Volume 76, Issue 4

This paper argues that the function of final consonant reduplication (FCR) in Siuslaw ([sis]; Oregon-Coast Penutian/Isolate) is to construe the information in a proposition as unsurprising and expected, as information that should already be known to listeners or at least well anticipated by them. This function is more or less the opposite of mirativity, where information is construed as surprising or unexpected, and is related to a functional domain that was recently labeled “enimitive”: the construal of information as “uncontroversial”. This paper shows that the discourse profile of the Siuslaw FCR includes uses that belong to the domain of the enimitive, e.g., when deployed in quoted speech or monologues, but that it also includes functionally related uses that do not belong to the enimitive domain, e.g., on the main event line of narratives and in procedural texts. The functional range of the Siuslaw FCR, then, is wider than the enimitive domain. We use this range of uses, together with the uses of similar constructions in some other languages, to argue for a functional domain of anti-mirativity that includes the enimitive as a sub-domain. We conclude by proposing a preliminary sketch of the anti-mirativity functional domain.

In replica languages attesting to grammatical gender, all loan nouns are obligatorily assigned to gender classes. If two languages with grammatical gender come into contact, loan nouns can either retain their original gender (i.e. Gender Copy) or obtain another gender in the replica language (i.e. gender change). In the recent research, it was mostly assumed that the assignment process occurs almost exceptionally according to the internal assignment rules of the replica language. The role of grammatical gender of the words in the donor language was either neglected generally or bound to special sociolinguistic circumstances. The empirical data show, however, that grammatical gender is much more often copied together with loan nouns than assumed until now. In my empirical study, I analyze the processes of gender assignment in a special type of loan words – internationalisms – in the standard varieties of Slavic languages. It is shown that Gender Copy is the most frequent strategy for this type of loans in these genealogically closely related and typologically similar languages.

This paper sheds light on the alignment of Existential, Possessive and Dative-Experiencer constructions prevalent in Modern Hebrew that involve ambiguity of syntactic relations. Data-driven and employing a strictly typological approach, the study argues that the constructions in question are fundamentally related, and that they do not conform to the typological criteria of ‘subject-oriented’ languages, like most Indo-European languages. It is suggested that an inner relationship holds between the constructions in question. As a non-subject oriented language that does not require entities of referential prominence to be encoded as subjects or topics, Hebrew tends to configure non-volitional events as happening, or coming from outside – existing with reference to the entity experiencing them or who is involved in them as Benefactive or Possessor.

Large-scale typological work on negation has so far ignored negation in adverbial clause-linkage. The present work makes inroads into this territory by analyzing the world-wide cross-linguistic variation in the expression of negation in precedence clauses (e.g. ‘before he arrived, we had already gone home’) in a variety sample of 155 languages. The research demonstrates that even when languages employ a clause-linking marker for conveying temporal precedence, negative markers may play an important role in that they may be obligatory, optional, or forbidden in the precedence clause. It is proposed that whether the clause-linking marker is semantically monofunctional or polyfunctional is the key to this puzzle. As for precedence clauses containing polyfunctional clause-linking markers and negative markers, it is shown that negation must not be considered expletive. With respect to precedence clauses occurring with monofunctional markers, it is proposed that the precedence clause tends not to license a negative marker. Moreover, it is shown that optional negative markers in precedence clauses may have an evaluative sense, which reflects the epistemic stance of the speaker. The paper also explores whether the analysis of precedence clauses put forward in the present research can be generalized to other adverbial clause-linkage constructions: negative concomitance clauses (e.g. ‘I cooked the soup without stirring it even once’).

This article is a contribution to the semantic map of imperatives, prompted by an implicational map proposed earlier in the literature. The tentative semantic map proposed here abstracts away from differences in use that can be attributed to pragmatics, like distinctions between commands, requests, suggestions etc. The functional differentiation resulting from person and number value, which determines a different character of the directive speech act, is adopted as the basis for the characterization of polysemy in imperatives, and taken as the nucleus of the semantic map, which is then expanded by taking into account non-directive meanings, which are also differentiated with regard to the person value from which they develop.