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This article presents an exploration of several linguistic and discursive variables as they relate to behavior change obtained from psychotherapeutic motivational interviews. These interviews were conducted with native Spanish speakers, a relatively under investigated language minority group in the US with regard to this type of discourse. Using a linguistic framework, the study examines the tense, mood, and aspect (TMA) of Spanish verbs, the semantic verb type, such as desire, ability, readiness, reasons, need and commitment (DARN-C), and the context in which the verbs were produced in [+/- conflict] in narratives. Using qualitative and quantitative analyses, the study shows how shifts in verb tenses, the production of DARN-C semantic verb types, and speakers’ utterances implicitly involve an expression of change. Based on Grimshaw’s (1990) and Labov and Fanshel’s (1977) tenets regarding conflict talk in which they note that conflict involves speech acts such as defenses, retreats and challenges, and Brenneis (1996) who maintains that the contents of conflict narratives are intertwined with the “narrator, audience, purposes and expectations” (p. 42), the study shows how the presence of conflict-related narratives decreases between interviews. Namely, participants decrease the use of utterances that recount past events and events containing conflict and move in the direction of speaking about future events and less conflict as their sessions progressed.

This paper investigates the morpho-phonological differences between the members of related noun-verb pairs in Catalan Sign Language. Like parallel investigations in other sign languages, our experimental work provides evidence that the major differentiating factors between related nouns and verbs materialize in the movement component of signs and non-manual markers, thus providing empirical support to the hypothesis that most of noun-verb pairs have different morpho-phonological properties. We distinguish different types of movements, which we categorize into four regular morphological subgroups. We also take into account a fifth group that shows no apparent movement distinction. Concerning non-manual markers, we provide empirical evidence that nouns are mostly produced simultaneously with mouthing, in contrast to verbs, which in a smaller proportion are produced mainly with mouth gestures. Crucially, the fifth group presents the largest ratio of mouthing for nouns and even for verbs. We address these findings within an exo-skeletal theoretical syntactic approach (Borer 2005a,b, 2013, 2014). We acknowledge the financial support for our research. M.Teresa Espinal's contribution has been made possible by the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and FEDER Funds (FFI2017-82547-P) and Generalitat de Catalunya (2017SGR634), as well as by an ICREA Academia fellowship. Josep Quer’s contribution has been made possible by the SIGN-HUB project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 693349, the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness and FEDER Funds (FFI2015-68594-P), and the Government of the Generalitat de Catalunya (2017SGR1478).

Recent rnquir ies demonstrate that emotion and affect, despite their seeming irrat iclnal i ty, are highly logical ly organized, and thus subject to scienti t lc investigation (G. Lakoff and Johnson 19f10: G. Lakoff 1987; Holland and Quinn 1987). More and more linguists have come to appreciate the grammatical realization of affect in language. Also. data accumulate suggesting that discourse is shot through by numerous atfect-carrying devices such as word order, verb voice, pronominal reference. mood, tense/ aspect, and case/ number/ gender/ animacy marking. (Ochs and Schieffel in 1989; Besnier 1990 for an extensive review). On the other hand, many discourse analysts have also tr ied to expl icate specif ic propert ies of the writ ten and spoken in terms of grammatical and rhetorical aspects (e.g. Chafe and Danielewicz 1987; Biber 1986; Hall iday 1987). Recently, research interest has developed in how features of the spoken language are incorporated into writ ing, and how these are mediated, as with the activation of involvement by imagery (Tannen 1982, 1992). The encoding of affect in writing needs here again to be captured in terms not only of syntactic features but also of social ly motivated intentions of the writer. Much as in face-to-face communication, the interaction and text creation between the message sender (speaker, writer) and the receiver (reader, hearer) is increasingly being emphasized (Rubin 19tt4; Bruner 1986; Nystrand 1989; Camitta 1993). Al l of these trends chal lenge the dichotomous view of speaking as the affectladen mode and writ ing as the opposite. Insofar as people take the trouble to communicate their message via such an

German, which has "verb-second" as its basic word order in independent sentences, requires final position of the finite verb in subordinate clauses. Thus, adverbial clauses introduced by "subordinate" conjunctions, such as WEIL ("because") and OBWOHL ("although") according to German grammar display "verb-final" ordering (e.g. "ich geh jetzt nach Hause, weil ich mude bin"; "ich esse kein Fleisch, obwohl ich's eigentlich gern mag"). German thus provides a clear signal for the grammatical incorporation of one clause into another.[3] However, during the last ten to fifteen years, in spoken colloquial German as well as in certain written genres that reproduce colloquial language (e.g., interviews, dialogues in advertisement), speakers are tending more and more to use main clause order (and thus "verb-second"-position)[4] in final adverbial clauses introduced by WEIL and OBWOHL.[5]

In German and many other Germanic languages, there is no fixed order of S and O as in an SVO language such as English. Rather, the topology of the declarative non-dependent sentence is canonically defined by the position of the finite and (where relevant) the non-finite parts of the verb. Together, they build up the sentence'brace', i.e., they define the front-field (before the finite verb), middle field (between finite and non-finite parts of the verb), and end-field (which often remains empty, but accommodates, for instance, post-positioned subordinate phrases). The front-field, also called topic position, may be filled by any constituent of the sentence, obligatory or non-obligatory. However, exactly one constituent (which, of course, may be of considerable complexity) can occupy this position.2 This restriction also applies to sentence adverbials and adverbial clauses, and to relative or complement clauses. Cf. the examples in Fig. 1. English, of course, allows more than one constituent before the finite verb, for instance a subject preceded by a disjunct or conjunct (Quirk & Greenbaum 1973:242ff; also cf. Allerton & Cruttenden 7974), or an adverbial clause. Cf. the translations of the German examples (a) and (c)

