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

This paper deals with the restrictive (limitative) marker kə̄n ‘only’ in Ulcha (Southern Tungusic). This marker has nontrivial positional features: it can attach before inflectional suffixes (as a derivational affix) or after them (as an enclitic). One might see the process of affix reordering described in Haspelmath (1993) as “externalization of inflection”, when a former clitic becomes a derivational affix. However, there is evidence that the uses of kə̄n after inflection are innovative as compared to those before inflection, not vice versa, and this direction of diachronic development is very unexpected. In this paper, I propose an explanation for this nonstandard reordering pattern and show that in fact it has the same motivation and the same mechanisms as previously reported types of affix reordering.

This study investigates the expression of Source and Goal in spontaneous motion events in Stieng (Cambodia, Vietnam). The analysis is based on data collected in Cambodia, using the Trajectoire video kit ( Ishibashi et al. 2006 ). Regardless the type of Ground, Stieng data includes a wide range of constructions in describing motion events, combining lexical and grammatical tools (verbs and adnominals). While morphosyntactic resources available to express Source and Goal are formally similar, Stieng data shows that the Goal tends to be privileged compared to the Source, at the semantic, morphosyntactic, and syntactic levels. However, Source and Goal tend to be symmetrical with respect to the semantic distinctions of the verbs, and potential (a)symmetries with respect to the discourse level remain to be clarified. Instances of asymmetries in favor of the Goal tend to support previous studies that postulated a tendency for languages to privilege the Goal in the linguistic expression.

Ese Ejja (Takanan) is an endangered language spoken in the Bolivian and Peruvian lowlands. The paper examines the expression of Source and Goal in this Amazonian language and focuses on three types of Source-Goal asymmetries. The first asymmetry concerns the higher number of Goal adnominals than of Source adnominals. Linked to this morphological asymmetry, the second asymmetry is semantic: Goal adnominals display a [± human] distinction absent from Source markers. In addition, the two Goal adnominals are dedicated while the only adnominal that encodes Source may also encode Median. In fact, the unambiguous (and most frequent expression) of Source requires a biclausal strategy, which accounts for the third type of asymmetry, at the syntactic level. The discussion is based on firsthand data including both spontaneous and elicited data, mostly obtained with Trajectoire, a visual methodological tool designed to collect Path expression.

According to Talmy (2000) , a motion event has four conceptual components: Figure, Motion, Path and one or more Grounds. Path can be further decomposed into Source, Medium and Goal (or: departure, passing and arrival). In many languages, intuitive pairs of motion events such as come/go seem to indicate that Source and Goal are equally able to build the image of the Path. However, numerous studies have pointed to an asymmetry in favor of Goal in motion descriptions. Using the corpus elicited during the Trajectoire project, this paper explores Source-Goal asymmetries in Romanian; this concerns adposition inventories (which are symmetrical for Source and Goal), adposition-verb combinations, and the attention payed by speakers to Source viz. Goal-oriented motion. The paper postulates possible semantic causes of Source-Goal asymmetry not identified in previous literature, such as the bounded nature of the Ground, and motion being associated with a particular human activity.

This paper examines a comparative construction in the Oceanic language Äiwoo and argues that it differs from those known in the typological literature on comparatives on two counts. It is similar to a so-called ‘exceed’ comparative in involving a morpheme meaning ‘go far’; but unlike canonical exceed comparatives, the construction is intransitive, and the standard of comparison is expressed as an oblique. Moreover, the standard is indicated not only by this oblique phrase but also by a directional marker on the verb, in an extension of the frequent use of directionals in Äiwoo to indicate peripheral participants. This construction thus, on the one hand, expands the established typology of comparative constructions; and on the other, shows that the use of directional morphemes to indicate peripheral participants, otherwise attested e.g. for recipients of give verbs, may extend to the standard in comparative constructions, pointing to an avenue for further typological exploration.

Khamti Shan features the marking of perfectivity comprised of three clause-final particles, one perfective and two imperfectives, each emerging from the basic verbs, yau¹ ‘finish’, u⁵ ‘live’, and nam⁵ ‘(be) extensive’. While the perfective category is straightforward, the imperfective category shows an unusual bifurcation, the first imperfective marker accommodating continuatives and habituals and the second imperfective marker working exclusively with the nominal predicate construction, clauses of potentiality (hortatives, futures), and the progressive construction. All three particles of perfectivity develop from lexical sources, with the pathways ‘finish’ > completive > perfective and ‘live’ > continuous/progressive > imperfective being well-documented across languages. The pathway ‘extensive’ > imperfective, on the other hand, appears unique to Khamti Shan. I motivate the usage of these perfectivity particles (primarily) with a semantic-cognitive analysis.

Like all Algonquian languages, Cree distributes its stock of nouns over two classes: animate and inanimate. While this distinction is firmly based on different agreement rules, and is to a large extent (but not completely) backed up by semantic differences, Cree nouns can also be put on a 4-level hierarchy scale, depending on their morphological valence with regard to whether or not they allow markers for the plural, obviative, vocative/honorific, absentative or which one of the two types of locatives. In addition, in a few recorded cases an inanimate noun may be reclassified, or “promoted”, as an animate noun, but rarely vice versa. Although this paper concentrates on Plains Cree, and examples are from that dialect unless otherwise noted, some observations are also made on (in)animacy in East Cree and in a wider Algonquian context.

The goal of this paper is to offer a theoretical analysis of chorophorics, a recently proposed pro-formal category that can refer either to “places”, or to locations as arguments of spatial relations. It is suggested that chorophorics are a common category that displays heterogeneous morphological properties but homogeneous syntactic distribution and semantic interpretation. Evidence supporting this argument is offered via eight genetically unrelated languages. The evidence shows that at least three different types of chorophorics can be individuated across languages: chorophorics as a sub-type of prepositions, of case-marked nouns or of postpositions. A formal account is offered, based on a Lexical Syntax analysis. The account shows that chorophorics share a similar distribution with prepositional phrases and receive their “place” sense from their distribution in discourse contexts.

According to Goldberg (1995) , placement verbs (such as put) are instantiated in the Caused-Motion Construction. Rohde (2001) , however, argued that placement verbs in fact occur in a different construction, which she names the Caused-Position Construction, whose semantic value is not ‘cause to move’ but rather ‘cause to be positioned’. The present paper redefines and justifies the postulation of Caused-Position Construction. The Caused-Position Construction is compatible with not only placement verbs but also a variety of other verbs, such as verbs of creation (write or build) or certain stative verbs (want or need), many of which also occur in the Locative Inversion construction. Further, a similar distinction between Caused-Motion and Caused-Position can be attested in Mandarin as well, which suggests that the distinction between two patterns of spatial causation may not be idiosyncratically confined to the English language but motivated by the general patterns of human cognition.

This paper reports on the Tibeto-Burman language, Nubri, of the high Himalayan region of northern central Nepal. Specifically, data is presented to illustrate the use of tone to mark two morphological features in the language: the use of a H tone suffix to mark the genitive case, and the use of a H tone prefix to mark an increase in transitivity. This is the first account of these phenomena in Nubri and an analysis is presented before contextualizing the phenomena in a typological perspective.