Ahead of Publication / Just Accepted

Counterargumentation marks the disruption of a causal chain by introducing an unexpected conclusion that cancels inferences drawn from a previous premise. The present study compares the processing costs produced by three minimal counterargumentative structures: a) counterargumentation marked by the Italian connective tuttavia (Eng. ‘however’); b) counterargumentation in utterances lacking a connective but containing the phoric element entrambi (Eng. ‘both’); c) counterargumentation with no procedural unit. The reading experiment (1 × 3 design) was carried out with 88 native Italians. The results show that both tuttavia and entrambi are processed as procedural units and that the semantic instruction of the connective helps reduce processing costs, especially when the connection of the phoric element is not present.

We present a comparative study in which we analyse the use of the intensified adjective construction by young learners of Italian and German from the multilingual region of South Tyrol (Italy). Italian and German share a range of intensifying constructions, relying both on morphological (e.g., the intensifying prefix construction It. strapieno , Ger. supervoll ‘very full’) and syntactic resources (e.g., the prototypical adverb + adjective construction It. molto pieno , Ger. sehr voll ‘very full’). However, they also rely on language-specific means, such as the Italian superlative suffix – issimo ( pienissimo ‘very full’) and the German intensifying compound construction ( knallvoll ‘very full’). By adopting a Diasystematic Construction Grammar and a usage-based approach, we investigate the ways in which different morphological devices interact and compete with each other and with syntactic intensification devices in L2 Italian and German. Results show that the frequencies of the intensified adjectives and learners’ proficiencies are the main predictors for the use of a morphological intensification type in both L2 Italian and German. However, morphological intensification is only occasionally used in L2 German, while L2 Italian learners commonly rely on the superlative construction in –issimo , competing with the prototypical syntactic construction.

The placement and realization of direct and indirect objects (henceforth DO and IO) in Kurmanji is subject to variation; e.g., DO and IO can be placed before or after one another in the preverbal domain; IO can be placed before the verb as an adpositional phrase, or, if recipient, it can be realized as a noun phrase (NP) after the verb. Although the postverbal variant has been the subject of a number of studies, the relative order between DO and IO in the preverbal domain has almost gone unnoticed. Taking a quantitative approach, in this study, first, we conducted a corpus study to observe the frequency of occurrences of IO in relation to the direct object and the verb, and to identify the potential factors that are involved in determining the choice of word order. Results indicated a clear preference for the DO-IO-V order. Definiteness of the DO, animacy of the IO, and the relative length between DO and IO are among the factors showing a meaningful effect. We next conducted a sentence production experiment to evaluate the effect of definiteness and animacy in a controlled manner. The results of our experimental study confirmed the effect of definiteness and animacy found in our corpus study. We further discuss the efficiency of each word order option in light of efficiency principles proposed by usage-based accounts of word order preferences.

In this paper, we examine a morphological phenomenon – the set of cognate prefixes including English arch- , Dutch aarts- , German erz- , and French archi-  – that requires us to locate a sense of negative evaluation, if at all present, variously either in a cluster of exemplars with a negatively evaluated base or in the prefix itself, as well as in the contexts in which the prefixed words are used. In many lexicalized forms, arch- and its cognates indicate, in a non-evaluative way, that the prefixed entity occupies a hierarchically higher position than entities not prefixed with it (e.g., archangel , archbishop , archduke ). However, in current usage, the prefix is found productively with an intensifying and often negatively evaluated meaning, as in arch-manipulator , arch-neo-conservative , and arch-baddie . We here use a semantic vector-space approach for contemporary English data as a useful window through which to examine the semantic aspects of arch -prefixation, allowing for the assessment of how homogeneous or heterogeneous the bases of this pattern are. Our study shows that an evaluatively neutral marker with the meaning ‘high(est) in rank’ may develop into a negative evaluative marker and, in French, into an evaluatively neutral strengthener. We pay attention to possibly extravagant properties of arch- and its cognates.

