Volume 57, Issue 5 -

Uriel Weinreich’s seminal study “Western Traits in Transcarpathian Yiddish” (in For Max Weinreich on his Seventieth Birthday: Studies in Jewish languages, literature, and society , 245–264. The Hague: Mouton) brought a feature into focus that is characteristic not only of Transcarpathian Yiddish, but also of the Haredi idioms descending from it. In the eyes of many representatives of secular Yiddish, it has become a hallmark of so-called Hungarian Yiddish, i.e. Haredi Yiddish derived from Central Yiddish subdialects spoken in Hungary with its 1914 borders. The feature in question is the consistent replacement of nominal dative objects by a prepositional phrase introduced by far ‘for, to’. It is tempting to ascribe the rise of the construction to contact-induced influence from Hungarian, which, for historical reasons, occupies an extraordinarily firm position among Jews living in the Transcarpathian area. A major obstacle to such an assumption is, however, that Hungarian itself does not employ prepositions at all. Being an agglutinative language, it expresses grammatical categories of the noun phrase by means of suffixation. In my paper, I will argue that a constructional borrowing from Hungarian can nevertheless be the source of the feature under scrutiny. To substantiate this assumption, another (more straightforward) example of the Hungarian impact on the prepositional system of Transcarpathian Yiddish – the employment of the preposition of (St Yid. oyf ‘on/onto’) to indicate movement in the direction of geographical locations – will be discussed as well.

The aim of this Article is to propose that fragment answers in Basaá (Bantu) derive from two different sources, namely, a regular source and a copular source. Regular fragments are those that are derived by movement of a Negative Polarity Item (NPI) or a CP complement to the left periphery of the clause followed by clausal ellipsis (Merchant 2004 and related work). Conversely, copular fragments involve a biclausal structure whereby the focalized fragment, no matter the syntactic function it fulfills in clause structure, finally ends up being the subject of the null verbal copula of the main clause. The fragment is initially selected as the external argument of the null verbal copula within the matrix VP along the lines of the VP-Internal Subject Hypothesis (Koopman and Sportiche 1991). From Spec-VP it raises to Spec-TP to satisfy the EPP requirements. The internal argument of the null copula is a headless relative in which a relative operator (covert/overt) moves to Spec-CP, a position above FocP the target of ellipsis. This gives rise to a structure whereby the fragment answer in the matrix clause and the relative operator in the embedded clause resist ellipsis. The analysis also provides semantic evidence that copular fragments are not clefts. The ellipsis approach is supported by a range of grammatical properties such as connectivity effects, locality constraints and subcategorization requirements. This paper is not only a contribution to Merchant’s (2004) ellipsis approach but it also provides new evidence for our understanding of the crosslinguistic variation of ellipsis.

In Mandarin Chinese, sentence-final aspect particles ne, le , and laizhe may occur in some types of embedded clauses, but not in other types, such as the complement of a control verb, a raising verb, lai ‘come’ and qu ‘go’, a non-epistemic modal, and the prepositional complementizer dui ‘to’. These latter types of clauses systematically show properties of nonfinite clauses in other languages. They are intrinsically embedded, ban pro -drop, their clause boundaries may be invisible for binding, and they disallow a speaker-oriented adverb and an epistemic modal. The restrictions on the distribution of the particles indicate that they are used in finite clauses only, although the language has no tense or case marker. The paper argues that finite clauses show speaker-oriented properties whereas nonfinite ones do not; instead, nonfinite clauses exhibit higher-clause-oriented properties. Identifying the role of speaker in the finiteness distinction reveals the capacity of finite clauses, whether or not the capacity is marked overtly.

This paper has both a descriptive and a theoretical aim. The descriptive one is to demonstrate that the phenomenon of clustering is not limited to verbs, but that it also affects adpositions. The theoretical one is to develop a formal analysis that captures the common properties of verb clustering and adposition clustering. For that purpose we employ the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Both the descriptive and the theoretical part are backed up with quantitative data about the use of adposition clusters in a sample consisting of one million words of spoken Dutch and one million words of written Dutch.

