Volume 52, Issue 5

According to the Bimoraic Constraint (Kager 1989) and the Minimal Rhyme Constraint (Booij 1995), Dutch syllables by default end in either a tense vowel or a lax vowel followed by a consonant. Syllables ending in a lax vowel do not meet the phonological requirements of a felicitous syllable. The present paper reports on a listening task in which this phonological constraint is explored. Three linguists were asked to categorize 3984 vowels in open syllables in bisyllabic Dutch words with two full vowels (e.g., gl o baal [glo'bal] ‘global’, dict ee [dɪk'te] ‘dictation’). The source words originated from spontaneously spoken Standard Dutch by 80 Flemish and 80 Dutch teachers of Dutch. The main variables of this study were stress (stressed vs. unstressed syllables), relative position in the word (first vs. second syllable), vowel (/a/-/e/-/i/-/o/) and country (Flanders vs. the Netherlands). The present study did not find conclusive empirical evidence for the phonological constraint at issue. In other words, it was not unusual for Dutch syllables to end in a lax vowel. As expected, vowels in stressed syllables are labeled as tense more often than their unstressed counterparts. More lax realizations were found in the first syllable than in the second, and Flemish vowels were more often categorized as lax than Dutch vowels. The vowel with the lowest tense-score was /a/.

We provide a constructional account of unselected objects in Polish with special focus on valence augmentation and valence creation processes (Michaelis and Ruppenhofer 2001a, 2001b) involved in prze- prefixed predications. Unselected objects appear in two transitive patterns, which we label Object-as-Figure and Object-as-Ground constructions. Unlike most non-cognitivist approaches (cf. Spencer and Zaretskaya 1998) and in accordance with Cognitive Grammar proposals (cf. Janda 1985; Dąbrowska 1996), we argue that prefixes do not have a vague meaning nor are sometimes mere aspectual markers. In particular, we show that the semantics of both prze- patterns is based on an image schema, where a Figure physically crosses a Ground. Furthermore, we show, through a corpus study, that this spatial configuration provides the basis for a number of metaphorical extensions of the central constructional meaning. However, in contrast to some Cognitive Grammar approaches (cf. Dąbrowska 1996), we propose that the prefix is not added to the verb, changing its valency, but rather it is the verb (or other grammatical category) that is integrated into the prefixed construction. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the analytical machinery of Construction Grammar that is used to account for irregular patterns, i.e., direct objects not involved in the verb's argument structure, can also be used to account for regular syntactic patterns, i.e., prze- constructions with prototypical direct objects.

This paper re-examines from an evolutionary perspective the typological status of Chinese, with regard to the issue of how the information of motion events is encoded (Talmy 2000; Slobin 2004). We investigate, with emphasis on the roles of both language structure and language use, the four periods of Chinese (Old, Middle, Pre-Modern and Modern) in terms of parameters such as path, manner and ground, and compare with typologically different languages, namely, verb-framed languages like Spanish and satellite-framed languages like English. Our statistical study shows that (i) Chinese has been undergoing a typological shift from a verb-framed language to a satellite-framed language, and Pre-Modern Chinese is a stepped-up period with respect to the speed of evolution; (ii) Modern Chinese adopts diverse patterns to encode motion events, which are different from both typical verb-framed languages and typical satellite-framed languages. We thus conclude that (i) contrary to Peyraube's (2006) claim, the typological shift in Chinese has not yet been achieved; (ii) there is little justification for classifying Chinese as an equipollently framed language as in Slobin (2004) and Chen and Guo (2009). Therefore, there is no need to posit an equipollent type for Chinese; and (iii) Modern Chinese is in a transitional state from a V-type to an S-type due to the evolution of its motion expressions. It also favors the S-type in both its morphosyntactic properties and language use.