In this paper, various interactional features of turn-constructional unit (TCU) continuation as realized in Korean conversation through post-predicate elements are analyzed from a conversation-analytic perspective. Formulated as increments, post-predicate elements serve as re-completers by expanding the host TCU after it has reached a possible point of completion, which is explicitly marked by the utterance-final verb predicate. In many contexts of TCU continuation, the host TCU tends to be allusively constructed (e.g., in the form of a verb predicate with unexpressed arguments) and saliently indexical of the speaker’s affective stance, and post-predicate elements, mostly taking the form of ‘insertables’, elaborate the host TCU. TCU continuation is often realized when the action of the allusive host TCU is ‘disjunctively’ executed, with the interactional import of being potentially interruptive of the current talk-in-progress. Such an intrusive deployment of the host TCU, which is implicated in the practice of foregrounding the speaker’s collusively motivated responsive stance (e.g., in a confirmation request), is demonstrably oriented to by the speaker, who produces a post-predicate element as a methodic way of mitigating the disjunctive initiation of the prior action. The recipient also orients himself/herself to the potentially topic-derailing import associated with such a disjunctive initiation of action by way of initiating repair and/or promptly resuming his/her talk. As such, the production of a post-predicate element itself, mostly as an insertable that is grammatically and semantically related to the host, may not be directly attributed to interactional contingencies per se; it is often sequentially occasioned by practices geared towards enlivening the sequence being wrapped up, initiating or continuing an assessment sequence by way of highlighting the speaker’s evaluative stance turn-initially, or building the current turn on the prior turn through turn-tying operations. The interactional feature of post-predicate elements ‘re-doing the completion point as a transition-relevance place’ is partially manifested in the way the prosodic contour of the final or whole component of the host TCU is repeated and matched by that of the post-predicate elements.

Totemo in contemporary Japanese is a degree adverb (intensifier). Previous studies have reported that totemo derived from the adverb totemo kakutemo, which means ‘either way’ (and hence is a bipolar item) in classical Japanese. These studies also reported that totemo became a negative polarity item (an adverb modifying words for negative evaluation), but then shifted to a positive polarity item (an adverb modifying words for positive evaluation), and that counter-expectation factors played an important role in this shift. It is reported that the ‘say’-derived complementizer develops into a hearsay evidential marker, counter-expectation marker, and in some cases an intensifier (e.g. Wang et al. 2003) in some languages. Tote in classical Japanese is known as a ‘say’-derived complementizer, but it does not grammaticalize into an intensifier. This study maintains that the intensifier totemo also derived from the verb ‘say’ and the entire process of grammaticalization of totemo may be chronologized as follows: concessive use of quotative > concessive use of hearsay evidential > counter-expectation marker > intensifier. Thus, this study reveals the language-specific development of grammaticalization of the intensifier totemo. We also reveal that a reanalysis of the concessive subordinator and the elision of the complement clause preceding totemo as a sentence initial counter-expectation marker further gave rise to the sentence-medial parenthetical phrase (intensifier) totemo.

The Spanish verbs amenazar ‘to threaten’ andprometer ‘to promise’ do not only have a lexical reading but can also yield a subjective one, whereby the likelihood of the event expressed in the infinitive receives a negative, resp. a positive, evaluation. Three hypotheses are being tested: 1) as an outcome of the illocutionary force and the subject commitment attached to lexical prometer, the subjective readings of the latter may be expected to score high on the probability scale, whereas the event introduced by subjective amenazar will score low, in line with the lack of illocutionary force and weak subject commitment in lexical reading of this verb. 2) The viewpoint substantiated by the two verbs also differs: Whereas amenazar renders an event-oriented evidential reading from an internal point of view, prometer projects an external viewpoint leading to a more speaker-oriented subjective reading. 3) As a result of (1) and (2), prometer should easily combine with negatively oriented complements, whereas amenazar should resist taking positively oriented ones. The corpus research fully corroborates the first two hypotheses. The data, however, fail to unequivocally sustain the third one, especially because amenazar displays more flexibility than expected.

This paper reports on patterns of verb choice in identifying relational clauses (e.g. ‘X is Y, Y is X’) in English technical manuals. While it is obvious that specific lexical verbs will feature in identifying clauses of different functions, e.g. mean (defining), call (naming), exemplify (exemplifying), less transparent is the distribution of these more specific verbs and the general or neutral verb be. The findings suggest that verb choice in (technical) identifying clauses is strongly associated with the degree of equivalence constructed between the two central nominal groups in the clause (the Token and Value). Equivalence relations are one-to-one (rather than one-to-many) and exhaustive (rather than semantically open). Major grammatical influences on equivalence include nominal group structure, ergativity of the clause, and the inclusion of features (e.g. interpersonal, logical or textual) that undermine the privileging of an experientially homogeneous world-view. The results challenge the notions that be and specific verbs are interchangeable and that be is an unmarked choice. On the contrary, the data reveal that under certain conditions be is the more marked choice. The results have practical implications for teachers and students of English (in particular, students of English for Academic and/or Specific Purposes) as well as translators.

Yiddish narratives contain a considerable number of declarative sentences which begin with the inflected verb: Hot im zayn vayb bald tsurikgeshikt dem briv ‘(So) his wife right away returned the letter.’ Such declarative sentences, which are never initial in a text, are often said to have resultative meaning (note the translation of the example just given); however grammarians concede that one encounters them often without such a meaning. The purpose of this study is to try to establish the discourse function of these V/1 clauses, utilizing the framework of Prince (1988). It turns out that the occurrence of the finite verb in initial position is a marker of cohesion, and that V/1 clauses actually contrast, in their ties to previous material, with non-V/1 clauses. My study as a by-product supports the conclusions of Prince (1988) regarding other clauses in Yiddish in which the verb does not immediately follow the subject. I also include remarks on V/1 constructions in German (§4.0).

