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Linguistics, English linguistics in particular, has witnessed a remarkable quantitative turn since the 1990s and the early 2000s. It was a turn both in scale and in quality, a turn concerning the degree (including the degree of sophistication) to which quantitative empirical studies, statistical techniques, and statistical modelling have come to be used and determine linguistic research. Which role have corpus linguistics and probabilistic linguistics, including usage-based approaches, played in this development? Has this turn been to the detriment of qualitative methods, or even of linguistic theorizing in general? Has linguistics reached the point of a "quantitative crisis", or is it still a discipline characterized by a healthy equilibrium, if not mutual reinforcement, of quantitative and qualitative approaches? What are, or should be, major repercussions of the strong quantitative turn for the publication system of (English) linguistics? These are the major overarching questions underlying the reflections offered in this opinion paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current publication system neither incentivizes publishing null results nor direct replication attempts, which biases the scientific record toward novel findings that appear to support presented hypotheses (referred to as "publication bias"). Moreover, flexibility in data collection, measurement, and analysis (referred to as "researcher degrees of freedom") can lead to overconfident beliefs in the robustness of a statistical relationship. One way to systematically decrease publication bias and researcher degrees of freedom is preregistration. A preregistration is a time-stamped document that specifies how data is to be collected, measured, and analyzed prior to data collection. While preregistration is a powerful tool to reduce bias, it comes with certain challenges and limitations which have to be evaluated for each scientific discipline individually. This paper discusses the application, challenges and limitations of preregistration for experimental linguistic research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantitative studies in linguistics almost always involve data points that are related to each other, such as multiple data points from the same participant, multiple texts from the same book, author, genre, or register, or multiple languages from the same language family. Statistical procedures that fail to account for the relatedness of observations by assuming independence among units can lead to grossly misleading results if these sources of variation are ignored. As mixed effects models are increasingly used to analyze these non-independent data structures, it might appear that the problem of violating the independence assumption is solved. In this paper, we argue that it is necessary to re-open and widen the discussion about sources of variation that are being ignored, not only in statistical analyses, but also in the way studies are designed. Non-independence is not something that is "solved" by new statistical methods such as mixed models, but it is something that we continuously need to discuss as we apply new methods to an increasingly diverse range of linguistic datasets and corpora. In addition, our paper delivers something that is currently missing from statistical textbooks for linguists, which is an overview of non-independent data structures across different subfields of linguistics (corpus linguistics, typology, phonetics etc.), and how mixed models are used to deal with these structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an analysis of the 'frustrative' marker séna7 in St'át'imcets (Lillooet Salish), and compares it to similar elements cross-linguistically. Séna7 appears in a range of discourse contexts, including when events have an unexpected outcome, fail to continue, or fail to take place optimally. We argue that séna7 felicitously applies to a proposition p only if there is a salient true proposition q and the speaker did not expect p and q to both be true. Séna7 encodes epistemic modality, refers only to the speaker's epistemic state (ignoring the common ground), and has no effect on at-issue truth conditions (séna7(p) entails p). We show that séna7 provides a diagnostic for distinguishing between entailments and implicatures in the language, and a clear diagnostic for the distinction between futures and prospective aspects. We compare séna7 with similar elements in Tohono O'odham, Kimaragang and Tagalog. We argue that séna7 and the Kimaragang frustrative can be captured by the same analysis once independent features of their tense/aspect systems are taken into account. Following Kroeger (2017. Frustration, culmination and inertia in Kimaragang grammar. Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics 2(1). 56. 1–29), but pace Copley and Harley (2014. Eliminating causative entailments with the force-theoretic framework: The case of the Tohono O'odham frustrative cem. In Bridget Copley & Fabienne Martin (eds.), Causation in grammatical structures (Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 52), 120–151. Oxford: Oxford University Press), we argue that frustratives should not be unified with non-culminating accomplishments, and can be analyzed without appealing to causality or efficacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spirantization is one of the most frequently studied phonological phenomena of Spanish (Barlow, Jessica A. 2003. The stop-spirant alternation in Spanish: Converging evidence for a fortition account. Southwest Journal of Linguistics 22. 51–86; Zampini, Mary. 1994. The role of native language transfer and task formality in the acquisition of Spanish spirantization. Hispania 77. 470–481; among others). For a majority of dialects, Spanish voiced plosives have been traditionally described as having a continuant and a non-continuant realization in complementary distribution (Navarro Tomás, Tomás. 1977. Manual de pronunciación española. 19th edn. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas; Hualde, José Ignacio. 2005. The sounds of Spanish. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press; among others). Yet, phonetic studies reveal a more complex picture consisting of a great deal of phonetic variability and gradience among continuant realizations (Carrasco, Patricio, José Ignacio Hualde and Miquel Simonet. 2012. Dialectal differences in Spanish voiced obstruent allophony: Costa Rican versus Iberian Spanish. Phonetica 69. 149–179; among others; Simonet, Miquel, José Ignacio Hualde and Mariana Nadeu. 2012. Lenition of/d/in spontaneous Spanish and Catalan. Paper presented at INTERSPEECH) which is not captured by existing generative accounts (Bakovic, Eric. 1997. Strong onsets and Spanish fortition. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 23. 21–39; Harris, James W. 1984. La espirantización en castellano y la representación fonológica autosegmental. Estudis Gramaticals 1.149–67; Hualde, José Ignacio. 1989. Procesos consonánticos y estructuras geométricas en español. Lingüística 1.7–44; Kirchner, Robert. 2001. Phonological contrast and articulatory effort. In Linda Lombardi (ed.), Segmental phonology in Optimality Theory, 79–117. