Volume 37, Issue 2

This study focuses on the structure ‘sit’/‘stand’/‘lie’ + and + main verb , which has come to express the continuative/durative/progressive in Bulgarian as well as in a number of other languages. It is argued that the auxiliation of ‘sit’/‘stand’/‘lie’+and+main verb results as the “sedimentation” (i.e. grammaticalization) of all-too-common usage of the bodily posture verbs in the languages in which we observe it. The main claims made are that i. the use of the posture-verb construction as an aspectual marker correlates with the use of the posture verbs as the UNMARKED/CANONICAL ENCODINGS OF SPATIAL POSITION OF OBJECTS; ii. the tendency for a language to encode the spatial position of an entity in terms of the notions of sitting, or standing, or lying elevates the corresponding verb structures to the status of basic, most common verb expressions and thus makes them appropriate source structures in auxiliation.

This paper investigates the Japanese predicate da as a device for linguistic expressivity. Based on examples taken from Japanese comics and novels, it is argued that da functions, not only as a copulative predicate but also, and more relevant to this study, as a modality indicator signaling the speaker's conclusive and assertive attitude toward his or her own verbal performance. These functions are connected, in part, to da 's fundamental indexical capacity to express stativity and to communicate the speaker's general situational assessment. The indexical meaning, which is interactionally motivated as well as dialogically and contextually interpreted, offers a ready means for emotional expressivity associated with da . The paper emphasizes the importance of investigating the expressivity of a grammatical device even when such device is seemingly unrelated to the attitudinal meaning. The paper also raises a theoretical point that certain grammatical devices must be viewed, first and foremost, as being attitudinal, and their indexical meanings must be understood in the context of real-life communication. Accordingly, contrary to the commonly held view, one must consider, at least in certain cases, the modal expressive meaning as being primary and its abstract propositional meaning secondary.

This paper presents a pragmatic account of and , a conjunction that iscommonly used by professional questioners as a question preface in institutional interactions. Based on some linguistic features characteristic of and -prefaced yes/no questions, it is argued that and -prefacing serves two main functions. It underscores a link to the anaphoric discourse (e.g. juxtaposition), thereby grouping the conjoined propositions as a coherent package of information (e.g. one conveying an argument in cross-examination) in a succession of Q–A sequences. More importantly, it underscores the questioner's skewed orientation toward the affirmative polarity of an answer. It is proposed that the frequent use of and -prefaced questions in institutional discourse may be attributed to three factors: (a) its structural organization, which is predominantly characterized by Q–A sequences with no alternation of the questioner–answerer roles between the interactants; (b) the professional questioner's prior knowledge of the answers, which seems maximal in courtroom settings; and (c) the primary recipients of the answers, that is, a third party other than the questioner not directly participating in the interaction (e.g. the jury).

It has been proposed that intransitive verbs can be divided into two subgroups, unaccusative verbs, such as “break” and “arrive,” and unergative verbs, such as “laugh” and “swim”; the former type has an internal but no external argument, whereas the latter type has an external but no internal argument. Unaccusative verbs are verbs of change of state or location, while unergative verbs are a set of agentive monadic verbs of manner of motion. English and Chinese differ in the mapping between semantics and syntax in the domain of unaccusativity. In English, the internal argument of the unaccusative verb has to raise to subject position to be Case-marked. In Chinese, however, the internal argument can remain in object position and get inherent partitive case as long as it is an indefinite NP. External arguments of unergative verbs in both English and Chinese are in a preverbal position whether they are definite or indefinite. The study reported in this paper was to find out whether the lexical-semantic distinction between the unaccusative verb and the unergative verb could be properly represented in English-speaking learners' L2 syntax of Chinese and whether the learner would allow only the single argument of the unaccusative verb but disallow that of the unergative verb to be in object position. The results indicate that the unaccusative/unergative distinction is acquired very late by English-speaking learners, and that the acquisition does not proceed in a linear fashion.

Additive particles such as ‘also’, ‘even’ are usually analyzed in relation to the sentence. When confronted with texts spontaneously produced by a speaker, it is, however, necessary for the analyst to go beyond the sentence boundary: this article defends the point of view that three levels of analysis — syntactic, semantic, and “pragmatic” (in the sense of the organization of coherent discourse) — must be taken into account to explain the behavior of these particles. Three specific points are made: A. An utterance in context forms part of the information structure (referential movement) of the text as a whole: information is introduced, maintained, or developed. This information structure determines both the constituent the particle relates to and the particle's meaning value. B. It follows that certain syntactic positions that are in principle possible for particles in a sentence are not attested in certain specifiable discourse contexts because the information structure of that utterance in that context disallows them. C. Learners' utterances tend to be more “iconic” than those of native speakers in the sense that learners have to rely more on their fully transferable knowledge of the information structure of a particular text type. Hence the interaction of this structure — a factor at work in all texts — with additive particles emerges more clearly in learner texts than in texts produced by native speakers.

GeoVrey Sampson: Educating Eve: The “Language Instinct ” Debate . London: Cassell, 1997. 184 pages.

In response to an invitation by the editors of Linguistics , I should like to comment on Victor Longa's review (this issue) of my Educating Eve (Sampson 1997).

Georgij A. Klimov: Etymological Dictionary of the Kartvelian Languages . Trends in Linguistics: Documentation 16. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998. xiii+504 pp. (Bernard Comrie) Raija Markkanen and Hartmut Schröder, editors: Hedging and Discourse. Approaches to the Analysis of a Pragmatic Phenomenon in Academic Texts . Research in Text Typology/Untersuchungen zur Texttheorie. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1997. 280 pp. (Maria Załęka) Charles Jones, editor: The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997. xi+690 pp. £150. (Manfred Goörlach)