Volume 42, Issue 3-4

This paper deals with grammaticalization and subjectification processes affecting adjectives in the English noun phrase (henceforth NP). It investigates Adamson's (2000) claim that grammaticalization in the NP is accompanied by movement of the grammaticalizing adjective to more leftward positions in the premodifying string. I will argue that this type of movement is implied in the concepts of grammaticalization (Traugott 1989, 1995) and subjectification (Langacker 1990, 1998, 1999) as they apply to the NP. I will then illustrate my argument with a semantic analysis of six adjectives of difference, different, distinct, divers(e), several, sundry and various , whose diachronic development is established on the basis of six corpus studies.

German Glide Formation converts /i/ to [j] before vowels, e.g. ‘Spain’, but the rule is consistently blocked in neologisms containing the suffix – esk , e.g. hippiesk [hrpiɛsk] / *[hrpjɛsk]. It is argued below that the underapplication of Glide Formation in such examples follows from a requirement that the stem in a derived word must be identical to the unaffixed base. The base in such examples will be shown to be a free-standing morpheme as opposed to a bound root. The analysis proposed will be shown to be supported in additional examples in which Glide Formation is blocked from applying to the [i] preceding the suffix – aner , but only if the suffix follows a free-standing morpheme, e.g. ‘adherent of Schumi (Michael Schumacher)’.

An earlier paper, to which some authors of the present paper have contributed (Brown et al. 2008), describes a method for automating language classification based on the 100-item referent list of Swadesh (1955). Here we discuss a refinement of the method, involving calculation of relative stabilities of list items and reduction of the list to a shorter one by eliminating least stable items. The result is a 40-item referent list. The method for determining stabilities is explained, as well as a method for comparing the classificatory performance of different-sized reduced lists with that of the full 100-item list. A statistical investigation of the relationship of lexical similarity of languages to their geographical proximity is presented. Finally, we test the possibility that information involving typological features of languages can be combined with lexical data to enhance classificatory accuracy.

This paper presents an outline of the Lexical Constructional Model , a meaning construction model that integrates insights from functional models of language (especially, Role and Reference Grammar) and Cognitive Linguistics (especially, Goldberg's Construction Grammar and Lakoff's Cognitive Semantics). The initial claim is that a theory of semantic interpretation should be constructed on the basis of two representational mechanisms, lexical and constructional templates, and two basic cognitive operations, subsumption and conceptual cueing, that specify in what ways meaning representations from different levels may interact. It is further shown that both lexical-constructional subsumption and purely constructional subsumption –at any stage of the meaning construction process– is regulated by an inventory of both internal and external constraints. Internal constraints involve the semantic units encoded in a lexical or a constructional template, while external constraints result from the possibility or impossibility of performing high-level metaphoric and/or metonymic operations on the items involved in the subsumption or cueing processes.

The notion of a missing or understood subject of infinitive and other non-finite clauses has been the topic of a vast enterprise of syntactic research for more than thirty years. It has also increasingly become the focus for discussion in semantic domains, with the tendency to determine control relations by the lexical nature of the verbs within their scope. The present study addresses the topic from a functionalist, grammaticalisation perspective, examining some examples from Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) in which subject Control relations appear to be absent. Within such enquiry, it is questioned what implications such examples may have for definitions of subject Control under a grammaticalisation account, and the relation of subject Control to subject selection in the complement. It is hypothesised that the presence of subject Control implies that the controlled subject must be selected by the complement verb and that the subject selection properties of the complement verb are determined by the level of grammaticalisation of the main verb. Furthermore, the presence of topic-prominent, rather than subject-prominent sentence structure in CSE underlies the contact influence most likely to contribute to the apparently reduced semantic relations holding between the verb and subject for speakers of that dialect.