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; among others). Furthermore, most analyses focus almost exclusively on the general distribution of spirantization, excluding other dialectal patterns (Amastae, Jon. 1995. Variable spirantization: Constraint weighting in three dialects. Hispanic Linguistics 6(7). 265–285; among others). The current proposal accounts for the phonetic variability and gradience evinced by phonetic studies, as well as dialectal variation in one optimality theoretic-analysis. Spirantization is explained as the result of effort reduction, rather than the result of assimilation (contra Harris, James W. 1984. La espirantización en castellano y la representación fonológica autosegmental. Estudis Gramaticals 1.149–67; Hualde, José Ignacio. 1989. Procesos consonánticos y estructuras geométricas en español. Lingüística 1.7–44, among others). Phonetic variability in the general dialects is argued to be related to the underlying representation: voiced obstruents are underspecified for continuancy both in the input and the output of the phonology, which explains gradience in implementation and responds to the need to avoid the marked configuration represented by a combination of voicing and maximal stricture found in voiced stops (Colina, Sonia. 2016. On onset clusters in Spanish: Voiced obstruent underspecification and /f/. In Rafael A. Núñez Cedeño (ed.), The syllable and stress: Studies in honor of James W. Harris. Boston, MA: Mouton de Gruyter). Dialectal variation stems from differences in the underlying representation and in the ranking of the constraints. The proposal is also able to explain variations on the two major dialectal patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Premodification patterns play a central role in the categorization of of-binominals in general, and particularly in the grammaticalization of the evaluative binominal noun phrase (a beast of a man) into an evaluative modifier (a beast of a Hollywood year), where the first noun functions as an extreme modifier. This paper compares a linear, construction-based account of the premodification patterns of the evaluative binominal noun phrase, evaluative modifier, and other historically related of-binominals to a hierarchical account in Functional Discourse Grammar in order to investigate in what way each theory captures and accounts for these patterns. The paper comprises two parts: First, based on a zone-based premodification model, an empirical study of the synchronic premodification distributional patterns of these of-binominals is presented. Second, the paper discusses a Functional Discourse Grammar explanation of the findings. In the conclusion, the theoretical implications of the explanations of these patterns in the two approaches are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I propose that replication failure in linguistics may be due primarily to inherent issues with the application of experimental methods to analyze an inextricably social phenomenon like language, as opposed to poor research practices. Because language use varies across social contexts, and because social context must vary across independent experimental replications, linguists should not be surprised when experimental results fail to replicate at the expected rate. To address issues with replication failure in linguistics, and to increase methodological rigor in our field more generally, I argue that linguists must use experimental methods carefully, keeping in mind their inherent limitations, while acknowledging the scientific value of observational methods, which are often the only way to pursue basic questions in our field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dative shift is a two-fold process that affects both the morphological coding and the order of T and R arguments of a three-participant construction, as in the teacher gave a book to the student vs. the teacher gave the student a book. Across languages, dative shift tends to express similar functions including differences in animacy, definiteness, semantic role of arguments, affectedness of recipient and permanence of transfer. This is understandable, since dative shift increases the formal transitivity of the affected clauses, and all the expressed functions are somehow related to transitivity. The goal of this paper is to study whether, and to what extent, mere changes in word order suffice to express the functions of dative shift. The examined language is Finnish, which suits very well for this purpose due to its relatively free word order and inherently different coding of Theme and Recipient. It can be hypothesized that mere word order changes readily express features related to definiteness and animacy, while they are less capable of expressing features such as affectedness of the recipient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the functions of the utterance-final particle -canha in modern spoken Korean. Analyzing naturally occurring spontaneous conversational data, I argue that its basic function is to explicitly mark the speaker’s belief of shared knowledge. This study suggests that -canha functions as a very useful device in managing the information flow in spontaneous conversation by enabling speakers to constantly signal other interlocutors and build common ground. This basic information-managing function can not only be used in discourse strategies (a pre-sequence and as a verbal filler), but can also be extended to express politeness and impoliteness, theticity, and mirativity. In sum, the functions of -canha discussed in this paper suggest that it is a highly intersubjective marker, in that it explicitly indicates the speaker’s awareness of and attention to the hearer’s information status and changes therein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses a class of so-called “marked” or “modal” indefinites in Romance, (e.g., Romanian un NP oarecare, Italian un NP qualunque, French quelque N), which have been shown to display the locality, shielding and rescuing effects familiar from the study of positive polarity items (PPIs) like someone (e.g., Săvescu-Ciucivara 2007, Oarecare indefinites are not just any indefinites. In Gabriela Alboiu, Andrei Avram, Larisa Avram & Daniela Isac (eds.), Pitar Moș: A building with a view: Papers in honour of Alexandra Cornilescu, 205–225. Bucharest: Editura Universității din București; Jayez and Tovena 2007, Evidentiality and determination. In Atle Grønn (ed.