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The English alternative embedded passive (AEP), or "needs washed" construction, is a noncanonical morphosyntactic feature found in some American and British Englishes. It involves a matrix verb surfacing immediately before a participle. Previous research has described this construction as only licit with matrix need, want, and like; however, isolated examples of the AEP with additional matrix verbs have surfaced. These rarely attested instances raise questions regarding the basic description of the construction and how matrix verb availability is constrained, as well as whether the AEP is truly the same feature across AmE and BrE varieties. This paper utilizes a large-scale grammaticality judgement survey to obtain as exhaustive a set of AEP matrix verbs as possible. Results show that far more verbs can be used in the AEP than previously attested. Acceptance is constrained by lexical semantics, verbal syntax, and verb productivity. This alternative view of the AEP as a more generalized phenomenon nevertheless shows a strong link between AmE and BrE varieties, as the constraints are nearly identical across the nations. The findings illustrate how attention to rarely attested or non-attested data can inform morphosyntactic and dialectological research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The dative in Hebrew poses a problem for a unified characterization as no single criterion seems to guides its interpretation. The present paper approaches this problem from a usage-based perspective, suggesting a multifactorial account of dative functions in Hebrew. Analyzing a corpus of Hebrew dative clauses with multivariate statistical tools I reveal the usage patterns associated with each dative function, showing that traditional descriptions of dative functions are not reflected in usage. Working within a Usage-Based perspective, in which the meaning of a word is its use in language, I argue that Hebrew has only four distinct dative usage patterns, termed Discourse Profile Constructions: conventional correspondences between a multifactorial usage pattern and a unified conceptualization of the world. The four Discourse Profile Constructions are: (i) the Extended Transitive Discourse Profile Construction, (ii) the Human Endpoint Discourse Profile Construction, (iii) the Extended Intransitive Discourse Profile Construction, and (iv), the Evaluative Reference point Discourse Profile Construction. By revealing such correspondences between usage patterns and conceptualizations, the present paper (i) broadens the Construction Grammar notion of Argument Structure Construction, and (ii), suggests an innovative account for the notion of usage as a factor in the conventional pairing between form and function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the authors discuss the various articles published within the issue on such topics as idioms, parallelism, and syntax-semantics interface.

The syntactic literature on idioms contains some proposals that are surprising from a compositional perspective. For example, there are proposals that, in the case of verb-object idioms, the verb combines directly with the noun inside its DP complement, and the determiner is introduced higher up in the syntactic structure, or is late-adjoined. This seems to violate compositionality insofar as it is generally assumed that the semantic role of the determiner is to convert a noun to the appropriate semantic type to serve as the argument to the function denoted by the verb. In this paper, we establish a connection between this line of analysis and lines of work in semantics that have developed outside of the domain of idioms, particularly work on incorporation and work that combines formal and distributional semantic modelling. This semantic work separates the composition of descriptive content from that of discourse referent introducing material; our proposal shows that this separation offers a particularly promising way to handle the compositional difficulties posed by idioms, including certain patterns of variation in intervening determiners and modifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a discourse-analytic study of the verbs aamadan 'come' and raftan 'go' in Persian as they appear in thirty oral elicited narratives and uses English narratives based on identical stimuli as a reference point for a comparative analysis. The paper argues that despite certain similarities, the two sets of verbs in English and Persian have clear differences, both in terms of the syntactic structures in which they appear and their functions within the stories. Notably, beyond the expression of translational motion, aamadan and raftan encode aspect, subjectivity, and the speakers' perspectives on certain elements of the events as the stories unfold in their memories. Such choices in grammatical structures of the narratives can reveal much about the speakers' underlying cognitive processing and contribute to the understanding of the speakers' conceptual image of the story line. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce the issue of adjective order and show that different approaches vary in their answers to the question of how fine-grained the semantic categories determining adjective order are. We report on a corpus study that we conducted and that illustrates that a clear answer to the question of what general factors exactly determine adjective order is elusive, given the multifactorial nature of the problem. We then present the individual contributions to this special issue, and how they attempt to add new observations from Germanic languages to the general issues revolving around the topic of adjective order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the diachronic development of labile verbs in the French causative-anticausative alternation. The aim is to show that the development is best described with the notion of persistence (defined as 'endurance under competition'). In the first part of the paper I will show that French labile verbs indeed had (and still have) a serious competitor, viz. the reflexively marked anticausative. While mostly labile verbs were used to encode the alternation in 12th century Old French, in present-day French the pattern with a formally derived anticausative dominates. In the second part of the paper I will focus on the second aspect of the notion persistence and provide the following empirical evidence for the endurance of the labile pattern: (i) the high number of labile verbs used to express the alternation in present-day French, (ii) labile verbs in the French causative-anticausative alternation are not just remnants from an older stage of the language, (iii) the decrease in lability is a very slow process, and (iv) unmarked anticausatives still appear in the same semantic contexts as reflexive anticausatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to shed light on the meaning of the construction 'a relativizer- cwul [complementizer] -al- 'know' ' in Korean, specifically on its semantic ambiguity between meaning 'believe that . . .' and meaning 'know that . . .'. When it is followed exclusively by psych predicates in present-day Korean, particularly either al- 'know' or molu- 'not.know,' cwul comes to have its extended function as a complementizer from its original sense meaning 'method,' or 'way.' I argue that the ambiguity belongs to the overall construction, which is licensed by the neutral epistemic stance encoded by the complementizer cwul. I also contend that the cwul al- construction that contains the predicate al- 'know' shows asymmetrical usages of first and nonfirst-person subjects; the present-tense cwul al- construction with a first-person subject is not normally licensed. This paper employs mental-spaces theory to account for the ambiguity and the asymmetry, which stem from the covert interactions between the two viewpoints. I show that the theory captures the speaker's backgrounded knowledge with backgrounded information accommodation, a specific mental-space evocation mechanism, which is crucial in the construal of the construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies constructions dedicated to the expression of an after the fact reprimand to a second person in the languages of Europe. Taking a usage-based perspective, it argues against earlier analyses of these reproachatives as imperatives, optatives or conditionals, which fail to capture their idiosyncrasies and overpredict both their cross-linguistic frequency and the grammaticality of types of imperative in a language. Based on a closer examination of Dutch, the paper assumes a middle position between the existing views in that it argues for an account of the Dutch reproachative as the hybrid outcome of the interaction of the aforementioned constructions and of processes such as analogy, conventionalization and insubordination. It explores to what extent such an analysis applies to the other European languages featuring a reproachative and what its implications are for our understanding of imperative semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numeral classifiers have consistently been treated as lexical words (实词 shici or 体词tici) by traditional Chinese grammarians but considered functional elements in most theoretical linguistic literature and treated as functionally equivalent to the definite article in English. In this paper, I point out that (i) unlike the definite article the in English that denotes "definiteness" regardless of context, bare nouns and numeral classifiers in Sinitic languages indicate neither "definiteness" nor "indefiniteness" out of context; (ii) the analysis of equating Chinese numeral classifiers with English definite article is the consequence of mistaking an essentially pragmatic phenomenon for a grammatical one (Wu 2016. 语法性与语用性Yufaxing yu yuyongxing [Grammaticality versus pragmaticality]. Shougao 手稿). Based on various sources of evidence, I demonstrate that the primary function of classifiers has remained unchanged, namely that of classification and individualization (cf. Bisang 1999. Classifiers in East and Southeast Asian languages: Counting and beyond. In Jadranka Gvozdanović (ed.), Numeral types and changes worldwide, 113–185. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter). Although bare [Cl +N] phrases and even bare classifiers in some Sinitic languages can sometimes be interpreted definitely, it is strictly subject to context and the pragmatic restriction of familiarity (Li and Bisang 2012. Classifiers in Sinitic languages: From individuation to definiteness-marking. Lingua 122. 335–355). This is confirmed by our questionnaire survey that reveals that the grammatical feature of "definiteness" in these languages is invariably indicated by demonstratives. I thus conclude that numeral classifiers in Sinitic languages can be treated as belonging to the semi-lexical category in the sense of Corver and van Riemsdijk (2001. Semi-lexical categories: The function of content words and the content of function words. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter), which is in agreement with analyses of classifiers as fu mingci "quasi-nominals" (Lü 1953. Hanyu xuexi [Chinese learning]. Beijing: Chinese Youth Press) or "nominal auxiliaries" (Chao 1968. A grammar of spoken Chinese. