Volume 51, Issue 6

Based on first-hand data, this paper shows how Mexican Romani-Spanish bilinguals have replicated several uses of the Spanish estar in Romani, using the nearly obsolete 3d person subject clitic pronouns. The Romani subject clitics ( lo , la , le ) have become associated with the Spanish copula estar ‘to be’ in affirmative present tense clauses, thus restricting the uses of the native Romani copula. Moreover, the subject clitics have replicated the uses of estar in locative predications and in constructions with participles. These findings contribute to the general discussion over the complexification or simplification of languages in contact settings. It is argued that although the replication of Spanish estar has rendered Romani more complex, the resulting convergence may be considered as an overall simplification for the bilingual speakers (Matras 2009).

In generative grammar, locative inversion in Bantu languages is typically analyzed in terms of A-movement of the locative from a VP-internal position to the subject position. I present an alternative analysis, according to which the locative subject-DP is introduced above the νP/VP, in the specifier of a functional category whose head selects the νP/VP as its complement. I suggest that this category is Pr (for “predication”), i.e., the same category that also introduces the subject argument of adjectival or nominal predicates in non-verbal predication constructions (see Bowers 1993, and especially Baker 2003a for Bantu). In locative inversion, Pr establishes a non-canonical predication relation between a νP/VP that expresses a state or event, and a DP that denotes the location of which this state/event is predicated as a property. My analysis is developed on the basis of a detailed discussion of “semantic” locative inversion in the Bantu language Zulu (Buell 2007), a construction in which the inverted subject-DP is not formally marked as a locative, but receives its interpretation solely by virtue of the locative semantics of its head noun.

This paper investigates optionality in grammar and language use, and argues that there is optionality and optionality, and thus that it is essential that we be much more careful than hitherto in categorizing linguistic entities as optional. Equipped with a suitably constrained construal of the term, it is possible to formulate testable generalizations about optionality. Specifically, it is always meaningful in the sense that the contrast between use and non-use of a given linguistic element conveys meaning; use and non-use are never in absolutely free variation. Furthermore, there are restrictions on the type of meaning associated with the two contrasting paradigmatic “forms”. It is always a type of interpersonal meaning, concerning the domain of joint attention. It is further suggested that the connection between form and meaning is motivated, and thus this represents another domain in which the linguistic sign emerges as non-arbitrary. Evidence for the proposed meaning is presented from case studies of five diverse domains of grammar: complementizers, case markers, definiteness markers, person and number markers, and NP ellipsis. While these case studies only scratch the surface of the range of optional phenomena in the world’s languages, they provide sufficient circumstantial evidence to make an initial case for the proposals; they also raise numerous questions for future investigation.

Discourse markers have been the subject of a considerable body of recent research. Most commonly, their genesis and development was described in terms of grammaticalization. But there were also alternative approaches to deal with their development, and the term pragmaticalization was proposed to account for features of discourse markers that pose a problem to grammaticalization theory. In the present paper it is argued that neither grammaticalization nor pragmaticalization are entirely satisfactory in the understanding of the nature of discourse markers. On the basis of recent work on Discourse Grammar (Kaltenböck et al. 2011; Heine et al. 2012) it is argued that the rise of discourse markers involves an operation called cooptation, whereby information units such as clauses, phrases, or words are transferred from the domain of sentence grammar to that of discourse organization.

The aim of this paper is to report that the firsthand evidential marker - te - can be employed in counterfactual conditional constructions in Korean. The phenomenon is of special interest, since it has been claimed that evidentials are not normally used in irrealis clauses (Anderson 1986: 274–275). Although it turns out that - te -'s core evidential function seems not in focus, I argue that the use of - te - in the protasis is, in fact, an optimal distancing strategy that conceptually licenses counterfactual conditional constructions in Korean; - te -'s functions of accommodating backgrounded information and of marking conceptual distance (Kwon 2012a) are exploited and they enable the constructions to convey more distanced counterfactuality than those without - te -, even implicating the speaker's nonagentivity or helplessness on the past event. I discuss these seemingly noncanonical phenomena within the Mental Spaces Theory framework (Dancygier and Sweetser 2005); I rely in the main on the system of representation used by Dancygier and Sweetser in their mental spaces analysis of conditionals, including their use of shading to represent counterfactuality. However, I introduce some new elements to the diagrams, including using the layering of spaces to represent additional distancing strategies.

In the loanword phonology of Japanese, voiced obstruent geminates ([bb, dd, gg]) have been claimed to devoice when they co-occur with another voiced obstruent within the same morpheme (e.g., /beddo/ → [betto] ‘bed’). This devoicing pattern has contributed much to address a number of theoretical issues in the recent phonological literature. However, the relevant data have been primarily based on intuition-based data provided by Nishimura (2003) and Kawahara (2006). Kawahara (2011a, 2011b) addressed this issue by conducting rating studies using naive native speakers of Japanese. The results generally supported the intuition-based data by Nishimura (2003) and Kawahara (2006). However, the rating studies also revealed several aspects of the devoicing pattern that go beyond the intuition-based data as well. The current study further investigates the devoicing pattern by varying several task variables. In particular, this paper builds on Kawahara (2011a, 2011b) by adding (i) nonce word stimuli, (ii) a binary yes/no experiment, and (iii) auditory stimuli. The results show that (i) nonce words and real words behave similarly, but nonce words nevertheless show less variability across different grammatical conditions than real words; (ii) the binary yes/no experiment shows results similar to those of the scale-based experiment; and (iii) while auditory stimuli yield results comparable with those of orthographic stimuli, they also show an exaggerated effect of a phonetic implementation pattern. Overall, this paper uses Japanese as a case study, and finds some task effects in phonological judgment experiments. It is hoped that this paper stimulates further experimental research on phonological judgments of other phenomena in Japanese as well as in other languages.

Most patterns of word formation convey more than one meaning. Although multifunctionality is such a widespread phenomenon, only a limited number of topics, such as the polysemy of diminutives, action nouns and agent nouns, have received special attention in the theoretical literature. The present article focuses on instrument and place nouns, which are expressed by means of one and the same derivational pattern in more than half of the languages expressing these two concepts morphologically. The empirical assessment of this syncretism provides the starting point for an in-depth discussion of multifunctionality in word formation. After a review of the literature on monosemy, polysemy and homonymy, diachronic pathways leading to syncretism of instrument and place nouns are described in detail. It turns out that the syncretism is not due to a particular semantic affinity of the concepts ‘instrument’ and ‘place’, as sometimes assumed in the literature, including the recent semantic-maps approach. Instead, five different processes can be discerned which lead to the multifunctionality of the respective markers: reanalysis, concretization of action nouns, ellipsis, homonymization, and borrowing.

This article examines how Korean verbal nouns are construed as either a noun or a verb in a given context. By adopting Langacker's Cognitive Grammar (CG) and its technical apparatus, I argue that the two types of case patterns arise due to different construals of the same content. More specifically, when a verbal noun is construed as a thing (noun), it needs to be nominally grounded to be a full nominal. The genitive-case pattern in verbal noun constructions is motivated by the need for this grounding. By contrast, when the same verbal noun is construed as a process (verb), it needs to be clausally grounded by tense to be a full clause. For the purpose of grounding, the schematic verb ha(y) - ‘do’ must combine with verbal nouns to lend its processual characteristic to them, since verbal nouns profile a nonprocessual complex relationship. The verbal case pattern arises due to this processual nature of the temporalized verbal nouns. I further argue that a verbal noun in a double accusative construction is indirectly grounded by an implicitly invoked reference point, which is realized as an accusative-marked nominal.