Volume 15, Issue 1

In Dolakha Newar the boundaries of syntactic sentences are clearly demarcated. However, each tightly-bounded sentence has the potential for infinite expansion and structural complexity. This results from the recursive interaction of two basic combinatorial structures: chaining and embedding. While these structures are basic to many of the world's languages, in Dolakha Newar speakers combine them freely and frequently to spontaneously create sentences of remarkable intricacy. Additional structural nuance is provided by the chaining of constituents at levels below the clause and the sharing of core arguments. The result is a syntactic fabric of depth and complexity.

This article describes the adjective class in Quechua, countering many previous accounts of the language as a linguistic type with no adjective/noun distinction. It applies a set of common crosslinguistic criteria for distinguishing adjectives to data from several dialects of Ecuadorian Highland Quechua (EHQ), analyzing examples from a natural speech audio/video corpus, speaker intuitions of grammaticality, and controlled elicitation exercises. It is concluded that by virtually any standard Quechua shows clear evidence for a distinct class of attributive noun modifiers, and that in the future Quechua should not be considered a “flexible” noun/adjective language for the purposes of crosslinguistic comparison.

Iquito, a Zaparoan language of Peruvian Amazonia, marks a binary distinction between realis and irrealis clauses solely by means of a word order alternation. Realis clauses exhibit a construction in which no element intervenes between the subject and verb, while in irrealis clauses a phrasal constituent appears between the subject and verb. No free or bound morphology otherwise indicates whether an Iquito clause is realis or irrealis. Based on these facts and partially similar phenomena in other languages, this article argues that typologies of inflectional exponence should be expanded to include word order as an inflectional formative.

Although “areality” and the idea of a linguistic area has become well-established in the literature, the notions remain controversial, mainly because of the lack of agreement about what constitutes linguistic areality and the subjective nature of their definition. This article follows the lead of Nichols 1992 and Bickel & Nichols 2006 in using statistical techniques for analysing the distribution of variables in different populations. We examine the frequency of occurrence of plosive prenasalisation in the Southeast Asia/New Guinea region as a test case for the robustness of simple statistical techniques and of more sophisticated techniques specifically designed for modelling the spatial distribution of variables.