Verbalization of nominalizations: A typological commentary on the article by Nikki van de Pol
Publication date: Available online 18 September 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Andrej MalchukovAbstractThe present article provides a typological commentary on the article by Nikki van de Pol (this issue) on the history of the English gerund. It is shown that in spite of certain idiosyncratic aspects, the history of the verbal gerund illustrates a well-known grammaticalization path of verbalization, whereby deverbal nouns are first grammaticalized into nonfinite forms (participles, infinitives, converbs), and may later be integrated into the verbal paradigm. It is further suggested that the mixed behavior attested...
Source: Language Sciences - September 20, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
The relevance of Marx to contemporary perspectives on Utterance Meaning in Context: a re-examination of Voloshinov’s Philosophy of Language
Publication date: Available online 18 September 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Jelena TimotijevicAbstractPhilosophers on all sides of the contemporary Contextualism debates have given primacy to the role context plays in utterance comprehension. They view language as a socio-cultural practice; their theoretical perspectives are largely focused on speaker's intentions and contextually modified senses of language elements appropriate to the situation at hand. Following Marx and Engels' (1845) philosophical contributions on language, Voloshinov (1929: 9–24, 83–98) argues that language can only exist if socially o...
Source: Language Sciences - September 20, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
On the edge between nouns and verbs. The heterogeneous behavior of Spanish deverbal nominalizations empirically verified
This study investigates the intricate semantic and morphosyntactic behavior of morphological nominalizations. Besides offering an in-depth quantitative and qualitative description of a set of Spanish nominals, it empirically verifies to what extent the more ‘nouny’ items adopt nominal features more frequently than the more ‘verby’ items. The starting point is the tripartite semantic distinction between referential, event, and state nominals, whose morphosyntactic behavior is then described on the basis of a detailed corpus analysis. The following properties are analyzed: determination, modification, number, and arg...
Source: Language Sciences - September 20, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Language and value: the philosophy of language in the post-Operaist critique of contemporary capitalism
Publication date: Available online 18 September 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Mikołaj RatajczakAbstractThis paper offers a discussion of the role played by the philosophy of language in the post-Operaist critique of contemporary capitalism, focussing specifically on the relation between language and questions of labour and value. It argues that the post-Operaist philosophy of language is a philosophy of immaterial labour which enables us to make new diagnoses concerning the contradictions and antagonisms of late, cognitive, financialized capitalism. The first part of the article broadly outlines post-Operaist th...
Source: Language Sciences - September 18, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Is there a pluralia tantum subcategory of nominal gerunds? Developing Gaeta's notion of morphological differentiation
Publication date: Available online 14 September 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): J. Lachlan MackenzieAbstractInspired by Gaeta's study of morphological distinctiveness as the basis for category formation, this article considers the possibility that by virtue of their invariable suffix -ings English pluralia tantum nominal gerunds (PTNGs) such as surroundings can be regarded as a subcategory of nominal gerunds. It is shown that the set of PTNGs is semantically very disparate with regard to the verb that underwent nominalization in the course of their formation. Differences are observed in a very large corpus with reg...
Source: Language Sciences - September 15, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
The structure of situation models as revealed by anaphor resolution
Publication date: Available online 14 September 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Sashank Varma, Amanda JanssenAbstractThis paper investigates the structure of situation models as revealed by the process of anaphor resolution. The situation model for a text combines the meanings of its individual sentences with inferences generated from prior knowledge into an overall understanding of the text. We conceptualize situation models as implemented by collections of traces in episodic long-term memory that are retrieved based on their similarity to cues in working memory. Traces encode both contextual (i.e., spatial and te...
Source: Language Sciences - September 15, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
A game of give and take: category change on the border between adverbial verbal gerunds and augmented absolutes in English
This article discusses one of several reasons for the loss of augmentation in English absolute constructions (ACs): the emergence of the verbal gerund (VG) in -ing. The VG was from the start strongly associated with prepositional contexts (de Smet, 2008) and has been shown to have a history connected to the AC (Fanego, 2004). More specifically, the strong association between VGs and prepositions probably caused a reinterpretation of most prepositionally augmented ACs as VGs, resulting in a functional split (Fonteyn & van de Pol, 2016). Second, this paper illustrates how the what with-construction underwent a very similar d...
Source: Language Sciences - September 15, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Writing: the re-construction of language
Publication date: Available online 13 September 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Andrew DavidsonAbstractThis paper takes as its point of departure David Olson’s contention (as expressed in The Mind on Paper, (2016) CUP, Cambridge) that writing affords a meta-representation of language through allowing linguistic elements to become explicit objects of awareness. In so doing, a tradition of suspicion of writing (e.g. Rousseau and Saussure) that sees it as a detour from and contamination of language is disarmed: writing becomes innocent, becomes naturalised. Also disarmed are some of the concerns given rise to by the...