This study examines how tone sandhi domains (TSDs) are determined in Fuzhou. The data include: (i) regular verb-object phrases (VOs) where the verb takes a direct bare noun object; and (ii) non-canonical VOs where the verb takes an adverbial expression as a surface object. Several observations are made. First, a three-way sandhi exists within every TSD. All antepenultimate syllables neutralize to low tones. A penultimate syllable’s sandhi tone is dependent on the final syllable’s citation tone, which remains unchanged. Second, in regular VOs, a monosyllabic verb consistently forms a single TSD with its direct bare noun object, but a disyllabic verb and its object are separated into two TSDs. Third, in non-canonical VOs, a monosyllabic verb never forms a single TSD with its adverbial object. Three questions are raised. First, what is the nature of each TSD? Second, why does the number of syllables in a verb determine the distinct TSDs formed in regular VOs? Third, how can we account for the different patterns of TSD formation in two types of VOs? We propose that each TSD equals to a prosodic word (PrWd). OT analyses are provided to show how PrWds are derived. The analysis of regular VOs relies on the ranking of a prosodic markedness constraint ft bin above the word-level interface correspondence constraints. The contrast between two types of VOs is explained by applying the model of Multiple Spell-Out and a cyclic interaction of morphosyntax and prosody. This approach is new in explaining the TSDs that are constrained by morphosyntax.

Tariana, a North Arawak language from northwest Amazonia, has a complex system of serial verbs and a certain amount of verb compounding. Serial verbs in Tariana provide important evidence in favour of the existence of cross-linguistically valid defining properties of serial verbs. Verb serialisation and verb compounding are independent grammatical processes, each with a grammaticalisation path of its own, and with distinct functions. Their coexistence in one language is consistent with the principle of iconic motivation: the closer the elements are in surface structure, the more they are grammaticalised or lexicalised.

Recent research has pointed out that certain grammaticalization phenomena originate in substandard varieties and/or colloquial speech styles. However, the potential of insights to be gained from relating grammaticalization and sociolinguistics still remains largely unexplored. The present paper is an attempt at such an approach, discussing grammaticalization processes in contemporary German youth language (Jugendsprache). On a word formation level, the paper deals with nominal and verbal formatives, denominal conversions, and the use of verb stems as lexical morphemes. Syntactic phenomena include the development of the non-inflected negative null and a new intensifier word order pattern. After highlighting the relevant grammaticalization mechanisms for each of these patterns, the paper discusses the relation between slang creation and grammaticalization, emphasizing the role of expressivity as a discourse-pragmatic motivation for linguistic innovations. Finally, the paper draws attention to connections between youth specific language varieties and language change, and tries to account for the fact that some grammaticalization processes in substandard varieties never reach their potential end point.

The aim of this study is to analyse intertextual differences in the use of V-final order in Old English conjunct clauses and to determine to what extent the source of these differences may be Latin influence. The analysis reveals that the frequency of V-final order in OE conjuncts is rather limited in most texts, and Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica surfaces as the text in which the frequency of V-final conjunct clauses is exceptionally high. The study shows that the regular use of V-final order in Bede may be interpreted as a translation effect, with Latin inflating the frequency of the pattern in conjunct clauses, which means that the frequency of V-final conjunct clauses in early OE translations may not reflect native tendencies.

This study aims to examine the subtypes of directives and their realization patterns in Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM). The data were drawn from a play script corpus published in the 20th century. Nine directive subtypes were identified: advice, begging, invitation, order, offer, request, suggestion, urge, and warning. The realization patterns were analyzed in terms of the main components in the directives: alerter, discourse marker, politeness marker, subject, modal expression, verb phrase, and utterance final particle. The analysis reveals a number of features: (1) Alerters mainly take the form of an address term; (2) Utterance-initial discourse markers are mainly realized by tan ‘now’; (3) The subject is either hearer-dominated or speaker- and hearer-dominated, with the latter expressing solidarity in casual situations; (4) the politeness marker chhiáⁿ tends to take an overt subject; (5) The modal verb tio̍h accounts for the majority of subtypes; (6) The dominant verb types include dynamic, stative, uttering, and ingesting verbs; (7) Complex verb constructions mainly include directional verbs, disposal markers, and benefactive verbs; (8) Directional verbs are pervasive across all directives. A metaphorical transfer is operative in the use of directional verbs. Those marking an action toward the speaker (e.g., lâi ‘come’) are strongly associated with a positive attitude, while those expressing movement away from the speaker (e.g., khì ‘go’) are highly connected to an adversative mood. The omnipresence of [lâi V] suggests that it has been conventionalized as a default bundle to express politeness.

This paper considers language evolution from a cognitive-grammar (CG) perspective taking Classical Arabic Case Marking (CACM) as a case in point and a departure point. It is argued that the accusative case is diachronically the baseline case mark, designating the Objective Scene (OS) and demarcating an object of perception in the initial stage of maximal subjectivity in which the ground (G) is totally implicit. Such maximum is then attenuated through a process of objectification such that g entities are gradually put onstage to fulfill the functions of identification and predication. The nominative case, then, figures to mark such emerging entities in their baseline, immediate status. This conception of G with its functions is later extended to mark entities external to G, which gives rise to the full, nominative-marked, baseline existential core (C∃) comprising the existential predicate (P∃) and the existential subject (S∃). The truncation (T) of a verb’s nominative case is argued to fulfill the semantic function of situating a process out of existential reality yielding the existential predicate minus (P-∃), which represents a basic elaboration on baseline C∃. Processes being extensions from perception, the accusative case attenuates to mark entities (D) that demarcate processes, implementing the semantic function of processual modification. Finally, a genitive-marked entity (RP) is proposed to implement the semantic function of referential modification, anchoring and referencing the conceptions of all those facets of reality.

This study investigates how speakers of English and Korean, two typologically distinct languages, derive information from a verb and a construction to achieve sentence comprehension. In a sentence-sorting task, we manipulated verb semantics (real versus nonce) in each language. The results showed that participants from both languages were less inclined to sort sentences by a verb cue when the lexical-semantic information about a verb was obscured (i.e., nonce verb). In addition, the Korean-speaking participants were less likely affected by the verb semantics conditions than the English-speaking participants. These findings suggest the role of an argument structure construction in sentence comprehension as a co-contributor of sentence meaning, supporting the constructionist approach. The findings also imply language-specific mechanisms of sentence comprehension, contingent upon the varied impact of a verb on sentence meaning in English and Korean.

