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The nature of the relationship between the head and modifier in English noun compounds has long posed a challenge to semantic theories. We argue that the type of head-modifier relation in an English endocentric noun-headed compound depends on how its referent is categorized: specifically, on whether the referent is conceptualized as an artifact , made by humans for a purpose; or as a natural kind , existing independently of humans. We propose the Events vs. Essences Hypothesis: the modifier in an artifact-headed compound typically refers to an event of use or creation associated with that artifact, while the modifier in a natural kind-headed compound typically makes reference to inherent properties reflective of an abstract essence associated with the kind, such as its perceptual properties or native habitat. We present three studies substantiating this hypothesis. First, in a corpus of almost 1,700 attested compounds in two conceptual domains (food/cooking and precious minerals/jewelry), we find that as predicted, compound names referring to artifacts tend to evoke events, whereas compound names referring to natural kinds tend to evoke essential properties. Next, in a production experiment involving compound creation and a comprehension experiment involving compound interpretation, we find that the same tendencies also extend to novel compounds.

In comparison to English, Spanish constructions of argument structure are highly verb-constrained (e.g., Goldberg, Adele E. 2006. Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language . Oxford: Oxford University Press; Narasimhan, Bhuvana. 2003. Motion events and the lexicon: A case study of Hindi. Lingua 113(2). 123–160): Pedro bajó/*bailó a la playa ‘Pedro went down/danced to the beach’. In some cases, the dominant role of the verbal meaning combines with a mismatching construction (e.g., an intransitive verb in a transitive construction: Pedro bajó las escaleras ‘Pedro went down the stairs’). To account for this evidence from a usage-based point of view, this study examines the Spanish transitive directed-motion construction combining verb lexeme analysis with collexeme corpus analysis (Stefanowitsch, Anatol & Stefan Th. Gries. 2003. Collostructions: Investigating the interaction beween words and constructions. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 8(2). 209–243). The analysis shows that in spite of frequent verb-construction mismatches, core components of the verbal meaning correlate closely with the usage of the verb in the transitive construction. The same patterns were not observed in comparable English constructions. Conceptualized in a constructionist framework, this study suggests that verb framing and learned constructional patterns have different roles in the encoding of argument structure in the two languages. This contrastive analysis has a broader application: to other construction types, to other semantic domains, and to other languages. It is argued that compared to the typological distinction between Verb-framed and Satellite-framed languages (Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a cognitive semantics , vol. 1 and 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), the proposed framework is better suited to account for the crosslinguistic differences and the intra-linguistic variation.

A classical topic in the syntax of the mainland Scandinavian languages is so-called pancake clauses where there seemingly is disagreement between the subject and the predicative adjective, as in Pannekaker er godt ‘Pancakes( f ): indf:pl be: prs good: n:sg ’; the subject is in the plural, whereas the predicative adjective is in the neuter singular. According to one of the several approaches, these clauses display a type of semantic agreement. Recently, it has also been argued that there are at least four different types of pancake constructions. In this article, the semantic relationship between the different constructions is investigated further. It is argued that, diachronically, pancake agreement started with subjects interpreted as virtual, ungrounded processes, and that the absence of grounding has been reinterpreted as absence of spatial boundedness in the latest kind of pancake construction. The analysis is supported by a diachronic corpus investigation. The emphasis on virtual reference is a new feature with the current paper, and it enables us to set aside an objection against the semantic agreement analysis. The diachronic corpus investigation enables us to revise, empirically, earlier suggestions as to when the pancake constructions originated: They are well attested from the mid-1800s, in both Swedish and Norwegian Nynorsk.

This paper presents a discourse-analytic study of the verbs aamadan ‘come’ and raftan ‘go’ in Persian as they appear in thirty oral elicited narratives and uses English narratives based on identical stimuli as a reference point for a comparative analysis. The paper argues that despite certain similarities, the two sets of verbs in English and Persian have clear differences, both in terms of the syntactic structures in which they appear and their functions within the stories. Notably, beyond the expression of translational motion, aamadan and raftan encode aspect, subjectivity, and the speakers’ perspectives on certain elements of the events as the stories unfold in their memories. Such choices in grammatical structures of the narratives can reveal much about the speakers’ underlying cognitive processing and contribute to the understanding of the speakers’ conceptual image of the story line.

I analyze English and Finnish front adpositions commonly used in sequence metaphors of time ( The days ahead of Christmas are busy ). A sequence metaphor represents the order of temporal entities as their different positions on a path along which they are moving, a temporally earlier entity being ‘ahead of’ a later one, i.e. further advanced in the direction of motion. In English, the motion-related front preposition ahead of is conventional in sequence metaphors, as opposed to in front of , which is used only occasionally and often results in ill-formedness ( *Monday is in front of Tuesday ). In Finnish, the dedicated two-mover adposition edellä ‘ahead of [two-mover]’ is conventional in sequence metaphors, while the general front adposition edessä is not. Based on an analysis of these adpositions in different scenarios of spatial motion, I argue that the adpositions common in sequence metaphors ( ahead of, edellä ) evoke a motion frame of reference (motion FoR). In the motion FoR, front is adjacent to the direction where the moving Ground (the entity designated by the complement of the adposition) is headed. In contrast, adpositions that bear a strong association with the standard (intrinsic or relative) FoRs ( in front of and edessä ) are less felicitous in sequence metaphors. Together, the two languages demonstrate how a metaphorical motion scenario in a sequence metaphor is grammatically coded as a stable, unchanging array, where both participants are steadily moving in the same direction.

A key parameter in received classifications of language types is the expression of pronominal subjects. Here we compare variation patterns in conversational data of English – considered a non-null-subject language – and Spanish – a well-studied null-subject language. English has a patently lower rate of expression (approximately 3% unexpressed 1sg and 3sg human subjects vs. 60% in Spanish). Despite the stark difference in rate of expression, the same probabilistic constraints are at work in the two languages. Contrary to popular belief, VP coordination is neither a discrete nor a distinguishing category of English. Instead, a shared constraint is linking with the preceding subject, a refinement of accessibility to include, alongside coreferentiality, measures of structural connectedness – both prosodic and syntactic. Other shared constraints on unexpressed subjects are coreferential subject priming (a tendency to repeat the form of the previous mention) and lexical aspect (reflecting the contribution of a temporal relationship to subject expression). Where the languages most differ is in the envelope of variation. In English, besides coreferential-subject verbs conjoined with a coordinating conjunction, unexpressed subjects are limited to prosodic initial-position in declarative main clauses, a restriction that is absent in Spanish. We propose that the locus of cross-language comparisons is the variable structure of each language, defined by the set of probabilistic constraints but also the delimitation of the variable context within which these are operative.

This paper examines the close parallels between the contact phenomena in Cantonese-English bilingual children and Southeast Asian creoles, especially in the domain of perfective aspect marking. ‘Already’ is a cross-linguistically common lexical source of perfective aspect markers given its conceptual link with the sense of perfectivity. In contact scenarios involving a European lexifier and Southeast Asian substrates, the development of ‘already’ into a perfective marker is further triggered by the incompatibility between the verbal morphology of the former and the isolating typology of the latter. Adopting an ecological approach to language transmission and creole genesis we discuss how the transient grammaticalization phenomena in the bilingual children can be compared to decreolization, and how the study of bilingual acquisition can contribute to contact linguistics. Despite the prevalence of unpredictable factors in contact scenarios, we argue that bilingual children can still serve as powerful “laboratories” for studying contact outcomes at the communal level.