Source: Language Sciences - September 14, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Categorial shift: foundations, extensions, and consequences
Publication date: Available online 13 September 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Marianne MithunAbstractAs the papers in this volume make clear, categorial shift is often not categorical. Category-altering processes do not necessarily shift all morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of their input simultaneously or completely (Noonan, 2007, Mackenzie, 1987, Lehmann, 1988, Givón, 1990, Givón, 2001, Givón, 2011, Croft, 1991, Koptjevskaja-Tamm, 1993, Koptjevskaja-Tamm, 2003, Cristofaro, 2003, Malchukov, 2004, Malchukov, 2006, Nikolaeva, 2007, Mithun, 2016a). A number of factors can affect the output of su...
Source: Language Sciences - September 14, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Categorial shift via aspect and gender change in deverbal nouns
Publication date: Available online 13 September 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Gianina Iordăchioaia, Martina WernerAbstractIn this paper we are concerned with the effects of categorial shift on action deverbal nouns formed by means of the suffix -ing in English and its counterpart -ung in German in the history of the two languages. While the two cognate suffixes exhibit similar degrees of categorial shift in terms of the coarse properties that they preserve from the base verbal category or acquire from the new nominal category, they turn out to exhibit opposite preferences with respect to the aspectual value of t...
Source: Language Sciences - September 13, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Wayward categorial shift: so odd an article
This article presents a diachronic study of the so-called ‘Big Mess Construction’, whereby an adverb of degree and an adjective precede an article, as in English so good a bargain. Due to the challenges this construction poses to noun phrase syntax, it has been the subject of a number of scholarly studies, often yielding ingenious explanations for its unusual syntactic behavior. Against most of these accounts, it is argued here that the construction at issue is the result of a ‘historical mistake’, in that inflectional morphology was reanalyzed as an indefinite article. This reanalysis, rather than the semantic nat...
Source: Language Sciences - September 11, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
A Gramscian reading of language in Bakhtin and Voloshinov
Publication date: Available online 6 September 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Alen SućeskaAbstractBoth Bakhtin and Voloshinov were very keen to show that language is socially stratified and that this stratification corresponds in form to the stratification between social groups or classes. Through a comparative analysis of their concepts such as ‘speech genres’/‘behavioural genres’, ‘heteroglossia’/‘multiaccentuality’, ‘refraction’ etc, this paper will aim to show how both of the authors offer a convincing theoretical framework for a social and historical approach to language which stresses it...
Source: Language Sciences - September 6, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Up and down the substantivization cline: response to Bekaert & Enghels
Publication date: Available online 30 August 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Stefan HartmannAbstractIn their target paper, Bekaert & Enghels (B&E) (this issue) show convincingly that deverbal nominalizations differ with regard to their ‘nouniness’: while some capture the semantics of their base verbs quite faithfully, others approximate the semantic prototype of a noun as they refer to more concrete concepts. This is also reflected in their distributional behavior. This response paper relates B&E's considerations to a different word-formation pattern in another language and to diachrony. Drawing on a corpus stu...
Source: Language Sciences - August 31, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
Testing factivity in Italian. Experimental evidence for the hypothesis that Italian sapere is ambiguous
Publication date: Available online 18 August 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Roberta Colonna Dahlman, Joost van de WeijerAbstractIn linguistics and in the philosophy of language it is standardly assumed that know is a factive verb, meaning that a sentence such as X knows that p, when uttered in its positive declarative form, presupposes, in fact entails, the truth of its complement. A problem for this analysis is the fact that the verb know can be used non-factively in contexts where it is evident that the proposition expressed by the subordinate clause is not true. In order to account for non-factive uses of know,...
Source: Language Sciences - August 19, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
How homo economicus is reflected in fiction – A corpus linguistic analysis of 19th and 20th century capitalist societies
Publication date: Available online 17 August 2018Source: Language SciencesAuthor(s): Michael Pace-SiggeAbstractThe issue of power and the use of language has been widely researched (e.g.: Bernstein, 1973; Fairclough, 1989), as have the issues of power-relations and control (cf. Bourdieu, 1991; Partington et al., 2013). This corpus-based lexical investigation focuses on the frequency, collocations, and semantic associations of words likely to express the presence or absence of an economic and power structure. For this, British works of literature of the 19th and 20th century were investigated. More specifically, this artic...
Source: Language Sciences - August 18, 2018 Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research
