Volume 11, Issue 3

Goal-marking morphemes, or allatives , are notoriously polysemous crosslinguistically. In a survey of 44 genetically and areally diverse languages, we have tracked synchronic usage patterns for 54 allative markers and confirmed that they indeed exhibit a wide range of semantic and grammatical functions. A number of previous grammaticalization studies undertaken from a cognitive/typological perspective have argued that various non-spatial goal-marking senses of allative morphemes, such as dative/benefactive and purposive , often develop out of a spatial sense through various semantic extensions. Our data also indicated that allatives grammaticalize extensively, but that dative, purposive , and other common abstract extensions, perhaps strongly associated with the allative sense, have an equal – and thus independent – likelihood of developing. That is, their functional evolution is not fully predetermined by a single implicational hierarchy or by a unidimensional grammaticalization chain. Instead, an allative marker undergoing grammaticalization has multiple extension pathways available to it.

It is generally assumed that the development of modality proceeds in a unidirectional manner from deontic to epistemic meaning. In this article, we present crosslinguistic data in contradiction of this hypothesis by showing that markers of possibility can, albeit rarely, develop to prohibitives by following a path of semantic change that includes warnings as intermediary links. In addition, this rare development is interesting in that it involves a polarity shift from an affirmative marker to a negative meaning.

Reciprocals are characterized by a crossover of thematic roles within a single clause. Their peculiar semantics often creates special argument configurations not found in other clause types. While some languages either encode reciprocals by clearly divalent, transitive clauses, or clearly monovalent, intransitive clauses, others adopt a more ambivalent solution. We develop a typology of valency/transitivity mismatches in reciprocal constructions, based on a sample of Australian languages. These include: (i) monovalent clauses with a single ergative NP, (ii) mismatches between case marking and the apparent number of arguments, (iii) ergative marking on secondary predicates and instrumentals with an intransitive subject, and (iv) complex clause constructions sensitive to valency. Such mismatches, we argue, result from an “overlay problem”: both divalent and monovalent predicates in the semantic representation of prototypical reciprocal scenes have had a hand in shaping the morphosyntax of reciprocal constructions.

Jack Feuillet, Introduction à la typologie linguistique . (Bibliothèque de grammaire et de linguistique, 19.) Paris: Champion, 2006, 716 pages, ISBN 978-2-7453-1269-3, EUR 105. (Gilbert Lazard) Andrej L. Malchukov, Nominalization/Verbalization: Constraining a Typology of Transcategorial Operations . (Lincom Studies in Language Typology, 8.) München: Lincom Europa, 2004, 143 pages, ISBN 978-3-89586-729-3, EUR 46 (paperback). (Tatiana Nikitina) Robert Pensalfini, A Grammar of Jingulu: An Aboriginal Language of the Northern Territory . (Pacific Linguistics, 536.) Canberra: Australian National University, 2003, xix + 262 pages, ISBN 0-85883-558-4, A$ 64.90 (Australia), A$ 59.00 (overseas). (Rachel Nordlinger)