Volume 70, Issue 4 -

The study aims to identify Adj+N compounds in Modern Standard Arabic by applying the cross-linguistic criteria for compoundhood discussed in the relevant literature. The analysis reveals that the most reliable cross-linguistic criteria to distinguish between phrases and compounds in MSA are adjacency, referentiality, compositionality and the presence of inflection. Another language-specific criterion, i.e. adjacency and the order of elements, which has asserted its validity, has been suggested to distinguish between the two types of construct. I have also shown that all cases of Adj+N compounding in MSA are bahuvrihis, since they denote a person in possession of the entity denoted by the compound. Similar to Fassi Fehri (“Arabic modifying adjectives and DP structures” 1999), I argue that the output of Adj+N compounding behaves more like a noun than an adjective. I propose that Adj+N compounds have a silent N head, i.e. ‘one/person’, which determines the syntactic category of such constructions in Modern Standard Arabic (cf. Günther [“The rich, the poor, the obvious: Arguing for an ellipsis analysis of ‘adjectives used as nouns’”, to appear) for a similar analysis of nominalized adjectives in English).

This paper aims to study instrumental related functions in some Western Iranian languages. The data were collected from descriptive grammars, and interviews in some cases. Narrog’s instrumental semantic map is the basis for analyzing polysemy patterns in these languages. The data show that two main polysemy patterns are attested: (1) Instrumental and companion functions are coded alike. (2) They are coded differently. These two patterns are distributed areally. Furthermore, some languages are shifting/have shifted between these two types mainly as a result of contact-induced matters. In languages in which two or more functions are not directly connected, one marker generally has both instrumental and dative functions.

The expression of a desire – a wish, a request, a demand, one’s will – triggers a presupposition. This has grammatical consequences, such as mood choice in Romance, verbal positioning in Germanic or complementizer selection in Slavic. Desiderative predicates are argued to contain special features of (counter-) factivity. This explains the strikingly similar behavior of emotive factive and implicative predicates as well as volitional and request expressions; it also captures some common characteristics with negated affirmative predicates.

After a wealth of studies on motion event descriptions, it seems hard to say something new: the Verb-framed/Satellite-framed typology proposed by Talmy has spawned a long debate. Among other things, previous work has shown within-type variation for one of the two language types defined by Talmy, namely Verb-framed languages. In this paper, we address this debate, showing within-type variation for the other type, Satellite-framed languages, with new data elicited from native speakers of Serbian. In order to do so, we compare it with five other languages, from three Indo-European language families (Romance, Germanic and Slavic). Our data show that Serbian is a particularly interesting case, since it is structurally Satellite-framed, but behaves like Verb-framed languages in that speakers do not always express manner and path jointly (i.e. manner in the verb and path in the satellite), as expected on the basis of Talmy’s typology. The main result of our paper is thus that there is a good deal of within-type variation for both language types identified by Talmy.