Volume 44, Issue 1

This article presents two contrasts between two types of indefinites in Chinese: those with an internal modifier and those with a left-peripheral modifier. With respect to interpretation, the former are ambiguous in specificity, whereas the latter are exclusively specific; with respect to structural positions, the former can occur neither as preverbal subjects nor as shifted objects, whereas the latter do not have this constraint. We claim that the exclusive specific reading of the latter type is related to the high position of the modifier. The distribution constraint on the former type is also seen in predicative nominals. We suggest that such indefinites are NPs, although they are individual-denoting.

In Swedish declaratives, clause-initial NP Fin NP … strings are structurally ambiguous. Though the prefinite argument NP normally occupies the role of the subject, in some circumstances the interpretation OVS is preferred over the basic SVO word order. Thus, the initial NP can also be analyzed as a nonsubject, that is, as a direct or indirect object, the object of a preposition, a predicate noun, or a predicate adjective. In this article, the consequences of this ambiguity for the production of NP Fin NP … sequences are studied. More specifically, the influence of word order, inflectional morphology, content factors, and anaphoric reference on the topicalization of nonsubject NPs in two written corpora are discussed. A necessary condition for the production of an OVS structure is that the NP Fin NP … string cannot be interpreted as an SVO structure. In the analyzed texts, formal markers have only a weak correlation with the occurrence of OVS sequences as compared to the effect of meaning. A further factor influencing the probability of an OVS order is the textual continuity of the nonsubject NP. Most of the topicalized nonsubjects in the corpora are NPs referring to an antecedent in the left context.

The quantitative approach to morphological productivity first proposed by Baayen crucially refers to the relation between the number of hapax legomena formed with a given affix occurring in a sufficiently large corpus and the total number of tokens of that affix sampled in the corpus. Most criticism against this measure focuses on its neglecting the role played by frequency in the evaluation of productivity. As an improvement of Baayen’s procedure, a variable-corpus approach is proposed. Accordingly, the productivity values should be calculated at equal token numbers for different affixes instead of taking the different token numbers which result from sampling the whole corpus for all affixes, as in Baayen's works. This implies that variably-sized subcorpora must be sampled to compare affixes displaying different frequencies. On the basis of a 75-million-token newspaper corpus, the productivity values for several Italian affixes in the deverbal and deadjectival domain are calculated. The resulting rank proves linguistically plausible, avoiding the overestimation of productivity for low-frequency affixes typically occurring in fixed-corpus calculations. As a further advantage, the procedure proposed here makes it possible to deal satisfactorily with two problematic aspects usually neglected in previous investigations, namely, the quantitative impact of (i) allomorphies and lexicalizations and (ii) inner-cycle derivations on productivity measures.

A phono-syntactic conspiracy is proposed to account for a recent language change in spoken Beijing Mandarin Chinese, which involves the loss of the general classifier through sound erosion caused by frequency of usage in discourse. The result of the change is a classifier-free numeral NP yi35+N ‘one+noun’, in which the tone of the numeral is frozen because it no longer follows Mandarin tone sandhi rules. Further, the frozen tone on the numeral has assumed a syntactic function as an indicator of a specific NP pattern in the language. Results of an experimental study demonstrate that the newly developed syntactic tone has its impact on native Mandarin speakers in their processing of written discourse as well. The study promotes the view that language changes may not always be conditioned by cognitive pressure. Instead, it can be triggered by everyday language usage. The study proposes to take discourse analysis as an important or even fundamental means for the study of human language.

In Northern Sotho one of the strategies to express locality makes use of locative particle groups, being complements preceded by any of the so-called locative particles ka, kua, mo, ga, or go . Current linguistic descriptions shy away from those cases where sequences of such particles are employed. In this article these sequences are termed “locative n-grams” and are studied for the first time. It will be shown that, synchronically, just a handful of locative trigrams and bigrams do actually occur in a relatively large corpus. An in-depth study of the examples allows taking stock of the existing structures, provides data regarding the distribution of all the n-grams, and hints at the semantic content as well as the restrictions posed on the nature of the complements. In order to get clarity on the latter two aspects, a diachronic approach is often pursued. As a by-product, the study of the higher-order n-grams also brings hitherto overlooked features of the unigrams to light. The main research question that drove this investigation was thus to find out whether or not higher-order locative n-grams exist in Northern Sotho. As the answer was found to be positive, the major objective became to describe the found structures minutely by drawing on corpus data.

Darrell T. Tryon and Jean-Michel Charpentier: Pacific Pidgins and Creoles: Origins, Growth and Development . Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004. xix + 559 pp. Hardcover ISBN 3-11-016998-3, €88.00.