Volume 49, Issue 2 -

The concept of motion is present in all the world’s languages. However, the ways in which speakers of different languages codify motion do not seem to be so universal. Languages offer different types of structures to express motion, and speakers pay attention to different elements within the motion event. The goal of this paper is to examine in great detail how motion events are described and expressed in Basque oral and written narratives. This study focuses on three main areas: motion verbs, elaboration of Manner and elaboration of Path. Although Basque can be classified in Talmy’s terms as a verb-framed language, it is argued that it is not a prototypical example of this group with respect to the lexicalisation of Path. Unlike other verb-framed languages, the description of Path in Basque motion events is very frequent and detailed, not only in situations when it adds new information, but also in pleonastic cases. This characteristic seems to be related to Basque’s rich lexical resources for motion and space, as well as to its high tolerance for verb omission. On the basis of these data, the scope of Talmy’s binary typology is questioned. It is suggested that the verb- and satellite-framed language typology should be revised in order to account for these intra-typological differences.

This article investigates a phenomenon which, though marginal, is important to linguistic theory: the use of feminine pronouns with weather verbs in contemporary colloquial English (e.g. She’s snowing pretty good ). Such uses, mentioned in a few studies only, with examples mostly drawn from fiction, have never been analysed in detail, despite a wide literature on the use of he/she for inanimate reference. The aim of the study is first to get a better understanding of the phenomenon, based on non-fictional utterances. It is shown that the data must be divided into two subsets: cases of anaphora, in which she signals personification, and less referential uses, in which the feminine pronoun emphasizes emotional involvement. This latter set is particularly important for gender research: it confirms that this emotional value of the feminine pronoun, which has been noted for inanimate reference, exists even when there is no clearly identifiable referent. The article then looks into the motivations behind the use of animate pronouns with weather verbs, taking into account the long-standing debate over the status of it in the same contexts in more formal registers. It proposes that in a number of cases in which she does not have a textual antecedent, the pronoun does not have an actual referent, but that owing to three converging factors, a slight degree of referentiality is projected on it.

This paper discusses the problem of degrammaticalization, that is, the exceptions to the unidirectionality of grammaticalization. After analyzing the criteria that allow us to distinguish between various instances of counter-directional change, two principles underlying degrammaticalization are identified; one is related to the type of language and the other to the type of target structures in which degrammaticalization occurs. Firstly, the targets of degrammaticalization are usually closed-class parts of speech with an abstract semantic component. Secondly, the languages in which counter-directional grammatical changes occur turn out to be deprived of an elaborate fusional morphology. These findings may also have an impact on the theoretical conception of grammaticalization, some of whose definitional properties are discussed. The paper ends with a discussion of a more controversial point, namely, counter-directional changes by folk etymology rather than by etymology proper.

This paper examines the complex interactions between pharyngeals and vowel quality in Sephardic Modern Hebrew. Phonetically similar to low vowels, gutturals in general and pharyngeals in particular tend to trigger vowel lowering and epenthesis of low vowels. Sephardic Modern Hebrew exhibits multiple strategies in order to avoid the proximity of non-low vowels to pharyngeals. The language processes take into account several factors, including the syllabic position of the pharyngeal (onset or coda), prosody (stress) and lexical category (nouns vs. verbs).

The goal of this paper is to discuss phonotactic constraints that govern the formation of word-initial consonant clusters in two different languages, German and Polish, and to establish a general procedure for a rank-ordering of clusters. The description of clusters is based on corpus and dictionary data. We define several dimensions in cluster description, namely (i) complexity of clusters, (ii) place of articulation, (iii) manner of articulation and (iv) voicing of segments, for which a total of 15 parameters is derived, each expressing a structural preference for cluster formation true to various degrees in the two languages. These preferences can be seen in part as extensions of the frequently used measure of sonority based mainly on manner of articulation features, and can be considered to provide a more detailed description of clusters than one based on sonority. In addition, a cluster analysis for the two sets of clusters lends support to the conclusions on the fundamental difference between Polish and German word-initial phonotactics. For each cluster, values obtained for every parameter are summed up to calculate an empirically justified rank ordering of the clusters in both languages.

This study investigates formal and functional variation in analytic causatives (ACs) in eighteen European languages from the Indo-European and Uralic language families. Employing the comparative concept approach, the paper presents a probabilistic semantic map of the main functions of ACs on the basis of a multilingual parallel corpus of film subtitles. This method enables us to detect common dimensions of semantic variation in ACs and to pinpoint cross-linguistic commonalities in the form–meaning mapping. The paper also presents three case studies, which test previous hypotheses about the grammaticalization clines in Romance and Germanic and facts of language contact between German and Slavic languages. The role of language contact is further explored in quantitative analyses that compare how the languages “carve up” the semantic space of causation. The results of this comparison suggest that frequently occurring semantically vague ACs may be regarded as a feature of Standard Average European.

This study reports on the perception and production of Standard Dutch and Standard British English vowels by speakers of two regional varieties of Belgian Dutch (East Flemish and Brabantine) which differ in their vowel realizations. Twenty-four native speakers of Dutch performed two picture-naming tasks and two vowel categorization tasks, in which they heard Standard Dutch or English vowels and were asked to map these onto orthographic representations of Dutch vowels. The results of the Dutch production and categorization tasks revealed that the participants’ L1 regional variety importantly influenced their production and especially perception of vowels in the standard variety of their L1. The two groups also differed in how they assimilated non-native English vowels to native vowel categories, but no major differences could be observed in their productions of non-native vowels. The study therefore only partly confirms earlier studies showing that L1 regional variation may have an influence on the acquisition of non-native language varieties.