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 12, 271–286. Oslo: Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages, University of Oslo; Chierchia 2013, Logic in grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press). Taking Romanian as a case study, I show that in positive contexts, these indefinites exhibit properties (obligatory non-specificity, free choice inferences) that set them apart from someone-PPIs and make them very similar to free choice indefinites. Adopting the framework in Chierchia (2013), we account for the interpretation of indefinites like un NP oarecare by assuming they activate scalar and domain alternatives. The computation of these alternatives is argued to be responsible for the observed interpretation and interaction with negation (as well as other positive polarity features). The proposed account emphasizes the connection between free choice and positive polarity and suggests that positive polarity behavior stems from more than one source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the Italian element già ‘already’ under negation in various contexts, including questions. The occurrence of già under negation in questions is unexpected because già cannot be licensed in declarative sentences with sentential negation (It. *Non ho già fatto colazione. literally ‘I did not have breakfast already.’). The empirical contribution of this paper is to provide a corpus analysis and to describe the contexts in which già can appear under negation. The main research questions of this paper are as follows: (i) how do we account for the distribution and the licensing conditions of già under negation? and (ii) how is the meaning of già related to its distribution? This paper shows that some syntactic restrictions are responsible for the distribution of già under negation, and that in contexts where già appears under negation in questions or conditionals, it is not interpreted under the direct scope of negation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ways in which specific-purpose writing exploits the linguistic resources of a language, in this case French, in order to meet rhetorical and communicative needs. The paper focuses on the uses of one particular verb form, the conditional as it is used in research articles in biology. While the conditional is not a frequently used tense in French scientific writing. after the present and passé composé it is the third most frequently used verb form. This paper analyzes the ways in which French scientific writing uses the conditional for rhetorical pin poses. Traditionally the conditional has been treated as an irrealis or potential verb form. This paper begins by examining some of these treatments and then examines these formulations about the conditional in the light of data from writing in the field of biology. It is demonstrated that the conditional does not appear to have a primary irrealis/potential meaning in these texts but that rather it is used as a hedging device. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an introduction to the papers in this special issue on the sociophonetics of /s/. We begin by reviewing some of the principal findings on variation in the production and perception of /s/, summarizing studies in sociolinguistics, experimental phonetics, and laboratory phonology. We go on to identify similarities in the meanings associated with /s/ variation cross-linguistically, and briefly describe how theories of sound symbolism may help us to account for these patterns. We conclude this introductory article with a summary of the contributions to the special issue and a discussion of how together these articles help us to better understand that origin and trajectory of socially meaningful sociophonetic variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the features that distinguishes Daghestanian languages of the Caucasus from many other languages is the richness of the nominal paradigm, which arises due to large locative subsystems, counting up to eighty forms. This paper presents a description of major distinctions made by Daghestanian in the topological domain. The paper reveals three basic semantic oppositions underlying systems of nominal locative markers and describes a number of minor points of variation. In the domain of location in Ground this is the distinction between location in container and location in substance. In the domain of location on Ground, the primary division in most languages of the family is between attachment and nonattachment configurations. In the domain of location near Ground, several languages use the formal distinction between localization marker and postposition to reflect the semantic contrast between location in a space associated with a given Ground and location near Ground. The detailed comparison shows that the same distinction can function quite differently even in related languages. The paper also makes a number of crosslinguistic observations related to patterns found in Daghestanian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first shows how the polysemy of a single question particle ka (self-addressed questions, exclamation, rhetorical questions, wishes, and regrets) in Old Japanese can be accounted for in a unified way, by using Akatsuka's (1985) "epistemic scale" and "speaker attitudes." In addition, this paper points out that there are remarkable similarities between Maynard's (1995) "information status" and Akatsuka's "epistemic scale," and between Maynard's typology of Modern Japanese rhetorical interrogatives (non-information-seeking interrogatives) and that of Old Japanese ka-type questions proposed in this paper. In a broader perspective, this study intends to clarify the concept of "doubt," a key concept in interrogatives in both Japanese and Western linguistics. It is argued that "doubt" represents the various speaker attitudes in the irrealis domain such as negative conviction, surprise, and uncertainty. It is also claimed that what has been referred to as "intensity of doubt" can be understood as the shift of the speaker attitude on the axis of the epistemic scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a case study in the positional properties of a complex set of clitics: the mood, pronominal, and clausal-aspect clitics in the Austronesian. language Kambera. The clitics of this language may form a cluster of maximally nine clitics. The positional properties of the clitics can be distinguished into two distinct categories: (a) the position of the clitic cluster as a whole with respect to its host, and (b) the position of the clitics within the cluster with reference to each other. The aim of this paper is to present an account of both these aspects of Kambera clitic placement. The placement of the cluster as a whole will be characterized syntactically, while the ordering of the clitics within the cluster has the characteristics of inflectional morphology. I argue that the placement of the Kambera clitics with respect to each other is the result neither of the syntactic manipulation of terminal elements of functional categories, nor of lexical word- formation rules or position-class morphology, nor is it determined by the phonological properties of the language alone. Instead, it is the result of the morpho- logical spell-out of morphosyntactic feature bundles (Anderson 1992) at the end of the syntactic derivation, at the interface between syntax and prosody: the postlexical level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following Kuroda (1965), Miyagawa (1989) classifies post-NP particles in Japanese into two categories, postpositions and case markers. Postpositions such as kara `from' and de `with' project their own maximal projections, whereas case markers such as the nominative ga and the accusative o directly cliticize onto an NP, without projecting a maximal projection. Particle ni presents a serious challenge to this analysis because it shows characteristics of both case markers and postpositions (as well as some other categories). In this paper, we examine the behavior of ni in various contexts and show that there are four types of ni: the dative case marker, the postposition ni, the ni of ni insertion, and a form of the copula. The last two categories being irrelevant to Kuroda's dichotomy, ni in fact neatly fits into Miyagawa's analysis of this dichotomy. Thus, the problem is only apparent. We also discuss issues concerning acquisition of ni. It is suggested that the dative case marker ni and the postposition ni can be discriminated by the "affectedness" of the referent of the NP they attach to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the close parallels between the contact phenomena in Cantonese-English bilingual children and Southeast Asian creoles, especially in the domain of perfective aspect marking. 