This article reports the results of an auditory lexical decision task, testing the processing of phonetic detail of English noun/verb conversion pairs. The article builds on recent findings showing that the frequent occurrence in certain prosodic environments may lead to the storage of prosody-induced phonetic detail as part of the lexical representation. To investigate this question with noun/verb conversion pairs, ambicategorical stimuli were used that exhibit systematic occurrence differences with regard to prosodic environment, as indicated by either a strong verb-bias, e.g., talk (N/V) or a strong noun-bias, e.g., voice (N/V). The auditory lexical decision task tests whether acoustic properties reflecting either the typical or the atypical prosodic environment impact the processing of recordings of the stimuli. In doing so assumptions about the storage of prosody-induced phonetic detail are tested that distinguish competing model architectures. The results are most straightforwardly accounted for within an abstractionist architecture, in which the acoustic signal is mapped onto a representation that is based on the canonical pronunciation of the word.

The Spanish benefactive verbal periphrasis dar ‘give’ + gerund is unique to the Spanish spoken in Ecuador and it seems to have emerged in the historical Ecuadorian context of multilingualism. The analysis presented sheds light to the intricacies of the construction, taking into consideration the inherent aspect of the gerundial verb. Oral data was collected during two months of participant observation in Ecuador. The aspectual theoretical analysis of Verkuyl (1993), González (2003) and González and Verkuyl (2017) is applied to the data in order to determine the inherent aspectual value of the gerundial verb in the predications. The results show that there is an overwhelming use of terminative predications. Additionally, some predications that prima facie seem durative can be interpreted as terminative. This finding can be partially explained by particular linguistic phenomena only appearing in the Spanish in contact with Kichwa. Moreover, this study adds empirical proof of how relevant discourse is in aspectual representations.

Durative events by default are atelic. However, temporal targets are typically required for durative verbs with a rushing manner, such as ‘We are catching the 3:30 flight’ and ‘The farmer rushed to harvest before the storm’. Why and how does manner introduce delimiting temporal concepts to durative verbs? This puzzle is addressed by our current study of two near-synonymous Mandarin durative verbs describing events carried out in a rushing manner: 赶 gǎn and 抢 qiǎng. Our event-based account will examine both their compositional meanings and their constructional patterns. We will show that 赶 gǎn and 抢 qiǎng not only coerce eventive readings from their nominal objects, but also require certain delineating temporal targets. The verb 赶 gǎn requires an understood deadline, while the verb 抢 qiǎng requires the presupposition of the limited availability of the object. As neither temporal targets mark the time of the actual activities, these are exceptional cases of aktionsart. We will show that the different ways to delineate event meanings of the constructions [gǎn/qiǎng+ noun] can be predicted from the lexical meaning of the two verbs and can in turn predict the event types represented by the object with the MARVS theory. Based on this lexical semantic representation, we further show that the Generative Lexicon theory predicts the coercions of the rushing meaning from the original activity verb senses, and that the Construction Grammar theory accounts for their sharing of the same syntactic configuration.

This study attempts to describe how metapragmatic devices can exert change in indirect reporting. This was achieved through the analysis of naturally occurring indirect reports during interaction. Specifically, indirect reports were extracted from a series of expert talks (≈800 minutes) broadcast by Iranian national TV. The analysis of these expert talks showed cases of communicative ‘know-hows’, where Persian speakers reflectively managed the dialogue in terms of their interpretation of the original utterance. Accordingly, Persian speakers negotiated the degree of reflexivity by changing the verb of saying and by adhering to specific syntactic markers. Thus, contrary to previous research, the present study revealed that Persian indirect reports can benefit from some syntactic markers to show that speakers do not perfectly adhere to the pragmatic force of the original speaker’s utterance. By contrast, Persian speakers use classes of markers, or contextualisation clues (Gumperz 1982), to show their control over the utterances. These markers are generally used to indicate politeness, uncertainty, and summarisation in Persian indirect reports. Such markers can distinguish indirect reports in Persian from those of other languages such as English.

While the general lines of the areal linguistic typology of Asia are well known, there are some less well understood pockets that promise to throw light on the overall range of variation within the continent. These include the indigenous languages of the Andaman Islands, which have for much of history stood apart from the population and language spreads that have characterized most of Asia. They fall into two families: Great Andamanese – the focus of this article – and Ongan. In some respects Great Andamanese languages go with the bulk of Asia, e.g. verb-final constituent order, but other aspects even of constituent order represent a mixture that matches neither the general Asian head-final type nor the Southeast Asian head-initial type. Some properties of Great Andamanese are typologically unusual, but do find presumably accidental parallels in languages spoken inside Asia, e.g. retroflex consonants, or elsewhere, e.g. body-part prefixes and verb root ellipsis.

This is a study of adverbs in nine typologically divergent Austronesian languages of Taiwan, Atayal, Bunun, Favorlang, Kavalan, Puyuma, Rukai, Saisiyat, Thao, and Tsou. There are only a few adverbs in each of these languages. The form of an adverb is usually invariant and its position in a sentence is relatively free. On the contrary, the form of a verb usually varies and its position in the sentence is usually fixed. Since the function of an adverb is to modify a verb, it may not occur without a verb in a sentence, whereas a true verb may occur without any other verb. Many adverbial concepts in Chinese and English, such as ‘all’, ‘only’, ‘often’, and ‘again’, are expressed using verbs that manifest different foci and take aspect markers. When these words function as the main verb in the sentence, they may attract bound personal pronouns in many Austronesian languages of Taiwan. However, there are a few genuine adverbs in each of these languages. It varies from language to language whether a certain lexical item functions as a verb or adverb.

The present contribution analyzes the acquisition of subjects in French based on a longitudinal case study of a trilingual child aged 2;8–3;2 who acquired French, Italian and Spanish simultaneously. The three languages vary with respect to the null-subject property; French is traditionally characterized as a non-null-subject language, while Italian and Spanish are prototypical null-subject languages. Argument subject omissions in French are ungrammatical but frequently observed in monolingual children in early acquisitional phases, as are ungrammatical postverbal subjects which cluster with null-subjects. Bilingual children acquiring French produce fewer subject omissions and postverbal subjects. The present study also finds an acceleration effect in the trilingual child. The results are interpreted in light of a parameter setting which accounts for different verb classes at different locations with which the null-subjects occur, giving rise to ‘categorial CS’ or ‘congruent categorialization.’

