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- Volume 18, Issue 2, 2017
Language and Linguistics - Volume 18, Issue 2, 2017
Volume 18, Issue 2, 2017
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The Lowland Kenyah posterior implosives
Author(s): Robert Blustpp.: 177–200 (24)More LessAbstractThe Kenyah languages of central Borneo form a distinct unit within the North Sarawak group of Austronesian languages. In northern Sarawak there is a well-defined contrast between types that have been called ‘Highland Kenyah’ and ‘Lowland Kenyah’. A key difference between these sets of closely-related languages is the reflexes of Proto-North Sarawak/Proto-Kenyah *b, *d, *j, *g and *bh, *dh, *jh, *gh, which are distinguished (usually as b, d, j, g vs. p, t, c, k) in Highland Kenyah, but show a complex set of innovations in some varieties of Lowland Kenyah. The most striking of these changes in the dialect spoken by the Lebu’ Vu’ Kenyah at Long Sela’an and Long Ikang, and the Long Tikan Kenyah at Long San, is the shift of voiced aspirates to phonetic implosives that were generalized to the reflexes of *b, *d, *j, *g as final syllable onsets, leading to merger of the two series. Because it was conditioned, this merger produced complementation between [b]/[ɓ], [ɟ]/[ʄ], and [g]/[ɠ] (*d lenited before implosion was generalized, preventing merger). Most remarkably, the reduction of Proto-Kenyah nasal-obstruent clusters in these dialects has begun to produce new instances of [ɟ] and [g], but not [b] and [d], creating contrastive implosives only at palatal and velar positions, a reversal of the distributional preference commonly associated with implosive stops in cross-linguistic perspective.
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Excessive serial verb construction
Author(s): Ying Fanpp.: 201–227 (27)More LessAbstractThis paper identifies a distinct serial verb construction in Mandarin Chinese: the Excessive serial verb construction. This construction exhibits formal similarity to the Resultative serial verb construction, since both of them involve adjacent unmarked verbs. Despite the similarity, the former construction differs from the latter most evidently in that it conveys an excessive meaning rather than a resultative meaning. This paper proposes that there is a syntactic difference between the two constructions. In contrast to the tight structure in the Resultative serial verb construction, which can be represented as S[vp V1 V2] le. The Excessive serial verb construction has a looser structure, which is structurally S[[vpV1] [vp V2-le]]. With respect to diagnostics of constituency, the two constructions behave in different ways. This paper further argues that correlating with a distinct structure, the Excessive serial verb construction requires obligatory topicalization of its undergoer argument, a phenomenon that is not observed in the Resultative serial verb construction. This study thus contributes to representing the interaction between the semantic properties – in particular, the function of le in the two constructions – and the syntactic properties.
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Is it syntactic or pragmatic?
Author(s): Ryoichiro Kobayashipp.: 228–253 (26)More LessAbstractThe main aim of this study is to reconsider Tomioka’s (2007) pragmatic account of the lf-intervention effects (IE), and to claim that Polarity Sensitive Items (psis) are genuine syntactic interveners. I will examine the parallelism among psis in IE configurations, which is distinct from other interveners, and further claim that the study of IE should not be monolithic, but hybrid: Syntactic lf-interveners (psis), blocking scopal interactions/Pragmatic interveners, causing illegal information structures. The predictions will be borne out that psis actually cause IE in other contexts as well, which pragmatic accounts cannot explain (Funakoshi & Takahashi 2014). Such hybrid perspectives bring back enormous findings on IE (e.g. lf wh-movement) to the field of syntax, without relegating all of them to pragmatics.
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Some notes on animals and plants for Proto-Austronesian speakers
Author(s): Paul Jen-kuei Lipp.: 254–268 (15)More LessAbstractMan’s life has always depended on animals and plants, a dependency most directly relevant to primitive societies. What animals and plants were available to the Proto-Austronesian (PAN) people of Taiwan 5,000 BP and earlier? What animals and plants had been domesticated at that stage? What animals and plants were endemic, with other alien species introduced to the island at later stages? In this paper I shall address myself to such problems, drawing upon various disciplines, including linguistics and archaeology, as well as zoology and botany. Lists of PAN cognates for animals, plants, and a few related cognates are given in the appendices.
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Processing conjunctive entailment of disjunction
Author(s): Chin-Ting Jimbo Liu and Li-mei Chenpp.: 269–295 (27)More LessAbstractIn a sentence where the disjunction huo ‘or’ appears under the negation mei ‘no’ (e.g.: Ta mei chi qingjiao huo qiezi. ‘He did not eat green peppers or eggplants.’), the sentence is globally ambiguous between the conjunctive interpretation and the disjunctive interpretation. The primary goal of this study is to investigate if there is a default meaning for simple negative statements containing huo ‘or’. Data collected from the self-paced region-by-region reading experiment indicated that the participants consistently preferred the conjunctive interpretation. Additionally, in the conjunction-biased condition where the sentences turned out to favor the disjunctive interpretations at the end, there was reading time penalty at the last region of the sentences and participants spent significantly longer time judging the appropriateness of those sentences. Contrary to Jing’s (2008) assertion that both disjunction and conjunction readings are equally prominent in an out-of-the-blue context, the results from the quantitative data revealed that the conjunction reading is the default meaning for simple negative statements containing huo ‘or’. The findings of the current experiment provide essential implications to the study of child language acquisition. Specifically, we argue that understanding the adults’ linguistic patterns is a prerequisite to the study of children’s language acquisition patterns.
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Development of ‘say’-derived constructions
Author(s): Mizuho Tamajipp.: 296–325 (30)More LessAbstractTotemo in contemporary Japanese is a degree adverb (intensifier). Previous studies have reported that totemo derived from the adverb totemo kakutemo, which means ‘either way’ (and hence is a bipolar item) in classical Japanese. These studies also reported that totemo became a negative polarity item (an adverb modifying words for negative evaluation), but then shifted to a positive polarity item (an adverb modifying words for positive evaluation), and that counter-expectation factors played an important role in this shift. It is reported that the ‘say’-derived complementizer develops into a hearsay evidential marker, counter-expectation marker, and in some cases an intensifier (e.g. Wang et al. 2003) in some languages. Tote in classical Japanese is known as a ‘say’-derived complementizer, but it does not grammaticalize into an intensifier. This study maintains that the intensifier totemo also derived from the verb ‘say’ and the entire process of grammaticalization of totemo may be chronologized as follows: concessive use of quotative > concessive use of hearsay evidential > counter-expectation marker > intensifier. Thus, this study reveals the language-specific development of grammaticalization of the intensifier totemo. We also reveal that a reanalysis of the concessive subordinator and the elision of the complement clause preceding totemo as a sentence initial counter-expectation marker further gave rise to the sentence-medial parenthetical phrase (intensifier) totemo.
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