'Already' is a cross-linguistically common lexical source of perfective aspect markers given its conceptual link with the sense of perfectivity. In contact scenarios involving a European lexifier and Southeast Asian substrates, the development of 'already' into a perfective marker is further triggered by the incompatibility between the verbal morphology of the former and the isolating typology of the latter. Adopting an ecological approach to language transmission and creole genesis we discuss how the transient grammaticalization phenomena in the bilingual children can be compared to decreolization, and how the study of bilingual acquisition can contribute to contact linguistics. Despite the prevalence of unpredictable factors in contact scenarios, we argue that bilingual children can still serve as powerful "laboratories" for studying contact outcomes at the communal level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A classical topic in the syntax of the mainland Scandinavian languages is so-called pancake clauses where there seemingly is disagreement between the subject and the predicative adjective, as in Pannekaker er godt 'Pancakes(f):indf:pl be:prs good:n:sg'; the subject is in the plural, whereas the predicative adjective is in the neuter singular. According to one of the several approaches, these clauses display a type of semantic agreement. Recently, it has also been argued that there are at least four different types of pancake constructions. In this article, the semantic relationship between the different constructions is investigated further. It is argued that, diachronically, pancake agreement started with subjects interpreted as virtual, ungrounded processes, and that the absence of grounding has been reinterpreted as absence of spatial boundedness in the latest kind of pancake construction. The analysis is supported by a diachronic corpus investigation. The emphasis on virtual reference is a new feature with the current paper, and it enables us to set aside an objection against the semantic agreement analysis. The diachronic corpus investigation enables us to revise, empirically, earlier suggestions as to when the pancake constructions originated: They are well attested from the mid-1800s, in both Swedish and Norwegian Nynorsk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adjective order restrictions on attributive adjectives (AORs) have been subject to debate in modern linguistic research for a long time. Most generally, the question whether AORs can be located in grammar as such in rule-based fashion is still unsettled. In the current paper, we largely argue against this view and claim that several of the core data to be explained are preferences based on norms rather than rules. A pragmatic explanation is offered to account for marked or apparently ungrammatical examples. First, we demarcate AORs in the narrow sense against data based on truth-conditional differences, show the sole hard constraint to be found in a distinction between object- and kind-modification, and introduce several of the factors argued to drive AORs in the literature. A large-scale corpus study on German AAN-phrases shows a hierarchy of relative adjectives preceding absolute ones to reliably predict preferences, while temporariness and weight do not. We then illustrate that norm-based preferences can be overwritten via discourse linking and implement markedness in out-of-the-blue contexts pragmatically based on the M-principle. Speculating that AORs in the narrow sense have their origins in more general cognitive principles, our findings support approaches that locate the better part of AORs outside the realm of core grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates three constructions in Mandarin, all of which convey a purposive/teleological meaning, including the lai purposive, the hao purposive, and the bare purposive. Despite the fact that each type of purposive clause in Mandarin occurs at the right edge of a sentence, it is argued that none of the purposive clause is a genuine right adjunct in the underlying syntactic structure. On the other hand, our analysis shows that the lai purposive employs complementation of a secondary predicate, the hao purposive involves conjunction of two clauses, and the bare purposive should be analyzed as left adjunction that is stranded in the right edge after verb movement. The evidence for our analysis is drawn from subject and object gaps, the ba-construction in Mandarin, agentivity, and linear ordering of multiple purposive clauses. This work thus demonstrates representative cases where a structure that appears to involve right adjunction may in fact employ no right adjunction at all. The conclusion is thus consistent with the prediction of Linear Correspondence Axiom (LCA). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates optionality in grammar and language use, and argues that there is optionality and optionality, and thus that it is essential that we be much more careful than hitherto in categorizing linguistic entities as optional. Equipped with a suitably constrained construal of the term, it is possible to formulate testable generalizations about optionality. Specifically, it is always meaningful in the sense that the contrast between use and non-use of a given linguistic element conveys meaning; use and non-use are never in absolutely free variation. Furthermore, there are restrictions on the type of meaning associated with the two contrasting paradigmatic 'forms'. It is always a type of interpersonal meaning, concerning the domain of joint attention. It is further suggested that the connection between form and meaning is motivated, and thus this represents another domain in which the linguistic sign emerges as non-arbitrary. Evidence for the proposed meaning is presented from case studies of five diverse domains of grammar: complementizers, case markers, definiteness markers, person and number markers, and NP ellipsis. While these case studies only scratch the surface of the range of optional phenomena in the world's languages, they provide sufficient circumstantial evidence to make an initial case for the proposals; they also raise numerous questions for future investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One peculiarity of Korean morphosyntax is the existence of a large set of converbal suffixes. A survey