Volume 47, Issue 1

Until recently, the West Central German dialect area was largely neglected in investigations of verb clusters. The article presents the results of a questionnaire study of two-verb clusters involving 55 participants in 17 localities in that dialect area. These results indicate that the occurrence of particular orders is subject to interspeaker, intraspeaker, and areal variation as well as morphosyntactic constraints. Furthermore, a comparison of these results with those from a corpus study of the same dialect area suggests diachronic stability in the relative areal distribution of verb clusters over the roughly 50 years since the spoken data for the corpus were collected. Finally, results for the Hessian region of West Central German point toward this area as a particularly promising locus of further research.

This article discusses a cross-linguistic phenomenon where a completive marker is used to express non-volitionality. I propose a semantic account for this phenomenon, based on the idea that completive markers can be used to emphasize the completion of an action as unexpected and unanticipated. This phenomenon is relevant from a broader typological perspective because it reveals that it is not possible to provide a unified analysis of non-volitional constructions in terms of reduced transitivity. Instead, I propose an analysis where different types of nonvolitional constructions are characterized by a shift in emphasis from the starting point of the action towards its endpoint.

Recent work on consonant epenthesis has argued that the insertion of [r] as a hiatus breaker is phonologically natural (De Lacy 2006, Uffmann 2007). This claim is argued to derive support from the high cross-linguistic frequency of (intervocalic) r-Epenthesis. The goal of the present article is to investigate the original sources for the languages which are assumed to have a regular synchronic r-Epenthesis rule. It is concluded - on the basis of these sources - that there is very little solid crosslinguistic support for that process. If correct, this finding means that r-Epenthesis in many varieties of English cannot be argued to be phonologically natural on the basis of non-related languages with that process.

In the interplay of aspect and quantity in the Finnish system of object-marking the opposition between the partitive object and the (morphologically heterogeneous) total object plays a central role. The received view holds that the partitive object indicates incompleteness of the event in one way or another: it is used if the event does not take place at all (negation); if the aspect is unbounded; or if the quantity of the object referent is open (unbounded). The total object is used in affirmative sentences that indicate bounded aspect together with a closed quantity affected in full. Recent grammars have crystallized the three conditions of the partitive into a hierarchy of decreasing strength: negation > aspect > quantity: negation triggers the partitive irrespective of both aspect and quantity, and unbounded aspect triggers it irrespective of quantity. The article elaborates the hierarchy and argues that the aspectual function of the partitive is in fact not monolithic but consists of three different subfunctions.

Causativization is typically understood as a process that increases the valency of verbs via agent introduction. In addition, causatives have other functions, such as agentivization. Here, we examine even less orthodox functions of causative morphemes: cases in which causativization decreases the degree of transitivity associated with the denoted event - that is, the expressed function is the exact opposite of the canonical function. The expression of this function by causative morphemes becomes understandable if we consider the differences between agent-related and causer-related causation. In agent-related causation, the original clause involves no agent and agent introduction is thus complete (as in ‘the child broke the vase’). In the causer-related causation, agent introduction is less complete since the original event already involves an agent (‘I made him build a house’). The occurrence of transitivity-decreasing causatives is explained by referring to features of causerrelated causation. Moreover, the article proposes a grammaticalization path for de-transitivizing causatives based on instances of causer-related causation.

The article investigates an unusual and poorly studied class of existential-like expressions in English, exemplified in the title. It is contended that these expressions represent a distinct grammatical sign or construction, with a distinct semantic meaning of its own that is not derivable from the meaning of the plain existential. The formal and semantic properties of this sign are examined and specified; it is suggested that the sign is not entirely arbitrary, but shows recurrent and non-random associations between its formal properties and its meanings. To fully understand it, the construction must be situated within the grammar of English; to this end, it is compared and contrasted with other constructions it enters into paradigmatic relations with. The investigation is based largely on instances garnered from language use, including literature, conversation, and electronic corpora. The investigation is framed within a usage-based grammar that presumes the importance of constant and mutual interaction between linguistic description and theory, and the theoretical importance of the rare and unusual.

The article investigates some diachronic aspects of the morpho-syntactic marking of indefiniteness, by focusing on a case study from Old Italian on the use of the indefinite article with a possessive and a kinship term implying a unique referent, as in una sua madre, literally ‘*a his/her mother’, that is, ‘a mother of his/ hers’. Using a corpus-based analysis of Old Italian texts, I will show how the function of the indefinite article in this kind of noun phrase may be accounted for if the notion of discourse prominence is taken into account. I further suggest that this quite peculiar use presupposes the same semantic-pragmatic reasons which determine the distribution of uno as a non-obligatory marker of indefiniteness, and its alternation with zero.

Study 1, a dictionary analysis of English, German, Swedish, Russian and Finnish VP idioms, shows that there is a general trend for these idioms to pick their nouns from among the most frequent body-part nouns. Thus, the same overall cognitive domains tend to be favored in the lexical resources for idiomatic and nonidiomatic language. In Study 2 we used corpora to test the degree of literal versus non-literal use, in terms of textual frequency, of the three most idiom-prone nouns in the five languages, viz., ‘hand’, ‘head’ and ‘eye’. Moreover, as text genres are expected to differ in their use of literal versus non-literal senses of words, two text types were pitted against each other, viz., fiction and newspaper language, entertaining the hypothesis that fiction would be more non-literal than newspaper texts. The reverse turned out to be the case. We explain the higher degree of nonliteral (mostly metaphorical) use of ‘hand’, ‘head’ and ‘eye’ with the notion that in fiction the authors describe a world constructed in situ, while newspaper writers interpret the world already shared by them and their readers.

The frequency of expressed first-person-singular subjects is significantly higher in European Portuguese (EP) than in Peninsular Spanish (PS). In both languages, subject expression is sensitive to the relative focusing of attention on different participants of the event and same/switch reference. In addition, in both PS and EP, subject-pronoun usage with the most frequent verb lexemes shows a tendency to grammaticalization. The different grammaticalizing constructions account for part of the differences found between the two languages. In addition to examining the variable subject pronoun expression in PS and EP, the article discusses the use of semantic roles in cross-linguistic analysis and the role of frequency and formulaicity in grammaticalization.