This paper examines the pragmatic uses and functions of the Latin verb inquam (‘I say’) and compares it with three synonyms – dico (‘I say, I speak, I declare’), loquor (‘I speak, I say, I utter’) and aio (‘I say yes, I say, I affirm’). Verbs of speech and thought in the first person are (cross-linguistically) a source of pragmatic markers, because the first person of these verbs is necessarily speaker-orientated and is also apt for expressing the speaker’s attitude. This can be seen in English pragmatic markers developed from verbs, such as I mean, I think and I say, and Romance ones, such as the Italian credo (‘I think’). Latin verbs with the meaning ‘I say’ (henceforth used as a hypernym for all of the verbs examined herein) also show pragmatic uses, as is clear from Latin dictionaries. The issue addressed in this paper is the extent to which they are interchangeable and how advanced they are in their development towards becoming pragmatic markers. For this goal, the paper will focus on a variety of pragmatic uses of ‘I say’, the contexts in which they appear, and the influence of genre on their distribution. Drawing on Bazzanella (2006) and Ghezzi (2014), the pragmatic uses will be divided into three main categories: textual, cognitive and interactional. It will be shown that the border between different pragmatic functions or readings is not neat and one instance can have various pragmatic uses at the same time.

Turkish 3rd person plural subjects normally appear with verbs that are unmarked for number. Following earlier findings which indicate that Turkish heritage speakers (HS) accept overt plural marking more readily compared to monolingually raised Turkish speakers, the present study investigates to what extent bilingual speakers are sensitive to grammatical, surface-level and semantic constraints on Turkish plural agreement marking. A scalar acceptability judgement task was carried out with non-bilingual Turkish speakers residing in Turkey and Turkish-German bilinguals residing in Germany. Our experimental design involved manipulating both subject animacy and subject position. Participants’ judgement patterns confirmed Turkish speakers’ general preference for unmarked verb forms, which was modulated both by subject animacy and by subject position. Significant differences were observed between lower proficiency HS on the one hand, and monolinguals and advanced proficiency HS on the other, suggesting that the relatively subtle interplay between different types of constraint on number agreement marking is affected by heritage language conditions. We found no evidence for simplification or optionality reduction in the lower proficiency HS’ judgements, however. We innovate on previous research by using Gradient Symbolic Computation modelling to capture between-group differences in the relative weightings of the constraints under investigation.

The aim of this dissertation is to examine how adult learners with a spoken language background who are acquiring a signed language, learn how to use the space in front of the body to express grammatical and topographical relations. Moreover, it aims at investigating the effectiveness of different types of instruction, in particular instruction that focuses the learner's attention on the agreement verb paradigm. To that end, existing data from a learner corpus (Boers-Visker, Hammer, Deijn, Kielstra & Van den Bogaerde, 2016) were analyzed, and two novel experimental studies were designed and carried out. These studies are described in detail in Chapters 3–6. Each chapter has been submitted to a scientific journal, and accordingly, can be read independently.1 Yet, the order of the chapters follows the chronological order in which the studies were carried out, and the reader will notice that each study served as a basis to inform the next study. As such, some overlap in the sections describing the theoretical background of each study was unavoidable.

The present study reports on verb-final variable realisation of the alveolar nasal /n/ in the Papuan language Idi. Elision of /n/ is correlated with both linguistic and social factors: present tense, a following consonant, and speakers over 60 show significantly greater rates of /n/ elision. Data from a 1988 grammar sketch indicate that for the present tense, variable realisation of verb-final /n/ is a case of stable, and perhaps age-graded, variation. Conversely, spread of n-less-ness into the other tenses may be a case of a change-in-progress, but at present this cannot clearly be confirmed. The older generation (speakers over 60) consistently show the highest rates of /n/ elision in all tenses. Elderly people are seen as the most proficient Idi speakers, and their position in society perhaps allows them to be more variable in their language use.

Turkic conquest and rule of China since 386 CE for nearly two hundred years had exerted its profound and long-lasting influence on many levels of Chinese society. Turkic sinification policy had induced the Xianbei National Language (XNL), which was Turkic language with selected set of Chinese characters for phonetic spelling. XNL, being spelt in Chinese characters, managed to function in Turkic-Chinese code-mixing in the bilingual communities as evidenced in bianwen 變文. Because of the Turkic politico-socio-economical dominance, some the Turkic elements in the code-mixing eventually gained prominance and have become permanent part of the northern vernacular, predecessor of modern Mandarin. This paper discusses twelve such Turkic-rooted verbal functional expressions: (1). The causative-passive qu 取; (2). Transitive passive sha 殺, sha 煞, si 死; (3). Causative dou 鬥, dou 逗; (4). Continuative hai 還, que 卻; (5). Resultative que 卻; (6). Reflexive nə 呢 (7). Positive indirective mo shi 莫是; (8). Negative indirective bu dao 不道; (9). Future participle cai 才, cai 纔; (10). Conditional yao shi 要是, yao 要, yao bu shi 要不是; (11). INDUCE-base nong 弄; (12). The speech quote verb dao 道.

This paper discusses possible attrition of verb second (V2) word order in Norwegian heritage language by investigating a corpus of spontaneous speech produced by 50 2nd–4th generation heritage speakers in North America. The study confirms previous findings that V2 word order is generally stable in heritage situations, but nevertheless finds approximately 10% V2 violations. The cases of non-V2 word order are argued to be due to lack of activation of the heritage language grammar, making it vulnerable to crosslinguistic influence from the speakers’ dominant language. This crosslinguistic influence does not simply replace V2 by non-V2, but is argued to operate more indirectly, affecting (a) the distribution of contexts for V2 word order, and (b) introducing two new distinctions into the heritage language, one (indirectly) based on a similar distinction in the dominant language (a difference between adverbs and negation with respect to verb movement), the other based on frequency of initial elements triggering V2 in non-subject-initial declaratives. Together, these findings also indicate that crosslinguistic influence affects different contexts of V2 differently, providing support for analyses that treat V2 word order as the result of many smaller rules.

