Volume 17, Issue 1

The study addresses the functional distinction between the annexed and absolute states of nouns, a controversial issue in Berber linguistics. It is demonstrated that the annexed state provides the specific value for a grammaticalized meaning encoded earlier in the sentence. The absolute state carries no function within the grammaticalized domains of the language. The importance of this study for linguistic typology is that it demonstrates the existence of a coding system on noun phrases that is not related to grammatical functions, semantic functions, or information structure.

The concepts of excess (`too') and sufficiency (`enough') and their expressions are studied crosslinguistically. An examination of these concepts across 59 languages shows that a distinction must be made between dedicated marking of excess and sufficiency and contextually determined interpretations of other meanings (including various degree meanings). It is argued that the concepts of excess and sufficiency are inherently associated with the concept of goal-directedness. This is reflected in the way these concepts are encoded and used across languages and in the difference between the construction of excess and sufficiency and resultative degree constructions.

Semantic maps are a means of representing universal structure underlying semantic variation. However, no algorithm has existed for inferring a graph-based semantic map from cross-language data. Here, we note that this open problem is formally identical to the known problem of inferring a social network from disease outbreaks. From this identity it follows that semantic map inference is computationally intractable, but that an efficient approximation algorithm for it exists. We demonstrate that this algorithm produces sensible semantic maps from two existing bodies of data. We conclude that universal semantic graph structure can be automatically approximated from cross-language semantic data.