Volume 66, Issue 2

As has often been demonstrated, Icelandic Quirky Subjects largely behave like canonical nominative subjects and unlike topicalized objects. Among verbs selecting for Quirky Subjects, experiential predicates with a dative Experiencer subject and a nominative Stimulus object are the most common type. Recently, several studies have proposed a sub-class within this group of dat-nom-verbs, characterized by an alternation in their argument mapping. Here, both the dative Experiencer and the nominative Stimulus can occur as either the syntactic subject or object.This paper empirically investigates this class as well as the extent to which its alternation is determined by semantic and pragmatic factors.

This article presents a sample-based typological account of suppletion in nouns and adjectives. The distribution of the grammatical categories involved in the suppletive forms is presented along with the lexical meanings most commonly found to be suppletive. It is demonstrated that nominal suppletion is not a rare phenomenon and most commonly involves the feature number followed by possession . The noun ‘child’ is the most common suppletive noun. In general, nouns referring to humans are more likely to be suppletive than others. The investigation shows that adjectival suppletion is less common than nominal suppletion and affects frequent adjectives with general meanings of the types value and size .

Parts of speech have both semantic and structural aspects. The two sets of features are essentially incommensurate, since the semantic features derive from the functions of language in communication and cognition, while the structural features are essentially based in the combinatorial potential of signs in a text. Consequently, the two sets of features are largely independent of each other.Their combination in a language yields sets of parts of speech whose systematicity is largely language-internal. To the extent that there is a functional motivation for parts of speech, three restrictions must be made: 1) It is not, in the first place, a cognitive, but rather a communicative motivation. 2) The functional motivation of word classes is not direct, but mediated by semantic and syntactic categories of higher order. 3) Only the primary word classes (verb and noun) are motivated in this way. The secondary classes (adjectives, adverbs etc.) and the minor word classes (pronouns, subordinators etc.) increasingly have a systeminternal structural rather than a universal functional motivation. Given these heterogeneous functions and constraints, there is no uniform nature to all parts of speech.

The paper offers a description of Slavic word order systems from the viewpoint of formal typology based on notions such as syntactic type, parametric settings, basic and derived order, linearization constraints, constituency, movement, spell-out, cliticity, clitic clusters, syntax-prosody interface, and grammaticalization.The aim is to classify Slavic word order systems with clitics on the basis of syntactic constraints without dependence on hypotheses about language-specific properties of prosodically deficient elements and to provide a viable typological classification, which can be verified by data from other world’s languages.