Volume 60, Issue 5

This article treats cliticization of a pronoun to a syntactic host and doubling of the clitic pronoun with a non-pronominal counterpart in Syrian and Omani Arabic. Although the two varieties are closely related and the morphological paradigms they display are very similar, the pronominalization and clitic pronoun doubling patterns they display are quite different. We trace this difference to a basic difference in whether the relevant syntactic processes are sensitive to intervention effects in the two dialects, with the result being that the restrictiveness of pronominalization and clitic pronoun doubling patterns parallel the restrictiveness of basic word order patterns – whether double-object constructions are ‘symmetric’ or ‘asymmetric’ – with Syrian being the more restrictive of the two varieties.

This paper provides an analysis of the ‘frustrative’ marker séna7 in St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish), and compares it to similar elements cross-linguistically. Séna7 appears in a range of discourse contexts, including when events have an unexpected outcome, fail to continue, or fail to take place optimally. We argue that séna7 felicitously applies to a proposition p only if there is a salient true proposition q and the speaker did not expect p and q to both be true. Séna7 encodes epistemic modality, refers only to the speaker’s epistemic state (ignoring the common ground), and has no effect on at-issue truth conditions ( séna7(p) entails p ) . We show that séna7 provides a diagnostic for distinguishing between entailments and implicatures in the language, and a clear diagnostic for the distinction between futures and prospective aspects. We compare séna7 with similar elements in Tohono O’odham, Kimaragang and Tagalog. We argue that séna7 and the Kimaragang frustrative can be captured by the same analysis once independent features of their tense/aspect systems are taken into account. Following Kroeger (2017. Frustration, culmination and inertia in Kimaragang grammar. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 2(1). 56. 1–29), but pace Copley and Harley (2014. Eliminating causative entailments with the force-theoretic framework: The case of the Tohono O’odham frustrative cem. In Bridget Copley & Fabienne Martin (eds.), Causation in grammatical structures (Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 52), 120–151. Oxford: Oxford University Press), we argue that frustratives should not be unified with non-culminating accomplishments, and can be analyzed without appealing to causality or efficacy.

This article studies Russian causal clauses employing formal contrasts that causal clauses manifest crosslinguistically. I explore two approaches that have been proposed to account for such contrasts: the coordination-subordination approach and the approach assuming that causal clauses represent different classes of adverbial clauses that differ in their degree of syntactic integration with the host clause. It is argued that the Russian data cannot be consistently accounted for unless a combination of the two approaches is applied. The analysis also reveals that the degrees of syntactic integration encoded by Russian causal clauses are different from those claimed for German causal clauses by previous research. Thus, while the degree of syntactic integration proves to be a valid parameter to compare systems of causal clauses crosslinguistically, its specific realizations may vary. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of the two approaches poses the question as to what the difference is between syntactically non-integrated adverbial clauses and coordinated clauses. I tentatively suggest that they too differ in terms of the degree of integration, but this difference belongs to the level of information packaging in discourse and not to the level of syntax.

This article scrutinizes the use of two competing Russian prepositions, tipa and vrode ‘like, such as’, in online student discourse. Both are associated with the crosslinguistically attested grammaticalization of taxonomic nouns, with tipa having derived from the noun tip ‘type’ and vrode from the noun rod ‘kind’. A prior study contemporary to the fairly recent grammaticalization of tipa forecasted a substitution scenario for the two competing forms. Forty years later, the present article shows that in the current discourse of younger speakers (i) there is indeed a selectional bias in favor of the prepositional tipa (which does not extend to the items’ particle uses) and (ii) the two prepositions demonstrate a high degree of attraction. However, this article also provides quantitative evidence that suggests the presence of a counterforce – subjectification. The selection is modeled on the basis of the items’ functions, realizations of the right- and left-side slots, the speaker’s gender, their evaluative attitude to the referent of the construction, and the perceived casualness of the discourse situation proxied by neutral or markedly informal expression styles.

