bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
On Shakespeare’s informal language
Authors: Blake Norman F.
Published: October 2007

Shakespeare’s works consist mainly of plays, yet little attention has been paid to his informal language although he was one of the first dramatists to exploit this variety in dialogue. This article, based on the author’s work for a dictionary of Shakespeare’s informal English, explores first what is meant by informal English and what data might provide the basis for this dictionary. It then reviews the understanding of different varieties of English in Shakespeare’s works. Finally, a passage from Romeo and Juliet provides the starting point for an analysis and review of some of the different types of informal English found in Shakespeare’s writings. Examples from many plays are quoted in the analysis, though a short paper like this cannot be comprehensive. It is hoped that the paper will spark greater interest in informal English from a historical viewpoint.
Performative aspects of late medieval English wills
Authors: Del Lungo Camiciotti Gabriella
Published: October 2007

This paper presents a case study of the fifty earliest English wills in the Court of Probate, London, with a view to contributing towards highlighting the historical development of this legal genre. By analysing these documents from a pragmatic perspective and setting them in a diachronic framework, I show how the realisation of the act of bequeathing is highly dependent on the socio-cultural context of production and use. Late medieval wills are utterly different from Anglo-Saxon ones in that they are the product of a relatively literate culture in which drafters followed the format of Latin testaments; in this sense late medieval wills are similar to modern ones because they conform to the model of autonomous, formal text. However, they do not fulfil all the felicity conditions necessary to achieve their full constitutive potential as the authority validating these documents remains rooted in religious practices rather than in legal enforcement. This paper offers evidence in favour of the view that a proper pragmatic analysis of medieval documents can only be achieved by taking the historical context into account.
Textual structures in eighteenth-century newspapers
Authors: Studer Patrick
Published: October 2007

Newspapers have recently become attractive objects of interest to linguists, but little research has been done thus far on news discourse of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The present study contributes to filling this gap by reporting results from a corpus-based study of early English-language newspaper headlines. The analysis reveals that the modern segmentation of news into the three elements of headline, lead, and news story cannot be applied to forerunners of modern newspapers. Instead, a classification model is proposed that takes account of the specific properties of the genre. The physical organisation of early newspapers is first considered, so as to be able to identify typographical categories of headings. In a second step, the intended textual functions of headlines are identified, along with typical correlations of headline forms and functions. Applying these categories to an eighteenth-century corpus reveals general tendencies of text structuring in early newspapers.
Prescription and practice
Authors: Cotter Colleen
Published: October 2007

The use of sentence-initial connectives (and, but) in written discourse historically has been disfavored, including by newspaper copy editors who delete them. This article describes changes in the frequency and use of sentence-initial connectives in news stories over the course of the twentieth century, from their relative absence to a semi-conventionalized frequency of use. Connectives have both referential (or semantic) meaning and functional (or pragmatic) meaning, the latter especially associated with spoken discourse. Using data from one community, I show how connectives in sentence-initial position have come to be used by reporters to meet profession-specific communicative functions that override other prescriptive considerations. These functions are mostly pragmatic, rather than semantic, and include goals that are both interactional (managing the interlocutorial distance between reporter and reader, by invoking spoken discourse norms) and structural (delimiting text categories or genres of journalism, and creating coherence in news narratives).
Language change via satellite
Authors: Muhr Rudolf
Published: October 2007

This article is concerned with media-induced language change in Austrian German (AG) which is caused by language contact with German German (GG) as presented in television programs broadcast via satellite. A detailed overview of the media situation and its impact on a number of linguistic features of AG is given. It is shown that the impact of this language contact is increasing and that it can be directly linked to the amount of TV-viewing time, especially of children. Examples of this are the emergence of the particle mal and other colloquial lexical items in informal AG, as well as the replacement of traditional items of core AG lexicon with their GG equivalents. Finally, factors which contribute to the ongoing process of language shift are considered: the relative powerlessness of a small language culture in permanent contact with a powerful one, the prestige of new media and their associated language usages which frequently symbolise modernity and worldliness, and lack of linguistic pride, such that the native variety is considered outmoded and provincial.
Mass media communication at the beginning of the twenty-first century
Authors: Jucker Andreas H.
Published: October 2007

