Linguistic Variation - Current Issue

Besides its main use as a form of the movement verb ir ‘to go’, the Spanish form vaya (lit. go) is also used as a verbal discourse marker. Here we trace this transition from a purely verbal form to a discourse marker by searching a historical corpus of documents in Spanish, which reveals the increasing use over time of vaya in exclamatives to replace a presentational construction. We focus on vaya in isolation and in combination with an indefinite DP or a bare NP. We analyze the meaning of vaya as an epistemic discourse marker, by means of which the speaker expresses a judgment, a subjective epistemic and evidential evaluation of a proposition accessible from context. We postulate that these constructions sit in a Judgment Phrase at the syntactic-pragmatic interface (Krifka 2020), a position to which vaya also moves when its meaning is that of an expressive intensifier that directly modifies over one or more (contextually salient) properties of the noun contained in the DP/NP.

Despite an increasing interest in German dialect syntax, the study of article use in Upper German (Alemannic and Bavarian) remains a desideratum. This is true in particular for Austrian varieties. The present study focusses on article variation and change in Austrian Upper German and discusses the status of article grammaticalization. To that effect, ‘radical’ cases of article use in Upper German are analysed, i.e. cases considered incorrect in standard German: the use of indefinite articles before mass nouns, of definite articles before proper nouns, and of indefinite articles in the plural. These phenomena are investigated by means of a comprehensive dialect survey (3,599 dialect translations by 163 dialect speakers from 40 research locations). The analysis examines inner-linguistic factors (lexis, semantics, syntax) as well as extra-linguistic factors (dialect areas, age group). The findings reveal a surprisingly high variability and a relatively advanced stage of grammaticalization in some areas, especially Central Bavarian dialects.

This paper offers novel insights on articlelessness in noun phrases in Dutch and German headlines. Modified noun phrases that lack a determiner in headlines exhibit adjectival agreement that cannot be explained if one assumes an article that is phonologically null or that has been PF-deleted. We describe the pattern, consider different analytical options and eventually conclude that the interpretation, distribution as well as the observed adjectival agreement characteristic of articlelessness noun phrases calls for an account in which the article is never projected to begin with.

This paper investigates the morphology, syntax, and semantics of five non-interrogative constructions that involve wh-expressions in Kaqchikel, a Mayan language of the K’ichean branch spoken in Guatemala. We focus on the properties of maximal free relative clauses, existential free relative clauses, ever free relative clauses, free choice items and negative indefinites. We show that the interpretive properties of these constructions are strikingly similar to those found in a number of unrelated languages.