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Article

Morphology in Dene Languages  

Keren Rice

Dene languages are often recognized for their morphological complexity. The languages are known in particular for their complex verbal morphology, and the Dene verb word has received considerable attention in the literature. The verb word is polysynthetic, with several unusual properties: the actual morpheme inventory is relatively small, with rich word formation possibilities; it is prefixing, while suffixing is far more common amongst the world’s languages; what is a single morpheme from a semantic perspective can be discontinuous, illustrating what Whorf calls interrupted synthesis; a single morpheme can be both semantically productive and lexically idiosyncratic; some affixes are mobile; there is considerable homophony; fusion of morphemes is common; and aspects of the phonology lead to surface opacity, with unexpected allomorphy. Several proposals have been introduced to account for the structure of the verb word, and psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic factors that enter in to understanding the complexities of the verb word have been addressed. There is also research on the acquisition of and teaching of the verb word. Overall, it is important to ask what the structure of the verb is synchronically, and what, while interesting, is a consequence of diachronic developments. In addition to the well-studied complexities of the verb, there are also interesting aspects of other categories. The nouns are worthy of attention for their formation, a noun classification system, and nominal possession. The directional systems of Dene languages tend to be rich, including both a root that indicates direction and a prefix that specifies distance or direction from the speaker. At least some of he languages also have evidentials, and these are, in general, understudied. Dene languages, like many other languages of North America, are now being learned largely as second languages. This increases the urgency to study areas such as acquisition and language use in order to help in sustaining the languages in communities where this is desired.

Article

Morphology in Dene-Yeniseian Languages  

Edward Vajda

Dene-Yeniseian is a putative family consisting of two branches: Yeniseian in central Siberia and Na-Dene (Tlingit-Eyak-Athabaskan) in northwestern North America. Yeniseian contains a single living representative, Ket, as well as the extinct Yugh, Kott, Assan, Arin, and Pumpokol languages. Na-Dene contains Tlingit, spoken mainly in the Alaskan Panhandle, and a second branch divided equidistantly between the recently extinct Eyak language of coastal Alaska and the widespread Athabaskan subfamily, which originally contained more than 40 distinct languages, some now extinct. Athabaskan was once spoken throughout interior Alaska (Dena’ina, Koyukon) and most of northwestern Canada (Slave, Witsuwit’en, Tsuut’ina), with enclaves in California (Hupa), Oregon (Tolowa), Washington (Kwalhioqua-Clatskanie), and the American Southwest (Navajo, Apache). Both families are typologically unusual in having a strongly prefixing verb and nominal possessive prefixes, but postpositions rather than prepositions. The finite verb arose from the amalgamation of an auxiliary and a main verb, both with its own agreement prefixes and tense-mood-aspect suffixes, creating a rigid, mostly prefixing template. The word-final suffixes largely elided in Yeniseian but merged with the ancient verb root in Na-Dene to create a series of allophones called stem sets. Na-Dene innovated a unique complex of verb prefixes called “classifiers” on the basis of certain inherited agreement and tense-mood-aspect markers; all of these morphemes have cognates in Yeniseian, where they did not innovate into a single complex. Metathesis and reanalysis of old morphological material is quite prevalent in the most ancient core verb morphology of both families, while new prefixal or suffixal slots added onto the verb’s periphery represent innovations that distinguish the individual daughter branches within each family. Other shared Dene-Yeniseian morphology includes possessive constructions, directional words, and an intricate formula for deriving action nominals from finite verb stems. Yeniseian languages have been strongly affected by the exclusively suffixing languages brought north to Siberia by reindeer breeders during the past two millennia. In modern Ket the originally prefixing verb has largely become suffixing, and possessive prefixes have evolved into clitics that prefer to attach to any available preceding word. Na-Dene languages were likewise influenced by traits prevalent across the Americas. Athabaskan, for example, developed a system of obviation in third-person agreement marking and elaborated an array of distinct verb forms reflecting the shape, animacy, number, or consistency of transitive object or intransitive subject. Features motivated by language contact differ between Tlingit, Eyak, and Athabaskan, suggesting they arose after the breakup of Na-Dene, as the various branches spread across northwestern North America. The study of Dene-Yeniseian morphology contributes to historical-comparative linguistics, contact linguistics, and also to the diachronic study of complex morphology. In particular, comparing Yeniseian and Na-Dene verb structure reveals the prominence of metathesis and reanalysis in processes of language change. Dene-Yeniseian is noteworthy not only for its wide geographic spread and for the effects of language contact on each separate family, but also for the opportunity to trace the evolution of uncommon morphological structures.