This paper describes a set of five focus enclitics in Bodo, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Assam, India. The focus enclitics are phonologically bound morphemes which are attached to a phrase-level constituent of a sentence, such as the verb, its arguments, or its adjuncts. They all trigger existential presuppositions and express various kinds of semantic and pragmatic relations between the asserted proposition and presuppositions, such as inclusion, exclusion, contrast, concession, and correction. The description of these relations as well as other more context and construction specific functions encoded by the focus enclitics constitutes the core of this paper. This paper also examines the distribution of the focus enclitics and discusses their associated scope and interpretations. Finally, this paper investigates co-occurrence, co-occurrence restrictions, and interpretations of sequences of the enclitics.

Based on first-hand data obtained during fieldwork, our article analyses numerals and frequently employed numeral classifiers of Darmdo Minyag. Numeral classifiers are obligated to follow a numeral when counting. There are three different roots for ‘ten’: /ɦa~ʁo/ used in the numbers 10–19; /ʁuɑ/ used in the numbers 20–49; and /ɡa/ used in the numbers 50–99. The presence of multiple roots for ‘ten’ with an initial glottal, uvular or velar stop or fricative has been attested in many languages of the Qiangic area. Although Tibetan forms may be used for all numerals, native forms up to 99 have been attested in Darmdo Minyag. The influence of Tibetan on cardinal and ordinal numerals, approximate, multiple and fractional numbers is noted as well. Darmdo Minyag has a rich inventory of sortal and mensural classifiers. Shape is the most important feature according to which nouns are categorized. Mensural classifiers may be divided into arrangement classifiers and units of measure. Units of measure are of two types: the first acts as a classifier, the second type is a [noun numeral+classifier] construction. Darmdo Minyag has two types of verbal action classifiers: several verbal action classifiers of unknown origin which modify semantically rich verbs, and numeral-verb combinations which modify a semantically empty verb. The main functions of classifiers are classification and individualization.

According to the dynamic view of metaphor, the complexities of metaphorical expressions are emergent products of language use. However, this view lacks an explicit mechanism to account for the process. This paper puts forward a model named single-scope integration network with entrenchment (SINE), and uses if-then rules in the model to explain the temporal order and regularities that the metaphoremes of a metaphor should follow in their emergence. The validity of the model is tested in the case studies of Chinese verb metaphors, which reveal four if-then rules that govern the metaphoreme emergence of Chinese verb metaphors. These if-then rules are obtained via the analysis of the occurrence order of metaphoremes by performing DepCluster, a machine learning tool for collostruction generation, over a large-scale diachronic corpus. The case studies demonstrate that the proposed model is applicable to Chinese verb metaphors.

le is the mostly widely studied aspect marker in Chinese. In addition to perfective aspect marker to indicate action completion, le can also serve as a sentence-final particle to indicate a currently relevant state. This study investigates how Chinese native speakers use le in oral discourse and the factors that influence their use. The data were collected from three discourses including informal conversations, elicited narratives, and teacher classroom speech. Multivariate analysis of 2,359 tokens revealed that verb complement type and verb type have the strongest effects, followed by le position, serial verb relationship, sentence type, discourse context, and time word presence/absence.

Support verb constructions figure among the most frequently investigated topics in the literature on collocation. So far, most studies of this kind have focused on bipartite structures, consisting of a verbal collocate and a nominal base. Accordingly, the analysis of how support verbs are distributed has concentrated almost exclusively on the lexical control exerted by the base. In this article, we draw attention towards the influence exerted by the participation of verb and noun in more complex patterns of lexical co-occurrence. We contend that the distribution of the support verb collocate is contingent not only on the base noun but also on other elements of the lexical context. This highlights the need to enrich the theoretical framework of collocation analysis with the additional descriptive category of ‘second-order collocate’. The proposal is illustrated with two case studies using a large-scale web corpus of English.

This study presents the results of an experimental investigation into the L2 acquisition of the core-peripheral distinction in the syntax of split intransitivity by L1 Mandarin EFL learners to verify whether or not their L2 acquisition is lexically constrained by the Split Intransitivity Hierarchy, which predicts that core verbs have primacy in both L1 and L2 acquisition over peripheral ones (Sorace, 2000, 2004, 2011). Two diagnostics of English split intransitivity, the prenominal past participles (PPPs) and the for hours constructions, were used to test native English speakers and Mandarin EFL learners’ gradient acceptability with respect to core-peripheral verb classes. The results of an acceptability judgment test show that both native speakers and nonnative speakers are sensitive to the core-peripheral distinction in the two diagnostics, and EFL learners exhibit a native-like sensitivity to core unaccusatives in PPPs but not in the for hours constructions. The results confirm that the core-peripheral distinction can be accounted for neither by L1 transfer nor L2 input, which suggests for the behavior is due to direct access to semantic universals in the L2 acquisition of split intransitivity syntax.

Previous studies using diachronic data from the Sejong Historical Corpus have traced the semantic extension of voice marker -eci from middle to passive uses (e.g. Ahn & Yap 2017). In this study, based on data from the Sejong Contemporary Spoken Corpus, we further examine the relationship between middle and passive uses of -eci constructions, with special attention to the neutralization of adversative readings that give rise to generalized (in addition to adversative) middle and passive -eci constructions. Our analysis reveals that judgments about adversative readings in Contemporary Korean are not emergent solely from the semantics of the verb or adjective preceding -eci but additionally are emergent and grounded in the interaction between discourse participants. The distributional characteristics of -eci also show a strong interaction between voice and tense-aspect-mood (TAM). There is also some interaction effects from register and text type/genre, particularly in the usage frequency distribution of spontaneous and passive -eci constructions. In addition, contrary to the traditional notion that -eci is essentially a passive marker, in real usage, -eci is still far more frequently used as a middle marker than a passive marker.

