Volume 55, Issue 3 -

This article examines the pragmatic uses of the verbal inflections in Bajjika, a Bihari language within the “eastern” group of the Indo-Aryan family. Previous studies have shown that Bajjika has a very complex system of verb-agreement, which is typical of Bihari languages but atypical of other Indo-Aryan languages. Of particular interest here is that Bajjika allows a maximum of two person-agreement slots in its verbal morphology: the first slot for markers that co-index with nominative participants, and the second slot for those markers that co-index with non-nominative participants as well as third person referents that are outside the discourse context (cf. Kashyap 2012, The pragmatic principles of agreement in Bajjika verbs. Journal of Pragmatics 44(13). 1868−1887). Our analysis, based on conversational data of Bajjika, reveals that the person-agreement system in Bajjika also registers the social standing of the interlocutors and third person referents along factors reflecting social hierarchy (e.g., age, rank, profession, and social class). Additionally, the non-nominative person-agreement markers (involving second and third but not first person reference) combine with future tense markers to yield epistemic effects (e.g., pragmatic softening or hedging) that contribute to the negotiation of face-needs among discourse participants and discourse referents. These findings have implications for the relationship between deictic elements (e.g., tense and person-agreement markers) and politeness strategies, and may shed light on the pragmatic uses of verbal inflections in other Bihari languages as well as other languages with verbal morphology that encode deictic information.

One of the longstanding problems in linguistic analysis is to identify, describe, and analyze the lexical aspect classes allowed in natural language. Recent developments on this issue have raised two interrelated questions: how many event classes there are and how they are derived from a minimum of primitives. In this article, we identify a class of predicates denoting the maintenance of a situation through which 13 tests can be shown to display mixed properties between states and activities, challenging the existing taxonomies of aspectual classes. We furthermore argue that the existence of this class is expected by any theory that treats aspectual classes as epiphenomena of the combination of a restricted set of primitives, and propose an analysis where they contain a central coincidence preposition selected by an eventive layer.

Nonfinite verb forms can gradually acquire morphological and syntactic properties of finiteness. Across the languages of the world, such developments can follow various pathways with various results. In this article, I first discuss the four major pathways mechanisms for developing finite function on formerly nonfinite forms. Next, I argue that the Transeurasian languages (i. e., Japanese, Korean, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages) share a common mechanism. Historical reconstruction indicates that these languages all show the tendency to reanalyze directly a nonfinite verb form as a finite one, without the omission of a specific matrix verb. I refer to this tendency as “indirect insubordination”. I argue that the recurrence of indirect insubordination on formally related suffixes can be taken as an indication of common ancestorship.

The exploitation of external as opposed to local language varieties in advertising can be associated with a history of colonization, the external variety being viewed as superior to the local (Bell 1991, The language of news media . Oxford: Basil Blackwell: 145). Although “Standard English” in terms of accent was never an exonormative model for speakers in Ireland (Hickey 2012, Standard Irish English. In Raymond Hickey (ed.), Standards of English: Codified varieties around the world , 96–116. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), nevertheless Ireland’s history of colonization by Britain, together with the geographical proximity and close socio-political and sociocultural connections of the two countries makes the Irish context an interesting one in which to examine this phenomenon. This study looks at how and to what extent standard British Received Pronunciation (RP), now termed Standard Southern British English (SSBE) (see Hughes et al. 2012, English accents and dialects , 5th edn. New York: Routledge) as opposed to Irish English varieties is exploited in radio advertising in Ireland. The study is based on a quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of ads broadcast on an Irish radio station in the years 1977, 1987, 1997 and 2007. The use of SSBE in the ads is examined in terms of referee design (Bell 1984, Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13(2). 145–204.) which has been found to be a useful concept in explaining variety choice in the advertising context and in “taking the ideological temperature” of society (Vestergaard and Schroder 1985, The language of advertising . Oxford: Blackwell: 121). The analysis is based on Sussex’s (1989, The Americanisation of Australian English: Prestige models in the media. In Peter Collins & David Blair (eds.), Australian English: The language of a new society , 158–170. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) advertisement components of Action and Comment, which relate to the genre of the discourse.

This paper studies the referring properties of post-nominal demonstratives in Spanish with an aim to contributing to our present understanding of this marked construction. A corpus analysis is presented, where 600 cases of pre- and post-nominal demonstratives are analyzed based on their discourse anaphoric properties: direct vs. indirect anaphora. The data reveal that post-nominal demonstratives are significantly preferred in cases of indirect anaphora; that is, where no antecedent is linguistically realized in the discourse, and the reference of the demonstrative anaphor has to be inferred from the discourse or situational context. Pre-nominal demonstratives, on the other hand, show a more balanced picture sharing similar numbers in direct and indirect anaphora. However, the data also reveal that post-nominal demonstratives can be used in direct anaphoric uses, which poses a problem for a categorical distinction between pre- and post-nominal demonstratives at the referential level. Since variability appears to be the nature of the phenomenon, I propose a uniform presuppositional characterization for pre- and post-nominal demonstratives that is able to account for the observed referential flexibility.

