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Ha Jin and his works have contributed significantly to world Englishes knowledge, both through direct scholarly engagement with contact literatures and through the linguistic creativity exhibited in his works of fiction (Jin 2010). His fiction writing also acts as a site of scholarly inquiry (e.g., Zhang 2002). Underexplored, however, are how local varieties of English as used to create queer identities. This paper will seek to address this gap by exploring how Ha Jin created queer spaces in his short story “The Bridegroom.” This investigation will utilize a Kachruvian world Englishes approach to analyzing contact literatures (B. Kachru 1985, 1990, Y. Kachru & Nelson 2006, Thumboo 2006). This analysis will be supported by interfacing it with perspectives from the fields of queer theory and queer linguistics (Jagose 1996, Leap & Motschenbacher 2012), which will allow for a contextually sensitive understanding of queer experiences in China. This approach will enable us to examine how Ha Jin utilized the rhetorical and linguistic markers of China English to explore historical attitudes towards queerness during the post-Cultural Revolution period. These markers include the use of local idioms and culturally-localized rhetorical moves to render a uniquely Chinese queer identity.

This paper describes the classification of the functions of preverbs in Georgian and the other Kartvelian languages as a contribution to the typology of this issue. Preverbs have different meanings and activities in different languages. The typological classification of the functions of preverbs reveals the four core functions: spatial, temporal, objective and lexical. This paper discusses verbal argument structure alternations encoded by preverbs. I argue that preverbs affect verbal valency changes and stimulate object role-shifting in Georgian verbs and other Kartvelian languages. I also argue that preverbs have a crucial role in object alternation across the languages.

This questionnaire study investigates South Korean students’ attitudes towards English loanwords and their use. Even though English enjoys high prestige in Korean society and is considered a requirement for personal and professional advancement, usage of English loanwords is evaluated predominantly negatively or with mixed feelings. For loanwords that semantically deviate from standard English meanings and thus demonstrate Korean identity (i.e., Konglish loanwords), the evaluations turn even more to the negative. Nevertheless, participants also posit positive aspects of general English and Konglish loanword use and, additionally, put forward a variety of perceived reasons for using English words. This study shows that general positive attitudes related to a language can be reversed or at least modified when it comes to the combination of the prestigious language with the native language.

This article analyses the acoustical properties of Dutch vowels produced by adult Spanish learners and investigates how these vowels are perceived by non-expert native Dutch listeners. Statistical vowel classifications obtained from the acoustical properties of the learner vowel realizations were compared to vowel classifications provided by native Dutch listeners. Both types of classifications were affected by the specific set of vowels included as stimuli, an effect caused by the large variability in Spanish learners’ vowel realizations. While there were matches between the two types of classifications, shifts were noted within and between production and perception, depending on the vowel and vowel features. We considered the variability between Spanish learners further by investigating individual patterns in the production and perception data, and linking these to the learners’ proficiency level and multilingual background. We conclude that integrating production and perception data provides valuable insights into the role of different features in adult L2 learning, and how their properties actively interact in the way L2 speech is perceived. A second conclusion is that adaptive mechanisms, signalled by boundary shifts and useful in coping with variability of non-native vowel stimuli, play a role in both statistical vowel classifications (production) and human vowel recognition (perception).

Long exposed to the democraticising effects of modernity, Britain's class structure supposedly collapsed during the 1990s (Turner 2013), though against this contention there is ample evidence to suggest that its essential contours are unaltered, and that the classless society is itself a myth (Marshall et al 1988). This paper explores an earlier period, in Britain's not too distant past, when the labels, 'working class' and 'middle class' were less controversial. The BBC's sit-com 'Whatever happened to the likely lads?' (Clement and La Frenais), from the early 1970s, was one of its most successful ever, enjoying both public support and critical acclaim. The show follows the lives of Bob Ferris and Terry Collier, two working class school-friends from the north-east who, after a period of separation, find each other again as they start out in life. While Bob is aspirational, attempting to achieve his goals of social progress through work, further education and marriage, Terry pursues the same lifestyle, viewing his friend's progress in terms of class betrayal. An episode from the series will be explored using a pragmatic-dialogic approach (Kecskes 2016), to suggest that the invisible framework of class needs to be invoked in order to make sense of the dialogue

