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

Although SAY-complementizers have been extensively documented, the question of the forms used in this function and their specific properties has received less attention. The paper focuses on the complementizer tenine (an action nominalization of SAY), which is used with communicative reception verbs (‘hear’, ‘read’, etc.), in a dialect of Chuvash (Turkic). The main puzzle concerns the difference between tenine and the more general complementizer teze (the same-subject converb of SAY) with respect to the controller of shifted first person (namely, teze, but not tenine, disallows non-subject controllers). An account of this restriction based on three independent language-specific constraints is offered. An alternative account is discussed whereby tenine (and teze) are synchronically non-finite forms of SAY. The findings highlight the importance of the form of the complementizer as well as of the choice of controller for shifted 1st person in SAY-based complementation and extend the typological parameters of indexical shift.

While the Swedish negator inte may be doubled in a final clause-external position, in both standard Swedish and dialects, many dialects also allow a final, clause-internal particle (e, i or ai) in negated clauses. FNPs occur in a coherent area around the Baltic Sea, and in contrast with doubling negation, they are possible both after both inte and aldrig ‘never’. FNPs are also used in questions and exclamations, contexts that disallow doubling negation. These particles may have developed from the former Swedish negator ej or from the common inte. An argument for the former alternative is that other dialectal phenomena that spread from central Sweden during the late Middle Ages have approximately the same geographic distribution. In the final section of the paper, some typological consequences and implications are discussed. Furthermore, it is argued that syntactic studies of non-standard varieties may reveal new insights of typological relevance.

Seto is an exceptional language in the Uralic family due to its systematic use of postverbal negation, although preverbal and double negation marking are also used. Postverbal negation is still the most frequent and unmarked pattern occurring in about 74% of negative clauses in Seto. This paper analyzes variation between pre- and postverbal negation in East Seto (spoken in present-day Russia), based on data gathered during fieldwork trips in 2010–2013. By applying quantitative methods that are used in variationist studies (regression modelling, conditional inference trees, and random forests), we determine the variables affecting the choice between pre- and postverbal negation. Marked preverbal negation occurs more likely with first and third person, cognition verbs, and present tense, all of which are often used in fixed expressions like I don’t know. We also found a strong structural persistence effect in the data and remarkable differences between individual speakers.

As one of the most robust typological findings, the suffixing preference captures the empirical observation that grammatical categories are more likely to be coded by suffixes than by prefixes. The goal of this contribution is to explore the effects that this asymmetry may have on the inflectional paradigms of the languages of the world. Three empirical issues are addressed: do languages with either possessive prefixes or suffixes and languages with both possessive prefixes and suffixes differ in their suffix-to-prefix ratio? Do prefixes and suffixes differ in the number of cases that they code? Do prefixes and suffixes differ in their probability of explicit singular in addition to plural marking? The answer to all three questions is in the affirmative. These effects are understood in terms of a response to an inherent disadvantage of prefixes. Morphological systems reduce the processing difficulty incurred by prefixes by assigning them fewer tasks (i.e. number of cases), by limiting their occurrence in highly competitive contexts (i.e. inconsistent possessive-affix coding) and by creating prefix paradigms, which are conceived of as protective structures in which the individual members strengthen one another. The general claim these three effects lead up to is that morphological systems develop “repair strategies” which reduce the processing cost involved in using inherently disadvantaged units. These repair strategies shape morphological structure.

Previous work on colour lexicons focussed on universal patterns in their structure and evolution. We collected new colour naming data in Japanese and three under-described Ryukyuan languages (Amami, Miyako and Yaeyama) to investigate semantic variation and change in the colour lexicon of related languages in a modern context. We found several new colour terms (e.g., midori and guriin for ‘green’) in the lexicon of Ryukyuan speakers, apparently resulting from contact with Standard Japanese and English. A comparison of our data with historical data suggests that modern Ryukyuan colour systems are closer to modern Japanese than they are to their historic pasts. However, we also found that modern-day Ryukyuan languages are more similar to each other than they are to Japanese. These findings show the scope of semantic changes that can occur through outside influence and highlight the need for fresh empirical data in the study of semantics in related languages.

