Volume 46, Issue 6

This article advances a lexical-constructional analysis of sentences like The door swung open and The trap door fell shut (henceforth open / shut expressions). These open / shut expressions involve both motion and change of state, as described by the verb and the AP, respectively. Two important characteristics of open / shut expressions are: (1) that they involve internal motion , as distinct from translational motion (e.g., The ball bounced down the hall ) or self-contained motion (e.g., The ball bounced up and down on the same floor tile ) in the sense of Talmy (2000), and (2) that the change of state is concurrent with the internal motion. Since open / shut expressions involve both motion and change of state, they are different from simple change-of-state expressions like He fell silent , which involve a change of state alone. They cannot be identified with spatial resultatives like Bill rolled out of the room , either, for the postverbal AP denotes a state. Remarkably, open / shut expressions should also be discriminated from intransitive resultatives like The kettle boiled dry , in that the AP open or shut simply indicates that the state of being open or shut results, without specifying the entity that state is predicated of. This analysis allows us to account for why open / shut expressions behave differently from ordinary resultatives, which are to be accounted for by means of argument structure constructions, as Goldberg (1995) argues. Open/shut expressions with verbs of sound emission (e.g., The door creaked open ) can be similarly handled. What makes these open / shut expressions distinct from open / shut expressions like The door swung open is that, generally, the verb metonymically stands for the internal motion, rather than describing the manner/path of the internal motion.

The article examines the usage of the “major constituent” concept in theories of coordination. The literature on coordination references major constituents when predicting the material that may and may not be shared by the conjuncts of coordinate structures. Previous attempts at defining the concept are, however, vague and insufficient. Hence the article presents a new definition. This definition is based in a dependency grammar framework. In addition to this new definition, two constraints are proposed that help predict which material can be shared in coordination. The first constraint, called the Restriction on External Sharing (RES) predicts which material external to coordinate structures can be shared. The second constraint, called the Restriction on Internal Sharing (RIS) , predicts which material internal to the initial conjunct can be shared. A central aspect of the approach is the distinction between conjunct-external and conjunct-internal sharing. Various data are examined that demonstrate the validity of this distinction.

This article bears on the properties and on the historical derivation of the multifunctional lexical item táa in Saramaccan, an English and Portuguese based Creole of Surinam. Táa fulfills several functions: it may be used as a verb, a complementizer, a quotative marker, and as a marker conveying similarity or manner. Táa is thus a multifunctional lexical item. Its functions parallel in a remarkable way those of the semantically closest substrate languages lexical entries. Furthermore, a review of the early sources reveals that táa was already a multifunctional item in early SA. This constitutes a major drawback for a grammaticalization account of the relationship between táki and táa . The properties of táa are argued to have been derived through the process of relexification. This process consists in assigning a new label to an existing lexical entry; relexification thus reduces to relabeling. Finally, the parameters of relexification/relabeling are shown to be compatible with a monosemic account of multifunctionality, and to not be compatible with a polysemic account of the phenomenon.