Volume 51, Issue 1 -

This paper deals with the linguistic means used to express predicative possession in the languages of the Circum-Baltic area. The domain of possession is considered here as a prototypically organized domain, where the prototype is the notion of ownership. It is shown that most languages of the area do not provide evidence of splits in their possession systems: rather, they extend the scope of use of their ownership constructions to include all other non-prototypical possessive notions. The linguistic expression of notions that belong to domains neighboring possession, namely experience, location and attribution, is also analyzed. The results show that these notions are rarely coded by means of possessive constructions: exceptions are explained by invoking semantic causes as well as language contact. A comparison of the functions fulfilled by “have”-verbs in the Indo-European languages of the area and by adessive constructions in the Finnic languages is provided, too, and their different scopes of use are explained with reference to their diachronic development and to processes of areal convergence.

This article argues against Neeleman et al.’s (2009) claim that in Russian focus is unitary and uniformly clause-final. First, it is pointed out that the account presented in Neeleman et al.’s study suffers from a number of conceptual shortcomings; among them are the lack of a structural basis of the postulated “right periphery focus” or the indeterminate status of the notion of “clause-finality”. Based on a larger set of data from Russian and Polish, it is then argued that neither the facts regarding the scope of quantifiers nor the available options of split scrambling allow a clause-final focus hypothesis to be sustained. More evidence against this position is provided from focus fronting of phrasal heads and instances of multiple and complex focus. The hypothesis that the factor inducing alleged focus fronting is the presence of contrast is, in turn, confronted with cases of ex situ information focus and in situ contrastive focus. In a wider perspective, the paper is critical of both a cartographic approach and a “focus-final” hypothesis. It is therefore suggested that an alternative is needed to both approaches, and a tentative preview for such a preview is given in the concluding section.

Drawing upon a corpus of five high-profile contemporary Anglo-American trials, this study explores and elucidates, qualitatively and quantitatively, the process of evaluative stancetaking in courtroom opening statements. In particular, the study examines such stance resources as self-mention, hedges, boosters, and attitude markers. The findings reveal that evaluative stance expressions constitute an integral part of the opening statements of both the prosecution and defense lawyers, exhibiting similar frequency patterns. Of these resources, devices that signal commitment or lack thereof (i. e., boosters and hedges) appear to occur frequently and outnumber explicit attitude markers, which occur least frequently. It is through these devices that lawyers are able to subtly bypass the legal constraints that prohibit explicit display of personal opinions and comments on the evidence.

The paper focuses on the pace of grammaticalization in (a number of varieties of) Piedmontese, a northwestern Italo-Romance language (which includes a regional koiné and several dialectal varieties), and compares it to the geographically closest languages conventionally discussed in the literature on the Romance grammaticalization cline (RGC): French and Italian. I examine the speed of grammaticalization in Piedmontese with respect to four grammatical domains previously analyzed for national languages in the literature on RGC, namely perfective auxiliaries, indefinite articles, demonstratives, and negation. The data show that Piedmontese varieties are on a par with, or even slightly ahead of, French along the Romance grammaticalization cline. While helping to explain why some languages appear to be more grammaticalized than others within the same genealogical family, these findings contribute to advancing our understanding of the role of language-external factors in the grammaticalization process: contact with other languages and the strength of social ties among speakers appear to be more important in favoring grammaticalization than early urbanization or the size of the speaker community.

In several studies on sound change, it has been suggested that change is not possible without allophonic variation; indeed, it appears to be the triggering factor in phonetic evolution. This paper examines the process of yeísmo in Spanish, which is presented in recent research as a change in progress (see Moreno Fernández 2005). Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the lateral palatal /ʎ/ has been gradually merging with the non-lateral palatal approximant /j/, traditionally considered a fricative consonant in spite of its formantic structure. Nevertheless, in this process there is not a real dichotomy between a lateral and an approximant consonant. Instead, there is an array of coexisting allophones of /ʎ/ ([ʎ], [j], [ʒ] or [ɟ͡j] are a few examples). The paper will thus focus on the wide variation in the phonetic representation of /ʎ/ and how it is affecting the Spanish sound system. This will be investigated through experimental means (analyzing speech acoustically) and through the collection of data for different dialects, which will give us information about (i) the existence of intra and inter-speaker variation and (ii) the way this variation functions. The results point to a restructuring of the palatal system of Spanish, at least in some parts of its linguistic territory, which seems to prove that the merger process is still progressing.

This article presents the results of a corpus study of the Dutch psychological verbs ergeren ‘to annoy’, interesseren ‘to interest’, storen ‘to disturb’, and verbazen ‘to amaze’. These verbs exhibit a syntactic alternation between their seemingly synonymous transitive and reflexive argument constructions, as in Elizabeth ergert John vs. John ergert zich aan Elizabeth (both: ‘Elizabeth annoys John’). On the basis of current theoretical insights, four hypotheses are formulated predicting the language user’s preferred argument construction. It is argued that the popular agentivity hypothesis, as proposed in studies by, for instance, Dowty, Langacker, and Zaenen, should be broken up into the token- and type-level agentivity hypotheses. Both agentivity hypotheses come with different theoretical entailments, and make distinct predictions about the quantitative data. These data confirm the token-level agentivity hypothesis, while not doing the same for the type-level agentivity hypothesis. Additionally, it is found that stimuli and experiencers that are heavier in terms of informational weight both prompt the use of the reflexive construction, and that the individual preferences of the verbs could not be predicted based on their historical semantic development.

The present case study tests the frequency of four clusters of features of computer-mediated communication (CMC) in a written chat corpus of more than two million words, produced by Flemish adolescents living in northern Belgium. The main focus is on the correlation between the occurrence of these features and the social variables gender and age, on the one hand, and the impact of the CMC-medium, on the other. For the latter parameter, a distinction is made between asynchronous and synchronous real time conversation. While gender has received ample attention in recent research on chat and texting practices, the findings qualify the impact of this social variable, and point to age and medium as two significant determinants of the use of typical CMC-features. Finally, the results call for a systematic distinction between expressive and playful vs. more strictly functional or economical features, since precisely that distinction enhances our understanding of the attested gender and age patterns.