Article

Morphology in Dravidian Languages  

R. Amritavalli

The Dravidian languages are rich in nominal and verbal morphology. Three nominal gender systems are extant. Pronouns are gender-number marked demonstratives. Gender-number agreement in the DP suggests an incipient classifier system. Oblique cases are layered on a genitive stem; iterative genitive and plural marking is seen. Genitive and dative case mark possession/ experience (there is no verb have), and the adjectival use of property nouns. Verbs inflect for agreement (in affirmative finite clauses), aspect, causativity, and benefactivity/ reflexivity. Light verbs are ubiquitous as aspect markers and predicate formatives, as are serial verbs. Variants of the quotative verb serve as complementizers and as topic and evidential particles. Disjunctive particles serve as question particles; conjunctive and disjunctive particles on question words derive quantifiers. Reduplication occurs in quantification and anaphor-formation.

Article

Morphology in Niger-Congo Languages  

Denis Creissels

This chapter is an overview of the structure of words belonging to the major lexical categories (nouns and verbs) in Niger-Congo languages, with an emphasis on the morphological patterns typically found in the core Niger-Congo languages commonly considered as relatively conservative in their morphology: rich systems of verb morphology, both inflectional and derivational, and systems of gender-number marking with a relative high number of genders, and no possibility to isolate number marking from gender marking. As regards formal aspects of the structure of words, as a rule, verb forms are morphologically more complex than nominal forms. The highest degree of synthesis is found in the verbal morphology of some Bantu languages. Both prefixes and suffixes are found. Cumulative exponence is typically found in gender-number marking. Multiple exponence is very common in the verbal morphology of Bantu language but rather uncommon in the remainder of Niger-Congo. Consonant alternations are common in several groups of Niger-Congo languages, and various types of tonal alternations play an important role in the morphology of many Niger-Congo languages. The categories most commonly expressed in the inflectional morphology of nouns are gender, number, definiteness, and possession. The inflectional morphology of verbs commonly expresses agreement, TAM, and polarity, and is also widely used to express interclausal dependencies and information structure. As regards word formation, the situation is not uniform across the language groups included in Niger-Congo, but rich systems of verb-to-verb derivation are typically found in the Niger-Congo languages whose morphological patterns are commonly viewed as conservative.

Article

Morphology in Quechuan Languages  

Willem F. H. Adelaar

Quechuan is a family of closely related indigenous languages spoken in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, in the central part of the Andean cordilleras, in what used to be the Empire of the Incas and adjacent areas. It is divided into two main branches, commonly denominated Quechua I and II, and comprises 15 or more spoken varieties and several extinct ones that can be considered separate languages, although an exact number cannot easily be established. Quechuan shares a long and intense contact history with the neighboring Aymaran languages, but a genealogical relationship between the two families has never been demonstrated, nor a relationship with any other language family in the area. Quechuan languages are mainly agglutinative. All grammatical categories are indicated by suffixes with very few exceptions. The order in which these suffixes occur within a word form is governed by rules and combinatory restrictions that can be rigid but not always explicable on a basis of scope and function. Portmanteau suffixes play a role in verbal inflection and in mutually interrelated domains of aspect and number in the Quechua I branch. In Quechuan verbal derivation affixes may be semantically polyvalent, depending on the combinations in which they occur, pragmatic considerations, the nature of the root to which they are attached, their position in the affix order, and so on. Verbal derivational affixes often combine with specific verbal roots to denote meanings that are not fully predictable on the basis of the meaning of the components. Other verbal affixes never occur in such combinations. Verbal morphology and nominal morphology tend to overlap in the domain of personal reference, where subject and possessor markers are largely similar. Otherwise, the two morphological domains are almost completely separate. Not only the morphological inventories but also the formal constraints underlying the structure of verbs and nouns differ. Nominal expressions feature an elaborate but relatively instable system of case markers, some of which appear to be of recent formation. Transposition from one class to another, nominalization in particular, is indicated morphologically and occupies a central place in Quechuan grammar, particularly in interaction with case. Finally, there is a class of Independent suffixes that can be attached to members of all word classes, including adverbial elements that cannot be classified as verbs or nominals. These suffixes play a role at the organizational level of larger syntactic units, such as clauses, nominal phrases, and sentences.