Despite the importance attached in the literature to the use of hedges, the study of hedging has been shown to target, mainly, the written corpora of various types and so remains neglected in naturally occurring speech. Moreover, the existing discussion predominantly encompass cross-cultural variation in the use of hedging devices and gender as a variable has largely been overlooked. This study was conducted to shed more light on the differences between 4 Iranian male and female English instructors’use of hedging and its different realizations in their actual speech. One teaching session of each instructor was videotaped and the instructors were asked to view their video and to recollect their reasons for resorting to different activities for teaching. Their recollections were recorded and transcribed. Based on Hyland’s classification of hedges, the frequency and realization of hedging in male and female corpus were identified. Results showed considerable differences in the overall distribution of hedges as well as certain types of hedging linguistic devices throughout the male and female corpus.

In a number of Slavic and Germanic languages, various derivational affixes and morphological patterns of Latin origin are relatively common, and bear effects as abstract as deriving event nouns from verbs and property nouns from adjectives. This seems to contradict the general observation that abstract morphology typically is not subject to borrowing. We discuss the status of two Serbo-Croatian (S-C) nominalizing Latinate suffixes, -cija and -itet, complemented by one Germanic suffix, -er. On our analysis, these are not borrowed suffixes and derivational patterns, in the sense that they were present in another language and got copied into S-C, but rather suffixes and patterns which emerged within S-C, more specifically in the borrowed stratum of the S-C lexicon. Crucial factors in their emergence were the shared semantic properties of the nouns ending in the respective sequences (-cija, -itet and -er), and the quantitative properties of these sequences closely matching those of native derivational suffixes. Pragmatic, phonological and prosodic constraints apply to these derivations to the effect that the suffixes that have emerged in the borrowed domain of the lexicon never enter a competition with the native nominalization patterns.

This paper studies the degree of cohesion among varieties of Spanish, proposing an analysis of Spanish dialectal variation and the internal cohesion of varieties using the Varilex-R database (2016). A battery of complementary statistical tests (correlation analysis, cluster analysis, association analysis) has been applied to these data in order to establish the distances between the principal modalities of the Spanish language. It also introduces the calculation of indices of generality and particularity, which, by establishing associations between linguistic uses within different countries, illustrate the extent to which each country’s Spanish, by virtue of its linguistic uses, can be considered more general or more particular.

“We know that Middle Indian (Middle Indo-Aryan) makes its appearance in epigraphy prior to Sanskrit: this is the great linguistic paradox of India.” In these words Louis Renou (1956: 84) referred to a problem in Sanskrit studies for which so far no satisfactory solution had been found. I will here propose that the perceived “paradox” derives from the lack of acknowledgement of certain parameters in the linguistic situation of Ancient India which were insufficiently appreciated in Renou’s time, but which are at present open to systematic exploration with the help of by now well established sociolinguistic concepts, notably the concept of “diglossia”. Three issues will here be addressed in the light of references to ancient and classical Indian texts, Sanskrit and Sanskritic. A simple genetic model is indadequate, especially when the ‘linguistic area’ applies also to what can be reconstructed for earlier periods. The so-called Sanskrit “Hybrids” in the first millennium CE, including the Prakrits and Epics, are rather to be regarded as emerging “Ausbau” languages of Indo-Aryan with hardly any significant mutual “Abstand” before they will be succesfully “roofed,” in the second half of the first millennium CE, by “classical” Sanskrit.

