Volume 23, Issue 1 -

This paper presents a cross-linguistic typology of performatives, especially with respect to their relationship with tense and aspect, in the languages of the world. I explore the relationship between performatives and particular tenses and aspects, and touch on the mechanisms underlying such a relationship. The paper finds that there is not one relation between performatives and a particular tense and aspect and there are no languages which have a special (dedicated) performative tense or aspect marker. Instead, performatives are compatible with various tense and aspect markers, even though the use of a present tense seems to be the most common. What counts as the most optimal tense and aspect for performatives depends on the division of labor within the linguistic structure.

Nakh-Daghestanian languages have encountered growing interest from typologists and linguists from other subdiscplines, and more and more languages from the Nakh-Daghestanian language family are being studied. This paper provides a grammatical overview of the hitherto undescribed Sanzhi Dargwa language, followed by a detailed analysis of the grammaticalized expression of spatial elevation in Sanzhi. Spatial elevation, a topic that has not received substantial attention in Caucasian linguistics, manifests itself across different parts of speech in Sanzhi Dargwa and related languages. In Sanzhi, elevation is a deictic category in partial opposition with participant-oriented deixis/horizontally-oriented directional deixis. This paper treats the spatial uses of demonstratives, spatial preverbs and spatial cases that express elevation as well as the semantic extension of this spatial category into other, non-spatial domains. It further compares the Sanzhi data to other Caucasian and non-Caucasian languages and makes suggestions for investigating elevation as a subcategory within a broader category of topographical deixis.

In many languages, expressions of the type ‘x said: “ p ”’, ‘x said that p ’ or ‘allegedly, p ’ share properties with common syntactic types such as constructions with subordination, paratactic constructions, and constructions with sentence-level adverbs. On closer examination, however, they often turn out to be atypical members of these syntactic classes. In this paper we argue that a more coherent picture emerges if we analyse these expressions as a dedicated syntactic domain in itself, which we refer to as ‘reported speech’. Based on typological observations we argue for the idiosyncrasy of reported speech as a syntactic class. The article concludes with a proposal for a cross-linguistic characterisation that aims at capturing this broadly conceived domain of reported speech with a single semantic definition.