constituents.

We ask whether there is a “macro-event phrase,” a uniform level of syntax at which complex scenarios may be described as single events under the Macro-Event Property (MEP). The MEP is a form-meaning mapping property that constrains the compatibility of event descriptions with time-positional modifiers. An examination of English infinitival complements, Ewe serial verb constructions, and Japanese converb constructions suggests that the putative crosslinguistic “macro-event phrase” is the verbal core of the Layered Structure of the Clause theory of Role and Reference Grammar. Across languages, simple cores necessarily have the MEP, whereas complex cores have it if and only if they are integrated by ‘cosubordinate’ nexus, defined as a symmetric union of two cores that together behave like a single core. We furthermore argue that this connection between core cosubordinations and the MEP may help explain why cosubordinate cores seem to always share an argument through control.

Clause-linking mechanisms are subject to cross-linguistic variation. As far as non-subordinate clauses are concerned, any combination of two clauses may show two predicates mutually equal or different in terms of finiteness: these are known as co-ranking and clause-chaining structures, respectively ( Longacre 2007 : 375). Clause-chaining constructions show two structural possibilities, namely medial-final and initial-medial chaining, depending on whether the more-finite verb follows or precedes the less-finite one. Clause-chaining constructions are found in unrelated language families scattered across the globe, including Afroasiatic ( Longacre 1990 ). However, the existing typological literature on the topic has totally neglected Berber, another Afroasiatic language. This work focuses on a clause-linking strategy found in Ayt Atta Tamazight (Berber, henceforth AAT) and in other Berber languages, the so-called Chained-Aorist construction (henceforth C-AOR). Stemming from my fieldwork on AAT, this paper provides an innovative typological analysis of C-AOR, analysing it in terms of initial-medial clause chaining.