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Adversative connectives such as alternatively , conversely , besides and while have lexical sources belonging to the spatial-temporal dimension. Over time, they develop different contrastive values such as opposition, correction and counterexpectation. In this paper, I analyze the semantic change of the two Italian adversative connectives anzi ‘or better/rather/on the contrary’ and invece ‘instead’, from their original temporal and spatial meanings to their contemporary meanings of oppositive, corrective and counterexpectative contrast. Focusing on these two case studies, my main goal is to identify tendencies in semantic change, and particularly, the links between the domain of spatial-temporal relations and that of contrast relations. In order to do so, the factors intervening in the development of anzi and invece are examined, with particular attention to the inferential mechanisms at work. The results of the analysis show that pragmatic context as well as lexical origins play a crucial role in the rise of different contrastive values.

This paper presents a corpus-based analysis of child-directed speech during Flemish family dinner table interactions. Specifically, we study parents’ style-shifts, that is, their alternation between Standard Dutch and Colloquial Belgian Dutch, a non-standard supraregional variant of Dutch, when interacting with their children. By integrating insights and methods from variationist and interactional sociolinguistics, we pay attention not only to macro-social categories (such as the age of the children), but also to the micro-social and pragmatic context (e. g. frames) of the style-shifts. The fact that this study focuses on a single case-study is a consequence of opting for this combination of course-grained quantitative analyses and fine-grained qualitative analyses. We rely on detailed transcriptions of three hours of recordings for one Flemish household with four children (age nine months, and four, five and seven years old). Our results reveal significant variation in the style-shifts of the mother (age 35) and the father (age 39) with respect to the four children. These results were interpreted against the background of comments made by the parents during a sociolinguistic interview that followed the recordings. Generally, our analyses allow us to provide a nuanced insight into the social meaning of the two language layers (Standard Dutch and Colloquial Belgian Dutch) as they are distributed across the speakers and situations in this family, thus revealing a link between the attested patterns of child-directed speech and the acquisition of sociolinguistic norms.

Blocking, as traditionally defined, refers to a situation where the mere presence of a form or pattern in language preempts the application of another form or pattern. Recent studies on blocking, especially in derivational morphology, have provided many examples which seriously cast doubt on the assumed discreteness of the notion. Using data from sizeable corpora, this paper seeks to address this issue in inflectional morphology. Within that domain, it is illustrated that – throughout time – there may have been an alternation between competing morphological patterns. In particular, pluralization by suffixation and transfixation, may have alternated in assuming the role of a blocker. On the basis of frequency data of inflectional classes in New Persian, it is shown that whenever there is an increase in the usage of either of these two strategies, there is also a decrease in application of the other. This alternation follows a neat and systematic pattern strongly suggesting that transfixation and suffixation have relative blocking effects on each other. It can therefore be concluded that there is essentially no need for one form, or a number of forms, to be eliminated in favor of a more productive one. In fact, competing forms can co-exist, decline and flourish alternatively, and thrive for centuries.

The do-so -diagnostic has been employed for decades to motivate two central aspects of constituency-based theories of syntax: the binary subject–predicate division of the clause (S→NP VP) and the layered analysis of VPs in general. Scrutiny of the diagnostic reveals that it actually supports neither of these two central aspects of most constituency grammars. This manuscript demonstrates that the distribution of the pro-verb do so can be accurately characterized in terms of the catena . The catena is a unit of syntactic analysis associated with dependency grammar (DG). It is a more inclusive and versatile unit than the constituency grammar constituent and it is therefore better suited than the constituent to serve as the fundamental unit of syntactic analysis. In the end, the catena-based account of do so delivers support for the flat analysis of (non-finite) VPs.

Azhee (of the Tibeto-Burman family, spoken in China) uses differential subject marking (DSM) conditioned by animacy and the potential ambiguity of subject and object. It is shown that the Azhee differential subject marker is a highly syncretic case marker, which derived from a source case, and developed into a contrastive focus marker. DSM is presented as the diachronic source of focus, rather than the other way around. In a range of publications, topic and focus have been identified to be associate functions of case markers. Furthermore, the position of Azhee is described in a typology of differential case marking motivated by the principles of markedness, faithfulness and economy.

