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The article presents a study which analyzes gaze allocation during language planning and dynamic events. It concerns with naturalistic, dynamic scenes showing causative events and the way in which the event status is encoded in German and English. It also exploits grammatical differences in terms of verbal aspect.

The perfect tense-form verb ἀναβέβηκεν in John 3.13 is usually interpreted in light of traditional verb theory, as a ‘past action with present results’. This interpretation introduces an apparent problematic chronology in that the Son of Man ascends before descending; however, recent developments in Greek grammar, particularly verbal aspect theory, provide a viable solution to this grammatical ‘problem’ and indicate that the Son of Man's descent precedes his ascent. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper, a spin-off from a larger-scale research project, advances a novel perspective on recent introducers to quotations in interactive communicative settings, with the (current reporting) speaker and addressee(s) co-present: be like, quote, quote unquote, and the air-quotes are all ‘newcomers’ to the quotative system in English; they are constrained in usage to face-to-face contexts, and they foreground through animating the quote, resorting to the various modalities available in such situations: verbal, vocal, and gestural. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The analysis of ‘get’-passives across Germanic poses a number of challenges to our understanding of valency alternations: they exhibit surprising case alternations and recalcitrant thematic properties (Alexiadou 2012, Alexiadou, Anagnostopoulou & Sevdali to appear). In this article, we present novel data on ‘get’-passives in Icelandic; while Icelandic has played an important role in our understanding of case marking and valency alternations, ‘get’-passives have not, to our knowledge, been studied in this language before. By situating ‘get’-passives within the landscape of well-established case patterns of Icelandic, we are able to argue in favor of the following conclusions: (i) Icelandic ‘get’-passives involve unambiguously verbal passives; (ii) the surface subject of recipient ‘get’-passives (‘I got a letter sent to me’) does not originate as the dative indirect object of the passive participle, but rather originates as an (external) argument of ‘get’; and (iii) at least some intransitive ‘get’-passives (‘This got changed’) involve anticausativization of the corresponding causative ‘get’-passive (‘I got this changed’), as proposed for English by Haegeman (1985). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the grammaticalization of the lexical meaning of QUO "to cross, pass" in Mandarin Chinese. QUO displays two aspectual/temporal values, known as the experiential suffix -guo and the phase complement guo respectively. The first indicates that in the past there is at least one instance of the event represented by the sentence and the second that an expected event has occurred and is now over. The experiential suffix refers to indefinite occurrences, whereas the phase complement refers to definite occurrences. These two values can be unified at a theoretical level. Aspectual QUO is concerned in all cases with the location of events in time: it situates an event in the (relative) past and it indicates either that among past events there is at least one occurrence of this type of event (suffix -guo), or that a particular (previously identified) event has passed, that is, entered the class of the past events (phase complement guo). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article first outlines the theory of the predicative and enunciative operations (TOPE) developed by Antoine Culioli and his associates. It then shows how this theory enables one to analyse such linguistic units as the verbal prefix z- in Ikwere, spoken in Nigeria, and, more precisely, the way they operate in the language. We find that behind the various uses of z- is an invariant meaning element which consists of introducing a ranking between p and p', i.e., two constituent values of a given unorganized notional domain, such that the domain is finally organized. It is further argued that the TAM (Tense-Aspect-Modality) category, which z- is related to, is constructed by the utterance in which z- occurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]