The hypothesis that “invited inferences” are factors in change and challenges to it are reviewed. In light of recent work on historical construction grammar and interactional discourse analysis, I suggest that at least three types of inferences play a role in interactional contexts: local inferences associated with specific expressions; discourse structuring inferences pertaining to factors like coherence, backgrounding and foregrounding; and turn-taking inferences associated with turn relevant positions. A case study tests this suggestion: the development of discourse structuring uses of a family of Look expressions. Turn-taking has been regarded as a trigger in related changes. However, in this case not turn-taking, but rather a profile shift associated with non-use of complementizers is hypothesized to be a crucial enabling factor.

This paper argues that conversation analysis has largely neglected the fact that meaning in interaction relies on inferences to a high degree. Participants treat each other as cognitive agents, who imply and infer meanings, which are often consequential for interactional progression. Based on the study of audio- and video-recordings from German talk-in-interaction, the paper argues that inferences matter to social interaction in at least three ways. They can be explicitly formulated; they can be (conventionally) indexed, but not formulated; or they may be neither indexed nor formulated yet would be needed for the correct understanding of a turn. The last variety of inferences usually remain tacit, but are needed for smooth interactional progression. Inferences in this case become an observable discursive phenomenon if misunderstandings are treated by the explication of correct (accepted) and wrong (unaccepted) inferences. The understanding of referential terms, analepsis, and ellipsis regularly rely on inferences. Formulations, third-position repairs, and fourth-position explications of erroneous inferences are practices of explicating inferences. There are conventional linguistic means like discourse markers, connectives, and response particles that index specific kinds of inferences. These practices belong to a larger class of inferential practices, which play an important role for indexing and accomplishing intersubjectivity in talk in interaction.

I explore some of the interconnections between inferences that participants make about one another’s (verbal) conduct, the implications they attribute to prior turns at talk, and the indirectness with which recipients may respond to enquiries - in short, the interconnections between inference, implication and indirectness. These are explored in the context of naturally occurring conversations (UK and US), from the methodological perspective of Conversation Analysis. Because inference has come to be associated closely with Grice’s concept of implicature, I begin by setting out my reasons for not following Grice’s path, preferring instead to revert to ‘implication’, namely the implication that a recipient finds in and attributes to a prior turn. My purpose here is to avoid the cognitive conceptualisation of speakers’ intentions that Grice supposed are associated with implicature. I argue that inference features in the understanding of and response to all turns at talk; it is not restricted to some special kind of utterance, as seems to be conveyed in Grice’s conceptualisation. The inferences that recipients make are evident in cases in which they respond not to what the prior speaker asked ‘literally,’ but to the inferred agenda of an enquiry. Moreover, recipients may respond indirectly to prior enquiries, thereby ‘side-stepping’ implications they attribute to those enquiries. In various ways, inference and indirection may on occasions be associated with practices for avoidance in conversation.

In this paper, I discuss critically the traditional view of reanalysis, taking into account recent debates about the concept. In particular, I argue that the debate about reanalysis tends to conflate two interpretations of reanalysis: reanalysis as a type of language change among other ones, and reanalysis as the recognition or “ratification” of any kind of change. I offer a possible explanation of that potential confusion. I then illustrate this distinction using the history of the French est-ce que question as a case study. I report original diachronic research on the history of that construction. Further, I discuss implications both at a conceptual-theoretical level and at a practical level for further diachronic research. The paper concludes with a summary and discussion of the findings.

