Volume 59, Issue 3

This article provides a general survey of a number of (mostly Indo-European) gender systems. In more recent years, regularities found in those systems have been accounted for by rule-based approaches where gender is assigned on-line by symbolic rules. A critical investigation of those accounts suggests that gender of existing nouns is stored individually, but that there must also be a mechanism that assigns gender to new nouns. It is argued that this behaviour is more adequately accounted for in a network model and it is shown how gender assignment can shed light on lexical structure at large.

In this article we offer a comparative survey of word-forming elements in German and Swedish known as “affixoids”. A highly controversial topic in German linguistics, the notion of affixoid does remain useful given the position of the elements in question midway along the cline between compounding and derivation – so useful in fact that we feel it ought to be adopted into Swedish linguistics, where it is as yet unknown. After an overview of the main positions and issues in the debate over affixoids in German, we survey the corresponding elements in Swedish, point out some convergent and divergent tendencies in the two languages, and then compare a few selected affixoids in more detail. We end with some wider issues, focusing mainly on the advantages of the crosslinguistic perspective and on the idea that the relationship of affixoids with their respective “parent morphs” can be described in terms of grammaticalization.

The paper focuses on the main temperature adjectives in Russian and Swedish, which are analysed and compared to each other on the basis of their combinability with nouns. Each of the two linguistic systems is strongly rooted in human experience of temperature. First, temperature attributes are chosen relatively to several temperature values or parameters, that are important and salient for humans and have only very approximate physical correlates. Second, physical objects differ considerably as to whether their temperature properties are ever registered by humans, or considered as important and worth mentioning, primarily depending on their function in the human life.

This article examines confixes, a type of word-forming elements between lexical stems and affixes. While confixes carry lexical meaning, confixing changes the constituent order in the word so that the internal word structure resembles the constituent order typical of derivation. It is argued that grammaticalization theory is an appropriate theoretical framework for the study of confixes because of its ability to describe the emergence of grammar under historical and contextual pressures. It is shown that confixes represent incipient grammaticalization and that their study from this point of view challenges the langue-parole and synchrony-diachrony dichotomies.

Starting from the clause, the functional domain of motion events with the three loci Verbal, Adnominal, and Adverbal, the paper investigates various grammatical and lexical means of expression for the encoding of the local roles Source and Goal in a sample of 117 languages and in more detail in one language with grammatically indifferent Source-Goal encoding, Mapudungun. It is found that the feature Source-Goal (in)difference forms a global cline with Consistent languages clustering in Eurasia and Indifferent languages being most frequent in the New World.