This paper explores the typological diversity and markedness of evidential systems in the languages in China, emphasizing their unique characteristics and cross-linguistic variations. The study reveals that evidential systems in the languages in China are shaped by the interplay of perceptual directness, perception neutrality, and grammatical economy. Direct sensory evidence, such as visual perception, typically employs unmarked zero-forms, aligning with the principle of linguistic economy, while indirect evidence, like inference or hearsay, often requires explicit morphological or syntactic markers. The analysis highlights binary oppositions in evidential systems, such as direct versus indirect evidence, personal versus mediated knowledge, and factual versus subjective interpretations. Direct evidence is generally less marked, whereas indirect evidence and subjective interpretations reflect the speaker’s evaluative stance and control over information. The degree of neutrality and markedness forms a continuum, influenced by language types and cognitive strategies. These findings underscore the intricate relationship between information sources, perception, and linguistic encoding in the evidential systems in the languages in China.

This article re-examines the syntactic properties of the so-called shi … de cleft construction in Mandarin Chinese, with special attention paid to the morpheme de that appears between the verb and the object (hence-forth de pre-object ). It reveals how the shi and d e pre-object morphemes at issue independently interact with focus and proposes a formal model of how the functional morphemes impose procedural constraints on and make semantic contributions to the construction of logical forms of propositions in a process of parsing a string of words linearly delivered in some context of communication. The account is implemented in the framework of Dynamic Syntax, which provides theoretical and technical convenience for capturing interaction between syntactic idiosyncrasy of lexical items and general deductive rules in a parsing process. The current account has a wider empirical coverage than the most comphrehensive one in literature and has theoretical implications regarding syntactic and semantic information of functional morphemes and pragmatic effect.

The present paper examines the relationship between grammaticalization and constructionalization in the context of recent studies on Diachronic Construction Grammar. Building on the concept of “Event Schemas” in language change, it explores the diachronic evolution of the English modal construction BETTER (in the forms had better , ’d better, and plain better  +  v ) since Old English times. The proposed study demonstrates that although this could be regarded as a typical case of ordinary grammatical constructionalization it is better explained as grammaticalization through Event Schemas, where the conceptual source elements of possession and evaluation remain evident throughout the construction’s entire diachronic journey. In this way, the possessive Event Schema known as the “Goal Schema”, likely grammaticalized into an “Action Schema” (explaining the introduction of the copula have found in present-day English), with the meanings of evaluation associated with the predicate adjective, better, co-existing as an Evaluative Schema. Thus, grammaticalization is manifested in the observed continuity of both possessive and evaluative semantic coordinates in the evolution of had better , which would not be permitted under typical constructionalization accounts that require parallel changes in both form and meaning.

New evidence from the extinct Dutch-lexified creole Skepi has brought to light the pronoun or as its third person plural form. This article proposes that or is a cognate of standard Dutch haar ‘her’, which in Early Modern Dutch also functioned as a plural pronoun meaning ‘them, their’ (present-day standard Dutch hun∼hen ). As such, the article provides a window into a largely forgotten chapter of Dutch pronominal history: the polysemous role of haar as both a singular feminine and all-gender plural pronoun. We revisit that chapter, focusing on the use of haar as a plural object pronoun (‘them’). The article reconstructs the diachronic development of haar in that role and traces its synchronic distribution in modern non-standard varieties of Dutch, Frisian, and Low German. Finally, we examine the dialectal provenance of Skepi or , with Zeelandic emerging as the primary suspect.

Consonant clusters in Qassimi Arabic (QA) exhibit distinct patterns of adherence to and deviation from the Sonority Sequencing Principle (SSP), analyzed here using Optimality Theory (OT). This study identifies three sonority profiles in QA clusters: falling, equal, and rising. While coda clusters generally conform to the SSP, onset clusters often violate it, which OT constraints effectively explain. Rising sonority violations in coda clusters are resolved through vowel epenthesis, whereas falling or equal sonority clusters of two obstruents require no epenthesis. The choice of the epenthetic vowel is influenced by vowel harmony and the place of articulation of adjacent consonants. Additionally, QA clusters reveal unique characteristics regarding minimal sonority distance: zero in coda clusters and (-1) in onset clusters. Through OT, the interplay of markedness and faithfulness constraints determines optimal cluster formation. For QA onset clusters, constraints are ranked as ONS >> SyllCon >> *V(short)]σ >> SSP >> LINEARITY >> Comp-Ons >> MAX-IO >> DEP-IO, while for coda clusters, the ranking is ONS >> *V(short)]σ >> SSP >> *i[-Pahr] >> Comp-Ons >> MAX-IO >> DEP-IO. This research sheds light on SSP violations, vowel epenthesis, and their governance in QA, enriching our understanding of its phonological structure.

