Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Volume 50, Issue 1, 2026

This article analyses verbal number in Muyu, a Lowland Ok language of the Trans New Guinea family spoken in South Papuan Province. Verbal number stands for a system of pairwise lexical contrasts in which alternating verb stems encode a singular/plural opposition for subject or object arguments of the clause (e.g. ‘take one object’ vs. ‘take many objects’) or for how often the denoted event occurs (e.g. ‘hit once’ vs. ‘hit repeatedly’). Muyu has a relatively large inventory of such verb pairings: 37 pairs. Since nominal morphology is virtually absent, verbal number is the most important means to signal participant number. Verbal number in Muyu is analysed as a system of lexical paradigms rather than suppletion. In addition to the synchronic analysis, this paper puts forth a scenario for the diachronic development of the system, in which any verb pair is lexicalised in three consecutive stages.

This paper documents relative clause constructions in the polysynthetic Circassian languages of the West Caucasian family and attempts to establish diachronic links between them. It is shown that the Circassian languages possess both externally-headed and internally-headed relative clauses, with the latter having semantic heads that are interpreted outside of the relative clause. In addition, these languages have constructions which cannot be unequivocally assigned to one type or the other, and have properties of both. This paper suggests that there is a diachronic explanation for this, but also argues that the contrast between externally-headed and internally-headed relative clauses is not as clear-cut as is usually assumed in the typological literature.

This study investigates the encoding strategies and morphosyntax of rainfall expressions across 222 Sino-Tibetan language varieties. The analysis reveals that 76.6% of these varieties encode rainfall events with the argument type, wherein only the argument carries the meteorological meaning, accompanied by a supportive verb as the predicate. The supportive verbs exhibit diverse patterns of transitivity and directionality, with expressions of heavy rain tending to employ verbs of high transitivity. In most sampled varieties, verbs for rainfall also extend to other precipitation events, such as snow and hail. Diachronically, the encoding strategy demonstrates a shift from predicate type to argument(-predicate) type through three pathways: lexicalization, word split, and loss of other encoding strategies. This development is argued to reflect a typological transition in Sino-Tibetan languages, moving from more complex morphology towards increasingly analytic structures.

An infrequently attested pattern of isomorphism between markers of valence-affecting constructions involves overlap between causatives and applicatives, with a transitivizing function, and middles, which are detransitivizing. Such synchronic overlap must be due to some feature of the development of the constructions; however, so far there has been little detailed argumentation for directionality in such cases. We consider an instance of this pattern in the South Central Tibeto-Burman languages. The representation of multiple stages of the phenomena allows us to posit directionality and motivations for the evolutionary pathways involved. Here, the source morphology developed into a comitative applicative; in some languages causative meanings emerged, and in others, the construction developed an array of middle meanings via a portative applicative bridging context. The study provides new evidence for how patterns may arise in which the same morphology marks both causative or applicative constructions, on the one hand, and middles, on the other.

The goal of this paper is to put the semantic functions of the Lithuanian and Bulgarian perfects into a perspective of the grammaticalization cline specific to BE-perfects, i.e., perfects that exclusively use auxiliaries derived from verbs meaning ‘to be’. The study is based on synchronic data and on the idea that diachronic conceptual shifts, characteristic of grammaticalization, are reflected in synchronic variation. The analysis follows semantic links between perfect functions from statives and resultative constructions to experientials and evidentials. Quantitative frequency data from genre-parallel collections of Facebook comments in Bulgarian and Lithuanian shows that, in both doculects, auxiliaries are more frequently omitted with less grammaticalized perfect functions, while with cross-linguistically typical functions the auxiliary is more frequently present. In Bulgarian, the auxiliary-drop tendency resurfaces with evidential functions of the perfect. I argue that this auxiliary usage pattern aligns with the grammaticalization cline of BE-perfects.

The paper explores exceptive constructions (e.g., all my family went to the wedding except Mark) in Huasteca Nahuatl (Uto-Aztecan). It is shown that connected and free exceptives have developed intriguing discourse-pragmatic functions that have not been identified by previous studies. While connected exceptives (e.g., everyone except Pedro went to the meeting) indicate a surprising situation, free exceptives (e.g., everyone went to the meeting except Peter) signal a non-surprising situation. It is argued that exceptive markers play an important role in the expression of these functions and it is demonstrated that the order of the exceptive phrase with respect to its associate and its relation to surprising and non-surprising situations can be explained by a syntactic iconic mechanism: the principle of adjacency. It is shown that Huasteca Nahuatl borrowed exceptive markers from Mexican Spanish. However, the discourse-pragmatic functions of exceptive constructions are an internally motivated development in Huasteca Nahuatl that cannot be attributed to Mexican Spanish.

Cuntou Tuhua, an undocumented Tuhua variety within the Sinitic languages spoken in northern Guangdong, exhibits three types of passive constructions. The la-construction and the piau-construction have developed internally from transitive constructions involving actions of taking and giving, and are typically used to express negative events, with the agent obligatorily present. In contrast, the phai-construction is a borrowed form from Mandarin, used exclusively for positive events and requiring the omission of the agent. The grammaticalization of the la-construction and the piau-construction indicates that they represent a strategy of topicalization. These passive constructions also serve a distinct participant-identification function, arising from the conventionalization of the construction, including determining participant roles and tracking referents in discourse.