Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 45, Issue 2, 2021

Native deaf signers express epistemic modality by different means: mental-state words, clause-internal particles, signs indicating hypothesis, and nonmanually. The data for this study come from two unrelated sign languages, Danish Sign Language and Japanese Sign Language. In dialogues the signers use both calques of majority-language words and signs that appear to have emerged in the sign languages only. Based on the multifunctionality of some word forms, the origin of the epistemic modal particles may be traced back to tags, interjections, and lexical signs, a route motivated by interaction and also found in unrelated spoken languages. Furthermore, in both sign languages, the first-person pronoun can be used, without a verb, as an epistemic “anchor” of a proposition, a construction that seems specific to languages in the gestural-visual modality. Another modality-specific feature is the possibility of transferring the expression of a marker of epistemic uncertainty from one articulator to another.

This paper provides a detailed description of the results of 24 constituency diagnostics, both morphosyntactic and phonological, to Chácobo, a southern Pano language of the northern Bolivian Amazon. While it is often assumed that misalignments across the domains that emerge from constituency diagnostics can be resolved by reference to a distinction between phonological and morphosyntactic words, I argue that this is not true of Chácobo. Divergence is at least as high within phonological domains and morphosyntactic domains as it is across them. While it is often assumed that domains tend to converge overall on a single wordhood candidate or that domain divergence is marginal, I argue that this is not true of Chácobo. I present a cluster of methodologies that assess the motivation for a word constituent as an empirical hypothesis, rather than treating it as an a priori assumption. No strong evidence for a word constituent emerges from the Chácobo data. Theoretical and methodological implications are discussed.

This paper presents an in-depth investigation of the binding strategies in Kokborok and we will look more specifically how this sheds light on the theories of reflexivization. Kokborok, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Tripura, a state in the North-East of India, has two reflexives: sak sak ‘self self’ and sak baithaŋ ‘self self’. The form sak sak ‘self self’ conforms to Principle A of classic Binding Theory, blocking long-distance binding, but this does not hold true for sak baithaŋ allowing non-local binding. It is a well-established fact that some reflexives allow non-local binding, but it is generally assumed that this phenomenon is limited to a certain type of reflexive, morpho-syntactically ‘simple reflexives.’ The so-called ‘complex reflexives’ generally bar non-local binding, and the Kokborok reflexive sak baithaŋ seems an exception to that. This paper explores the uniqueness involved in the nature of anaphoric binding in Kokborok.

This paper reports on the Tibeto-Burman language, Nubri, of the high Himalayan region of northern central Nepal. Specifically, data is presented to illustrate the use of tone to mark two morphological features in the language: the use of a H tone suffix to mark the genitive case, and the use of a H tone prefix to mark an increase in transitivity. This is the first account of these phenomena in Nubri and an analysis is presented before contextualizing the phenomena in a typological perspective.

In this paper, we investigate empirical data that raise challenging issues with respect to focus sensitivity of the Hungarian additive particle is ‘also, too’. In Hungarian, the additive particle is attached to a constituent, and the is-phrase cannot occupy the structural focus position. This raises the issue how to capture the focus sensitivity of is. We propose a primarily pragmatic, context-based analysis of the Hungarian additive particle, where the particle associates with the pragmatic focus (Lambrecht 1994) determined on basis of the immediate question under discussion (Roberts 2012). Important evidence for this claim is that the Hungarian additive particle can take different semantic associates, corresponding to the pragmatic focus of the sentence. After discussing the Hungarian data, we will present the analysis in the framework of Role and Reference Grammar (Van Valin & LaPolla 1997; Van Valin 2005). To capture Hungarian and English data in a uniform way, important extensions of the framework will be proposed.

According to Goldberg (1995), placement verbs (such as put) are instantiated in the Caused-Motion Construction. Rohde (2001), however, argued that placement verbs in fact occur in a different construction, which she names the Caused-Position Construction, whose semantic value is not ‘cause to move’ but rather ‘cause to be positioned’. The present paper redefines and justifies the postulation of Caused-Position Construction. The Caused-Position Construction is compatible with not only placement verbs but also a variety of other verbs, such as verbs of creation (write or build) or certain stative verbs (want or need), many of which also occur in the Locative Inversion construction. Further, a similar distinction between Caused-Motion and Caused-Position can be attested in Mandarin as well, which suggests that the distinction between two patterns of spatial causation may not be idiosyncratically confined to the English language but motivated by the general patterns of human cognition.