This study examines the evaluative morphology of the English suffixoid -head and its equivalents in Spanish and Italian. Adopting a construction morphology approach, the research focuses on the pejorative and human-related connotations in English [x- head ] N constructions, such as crackhead or fathead . A quantitative/qualitative analysis using the itTenTen20 and esTenTen18 (in Sketch Engine ), combined with a contrastive analysis in OPUS parallel corpora (OPUS2), reveals that, while English often uses suffixoids for negative evaluation, Spanish and Italian employ different morphological strategies, such as augmentatives, loose compounds, or syntactic constructs. The study further explores the morphosemantic features of equivalent constructions [ cabeza de [x] N ] N and [ cabeza [x] A ] N (in Sp.) and [ testa di [x] N ] N and [ testa [x] A ] N (in It.), comparing their meanings and productivity. The findings contribute to understanding how construction networks in languages from different families can converge in expressing similar evaluative frames – such as representing individuals with negative traits through body part references – while also highlighting structural preferences, such as the widespread use of N of N syntagmatic patterns in Romance languages. Importantly, the study acknowledges that these constructions are not inherently tied to negative evaluation or to the presence of the lexeme head , but rather reflect broader tendencies in phrase formation and semantic extension across languages.

This study investigates the stance functions of but as a contrastive marker in Nigerian Supreme Court judgements to explore other lexical means of marking stances in the legal genre aside value-laden words and lexico-grammatical constructions. The study analysed a corpus of Nigerian Supreme Court judgements comprising lead, supporting and dissenting judgements for stance classification, following the stance triangle model. Findings show that the contrastive marker mostly signals epistemic, evidential, and evaluative stances, an indication that even with but the presentation of subjective positions in judicial opinions entails evaluation of other stance takers’ stances, assertive presentation of such positions alongside cogent evidence to justify and legitimise them. Alignment and affective positions are rarely signalled with but in the corpus, which implies that beyond any other communicative intents, projection of individual voice based on legal principles and facts is more important to the judge than expression of affect or alignment with others.

The present paper tests a series of hypotheses dealing with variation, across dialects of English, in the degree of lexical specificity of constructions. The study focuses on the null subject alternation, which is conceptualized here as consisting of two allostructions, the null and overt variants, of a more schematic constructeme. Five hypotheses put forward in the specialized literature are adapted to the null subject alternation and tested on a dataset of null and overt subjects extracted from GloWbE by means of five indexes of frequency and lexical specificity. The results confirm four of the five hypotheses and provide further support to the claim that speakers of varieties of English in earlier phases in Schneider’s Dynamic Model rely more on partially lexically filled constructions.

The paper aims to provide a typological analysis of inchoativity in Romance languages, specifically focusing on French and Spanish. The concept of inchoativity, which marks the beginning of an event or change of state, has been ambiguously used and inconsistently defined across linguistic studies. The paper highlights the complexities in terminology, where the same term may represent different concepts or be applied in varied contexts. Two primary approaches are explored: the onomasiological perspective, which examines how inchoativity is expressed through lexical and grammatical elements, and the semasiological perspective, which focuses on the morphological features of verbs denoting state changes. Finally, the paper examines if an integrated approach, attempting to bridge these perspectives, can be defended. In contrast to earlier studies, we conclude that significant challenges remain in reconciling them at the semantic level.