The widespread occurrence of nouns in one language with a determiner in the other, often referred to as mixed NPs, has generated much theorizing and debate. Since both a syntactic account based on abstract features of the determiner and an account highlighting the notion of a Matrix language yield largely the same predictions, we assess how the tenets of each play out in speaker choices. The data derive from a massive corpus of spontaneous nominal mixes, produced by bilinguals in New Mexico, where bidirectional code-switching is the norm. Bilinguals’ choices concern (1) NP status (mixed vs. unmixed); (2) mixing type (limited-item vs. multi-word); and (3) language of the noun (here, English vs. Spanish). Results show that the community preference is for mixed NPs, independent of their theoretical felicity as dictated by determiner language properties. As to mixing type, these NPs are mostly constituted of lone nouns, such that the language of the determiner and any associated verb is perforce that of the surrounding discourse. Finally, the overwhelming choice is for English lone nouns incorporated into Spanish, and hence for a Spanish determiner. The language of the determiner thus proceeds, not from abstract linguistic properties, but instead from straightforward adherence to bilingual speech community conventions.

This article investigates word order changes in negated periphrastic constructions in the history of Basque. A number of linguistic variables are argued to correlate with these changes: the negative particle ez is increasingly focalized in main clauses, the innovative pattern negative particle – auxiliary verb – main verb allows for more syntactic flexibility than the conservative one, and the word order changes do not progress at equal rates in all clause subtypes. Genre issues are also considered, including the hypothesis that the loss of the conservative order main verb – negative particle – auxiliary verb of main clauses occurs first in texts close to oral language. Moreover, it is argued that eastern dialects are more innovative than western dialects and that efforts towards standardization of the language have slowed down this case of word order change.

This paper argues that ordered abstract scales are applicable to analyses of a range of grammatical domains. We argue this based on data from a number of unrelated languages, primarily Logoori (Bantu, JE 41; Kenya). The Logoori verb kudoka can be translated into English as ‘to arrive’/‘to reach,’ ‘to be enough,’ and ‘must,’ depending on its linguistic context. We propose that these meanings arise from a single semantic denotation that is sensitive to a shared gradable component in the semantics of linguistic expressions referring to spatial paths, gradable predicates, measures of plural count nouns/mass nouns, and modals. The central theoretical issue addressed in this paper is the application of ordered, abstract scales in a model of grammar. This data and proposal is an important contribution to the literature arguing for a gradable model of modality (Lassiter 2014, 2017b, among others).

Frequency asymmetries within a minimal grammatical domain create offline associations that languages tend to exploit for a more efficient encoding. We explore cross-linguistic coding patterns of antipassives. We first argue that antipassive markers tend to have properties of derivational markers. Secondly, we show that antipassives are considerably rarer than the basic transitive constructions. The lower frequency correlates with the length of coding: antipassives tend to be coded with longer forms than basic transitive verbs. Thirdly, we explore frequency associations of different lexical input types and find that it is the rare input types that tend to select the antipassive, if the marking is differential, while the frequent ones correlate with the unmarked verb (A-lability). We, furthermore, show that the rarer argument types and argument scenarios correlate stronger with antipassives than the more frequent argument types and scenarios.

In this article, I analyse how conventional height-specifier gestures used by speakers of Yucatec Maya become incorporated into Yucatec Maya Sign Languages (YMSLs). Combining video-data from elicitation, narratives, conversations and interviews collected from YMSL signers from four communities as well as from hearing nonsigners from another Yucatec Maya village, I compare form, meaning and distribution of height-specifiers in gesture and sign. Co-speech gestures that depict the height of upright entities – performed with a flat hand, palm facing downwards – come to serve various linguistic functions in YMSLs: a noun for human referents, a verb GROW, a spatial referential device, and an element of name signs. Special attention is paid to how height-specifier gestures fulfil a grammatical purpose as noun-classifiers for human referents in YMSLs. My study demonstrates processes of lexicalisation and grammaticalisation from gesture to sign and discusses the impact of gesture on the emergence of shared sign languages.

Based on argument indexation properties, this paper offers a model of four verb classes for Geshiza and Stau, two closely related and endangered Horpa lects spoken in Sichuan. Despite increased awareness and interest in Horpa, no exhaustive classification of verbs from the viewpoint of argument indexation has been offered. Even though argument indexation itself has been discussed in previous scholarship, the striking diversity of argument indexation patterns has not been addressed. It is shown that both Geshiza and Stau, the two lects chosen as the sample for this study, share the same verb classes, even though the class assignment of individual cognate verbs occasionally varies. The paper also describes how semantic and animacy features inherent in verbs, most prominently compatibility with human S and P arguments resulting in compatibility with speech act participants, play a crucial role in verb class assignment. Establishing a framework for Horpa verb classes helps in the ongoing descriptive work of these languages. In addition, it offers new material for typological studies of argument indexation.

In this paper, using the tenets of Situation-Bound Utterances (SBUs) (Kecskes 2000, 2010) and referring to Pragmatic Act Theory (PAT) (Mey 2001), the verb mordan (‘to die’ in English), and its different realisations are analysed among Persian speakers. Through the analysis of authentic talk in interaction, this study aims to ponder nonstandard (situation-derived) meanings of the term mordan and its different SBUs. The primary focus of the study is on strings of linguistic events as well as the “conventions of usage” (Morgan 1978) or cultural understanding that may lead to standard and nonstandard meanings considering mordan and its different SBUs. The findings suggest that the SBUs regarding mordan, a neglected sociolinguistic context, not only is affected by its actual situational characteristics but also by prior context encoded in utterances used, which manifests culture-specific ways of thinking (Capone 2018; Wong 2010). Overall, 19 SBUs and 7 generic categories were identified with regard to the verb mordan in Persian. This paper exhibits that mordan is a versatile verb, which, when combined with situational/contextual factors, conveys different nonstandard functions that fulfil social needs. This study will also refer to linguistic features underlying SBUs that are influential in assigning various distinct meanings to the verb mordan in Persian.