This paper identifies and analyses current dimensions of change in mass media communication and in particular changes in mass media news transmitted via the Internet. In comparison with traditional media such as newspapers, Internet mass media products rely increasingly on a hypertext structure and on the integration of different channels of communication (hypermedia). In addition, they seek to convey the impression of personal, almost private communication. Audiences are carefully targeted, and media products can be customised to the personal needs and preferences of individual consumers. Online news media are also more interactive, requiring choices by users who activate some links and ignore others, and allowing users to talk back to the producers and interact with other users. The life span of information is changing as information is published as news in increasingly shorter time spans. Reception patterns are also changing: television and radio broadcasts available on the Internet can be received in a selective and asynchronous manner, like newspapers. Finally, online media differ from their traditional predecessors in their immediate world-wide availability, and in a reduction in the fixity of their texts.
Looking across the river
Authors: Galasiński Dariusz , Meinhof Ulrike H.
Published: October 2007

The paper reports results of an ongoing ESRC-funded project into constructions of identity in German and Polish border communities. We are interested here in how our informants from different generations position themselves and their communities with regard to those on the other side of the river.

The data come from a set of semi-structured interviews conducted in the towns of Guben (Germany) and Gubin (Poland) separated by the river Neisse, with some reference to the data elicited in the similarly split communities on the former East West German border on the Saale. For the people living in our target communities, the official narratives of the nation were re-written not just once, but in the case of the older generation at least three times. This meant a challenge of how to construct their own cultural identity in response to official changes and in relation to oppositional constructions of the nation on the other side of the border literally by ‘looking across’ at the Other in their every-day lives.

In this paper we discuss how members of the oldest generation living on both sides of the river Neisse in the respective German and Polish towns of Guben and Gubin construct each other in their discourses. We show that the discourses of the Other are ridden by a mismatch in the constructions of the ownership of the past and the present. While the Polish narratives construct the German neighbours in terms of threat to the present status quo of the town, the German narratives position Gubin mostly in terms of the nostalgic past.
National languages as flags of allegiance, or the linguistics that failed us
Authors: Rajagopalan Kanavillil
Published: October 2007

This paper focuses on what appears to be the emergence of linguistic chauvinism in Brazil. Large-scale influx currently under way of foreign words (mostly from English) into the country’s national language, Portuguese, is being eyed with suspicion and distrust by large segments of the population. The current crisis was kick-started by a federal deputy in the House of Representatives who presented a controversial bill aimed at curbing the use of foreignisms by the use of law. Critics have however been quick to point out that the bill is a covert attempt to advance a political agenda. The paper examines the role of linguists in the unfolding national debate. After noting that they have by and large been set aside and have failed to bring the weight of their expert opinion to bear on the whole issue, I advance the claim that it is they themselves who are largely to blame. I conclude by making a plea that it is high time we as linguists did some soul-searching and asked ourselves whether, in our single-minded effort to theorise about language in total disregard for what the lay people think and believe about it, we have not isolated ourselves from them and rendered ourselves largely inconsequential. I suggest that Critical Linguistics may turn out to be one way of regaining some of the lost ground.
Autobiographical Time
Authors: Brockmeier Jens
Published: October 2007

Recently, a number of studies have drawn attention to the narrative fabric of autobiographical identity construction. In this process, time plays a pivotal role, both as a structure and object of construction. In telling our lives, we deal not only with the classical time modalities of past, present, and future, but also with the different temporal orders of natural, cultural, and individual processes. We find all forms of linguistic constructions of time, such as tense systems, tropes, anachronies, and the use of specific narrative genres. In this paper, I shall argue that in the process of autobiographical identity construction a particular synthesis of cultural and individual orders of time takes place. The result is autobiographical time, the time of one’s life. For this synthesis the form of narrative is not only the most adequate form, it is the only form in which this most complex mode of human time construction can exist at all. Discussing various case studies, I shall distinguish six different narrative models of autobiographical time: the linear, circular, cyclical, spiral, static, and fragmentary model. To study how people make use of these models in their autobiographical narratives is to investigate how we become immersed into the fabric of culture and, at the same time, express our unique individuality.
Autobiography, Mediated Action, and the Development of Moral Identity
Authors: Tappan Mark B.
Published: October 2007

This paper explores a sociocultural approach to the development of moral identity, by considering the recently published autobiography of Ingo Hasselbach. Hasselbach, the founder (in 1991) of the National Alternative neo-Nazi party in East Germany, writes about his childhood and youth, how and why he embraced the neo-Nazi perspective, and how and why he ultimately repudiated the movement that he had helped to create. The analysis of Hasselbach’s story employs a “mediated action” approach to identity formation (Penuel & Wertsch, 1995; Wertsch, 1998). Such an approach entails taking human action as the starting point for the study of identity development, and understanding that mediated action, rather than an inner sense of identity, continuity, or sameness, provides the primary unit of analysis. In bringing a sociocultural perspective to bear on Hasselbach’s autobiographical narrative, this paper thus highlights the connections that emerge in his autobiography between his changing/developing sense of moral identity and his moral actions and interactions in the world. In so doing, it explores and explicates the relationship between Hasselbach’s moral identity and the sociocultural context in which it develops.
Interactional Positioning and Narrative Self-construction
Authors: Wortham Stanton E.F.
Published: October 2007

