Volume 47, Issue 2

This article discusses the morphologically complex phenomenon of syncretism in its relation to stem patterns, overabundance and overdifferentiation, by describing and analyzing past and ongoing changes in Maltese nominal paradigms. Pathways of diachronic change leading to nominal paradigms in Present-day Maltese are put forward. It will be shown that the canonical/non-canonical paradigmatic classification cannot be simply reduced to a binary parameter. Rather, canonical or non-canonical behaviour can refer to the stem form, word form, affixes or other potential units in a given inflectional paradigm, separately. On such an account, the same paradigm may have different facets, and can be canonical on one parameter but non-canonical on others. A parallel claim will be made for overdifferentiated vs. non-overdifferentiated sets of lexemes. Such lexemes cannot be exclusively considered as belonging to the overdifferentiated or non-overdifferentiated set. As will be shown from the body-parts set of data in Maltese, a lexeme may have split membership, and may belong within both an overdifferentiated and a non-overdifferentiated class of lexemes depending on the inflectional paradigm employed.

The No Blur Principle (NBP) or Vocabulary Clarity (VC) approach (Carstairs- McCarthy 1994, 2010) is a possible restriction on the behaviour of inflectional affixes (grammatical units), originally motivated by an analogy with words (lexical units). The restriction is grounded in synonymy avoidance, in the observation that “Every two forms contrast in meaning” (Clark 1993) and in behaviour in multivocabular situations, where speakers have more than one vocabulary although they have only one grammar (e.g. Dyirbal, Javanese). There have not been many suggestions for restrictions on the behaviour of affixes in the morphological literature, so the approach deserves attention. In this article, the NBP or VC-approach is applied to Faroese noun declensions. While these Faroese data seem problematic at first, it is argued that they can be perfectly accommodated within the NBP/ VC-aproach.

The grammatical status of final particles in spoken English, such as then , though , anyway , and but , is undefined, as the various labels used in the literature (e.g. connectors , linking adverbials , conjuncts ) show. This indeterminacy derives from the functional diversity of these particles. They not only link units of (spoken) discourse, but may also create a link between a discourse unit and an implied proposition; they are used to express subjective meanings and to modify illocutionary force. As such particles represent a borderline case between grammar and pragmatics, they invite discussion of the usefulness of a strict grammar-pragmatics divide and suggest a conception of grammar that goes beyond the level of “well-formed” sentences. A distinction will be made between “microgrammar”, which refers to sentence-internal strucural relations, and “macrogrammar”, referring to structural relations beyond isolated sentences. Final particles are analyzed as grammatical elements on the macrogrammatical level.

This article presents an empirical evaluation of Martin Ehala’s (2007) mathematical model of ethnolinguistic vitality (EV). The model is here applied to assess the vitality of Taiwan’s native Bensheng group (native Taiwanese speakers of Southern Min) by means of a comparison with the local Waisheng ethnolinguistic group (Mainland Chinese speakers of Mandarin). Traditionally, the EV-model measures the attitudes toward two distinct groups and their languages and cultures. In this article, we use the formula to deal with Taiwan’s cultural complexity by including bilingual and hybrid identities into the EV-model. After an overview of the basic principles of the mathematical model and some essential facts about the Southern Min language, we test and discuss the results from 298 written questionnaires offered in Taipei and Kaohsiung. We then evaluate the workability of the EV instruments as well as the vitality of the Southern Min speakers and their language in Taiwan as indicated through EV results. The article concludes with suggestions for further elaboration of the model.

It is widely acknowledged in the literature that the common function of the modifier in nominal compounds is the classifying function. Classifying modifiers specify what kind of entity is being denoted by the head noun, that is, they specify subkinds; e.g. apple juice ‘a kind of juice made from apples’. While the classifying function can certainly be regarded as the default function of lexical modification, lexical modifiers in nominal compounds may also have functions other than classification. Drawing on functional types of noun phrase modification from the typological literature, the article discusses lexical modifiers in German nominal compounds with an attitudinal or an identifying function, and the conditions under which they arise.

Comparing ( ’t ) schijnt to ( zo ) schijnt het (lit. ‘so seems it’), the parenthetical use of the verb schijnen ‘seem’, we argue that ( ’t ) schijnt is best analysed as an evidential particle. Although both parenthetical and particle uses of schijnen have been subject to particulization, viz. grammaticalization towards particlehood, this grammaticalization path is bifurcated; while ( ’t ) schijnt is best accounted for by the matrix clause hypothesis, ( zo ) schijnt het fits the parataxis hypothesis and is less grammaticalized, not having reached particle status yet. The possible further grammaticalization of ( zo ) schijnt het into a more particle-like element is discussed on the basis of recent developments in Netherlandic Dutch, suggesting that distinct grammaticalization paths may lead to similar outcomes. This study calls attention to the need to allow for a certain flexibility of categories when considering cases of grammaticalization such as those affecting schijnen , bearing in mind that each individual instance of ( ’t ) schijnt or ( zo ) schijnt het can be more or less central to the idealized categories of matrix clause, parenthetical or particle.

The article presents a formal syntactic study of the derivation of the construction involving Subject Control across an Object (SCaO). In an initial part, a critical review is presented of recent minimalist attempts at accounting for the SCaO phenomenon, both from the Agree-based and Movement-based perspectives. As each of these accounts faces the problem of undoing the effect of Chomsky’s (1995) Minimal Link Condition, the article explores the strategies employed by them. These involve Richards’s (1998) Principle of Minimal Compliance, encapsulation of the nominal object within a silent PP, late merge of the nominal object, and reversing the order of the complements of the promise -type verb in the base. Eventually, a solution based on smuggling is proposed, whereby at a certain stage of the derivation a larger container phrase is moved around the intervener and subsequently a smaller sub-constituent is launched from within it. Among the syntactocentric solutions to the problem at hand, the new smuggling alternative appears to avoid, at a relatively low price, the empirical and conceptual pitfalls which the other accounts have not been able to steer clear of.