Volume 53, Issue 2 -

This paper offers quantitative typological data to investigate a revised version of the Greenberg-Sanches-Slobin generalization (GSSG), which states that (a) a language is unlikely to have both sortal classifiers and morphosyntactic plural markers, and (b) if a language does have both, then their use is in complementary distribution. Morphosyntactic plurals engage in grammatical agreement outside the noun phrase, while morphosemantic plurals that relate to collective and associative marking do not. A database of 400 phylogenetically and geographically weighted languages was created to test this generalization. The statistical test of conditional inference trees was applied to investigate the effect of areal, phylogenetic, and linguistic factors on the distribution of classifiers and morphosyntactic plural markers. The results show that the presence of classifiers is affected by areal factors as most classifier languages are concentrated in Asia. Yet, the low ratio of languages with both features simultaneously is still statistically significant. Part (a) of the GSSG can thus be seen as a statistical universal. We then look into the few languages that do have both features and tentatively conclude that part (b) also seems to hold but further investigation into some of these languages is needed.

This work presents a first morphosyntactic account of the category gender in Ninilchik Russian, a highly-endangered dialect of Russian, within the framework of Distributed Morphology. Furthermore, it compares gender in Ninilchik Russian with that of Contemporary Standard Russian. I show that, unlike Standard Russian, Ninilchik nouns have no grammatical gender features on the nominal head. Masculine is the default grammatical gender. Human nouns, however, can be assigned feminine gender through the context, which is determined by the natural gender (sex) of the referent. The investigation is multi-disciplinary. The anticipated results will be of interest to theoretical linguists, language typologists, language-area specialists, and language educators. Since Ninilchik Russian is on the verge of extinction, the findings will also be relevant to the fields of education and endangered language documentation, maintenance, and revitalization.

This paper investigates marked and unmarked word order patterns in embedded clauses in Jordanian Arabic (JA), motivating a mono-clausal analysis of them. It shows that ‘topic’ in this Arabic dialect is not a unique category, nor susceptible to a single analysis, hence providing support for proposals that argue for topics typology. For instance, topics that express information that is newly introduced, newly changed or newly returned to, i.e. Aboutness Topic, are shown not to be licensed in JA embedded clauses. On the other hand, the study argues that topics that convey familiar information, i.e. Familiar Topic, are more constrained in embedded contexts than previously believed; they are not recursive. Such a state of affairs implies that there are no elements being assigned the same informational/communicative value in the left periphery of JA embedded clauses.

A range of studies on language use suggests that there is a general contrast between two kinds of discourse processing. Based on a review of these studies, which rest on a number of different methodological approaches and perspectives, the present paper argues that there is in fact converging evidence in support of the hypothesis that linguistic discourse has a dualistic structure. Central to this structure is a distinction between what tends to be referred to, respectively, as the microstructure and the macrostructure of discourse. Furthermore, it is argued that the distinction shows significant neurolinguistic correlations, and that these correlations concern the lateralization of the cerebral brain.

This paper investigates a semantic change from ‘bring’ to ‘give’, and the language-specific factors that determine when it may happen. Drawing on a corpus of blogs and an acceptability judgment experiment, we demonstrate an ongoing change in the meaning of the Hebrew verb hevi , usually glossed as ‘bring’: older speakers are more likely to use hevi for unambiguous bring events, whereas younger speakers are more likely to use it in contexts also compatible with give events, although not in the full range of ‘give’ contexts. We argue that this change is facilitated by the specific discourse profile associated with the verb hevi : (1) frequent uses of hevi in the Goal-theme construction, the Hebrew functional equivalent of the English double object construction, creating a “bridging context” for semantic change (2) frequent uses of hevi in which there is no real-world motion, facilitating the bleaching of the ‘agent motion’ component. We then examine the English verb bring , which is not undergoing a similar change, and demonstrate that it has a different discourse profile (namely, far fewer double object constructions and no-motion uses). Thus, while a ‘bring’>‘give’ change is well-motivated and potentially possible, the factors enabling it to actually happen are determined by the predominant discourse pattern characteristic of the verb.

Spanish relative clauses, as in other languages, can contain a resumptive pronoun or other resumptive element. This study attempts to explain what factors favor the presence of such resumptive elements in the production of Spanish relative clauses. In order to do so, 1237 relatives clauses were extracted from an oral corpus of Peninsular Spanish conversations. A total of 18 factors, some new and some known from previous studies, pertaining to semantic and syntactic processing difficulties, were coded as potentially influencing the choice of a resumptive pronoun. Multivariate analysis (conditional tree and random forest) was then used to determine the significant factors and the most explicative minimal model. The results suggest that the conditions with the most impact are related to difficulties in determining the function of the relativizer. A discussion follows about how these difficulties relate to the different factors studied and how they could be due to a looser relationship between the clauses involved.

In Udmurt, a Uralic language that has experienced long and extensive contact with the dominant Russian language, all four typologically relevant strategies of verbal borrowing are attested: direct and indirect insertion, light verbs, and paradigm insertion. This is unusual both cross-linguistically and for the Uralic family. The paper investigates these strategies and the factors that govern the choice between them. It turns out that, although free variation plays a major role in the distribution of strategies, there are also several important morphological, stylistic and areal factors. By analyzing these factors and the available historical data, I propose a diachronic explanation of the currently observed distribution. The study is mostly based on corpus data collected from contemporary Udmurt-language social media.