Many have proposed that autobiographical stories do more than describe a pre-existing self. Sometimes narrators can change who they are, in part, by telling stories about themselves. But how does this narrative self-construction happen? Most explanations rely on the representational function of autobiographical discourse. These representational accounts of narrative self-construction are necessarily incomplete, because autobiographical narratives have interactional as well as representational functions. While telling their stories autobiographical narrators often enact a characteristic type of self, and through such performances they can become that type of self. A few others have proposed that interactional positioning is central to narrative self-construction, but none has given an adequate, systematic account of how narrative discourse functions to position narrator and audience in the interactional event of storytelling. This article describes an approach to analyzing the interactional positioning accomplished through autobiographical narrative, and it illustrates this approach by analyzing data from one oral autobiographical narrative.
“Really Unreal”: Narrative Evaluation and the Objectification of Experience
Authors: Gwyn Richard
Published: October 2007

The specific narrative feature of ‘evaluation’, as described by Labov and Waletzky (1967/97), is not a discrete and secondary structure, but rather is embedded in the continuous acts of description that constitute a story, as well in the second-order evaluations provided by reported speech. Making use of Bakhtin’s (1984) concepts of polyphony and dialogism and recent work on ‘active voicing’, it is argued that (a) evaluation is a continuous and constantly shifting process within the narrative encounter; and (b) within this process, polyphony becomes a means towards the objectification of personal experience. Narratives are not the static discourses of literary theory and structuralist analysis, but dialogically evolving episodes of interaction, in which evaluations are frequently co-constructed between speaker and listener. (Narrative, Evaluation, Polyphony, Dialogic, Co-constructed, Objectification)
Sanctioned and Non-Sanctioned Narratives in Institutional Discourse
Authors: Barton Ellen
Published: October 2007

This article describes the conventions of sanctioned and non-sanctioned narratives in two institutional discourses, medical encounters and support groups. In the well-established institutional discourse of medicine, sanctioned narratives are specifically invited and non-sanctioned narratives are effectively deflected through standard conventions. In the less well-established institutional discourse of support groups, the line between sanctioned and non-sanctioned narratives is considerably blurred and the conventions for deflecting a non-sanctioned narrative are not necessarily effective. (Medical communication, Institutional Discourse, Conversation Analysis, Narrative Analysis)
Negotiating “normality” when IVF fails
Authors: Throsby Karen
Published: October 2007

This article argues that the dominant social and cultural representations of IVF as successful, and of reproduction as the natural and inevitable life course, particularly for women, offer those for whom treatment fails a limited set of discursive resources through which to make sense of that experience. The article explores the ways in which those resources are both deployed and resisted by those who have experienced treatment failure, and who have since stopped treatment, in order to establish themselves as “normal”. It is argued that through the construction of themselves as meeting rather than transgressing the normative social and cultural reproductive standards, the participants can be seen to discretely subvert and redefine the dominant discourses of both technology and reproduction, even while appearing to shore them up.
Photographic visions and narrative inquiry
Authors: Harrison Barbara
Published: October 2007

This paper examines the ways in which photographic images can be used in narrative inquiry. After introducing the renewed interest in visual methodology the first section examines the ways in which researchers have utilised the camera or photographic images in research studies that are broadly similar to forms of narrative inquiry such as auto/biography, photographic journals, video diaries and photo-voice. It then draws on the published literature in relation to the author’s own empirical research into everyday photography. Here the extent to which the practices which are part of everyday photography can be seen as forms of story-telling and provide access to both narratives and counter-narratives, are explored. Ideas about memory and identity construction are considered. A critical area of argument centres on the relationship of images to other texts, and asks whether it is possible for photographs to narrate independent of written or oral word. It concludes with some remarks about how photographs can be used in research and as a resource for narrative inquiry. This necessitates a understanding of what it is people do with photographs in everyday life.
“That’s very rude, I shouldn’t be telling you that”
Authors: Jones Rebecca L.
Published: October 2007

