Volume 58, Issue 4

Large lexica of basic smell terms are considered to be restricted to a handful of small languages of non-industrialized societies. Accordingly, they are thought to belong to the sphere of rara within lexical typology (Plank 2001. Das grammatische Raritätenkabinett . Konstanz: University of Konstanz. https://typo.uni-konstanz.de/rara/intro/index.php (accessed 3 October 2017)). However, smell lexica might in fact be more common than previously suggested. In this article, we discuss the case of Thai – a language with a population of tens of millions of speakers – which defies this assumption. We show Thai has a sizeable lexicon of terms for olfactory qualities, and investigate their semantics using a multi-method approach. In particular, we demonstrate a novel use of exemplar listing where – in addition to giving insights into the terms’ extensions – exemplar data is used to reveal the structure of the lexicon. Additionally, we use corpus data to provide complementary information on meaning and usage, thereby showing the advantage of multi-method approaches. Overall, the findings suggest smell lexica are not rara, and their distribution in the world’s languages goes beyond the stereotypical cases of languages spoken by small-scale societies.

Double and triple negation marking is an ancient and deep-rooted feature that is attested in almost the entire Berber-speaking area (North Africa and diaspora), regardless of the type of negators in use; i. e., discontinuous markers (preverbal and postverbal negators) and dedicated negative verb stem alternations. In this article, we deal with the main stages that have led to the present Berber negation patterns and we argue, from a typological viewpoint, that certain morphophonetic mechanisms are to be regarded as a hitherto overlooked source for new negators. Moreover, we present a number of motivations that account for the hypothesis that, in Berber, those languages with both a preverbal and a postverbal negator belong to a diachronic stage prior to the attested languages with a preverbal negator only. Consequently, the study demonstrates that the Jespersen Cycle is back to the beginning in certain Berber languages. In doing so, we also show that Berber is to be regarded as a substrate in the development of double negation in North African Arabic. In addition, the study accounts for the asymmetric nature of Berber negation, although some new developments towards more symmetrical negation configurations are also attested.

This study examines the acquisition of broken plural (BP) patterns generated by child speakers of Jordanian Arabic (JA). Data were collected from 20 Jordanian children via an experimental production test. Children were given pictures of a set of singular entities depicting nouns and pictures containing their plural counterparts, and they were asked to say the names of the items in the pictures in an attempt to provide their corresponding plural forms. The results reveal that the acquisition of correct BP patterns appears critical for children. The feminine sound plural (FSP) was employed as the default pattern by children and thus is acquired before the BP, with the acquired patterns mainly shaped by productivity, predictability (but not familiarity) and overgeneralization (morphological, phonological, and semantic). Based on the oral speech corpus produced by adult JA speakers, published in Semarchive, a rough count of plural pattern frequencies was undertaken. The FSP proved to be less frequent than BPs in tokens and can thus be considered a minority default, a finding that calls into question the validity of Boudelaa and Gaskell’s corpus (2002. A re-examination of the default system for Arabic plurals. Language and Cognitive Processes 17(3). 321–343) on JA. Although 3- to 5-year-old children use the FSP as the most productive pattern, frequency does not significantly contribute to the predictability of the distribution in shaping the correct plural form at this stage of learning BPs.

The paper investigates preposition (and determiner) drop in Greek. A close look at the properties of preposition-drop reveals that despite the lack of a definite determiner, the place nominal that participates in preposition-drop is interpreted as familiar. This familiarity presupposition of the place nominal is achieved via movement of NP-to-SpecDP for the satisfaction of a D-feature bundle on D. Further, the lack of strict adjacency between the verb and the NP provides evidence that Greek preposition-drop aligns more closely with pseudo-incorporation. Here, pseudo-incorporation is triggered for the satisfaction of an EPP/LOC feature available on the verb and satisfied via PP-preposing.

This paper presents a corpus study of the position of object pronouns relative to a non-pronominal subject in embedded clauses of German. A total of 4322 embedded clauses from the deWaC corpus (Baroni, Marco, Silvia Bernardini, Adriano Ferraresi & Eros Zanchetta. 2009. The WaCky Wide Web: A collection of very large linguistically processed web-crawled corpora. Language Resources and Evaluation Journal 23(3). 209–226), a corpus of written German Internet texts, were analyzed. In 67.0% of all clauses, the object pronoun occurred in front of the subject. Several factors that have been proposed in the literature on word order alternations were found to govern the choice between subject–object and object–subject order in the corpus under investigation. The most important findings are: (i) The Extended Animacy Hierarchy and the Semantic Role Hierarchy independently contribute to the choice of word order. (ii) The Definiteness Hierarchy has a strong effect on the position of the object pronoun. (iii) Word order effects of constituent weight, measured as length in number of words, cannot be reduced to effects of grammatical factors, nor can effects of grammatical factors be reduced to effects of weight.

Changes in the productivity of word-formation patterns are often investigated using hapax legomena. In this paper, I argue that at least in diachronic investigations of productivity, a measure based on first attestations is a viable alternative to hapax-based measures. I show that such a measure is a more direct proxy to new words than hapax-based measures – it measures what we want to measure, which is not always true for the latter. I present a method that deals with the common problem of varying subcorpus sizes (I suggest we randomly resample the subcorpora up to a predefined size), and to the problem of old words appearing as new at the start of the corpus (I suggest we take an earlier corpus and determine a point in time when almost all old words have registered). Armed with these instruments, we can determine the ratio of new types to existing types for a time span, which can be regarded as the renewal rate of the respective category.

This study focuses on the distribution of agrm-bc , one of two agreement markers used in Austrian Sign Language (ÖGS; Krebs, Julia, Ronnie B. Wilbur & Dietmar Roehm. 2017. Two agreement markers in ÖGS. Sign Language and Linguistics 20(1). 27–54), with respect to different “verb types”. Using an online questionnaire, ÖGS signers rated ÖGS sentences involving different verb types that varied in whether they show agreement with their arguments (“agreeing” with two arguments, “plain” with none or only one) and if so, how (movement from subject to object, backwards from object to subject and/or facing towards object). Thus, the verbs differ in the degree and form of expressing agreement. In addition, these verbs either appeared with or without agrm-bc . Data analysis revealed that the combination of inflected agreeing verbs and the agreement marker (“double agreement”) is acceptable in ÖGS. If the verb itself does not indicate full agreement (i.e., as in plain verbs) agrm-bc can, but does not have to, be used to indicate the argument structure. Independently, whether the verb showed full agreement marking (movement and facing) or only facing did not influence the acceptability of the occurrence of agrm-bc . The relatively high ratings for the combination of agrm-bc with different verb types suggests that agrm-bc functions as a general agreement marker in ÖGS.