ARTICLES
Linda Manney (1)
The reflexive archetype and its various realizations in Modern Greek
Eung-Do Cook and Andrea Wilhelm (49)
Noun incorporation. New evidence from Athapaskan
Mark Donohue (83)
Transitivity in Tukang Besi
Tania Kuteva (113)
On identifying an evasive gram: action narrowly averted
Nam-Kil Kim (161)
On experiential sentences
REVIEWS (205)
Salvatore Attardo: Linguistic theories of humor (Helga Kotthoff)
Andreas Bittner: Starke ‘schwache’ Verben — schwache ‘starke’ Verben:deutsche Verflexion und Natürlichkeit (Christopher Beedham)
Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola Östman and Jan Blommaert (eds): Handbook of pragmatics: Manual and Handbook of pragmatics: 1995 supplement (Ken Turner)
Sten Vikner: Verb movement and expletive subjects in the Germanic languages (Enrique Mallen)
Robert S.P. Beekes: Comparative Indo-European linguistics: An introduction (Steven Schäufele)
BOOK NOTICES (253)
Jan Noordegraaf, Kees Versteegh and Konrad Koerner (eds): The history of linguistics in the Low Countries (Paul T. Roberge)
Robert Bloomer: System-congruity and the participles of Modern German and Modern English: A study in natural morpholoy (Wolfgang U. Dressler)
Barbara Lenz: Un-Affigierung (Nils Langer)
Dirk Boutkan: The Germanic ‘Auslautgesetze’ (Charles M. Barrack)
Noun incorporation. New evidence from Athapaskan
Eung-Do Cook and Andrea Wilhelm
This paper deals with noun incorporation data from Northern Athapaskan languages, which have not hitherto been analyzed formally. Based on semantic characteristics of noun incorporation and on incorporation from oblique and subject positions, we claim that this phenomenon does not obey the syntactic rules posited by Baker (1988). A theory which seeks to constrain noun incorporation in terms of grammatical relations is not adequate for explaining it in Northern Athapaskan. A functional approach (Givón 1984, 1985), which is sensitive to the semantics and pragmatics of incorporation, is found to be more adequate. We argue that noun incorporation is a functionally motivated process at the interface of morphology and syntax that changes linguistic coding from independent and salient to dependent and nonsalient.
Transitivity in Tukang Besi
Mark Donohue
The Tukang Besi language does not appear to display a clear distinction between transitive and intransitive clauses, as transitive verbs are freely able to appear without any overt object and degrees of intransitivity are to be found in the language. The ground between transitive and intransitive contains several points of interest in that eight different degrees of transitivity can be morphologically defined in the one language, allowing us to test the relative ranking of Hopper and Thompson’s criteria for transitivity.
On experiential sentences
Nam-Kil Kim
In the study of the syntactic category experiential, it has been known that the experiential is mainly concerned with indefinite (or nonspecific) situations. However, a comparative study of the experiential in Chinese, Japanese and Korean reveals that there exists another type of experiential which is concerned with definite (or specific) situations. All three languages share the semantic properties of repeatability, experience, discontinuity and relevant duration for the experiential. The distinction between the indefinite and definite experiential is supported by syntactic as well as semantic evidence.
On identifying an evasive gram: action narrowly averted
Tania Kuteva
On the basis of data from both genetically and geographically remote languages the present paper builds a case for the existence of action narrowly averted (ANA) as a cross-linguistically identifiable gram involving the meaning was on the verge of V-ing but did not V.
The paper proposes the methodology of recent grammaticalization theory as a theoretical tool which enables us to describe the specificities of linguistic behavior (nuances of meaning, contextual distribution, etc.) of ANA and related grams in terms of the particular grammaticalization path along which they may develop.
The present treatment challenges structuralist-oriented approaches which tacitly assume that in juxtaposing grammatical structures from different languages we face only two situations: either full identity or idiosyncrasy.