The present paper analyzes the discourse-pragmatic function of introducing Spanish qué ‘what’- interrogatives with the concessive connective pero ‘but’. In some contexts, a pero-preface contributes to the interpretation of the interrogative as the realization of an interactional challenge rather than a request for information (e.g. an information question). We explore the inferential processes by which the peropreface leads to an interpretation of the interrogative as an interactional challenge and try to demonstrate that this challenge function of pero-prefaced qué-interrogatives may not only achieved ‘ad hoc’ by a local combination of the constitutive elements, but also by conventionalized form-function associations that developed diachronically. In a first step, we analyze pero-prefaced qué-interrogatives in a corpus of spoken Present Day Spanish. There are three main functions of pero-prefaces: to signal that a previous answer to the same interrogative is insufficient, to insist on an answer to a previously unattended request, or to challenge an immediately preceding action by an interlocutor. Using methodology from variationist linguistics, we identify entrenched patterns of pero-prefaced qué-interrogatives that have conventionalized the challenge function. In a second step, we conduct a diachronic variationist analysis of the development of Spanish pero-prefaced qué-interrogatives between 1700 and 1975, testing the hypothesis that the challenge reading developed later than the question reading. Our results show that due to their largely monological nature, the same inferential processes cued by pero lead to different discourse functions in historical texts. Over time, however, the use of pero-prefaced interrogatives started to become more likely in constructed dialogues. We argue that this change reflects an ongoing conventionalization of the challenge function in pero-prefaced interrogatives in spoken language.

This paper offers an exploratory Interactional Linguistic account of the role that inferences play in episodes of ordinary conversational interaction. To this end, it systematically reconsiders the conversational practice of using the lexico-syntactic format oh that’s right to implicitly claim “just-now” recollection of something previously known, but momentarily confused or forgotten. The analyses reveal that this practice typically occurs as part of a larger sequential pattern that the participants orient to and which serves as a procedure for dealing with, and generating an account for, one participant’s production of an inapposite action. As will be shown, the instantiation and progressive realization of this sequential procedure requires local inferential work from the participants. While some facets of this inferential work appear to be shaped by the particular context of the ongoing interaction, others are integral to the workings of the sequence as such. Moreover, the analyses suggest that participants’ understanding of oh that’s right as embodying an implicit memory claim rests on an inference which is based on a kind of semanticpragmatic compositionality. The paper thus illustrates how inferences in conversational interaction can be systematically studied and points to the merits of combining an interactional and a linguistic perspective.

In this paper, we ask whether English pragmatic markers may evoke similar inferential processes in discourse as German modal particles, studying alright/all right, already and then in more detail. Moreover, we investigate whether specific formal features are associated with these uses and thus whether there is any evidence for a productive modal particle category that can serve as a guideline for the creation and interpretation of modal particle uses of English pragmatic markers. Our analysis shows that even though evidence for a schematic modal particle construction is not conclusive, modal particle uses of pragmatic markers may be potentially widespread in English, and the inferential processes involved may be similar across languages.

In this paper, I analyze the evolution of the Latin adverb/discourse marker NUNC and its Old and Modern French equivalents, or and maintenant, markers whose content-level source meanings are in all cases equivalent to English now. The analysis pays particular attention to the role of metonymic inference, and to bridging contexts. Showing that the three etymologically unrelated markers have remarkably similar (but crucially not identical) uses, both as temporal adjuncts and as pragmatic markers of various types, I argue that the diachronic changes undergone by these three items constitute a semantic/pragmatic cycle of a type that I call “onomasiological” (cf. Hansen 2015, fc). I suggest that cyclic developments at the level of semantics and pragmatics take place because source items that are semantically similar will favor similar types of contextual inferences. Furthermore, the fact that the range of uses of the items under consideration is not necessarily exactly identical from one cycle to the next supports an instructional view of semantics, which affords a central role in the process of meaning construction precisely to inferencing.

