Volume 44, Issue 2

1. Background This special issue of Linguistics represents the result of a German/ Japanese research project jointly funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences (JSPS). The principal investigators on the German side were Ekkehard König (Free University of Berlin) and Peter Siemund (University of Hamburg, formerly Free University of Berlin). On the Japanese side, the research project was conducted by Masayoshi Shibatani (then Kobe University, now Rice University). Affiliated to the research project were Daniel Hole (now University of Munich, then Free University of Berlin), Akio Ogawa (Kansai University, formerly Kobe University) and Mitsunobu Yoshida (Hiroshima University). The funding period started early 2000 and came to an end late in 2002. The codes assigned to the project by the funding agencies were KO 497/8-1 and 446 JAP-113/233/0. We would like to express our gratitude to these agencies for making this cooperation possible.

This article attempts to lay the conceptual foundations of voice phenomena, ranging from the familiar active/passive contrast to the ergative/antipassive opposition, as well as voice functions of split case-marking in both transitive and intransitive constructions. We advance the claim that major voice phenomena have conceptual bases rooted in the human cognition of actions, which have evolutionary properties pertaining to their origin, development, and termination. The notion of transitivity is integral to the study of voice as evident from the fact that the so-called transitivity parameters identified by Hopper and Thompson (1980) and others are in the main concerned with these evolutionary properties of an action, and also from the fact that the phenomena dealt with in these studies are mostly voice phenomena. A number of claims made in past studies of voice and in some widely-received definitions of voice are shown to be false. In particular, voice oppositions are typically based on conceptual — as opposed to pragmatic — meanings, may not alter argument alignment patterns, may not change verbal valency, and may not even trigger verbal marking. There are also voice oppositions more basic and wide-spread than the active/passive system, upon which popular definitions of voice are typically based.

The aim of this article is twofold: (a) to offer a detailed analysis of reciprocal constructions in German and Japanese against the background of a preliminary typology of such constructions developed in analogy to the one proposed by L. Faltz (1985) for reflexivity and (b) to examine the implications of these analyses for supporting and possibly refining this typology. Reciprocity is defined as the grammatical encoding of symmetric relations, and four different types of reciprocal constructions are distinguished. Languages typically have more than one strategy at their disposal, which can often be combined but may also contrast and differ in their interpretation. It is shown that symmetric predicates play an important role in reciprocal structures and provide in fact one of their historical foundations. Combinations of quantifiers (and alterity expressions like other), another important source for the development of reciprocal markers, are shown to manifest considerable variation across languages, which is not compatible with the view that they can simply be subsumed under the category “anaphor.” Our typological approach provides some new perspectives and perhaps even solutions for some traditional puzzles in the analysis of reciprocal constructions in German and Japanese.

Utilizing the classification of formal relations in causative–inchoative verb pairs developed by Haspelmath (1993), this article examines two further ramifications. First, the 30 verbs in his list are divided into two groups of fifteen, one where cross linguistically a causative pairing is most likely and the other where the anti causative pairing is most likely. Individual languages are then tested to see whether their verbs conform to this ordering, with overall very positive results. Second, the diachronic stability of languages with predominance of one or other of the individual types within the classification, in particular of the causative and anti causative types, is examined, with some results suggesting stability at least over millennia. Thus, Classical Arabic and Maltese have very similar profiles, even down to individual lexical concepts (even where the two languages have noncognate lexical items). Uralic languages, despite their close proximity to Indo-European languages with predominance of the anticausative type, still show predominance either of the causative type (Finnish, Udmurt), or of the equipollent type (Hungarian), the latter perhaps reflecting a compromise between the putative predominance of the causative type in Proto-Uralic and contact with Indo-European.

In this article, we will examine the similarities and differences between the passive forms of German and Japanese. We would like to argue that the structural similarity observed in the passive forms is the result of the de-profiling of the agent, and that the most salient difference between both passives, namely the existence of the Japanese adversative passive, can be explained in line with a general property of the Japanese language, which is the ability to extend its argument structure by adding the experiencer as an extra-argument. Through the discussion above, the “traditional” definition of passive (that a marked verbal morphology and a case alternation describe an event centripetally from the viewpoint of the patient) will be modified to a more universal treatment of the voice category. This universal treatment is compatible with a higher degree of variation among languages.

Recent studies into the syntax and semantics of intensifying self-forms (e.g. [John himself ] came) have shown that a distinction needs to be drawn between two uses of such expressions: a juxtaposed or adnominal use (cf. above), and a nonjuxtaposed use (e.g. John [came himself ]). This differentiation allows us to reconsider a number of issues relating to the synchronic and diachronic relationship between SELF-intensifiers and reflexive anaphors. Assessing relevant cross linguistic data against the background of the aforementioned distinction reveals a surprising fact: patterns of “formal relatedness” suggest a particularly strong empirical as well as conceptual tie-up between reflexives and SELF-intensifiers in their nonjuxtaposed rather than adnominal use. This is remarkable because it has generally been assumed that it is always the adnominal SELF-intensifier which gives rise to the development of reflexive markers. In the light of our cross linguistic findings, we explore the synchronic and diachronic relationship between reflexives and SELF-intensifiers in their nonjuxtaposed use. We argue that the picture of a (unidirectional) development from adnominal SELF-intensifiers to reflexives needs to be modified insofar as reflexive markers often develop from nonjuxtaposed, rather than adnominal, intensi.ers. Moreover, reflexive markers often form part of a strategy of SELF-intensification, which entails that the reflexives are older than the resulting intensifiers.

This article investigates sentences with additional core arguments of a special type in three languages, viz. German, English, and Mandarin. These additional arguments, called extra arguments in the article, form a crosslinguistically homogeneous class by virtue of their structural and semantic similarities, with so-called “raised possessors” forming just a sub-group among them. Structurally, extra arguments may not be the most deeply embedded arguments in a sentence. Semantically, their referents are felt to stand in a specific relation to the referent of the/a more deeply embedded argument. There are two major thematic relations that are instantiated by extra arguments, viz. affectees and landmarks. These thematic role notions are justified in the context of, and partly in contrast to, Dowty’s (1991) proto-role approach. An affectee combines proto-agent with proto-patient properties in eventualities that are construed as involving causation. A landmark is a ground with respect to some spatial configuration denoted by the predication at hand, but a figure at the highest level of gestalt partitioning that is relevant in a clause. Thereby, both affectees and landmarks are inherently hybrid categories. The account of extra argumentality is couched in a neo-Davidsonian event semantics in the spirit of Kratzer (1996, 2003), and voice heads are assumed to introduce affectee arguments and landmark arguments right above VP.