Volume 56, Issue 3 -

There exists a controversy in the literature and among the speakers of Slovenian concerning the grammaticality of wh-island and subject island constructions in this language. We conducted an acceptability rating study of wh-islands and subject islands in Slovenian, using the factorial definition of island. This definition provides for a possibility to isolate a true island effect while controlling for two complexity factors that potentially interfere in speakers’ evaluation of the relevant sentences: the length of the respective movement dependency and the presence of an island structure itself. We found that (i) Slovenian speakers do judge the wh-island sentences worse than the respective controls, but the observed degradation cannot be attributed to a true island effect; (ii) subject extraction out of a wh-island leads to a so called reverse island effect whereby the acceptability is higher than expected even if the above two complexity factors are taken into consideration; and (iii) speakers are sensitive to the subject island effect, as predicted by the mainstream theories of syntactic locality. The results of our study contribute to establishing a solid empirical base for further theoretical investigations of the island effects and raise new questions about the role of processing factors in speakers’ evaluations of island constructions.

Differential locative marking is found in languages all over the world. Toponyms, in particular, are well known to often require less locative marking than other types of nouns, and it has been suggested that they express ‘where’ concepts. This paper presents a case study of differential locative marking in Makalero, a Papuan language of East Timor, where nouns fall into three categories: those which need no overt locative marking, i.e., can be zero-marked; those which are used with a semantically general locative verb; and those which can only be used with semantically specific locative verbs. Zero-marking of spatial relations occurs only in a specific construction where the nouns in question are used predicatively, suggesting that the syntactic equivalent of the ‘where’ category is a relational expression, not a noun. There is furthermore a certain degree of flexibility in Makalero locative constructions, and alternative expressions result in predictable semantic differences. These differences show that the lack of perceptual boundaries and of an internal structure are important parameters that distinguish the referents of so-called natural location nouns from nouns which denote ‘what’ concepts. More comparative case studies are needed to enrich our understanding of these notions and the properties characterizing them.

This article investigates the distributional and information structural (IS) properties of il y a ‘there is’ clefts in comparison with c’est ‘it is’ clefts in French. Il y a clefts, which are prototypically said to be “presentational” or express all-focus, are relatively under-researched with respect to c’est clefts. We present the results of an extensive corpus study of il y a clefts in three different registers, revealing that these clefts most often express an all-focus articulation, but also quite often express a focus-background articulation, which has not been acknowledged often in the linguistic literature. Moreover, the corpora contain contrastive il y a clefts (displaying properties of both all-focus and topic-comment sentences), which to our knowledge have not been noticed before. It follows from these data that although c’est and il y a clefts can both express all-focus and focus-background, they clearly differ with respect to the topic-comment articulation and have specialized for different functions. Finally, several syntactic and pragmatic factors are presented that may account for the (distributive) differences between the two cleft types, e.g., the impossibility of non-(pro)nominal clefted elements in il y a clefts, genre differences, and the implication of exhaustivity.

Typical words in some East Asian languages, including Chinese, have reduced historically from disyllabic (CV·CV(C)) to monosyllabic (C(C)V(C)) and then open monosyllables (CV). More recently, in some of those languages, many monosyllabic CV forms again appear as disyllabic (CV·CV). The former developments result from a variety of apparently unconnected segmental changes. In the latter, they often reflect morphological innovations, like compounding and affixation. That is, apparently disparate segmental phonological processes reduced monosyllabic word templates and apparently disparate morphological and phonological processes have created new disyllables, which can all be captured in terms of preferred prosodic templates. We integrate these areal and genetic patterns into a growing literature on prosodic templates in diachrony, expanding the set of languages and patterns. That body of work has focused on sound changes that bring words into alignment with templates while our cases studies also involve clear changes in the templatic structures themselves. Finally, the patterns reviewed here resemble cycles of prosodic change, driven by tensions between reduction and minimal word constraints; we suggest that these phenomena show ‘bare’ prosodic cyclicity without the grammatical or functional ramifications of familiar cycles of change.

