Volume 51, Issue 1

In this article, it will be argued that the concept of functional layering – an extension of Hopper's (1991) concept of layering – can be fruitfully applied to understand the mechanisms behind the sometimes large and messy looking synchronic picture of diverse meanings which one and the same construction can fulfill at a particular point in time. The concept will be used to account for the meaning spectrum of the present-day English progressive, which, it will be argued, no monosemic approach to date can account for. Taking a look at the diachrony of the construction will help to reveal that the various “exceptions” found in the use of the progressive can be understood as reflections of different stages in its development. Older, less grammaticalized or less well-defined usage patterns thus often survive in certain restricted niches next to the newer, more grammaticalized or more clear-cut functions, representing different diachronic layers. In addition to this diachronic motivation for synchronic meaning variety, the article will also address the crucial question of how a present-day hearer of a progressive form is able to decode the specific meaning intended by the speaker based on contextual clues. The article ends with some suggestions for further applications of the concept of functional layering.

We examine the varying role of conditions on grammatical relations marking (namely animacy and volitionality) by looking at different languages of one family, using both existing descriptions and working with specially prepared video stimuli. This enables us to see the degree of variation permitted within closely related languages. We look at four Alor-Pantar languages (Teiwa, Adang, Kamang, and Abui), Papuan languages of eastern Indonesia. The conditions on argument marking are manifested in different ways. Those languages with syntactic alignment index objects with a prefix, those which have semantic alignment index objects and some subjects with a prefix. In 42 video clips we systematically varied animacy and volitionality values for participants in one and two-participant events. These clips were used in fieldwork to elicit descriptions of the events. The data show that animacy of the object is an important factor which favours indexation of the object on the verb in all four languages to varying degrees. Volitionality, on the other hand, is a factor in the semantically aligned languages only. While the presence of a prefix on the verb is semantically motivated in many instances, marking is not directly determined by verbal or participant semantics, and lexical factors must also play a role.

This paper combines the findings of a detailed corpus study and the results of a small-scale experiment in an attempt to support the idea that grammatical knowledge includes knowledge of usage patterns. The linguistic structures investigated are English not that sentences of the type Other people have friends. I have enemies. Not that I care (example taken from the British National Corpus). An in-depth investigation of 1,759 uses of this structure extracted from the British National Corpus reveals that neither their lexico-grammatical environments nor the pragmatic functions they serve are distributed in a random or unpredictable way, but rather pattern to an astonishing extent. This finding prompts the question as to whether the observed patterns are merely a matter of repeated usage driven by recurring pragmatic needs, or instead are represented as part of the linguistic knowledge of individual speakers, i.e., as a part of grammar. In order to answer this question a simple experiment was designed aiming to investigate whether there is a match between the data observed in the corpus (reflecting usage) and the knowledge-based behavior of individual speakers in an offline task (tapping into grammar). 30 native speakers of English participated in a test which put them under severe time pressure while they filled in gaps in short texts. Four gaps targeted uses of not that representing patterns with different frequencies in the corpus. The results of the experiment indicate that the participants were faster and found it easier to activate the structure not that for stimuli targeting frequent patterns than for those targeting very rare types of usage. This is interpreted as evidence for the assumption that frequency-related knowledge about lexico-grammatical and even pragmatic patterns is a part of grammatical knowledge.

This article presents the results of a study on the interpretation and acceptance of adjectival resultatives of German children between 6 and 9 years of age and adults. These results brought to light significant differences, due to age, in the interpretation and acceptance of these resultatives, that is to say, sentences with an adjective in the final position. The youngest participants were prone to accept ungrammatical sentences by assigning a resultative meaning. The ungrammaticality of the sentences in question was not due to semantic inconsistencies but to violations of the selectional properties of verbs, as for instance in *die Kinder erschrecken die Katze ängstlich ‘the children frighten the cat scared’. In contrast, the adults rejected or amended those sentences. The conclusion is (a) that the children seemed to rely on the sentence structure as a primary cue to compute the meaning of an utterance and (b) that, in contrast with adults, the youngest children in particular had not yet learned the relevant semantic properties of verbs that determine the selectional restrictions and thus the syntactic options of verbs. This means that differences in interpretation and acceptance of sentences are due to differences in knowledge of semantic verb properties between adults and children. The relevant semantic knowledge increases in gradual stages during language acquisition.

We propose a new model of second language acquisition consisting of multiple interacting principles and inspired by work on complex adaptive systems. The model is referred to as CASP, short for complex adaptive system principles for second language acquisition. It is informed by a broad range of linguistic and psycholinguistic research and supported empirically by recent second language research studies based on a learner corpus. The novelty of our model lies in the definitions that we propose for a number of general and specific principles of learning, in the interactions that we demonstrate between them, in the predictions that we make and illustrate empirically, and in our integration of research findings from numerous areas of the language sciences. The result is a broadly based theory of SLA, which can potentially solve some of the traditional puzzles in this field, e.g., involving when transfer from an L1 does and does not occur.

This article is a contribution to recent discussion on impersonality. The focus is on speaker-inclusive and speaker-exclusive interpretation of European Portuguese (EP) and Finnish impersonal constructions where the range of potential human referents is left open and, by default, construed as human and plural. These include reflexive-based se-impersonals and the pronoun a gente in EP, impersonal passive in Finnish, and impersonal third person plurals (3PL) in both languages. By investigating these constructions in non-standard data representing a comparable genre (dialectal interviews), we obtain a detailed picture of their functions in actual use and the division of labor of the different constructions. In addition, we point at some problems in their classification. Our data suggest that both languages manifest a division of labor between speaker-inclusive and speaker-exclusive impersonals. The distinction is more entrenched in EP than in Finnish, where the productivity of the speaker-exclusive impersonal 3PL is, to a great extent, dependent on the dialect in question.