This paper discusses narratives created during interviews with 23 older women (aged 61–90) about their experiences of sex and intimate relationships in later life. For analytic purposes, the paper understands narratives to be neither pre-existing nor a simple reflection of experience, but to be made moment-by-moment in the interaction between parties drawing on available cultural resources. Attention to the interactional situation in which the narrative is produced helps to explain the ways in which speakers perpetuate or resist dominant cultural storylines. Older women’s accounts of sexual relationships provide a particularly rich site for this analysis because a dominant cultural storyline of ‘asexual older people’ is often evident in popular culture. This storyline provides an important cultural resource which older women who are talking about sex can both draw on and resist in order to produce their own accounts. This paper uses a discourse analytic approach to discuss some of the moments in which speakers explicitly produce counter-narratives. These moments are visible to the analyst by the participants’ own orientations to telling a counter-narrative. The paper also considers parts of the accounts which the analyst identifies as counter-narratives, although the speakers do not orient to this. The analyst’s own position is thus implicated in the analysis and is reflexively considered.
Charting the narrative unconscious
Authors: Freeman Mark
Published: October 2007

This essay explores the cultural dimension of autobiographical narrative, focusing especially on the way in which cultural texts and “textures” become woven into the fabric of memory. This process is one of which people are often unaware, resulting in regions of history that may be all but unknown. The “narrative unconscious,” therefore, refers not so much to that which has been dynamically repressed as to that which has been lived but which remains unthought and hence untold, i.e., to those culturally-rooted aspects of one’s history that have not yet become part of one’s story. An important challenge for those fashioning autobiographies is thus to move beyond personal life, into those largely uncharted regions of history that find their origins in the shared life of culture. From this perspective, autobiography is not only a matter of representing a life from (sometime after) birth until (sometime before) death; it is a matter of discerning the multiple sources, both proximate and distant, that give rise to the self.
A linked aggregate code for processing faces
Authors: Lyons Michael J. , Morikawa Kazunori , Akamatsu Shigeru
Published: October 2007

A model of face representation, inspired by known biology of the visual system, is compared to experimental data on the perception of facial similarity. The face representation model uses aggregate primary visual cortex (V1) cell responses topographically linked to a grid covering the face, allowing comparison of shape and texture at corresponding points in two facial images. When a set of relatively similar faces was used as stimuli, this “linked aggregate code” (LAC) predicted human performance in similarity judgment experiments. When faces of different categories were used, natural facial dimensions such as sex and race emerged from the LAC model without training. The dimensional structure of the LAC similarity measure for the mixed-category task displayed some psychologically plausible features, but also highlighted shortcomings of the proposed representation. The results suggest that the LAC based similarity measure may be useful as an interesting starting point for further modeling studies of face representation in higher visual areas.
Exploring the relations between categorization and decision making with regard to realistic face stimuli
Authors: Townsend James T. , Silva Kam M. , Spencer-Smith Jesse , Wenger Michael J.
Published: October 2007

Categorization and decision making are combined in a task with photorealistic faces. Two different types of face stimuli were assigned probabilistically into one of two fictitious groups; based on the category, faces were further probabilistically assigned to be hostile or friendly. In Part I, participants are asked to categorize a face into one of two categories, and to make a decision concerning interaction. A Markov model of categorization followed by decision making provides reasonable fits to Part I data. A Markov model predicting decision making followed by categorization is rejected. In Part II, a no-parameter model predicts decisions using categorization and decision responses collected in separate trials, suggesting that Part 1 results are not an artifact of the presentation of categorization and decision questions within a single trial. Decisions concerning interaction (defensive/friendly) appear to be based on information from the category decision, and not from the face stimuli alone.
Female facial beauty
Authors: Johnston Victor S.
Published: October 2007

Prior research on facial beauty has suggested that the average female face in a population is perceived to be the most attractive face. This finding, however, is based on an image processing methodology that appears to be flawed. An alternative method for generating attractive faces is described and the findings using this procedure are compared with the reports of other experimenters. The results suggest that (1) beautiful female faces are not average, but vary from the average in a systematic manner, and (2) female beauty can best be explained by a sexual selection viewpoint, whereby selection favors cues that are reliable indicators of fertility.
Recognizing expression from familiar and unfamiliar faces
Authors: Baudouin Jean Yves , Sansone Stéphane , Tiberghien Guy
Published: October 2007

The aim of this study was to clarify the relationship between accessing the identity of a face and making decisions about its expression. Three experiments are reported in which undergraduate subjects made expression decisions about familiar and unfamiliar faces. The decision was slowed either by concealing the mouth region with a black rectangle (experiment 1) or by using a short presentation time (experiments 2 and 3). Results of experiment 1 showed that subjects recognized the displayed expression of celebrities better than those of unknown persons when information from the mouth was not available. Results of experiment 2 showed that they recognized the expression displayed by celebrities more easily when the presentation time was short. Experiment 3, using familiarized faces, replicated the results of experiments 1 and 2 and ruled out a possible explanation of these results by the use of some identity specific representations that are expressive. Implications for face recognition models are discussed.
The semantics of human facial expressions
Authors: Wierzbicka Anna
Published: October 2007