This paper deals with the question of how and why resultative constructions change into anteriors. This discussion will be based on synchronic data concerning tener + past participle, a resultative construction used in modern Spanish. One of the latter's most frequent is te lo tengo dicho 'I have (already) told you'. This is remarkable since decir 'to tell' is a non-transitional verb; te lo tengo dicho thus violates the requirement that resultatives should only combine with transitional verbs. In the literature, such mismatches between the semantics of a given construction and the meaning of its lexical filler have been claimed to normally trigger coercion, i.e. an inferential repair mechanism giving rise to special meaning effects. Thus, coercion - despite being conceived as a purely synchronic mechanism - is a prime candidate for an explanation of the change from resultative to anterior. In line with this hypothesis, occurrences of te lo tengo dicho are attested in my corpus where the latter is specified by quantifying adverbials such as muchas veces 'many times'. However, speaker judgements indiacte that even te lo tengo dicho muchas veces is not an iterative anterior construction, but still a resultative. Based on synchronic data taken from the CREA-corpus, it will be shown that in the vast majority of its occurrences, te lo tengo dicho is part of an dialogal discourse pattern where certain argumentative effects based on its resultative meaning are highly relevant. Crucially, therefore, in such "strong" uses a coercive shift towards an anterior meaning is excluded. On a more abstract level, it will be shown that coercion is controlled by pragmatic factors; in the case of te lo tengo dicho muchas veces, conceptual/semantic plausibility is systematically overridden by pragmatic relevance.

In this paper, we first present a close analysis of conversational data, capturing the variety of non-addressee deictic usages of du in contemporary German. From its beginnings, it has been possible to use non-addressee deictic du not only for generic statements, but also for subjective utterances by a speaker who mainly refers to his or her own experiences. We will present some thoughts on the specific inferences leading to this interpretation, making reference to Buhler’s deixis at the phantasm. In the second part of the paper, we show that non-addressee deictic du (‘thou’) as found in present-day German is not an innovation but goes back at least to the 18th century. However, there is some evidence that this usage has been spreading over the last 50 years or so. We will link non-addressee deictic du back historically to the two types of “person-shift” for du discussed by Jakob Grimm in his 1856 article “Uber den Personenwechsel in der Rede” [On person shift in discourse]. Grimm distinguishes between person shift in formulations of “rules and law” on the one hand, and person shift in what he calls “thou-monologue” on the other. The subjective interpretation of non-addressee-deictic du in present-day German may have originated from these “thou-monologues”

In this introductory paper, we will briefly introduce FDG and its treatment of systems of tense, aspect, mood, evidentiality, polarity, mirativity and localization, as well as their lexical counterparts.

The aim of this paper is to show how the TAME system of A'ingae, a language isolate spoken in Colombia and Ecuador, can be captured within the theoretical framework of Functional Discourse Grammar. An important prediction in this theory is that the surface order of TAME expressions reflects the scope relations between them in their underlying representation. An initial analysis reveals that, with three exceptions, the A'ingae TAME system confirms this prediction. Closer inspection of the three exceptions, which concern basic illocution, evidentiality, and quantificational aspect, then reveals that on the one hand, the theoretical model has to be adapted, while on the other hand some of the A'ingae facts allow for an alternative interpretation.

One of the distinctive features of the theory of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) is that it distinguishes various hierarchically organized layers of analysis, each of which is provided with a slot for modifiers relevant at the layer in question. Linear placement of these modifiers is determined by the layer to which they belong, with the ordering of elements taking place in a top-down, outward-inward manner. The model, in other words, makes predictions concerning the (relative) clausal position of different types of modifiers. In addition, the model places constraints on the occurrence of different types of modifiers in embedded environments (e.g. within the complement of certain types of verbs). Finally, the model places constraints on which modifiers can be expected to co-occur in coordinated constructions. The aim of the present paper is to test these predictions by examining the function, position and distribution of ten adverbs expressing various kinds of modality. Data from the British National Corpus (BYU-BNC) is used (i) to determine whether the predictions following from the overall organization of the FDG model are supported by empirical data; and (ii) to refine, where necessary, the classifications of modal adverbs proposed in the literature.

This paper provides an analysis of modality in Spanish Sign Language (Lengua de Signos Española: LSE) from a functional perspective. Following FDG assumptions, scope will be the basic criterion in delineating modal subtypes. Four representational layers are taken into account: Propositional Content, Episode, State-of-Affairs, and Configurational Property. This study highlights that LSE offers an extensive sample of manual items (with a variable degree of grammaticalization) that enable the efficient expression of a wide range of modal contents: epistemic, deontic, volitive, and facultative. LSE is thus fully congruent with oral languages (OLs) in this domain.

