Volume 26, Issue 1

Although there has been growing interest in the study of demonstratives, a number of demonstrative categories remain largely unexplored. This article addresses one gap, presenting a preliminary typological overview of predicative demonstratives, a type of demonstrative used primarily in non-verbal predication constructions. The morphosyntax of predicative demonstratives is first briefly examined, followed by a typological characterization based primarily on semantic and morphosyntactic grounds. Predicative demonstratives focus on the immediately surrounding spatial, temporal, or textual environment of the speech act, showing restrictions on occurring in negated clauses or questions. In terms of lexical categorization, predicative demonstratives most commonly find themselves in a small closed word class of non-verbal predicators. Four types of predicative demonstratives are proposed here: Presentatives, identifiers, localizers, and the rare copular demonstratives.

Some languages around the Pacific have multiple possessive classes of alienable constructions using appositive nouns or classifiers. This pattern differs from the most common kind of alienable/inalienable distinction, which involves marking, usually affixal, on the possessum, and has only one class of alienables. The Japanese language isolate Ainu has possessive marking that is reminiscent of the Circum-Pacific pattern. It is distinctive, however, in that the possessor is coded not as a dependent in an NP but as an argument in a finite clause, and the appositive word is a verb. This paper gives a first comprehensive, typologically grounded description of Ainu possession and reconstructs the pattern that must have been standard when Ainu was still the daily language of a large speech community; Ainu then had multiple alienable class constructions. We report a cross-linguistic survey expanding previous coverage of the appositive type and show how Ainu fits in. We split alienable/inalienable into two different phenomena: argument structure (with types based on possessibility: optionally possessible, obligatorily possessed, and non-possessible) and valence (alienable, inalienable classes). Valence-changing operations are derived alienability and derived inalienability. Our survey classifies the possessive systems of languages in these terms.

I aim to provide a typological investigation of the General Noun-modifying Clause Construction (NMCC) in languages other than those of Eurasia. I show that the five properties proposed by Matsumoto et al. as potentially correlating with the General NMCC are rather areal features which are falsified by the data of languages from Africa and Europe. The semantic interpretability condition and the syntactic licensing condition of the General Noun-modifying Clause Construction need reconsidering. Semantically, I argue that the interpretability of the General NMCC depends both on the semantics of the head noun and that of the modifying clause because they show close interaction with each other. Syntactically, I propose three general syntactic properties of the languages with the General NMCC, i.e. (1) no relative pronouns or relative pronouns in competition with a general clause marker, (2) complex subordinate locutions composed of the general clause marker(s) (and a head noun), and (3) unified verb forms in subordination.

Over the last few years, the number of corpora that can be used for language comparison has dramatically increased. The corpora are so diverse in their structure, size and annotation style, that a novice might not know where to start. The present paper charts this new and changing territory, providing a few landmarks, warning signs and safe paths. Although no corpus at present can replace the traditional type of typological data based on language description in reference grammars, corpora can help with diverse tasks, being particularly well suited for investigating probabilistic and gradient properties of languages and for discovering and interpreting cross-linguistic generalizations based on processing and communicative mechanisms. At the same time, the use of corpora for typological purposes has not only advantages and opportunities, but also numerous challenges. This paper also contains an empirical case study addressing two pertinent problems: the role of text types in language comparison and the problem of the word as a comparative concept.

This article provides a new precise algorithmic definition of the notion “phonological-inventory gap”. On the basis of this definition, I propose a method for identifying gaps, provide descriptive data on several types of consonant-inventory gaps in the world’s languages, and investigate the relationships between gaps and inventory size, processes of sound change, and phonological segment borrowing.