Volume 54, Issue 1 -

Drawing on Clyne’s (2003) explanatory framework of facilitation, this study presents evidence of monosyllabic salience in Hong Kong Cantonese. Grounded in the perceptual salience of bilingual speakers of two or more languages (Clyne 1997: 95), facilitation extends Clyne’s earlier work on triggering (1967, 1980), which seeks to explain why linguistic (phonological, lexical, syntactic, semantic, etc.) features of one’s earlier-acquired language(s) may be transferred to languages learned or used later. In a corpus of texts appearing in informal discourse of Hong Kong Chinese newspaper columns in the mid-1990s (Li et al. 2014), a large number of monosyllabic English words, occurring as unintegrated insertions (Muysken 2000), were found. Building on Luke and Lau’s (2008) empirically supported insight that Cantonese verbs and adjectives are more characteristically monosyllabic compared with nouns, we present additional evidence in support of the Monosyllabic Salience Hypothesis (MSH): (i) shorter average word length in Cantonese vis-à-vis Mandarin, as evidenced in miscellaneous wordlists, including the Leipzig-Jakarta list (Tadmor et al. 2010: 239–241) and the World Loanword Database (WOLD) online (Haspelmath and Tadmor 2009); (ii) the truncation of the first syllable of polysyllabic words embedded in the A-not-A structure; (iii) bilingual punning; and (iv) monosyllabic Romanized Cantonese words (e.g., chok , chur , hea ).

The Principle of the Uniqueness of Grammatical Relations, which requires that all grammatical relations be distinguishable on morphological and/or syntactic grounds and non-repeatable in a clause, is often assumed to be a universal requirement of language and is a central tenet, explicit or implicit, of many theories of grammar. Upper Necaxa Totonac offers an apparent exception to this principle in that it has clauses with multiple objects that seem grammatically identical, yet do not appear to be adjuncts as they control agreement and are active in processes such as reciprocalization. Extensive testing of the properties of Upper Necaxa objects shows that, while a primary object can be distinguished on the basis of a single diagnostic, any remaining objects are indistinguishable and so must be treated as being governed by the same grammatical relation which is, therefore, non-unique. This data requires a reconsideration of the Uniqueness Principle as an absolute universal, and as an axiom or a necessary tenet of theories of human language.

The imperative should be thought of as a comparative concept, defined as a sentence type whose only prototypical function is the performance of the whole range of directive speech acts. Furthermore, for a non-second-person form to count as an imperative it must be homogeneous with the second-person form, thereby allowing true imperative paradigms to be distinguished from those that recruit alternative structures. This definition of the imperative sentence type allows more accurate crosslinguistic analysis of imperative paradigms, and provides principled grounds for distinguishing between imperative and so-called “hortative” and “jussive” forms. It also helps to clarify the irrealis – or better – potential status of imperatives, and suggests an explanation for the crosslinguistic variability in the non-directive occurrence of imperatives in good wishes.

This paper investigates syntactic productivity in diachrony with a data-driven approach. Previous research indicates that syntactic productivity (the property of grammatical constructions to attract new lexical fillers) is largely driven by semantics, which calls for an operationalization of lexical meaning in the context of empirical studies. It is suggested that distributional semantics can fulfill this role by providing a measure of semantic similarity between words that is derived from lexical co-occurrences in large text corpora. On the basis of a case study of the construction “V the hell out of NP”, e.g., You scared the hell out of me , it is shown that distributional semantics not only appropriately captures how the verbs in the distribution of the construction are related, but also enables the use of visualization techniques and statistical modeling to analyze the semantic development of a construction over time and identify the determinants of syntactic productivity in naturally occurring data.

In several Dogon languages, the ordering of simple N-Adj-Num DPs is strict. Adjectives and numerals also differ from each other in morphology and tonosyntax. When an inversion licensor (usually a reference restrictor) is addèd, N-Adj-Num is optionally inverted to N-Num-Adj. Pronominal possessors are also subject to reordering in some of the languages. The order of two adjectives in N-Adj1-Adj2 is free, so a syntactically conditioned stem-class merger between numerals, adjectives, and pronominal possessors would account for optional inverted orderings. However, morphological and tonosyntactic processes follow inversion and are sensitive to stem-class categories, showing that inversion cannot be postsyntactic. This suggests that the relevant word-classes belong to a supercategory medial modifier that is activated in linearization by an inversion licensor, but is disregarded by morphology and tonosyntax. Typological comparisons, e.g. to Slavic numerals, are superficial, so the approach here is micro-typological, focusing on variations within a broadly shared family-specific system.