The present study answers the following questions: why the semantic roles of agent or patient are often unmarked; why other semantic roles, such as benefactive, stative locative, goal, or source, are unmarked when used with some verbs and marked when used with other verbs; and why semantic… read more
The aim of this study is to advocate one of the aims of linguistic typology, viz. the discovery of how languages are similar or different with respect to the functions they encode and consequently for the development of a typology based solely on the functions encoded in the grammatical systems… read more
Heine and Kuteva (2004) list ‘reflexive’, ‘middle’, and ‘reciprocal’ as functions grammaticalized from the noun ‘body’ across languages. The present study, based on data from Pero (West Chadic), demonstrates the grammaticalization of one additional function, namely that of indicating that the… read more
The aim of this study is to demonstrate that Proto-Chadic had a category ‘locative predication’ that was formally and semantically distinct from all other predications in the language. The proposed hypothesis, combined with the principle of functional transparency (Frajzyngier & Shay 2003), allows… read more
This paper investigates a strategy other than the one currently implemented in the CorpAfroAs project, allowing cross-linguistic comparison among multiple-language corpora. It involves comparing a database of functional domains and subdomains across languages. The underlying principle is that… read more
Aprioristic approaches to typology, whether based on assumptions about cognition or real-world reference or on categories exhibited in a single language or groups of languages, are likely to overlook important functions that just happen to lie outside of the aprioristically assumed categories. The… read more
The emergence of many grammatical categories cannot be explained in terms of the semantic properties of the source and the target or in terms of other cognitively based processes or language use such as metaphor, metonymy, usage and frequency of use. The term ‘grammaticalization’ refers here to the… read more
The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the existence of the category ‘comment clause’ whose range of use by far exceeds the traditional comment-on-topic category. In addition to a topicalized noun, the comment clause may have in its scope an element in focus, an adverbial phrase, and most… read more
In Classical Chinese, there were four first person pronouns: wu2, wo3, yu2, yu3, and a zero-pronoun1 with the following functions: wu2 was the default marking the speaker; wo3 coded contrast between the speaker and others; yu3 was used when talking about the speaker in connection with heaven,… read more
The paper aims at providing an expanded model of grammaticalization, where the term is understood as the process through which a language develops grammatical means of coding various formal, semantic or pragmatic functional domains. It thus subsumes the traditional scope of grammaticalization, but… read more
The general aim of the study is an exploration into the meaning of a grammatical form and the proofs of its meaning. The scope of this study is the form referred to as the “progressive aspect” in English. The absence of an imperative progressive is used as a heuristic tool in the determination of… read more