This paper points out that a major shift of paradigm is currently going on in the study of the human face and it seeks to articulate and to develop the fundamental assumptions underlying this shift. The main theses of the paper are: 1) Facial expressions can convey meanings comparable to the meanings of verbal utterances. 2) Semantic analysis (whether of verbal utterances or of facial expressions) must distinguish between the context-independent invariant and its contextual interpretations. 3) Certain components of facial behavior (“facial gestures”) do have constant context-independent meanings. 4) The meanings of facial components and configurations of components have an inherent first-person and present tense orientation. 5) The basis for the interpretation of facial gestures is, above all, experiential. 6) The meanings of some facial expressions are universally intelligible and can be interpreted without reference to any local conventions. 7) To be fruitful, the semantic analysis of facial expressions needs a methodology. This can be derived from the methodological experience of linguistic semantics. The author illustrates and supports these theses by analyzing a range of universally interpretable facial expressions such as the following ones: “brow furrowed” (i.e. eyebrows drawn together); eyebrows raised; eyes wide open; corners of the mouth raised; corners of the mouth lowered; mouth open (while not speaking); lips pressed together; upper lip and nose “raised” (and, consequently, nose wrinkled).
Automatic facial expression interpretation
Authors: Lisetti Christine L. , Schiano Diane J.
Published: October 2007

We discuss here one of our projects, aimed at developing an automatic facial expression interpreter, mainly in terms of signaled emotions. We present some of the relevant findings on facial expressions from cognitive science and psychology that can be understood by and be useful to researchers in Human-Computer Interaction and Artificial Intelligence. We then give an overview of HCI applications involving automated facial expression recognition, we survey some of the latest progresses in this area reached by various approaches in computer vision, and we describe the design of our facial expression recognizer. We also give some background knowledge about our motivation for understanding facial expressions and we propose an architecture for a multimodal intelligent interface capable of recognizing and adapting to computer users’ affective states. Finally, we discuss current interdisciplinary issues and research questions which will need to be addressed for further progress to be made in the promising area of computational facial expression recognition.
Living with difficulties of facial processing
Authors: Cole Jonathan
Published: October 2007

The present paper considers the processing of facial information from a personal and narrative aspect, attempting to address the effects that deficits in such processing have on people’s perceptions of themselves and of others. The approach adopted has been a narrative and mainly subjective one, entering the experience of several subjects with facial problems to tease out the interactions between their facial problems and their relations with others. The subjects are those with blindness, either congenital or acquired, autism, Moebius syndrome (the congenital absence of facial expression), Bell’s palsy and facial disfigurement. From these biographical experiences the effect of facial problems on people’s perception of self and their social existence is explored. Facial information processing is being examined to brilliant effect scientifically: the effects of problems in the system on individuals’ self esteem may be informed, in part, by a clinical, descriptive approach.
Connectives and frame theory
Authors: Kitis Eliza
Published: October 2007

In this study I examine some uses of connectives, and in particular co-ordinate conjunction, from a critical discourse perspective; these uses, in my view, cannot find a satisfactory explanation within current frameworks. It is suggested that we need to identify a conceptual level at which connectives function as hypo-textual signals, activating systematic law-like conditional statements (IF-THEN), which form default specifications of consistent structured knowledge frames. I argue that an account of connectives at the conceptual level of their function that does not take into consideration such tightly structured background schemata, representing both general knowledge and ideologies, cannot afford any generality. As a result, ‘deviant’ or ‘subversive’ uses of these connectives can neither be identified as such nor find an adequately general explication within existing accounts, whereas in the proposed framework such uses find a ready explanation of sufficient generality. This framework lies at the intersection of disciplines: Linguistic pragmatics (empirical pragmatics, critical discourse analysis), on the one hand, and cognitive science, on the other. Consequently, this proposal, too, can be regarded as a plea for crossing boundaries and joining forces.
What does our face mean to us?
Authors: Yu Ning
Published: October 2007