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accounts of semantic change have tended to emphasize universal, language internal explanations embedded within comparative typological frameworks. This paper describes in detail one lexeme and its many idiomatic collocations in one Arabic dialect, showing that the idiomaticity of Nigerian Arabic raas 'head' has been fundamentally determined by Kanuri, the dominant language of the Lake Chad region, with which Arabic has been in contact for 600 years. That the changes are due to contact is substantiated by the striking difference Nigerian Arabic shows against Egyptian-Arabic, from which ancestral Nigerian Arabic originally split. The semantic change can be ascertained via qualitative, categorical interpretation using established cognitive linguistic concepts, and via corpusbased statistical measures, providing a striking example of the largescale transfer of motivated opacity via contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the perception verb systems in three little documented Khoe languages, i.e., ⫲Haba, G∣ui, and G∥ana, the present paper demonstrates their typologically unique feature, namely the crosslinguistically uncommon behavior of TASTE among the five sense modalities involved in perception verbs. By using the new findings the paper examines two models of the sense-modality hierarchy proposed by Viberg (1984, 2001). In addition, this study also reports on two peculiar lexical semantic classes, i.e., 'elaborate taste verbs' and 'food texture verbs', attested in G∣ui and G∥ana, in which TASTE potentially plays an important role. The findings of this study have some theoretical implications for lexical typology since they show a subtle interaction between universal and language-specific factors. [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]

The paper revisits Duffield's (2007) (Duffield, Nigel. 2007. Aspects of Vietnamese clausal structure: Separating tense from assertion. Linguistics 45(4). 765–814) analysis of the correlation between the position of a 'when'-phrase and the temporal reference of a bare sentence in Vietnamese. Bare sentences in Vietnamese, based on (Smith, Carlota S. & Mary S. Erbaugh. 2005. Temporal interpretation in Mandarin Chinese. Linguistics 43(4). 713–756), are argued to obtain their temporal interpretation from their aspectual composition, and the default temporal reference: bounded events are located in the past, unbounded events at present. It is shown that the correlation so observed in when-questions is superficial, and is tied to the syntax and semantics of temporal modification and the requirement that temporal adverbials denoting future time is base generated in sentence-initial position, and past time adverbials in sentence-final position. A 'when'-phrase, being temporally underspecified, obtains its temporal value from its base position. However, the correlation between word order and temporal reference in argument wh-questions and declaratives is factual, depending on whether the predicate-argument configuration allows for a telic interpretation or not. To be specific, it is dependent on whether the application of Generic Modification (Snyder, William. 2012. Parameter theory and motion predicates. In Violeta Demonte & Louise McNally (eds.), Telicity, change, and state. Acrosscategorial view of event structure, 279–299. Oxford: Oxford University Press) or accomplishment composition is realized. Canonical declaratives, and argument wh-questions, with telicity inducing material, license GM or accomplishment composition, yielding bounded events, hence past; by contrast, their non-canonical counterparts block GM or accomplishment composition, giving rise to unbounded event descriptions, hence non-past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the interpretations of caused change-of-state predicates in Korean, and in particular non-culmination readings in which the result state inherent to the meaning of the predicate fails to obtain either fully (zero result) or partially. We argue that zero result readings require that the subject intended the coming about of the result state, while readings in which some result obtains (partially or completely) lack this entailment. Yet zero result interpretations are not reducible to 'try'-constructions since the former but not the latter require the direct causation. Furthermore, zero result readings arise only in active voice, a grammatical constraint not explicitly discussed for other languages. We argue that the full suite of possible readings arises from two factors: a sublexical modality over worlds conforming to the agent's intentions for zero result readings that arises from a special active voice inflection in Korean and a scalar semantics for change-of-state verbs that derives partial result readings as a type of degree achievement interpretation. An interaction of these two factors produce the range of possible readings for Korean change-of-state predicates. Finally, we discuss our account in relation to the Agent Control Hypothesis of Demirdache and Martin (2015) that agentivity properties of the subject are necessary for certain non-culmination readings, and suggest that Korean exemplifies the ACH provided that what counts as "control" includes intentionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares the diachronic development of tornar( e)+ a+infinitive (henceforth abbreviated RETURN+INF) constructions in Spanish, Catalan, and Italian, a topic that especially for Catalan and Italian has not received much attention. I develop and explore the hypothesis that due to their lexical origin, iterative constructions develop from a restitutive to a repetitive function. A diachronic analysis of a corpus of RETURN+INF tokens from the three languages suggests that the grammaticalization of RETURN+INF constructions can be measured in terms of (a) actionality