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Macanese, the near-extinct Portuguese creole of Macao, is an Asian Portuguese Creole language closely related to Malaccan Papia Kristang. In this paper, I argue that a distinctive feature of Macanese vis-à-vis other Asian Portuguese Creoles is its system of negation; specifically, its usage of the negators nunca and nádi. Negators deriving from Portuguese nunca ‘never’ and não há-de ‘shall not’ are attested in several Asian Portuguese Creoles: while their usage varies considerably, the former usually acts as the negator for realis predicates, whereas the latter typically negates irrealis predicates. In this paper I argue that, differently from other Asian Portuguese Creoles, Macanese nunca is also the only available negator for adjectival and nominal predicates, independently from tam features. Through a comparison with other Asian Portuguese creoles, and with the adstrates and substrates of Macanese, I also discuss the possible origin of these features.

CHUN - Chinesischunterricht, Bd. 34 (2019): CHUN - Chinesischunterricht

Although there is a rich literature on compounding in Turkish, coordinating compounds have not received enough attention from researchers in the field of morphology. The Turkish lexicon is characterised by a large number of coordinating compounds, belonging to different subclasses; this paper is a first attempt to sketch a typology of these word forms. We will first provide an overview of the different types of coordinating compounds in the language, exploring the limits of this phenomenon, and we will then analyse them in terms of five main parameters: (a) the semantic relation between the constituents and the referent of the whole compound; (b) input and output word classes; (c) morphological cohesiveness; (d) prosodic cohesiveness; (e) degree of conventionalisation/lexicalisation. We will argue that there is a fundamental divide between endocentric and exocentric coordinating compounds; the latter appear as more lexicalised and entrenched in the Turkish lexicon than the former and also seem to be closer to prototypical words in the morphology-syntax continuum. © 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.

Le lingue del mondo, secondo il calcolo aggiornato di Ethnologue (www.ethnologue.com), sono 7.102, anche se non tutte godono di ottima salute. La proprietà strutturali che le caratterizzano mostrano una variazione non casuale, come emerso dall’ultimo cinquantennio di studi tipologici, al punto che è oggi possibile individuare alcuni comportamenti prevedibili e ricorrenti, se non addirittura ‘universali’ e presenti in tutte le lingue. Tuttavia, il modo in cui le lingue posso variare resta sorprendente e resta il dato che, più ancora delle somiglianze osservate, conduce a inseguire nuovi interrogativi di ricerca. Lo scopo di questo libro è proprio aprire una finestra su tale diversità linguistica, mostrando quanto e come ciò che siamo soliti osservare da una prospettiva eurocentrica possa improvvisamente apparire raro e strano, se confrontato con lingue distanti genealogicamente e geograficamente. Vedremo che esistono lingue senza ‘e’ e senza ‘o’, lingue che indicano il tempo passato e futuro sui nomi, o che non distinguono tra verbi e aggettivi. Mostreremo come i modi a cui siamo soliti ricorrere, come l’indicativo o il condizionale, vengono tradotti in certe lingue in sistemi binari che parlano di realtà e irrealtà, e come esistano lingue con determinanti specifici che distinguono tra oggetti con una superficie piatta, oggetti cilindrici e strumenti. Proporremo una rivisitazione del concetto di ‘esotico’, alla luce della aumentata e sempre crescente accessibilità a dati di lingue distanti, che diventano oggi più velocemente e facilmente lingue vicine. Intendiamo condurre il lettore in un percorso attraverso aree diverse della grammatica, per esplorare la complessità e varietà dei modi in cui le stesse funzioni si possono realizzare, con la speranza di suscitare stupore e curiosità verso la linguistica e lingue.

In this paper, we first propose evidence for the status of adjectives as an independent word-class in Mandarin Chinese, both as the instantiation of a universal prototype and as a language-specific category, also discussing functionally-based and semantically-based subclasses of adjectives. We then discuss the implications of our proposal for language teaching, showing that English-language, Italian and Chinese teaching materials tend to oversimplify the nature and properties of Chinese adjectives. We suggest that instructors and textbooks should illustrate the various subclasses of adjectives, stressing the differences in their usage and discussing adjective/verb conversion

Chinese is often defined as a 'textbook example' of an isolating language, with comparatively few affixes, usually etymologically transparent (Sagart 2004). After 'deconstructing' the notion of the isolating morphological type, I shall discuss data from a number of Chinese dialects spread over the Shanxi, Shaanxi, Henan, Hebei and Shandong provinces. I will show that there seem to be some areal clusters with productive morphological phenomena not expected to occur in isolating languages, and which can be explained both by a cross-linguistically widespread tendency towards the reduction of certain items in speech production and, arguably, by processes of convergence among dialects