With the recognition of incrementality and context-relativity in language parsing and production, this study explores the significance of these two concepts in the Chinese do so ( zheme/name zuo ) construction, in which the adverb zheme/name ‘so’ precedes the verb zuo ‘do’. Within the framework of Dynamic Syntax (Cann, R. & R. Kempson. 2017. What do words do for us? Dialectica 71(3). 425–460; Cann, R., R. Kempson & L. Marten. 2005. The dynamics of language . Oxford: Elsevier; Kempson, R., E. Gregoromichelaki & C. Howes. 2019. Language as mechanisms for interaction: Towards an evolutionary tale. In International Tbilisi symposium on logic, language, and computation . Springer; Kempson, R., M.-V. Wilfried & D. Gabbay. 2001. Dynamic Syntax: The flow of language understanding . Oxford: Blackwell), it is argued that (i) the Chinese do so construction, as a kind of anaphoric expression, merely serves to draw the hearer’s attention to details related to an earlier context, with the task of creating a more definite and pertinent piece of content based on the earlier utterance to reduce the processing effort by speakers and hearers; (ii) The retrieval of semantic content for zheme/name zuo (lit. ‘so do’) is the effect of re-using contextual information; (iii) Zuo ‘do’ should be taken as a main verb since its semantic value will be substituted by a specific one from the preceding context.

Linguistic asymmetries have been of great interest in much research and continue to provide intriguing insights into the working mechanisms of language. Focusing on the domain of speed , we explore the structure of Estonian speed adverbs and provide evidence for the fast-over-slow asymmetry – the tendency for fastness to be expressed more extensively than slowness. As a pre-study, in which we combined dictionary lookup, corpus and rating methods, we compiled a list of 419 speed adverbs, with 369 representing the clearest instances. The main study revealed that the number of unique fast adverbs (e.g. kiiresti ‘fast, quickly’) is more than four times larger than that of slow adverbs (e.g. aeglaselt ‘slowly’). Comparing the 30 most frequent fast adverbs to the 30 most frequent slow adverbs further showed that the token frequency of fast adverbs, as attested in the Estonian National Corpus 2021, is significantly higher than that of slow adverbs. Nevertheless, the meaning of fast adverbs was not intensified by prefixoids (e.g. hüperkiiresti ‘hyper fast’) and reduplication (e.g. kiiresti - kiiresti ‘quickly-quickly’) more frequently than that of slow adverbs. The study suggests that the widely acknowledged inherent asymmetry in polar antonyms is rooted in the general asymmetry in lexicon, which, in turn, reflects cognitive asymmetries.

The Kazakh auxiliary verb ‘ žat ’ has been primarily associated with expressing the progressive aspect. However, its additional functions have either been briefly acknowledged or overlooked. In this study, I demonstrate that beyond the progressive aspect, ‘ žat ’ conveys two types of pluractionality (namely, the iterative and a specific pluractional form associated with motion verbs), the perfect aspect, governed by event boundedness, and notably, both low and high hypotheticality (i.e., epistemic modality) in specific constructions. These functions are contingent upon the lexical verb, converb selection, form of the auxiliary, and type of clause. The analyses draw upon corpus data and recent fieldwork aimed at exploring previously undocumented constructions, thereby contributing to an expanding body of research on the versatility of tense, aspect, and modality (TAM) expressions.

This research analyses Object Experiencer (OE) nominalizations, a widely discussed topic in the broader debate on the lexicalist versus the syntactic hypotheses concerning nominalizations. I tested two types of hypotheses to explain Italian OE nominalizations: the anticausative hypothesis and the light verb construction hypothesis. The former proposes that causative psych nominalizations from OE verbs undergoing causative-anticausative alternation are derived from the anticausative alternant. The light verb construction hypothesis suggests that OE nominalizations derive from light verb constructions that encode the result of the change in emotional state. I show that the anticausative hypothesis does not explain some counterexamples, whereas the light verb construction hypothesis correctly explains all OE nominal constructions, regardless of whether they derive from verbs that undergo the causative-anticausative alternation. Psych nominalizations inherit their argument and event structure from light verb constructions and show a resultative semantics.

