Volume 65, Issue 2 -

The present paper aims to investigate the main semantic-functional and discursive properties of partitives on the bases of the bare (independent) partitive genitive in Ancient Greek. Contrary to previous views that the bare partitive genitive (b-PG) primarily encodes the part-of-relation I claim that this meaning of the b-PG has been lost in Ancient Greek. Instead, I claim that the b-PG encodes undetermined instantiations of a set descriptive and restrictive in nature and compatible with kind- or subkind-referring NPs/DPs. It allows the speaker to make no commitment as to the quantity, referentiality and semantic role of these instantiation(s); this/these instantiation(s) have inherently narrow scope (e.g. with negation). These semantic properties determine the discursive function of the b-PG. I claim that the b-PG detracts the focus of attention from the actual participant and links it to the descriptive set or kind/subkind this participant belongs to; the actual participant is extremely backgrounded and its reference is never stored in the discourse model. The b-PG allows the speaker to zoom out from the actual participant and view it schematically in terms of one of its hypercategories (subkind, kind, characterizing/descriptive set). This function of the b-PG explains its frequent occurrence with the verbs of consumption or desire. It explains, furthermore, its use in the predicative position and in headings. As to the diachronic perspective, it is claimed that the foregroundedness of the respective hypercategory and extreme backgroundedness of the subset indicate that the b-PG develops semantically towards pseudo-partitivity.

This article examines internal and external changes in the analytic expression of local relations in Early Romani. It focuses on the external influence of late Medieval Greek on Early Romani and describes how pattern replication led to the formation of complex PPs for the locative and ablative cases (cf. MATRAS & SAKEL 2007). Definiteness contributes to synthetic case stability in Romani. Representative data from all Romani dialect groups, on the other hand, show that definiteness facilitated the formation and development of Romani PPs, which is a contact-induced change towards analyticity. I investigate how the formal and pragmatic features of the Greek definite article affect the replication of analytic case marking.

In recent research on cross-linguistic differences in linguistic rhythm, it has been hypothesized that the traditional dichotomy ‘stress-timed’ versus ‘syllable-timed’ might be recast with respect to which level of the Prosodic Hierarchy constitutes the most prominent domain for the organization of prosodic structure. In this paper, we test the prediction that ‘stress-timed’ languages are characterized by a dominance of the prosodic word against a typological sample of 58 languages. Although there is a slight cross-linguistic tendency in favor of the prediction, there is no statistical support for the proposed correlation. Since counterexamples include not only individual languages but also entire language families, we advocate a different view on prosodic word domain structure. The prosodic word profile of a given language is more reliably predicted by the family membership of that language than by universal correlations concerning its rhythm class membership. We substantiate this claim by a survey of Mon-Khmer’s family signature on prosodic word domain structure in Mon, where sound patterns target either the monosyllabic stem or the maximally inflected disyllabic word.

This paper offers an analysis of various typologies of speech rhythm with a Second Language Acquisition (SLA) perspective. The notion of isochrony and the enduring stress- and syllable-time theory are shown to be perception-, rather than production-, related. Duration-centered statistical approaches are found to measure phonotactics rather than establish a functional typology. It is further argued that no existing rhythmic typology can be recognized as efficiently organizing data to enable grouping and comparison of languages, a highly coveted tool in SLA. The outline of an SLA relevant classification, taking into account phonological elements and phonetic processes, is sketched.

Bernd Heine & Heiko Narrog (eds.), The Oxford handbook of linguistic analysis , (Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. xxviii, 1016 pp.

Thomas Stolz, Christina Vossmann und Barbara Dewein (eds.): Kolonialzeitliche Sprachforschung. Die Beschreibung afrikanischer und ozeanischer Sprachen zur Zeit der deutschen Kolonialherrschaft. (Koloniale und Postkoloniale Linguistik/Colonial and Postcolonial Linguistics I). Berlin:Akademie Verlag, 2011. 312 pp.