Volume 78, Issue 2 - Special Issue: New ideas for linguistic typology - the Bremen perspective; Guest Editor: Kevin Behrens

This paper argues for considering familiarity a candidate for the status of parameter in the domain of the Grammar of Names. The evidence in support of this claim is drawn from the Special Toponymic Grammar of twelve genealogically, typologically, and geographically different languages. It is shown that place names of the same class are frequently subject to a division into two subcategories, namely, on the one hand, place names that are familiar in some way to the participants of the communicative event and, on the other hand, place names which speakers and/or hearers are not familiar with. The different degrees of familiarity correlate with structural differences on the expression side. The rules that determine the morphosyntactic behaviour of familiar place names do not correspond one-to-one with those that regulate the morphosyntax of non-familiar place names. The data suggest that familiarity is spelled out differently across the languages of the world. It is concluded that further cross-linguistic research might reveal that familiarity is not restricted to the Special Grammar of Toponyms. This is why familiarity needs to be investigated in-depth in follow-up studies.

Most sign languages have a class of verbs that possess the ability to mark agreement with the subject and/or object by spatial markers within the signing space. The size of this verb class is comparatively small, ranging from zero verbs to as many as 148 verbs. One factor that determines this size is the type of sign language. There are deaf community sign languages, that are spoken predominantly among d/Deaf people, and rural sign languages that emerged in small communities with a higher than usual ratio of hereditary deafness; here, both hearing and d/Deaf people use the sign language. My data of 18 sign languages, including rural sign languages, confirms what has been suggested recently; rural sign languages, too, can make use of the signing space for agreement. My language sample also defeats other previous assumptions about sign languages. For one, the inventories of the agreeing verb class is organised highly differently among sign languages. Their sizes can differ considerably and their makeup shows that semantics and thematic roles play no crucial role in being the motivator for agreement. I conclude that while sign language agreement seems to be universal among deaf community sign languages, the content of the inventory of this class is highly language specific and follows no universal concept as to semantic motivation.

One aspect of conjunction behaviour in language contact is the degree to which conjunctions in specific functions are borrowable. The literature has proposed several implicational and causal borrowing hierarchies, which suggest that certain functions and categories of conjunctions tend to be borrowed at earlier stages of language contact than others. These hierarchies are tested in the present study on the basis of data from seven alloglottic languages of Italy – of Germanic, Slavic, Albanian, and Greek origin. The empirical data supports, in general, the proposed borrowing hierarchies, though with certain limitations. A range of new research questions emerges from the analysis of conjunctions in language contact.

The paper explores how the concept of home in Goal constructions is expressed in comparison to common nouns ( comm s) and toponyms ( topo s) in a sample of one hundred languages world-wide. In previous studies, it has already been shown that topo s in spatial constructions are more often zero-marked or bear a shorter marker than comm s in the same role. Furthermore, it has been found that some languages have a small set of certain nouns that receive special treatment similar to topo s, ‘one’s house’ commonly being one of them. Based on these findings, the strategies used to express the movement home are evaluated and set in relation to comm s and topo s both qualitatively and quantitatively.

This paper provides an overview of Maltese coordinating constructions involving prepositions. A preposition in these constructions can precede each complement or only the first one ( equi-p -deletion). Corpus-based data are collected from a large text corpus for each preposition. The data indicates that constructions with only one overt preposition are the preferred option. However, the results for individual prepositions vary considerably. Conjunctive coordination with the coordinator u ‘and’ and disjunctive coordination with the coordinator jew ‘or’ are compared. Possible factors influencing coordinating constructions are then discussed to establish their relevance for variation in Maltese coordination.