In most Germanic and Romance languages the present perfect has developed from a resultative meaning via an anterior into absolute past. In Functional Discourse Grammar terms this corresponds to the grammaticalization of a phasal aspectual operator at the layer of the Configurational Property, via a relative tense operator at the layer of the State-of-Affairs, into an absolute tense operator at the layer of the Episode. This is what happened in Romance languages, such as French and Italian, while Peninsular Spanish is developing in the same direction, without as yet having fully reached the absolute past stage. The Portuguese present perfect, however, is different as it does not express resultative aspect, relative past or absolute past meaning but rather the iteration or continuity of an event from some past moment onward until after the moment of speaking. A further idiosyncrasy of the perfect in Portuguese is that the auxiliary is based on Latin tenere rather than habere, as is the case in the other Romance languages. This paper describes the semantic and the morphosyntactic aspects of the grammaticalization of the (Brazilian) Portuguese perfect in diachrony and synchrony. It turns out that (i) the medieval habere-based Portuguese present perfect becomes obsolete and the past perfect develops into a relative past, (ii) the post-medieval tenere-based past perfect turns into a relative past as well, whereas (iii) the tenere-based present perfect undergoes semantic specialization in the course of the 20th century. This paper shows how these facts can be accounted for within the Functional Discourse Grammar approach to the grammaticalization of aspect and tense.

Mirativity is a distinct grammatical category. In the literature, no mirative marker has been identified so far in Mandarin Chinese. This paper aims to argue that Mandarin Chinese is a language that has grammatical means of expressing mirativity. The sentence-final particle le (SF le) in Mandarin is a mirative marker in its own right. It encodes the information as newsworthy or surprising and occurs with different time references and Illocutions. Based on the data from SF le, this paper extends the definition of mirativity given by Hengeveld & Olbertz (2012) by proposing that mirativity can not only be targeted towards either the speaker or the addressee, but also towards both. Lastly, it is argued that mirativity should be accounted for at the layer of Communicated Content at the Interpersonal Level in Functional Discourse Grammar.

This paper examines the rare but well-attested combinations of the Present Perfect with definite temporal adverbials denoting past time in US-American English. The goal of this paper is twofold. For one thing, it outlines the disemous analysis FDG proposes for the form have + past participle in its prototypical use, arguing that two different operators can reliably trigger this form, one marking anteriority and one encoding phasal resultativeness. For another, it shows how, via synchronic inferential mechanisms, the Present Perfect may have absorbed discourse pragmatic functions that now permit the felicitous use of definite temporal adverbials together with the Present Perfect in certain contexts. It is argued that this combination has routinized, taking over certain functions typically associated with the Present Perfect in a manner that suggests this development as potentially part of a grammaticalization process. The paper proposes that they are not as such part of the function the Present Perfect encodes, but that they currently represent a switch stage in the development of the US-American Present Perfect. It further suggests that in this switch stage, the combination of the Present Perfect with an adverb specifying past reference can be read as signaling the relationship between two Discourse Acts as justificational or can encompass the temporal specification as a necessary part of the action that is then available for a Resultative reading.

The functions of the simple past and the present perfect appear to be well delimited in English according to prescriptive grammars. However, in actual use their distribution is still a challenging area of English linguistics since there are fuzzy cases in which this distinction is blurred. For example, in some varieties of English the present perfect seems to be taking over the role of the simple past to express definite past in narratives, where the simple past is the default tense. In these cases, the use of the present perfect has been regarded to be functionally motivated by the speaker’s intention to highlight the current relevance of the event expressed by this form (Ritz, 2010, Walker, 2011). The main objective of this research will be to use the results of corpus analysis and of the relevant studies on this topic and to propose an FDG analysis of these data. It will be concluded that the use of the present perfect in narratives has various functions captured at two different levels of the architecture of FDG, namely the Representational Level (RL) and the Interpersonal Level (IL). At the RL, the present perfect functions either as a marker of resultative aspect, or as a signal that a new narrative Episode is introduced. At IL, this form functions as a device for Emphasis, highlighting a salient passage in the narrative.

