Linguistic Typology at the Crossroads

Expletive negation and related problems

Paolo Ramat — 2022-12-22

This paper makes two main claims: the presence of two or more negative elements in Negative Concord, Negative Comparison, and Expletive Negation basically rests upon the pragmatic need of intensifying the negative import of the sentence. Secondly, the paper aims at identifying a possible path of functional expansion that may account for the use of the Expletive Negation in the constructions under scrutiny. Expletive Negation is originally tied to the core concept of inequality comparison (x is more/has more y than z, where y refers to a state, a quality or property), as well as to temporal comparison (x before y)–where the second member is implicitly negated; it may then expand to other constructions such as Negative Concord and the construction of fear verbs.

Person alignment in reported speech and thought: the distribution and typology of participant roles (based on six Finno-Ugric languages)

Denys Teptiuk — 2022-12-22

This paper investigates how person alignment is arranged in discourse reporting. I focus on participant roles appearing in narrated and speech events (Jakobson [1957] 1971) and how they are linguistically encoded in (re)presentations of speech and thought. Besides the (re)presentations of speech and thought attributed to other speakers, I include two other types of report: self-quotations (Reported Speaker = Reporter) and quotations with an unknown source (Reported Speaker = ?). For illustrative purposes, I use data from internet communications of six Finno-Ugric languages: Hungarian, Estonian, Finnish, Erzya, Udmurt, Komi. The results show that three types of reports exhibit idiosyncrasies regarding the participant distribution in the narrated event. These idiosyncrasies affect how the linguistic encoding of participants is arranged and how different perspectives are highlighted in reported speech and thought. In addition to two canonical perspectives, i.e. Reported Speaker’s and Reporter’s, there are some ambiguous cases where person marking does not index only one type of perspective. Such ambiguity is characterized by the overlap between different roles carried out by one participant or subsumption of participants from different events under one formal reference. Furthermore, ambiguous cases often contain a generic reference equally suitable for participants in the narrated and current speech event.

Predicting grammatical gender in Nakh languages: Three methods compared

Jesse Wichers Schreur — 2022-12-22

The Nakh languages Chechen and Tsova-Tush each have a five-valued gender system: masculine, feminine, and three “neuter” genders named for their singular agreement forms: B, D and J. Gender assignment in languages is generally analysed as being dependent on both forms and semantics (e.g. Corbett, 1991), with semantics typically prevailing over form (e.g. Bellamy & Wichers Schreur, 2021, Allassonnière-Tang et al., 2021). Most previous studies have considered only binary or tripartite gender systems possessing masculine, feminine, and neuter values. The five-valued system of Nakh thus represents an innovative and insightful case study for analysing gender assignment. In this paper we build on the existing qualitative linguistic analyses of gender assignment in Tsova-Tush (Wichers Schreur, 2021) and apply three machine-learning methods to investigate the weight of form and semantics in predicting grammatical gender in Chechen and Tsova-Tush. The results show that while both form and semantics are helpful for predicting grammatical gender in Nakh, semantics is dominant, which supports findings from existing literature (Allassonnière-Tang, Brown & Fedden, 2021). However, the results also show that the coded semantic information could be further fine-grained to improve the accuracy of the predictions (see also Plaster et al., 2013). In addition, we discuss the implications of the output for our understanding of language-internal and family-internal processes of language change, including how loanwords are integrated from Russian, a three-gender language.

Cross-linguistic sources of anticausative markers

Guglielmo Inglese — 2022-12-22

The (anti)causative alternation, that is, the alternation whereby languages contrast intransitive verbs expressing spontaneous events with transitive ones expressing externally caused events, has been the object of extensive language-specific and cross-linguistic studies. Within this type of alternation, marking on the intransitive member goes under the name of anticausative marking, while marking on the transitive member is causative marking. Historical research has mostly focused on causatives, while the diachrony of anticausative markers has largely been neglected. In the literature, only two possible cross-linguistic sources of anticausatives are mentioned: reflexives and passives. By looking at a sample of 97 languages, in this paper I show that sources of anticausativization are much more varied than what currently reported in the literature. Taking this richer diachronic evidence into account also sheds light on some yet controversial aspects concerning the relationship between anticausativization and reflexivity.

The rise of unemphatic negation: two standard negation constructions in Oji-Cree and their patterns of use

Matthew Windsor — 2022-12-22

Oji-Cree (Algonquian) makes use of two negation constructions which overlap in non-future environments and differ subtly in their pragmatic contexts of use. Ci-negation is used for neutral, descriptive negation whereas hsii-negation is associated with polemic, emphatic-like uses within stronger assertions. While hsii-negation dates to Proto-Ojibwe, I show that ci-negation developed more recently from indirect irrealis expressions as a way to downplay the inherent abruptness of negation. This represents an opposite pathway from Jespersen’s Cycle, which is partly motivated by the desire to emphasize negatives. Oji-Cree ci-negation instead arose as a new unemphatic expression, motivated by the desire to avoid social tension. Though many languages of the world feature multiple standard negation constructions, the development of these systems remain to be investigated in relation to their diachrony and social contexts. This study contributes to our knowledge of why and how such systems might arise