27 research outputs found
Ergativity, Number, and Agreement
Proceedings of the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics
Society (1985), pp. 96-10
Population Frequencies of the Triallelic 5HTTLPR in Six Ethnicially Diverse Samples from North America, Southeast Asia, and Africa
Genetic differences between populations are a potentially an important contributor to health disparities around the globe. As differences in gene frequencies influence study design, it is important to have a thorough understanding of the natural variation of the genetic variant(s) of interest. Along these lines, we characterized the variation of the 5HTTLPR and rs25531 polymorphisms in six samples from North America, Southeast Asia, and Africa (Cameroon) that differ in their racial and ethnic composition. Allele and genotype frequencies were determined for 24,066 participants. Results indicated higher frequencies of the rs25531 G-allele among Black and African populations as compared with White, Hispanic and Asian populations. Further, we observed a greater number of ‘extra-long’ (‘XL’) 5HTTLPR alleles than have previously been reported. Extra-long alleles occurred almost entirely among Asian, Black and Non-White Hispanic populations as compared with White and Native American populations where they were completely absent. Lastly, when considered jointly, we observed between sample differences in the genotype frequencies within racial and ethnic populations. Taken together, these data underscore the importance of characterizing the L-G allele to avoid misclassification of participants by genotype and for further studies of the impact XL alleles may have on the transcriptional efficiency of SLC6A4
INDIRECT OBJECT AND BENFACTIVE PREDICATIONS IN CHADIC: A TYPOLOGICAL SKETCH
The aim of the present study is to propose, for the first time, a typology of the forms and functions related to the indirect object and benefactive predications in Chadic languages. Some languages have grammaticalized only the indirect object predication; others have grammaticalized the indirect object and the benefactive predication; and still other languages have not grammaticalized either of the predications, leaving the relevant semantic relations to be inferred from the coding of other predications. In the sample selected there are no languages that have grammaticalized the benefactive but not the indirect object predication. The study also demonstrates the consequences of the grammaticalization of indirect object and benefactive predications: A predication whose verb inherently indicates the presence of an indirect object or benefactive complement requires fewer formal means than a predication whose verb does not inherently imply the presence of an indirect object or benefactive complement. This generalization does not apply to a language that has not grammaticalized either type of predication. The theoretical approach in the present study differs significantly from the usual discussions of related phenomena subsumed under the terms of 'ditransitive', 'three argument verbs', and 'datives'
Grammaticalization as emergence of functional domains: three cases in Chadic
The purpose of this article is to describe the grammaticalization of selected functions in Chadic languages , functions that have seldom been observed in other languages and that have been largely ignored by literature making theoretical claims but that have profound effects on the structures of languages involved. The selected grammaticalizations are important for the overall typologies of syntax and semantics. The selected grammaticalizations are: grammaticalization of non-categorial morphology whose function is to code the syntactic organization of the clause, i.e. the internal structure of the utterance; the coding of the category ‘goal’; and the coding of the domain of locative predication. Interestingly, the first and third grammaticalizations described here do not involve changes from a lexical item to a grammatical morpheme. The grammaticalization of non-categorial morphology has exploited phonological reduction to code one function and has exploited the most frequently used form in the coda of lexical items to code another function. The second grammaticalization, that of the category ‘goal’, may have a lexical item as its source. In addition to different sources, it appears that each grammaticalization had different motivations