Identifying who is who in Brokpa

The grammatical features of a language reflect the attitudes and societal practices, both past and present, of its speakers. This chapter examines some select linguistic categories in order to understand how the Brokpa language and its society are closely correlated. The linguistic categories include the comparative construction, honorific systems and social deixis, and topographic deixis. Brokpa has a well-developed honorific systems. For example, the verbs of speaking and giving have three different forms for the same meaning, two honorific and one ordinary. One honorific form is to describe the action of speaking/giving from a higher to a lower (downward) speech-act-participant, the other honorific form from a lower to a higher level (upward), and the ordinary form to be used with the equals (horizontal). Most nouns and verbs have at least two forms, honorific and ordinary. These kinds of bipartite and tripartite systems are for the purposes of according deference to people who are 'elders' not only in terms of age, but also in terms of responsibility, experience, knowledge, contribution, and suchlike, in the society. Topographic deixis and demonstratives make a two-way or a three-way distinction which have striking parallels with the social deixis.

Wpływ dwujęzyczności na kształtowanie się urzędowej odmiany języka – na przykładzie średniowiecznych wielkopolskich rot sądowych

The article discusses Polish-Latin bilingualism of Polish medieval legal texts and its impact on the shaping of the official language variant. The article presents construc­tions that, in their own structure of court oath, include a form of set and often repeated formulas. These are: the formula of initial oath (Tako mi pomoży Bog i święty krzyż [so help me God and the holy cross]) and the comparative construction indicating the mem­bership of a social class of the participants of the events (tako dobry jako sam [as good as himself]) or the material value (tako dobry jako [as good as]). These constructions would appear in the Polish text in Latin, both in full or shortened form, or they would be part in Polish, part in Latin. The stable form of constructions that appeared in Latin as calques due to the influence of Polish indicates that they became, as a result of the domination of the Latin template, vivid markers of the official style in medieval Polish.

Más tontos que el novio de la Chelo. La intensificación de la estulticia en foros y chats por medio de comparaciones creativas: una aproximación desde la Gramática de Construcciones.

El objetivo principal de este trabajo consiste en describir por medio de corpus, con una metodología inductiva, la construcción comparativa intensificadora [ser más tonto que X]: ‘ser tonto en grado sumo’, para lo que se tomará como marco teórico la Gramática de Construcciones. En este sentido se realizará un estudio cuantitativo y cualitativo de las actualizaciones léxicas del slot X con el fin de determinar la fijación cognitiva y la productividad de la construcción, así como descubrir posibles rasgos recurrentes en su creatividad. Con esta investigación intentamos demostrar cuán fina es la línea que separa las unidades lexicalizadas de las creativas, con un predominio claro de estas últimas. Adopting a corpus-based approach, the main aim of this study is to inductively describe the intensifying comparative construction [ser más tonto que X]: ‘be foolish in its highest degree’. Therefore, it will be applied the Construction Grammar approach. In this sense, lexical fillers of the slot X will be quantitatively and qualitatively analysed in order to determine the entrenchment and productivity of the construction, as well as to find out potential recurrent traits of its creativity. This study aims to show the fine line between lexicalised and creative units, , the latter being the most predominant.

Old Latvian Comparative Constructions

What functioned as the primary comparative construction in seventeenth-century Latvian was a construction with the conjunction nekā ‘than’ (literally: ‘not like’), which typologically represents the so-called conjoined comparative in Stassen’s terminology (Stassen 1985). This is consistent with the state of affairs evidenced in sixteenth-century Lithuanian, where, as primary comparative constructions of inequality (COI), we find constructions with conjunctions comprising negation: neg(i), nei(gi), neng, nekaip, net, nent ‘than’ (Ostrowski 2018).

