Volume 53, Issue 1

In several Bantu languages in the regions where Kikongo and Lingala are spoken, we encounter sentences where the word ‘person’ can appear after the subject of a canonical SVO sentence, resulting in a focused interpretation of the subject. Synchronically, we analyze this as a monoclausal focus construction with moto ‘person’ as a focus marker. Diachronically, we argue, the construction derives from a biclausal cleft, where moto functioned as the head noun of the relative clause. This is a crosslinguistically rare but plausible development. The different languages studied in this paper show variation in the properties indicative of the status of the ‘moto construction’, which reflects the different stages of grammaticalization. Finally, we show how contact-induced grammaticalization is a likely factor in the development of moto as a focus marker.

Many languages of the world have connectives to express causal relations at the discourse level. Often, language users systematically prefer one lexical item ( because ) over another (even highly similar) one ( since ) to express a causal relationship. Such choices provide a window on speakers' cognitive categorizations, and have been modeled in previous work in terms of subjectivity. However, a broader empirical basis and a more specific operationalization of subjectivity are urgently needed. This paper provides in these needs by developing an integrative empirical approach to the analysis of the Dutch connectives omdat ‘because’ and want ‘since/for’ in written text, conversation, and chat interactions. These can be considered a case in point for linguistic categorization since related European languages show similar distinctions. The construct of subjectivity is decomposed into characteristics like type of relation and subject of consciousness (who can be considered responsible for the causality?). The use of statistical methods specifically suitable for hypothesis testing in natural language corpora produces results that provide new insights into the division of labor between the two connectives, as well as into the notion of subjectivity.

This paper deals with the relative empirical length of signs in sign languages and provides evidence for the view that they are actually longer units than has hitherto been recognized. The evidence is presented from two perspectives: those of sign articulation and sign recognition. Concerning sign articulation, it is suggested that signs are longer units than is currently assumed because most of the structural features of signs are in fact already present before the currently accepted beginnings of signs and they continue after signs' generally accepted endings. Concerning sign recognition, the longer view of the sign is proposed on the grounds that the recognition point of signs is typically located before their alleged beginning, and because signs (as currently understood) can also be recognized on the basis of parts of their subsequent transitions only. The nature of the longer sign is discussed together with some more general consequences for sign language research of the revision of our view of what a sign might be.

The position of wh -items is one of the most striking features of the syntax of sign languages (SLs). In contrast to spoken languages, where wh -words are generally found either clause-initially or in situ , SLs allow wh -signs in situ, in clause-final position (preferred for many SLs), or repeated in two different positions of the clause. Moreover, in many cases all these options coexist in the same language (and even within a single signer). Several proposals in the theoretical literature showed how grammars are able to generate such constructions; however, none of the proposals addresses the issue of what factors determine the choice of these options. We present corpus evidence showing that both linguistic and social factors constrain the distribution of wh -signs in LIS (Lingua dei Segni Italiana, Italian Sign Language). The result of multivariate analysis suggests that LIS is undergoing a grammatical change and becoming less like spoken Italian with respect to the position of wh -signs.

This study has two goals: First, to give an account of the semantic organization of individually used antonymic adjectives in discourse and second, based on those findings and previous work on antonymic meanings, to contribute to a comprehensive theoretical account of their representation within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics. The hypothesis is that the members of the pairs are used in the same contexts and in the same type of constructions, not only when they co-occur and are used to express binary opposition as shown in previous studies, but also when they do not. The manually coded corpus data from the BNC are analyzed along four semantic parameters: (i) the configuration of the adjectives in terms of gradability, (ii) the way they modify the nominal meanings, i.e., attributively or predicatively (iii) the meaning type of the modified nouns, and (iv) the status of the constructions with respect to whether their meanings are what we refer to as “basic”, metaphorical or metonymical. Correspondence analysis technique is used to identify similarities and differences on the basis of the totality of the data. As predicted, our findings confirm a high degree of pairwise similarity – but also some differences. On the basis of these results, it can be argued that the long-standing controversy within Structuralism between proponents of the co-occurrence hypothesis and the substitutability hypothesis in antonym research is a non-issue.