Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 47, Issue 2, 2023

The Arabic prepositions min and ʕan in their prototypical spatial use relate to the Source domain, translating as ‘(away) from’. In many contemporary dialects ʕan is absent or limited to secondary, non-spatial meanings. In Traditional Negev Arabic, however, both prepositions are used complementarily. The proto-scene of ablative min is a Figure (F) exiting from a 3-dimensional Ground (G)-source, with ‘containment’ and ‘boundary-crossing’ typical components of the scene. The preposition ʕan prototypically fulfils a separative function, denoting separation from a Source with no relevance to dimensions, and has developed secondary modal functions. Both also have perlative functions and may appear in static scenes. Only min heads prepositional complexes, where it typically restores the nominal origin of the following element as a bounded region. So ‘min behind the house’ may denote ‘in the back zone of the house’; these complexes characterize multiple axes, when F crosses G’s path.

This paper provides a first description of verbal number in Idi, a language of the Pahoturi River family spoken in Western Province, Papua New Guinea. Idi shows an intricate system of marking verbal number, evident in verb stems and two sets of suffixes occurring in different positions on the verb, based on a distinction between nonplural (1 or 2) versus plural (more than 2). Verbs also agree in person and number with core arguments; this system of nominal number is distinguishing singular (1) from nonsingular (more than 1). Elements from the two systems are combined to arrive at composite number values for both events and participants. In addition, verbal number interrelates with a lexical aspectual distinction of punctual/telic versus durative/atelic, manifesting on verb stems and in inflectional patterns. The paper provides evidence for the thesis that verbal number in Idi is not merely lexically determined, but largely inflectional.

This paper addresses the development of the Chinese V de O cleft construction, and how the cleft constructional network was developed in the history of Chinese. It is argued that V de O clefts emerged in the 13th century which was about 300 years later than VP de clefts. A key factor in their development is the use in Middle Chinese of relative clause in post-copula position. We argue that the emergence of V de O clefts also involved analogization to the extant VP de clefts as well as deferred equatives. Once V de O clefts occurred, they were recruited into the cleft network as a subschema, resulting in the schematic network being augmented and expanded. This study is a contribution to the developing field of constructionalization by making more explicit the way how nodes are created in a constructional network and how the network is reorganized and expanded.

This study investigates the hypothesis that marked sounds are more likely to be gaps in a sound inventory. A gap is defined as an absence of an [α voice] stop or fricative when the [−α voice] counterpart exists. Different formulations of markedness are tested and evaluated on whether they label the gaps as more marked than attested sounds. Results show an overall success of markedness based on typological attestedness of sounds in labeling gaps as more marked. However, the success of markedness based on aerodynamics and cross-linguistic phonological processes is limited to stops and fricatives, respectively. Analyses also show that gaps in attested inventories are more likely to be marked than gaps from randomized artificial inventories. This discrepancy between attested and artificial inventories shows how markedness, feature economy, and symmetry interact in shaping sound systems of human languages.

Dogon pseudo-subjects are bare meteorological, temporal-environmental, and partonymic nouns of low referentiality/specificity that occur in fixed noun-verb collocations. The pseudo-subject controls the choice of verb in all cases, but it fails to behave like a true subject in linear position, in a quotative-subject construction, or in pronominal-subject agreement. The pseudo-subject is the sole nominal in these meteorological and temporal collocations, but in partonymic collocations it co-occurs with a true subject denoting the possessor-experiencer. The latter has all of the clear subject properties except controlling the choice of verb. Pseudo-subjects have some similarities with, but are distinct from, a range of typologically familiar phenomena including impersonal subjects, direct objects, possessums stranded by possessor raising, East Asian-style second subjects or post-topic subjects, incorporated nouns, and adverbial adjuncts. They can be classified as pseudo-incorporated nominals if this category is broad enough to include subject-like as well as object-like nominals. The relevant constructions are easily modelled in construction grammars, but not in arboreal syntax.

This article describes adverbial universal quantification in Besemah, a little-described Malayic language of southwest Sumatra, and how the syntactic position of the quantifier relates to grammatical relations and information structure. Given previous descriptions of the relationship between quantifiers and grammatical relations, especially in western Austronesian languages (e.g., Kroeger 1993; Musgrave 2001), Besemah presents a unique system of universal quantification wherein adverbial universal quantifiers place severe restrictions on which arguments can be quantified. I argue that these restrictions are fundamentally different than those described as ‘quantifier float’ in other languages, but they are not incidental. Instead, these restrictions can be explained by the fact that the adverbial universal quantifier also marks focus in Besemah.

Cross-linguistically, very few complete sentences, as opposed to a myriad of phrases, lexicalize to become words. I here offer an account for this skewed distribution, along the lines of Construction Grammar, by analyzing a set of mono-clausal sentences in Hebrew which have indeed become – or are on the verge of becoming – words. I adopt the distinction between categorical and thetic propositions, and show that only the latter can evolve into words. A thetic – unlike a categorical – proposition, much like a verb-phrase, enables a tight semantic bonding between its components to form an ‘interpretatively cohesive’ unit, which may lead to semantic change. An evaluative thetic – unlike a categorical – proposition is comment-like, hence ‘semantically-incomplete’, and in need of a topic from prior discourse to predicate on, which may lead to a change in grammatical status. All verb-phrases meet these two criteria but only few sentences do, hence, I argue, the skewed distribution of sources from which new words evolve.