The Unergative-Unaccusative Distinction and the Benefactive Applicative in Amharic

Proceedings of the Twenty-Third Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on Syntax and Semantics in Africa (1997

Functional Verbs in Predicate Formation: Event-Type Hierarchy and Grammaticization

Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Historical Issues in Sociolinguistics/Social Issues in Historical Linguistics (1995

Change-of-state Paradigms and the middle in Kinyarwanda

This paper investigates the derivational relationships among members of verbal paradigms in Kinyarwanda (Bantu JD.61; Rwanda) by pursuing two interrelated goals. First, I describe a variety of derivational strategies for marking transitive and intransitive variants in change-of-state verb paradigms. Second, I focus on the detransitivizing morpheme –ik which serves as one possible marking for intransitive members of these paradigms. Ultimately, I argue that this morpheme is a marker of middle voice, and the variety of readings which appear with this form can be subsumed under a single operation of argument suppression. Finally, I provide a discussion of reflexives and the apparent lack of a reflexive reading with –ik by arguing that this reading is blocked by either lexical reflexives or the reflexive prefix i–

African Linguistics in Central and Eastern Europe, and in the Nordic Countries

Non peer reviewe

Smell is coded in grammar and frequent in discourse: Cha'palaa olfactory language in cross-linguistic perspective

It has long been claimed that there is no lexical field of smell, and that smell is of too little validity to be expressed in grammar. We demonstrate both claims are false. The Cha'palaa language (Ecuador) has at least 15 abstract smell terms, each of which is formed using a type of classifier previously thought not to exist. Moreover, using conversational corpora we show that Cha'palaa speakers also talk about smell more than Imbabura Quechua and English speakers. Together, this shows how language and social interaction may jointly reflect distinct cultural orientations towards sensory experience in general and olfaction in particular

Functional Verbs in Predicate Formation: Event-Type Hierarchy and Grammaticization

Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Historical Issues in Sociolinguistics/Social Issues in Historical Linguistics (1995

Intervention in the second language to improve communication after stroke

1 page(s