of previous descriptions reveals a lack of consensus in the analysis of these converbs. Too often they have been pressed into a Eurocentric dichotomy of subordination versus coordination, leading to confusion about their typological status. Trying to correct this approach by describing the language on its own terms is therefore the main objective of our paper. We compare the morphosyntactic behavior of four selected suffixes with respect to some relevant criteria for subordination versus coordination, such as the scope of illocutionary operators, shared TAM, subject coreference, constituent order, and the development of dependent verb forms into complex predicates or adpositions. This empirical research feeds back into the theoretical discussion, as it will be shown that the Korean converbs can indeed be described using conventional typological concepts if construed appropriately. Our second objective is therefore to review the criteria involved in describing clause-linkage and to see how relevant terminology can be used more consistently. The conclusion is that the four converb types turn out to be located on a continuum between coordination and subordination, thus constituting an instantiation of syntax-semantics isomorphism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Polarity sensitivity has been an established key topic of linguistic research for more than half a century. The study of polarity phenomena can be extremely revealing about the internal structure of a language, as they usually involve an interaction at the interface between syntax, semantics and pragmatics. In the past, most attention was paid to negative polarity items. However, recent years have witnessed a growing interest in positive polarity items. As a continuation of this trend, this issue collects four papers dedicated to positive polarity items, which enrich the empirical domain with novel observations from different languages and appeal to diverse theoretical concepts such as scalarity and presupposition in their modeling of positive polarity. The results show that positive polarity is a distributional phenomenon that has different sources and most likely cannot be modeled in a unifying way, although there may be subsets of positive polarity items that allow unifying accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many languages employ articles as an expression device to mark identifiability. There are, however, other means to mark identifiability in languages. In this paper I show that one of the two sets of cross-referencing markers on the transitive verb in Hungarian serves this purpose, i.e., it represents the instruction from the speaker that he considers the referent of the object argument to be identifiable to the hearer. Next, attention is paid to four sets of Hungarian data which are seemingly at odds with this claim. These sets relate to the use of particular person distinctions, indefinite noun phrases which contain either a possessive restrictor or the interrogative pronoun melyik ‘which’, and to relative clauses. Apart from a descriptive account of the relevant data, the paper also offers a theoretical account within the framework of functional discourse grammar, where the speaker assessment of identifiability of referents is formally represented by operators which apply to the referential act, represented by the variable R at the interpersonal level. Distinctions made at the interpersonal level thus affect the choice of verbal forms in Hungarian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1. Introduction This special issue is a collection of seven papers dealing with the theory and typology of the word. In Section 2 we discuss various theoretical issues and typological generalizations involving grammatical words and phonological words. Section 3 provides a brief summary of the main ideas contained in the seven articles and shows how they relate to the general topics discussed in Section 2. Section 4 points to future areas of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at focus/background structures (FBSs) from a production point of view. Based on an analysis of retellings, we demonstrate that syntax-oriented conceptions of focus are applicable to these spoken data, resulting in minimal or maximal foci (Uhmann 1991). These foci do not always come up to the predictions of the textlinguistic quaestio model (Stutterheim 1997) with respect to focus realization. According to the quaestio model we would expect that the linguistic units referring to the respective events are focused. The minimal and maximal foci have different pragmatic functions that will be characterized as perspectivation process (cf. Glatz and Stutterheim, this issue) during conceptualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the auxiliary verb constructions V-a/e pelita in Korean and V-te shimau in Japanese as markers of both completive aspect and speaker stance. These constructions are, for the most part, grammatically optional in their respective languages. When they occur, they generally mark finality or completion of some event or action in addition to some aspect of the speaker's judgment. The two constructions, while not at all related morphologically or semantically to the reflexive in either language, pattern in a manner strikingly similar to some occurrences of the middle marker se in Spanish. That is, in all three languages, the constructions are generally optional, they tend to cooccur with certain types of verbs, they tend to increase or decrease the sense of volitionality/control expressed by the main verbs with which they cooccur, and they all express aspects of speaker stance such as emphatic perspective, accidentality/uncontrollability, regret, relief, pride, counterexpectations, and strong resolve. In view of these parallels with certain functions of Spanish se, this paper will posit that Korean V-a/e pelita, Japanese V-te shimau, and the "energetic middle" are instances of the dynamic eventive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to account for the suspended reading of before clauses, that is, a reading on which the proposition expressed by the subordinate clause is neither true nor false. The analysis is based on French linguistic material. The paper attempts to demonstrate that the suspended reading of the subordinate clause is intrinsically related to the intentional reading of the sentence, that is, a reading on which the sentence is introduced by an implicit intentional propositional attitude. The analysis shows that, in sentences referring to the past, the inference of the intentional attitude is brought about by three types of lexical and/or syntactic marker, which allows us to divide the sentences that trigger the suspended reading into three categories. The paper accounts for the cases of ambiguity and lists the readings that are allowed by each type of ambiguous sentence. The position defended is that avant que 'before' clauses, like other temporal clauses, do express a presupposition. The phenomenon known as "presupposition suspension" is due to the fact that the lexical content of the connective allows the presupposition to be modalized by a propositional attitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies