Review of Regina Pustet : Copulas: universals in the categorization of the lexicon: (Oxford University Press 2003; 262pp)

The renowned Grimm Dictionary (1854-1961) makes the statement that the German copula sein (to be) is “the most general and colourless of all verbal concepts” (der allgemeinste und farbloseste aller verbalbegriffe). A more concise summary of the linguistic issues surrounding the copula is hardly possible. These two properties (and the latent tension between them!) make copulas a particularly interesting and vexing subject of linguistic research. Copulas appear to be almost colourless, i.e., devoid of any concrete meaning, thus leading to the question of why such expressions exist at all, not only in German but in the majority of the world’s languages. And at the same time copulas presumably provide the best window into the core of verbal concepts thereby telling us what it actually means to be a verb – at least in a language like German or English. While there is a rather rich body of research on copulas in philosophical and formal semantics including several in-depth studies on the copular systems of individual languages, copulas have received comparably little attention from a typological perspective. The monograph of Regina Pustet sets out to fill this gap. She presents an extensive cross-linguistic study of copula usage based on a sample of 154 languages drawn from the language families of the world. The analysis is embedded in the theoretical framework of functional typology. The study aims at uncovering universal principles that govern the distribution of copulas in nominal, adjectival, and verbal predications. Its major objective is the development of a “semantically-based model of copula distribution” (p.62) by means of which the presence vs. absence of copulas can be motivated through the inherent meaning of the lexical items they potentially combine with. Drawing mainly on the work by Givón (1979, 1984) and Croft (1991, 2001), who provide a functional foundation of the traditional parts of speech, Pustet identifies four semantic parameters which, if taken together, are claimed to support substantial generalisations on copula distribution – within a given language as well as crosslinguistically. These parameters are DYNAMICITY, TRANSIENCE, TRANSITIVITY, and DEPENDENCY. Pustet goes on to argue – and this is in fact the driving force behind the overall monograph – that the distributional behaviour of copulas, in turn, yields a useful methodology for developing a general approach to lexical categorization. Thus, in the long run Pustet aims at contributing to a better understanding of the traditional parts of speech, noun, adjective, and verb by defining them in terms of “semantic feature bundles, which can be arranged in [a] coherent semantic similarity space” (p.193)

'Natural concepts' in the spatial topological domain - adpositional meanings in crosslinguistic perspective: An exercise in semantic typology

Most approaches to spatial language have assumed that the simplest spatial notions are (after Piaget) topological and universal (containment, contiguity, proximity, support, represented as semantic primitives suchas IN, ON, UNDER, etc.). These concepts would be coded directly in language, above all in small closed classes suchas adpositions—thus providing a striking example of semantic categories as language-specific projections of universal conceptual notions. This idea, if correct, should have as a consequence that the semantic categories instantiated in spatial adpositions should be essentially uniform crosslinguistically. This article attempts to verify this possibility by comparing the semantics of spatial adpositions in nine unrelated languages, with the help of a standard elicitation procedure, thus producing a preliminary semantic typology of spatial adpositional systems. The differences between the languages turn out to be so significant as to be incompatible withstronger versions of the UNIVERSAL CONCEPTUAL CATEGORIES hypothesis. Rather, the language-specific spatial adposition meanings seem to emerge as compact subsets of an underlying semantic space, withcertain areas being statistical ATTRACTORS or FOCI. Moreover, a comparison of systems withdifferent degrees of complexity suggests the possibility of positing implicational hierarchies for spatial adpositions. But such hierarchies need to be treated as successive divisions of semantic space, as in recent treatments of basic color terms. This type of analysis appears to be a promising approachfor future work in semantic typology

Typing after syntax. An argument from quotation and ellipsis

The paper, assuming the general framework of Chomsky’s (2013a, 2015b) current version of the Minimalist syntax, investigates the syntax of quotation in light of ellipsis. I show that certain unexpected effects arising for quotational ellipsis are problematic for the standard feature valuation system and, especially, for the theory of phases. I discuss some effects of two possible interpretations of such ellipsis, as well as a constraint following from deviant antecedents, to show that the standard view on the internal syntax of quotational expressions should be reconsidered. The paper offers a new view on feature valuation, as well as the connection between the Narrow Syntax and the C-I interface, defined in terms of recursive typing taking place at the interface

Issues in Esahie Nominal Morphology: From Inflection to Word-formation

The present study is a documentation-oriented research which aims at exploring the nominal morphology of Esahie, an otherwise unexplored cross-border Kwa language. Essentially, it examines pertinent inflectional and word formation issues in the nominal domain of Esahie such as noun class system, agreement, syncretism, nominalization, and compounding. The overall goal of this thesis is to investigate and provide a comprehensive account of the attested types, structure, formation, and the lexical semantics of nouns and nominalizations in Esahie. This thesis also seeks to understand what the facts about the structure and formation of nouns and nominalizations in Esahie reveal about the nature of the interface between morphology, phonology, syntax, and semantics, and about the architecture of the grammar in general. In interpreting the Esahie data, we ultimately hope to contribute to current theoretical debates by presenting empirical arguments in support of an abstractive, rather than a constructive view of morphology, by arguing that adopting the formalism of Construction Morphology (CxM, see Booij 2010a-d), as an abstractive model, comes with many advantages. We show that the formalism espoused in CxM is able to deal adequately with all the inflectional and word formation issues discussed in this thesis, including the irregular (non-canonical) patterns which are characterized either by cumulative exponence or extra-compositionality. With regards to compounding, this study confirms the view (cf. Appah 2013; 2015; Akrofi-Ansah 2012b; Lawer 2017) that, in Kwa, notwithstanding the word class of the input elements, the output of a compounding operation is always a nominal. This characterization points to a fascinating (mutual) interplay between the word-formation phenomena of compounding and nominalization, since the former operation invariably feeds into the latter. Overall, this thesis shows that nominalization is a prominent word-formation operation in Kwa grammar. Data used in this thesis emanates from several fieldtrips carried out in some Esahie speaking communities in the Western-North region of Ghana, as well as other secondary sources

Wolfgang U. Dressler–Oskar E. Pfeiffer–Markus Pöchträger–John R. Rennison (eds): Morphological analysis in comparison. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory Vol. 201

Wolfgang U. Dressler - Oskar E. Pfeiffer - Markus Pöchträger - John R. Rennison(eds): Morphological analysis in comparison. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory Vol.201.John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2000, 253 pp. ; Stephen C. Levinson : Presumptive meanings. The theory of generalized conversational implicature. The MIT Press, Cambridge MA&London, 2000, 480 pp. ; István Kenesei(ed.): Crossing boundaries. Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic science. John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 1999, 301 pp