Aspect construal in Mandarin: a usage-based constructionist perspective on LE

Despite extensive research efforts to explain the Mandarin Chinese particle le, confusion persists in the absence of a unitary theory and sufficient empirical evidence. This study provides a unitary account of le by adopting a usage-based constructionist approach, one that liberates grammatical aspect from, and is able to accommodate, lexical aspect. We argue that le participates in two distinct family resemblance constructions of aspect construal associated with two distinct sentential positions. The clause-internal le construction construes the closing or final boundary of an event and the clause-final le construction construes the opening or initial boundary of an event. Corpus analysis showed that the two aspect constructions have distinct patterns in natural language uses that are consistent with the proposed construals. Results from elicited response data showed that native speakers paid attention to construction-level formal and semantic cues in making family resemblance judgments about tokens of the two constructions. This study has both theoretical and methodological implications for crosslinguistic research on grammatical aspect in relation to lexical aspect and for usage-based constructionist approaches to grammatical categories beyond aspect.

Syntactic discontinuous reduplication with antonymic pairs: a case study from Italian

This article aims at giving a comprehensive account of a so far undescribed reduplicative pattern in Italian named syntactic discontinuous reduplication with antonymic pairs (SDRA). This pattern, characterized by the non-contiguous repetition of the same element within a larger fixed configuration defined by two spatial antonyms, can be schematized as <Xi Adv1 Xi Adv2>, where Adv1 and Adv2 are antonyms (e.g., di qua ‘here’ ∼ di là ‘there’). After describing its formal and functional properties, based on naturally occurring data extracted from the Italian Web 2016 corpus, the SDRA is analyzed as an independent ‘construction’ in the Construction Grammar sense. This construction is claimed to convey a general value of ‘plurality’ and to have developed a polysemy network of daughter constructions expressing more specific functions such as ‘distributivity,’ ‘related variety,’ and ‘dispersion.’ In addition, we propose considering the SDRA a ‘multiple source construction,’ originating from the blending of two independent constructions: syntactic reduplication and irreversible binomials with antonymic adverbs. Finally, we discuss SDRA-like patterns in other typologically different languages (Russian, Modern Hebrew, Mandarin Chinese, German), pointing out similarities and differences, and paving the way to a more systematic study of discontinuous reduplication in a crosslinguistic perspective.

A semantic typology of location, existence, possession and copular verbs: areal patterns of polysemy in Mainland East and Southeast Asia

This study is based on a sample of 116 languages from the Mainland East and Southeast Asian linguistic area. Its first objective is to examine four distinct synchronic patterns of areal polysemy, created by the semantic domains of copular, locative, existential and possessive verbs and the constructions they form. As a consequence, its second objective is to model the diachronic change underlying four language types identified on this basis from the data. We argue that there are three grammaticalization pathways which motivate the four synchronic patterns: Type III languages are distinguished by the grammaticalization chain: (Postural verb) > (Dwell) > Locative > Existential > Possessive, while the other two types, Type II and Type IV, show an opposing pathway: (Grasp) > Possessive > Existential. Type I and Type II languages additionally reveal a recurrent polysemy between Locative and Copular verbs. On this basis, an implicational universal is adduced to the effect that no diachronic adjacency exists between locative and possessive constructions. Crucially, the intervening stage of an existential construction provides the necessary bridging context for possessive reanalysis in this first pathway, while possessive verbs are formally distinct from locatives in the second, bearing no diachronic relationship to them. The findings on the patterns of polysemy sharing reinforce the notion of a clear typological split between Tibeto-Burman languages on the one hand, and Sinitic, Kra–Dai, Hmong–Mien, and Austroasiatic on the other.

