Volume 49, Issue 3

This paper focuses on native speaker judgments of a construction in Dutch that functions as a progressive aspectual marker ( aan het X zijn , referred to as aan het -construction) and represents an event as in progression at the time of speech. The method was chosen in order to investigate how native speakers assess the scope and conditions of use of a construction which is in the process of grammaticalization. It allows for the inclusion of a large group of participants of different age groups and an investigation of potential age-related differences. The study systematically covers a range of temporal variables that were shown to be relevant in elicitation and corpus-based studies on the grammaticalization of progressive aspect constructions. The results provide insights into the selectional preferences and constraints of the aan het-construction in contemporary Dutch, as judged by native speakers, and the extent to which they correlate with production tasks.

A central assumption about relative adjectives (e.g., big, old) is that their positive form is interpreted vis-à-vis a class-specific reference point located in the midzone of a series (norm). More recently, functional-cognitive studies argued that other reference points (e.g., argumentative zero, endpoints) are more relevant in actual language use than a norm. This paper argues that the two positions are not necessarily irreconcilable and experimentally tests a hypothesis that a norm is a default reference point used for the interpretation of relative adjectives in zero contexts. Experiment 1 addressed the location of a norm in the midzone of a series and its category dependence. As predicted by the traditional semantic studies, the cutoff point between “big” and “small” is located around the midpoint of a scale. Furthermore, its location is category-dependentand sensitive to prototypicality effects. The results further indicate that adults easily compute a contextually relevant norm by integrating their world knowledge with the visually provided information. Experiment 2 investigated the relevance of a norm in the online processing of relative adjectives. The results suggest that language users indeed exploit norms for the interpretation of relative adjectives in real time.

A much debated question with respect to referential expressions is under what conditions speakers and writers produce overspecified expressions, i.e. expressions that contain more information than what is necessary for unique identification. In an earlier study we found that overspecifications facilitate the identification process for the understander, in particular if they contain complete object information and/or complete location information. In the present study, a production experiment is discussed in which the importance (high, low) of the instructed referential task was manipulated. In the high-importance condition more overspecifications were produced than in the low-importance condition, and this was particularly the case for overspecifications that facilitate identification for the understander.

Although third person plural impersonal constructions (3pl IMPs) are widely attested crosslinguistically, they have not yet been the main subject of a typological study. This paper aims to establish the basis for such a study by applying a tentative but rather elaborate typology of 3pl IMPs, developed by Cabredo Hofherr (Arbitrary readings of third person pronominals: 81–94, 2003, “Arbitrary” pro and the theory of pro-drop, Oxford University Press, 2006), to a sample of European languages. The typology recognizes as many as five different types of impersonal uses of the 3pl: a) the universal, b) corporate, c) vague, d) inferential and e) specific. This typology is tested on the basis of ten European languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian and Spanish) using data stemming from a parallel translation corpus of Harry Potter and also acceptability judgments elicited from speakers by means of a questionnaire. The investigation reveals that while all the languages in the sample have universal, corporate and vague 3pl IMPs, the specific are at best marginal in English, Dutch, French, German and Polish, as are also the inferred in English, French and German. These findings are shown to correlate in part with the morphophonological realization of the 3pl IMP (as a free vs. a bound form), which may be interpreted as a reflection of the degree of grammaticalization of 3pl IMPs but also the result of the nature of the alternative impersonalizing constructions available among the relevant languages. The distribution of the five types of 3pl IMPs together with a sixth type is captured in the form of a preliminary semantic map, the nature of which requires substantiation by wider crosslinguistic data. The discussed typology of 3pl IMPs is found to be a promising basis for a wider typological investigation, provided a separate type of 3pl IMP involving the category of speech act verbs is included and the use of the 3pl for events which necessarily (not only contingently) involve singular individuals, nonhumans or alternatively the speech act participants are catered for.

This article takes up the longstanding debate on the categorization of the past participle. This construction is known to exhibit the structural and semantic features of both adjectives and verbs. In this article, the question is addressed how the past participle should be categorized in contexts where both an adjectival and a verbal analysis are equally possible (such as in clauses with the stative verb to be). Previous research has focused on determining diagnostics to discriminate between the adjectival and verbal analysis in particular contexts of usage. In this article, however, it will be argued that even a combination of all state-of-the art criteria does not guarantee a full coverage of all past participles in actual language usage. In answer to this shortcoming, an alternative viewpoint is developed in which past participles are considered to be fundamentally ambiguous, unless a preference is indicated by additional contextual elements. This inherent ambiguity of past participles is supported by the conversational maxims of quantity that state that a contribution should only be as informative as is required to fulfill the goal of the conversation. In this perspective, contextual elements that point to a resultative or a processual interpretation are only added if conversational needs require the disambiguation of the past participle.