Volume 58, Issue 6

In contrast to well-studied prenominal relative clauses (RCs) in Chinese, little has been known about postnominal RCs that are non-canonical but existent in spoken Chinese. Focusing on Standard Mandarin, this paper examines in a large-scale spoken corpus the distributional patterns of postnominal RCs. Using distribution patterns of prenominal RCs in existing corpus studies as benchmarks, we show that postnominal RCs in our spoken corpus of Standard Mandarin tend to modify sentential objects more frequently than sentential subjects, and that they are likely to be short, with extremely rare presence of aspect markers. Based on these patterns, we propose that postnominal RCs in Standard Mandarin are mostly afterthoughts, motivated by information structure of spoken languages and word order principles. To better understand their general coverage, we further investigate postnominal RCs in Chinese dialects using available resources, including Yue, Min, Xiang, and Wu, followed by a raw comparison of cross-dialectal similarities and differences. We conclude that postnominal RCs in Chinese are similarly motivated, but their degrees of grammaticalization vary.

This article discusses the diachronic development of the Spanish multifunctional formula en plan (with its variant en plan de , literally ‘in plan (of)’ but usually equivalent to English like ). The article has two main aims: firstly, to describe the changes that the formula has undergone since its earliest occurrences as a marker in the nineteenth century up to the early 21st century. The diachronic study evinces a process of grammaticalization in three steps: from noun to clause adverbial and then to discourse marker. Secondly, to conduct a contrastive analysis between en plan (de) and the English markers like and kind of/kinda so as to shed new light on the potential existence of a universal pathway of grammaticalization in the emergence of discourse markers.

Using conversational data, frequency counts, and prosodic evidence drawn from corpora of 70 television drama series and 142 audio-recorded natural conversations, I demonstrate that the Korean connective construction hakonun ‘after having done,’ which comprises ha ‘do’, ko ‘and’ and the topic marker nun and indicates a temporal sequence, has developed into a final particle that encodes a speaker’s stance of criticism and complaint. I show that the source, hakonun, has routinely been used in expressing concessive relations between two sequential events that go against the speaker’s expectation (‘counter-expectation’), and thus, is frequently used to challenge a hearer (e.g., ‘after having done many evil deeds, how can you ask for my help?’). Through this use, the speaker’s negative affect and stance of disapproval have become semanticized with hakonun . Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of (inter)subjectification and insubordination, I propose that hakonun and Japanese shi ‘and’ constitute another case of crosslinguistically similar development of connectives becoming final particles. McGloin and Konishi (2010) argue that through its frequent use in the context of counter-expectation, shi ‘and’ has recently developed into a final particle expressing a speaker’s negative stance such as criticism and complaint.

How might Basque have looked before it came in contact with Latin? This interesting line of research may give us an idea of what the pre-Indo-European languages of Europe might have looked like, and it may help clarify how much contact-induced change Basque might have undergone during the last two millennia or so. The present paper puts forward the hypothesis that, towards the end of the Era (BC), Pre-Basque used to have a small class of verbs. These verbs were inflected for person and tense-aspect (although we know little about the specific characteristics of this inflectional system). Together with this small class of verbs, Pre-Basque had a larger group of uninflecting elements that combined with the inflecting verbs to form complex predicates. The group of uninflecting elements included bare nouns, adjectives, possibly adverbs, ideophones, and what I will call “uninflecting verbs”. The exact nature of these “uninflecting verbs” is hard to determine at this point, but they may have constituted a distinct part of speech. Certainly, this type of verbal organization is reminiscent of one common in Northern Australia. Thus, this paper also compares the reconstruction proposed for Pre-Basque with the verbal system typical in Northern Australian languages, to conclude that the similarities are remarkable and, therefore, that the verbal organization of Pre-Basque was quite different from that of the modern Western European languages, including Modern Basque.

Numerous crosslinguistic studies on motion events have been carried out in investigating the scope of the two-fold typology “path versus manner” (Talmy 1985, 2000) and its possible implications. This typological contrast is too narrow as it stands, however, to account for the diversity found both within and across types. The present study is based on what can be termed a process-oriented perspective . It includes the analyses of all relevant conceptual domains notably the domain of temporality, in addition to space, and thus goes beyond previous studies. The languages studied differ typologically as follows: path is typically expressed in the verb in French and Tunisian Arabic in contrast to manner of motion in English and German, while in the temporal domain aspect is expressed grammatically in English and Tunisian Arabic but not in German and French. The study compares the representations which speakers construct when forming a reportable event as a response to video clips showing a series of naturalistic scenes in which an entity moves through space. The analysis includes the following conceptual categories: (1) the privileged event layer (manner vs. path) which drives the selection of breakpoints in the formation of event units when processing the visual input; (2) the privileged category in spatial framing (figure-based/ground-based) and (3) viewpoint aspect (phasal decomposition or not). We assume that each of these three cognitive categories is shaped specifically by language structure (both system and repertoire) and language use (frequency of constructions). The findings reveal systematic differences both across, as well as within, typologically related languages with respect to (1) the basic event type encoded, (2) the changes in quality expressed, (3) the total number of path segments encoded per situation, and (4) the number of path segments packaged into one utterance. The findings reveal what can be termed language-specific default settings along each of the conceptual dimensions and their interrelations which function as language specific attentional templates .

