Volume 44, Issue 6

The functions of the Hausa particle dà are, among others, an existential predicate, a comitative preposition, and a coordination conjunction. It is also used in the main possessive ‘have’ predication in combination with the copula nàa ‘be at’. In previous accounts, this possessive construction is said to have the structure [possessor is with possessed] or [possessor is (somewhere) with possessed], thus taking the particle dà in this construction to be the comitative preposition. This article instead shows that the existential predicate dà , through grammaticalization, independently gave rise to the comitative dà and the particle dà used in the possessive construction. The article shows that the possessive construction derives from the structure [[possessor is at] [possessed exists]], a structure for which source sentences can be reconstructed using Heine's (1997) approach. This structure is also shown to fit with other facts of Hausa morphology and syntax better than the alternative analyses.

This article analyzes a case of Italian word formation in which the semantics of the derived words appears to contain mutually exclusive ambiguities. Italian productively derives verbs of removal from nouns. These verbs have the general semantic form A removes X from Y. There are two subtypes that differ in whether the nominal base is taken to be the figure or the ground : scremare ‘to skim’ ( crema ‘cream’) is a figure verb, and scarcerare ‘to release from prison’ ( carcere ‘prison’) is a ground verb. Current analyses are at a loss to give a uniform account for the semantics of derivational processes of these two kinds. In this article, such an analysis is proposed. It is based upon the model of lexical semantics known as two-level semantics. Two-level semantics makes a distinction between a layer of meaning, which is defined by grammar, and a level of interpretation, which is based upon conceptual knowledge. We propose that the derivation of Italian denominal verbs of removal of both types starts from a single underspecified representation, which is then specified at the conceptual level; depending on the concept type of the base, the denominal verb is either a figure verb or a ground verb. This study is an example of how the semantics of language-specific morphology may be embedded in cognitive structure.

In this article we propose that there are two universal properties for phonological stop assibilations, namely (i) assibilations cannot be triggered by /i/ unless they are also triggered by /j/, and (ii) voiced stops cannot undergo assibilations unless voiceless ones do. The article presents typological evidence from assibilations in over 30 languages supporting both (i) and (ii). It is argued that assibilations are to be captured in the Optimality Theoretic framework by ranking markedness constraints grounded in perception that penalize sequences like [ti] ahead of a faithfulness constraint that militates against the change from /t/ to some sibilant sound. The occurring language types predicted by (i) and (ii) will be shown to involve permutations of the rankings between several different markedness constraints and the one faithfulness constraint. The article demonstrates that there exist several logically possible assibilation types that are ruled out because they would involve illicit rankings.

Four cognitive factors potentially influencing the perception of Spanish stress placement are examined experimentally through a nonce word perception task, and the results are considered from the perspective of their implications for a psychological model of perception. The four factors considered for a potential influence on the perception of Spanish stress placement are segmentally similar words, syllable weight, subregularities in the lexicon, and morphological category. Each of these, with the exception of syllable weight, is shown to influence the perception of Spanish stress placement. The results of the experiment probe the structure of the lexicon in a way that shows that speakers are sensitive to lexical organization, and hence provide a window into the lexical system.

Dizque has developed from the verb decir ‘say’ and the complementizer que , originating in a phrase meaning something like ‘it is said that’. This article presents an analysis of this expression as used in contemporary Colombian Spanish based on a corpus of naturally occurring spoken and written data. It is shown that the range of use of dizque extends from functioning as a purely evidential marker, encoding reported speech and hearsay with a notion of doubt implied in some contexts, to a marker of epistemic modality, encoding extensions of the notion of doubt implied in its evidential use and nothing about source of information. This development is particularly interesting because it mirrors that seen for reported evidentials in languages that have a grammaticized system of evidentiality. This demonstrates that lexical and grammatical evidential devices may follow similar paths of semantic change, and suggests that this specific change, from reported speech to doubt, is representative of a cognitive phenomenon related to the nature of reported speech itself.