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The category of person has both inflectional and lexical aspects, and the distinction provides a finely graduated grammatical trait, relatively stable in both families and areas, and revealing for both typology and linguistic geography. Inflectional behavior includes reference to speech-act roles, indexation of arguments, discreteness from other categories such as number or gender, assignment and/or placement in syntax, arrangement in paradigms, and general resemblance to closed-class items. Lexical behavior includes sharing categories and/or forms and/or syntactic behavior with major lexical classes (usually nouns) and generally resembling open-class items. Criteria are given here for typologizing person as more vs. less inflectional, some basic typological correlations are tested, and the worldwide linguistic-geographical distribution is mapped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the problem of crosslinguistic rarity by mapping the types of diachronic factors that contribute to the rarity of a particular feature. It is proposed that a number of different diachronic factors may play a role, such as the rarity of source constructions, the rarity of particular types of change, the number of stages necessary for a particular feature to develop, and the number of pathways that can lead to a particular feature. This article looks at a rarissimum of person marking, namely, a zero-marked feminine 2nd singular person index in the Sahidic dialect of Coptic (Afroasiatic; Egypt). It is argued that such markers are rare because they presuppose rare input structures, and most processes of change would lead away from - rather than to - zero-marked 2sg. Furthermore, this study identifies a diachronic process in which a part of a morpheme is reinterpreted as a segmentable morpheme (in this case, a person index), thereby leading to the loss of a zero person marker. This is the converse of the well-known 'Watkins' Law', in which a segmentable person marker is reinterpreted as part of a base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Verbs in San Pedro Amuzgo, an Oto-Manguean language of Mexico, often have two different stems in the paradigm, one used with singular subjects and the other with plural subjects. This split motivated by number is typologically interesting due to its rarity, since number splits are commonly along the S/O vs. A distinction, not the S/A vs. O distinction. Apart from at stem level, the split is also manifested in the incompletive of an inflectional class of verbs. At stem level the plural stem is derived in a variety of unproductive ways, making the relation between singular and plural stems, synchronically, one of suppletion. In this article, we study the distribution and the morphological properties of this split in depth, using a sample of almost 600 fully inflected verbs from a large database compiled by native linguist Fermín Tapia and now publicly accessible on the Surrey Morphology Group's website. We also place it in a typological context, relating it to other systems we have observed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Ecuadorian Siona reportative is prima facie an evidential par excellence because it indicates that the information contained in the utterance has been acquired through hearsay. However, the morphosyntactic and semantic behavior of the reportative verb form demonstrates that it is not an evidential. Rather, it is part of the clause-typing system, together with the assertive, interrogative, and imperative. Clause-typing relates to the assignment of authority: the speaker holds the epistemic authority in assertions, the addressee in questions, and a non-speech-act participant in reports. The hearsay reading of the reportative clause type emanates from a shift of epistemic authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidentiality - a grammatical expression of information source (, ) - is often expressed on a clausal level, and its marking is associated with the verb. In a few languages, a noun phrase can acquire its own evidential specification. Evidentiality can be expressed autonomously, or be fused with another grammatical category, including aspect, tense, or mood for verbs, or spatial distance and topicality for noun phrases. We investigate interactions and dependencies between evidentiality and other grammatical categories, both verbal and nominal. A number of such dependencies is supported by the diachronic development and history of evidentials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a typological characterization of a class of demonstratives so far neglected in the literature: demonstrative verbs expressing manner. First, the morphological characteristics and syntactic behaviors of these demonstratives are examined to illustrate their verbal properties and to justify categorizing them as verbs. Next, their exophoric and endophoric roles in narratives and interactions are described. As their discourse usages closely replicate that of nominal demonstratives, we argue that demonstrative verbs belong to the class of demonstratives and propose to integrate them in a general typology of demonstratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Allocutivity is a term coined to describe a phenomenon in Basque whereby, in certain pragmatic (and syntactic) circumstances, an addressee who is not an argument of the verb is systematically encoded in all declarative main clause conjugated verb forms. Although the term has been exclusively applied to Basque, similar phenomena are found in other languages as well. Indeed, despite certain differences in the degree of grammaticalization and usage, allocutive verb forms are attested in at least Pumé (isolate; Venezuela), Nambikwara (isolate; Brazil), Mandan (Siouan; North America), and Beja (Cushitic; Northeast Africa). The aim of this article is to propose a typology of verbal allocutivity in a crosslinguistic perspective, taking into consideration the locus of encoding, the manner in which it is encoded, the information concerning the addressee which is encoded, and the syntactic environments in which it can appear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critically reviewing the recent analysis of the distinction between the so-called 'absolute' and 'annexed' 'states' in Kabyle (Berber) by (M&F), it is shown that it does not fare better than the existing treatments in its account of the