have shown that thesamesociolinguisticfeature can be used as a sociolinguistic resource with different indexical potentials in different linguistic as well as social contexts. In this paper we present the results of a perceptual study of indexical meanings of fronted and palatalized variants of /t/ in combination with fronted /s/ in different registers of Copenhagen Danish. The data consist of responses to male speakers' use of the two variants of /t/ in two different registers that we label "modern Copenhagen speech" and "street language." Results show that the palatalized /t/ affects the indexicality of fronted /s/ with respect to perceived femininity and gayness when it occurs in "modern Copenhagen," where fronted /s/ has previously been shown to index these traits. However, the variation has a different and less significant effect when occurring in "street language." Furthermore, the effect is only found in "modern Copenhagen" if the speaker has not previously been heard to produce a fronted /s/. We discuss the implications for theories of the relation between features and clusters of features in listeners' perceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the role of morphology-syntax interactions in explaining apparent parametric variation in Germanic syntax. It is argued that the Spec, TP parameter (Bures 1993; Bobaljik and Jonas 19%) is a reflex of aspects of the inflectional morphology that divide the Germanic languages into two groups, and not simply an arbitrary parameter as previously assumed. The theory of distributed morphology is adopted and leads to the following position. Complementary distribution between tense and agreement markers in a language must be taken to reflect FUSION of the functional heads in that language. This fusion is only possible if head movement in the syntax has concatenated the relevant heads in a specific configuration. The required configuration in turn follows from a derivation that precludes the licensing of Spec, TP. Thus, only languages that do not have this complementarity in their inflectional morphology may utilize the syntactic derivation that licenses the specifier of TP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Modern Japanese, three nominalizers, no, koto, and zero, are used in overlapping but slightly differing syntactic and semantic environments. This paper will discuss two types of strategy in nominalizer variation in Modern Japanese, koto versus no, on the one hand, and no versus zero, on the other. The two types of variation, are shown to be very different in nature. The contrast between koto and no is primarily a semantic one characteriz-able in terms of greater versus lesser semantic specificity. Koto nominalization is the most semantically sensitive type of nominalization, it tends to be called for where its semantic contribution is expected, no tatter. how abstract it is. No nominalization, which generally lacks semantic content, is the most unmarked nominalization strategy extensively used in Modern Japanese. The contrast between no and zero, on the other hand, is primarily a syntactic one with a diachronic dimension. In Old Japanese, which lacked the nominalization, a syntactic contrast existed between koto and zero. Zero nominalization, a remnant of Old Japanese, is now generally a nonproductive process limited to lexicalized expressions with varying degrees of archaism. No nominalization has long competed with zero nominalization and has successfully replaced it in many syntactic environments including some of the lexicalized expressions where zero was traditionally the norm. However, in spite of the overall dominance of no nominalization zero nominalization has continued to be used fairly productively in some limited syntactic environments and is not expected to disappear from the syntactic inventory of Modern Japanese in the near future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the first of a series of papers that, taken together, will give an essentially complete account of inflection in standard German. In this paper we present that part of' the account that covers adjectives, determiners, and third-person pronouns, one that captures all the regularities, subregularities, and irregularities that are involved. The forms are defined in terms of their syllable structure, as proposed in Cahill (1990a, 1990k 1993). The morphological treatment Lv based on ideas original/v set out by Zwicky (1985). The analysis is formulated as a DATR theory - a set of lexical axioms - from which all the relevant facts follow as theorems. DATR is a widely used formal lexical-knowledge-representation language developed for use in computational linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on three explicitly defined types of VO sequences in Chinese: (1) words, (2) idiom phrases, and (3) dual status -- words and phrases (Huang 1984; Her 1992, 1993), this paper argues for a lexicalist synchronic account of this variation. Diachronically this variation is the consequence of two competing processes, lexicalization and ionization (Her 1993); synchronically, however, the two process-oriented solutions, lexicalization and ionization, both deft generalization and complicate the grammar, leaving lexical listing a better alternative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research sets out to challenge a conventional wisdom in Japanese linguistics, that the reflexive pronoun zibun is unable to take an inanimate antecedent. Through careful presentation of the data, including corpus sources, it is unequivocally demonstrated that the reflexive use of zibun can indeed overcome the animacy constraint and be anteceded by an inanimate antecedent, without any personification present. This has specific theoretical consequences in the sense of providing a theoretical simplification behind reflexivity modeling in Japanese. This is followed by a psycholinguistic experiment investigating how native Japanese speakers judge and process sentences with inanimate zibun. The key factors tested are the animacy of the antecedent, and also if the type of sentence, episodic versus generic, will affect the acceptability of inanimate zibun. Results from the experiment show that native speakers indeed do find inanimate zibun acceptable, and appear to process it slightly slower than the animate counterpart. The episodic versus generic distinction does not play a role in either the judgment or processing. Combining the corpus and experimental data anchors the phenomenon firmly. Finally, our attention turns to how to account for inanimate zibun theoretically, where we draw information from how zibun can already take inanimate antecedents if they are construed as agentive, or if zibun is used as an adverbial reflexive, showing that in fact, inanimate zibun does not require additional theoretical treatment – leading to a reformulation of Kuno's animacy constraint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Experiential constructions is an understudied topic in western Austronesian languages. The focus is on Northern Amis (Formosan), with some crosslinguistic comparison. In Amis, experiential constructions are derived by a syncretic suffix –en, which is also an Undergoer Voice suffix. In experiential constructions, –en is suffixed to stative-intransitive verbs compatible with experiences, and functions as an applicative voice that licenses an extra-thematic experiencer marked as the nominative argument, generally with adverse meaning. Though reminiscent of adversative passives in some Asian languages, experiential constructions in Amis are not passives, nor are they standard Undergoer Voice –en constructions for two main reasons: (i) they are restricted to stative and intransitive stems; (ii) their argument structure and case-marking are different. It is argued that the source of Amis experiential constructions is a Proto-Austronesian adversative *ka- ... -an/-en construction (Blust, Robert. 