Volume 48, Issue 1

The origins of language change, particularly grammatical change, appear to be unobservable. But the first step in language change, innovation, can be observed in the production of synchronic variation in sound change. The same can be done for morphosyntactic change such as grammaticalization by comparing alternative verbalizations of the same experience in a controlled situation. Examples of innovation in lexical semantic change and grammaticalization are examined using the twenty parallel English narratives of the Pear Stories. Morphosyntactic variation is pervasive in the Pear Stories narratives and the alternative verbalizations show that morphosyntactic change is drawn from a pool of synchronic variation. These results disconfirm the traditional theory of morphosyntactic change, in which innovation is rare and special mechanisms are required to produce it. Instead, grammaticalization, and language change in general, originates in the variation inherent in the verbalization of experience.

This article examines the hypothesis that sensory perception is linguistically conceptualized as a directional relationship that involves the motion of a signal between the experiencer and the stimulus. The hypothesis is tested with data from Finnish. The study focuses on expressions of visual, auditory and olfactory perception. The data consist of sentences including a perception verb and a locative element that indicates the position of either the experiencer or the stimulus. There are three options for marking such a locative: a static ‘in’/‘on’/‘at’ case, a directional ‘from’ case, or a directional ‘to’ case. The results reveal crucial differences on the one hand between different verbs in each domain, on the other between the different sensory domains. Agentive perception verbs favor the directionality experiencer ⇒ stimulus to a greater extent than non-agentive or intransitive perception verbs. The opposite directionality (stimulus ⇒ experiencer) is favored if the stimulus is a signal or a mental content rather than a concrete entity. In general, expressions of visual perception favor the static coding to a greater extent than expressions of auditory and olfactory perception, which favor the directional stimulus ⇒ experiencer coding. It is argued that this difference follows from the conceptualization of auditory and olfactory perception as involving the motion of a signal (a sound or a smell) as opposed to visual perception, which is conceptualized as the perception of a concrete entity.

This article discusses the acquisition of English initial consonant clusters by Cantonese ESL learners in Hong Kong with an aim to examine the explanatory power of the Markedness Differential Hypothesis (MDH) (Eckman, Language Learning 27: 315–330, 1977) and the Interlanguage Structural Conformity Hypothesis (ISCH) (Eckman, Moravcsik & Wirth, Language Learning 39: 173–205, 1989) and to gain insights into the interlanguage phonology of the learners. Both hypotheses make predictions about second language learning on the basis of implicational universals, but the former is also premised on the differences between the native and target languages. The study investigated Cantonese ESL learners' acquisition of English obstruent + nasal onsets and obstruent + liquid onsets as well as their acquisition of two-member onsets and three-member onsets. A total of twelve learners participated in the study. They were asked to perform four different speech tasks including the reading of a word list, the description of a series of pictures using isolated words, the reading of three passages, and a conversational interview. The participants' speech was recorded using a high-quality mini-disk recorder and transcribed by two raters. The results of the study show that the implicational relationships which hold between the different categories of onset clusters also hold for the interlanguages of the participants, and the predictions of the MDH and the ISCH are also borne out. Where no universal markedness relationships exist among different onset clusters, the inherent difficulty of a segment resulting from the phonotactic constraints of a learner's mother tongue remains the most important factor contributing to the overall level of difficulty of an onset cluster. It is also argued that, in the interlanguages of the participants, there exists a phonological rule which neutralizes liquids in clusters. Further research is needed to investigate the abilities of Cantonese ESL learners to perceive English speech sounds and the possible effects that their perceptual abilities may have on their production abilities.

Much research establishing phonemic bases for grammatical gender assignment in Spanish nouns relies on straightforward word counts, some of them rather small, and does not examine the characteristics of individual words. No distinction is made between native Spanish words and loanwords, or between terminal letter, terminal phoneme, and terminal morpheme. As a result, some useful generalizations are lost, and others, less useful, have been accepted as true and repeated over and over. When large amounts of data are examined in detail, it becomes clear that in many cases noun ending does not serve to establish a significant statistical pattern with respect to gender assignment. However, some very large groups of words share some very productive terminal morphemes, which are invariably masculine or feminine. Sorting out noun ending from terminal morphemes makes it much easier to identify patterns of gender assignment in a system that is otherwise quite random and arbitrary.

This article reviews research on English past-tense acquisition to test the validity of the single mechanism model and the dual mechanism model, focusing on regular-irregular dissociation and semantic bias. Based on the review, it is suggested that in L1 acquisition, both regular and irregular verbs are governed by semantics; that is, early use of past tense forms are largely restricted to achievement verbs — regular or irregular. In contrast, some L2 acquisition studies show stronger semantic bias for regular past tense forms (Housen, The development of tense-aspect in English as a second language and the variable influence of inherent aspect, John Benjamins, 2002). It is argued that L1 acquisition of the past-tense morphology can be accounted for adequately — without assuming dual mechanisms — by relying on connectionist-like input-based prototype formation as a mechanism for the development of tense-aspect morphology.

Akan (Kwa, Niger Congo) has a rich inventory of lexical items for the purposes of signaling information structure. This article examines the communicative role of a number of these markers. The focus marker na singles out the constituent within its scope as the only new information in the utterance in which it is contained. Two inclusive markers are identified; they are (n)so and mpo . (N)so is an additive focus marker which indicates that the utterance to which it is attached has to be interpreted in a context parallel to that of the immediately preceding utterance. Mpo is a scalar marker; the entity within its scope is considered quite low on a pragmatically given scale. Exclusive markers in the language include the restrictive nko and the multifunctional ara . The latter combines with features of the context to communicate restriction, simultaneity, continuity, or it may cause the accompanying utterance to receive a scalar reading. Finally, the traditional analysis associated with the information structural marker de is shown to be untenable. Thus, an alternative analysis is proffered, based on critical examination of its discourse function, using attested data.

Some recent studies on reflexive constructions have claimed that the socalled weak reflexive always blocks the appearance of the external argument. According to this analysis, the subject of the reflexive predicates corresponds to the internal argument. I argue against this view and show that the subject of reflexive sentences in German corresponds to either the external or internal argument, as Reinhart and Siloni (Linguistic Inquiry 36: 389–436, 2005) claim. However, as opposed to them, I argue that the reflexive with grooming verbs in German bears a thematic role, just as the reflexive with transitive verbs. Consequently reflexive verbs in German are classified into the following three types with respect to argument structure: (i) verbs that have both an external argument and an internal argument; (ii) verbs that have an external argument only; (iii) verbs that have an internal argument only. It is also shown that this classification captures the distribution of reflexives both in English and Dutch.