Volume 75, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Lexical restrictions on grammatical relations in voice and valency constructions; Issue Editors: Eva van Lier and Maria Messerschmidt

This paper introduces the topic and the contributions of this special issue. While lexical restrictions are well-studied for grammatical relations defining argument coding (case marking and indexation), they are also common with voice and valency constructions, be they morphologically coded or not. The paper defines relevant terms and sketches the development of current usage-based approaches to lexical restrictions, in reaction to earlier lexicalist and constructional approaches. It then reviews existing studies of lexical restrictions on valency-preserving and valency-changing constructions, drawing connections with the other papers in this issue. In closing, it recommends further corpus-based cross-linguistic research of lexical restrictions.

Amis (Austronesian, Taiwan) displays a rich, partly symmetrical voice system and a split case-marking pattern which are selected and restricted by (i) verb classes whose basic diathesis correlates with semantic properties such as activities versus states, and (ii) by Aktionsart features (i.e., atelic activities versus telic accomplishment and achievements), which also denote degrees of patient affectedness. Referential features such as patient definiteness, and semantic features such as agent’s animacy and intentionality also bear on voice selection. This voice system offers alternate ways of encoding arguments within a bipartite case-marking pattern; it also promotes peripheral, non-core arguments to subject function via applicative voice constructions.

In this paper, I consider double causatives in Mehweb, a one village language spoken in Daghestan, Russia, and belonging to the Dargwa branch of East Caucasian. The capability of stacking two causative suffixes seems to be lexically restricted, and mapping onto verbal meanings that are typically P-labile in the languages of the family. Interestingly, the verbs allowing double causatives are not morphosyntactically labile in Mehweb, which is generally poor in labile verbs as compared to sister languages. I conclude that the ability to form double causatives is not a consequence of the morphosyntactic property of being labile; rather, both morphosyntactic properties follow from the same component of the lexical semantics of these verbs and ultimately from the properties of the situational concepts they convey. As a tentative functional explanation I suggest that the relevant property is the weakened status of the agentive participant.

Turkic and Uralic languages of the Russian Volga-Kama Region share a strong preference for transitivization over detransitivization (in contrast to Russian), leading to wide usage of causative derivational suffixes. These tendencies are typical for Turkic and Uralic however and do not necessarily require a contact-linguistic explanation. However, microvariation in causative constructions in these languages and their dialects show convergence between unrelated or distantly related varieties – i.e., strong indicators of contact-induced convergence. This paper looks at such facets in three Uralic (Mari, Udmurt, Komi-Permyak) and two Turkic (Tatar, Chuvash) languages of the region.

Western Malayo-Polynesian (WMP) languages exhibit inner diversity with regard to voice systems. While some lack verbal morphology encoding voice alternations, others demonstrate so-called symmetrical voice alternations. This paper discusses the internal typological grouping within the latter classification of languages, which are further categorized as being either Indonesian-type and Philippine-type. There are, however, certain languages that do not exhibit all the criteria of either category, but do display symmetrical voice alternations. These languages can be viewed as having ‘transitional’ features. With a focus on two languages from Indonesia, this paper aims to provide a new semantic perspective for describing one of these transitional features by examining voice alternations and categorizing the languages as having either a derivational voice system or an inflectional voice system .

This paper surveys the valency-increasing constructions that apply to motion verbs in 49 genetically diverse languages. These include causative constructions, a variety of applicative constructions and the portative construction which is a valency-increasing construction that is lexically restricted to motion verbs. In the portative construction, the verb’s valency is increased by adding theme as a P-argument, but conceptually there is also an element of (co-motional) causation. However, the paper argues that the construction is neither causative nor applicative. Instead, the portative construction, which is frequent in the sample languages, should be considered a distinct type of valency-increasing construction.