1999. Notes on Pazeh phonology and morphology. Oceanic Linguistics 38(2). 321–365) and that Amis innovated by creating a verbal ma- ... -en experiential applicative construction from that originally non-finite construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits the distinction between inflectional and derivational patterns in general grammar and discusses the possibility that this well-known distinction is not rooted in the reality of languages, but in the Western tradition of describing languages, through dictionaries (for words, including derived lexemes) and through grammar books (where we often find tables of exemplary paradigms). This tradition has led to rather different terminological treatments of the two kinds of patterns, but from the perspective of a constructional view of morphology, there is no need to incorporate such differences into formal grammatical descriptions. For practical purposes, we need clear and simple definitions of entrenched terms of general linguistics, so the article proposes semantically based (retro-) definitions of inflection, derivation and lexeme that cover the bulk of the existing usage. Finally, I briefly explain why we need sharp definitions of comparative concepts, and why prototype-based and fuzzy definitions of traditional terms are not helpful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper predicts the mutual intelligibility of 15 Chinese dialects from multiple objective distance measures. Empirical mutual intelligibility measures were obtained from functional intelligibility tests at the sentence level from 15 listeners for each of 15 Chinese dialects. We computed various proximity measures on the basis of shared phonemes and tones in the sound inventories of the 15 dialects. Next, Levenshtein (string-edit) distance measures were computed on the 764 common syllabic units (zi in Pinyin, i.e., a meaningful character or morpheme with a complete transcription of segments and tone) shared by the same 15 Chinese dialects in the Dialect Sound Database of Modern Chinese (compiled by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences). Unweighted and perceptually weighted Levenshtein distance measures were computed. We also included objective similarity measures of phonological correspondence, based on the Zihui character list and of lexical affinity, based on the Cihui cross-dialect lexical database with all cognate and non-cognate expressions of 905 core concepts) that have been published by Cheng (1997). The best single predictor of mutual intelligibility between a pair of dialects was the percentage of cognates shared between them (r² = .548). Including all predictors afforded a highly accurate prediction of mutual intelligibility (R² = .874). A very reasonable prediction is afforded if we just add the lexical frequency of finals (syllable rhymes) shared by a pair of dialects (R² = .611). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper combines the findings of a detailed corpus study and the results of a small-scale experiment in an attempt to support the idea that grammatical knowledge includes knowledge of usage patterns. The linguistic structures investigated are English not that sentences of the type Other people have friends. I have enemies. I care (example taken from the British National Corpus). An in-depth investigation of 1,759 uses of this structure extracted from the British National Corpus reveals that neither their lexico-grammatical environments nor the pragmatic functions they serve are distributed in a random or unpredictable way, but rather pattern to an astonishing extent. This finding prompts the question as to whether the observed patterns are merely a matter of repeated usage driven by recurring pragmatic needs, or instead are represented as part of the linguistic knowledge of individual speakers, i.e., as a part of grammar. In order to answer this question a simple experiment was designed aiming to investigate whether there is a match between the data observed in the corpus (reflecting usage) and the knowledge-based behavior of individual speakers in an offline task (tapping into grammar). 30 native speakers of English participated in a test which put them under severe time pressure while they filled in gaps in short texts. Four gaps targeted uses of not that representing patterns with different frequencies in the corpus. The results of the experiment indicate that the participants were faster and found it easier to activate the structure not that for stimuli targeting frequent patterns than for those targeting very rare types of usage. This is interpreted as evidence for the assumption that frequency-related knowledge about lexico-grammatical and even pragmatic patterns is a part of grammatical knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an off-line study consisting of five questionnaires in which we observed interpretational preferences for ambiguous intra-sentential pro-nouns in parallel structures in German and French. We tested the influence of information structural factors, in particular, we compared the effects of topicalizing versus focusing potential antecedents of the ambiguous pronoun. Results replicated a baseline difference between the two languages: a subject preference in German and an object preference in French (Hemforth et al. 2010). We argue that the object preference in French is due to the fact that speakers take into account an alternative nonambiguous construction. In addi-tion, we found that in both languages, topicalization enhances, but focusing reduces the accessibility of antecedents for pronouns in the same sentence. This stands in contrast with previous results showing an equal accessibility of focused and topicalized referents for pronouns in subsequent sentences (Cowles et al. 2007). We explain this difference with the different function of focus within and across sentences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A central assumption about relative adjectives (e.g., big, old) is that their positive form is interpreted vis-àà-vis a class-specific reference point located in the midzone of a series (norm). More recently, functional-cognitive studies argued that other reference points (e.g., argumentative zero, endpoints) are more relevant in actual language use than a norm. This paper argues that the two positions are not necessarily irreconcilable and experimentally tests a hypothesis that a norm is a default reference point used for the interpretation of relative adjectives in zero