Concentric - Volume 45, Issue 1, 2019

This paper examines the morpho-syntactic properties of elements that realize adverbial meanings in Isbukun Bunun and investigates how its adverbs are syntactically represented. I show that most adverbial meanings are realized as verbs in this language, with only a few adverbial expressions realized as adverbs in the traditional sense. Specifically, the adverbial verbs, just like typical verbs, have to occur sentence-initially, take inflectional morphology and attract cliticization, whereas the genuine adverbs are invariable in form and exhibit relatively free distribution. The paper also presents evidence which bears on the debate concerning the syntax of adverbials and shows that a hybrid treatment is needed in which phrasal adverbs are adjoined to clauses while adverbial verbs are located in strictly-ordered functional projections in the backbone of the clause.

The possessive construction in Mandarin is similar to English prenominal possessives except that maximality is presupposed only for cases involving inherently relational nouns. In this paper, I adopt the hypothesized split of argument and modifier genitives proposed by Partee & Borschev (2001, 2003) and argue that modifier-genitives can occur NP-internally in Mandarin possessives, whose appearance is restricted to cases with non-relational nouns. The discrepancy of the maximality presupposition observed in Mandarin can thus be captured since non-relational nouns can have a split of interpretations between argument and modifier genitives, resulting in a non-maximality reading.

Kunming exhibits a special kind of interaction between tone and prominence whereby the prosodic headedness is shown to play an indirect role in tone sandhi. Due to higher-ranked tonal faithfulness constraints, lower tones, which are universally unfavored in the head position, do not change to higher tones, and higher tones, which are universally unfavored in the non-head position, do not change to lower tones. Nonetheless, though the unfavored tone-(non-)head correlation does not directly trigger tone sandhi, it indirectly decides whether tone sandhi will take place. Falling tones, inter-syllabic tone segment disagreement, and tonal combinations with identical contours are marked tonal structures in the language. But not all these structures result in tone sandhi. The penalization of these structures is tied to an unfavored tone-(non-)head correlation; only when an undesired tone-(non-)head correlation is involved are the marked tonal structures penalized. The indirect tone-(non-)head interaction observed in Kunming is special but not unique to the language as a similar correlation is found in the Chinese dialects of Dongshi Hakka and Beijing Mandarin.

Lagi, a less studied Malay adverb, has meanings such as ‘in addition’, ‘again’, ‘more’, and ‘yet/still’. We aimed to see how these meanings could be related in a single word and to find the conceptualization and grammatical paths involved. We also intended to find out whether this word carries any underlying meanings not specified in dictionaries. In the corpus, although many examples have lagi in the sentence-final position, some unconventional sentence-initial uses were also found in news headlines. We found that lagi serves a special function in news headlines, emphasizing the repeatedness of events that were often negative or undesirable. The seemingly unrelated meanings of lagi can be categorized based on three meaning concepts – addition/more meaning, less-more continuum, and temporallagi (‘yet/still’, ‘again’). In addition to these concepts, we also found several possible grammaticalization paths that contribute to the different uses of lagi.

This paper presents a qualitative and descriptive study of textual genre, based on the epistemological concept of Socio-Discursive Interactionism. As a study concerning language and identity, it focuses on identity construction of the bank, its customers, and products in seven Portuguese bank pamphlets. Being aware of the pamphlets’ multimodal nature, the author employs the analytical model to examine both their verbal and non-verbal components. The model incorporates four theoretical approaches: the notion of personal deictic markers proposed by Socio-Discursive Interactionism, Greimas’ actantial model, symbolic attribute and suggestive processes, as well as the ideational and interpersonal functions proposed by the Grammar of Visual Design. The analysis presents three-fold conclusion. Firstly, the three major stakeholders’ identity in the pamphlets under analysis is multimodally constructed. Secondly, construction of the said identity is both denotative and connotative. Thirdly, besides relating advertising ideology in general, such identity construction also incorporates social meaning of the three major textual participants in the data already analyzed.