This paper aims to analyze the interaction between prefixes, verbs, and abstract argument structure constructions, using as a testing ground the locative alternation. It has been assumed that in order to participate in the locative alternation, a verb must specify a manner of motion from which a change of state can be obtained (see, for instance, Steven Pinker’s Learnability and cognition , 1989). However, this generalization does not take into account the argument structure effects involved in verbal prefixation in Slavic where some change-of-location verbs can appear in the change-of-state variant, when headed by a resultative prefix. In Olbishevska’s generative-derivational analysis of the locative alternation in Russian, it is claimed that resultative prefixes are derivational morphemes subcategorizing for a location argument. While I agree that it is the resultative prefix that makes the alternation possible, I propose that it is not the case that a new verb with a different argument structure is derived by means of prefixation, but rather that it is the verb that integrates into the prefixed change-of-state variant. I analyze the change-of-state variant in the spirit of Goldberg’s Construction Grammar and Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar approach and show that resultative prefixes are not abstract syntactic features, but rather that each prefixed change-of-state construction is based on a specific configuration between the locatum and the location. I demonstrate that the interaction between resultative prefixes, alternating verbs, and the more abstract change-of-state variant is driven by semantic coherence.

This study investigates a special variety of rhetorical questions in colloquial Jordanian Arabic, namely proverbial rhetorical questions: these are rhetorical questions used as proverbs with metaphorical content. Eighty-one instances of PRQs, ethnographically observed in everyday, naturally occurring conversations, were analyzed and their discursive role examined. It was found that PRQs are exploited by the interactants to serve a variety of pragmatic functions, namely invoking common ground in order to convey an opposite point of view, performing ritual impoliteness, performing face-enhancing and face-aggravating acts, evoking humor, and communicating irony. A common thread of these functions is the socioculturally shared presuppositions that underlie these formulaic PRQs and the role that metaphor plays in shaping and communicating messages in social interaction.

This article examines the use of subjective and objective nouns and noun phrases in discourse using the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus . It expands upon an earlier study, where I showed that subjective adjectival premodifiers are typically used with the indefinite article in corpus data (e. g. an interesting conclusion ), and that further modification (e. g. a very interesting conclusion ) results in an even higher likelihood of indefinite marking (Vartiainen 2013, Subjectivity, indefiniteness and semantic change. English Language and Linguistics 17(1). 157–179). In this paper, I focus on three research questions: (i) does the correlation between subjective meaning and indefinite marking also obtain when demonstrative and possessive determiners are included in the data, (ii) does the correlation depend on adjectival modification, or are subjective nouns also used more often in indefinite structures, (iii) are there qualitative differences (in terms of syntactic roles) between the use of indefinite subjective and objective NPs?

This study takes a semantic approach to Nichols’ influential locus of marking typology, as applied to the possessive noun phrase. In this approach, a careful distinction is made between two semantic types of dependency relations: those between inherently relational nouns and their argument possessors and those between inherently non-relational nouns and their modifier possessors. I furthermore propose an alternative analysis of possessive person markers in terms of locus, by distinguishing referential markers from agreement markers, depending on the distribution of grammatical feature information in the possessive NPs of individual languages. On the basis of a 37-language sample, I show that locus of marking follows two tendencies: marking the possessum in alienable possession implies marking the possessum in inalienable possession, and marking the possessor in inalienable possession implies marking the possessor in alienable possession. Moreover, I show that if inalienable person markers are referential, alienable person markers are referential as well. These tendencies reflect a greater need of alienable (modifier) possessors for expressive means of coding as compared to inalienable (argument) possessors. On a more general level, I argue against the traditional opposition between head-marking languages and dependent-marking languages, showing that, from a semantic perspective, dependent-marking may also occur on heads.