Volume 51, Issue 3 -

Vocabular Clarity is a proposed restriction on the behaviour of inflectional classes and affixes grounded in the idea of synonymy avoidance. The proponents of Vocabular Clarity claim that it holds true for Icelandic and Faroese nominal inflections. In this article, data from these languages is examined and difficulties which have not been previously addressed are pointed out. It is argued that the Vocabular Clarity approach is somewhat vaguely specified. In particular, it needs a clear operational method for distinguishing affixes and stem allomorphy. Without this, it remains uncertain whether it makes any testable predictions. The paper shows that while the theory is intuitively appealing, it is – even under fairly generous assumptions – difficult to reconcile with the insular Scandinavian data.

This paper investigates the contrast between two kinds of clausal complements in the shell noun construction in Portuguese, namely finite clause complements introduced by the conjunction que ‘that’, as in a ideia de que éramos vigiados ‘the idea that we were being watched’, and inflected infinitive complements, as in a idéia de tomarem chá ‘the idea (for them) to have tea’. The aim is to reveal which factors motivate the choice of either the finite complement or the inflected infinitive construction. Three successively more detailed quantitative corpus analyses were carried out: a collostructional analysis, a distinctive collexeme analysis, and a logistic regression analysis. The results show significant differences in the constructional preferences for most nouns, but also reveal 13 nouns that frequently combine with the two complement clause constructions. With these 13 nouns, it was found that a higher degree of complement clause autonomy, complexity, and verbality favored the use of the finite clause alternative.

In the structuralist view, the distinction between scalar and complementary adjectival antonyms plays an important role in definitions and classifications of antonyms. Scalar adjectival antonyms are gradable and can be combined with degree modifiers ( very cold, rather long ), whereas complementary adjectival antonyms are mutually exclusive and can only be used with totality modifiers ( completely dead, absolutely wrong ). This theoretical classification, which is mostly based on researchers’ intuitions, can be complemented if we take a corpus-based approach to the study of antonyms and examine actual language data. Studies in different languages have found that antonyms perform various discourse functions in corpora of both spoken and written language. The aim of this study is to examine the question whether the categorization into scalar and complementary adjectival antonyms is reflected in actual usage in texts. The analysis is based on examples retrieved from the largest electronic corpus of Serbian; it includes twelve pairs of adjectival antonyms, occurring in a total of 5,296 sentences. The conclusion questions the necessity of making theoretical distinctions based on gradability, as examples from real language use show that adjectival antonyms are used similarly in written texts, irrespective of the property of gradability.

The present paper explores the positional (and syntactic) behavior of determiners in Luwian, a very archaic article-free Indo-European Anatolian language which relied on a limited set of demonstratives, as well as in some specific constructions of Ancient Greek, an Indo-European language with definite articles and with a relatively “free” word order. Its aim is to highlight the structural differences and analogies between these languages. The present contribution will employ a framework-independent approach in investigating aspects of the combinatory constraints of determiners and determiner phrases. It will interpret these constraints as syntactic filters that regulate the interaction between syntax and information flow. The results will highlight how this model of interpretation can be applied even to languages that resort to different strategies to encode definiteness.

Studies on post-apartheid South Africa have revealed the persistence of important social challenges in this country. From a sociolinguistic viewpoint, the ethnic diversity and the co-existence of the eleven official languages seem to play an important role in the identity formation of South Africans and the development of intergroup relations. Against the background of key socio-historical events, this article investigates the situation of young white Afrikaans South Africans. It is hypothesized that individuals belonging to this particular ethno-linguistic group represent a case of liminality or liminal identity. Data from two recent research projects on social categorization and language preferences (2012–2014) together with the results of an ongoing study on the role of social distance in the South African context (2014–present) are used to illustrate the current social situation of the young white Afrikaans group and analyse implications for its identity.

This paper presents data from two experiments on the perception of phrase-medial word-initial vowels in Polish. Previous research has suggested that Polish resembles German in its resistance to the types of sandhi linking processes found in English or French. In production, glottalization frequently intervenes to block such processes involving vowel-initial words. In the listening tests described here, glottalization had an impact on response time only in the word monitoring task, in which other top-down factors may have played a role. It is therefore suggested Polish listeners have only minimal perceptual sensitivity to glottalization, a feature that is prevalent in production. This largely negative result may be interpreted as evidence that when it appears, glottalization in Polish is not due to the insertion of a boundary marker, which would be perceptually more salient. Rather, glottalization reflects the preservation of the prosodic well-formedness of vowel-initial syllables in Polish, as formulated in the Onset Prominence representational framework.

The first objective of this paper is to provide justification for the claim that variation between the prepositions por ‘by’ and de ‘of’ introducing the subject argument in Spanish nominalisations should not be explained as primarily paralleling sentence-level voice or aspectual distinctions. The strongest arguments against assuming a direct analogy between the clausal and the phrasal levels with respect to these functional categories are, on the one hand, that the use of agentive por -phrases is far from limited to nominals which can reasonably be claimed to bear a resemblance to a passive structure and, on the other, that de -marking of the Agent is fully compatible with an activity reading of the nominal, as opposed to a result reading. Secondly, as an alternative, it is proposed that the use of por vs. de relates to the perceived degree of agentivity of the subject referent, correlated with the degree of affectedness experienced by the object referent, and that por functions as a semantic marker overtly signalling agentivity rather than a syntactic marker of subjective Case.