The Syntax and Semantics of Clause-Chaining in Toposa

Some languages make extensive use of clause-chaining. According to Payne (1997: 312), clause-chaining has been documented for languages in the highlands of New Guinea, Australia and the Americas. In Africa it is found in Ethiopia (Völlmin et al. 2007), in Kiswahili, a Bantu language (Hopper 1979: 213-215, Mungania 2018), in Anuak, a Western Nilotic language (Longacre 1990: 88-90 and 2007: 418) and in Toposa, a VSO language of South Sudan (Schröder 2011). Clause-chaining is characterized by a long combination of non-finite clauses that have operator dependency on a finite clause, and it usually signals foregrounded information in discourse (see also Dooley 2010: 3). Besides its discourse function, clause-chaining exhibits morpho-syntactic and semantic properties as demonstrated in this paper with examples from Toposa, an Eastern Nilotic language.

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Pragmatic motivations for the development of evidential and modal meaning in the construction “be supposed to X”

Journal of Historical Pragmatics ◽

10.1075/jhp.7.1.03ber ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 7 (1) ◽

pp. 39-71 ◽

Cited By ~ 6

Author(s):

Catie Berkenfield

Keyword(s):

Relative Frequency ◽

Human Subjects ◽

General Category ◽

Discourse Function ◽

Frequency Effects ◽

Passive Construction ◽

Linguistic Patterns ◽

Semantic Development ◽

Semantic Properties

The English construction “be supposed to X” is used in a variety of functions in Present-day English, including evidential, epistemic, and deontic functions. This research offers description and explanations for the development of the evidential, epistemic, and deontic functions from an earlier passive construction, through distinct processes of reanalysis (Hopper and Traugott 1993). I argue that the motivations for these semantic and syntactic shifts are motivated by pragmatic inferences based on: discourse function, discourse expectations about human subjects, frequency effects related to semantic properties of the construction in discourse, and reader-writer expectations about genre type. The results indicate that the evidential function is not part of the general category of epistemicity for this construction, following de Haan (1999, 2001b); that this construction does not exhibit the predicted pathway of semantic development from deontic to epistemic functions (Traugott 1989) due to constraints imposed by the source construction; and that genre plays an important role not only in the relative frequency of the construction (Biber et al. 1999), but also in the emergence of the deontic function diachronically. Finally, I situate the construction in relation to cross-linguistic patterns (Bybee et al. 1994), noting how it parallels broader patterns in the development of the deontic function.

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The Syntax and Semantics of Nonfinite Forms

Annual Review of Linguistics ◽

10.1146/annurev-linguistics-011718-012545 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 5 (1) ◽

pp. 309-328

Author(s):

John J. Lowe

Keyword(s):

Internal Structure ◽

Verb Phrases ◽

Syntactic Properties ◽

Finite Clause ◽

Nonfinite Clauses ◽

Verb Categories ◽

Semantic Properties ◽

Finite Verb

The syntactic and semantic properties of nonfinite verb categories can best be understood in relation to and distinction from the corresponding properties of finite verb categories. In order to explore these issues, it is necessary to provide a crosslinguistically valid characterization of finiteness. Finiteness is a prototypical notion, understood in relation to a language-specific finite verb prototype; nonfiniteness is therefore understood in terms of degrees of deviation from this prototype. The syntactic properties of nonfinite verb categories, so defined, can be considered from two perspectives: the functions of nonfinite clauses within superordinate clauses (e.g., argument and adjunct functions) and the internal structure of nonfinite verb phrases. Typical of the second aspect is that nonfinite phrases tend to be defective in one or another respect, relative to finite phrases, which may be understood in terms of lacking functional projections or features which are an obligatory part of finite phrases. This defectiveness relative to the finite prototype plays out also in the semantics; typically, certain aspects of the meaning of nonfinite phrases are not independently specified, but must be derived from semantic properties of a superordinate finite clause.

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The semantics of pluperfect forms in Classical Armenian Gospels

Rhema ◽

10.31862/2500-2953-2019-3-74-100 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 74-100

Author(s):

X. Semionova

Keyword(s):

Past Tense ◽

Discourse Function ◽

Relative Tense ◽

Auxiliary Verb ◽

Semantic Properties

The paper focuses on the semantic properties of Classical Armenian periphrastic verbal forms consisting of a participle in -eal and an auxiliary verb em ‘to be’ in past tense; the data are from Armenian translation of four Gospels. The pluperfect in Classical Armenian may function as past perfect representing resultative, stative, and experiential uses. Likewise, irreal (both hypothetical and counterfactual) and antiresultative meanings (non-achieved or cancelled result) are well attested. Finally, standard relative-tense uses are also frequent. The most important discourse function of pluperfect forms is related to marking «out-of-sequence» events. Cross-linguistically, this inventory of functions is more or less standard, but some details require further analysis.

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RITUEL INTERAKTION OG ILLUSION: En relationel tilgang

Tidsskriftet Antropologi ◽

10.7146/ta.v0i41.107472 ◽

2000 ◽

Author(s):

Michael Houseman ◽

Carlo Severi

Keyword(s):

Papua New Guinea ◽

Internal Consistency ◽

Democratic Republic ◽

New Guinea ◽

Ritual Action ◽

Inherent Nature ◽

Semantic Properties

By providing an explicitly formal account of three ethnographic examples – the Naven rite of the Iatmul (Papua New Guinea), Amerindian shamanism as illustrated by the Kuna (Panama), and African male initiation among the Wagania (Democratic Republic of Congo) – the authors outline a “relational” approach to the analysis of ritual action. They suggest that the illusion implied by the effectiveness of ritual action derives not from the inherent nature of the items of behaviour involved, but from the particular kind of internal consistency that is imposed by the interactive context in which they occur. Thus, the singular realities constructed through ritual performances are built up and sustained, neither by their functional or semantic properties nor by their syntactic features (for example repetition or fragmentation), nor by qualities depending on pragmatic considerations (performativity, staging procedures, etc.). Rather, they are constructed primarily by the establishment of a particular type of relational configuration.

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