Studies in Language. International Journal sponsored by the Foundation “Foundations of Language” - Online First

Sinitic languages are known for their SVO order and mostly isolating morphology. This study addresses eleven languages of four different areas in Hunan, Yunnan, Sichuan, and Qinghai/Gansu provinces in China that possess SOV order and developed a postnominal flagging system. This study presents a synchronic description as well as a diachronic analysis of the flagging systems in these languages, focusing on typological properties (ergative or secundative alignment) and the role of language contact. The existence of four separate areas with limited mutual contact allows a contrastive approach and inferences on the role of different contact languages (Tibetic, Mongolic, Tujia) or different types of language contact (borrowing of flags, shared grammaticalization). The study argues against OV order and postnominal flagging as defining features of the “Amdo Sprachbund”, showing that these are universally present in all four areas and are better understood as the result of contact between two Eurasian macro areas.

This paper examines the structural and functional links between symmetrical voice systems, typologically unusual and characteristic of western Austronesian languages, and systems of accusative alignment. It compares the clausal patterns of two closely related languages, Äiwoo and Engdewu, where one is analysed as having symmetrical voice and the other as having accusative alignment. It argues that the usage patterns in Äiwoo point towards a possible path of reanalysis from one type of system to another, and that this involves two key factors: increased importance of referentiality of the patient argument as a condition for the choice between two alternative constructions, and loss of the distinction between subject and nonsubject actors in two domains of grammar. Referentiality in particular, being a key factor in the concept of transitivity as it is understood in the typological literature, provides a promising avenue for better understanding the relationships between the two types of system.

The Old Assyrian language is a branch of East Semitic. East Semitic has been extinct since around 400 BCE. The Old Assyrian texts used in this study were produced by Assyrian merchants between 1890 and 1860 BCE in Northern Mesopotamia and Central Anatolia. Old Assyrian, as well as most other East Semitic varieties, had a ventive (or cislocative) marker hosted on motion verbs. This marker obligatorily encoded motion either toward the speaker or the interlocutor (the addressee of a written message). By way of a deictic shift, the ventive sometimes also came to point to a future location of the speaker and even to the whereabouts of non-speech act participants. The ventive marker had three allomorphs which are also allomorphs of the 1st person singular indirect object pronoun ‘to/for me’. The cislocative and personal pronoun meanings of the marker evolved in the course of a complex interaction which we trace in the etymological part of the study.

In this paper, we explore how changes in the inflection class membership of verbs in Matlatzinca (Oto-Pamean, Oto-Manguean, Mexico) lead to changes in both their valency and meaning. In Matlatzinca, verbs often exhibit multiple class membership so that a given verb may be inflected as transitive in one class but as intransitive in another. For instance, the verb chun+ta, when inflected in different classes, can encompass diverse meanings: the action of ‘waking someone up’; the result state of ‘being awake’; and the spontaneous event of ‘waking up’. This linguistic phenomenon is intriguing from both a typological and a theoretical perspective as it challenges our understanding of lexical representation by prompting the question of whether these meanings represent distinct lexical entries or various construals of the same verb (Spencer 2013).

Lalo Yi (Tibeto-Burman; China) makes systematic distinctions in the encoding of specificity with numerically-quantified nominals. Whereas specific indefinite NPs involve the presence of an article nikhe in an NP-internal position [Noun nikhe Numeral Classifier], non-specific existentially-asserted indefinites require the use of a syntactically discontinuous floating quantifier pattern [NP…Numeral-Classifier…]. A third, distinctive patterning is found with weak, non-specific indefinites (indefinites that are not existentially asserted). This paper describes these previously undocumented contrastive forms in Lalo Yi and how the language has developed a strikingly transparent linking between morpho-syntax and semantics/pragmatics in the domain of nominal phrases.