This study is a semantic analysis of metonymic and metaphoric expressions involving body-part terms for the face in Chinese. These expressions are discussed regarding four perceived roles of face, namely, as highlight of appearance and look, as indicator of emotion and character, as focus of interaction and relationship, and as locus of dignity and prestige. It is argued that the figurative extensions are based on some biological facts about our face: it is the most distinctive part on the interactive side of our body capable of revealing our inner states. Referring to English the study shows that the terms for the face in both languages have developed figurative meanings along similar routes with similar stops. It also shows that the concepts of “face and facework”, admittedly ubiquitous in all cultures, are manifested more richly in Chinese than in English — a reflection of cultural differences in values attached to those concepts. Finally, a hypothetical “Triangle Model” is proposed to account for the relationship between language, culture, body, and cognition.
The Occurrence and Non-Occurrence of the Japanese Direct Object Marker o in Conversation
Authors: Fujii Noriko , Ono Tsuyoshi
Published: October 2007

Although in written Japanese grammatical relations such as subject and object are marked by postpositional particles, in informal conversation they may occur without any particles. This paper examines the occurrence and non-occurrence of the direct object marker o in spontaneous informal conversation and clarifies that the choice of object marking is a device to facilitate selective focusing on information. Our study shows that zero-marking is the unmarked option for marking direct objects and o is used when the information indicated by the direct object NP is salient in the discourse or when cognitive processing requires some additonal effort.
Echo Pronominalization and Complementation in Lakota
Authors: Pustet Regina
Published: October 2007

The functional domain of complementation breeds a vast spectrum of construction types. This structural diversification concerns, among other things, the coding of the notional subject of the complement clause. One coding option which invites further study within the functional-typological framework is echo pronominalization. In Lakota, the distribution of echo pronominalization relative to that of alternative coding strategies follows a clear-cut pattern. The continuum which emerges here correlates with a semantic scale that can be characterized in terms of varying degrees of participant involvement.
Language games, segment imposition, and the syllable
Authors: Botne Robert , Davis Stuart
Published: October 2007

Language games in which the phonological forms of words are systematically altered have been well-studied from a typological perspective. The two most common types of language games entail the transposition of phonological constituents (usually syllables) and the addition of phonemes at one or more locations within the word. Here we examine the latter type, proposing a novel distinction between insertion-type games and imposition-type games (exemplified, for example, by Spanish grande, which has the language game form grafandefe). In previous studies, imposition-type games have been analyzed formally as inserting a CV-template after each vowel of the word. We propose instead that such games involve the imposition of a consonant articulation upon the vowel. Not only is this approach conceptually simpler than the templatic approach, but it also provides an unproblematic account of diphthongal behavior, a natural explanation for the high frequency of inserted labial consonants, and independent support for the concept of the demisyllable.
Multiple dative-marking grammaticalization
Authors: Company Company Concepción
Published: October 2007

The aim of this paper is to provide some diachronic evidence of how a language acquires primary object properties, and to shed some light on the disputable status of dative expressions (Dats) in two object constructions. Spanish having in its origin two object case-markings, one for the Acc-patient and one for the Dat-recipient, has been progressively acquiring only one object case-marking. This language would have been sliding from a DO–IO language toward a special kind of PO–SO language. This paper examines seven apparently unconnected syntactic changes, showing that a common deep pattern unifies them: a grammaticalization process which reinforces Dat object-marking as a prime argument in the history of Spanish. In various areas of the transitivity system, Dats usurped the grammatical function performed originally by the Acc. As a consequence, a fair distinction between DO and IO does not hold; there are primary object effects in this language.
What corpora tell us about the grammaticalisation of voice in get-constructions
Authors: Hundt Marianne
Published: October 2007

Grammaticalisation studies are a potential meeting ground for theoretical linguistics and corpus-based approaches. The present paper uses evidence from the ARCHER corpus to investigate the relationship between frequency and the grammaticalisation of the get-passive. It seeks to verify whether the grammaticalisation of the passive function is reflected in an increase in the overall frequency of get, and whether grammaticalised patterns of get have spread at the expense of its lexical use. Givón/Yang (1993) have singled out several patterns that were involved in the grammaticalisation of the get-passive. Data from ARCHER are analysed to find out which of these patterns were frequent and which were of marginal importance. Finally, evidence from standard one-million-word corpora is used to test existing hypotheses on the maturation of the get-‘passive’. These data show that it has not lost its middle semantics and come closer to a true passive.
The passive matrices of English infinitival complement clauses
Authors: Noël Dirk
Published: October 2007

English verbs of the believe type, which display variation between that-complements and infinitival complements, more often combine with infinitives as passives than as actives. Though there are good information/thematic structural reasons for this (Noël 1998b), the higher frequency of passive matrices could also be a concomitant of a grammaticalization process as a result of which (some of) these matrices are turning into auxiliary-like evidentials. Anderson’s (1986) four-part definition of true (grammaticalized) evidentials is used to establish whether they can qualify as such. The fact that passives are more tolerant of lexical (even dynamic) infinitives than actives (which prefer be and statives) is adduced as evidence of grammaticalization. Individual instances of the passive pattern are differentiated using three criteria of grammaticalization: frequency, expansion and intraparadigmatic variability.
Japanese enter/exit verbs revisited
Authors: Tsujimura Natsuko
Published: October 2007