The “dynamic coevolution of meaning and form” of Bybee et al. ( 1994 : 20) has been the subject of significant discussion as regards the languages of Mainland Southeast Asia. However, little work has focused on the mechanisms through which this coevolution occurs when it does surface in these languages. The current work considers phonological reidentification resulting from phonetic reduction in White Hmong (Hmong-Mien, Laos) involving four morphemes, ntshai/ntshe ‘maybe’, saib/seb ‘see if/whether; comp.cfact’, puag/pug ‘locl;ints’, and niaj/nej ‘each, every’. These morphemes exhibit an alternation where a rime is phonologically reidentified in a manner consistent with typical phonetic underarticulation patterns, such that an exemplar-model approach ( Pierrehumbert 2001 , inter alia) provides a straightforward explanation. Furthermore, the data show that the phonological reidentification patterns found in White Hmong exhibit parallels in other languages in the region, confirming that an areal approach to grammaticalization provides greater descriptive adequacy cross-linguistically as regards this phenomenon.

This study attempts to investigate the phonological structures of Sanzari Boro (SB), a variety of Boro, a Tibeto-Burman language that is mainly spoken in the state of Assam in the North East India. This paper highlights the phonological processes in SB that have emerged due to geographical as well as social factors and language contact. This research is based on the data collected from 10 native speakers. The analysis of data reveals that although Standard Boro and SB have similarities in some features, they contain some evident differences too. A closer investigation of data establishes that SB has maximum number of phonemes as compared to any other variety of Boro and it has three distinct tones that have been observed in monosyllabic words. Declustering is facilitated through epenthesis. Phonological processes like deletion, insertion, assimilation, weakening and strengthening, metathesis and substitution are operational in formation of SB words.

This paper argues that recent proposals to sharply distinguish between language description and comparison are ill-conceived for two reasons. First, comparison is unavoidable and hence an integral part of description. Second, the proposals for a strict separation are based on an unrealistic and anachronistic conception of descriptive categories, assuming that these can be defined in purely distributional terms. Here it is shown that description and comparison make use of, and struggle with, the same kind of empirical evidence; namely, crosslinguistically identifiable properties of grammatical formatives and constructions. If descriptive categories and crosslinguistic comparative concepts did not share such properties, language comparison would be devoid of empirical content. Hence claims that they are ontologically different do not stand up to further scrutiny. In short, said recent proposals portray language description and comparison in too-simplistic terms. They ignore, or at least downplay, most of the complexities involved in both descriptive and comparative projects, many of which in fact result from the inseparability of description and comparison.

Tariana, an Arawak language from Brazil, has nominal markers which convey temporal and aspectual information about the noun phrase. Besides nominal future, there is a distinction between completed and non-completed nominal pasts. The completed nominal past has three meanings – decessive (‘late, gone’), temporal (‘former’), and commiserative or deprecatory (‘poor thing’). The latter is only applicable to humans and higher animates. The non-completed nominal past has a further semantic component of relevance of the state or property for the present time. The usage of the markers is governed by the principle of communicative necessity – in contrast to clausal, or propositional, tense-cum-evidentiality markers which are always obligatory. Having special means for expressing tense, aspect and relevance within a noun phrase – distinct from tense and aspect categories with clausal scope – constitutes a typologically rare feature of the language.

Frequency asymmetries within a minimal grammatical domain create offline associations that languages tend to exploit for a more efficient encoding. We explore cross-linguistic coding patterns of antipassives. We first argue that antipassive markers tend to have properties of derivational markers. Secondly, we show that antipassives are considerably rarer than the basic transitive constructions. The lower frequency correlates with the length of coding: antipassives tend to be coded with longer forms than basic transitive verbs. Thirdly, we explore frequency associations of different lexical input types and find that it is the rare input types that tend to select the antipassive, if the marking is differential, while the frequent ones correlate with the unmarked verb (A-lability). We, furthermore, show that the rarer argument types and argument scenarios correlate stronger with antipassives than the more frequent argument types and scenarios.