Previous research on speech perception has found an effect of ethnicity, such that the same audio clip may be rated more accented when presented with an Asian face (Rubin, Donald L. 1992. Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates’ judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants. Research in Higher Education 33(4). 511–531. doi: 10.1007/bf00973770). However, most previous work has concentrated on Asian non-native English speakers, and Caucasian speakers remain under-explored. In this study, listeners carried out an accentedness rating task using stimuli from first language Korean, German, and English speakers in 3 conditions: audio only, video only, and audiovisual . Korean speakers received similar accentedness ratings regardless of condition, but German speakers were rated significantly less accented in the video condition and more accented in the audiovisual condition than the audio one. This result is explained as an expectation mismatch effect, whereby, when the listeners saw a Caucasian speaker they did not expect to hear a foreign accent, but if they actually heard one it was made more salient by their expectation to the contrary.

This paper analyzes a hitherto unnoticed semantic change process in Chinese, in which lexical (adjectival) materials develop into superlative operators, and subsequently turn into definiteness markers. Our analysis focuses on the semantic factors that underlie this meaning change trajectory. Specifically, we argue that frequent association of gradable adjectives with superlative implication leads to pragmatic strengthening in which the superlative implication conventionally enters the literal meaning. Furthermore, we show that a further change in the extension of the nominal part of superlative phrases leads to a maximality reanalysis that is compatible with the semantics of definite NPs. This paper contributes to the burgeoning field of applying truth-conditional semantics to theories of grammaticalization.

It is common both crosslinguistically and specifically in Bantu languages for the prohibitive to be formed by a construction consisting of a cessative verb in collocation with a non-finite verb. This is also the case in Manda, an understudied Southern Tanzanian Bantu language. In Manda, a negative imperative is expressed by the auxiliary - kotok -, with the (lexical) meaning ‘leave (off), stop’, operating on an infinitive full verb. Intriguingly, there is variation in this construction, as - kotok - may be both formally reduced and may be used more broadly to denote non-factivity in other “non-main” (or non-standard) contexts. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that this functional and formal variation reflects a historical and ongoing process of grammaticalization along the verb-to-affix cline. Drawing on field data, the available historical data and (micro-)comparative data, this study argues that - kotok - is transforming into a more general non-main negation marker. These changes corroborate Güldemann’s hypothesis (Güldemann, Tom. 1999. The genesis of verbal negation in Bantu and its dependency on functional features of clause types. In Jean-Marie Hombert & Larry Hyman (eds.), Bantu historical linguistics , 545–587. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications) that the salient category of non-standard secondary negative markers in Bantu is derived from constructions with an auxiliary and a non-finite verb.

Anaphoric underspecification involves multiple potential candidate antecedents for an anaphoric expression. In abstract object anaphora, where linguistic antecedents are clauses, sentences and larger fragments of discourse, the source of referential underspecification is commonly found at the propositional level. Thus, underspecified abstract anaphors have multiple antecedents of a higher-order nature (i.e., propositions and events). Following previous research on anaphoric underspecification with nominal antecedents, I propose a hypothetical three-step process toward the resolution of underspecified abstract object anaphors by hearers in discourse: (i) creation of a complex abstract object with a mereological structure that includes all potential interpretations for an anaphor, (ii) recognition of the thematic connection among propositions intended by the speaker in the form of a specific rhetorical relation, and 3) resolution of the abstract anaphor. Potential antecedents for any underspecified abstract anaphor may include atomic propositions and complex abstract referents that result from a merged interpretation of several propositions that are thematically connected. Provided that it is available, I claim that such a merged interpretation, which is part of the mereological structure, is the preferred interpretation as it is generally interpreted as part of a general purpose by the speaker, in addition to contributing to the thematic coherence of discourse.