Volume 59, Issue 1

The paper revisits Duffield’s (2007) (Duffield, Nigel. 2007. Aspects of Vietnamese clausal structure: Separating tense from assertion. Linguistics 45(4). 765–814) analysis of the correlation between the position of a ‘when’-phrase and the temporal reference of a bare sentence in Vietnamese. Bare sentences in Vietnamese, based on (Smith, Carlota S. & Mary S. Erbaugh. 2005. Temporal interpretation in Mandarin Chinese. Linguistics 43(4). 713–756), are argued to obtain their temporal interpretation from their aspectual composition, and the default temporal reference: bounded events are located in the past, unbounded events at present. It is shown that the correlation so observed in when-questions is superficial, and is tied to the syntax and semantics of temporal modification and the requirement that temporal adverbials denoting future time is base generated in sentence-initial position, and past time adverbials in sentence-final position. A ‘when’-phrase, being temporally underspecified, obtains its temporal value from its base position. However, the correlation between word order and temporal reference in argument wh-questions and declaratives is factual, depending on whether the predicate-argument configuration allows for a telic interpretation or not. To be specific, it is dependent on whether the application of Generic Modification (Snyder, William. 2012. Parameter theory and motion predicates. In Violeta Demonte & Louise McNally (eds.), Telicity, change, and state. Acrosscategorial view of event structure , 279–299. Oxford: Oxford University Press) or accomplishment composition is realized. Canonical declaratives, and argument wh-questions, with telicity inducing material, license GM or accomplishment composition, yielding bounded events, hence past; by contrast, their non-canonical counterparts block GM or accomplishment composition, giving rise to unbounded event descriptions, hence non-past.

Many researchers seem to think that Construction Grammar posits the existence of only wholly idiosyncratic constructions. However, this misconception betrays a deep misunderstanding of the approach because it glosses over the fact that constructions rarely if ever emerge sui generis . Rather, Construction Grammar aims to balance the fact that some linguistic uses cannot be fully predicted from other well-established uses with the fact that extensions of a construction, while not predictable, are motivated by other senses in the constructional network. This paper illustrates this idea by providing an analysis of the Spanish completive reflexive marker se .

Our research on variation in the expression of grammatical gender (in determiners and adnominal inflection) in present-day ethnolectal Dutch is based on interactional speech data collected among 10–12 and 18–20-year-old male adolescents with Turkish, Moroccan and non-immigrant Dutch backgrounds, born and raised in the Dutch cities of Amsterdam or Nijmegen. The cities, which both have multicultural demographic profiles, are located in different dialect areas. In the data, the realization of neuter gender appears to vary greatly; in our analyses of this variation linguistic and social parameters were included. With regard to the language-internal conditioning, grammatical and semantic dimensions have been taken into account. Apart from the speakers’ age and city of residence, the social dimensions also include background of both the speaker and the interlocutor. The outcomes shed light on three aspects. As regards conditioning factors, L1 substrates, processes of L2 acquisition of the first generations of migrants, and surrounding regional variation all play a role. As regards the place of ethnolectal variation in the speakers’ verbal repertoires, we found evidence for a stylistic role of variable gender assignment in determiners. Our data do not support the hypothesis of the cross-over of ethnolectal changes in Dutch grammatical gender marking to speakers without an immigrant background.

Multiple studies demonstrate that social and linguistic information is connected in speech perception such that the priming of a social category will affect listeners’ linguistic behavior. At the same time, the degree to which social information is relied upon during speech perception is less well understood. The current study investigates whether priming of a country affects the perceived degree of foreign accent and whether this effect varies across different social groups. Two groups of bilinguals (one dominant in Russian, another dominant in English) listened to audio recordings of monolingual and bilingual (also either dominant in Russian or English) speakers and rated the degree of their foreign accentedness in English and Russian. The recordings were divided by topic: neutral, Russia-related, and Australia-related. Statistical analysis revealed a significant effect of topic: Russia-related clips were rated as more foreign-accented in English by bilinguals dominant in Russian, and Australia-related clips were rated as less foreign-accented in Russian when produced by bilinguals dominant in English. The variation is explained through listeners’ using social information more when the linguistic information is less reliable.

