Table of Contents
Volume 75 Number 2
(June 1999)
| Articles | ||
| Explaining article-possessor complementarity: Economic motivation in noun phrase syntax | Martin Haspelmath | 227 |
| Processing complexity and filler-gap dependencies across grammars | John A. Hawkins | 244 |
| Revisiting Tungusic classification from the bottom up: A comparison of Evenki and Oroqen | Lindsay J. Whaley, Lenore A. Grenoble, & Fengxiang Li | 286 |
| The grammaticalization of the proximative in Tok Pisin | Suzanne Romaine | 322 |
| Discussion Notes | ||
| On the origin of Hawaiian Creole English: A rejoinder to Roberts | Morris Goodman | 347 |
| Response to Goodman | Sarah Julianne Roberts | 349 |
| Reviews | ||
| Spears & Winford (eds.): The structure and status of pidgins and creoles | J. M. Lipski | 352 |
| Van Dijk (ed.): Discourse studies: Vol. 1: Discourse as structure and process; Vol. 2: Discourse as social interaction | A. W. He | 354 |
| Smith: Restrictiveness in case theory | N. Ostler | 357 |
| Lyovin: An introduction to the languages of the world | G. Pullum | 360 |
| Lippi-Green: English with an accent: Language ideology and discrimination in the United States | W. Wolfram | 362 |
| Schenker: The dawn of Slavic: An introduction to Slavic philology | H. Andersen | 365 |
| Boskovic: The syntax of nonfinite complementation: An economy approach | S. Franks | 368 |
| Marconi: Lexical competence | M. L. Murphy | 371 |
| Posner: Linguistic change in French | E. Pulgram | 373 |
| Fishman et al. (eds.): Post-imperial English: Status change in former British and American colonies, 1940-1990 | R. Phillipson | 375 |
| Bammesberger & Heberlein: Actes des VIII. internationalen Kolloquiums zur lateinischen Linguistik | R. E. Wallace | 378 |
| Book Notices | 381 | |
| The Editor's Department | 412 | |
| Publications Received | 417 |
Explaining
article-possessor complementarity: Economic motivation in noun
phrase syntax
Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
In many languages the definite article cannot occur when a possessive phrase is present in the NP (e.g. English *the my book, *John's the book). I argue that these patterns can be understood in terms of economic motivation because possessed NPs are very likely to be definite. A structural explanation in terms of a unique determiner position is insufficient to account for the full range of attested crosslinguistic patterns, and the universal generalizations that do seem to be valid can be derived from the economy-based explanation. Finally I show how the performance motivation of economy creates the competence pattern in diachronic change.
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Processing
complexity and filler-gap dependencies across grammars
John A. Hawkins
University of Southern California
This article examines crosslinguistic variation in FILLER-GAP DEPENDENCIES (WH-questions and relative clauses) from a processing perspective, and integrates research findings from psycholinguistics, language typology and generative grammar> Numerous implicational universals and hierarchies are proposed that receive a natural explanation in terms of processing and complexity. Filler-gap domains are complex in proportion to their size and in proportion to the amount of simultaneous syntactic and semantic processing that is required in addition to gap identification. They are simplified by making the gap easier to identify and process, or by avoiding a gap structure altogether. When variation is viewed from this perspective many descriptive insights and implicational patterns can be motivated that have either been stipulated or that have gone unnoticed hithero. This approach provides an alternative to the assumption of innate parametrized constraints in this area.
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Revisiting
Tungusic classification from the bottom up: A comparison of Evenki
and Oroqen
Lindsay J. Whaley
Dartmouth College
Lenore A. Grenoble
Dartmouth College
Fengxiang Li
California State University, Chico
Efforts to determine the genetic relations among Tungusic language have been dominated by a methodology that categorizes the entire family on the basis of a small number of sound correspondences and some shared inflectional morphology, despite the fact that this evidence can be contradictory ways. The approach, style after traditional classification, which uses a tree model, is even less successful in indicating the relationship among languages at a finer level of detail. This article demonstrates that two Tungusic languages, Evenki and Oroqen, which have long been treated as a single language for classification purposes, are better treated as distinct linguistic varieties. The article raises fundamental questions about the current classification of Tungusic languages and suggests a renewed examination of the role of dialect continua and contact languages in understanding the composition of the family. Finally, we question whether a tree-based model is appropriate for classifying languages that have had a high degree of contact and are find in families or branches of a shallow time depth.
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The grammaticalization
of the proximative in Tok Pisin
Suzanne Romaine
University of Oxford
This article discusses the grammaticalization laik 'want/like/desire' (from English like) and klostu 'near' (from English close to) as markers of what Heine (1994b) has called the PROXIMATIVE with the meaning 'almost', 'nearly', 'be about to', etc. I will show that although klostu was more generally a feature of Pacific Pidgin English and began to grammaticalize in the mid-nineteenth century, it is now in competition with laik, which is a development specific to twentieth-century Tok Pisin, a pidgin/creole language spoken in Papua New Guinea. The fact that Tok Pisin has two constructions, of different origin and time depth, expressing the proximative yields valuable data contributing to a typology of a much neglected grammatical notion and sheds some light on the grammaticalization paths along which proximatives develop.
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