Practices of word segmentation in French and Moroccan Arabic by beginning and advanced bilingual writers in two historically and linguistically divergent settings are analysed in a threefold perspective: (1) In the different sociocultural contexts of linguistically heterogeneous France in the 1870’s and a town with remarkable immigration from Morocco in Germany in 2000, dictations constitute monolingual settings of language policy and normativity; (2) structurally, open and closed spellings of (clitic) function and content words indicate constraints of different orthographies, focussing either phonology or morphosyntax; (3) in the framework of contact linguistics, bilingual students write in one of their languages (French, Moroccan Arabic) with resources of other languages (like Breton, German, Classical Arabic). The results show that the students’ writings are influenced by graphematic structures not directly related to the language dictated. In French Brittany, a great importance of closed spellings may be supported by the agglutinative feature of the Breton language, while the apostrophe as a striking feature of French orthography is used primarily, but often only emblematically, by the students in Gascony. Moroccan Arabic writers in Germany are influenced indirectly by their first school language, German, in the way they mark word boundaries in prepositional phrases (PP) and imperfective verb forms. Classical Arabic, however, remains of marginal influence although both varieties are historically and structurally closely related.

This paper suggests two possible ways in which cognitively-oriented constructionist approaches (Cognitive Construction Grammar, Radical Construction Grammar, and Embodied Construction Grammar) could enhance the explanatory power of constructions. First, the anatomy of a construction should spell out how the morphosyntactic realizations of arguments are specifically mapped onto their inherent semantico-pragmatic properties, while also including detailed information concerning illocutionary force, information structure, register, politeness, etc. Second, it is argued that coercion should be best understood as a continuum allowing for varying degrees of (in-)compatibility between the verb and the construction taken as a whole. Moreover, parameterization and linguistic cueing prove useful to handle the dynamic interaction of the morphosyntactic, semantico-pragmatic, and discourse-functional hallmarks of constructions, including those which invite metonymic inferencing.

This paper explores the figurative expression of emotion in Gija, a non-Pama-Nyungan language from the East Kimberley in Western Australia. As in many Australian languages, Gija displays a large number of metaphors of emotion where miscellaneous body parts – frequently, the belly – contribute to the figurative representation of emotions. In addition, in Gija certain verbal constructions describe the experience of emotion via metaphors of physical impact or damage. This second profile of metaphors is far less widespread, in Australia and elsewhere in the world, and has also attracted far fewer descriptions. This article explores both types of metaphors in turn. Body-based metaphors will be discussed first, and we will highlight the specificity of Gija in this respect, so as to offer data that can be compared to other languages, in Australia and elsewhere. The second part of the article will present verbal metaphors. Given that this phenomenon is not yet very well undersood, this account aims to take a first step into documenting a previously unexplored domain in the language thereby contributing to the broader typology that this issue forms a part of. Throughout the text, we also endeavour to connect the discussion of metaphors with local representations and understanding of emotions.

Although several studies have investigated the influence of the grammatical class of cue words on response patterns in the word association task, relatively little is known about the influence of more fine-grained distinctions such as cue transitivity. The present study tests two predictions, made in existing studies, of the influence of this variable. The first is that cue transitivity would influence the grammatical class of responses; the second, that it would affect the directionality of position-based, or syntagmatic, responses. English language associative responses to 49 transitive and 49 intransitive cues were gathered from 53 English L1 respondents. These responses were then analysed according to their grammatical class and categorical designation. Results suggested that cue transitivity influences both of these measurements: transitive cues yielded more noun responses and more associations classified as likely to follow the cue in text than did intransitives, while transitives received more verb responses and more associations likely to precede the cue. These results are discussed in the light of contiguity-based and semantic theories of the determinants of word association.

A well-known generalization about bare numeral phrases (BNPs) in Mandarin is that they tend to require the existential verb you ‘have’ when in subject position, but there are some notable exceptions. This paper concentrates on the data cited by Li (1998) and proposes an Exhaustivity Condition according to which a subject BNP is felicitous if and only if it is interpreted exhaustively. It is shown how this condition generalizes to all the constructions under discussion, while at the same time they each belong to a particular type of quantificational construction or another (cumulativity, scalar focus, sufficiency, or conditional). I argue that the close relation between Mandarin subject BNPs and exhaustivity not only explains the restricted distribution of the former but also enables us to account for their so-called quantity readings in terms of exhaustive interpretation. Comparisons of the proposal with previous approaches will also be discussed.

Birhor (Birhoɽ) is a Kherwarian Munda language spoken in small enclaves in India, primarily in Hazaribagh, Ranchi, and Singhbhum districts and other small pockets in Jharkhand state. Birhor has to date been poorly documented, and even the basic properties of its core grammatical systems remain largely undescribed. All data used in this study come from field notes collected in several trips dating back to 2015. This paper is a preliminary attempt to identify the basic templatic structures of positive and negative finite conjugations in Birhor of both monovalent and polyvalent predicates. We discuss here two basic intersecting inflectional oppositions in the grammar of Birhor: (i) between perfective and imperfective tense-aspect forms (the imperfective includes imperfective and imperfect forms, and the perfective includes the past, the anterior and the perfect); and (ii) between monovalent predicates and polyvalent ones. Like all Kherwarian languages, Birhor has a nominative-accusative alignment of argument indexing and a complex templatic verb structure. It encodes subjects with monovalent stems. Polyvalent predicates encode two arguments, a first argument/syntactic subject and a second argument/syntactic ‘object’ following a primary object pattern. A complex array of different templates is thus found across positive and negative conjugations that contrast polyvalent vs. monovalent imperfective, perfective, and imperative forms. Many different formal templatic patterns are attested within each of the paradigmatic oppositional sets in Birhor. There are two formal subtypes of monovalent predicates. They contrast in both positive and negative conjugations, for both the imperfective and the perfective series of inflections. Polyvalent predicates also contrast the imperfective and the perfective series. Lastly, there are distinct templates for imperative and prohibitive of monovalent and polyvalent predicates as well.