Volume 57, Issue 1

This article looks at descriptions of ideophones in Kiranti (Sino-Tibetan, Eastern Nepal) languages. It will do so by first providing a description of the ideophones of Thulung, for which four distinct ideophone types are identified, on the basis of a 10 h narrative corpus. Next, the results of this analysis will be compared to descriptions of ideophonic lexemes in sources on other Kiranti languages. In order to place these topics within an areal perspective, descriptions of the same phenomena in Nepali, the contact language for the linguistic area in question, will also be looked at. The goal of the article is to present data on the ideophonic patterns found in the Kiranti linguistic area and to consider the question of borrowing for ideophones in the Himalayas.

This investigation offers an analysis of crosslinguistic variation in the expression of clausal negative concomitance (e.g. ‘he slept without using a pillow’) in a sample of 65 languages, showing that most languages in the sample tend to use conjunctions and converbs for indicating clausal negative concomitance. The discussion of clause-linkage patterns reveals that most languages have monofunctional devices for signaling clausal negative concomitance. Intriguingly, even when languages employ a clause-linking device for conveying clausal negative concomitance, negative markers may play an important role in that they may be obligatory, optional, or disallowed in the ‘without V-ing’ clause. It is proposed that whether the clause-linking device is semantically monofunctional or polyfunctional is the key to this puzzle. The paper also shows that most languages in the sample tend to signal clausal negative concomitance and nominal negative concomitance (e.g. ‘you took a basket without holes’) in the same way. This indicates a diachronic connection between these constructions.

This paper aims at contributing to ascertain the principles of intonational grammar that lie behind the realization of nuclear contours and at presenting them in terms of Optimality Theory constraints. In order to do so, we analyse the prosody of the nuclear configuration of Southern Valencian Catalan yes-no questions, with special emphasis on situations where text-tune accommodation phenomena take place. The empirical data, which are analysed according to the principles of the autosegmental-metrical model, show a complex interplay of different phenomena at the text-tune interface, like vowel lengthening, tonal spreading, tonal retraction and intonation-driven schwa epenthesis. We argue that the variation detected in the data can be accounted for by the interaction of nine constraints (i.e.,  Max -IO(µ p ), Dep -IO(µ s ), Anchor (T%,Rt,IP,Rt), Anchor (L*,Rt,ˈσ,Rt), *Anchor (T,C), *Anchor (T,-voice), Share (T*,NC), Dep -IO (Associate), Max -IO (Associate) ), whose ranking is established by means of a Stochastic Optimality Theory analysis.

This paper addresses the relationship between habituals, including expressions of unbounded repetition, and verbal aspect. It is often assumed that past events that are conceptualized as habitually occurring or repeated in an unbounded way are inherently expressed by imperfective verb forms in languages with verbal aspect. A crosslinguistic analysis is provided of the relationship between habituals and the perfective and imperfective aspect, based on analysis of 36 languages from different language families. It is shown that there is a strong but certainly not absolute association between the imperfective and habitual constructions/expressions of unbounded repetition with past reference. With respect to perfective habituals, some crosslinguistic patterns can be found. It is further argued that any account of the specific aspectual behavior in habituals must take heed of language-specific properties of the aspectual-verbal structure, and that using general, abstract comparative concepts, such as ‘perfective’, ‘imperfective’, or ‘habitual’, is insufficient to explain aspectual usage.

Berbice Dutch was a creole language spoken in the Republic of Guyana in South America, a country first under Dutch, and later under British colonial rule. Owing mainly to Silvia Kouwenberg ( A grammar of Berbice Dutch Creole , De Gruyter Mouton, 1994), we were blessed with a detailed synchronic documentation of Berbice Dutch before its demise. However, the formation of the language remains clouded in mystery: its grammar and (basic) lexicon display a seemingly unique mixture of Dutch (Creole) and Eastern Ijo, as a result of which the language is often portrayed as a challenge to existing contact-linguistic theory. In this paper, a scenario is proposed that, rather than challenging the said theory, is fully grounded in it: it will be argued that the language was a case of serial glottogenesis: a first stage of creolisation was later followed by language mixing. The paper furthermore presents hitherto unknown historical data pertaining to the arrival of Ijo speakers in Berbice.