Volume 56, Issue 1

In research on intra-sentential pronominal anaphora resolution in null subject languages, it has been argued that null pronouns tend to be biased towards subject antecedents, whereas overt pronouns tend to prefer object antecedents, as predicted by Carminati’s ‘Position of the Antecedent Hypothesis’. However, these studies have mainly focused on only one of the two possible clause orders (main-subordinate or subordinate-main), which have not been overtly contrasted. This paper investigates the effects of clause order on the interpretation of third-person subject pronouns in globally ambiguous intra-sentential contexts by 49 native speakers of Spanish. The results of an acceptability judgment task explicitly comparing both clause orders indicate that relative clause order is a key factor affecting the interpretation of pronouns: while a preference of overt pronouns for object antecedents holds across clause orders, null pronouns show a bias towards subject antecedents only in subordinate-main sequences. These findings refine the Position of the Antecedent Hypothesis predictions by restricting them to subordinate-main complex sentences.

It is well-known that Tai-Kadai languages have affected the typological profiles of Southern Sinitic varieties. For example, compared with their northern sisters, Southern Sinitic varieties display a stronger tendency towards head-initial structures, as in the N – N compounds for expressing the sex of animals and in post-verbal temporal adverbs. Given that the Tai-Kadai languages in China have been in contact with Sinitic for over two millennia, it is quite natural to find signs of Sinitic influence therein. Most remarkably, pre-verbal adjunct phrases and pre-nominal relative clauses, which are extremely atypical of VO languages but distinctive of Sinitic, are attested in some Tai-Kadai languages in Southern China. The prevalence of such typologically unusual traits among different linguistic groups in the Lingnan region of Southern China provides strong support for its status as a linguistic area. Devising and adopting a ‘mutualist’ approach, we analyse the typological data of over 280 language varieties, which we believe illustrates and strongly supports the idea that Western Lingnan qualifies as a linguistic area in its own right according to criteria widely recognized by areal linguists. The approach proposed in this study can be applied to other putative linguistic areas around the world to study the mechanisms and outcomes of contact-induced change under a specific set of ecological conditions.

In this article, we present and analyse phonaesthemic alternations as they appear in Flemish dialects of Dutch, that is when a root-initial consonant or consonant cluster is replaced by a post-alveolar affricate /ʧ/ or /ʤ/ in order to create a phonaesthemically marked variant of a neutral base word. Although no longer productive in Flemish dialects, we show that such phonaesthemic alternations exhibit strong functional similarities to those found in other languages, in particular the evaluative notions of diminutivity and augmentativity. We also show that, formally speaking, Flemish phonaesthemic alternations differ from those attested in other languages in only targeting a single consonant or consonant cluster. We then put forward the hypothesis that Flemish speakers may have copied this mechanism to produce phonaesthemic alternations from Picard speakers, corroborating the notion that phonaesthemic alternations may emerge from language contact.

This paper first describes the prefixation and circumfixation processes of Mirandese word formation and determines the general conditions of phonotactic correspondence between Portuguese and Mirandese. It then analyses the permeability of Mirandese to Portuguese in word formation, specifically concerning these affixation processes, and goes on to identify the specific phonological conditions that concern the allomorphy of each affix while quantifying their morphotactic transparency. Using Natural Morphology as a framework, data from this analysis demonstrate a relationship between morphotactic transparency and the actualisation of either specific allomorphic conditions or the general conditions of phonotactic correspondence.

It is widely accepted that adpositions are used to code the relationship between noun phrases and the relationship between noun phrases and predicates. The present study demonstrates that adpositions are also a coding means for several functions unrelated to the role of noun phrases in the clause and unrelated to the relationship between noun phrases. The following distinct functions of adpositions are added to the existing typologies: 1. Coding the complement as locative (distinct from spatial relations); 2. Coding the directionality of movement (distinct from spatial relations); 3. Coding spatial relationship with respect to the point of reference (distinct from locative function or directionality); 4. Coding the change of the inherent semantic properties of nouns (distinct from spatial relations, directionality, or the locative function); 5. Coding locative predication as distinct from other predications (distinct from locative complement). The study also addresses a fundamental question, viz. why adpositions are sometimes used and sometimes not used within the same language even if the same functions are encoded in the clause. The study also addresses why adpositions are used or not used across languages when the same functions are involved. The general implication of this study is that it provides the evidence that languages encode different semantic structures in their grammatical system. Consequently, the formation of utterances is driven by the speaker’s choice from semantic functions encoded in the grammatical system of the given language and from the available formal means of coding.

In Tātic, a modern Northwest Iranian language group, =rā is a polysemous postposition which has not evolved into an accusative marker, unlike what happened in Modern Persian. Tātic varieties, which include all Tāti, Tālyshi and Tātoid dialects spoken in northwest Iran, exploit the postposition =rā to mark many different case roles. This paper studies the various functions of the postposition =rā and its variants in this language group. The data for the study have been gathered through fieldwork and interviews with Tāti native speakers as well as through available descriptive grammars. Using the dative semantic-map approach, we show that the main functions that =rā marks in all Tātic dialects are ‘beneficiary’, ‘reason’ and ‘purpose’. We conclude that because some of the functions of =rā are not among the semantic roles in the conventional dative semantic map, this needs to be expanded in order to account for the polysemy patterns of =rā in the Tātic language group.

This corpus-based study focuses on the spoken nature of insubordination by analyzing intonation vis-à-vis interpersonal functions associated with specific insubordination patterns in spontaneously produced Czech conversations. This paper shows that there is a consistent relationship between the epistemic function of a given variant and its intonational contour: the pattern found in argumentative settings is associated with a conclusive, sharply falling cadence, while the variant found in collaborative contexts and imparting an explicative flavor has a slightly rising melody, suggesting inconclusiveness. We also discovered a clear parallelism between these two intonational variants and an intonational split in the embedded polar questions after the verb form nevím ‘I don’t know’, the most likely source of the insubordinate structures. This finding further motivates the interpersonal functions served by the insubordination patterns: the argumentative variant marks a high degree of confidence about p not being true, while the slightly rising contour of the explicative pattern marks a low degree of confidence in p being true, thus necessarily projecting tentativeness. The results strengthen the status of these patterns as conventional grammatical units distinct from their syntactic source; they show that their phonic properties provide salient interpretive cues; and they also contribute to the question of how we conceptualize the emergence of insubordination.