Aspectual properties of English particles still lack a satisfactory account, as neither the standard (Brinton 1985, Verb particles in English: Aspect or aktionsart? Studia Linguistica 39(2). 157–168. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9582.1985.tb00750.x (accessed 30 January 2015)) nor a more recent (Cappelle and Chauvin 2010, Interprétations aspectuelles des verbes à particule en anglais: Téliques, comparatifs, résultatifs. In Pascale Hadermann, Olga Inkova, Michel Pierrard & Dan Van Raemdonck (eds.), Approches de la scalarité , 249–281. Geneve: Droz) account can be generalized over all aspectual particles. By analyzing aspect in terms of scalarity this paper argues that particles are either scalar or non-scalar, which leads to their different aspectual and syntactic behavior. Scalar particles are marked for scalarity; they can affect the argument structure of the verb root and enforce telicity. In contrast, non-scalar particles are unmarked for scalarity; they do not affect the argument structure and do not enforce telicity. Both scalar and non-scalar particles systematically appear in atelic and telic sentences, depending on the verb root and its arguments. Scalarity, like telicity, is a feature built compositionally and monotonically.

This paper extends Slobin’s (2005, Relating narrative events in translation. In Dorit D. Ravid & Hava B. Shyldkrot (eds.), Perspectives on language and language development: Essays in honor of Ruth A. Berman , 115–129. Dordrecht: Kluwer) examination of 10 satellite- and verb-framed translations of a single English text to Chinese, a language considered variously as a satellite-framed language and an equipollently framed language. The Chinese translation is examined in terms of the patterns of manner and path encoding employed in attempting to reproduce the vividness of manner description and degree of detailed path elaboration of the original source text, and in how these compare to the other languages examined in Slobin. Lexical, morphosyntactic, typological and cultural factors contributing to the overall narrative style of Chinese are examined, and an evaluation offered of the place of Chinese on proposed clines of manner and path salience.

Idioms have generally played a supporting rather than a leading role in research on figurative language. In Cognitive Linguistics for instance idioms have been understood against how they are embedded in conceptual metaphors (Lakoff 1987, Women, fire, and dangerous things . Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Clausner and Croft 1997, Productivity and schematicity in metaphors. Cognitive Science 21. 247–282) while in the experimental psycholinguistic tradition their role has been to challenge the basis of conceptual metaphor in “priming” figurative language (Glucksberg et al. 1993, Conceptual metaphors are not automatically accessed during idiom comprehension. Memory and Cognition 21. 711–719; McGlone 2007, What is the explanatory value of a conceptual metaphor? Language and Communication 27. 109–206). It is, moreover, broadly assumed that criteria defining grammatical properties of idioms are limited to their morphological and syntactic behavior (Nunberg et al. 1994, Idioms. Language 70. 491–538). While the pragmatic properties of idioms have been described informally (Glucksberg 2001. Understanding figurative language: From metaphors to idioms (Oxford psychology series 36). Oxford: OUP), there are few studies which systematically contrast the behavior of nouns in literal vs. idiomatic expressions in discourse. Using a battery of criteria which has been developed to study discourse properties of subjects in spoken Arabic (Owens et al. 2013. Subject expression and discourse embeddedness in Emirati Arabic. Language Variation and Change 25. 255–285), we show that keyword nouns in Nigerian Arabic are significantly different according to whether they are idiomatic or literal. The basis of the conclusion is the statistical analysis of 1403 tokens derived from a large corpus of natural Nigerian Arabic texts. Nouns in idiomatic expressions are opaque to discourse in a way those in literal ones are not. To explain the statistical results we argue that idioms partake in a ‘semantic mapping’ which incorporates the noun and its collocate in the idiom into a word-like unit, rendering it largely invisible to subsequent discourse. Since Nigerian Arabic idiomatic nouns, as is shown, display no clause-internal syntactic constraints, exhibit no cross-clausal syntactic dependencies, and show no significant interactions with possessive pronouns which ostensibly appear to mark the discourse argument of the keyword they are suffixed to, it is concluded that the mapping is of semantic nature. Other than exemplifying basic facts obtained via elicitation, the entire argument hinges on an examination of nouns in actual spoken discourse. The article establishes that large corpora coupled with multivariate statistical treatment contribute directly to understanding semantic factors difficult to evaluate via direct elicitation or examination of individual examples, in this case the sensitivity of cross-clausal referentiality to idiomatic contextualization.