The purpose of this paper is to show that the theory of Functional Discourse Grammar constitutes a powerful model to account for the complex phenomenon of Neg-Raising in a consistent and systematic way. Previous studies on Neg-Raising, the phenomenon involving the transfer of the negative from a complement clause to the matrix clause, have traditionally characterized it in terms of syntactic and, more extensively, semantic criteria. These studies have focused on the delimitation of the type of verbs involved in this construction, since Neg-Raising is only allowed by some complement taking verbs, all related to certain kinds of modality. However, despite having been studied extensively, Neg-Raising remains an unclear phenomenon in certain respects. Taking as a point of departure the classification of Complement Clauses resulting from the application of the three parameters (Entity Type, Presupposition and Factuality) proposed within Functional Discourse Grammar, it is possible to arrive at a consistent delimitation of the constructions exhibiting Neg-Raising. Furthermore, the Morphological Level allows accounting for Neg- Raising without resorting to any kind of movement rule. It is through the operation of Morphological Encoding that the negative comes to occupy its position in the matrix clause.

The present paper examines the distribution of English evidential -ly adverb in the scopal hierarchical framework that was presented by Hengeveld and Dall’Aglio Hattnher (2015) in their results of work on Brazilian grammatical evidentials. The analysis will constitute the categorization of eleven English evidential - ly adverb. The results will determine whether the analysis supports Hengeveld and Dall’Aglio Hattnher’s (2015) conclusion that evidential items with multiple meanings occur in adjacent positions within an FDG Level, and that they can occur on two Levels in the FDG framework. The data which was retrieved from recent UK newspaper articles in the BYU NOW corpus (News on the Web), comprise main clauses modified by an evidential - ly adverb. Categorization of the evidential adverbs in the FDG framework was determined by paraphrasing, and by applying diagnostic scope criteria. For the eleven evidential - ly adverbs studied, it is shown that non-reportative evidential adverbs with multiple meanings occur at adjacent FDG layers at the Representational Level, and that two adverbs occur at both the Interpersonal and the Representational Level.

In addition to its central role in the organization of gender systems and its numerous effects on different parts of the grammar, animacy reveals itself as a significant, sometimes even determinant factor in diachronic processes like the reduction of morphological complexity. Complexity in the realm of inflection may be defined as the extent to which formal distinctions in paradigms are semantically or phonologically unmotivated and therefore largely unpredictable on extramorphological grounds. Animacy and natural (or sex-based) gender emerge in certain cases as features capable of constraining this kind of complexity by offering a transparent semantic criterion that helps substantiate several formal distinctions in languages, thereby reducing the amount of morphological complexity or unpredictability inherited from earlier stages in the evolution of different linguistic systems.

This paper deals with the intermediate position of non-human animates on semantic prominence scales and illustrates the complexity and the context-driven aspect of linguistic animacy. The focus is on deontic and dynamic modals, as well as the zero person and passive constructions, in Finnish. These types of structures have been described as reserved for human reference. The corpus of this study is collected from a radio program where listeners call in to present questions arising from their nature observations. It consists of 263 occurrences of modal and open reference constructions with non-human animate reference. The paper aims to determine the properties that make non-human animates acceptable referents in the constructions under study and shows that prioritizing human reference is not a grammatical property of these constructions. Rather, they encode shared intersubjective, interspecies experience. Seeking to understand the behavior of the other animate being, speakers display recognition of non-human beings’ concerns and interests: they use linguistic constructions that engage them and all other interlocutors as potential participants of the situation, even when the situation described is not typical of humans. The nonhuman animates’ capacities, environment and life span are unfamiliar to the interlocutors and motivate their questions and explanations, but there are physical states and processes as well as mental experiences common to all animates that allow for the interlocutors to adopt the non-human viewpoint.

