Volume 75, Issue 2

The internal structure of numeral systems can shed light on processes of word formation, language contact and change. In this article I analyze the numeral system of P’urhepecha on the basis of historical and contemporary sources. The system is unusual typologically and areally since it possesses monolexemic terms to six, while seven to nine are compounds with five; and the forms for the base (20) and next power (400) have clear non-corporeal meanings. I also provide a more nuanced evaluation of vigesimal counting systems in Mesoamerica. The language-internal and external findings underline the importance of more detailed historical studies of P’urhepecha.

The present paper presents a descriptive and analytical account of the various functions of the morpheme ko in Miluo, a Xiang variety of Chinese. This morpheme is used as a classifier, genitive, possessive, pronominal, relative clause marker, nominalizer and as a sentence-final stance-marking marker. We also illustrate the use of ko as a demonstrative pronoun and prenominal topic marker. We discuss these functions in the light of the diachronic development of nominalizers and topic markers. Our findings provide support for proposals concerning the pathways of grammaticalization that have either been conjectured or attested in various languages, specifically the relation between adnominal markers and nominalization and the relation between demonstratives and topic markers.

The paper investigates discontinuous reduplication (DR), a pattern where reduplicant and base are separated by other material, by annotating a 214-example dataset collected from a 99-language sample. Several items turned out to serve as interposing elements, although their nature does not seem to correlate with function, unlike the category of the base. DR’s functions are a subset of those associated with reduplication cross-linguistically. All languages displaying DR also present contiguous reduplication, suggesting a contiguous reduplication > discontinuous reduplication hierarchy. Finally, a corpus-based analysis of Italian (lacking DR according to grammars) unveiled a wealth of DR patterns, suggesting that corpora are essential for the typological enterprise.

This paper provides the first cross-linguistic study on non-exhaustive connectives. After defining non-exhaustivity and briefly exploring the range of linguistic strategies encoding it across languages, the methodology underlying the study will be discussed. Based on the analysis of 35 languages, for which at least one non-exhaustive connective was found, it will be argued that non-exhaustive connectives exhibit quite homogenous distributional properties and derive from a restricted set of recurrent diachronic sources. Speakers are indeed likely to mobilize i ) elements already encoding or implying non-exhaustivity, ii ) elements expressing an epistemic condition of uncertainty, or iii ) elements expressing exemplification.