Volume 63, Issue 5

This article investigates the distribution, linear ordering and functions of sequences of linguistic elements occurring at the left and right peripheries of discourse units across three genres of written English discourse. Based on a corpus of news reports, commentaries and personal narratives, the paper aims to account for discourse-genre-specific preferences in the use of peripheral two-part sequences such as and so , but I think or now though . The data show considerable variation across genres in terms of (i) which formal types of sequences occur at the peripheries, (ii) how peripheral elements are sequentially ordered, and (iii) which discourse-pragmatic functions left- and right-peripheral sequences fulfil in written English discourse. The observed variation in the use of peripheral sequences across news reports, commentaries and personal narratives can be explained by discourse-related factors as well as the specific communicative purposes of each genre. The present article argues for a prototype-anchored conceptualization of the internal structure of discourse units: On the one hand, the left and right peripheries are conceptualized as containing a wide range of – more and less prototypical – linguistic elements (i.e. extra-clausal constituents and adjuncts); on the other hand, the boundary between core and periphery is conceptualized as fuzzy and gradient.

In this article, I show that, due to the influence of English, major changes have occurred in Yoruba morphosyntax. The changes I identify include (i) the emergence of a transitive-marking Mid Tone Syllable (MTS) on loan verbs; (ii) the emergence of a pattern in which native verbs select accusative weak pronouns while loan verbs select genitive weak pronouns; (iii) changes in word order; (iv) syntactic doubling; and (v) category changes that apply only to loanwords. These changes have led to different forms of synchronic variation in the language. I show that the resulting variations fall into three major descriptive categories: free variation, lexicon-driven variation, and stratification-driven variation. Contact-induced stratification-driven variation exhibits two of the three patterns of the core-periphery structure of the lexicon (Brian Hsu and Karen Jesney, “Weighted scalar constraints capture the typology of loanword adaptation” [2018]), namely the “subset at periphery” and “superset at periphery” patterns. The Yoruba data exhibit an additional pattern that I describe as “complementary subsets”. Although the core-periphery structure of the lexicon (Junko Itô and Armin Mester, “The core-periphery structure of the lexicon and constraints on reranking” [1995] and “The phonological lexicon” [1999]) has been largely shown to have consequences for the module of phonology, the Yoruba data show that the core-periphery structure of the lexicon can be consequential for the syntactic module as well.

This study investigates the productivity of a family of inchoative constructions in (Peninsular) Spanish ( empezar a + inf., echar a + inf.) and the way it correlates with semantic openness. Productivity is defined as lexical openness of a slot (here the infinitive) of a construction. A range of productivity measures (e.g., type/token ratio, hapax/token ratio, and other parameters related to the frequency of the most frequent types) are discussed and compared. Semantic openness is operationalized on the basis of distributional semantics, yielding two measures viz.  semantic range and semantic sparsity . The correlations between productivity measures and semantics are studied by means of a Principal Components Analysis. It is shown that the so-called ‘anti-productivity’ measures (related to entrenchment due to high token frequency) on the one hand, and the productivity measures (including the hapax-based ones, traditionally associated with extensibility) on the other hand, strongly correlate and constitute opposites along the same dimension of lexical openness. In addition, the semantic measures strongly correlate with productivity, which suggests that often semantic and lexical openness go hand in hand in this dataset. As to the behavior of the individual auxiliaries (= micro-constructions), they appear to be rather extreme, showing very productive and less productive profiles.

Contemporary dialects of Goranî (a Northwestern Iranic language spoken in Kurdistan) exhibit considerable variation in the formation of tense-aspect-mood categories. It has long been recognized that compatibility of the indicative/imperfective prefix mi- or the subjunctive prefix bi- with present-tense verb stems is phonologically conditioned. However, all attempts to identify the specific conditioning environments have failed. In this article, we reexamine the diachronic development of these affixes, showing that subsequent sound changes have obscured the original conditioning environment for the retention of these affixes. Early work on Hewramî (the main variety of Goranî) shows how the pattern of verbs that have lost the prefixes has begun to be extended to the verbs that take these prefixes for synchronically opaque reasons. The least frequent of these verbs were the first to begin the process of extension, showing inconsistent marking in these early works. Moreover, younger generations continue this process of extension using many more unmarked verbs compared to older speakers. The findings of this paper have implications for cyclic developments in the domain of tense and aspect.

Words that speakers and dictionaries deem to be morphologically defective (and thus unacceptable) are often found in corpora, suggesting a disconnect between judgements about such words and usage of them. This paper explores the hypothesis that social and contextual factors may help explain why defective words are often attested despite speakers’ intuitions that they should not be. We carry out a study on French, proposing that some verbs conventionally analysed as defective in this language are not so much examples of ineffable ungrammaticality as they are examples of social stigmatisation. We perform an acceptability judgement task which finds that the acceptability of defective words is inversely correlated with the extent to which participants orient to prescriptivist discourses circulating in French society, and depends also on the emphasis that the task places on taking a prescriptive attitude to language. The hypothesis that speakers’ metalinguistic awareness is key to accounting for speakers’ felt sense of defectiveness is further substantiated by the fact that acceptability of defective items is inversely proportional to the frequency of their lexeme, suggesting that the amount of evidence speakers have about a lexeme plays an important role in how acceptable the item is perceived to be.

How do deaf BSL signers signal polar and content questions? This study quantitatively investigates the manual and non-manual forms used to signal polar and content questions during dyadic conversations documented in the BSL Corpus. We found that non-manual movements such as eye, eyebrow and/or head movements do not differentiate content and polar questions in BSL. Instead, it is the presence or absence of conventionalised wh -forms that most strongly differentiates content questions in BSL, and these wh -forms can be signed in BSL and/or mouthed in English. These findings challenge the traditional manual versus non-manual paradigm for analysing polar and content questions in signed languages, while demonstrating how corpus methods can further our understanding of signed language variation and use.

It is widely acknowledged that L2 learners whose native language lacks case markers often encounter difficulties when trying to acquire the usage of case markers in a second language. This article investigates whether L2 Japanese learners whose native language lacks case markers are able to use case marking information to comprehend Japanese OSV sentences in real time. A picture-sentence matching truth value judgment experiment was created in both listening and reading versions. A proficiency test was also developed to measure the Japanese proficiency of L2 learners. A group of L1 Chinese L2 Japanese learners and a control group of L1 Japanese speakers were recruited for this study. The findings suggest that L1 Chinese L2 Japanese learners can utilize case markers to interpret Japanese OSV sentences online, with their accuracy strongly predicted by their Japanese proficiency.