Volume 77, Issue 1

This paper investigates a type of empty morph that attaches to noun forms and that will be called “noun affix” here. Based on six case studies from unrelated African and American genera, I arrive at a diachronic typology of noun affixes that in many ways confirms and in other ways expands on the findings of Joseph Greenberg, whose work on the topic remains the yardstick. One claim is that noun affixes may emerge directly from gender markers and that this is reflected in the paradigm size of noun affixes. Furthermore, there is evidence for the idea that old noun affixes may be repurposed for the creation of phonologically minimal word forms. The main interest of this study is in what the development of noun affixes reveals about processes of grammaticalization. The current literature mostly focuses on the fact that grammaticalization is initiated by semantic changes (mostly semantic reduction) rather than by formal changes. This raises the question of whether semantic reduction is also completed before formal reduction. The noun affixes provide compelling evidence for this idea and thus suggest that empty morphs may arise via grammaticalization. This runs counter to approaches on which form and function erode in parallel.

The present study contributes to the empirical basis of grammaticalization theory by presenting a grammaticalization profile of Zapotec, a language family of Mesoamerica. The discussion centers around co-grammaticalization of lexemes and constructions, polygrammaticalization, interdependence between syntactic and prosodic conditioning of grammaticalization, and mutual feedback between grammaticalization and morphosyntactic typology.

In this paper, I discuss the employment of expressions meaning ‘still’ to signal the negative counterpart of ‘still’, ‘not yet’, without an overt negator. I show that this phenomenon is found in languages from across the globe and that it surfaces in four recurrent types of environments, namely when a ‘still’ expression is used (i) without an overt predicate, (ii) with a less-than-finite and/or dependent predicate, (iii) with a predicate belonging to a specific actional class, or (iv) when the expression occupies a determined position in the clause. I lay out how each of these types finds a functional explanation and I also discuss some patterns of employment that build on these ‘still’-as-‘not yet’ uses.

This article presents the first study on reflexive expressions having lexicalized an emotional meaning, as in the English example enjoy oneself . Such lexicalized forms, which we call ‘reflexemes’, occur in a number of genetically unrelated languages worldwide. Here we interrogate the cross-linguistic distribution and semantics of reflexemes, based on a sample of 58 languages from 6 genetic groups throughout Europe, Australia, and Asia. Reflexemes exhibit uneven distribution in this sample. Despite the presence of reflexemes across all three continents, European languages generally display much larger inventories. Based on our language sample’s contrasts, we hypothesize that these disparities could be driven by: the form of reflexive markers; their semantic range, including colexifications with anticausative constructions; and their longevity, with ancient, cognate European markers fostering accumulation of reflexemes via inheritance and borrowing. As for semantics, reflexemes target comparable emotions across languages. Specifically, categories labelled ‘Good feelings’, ‘Anger’, ‘Worry’, ‘Bad feelings’ and ‘Fear’ are consistently most prevalent. These tendencies apply across our sample, with no sign of family- or continent-specific semantic tendency. The observed semantic distribution may reflect universal lexicalization tendencies not specific to reflexemes, perhaps combined with an emphasis on self-evaluation and other social emotions imparted by reflexive semantics.