empirical facts, mainly due to the assumption of monosemy. It is further argued that M&F's rejection of 'case' as a valid notion for the description of the Kabyle data rests on simplistic and ill-informed views on the nature of case, and that adoption of a case analysis allows one to compare the Berber data to a wide range of languages with similar peculiarities in the distribution of dependent marking. Finally, M&F's claim that their analysis of Kabyle has pointed out a 'previously unrecognized typological category' is refuted, showing that it stems from an unwarranted mixing of language-particular descriptive categories and crosslinguistic comparative concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the perspective of prototype theory, boundaries between categories can be more distinct or less so. This gradience is captured by the notion of boundary permeability which is applied to units (e.g., nouns vs. verbs), properties (e.g., count vs. mass), and levels (e.g., phonological vs. morphological). boundary permeability is introduced as a typological parameter in the sense that a given language is generally characterized by (relatively) soft or (relatively) sharp boundaries. A fairly extensive analysis is offered of category and level boundaries in English and German. A battery of fourteen comparisons between the two languages reveals that German is a largely sharp- or strict- but English a largely soft-boundary language. This scalar difference is argued to follow from the varying importance of inflectional morphology in the two languages. Inflections are claimed to be boundary markers in that they bring about a divide between syntax and the lexicon. Thus, the moderately strong inflectional component makes German a strict-boundary language and the relative lack of inflections makes English a soft-boundary language. A tentative case is made for regarding strict boundaries as the typologically unmarked, and soft boundaries as the typologically marked, option. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article two hypotheses about the relationship of verbal and adnominal agreement are proposed: first, it is claimed that languages tend to have adnominal agreement only if they also have verbal agreement, but not vice versa. Second, it is argued that languages with adnominal agreement are areally restricted, while languages with verbal agreement are not. A sample of languages was selected to test these hypotheses, and both are confirmed by the data. The article closes with an admittedly speculative explanation of the hypotheses involving patterns of grammaticalization of different types of agreement markers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognate Head-Dependent Constructions (CHDCs) are employed across numerous genera in Africa to signpost alternations in the aspectual characteristics of a predicate or the information focus of a clause. The co-occurrence of a finite lexical verb (the cognate head) and an etymologically related (deverbal) noun or non-finite verb form (the cognate dependent) in such structures is interpreted with reference to the scalar semantics of events and properties. Within this areal typology, CHDCs are employed to indicate either (i) a high point relative to a norm on a semantic scale or (ii) a conventionally low-ranked possibility, in order to implicitly contrast possible alternatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the reality status system of Nanti (Arawak) and argues that it constitutes an instance of a canonical reality status system. The relevance of such a system is examined in the light of literature that casts doubt on the typological validity of reality status as crosslinguistic grammatical category. It is shown that reality status is an obligatory inflectional category in Nanti, and that the distribution of realis and irrealis marking across Nanti construction types hews closely to expectations based on notional understandings of 'realis' and 'irrealis' categories grounded in a contrast between 'realized' and 'un-realized' situations. It is also shown that the Nanti reality status system does not exhibit evidence of being based, either synchronically or diachronically, on semantically narrower notions that could account for the distribution of reality status marking in the language, without recourse to the more generalized notions of realized and unrealized events. It is suggested that the Nanti reality status system might serve as a suitable canonical system around which a canonical typology of reality status might be built. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study addresses the functional distinction between the annexed and absolute states of nouns, a controversial issue in Berber linguistics. It is demonstrated that the annexed state provides the specific value for a grammaticalized meaning encoded earlier in the sentence. The absolute state carries no function within the grammaticalized domains of the language. The importance of this study for linguistic typology is that it demonstrates the existence of a coding system on noun phrases that is not related to grammatical functions, semantic functions, or information structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Albanian admiratives specify a complex of meanings including 'surprise', 'disbelief', and 'report'. "Non-confirmative" summarizes these in contrast to Macedonian's "confirmative". Macedonian synthetic preterites specify speaker confirmation, and Macedonian analytic preterites therefore include -but are not limited to - non-confirmation. Albanian synthetic pasts do not specify confirmativity, and admiratives specify a present (disbelief, report) or previous (surprise) state when the speaker would not confirm the event. The Albanian admirative is used where similar Balkan Slavic and Turkish paradigmatic sets are not. The category "mirative " is unnecessary for the Balkan languages, but "admirative " describes the specific intersection of non-confirmative meanings of Albanian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-presents the case, first presented in DeLancey (1997), for the mirative as a crosslinguistic category, and responds to critiques of that work by Gilbert Lazard and Nathan Hill. The nature of the mirative, a category which marks a statement as representing information which is new or unexpected, is exemplified with data from Kham (Tibeto-Burman) and Hare (Athabaskan). The mirative category is shown to be distinct from the well-known mediative or indirective evidential category. Finally, the role of mirativity in the complex verbal systems of Tibetan languages is briefly outline [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues, contra Hill (this volume), that mirativity is an independent linguistic category. It also argues, contra DeLancey (1997), that this category should be defined not only in terms of newsworthiness for the speaker but also in terms of newsworthiness for the addressee, and that expressions of mirativity do not necessarily have an evidential component. These claims are supported by examples of mirative expressions in a number of languages from different genetic stocks. Finally, the article suggests an explanation for the fact that in many languages evidentiality and mirativity are indeed expressed by the same linguistic means. