Reanalyzing perfects

Where does that fit in? Morphological variation and reanalysis in Georgian placeholder verbs

The placeholder verb construction, which has emerged relatively recently in colloquial Georgian, offers a unique case study of grammaticalization in progress: the emergence of a structurally innovative type of verb within a language whose verbal morphology is already quite complex. Derived from reanalysis of the event-...

The Spanish pragmatic marker of vale

This article examines the linguistic change undergone by the verb valer , which gave rise to the pragmatic marker vale (‘ok’). On the one hand, it seeks to identify the context(s) in which the construction was coopted and explore the relational links (Traugott & Trousdale, 2013). On the other, it aims to clarif...

Control of clitics in Greek tough -constructions

Greek na -clauses are central to the debate on syntactic control, as they have been claimed to involve obligatory control (when selected by a control predicate) despite inflection on the verb. In this paper, we argue that Greek na -clauses also challenge the common assumption that control can only target the su...

Split Nominal Constructions in Italian MARA FRASCARELLI & FRANCESCA RAMAGLIA

Evidential raising in Mandarin Chinese

In this article, we develop the first syntax-and-semantics analysis of the evidential raising construction of Chinese as in [Akiu (haoxiang) xihuan he pijiu] de yangzi ‘Akiu seems to like drinking beer’ (not the DP reading that this string has, too: ‘the appearance of Akiu liking to drink beer’). PF reordering preposes...

Interplicate final concepts in the linguistic worldview (based on the Russian and Chuvash languages)

The article is devoted to a comparative study of such interplicate final concepts as PURPOSE, CONDITION, and CONCESSION. The purpose of the work is to identify the features of the representation of the concepts of PURPOSE, CONDITION, and CONCESSION in Russian and Chuvash linguistic worldviews. The scientific novelty of...