The dative in Hebrew poses a problem for a unified characterization as no single criterion seems to guides its interpretation. The present paper approaches this problem from a usage-based perspective, suggesting a multifactorial account of dative functions in Hebrew. Analyzing a corpus of Hebrew dative clauses with multivariate statistical tools I reveal the usage patterns associated with each dative function, showing that traditional descriptions of dative functions are not reflected in usage. Working within a Usage-Based perspective, in which the meaning of a word is its use in language, I argue that Hebrew has only four distinct dative usage patterns, termed Discourse Profile Constructions : conventional correspondences between a multifactorial usage pattern and a unified conceptualization of the world. The four Discourse Profile Constructions are: (i) the Extended Transitive Discourse Profile Construction, (ii) the Human Endpoint Discourse Profile Construction, (iii) the Extended Intransitive Discourse Profile Construction, and (iv), the Evaluative Reference point Discourse Profile Construction. By revealing such correspondences between usage patterns and conceptualizations, the present paper (i) broadens the Construction Grammar notion of Argument Structure Construction, and (ii), suggests an innovative account for the notion of usage as a factor in the conventional pairing between form and function.

This paper addresses the (inter)subjective functions of progressive aspect in Dutch. While the aspectual profile of the various Dutch progressive constructions has received considerable attention in the last few years, much less attention has been paid to their non-aspectual uses. As we will demonstrate in this paper on the basis of a corpus study of spoken Dutch, complemented with native-speaker elicitations, the Dutch progressive constructions can be specifically recruited to express (inter)subjective meanings such as surprise, irritation and intensity, and they differ in this respect from their simplex counterparts. Our analysis of progressive aspect in terms of backgrounded boundaries provides an explanation for (i) the general association of progressive aspect with (inter)subjectivity and (ii) our observation that some Dutch progressive constructions are more prone to such (inter)subjective exploitation than others. This semantic account also underlies the last part of this contribution, in which we discuss cases of what we call “(inter)subjective reinforcement” in complex progressive constructions, that is, the embedding of progressive constructions in other constructions that are also semantically affiliated to (inter)subjectivity (e.g. the perfect, gaan/komen ‘go/come’, modals and the bare infinitive construction), which has been largely neglected in the literature.

This paper presents the hypothesis that words (and not morphemes) are the minimal units of connection between sound and meaning in human languages. Such a proposal implies the definition of the word as a categorized syntactic derivation that is linked in memory to a representation in the sensorimotor system. The main implications of the hypothesis are the following: (i) A non-lexicalist model is compatible with the phenomena of lexical integrity and lack of productivity that motivate lexicalist models. (ii) It can be concluded that bound morphemes (roots and affixes) are neither syntactic nor conceptual entities, but purely morphophonological ones. Morphemes are side effects of linguistic change operating as resources to optimize the processing and memorization of words. And (iii) a neo-constructionist conception of words is made compatible with a paradigmatic morphology.

Based on a statistical analysis of a corpus data from the period of 1915–2005, this article discusses two variants for a subject marker in Japanese, and argues that it is a case of linguistic change in progress. While representing effects of three linguistic factors on the use of the variants, the chronological observation of each factor revealed that this phenomenon demonstrates the Constant Rate Effect. The quantitative data also provides firm evidence for effects of other independent diachronic changes on the current phenomenon, pushing the change further by shrinking the linguistic environment for the dying-out variant. Dissecting the relationship between those diachronic changes and the current phenomenon in a quantitative manner, the findings of the study reveal that the two competing hypotheses in theoretical syntax properly capture the essential syntactic properties of the phenomenon in the contemporary Japanese and the discrepancy of the two accounts is attributable to their data reflecting a different stage of its ongoing change.