Volume 21, Issue 1 -

The expression of standard negation by means of manual and/or non-manual markers has been described for a considerable number of sign languages. Typological comparisons have revealed an intriguing dichotomy: while some sign languages require a manual negative element in negative clauses (manual-dominant sign languages), in others negation can be realized by a non-manual marker alone (in particular a headshake; non-manual-dominant sign languages). We are here adding data from Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT) to the picture, and we demonstrate that NGT belongs to the latter group. Still, detailed comparison suggests that NGT patterns differently from other non-manual-dominant sign languages, thereby improving our understanding of the typological variation in this domain. A novel contribution of the present study is that it is based on naturalistic corpus data, showing more variation than often found in elicitation and grammaticality judgment studies of sign languages, but also presenting new problems of interpretation.

The subject of this study is the copy-verb construction { verbal_stem=discourse_clitic final_verb} in the Tibeto-Burman family, with particular emphasis on two languages, Burmese and Pumi. Both languages show a highly diverse functional span of this construction, thereby offering insights for its analysis and for our understanding of the interaction of verbal categories with information structure and context. The copy-verb construction of Pumi and Burmese is subsequently compared with parallel phenomena in Tibeto-Burman and is situated in a wider crosslinguistic perspective.

Expressions like English ago have been claimed to be among the most likely candidates for postposition crosslinguistically, and the reason for this has been conjectured to be diachronic. A few previous contributions notwithstanding, however, we still lack a typologically wider-ranging account of such temporal adpositions and adverbials and of how they develop. These are the main goals of the present article. Relying on a sample of 100 languages, it has been found that: (i) the structure instantiated in English by ago is far from universal and is geographically unevenly distributed; (ii) these expressions are indeed predominantly postposed, which does not hold for their mirror images for the future; and (iii) evidence from etymology, patterns of polysemy, and documented semantic extensions suggests that this asymmetry is the result of past and future markers having different diachronic sources.

In this article we describe a possessive construction in the Ngumpin-Yapa languages of Australia which has interesting implications for crosslinguistic models of agreement. In this “possessor dissension” construction, the possessor NP remains a modifier within the larger possessive NP, yet both the possessor and the possessum are cross-referenced with clause-level agreement morphology. Thus, there is a type of morphosyntactic disagreement (or dissension) between the syntactic position of the possessor as an NP-internal argument and its being agreed with at the clausal level as if it were a clausal argument. This phenomenon has had only limited mention in the typological literature, and has not previously been discussed for Australian languages. We discuss the properties of the construction, how it can be distinguished from other related construction types, and its implications for the typology of agreement.

We test Preferred Argument Structure theory against corpus data from Tondano, an Austronesian language with symmetrical voice. Investigating the use of full noun phrases in individual argument positions, we find no significant clustering of both S and P as opposed to A, hence no discourse ergativity. Moreover, neither pivotal nor non-pivotal grammatical relations appear to specialise in the accommodation of full noun phrases. Thus, grammatical relations do not serve as architecture for regulating information flow in discourse. Only constituent order reflects information flow, so that full noun phrases tend to occur in clause-final position. More generally, correlations of humanness and topicality predict most straightforwardly attested patterns of argument realisation.