Kaada is one of the proximity verbs that has confounded Arabic grammarians, initiating long-standing linguistic debates on its syntax and semantics. The present paper aims to provide a descriptive and theoretical account of kaada within the constraint-based approach of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). It particularly seeks to investigate these three aspects: the characterizing linguistic properties of kaada in Standard Arabic (SA), an HPSG theoretical account of kaada ’s syntactic and semantic properties, and the interaction of kaada with negation within the framework of Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS). The primary source of linguistic data/examples is Falak Platform, which is a modern corpus used in the current paper to provide authentic SA examples and thereby facilitate a reliable empirical analysis. Among the key contributions of this paper is the clarification of narrow and wide negation scopes of kaada , as well as the identification of the proper interpretation of negated kaada , which is considered a rich area of linguistic inquiry. This paper also presents practical implications for the comprehension of ambiguous constructions of kaada in SA. Potential research directions include the application of similar frameworks to other copular verbs in SA and the exploration of kaada -like constructions in dialectal Arabic and other languages.

Perception, involving five sense modalities, namely sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, is traditionally analyzed as a binary distinction between direct and indirect perception. This distinction leads to the identification of two complement types of perception verbs (e.g., see , hear , feel in English): either a verbal or a clausal complement. This paper provides a systematic description of perception verbs and their complementation patterns in Mandarin Chinese within the hierarchical framework of Functional Discourse Grammar, supported by naturally occurring examples retrieved from corpora. It has been found that, unlike Dik and Hengeveld (1991. The hierarchical structure of the clause and the typology of perception-verb complements. Linguistics 29. 231–259), who propose four semantic complement types of perception verbs, and Hengeveld et al. (2019. Perception verbs in Brazilian Portuguese: A functional approach. Open Linguistics 5. 268–310), who identify five, Mandarin exhibits six semantic complement types. Since the parameters typically used to differentiate complement types in the literature are largely morphologically oriented and therefore inapplicable to isolating languages such as Mandarin, this paper investigates the formal distinctions by examining their syntactic properties. By using four relevant tests, this study reveals a finite versus non-finite pattern among clausal complements in Mandarin. Furthermore, drawing on evidence from Mandarin, this research refines the two typological implicational hierarchies for perception complementation proposed by Hengeveld et al. (2019) by incorporating the Propositional Content layer into the semantic hierarchy and by reformulating the relations between the lower layers and the Communicated Content layer.

The process usually known as conversion involves a number of descriptive levels that exceed what is usual in word-formation: orthographical, phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic requirements give shape to a profile that, precisely because of the varied preconditions at play, may match or overlap to some extent the result of other processes, or occur in words of a different kind. As a result, the literature has often discussed the limits of conversion and/or has presented conversion as a process that may apply in full or partially, according to how many and which of the preconditions are met. This paper presents and discusses the cases that are not central or major conversion in English (albeit with projections to other languages), and argues the extent to which each of the neighbouring profiles can be viewed as word-formation or not. The discussion leads to dissimilar standpoints, whereby the words formed by conversion can be viewed as a clear-cut group, or a group with blurred boundaries according to the theoretical positions taken in various regards. The inherent difficulty of this outcome applies in English, but also in languages that have their own specific preconditions (and their repercussions), and still are burdened with the descriptive difficulties of English.

Udmurt and Tatar are two languages that have very similar typological profiles and have been in contact for a long time. Tatar has influenced Udmurt in many respects, especially its vocabulary and phonology, with Udmurt dialects in the South affected more than those in the North. Udmurt relational nouns (also called inflected postpositions) exhibit dialectal variation in case marking of their pronominal complement and possessive agreement with it. I sketch the geographic distribution of these features, based mainly on the questionnaire responses I collected in the field. I arrive at the conclusion that Tatar has had no part in shaping this distribution. The patterns attested in the Southern varieties most strongly influenced by Tatar bear no resemblance to the morphosyntax of Tatar relational nouns. The only way Tatar might have affected possessive agreement in Udmurt RelNPs is indirectly, through reshaping the Udmurt NP. Even if that was the case, Tatar must have tapped into a “minor use pattern” that had already existed in Udmurt. This demonstrates once again that structural similarity does not suffice for replication of grammatical structures.

