Volume 77, Issue 2

The present work is devoted to the syntax of specificational constructions with proper names within a typological perspective. The provided typology is based on the results obtained from the analysis of grammar descriptions and available corpus data for 94 languages. The paper discusses the morphosyntactic means that languages use to express specification, namely juxtaposition, attribution, and other less common strategies. It is shown that juxtapositional and attributive strategies are in competition in many of the sampled languages, so that certain expressions (for example, specificational constructions with the common noun ‘city’) prefer attributive-like coding, while others (especially constructions including personal names) show a clear tendency for juxtapositional coding cross-linguistically. Evidence from languages using an attributive strategy in specificational constructions shows that the common noun is generally the syntactic head of the construction. This conclusion contributes to the wide-scale discussion of the semantic grounds for headedness in specificational constructions. In addition, the paper shows that languages tend to place common nouns before personal proper names regardless of the word order used in specificational constructions with toponyms. This, as predicted, is correlated with the relative ordering of the head noun and its genitival dependent. The results of the present study also show that the constituent ordering in constructions with personal names implicationally depends on the order in constructions with toponyms.

This paper deals with an important aspect of the integration of loan nouns into the grammatical systems of languages attesting to grammatical gender, namely gender assignment. Traditionally, it is assumed that gender assignment takes place according to the internal assignment rules of the replica language. In many cases, however, the original grammatical gender is borrowed along with the source word. This is the case of gender copy which often takes place under special (sociolinguistic) conditions and is used as assignment strategy in languages to a different extent. A special focus of my study is on gender assignment and particularly gender copy in the contact of languages of different assignment types (formal vs. semantic). The empirical data comes from five European languages in different sociolinguistic situations, attesting to different assignment systems and of different language branches of two language families – Indo-European (Romanian, Slavic, and Indo-Arian) and Nakh-Daghestanian (Lezgic and Tsezic). The analysis shows that gender copy is possible mostly in the contact of languages of the same assignment type. In the contact of languages of the formal assignment type, gender copy often goes along with the formal adjustment of the loan word. Sociolinguistic circumstances play an important role as to the possibility and frequency of the occurrence of gender copy.

While speed is a secondary parameter in some associated motion systems, some languages have verbal affixes dedicated to the encoding of speed – celerative markers. Celeratives can encode both quick and slow speed and are in some languages even the main or the sole way of expressing this meaning. However, some morphemes not only encode speed, but also other types of action manner , in particular hurry or suddenness, following colexification patterns also observed in the lexicon crosslinguistically. This paper provides a first overview of this category in the world’s languages, and more generally suggests that action manner constitutes a set of comparative concepts that can be be encoded morphologically.

This paper describes the verbal argument coding by a system of person indexing and the alignment type of Beria. Beria is a Saharan language spoken in the Sudan and Chad. The data presented here is from the Wagi dialect. The person indexing system has been analyzed as exhibiting split-S alignment with two types of intransitive verb classes: agentive and patientive verbs. Patientive verbs – though mostly encoding one-participant events – are, however, formally transitive. This morphosyntax-semantics mismatch poses a challenge for the split-S analysis and calls for a reassessment of the transitivity status of the patientive verb class. The present study takes morphosyntactic facts into account that have not been considered in previous contributions. It provides evidence from the verbal number marking system which corroborates an analysis in terms of a split-S alignment type with typologically unusual features.