Volume 59, Issue 4

The paper discusses verbal markers of the past tense with a meaning roughly charac-terizable as “past and not present” or “past with no present relevance”. This type of past time reference (labelled “discontinuous”) is opposed to standard past markers, which normally do not provide any information about the state of affairs in the present domain. Discontinuous past can be analyzed as a special cross-linguistically valid type of past tense marking. It occurs in a considerable amount of genetically unrelated languages of different areas (especially in Oceania and West Africa), though in cur-rent descriptions it may sometimes hide behind misleading terms or fall under the broad headings of “past” or “anterior”.

Work on grammaticalization that has bee carried out in the course of the last decades has shown that there are some domains of grammatical structure that are more conservative while others are more innovative. The present paper deals with one domain that appears to belong to the most innovative parts of grammar, namely that of adjectival intensifiers. Looking in more detail into the nature and the use of such intensifiers in one particular language, which is German, the paper aims to show that intensifiers in particular and hyperbolic language in general are a culture-dependent phenomenon, and that their study can offer new insights into the mechanism underlying the nature of grammatical change.

The morphosyntactic structures of equative constructions, which represent one class of comparison constructions (alongside positive, comparative, and superlative con-structions), are cross-linguistically quite diverse. In the present investigation, which is based on a convenience sample consisting of 25 languages, constructions of this kind are exemplified, analyzed, and classified. Underlying these different morphosyntactic structures are various semantic structures, which are classified and illustrated, too.