Volume 45, Issue 2

This article argues for a treatment of telicity that gives due space to intentionality, i.e., that recognizes the role intentionality may play in establishing the mutually manifest inherent or natural endpoint crucial to the definition of telicity. Sentences with numerical NP objects and for adverbials are shown not to be automatically telic. It is only if the constituents in question are contextually given as inherent endpoints that they are [+telic], intentionality being one of the extralinguistic factors that may bring about telicity.

Grammaticalization, the historical emergence of new items with grammatical function from earlier lexical items, is generally considered to be a unidirectional process. Much recent interest has, however, focused on degrammaticalization changes that run counter to this general direction. This article considers three cases of degrammaticalization from Bulgarian and Welsh, involving shifts from pronoun to noun, and from preposition to verb. These cases exhibit a common set of properties, such as the central role played by syntactic reanalysis and pragmatic inferencing, that justify viewing them as examples of a new type of degrammaticalization. Degrammaticalization via syntactic reanalysis appears to be cross-linguistically rare, because it is constrained by two factors: the requirement that the item undergoing degrammaticalization should have become grammatically or semantically isolated; and the requirement that it should match a possible morphological pattern for the lexical category that it is to join.

This article presents well-formedness conditions on Turkish coordinate constructions with suspended affixation (SA), where certain bound morphemes are omitted from all conjuncts other than the final one while maintaining their semantic scope over the whole construction. It is argued that the legitimacy of verbal conjuncts with suspended affixation neither directly falls out from the conjunct's being the complement of the copula, nor is it due to the type of agreement paradigm. Instead, the article provides a unified analysis that accounts for SA in both verbal and nonverbal constructions based on the notion of morphological words. The morphological word is comprised of a stem plus optional affixes, the right edge of which can terminate a morphological string independently from agreement markers. Accordingly, SA is licit if the omission of inflectional affixes in nonfinal conjuncts results in a morphological word. It is further shown that the terminal morphemes must be overtly marked in nonfinal conjuncts although they can be null elsewhere, and derivational morphemes cannot be suspended. Finally, it is argued that affixes that exhibit tight phonological cohesion with their stems resist suspension, suggesting that the degree of morphological bonding correlates with the degree of phonological cohesion.

Brian D. Joseph and Richard D. Janda, editors: The Handbook of Historical Linguistics . Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.

Geert E. Booij, Christian Lehmann, Joachim Mugdan, and Stavros Skopeteas, editors: Morphologie/Morphology. Ein internationales Handbuch zur Flexion und Wortbildung, 2. Halbband/An International Handbook on Inflection and Word-Formation, vol 2. HSK 17-2. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004. xi + 973–2000. ISBN 978-3-11-017278-2.(Rita Brdar-Szabó and Mario Brdar)