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Linguistic and cultural diversity is a feature of most, if not all, modern societies, whether it results from historical processes of state formation, from the aggregation of colonial possessions a...

Some languages code that an action was performed unintentionally using evidentials, which in other contexts indicate a speaker’s source of information. Evidentials are only used for indicating nonvolitionality when an action was carried out by the speaker in the past. The evidential marker may carry a quite different meaning in coding nonvolitionality, this may be an extension of its primary meaning, or it may simply be a pragmatic interpretation of the use of a particular evidential in first person contexts. A nonvolitional interpretation can arise with nonvisual evidentials, visual or direct evidentials, inferential evidentials, and nonwitnessed, nonfirsthand or indirect evidentials.

The term logophoric is most strongly tied to pronominal systems. However, most recent literature on logophoricity accepts the existence of verbal marking of logophoricity. Through examining the verbal logophoricity which has been reported in African languages, it can be seen that there are three different types of verbal marking: logophoric cross-referencing, first person logophoricity, and verbal logophoric affixation. These different types may appear as the only form of logophoric marking in a language, or they may combine with each other and with logophoric pronouns. Each of these types appears to have distinct properties and, hence, needs to be treated separately in typological literature.

The use of the expression gay and lesbian in a corpus of televised spoken Australian English is examined. It is shown that speakers treat this as a lexicalized expression, rather than a productively created conjunct of gay and lesbian . The meaning of the whole expression is not predictable from the meaning of the parts, in that gay and lesbian is used to refer to a broader set of people than the sets covered by the terms gay and lesbian individually. Gay and lesbian is also used in reference to a single non-specific individual, where a disjunct phrase with or would normally be appropriate. Additional support for the lexicalized status of this expression comes from the occasional use of gay and lesbians, with a single marker of plurality on what appears to be a conjoined noun phrase.

Donohue's (1998) recent unarticle developed an Optimality Theory analysis of the verb prefix ordering of the general tense form of Maung, a non‐Pama Nyungan language of northern Australia. However,...

La linguistique historique repose sur l'utilisation de sources. Dans la reconstruction de l'histoire des langues, les donnees les plus anciennes sont evidemment les plus recherchees. Mais cela pose parfois certains problemes, que l'A. examine ici, apportant des corrections a une classification erronee de certaines langues equatoriales et colombiennes

This paper on Spanish for Science and Technology (SST) analyzes the rhetorical functions carried out by the selection of voice — active, passive or se-passive — in five biological research articles in Spanish. It compares these rhetorical functions with those found in French and English scientific papers. Finally it suggests that there may be some universals which can be established on the basis of this comparison, but only through the introduction of an intermediate level of “discourse function” between the levels of rhetorical function and the level of grammatical form.

This paper examines the semantics of two Spanish causative constructions ‐ the hacer‐plus‐infinitive construction and the hacer‐plus‐subjunctive construction using Natural Semantic Metalanguage to describe the semantic invariants of these two constructions. The analysis is limited to sentences which have animate causers. From the analysis of such sentences, it can be demonstrated that the two constructions have similar but distinct meanings. The hacer‐plus‐subjunctive construction encodes some idea of intentionality which is absent from the hacer‐plus‐infinitive construction. Where the construction with the subjunctive is used, the action involved is often (though not always) indirect, or mediated, rather than direct, in which case the infinitive is usually (but not always) used.