Living between languages: The politics of translation in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

This is the author's final draft post-refereeing as published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2012 47: 207 DOI:10.1177/0021989412440433. The online version of this article can be found at: http://jcl.sagepub.com/content/47/2/20

Reflexive constructions in the world's languages

Synopsis: This landmark publication brings together 28 papers on reflexive constructions in languages from all continents, representing very diverse language types. While reflexive constructions have been discussed in the past from a variety of angles, this is the first edited volume of its kind. All the chapters are based on original data, and they are broadly comparable through a common terminological framework. The volume opens with two introductory chapters by the editors that set the stage and lay out the main comparative concepts, and it concludes with a chapter presenting generalizations on the basis of the studies of individual languages

The death of collective identity? Global movement as a parallelogram of forces.

yesThis paper brings together a number of theoretical and political interests we have with the concept of global movements and the alter-globalisation, anticapitalist, and social justice movements in particular (Chesters & Welsh, 2004, 2005, 2006). The argument contained in this paper is that these movements are the emergent outcome of complex processes of interaction, encounter and exchange facilitated and mediated by new technologies of mobility and communication and they suggest the emergence of a post-representational cultural politics qualitatively different from the identity based social movements of the past

Transitivity and the Choice of a Preposition in any Language

This thesis examines the question of determination of transitivity for a verb through a comparison of processes involved in English and in French. It takes in several theories belonging to the area of the syntax-semantics interface in order to understand how a predicate is construed as either intransitive or direct transitive or indirect transitive in either language.The study focuses on a corpus of verbs that present different argument structures in French and in English. It analyses the various factors that determine the choice of a transitivity status for a given predicate. It discusses whether that process of determination lies in the lexicon on first acquisition of a new verb, or in an interaction of pertinent semantic categories that develop as part of an individual’s language acquisition process, in order to yield the correct syntactic output. This thesis refers in particular to the study of prepositions in the field of cognitive semantics. It concludes that determination of a verb’s transitivity status takes in the “power struggle” between the various participants involved in the process. Semantic values such as human vs. non-human, active vs. passive, agency and volition, are analysed for all participants involved, in order to establish a predicate’s a-structure

Semantic verb classes in Tima (Niger-Congo)

The dissertation explores the correlations between the lexical meaning of verbs and their morphosyntactic behavior in terms of valency alternation patterns in the Niger-Congo language Tima spoken in Sudan

Constructed middles in Marori: an LFG analysis

This paper discusses middles in Marori (Isolate, TNG; Indonesian Papua), contributing to the theoretical debate as to the best approach to middles. Marori data on middles shows that the valence and transitivity of a middle structure is constructed in both morphology and syntax. However, certain lexical properties of the predicate (e.g. inherent reflexivity) are important. It is demonstrated that LFG’s parallel structure model is well suited to handle the properties of middles in Marori. Drawing insights from earlier LFG works on reflexives/reciprocals (Alsina 1996, Dalrymple et al. 1998, Rákosi 2008, Hurst 2010), a lexical-constructional analysis in LFG to account for the interface of morphology-syntax-semantics of middle expressions in Marori is proposed

Voice syncretism

This book provides a comprehensive typological account of voice syncretism, focusing on resemblance in formal verbal marking between two or more of the following seven voices: passives, antipassives, reflexives, reciprocals, anticausatives, causatives, and applicatives. It covers voice syncretism from both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, and has been structured in a manner that facilitates convenient access to information about specific patterns of voice syncretism, their distribution and development. The book is based on a survey of voice syncretism in 222 geographically and genealogically diverse languages, but also thoroughly revisits previous research on the phenomenon. Voice syncretism is approached systematically by establishing and exploring patterns of voice syncretism that can logically be posited for the seven voices of focus in the book: 21 simplex patterns when one considers two of the seven voices sharing the same marking (e.g. reflexive-reciprocal syncretism), and 99 complex patterns when one considers more than two of the voices sharing the same marking (e.g. reflexive-reciprocal-anticausative syncretism). In a similar vein, 42 paths of development can logically be posited if it is assumed that voice marking in each of the seven voices can potentially develop one of the other six voice functions (e.g. reflexive voice marking developing a reciprocal function). This approach enables the discussion of both voice syncretism that has received considerable attention in the literature (notably middle syncretism involving the reflexive, reciprocal, anticausative and/or passive voices) and voice syncretism that has received little or no treatment in the past (including seemingly contradictory patterns such as causative-anticausative and passive-antipassive syncretism). In the survey almost all simplex patterns are attested in addition to seventeen complex patterns. In terms of diachrony, evidence is presented and discussed for twenty paths of development. The book strives to highlight the variation found in voice syncretism across the world’s languages and encourage further research into the phenomenon