Volume 57, Issue 3

This paper is the first survey of verbal affixes encoding the day period (‘at night’,‘in the morning’ etc.) or the yearly seasons (‘in winter’ etc.) when the action takes place. It introduces the term ‘periodic tense’ to refer to this comparative concept, explores the attested paradigms, their interactions with other verbal categories (including the more usual deictic tense), and investigates their diachronic origins. It shows that periodic tense markers are not restricted to incorporated nouns of time period but constitute a highly grammaticalized verbal category in some languages, which can redundantly co-occur with free adverbs or nouns indicating time.

This paper presents an account of a Sakhalin Ainu (also Enciw‘itah, isolate, Russia and Japan) construction that semantically encodes an agent-patient interaction and that is characterized morphosyntactically by the expression of the agent with an oblique. In the analysis to follow, this construction is named ‘impersonal passive’ by analogy with a structurally and functionally similar construction attested in the Southern Hokkaidō dialects of Ainu. Keeping the main focus on eastern dialects, the paper takes a primarily semantic approach to the East Sakhalin Ainu impersonal passive and underlines a number of striking structural differences with the Hokkaidō counterpart. In addition, it will be argued that in the north-eastern dialects of Sakhalin Ainu, the impersonal passive can be described as an object-individuation construction ( oic ), which marks a patient object as referential and definite and has the pragmatic extension of overtly flagging the topicality of this object at the discourse level. As such, the oic compensates for the lack or non-obligatoriness of overt marking for definiteness and topicality in Sakhalin Ainu. The present paper adds to our knowledge on the still under-described Sakhalin variety of Ainu and to our understanding of the verbal and nominal semantics of Ainu more generally, which to date remains a largely unexplored topic.

This paper presents the results of a study of the five causative formations of Classical Armenian. It focuses on the correspondence between the morphosyntactic complexity of causatives and the autonomy of the causee , which is specified based on the semantic type of the noncausal base verb. The correspondence proves to be incomplete as witnessed by areas of overlap in the lexical distribution of base verbs. While the competing lexical and synthetic causatives reflect the patientive and non-patientive readings of the first argument of the noncausal verb, respectively, the competing synthetic and analytic causatives rather express the contrast in the degree of affectedness of the causee , which does not fully depend on the semantic properties of the noncausal predicate. The semantic types of causation better correlate with morphosyntactic complexity than with segmental length in Classical Armenian.

The present paper explores the nexus of coordination and referential dependencies, focusing on sentences such as ‘Max and Lucie talked about him’, in which it is hardly possible for Max and him to be co-valued. Previous accounts claim that such referential dependencies are in fact possible on a collective reading. It will be demonstrated here, however, that informants consistently judge the co-valued reading in such cases to be either strongly marginal or unavailable, regardless of whether a collective or distributive reading obtains. It is claimed that the manner in which referential dependencies interact with coordinate structures can be addressed insightfully in terms of ‘predicate-valent’ structures (as opposed to ‘predicate-argument structures’). A constraint in this regard will be proposed: the ‘Conjunct Referential Dependency Constraint’ (CRDC). The CRDC is couched in a Dependency Grammar (DG) approach to syntax.

This paper describes the evolution of grammaticalized evidentiality in the Moldavian dialect of Hungarian. It documents how the suffix -a/e , originally the marker of narrative past, became a rare, elevated marker of past tense highlighting significant past events; how it assumed a mirative overtone; and how the features ʻwitnessedʼ and ʻimmediate pastʼ, often present in mirative utterances, became inherent parts of its meaning. This grammaticalization path has resulted in an evidential system with typologically unique features. It is a two-term system based on the opposition of direct evidentiality and no evidentiality – violating the alleged universal that if a language has grammaticalized direct evidentiality, it has also grammaticalized indirect evidentiality. Mirative meaning is expressed by the same - a/e suffix that also encodes direct evidentiality – whereas it is claimed to be the extension of inferred evidentiality elsewhere. The unique properties of Moldavian Hungarian evidentiality are derived from the historical evolution of the - a/e suffix.

This study holds that negation phenomena in a natural language involve much more than mere logical entailments in some individual’s epistemic model. The unique characteristics of negation, i.e., the persistent diachronic renewal of negative particles cross-linguistically, as well as the prevalent synchronic reinforcement of these particles through emphatic mechanisms, demand an analysis that casts the expressive speaker, not her epistemic model, in the leading role. Opting for a comprehensive account of negation in Modern Greek, the present analysis highlights this subjective involvement of the individual and suggests that it is the thinking and – more important – the feeling speaker that directs the distribution of Modern Greek negators.

This paper investigates different aspects of syntactic productivity and its relation to semantics. Based on a case study of 43 Dutch minimizing constructions, the correlations between nine different variables are examined: metrics of lexical openness ( TypeTokenRatio , HapaxTokenRatio , HapaxTypeRatio ), measures of conventionalization ( FrTop1 , MeanFrTop3 , SDTop3 ), characteristics of the frequency distribution ( Alpha parameter of the Zipf curve) and two semantic variables based on distributional semantics ( SemanticRange , SemanticSparsity ). The analysis shows very strong correlations between most variables, but it also detects second-order extensibility based on HapaxTypeRatio and the way it interacts with semantic openness as measured by SemanticSparsity .