Volume 52, Issue 3

Studies on prepositions in Hong Kong English have focused on syntactic issues, most notably on the constituent structures of different prepositions with five transitive verbs (i.e., enter into, discuss about, return back, stress on and list out). As a result, they have neglected the role of meaning in the choice of prepositions that are associated with these verbs. This paper attempts to provide a convincing semantic explanation of the phenomenon from the theoretical framework of Cognitive Grammar. I will argue that the cooccurrence of particular prepositions with these verbs in Hong Kong English is not completely arbitrary, but is in fact semantically motivated to a considerable degree. All corpus uses of these structures evoke some kind of conceptual overlap between the lexical verb and the preposition. More specifically, a certain facet of the verb's conceptual content corresponds in some evident way to an active zone of the associated preposition. The conclusion considers the implications of a highly schematic constructional schema instantiated by these five verbpreposition constructions as a unit entrenched by nonnative speakers.

In the long-running and framework-independent discussion among historical linguists on the dominant mechanism in grammaticalization, viz. “reanalysis” or “analogy”, recent case studies (De Smet 2009, 2012, forthcoming; Fischer 2007, 2008, 2012) have proposed in favor of analogy that syntagmatic associations often precede and to some extent trigger structural reanalysis. This article supports analogical thinking in both the grammaticalization (diachrony) and functional organization (synchrony) of binominal quantifiers in Spanish (e.g., un montón de gente ‘a lot of people’). The corpus-based analysis starts off from the “hybrid” status of quantifying nouns (e.g., montón ‘heap, lot’), as they continue to exploit typical noun features in functional uses. The variation in the co-selection patterns is shown to arise from the complex interaction between (conceptual) persistence, analogy and discourse integration. In addition to providing additional evidence for the prevalence and driving force of syntagmatic associations over paradigmatic pressure, the paper characterizes conceptually driven analogy as a two-way discourse phenomenon and zooms in on the reasons for some grammaticalization processes to remain (at least temporarily) “on hold.”

This study investigates a putative case of negative concord in Southern Min where two negatives ( m ‘not’ and bian ‘need.not’) co-occur without canceling each other out semantically. Contra common belief, I argue that Southern Min does not have negative concord. Corpus data on m-bian and m-tioh are examined, where tioh ‘need’ and bian are necessity modal counterparts. Corpus findings reveal that negativity in m participates in neither m-bian nor m-tioh in semantics. Feature loss is discovered in m , which is then taken as evidence for m being a new category other than negative. I analyze m under investigation as mood, situated in the discourse layer.

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the meaning of the construction ‘a relativizer- cwul [complementizer] -al - ‘know’ ’ in Korean, specifically on its semantic ambiguity between meaning ‘believe that . . .’ and meaning ‘know that . . .’. When it is followed exclusively by psych predicates in present-day Korean, particularly either al- ‘know’ or molu- ‘not.know,’ cwul comes to have its extended function as a complementizer from its original sense meaning ‘method,’ or ‘way.’ I argue that the ambiguity belongs to the overall construction, which is licensed by the neutral epistemic stance encoded by the complementizer cwul . I also contend that the cwul al- construction that contains the predicate al- ‘know’ shows asymmetrical usages of first and nonfirst-person subjects; the present-tense cwul al- construction with a first-person subject is not normally licensed. This paper employs mental-spaces theory to account for the ambiguity and the asymmetry, which stem from the covert interactions between the two viewpoints. I show that the theory captures the speaker's backgrounded knowledge with backgrounded information accommodation , a specific mental-space evocation mechanism, which is crucial in the construal of the construction.

Grammatical constraints in one language often surface as statistical tendencies in another, suggesting that cross-linguistic comparative studies can play a central role in the study of language-internal “free” variation. This paper applies this approach to the case of the variation between two Hebrew constructions: possessive dative (PD) and ordinary possession. While both constructions convey a possessive meaning, PD additionally highlights the fact that the possessor was affected by an event involving his or her possessed object. To elucidate the concept of affectedness, we turn to European languages that have encoded in their grammar various concrete reflexes of this notion, such as the animacy of the possessor (animate possessors are more often perceived as affected). We show that these concrete reflexes, while not grammatically encoded in Hebrew, have a statistical effect in that language as well. This makes it possible to predict the choice of construction in any given context using these objective proxies of affectedness. Furthermore, we argue that certain categorical restrictions on PD, previously attributed to formal syntactic factors, are best captured as consequences of the semantic affectedness condition. Our results illustrate the continuum between categorical constraints and statistical tendencies, both across languages and within a single language.

This paper presents the results of corpus research on the distribution of different functional-pragmatic types of it -clefts and c'est- clefts in English and French adverbial clauses. We distinguish between narrowly contrastive clefts , broadly contrastive clefts (or new information focus clefts ) and non-contrastive clefts . We present the results of corpus research showing that, whereas the three types occur in asserted (or peripheral ) adverbial clauses (typically causals), only narrowly contrastive clefts occur in non-asserted (or central ) adverbial clauses (typically temporals). The distribution of the three functional-pragmatic types of clefts is explained on the basis of the interaction between information structure, epistemic modality and assertion.