Äiwoo wâtu and the typology of comparatives

This paper examines a comparative construction in the Oceanic language Äiwoo and argues that it differs from those known in the typological literature on comparatives on two counts. It is similar to a so-called ‘exceed’ comparative in involving a morpheme meaning ‘go far’; but unlike canonical exceed comparatives, the construction is intransitive, and the standard of comparison is expressed as an oblique. Moreover, the standard is indicated not only by this oblique phrase but also by a directional marker on the verb, in an extension of the frequent use of directionals in Äiwoo to indicate peripheral participants. This construction thus, on the one hand, expands the established typology of comparative constructions; and on the other, shows that the use of directional morphemes to indicate peripheral participants, otherwise attested e.g. for recipients of give verbs, may extend to the standard in comparative constructions, pointing to an avenue for further typological exploration.

An Optative-Comparative Construction Expressing Emphatic Assertion in Classical Spanish

This paper offers a pragmatic analysis of a rarely used construction in Classical Spanish: an emphatic comparison of equality with optative illocution A comparative sentence such as Así me ayude Dios como fue buena mi intención (’May God help me just as my intention was good‘) is used for emphasizing the assertion fue buena mi intención (’my intention was good‘) This construction is probably a Latinism It occurs in Latin, especially in Plautus and Terence, and is mostly attested in Spanish in humanistic comedy and in the Celestinesque tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries The first member of the construction is interpreted at the pragmatic level as a reinforcer of the illocutionary force of the comparative construction as a whole, which expresses an indirect assertive speech act Speakers perform this type of act by satisfying its sincerity condition: they believe that the event of the second member is true, because if it were not, they would run a risk, i.e. the optative would entail a curse for themselves By contrast, when the event is true, the optative entails a good wish for themselves This paper also analyzes how the pragmatic properties of the construction are reflected in its semantic and morphosyntactic properties

A study of the development of the Chinese correlative comparative construction from the perspective of constructionalization

The paper addresses the emergence and development of the Chinese correlative comparative construction (CrCC) from the perspective of constructionalization. Most previous historical studies of the CrCC take a grammaticalization approach (e.g., Long 2013), focusing mainly on morphosyntax alone rather than investigating syntax and semantics in an integrated way. However, the architecture of construction grammar requires approaching linguistic analysis with both form and meaning equally in mind. This approach suggests that what have sometimes been considered to be merely different formal expressions of the CrCC are in fact two different constructions, one correlative, and the other a simple incremental. We identify the critical contexts (see Diewald & Smirnova 2010) that by hypothesis enabled the constructionalization of the CrCC, and point to the importance of considering network reorganization and multiple sources in the development of the simple incremental construction (see e.g., Boas 2008; Van de Velde et al. 2013).

Systematicity in linguistic feature selection: Repair sequences and subsequent accommodation

This study examines linguistic feature selection and its relationship with repair sequences in a longitudinal corpus of Japanese–Filipino business ELF interactions. In the corpus, Japanese employees communicate once a month with Filipino employees via computer software to confirm infrastructure status at a Filipino company’s factories. Comparative constructions frequently appear in the corpus because of the nature of the interactions, but the kinds and frequencies of comparative constructions change month to month. This study demonstrates that early in the corpus, the speakers utilized a multitude of comparative constructions, but after 12 months, the speakers have settled on one preferred comparative construction. Furthermore, the preferred construction emerged from repair sequences, which suggests that repair is significantly related to linguistic feature selection. Accordingly, this study hypothesizes that repair sequences do far more than just resolve an interactional problem; repaired linguistic features are more likely to be selected again the next time a similar linguistic feature is relevant to the progression of the interaction.

Verbal Characteristics of Adjectives in Hakha Chin

This paper will present a few items of interest regarding adjectives in the Tibeto-Burman language Hakha Chin, which has approximately 165,000 speakers worldwide (Simons and Fennig, 2018). Using Fiona Mc Laughlin’s methodology of comparing adjectival verbs and non-adjectival verbs in Wolof (Mc Laughlin, 2004), data will be presented comparing adjective and verb structures in Hakha Chin in an intransitive predicate construction, in a comparative construction, in a superlative construction, in questions, in negative constructions, and in relative clauses. This data will establish adjectives in Hakha Chin as being more verb-like than noun-like, and will place Hakha Chin in adjective class I, category 1, according to the classifications set by Robert Dixon (Dixon, 2004). This paper will conclude with a brief discussion of the role that adverbs may play in the adjectival verb phrases of Hakha Chin.