and (b) restructuring as mirrored in the possibility of clitic climbing. A statistical analysis using generalized linear mixed-effects regression modeling demonstrates an interplay between restructuring and the actionality of the predicates in the development of RETURN+INF constructions: the grammaticalization process affects state, achievement, and accomplishment predicates before activity predicates because activity predicates exclude a restitutive meaning. The paper thus identifies a grammaticalization path for RETURN+INF constructions common to three Romance languages that suggests a link between typological and diachronic observations. At the same time, it identifies differences in the diachronic development of these periphrases between the Ibero-Romance languages and Italian. In addition, it proposes a statistical means of assessing quantitative differences in the degree to which a verbal periphrasis is grammaticalized across related languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Morphemes that encode the semantic role of Beneficiary display complex patterns of polysemy. Such patterns have arisen through diachronic processes which are for the most part still unexplored. In the paper I discuss common assumptions about the directionality of semantic extension and about expected and unexpected polysemies. I show that, next to the often mentioned polysemy of Beneficiary, Recipient, Purpose and Direction, another frequent pattern includes Beneficiary, Purpose and Cause. Morphemes that exhibit such polysemy have original spatial meanings which include Location or Path, but not Direction. Notably, such original spatial meanings have been dropped in the course of semantic developments described in the paper. After discussing some well-attested diachronic developments, I show that, at least in the languages of Europe, markers of Beneficiary, Purpose, and Cause underwent an unpredicted semantic extension that led them to also indicate Direction. Such extension provides evidence for a rare development that has led a concrete spatial concept to be denoted by a morpheme that had an abstract meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for a syntactic approach to aspectuality, where semantic information about subevent structure is incorporated into the phrase marker. Such an approach would be justified only if aspectual properties present syntactic as well as semantic effects. It is the aim of the paper to present evidence of such syntactic effects. Slavic preverbs have standardly been regarded as perfectivizing (or felicity-marking) morphemes. It will he argued that pre verbs are also causative morphemes. As such, they are situated in the tipper part of a VP-layer structure, a light verb widely accepted to he reserved for CA USE. In English, the aspectual interpretation of a terminative or durative event depends on the specified or unspecified cardinality of the object (Verkuvi 1993) and aspect is calculated in a functional projection Asp.P between the two VP layers (Travis 1991). In Slavic, on the other hand, it is the presence or absence of a preverb in the upper verbal head that encodes a terminative or a durative interpretation. This contrast is explained with the relatively higher structural position of Slavic preverbs with respect to the functional projection AspP in English. Similar scope effects are den monstrated with articles in Russian, with interpretations of Polish and English imperfective sentences, and with manner adverbs in Bulgarian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that contrary to commonly held belief the -ing affix in nominal gerund phrases (NGPs) in English does not function as a nominalizing element. The primary evidence for the argument comes from the failure of the V-ing element in NGPs to take nominal inflections (FuIlum 1991), unlike nominalized verbs heading phrasal nominalizations in languages with dedicated nominalizing affixes (such as Korean), which behave morphologically as nominals. However, in order to account for the fact that (i) V-big, when used in lexical deverbal nominalizations, behaves morphologically as a noun, and (ii) the same element is used in both lexical and phrasal nominalizations (ALe. NGPs), I propose that both types of nominalizations are zero-derived from projections of the present participle form of the verb - the difference being that zero derivation applies LEXICALLY to V° in lexical deverbal nominalizations while it applies PRASALLY to Vn in NGPs. The proposal for English receives support from a similar analysis for lexical and phrasal nominalizations in Spanish, both of which are based on the infinitive. The paper also provides an account of the aforementioned morphological difference between the deverbal elements in English and Spanish nominalizations on the one hand, where nominalizations are based on an inflectionalform of verbs (VFORM), and those in languages with dedicated nominalizers, such as Korean, on the other. The analysis proposed in the paper presupposes a view of morphosyntactic interaction in which morphological combinatoric operations such as affixation and zero derivation apply in both the lexicon and syntax. To the extent that it succeeds in answering descriptive and conceptual questions about the behavior of lexical and phrasal nominalizations in different languages, the analysis proposed here provides support for this particular view of morphosyntactic interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates syntactic productivity in diachrony with a data-driven approach. Previous research indicates that syntactic productivity (the property of grammatical constructions to attract new lexical fillers) is largely driven by semantics, which calls for an operationalization of lexical meaning in the context of empirical studies. It is suggested that distributional semantics can fulfill this role by providing a measure of semantic similarity between words that is derived from lexical co-occurrences in large text corpora. On the basis of a case study of the construction 'V the hell out of NP', e.g., You scared the hell out of me, it is shown that distributional semantics not only appropriately captures how the verbs in the distribution of the construction are related, but also enables the use of visualization techniques and statistical modeling to analyze the semantic development of a construction over time and identify the determinants of syntactic productivity in naturally occurring data. [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]

