Subordinate clauses: common properties and internal structure

Chapter 14 serves as a general introduction to clause combining, the various ways in which in Latin simple clauses can be combined into sentences or other units. It discusses the internal structure of subordinate clauses, both finite and non-finite, the role of subordinators, and the difference between subordination and coordination. In addition it deals briefly with periodic structure and and indirect speech.

The Northwest Caucasian Languages

This chapter describes the major features of the Northwest Caucasian (Abkhaz-Adyghe) language family, comprising Abkhaz, Abaza, West Circassian (Adyghe), East Circassian (Kabardian), and the now extinct Ubykh. Starting with the sociolinguistic setting of the Northwest Caucasian varieties and the history of linguistic research on them, the discussion then proceeds to a description of the most important features of their phonology, morphology, and syntax, concluding with a brief discussion of a number of typologically outstanding features. The chapter, based both on published sources and the authors’ fieldwork data, covers issues such as exuberant consonantism, lexical category underspecification, polysynthetic morphology, expression of spatial meanings in the verb, rich systems of tense, aspect and mood categories, finite and non-finite verbal forms, non-trivial noun phrase syntax, relativization, and complexities of clause-combining. Besides describing the features common for all the languages of the family, we focus on important points of variation among the Northwest Caucasian languages and their dialects, aiming at an adequate representation of the wealth of phenomena they present and highlighting the challenges they offer for typology and linguistic theory.

Expression of anaphoric subjects in Vera'a: Functional and structural factors in the choice between pronoun and zero

The choice between a pronoun and zero anaphor for the expression of third-person subjects is examined in a corpus of Vera'a (Oceanic). While predominantly expressed by a pronoun, subjects are found to permit zero form with referents that have low anaphoric distance. Within this context, zero is found to be preferred with a subset of verbal predicates that take a specific tense-aspect-mood-polarity (TAMP) marker that historically retains subject agreement. The strong preference for pronouns is related to the clitic behavior of adjacent TAMP morphology and the rudimentarity of agreement. Animacy and number also bear on subject variation. Effects of clause-combining and the use of connectives do not align with findings from studies of the same choice in other languages. Our findings underscore the prominent role of purely structural over functional motivations for the choice of pronouns over zero.

A Grammar of Akabea

This grammar of Akabea is the first published descriptive grammar of a traditional language of the Great Andamanese family and the first grammar of a traditional Great Andamanese language written to current linguistic standards. Akabea died out in the 1920s, but was extensively documented in the late nineteenth century by two British administrators, Edward Horace Man and Maurice Vidal Portman. Although neither was a trained linguist, their material nonetheless provides a sufficient basis for a reliable analysis of Akabea grammar, especially its morphology and phrasal and clausal syntax, although there are inevitable limitations on our understanding of Akabea phonology, clause combining, and discourse structure. The published grammar is accompanied by an online appendix providing a diplomatic edition with commentary and analysis of the single most valuable resource for Akabea grammatical analysis, Portman’s Dialogues. For the first time, linguists will have access to an extensive and reliable grammatical description of a traditional Great Andamanese language, thus enabling Akabea to take its rightful place as an object of scientific study among the languages of the world. This is all the more important in that the language exhibits a number of cross-linguistically rare phenomena, such as a rich system of somatic (body-part) prefixes and the phenomenon of Verb Root Ellipsis, whereby under certain circumstances the root of a verb may be absent, leaving behind a grammatical word consisting solely of affixes. The work will also contribute to a deeper interdisciplinary understanding of the history and prehistory of the indigenous inhabitants of the Andaman Islands.

Varieties of dependent Verb Second and verbal mood

This chapter studies varieties of “dependent V2” with “broad” (bDV2) and “narrow” (nDV2) distribution—that is, “generalized” and “limited embedded V2”— arising within Icelandic. This pattern is taken to correlate with construals of verbal mood as “dominant” in the former case and “non-dominant” in the latter case, where dominance of verbal mood allows the disregarding of the illocutionary impact of V2. It further shows that the variation fits into a model of historical stages with earlier variants “recruiting” verbal mood for clause combining and drift in later stages towards “autonomous” mood, that is, towards a mood system with enhanced semantico-pragmatic transparency.