Volume 55, Issue 1 -

The present contribution examines object complement clauses from the perspective of constituent-order typology. In particular, it provides the first principled empirical investigation of the position of object clauses relative to the matrix verb. Based on a stratified sample of 100 languages, we establish that there is an overall cross-linguistic preference for postverbal complements, due largely to the heterogeneous ordering patterns in OV-languages. Importantly, however, we also show that the position of complement clauses correlates with aspects of their structural organization: Preverbal complement clauses are significantly more likely to be coded by morphosyntactically “downgraded” structures than postverbal complements. Given that previous research has found a parallel correlation between structural downgrading and the semantics of the complement-taking predicate (Givón 1980. The binding hierarchy and the typology of complements. Studies in Language 4. 333–377, Cristofaro 2003. Subordination . Oxford: Oxford University Press), one needs to analyze how positional, structural and semantic factors interact with one another. Our data suggest that the correlation between clause order and morphosyntactic structure holds independently of semantic considerations: All predicate classes distinguished in the present study increase their likelihood of taking downgraded complements if they are preceded by the complement clause. We thus propose that, in addition to the well-known “binding hierarchy”, a second correlation needs to be recognized in the typology of complementation: the co-variation of linear order and morphosyntactic structure.

The study aimed at an analysis of sociolinguistic variables associated with the language acquisition progress between the first and the second test sessions in three follow-up studies with German preschool children. In all three samples, children acquiring German, both Germans and immigrants, were tested twice with validated language tests within a time span of several months. Furthermore, language skills of children were judged by daycare center teachers. The language competence of normally developed test subjects did not change much between two test sessions, whereas children acquiring German under more challenging circumstances were still in the process of active development, mostly due to the daycare center attendance, language courses, and medical therapies. Therefore, contra-intuitively at first sight, the following factors were associated with the quick progress in language development (floor effect): bad school marks for the language competence at the beginning of the daycare attendance, low age at the first test session, not regular attendance of the daycare centers, late contact to the German language, foreign language(s) spoken at home, medical issues, and some other unfavorable language acquisition conditions.

The present paper contributes to the study of speech act pragmatics, language contact, bilingualism, and heritage languages by bringing attention to the pragmatics of a contact language, heritage Russian (HR). The current study has a descriptive orientation, its main goal being to create a baseline for the pragmatic competence of speakers with incomplete acquisition of L1, which characterizes language contact in immigrant populations. We focus on communicative strategies and the choice of linguistic forms in requests made by heritage speakers of Russian, native speakers of full Russian, and native speakers of American English. The specific research questions explored in this study are: Is the linguistic variable – the form of polite requests – correlated with the population (speakers of HR vs. speakers of full Russian)? How do the differences play out? Do HR speakers have their own communicative norms? If yes, did these new norms develop under the influence of English or as a result of language-internal restructuring? We report that HR exhibits evidence of developing its own conventions for expressing polite requests which differ from the corresponding conventions in full Russian. Specifically, HR speakers use significantly more impersonal modals than monolingual native speakers of Russian in informal scenarios and rely on increased syntactic complexity to mark polite requests in formal scenarios. In indirect requests produced in both types of scenarios, HR speakers overuse the downgrader požalujsta ‘please’ and underemploy the negative particle ne . These emergent communicative norms in HR seem to be partially influenced by English, but may also involve language-internal change.

In this paper I discuss the creative rendezvous of necrotizing habituation with the speakers’ reviving – if not artful – imagination in negative responses. Ιn particular, I reconsider the so-called kanenas - [ κανένας -] series in Modern Greek as a byproduct of a discourse strategy involving the logical sequence of modus tollens. I argue that the intensifier kan [ κάν < ancient κἄν ] ‘even (if)’ is the diachronic manifestation of a prevalent speaker’s tactic intended for making the perception of a denial long and “laborious” by estranging and complicating the negative structure. And that when this autonomous kan comes to be processed as a single unit with the emphatic cardinal enas [ ένας < ancient εἷς ] ‘one’, it opens a fertile grammaticalization cycle. More specifically, as the contexts in which the resultant minimizer kanenas [emphatic] is welcome proliferate, the frequency of use of this fashionable Negative Polarity Item increases dramatically, resulting in a gradual loss in semantic specificity and phonological flesh: kanenas [non emphatic], kanas . The unavoidable price for that proliferation, which is, however, ultimately balanced by an impressive earnings yield in positive polarity items: kapjos [κάποιος] ‘some(one)’, kati [κάτι] ‘some(thing)’, kapu [κάπου] ‘somewhere’ etc.

This paper investigates sex-related euphemisms in four Asia sign languages, namely, Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL), Jakarta Sign Language (JakSL) (Indonesia), Sri Lankan Sign Language (SLSL) and Japanese Sign Language (JSL). It aims at finding out if direct visual reference to sex-related body parts or concepts is taboo to Deaf signers and if this is the case, what strategies they adopt to form the corresponding euphemistic expressions. It will be argued that even though Deaf signers are used to the visual explicitness of the signing modality, the highly iconic nature of certain sex-related signs can still be offensive at times, thus giving rise to euphemistic expressions. While certain euphemistic strategies by the Deaf signers target at toning down the degree of visual iconicity originally associated with the taboo signs, most of the remaining strategies show striking resemblance to those used in spoken languages, suggesting the universality of these verbal politeness strategies across language modalities.

Motion events and their linguistic form have been studied extensively over the past decades from a typological as well as a psycholinguistic point of view. While many studies take Talmy’s (1985. Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In Timothy Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description: Grammatical categories and the lexicon , vol. 3, 57–149. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Toward a cognitive semantics . Cambridge: MIT Press) distinction as the starting point of their theoretical considerations, this twofold, lexicon-based typology has since been extended to capture the range of variation which languages display. Although the specifics of motion event conceptualization entail other factors in addition to space and lexical form, there are few studies on the implications of temporal categories. The aim of the present study is to document the role of aspectual categories in the construal of motion events, as observed in Tunisian Arabic (TA) and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), two closely-related varieties with relevant contrasts in the types of verbal aspectual categories they encode. The analysis is based on descriptions of different types of motion events elicited on the basis of video clips. The findings reveal basic differences in the spatial and temporal categories selected for encoding-differences which are rooted in the respective linguistic systems: while TA, in contrast to MSA, has fewer forms to express directed motion via spatial concepts (path verbs, prepositions), its aspectual system is richer. The comparison indicates how the expression of directed motion in spatial terms in MSA is conveyed via temporal aspect (progression) in TA. In conclusion, the study outlines the case for the inclusion of temporal categories, in particular grammaticalized aspect, in approaches to the typology of motion events.