Volume 51, Issue 5

A language sensitive to a thing-place distinction (e.g., cup vs. Paris) may use thing-to-place conversion devices to allow a thing to be conceptualized as a place. Mandarin Chinese behaves inconsistently in the use of the conversion device – the addition of a localizer (e.g., li ‘inside’) to a thing noun – in that the device is not required in every situation where a thing is understood as a place, cf. dao chezi- * (li) arrive car-inside and jin chezi-(li) enter car-inside. Drawing evidence from Chinese directed motion contractions, I argue that such inconsistency is closely related to the other function of localizers: specifying the search domain of a ground that a figure is located with respect to. Specifically, Chinese adheres to a Localizer Condition according to which a localizer is not required if the information conveyed in the path verb and the (thing) ground is sufficiently specific to identify the figure's final location with respect to the (thing) ground. I show that the effects of the condition are observed in other languages such as Likpe and French, despite differences in encoding spatial relations.

This paper finds that the syntactic position of the particle le in Chinese varies with the structure of the verb phrase (hence VP) to form various meanings with the VP. Differing from the traditional analysis which treats le as a perfective aspect marker denoting completed action, in this study le is identified as a grammatical form of realis in the mood system of Chinese, a tenseless language. Clarification of the realis meaning of le is based on crosslinguistic studies of the tense/mood distinction (Comrie 1985). Moreover, the crosslinguistically identified aspect with a perfective/imperfective distinction (Comrie (1981 [1976]) and the asymmetrical meaning relation between marked and unmarked categories (Jakobson 1984) establish that aspect is located in the base structure of the Chinese VP not containing le . With a numeral-measure (hence N-M) expression, the VP is analyzed as a marked form of the perfective aspect; without an N-M, the unmarked VP is used chiefly, but not exclusively, for the imperfective aspect. By varying its syntactic position and its number of occurrences, realis le composes the perfective or the imperfective aspectual meaning in the base structure of the VP; therefore, various meanings related to actualization such as “being in the past”, “being a past occurrence with present relevance”, “having started”, “having finished”, “being going to happen”, or “being a newly changed state” are formed in the VP containing le .

Research on the relationship between grammatical aspect and motion event construal has posited that speakers of non-aspect languages are more prone to encoding event endpoints than are speakers of aspect languages (e.g., von Stutterheim and Carroll 2011). In the present study, we test this hypothesis by extending this line of inquiry to Afrikaans, a non-aspect language which is previously unexplored in this regard. Motion endpoint behavior among Afrikaans speakers was measured by means of a linguistic retelling task and a non-linguistic similarity judgment task, and then compared with the behavior of speakers of a non-aspect language (Swedish) and speakers of an aspect language (English). Results showed the Afrikaans speakers' endpoint patterns aligned with Swedish patterns, but were significantly different from English patterns. It was also found that the variation among the Afrikaans speakers could be partially explained by taking into account their frequency of use of English, such that those who used English more frequently exhibited an endpoint behavior that was more similar to English speakers. The current study thus lends further support to the hypothesis that speakers of different languages attend differently to event endpoints as a function of the grammatical category of aspect.

Recent linguistic studies on perception have focused mainly on verbs referring to the dominant visual and auditory modalities, (e.g., English see/look and hear/listen) and have largely ignored the minor verbs. The present paper seeks to fill this gap by comparing the complex semantics of the cognate verbs sentir(e) in three Romance languages, namely Spanish, French and Italian. Since the objective study of semantics is a problematic issue, we pay special attention to methodological problems and opt for a “combined corpus approach” involving both a translation corpus and comparable data. Evidence from both corpora indicates that, notwithstanding the fact that the rich polysemy of the three verbs partly coincides, each individual verb has undergone semantic specializations differentiating the morphological cognates.

This article discusses the interpretation of the English present perfect adopting a pragmatic approach. I show that a full interpretation of the English present perfect requires identification of the nature of current relevance, or, within a perfect state account (e.g., Nishiyama and Koenig 2010), value-assignment for a present state. I argue that the specific value of the present state is either an explicature or an implicature of the utterance containing the present perfect. The difference between such interpretations as continuative, resultative and experiential perfects, on a pragmatic level, lies in the content of the explicatures they express. I further argue that this process of value-assignment should be understood in light of the relevance-theoretic account of communication (Sperber and Wilson 1995 [1986]; Wilson and Sperber 2002, 2004). It entails, on the part of the speaker, communication of a particular proposition which is most relevant to the discourse topic and, on the part of the addressee, identification of a particular proposition which is sufficiently relevant to the discourse topic. On this view, several seemingly unrelated “puzzles” of the English present perfect amount to violations of a general pragmatic principle of optimal relevance, instead of independently motivated principles.

The world-wide spread of English is one of the most visible symptoms of globalization. In weak contact settings such as Western Europe, where contact with English is usually indirect, remote and asymmetrical, the English language started diffusing at a hitherto unknown rate in the second half of the twentieth century. Crucially, this diffusion happens at two different levels. First, on the macro-level, English is more and more used as a language of (international) communication. Second, on the micro-level, English is intruding in local languages, most notably by means of lexical borrowing. So far, the macro- and micro-level of linguistic influence are hardly ever linked or simultaneously studied. Nevertheless, as will be shown in this paper, it is interesting to investigate whether a connection between both levels exists. Specifically, we present a quantitative multivariate comparison of the features underlying the choice for English at both levels of analyses, using a diachronic corpus of over 16 000 job ads published in two Dutch job ad magazines. On the macro-level, we verify what communicative and situational parameters (e.g., branch of industry of the recruiter) determine the choice for and distribution of ads written entirely in English. On the micro-level, we verify the impact of the same set of parameters on the choice for inserting English elements in ads where Dutch is the matrix language. Using two multiple logistic regression models, we can verify to which extent the mechanisms underlying language choice at both levels are different. Results show that a large difference exists in the basic proportion of English at both levels, but that quite some similarities in the distribution of English are found when zooming in on the specific parameters underlying language choice. As such, this paper advocates to perceive of the different manifestations of the spread of English as part of a continuum, rather than as isolated phenomena. Hence, we hope to provide a first step in bridging the theoretical and methodological gap between the ELF paradigm and anglicism research.