Asynchronous grammaticalization: V1-conditionals in present-day English and German

The present paper contrasts verb-first (= V1-)conditionals in written usage in present-day English and German. Based on the hypothesis that V1-protases originated in independent interrogatives and then grammaticalized as conditional subordinate clauses in an asynchronous fashion in both languages, we use data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Deutsches Referenzkorpus (DeReKo) to investigate the lexical overlap of V1-protases with interrogatives and their functional overlap with ‘if-/wenn’-conditionals. The results show, inter alia, that English V1-conditionals are highly divergent from polar interrogatives and occupy a functional niche with respect to ‘if-’conditionals, with their German counterparts showing more transitional characteristics in both respects; they also suggest a special role for V1-protases with ‘should/sollte’ in expressing a subtype of neutral, rather than tentative, conditionality. Finally, prospects are discussed for future research regarding possible synchronic (i.e. discourse-functional) and diachronic (i.e. systemic) motivations for the differences and similarites observed between V1-conditionals in the two present-day languages

Parenthetical 'I say (you)' in Late Medieval Greek vernacular: a message structuring discourse marker rather than a message conveying verb

In this paper, I argue that the first-person singular of the "ordinary" verb lambda epsilon gamma omega/lambda alpha lambda(omega) over tilde ('I say') in the thirteenth-to fourteenth-century political verse narratives Chronicle of Morea and War of Troy does not always carry its "normal", representational content ('I inform/assure [you]'). Frequently, lambda epsilon gamma omega/lambda alpha lambda(omega) over tilde structures the discourse rather than conveying conceptual meaning and, thus, has procedural meaning. In this respect, the verb can be compared to modern discourse markers (i.e., semantically reduced items which abound in spoken language). An important-yet not decisive-criterion to distinguish the conceptual from the procedural use is the position of lambda epsilon gamma omega/lambda alpha lambda(omega) over tilde: all "DM-like" examples are parenthetical. As for their precise pragmatic function, these forms are used, in particular, to signal a clarification towards the listener ("I mean") or, more generally, to grab the attention of the audience. Applied to the modern binary distinction between interpersonal and textual discourse markers, they thus belong to the former category. Finally, I tentatively relate the observation that the procedural parenthetical examples show a marked preference for pre-caesural position to the concept of "filled pauses", which makes sense given the adopted oral style of the Late Medieval Greek political verse narratives

Never again: the multiple grammaticalization of never as a marker of negation in English

In both standard and nonstandard varieties of English there are several contexts in which the word never functions as a sentential negator rather than as a negative temporal adverb. This article investigates the pragmatic and distributional differences between the various non-temporal uses of never and examines their synchronic and historical relationship to the ordinary temporal quantifier use, drawing on corpora of Early Modern and present-day British English. Primary focus is on (i) a straightforward negator use that in prescriptively approved varieties of English has an aspectual restriction to non-chance, completive achievement predicates in the preterite, but no such restriction in nonstandard English; and (ii) a distinct categorical-denial use that quantifies over possible perspectives on a situation. Against Cheshire (1998), it is argued that neither of these uses represents continuity with non-temporal uses of never in Middle English, but both are instead relatively recent innovations resulting from semantic reanalysis and the semanticization of implicatures

The Chinese copula SHI and Its Origin: A Congnitive-based Approach

This paper discusses the proposals of Li and Thompson (1977), Yen (1986), and Feng (1993) in relation to the development of the Chinese copula and argues that Li and Thompson’s suggestion of a topic mechanism, Yen’s analogical change, and Feng’s phonological pause are unsatisfactory in explaining the development of the copula. It is suggested that Katz’s (1996) cognitive concept of existence in time and space between pronouns and copulas is what relates the demonstrative pronoun shi to a copula, while the verbal form shi occurring in the same syntactic context as the demonstrative pronoun shi is what triggers this demonstrative pronoun to turn into a copula

Incomplete conditionals and the syntax-pragmatics interface

This paper is concerned with conditional thoughts that are expressed via ‘incomplete conditionals’ in which an if-clause is uttered with no corresponding main clause, and yet still succeeds at communicating a fully-fledged conditional proposition. Incomplete conditionals pose a puzzle for the semantics and pragmatics of conditionals as in one respect, a condition is expressed explicitly using the canonical form ‘if p’, yet in another, the target of the condition is left unexpressed, requiring recourse to other linguistic or extra-linguistic information for its recovery. Taking observations from attested corpora, we explore the various ways in which the consequent of an incomplete conditional can be recovered, demonstrating that cases of incompleteness range from simple cases of ellipsis which are susceptible to a syntactic solution at one end of the continuum, to pragmatically recoverable cases at the other. This involves considering aspects of meaning arising out of the co-text, including cross-sentential anaphoric dependencies and considerations of coherence, as well as extra-linguistic context such as shared sociocultural information and world knowledge

