Volume 48, Issue 6

This paper addresses the analysis of English - ing -clauses and discusses its theoretical significance with respect to the architecture of grammatical categories. English - ing -clauses pose two major descriptive issues: first, whether the two historically distinct clause-types of gerunds and participles can be collapsed into a single category, and second, whether - ing -clauses still relate to their phrasal origins as (historical) noun phrases and adjectival/adverbial phrases. It is argued that neither question can receive a straightforward answer, as the existing evidence is simply contradictory. This, in turn, has theoretical consequences. English - ing -clauses show that language users can operate with different grammatical generalizations at once. The representation of grammatical categories must therefore be internally complex, allowing grammatical categories to be simultaneously unified and distinct, interrelated and autonomous.

This paper claims that psychological sound-symbolic words (or psych-mimetics; e.g., kat (to) ‘angry’, wakuwaku ‘exhilarated’) in Japanese and predicates they form have embodied semantic characteristics. Previous studies have assumed that psych-mimetics form one category. However, the possibility of cooccurrence with locus NPs enables a clear distinction among them. Psych-mimetics that optionally take a locus NP (termed “somatopsych-mimetics”) refer to bodily sensation and those that cannot take one (termed “visuopsych-mimetics”) refer to observable activity or behavior in addition to emotion. Several sorts of reinforcement are given to this dichotomy. First, not a few somato- and visuopsych-mimetics can be synchronically or diachronically analyzed as being derived from mimetics for bodily sensation and mimetics of vision, respectively. Second, some morphosyntactic properties of mimetic psych-verbs, including their morphology and participation in two controllability-related constructions, support the distinctive statuses of somato- and visuopsych-mimetics. Third, an experiment asking Japanese speakers to draw pictures for psych-mimetics provided further evidence for the visual basis of visuopsych-mimetics. Thus, like other psychological/perceptual expressions, psych-mimetics represent emotion by referring to particular physical experiences associated with or similar to it. Consequently, this study is dually significant. It contributes to the embodiment theory and points out the regularity of this apparently peculiar word class.

Verbs are traditionally assumed to have an “argument structure”, which imposes various constraints on form and meaning of the noun phrases that go with the verb, and an “event structure”, which defines certain temporal characteristics of the “event” to which the verb relates. In this paper, I argue that these two structures should be brought together. The verb assigns descriptive properties to one or more arguments at one or more temporal intervals, hence verbs have an “argument-time structure”. This argument-time structure as well as the descriptive properties connected to it can be modified by various morphological and syntactic operations. This approach allows a relatively simple analysis of familiar but not well-defined temporal notions such as tense, aspect and Aktionsart. This will be illustrated for English. It will be shown that a few simple morphosyntactic operations on the argument-time structure might account for form and meaning of the perfect, the progressive, the passive and related constructions.

In this paper we show that the Bantu A70 languages did not preserve the passive morpheme inherited from Proto-Bantu (PB), but developed a new suffix. It is a morpheme that is compound in origin, consisting of two verbal derivation suffixes which still function independently in today's languages as a middle marker and an associative/reciprocal marker respectively, though with variable degrees of productivity. The genesis of a passive marker from the stacking of two pre-existing suffixes is a typologically rare evolution path, but it fits in with a wider Bantu phenomenon of double verb extensions which develop non-compositional meanings. Especially double extensions involving the Proto-Bantu associative/reciprocal marker *-an- tend to develop such idiosyncratic meanings. This suffix is also one of the constituents of the Bantu A70 passive marker. Nevertheless, even within Bantu, the emergence of a productive passive marker from such double extension is unique. In this paper, we argue that the notion of co-participation may account for the rising of this passive meaning out of the stacking of the common Bantu associative/reciprocal suffix to a common Bantu middle suffix. The semantic development of this compound suffix (and its historical constituents) happened within the semantic continuum that links reciprocals, reflexives, middles and passives in many languages of the world, but did not necessarily follow the typologically common reflexive > reciprocal > middle > passive cline.

The article presents a contrastive analysis of the use of English and German deictic expressions. Its focus is on the communicative role of these items, i.e., the way in which they are used by authors to communicate effectively with their readers. The analysis tries to combine a qualitative (discourse analytic) and a quantitative (corpus linguistic) perspective by making use of a small corpus containing the endings of 32 English and 32 German texts from the genre popular science. All deictic expressions present in the corpus were manually identified, counted and analyzed according to the function(s) they fulfill in their respective context. The results suggest that deictic expressions are more frequent in German than in English texts. Two (related) reasons seem to account for this finding: first, deictics figure more prominently in the German system of textual cohesion. Second, they were in many instances found to serve as an (optional) instrument for maximizing explicitness, a communicative strategy which is customary in German but not in English discourse.

This study addresses entrenchment into the lexicon of lexical borrowings. We search for all new lexical borrowings in a corpus of French newspaper texts and examine the frequency with which these borrowings reoccur in a second corpus of newspaper texts from about 10 years later. Lexical entrenchment emerges as depending on a variety of factors, including length in syllables, the original language of the borrowing, and also semantic and contextual factors. The dispersion of a word in the early corpus is found to be a better predictor of its frequency in the later corpus than its frequency, but both measures contribute to predicting the degree of entrenchment of a lexical item. The interaction between these two variables implies that borrowings are penalized for their burstiness.