Volume 41, Issue 1-2

This paper applies Ariel's (1990) Accessibility Theory to two French anaphors: il and celui-ci . Its aim is to test the hypothesis that pronouns mark a higher degree of accessibility to their antecedents than demonstratives. The four factors, namely distance, saliency, unity and competition, which, according to Accessibility Theory, play a role in the relative accessibility of referents are examined in a newspaper corpus. The results of the analysis partly challenge the claims made by Ariel, as only two parameters, saliency and competition, seem to have an impact on the choice between il and celui-ci .

This paper is an empirical investigation of the use of hesitation phenomena, specifically filled pauses ( ums and ers ), automatisms ( sort of, at the end of the day ), repetitions and reformulations, in both the mother tongue (L1) and second language (L2) of highly proficient adult bilingual speakers (English and German). Its purpose is to ascertain: i) whether speakers who are highly proficient in L2 produce an approximately similar amount of hesitation phenomena in both languages; and ii) whether the production of such elements (in both languages) is linked to working memory capacity. Results show that: i) despite high proficiency, speakers produced a higher overall rate of hesitation phenomena in their L2, indicating that there was an additional cognitive load imposed by working in L2; and ii) in each language there was an underlying negative relationship between memory capacity and the production of hesitation phenomena, implying that speakers with lower memory ability rely more heavily on such time-buying devices. Furthermore, it was shown that the individual types of hesitation phenomena produced by speakers in their L1 were carried over into their L2, which suggests that a speaker's planning behaviour is mirrored in both languages.

This article examines the semantic factors motivating the use of directional (‘to’) local cases in the morphological marking of the locative argument of the verb jäädä ‘remain’ in Finnish. It is argued that this use of the directional cases is motivated by the dynamic conceptualization of an apparently static situation. In this dynamic conceptualization, the actual course of events where the entity remains in a location is contrasted with a projected course of events whereby the entity leaves the location. The event of ‘remaining’ thus constitutes a change from the projected course of events into the actual one, and it is this dynamic meaning that motivates the directional case marking. The paper also addresses the more theoretical question of whether conceptualization can motivate the use of grammatical markers with other Finnish verbs.

In typological and contrastive investigations, constructions that designate similar categories of meaning in different languages are often assigned to the same grammatical category. In order for a linguistic investigation to be truly comparative, however, it is not enough for the constructions that are being compared to be mere translation equivalents: they must be identifiable as genuine grammatical constructions in the languages in question. This problem becomes particularly acute with periphrastic constructions, as on formal grounds they cannot always be easily distinguished from free syntactic combinations. This article seeks to define periphrastic constructions on the basis of a renewed interpretation of Saussure's (1916) theory of the linguistic sign. It is argued that in order for periphrastic grammatical constructions to constitute linguistic signs in their own right they must meet the same criteria as lexemes or morphemes, i.e. they must be combinations of a specific linguistic content with specific formal characteristics. This definition is applied to several constructions in the Germanic languages that have been treated as progressives in the literature; the empirical evidence shows that the status of some of them as linguistic signs, and hence as genuine grammatical constructions, is questionable.

This paper argues that in comitative constructions, two Determiner Phrases (DPs) and the word with form a complex nominal [DP 1 with DP 2 ] in their base-positions. Moreover, it establishes a distinction between two types of comitative constructions: symmetrical and asymmetrical. Unlike symmetrical comitatives, DP 2 in asymmetrical comitatives denotes an appurtenance of the referent of DP 1 . Other differences between the two types are that symmetrical comitatives always contain a plural feature and that in asymmetrical comitatives the cluster [ with DP 2 ] is optional and the cluster [DP 1 with DP 2 ] may occur in preverbal subject positions and A-bar positions. My proposal is that in symmetrical comitatives the word with has features of [D, Plural, Case assigning], and takes DP 2 as its complement and DP 1 as its Specifier. In asymmetrical comitatives, by contrast, the word with is a regular preposition and the cluster [ with DP 2 ] is a Prepositional Phrase and an adjunct to DP 1 . Finally, the paper also argues against an extraposition analysis of discontinuous surface word orders in comitative constructions.

Marcella Bertuccelli Papi, ed . 2005. Studies in the semantics of lexical combinatory patterns . Pisa: Edizioni Plus – Pisa University Press. Pp. 540. ISBN 8884922364. (C ristiano B roccias ) Mirjam Fried & Hans C. Boas, eds . 2006. Grammatical constructions. Back to the roots . (Constructional Approaches to Language 4). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ISBN 9027218242. (A lexander B ergs ) Igor Mel'čuk . 2006. Aspects of the theory of morphology , ed. by David Beck. (Trends in Linguistics – Studies and monographs 146). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. xvi + 616. ISBN 9783110177114. (S alvador V alera ) Frederick J. Newmeyer . 2005. Possible and probable languages. A generative perspective on linguistic typology (Oxford Linguistics). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. x + 278. ISBN 0199274339 (hb); 0199274347 (pb). (E lly van G elderen ) Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez & M. Sandra Peña Cervel, eds . 2005. Cognitive Linguistics. Internal dynamics and interdisciplinary interaction . (Cognitive Linguistics Research 32). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. x + 432. ISBN 9783110186178. (M ario B rdar )

The 39th Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea (SLE) took place in Bremen, Germany, from 30 August to 2 September 2006. The meeting, whose central theme was “Relativism and universalism in linguistics”, was organized by Thomas Stolz and his colleagues from the Department of Linguistics and the Institute of General and Applied Linguistics (IAAS) of the University of Bremen. The conference attracted quite a number of participants from a variety of European and non-European countries, who presented a total of over 170 papers during the three and a half conference days.

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