This comparative study presents an overview of Place/Goal/Source coding strategies in 35 languages and discusses asymmetries across different types of Ground arguments. The genealogically balanced sample was created using a novel computer-assisted approach which detects information-dense descriptions of languages. The comparison of data uncovers a variety of coding patterns across and within languages that leads to general Goal-Source asymmetry. Asymmetry can be shown to arise frequently due to different degrees of verb-conflation especially in the relation of Goal, and with inherently spatial Ground arguments such as spatial adverbials. Most sample languages do not show a consistent coding strategy that holds for (i) Place/Goal/Source expressions with the same Ground type and (ii) Goal and Source expressions across different Ground types, such as common nouns, interrogatives, adverbials, animates and toponyms. Grammatical distinctions of Goal and/or Source are employed by less than half of the sample, and Source expressions are more often subject to strategies unique to their relation such as iconically ordered Source expressions, deictic coding or contextual resolution.
The present study is concerned with the encoding of concessive conditionals in Cappadocian Greek, a critically endangered variety of Modern Greek. Concessive conditionals are a type of adverbial clauses that link an open set of antecedents in their protasis to a consequent in their apodosis: 'if {p 1 , p 2 , p 3 , & mldr;}, then q'. Three subtypes are distinguished: scalar, alternative, and universal concessive conditionals (SCCs, ACCs, and UCCs). Although these structures tend not to be investigated systematically in the literature, preliminary cross-linguistic observations suggest that they are prone to borrowing. Given that Cappadocian grammar has been thoroughly influenced by Turkish for almost nine centuries, the present study pays special attention to features that can be explained by contact-induced change. Moreover, Cappadocian concessive conditionals are of particular typological interest because Greek and Turkish differ considerably in how they encode concessive conditionals. Based on a dataset of 80 tokens, gathered from a 103,770-word corpus, some instances of matter and pattern replication are identified in ACCs and UCCs. In the majority of coding strategies, however, Cappadocian concessive conditionals retain their Greek profile whilst also exhibiting a notable idiosyncratic feature in that most UCCs lack nonspecificity marking. This study adds to our knowledge about this nearly extinct variety of Asia Minor Greek, identifying instances of matter and pattern replication that had previously gone unnoticed. Furthermore, it contributes to the study of language contact in general, in which concessive conditionals have so far received little attention.
This article studies the potential motivation (or, on the contrary, accidentality) of the consonantal nature of conative animal calls (CACs) as contrasted with the vocalic nature of interjections. The authors examine this issue by drawing on data from Gorwaa and locating them within a broader typological context. The evidence presented suggests that Gorwaa CACs exhibit a markedly consonantal character, manifested through a set of more specific phonetic properties, which stands in stark contrast with the vocalic character of interjections; and both correlations are not accidental. The close relationship of interjections with vocalicity and that of CACs with consonantality stems from the more general distinct tendencies of the two categories towards sonority. Such opposite sonority tendencies are, in turn, motivated: in the case of interjections, by the similarity of more sonorous phones with emotive cries; and in the case of CACs, by the acoustic suitability of less sonorous phones for alerting, drawing attention, and chasing away interlocutors and the mimicry (or morphism) of noises made by animals (the less sonorous properties of which stem in turn from their own acoustic suitability and an animal ' s physio-anatomy).
The article deals with the pseudo-cleft construction (also known as wh-cleft) in Lithuanian, a Baltic language. It focuses on the syntactic and morphosyntactic changes that have set the Lithuanian pseudo-cleft apart from its source construction, the specificational copular construction. It is argued that this pseudo-cleft has become monoclausal as a result of a process in which the kernel component of the pseudo-cleft construction (consisting of relative pronoun, relative-clause verb and copula/focus marker) became non-compositional and started occupying a slot corresponding to that of the simple-clause verb. This process may have been driven by the morphosyntactic marking assigned by the relative-clause verb being copied onto the focus noun phrase and subsequently being reanalysed as governed by the pseudo-cleft kernel component as a whole. As a result of these processes, the Lithuanian pseudo-cleft is superficially still similar to the original specificational construction from which it derives, but certain morphosyntactic and syntactic features betray it as being monoclausal. The Lithuanian pseudo-cleft is further considered against a cross-linguistic background to point out that it represents a non-trivial and typologically interesting instantiation of the more general process of development of clefts and pseudo-clefts into monoclausal structures.
The complexity of valency class systems remains an underexplored dimension of typological variation. Drawing on data from BivalTyp, a database cataloging valency patterns of 130 bivalent verbs across 120 languages, this paper proposes three metrics to quantify this complexity. Two of these metrics - the ratio of intransitive verbs among bivalent verbs and the entropy in the distribution of bivalent intransitive verbs across valency classes - are strongly positively correlated, reflecting different aspects of the overarching valency class complexity. The third metric, the entropy of all bivalent verbs across valency classes, captures both of these facets. Languages tend to gravitate toward moderate complexity values, avoiding overly simplistic or excessively complex valency class systems. However, significant variation exists, primarily driven by areal and genealogical factors. Valency class complexity, as measured and discussed in this paper, is empirically interwoven with numerous other parameters of morphosyntactic typology, suggesting that it is a fundamental factor in shaping linguistic diversity. Specifically, languages with large case inventories, a high prevalence of non-verbal predicates, and a preference for satellite-framed constructions in motion events are hypothesized to favor more complex valency class systems. Furthermore, complex argument-encoding devices tend to favor postverbal positions, aligning with the principles of incremental processing and the minimization of processing effort. Overall, this study contributes to understanding how efficiency pressures influence typological distributions.
