Volume 77, Issue 4

Chamorro illustrates how Special Onymic Grammar can be shaped in a given language. It is shown that the rules that determine the morphosyntactic behaviour of common nouns cannot be generalized over onyms. Anthroponyms and toponyms differ markedly from common nouns within the NP and beyond. In addition, there are also structural differences that separate anthroponyms from toponyms so that it makes sense to speak of Special Anthroponymic Grammar as opposed to Special Toponymic Grammar . These differences come to the fore in the domain of pre-nominal markers, the formal distinction of cases, case government in PPs, and the functions of zero-marking. It is shown that the latter phenomenon is prominent with toponyms in journalistic prose where zero-marking competes with the use of the phonologically realized toponymic marker. On the basis of the Chamorro facts, topics for follow-up studies are put forward.

It has been shown that linguistic features of main and dependent clauses in complex sentence constructions may show different degrees of association strength giving rise to a number of cross-clausal associations. While this domain has been explored for the most part in corpus-based studies in individual languages, it has received little attention from a typological perspective. The present study makes inroads into this territory by exploring cross-clausal associations of one complex sentence construction in typological perspective: Counterfactual conditionals (e.g., if you had gone, you would have seen her ). In particular, special attention is paid to the interaction of clause-linkage patterns, TAM markers, iconicity of sequence, and ‘but’ clauses in counterfactual conditionals in a sample of 131 languages. By using a hierarchical configural frequency analysis, we identify a number of preferred and dispreferred cross-clausal associations in counterfactual conditionals that we explain from a functional perspective.

Many Philippine languages of the Austronesian family exhibit a three-case system: two reserved for marking core arguments and the third for marking non-core participants. This paper examines the Batanic subgroup, which differs from the typical Philippine configuration by distinguishing two separate non-core cases (oblique and locative), thus raising the question of how the single non-core category of other Philippine languages is more finely split in Batanic languages. Previous analyses of the Batanic non-core cases often reduce the oblique to merely marking indefiniteness but ascribe a wider range of functions to the locative in marking various peripheral arguments and adverbials. Using textual and usage-based data, this paper proposes a reevaluation of the non-core cases in Batanic and argues that: (1) the Batanic oblique should be conceptualized more like the typical Philippine oblique, as it marks both indefinite and definite participants excluded from the core for various syntactic reasons, and that (2) the functions of the locative are more specific, compact, and stem from its basic spatial meaning with an additional association with animacy. This analysis offers a typological perspective on possible ways that languages organize their non-core categories and provides further insight on what exactly the ‘non-core’ might consist of.

We motivate the view that Arabic psych construction types originate as root phrases, devoid of categorial specifications, rather than verbal phrases, as commonly assumed. It is shown that roots are categorially and ontologically flexible, and that valency affixes are arguably roots, not categorical templates . Furthermore, the root/template divide, as defended by many authors, can only be construed as morphonological, once implemented in Distributed Morphology, rather than morphosyntactic. One advantage of our approach over the category (or vP) based approach is that it can apply on equal bases to all categories alike, because roots are acategorial , and psych expressions are not limited only to verb phrases. This is supported cross-linguistically by the existence of psych nominals or adjectives that have no verbal source. More motivation for the root hypothesis comes the root ontological flexibility, their complexity in valency increasing or decreasing morphosyntactic alternations, as well as from investigating adicity limitations on psych nominals, compared to those of psych (causative) verbs.