Concentric - Volume 50, Issue 2, 2024

Word stress is a structural property of increasing prominence. An established line of scholarship regarding word stress exists both in terms of theory and description in the Lhasa Tibetan (LT) language. Unlike LT, no such scholarly works are available that focus on Dharamshala Tibetan (DT), a dialectal variety spoken by Tibetan refugees living in the Dharamshala area in Himachal Pradesh, India. The current work aims to provide a systematic and concise theorisation of DT word stress based on the data collected from field in terms of parameters like culminativity, location of the head, direction, and quantity sensitivity. Optimality Theory is used to offer a theoretical judgment behind the analysis. A majority of DT words contain a trochaic, weight-insensitive, left-to-right stress pattern. The degenerate foot is accepted. Very few instances of words with an iambic stress pattern were found during the fieldwork. Similarly, few words containing heavy syllables are available in the word stress pattern inventory of DT.

In Taiwanese, when a sentence or predicate follows a verb or an adjective, one of three distinct markers (kah, liáu, or tio̍h) usually occurs. Previous investigations have not provided a clear explanation of these markers. This poses difficulties in teaching Taiwanese as a second language and hinders analytical precision. Through a judgment survey conducted with nine proficient native consultants, this study comprehensively elucidates the usage of these three markers while distinctly delineating their similarities and differences. Firstly, the consultants’ responses substantiate the declining usage of V-liáu and V-tio̍h. Moreover, this study highlights the constraints associated with the types of predicates preceding these markers and how these markers are used. Furthermore, it points out that, unlike the consistent nature of resultatives in some languages, when used as a resultative, V-kah represents a strong resultative, V-liáu represents a weak resultative, and V-tio̍h exhibits both strong and weak aspects depending on the orientation involved (subject- vs. object-orientation). Additionally, this study presents one of the first to show that object-oriented constituents following these markers are subject to limitations based on their predicate types. Lastly, this study examines the ambiguous temporal implications associated with V-liáu and V-tio̍h in previous research.

This paper examines the use of the sentence final particle tai (呔) in the Changsha dialect (Xiang Chinese). It is demonstrated that tai encodes complex speech acts: on the one hand, it expresses the speaker’s high degree of certainty about the truth value of the associated proposition p; on the other, it seeks the addressee’s confirmation, via an implicitly entailed biased question, of the truth value of p. In view of the discursive interplay between the speaker and the addressee expressed by tai, the present study adopts a syntax-pragmatics interface approach to the syntax of tai, decomposing the complex speech acts it conveys into three functional projections at the structural level. Two are related to the speaker’s and the addressee’s knowledge/belief in the utterance (i.e., GroundSpkrP and GroundAdrP) and one is responsible for the speaker’s call on the addressee to confirm (i.e., ResponseP). This study contributes to cross-linguistic investigations on the grammatical realization of complex speech acts, an area which remains in its infancy. Tai represents a new type of grammatical strategy for expressing complex speech acts, that is, to encode the speaker’s commitment and the addressee’s engagement via a single lexical element without any particular intonation pattern.

Saaroa has a special set of pronominal forms not found in most other Formosan languages, as first noted by Pan (2018). This study departs from his claims that these forms only function as plurals. In fact, extensive Saaroa texts collected by different linguists (Li 2023) at different periods of time indicate that they can be either singular or plural. The functions of both the special free and bound forms will be clarified. Above all, they are contrastive. The origin of the special forms in Saaroa is suggested as a diffusion from Kanakanavu, which has similar forms with similar functions recorded earlier and is geographically adjacent. That the first person plural forms may function as singular is found not only in a few other Formosan languages, but also in unrelated languages. This study has thus cross-linguistic evidence and implications for languages in general.

A cognate object construction (COC) is a construction in which a typically intransitive verb combines with a nominal phrase that has the same meaning or the same morphological stem, e.g., live a happy life. In the literature, the syntactic status of cognate objects (CO) is one of the most debated issues. Pham (1999) observes that in Vietnamese, COs can occur with transitive verbs in both the direct object and indirect object position. She concludes that examples of direct COs provide evidence for the view that COs are arguments, and the existence of indirect COs shows that they can also be indirect objects. First, this paper argues that direct COs cannot be treated as evidence for the argument status of COs since they are not additional arguments. Moreover, they are not nouns but classifiers. Second, indirect COs are not indirect objects but prepositional objects in an adverbial prepositional phrase. These findings reveal that Vietnamese transitive COs are complex and different from the description in Pham’s study. It is important to make a clear distinction between these transitive COs and intransitive COs, especially in cross-linguistic research.

The present study attempts to unveil patterns in interactive information structure of clause enhancement that conventionalize the actual representation of circumstantial elements which add information about time, place, manner, means, and reason/cause through circumstantial augmentation, tactic augmentation, or connectives in method sections of research articles (RAs). The dataset consisted of 120 method sections of randomly selected empirical RAs from ISI-indexed Q1-ranked applied linguistic journals published between 2020 and 2022. The results of the study point to a significant distinction in hypotactic augmentation to register circumstantial information in comparison to other choices available to authors. Moreover, the most striking observation to emerge from the data is that a logical information structure of circumstantial meaning is mostly facilitated through hypotactic non-finite enhancement rather than its finite counterpart. This viable preference lies in elliptical, evincing, and expressive functions of hypotactic clauses that make comprehension more attainable to the readers and assist authors in fulfilling the generic conventions and communicative purposes of academic writing and managing interactive information structures. A major theoretical implication of the current research entails the significance of the interactive functions of the options available to authors which can impose priorities on the system of choices within the context of information.