Yoga instructions in Polish and Russian as directive speech acts: a cognitive linguistic perspective

abstract This paper offers an account of within- and between-language differences in the grammatical encoding of directive meaning as represented in yoga discourse in two cognate languages: Polish and Russian. Specifically, the focus is put on three constructions: the imperative and the imperfective non-past indicative in both languages, and the indicative past, which is utilised only in Russian. In the analysis, we make an eclectic selection of methodological tools, drawing on a few models of illocution which have been put forward within Cognitive Linguistics. As is shown, even if yoga instructions are generally assessed as relatively weak directives, there are fine-grained differences in some aspects of construal evoked by the examined constructions resulting in differences in the force impact among the respective patterns and in their distribution. In the analysis, we consider such aspects of construal as: (i) the actuality or virtuality of the event presented in the utterance; (ii) the presence or absence of the speaker in the onstage region; and (iii) the aspectual opposition between an ongoing or completed event. The analysis, which is both qualitative and quantitative, has been based on a corpus of 300 randomly selected instructions in each language (600 in total).

Grammatical encoding of agency in Asturian middle constructions

Middle-passive constructions in Asturian –a Romance language spoken in the diglossic region of Asturias, in northern Spain– appear to optionally allow the occurrence of the reflexive pronoun se in them; this has been traditionally considered a pleonastic use of the reflexive due to the influence of Spanish, i.e. the dominant language in the territory (ALLA 2001). Here, I show that the presence of such pronoun is neither aspectual nor stylistic; instead, I argue that this clitic spells out a passivized Voice head encoding the participation of an implicit generic agent/experiencer in the event, i.e. a generic passive construction. The non-pronominal variant, on the contrary, is only possible with unaccusative verbs or those undergoing the causative alternation, i.e. in inchoative configurations, which can be generic. Evidence for this claim is that only the pronominal counterpart can control into a purpose clause but does not license the insertion of the PP por sí mesmu (‘by itself’), and vice versa. Additionally, these structures can host an additional dative argument which can only be interpreted as an unintentional causer of the event in absence of the reflexive, therefore supporting Suárez-Palma’s (2020) claim that there exists a mutual incompatibility between Voice and a high applicative head –both different realizations of i* (Wood & Marantz 2017)–, which compete for the position above the verbalizing head in generic passives. Finally, cases of linguistic transfer between Asturian and Asturian Spanish are discussed.

Basic pain terms in Beserman Udmurt

This paper is devoted to semantic structure and syntactic properties of predicates of pain in Beserman Udmurt. Beserman is a variety of Udmurt spoken in northwestern Udmurtia, which has undergone contact infl uence of Russian dialects and of Turkic languages. We analyze meanings and compatibility of units which denote pain, describe grammatical encoding of diff erent participants of the situation of pain — the experiencer, the body part where pain is located, and the cause of pain. We consider the following parameters to be relevant for encoding the situation of pain in Beserman Udmurt: type of experiencer, location of pain and its cause (including a human making someone feel pain), pure pain vs. pain accompanied by functionality loss, physical pain vs. painful emotions, intensity of pain and its type. We compare Beserman Udmurt data with those from idioms which either are closely related to Udmurt genetically or are in the situation of close contact with it — namely, with the data from Komi-Zyrian, certain Russian dialects, and Turkic languages. We show that unlike Komi-Zyrian, its relative, Beserman Udmurt encodes diff erent types of pain on the lexical level (i. e. by verbal roots and ideophones), not on the grammatical one (i. e. through morphological derivation). In this respect, Beserman Udmurt resembles certain Turkic languages. The diversity of argument encoding in expressions of pain is a common trait of Beserman Udmurt and Komi-Zyrian; it seems to be supported by the infl uence of Russian dialects.

Variation in P

Over the past thirty years, the generative framework has greatly contributed to the study of both the internal and external syntax of spatial adpositions, with the intent—among many other things—of giving a unitary account of their heterogeneous nature and behavior. Once the Cinderellas of grammar, prepositions have been extensively investigated in earlier research. The major result of these studies was to show that prepositional phrases have a complex internal structure, and that the grammatical encoding of locative meaning has its own place in UG. This volume constitutes the implementation and the ideal continuation of the seminal proposals in the generative tradition. The essays collected in the first part of the volume not only test these proposals against new (micro-)comparative data, but also shed new light on the relation between spatial expressions and other semantic relations like possession. The second part of the volume looks beyond spatial PPs, exploring the role of Ps not only in non-spatial environments such as comitatives, but also in more general phenomena like verbal affixation, ellipsis, and complementation.

Effects of Verb Overlap on Structural Priming in Dialogue: Implications for Syntactic Learning in Aphasia

Purpose Although there is increasing interest in using structural priming as a means to ameliorate grammatical encoding deficits in persons with aphasia (PWAs), little is known about the precise mechanisms of structural priming that are associated with robust and enduring effects in PWAs. Two dialogue-like comprehension-to-production priming experiments investigated whether lexically independent (abstract structural) priming and/or lexically (verb) specific priming yields immediate and longer, lasting facilitation of syntactic production in PWAs. Method Seventeen PWAs and 20 healthy older adults participated in a collaborative picture-matching task where participant and experimenter took turns describing picture cards using transitive and dative sentences. In Experiment 1, a target was elicited immediately following a prime. In Experiment 2, 2 unrelated utterances intervened between a prime and target, thereby allowing us to examine lasting priming effects. In both experiments, the verb was repeated for half of the prime–target pairs to examine the lexical (verb) boost on priming. Results Healthy older adults demonstrated abstract priming in both transitives and datives not only in the immediate (Experiment 1) but also in the lasting (Experiment 2) priming condition. They also showed significantly enhanced priming by verb overlap (lexical boost) in transitives during immediate priming. PWAs demonstrated abstract priming in transitives in both immediate and lasting priming conditions. However, the magnitude of priming was not enhanced by verb overlap. Conclusions Abstract structural priming, but not lexically specific priming, is associated with reliable and lasting facilitation of message–structure mapping in aphasia. The findings also suggest that implicit syntactic learning via a dialogue-like comprehension-to-production task remains preserved in aphasia.