Article

Morphology in Japonic Languages  

Taro Kageyama

Due to the agglutinative character, Japanese and Ryukyuan morphology is predominantly concatenative, applying to garden-variety word formation processes such as compounding, prefixation, suffixation, and inflection, though nonconcatenative morphology like clipping, blending, and reduplication is also available and sometimes interacts with concatenative word formation. The formal simplicity of the principal morphological devices is counterbalanced by their complex interaction with syntax and semantics as well as by the intricate interactions of four lexical strata (native, Sino-Japanese, foreign, and mimetic) with particular morphological processes. A wealth of phenomena is adduced that pertain to central issues in theories of morphology, such as the demarcation between words and phrases; the feasibility of the lexical integrity principle; the controversy over lexicalism and syntacticism; the distinction of morpheme-based and word-based morphology; the effects of the stage-level vs. individual-level distinction on the applicability of morphological rules; the interface of morphology, syntax, and semantics, and pragmatics; and the role of conjugation and inflection in predicate agglutination. In particular, the formation of compound and complex verbs/adjectives takes place in both lexical and syntactic structures, and the compound and complex predicates thus formed are further followed in syntax by suffixal predicates representing grammatical categories like causative, passive, negation, and politeness as well as inflections of tense and mood to form a long chain of predicate complexes. In addition, an array of morphological objects—bound root, word, clitic, nonindependent word or fuzoku-go, and (for Japanese) word plus—participate productively in word formation. The close association of morphology and syntax in Japonic languages thus demonstrates that morphological processes are spread over lexical and syntactic structures, whereas words are equipped with the distinct property of morphological integrity, which distinguishes them from syntactic phrases.

Article

Morphology in Northwest Caucasian Languages  

Yury Lander

The five languages of the Northwest Caucasian family (also known as West Caucasian or Abkhaz-Adyghe), namely West Circassian, Kabardian, Ubykh, Abkhaz, and Abaza, are remarkable for their high degree of polysynthesis. This manifests itself in complex words that bear a lot of information on arguments and the characteristics of a situation, and which presumably can be constructed in the course of speech. Content words usually consist of several morphological zones within which certain permutations of morphemes are possible. Both prefixes and suffixes occur, with some morphemes being capable of appearing either as a prefix or a suffix, depending on the form. The predicate shows ergative-based cross-reference of core arguments and indirect objects introduced by applicatives, extensive use of the causative (including double causativization), highly developed means of expressing locational semantics within the predicate, and intricate tense-modality-aspect and polarity systems. Although classical noun-to-verb incorporation does not occur, there are constructions akin to incorporation, especially in the nominal domain. Nouns constitute a subclass of a broad class of predicates (both morphologically and syntactically) and hence may take the basic predicate morphology. At the same time, they form word-like nominal complexes with their attributes, and show specific head-marking possessive morphology (in West Circassian even distinguishing alienable and inalienable possession). Definiteness/specificity is regularly expressed either by articles (in Abkhaz, Abaza and Ubykh) or by the presence/absence of core case marking (in West Circassian and Kabardian). Morphemes demonstrate features that are not typical of morphemes in Standard Average European languages, including a high degree of autonomy reflected in affix order variation, widespread morphological recursion, occasional reduplication and even the ability to attach to complex syntactic constituents.

Article

The Morphology of Yam Languages  

Matthew J. Carroll

The Yam languages are a primary language family spoken in southern New Guinea across an area spanning around 180km west to east across both the Indonesian province of Papua and Papua New Guinea. The Yam languages are morphologically remarkable for their complex verbal inflection characterized by a tendency to distribute inflectional exponence across multiple sites on the verb. Under this pattern of distributed exponence, segmental formatives, that is, affixes, are identifiable but assigning any coherent semantics to these elements is often difficult and instead the inflectional meanings can only be determined once multiple formatives have been combined. Despite their complex inflectional morphology, Yam languages display comparatively impoverished word formation or derivational morphology. Nominal inflection is characterized by moderately large case inventories, the largest displaying 16 cases. Nouns are occasionally marked for number although this is typically restricted to certain case values. Verbal paradigms are much larger than nominal paradigms. Verbs mark agreement with up to two arguments in person, number, and natural gender. Verbs also mark complex tense, aspect, and mood values; in all languages this involves at least two aspect values, multiple past tense values, and some level of grammatical mood marking. Verbs may also be marked for diathesis, direction, and/or pluractionality. The overall morphological pattern is that of fusional or inflectional languages. Nominal inflection is rather straightforward with nominals taking case suffixes or clitics with little to no inflectional classes. The true complexity lies in the organization of the verbal inflectional system, about which, despite individual variation across the family, a number of architectural generalizations can be made. The family displays a fairly uniform verbal inflectional template and all languages make a distinction between prefixing and ambifixing verbs. Prefixing verbs show agreement via a prefix only while ambifixing verbs via agreement with a suffix, for monovalent clauses, or with both a prefix and a suffix for bivalent verbs. These agreement affixes are also involved in the distributed exponence of tense, aspect, and mood.

