Volume 52, Issue 1

It is generally believed that numeral classifier languages such as Chinese have no productive way to encode the contrast between plurality and singularity. This paper shows that although bare nouns in Mandarin Chinese encode general number, the language uses reduplicate unit words (including classifiers and measure words) to express unit plurality, and uses non-reduplicate form of unit words to express unit singularity. Neither way of number encoding is compatible with a numeral. The paper shows that plural markers in Mandarin Chinese are structurally licensed by certain quantifiers. This work indicates that classifier languages use the morphological forms of classifiers themselves to express the singular-plural contrast productively, a new understanding of the forms of number markers in numeral classifier languages.

This article discusses the perception and production of English speech sounds by Cantonese ESL learners in Hong Kong and examines the validity of the claims of the Speech Learning Model for explaining second language speech production by Hong Kong Cantonese ESL learners. Forty university English majors participated in the study, which included two L2 speech perception tasks, two L1 L2 speech perception tasks, and three L2 speech production tasks. It is found that although the perceived similarity between the L1 and the L2 is inversely related to L2 speech perception, such an inverse relationship between perceived L1 L2 similarity and L2 speech production is not so straightforward and is often mediated by other widespread phonological phenomena such as final obstruent devoicing and final lateral vocalization. Speech perception and speech production, thus, do not bear a strict one-to-one relation, and correct discernment of a target sound does not necessarily lead to correct production. The predictions of the SLM regarding speech production do not seem to be entirely borne out. Further research is needed to investigate the perceptual and production abilities of ESL learners of other linguistic backgrounds.

One of the two object cases in Finnish, the accusative, has three variants. One of these is a pronoun form similar to the English accusative. The choice between the remaining two forms is based on a number of syntactic properties. Here we show that the correct generalization needs to refer to the agreement features of the noun itself, c-command, and agreement higher in the structure. Moreover, it will be shown that the two accusative forms instantiate long distance case assignment, namely a system in which the case assigner may be situated in a position arbitrarily far from the assignee. Despite the several interacting mechanisms which take part in determining the accusative form in Finnish, we present a simple system of grammatical Case assignment that allows us to account for the three-way accusative realization as a by-product of more general syntactic mechanisms. At the core of our explanation is a notion of last resort: under certain exceptional conditions, higher functional heads, such as C and Agr, participate in direct object Case marking in order to save the derivation from crashing. The results suggest that the system of structural case/Case in UG needs to be broadened in order to capture all of the observed phenomena.

Accounts of semantic change have tended to emphasize universal, language internal explanations embedded within comparative typological frameworks. This paper describes in detail one lexeme and its many idiomatic collocations in one Arabic dialect, showing that the idiomaticity of Nigerian Arabic raas ‘head’ has been fundamentally determined by Kanuri, the dominant language of the Lake Chad region, with which Arabic has been in contact for 600 years. That the changes are due to contact is substantiated by the striking difference Nigerian Arabic shows against Egyptian-Arabic, from which ancestral Nigerian Arabic originally split. The semantic change can be ascertained via qualitative, categorical interpretation using established cognitive linguistic concepts, and via corpusbased statistical measures, providing a striking example of the largescale transfer of motivated opacity via contact.

Together with raising constructions, English employs the so-called copy raising (CR) constructions. The traditional wisdom for the treatment of these CR constructions has been that the subject of the highest embedded clause governed by the CR verb is raised to the matrix subject, leaving behind a coreferential pronoun (pronominal copy) in the subject position. This kind of movement-based analysis raises both empirical and analytical issues, when considering great variations in the position of the pronominal copy. This paper shows that copy raising predicates are basically classified into two main types, genuine and perception ones, while displaying similarities as well as distinctive properties. Together with the augmentation of empirical data through extensive corpus search, the paper further suggests that the similarities and differences of these two types as well as the variations of the CR construction can be followed from tight interactions among the lexical properties of these two types organized in a hierarchical structure, constraints on the argument realization specifying how the arguments are mapped on syntactic and semantic elements, and characterization constraints on the CR construction involved.

There is a broad consensus that native speakers' knowledge of the grammatical system of their language is predominantly implicit, i.e., unconscious and acquired incidentally rather than intentionally. Word meaning, in contrast, is regarded as the paradigm case of explicit, or declarative, knowledge (although some aspects of lexical knowledge, e.g. collocations and grammatical features, may be implicit). This paper presents evidence that knowledge of word meanings can also be implicit. 63 undergraduate students were given a self-evaluation task in which they were asked to assess their own knowledge of low frequency words, followed by a multiple-choice test providing an objective measure of their knowledge of the same words; they were asked to guess if they did not know the meaning of a word. Results indicate that even when participants claimed to be guessing, their performance was significantly above chance, indicating the existence of implicit knowledge by the guessing criterion (Dienes 2008).

The syntactic correlates of the diachronic process of subjectification within grammatical constructions, unlike that of discourse markers and connectives, do not include a cancellation of syntax. This can make the identification of subjectification within some grammaticalization processes difficult to identify. Pairs of purportedly synonymous constructions, such as continuative aspectual markers in Spanish, offer an ideal site to explore how certain linguistic contexts, through frequency, can come to be associated with more or less subjectivity. Six forms are included in this study: the phasal adverbs aún ‘still’ and todavía ‘still’ and the “phasal periphrastic” (Laca 2000) constructions including (semi-)auxiliaries: seguir ‘follow’ + V ndo and continuar ‘continue’ for positive polarity, and the corresponding seguir sin ‘follow without’ + INF and continuar sin ‘continue without’ + INF for negative polarity. In a variationist study of 481 occurrences of these forms from 1760–1860 in Corpus Diacrónico del Español (CORDE) and 2762 occurrences from 1975–1980 from Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA), it is found that the difference between these “synonyms” is linked, on the one hand, to contextual elements indicative of subjectivity, and on the other, to register. Furthermore, it is suggested that variation due to differing levels of subjectivity and register variation may share some characteristic patterns in the distribution of grammatical features.