Volume 45, Issue 3

This issue investigates the linguistic encoding of events with three or more participants from the perspectives of language typology and acquisition. Such “multiple-participant events” include (but are not limited to) any scenario involving at least three participants, typically encoded using transactional verbs like ‘give’ and ‘show’, placement verbs like ‘put’, and benefactive and applicative constructions like ‘do (something for someone)’, among others. There is considerable crosslinguistic and withinlanguage variation in how the participants (the Agent, Causer, Theme, Goal, Recipient, or Experiencer) and the subevents involved in multipleparticipant situations are encoded, both at the lexical and the constructional levels.

Although one- and two-participant events, as expressed by intransitive and transitive constructions, have been extensively studied from a crosslinguistic perspective, little work has been done on three-participant events and the ways they operate in different languages. Where there is description and analysis it is typically confined to syntactic three-place predicates ignoring functional equivalent constructions in languages where such events may be realized with other argument configurations. Also, where analysis exists, it is typically limited to those three-participant events that get lexicalized as three-place predicates in English and other well-known languages. In this article, we explore the semantic categories of three-participant events and outline a range of different strategies for coding them crosslinguistically. We show that, as alternatives to syntactic three-place strategies, there are a variety of constructions that are syntactically two-place but express a third participant by some other means — morphological, syntactic, or pragmatic.

The present article discusses the syntax and semantics of tritransitive constructions. The label comprises constructions like a physiotherapist made the phonetician give a book to the bassoon player and a phonetician gave a book to the bassoon player for the physiotherapist and their equivalents in the languages of the world. The article proposes a formal typology, which is based on the formal similarities and differences in the Recipient and Beneficiary/ Causee coding in ditransitive and tritransitive clauses. Four types are distinguished, all of which are illustrated by crosslinguistic data. The arguments either receive distinct formal treatment irrespective of clause type, or the differences may be confined to tritransitives (they may also be marked alike). Moreover, the attested differences can be divided into subtypes based on whether the relevant arguments bear marking not attested outside tritransitives, or whether their formal treatment is different in more general terms. In addition to the formal typology, the article also discusses the rationale behind the attested tritransitive types. The key feature here is Ambiguity Avoidance, which is compared to Case Hierarchy (see, e.g., Comrie 1975).

Any language will have a range of predicates that specify three core participants (e.g. ‘put’, ‘show’, ‘give’), and will conventionally provide a range of constructional types for the expression of these three participants in a structured single-clause or single-sentence event description. This article examines the clausal encoding of three-participant events in Lao, a Tai language of Southeast Asia. There is no possibility in Lao for expression of three full arguments in the core of a single-verb clause (although it is possible to have a third argument in a noncore slot, marked as oblique with a prepositionlike element). Available alternatives include extraposing an argument using a topic-comment construction, incorporating an argument into the verb phrase, and ellipsing one or more contextually retrievable arguments. A more common strategy is verb serialization, for example, where a threeplace verb (e.g. ‘put’) is assisted by an additional verb (typically a verb of handling such as ‘carry’) that provides a slot for the theme argument (e.g. the transferred object in a putting scene). The event construal encoded by this type of structure decomposes the event into a first stage in which the agent comes into control over a theme, and a second in which the agent performs a controlled action (e.g. of transfer) with respect to that theme and a goal (and/or source). The particular set of strategies that Lao offers for encoding three-participant events — notably, topic-comment strategy, ellipsis strategy, serial verb strategy — conform with (and are presumably motivated by) the general typological profile of the language. The typological features of Lao are typical for the mainland Southeast Asia area (isolating, topic-prominent, verb-serializing, widespread nominal ellipsis).

The present article investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of verbs with optionally three participants in Jalonke. Jalonke, a variety of Yalunka, belongs to the Mande group of the Niger-Congo language stock and is spoken in and around Guinea (West Africa). In contrast to languages with ditransitive verbs, Jalonke has no verbs with three arguments. Rather, the third participant of the verbs in question is realized in a postpositional phrase, just like an adjunct, and is not distinguishable from adjuncts on semantic and syntactic grounds. The article gives an overview of the postpositions involved in the marking of the third participant of verbs whose second or third participants are Recipients, Beneficiaries, and to a lesser extent, Experiencers, since these are the roles attested across languages for verbs encoding three-participant events. Jalonke verbs with optionally three participants are explored according to two parameters of variation: the thematic roles and linking properties of their second and third participants and the alternation attested for verbs and classes of verbs. The article further systematizes which of the crosslinguistically attested linking patterns occur in Jalonke, and which semantic parameters govern differences between semantically related verbs and constructions in the language.

The External Possession Construction (EPC) (Payne and Barshi 1999) morphosyntactically encodes a possessor participant as an apparent argument of the verb, in a constituent separate from its possessum. However, the meaning of a sentence containing an EPC entails the proposition expressed by the corresponding sentence containing a regular possessive DP; the external possessor is “extrathematic.” This study of three typologically diverse languages, Northern Pomo, Spanish, and Czech, takes up the question of the extra contribution to utterance interpretation made by the EPC, both its content and its status within the grammar. Three hypotheses are considered: affectedness of possessor, speaker empathy towards possessor, and topicality of possessor. It is argued on the basis of a variety of diagnostics that the EPC's extra meaning contribution is a conventional implicature (Potts 2005) with two components. The argument includes consideration of two types of data that have been relatively neglected: unpredicted restrictions on EPC use to conventional contexts, and “alternation-based scalar implicatures”, a type of generalized conversational implicature that results from avoidance of the EPC in certain contexts.

Japanese-speaking children erroneously produce intransitive forms instead of (di)transitive forms, and intransitive/(di)transitive forms instead of causative forms. Murasugi and Hashimoto (2004) provide a uniform account of such verbal errors following Larson's (1988) v-VP frame or VP-shell hypothesis: (i) the predicate-argument structures of large V's and small v's are acquired early, (ii) children assume [±cause] v to be phonetically null at one stage, and (iii) what requires time is the acquisition of the lexical form of each V and the forms in which [±cause] small v's are realized. Additional empirical evidence for their v-VP frame analysis is obtained from Sumihare Noji's database as well as from observational data reported in previous research. Based on an analysis of Japanese-speaking children's common errors widely observed in previous literature and on the two longitudinal studies presented in this article, we develop the v-VP frame analysis for the acquisition of Japanese verbs and complex predicates.

This article uses data on Mayan applicative constructions to demonstrate the use of a comparative method for language acquisition research. Mayan languages express indirect objects through an applicative suffix on verbs, a prepositional phrase, or the possessor of the direct object. Mayan children must also acquire language specific lexical constraints on the applicative suffix. Learners cannot resolve the setting for these parameters through positive evidence. Two-year old children learning the Mayan languages K'iche' and Tzeltal demonstrate language specific acquisition patterns. Children learning K'iche' omit the preposition at the head of the indirect object phrase, but retain the ergative cross-reference markers. Children learning Tzeltal sometimes omit the applicative suffix on the verb, but retain the absolutive crossreference markers. Tzeltal children begin producing the applicative suffix a year earlier than children learning K'iche'. The Mayan acquisition data refute Crain and Pietroski's (2002) Continuity proposal. There is no evidence that K'iche' children extend the applicative along Tzeltalan lines or that Tzeltalan children extend prepositions in the K'iche' manner. The comparative Mayan data also refute Pinker's (1989) theory of narrow semantic verb classes in that the applicative suffix is not constrained by narrow semantic classes of verbs, but rather by the patterns of usage within a given society. The comparative method offers a systematic framework for assessing claims about the nature of children's language.