Nominal grammatical metaphor (NGM), as theorised within systemic functional linguistics (SFL), typically refers to cases where a process is ‘metaphorically’ encoded through nominal resources, rather than its typical encoding through the clause. Previous approaches to the study of NGM have generally relied on the concepts of agnation and congruence, but these concepts can be quite subjective in nature, leading to an unstable account of the phenomenon. This paper evaluates the theoretical status and methodological implementation of NGMs. Our aim is to consider whether Aktionsart can offer a means of operationalizing NGM. We analyzed 492 nouns from a random selection of 200 sentences in the PopSci register of the CroCo corpus. The nouns were analyzed separately by different coders in terms of (i) grammatical metaphor status and (ii) their ontological status combined with an analysis of Aktionsart. Our statistical analysis shows that adopting an Aktionsart approach provides a more nuanced and anchored methodology for the analysis of NGMs as it not only provides a more consistent and robust analysis, but it also enables us to specify subtypes of nominal grammatical metaphor based on their subtler semantic characteristics.

This article explores, from a diachronic perspective, the rising usage of infinitive constructions at the expense of subjunctive forms in Spanish subordinate clauses governed by the verbs recomendar ‘to recommend’ and aconsejar ‘to advise’. Focusing on contexts of coreference between the indirect object of these verbs and the subject of the subordinate verb, the study analyzes 11,367 occurrences extracted from three major corpora (CDH, CREA, and CORPES), spanning from the 13th century to the present. The findings demonstrate a statistically significant increase in infinitive usage for both verbs, reflecting their ongoing integration into the collective speakers’ experience as causative predicates. The article argues that linguistic economy and analogy are key factors driving this syntactic change, and that the respective evolutionary processes of recomendar and aconsejar differ in chronology and speed according to each verb’s degree of diffusion.

This study explores the intersection of phraseology and morphology within the postulates of usage-based Construction Grammar, focusing on the construction [ a N-suffix singular.blow limpio ]. The peculiarity of this syntactic construction is that it embeds productive morphological formations with the suffixes -azo , -ada and -ón , all of which convey the notion of ‘blow’ or ‘impact’. Through a corpus-based analysis of 3,300 tokens from the esTenTen18 corpus (Sketch Engine), we offer a semantic/pragmatic description of the construction and its realizations, examining how lexicalized and non-lexicalized slot fillers interact with the construction’s lexically filled elements. The analysis aims to investigate the degree of morphological creativity and semantic coercion present in the construction, identifying how evaluative suffixes encode metaphorical or compositional meanings depending on the context. By distinguishing between frequent, conventionalized forms and low-frequency forms or hapax legomena, we shed light on the gradient between F-creativity and E-creativity, and on how morphologically derived lexemes can be reanalyzed within a semi-schematic construction. Ultimately, this research contributes to understanding how evaluative and metaphorical meanings emerge at the intersection of morphological schemas and syntactic patterns.

Passives in some languages are less frequent than in English, and this infrequency is compensated for by alternatives. This typological analysis focuses on passivisation and semi-passive constructions in two lesser-studied languages: Eshkevari Gilaki (EG) and Hungarian. For comparative context, three widely-studied lingua franca languages, English, Mandarin Chinese and Arabic, are also referenced. It evaluates these languages’ conformity to Edward L. Keenan’s universals of passive productivity. The synthesised data are derived from native speakers and existing literature. Hungarian and EG, being topic-prominent, adopt passive-like functional alternatives such as agentless clauses, impersonals and middles. Moreover, the observations challenge the assumed direct correlation between syntactic flexibility and passive productivity. Despite its less-configurational nature, Hungarian prioritises pragmatic role assignment over syntactic promotion. This analysis proposes an extension of Keenan’s framework, arguing that typological restrictions on passivisation emanate not from structural incapacity but from morphosyntactic conditions and discourse-pragmatic priorities. It is also suggested that, given the unique features observed in EG (inchoatives and middles) and Hungarian (telicity), functional alternatives and semi-passives should be integrated into cross-linguistic typology, particularly for languages with low EGIDS rankings.

