Volume 62, Issue 1

Experiential constructions is an understudied topic in western Austronesian languages. The focus is on Northern Amis (Formosan), with some crosslinguistic comparison. In Amis, experiential constructions are derived by a syncretic suffix – en , which is also an Undergoer Voice suffix. In experiential constructions, – en is suffixed to stative-intransitive verbs compatible with experiences, and functions as an applicative voice that licenses an extra-thematic experiencer marked as the nominative argument, generally with adverse meaning. Though reminiscent of adversative passives in some Asian languages, experiential constructions in Amis are not passives, nor are they standard Undergoer Voice – en constructions for two main reasons: (i) they are restricted to stative and intransitive stems; (ii) their argument structure and case-marking are different. It is argued that the source of Amis experiential constructions is a Proto-Austronesian adversative * ka- … -an/-en construction (Blust, Robert. 1999. Notes on Pazeh phonology and morphology. Oceanic Linguistics 38(2). 321–365) and that Amis innovated by creating a verbal ma- … -en experiential applicative construction from that originally non-finite construction.

This article revisits the distinction between inflectional and derivational patterns in general grammar and discusses the possibility that this well-known distinction is not rooted in the reality of languages, but in the Western tradition of describing languages, through dictionaries (for words, including derived lexemes) and through grammar books (where we often find tables of exemplary paradigms). This tradition has led to rather different terminological treatments of the two kinds of patterns, but from the perspective of a constructional view of morphology, there is no need to incorporate such differences into formal grammatical descriptions. For practical purposes, we need clear and simple definitions of entrenched terms of general linguistics, so the article proposes semantically based (retro-) definitions of inflection , derivation and lexeme that cover the bulk of the existing usage. Finally, I briefly explain why we need sharp definitions of comparative concepts, and why prototype-based and fuzzy definitions of traditional terms are not helpful.

The Discriminative Lexicon is a theory of the mental lexicon that brings together insights from various other theories: words are the relevant cognitive units in morphology, the meaning of a word is represented by its distribution in utterances, word forms and their meaning are learned by minimizing prediction errors, and fully connected networks successfully capture language learning. In this article we model comprehension and production of Kinyarwanda verb forms in the Discriminative Lexicon model. Kinyarwanda is a highly inflectional language, and therefore particularly interesting, because its paradigms are almost unlimited in size. Can knowledge of its enormous paradigms be modeled only on the basis of words? To answer this question we modeled a data set of 11,528 verb forms, hand-annotated for meaning and their grammatical functions, in the Linear Discriminative Learning (LDL), a two-layered, fully connected computational implementation of the Discriminative Lexicon model. We also extracted 573 verbs from our data set for which meanings are available that are based on empirical word embeddings obtained from large text corpora, and modeled them in LDL. Both comprehension and production is learned accurately: Kinyarwanda verb forms can be comprehended and produced relying on words as cognitive units, in a two-layered network, in which prediction errors are minimized.

Psychological verbs, especially Object Experiencer verbs, are widely discussed in the linguistic literature because of their peculiar syntactic and semantic properties. Two main issues regarding Object-Experiencer verbs are often raised: their aspectual nature and an alternation process (with the experiencer in subject position). This article analyzes Brazilian Portuguese Object Experiencer verbs, focusing on these issues. Based on a study of 170 verbs, we claim that Object Experiencer verbs constitute a verb class whose members describe a complex stage-level state in which a stimulus state activates (in a causative relation) a mental state in an experiencer. In addition, we argue that Object-Experiencer verbs appear in an inverse form: the experiencer as subject, and the stimulus as oblique. We claim that such an inverse form does not result from the causative alternation. In the inverse structure, different from an inchoative form of a change-of-state verb, both arguments are strongly preferable, and the verbs still denote a stative situation. We also provide a representation for the event structure of those verbs, using predicate decomposition, that is associated with their syntactic properties.

Change-of-state verbs are heterogeneous with respect to their occurrence in the causative-anticausative alternation. While some of them are never used as anticausatives (e.g., destroy ), others seem to largely favor the anticausative form (e.g., wither ). On the basis of corpus data and statistical analysis for French change-of-state verbs, we show that there is a relationship between the anticausative use of a verb and the semantic role of its transitive subject: The more frequently the transitive subject of a verb is a cause (as opposed to agent or instrument), the more frequently the verb is used as anticausative (as opposed to transitive causative). In addition to presenting this novel empirical finding, we propose an account for the observed correlation: Depending on their semantic role, causers have different likelihoods to end up in the subject position of a transitive causative sentence, and the likelihood is lower for causes than for agents. Different factors are considered responsible for the observed correlation, including the asymmetry between agents and causes concerning salience as event participants, topic-worthiness, and the possibility of being expressed as anticausative adjuncts.

Spanish normative grammar considers any two-vowel combination of /e/, /a/, and /o/ as a hiatus, accepting that they can be pronounced as a diphthong in lower basilects and/or informal registers. This article analyzes speeches of educated speakers, performing an acoustic analysis of 60 segmental and suprasegmental features in 493 vowel sequences. Linear mixed-effects models suggest that two-vowel sequences of /e/, /a/, and /o/ are pronounced as diphthongs in 77.27 % of cases; suprasegmental features (especially duration) are the most reliable cues to distinguish a hiatus from a diphthong in Spanish. These results call for a re-examination of diphthong classification in Spanish.

This article argues that in Alsea ([aes]; Penutian/isolate; dormant; Oregon Coast) the main event line ( mel ) of narratives is reliably signaled by a particular combination of clause-initial particles, functioning as discourse markers, and not by a specific set of verb forms, the means usually identified and discussed in the literature as a cue for the mel status of a clause. The strength of the link between this combination of discourse markers and the mel , then, represents a cross-linguistic situation that seems rare. Alsea has a rich system of discourse markers and a rich system of verbal affixes, with over 20 potentially co-occurring markers in each. The relative wealth of these discourse markers and their potential combinations make an intricate system of signaling the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic relationship between clauses and their immediate environment, essentially signaling their discourse status. One combination of markers has the function of signaling the mel . Alsea verbal affixes, on the other hand, play a major role in event semantics and aspectual construal, but a minor one in discourse structuring. This allows for seemingly paradoxical uses of irrealis or imperfective verb forms on the mel of narratives, where the later coerces the event into specific types of bounded and realis readings.