Volume 63, Issue 4

A nominal predicate construction (NPC; e.g. “Cicero is {Tully/an orator}”) typically indicates the relation of identity or inclusion. NPCs, however, may receive marked interpretations as well, as in “I’m the ham sandwich” and “Their car is a peculiar color”; the former does not entail that the speaker is identical to the sandwich, and the latter does not entail that the car belongs to a set of colors. This article identifies, classifies, and analyzes such marked NPCs in English and Japanese, thereby enriching the taxonomy of NPCs acknowledged in the existing literature. It will be argued that both Japanese and English NPCs may indicate either (i) one of a handful of relatively specific semantic relations including the one of identity/inclusion, or (ii) an unspecified relation that is to be contextually inferred. The English NPC is semantically less flexible than the Japanese one, being compatible with a narrower range of specific semantic relations and allowing the unspecified-relation interpretation less leniently. The English NPC, on the other hand, is more liberally used in comparison to its counterparts in some related languages (e.g. German). The analysis put forth makes a good vantage point for general-linguistic and typological inquiries as to how languages in general may contrast with each other in terms of what types of situations can be described with a NPC.

Left Dislocation/Detachment (LD) and related constructions consist of a detached NP and a subsequent clause that conveys information about it. Information Structural approaches analyze these constructions (dubbed here “LD-type”) as cross-linguistically widespread topicalizing structures, which reveal a cognitive constraint on activating a referent and using it as a sentence topic simultaneously. This study of natural Israeli Hebrew conversation challenges this view, approaching the structure from an interactional, online-syntax perspective. Unlike the previous studies that pre-select the NP+clause configuration for the analysis, this study examines all NPs produced first as structurally and prosodically detached constituents irrespective of whether they were continued by a clause or not. This choice more genuinely reflects utterance structuring processes of spoken language, where upon the production of the initial NP speakers do not have yet the rest of the utterance planned. The findings show that less than a third of the detached NPs are followed by a continuation, producing an LD-type configuration. Yet, across all the cases, detached NPs perform the same range of local discourse moves accounted for by identical basic factors of cognition and interaction: attention alignment, recycling, and planning difficulties. Based on these findings, the reexamination of the LD-type structures demonstrates that they do not represent a conventionalized sentence type with a dedicated function, but are unplanned, compositional discourse collocations of two separate constructions each performing a local move: a NP and a clause. Topical interpretations and discourse functions associated with LD-type collocations are epiphenomenal of more basic factors of cognition and interaction, and irrelevant for the interpretation of the examined utterances in natural conversation. This study adds to the usage-based approaches to Information Structure that question the need for the domain-specific Information Structural categories of topic and focus, disentangling them into more primitive factors of discourse management, epistemic states, and attention.

Color terms show a remarkable variation in their possible lexicalization patterns across different languages. In the literature, the interest has been especially to describe the color lexicon of a certain language and to determine whether it may abide or not by Berlin and Kay’s universal evolutionary sequence, e.g., whether a certain color denomination may be considered as a basic color term, or whether a certain color category is lexicalized by more than one basic color term, by which criteria, etc. It has not been established, however, which are the most common lexical sources of basic color terms on a comparative basis, and which semantic changes are more common in this semantic field. On the basis of data drawn from 70 ancient and modern Indo-European languages, we aim at answering precisely these research questions concerning the origin and the development of basic color terms. We discuss the various lexical sources of the basic color terms for white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, gray, orange, pink, and purple, and we show the most important semantic changes leading to these color meanings. We also discuss to which extent these terms are likely to be inherited or borrowed. All this aims at being a contribution to the study of diachronic semantics.

Pseudoparticiples follow phonotactic, morphological, and syntactic rules for regular participles, but they are special in that they lack corresponding verbal forms. This article offers a constructionist account of two types of pseudoparticiples in Dutch, i.e., those with a nominal base and the prefix ont- or be- , e.g., ontkoeid ‘de-cowed’ or bedauwd ‘bedewed’. Their properties raise interesting questions regarding the nature of morphological creativity, back-formation, and the establishment of new schemas or paradigms. Using data from the nlTenTen14 corpus, we consider constraints on the formation of verbal paradigms from such pseudoparticiples, and what this tells us about the nature of morphological creativity. Our corpus data suggest substantial differences between be - and ont -pseudoparticiples in terms of frequency distributions, productivity, and syntactic behavior. Drawing on concepts from cognitive linguistics generally and Construction Morphology in particular, this article addresses the usefulness of the distinction between full and partial sanction as a means to explain the variation (i) within the pseudoparticiple sets and (ii) between regular and pseudoparticiples. We also suggest some revisions to the notions of E- and F-creativity to account for differences between the be - and ont - sets.

We conducted a study on how people refer to gender-neutral, grammatically feminine role or job nouns in German, like “die Lehrkraft” (the teacher [fem.]), and compared it to masculine role or job nouns, like “der Lehrer” (the teacher [masc.]). We found that people use different pronouns depending two factors: the grammatical gender of the nouns and the social gender associated with these nouns, that means how gender-typical these nouns are perceived to be. Our results showed that grammatically masculine role or job nouns were almost always referred to with masculine pronouns. In contrast, grammatically feminine role or job nouns were more often referred to in ways that could apply to any gender. We take this as support that these terms have a gender-neutral interpretation. We conclude that grammatically feminine, gender-neutral role or job nouns are better for being inclusive in German than masculine role or job titles, which tend to have a male bias. This research is important to anyone in the German-speaking community striving for gender equality.

Incomplete mastery of dialect grammar engenders ‘hyperdialectisms’ which may be unconscious errors, but which may also be the result of indexical resourcefulness, viz. the profiling of a regional identity. Fifty younger and older speakers from the Brabantish city of Eindhoven (Netherlands) were first administered an acceptability judgment task containing correct forms and three types of hyperdialectisms featuring gender and number constraints. Following the survey, the same respondents participated in a focus group discussion. Regression analysis on the scaled ratings revealed that all three types of hyperdialectisms were rejected, although it was especially the older respondents (almost all L1 dialect speakers) who were weary of the incorrect forms. Analysis of the focus group data demonstrated that older respondents are consciously aware of the rules of their dialect grammar, and hate it when these rules are violated. Younger respondents showed almost no meta-grammatical awareness, and admitted to ‘allowing’ the incorrect forms in some contexts because they ‘sound Brabantish’. Identity construction, in other words, is at the heart of hyperdialectal usage. Methodologically, this paper makes a plea for the confrontation of quantitative data – which provide the backbone of analysis – with qualitative data that offer access to motives for, and constraints on grammatical variation.

The Spanish discourse marker bueno has multiple functions ranging from the expression of (dis)agreement to topic management. The present paper sets out to explore what happens when bueno starts to be used in written monological contexts. We examine the use of bueno in spoken sociolinguistic interviews and written internet texts in Mexican and Peninsular Spanish. We propose a unified account of the different functions of bueno based on preference structure and mitigation, tracing a grammaticalization path from adjectival to dialogical and, subsequently, monological uses of bueno . We use regression analysis to examine the hypotheses that (a) written medium serves as a catalyst for monologization, and (b) the two dialects studied represent two different stages of grammaticalization of bueno . While the first hypothesis is confirmed, evidence supporting the second hypothesis is less conclusive, suggesting that written uses are more similar between the two dialects than the spoken ones.