Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 49, Issue 3, 2025

One cross-linguistically recurrent asymmetry between affirmation and negation is the neutralization of tense-aspect distinctions in negatives. A functional explanation proposed for this is that in their typical discourse context negatives have less need for temporal specification than affirmatives and in some languages this discourse preference is reflected as fewer tense-aspect distinctions in grammar. To examine whether such a discourse preference exists, we compare the use of temporal adverbials in affirmatives and negatives in English, Finnish and Korean corpus data. The results provide qualified support for the hypothesized discourse preference: in English and Korean, affirmatives are likelier to have temporal adverbials than negatives, but Finnish shows no statistically significant difference. In English and Finnish, affirmatives are likelier than negatives to contain adjuncts indicating temporal position. Verb semantics is found to interact with temporal specifications. The study also uncovers further differences between affirmatives and negatives in the use of adverbials.

In this paper, we take stock of our linguistic tools to investigate potential markers of the perfect and ‘already’, and challenge the necessity of assuming the existence of the category of iamitives (Olsson 2013). Iamitives are said to have a core meaning of change-of-state, similar to ‘already’, with an additional resultative meaning making it also similar to perfect aspect. We investigate several perfect/iamitive/‘already’ markers in Nafsan, Toqabaqita, Unua, Javanese, and Mandarin Chinese. We argue that characteristics that have been taken as evidence of iamitives can be explained by the interaction between the perfect/‘already’ and the following language-internal mechanisms: (a) aspectual coercion in languages with underspecified verbal aspect can explain the presence of the change-of-state meaning with perfect aspect; (b) paradigmatic blocking can explain the lack of some perfect functions of a given marker in a language; and (c) compatibility in meaning can explain certain overlaps between perfect and ‘already’.

The middle voice defies definitive characterization due to its dual nature, straddling both oppositional (grammatical) and non-oppositional (lexical) properties. Data from eight Sinitic languages reveal an emerging middle marker derived from passives, whose distribution is restricted by four features: [+non-agentive], [+subject affected], [+change of state], and [+adverse]. Over time, this marker expands to additional predicate classes while becoming obligatory with some predicates, thus becoming more “grammatical” on the one hand and more “lexical” on the other. An “overlap-and-bleach” mechanism is at work, in which a grammatical element dependent on a semantically similar lexical element undergoes semantic bleaching due to its secondary discourse status and semantic redundancy. Partial semantic overlap preserves some of the marker’s oppositional meaning, while complete overlap results in complete bleaching and yields non-oppositional middles when combined with frequency effects. This diachronic process driven by the overlap-and-bleach mechanism may account for middle voice’s dual nature.

One possible usage-based motivation for ergative alignment in grammars is the reference-establishing function shared by the sole argument of intransitives and the patient argument of transitives. Here we test this hypothesis, known as Preferred Argument Structure, against discourse data from Basque, a language with ergative case marking. While we do find a discourse-ergative distribution of lexical forms of reference, our results suggest animacy in addition to role to be a central driver of this distribution. Thus, syntactic position does not appear to reflect referential status directly. This opens new avenues for exploring the specific effects of reference management on grammar. In drawing on production data from a language with ergative case, we also complement previous studies into discourse ergativity that were based primarily on languages with accusative alignment in their grammatical relations.

This paper is a comparative study of contact effects in nominal number systems, based on a sample of 49 pairs of languages in contact and focusing on pattern borrowing. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, we find that plural marking and number marking on nouns are the features most likely to display similar encodings across languages in contact. We also show that, though less frequent globally, duals are particularly sensitive to contact effects. The study confirms that inherent inflections are more likely to show contact effects than contextual inflections. It also shows that certain number distinctions are prone to contact-induced convergence regardless of their crosslinguistic frequency.