Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 44, Issue 4, 2020

Komo (Koman) of Ethiopia has an obligatory paradigm of deictic directional (dd) verb morphology that, among its functions, indicates direction of motion relative to a deictic reference point, associated motion and grammatical aspect when collocated with verb roots of different semantic classes. The semantic components of a motion event underlie the Komo dd system and the grammatical aspect of a predicate can be directly mapped to the bounded/unbounded path profile. The Associated Motion function contains a bounded path which entails arrival at or departure from a reference point and, as a result, imparts aspectual telicity to the predicate. The Direction function by contrast, contains an unbounded path that expresses motion towards a reference point and does not impart aspectual telicity. Further, some morphemes express exchoativity, or the ‘exiting’ of a state, a rare if unattested grammatical category.

In Hittite, deictic motion verbs pai- ‘go’ and uwa- ‘come’ may co-occur in a monoclausal structure with a second verb that carries the lexical meaning. As yet, their exact function remains obscure. I argue that motion verbs involved in such construction underwent transcategorization and function as New Event Markers. I show that this development is best explained as an instance of constructionalization involving both the motion verbs and the second verb in the clause, which is based on a pragmatic inference arising when motion verbs were used without a spatial complement. Either motion verb contributes a different semantics to the construction based on the different perspective regarding the deictic center identified by the ego, whereby pai- ‘go’ (motion originating from the deictic center) marks an event as close in time and controlled, while uwa- ‘come’ (motion originating outside the deictic center) indicates distance in time and possible lack of control.

As pointed out by Corbett (2006, 2012), animacy manifests itself in the grammar of languages in two ways: as a feature and as a condition for the realization of other features. In this work I explore this dual behavior by adding further crosslinguistic evidence. I provide examples affecting number, person, case, and gender, and show that, regarding this distinction, they cannot be analyzed in the same way. Moreover, I examine more closely the relation between these manifestations of animacy and show that they can operate simultaneously not only within the same language but also in the same phenomenon. For these cases, I establish a hierarchy between them that can be crossed with the equally hierarchical relation between the animate/inanimate and the human/nonhuman distinction.

This article studies the various uses of a Dutch thetic and sentence-focus construction, viz. the Syntactic Inversion with Filler Insertion Construction (henceforth: SIFIC), e.g. Er loopt een man over straat (‘There is a man walking across the street’). The article investigates whether theticity and sentence-focus are semantically encoded meanings of the SIFIC or pragmatically inferred senses. SIFIC tokens (N = 750) were extracted from the Dutch SoNaR Corpus and annotated for five factors. The analysis shows that the SIFIC can have information-structural uses that are diametrically opposed to theticity and sentence-focus, i.e. topic-comment structure, predicate-focus articulation and categorical judgment. It is argued that theticity and sentence-focus can therefore not be regarded as the encoded semantics of the SIFIC, but should rather be analyzed as default senses of the construction. Based on similar cross-linguistic findings the article takes issue with the assumption that most languages have dedicated thetic and sentence-focus constructions.

Despite extensive research on Ryukyuan languages, relatively few attempts have been made to describe Ryukyuan nominalization. This paper sets out the agenda for exploring Ryukyuan nominalization with special reference to Yoron Ryukyuan, which, we propose, has four nominalizers: -si, hutu, munu, and Ø (zero). We divide nominalization into GB (Gap-Based) and GL (Gap-Less) nominalization. Firstly, -si is the most productive; it realizes GB/GL nominalization and derives clefts, relatives, and stance constructions. Secondly, hutu is less productive; its use in GB nominalization is restricted, and it derives only stance constructions. Thirdly, munu is viewed as a formal noun in that it encodes the general meaning ‘person, thing’ and usually requires a modifying element. Finally, Ø is the least productive, found only in fixed constructions. Based on these observations, we propose a non-discrete view of nominalizer and formal noun and a cline of their productivity.

The diachronic development of morphemes meaning ‘wait’ has not been well documented. This paper describes multiple functions of the ‘wait’ verb dang2 in Hong Kong Cantonese: (a) a verb meaning ‘be in need of’, (b) a permissive verb meaning ‘let’, (c) a causative verb meaning ‘cause’, (d) a temporal marker meaning ‘at, when’, (e) a particle for giving notice of a coming event, and (f) a subordinating conjunction signifying someone’s surprise. Four development paths are proposed to account for the multifunctionality: ‘wait’ > (a); ‘wait’ > (d); ‘wait’ > (b) > (e); and ‘wait’ > (c) > (f). This case draws attention to the potential of ‘wait’ morphemes to be employed to express various other abstract concepts and, furthermore, highlights the role of indirect sources in the theory of grammaticalization.

This paper contributes to the typology of ditransitive constructions. Akebu (Kwa, Ghana-Togo mountain, West Africa) has four strategies of alignment of ditransitive verbs, if both theme and recipient objects are expressed: a neutral strategy, a possessive-like strategy, a strategy with a pronominal reprise and a ‘take’ serial verb construction strategy. The possessive-like strategy that is most standard in Akebu is rare in a cross-linguistic perspective and has not been attested in other Kwa languages. The factors that license a certain strategy are person, number and noun class of the theme and recipient and the internal structure of the theme noun phrase.