contexts. Experiment 1 addressed the location of a norm in the midzone of a series and its category dependence. As predicted by the traditional semantic studies, the cutoff point between ''big'' and ''small'' is located around the midpoint of a scale. Furthermore, its location is category-dependentand sensitive to prototypicality effects. The results further indicate that adults easily compute a contextually relevant norm by integrating their world knowledge with the visually provided information. Experiment 2 investigated the relevance of a norm in the online processing of relative adjectives. The results suggest that language users indeed exploit norms for the interpretation of relative adjectives in real time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although third person plural impersonal constructions (3pl IMPs) are widely attested crosslinguistically, they have not yet been the main subject of a typological study. This paper aims to establish the basis for such a study by applying a tentative but rather elaborate typology of 3pl IMPs, developed by Cabredo Hofherr (Arbitrary readings of third person pronominals: 81--94, 2003, ''Arbitrary'' pro and the theory of pro-drop, Oxford University Press, 2006), to a sample of European languages. The typology recognizes as many as five different types of impersonal uses of the 3pl: a) the universal, b) corporate, c) vague, d) inferential and e) specific. This typology is tested on the basis of ten European languages (Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Russian and Spanish) using data stemming from a parallel translation corpus of Harry Potter and also acceptability judgments elicited from speakers by means of a questionnaire. The investigation reveals that while all the languages in the sample have universal, corporate and vague 3pl IMPs, the specific are at best marginal in English, Dutch, French, German and Polish, as are also the inferred in English, French and German. These findings are shown to correlate in part with the morphophonological realization of the 3pl IMP (as a free vs. a bound form), which may be interpreted as a reflection of the degree of grammaticalization of 3pl IMPs but also the result of the nature of the alternative impersonalizing constructions available among the relevant languages. The distribution of the five types of 3pl IMPs together with a sixth type is captured in the form of a preliminary semantic map, the nature of which requires substantiation by wider crosslinguistic data. The discussed typology of 3pl IMPs is found to be a promising basis for a wider typological investigation, provided a separate type of 3pl IMP involving the category of speech act verbs is included and the use of the 3pl for events which necessarily (not only contingently) involve singular individuals, nonhumans or alternatively the speech act participants are catered for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Locative expressions encode the spatial relationship between two (or more) entities. In this paper, we focus on locative expressions in signed language, which use the visual-spatial modality for linguistic expression, specifically in Turkish Sign Language ( Türk İşaret Dili, henceforth TİD). We show that TİD uses various strategies in discourse to encode the relation between a Ground entity (i.e., a bigger and/or backgrounded entity) and a Figure entity (i.e., a smaller entity, which is in the focus of attention). Some of these strategies exploit affordances of the visual modality for analogue representation and support evidence for modality-specific effects on locative expressions in sign languages. However, other modality-specific strategies, e.g., the simultaneous expression of Figure and Ground, which have been reported for many other sign languages, occurs only sparsely in TİD. Furthermore, TİD uses categorical as well as analogical structures in locative expressions. On the basis of these findings, we discuss differences and similarities between signed and spoken languages to broaden our understanding of the range of structures used in natural language (i.e., in both the visual-spatial or oral-aural modalities) to encode locative relations. A general linguistic theory of spatial relations, and specifically of locative expressions, must take all structures that might arise in both modalities into account before it can generalize over the human language faculty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clausal perception-verb complements are known to show a contrast in meaning between “object of perception” and “knowledge acquired”. This contrast has traditionally been analyzed denotationally in terms of a distinction between extra-linguistic entities belonging to two ontologically different types. However, Cognitive Grammar offers an analysis which is based on a distinction between two ways of construing the same conceptual content and does not presuppose the relevant notion of extra-linguistic entities. The present paper argues that both analyses are inadequate. On the basis of a number of relevant crosslinguistic data, it argues that the contrast under scrutiny must be understood in terms of a distinction which turns on a certain link between conceptual contents and extra-linguistic entities: reference. More precisely, it must be understood in terms of a distinction between nonreferring and referring status in the sense of Lyons 1977. A conception of this distinction is outlined, and an analysis is proposed which can bridge the gap between a purely cognitive and a purely denotational approach to clause meaning. Eventually, the paper sketches how the analysis can be adopted within Cognitive Grammar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the field of language acquisition the term bootstrapping stands for the assumption that the child is genetically equipped with a specific program to get the process of language acquisition started. Originally set within the principles and parameters framework bootstrapping mechanism are considered as a linkage between properties of the specific language the child is exposed to and pre-existing linguistic knowledge provided by universal grammar. In a different view — primarily developed within the so-called prosodic bootstrapping account — bootstrapping mechanism direct the child's processing of the input thereby constraining the child's learning in a linguistically relevant way. Thus, the attendance to specific input cues provides the child with information to segment the input in linguistically relevant units which constitute restricted domains for more general learning mechanism like e.g., distributional learning. The paper will present a review of empirical findings that show that children are in fact equipped with highly sensitive and efficient mechanism to process their speech input which initially seem to be biased to prosodic information. It will be argued that further research within this framework has to deal with the reliability of the proposed relevant input cues despite crosslinguistic variation and with children's ability to overcome an initial reliance on single cues in favor of an integration of different sources of information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]