Volume 51, Issue 3

This paper deals with the issue of social variation at the level of syntax, investigating wh-movement and subject-verb-inversion (stylistic inversion) in wh-constructions in European French. It proposes an analysis of the subjective side of social structure, in terms of the sociocultural theory of Bourdieu and the lifestyle concept. Furthermore, this work shows that acceptability judgments do represent a valid and insight-providing source of evidence in sociolinguistics. Statistical analyses of variance are first calculated with (language-)internal, and then with both internal and (language-)external variables. This two-step strategy reflects the transition from a perspective of a commonly shared system of syntax to one of social variation. The results show that lifestyle is a very prominent element of the variable set. It can be fruitfully applied even when a sample is less diverse from a sociodemographic point of view. These findings underline that a more sophisticated social structure analysis can reveal salient patterns of sociolinguistic variation that would otherwise remain undetected.

This paper explores the constructional meaning of NPs preceded by a demonstrative determiner and NPs preceded by a definite article, in both Spanish and Dutch. First, I will give a brief, general description of the meaning of the two constructions, focusing on three features: unique identifiability, deictic force and predicating force. Then, a contrastive analysis will show that demonstrative determiners and definite articles differ crosslinguistically. A quantitative analysis of translational shifts will reveal a systematic shift between Dutch demonstrative determiners and Spanish definite articles. Through the qualitative analysis of several subgroups of examples, I will show that the Dutch and Spanish paradigms differ with regard to the features of deictic and predicating force. Both Dutch demonstratives and definite articles seem to be more semantically bleached and hence more grammaticalized than their Spanish counterparts, which may well go some way to explaining the frequent and systematic translational shifts. Finally, I will draw attention to some specific phenomena, such as the cultural embeddedness of anaphoric relations, and the role of demonstratives in evoking a visual frame, which also motivate translational shifts between demonstratives and definite articles, but are better interpreted as local translator's decisions, rather than as systemic contrastive differences between Dutch and Spanish.

This study proposes a novel approach to analyzing the motivations for the occurrence of non-iconic chronology in English (as compared with German and Russian). Non-iconic chronology is represented by textual deviations from the strict temporal order of clauses, e.g., “I conquered after I came (and saw)”, as opposed to the well-known example of temporally iconic order “I came, I saw, I conquered”. Based on the corpus data outlined in Yevseyev (2011) and elsewhere, this article characterizes in a novel view a series of functional principles which have been mentioned in the literature as motivations for the breach of the principle of temporal iconicity. First, Behaghel's (1909) “law of increasing constituents” appears to influence non-iconic event coding in another way than predicted by Hawkins (1994); second, Clark and Clark's (1968) “main-clause-first principle” is obviously not applicable to sequential actions at all, it is instead reducible to another principle labeled here “Code anterior event in subordinate clause!”; third, Givón's (1985) idea of “task urgency” seems to be productive here, and developing it a step further, the “posterior-event-fronting hypothesis” is advanced and balanced against the “anterior-event-delaying hypothesis”.

In the Indo-Aryan language Nepali, the transitive subject A in perfective constructions is ergatively marked with the postposition le . However, in contrast to Hindi, also Indo-Aryan, le can mark A in imperfective constructions. The postposition is then optional and seems to occur on a highly irregular basis. Various hypotheses have been assumed to account for this anomalous distribution; the traditional textbook hypothesis considers “emphasis” as the factor controlling the occurrence of le . However, pure emphasis is too vague as a linguistic concept to account for all occurrences. Other accounts select different syntactic and/or semantic factors that determine the distribution of le ; for instance, le would distinguish between a stage- and an individual-level predicate. An in-depth analysis of new data in Nepali shows that none of the previous accounts can predict the occurrence of le as a marker of A in an imperfective construction. The emphasis approach has the greatest validity among the existing explanations; however, it is shown that le does not simply indicate the emphasized A-argument, but rather, the argument in focus. Secondly, it is argued that le , as a syntactic postposition associated with perfective verbs, carries over a perfective meaning to present and progressive verb constructions and adds a notion of completeness and determination to the clause.

Esperanto is a constructed or planned language which is actively used by a multifaceted speech community all over the world. For more than a century, the nature of the parts-of-speech (PoS) system of Esperanto has been an item of controversy among its grammarians. Based on a study of the language as it is actually used by its speech community and supported by historical and contemporary documents, the author argues that the language's current PoS system can be described adequately as a mixture of contentive lexemes and verbally specialized lexemes. A system of contentive lexemes, which allows the user to create four different words with predictable meanings out of each single root of any semantic category without having to use derivational tools, does justice to the learnability claim which underlies the structure of this language, which was made to be easy. The increasing number of verbally specialized lexemes is a development which is known to, but unsatisfactorily explained by many esperantologists. The paper develops the hypothesis that the diachrony of Esperanto (constructed in its origin, but freely developing) provides support to the claim that natural languages can be classified in terms of an implicational hierarchy of their PoS systems, in which verbal specialization precedes all other forms of syntactic specialization of lexemes. The analysis is done within the framework of functional discourse grammar.