Language and Linguistics - Volume 22, Issue 2, 2021

Previous studies using diachronic data from the Sejong Historical Corpus have traced the semantic extension of voice marker -eci from middle to passive uses (e.g. Ahn & Yap 2017). In this study, based on data from the Sejong Contemporary Spoken Corpus, we further examine the relationship between middle and passive uses of -eci constructions, with special attention to the neutralization of adversative readings that give rise to generalized (in addition to adversative) middle and passive -eci constructions. Our analysis reveals that judgments about adversative readings in Contemporary Korean are not emergent solely from the semantics of the verb or adjective preceding -eci but additionally are emergent and grounded in the interaction between discourse participants. The distributional characteristics of -eci also show a strong interaction between voice and tense-aspect-mood (TAM). There is also some interaction effects from register and text type/genre, particularly in the usage frequency distribution of spontaneous and passive -eci constructions. In addition, contrary to the traditional notion that -eci is essentially a passive marker, in real usage, -eci is still far more frequently used as a middle marker than a passive marker.

This study conducted two experiments to examine the derivation of the head noun phrase in Japanese relative clauses, with a focus on whether the anaphors jibun ‘self’ and jibun-jishin ‘self-self’ within the head noun phrase can be co-referential with the relative clause subject. It aims to settle a long-standing debate among the previous studies concerning the interpretation of the anaphors inside the head noun phrase: while several studies claimed that the co-reference between the anaphor jibun ‘self’ and the relative clause subject is prohibited, many other studies argued that such co-reference is possible. In addition, it has been claimed that while co-indexing the anaphor jibun with the relative clause subject might be marginally acceptable, it would become fully acceptable if we replace jibun with the morphologically complex anaphor jibun-jishin ‘self-self’, which implies that the morphological make-up of an anaphor may affect its ability to be co-indexed with the relative clause subject.

The results of two carefully controlled truth value judgment experiments show that neither the simplex anaphor jibun nor the complex anaphor jibun-jishin within the head noun phrase of relative clauses can take the relative clause subject as its antecedent, which suggests that the head noun phrase does not reconstruct and therefore lends support to the pro-binding analysis of Japanese relative clauses. Moreover, the findings also suggest that the morphological make-up of an anaphor does not affect its ability to take the relative clause subject as its antecedent, despite the claim that it is more acceptable to co-index the complex anaphor jibun-jishin with the relative clause subject than the simplex anaphor jibun.

A degree sentence such as John and Mary are equally tall conveys both reciprocity and equivalence and hence are termed “Reciprocal Equatives” (RE). Building on Schwarz’s (2007) pioneer study, I suggest an account for this degree construction that covers a wider range of data. To the extent that the proposal is on the right track, it provides new support for building in plurality in the domain of degrees, an idea that has been put forward by Beck (2010; 2014) and Dotlačil & Nouwen (2016).

The main purpose of this paper is to identify the novel type of Korean definiteness marker. Especially I show that Korean KU which originated from the morphological demonstrative ‘that’, instantiates a solid pattern of distribution of definiteness marker. Mainly focusing on the semantico-pragmatic role of KU, the proposal comprises three main parts: (i) Given that Korean employs distinct devices teased apart into uniqueness (i.e. referential use) and familiarity (i.e. anaphoric use) in its definiteness system, I show that the effect of referential use in argument saturating function is achieved by the covert “determiner” in bare nouns, whereas anaphoric use in argument non-saturating function is achieved by the overt KU; (ii) The semantic contribution of KU is analyzed as a domain restrictor (DDR; Etxeberria & Giannakidou 2010) which supplies an indexical property as an argument (Schwarz 2009, 2013; Jenks 2018); (iii) I further show that the DDR operator is present in the syntax, falling out from the standard D position as an adjunctive modifier in a lower DP layer. The contribution of my work is that the proposed account allows us to widen our view of cross-linguistic variation to cases where the prerequisite of definiteness is based on the dissociation of meaning (i.e. the semantic role of D as encoding familiarity) and form (i.e. the syntactic role of D as an argument-building function).

In this paper, I describe the morphology as well as the uses of the basic motion verbs, ‘to come’ and ‘to go’, in Khroskyabs based on two of its varieties, Siyuewu and Wobzi, before analyzing the evolutionary pathways of their stem alternation patterns. The meanings of the basic motion verbs in Khroskyabs originally were not ‘to come’ or ‘to go’; instead, these verbs denoted Goal-oriented motion and Source-oriented motion. The choice of the deictic center is the key to the semantic change toward ‘to come’ and ‘to go’ in the modern language.