This article addresses the hitherto neglected topic of the Korean Nominative Object Construction (NOC) within the Cognitive Grammar (CG) framework. In the NOC, schematically illustrated as [N-NOM N-NOM PSYCH-PRED], the second NP behaves like a direct object. While the construction has puzzled many researchers in different languages, and a sizable amount of research exists, relatively little attention has been paid to Korean. It is worth noting that the findings made in the extant generative-linguistic research – including the research on Japanese, which exhibits significant typological similarities to Korean – are not sufficient to account for the Korean data. After identifying the properties of the Korean NOC, we demonstrate that the NOC merely reflects how the experiencer conceptualizes the stimulus that exists in a certain domain of mental experience within her mind. This internal representation of the stimulus is marked nominative by being the sole participant in the relationship profiled by the psychological verb at the lower level of organization. At the higher level of organization, the first nominal is the primary participant as an experiencer, thereby receiving nominative case as well. Our analysis is extended to the desiderative construction, which exhibits similar patterns to the PSYCH-PRED NOC but allows alternation of case in the second nominal between nominative and accusative marking. The case alternation is motivated by two different types of construals of the same conceptual base. The nominative marking arises when the embedded transitive relationship is backgrounded, whereas the accusative marking becomes available when the profile is given to the transitive relationship. We demonstrate that the source of the case alternation lies in the profile, rejecting the dichotomous division of the construction based on its mono- or bi-clausal properties.

This typological study based on data from a parallel text corpus is a two-step investigation of selectives (“topic markers”). First, a set of selectives in 81 languages from all continents is compiled on the basis of their occurrence with emphatic personal pronouns in contrast constructions. In a second step, it is explored how this set of markers is used across 19 subordinate clause domains. The results indicate that, despite much crosslinguistic diversity, the distribution of selectives across subordinate clauses is strongly constrained. Selectives in subordinate clauses are distributed following a tendency scale (no strict hierarchy, but no blatant exceptions): general relative clauses rank highest followed by conditional and temporal clauses with concessive and purpose clauses ranking lowest. No postposed subordinate clauses attract selectives. It is further found that selectives tend to occur at the end of the constituent which they have scope over where there is minimal risk of scope ambiguity. Despite the frequent occurrence of selectives on conditional clauses, selectives tend not to be conditional connectives unless this happens to be their grammaticalization source.

Extraction of a PP from an NP in German is possible only if the head noun and the governing verb together form a natural predicate. We show that this corresponds to collocational frequency of the verb-noun combinations in corpora, based on the metric of Δ P . From this we conclude that frequency should be conceived of as a language-external grammatical building block that can directly interact with language-internal grammatical building blocks (like triggers for movement and economy constraints blocking movement) in excitatory and inhibitory ways. Integrating frequency directly into the syntax is not an option in most current grammatical theories. However, things are different in Gradient Harmonic Grammar , a version of Optimality Theory where linguistic objects of various kinds can be assigned strength in the form of numerical values (weights). We show that by combining a Minimalist approach to syntactic derivations with a Gradient Harmonic Grammar approach of constraint evaluation, the role of frequency in licensing extraction from PP in German can be integrated straightforwardly, the only additional prerequisite being that (verb-noun) dependencies qualify as linguistic objects that can be assigned strength (based on their frequency).

Talmy’s motion event typology (Talmy, Leonard. 2000 . Towards a cognitive semantics: Conceptual structuring systems , vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press) has served as an influential framework for exploring event representation across languages. While confirming its basic premises, many studies argued that the typology cannot fully capture the vast intra- and inter-typological variations. Consequently, proposals have been made to expand the typology and/or reconceptualize it as a typology of constructional strategies for encoding events. This article furthers this line of inquiry by examining caused-motion expressions by adult speakers of an understudied Turkic language, Modern Uyghur. Systematic analyses of lexicalization patterns, that is, which components are typically selected for expression, how frequently they are selected, and how they are packaged in syntactic constructions, show that Uyghur is a prototypical verb-framed language. It differs most strikingly from English (considered satellite-framed) in terms of lexicalization patterns. Detailed comparisons with French and Turkish (putatively verb-framed) reveal intra-typological variations in that Uyghur speakers systematically used verb-framed constructions while French and Turkish speakers exhibit much flexibility and a general preference for satellite-framed constructions. Overall, our data lend support to Talmy’s typology conceived as a strategy-based typological framework.