Table of Contents Volume 75
Number 3 (September 1999)
| Articles | ||
| The complexity of nested structures in Japanese | Maria Babyonyshev & Edward Gibson | 423 |
| Agent focus and inverse in Tzotzil | Judith Aissen | 451 |
|
Alternative models of dialect death: Dissipation
vs. concentration |
Natalie Schilling-Estes & Walt Wolfram | 486 |
| Pragmatic halos | Peter Lasersohn | 522 |
| On the behavior of definite articles in Chamicuro | Steve Parker | 552 |
| Obituary: | ||
| Floyd Glenn Lounsbury | 563 | |
| Review Article: | ||
| Lambrecht: Information structure and sentence form: Topic, focus, and the mental representation of discourse referents | Maria Polinsky | 567 |
| Reviews: | ||
| Jahr & Broch (eds.): Language contact in the Arctic: Northern pidgins and contact languages | J. P. Williams | 583 |
|
Bakker: A language of our own: The genesis of Michif, the mixed
Cree-French language of the Canadian Métis |
J. M. Lipski | 584 |
| Garcia & Fishman (eds.): The multilingual apple: Languages in New York City | M. Aceto | 586 |
| Van der Wouden: Negative contexts: Collocation, polarity, and multiple negation | R. Aranovich | 589 |
|
Savage-Rumbaugh et al.: Apes, language, and the human mind |
R. Burling | 591 |
| Silverstein & Urban (eds.): Natural histories of discourse | J. Stanlaw | 593 |
|
Campbell: American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America |
D. Bartholomew | 596 |
|
Linn (ed.): Handbook of dialects and language variation (2nd edn.) |
E. Johnson | 600 |
|
Tobin: Phonology as human behavior: Theoretical implications and clinical applications |
A. Liberman | 603 |
| Book Notices | 606 | |
| Publications Received | 647 |
The complexity of nested structures
in Japanese
Maria Babyonyshev
Harvard University
Edward Gibson
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
This article presents two questionnaire experiments that investigate the processing complexity of a variety of nested constructions in Japanese. The first experiment demonstrated that embedded structures containing a direct object NP in the most embedded clause were more complex than comparable nested structures that lacked an object NP in the most embedded clause. The second experiment demonstrated that a construction consisting of a relative clause embedded within a sentential complement is less complex than the reverse embedding, consisting of sentential complement embedded within a relative clause. These results are discussed in terms of the syntactic prediction locality theory (Gibson 1998).
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Agent focus and inverse in Tzotzil
Judith Aissen
University of California, Santa Cruz
Many Mayan languages use a special verb form, the AGENT FOCUS form, when extracting the subject of a transitive clause. These verbs have a cluster of properties that have resisted satisfactory analysis. This article suggests that in Tzotzil, agent focus verbs are the INVERSE, in the sense of Algonquian linguistics, and that their distribution is determined by the relative OBVIATION status of agent and patient. Evidence for the analysis comes from syntactic constraints on agent focus verbs and on their use in discourse. The properties of these verbs provide further evidence that obviation can play a central role in languages where it is not a morphological category.
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Alternative models of dialect death:
Dissipation vs. concentration
Nathalie Schilling-Estes
Georgetown University
Walt Wolfram
North Carolina State University
The comparison of the moribund dialects of Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, and Smith Island, Maryland, demonstrates that valuable insight into the patterning of variation and change in language death can be obtained by investigating moribund varieties of healthy languages. In addition, it is crucial to investigate not only cases of death by linguistic decay (DISSIPATION), but also cases of death by population attrition in which linguistic distinctiveness is maintained or heightened among fewer speakers (CONCENTRATION). The comparative investigation of both types of language death lends insight into the macrolevel socioeconomic and microlevel sociopsychological factors that lead to the maintenance or demise of moribund languages and language varieties, as well as the nature of change in language death. It is demonstrated that change in both concentrating and dissipating varieties is rapid but otherwise indistinct from change in healthy varieties and that unusual patterns of variation and change can be explained by appealing to the social significance of language features.
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Pragmatic halos
Peter Lasersohn
University of Illinois
It is a truism that people speak 'loosely' -- that is, they often say things that we can recognize not to be true, but which come close enough to the truth for practical purposes. Certain expressions, such as those including exactly, all and perfectly, appear to serve as signals of the intended degree of approximation to the truth. This article presents a novel formalism for representing the notion of approximation to the truth, and analyzes the meanings of these expressions in terms of this formalism. Pragmatic looseness of this kind should be distinguished from authentic truth-conditional vagueness.
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On the behavior of definite articles in
Chamicuro
Steve Parker
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
and Summer Institute of Linguistics
This report describes the unique behavior of two clitic particles in a moribund Amazonian language. In Chamicuro na and ka are basically definite articles, yet they contrast for tense (ka indicates a past action while na is used in present and future contexts). The prosodic encliticization of na and ka is completely predictable from general phonological constraints alone and thus does not depend on any syntactic factors. Consequently, the stranding of an article in a different clause from its head noun follows automatically from the posited constraint system without any need to stipulate any additional formal devices.
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