Volume 56, Issue 1

This study sets out to examine how reportative evidentiality and attribution are achieved in Romanian fairy tales. By comparing and contrasting reportative and attribution expressions, the current research aims to determine the deictic function of these constructions, the pragmatic motivations of the speaker for evidential usage as well as the lexicalization, richness and functional diversity of these expressions in the Romanian language. In fairy tales, the content, actants, constructed reported discourse, sources of information and reproduction of speech vary widely, thus the relationship between evidentiality and attribution can be richly explored from a syntactic, lexical and a pragmatic/interactional/functional perspective. Research findings suggest, among other things, that Romanian fairy tales integrate evidential and attributive preferences that are reflective of a regional practicality of the genre as a form of communication, that there is cognitive implication of the storyteller in the process of evidential choice and that evidential values are associated with particular constructions that allow for evidentiality and attribution to operate as effective discourse strategies in the realization of the interpersonal functions in the tales. With regard to Romanian fairy tales, such evidential expressions help clarify, validate and evaluate sources of information, operating as prompters in a perspective-taking dynamic process.

This paper argues that the Polish noun-pronoun asymmetry in which the intensifier sam ‘self’ precedes nouns and follows pronominals is not a simple case of configuration in the DP, whereby pronouns, unlike nominals, target D 0 for referential reasons (cf. Rutkowski 2002, 2012). Such viewpoints, in the case of Polish, are unfortunate because they appear to underlyingly work on and draw from the syntax of nominal projections characteristic of English or Italian i.e., languages with articles. We show that the asymmetry pertains to various semantic interpretations of sam , the different semantic specification of nominals and pronominals, and the flexible word order property. What we need, therefore, is a broader clausal perspective coupled with necessary remarks on the abovementioned issues. Thus, rather than employing the DP-hypothesis, we assume two cornerstone phenomena i.e. flexible word order and rich agreement to be crucial here as they facilitate syntactic options like focalisation or topicalisation which manifest discourse information and in which sam functions as a focus or topic particle (cf. Constantinou 2014). These contexts are held typical of the asymmetry, thereby making it an interplay between semantic properties of nominal/pronominal expressions and organisation of discourse information that syntax makes available.

The aim of this paper is to provide a pragmalinguistically inspired framework for analysing the relationship between linguistic forms and conventional and ritual behaviour. To date, no body of pragmalinguistic research has been dedicated to the relationship between conventional and ritual phenomena, which play a fundamental role in language use. Even more importantly, the examination of this phenomenon provides insight into a longstanding issue in pragmatics, namely, how the relationship between form and language use can be pinned down. We will pursue this question on the basis of an English and Chinese corpus-based examination of expressions, which we define as ‘ritual frame indicating expressions’ (RFIEs). As a case study, we examine the Chinese RFIE ‘duibuqi’ and its English counterpart ‘sorry’. The results indicate that while ‘sorry’ is largely used in a conventional way throughout the contexts in our English corpus, ‘duibuqi’ is predominantly anchored in ritual. This, in turn, reveals how these forms are related to convention v. ritual as far as our data is concerned.

We examine the complex nominal classification system in Nepali (Indo-European, Indic), a language spoken at the intersection of the Indo-European and Sino-Tibetan language families, which are usually associated with prototypical examples of grammatical gender and numeral classifiers, respectively. In a typologically rare pattern, Nepali possesses two gender systems based on the human/non-human and masculine/feminine oppositions, in addition to which it has also developed an inventory of at least ten numeral classifiers as a result of contact with neighbouring Sino-Tibetan languages. Based on an analysis of the lexical and discourse functions of the three systems, we show that their functional contribution involves a largely complementary distribution of workload with respect to individual functions as well as the type of categorized nouns and referents. The study thus contributes to the ongoing discussions concerning the typology and functions of nominal classification as well as the effects of long-term language contact on language structure.

Lin (2017), according to the author, “offers a refutation of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (UG) from a novel perspective”. Unfortunately, “novel” does not mean logical or valid. On the contrary, as I will show in this refutation of Lin’s refutation, there is a profound and fundamental misunderstanding in Lin’s interpretation of UG. His refutation only proves his superficial understanding of the questions raised and discussed, which nevertheless are worth discussing and explaining. I take each of Lin’s arguments in turn and attempt to show why they are not well founded, either because of flaws in his argumentation or because of a careful consideration of the available empirical evidence. In the first section I show that Lin’s refutation of UG is illogical in that he confuses UG as a theoretical construct and as a reality entity, which renders his own analysis self-contradictory. The second section aims to examine in detail the so-called novelty of Lin’s refutation, proving that his refutation is unscientific. The third section offers a point-to-point refutation of his arguments presented in the third section of his paper. The fourth section furthermore points out several misunderstandings of previous studies against Chomsky and UG. The last section concludes the paper.