Studies in Language Companion Series

This book offers an analysis of the French clitic object pronouns lui and le in the radically functional Columbia school framework, contrasting this framework with sentence-based treatments of case selection. It suggests that features of the sentence such as subject and object relations, normally taken as pretheoretical categories of observation about language, are in fact part of a theory of language which does not withstand empirical testing. It shows that the correct categories are neither those of structural case nor those of lexical case, but rather, semantic ones. Traditionally, anomalies in the selection of dative and accusative case in French, such as case government, use of the dative for possession and disadvantaging, its use in the faire-causative construction, and other puzzling distributional irregularities have been used to support the idea of an autonomous, non-functional central core of syntactic phenomena in language. The present analysis proposes semantic constants for lui and le which render all their occurrences explicable in a straightforward way. The same functional perspective informs issues of cliticity and pronominalization as well. The solution offered here emerges from an innovative instrumental view of linguistic meaning, an acknowledgment that communicative output is determined only partially and indirectly by purely linguistic input, with extralinguistic knowledge and human inference bridging the gap. This approach entails identification of the pragmatic factors influencing case selection and a reevaluation of thematic-role theory, and reveals the crucial impact of discourse on the structure as well as the functioning of grammar. One remarkable feature of the study is its extensive and varied data base. The hypothesis is buttressed by hundreds of fully contextualized examples and large-scale counts drawn from modern French texts.

This volume brings together 18 typological studies of causative and related constructions (transitivity, voice, other expressions of cause) by 19 scholars from North America, Western Europe, and Russia. The inspirations for the volume is the pioneering work on causative constructions by the Leningrad Typology Group; several of the contributors have close connections to the charter members of that group, others have appreciated this work from a distance. The volume as a whole is based on the concept of causative constructions as embracing both morphology and syntax, with an important semantic component as well. In addition to general studies concerning the morpho syntactic and semantic typology and the history of causative constructions and relations to other phenomena, the following individual languages are treated in detail: Russian, English, Dutch, Svan, Even, Korean, Yukaghir, Alutor, Aleut, Haruai, Dogon, Athabaskan languages. The volume will be of interest to typologists, to other linguists interested in causative constructions and transitivity relations, and to all who are interested in the linguistic expression of causal relations.

The complex diachronic and synchronic status of the concepts be and have can be understood only with consideration of their full range of constructions and functions. Data from modern Slavic languages (Russian, Czech, Polish, Bulgarian) provides a window into zero copulas, non-verbal have expressions, and verbal constructions. From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, be and have are analyzed in terms of a blended prototype model, wherein existence/copula for be and possession/relationship for have are inseparably combined. These concepts are related to each other in their functions and meanings and serve as organizing principles in a conceptual network of semantic neighbors, including give, take, get, become, make, and verbs of position and motion. Renewal and replacement of be and have occur through processes of polysemization and suppletization involving lexical items in this network. Topics include polysemy, suppletion, tense/mood auxiliaries, modality, causatives, evidentiality, function words, contact phenomena, syntactic calques, and idiomatic constructions.

Was Tesnière the founding father of dependency grammar or merely a culmination point in its long history? Leaving no doubt that the latter position is correct, Chapters of Dependency Grammar tells the story of how dependency-oriented grammatical description developed from Antiquity up to the early 20th century. From Priscian’s Rome to Dmitrievsky’s Russia, from the French Encyclopaedia to Stephen W. Clark’s school grammars in 19th century America, it is shown how the concept of dependencies (asymmetric word-to-word relations) surfaced again and again, assuming a central place in syntax. A particularly intriguing aspect of the storyline is that even without any direct contact or influence, authors were making key breakthroughs in similar directions. In the works of Sámuel Brassai, a Transylvanian polymath, and Franz Kern, a German grammarian, the first dependency trees appear in 1873 and 1883, respectively, predating Tesnière’s stemmas by several decades.