Argument coding splits such as differential (= split) object marking and split ergative marking have long been known to be universal tendencies, but the generalizations have not been formulated in their full generality before. In particular, ditransitive constructions have rarely been taken into account, and scenario splits have often been treated separately. Here I argue that all these patterns can be understood in terms of the usual association of role rank (highly ranked A and R, low-ranked P and T) and referential prominence (locuphoric person, animacy, definiteness, etc.). At the most general level, the role-reference association universal says that deviations from usual associations of role rank and referential prominence tend to be coded by longer grammatical forms. In other words, A and R tend to be referentially prominent in language use, while P and T are less prominent, and when less usual associations need to be expressed, languages often require special coding by means of additional flags (case-markers and adpositions) or additional verbal voice coding (e.g., inverse or passive markers). I argue that role-reference associations are an instance of the even more general pattern of form-frequency correspondences, and that the resulting coding asymmetries can all be explained by frequency-based predictability and coding efficiency.

This article looks at topic marking strategies in Kusaal and related Mabia (Gur) languages: Dagaare, Buli, Moore, Dabgani, and Gurene, spoken in Ghana, Togo and Ivory Coast. It is generally observed that these languages use left dislocation as a topic coding strategy. They either use topic phrases or particles, which may be obligatory or optional. It is argued that the languages under discussion cannot be fully classified as subject prominent languages alongside other Niger-Congo languages. It is shown that these languages demonstrate features that put them in between subject prominent and topic prominent languages. To identify a topic constituent in these languages, three tests are suggested: the if+be test, the “aboutness test” and the use of left dislocation accompanied by a resumptive pronoun.

This paper examines comparability of descriptive grammars across typologically different languages. Focusing on the Nepal Himalayas, which has high language diversity that extends beyond areal, genetic, and historical categorization, the paper examines similarities across grammars and the influences motivating these. It reports on the construction and use of a database comprising materials from 18 descriptive grammars of Tibeto-Burman languages of Nepal written over a 30-year period. This includes a small sub-database of metadata noting grammarian linguistic training, career affiliations, and dissertation supervisors and a larger sub-database of fully tagged tables of contents for each of the grammars. The overarching relational database links sections containing similar content, enabling search functions to explore the locations of similar information and feature labels across grammars in the database. While some grammar-features in the corpus reflect broader structural properties across grammars, findings indicate strong local influences. We find evidence of three foundational linguistic “schools” connecting the structural organization of the grammars across multiple generations of linguists, correspondences across chapter titles, sections, as well as school-influenced organization of verbal paradigms, treatment of marginal topics, and terminological choices.

Over the last 300 years, the into -causative ( he talked his father into giving him money ) increased in frequency and lexical diversity. Changes of this kind are often taken as evidence of functional expansion. From a Construction Grammar (CxG) perspective, this paper argues that what appears to be a loss of restrictions on the verbal slot results from changes in argument mapping links. As the construction provides the argument roles by mapping semantics (causer, causee, result) onto syntax (subject, object, oblique), stronger mapping links increasingly facilitated the use of verbs that are semantically and syntactically atypical for the expression of causation. Data from the Corpus of Historical American English confirm three predictions of this hypothesis with respect to shifts in (i) the semantic classes of matrix verbs, (ii) their general argument structure preferences, and (iii) voice-marking. The results provide evidence for a subtle semantic change from movement into action to manner of causation . The increase in frequency and productivity are hence explained as the consequence of the syntactic form becoming a more reliable cue for causative meaning. We discuss implications for models of language change against the background of current issues in Diachronic Construction Grammar (DCxG) pertaining to constructionalization vs. constructional change .

This article argues that a usage-based construction (a conventional pairing of form and function) is required to account for a certain pattern of English exemplified by e.g., it’s nice of you to read this . Contemporary corpus and survey data reveal that the construction is strongly associated with certain adjectives (e.g., nice, good ) over others, while diachronic data demonstrate that the construction’s overall frequency has systematically waxed and waned over the past century. The construction’s unique function – namely to concisely convey a judgment regarding how an action reflects on the agent of the action – enables us to predict many observations about its distribution without stipulation. These include restrictions on the interpretation of adjectives that occur in the construction, its infinitive complement, the modal verbs that may appear in it and its ability to be embedded. We further observe that certain conventional fragments of the construction evoke the semantics of the entire construction. Finally, we situate the construction within a network of related constructions, as part of a speaker’s “construct-i-con”.