Linguistic animacy reflects a particular construal of biological distinctions encountered in the world, passed through cultural and cognitive filters. This study explores the process by which our construal of animacy becomes encoded in the grammars of human languages. We ran an iterated learning experiment investigating the effect of animacy on language transmission. Participants engaged in a simple artificial language learning task in which they were asked to learn which affix was assigned to each noun in the language. Though initially random, the language each participant produced at test became the language that the subsequent participant in a chain was trained on. Results of the experiment were analysed in terms of learnability, measured through the accuracy of responses, and structure, using an entropy measure. We found that the learnability of languages increased over generations, as expected, but entropy did not decrease. Languages did not become formally simpler over time. Instead, structure emerged through a reorganisation of noun classes around animacy-based categories. The use of semantic animacy distinctions allowed languages to retain morphological complexity while becoming more learnable. Our study shows that grammatical reflexes of animacy distinctions can arise out of learning alone, and that structuring grammar based on animacy can make languages more learnable.

This paper deals with the influence of animacy on affectedness. German, like other Germanic languages, requires oblique marking of the inanimate undergoer argument of verbs of contact by impact (e.g. hit, kick, bite), whereas the animate undergoer argument takes non-oblique marking. Inanimacy does not necessarily result in oblique marking; undergoer arguments with inanimate referents are realized in a non-oblique construction if a change of state or location is explicitly predicated, as in resultative constructions. This suggests that the marking of inanimate undergoer arguments is conditioned by two factors: animacy and affectedness. The basic claim is that animate and inanimate entities are affected differently by hitting, kicking and similar activities. Inanimates can only be physically affected, whereas animates can be psychologically affected as well. Since verbs of contact by impact do not entail a change of state/location, they do not represent their undergoer arguments as being (necessarily) physically affected. Hence, the potential psychological effect of hitting, kicking and the like on animate beings gives rise for interpreting animate undergoer arguments of those verbs as being affected.

This paper investigates the logophoric pronoun system of Finnish, with a focus on reference to animals, to further our understanding of the linguistic representation of non-human animals, how perspective-taking is signaled linguistically, and how this relates to features such as [+/-HUMAN]. In contexts where animals are grammatically [-HUMAN] but conceptualized as the perspectival center (whose thoughts, speech or mental state is being reported), can they be referred to with logophoric pronouns? Colloquial Finnish is claimed to have a logophoric pronoun which has the same form as the human-referring pronoun of standard Finnish, han (she/he). This allows us to test whether a pronoun that may at first blush seem featurally specified to seek [+HUMAN] referents can be used for [-HUMAN] referents when they are logophoric. I used corpus data to compare the claim that han is logophoric in both standard and colloquial Finnish vs. the claim that the two registers have different logophoric systems. I argue for a unified system where han is logophoric in both registers, and moreover can be used for logophoric [-HUMAN] referents in both colloquial and standard Finnish. Thus, on its logophoric use, han does not require its referent to be [+HUMAN].

We show by means of a corpus study that the language used by the inanimate first person narrator in the novel Specht en zoon deviates from what we would expect on the basis of the fact that the narrator is inanimate, but at the same time also differs from the language of a human narrator in the novel De wijde blik on several linguistic dimensions. Whereas the human narrator is associated strongly with action verbs, preferring the Agent role, the inanimate narrator is much more limited to the Experiencer role, predominantly associated with cognition and sensory verbs. Our results show that animacy as a linguistic concept may be refined by taking into account the myriad ways in which an entity’s conceptual animacy may be expressed: we accept the conceptual animacy of the inanimate narrator despite its inability to act on its environment, showing this need not be a requirement for animacy.