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

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.

We investigate an unstudied, rich component of the relative clause system in Teramano, one of the Upper Southern Italian languages. We focus on light-headed relative clauses – relative clauses that lack a full nominal head and are introduced by only a Determiner-like or pronominal “light head”. We also briefly describe headed relative clauses in Teramano since the morphosyntactic features they exhibit are relevant for the investigation of light-headed relative clauses. Last, we highlight commonalities and differences between light-headed relative clauses in Teramano and Italian. Our paper provides the first systematic in-depth description of light-headed relative clauses in an Upper Southern Italian language that we are aware of, contributes to the knowledge of Teramano, the study of light-headed relative clauses crosslinguistically, and the ongoing investigation of microvariation among Italian and Italian languages.

Ideophones and direct quotations are “depictive” signs, or vivid re-enactments of what they signify. Pursuing the typology of linguistic depiction, the current study proposes a three-way classification of depiction marking strategies: framing, foregrounding, and backgrounding. While well-known formal characteristics of ideophones, such as prosodic prominence and quotative constructions, illustrate framing and foregrounding, this paper discusses low-pitched quotative indexes in Japanese as backgrounding-type depiction markers. These quotatives immediately follow ideophones and exclamatory quotations and set them off. They also underlie the exceptional pitch pattern of heavy syllables in ideophones.

This paper analyzes Differential Object Marking in P’orhépecha, which involves split case and fluid case alternations. Although this system is sensitive to Animacy and Definiteness, I will show that prominence on these scales does not account for the distribution of flagging. In fact, in P’orhépecha, the expected prominence effects of these scales are overridden by certain grammatical properties of the NPs, which explains the obligatory vs. forbidden flagging. The fluid pattern is of special interest, since even though there is evidence that flagging is used as a device to codify definiteness/specificity, higher and lower ranked objects on the definiteness scale may be (un)flagged. This peculiar behavior is explained by two facts: (a) definite/specific descriptions may, and in some instances must, be unflagged when the context of use guarantees the intended referential interpretation of the NP; and (b) lower ranked objects may be flagged only when their referents exhibit discourse salience.

Morphological complexity is expected to decrease under mass admixture from adult second language speakers. While this has been chiefly shown for morphological richness, an unresolved question is whether the effect extends to aspects of morphological boundedness. Here we report a case study of Sino-Tibetan verbs, contrasting verbal expressions of two languages with very large (Chinese, Burmese) and of two languages with very small (Bunan, Chintang) numbers of second language speakers. We find that while the amount of second language speakers accounts for differences in the range and number of inflectional categories (degrees of synthesis), it does not affect the way in which morphological constituents are bound together, reflecting fortification through a mix of diachronically stable and universally preferred patterns. This calls for theoretical models that narrow down the range of changes that are driven by second language speaker admixture, and for extensive empirical testing on a global scale.

In this paper, we investigate empirical data that raise challenging issues with respect to focus sensitivity of the Hungarian additive particle is ‘also, too’. In Hungarian, the additive particle is attached to a constituent, and the is-phrase cannot occupy the structural focus position. This raises the issue how to capture the focus sensitivity of is. We propose a primarily pragmatic, context-based analysis of the Hungarian additive particle, where the particle associates with the pragmatic focus ( Lambrecht 1994 ) determined on basis of the immediate question under discussion ( Roberts 2012 ). Important evidence for this claim is that the Hungarian additive particle can take different semantic associates, corresponding to the pragmatic focus of the sentence. After discussing the Hungarian data, we will present the analysis in the framework of Role and Reference Grammar ( Van Valin & LaPolla 1997 ; Van Valin 2005 ). To capture Hungarian and English data in a uniform way, important extensions of the framework will be proposed.

This paper presents an in-depth investigation of the binding strategies in Kokborok and we will look more specifically how this sheds light on the theories of reflexivization. Kokborok, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Tripura, a state in the North-East of India, has two reflexives: sak sak ‘self self’ and sak baithaŋ ‘self self’. The form sak sak ‘self self’ conforms to Principle A of classic Binding Theory, blocking long-distance binding, but this does not hold true for sak baithaŋ allowing non-local binding. It is a well-established fact that some reflexives allow non-local binding, but it is generally assumed that this phenomenon is limited to a certain type of reflexive, morpho-syntactically ‘simple reflexives.’ The so-called ‘complex reflexives’ generally bar non-local binding, and the Kokborok reflexive sak baithaŋ seems an exception to that. This paper explores the uniqueness involved in the nature of anaphoric binding in Kokborok.

Native deaf signers express epistemic modality by different means: mental-state words, clause-internal particles, signs indicating hypothesis, and nonmanually. The data for this study come from two unrelated sign languages, Danish Sign Language and Japanese Sign Language. In dialogues the signers use both calques of majority-language words and signs that appear to have emerged in the sign languages only. Based on the multifunctionality of some word forms, the origin of the epistemic modal particles may be traced back to tags, interjections, and lexical signs, a route motivated by interaction and also found in unrelated spoken languages. Furthermore, in both sign languages, the first-person pronoun can be used, without a verb, as an epistemic “anchor” of a proposition, a construction that seems specific to languages in the gestural-visual modality. Another modality-specific feature is the possibility of transferring the expression of a marker of epistemic uncertainty from one articulator to another.