In Nakh-Daghestanian languages (Northern Caucasus), one of the most common sources of the jussive (indirect command such as ‘Let him go’) are grammaticalized from reported speech constructions with the imperative of the main verb followed by the imperative of the verb ‘say’: e.g., literally go.imp say.imp. In some languages, the imperative of the verb ‘say’ is reduced to a suffix. Suffixes coming back to the verb ‘say’ can also be found in optatives (forms that express the wish of the speaker, such as ‘May God bless you’). The aim of this paper is to model the process of grammaticalization of reported speech constructions into jussive or optative, exploring the accompanying morphosyntactic restructuring and semantic changes in a dozen of languages of the Nakh-Daghestanian family. The paper also discusses possible scenarios of the diffusion of the forms with the ‘say’-element spanning the whole territory where languages from different branches of the family are spoken.
Based on a worldwide sample of 604 languages from 179 families, this study shows that affirmative markers, the functional opposite of standard negators, are highly infrequent and possibly ‘rara.’ This confirms previous impressionistic claims. Nine languages with one affirmative marker each were found. Their geographical distribution (a major cluster in eastern Africa), exponence (five of the nine markers are prefixes), and possible diachronic emergence are discussed. The existence of affirmative markers is explained against the background of ‘overspecification,’ operationalized here as the combination of a high degree of verbal synthesis and a low number of zero markers throughout the system. Languages with affirmative markers generally have a large number of morphological categories/slots and also show a tendency to overtly mark other meanings often zero-marked cross-linguistically (e.g., nominative, present tense, third person). The results suggest that some languages prefer explicitness to economy, which informs different aspects of typology.
This paper presents a cross-linguistic study of habitual markers, defined as morphs or constructions expressing that a situation typically occurs. We investigate the frequency, formal types, and likely diachronic origins of habitual markers. On the basis of an areally and genetically balanced sample of 102 languages, we find that habitual markers are cross-linguistically common, being found in at least 57 of the languages in the sample; in 14 of these, more than one habitual marker was found. Affixes are the most commonly reported type of marker, followed by particles and auxiliaries. For the investigation of the diachronic origins of habitual markers, we added a convenience sample of 85 languages and dialects where we knew habituals to be attested. This allowed us to collect a large catalogue of lexical sources of such markers, which includes lexemes meaning ‘know’, ‘do’, ‘like/love’, ‘belong’, ‘be strong’, and various verbs of movement.
Linguistic typology has identified properties shared by the world’s languages, as well as features with respect to which languages diverge, including infrequent or rare phenomena. Cognitive biases are one important source of language universals, through their indirect effect on language change via their impact on language learning and language use. At the same time, typologically rare phenomena can exist only if the human brain is able to accommodate them. Nonetheless, our knowledge of how we process language mostly derives from the analysis of a limited set of languages associated with WEIRD (Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic) societies. Including non-WEIRD languages in our psycholinguistic experiments stands to benefit the cognitive science of language and, in addition, linguistic typology, given that languages do best what speakers do most, which in turn depends on what our brains do most. In this paper, the benefits of a less biased approach to the cognitive science of language diversity are illustrated through the consideration of a research project aimed at determining the impact of the typological diversity of human languages on different memory types, specifically, procedural vs. declarative memory, with the latter encompassing two subtypes of relevance to linguistic structure, semantic and episodic. Our focus is on typological features that have been shown, in the past, to correlate with sociolinguistic factors. Overall, we aim at delving into an array of multi-directional feedback relationships among memory types, sociolinguistic properties, and typological features.