Typologizing nominal expressions: the noun phrase and beyond

This article develops foundations for a new typology of nominal expressions. Despite the significant diversity attested in languages around the world, a view traditionally and sometimes still found holds that languages either have ‘classic’, rigidly structured noun phrases (NPs) or lack them. A simple dichotomy, however, does not adequately represent the significant language-internal and crosslinguistic diversity of forms and functions of nominal expressions. While many linguists may not in fact think in such binary terms, a comprehensive typology is still wanting. This article offers foundations towards such a typology, with a particular emphasis on language-internal diversity. This diversity within languages has received little attention in previous studies, even while it reveals much about the actual complexity in the nominal domain. Besides surveying structural types and their motivating factors across as well as within languages from around the world, this article approaches nominal expressions also from a variety of other perspectives to enrich our understanding of them. This includes approaching nominal expressions from the perspective of word class systems as well as diachronically. We round off the article by looking at the impact of orality-literacy dimensions and communicative modes.

The AMAR mechanism: nominal expressions in the Bantu languages are shaped by apposition and reintegration

Nominal expressions in the Bantu languages have extraordinary typological characteristics. Their word order patterns are extremely diverse and some of the attested patterns are crosslinguistically very rare, or even unique. The same diversity can be found in the number of agreement marker paradigms. Equally remarkable are the prosodic idiosyncrasies found at the level of nominal expressions, especially the existence of prosodic boundaries associated with certain types of adnominal modifiers. Although logically unrelated, I argue that these typological characteristics can be accounted for by a single diachronic scenario here called the AMAR mechanism: a double tendency in the Bantu languages for the emergence of construals in which a nominalized modifier is in apposition to the phrase that contains its semantic head and for such appositional construals to be gradually reintegrated into a single nominal constituent. This paper aims to summarize some of the more remarkable typological characteristics of nominal expressions in the Bantu languages and to lay out the AMAR mechanism as a hypothetical diachronic explanation for many of them.

Foot-based allomorphy in Tlapanec (Mè’phàà)

Tlapanec (Mè’phàà), an Otomanguean language spoken in Mexico, has several allomorphic alternations which are sensitive to the number of syllables of the stem (monosyllabic vs. disyllabic). We argue that these alternations are motivated by the foot structure which consists of two syllables, and that such alternations can be captured by subcategorization frames. An alternative, P » M analysis is also provided, where the allomorphic alternations are motivated by markedness constraints, namely *(tV.ˈσ), which avoids [t] in the weak position of the foot. These two approaches will be compared, and it will be argued that a subcategorization approach is more adequate than a P » M analysis.

Additive particles, prosodic structure and focus sensitivity in Hungarian

The main aim of this article is to investigate the prosody-information structure interface in the analysis of the Hungarian additive particle is ‘also, too’. We present a prosodic study of narratives, collected through guided elicitation, and provide a prosodic basis for a focus-based analysis of is. Standard formal semantic approaches to the interpretation of additive particles regard additive particles as focus sensitive, hence the associate of the particle is focal and the focus interpretation (in terms of alternatives) is a significant part in its semantics. This view is considered crosslinguistically valid, although the discussion mostly concerns English. In Hungarian, the focus sensitivity of the additive particle is not directly transparent and needs more elaboration. In the relevant literature, the issue of focus marking with respect to the additive particle is has been insufficiently studied or merely stipulated. In this article, we argue for the importance of a more elaborate study of the prosody-information structure interface in the analysis of Hungarian additive particles. Accordingly, we provide data and its analysis to support our core argument and claims. Our study contributes to the overall understanding and analysis of is and to the general claims about focus marking and focus types in Hungarian. We aim to complement the standard semantic analyses by providing a prosodic analysis supporting the focus-sensitive analysis of is instead of merely stipulating an association with focus. On a more general level, we show that the various readings of additive particles can be explained by taking the prosodic patterns of the relevant constructions into account.

Light heads and predicate formation: on two scopes of discontinuity

The present article addresses the problem of syntax-semantics mapping of syntactically complex structures that are interpreted as semantically simple terms. While these morphosyntactic mechanisms have been successfully applied to roots in Marantz’s framework, more complex structures turn out to be formally and conceptually challenging. To solve these problems, I make use of Cooper’s type-theoretic framework to propose a formal account of Transfer. I apply this to verbal idioms and direct quotation, whose parts do not obtain the idiomatic/quotational reading. The main result is a formal account of light heads providing the operation of predicate formation within cyclic derivations.