The area around the Baltic Sea has for millennia been a meeting-place for people of different origins. Among the circum-Baltic languages, we find three major branches of Indo-European — Baltic, Germanic, and Slavic, the Baltic-Finnic languages from the Uralic phylum and several others. The circum-Baltic area is an ideal place to study areal and contact phenomena in languages. The present set of two volumes look at the circum-Baltic languages from a typological, areal and historical perspective, trying to relate the intricate patterns of similarities and dissimilarities to the societal background. In Volume I, surveys of dialect areas and language groups bear witness to the immense linguistic diversity in the area with special attention to less well-known languages and language varieties and their contacts.

This collective volume explores clause-linkage strategies in a cross-linguistic perspective with greater emphasis on subordination. Part I presents some theoretical reassessment of syntactic terminologies and distinctive criteria for subordination, as well as typological methods based on sets of variables and statistics allowing cross-linguistic comparability. Part II deals with strategies relating to clause-chaining, conjunctive conjugations, converbial constructions, masdars. Part III centers on the interaction between the syntax, pragmatics, and semantics of clause-linking and subordination, in relation to informa­tional structure, to referential hierarchy, and correlative constructions. Part IV presents insights in the clause-linking and subordinating functions of some T.A.M. markers, verbal inflectional morphology and conjugation systems, which may also interact with informa­tional hierarchy, via the backgrounding effects and lack of illocutionary force of some aspect and mood forms. The volume is of particular interest to linguists and typologists working on clause-linkage systems and on the interface between syntax, pragmatics, and semantics.

Conditionals encode speculation. They convey how events could have been different in the past or present, or might be different in the future if particular conditions had been or will be met. While all languages afford the means to speculate or hypothesize about possible events, the ways in which they do so vary. This work explores some of this variation through an analysis of the stucture and semantics of complex conditional sentences in Russian and Macedonian. It addresses typological questions about the general properties of natural language conditionals and examines the role of the grammatical categories tense, aspect, mood and status in the coding of conditional meaning. The book also discusses the relationship between the use of these categories and the shape of a language’s conditional system. For example, the use of tense in counterfactual contexts in Macedonian correlates with the grammaticalization of more shades of conditional meaning than are grammaticalized in Russian, which does not employ tense forms in this way. The study draws on data from a rich variety of sources and thus includes kinds of conditionals overlooked in many other studies. The book addresses issues of concern to Slavists and raises questions for those interested in conditionals and the coding of hypothetical meaning.

The book defines the concept of Semantic-Communicative Structure [= Sem-CommS]-a formal object that is imposed on the starting Semantic Structure [= SemS] of a sentence (under text synthesis) in order to turn the selected meaning into a linguistic message. The Sem-CommS is a system of eight logically independent oppositions: 1. Thematicity (Rheme vs. Theme), 2. Givenness (Given vs. Old), 3. Focalization (Focalized vs. Non-Focalized), 4. Perspective (Foregrounded vs. Backgrounded), 5. Emphasis (Emphasized vs. Non-Emphasized), 6. Presupposedness (Presupposed vs. Non-Presupposed), 7. Unitariness (Unitary vs. Articulated), 8. Locutionality (Communicated vs. Signaled). The values of these oppositions mark particular subnetworks of the starting SemS and thus allow for the distinction between sentences such as (a) A man killed a dog vs. The dog was killed by a man, (b) John washed the window vs. It was John who washed the window or (c) It hurts! vs. Ouch! The proposed Sem-Comm-oppositions are conceived as an attempt at sharpening the well-known notions of Topic ~ Comment, Focus, etc. Possible linguistic strategies for expressing the values of the Sem-Comm-oppositions in different languages are discussed at some length, with linguistic illustrations.

This volume offers a coherent and detailed picture of the diachronic development of verbal categories of Old English, Old High German, and other Germanic languages. Starting from the observation that German and English show diverging paths in the development of verbal categories, even though they descended from a common ancestor language, the contributions present in-depth, empirically founded studies on the stages and directions of these changes combining historical comparative methods with grammaticalisation theory. This collection of papers provides the reader with an indispensable source of information on the early traces of distinct developments, thus laying the foundation for a broad-scale scenario of the grammaticalisation of verbal categories. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars of language change, grammaticalisation, and diachronic sociolinguistics; it offers important new insights for typologists and for everybody interested in the make-up of verbal categories.