Volume 28, Issue 3

Many languages have words that denote a human body part and an object, for example, hand , which refers to a part of a person and a watch. As of yet, there is no systematic study on the distribution of these shared names, i.e., colexifications, between two concrete semantic domains in a variety of languages. Here, I present a study that investigates colexifications between body and object concepts, i.e., body-object colexifications. By using a newly established workflow, colexifications are automatically extracted based on a seed list containing 134 body concepts and 650 object concepts. The analysis focuses on the frequency, distribution, cognitive relations, and coincidental cases of 78 body-object colexifications occurring across 396 language varieties. The results show that some body-object colexifications are widespread, but most occur in a small number of language varieties. By creating a network structure to examine individual relations and additionally comparing ratings of visual and haptic perception across concepts, the study indicates that the similarity of visual perception plays a central role in the emergence of body-object colexifications. The findings provide a first general overview of the phenomenon and offer ample opportunities for future research.

The lexicalization of perception verbs has been of widespread interest as a route into understanding the relationship between language and cognition. A recent study finds global biases in colexification patterns, suggesting recurrent conceptual associations between sensory meanings across languages. In this paper, drawing on a balanced sample of 100 languages, we examine cross-modal semantic associations in word formation. Confirming earlier proposals, we find derived verbs are lower on a proposed Sense Modality Hierarchy (sight > hearing > touch > taste, smell) than the source perception verbs on which they are based. We propose these findings can be explained by verb frequency asymmetries and the general tendency for sources of derivations to be more frequent than their targets. Moreover, it appears certain pairings (e.g., hear–smell) are recurrently associated via word formation, but others are typologically rare. Intriguingly, the typological patterning partially diverges from the patterning reported for colexification in the same domain. We suggest that while colexification is driven by conceptual resemblance between sensory meanings, cross-modal word formations tend to arise from grammaticalization processes of lexical specification, where additional material (e.g., a sensory noun) is collocated to a polysemous verb in order to disambiguate it in context. Together, these processes can account for the typological similarities and divergences between the two phenomena. More generally, this study highlights the need to consider conceptual, communicative and diachronic factors together in the mapping between words and meanings.

This paper has two main goals. One is to introduce a type of “headless” (or “antecedentless”) relative clause that presents a gap strategy and that has not been sufficiently discussed in the typological literature. The other is to show that this type of headless relative clause with a gap is a characteristic trait of Mesoamerican languages, since it exists in many languages of the Mesoamerican linguistic area as an important constructional option in their relativization syntax, independently of the genetic relationships of the language in question. Two types of headless relative clauses are well known to date: one involving a relativization strategy with a relative pronoun (e.g., I wore what you asked me to wear ) and another with a light head, introduced by Citko (2004. On headed, headless, and light-headed relatives. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 22. 95–126), somewhat comparable to I wore the one that you asked me to wear . The third type of headless relative clause discussed here presents a gap (i.e., there is no manifestation of the relativized term in the relative clause). It would be equivalent to saying ‘ I wore you asked me to wear ’. The phenomenon we study here is interesting both from a typological and areal point of view.

In this typological study, we identify 31 languages that have reduplication with a changed vowel, as in English tick-tock , referred to as ablaut reduplication. Cross-linguistically, this type of reduplication typically manifests as total reduplication with a changed vowel whose quality may or may not be fixed, and when it is not fixed the vowel differs maximally from the corresponding vowel in the base. The order of the copy relative to the base can be fixed or variable, and when it is variable the order enforces a language-specific vowel contour across the two components, such as a low vowel in the first constituent and a high vowel in the second, regardless of which constituent is the base. Furthermore, all cases of ablaut have strikingly similar semantics (playfulness, onomatopoeia, movement, etc.). We review previous treatments of the topic and outline the necessary components of a unified analysis that accommodates the typological patterns.

According to the principle of informativity, more useful information is more likely to be coded than less useful information. This principle underlies Greenberg’s Universals 37 and 45, which state that a larger number of (sex-based) gender contrasts are on average found in singular than in non-singular forms. As an increase in group size lowers the probability of same sex groups, gender-specific personal pronouns are less useful in the non-singular than in the singular. Curiously enough, the principle of informativity also makes the opposite prediction: in the first person, non-singular forms are predicted to show a gender contrast more frequently than singular forms do. Moreover, exclusive forms are predicted to develop gender distinctions more often than inclusive forms. In this paper, these predictions are put to a typological test. A total of 51 languages from 17 different families and 24 different genera has been found in which the first person singular personal pronoun is gender-neutral while one or more of its non-singular counterparts inflect for gender. It is argued that Universals 37 and 45, as well as their counterclaim, are empirically adequate. This apparent paradox dissolves in a three-way interaction of gender, number and person in pronominal paradigms. In keeping with the principle of informativity, there is a bias in favour of gender marking in the third person singular but also a bias in favour of gender marking in the first person non-singular.

This paper presents a general review of the Oxford Handbook of the Languages of the Caucasus. It summarizes over four dozen different typological rarities found in Caucasian languages, and examines what explanations have been given for their presence, and what roles phylogeny, contact and human geography play in their appearance in these languages.