In corpus linguistics, local grammar has been recognized as an effective approach to describing the semantic patterns of language for a particular communicative function/meaning. However, no study has yet examined whether the semantic patterns (i.e. local grammar patterns) produced by local grammar analyses are psychologically real for language learners. To assess the psycholinguistic reality of local grammar patterns, it is reasonable to start with testing whether such patterns can affect language learners’ processing of their corresponding language instances. This study used an eye movement experiment to test whether the local grammar patterns of a particular type of metaphorical expressions (i.e. health metaphor) in research articles of economics can influence Chinese EFL learners’ perception and comprehension of these expressions. The results showed that the occurrence of particular meanings and the positioning of the meanings in the patterns significantly affected the learners’ processing. These findings provide evidence for the psycholinguistic reality of local grammar patterns. The study also provides theoretical implications for local grammar research and metaphor research and pedagogical implications for metaphor teaching.

This paper investigates – to the best of our knowledge, for the first time – whether social media platforms can be used to detect and geographically map theoretically predicted but previously undocumented morphosyntactic variants. Specifically, it examines Spanish bare singular count nouns with ir a (lit. ‘to go to + [noun]’) across different national varieties of Spanish, as opposed to Standard Spanish ir al  + [noun] (lit. ‘to go to the + [noun]’). Based on Twitter data ( n  = 6,206), we show that such bare singular count nouns exist and are particularly prevalent in Colombian Spanish, a fact not previously reported in the literature. However, a follow-up acceptability judgment task with native Spanish speakers ( n  = 226) suggests that social media data may produce false positives, especially for low-frequency phenomena. As a result, we argue that such studies should always be complemented by other methods, e.g., from experimental linguistics.

The paper examines whether the borrowed constituent - like in German adjectives such as bilderbuchlike ‘storybook-like’ and Aschenbrödel - like ‘Cinderella-like’ qualifies as an evaluative or, more specifically, approximative marker. Similative items such as like are an important source of approximation. However, it is argued that similarity and comparison alone are not sufficient for establishing approximation. With regard to both the relationship between evaluation and approximation as well as the significance of the concept of approximation for morphological theory in general, the paper argues that it is necessary to define approximation narrowly and, in particular, to distinguish it from other forms of comparison in word-formation. To this end, similative items from English, French, and Italian that have previously been analysed as approximative markers in the literature are examined. The paper concludes that under the conditions specified here, German - like cannot be considered an approximative or evaluative marker.

Whilst there is a wealth of morphosyntactic studies on Assamese (Indo–Aryan), little attention has been paid to its semantic and pragmatic aspects. In this paper, we describe the polyfunctional item heri in Assamese, drawing on examples from podcasts, supplemented by film and web series scripts. We show that heri functions as a vocative (politely addressing an unknown person), a placeholder (substituting for a target form), an interjective hesitator (filling pauses interjectively), a general extender (yielding a conjunctive or disjunctive list reading), and a discourse marker (initiating new conversation topics). Furthermore, we model the grammatical, functional, and prosodic properties of heri across these distinct uses and analyse them in the framework of Discourse Grammar. The placeholder and general extender uses fall within the Sentence Grammar domain, and the vocative, interjective hesitator, and discourse marker uses are situated in the Thetical Grammar domain. Also, the developments of the interjective hesitator and discourse marker uses are examined through the lens of cooptation, a pragmatic operation whereby a unit in Sentence Grammar is recruited as a unit in Thetical Grammar. This study represents the first functional–grammatical analysis of Assamese based on spontaneous data.

