 | Stress, Extrametricality and the Minimal Word in Seri
by Stephen A. Marlett (PDF - 277k) Seri, a language isolate spoken in northwestern Mexico, regularly assigns stress to the penultimate syllable of a root; affixes are not relevant for determining the placement of stress. A heavy final syllable in the root attracts stress, however, although a final consonant is extrametrical. The final consonant of a word is relevant for the minimal word condition that major class lexical items respect, as this paper shows. Some roots have extrametrical final syllables and a few roots have exceptional stress. This paper documents these facts with audio recordings. Perfectivity and time reference in Hausa
by Mahamane L. Abdoulaye (PDF - 352k) The relative marking in Hausa marks discourse presupposition in perfective and imperfective relative clauses and out-of-focus clauses of focus and fronted wh-questions. However, the Relative Perfective also appears in storyline narrative clauses and various accounts try to find a common feature between relative clauses and narrative context. This paper rejects the common feature approach to Hausa relative marking and presents a systematic grammaticalization account of the functions of the Relative Perfective. The paper shows that in temporal when relative clauses headed by look?cin d? 'time that', the aspectual contrast Relative Imperfective vs. Relative Perfective has vanished, and the Relative Perfective indexes the specific time of the event. The temporal relative clauses differ from locative and manner adverbial relative clauses, whose semantics (location and manner) are not usual inflectional categories and they therefore maintain the aspectual contrast between Relative Perfective and Relative Imperfective. The paper shows that the new temporal category, the Specific Time Marker, spread to other environments and incorporated a time orientation feature in main clauses of narrative and dialogical discourse to become a simple past. The paper proposes a mixed tense and aspect TAM system for Hausa, a system positioned between aspect-only and tense-prominent systems. A frequentist explanation of some universals of reflexive marking
by Martin Haspelmath (PDF - 359k) This paper identifies a number of empirically observable universals of reflexive marking that concern the existence of a special reflexive pronoun and the length of the marker that is used in reflexive constructions, in various different positions of the nonreflexive or reflexive pronoun. Most of the proposed universals have been mentioned earlier in the literature, but they have not been very prominent because the literature on binding has focused on language-specific generalizations rather than identifying readily testable generalizations. I argue that all of these universals have their basis in a frequency asymmetry: Under different circumstances, the likelihood of an anaphoric pronoun being coreferential with the subject can be quite different, and this is argued to be the motivation for the universal patterns of form. |