Unlike the traditional approaches that describe and define antonymy on the basis of semantic properties of antonymous pairs in a language system, antonyms are in this paper considered with reference to their roles in actual language use. Antonymy has traditionally been regarded as a paradigmatic relation, but recent studies of antonym co-occurrence in electronic corpora of English and Serbian have identified two major and four minor functions of antonyms in discourse, with its accompanying lexico-syntactic patterns, matching the results of similar analyses in Japanese, Swedish, and Dutch. This paper aims to investigate the performance of three antonymous patterns in retrieving contrastive terms and the possibility to create the contrastive profile of given seed words in Serbian written discourse by means of those patterns. It also examines whether there is a relation between the markedness distinction between members of the antonymous pair and the position of the chosen seed word (i.e., whether it comes in the X or the Y position in the pattern). Results of the study show that it is possible to create the textual profile of antonyms using these lexico-syntactic constructions, and that the unmarked member has a richer contrastive profile in text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Together with other Northern Samoyedic languages, Enets shows a crosslinguistically unusual way of expressing benefactive semantics. The Enets benefactive construction consists of a specific 'destinative' affix that marks the presence of a beneficiary in a given clause and of a possessive affix that marks the beneficiary itself. Both affixes are attached to one of the verb's arguments. This makes the beneficiary encoded as an adnominal dependent of the verb's argument. This paper has two goals. Firstly, a detailed description of the Enets benefactive construction is provided, including its morphology, morphosyntax, and peculiarities of the differential object marking. Secondly, we aim to establish crosslinguistic parallels with the Enets benefactive construction. While phenomena with similar semantic features have been attested in the world's languages, we show that the Enets construction demonstrates a unique set of semantic and morphosyntactic properties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including transitivity in grammar, Uralic languages, and semantics.

This paper discusses differential argument realization in Abui, a Papuan language (Eastern Indonesia) with semantic alignment (in terms of Donohue and Wichmann 2008; Kratochvíl 2011). The paper examines the roles of volitionality, referential hierarchy, and specificity in differential argument realization (employing light verbs and verbal agreement) and shows that their effects are observable throughout the argument realization system and can be therefore considered the counterpart of differential case marking (DOM/DSM) reported for syntactically aligned, case-marking languages (Bossong 1983; Aissen 2003; Malchukov 2005; Kittilä 2006; de Swart 2007; and others). Although Abui differential argument realization correlates with the referential hierarchy (Bickel 2008), verbal subclasses (in terms of Tsunoda's 1985: 388 affectedness hierarchy) determine whether differential argument realization appears or not (cf. von Heusinger and Kaiser 2011). The paper also considers the diachronic origins of differential argument realization in Abui. Most constructions are argued to originate from two-clause constructions, such as topic/focus constructions gradually merging into singleclause structures. Information-structure related morphemes (light verbs in Abui) serialize with lexical verbs. The process starts with 1st and 2nd person participants (interlocutors) and may extend to human or human-like third persons. Grammaticalization ends in the fusion of the light verb and person prefix, creating new verbal agreement paradigms, as manifested in several central Alor-Pantar languages (Kratochvíl et al. 2011). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we consider the grammaticalization of subject agreement adducing first-hand synchronic evidence from presentational VS constructions in Italo-Romance dialects. While the existing literature has placed emphasis on the pragmatic properties of the controller, we explore its semantic properties. We argue that variation in subject agreement can only be fully captured with reference to an independently established semantic scale of subjecthood that is based on the position of arguments in semantic representation, and hence on their lexical entailments. Unaffected actor is the default controller in accusative alignment. The patterns of dialect microvariation arise, in our analysis, from variation in macrorole assignment in presentational focus. Our proposal formalizes at the discourse-semantics-syntax interface the idea that, in presentational VS constructions, the core argument S may be treated as part of the predicate, thus failing to control grammatical subject agreement. This happens in presentational focus because the predication is about an implicit topic. The latter can trigger a type of pronominal agreement that is comparable to Bresnan and Mchombo's (Bresnan, Joan & Sam A. Mchombo. 1987. Topic, pronoun and agreement in Chichewa. Language 63. 741–782) anaphoric agreement. This study provides robust arguments in support of an understanding of subject agreement as the grammaticalization of semantic-relation contrasts, as well as pragmatic-role distinctions. [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]

