Verbal noun or verbal adjective? : the case of the latin gerundive and gerund

It is the aim of this paper to present and elaborate a new solution to the old syntactic problems connected with the Latin gerundive and gerund, two verbal categories which have been interpreted variously either as adjective (or participle) or noun (or infinitive). These questions have been much discussed for quite a number of years […] but for the most part from a philological or purely diachronic point of view. All these linguists try to explain the peculiarities of these categories and their syntax by showing that the gerund is historically prior to the gerundive. [...] It is our thesis […] that in order to arrive at a unified account of gerundive and gerund we do not have to go back to prehistoric times. Even for the classical language gerund and gerundive represent the same category, in the sense that the gerund can be shown to be a special case of the gerundive. Additional evidence from a parallel construction in Hindi is adduced to make the Latin facts more plausible. It is only in the post-classical language that certain tendencies which had shown up already in Old Latin poetry become stronger and finally lead to a reanalysis of the gerundive and a split into two distinct syntactic constructions. The propositional meaning of the gerundive in its attributive use is explained with reference to a conflict between syntactic and cognitive principles. Special constructions which are the effects of such conflicts can be found in other parts of grammar. Languages differ with respect to the degree of syntacticization (or conventionalization) of these special constructions

Ergativity and depth of analysis

In this paper, I argue that “depth of analysis” does not deserve the prestige that it is sometimes given in general linguistics. While language description should certainly be as detailed as possible, general linguistics must rely on worldwide comparison of languages, and this cannot be based on language-particular analyses. Rigorous quantitative comparison requires uniform measurement, and this implies abstracting away from many language-particular peculiarities. I will illustrate this on the basis of ergative patterns, starting out from I.A. Mel’čuk’s (1981) proposal for Lezgian. This proposal was not successful, but why not? And why is Baker’s (2015) theory of dependent case likewise unsuccessful? By contrast, quantitative worldwide research has found striking similarities of ergative coding patterns, which can be explained by the efficiency theory of asymmetric coding. I will argue that this success is due to a more cautious approach to understanding Human Language, which does not rely on the Mendeleyevian vision for grammar (that all grammars are made from the same innate building blocks)

Transitivity alternations of the anticausative type

This paper is concerned with anticausative verbs (or verb-forms), or shortly, anticausatives. [...] [C]ausative/non-causative pairs with a marked non-causative are quite frequent in the languages of the world. However, so far they have not received sufficient attention in general and typological linguistics, a fact which is also manifested in the absence of a generally recognized term for this phenomenon […]. This paper therefore deals with the most important properties of anticausatives (particularly semantic conditions on them), their relationship to other areas of grammar as well as their historical development in different languages. The grammatical domain of transitivity, valence and voice, where the anticausative belongs, takes up a central position in grammar and consequently the present discussion should be of considerable interest to general comparative (or typological) linguists

Grammatikalisierung: Von der Perfomanz zur Kompetenz ohne angeborene Grammatik

Innerhalb der Linguistik wird die Frage kontrovers diskutiert, ob es eine angeborene Universalgrammatik hinter den 5500 verschiedenen lebenden Sprachen gibt, mithin, ob die Kompetenz zum großen Teil in den menschlichen Genen festgelegt ist. Vorliegender Beitrag argumentiert gegen den Nativismus chomskyscher Prägung und für eine konstruktivistische Position, derzufolge Grammatik als Nebenprodukt des Sprechens in sozialer Interaktion entsteht

Explaining grammatical coding asymmetries: Form–frequency correspondences and predictability

This paper claims that a wide variety of grammatical coding asymmetries can be explained as adaptations to the language users’ needs, in terms of frequency of use, predictability and coding efficiency. I claim that all grammatical oppositions involving a minimal meaning difference and a significant frequency difference are reflected in a universal coding asymmetry, i.e. a cross-linguistic pattern in which the less frequent member of the opposition gets special coding, unless the coding is uniformly explicit or uniformly zero. I give 25 examples of pairs of construction types, from a substantial range of grammatical domains. For some of them, the existing evidence from the world’s languages and from corpus counts is already strong, while for others, I know of no counterevidence and I make readily testable claims. I also discuss how the functional-adaptive forces operate in language change, and I discuss a number of possible alternative explanations

Linguistic typology and usage frequency

This presentation, presented to the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków (Institute for the Polish Language, 50th Anniversary Colloquium) gives an overview of linguistic typology and grammatical universals, introduces the efficiency theory of asymmetric coding and the role of usage frequency, talks about coexpression and coding-length universals of accusative and ergative alignment, and notes how Tadeusz Milewski and Witold Mańczak (two linguists from Kraków) had important early insights in these areas

Some principles for language names

Linguists are sometimes confronted with choices concerning language names. For example, one and the same language may be referred to as Persian or Farsi. This short paper discusses some principles that one might use for making decisions when there are variant forms in use, or when one feels that none of the existing names is appropriate. The principles discussed here arose from work on Glottolog, an English-language database of the world’s languages (Glottolog.org), where each language has a single primary English name (though variant forms are of course included), and where the goal is to choose the best variant form as the primary name of the language. Whenever the question arises which variant name form to choose, the Glottolog editors are guided by these principles, so they are formulated in a prescriptive way, but with explanation and justification for each principle. It seems that the general issue is also quite important for language documenters, because the names of non-major languages are often not fully established yet, and naming decisions have to be made.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Indefinite pronouns

This book is a comprehensive cross-linguistic study of indefinite pronouns ('someone', 'anything', 'nobody') in the world's languages. The PDF file deposited here is the manuscript version submitted to the publisher. The final published book is available in open access at http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/9780198235606.001.0001/oso-9780198235606