The predicate marker li in Mauritian Creole

There is a morpheme 'li' in Mauritian Creole (MC), which is homophonous with the 3sg pronoun, and which, in the early creole, occurs frequently between the subject and the predicate in affirmative, present tense clauses. I propose that that 'li' may have originated as a resumptive pronoun, co-referential with the subject, but following the grammaticalization of new determiner elements to mark the semantic contrasts of [±definite] and singular vs. plural, 'li' has now grammaticalized into a predicate marker. Its presence is sensitive to both the nature of the predicate, and to the definiteness and specificity features of the subject NP. My analysis is within the framework of Truth Conditional Semantics, where indefinite NPs are analyzed as variables that get introduced into the discourse, and must be bound by an operator to yield a closed proposition, with a truth value. Drawing on a comparison with a cognative morpheme 'i' in Seychellois Creole, I claim that its path to grammaticalization is linked to that of the specificity marking 'la'

Recycled neuter expletive pronouns and the nature of the left periphery : ell and relatives revisited

In this paper, we revisit two types of apparently Neuter Expletive Pronouns in Romance, namely Catalan ell, Spanish ello, EP ele, a.o., and the expletive neuter demonstratives aço, eso, esto, which have been argued in the literature to have an expressive value and to belong to the Left Periphery of the sentence. Our aim is to explore the relationship between expletive subjects and the Left Periphery in NS languages in a simple way. We base our investigations on the rich insights set up in the literature, and discuss if grammaticalisation could explain the shift from expletive subject to expressive marker. After briefly reviewing the properties of ell/ ello/ele, we show that it is unclear how they could fit into the current definition of grammaticalisation. We then review the common semantic properties of ello elements and neuter demonstratives, and argue that these elements anchor a speech act, a predication to the external situation. We explain how this property is encoded in a framework like the one of Hale & Keyser's work. As for their syntactic properties, we claim that these elements belong to a reduced C-T area.En aquest article revisem dos tipus de pronoms neutres, aparentment expletius, ell i açò/això en català (i els seus equivalents en altres llengües romàniques). Tal com s'ha argumentat en la bibliografia sobre el tema, no es tracta en realitat d'elements expletius, sinó d'elements amb un determinat valor discursiu pertanyents a la Perifèria Esquerra de l'oració. Revisem les propostes d'anàlisi que se n'han fet i explorem la possibilitat que el seu valor discursiu pugui derivar-se d'un anterior comportament com a expletiu via un procés de gramaticalització. Descartem aquesta possibilitat i plantegem una anàlisi en dos temps. En primer lloc considerem que la relació entre aquests elements i la resta de l'oració és una relació predicativa mediatitzada per un element (abstracte o explícit) de coincidència central. El valor contrastiu es deriva de les seves propietats lèxiques i dels seus trets formals. Considerem que els trets d'aquest elements es poden validar tant a T com a C

Information structure and the referential status of linguistic expression : workshop as part of the 23th annual meetings of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft in Leipzig, Leipzig, February 28 - March 2, 2001

This volume comprises papers that were given at the workshop Information Structure and the Referential Status of Linguistic Expressions, which we organized during the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft (DGfS) Conference in Leipzig in February 2001. At this workshop we discussed the connection between information structure and the referential interpretation of linguistic expressions, a topic mostly neglected in current linguistics research. One common aim of the papers is to find out to what extent the focus-background as well as the topic-comment structuring determine the referential interpretation of simple arguments like definite and indefinite NPs on the one hand and sentences on the other

Evidentials dizque and que in Spanish : Grammaticalization, parameters and the (fine) structure of Comp

In this paper we study one type of Spanish que (the equivalent to the complementizer “that”) that can be shown to belong into the crosslinguistically restricted list of evidentials. In particular, we will claim that it encodes the (most basic) marks of nonfirst- hand or indirect (reported) evidence. Our point of departure is certain (apparently) independent clauses of Spanish headed by an overt complementizer (que). Some tests will be presented that support the idea that that one type of que introducing a well specified subset of root sentences shares most of the properties that have been claimed to characterize reportative evidentials in languages such as Quechua (Faller 2002, 2006). As for the properties of reportative que, it will be further shown that it does not encode any features related to epistemic modality (reliability or (im)probability) and we will propose that it is better analyzed as an illocutionary operator, affecting the illocutionary force (in line with Faller 2002 among others) and not as an epistemic modal (Izvorsky 1997 among others). In order to determine the nature of this reportative element and its origin, we contrast it with an old Spanish form, dizque, which exists nowadays in certain modern American varieties. This particle also has the properties of an evidential but behaves as an epistemic modal. In the last sections, we will propose that both evidential particles (que and dizque) are the result of a process of grammaticalization (i.e. ‘upward reanalysis’, or categorial change, of functional material, in the sense of Roberts and Roussou 2003) of the complex structure headed by a communication verb, dicen que “they say that”. We will tentatively describe such process and introduce a hypothesis as to the nature and role of the parameter involved in the claimed reanalysi