This study undertakes a cross-linguistic investigation of orientation preverbs in Qiangic languages (Sino-Tibetan), examining their multifunctional properties (scope and type) and grammaticalization trajectories within the framework of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG). By identifying both typological variation and shared patterns evident in these trajectories, this study establishes a classification of Qiangic preverb systems based on their degree of functional diversification. This typological classification reveals two different systems: Type I systems display limited grammatical multifunctionality, with preverbs primarily encoding perfective aspect and certain illocutionary values while retaining their directional semantics. Type II systems exhibit more advanced grammaticalization, where the preverbs of a system can systematically express a wider spectrum of TAME (tense-aspect-modality-evidentiality) functions through deeper integration with the grammar of the language. The FDG-based analysis yields five potential paths of grammaticalization for the preverbs. These paths suggest that the multifunctionality observed in Type I systems emerges from interactions between the lexical and grammatical systems of a language, while the multifunctionality in Type II systems is largely attributable to subsequent grammatical evolution.

Like standard Slovenian, Polish, and several Romance languages, the Slovenian dialect of Resia forms impersonal clauses by combining transitive and intransitive verbs with reflexive clitics. Due to their syntactic and semantic properties, these reflexive impersonals have been analyzed as involving a subject with an arbitrary human referent realized by the reflexive clitic. Based on data from a recent translation of The little prince and other Resian resources, this paper brings forward hitherto unnoticed empirical evidence supporting this analysis. Unlike other Slavic languages, Resian has developed a set of subject clitics whose position in the clause differs from that of object clitics. Interestingly, when forming impersonal constructions, reflexive clitics are placed like subject clitics and not like object clitics as they are in other contexts. Furthermore, the distribution of the reflexive clitic variants se and sa in The little prince suggests that the latter is becoming the sole impersonal marker while the former is used to express all other reflexive meanings. This implies that sa is developing into a separate subject clitic. The general significance of these findings lies in the fact that they demonstrate a link between impersonal reflexives and subjects which does not depend on the assumption of a specific theoretical framework.

The predicate restriction (PR) indicates that only stage-level predicates (SLP) are permitted in the coda position of existential sentence (ES), whereas individual-level predicates (ILP) are barred. This restriction has theoretically shown to be available in the structure of the ES of Najdi Arabic (NA). This study aimed to empirically examine whether the facts reported in the theoretical literature about the effect of the PR in NA ES were reflected in the actual use of NA ES. A grammaticality judgement task in the form of a questionnaire was presented to 85 NA native speakers. The participants were asked to rate the grammaticality of the NA ESs given in the questionnaire according to their intuition. The questionnaire comprised three conditions based on the predicate type: adjectival SLP, adjectival ILP, and nominal predicates. It was expected that NA ES with adjectival SLP would yield the best ratings of the three conditions, followed by ES with adjectival ILP and ES with nominal predicates. As expected, the findings showed that the NA ES with adjectival SLP obtained the higher ratings, whereas those with adjectival ILP and nominal predicates obtained the very lowest ratings. These findings revealed that adjectival SLPs are more acceptable in the coda position of NA ES, whereas adjectival ILPs and nominal predicates are unacceptable in this position. This empirical study established a connection between the conclusions confirmed in the theoretical literature and the actual manifestations of the PR in the structure of ES.

The continuous simile construction “ ru A si B ” is a distinctive phenomenon in Chinese that has not been previously studied. This article provides a detailed analysis of the formation of its form-meaning pairing from the perspective of Conceptual Integration Theory. “ Ru A si B ” is identified as a polysemous construction with multiple origins. This study proposes four diachronic integration pathways: “ X ru A + Y si B → ru A si B ”, “ ru AB xiangsi/si → ru A si B ”, “ rusi + AB → ru A si B ”, and “ ru + si A si B → ru A si B ”. The validity and feasibility of these integrations are substantiated through in-depth analysis of linguistically derivative evidence from both diachronic and synchronic evolutionary processes, supported by relevant statistical data and phonetic experiments. This methodology offers a novel avenue for future research in diachronic construction grammar. Beyond reanalysis and analogy, this article innovatively proposes several new mechanisms characteristic of the Chinese language, such as prosodic rhythm, tonal patterns (平仄), structural symmetry, and the implicit adhesion resulting from the separation of disyllabic words. These contributions are of significant importance for enriching and expanding the theory and methodology of constructionalization.