Kita (1999) compares Japanese and English Enter/Exit verbs in spatial expressions, and argues that Japanese Enter/Exit verbs lack semantic encoding of motion. He claims that this runs counter to the view which considers motion and location to be primitives in the semantics of spatial expressions; instead, he proposes that discrete change of state should be included in the set of primitives. In this reply,I will first show that Kita’s evidence does not support lack of motion in Japanese Enter/Exit verbs, but that instead these verbs do pattern with motion verbs in the language, where conflation of motion is not disputable. I finally demonstrate that Kita’s claim about change of state may be well taken, but it should be put in a larger context of regular polysemy.
Deixis and aspect
Authors: Hooper Robin
Published: October 2007

Semantic extensions of spatial deictics and of verbs meaning ‘come’ and ‘go’ have aroused interest in the context of studies of grammaticalisation. Reflexes of the Proto Polynesian directional particles *mai ‘towards speaker’/venitive, *atu ‘away from speaker’/andative, *hake ‘upwards’ and *hifo ‘downwards’ show the development of psychological, expressive and temporal meanings from concrete (in this case spatial) meanings which has been seen as central to many cases of semantic change. This discussion of Tokelauan mai and atu is based on a quantitative analysis of a corpus of spoken Tokelauan. In most types of discourse, the expression of spatial deixis is by no means the most frequent use of the particles. Uses relating to communication, perception, emotion, point of view and speaker’s attitude predominate. Most interestingly, there is also evidence for the development of aspectual functions. I show that the venitive particle mai can function as a marker of continuative aspect and that this development arises from its temporal and evidential uses. The andative particle atu can indicate ingressive aspect, particularly in certain idiomatic collocations and in ‘begin’ constructions. These meanings lack spatial content, but the deictic element is always detectable, though at a more abstract level.
Polysemy patterns in semi-lexical elements in Spanish and Catalan
Authors: Juge Matthew L.
Published: October 2007

Researchers investigating the Spanish word mismo and its Catalan congener mateix have traditionally focused exclusively on phonological issues, ignoring a number of worthy semantic topics. In this paper I explore the polysemy patterns of these forms in a cross-linguistic perspective. I argue that such examination of polysemy patterns in different languages will help us understand the nature of polysemy. I also claim that the evidence points to a three-way division of the lexicon into lexical, semi-lexical, and grammatical subparts.
Perfect in the Yi group
Authors: Gerner Matthias
Published: October 2007

The languages of the Yi group shed new light on the Perfect forms of other languages through their perfect particles. Several Yi languages display two perfect particles which unite in one paradigmatic picture the English type and the Mandarin type. I will first present Liangshan Nuosu’s ta33 (stative perfect) and o44 (dynamic perfect) with Klein’s aspect-tense terminology (1992) and will then establish a formal definition of the notion of stative and dynamic perfect. It appears that both perfects have in common their relating the utterance situation to the discourse topic (in Klein’s terminology: TU þ TT). I will claim that the property ‘TU þ TT’ is the essence of perfect and can be viewed as an aspect-tense characterization of ‘current relevance’, a vague term that is employed by an array of authors without precise definition.
The WA/GA distinction and switch-reference for ellipted subject identification in Japanese complex sentences
Authors: Nariyama Shigeko
Published: October 2007

This paper elucidates one interacting aspect of two problematic issues in Japanese grammar: the functional differences between the nominative marker GA and the topic marker WA, and the referential identity of ellipted subjects. My analysis shows that the interaction of WA and GA in complex sentences has an analogous property to switch-reference systems which determine the identity of ellipted subjects; GA in subordinate clauses signals Different Subject, and WA in all loci Same Subject. This syntactic finding is further evaluated in the light of non-syntactic features, some of which can override the interpretation created by these particles. Statistically in examining texts, however, over 90% of ellipted subjects in complex sentences are successfully identified solely by WA and GA.
Moving the actants
Authors: Gerstner-Link Claudia
Published: October 2007

