Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 42, Issue 2, 2018

Modern Chinese Pseudo-Possessive-Object Constructions (shortened as Modern Chinese PPO constructions; e.g. ta shuo le wo de haohua (他说了我的好话) ‘he has put in a good word for me’ and ta chi le wo de doufu (他吃了我的豆腐) ‘he has taken advantage of me’) are actually constructions displaying possessor-affectee syncretism. They derive from Early Modern Chinese Real-Possessive-Object constructions in bridging contexts, some examples being wo ye quande liewei daren de jiu (我也劝得列位大人的酒), ‘I also urged all the magistrates here to finish drinking your wine’ and shi nage zai jie wo de duan li (是那个在揭我的短哩) ‘who is uncovering my demerits’. Di-transitive constructions in Middle Chinese and Early Modern Chinese (e.g. Changxing! quan er yibei jiu (长星，劝尔一杯酒) ‘Comet! I urge you (to finish drinking) a cup of wine’ and shuru gan jie wu duanchu (竖儒敢揭吾短处) ‘how dare the Confucius scholar uncover my demerits’) have provided structural templates for the formation of Modern Chinese PPO constructions. They also have led to a condition in which there are more examples of a maleficiary Modern Chinese PPO construction than examples of a beneficiary Modern Chinese PPO construction (e.g. ta chi le wo de doufu (他吃了我的豆腐) ‘he has taken advantage of me’ vs. ta shuo le wo de haohua (他说了我的好话) ‘he has put in a good word for me’). The grammaticalization pathway can also explain the formation of other constructions including another Modern Chinese PPO construction (e.g. ta chi le wo de kui (他吃了我的亏) ‘he has suffered the loss caused by me’), a Modern Chinese pseudo-object construction (e.g. wo ganxie ni de haoxin (我感谢你的好心) ‘I thank you for your kindness’), and a Modern Chinese pseudo-modifier construction (e.g. wo pa le yi xiawu de shan (我爬了一下午的山) ‘I did mountain-climbing for the whole afternoon’).

Roper Kriol exhibits variation in the shape of the first-person singular pronoun in subject position. This paper provides an account of the numerous syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors that appear to influence the selection of either ai or mi based predominantly on a study of a corpus of the written language. It is claimed that the synchronic distribution of ai and mi is an innovation primarily motivated by speaker reanalysis of the semantic entailments frequently associated with English subject and object arguments – effectively evidence of the partial grammaticalisation of agentivity in these varieties. This work has implications for our understanding of ‘agentivity’ as a cross-linguistic, cognitive category and for the dynamic relationship between semantic roles and the morphosyntactic encoding of grammatical relations.

Je suis Charlie was used over 619.000 times in the two days that have followed the attack of Charlie Hebdo and has regularly been taken up in both written and spoken forms since. A number of variants of this meme (i.e. Nous sommes tous (des) Charlie) have also emerged among French speakers. We argue that this is primarily related to the fact that the structure of Je suis Charlie actually clashes with its meaning. Whereas its word order and default rightmost sentence stress are compatible either with an all-focus reading or a narrow focusing of Charlie, the solidarity/empathy message it communicates suggests that its subject is narrowly focused. We propose that two strategies have emerged to solve this conflict: (i) various alternative forms have appeared that allow proper subject focusing and (ii) speakers have reinterpreted the original structure so as to pragmatically retrieve the (additive) focused nature of the subject.

This paper considers the relationship between synchronic variation and language change in the context of the existential and possessive constructions in Modern Hebrew, which exhibit a normative – colloquial alternation. The study examines usage patterns across age groups and time periods, as represented in spoken-language corpora. It shows that the non-normative construction is used extensively in the contemporary speech of adults. Moreover, a comparison of the use of the normative – colloquial alternations by two populations, children and adults, in different time periods, provides evidence to suggest that these constructions are undergoing language change. A cross-linguistic perspective lends additional support: across languages the expression of existence involves non-canonical structures, which are particularly susceptible to language variation and, possibly, language change.

In Yoron Ryukyuan, passives are formed through the verbal suffix ‘-ari’. In this article, we observe that the suffix is used to form a construction distinguished from the standard passives in several respects: (i) attachment of ‘-ari’ to a wide range of predicates, (ii) ‘-ari’ obligatorily coexisting with the clause-linking suffix ‘-ti’, (iii) the case-marking pattern identical to that of active sentences, among other properties. Semantically, this construction expresses that the speaker is affected (typically, in an adversative fashion) by the situation denoted by the ‘-ari’-attached predicate. We call this linguistic unit "Affective Construction" (AC), revealing its unique syntactic and semantic properties. Furthermore, we suggest that the development of ‘-ari’ into ‘-ari-ti’ to constitute the AC may be viewed as an instance of grammaticalisation, with remarks on its generality in line with Unidirectionality and on the licensing conditions on the AC which seem to be uncommon cross-linguistically.