Volume 73, Issue 1 -

This paper shows that the head noun of the Construct State may ɸ-agree (in Number and Gender) with the accompanying DP associate in Jordanian Arabic. When it occurs, this agreement is, however, only invoked when the DP associate is referential (e.g., galam ʔil-walad ‘the boy’s pen’> galam uh i ʔil-walad i , but barbiiʃ ʔil-ʁaaz ‘the gas pipe’> *barbiiʃ -uh i ʔil-ʁaaz i ). The paper provides a syntactic account of this observation which clearly demonstrates that Construct States do not constitute a homogenous group. We specifically argue that the head D° of the Construct State is endowed with a bundle of uninterpretable, unvalued ɸ-features which are valued via Agree by the DP associate of the Construct State. The outcome of this valuation, when it occurs, may surface as an inflectional suffix that appears on the head noun occupying this position, i.e. D°, in PF. For why D°-related uninterpretable ɸ-features are only valued by referential DPs, we propose that this follows from the assumption that such DPs carry a [ person ] feature, hence ɸ-complete, unlike nonreferential DPs which lack a [ person ] feature, and hence ɸ-incomplete. ɸ-incompleteness makes non-referential DPs incapable of valuing uninterpretable ɸ-features carried by c-commanding heads in Jordanian Arabic.

Complex predication is understood to be a highly productive process in Northwestern Amazonian languages in which complex predicates may be realized as compounds, verb-auxiliary constructions or serial verb constructions depending on language-internal criteria. These constructions play an important role in the organization of discourse and information packaging and can also carry out grammatical functions such as increasing or decreasing valency. In Dâw, a language from the Naduhup family, complex predicates are used to express spatial notions such as directionality and manner in complex motion events or to provide detailed of how complex predicates in Dâw function as semantic and syntactic resources used to express space in discourse in comparison to their expression in simple predicates. I provide a typology of the most frequent patterns and their respective ordering principles found in our corpus in order to understand how fine-grained spatial notions are expressed in Dâw.

This paper tackles the challenge of how to identify multi-word (or “complex”) nominal expressions in flexible word order languages including certain Australian languages and Vedic Sanskrit. In these languages, a weak or absent noun/adjective distinction in conjunction with flexible word order make it often hard to distinguish between complex nominal expressions, on the one hand, and cases where the nominals in question form independent expressions, on the other hand. Based on a discourse-based understanding of what it means to form a nominal expression, this paper surveys various cases where we are not dealing with multi-word nominal expressions. This involves, in particular, periphery-related phenomena such as use of nominals as free topics or afterthoughts, as well as various kinds of predicative uses. In the absence of clear morpho-syntactic evidence, all kinds of linguistic evidence are relied upon, including, in particular, information structure and prosody, but also derivational morphology and lexical semantics. In this way, it becomes frequently possible to distinguish between what are and what aren’t complex nominal expressions in these languages.

This paper discusses a typologically peculiar inverse-like construction found in the polysynthetic ergative Circassian languages of the Northwest-Caucasian family. These languages possess a cislocative verbal prefix, which, in addition to marking the spatial meaning of speaker-orientation, systematically occurs in polyvalent verbs when the object outranks the subject on the person hierarchy. The inverse-like use of the cislocative in Circassian differs from the “canonical” direct-inverse system in that, first, it is fully redundant since the person-role linking is achieved by means of the person markers themselves and, second, it does not occur in the basic transitive construction, featuring instead in configurations involving an indirect object both in ditransitive and bivalent intransitive verbs. It is argued that the typologically outstanding properties of the Circassian inverse-like marking can be naturally explained by its diachronic origin.

This paper gives an account of participial clauses in Agul (Lezgic, Nakh-Daghestanian), based on a sample of 858 headed noun-modifying clauses taken from two text corpora, one spoken and one written. Noun-modifying clauses in Agul do not show syntactic restrictions on what can be relativized, and hence they instantiate the type known as GNMCCs, or general noun-modifying clause constructions. As the text counts show, intransitive verbs are more frequent than transitives and experiencer verbs in participial clauses, and among intransitive verbs, locative statives with the roots ‘be’ and ‘stay, remain’ account for half of all the uses. The asymmetry between the different relativization targets is also significant. Among the core arguments, the intransitive subject (S) is the most frequent target, patient (P) occupies second place, and agent (A) is comparatively rare. The preference of S and, in general, of S and P over A also holds true for most other Nakh-Daghestanian languages for which comparable counts are available. At the same time, Agul stands apart from the other languages by its high ratio of non-core relativization which accounts for 42% of all participial clauses. Addressee, arguments and adjuncts encoded with a locative case, as well as more general place and time relativizations show especially high frequency, outnumbering such arguments as experiencers, recipients, and predicative and adnominal possessors. Possible reasons for the high ratio of non-argument relativization are discussed in the paper.