Volume 52, Issue 2 -

In this paper we first test whether there is statistical support for a transitivity hierarchy viewed as an implicational hierarchy. To that end we construct data-driven transitivity hierarchies of two-place verb meanings based on the Valency Patterns Leipzig (ValPaL) database using Guttman scaling. We look at how well the hierarchies conform to strict scalarity (one-dimensionality) and, through matrix randomization, test whether their strengths are significant. We then go on to construct slightly different hierarchies based on simple counts of instances of two-participant coding frames for a given verb meaning across languages, rather than through the Guttman scaling procedure, which yields less resolution and is not designed for missing data. Finally, we assess whether the members of the hierarchies fall into semantic verb classes. The concluding section summarizes the results.

This study analyzes the pragmatics of in-situ wh- and complex bare wh -interrogatives such as ¿de qué? ‘of what?’ in spoken Spanish, developing a typology of their discourse functions. The interpretation of such postposed wh- interrogatives depends on inference processes by the hearer that take as cues both the degree to which the interrogative proposition and the referent of the interrogative pronoun/adverb are cognitively accessible. This relationship follows from the fact that on the basis of the combination of the information states of the interlocutors (i.e. the degree of accessibility of the proposition and the referent of wh ) with the information structure of this type of wh -interrogatives, the utterer of the wh -interrogative can predict the pragmatic effect of a given postposed wh -interrogative token in the hearer. I establish a hierarchy of the different discourse functions on the basis of their potential to change the current ‘Question under Discussion’ (QuD). In particular, the analysis demonstrates that postposed wh -interrogatives that realize or imply a challenge to a previous utterance by the addressee of the interrogative have weaker pragmatic conditions than other uses. Consequently, I theorize that these uses are crucial for our understanding of the expansion of the use of in-situ wh -interrogatives in languages such as French and Brazilian Portuguese.

Although there is a rich literature on compounding in Turkish, coordinating compounds have not received enough attention from researchers in the field of morphology. The Turkish lexicon is characterised by a large number of coordinating compounds, belonging to different subclasses; this paper is a first attempt to sketch a typology of these word forms. We will first provide an overview of the different types of coordinating compounds in the language, exploring the limits of this phenomenon, and we will then analyse them in terms of five main parameters: (a) the semantic relation between the constituents and the referent of the whole compound; (b) input and output word classes; (c) morphological cohesiveness; (d) prosodic cohesiveness; (e) degree of conventionalisation/lexicalisation. We will argue that there is a fundamental divide between endocentric and exocentric coordinating compounds; the latter appear as more lexicalised and entrenched in the Turkish lexicon than the former and also seem to be closer to prototypical words in the morphology-syntax continuum.

The paper discusses the widely accepted assumption concerning the postulated universal ordering of derivational and inflectional affixes, first proposed by Greenberg as Universal #28. Various theoretical and empirical predictions underlying this assumption are briefly outlined. A sample of 73 European languages and a sample of 58 ‘world’ languages are used to show the range of violations of Greenberg’s universal in order to propose a tentative typology of these violations, and to examine the relatedness of postfixation to the genetic type of a language and its areal characteristics.

Although past research has amply discussed the discourse-deictic function of demonstratives, it mainly focused on entity-referring and place-referring demonstratives, and was typically grounded in monologic, mostly written, data. To fill this gap, this study examines the discourse-deictic occurrences of the manner demonstrative kaχa ‘thus’ in Israeli Hebrew conversation. In these uses, kaχa points—prospectively or retrospectively—towards a contextually relevant discourse representation, requiring the recipient to operate upon that representation in order to create a new referent. The study argues for an essential difference between prospective and retrospective discourse-deictic occurrences of kaχa . As a prospective indexical, kaχa is maximally deictic – it directs the recipient’s attention towards an anticipated segment, enabling the speaker to claim the right to an extended turn, as well as facilitating the interlocutor’s processing of the upcoming segment. As a retrospective indexical, kaχa is anadeictic – it combines both the deictic and the anaphoric indexical procedures, targeting opinions or perspectives previously conveyed by the interlocutors, and subjecting them to further evaluation.

Despite ample evidence that grammaticalization is accompanied by phonological reduction and ultimately morphological fusion, the latter process is remarkably less common in Turkish – hence its prototypically agglutinating morphology. Since vowel harmony is a means of articulatory reduction, Turkish, as a vowel-harmonic language, therefore shows reduction but (virtually) no fusion. One morphosyntactic consequence of agglutination is that Turkish “suffixes” in many ways continue to behave like free words. To compensate for the resulting lack of clear-cut suffixes, vowel harmony and stress are co-opted to perform affixal functions such as the demarcation of words and encoding of relationships among morphemes. Due to the grammatical function of suffix vowels, however, even grammaticalized items must then remain at least monosyllabic, which constrains the extent of fusion possible. This situation suggests that theories of grammaticalization that do not sufficiently distinguish between reduction and fusion need to be refined. In addition, it highlights the need for language-specific analyses on the diachronic dimension and restores the status of morphological typology as a predictor of certain linguistic variables.

In this paper I try to establish bidirectional links between the grammar and the processing (especially production) of agreement in order to provide the broad strokes of a psychologically viable theory of agreement. I start by arguing that full encapsulation and full interactivity in agreement operations are not realistic options. The question therefore becomes how much of each should be posited on principled grounds. It is further argued that in language production agreement ‘leaks’, in the sense that conceptual structure is ready to interfere in the establishment of agreement ties, and that that interference is neatly modulated by morphological strength, in the sense that morphology acts a barrier to it. I suggest a series of components that a theory of agreement must contain if it is to be psyscholinguistically realistic. Among these: a. constant conceptual pressure (leaking) and varying degrees of morphologisation both inter- and intra-linguistically (blocking); b. constructional ‘listing’, which adds to the division of labour between direct semantic influence and encapsulated feature transmission; c. ‘Avalanching’ (a chain reaction of chunking), which results in near encapsulation in practice in the minds of speakers of languages with a rich morphology; d. a process of ‘Match and Check’, which ensures automatic, non-strategic computations of massive feature redundancy (Match) without the need for accompanying access to conceptual structure (Check).

Drawing on a corpus study using German and Austrian parliamentary protocols, this paper shows that the originally temporal connector nachdem ‘after’ may carry causal meaning in southern German standard varieties. In these varieties, nachdem clauses may occur with individual level predicates, cases which, I will argue, provide unambiguously causal contexts since a temporal succession of events is excluded with individual level predicates. While nachdem displays polysemy comparable to English since in southern German standard varieties, it is a temporal marker in central and northern German varieties and a causal link may arise only due to a conversational implicature. The observed polysemy coincides with a higher token frequency of nachdem as well as a higher incidence of present tense use in the nachdem clause in the respective southern German varieties. Remarkably, causal nachdem clauses show a clear tendency to be fronted to the matrix clause despite the overall tendency of causal clauses to be post-posed, both cross-linguistically and in German, which may be explained in terms of information structure and discourse-organizing functions.