Volume 37, Issue 4

This paper offers a unified analysis of the coded meaning of Spanish conditional marker si es que : it conventionally conveys conditionality and the speaker’s lack of commitment to the proposition. This second meaning differentiates si es que from the general conditional marker si . It is also argued that si es que has two values: suspending a proposition and expressing a necessary condition, and established that these two share the conventional meaning but differ in the discourse status of the proposition: suspension takes place when the proposition was explicitly evoked in previous discourse, while the marking of necessary conditionals takes place when the proposition is not evoked, but typically new information. The analysis of Spanish si es que contributes to determining the relationship between the operation of suspending a content and the expression of conditionality.

In many languages, it is possible to describe the location of any entity with respect to a landmark object without specifying the exact place that the locatum occupies (e.g. English at in at home ). Such vocabulary items usually contrast with items that belong to the same categories but have more restricted senses (e.g. on top of in on top of the shelf ). Thus, the degree of “abstractness” that such spatial case markers can convey usually depends on the organization of the lexicon and grammar of spatial terms in each language. The goal of this paper is to explore these properties across a small sample of languages and offer an account of this variation that is connected to previous theories of spatial case markers (e.g. adpositions). Our key proposal is that the morpho-syntactic structure of spatial case markers and their phrases can license a clear division of labour between functional and lexical spatial senses. However, intermediate solutions blurring categories and semantic boundaries are shown to be possible. We formalize this proposal via a fragment of Lexical Syntax, and show that degrees of distinction between ‘functional’ and ‘lexical’ sense types and categories can be modelled via a unified account.

Crowhurst and Michael (2005) develops an OT analysis of the complex word stress system of Nanti, an Amazonian language of the Kampa group. They claim that the difficulty of developing a transformational analysis of the system clearly demonstrates the superiority of OT. One goal of this paper is to show that their claim is false and the complexities of the system are well within the scope of transformational phonology; a straightforward analysis is possible. The second goal is to show how prominence can naturally be included in rule systems.

Two differences between signed and spoken languages that have been widely discussed in the literature are: the degree to which morphology is expressed simultaneously (rather than sequentially), and the degree to which iconicity is used, particularly in predicates of motion and location, often referred to as classifier predicates. In this paper we analyze a set of properties marking agency and number in four sign languages for their crosslinguistic similarities and differences regarding simultaneity and iconicity. Data from American Sign Language (ASL), Italian Sign Language (LIS), British Sign Language (BSL), and Hong Kong Sign Language (HKSL) are analyzed. We find that iconic, cognitive, phonological, and morphological factors contribute to the distribution of these properties. We conduct two analyses—one of verbs and one of verb phrases. The analysis of classifier verbs shows that, as expected, all four languages exhibit many common formal and iconic properties in the expression of agency and number. The analysis of classifier verb phrases (VPs)—particularly, multiple-verb predicates—reveals (a) that it is grammatical in all four languages to express agency and number within a single verb, but also (b) that there is crosslinguistic variation in expressing agency and number across the four languages. We argue that this variation is motivated by how each language prioritizes, or ranks, several constraints. The rankings can be captured in Optimality Theory. Some constraints in this account, such as a constraint to be redundant, are found in all information systems and might be considered non-linguistic; however, the variation in constraint ranking in verb phrases reveals the grammatical and arbitrary nature of linguistic systems.