Volume 56, Issue 2

Middle voice markers are highly polyfunctional items that, among other things, also perform a range of valency-changing operations such as anticausativization and reflexivization. Typological research has shown that individual markers display a great deal of variation with respect to their inventory of functions. Explaining this variation remains a key question that a comprehensive typology of middle markers needs to address. We now know that only a sub-set of the possible polyfunctionality patterns is actually attested and that existing patterns often represent the result of specific grammaticalization processes. In this paper, I explore yet another possible factor, that is, the interaction between middle markers and other valency-changing constructions within the same language. Based on a study of 129 middle-marking languages, I single out two recurrent patterns, that is, complementarity and competition, and argue that their study offers crucial insights in explaining the synchronic polyfunctionality of middle markers.

The aim of this acoustic study of voiced and voiceless word-initial plosives is to establish the nature of the relationship between prosodic positions, accent, and segmental phonetics in Polish. Four different acoustic parameters were investigated (VOT, pitch, F1, and preceding vowel’s duration). The results show rather modest effects of prosodic position. The findings are interpreted with reference to the prosodic typology posited in the Onset Prominence representational framework (OP), in which prosodic domains are not imposed from above but rather are formed according to opposing mechanisms of ‘submersion’ and ‘adjunction’. The findings support the claim that Polish belongs to the latter category, in which only modest effects of position are expected.

This study presents new data on the bi-absolutive construction in Chechen, a Nakh-Daghestanian language spoken in the northern Caucasus. The basic case frame in a transitive clause in Chechen is ergative-absolutive. In progressive constructions with an auxiliary and a simultaneous converb, the basic case frame alternates with an absolutive-absolutive – or bi-absolutive – construction. To assess the factors conditioning this alternation, we use data from two corpora (one of spoken narratives and one of written newspaper articles) and data elicited from native speakers using visual (video and picture) stimuli. We discuss conditions on the relatively infrequent bi-absolutive construction in terms of (in)animacy/humanness of the A argument, verb class, discourse-based factors, and aspectual meaning. We connect our results to existing studies of bi-absolutive constructions in other Nakh-Daghestanian languages as well as to methodological challenges associated with the study of minority patterns in under-resourced languages.

Recent cross-linguistic studies on spatial language reveal a great diversity in the way languages encode spatial information. Yet, given that there are not many spatial studies that have systematically targeted languages with a Philippine-type voice system, it is not clear how spatial expression is structured in such languages. The aim of this study is to address this knowledge gap through an in-depth investigation of Northern Alta, a language presenting such a voice system. The study combines data from stimulus-based tasks with a modern documentation corpus of the language and elicited data to examine the linguistic strategies deployed in four different spatial subdomains: location, disposition, orientation, and routes. The results show that each subdomain favors a distinct set of derivational affixes and a particular set of lexical roots. It is argued that the morphological system of the language plays a crucial role in the structuring of spatial expression. It allows roots with spatial meanings such as ‘front’, ‘side’, ‘top’, and ‘back’ to derive a variety of spatial verbs that are key in several spatial domains. The study also shows that Philippine-type languages have important information to contribute to cross-linguistic studies of spatial language.

When a communicator faces a word-formulation problem, they may use a placeholder (PH) such as whatchamacallit to avoid producing a target expression or to delay it. A PH is a dummy element used to fill in the syntactic slot of a target item that a communicator is unable or unwilling to produce (e.g. due to memory lapse). Previous studies have generally been concerned with grammatically stable PHs (e.g. whatchamacallit , you-know-what ), ‘grammatically stable’ in the sense that they are acceptably used (as long as the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic conditions are met) on their own, without a morphosyntactic aid. In this article, we describe ‘grammatically unstable’ wh -derived PHs in three East Asian languages: Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin. To give a specific example, typically, the PH use of Japanese dare ‘who’ is not fully acceptable unless it is doubled (i.e. dare∼dare ) or combines with a non- wh element (e.g. dare - sore , where sore is the medial demonstrative ‘that’). We show that the types of such remedial morphosyntactic operations vary from language to language and also within a language.

The variable use of rhotics is a salient linguistic feature in the variety of Portuguese spoken on São Tomé Island. In this study, we employ ethnographic and variationist sociolinguistic methods to report on the use of rhotics by 40 Santomeans living in Portugal. The objective is to determine whether Santomeans who are in closer proximity with European Portuguese, which is the variety perceived as standard and more prestigious in Portugal, tend to use rhotics in a more standard way or if they maintain the distinctive use of rhotics from their island. The results indicate that Santomeans do not converge toward a more European standard use of rhotics. We argue that the distinctive use of rhotics is available for identity-driven use to express a connection to São Tomé and Príncipe.

In his book Are some languages better than others? , the leading linguist R.M.W. Dixon put forward what we refer to as ‘Dixon’s dangerous idea’, i.e. the idea that linguistics should evaluate the relative worth of languages and provide some general criteria for deciding whether certain languages can be taken to be better or worse than others. Although it is obviously licit to raise this question, Dixon’s arguments when answering it are inaccurate, thus spreading a dangerous idea. This article critically discusses Dixon’s proposals and shows how his arguments draw on arbitrary and decontextualized criteria, and on naive evolutionary ideas of absolute fitness.