In this article we present a new approach to words of the type zigzag , chitchat , etc. in English. Such words form a formal (phonological) and functional (semantic) pattern in English. We argue that this pattern should be analysed in a construction-based approach, which has clear advantages over other approaches, e.g. analyses involving extragrammaticality or a synchronically productive reduplication process. We propose to extend the construction-based approach beyond its original scope (syntactic constructions) to words that may even no longer be morphologically complex. Finally, we make a tentative suggestion about how the difference between productive and unproductive patterns could be captured in the construction-based approach.

The goal of this paper is to address the syntax of certain oblique nominals in Blackfoot (Algonquian) that are introduced by a set of verbal prefixes called linkers. In the literature, an oblique nominal introduced by a verbal affix always shows certain properties of objects, e.g., agreement. This type of affix is analyzed as forming a complex verb with the main verb via head movement, and the oblique nominal is treated as an object of the complex verb. However, this paper demonstrates that oblique nominals introduced by linkers in Blackfoot do not show certain object properties even though the linker looks like it forms a complex verb. Building on the lack of object properties, linker phrases are proposed to be adjuncts. As proposed for adjuncts generally (e.g., Stephanov, Arthur. 2001. Late adjunction and minimalist phrase structure. Syntax 4(2). 94–125), this paper proposes a late merge analysis for linker phrases. Within an Agree-based model (Chomsky, Noam. 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework. In Roger Martin, David Michaels & Juan Uriagereka (eds.), Step by step: Essays on minimalist syntax in honor of Howard Lasnik , 89–155. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001. Derivation by phase. In Michael Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken Hale: A life in language , 1–52. Cambridge: The MIT Press) where the derivation proceeds by phases (Chomsky 2008), a linker phrase, as an adjunct, lacks the relevant features to participate in the derivation via Agree, and thus it merges late at the end of a given phasal derivation such as v P. When spell out applies, the linker linearizes with a [V- v ] complex in the base position, i.e., v P, giving its surface appearance as a verbal affix. Under this view, a linker does not lead to formation of a complex verb as it does not undergo head movement to the verb, unlike applicative affixes, consistent with the absence of object properties.

The Korean anaphor caki-casin , which has been regarded as a local anaphor, has been shown to allow long-distance binding when local binding is not an option (Kim, Ji-Hye & James Yoon. 2009. Long-distance bound local anaphors in Korean: An empirical study of the Korean anaphor caki-casin . Lingua 119. 733–755). In this study, we examined the long-distance binding of caki-casin in domains where local binding is possible, and compare it with the long-distance binding of caki , the representative long-distance anaphor in Korean. Our investigation revealed that the availability of local binding does not rule out long-distance/exempt binding of caki-casin . The results imply that core and exempt binding may not be in complementary distribution, at least in Korean.

This paper reassesses the widespread claim in Hebrew linguistics that the medial third person pronoun in the “subject NP + pronoun + predicate” construction in Israeli Hebrew functions either as copula, or as a referential subject in an extrapositional sentence. Based on the examination of this construction in Hebrew conversation, as represented in The Corpus of Spoken Israeli Hebrew (CoSIH), and based on theoretical considerations, the paper argues that the distinction between copular and referential uses of medial third person pronouns is not justified, leading to the conclusion that apparent “copular” third person pronouns are in fact a second realization of the subject referent, and that sentences containing such pronouns are better viewed as cases of subject doubling. This paper positions subject doubling in the context of typology and language acquisition, and argues for the need to analyze it using natural data, focusing on speaker- and listener- oriented motivations.

This study explores Mandarin children’s competence with quantifier domain restriction. We present results from two experiments in which adults and four- to five-year old children evaluated two possible candidates for the domain selection associated with the distributive operator dou ‘all’ in Mandarin Chinese. In the first experiment, we investigated whether children and adults are capable of selecting an appropriate domain when two candidate NPs both appear inside dou ’s quantification scope; i.e., both of the NPs c-command dou . In the second experiment, still two candidate NPs were presented, but one within dou ’s scope and the other outside its scope. Our results indicate that four- to five-year-old children are capable of basic distributive computation associated with dou , but they may choose an NP that adults do not usually choose as the domain of dou , resulting in non-adult interpretations of distributive computation in certain cases. Based on the results, we propose that four- to five-year-old children are less certain about the domain restriction associated with dou -quantification. This proposal has important implications for the current debate on the acquisition of universal quantifiers, specifically, the problem of quantifier spreading. We explain children’s uncertainty about the domain restriction with a universal grammar-based statistical acquisition model.

Over the past decades a considerable number of works have observed differences in the phonetic realization of nouns and verbs. The guiding question in most relevant research is whether such differences are caused by grammatical category per se, or are triggered by more general processes of phonetic implementation that impact nouns and verbs differently. Most studies argue for the latter and focus on one particular process or variable, which is advocated to be responsible for the acoustic differences observed. Among the processes mentioned are pre-boundary lengthening, accentuation, and frequency-induced reduction. Due to the focus on monofactorial explanations, an overview and contextualization of the different processes interacting with the noun-verb distinction is yet missing. The present paper aims to fill this gap. This goal is pursed by providing an in-depth discussion of how grammatical category interacts with a number of different processes that affect acoustic realization. To that end results from the literature on the topic are synthesized with new acoustic analyses of noun-verb homophones from spontaneous speech. The analysis shows that differences in acoustic realization between nouns and verbs are caused by the complex interplay of a number of different processes, defying simple, monofactorial explanations.