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The goal of this paper is to offer an analysis of polysemy and related semantic relations emerging in prepositions belonging to Aquilan, a dialect of Italian. The data are based on fieldwork research, in which different polysemy tests where used in an experimental setting. Two key results emerged from the study. First, Aquilan prepositions display a degree of polysemy inversely proportional to their morphological complexity, with some prepositions being monosemous (e.g. a, a destra de, ‘ngima a). Second, prepositions’ senses can stand in relations of colexification, partial synonymy, or hyponymy. Colexification holds when related senses become part of a preposition’s sense range; hyponymy and partial synonymy (overlap) when one preposition denotes all or some of the places denoted by a second preposition. The work thus offers a paradigmatic view of the polysemy of Aquilan prepositions that sheds light on seldom attested polysemy patterns, and contributes novel insights on the ongoing debate on this phenomenon.

The Modern Chinese parenthetical clause-taking mental predicate (CTMP) ni xiang (as in Ni xiang yinian huafei duoshao qian a? 'You think (about it), how much money will it cost each year?') is used to urge the hearer to give attention to the content of the clause with which it combines. It is argued that its formation does not follow a commonly accepted matrix clause pathway, in which a parenthetical CTMP develops from a corresponding matrix clause structure, because examples of parenthetical CTMP ni xiang appear more than 150 years earlier than examples of matrix clause ni xiang in Early Modern Chinese. It is hypothesized instead that a conjoining pathway leading from a prosodically separated CTMP ni xiang to a prosodically unseparated CTMP ni xiang may be adopted to account for the formation of parenthetical CTMP ni xiang and its various contextual properties.

Studies in grammaticalization have established that processes of grammatical change frequently have lexical items as their source, and more specifically nouns and verbs. But there is at least one potential exception: As argued by Holger Diessel in a number of publications, demonstratives cannot be historically derived from other entities, such as lexical items. Based on a survey of languages from different parts of the world and belonging to different language families, the present paper argues that this generalization is in need of reconsideration.

Some recent lines of research suggest that there are two different domains of discourse processing where one is concerned with the form and meaning of sentences and their parts and the other with the organization of discourse beyond the sentence and the relationship between linguistic material and the extra-linguistic situation of discourse. One important mechanism relating the two domains to one another is provided by cooptation, a cognitive-communicative operation whereby pieces of discourse located in one domain are transferred to another domain. In the present paper, the nature of this operation is looked at in more detail based on the framework of Discourse Grammar (Kaltenbock et al. 2011, On thetical grammar. Studies in Language 35(4). 848-893; Heine et al. 2013, An outline of Discourse Grammar. In Shannon Bischoff & Carmen Jeny (eds.), Reflections on functionalism in linguistics, 175-233. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter Mouton).

Building on recent findings made in the framework of Construction Grammar, on the one hand, and within the framework on grammaticalization, on the other, the present paper is concerned with the development from lexical compounding to derivation. Compounding is presumably the most common source of derivational categories and this applies in particular to modifying (endocentric) compounds, which are the main subject of this paper. By looking at three cases of grammatical change in English, German, and the West African language Ewe it is argued that the two frameworks differ in their goals and in their approaches. Both frameworks search for regularities in grammatical change, but whereas Construction Grammar has a focus on constructional change, that is, change in the development of constructions, the central question asked by students of grammaticalization is how and why, e.g., lexical categories give rise to grammatical (or functional) categories.

The source construction and the pathway for the formation of English epistemic adverbials are widely discussed in the literature. However, few studies to our knowledge have specifically discussed a hypothetical source construction of separate clauses and a hypothetical initial-to-medial pathway. Chinese guoran was first used as a separate clause, and later developed into an epistemic adverbial meaning 'it really happens'. Diachronic investigations reveal that it followed a hypothetical initial-to-medial pathway leading from a clause-initial position to a clause-medial position. The hypothetical source construction and the hypothetical pathway are supported by diachronic changes of other epistemic adverbials in Chinese, and may be adopted to account for the formation of some epistemic adverbials in the other languages.