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The range of mirative meanings across the world's languages subsumes sudden discovery, surprise, and unprepared mind of the speaker ( and also the audience or the main character of a story). Mirative markers may also convey overtones of counterexpectation and new information. The range of mirative meanings may be expressed through a verbal affix, a complex predicate, or a pronoun. Evidentials whose major function is to express information source may have mirative extensions, especially in the context of the 1st person subject. The mirative category appears to be susceptible to linguistic diffusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Largely through the efforts of Scott DeLancey the grammatical category "mirative " has gained currency in linguistics. DeLancey bases his elaboration of this category on a misunderstanding of the semantics of hdug in "Lhasa " Tibetan. Rather than showing "surprising information", linguists working on Tibetan have long described hdug as a sensory evidential. Much of the evidence DeLancey and Aikhenvald present for mirativity in other languages is also susceptible to explanation in terms of sensory evidence or appears close to Lazard's "mediative" (1999) or Johanson's "indirective" (2000). Until an independent grammatical category for "new information" is described in a way which precludes analysis in terms of sensory evidence or other well established evidential categories, mirativity should be excluded from the descriptive arsenal of linguistic analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oceanic languages have rich systems of number marking, most including for-mal exponence of a dual, and very many also marking trial and/or paucal. In most Vanuatu languages number marking combines with person marking, including clusivity, in both independent pronoun paradigms and subject refer-encing paradigms. This study of pairs of these two kinds of paradigms in 34 Vanuatu languages shows that, in contrast to person values which can have fewer contrasting forms only in a subject referencing paradigm, contrasts in number values may be fewer either in the independent pronoun paradigm or in the corresponding subject referencing paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Iquito, a Zaparoan language of Peruvian Amazonia, marks a binary distinction between realis and irrealis clauses solely by means of a word order alternation. Realis clauses exhibit a construction in which no element intervenes between the subject and verb, while in irrealis clauses a phrasal constituent appears between the subject and verb. No free or bound morphology otherwise indicates whether an Iquito clause is realis or irrealis. Based on these facts and partially similar phenomena in other languages, this article argues that typologies of inflectional exponence should be expanded to include word order as an inflectional formative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the adjective class in Quechua, countering many previous accounts of the language as a linguistic type with no adjective/noun distinction. It applies a set of common crosslinguistic criteria for distinguishing adjectives to data from several dialects of Ecuadorian Highland Quechua (EHQ), analyzing examples from a natural speech audio/video corpus, speaker intuitions of grammaticality, and controlled elicitation exercises. It is concluded that by virtually any standard Quechua shows clear evidence for a distinct class of attributive noun modifiers, and that in the future Quechua should not be considered a 'flexible' noun/adjective language for the purposes of crosslinguistic comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I observe that Ossetic has a system of possessive pronouns with two features untypical for Iranian languages. First, along with genitive forms of full pronouns, it has a full paradigm of possessive proclitics. Second, while having accusative enclitics, it lacks possessive enclitics. I argue that the former trait is likely to have developed under West Caucasian influence. As for the absence of possessive enclitics, it is a nearly universal areal feature in the Caucasus. To substantiate these claims, I give an overview of possession marking in Iranian languages and in languages of the Caucasus and compare it to the Ossetic system. I suggest a possible scenario for the grammaticalization of possessive proclitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ASJP project aims at establishing relationships between languages on the basis of the Swadesh word list. For this purpose, lists have been collected and phonologically transcribed for almost 3,500 languages. Using a method based on the algorithm proposed by Levenshtein (Cybernetics and Control Theory 10: 707–710, 1966), a custom-made computer program calculates the distances between all pairs of languages in the database. Standard software is used to express the relationships between languages graphically. The current article compares the results of our lexicon-based approach with the results of a similar exercise that takes the typological variables contained in the WALS database as a point of departure. We establish that the latter approach leads to even better results than the lexicon-based one. The best result in terms of correspondence with some well-established genetic and areal classifications, however, is attained when the lexical and typological methods are combined, especially if we select both the most stable Swadesh items and the most stable WALS variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]