Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 41, Issue 4, 2017

This paper presents a study on the form-meaning relationship within a subpart of the lexicon, namely lexical reduplication. It compares the semantic classification of lexical reduplication in diverse languages, focusing on three quantitative studies on the distributions of semantic categories in three typologically and genetically unrelated languages, Bikol, Tibetan and Arabic. On this basis, it is argued that the common view that lexical reduplications are a “semantically arbitrary class” and as such irrelevant for studies on reduplication is not justified. It is in contrast claimed that the mapping of certain meanings on this specific phonological pattern is highly iconic, and that these word forms can be classified as a specific subgroup of expressives. This group even shows remarkable parallels with the prototypical meanings of morphological reduplication. An explanation for this – certainly controversially discussed – observation could be provided by the cognitive semiotic concept of “cross-modal iconicity” ( Ahlner & Zlatev 2010 ).

Typological discussions of mirativity often consider the relationship between mirativity and evidentiality ( DeLancey 1997 , 2001 ; Aikhenvald 2004 ). However, in interaction speakers mobilize pragmatic extensions of miratives in ways that defy specific categorization. This study analyzes the function and distribution of the Navajo enclitic lá in a Navajo Conversational Corpus ( Mithun ed 2015 NSF-DEL project 0853598). The enclitic most frequently functions as an interrogative in information questions ( Young & Morgan 1987 ), but it also encodes mirative senses including surprise, counter-expectation, discovery, and reported speech. Though the two seem synchronically unrelated, an examination of the pragmatic functions, as well as consideration of comparative Athabaskan evidence, links the polysemous enclitics as metadiscourse markers signaling contrastive focus on the unexpectedness of a proposition. These data support the interactional relevance of the semantic domain of expectation, subsuming contrastive focus and surprise ( Behrens 2012 ).

Subject preference in relative clauses (RCs) has been reported in typologically diverse languages, but overall one notes that the number of languages analyzed experimentally remains extremely low. This paper presents experimental and natural evidence from Ixcatec, a critically-endangered Otomanguean language. Ixcatec is relevant to the discussion on universal subject preference for having syntactically and morphologically ambiguous subject and object RCs that can offer an unconfounded result. Study 1, a picture-matching comprehension experiment, shows that 63% of the ambiguous RCs are interpreted as subject RCs. Results from reaction times show that subject RC interpretations are numerically faster than object RC interpretations, but this difference does not reach significance. Analysis of a three-hour, free-speech corpus in Study 2 indicates that transitive subject RCs are only slightly more frequent than object RCs. In conclusion, although the Ixcatec data support universal subject preference, they also show how this preference is weaker than predicted.

This paper discusses the analysis of a particular class of morphemes in the Oceanic language Äiwoo, and argues that the difficulties in accounting for them in traditional terms such as nominalisation, compounding, relative clauses, or classifiers is due to their status as bound lexical morphemes, also known as bound roots, an under-discussed category in linguistic literature. It proposes some parameters of variation within bound lexical morphemes as a class and shows that the Äiwoo facts can be best accounted for by reference to these parameters, both in terms of language-internal description and crosslinguistic comparability. It argues that understanding crosslinguistic morphological structure in terms of a dichotomy between “roots” and “affixes” underplays the existing variation in linguistic structure, and that a more detailed examination is necessary of forms which do not fit clearly into this dichotomy; the discussion of the Äiwoo data aims to provide a starting-point for such an examination.

This paper discusses reciprocal constructions in Hittite, framed within the typology of reciprocals laid out by Nedjalkov (2007), König & Gast (2008) , and Evans et al. (2011) . Hittite attests to at least three reciprocal markers, that is, the middle voice, the particle =za, and three different polyptotic constructions, based on the iteration of the numeral šia- ‘one’, the demonstrative ka- ‘this’, and the noun ara- ‘fellow, comrade’ respectively. Synchronically, these three strategies cover different sub-domains of reciprocity, as they encode different kinds of reciprocal situations and display different syntactic properties. These differences can be accounted for by taking into account the processes out of which these constructions developed, which can be described in terms of grammaticalization (Heine & Miyashita 2008). In this respect, beside enriching our knowledge of reciprocals in Indo-European languages, this paper also contributes to our general understanding of the diachronic typology of reciprocal constructions.