This paper presents Dutch and English predicates that behave as positive polarity items and provides a partial, semantically-grounded classification of this group of PPIs. The items are studied from the perspective of anti-licensing behavior (by negation, either locally or long-distance, in questions, and by weakly negative quantifiers such as little and few). Predicates, unlike quantifiers, do not have wide scope readings (which allow quantificational PPIs such as somebody to appear in the syntactic scope of negation). Using a mixture of corpus data and introspective judgments, we show that anti-licensing among PPIs is not uniform (mirroring earlier results on NPIs which likewise show considerable variation). Rescuing contexts are likewise shown to differ among PPIs. Some of the PPI predicates show complex interaction with illocutionary force (especially mandative force), and others with differences between presupposed and asserted propositions. High degree predicates, finally, point toward the existence of connections between the marking of degree and positive polarity. PPI status is argued to be the result of a complex interaction between the effects of negation and other nonveridical operators, and other semantic factors, which differ among subclasses of PPIs. Anti-licensing by weak negation correlates fairly well with anti-licensing by long-distance negation, a finding which is (partly) in line with a recent proposal by Spector (2014, Global positive polarity items and obligatory exhaustivity. Semantics and Pragmatics 7(11). 1–61) concerning global PPIs. However, we find there to be more variation among the PPIs studied here than the classification of Spector (2014) or any binary classification stipulates. [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]

This paper discusses a multidimensional probabilistic semantic map of lexical motion verb stems based on data collected from parallel texts (viz. translations of the Gospel according to Mark) for 100 languages from all continents. The crosslinguistic diversity of lexical semantics in motion verbs is illustrated in detail for the domain of 'go', 'come', and 'arrive' type contexts. It is argued that the theoretical bases underlying probabilistic semantic maps from exemplar data are the isomorphism hypothesis (given any two meanings and their corresponding forms in any particular language, more similar meanings are more likely to be expressed by the same form in any language), similarity semantics (similarity is more basic than identity), and exemplar semantics (exemplar meaning is more fundamental than abstract concepts). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The semantic space location-existence-possession has been investigated from different perspectives since Lyons 1967. In this paper it is first accurately redefined (Section 2) so that it constitutes an operative onomasiological grid for lexical and constructional typological research. Patterns of joint expression of categories and of clear distinction of categories are examined over significant subparts of the relevant semantic space (Sections 2.3/3.1: possession corresponding e.g., to E. The boy had a book; thematic location: E. The book was on the table; rhematic location: E. There was a book on the table; bounded existence: E. There are many lions in Africa; ( generic) existence: E. There are many unhappy people). This research is conducted on the basis of an initial 19-language sample (Section 3.2 and Appendix B), which, despite its bias towards Europe and Africa, yields very interesting observations concerning crosslinguistic tendencies and the effects of genetic affiliation and areal proximity. Since for the typology of this field it is not only the verbal lexical item that counts, but the whole construction (in some languages even with zero copula), adequate tools for a constructional typology have to be developed in terms of inheritance links inspired by Construction Grammar (Section 4). In the central sections of the paper, crosslinguistic patterns of inheritance and of clear distinction of categories within the semantic space are analyzed with respect to the target concepts possession (Section 5), location (Section 6), and existence (Section 7). On the semantic level the relevant links are all metonymic or at least contiguity-based. From the detailed analyses several interesting crosslinguistic, but also areal tendencies can be gathered (Section 8.1). A general hypothesis about the domain location + existence emerges: languages either opt for informational salience, opposing thematic location to the (rhematic) rest, or for propositional salience, opposing (generic) location to existence, or they dismiss both types of salience, linking (generic) location and existence directly to each other. As a conclusion, three interesting methodological and theoretical issues are addressed: the non-necessary congruence between synchronic patterns and diachronic paths (Section 8.2.1), problems of the conceptual grid in the realm rhematic existence/ rhematic location (Section 8.2.2), and the utility of an account in terms of constructional typology (8.2.3). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an overview of a project that aims at creating a representative catalogue of crosslinguistically recurring semantic shifts in the languages of the world and at implementing this catalogue in the form of a searchable computer database. Such a catalogue is useful in several theoretical and methodological respects. First of all, both universal and language-specific semantic shifts can be considered a window onto human cognitive mechanisms operative in the domain of linguistic conceptualization. Second, the catalogue provides a rich empirical basis for the study of genetic and areal tendencies in semantic change, as well as in polysemy patterns. Another potential application is historical reconstruction, since the catalogue gives evidence for attested paths of diachronic semantic evolution. In Section 1 we outline the general concept of the catalogue of semantic shifts. Section 2 describes the design of the computer database. In Section 3 we discuss some difficulties that we have faced while working on the catalogue. The next three sections demonstrate how the catalogue can be used in linguistic research and present an analysis of three selected issues, namely semantic shifts in the domain of dimension (Section 4), motivation strategies in the domain of folk biology (Section 5), and euphemization as a mechanism of semantic change (Section 6). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates Japanese-speaking children's (in)sensitivity to information strength when interpreting sentences containing the focus particle datte even. It examines whether or not their sensitivity is affected by the Question Under Discussion (QUD) and the Felicity Judgment (FJ) task based on the Processing Limitation Hypothesis (PLH; cf. Chierchia et al., The acquisition of disjunction: Evidence for a grammatical view of scalar implicatures: 157168, Cascadilla Press, 2001, Semantic and pragmatic competence in children's and adults' comprehension of or, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Because datte even is not a scalar term, it does not give rise to scalar implicatures (SIs) by constituting a part of scales. Even evokes conventional implicatures. However, an even sentence in context in addition to the conventional implicatures evokes a special case of SI calculated from context-dependent scales, which is pragmatic inferences induced by evens conventional implicatures (i.e., the word's semantic/pragmatic import). The relevant scale (generally) concerns the NP element focused by even and a set of alternatives. Because sentences without even do not evoke any SI, I assume that the relevant implicatures are conventional in nature. Three experiments were done to examine whether Japanese-speaking children are really (in)capable of calculating conventional implicatures derived from datte sentences. It was found that (i) Children are insensitive to pragmatic anomalies of single infelicitous sentences (Experiments 1 and 2). This inability to detect pragmatic infelicity is consistent with findings about their ability to compute SIs. On the other hand, the adults showed sensitivity to conventional implicatures in all three experiments, which may be taken as evidence that the computation of implicatures derived from datte sentences differs from that of SIs. (ii) Unlike the results reported for SI in Zondervan (Effects of question under discussion and focus on scalar implicatures: 3952, 2007, Experiments on QUD and focus as a contextual constraint on scalar implicature calculation, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), the wh-focus/QUD way of asking questions does not facilitate the children's performance with datte sentences (Experiment 2). (iii) The FJ task improved children's performance (Experiment 3), thus supporting the PLH, which was applied to SI computation (Chierchia et al., Semantic and pragmatic competence in children's and adults' comprehension of or, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004; cf. Reinhart, The processing cost of reference-set computation: Guess patterns in acquisition, Utrecht University, 1999, Interface strategies, MIT Press, 2006), and to the computation of implicatures involved in datte sentences. (iv) Children are unable to compute implicatures based on context-specific pragmatic scales derived from datte sentences, when a single underinformative statement is given. This partly contradicts previous findings on SI based on contextdependentpragmatic scales (Papafragou and Tantalou, Language Acquisition 12: 7182, 2004). The results indicate that children's insensitivity to the pragmatic infelicity of datte sentences stems from the processing load induced by building and maintaining alternative representations, as reported for SI computation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of insertional code switching frequently include examples in which combinations of several words from the embedded language occur together in matrix-language clauses. In this paper, a range of such constructions are analyzed as multimorphemic lexical units. Such units are a rental yet neglected, element of grammar, which blur the distinction between syntax and lexicon. The paper identifies several types of unit in bilingual codeswitching data, including inserted plural nouns, compound nouns, adjective-noun and verb-object collocations, and idioms, and provides evidence for their widespread involvement in insertional code switching. Independent evidence for unit status comes from their frequently observed semantic noncompositionality and other semantic and morphosyntactic features. Recognition of the lexical status of these chunks may contribute to a unified theory of code