Volume 48, Issue 2

This article inquires into the diachrony of the determiner in Dutch. First, it is argued that the determiner is an emergent syntactic category, and that it must be consequently excluded from universal grammar. Second, it is argued that languages that do have a determiner slot in the NP differ considerably with regard to which lexemes they allow in this function. On the basis of these two observations, an in depth usage-based analysis of the emergence of the Dutch determiner is undertaken. It seems that over the centuries, the determiner projection consolidates its position in Dutch. It first cropped up in Old Dutch, and was further elaborated in Middle Dutch, Modern Dutch and Present-day Dutch by the recruitment of ever new slotfillers. Difficulties in the demarcation of the determiner phrase and the notoriously elusive syntax of some adjectives are claimed to be due to diachronic instability: what is e.g., conveniently but somewhat misleadingly called postdeterminers, can be argued to be an instable syntactic category that represents an intermediate stage in the diachronic process. Evidence will be drawn from (quantitative) corpus inquiry.

In Norwegian complex sentences with a main clause and an embedded complement clause, linguistic main clause features, whether syntactic or intonational, must converge, that is, their syntactic domain must be the same string for all, either the total sentence structure for all co-occurring main clause features or just the complement clause for all such features. Violation of this convergence constraint leads to ungrammaticality. This article addresses specifically what happens in speech acts where the proposition expressed by the speaker is an interpretation, often referred to as a metarepresentation, of someone else's thought rather than the speaker's explicated thought, where the encoded semantic representation that forms the linguistic basis for inferential derivation of the metarepresented thought is located in the part of the utterance that contains the convergent linguistic main clause phenomena, and where the rest of the utterance is a comment on that thought.

For intransitive verbs in languages with a choice of perfective auxiliaries, off-line acceptability judgments conform to a semantically based Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy (ASH) (Sorace, Language 76: 859–890, 2000, Gradience at the lexicon-syntax interface: Evidence from auxiliary selection, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). According to the ASH, inherently telic verbs regularly selecting auxiliary be appear to be core exemplars of unaccusative syntax, while atelic verbs of agentive activity regularly selecting have are core exemplars of unergative syntax. Non-core verbs that are inherently neither telic nor agentive allow either auxiliary to degrees depending on context and on distance from telic and agentive poles. ASH effects have not yet been investigated in real-time language processing. This paper demonstrates ASH effects on processing of Italian auxiliaries essere ‘be’ and avere ‘have’ in on-line comprehension and production. For native speakers reading Italian sentences, total reading times display the ASH effect: a stronger advantage for correct over incorrect auxiliaries with aspectually prototypical core verbs than with peripheral exemplars. In word production, the ASH effect appears when visually presented auxiliaries prime production of participles corresponding to infinitive stimuli. The pattern of results conforms to linguistic markedness and suggests how the ASH may be reflected in the real-time processing of auxiliaries.

Language change has been described as an unintended effect of language in use (Keller, On language change: The invisible hand in language, Routledge, 1994). In this view, change results from the way individuals use their language; the challenge is thus to explain change and its properties in terms of factors operating on the individual level, and population dynamics. An intriguing example of such a phenomenon is the finding that language change shows some highly regular tendencies. This has recently received considerable attention in the literature (Bybee et al., Why small children cannot change language on their own: Suggestions from the English past tense, John Benjamins, 1994; Heine and Kuteva, World lexicon of grammaticalization, Cambridge University Press, 2002; Traugott and Dasher, Regularity in semantic change, Cambridge University Press, 2002; Hopper and Traugott, Grammaticalization, CambridgeUniversity Press, 2003). In unrelated languages, similar words often change in similar ways, along similar “trajectories” of development. This phenomenon is called “unidirectionality”, and it is an important part of processes of grammaticalization, items changing from a lexical meaning to a grammatical function. It has been claimed that around 90–99% of all processes of grammaticalization are unidirectional (Haspelmath, Linguistics 37: 1043–1068, 1999). This article explores several mechanisms that may lead to language change, and examines whether they may be responsible for unidirectionality. We use a cultural evolutionary computational model with which the effects of individual behavior on the group level can be measured. By using this approach, regularities in semantic change can be explained in terms of very basic mechanisms and aspects of language use such as the frequency with which particular linguistic items are used. One example is that frequency differences by themselves are a strong enough force for causing unidirectionality. We argue that adopting a cultural evolutionary approach may be useful in the study of language change.

Clausal perception-verb complements are known to show a contrast in meaning between “object of perception” and “knowledge acquired”. This contrast has traditionally been analyzed denotationally in terms of a distinction between extra-linguistic entities belonging to two ontologically different types. However, Cognitive Grammar offers an analysis which is based on a distinction between two ways of construing the same conceptual content and does not presuppose the relevant notion of extra-linguistic entities. The present paper argues that both analyses are inadequate. On the basis of a number of relevant crosslinguistic data, it argues that the contrast under scrutiny must be understood in terms of a distinction which turns on a certain link between conceptual contents and extra-linguistic entities: reference. More precisely, it must be understood in terms of a distinction between nonreferring and referring status in the sense of Lyons 1977. A conception of this distinction is outlined, and an analysis is proposed which can bridge the gap between a purely cognitive and a purely denotational approach to clause meaning. Eventually, the paper sketches how the analysis can be adopted within Cognitive Grammar.

This article offers an analysis of the function of the second person subject of the imperative in Russian. Apart from expressing contrast, the subject of the imperative is used for various pragmatic functions. It is shown that these functions can only be accounted for by looking both at the information structure of the sentence as a whole (word order and sentence stress), and the vocative-like properties of the subject. The specific analysis of these functions is supported by corpus data, more specifically the use of lexical verbs and the use of modal particles. Finally, the function of the subject of the imperative in Russian is compared to the function of the subject of the imperative in English. This comparison shows that the pragmatic functions of the imperative subject in English differ significantly from those of Russian. It is suggested that the difference between Russian and English may be partly due to the fact that English has a relatively rigid word order, whereas Russian word order is largely determined by information structure.

Most traditional approaches to the French imparfait characterize this tense by combining notions of past reference, imperfective aspect, and/or anaphora. Typically, the imparfait may refer to a past situation, present this situation as unbounded, and, in narratives, as simultaneous to a situation previously reported in the passé simple. This article argues that a unified definition of the imparfait, taking into account all of its uses, cannot be based on these notions alone. It is proposed that the imparfait presents a situation as part of a mentally construed reality which does not coincide with the speaker's, and which is not to be considered as actual for that reason. In particular, it construes the viewpoint (ground) from which a designated situation is conceived as distinct from that of the speaker at the time of speaking. This shift of viewpoint in the meaning of the imparfait, away from the speech event, effectively sets up a virtual locus of viewing that is treated as a given or known reference point in the construction of an alternative conception of reality. This alternative, virtual reality may, but need not, correspond with the conception of an actual situation in the past, depending on contextual licensing. It is the virtual nature of the viewpoint — or, in other words, its modal (epistemic) import — that sets the use of the imparfait apart from that of other French simple tenses, and notably from that of the passé simple.