Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 49, Issue 2, 2025

This article presents a comprehensive survey of anticausativization within Gyalrongic languages, a group of Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in Sichuan, China, contributing significantly to our understanding of this phenomenon’s theoretical and diachronic underpinnings. The research affirms that anticausative alternation is predominantly associated with verbs that exhibit a change of state semantics. This categorization includes decausative and autocausative verbs, further subdivided in Gyalrongic languages into specific semantic groups such as Separation, Removal, Physical Transformation, etc. Certain verbs with agent-oriented meanings also undergo anticausative alternation, calling for a revision of previous claims. Gyalrongic languages demonstrate a unique trend in their use of anticausative marking, deviating from global patterns by avoiding the polyfunctional employment of these markers. The article traces the origins of anticausative marking to a spontaneous / non-volitional action prefix and identifies the emergence of a new non-volitional prefix that has overtones of anticausative marking, descending from an orientational / TAME prefix.

Drawing on a corpus-based typology of 24 spoken dialects of contemporary Arabic and Aramaic, we explore relevant microvariation along the VO-OV spectrum in Central Semitic, which holds implications for the still understudied VO-to-OV shift. While the literature emphasizes that this type of syntactic change is only possible under external pressure, our findings demonstrate that this development is also driven by internal dynamics, in particular the syntax of definite objects. Our study shows a robust tendency for pronouns and definite object NPs to be selected first for preverbal placement; being originally left-dislocated topics with resumption, this at times results also in higher rates of object cross-referencing. Furthermore, this corpus-based typology also highlights the importance of a gradient approach to word order variation and change as well as the importance of studying distinct object types, which, together, help us document mixed systems that in themselves can be diachronically stable.

The structuring and encoding of space through language, the shape of the linguistic inventories found in individual languages, as well as the symmetries and asymmetries manifested by such systems have received a great deal of attention during the last four decades. The vast majority of the relevant studies adopted a purely synchronic perspective and diachronic studies of the relevant phenomena are rare. The aim of this paper is to contribute to this discussion by analyzing the historical development of directional demonstratives in Germanic languages, the structure of the relevant systems at different stages, the reduction and loss of oppositions and the resultant creation of asymmetries. The results of the descriptions will be examined and evaluated from a comparative and typological perspective.

In spontaneous discourse, a communicator may be unable or unwilling to produce certain words for contextual reasons. An effective strategy to overcome such difficulties is the use of a placeholder like whatchamacallit. It has been observed that in some languages, demonstrative-related placeholder forms also serve as an interjective hesitator, the type of expression illustrated with um, well, etc. This paper reveals that this functional duality is a broad phenomenon observed with not only demonstratives but also non-demonstrative forms such as wh-words. I investigate non-demonstrative forms in 14 languages and propose a functional account within Discourse Grammar. My contention is twofold: (i) syntactic, semantic, and prosodic differences between placeholders and interjective hesitators are reducible to differences between two grammatical domains, Sentence Grammar and Thetical Grammar; (ii) the functional duality is captured in terms of cooptation, a process whereby a Sentence Grammar unit is transferred to a Thetical Grammar unit.

Central Pame verbal inflection constitutes a system whose organization is strikingly complex, with dozens of inflection classes distributed syntagmatically across multiple positions in a word: prefix, suffix, stem, and tone. This paper presents the first thorough description of this understudied system and investigates every layer and subsystem in detail and how they relate to each other, concluding that, in this distributed-exponence system, syntagmatic predictability relations between subsystems are fundamental

This paper offers a description of the multifunctional morpheme manang in Toba Batak (Austronesian; Sumatra) — as the disjunctor, the interrogative complementizer, and a particle forming wh-based polarity items — contextualized within the broader semantic and typological literatures on such meaning expressions. I also observe a puzzle regarding its form: the form manang diverges substantially from its functional equivalent, barang, as described in H. N. Van der Tuuk’s pioneering grammar of Toba Batak (Van der Tuuk 1864–1867). I argue that consideration of this historical change supports the analysis of these various uses of manang as a case of functional polysemy, reflecting a common conceptual core.