switching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the common denominator of topic comment (TC) constructions in natural languages is not a single Junctional feature (e.g. aboutness) but rather the fact that they share some salient semantic attributes with prototypical examples of TC. The paper tries to disentangle these prototypical semantic attributes of TC and then shows, mainly referring to examples from German, that different TC constructions are characterized by different combinations of these attributes and therefore cannot be analyzed properly by unitary theories of TC function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper deals with the description and characterization of the melodic patterns of absolute interrogative utterances in northern German spontaneous speech from an intonation and semantic-pragmatic point of view. This research has been carried out based on 246 absolute questions from spontaneous speech settings by multiple speakers of different gender, age, and education by applying the Melodic Analysis of Speech (MAS) method developed by Cantero (2002, Teoría y análisis de la entonación. Barcelona: Ediciones de la Universidad de Barcelona.). As a result, we found five intonation patterns for absolute questions in German: falling final inflection, rising final inflection, risingfalling final inflection, high nucleus final inflection and rising body and final inflection. The first three have been previously defined by researchers using the ToBI method, while the fourth and fifth patterns had not, to date, been described in this context. In addition to defining the melodic features of each one in spontaneous speech, we have also contributed to providing the different pragmatic meanings discovered in the various contexts in which each pattern appears. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the indexical value of /s/-fronting in White Afrikaans and in White South African English (WSAfE). Prior research on this feature has shown that fronted articulations of /s/ in WSAfE serve as a regional and social indicator of the wealthy northern suburbs of Johannesburg, and anecdotal evidence suggests that the feature carries a similar meaning in White Afrikaans. This study therefore aims to examine whether the variable carries similar meanings across the two languages. Data are based on the evaluative reactions toward different experimental stimuli that were presented to 214 Afrikaans-English bilinguals in South Africa during a modified matched-guise task. The results indicate that /s/-fronting in a man's voice is perceived in similar terms in White Afrikaans and WSAfE though it carries somewhat different meanings across the two languages when it occurs in a woman's voice, a difference related in turn to different approaches to gender across the two speech communities. The results of this research, and the indexical value of /s/-fronting in the two languages, are therefore only understandable in terms of certain sociohistorical and sociological differences between the two speech communities. The article ends with some discussion relating to the possible source of the relevant similarities and differences, i.e., parallel innovation or sociophonetic transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aspectual properties of English particles still lack a satisfactory account, as neither the standard (Brinton 1985, Verb particles in English: Aspect or aktionsart? Studia Linguistica 39(2). 157-168. doi:10.1111/j.1467- 9582.1985.tb00750.x (accessed 30 January 2015)) nor a more recent (Cappelle and Chauvin 2010, Interprétations aspectuelles des verbes à particule en anglais: Téliques, comparatifs, résultatifs. In Pascale Hadermann, Olga Inkova, Michel Pierrard & Dan Van Raemdonck (eds.), Approches de la scalarité, 249-281. Geneve: Droz) account can be generalized over all aspectual particles. By analyzing aspect in terms of scalarity this paper argues that particles are either scalar or non-scalar, which leads to their different aspectual and syntactic behavior. Scalar particles are marked for scalarity; they can affect the argument structure of the verb root and enforce telicity. In contrast, nonscalar particles are unmarked for scalarity; they do not affect the argument structure and do not enforce telicity. Both scalar and non-scalar particles systematically appear in atelic and telic sentences, depending on the verb root and its arguments. Scalarity, like telicity, is a feature built compositionally and monotonically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with two cognate modifiers, respective and respectively. Despite the obvious fact that they belong to different parts of speech, they have been considered to perform the same semantic function of mapping two sets of participants in a sentence, and of distributing the predicate of the sentence, in accordance with the mapping, to a number of propositions representing the subparts of the event described in that sentence. As regards their syntactic occurrence& they have been regarded as complementary in distribution. This paper endeavors to show that the two modifiers play different roles and select different domains for their notional operations, and that the syntactic complementarity claimed by many researchers is only apparent and does not obtain in every case. The important thing to note in handling the semantic function and syntactic distribution of these modifiers is their difference in syntactic category. We begin with this very basic observation, and in the course of this study, the slight morphological difference proves to be strongly connected with every aspect of the syntactic and semantic properties of the two modifiers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]