This paper deals with morphosyntactic splits in the coding of actancy in transitive and intransitive sentences. In transitive sentences the splits are motivated by particular actant/person constellations and their interplay with modality, especially with negation. In intransitive sentences the splits are motivated by modality alone. All the different actancy coding procedures and intricate split patterns are explained here in terms of semantic motion, that is, the local increase or decrease of agency/salience properties of the actants involved. Thus motion manifests itself as promotion or demotion; this leads to a dynamization of the language-specific nominal hierarchy. Semantic motion is not bound to a particular type of alignment since it occurs with accusative as well as ergative coding behavior. The grammar of Yimas illustrates a broad variety of motional procedures rich enough to discuss the typologically useful notion of motion on the basis of one single language.
Discourse-pragmatic principles for temporal reference in Mandarin Chinese conversation
Authors: Wu Ruey-Jiuan Regina
Published: October 2007

This study investigates the Mandarin temporal system in ordinary conversations. It is found that during the dynamic time course of interaction, Mandarin speakers tend to rely more heavily on certain underlying principles, rather than on overt markers, to convey temporal location: In a narrative context, temporal reference is almost always established at the beginning of the story and is not subsequently changed, provided that there is a continuity of action across the verbs. In contexts where turn-by-turn talk is at work, speakers tend to establish the time reference through the inherent semantics of the verbs being employed. The data also suggest that other factors, such as shared knowledge and discourse co-text, appear to play a significant role in helping disambiguate the temporal standpoint of utterances which otherwise have potentially competing temporal anchors.
Systematization and the origin of rules
Authors: Haiman John
Published: October 2007

One of the design features of language is its systematicity: to a considerable extent, the rules of grammar relate not to the world outside, but only to other rules. They exist in autonomy from external motivations. Subject-verb inversion in the Germanic languages as a marker of interrogatives is a well-known example of such an externally unmotivated rule. The notion of systematization implies a process whereby such rules have evolved from pre-systematic externally motivated origins.

In this particular case: Greenberg’s constituent order universal #11 proposed that only those languages with sentence-initial interrogative words will ever allow subject-verb inversion in questions. There is, however, an obvious functional basis for fronting question words: Jespersen’s principle of actuality. Moreover, of the languages which front question words, many demarcate focussed from presupposed material by a focus-marking flag. In other languages, it may be that the verb itself may function as such a flag, that is, subject-verb inversion may be the functional analog of a demarcative focus marker. The best evidence for the functional unity of focus marking and subject-verb inversion is their complementary distribution, sometimes within the same language. The genuine systematicity of subject-verb inversion may then be the outcome of functional external motivations, and a series of analogical steps.

More generally, it may be that other aspects of the autonomization or emancipation of language can be explained by reference to processes that are attested in observed language change. Analogy leads to systematization (and possibly even to recursiveness), as ritualization leads to displacement, and its linguistic aspects (sound change and grammaticalization) lead to arbitrariness, discreteness, and double articulation.
The linguistic encoding of three-participant events in Saliba
Authors: Margetts Anna
Published: October 2007

In this article I investigate the strategies for encoding events with three participants in an Oceanic language. I look at three-place predicates featuring three syntactic arguments but also and particularly at the functional alternatives to such constructions. Besides ditransitive clauses and clauses featuring two arguments plus an adjunct, Saliba speakers productively use two further strategies to express three-participant events. One strategy makes use of possessive classifiers to express a beneficiary, the other features directional suffixes to express a recipient or goal. In both cases pragmatic implicature plays a role in encoding the third participant. There is evidence though that the three-participant reading is beginning to grammaticalize and in investigating these constructions we are looking at the gray area between morpho-syntax and pragmatics.
Semantic parameters and the unaccusative split in the Austronesian language family
Authors: Foley William
Published: October 2007

A fundamental issue facing all models of grammar is the mapping problem: how to link the semantic arguments defined by the lexical verb in a clause to their formal realizations in morphosyntax. This paper investigates this problem across a range of intransitive verb types, often grouped into unergative and unaccusative classes. It demonstrates that the criteria which determine this split vary across the Austronesian languages investigated, but that a strict hierarchy, putatively universal, of semantic parameters will predict exactly where the various splits can be drawn.
Numeral Classifiers and Counted Nouns in the Classic Maya Inscriptions
Authors: Macri Martha J.
Published: October 2007

Yucatecan, Ch’olan, and Tzeltalan languages have numeral classifiers which obligatorily follow numbers. Although such classifiers are not present in every number expression, several numeral classifiers occur frequently in the Classic Maya inscriptions. The most common of them, the period glyphs, constitute a feature which distinguishes Maya inscriptions from Mixe-Zoquean inscriptions, since the classifiers required in Mayan languages do not occur in Mixe-Zoquean languages. Any glyph immediately following bar/dot numbers should be examined carefully for that possibility. Several morphemes which immediately follow numbers are discussed here, and evaluated for the likelihood of their having functioned as classifiers.