Volume 25, Issue 2

Although some characteristics of incorporating verbs and non-incorporating verbs have been proposed in previous studies, little systematic cross-linguistic research has been done on restrictions on the types of verbs that incorporate nouns. Knowledge about possible verb-based restrictions on noun incorporation may, however, provide important insights for theoretical approaches to noun incorporation, in particular regarding the question to what extent incorporation is a lexical or a syntactic process, and whether and how languages may vary in this respect. This paper therefore investigates to what extent languages restrict noun incorporation to particular verbs and what types of restrictions appear to be relevant cross-linguistically. The study consists of two parts: an explorative typological survey based on descriptive sources of 50 incorporating languages, and a more detailed investigation of incorporating verbs in corpus data from a sample of eight languages, guided by a questionnaire. The results demonstrate that noun incorporation is indeed restricted in terms of which verbs allow this construction within and across languages. The likelihood that a verb can incorporate is partly determined by its degree of morphosyntactic transitivity, but the attested variation across verbs and across languages shows that purely lexical restrictions play an important role as well.

Some languages tend to derive intransitive verbs from transitive verbs, while others tend to derive transitive verbs from intransitive verbs. In this paper, we will argue that Teotitlán Zapotec, an Otomanguean language spoken in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, represents an extreme case of a transitivizing language: the transitive counterpart is almost always morphologically more complex, not only in the anticausative/causative alternations, but also in passive/active alternations, thus, an ‘activizing’ language.

It is common for languages crosslinguistically to employ the same verb form in several diathetic constructions distinguished by a different degree of agent suppression. In South Slavic languages the so called ‘quasi-passive reflexive se -constructions’ (QRCs) encode a number of non-factual situations, expressing an array of semantically close meanings unified by modal semantics. The paper argues that QRCs in South Slavic languages represent a gradient category comprising potential, normative and generalizing situation types. The difference between these subclasses depends on the degree of implication of the agent in the construction: the agent is indirectly evoked in the potential, its presence can be felt in the normative, and a non-referring agent is present in the generalizing constructions. The intended interpretation of QRCs is obtained through the predicate-participant relation and pragmatic factors. In shaping the setting the latter may trigger overlapping between the subclasses. The goal of the paper is to prove that QRCs supply the cognitive link between anticausative reflexive (coding autonomous events) and passive reflexive constructions (coding agent defocusing situations): the potential type is closer to anticausatives, while the generalizing type shows affinity with passives. Such scalar analysis of QRCs may contribute to a better understanding of the typology of reflexive constructions.

This study analyzes systems of direction and associated motion in 23 languages of the Tibeto-Burman family. Both direction and associated motion can be encoded by a range of grammatical strategies, including affixes, clitics, particles, serial-verb constructions, and auxiliary verbs. While some languages have only associated motion or direction, others have both, either via distinct subsystems, syntactic ambiguity, or context-dependent interpretation. While directional encodings can be interpreted as associated motion in some contexts, the reverse can also be true. Verbal semantics is key to the pragmatic interpretation of examples in context; some types of motion verbs are more compatible with directional interpretations and others with associated motion. In addition, certain types of motion verbs were found to be compatible with different temporal relationships that hold between the activity of the primary verb and the motional component. Finally, the grammatical role of the figure in such constructions depends on both the temporal relationship and the semantics of the verb.