Article

Morphology in Sino-Tibetan Languages  

Giorgio Francesco Arcodia and Bianca Basciano

Sino-Tibetan is a highly diverse language family, in which a wide range of morphological phenomena and profiles may be found. The family is generally seen as split into two major branches, i.e., Sinitic and Tibeto-Burman, but while Sinitic is a fairly homogeneous group in terms of morphology, the so-called Tibeto-Burman branch of the family includes isolating languages like Karen, languages with transparent and regular agglutinative morphology (Lolo-Burmese, Tibetic, and Boro-Garo), but also paradigmatically complex languages, with elaborate argument indexation and transitivity management systems; while in some languages morphological complexity is mostly a conservative trait (e.g., Rgyalrongic and Kiranti), other languages developed innovative paradigms, with only few vestiges of the archaic system (Kuki-Chin). Some notable morphological phenomena in modern Tibeto-Burman languages are verb stem alternation, peculiar nominalization constructions, and long sequences of prefixes, which in some languages (Chintang) may even be freely permutated without any relevant change in meaning. Also, while Sinitic languages are normally taken to be a prototypical example of the (ideal) isolating morphological type (with virtually no inflection, stable morpheme boundaries, no cumulative exponence, and no allomorphy or suppletion), phenomena of strong reduction of morphemes, blurring of morpheme boundaries and fusion between root and suffix, and nonconcatenative morphology, as well as allomorphy and (proto-)paradigmatic organization of morphology, are attested in some Chinese dialects, mostly concentrated in an area of Northern China (Shaanxi, Shanxi, Henan, Hebei, and Shandong provinces). Moreover, ‘Altaic-type’ agglutinative morphology, including case marking, is found in Sinitic languages of the so-called Qinghai-Gansu Sprachbund; in this case, the development of agglutination, as well as other typological traits (as SOV word order), is clearly the product of intense and prolonged contact between Northwestern Chinese dialects and Tibetic and Mongolic languages of China. On the other hand, Southern Chinese dialects have developed in closer contact with Hmong-Mien, Tai-Kadai, and Austroasiatic languages, and are thus closer to the typology of Mainland Southeast Asian languages, with a very strong isolating profile.

Article

Morphosyntactic Variation and Change in Italian  

Michela Cennamo and Francesco Maria Ciconte

Italian is an Italo-Romance language based upon a form of Tuscan, old Florentine. For centuries, Italian was a literary language mastered only by well-educated elites. In contrast, almost the entire population spoke a local variety of Italo-Romance. The Italo-Romance varieties are not dialects—that is, variations—of Italian, but they are languages in their own right, which, like Tuscan, developed independently from Latin. The long-term and intensive coexistence of Italian and the Italo-Romance varieties has produced a great deal of variation, which still characterizes the linguistic repertoire of Italy. The diglossic relationship between Italian and the Italo-Romance varieties is thus the key to capturing such variation. The interrelation between a superstrate national language—that is, Standard Italian—and the deep-rooted local varieties has yielded interlanguage phenomena, which eventually led to substratum interference, that is, the occurrence of local features in Italian. This variation has not affected Standard Italian, but, rather, it has produced geo-varieties of Italian, altogether termed “Regional Italians.” The use of certain regional features has become the norm—a norm which is socially accepted and in fact constitutes the standard within the respective regional areas. Besides phonetic and prosodic variation and substantial lexical importation into Italian from the Italo-Romance varieties, a set of shared interference features has transcended isoglossic boundaries at the morphosyntactic level as well. At the same time, the traditional diamesic dichotomy between the spoken and written domain has loosened, allowing a variety of interrelated styles and registers. In this respect, contemporary Italian can be said to be undergoing a process of restandardization. The newly emerging standard variety, “Neo-Standard Italian,” encompasses originally regional morphosyntactic features which have become pan-Italian and are commonly used in almost all functional domains of communication. After discussing some typical instances of morphosyntactic variation in the macro-areas of Regional Italians, this article analyzes some shared Romance phenomena with regard to the specific features of Italian and its regional variation, namely existential constructions, forms of address, futurity, mood, and negation, pointing to emerging new phenomena, coexisting with stable patterns of variation, some of which are already attested in earlier stages of the language and of the early vernaculars.

Article

Morphosyntax of Dravidian Languages  

R. Amritavalli

The Dravidian languages, spoken mainly in southern India and south Asia, were identified as a separate language family between 1816 and 1856. Four of the 26 Dravidian languages, namely Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam, have long literary traditions, the earliest dating back to the 1st century ce. Currently these four languages have among them over 200 million speakers in south Asia. The languages exhibit prototypical OV (object–verb) properties but relatively free word order, and are rich in nominal and verbal inflection; only Malayalam lacks verb agreement. A typical characteristic of Dravidian, which is also an areal characteristic of south Asian languages, is that experiencers and inalienable possessors are case-marked dative. Another is the serialization of verbs by the use of participles, and the use of light verbs to indicate aspectual meaning such as completion, self- or nonself-benefaction, and reflexivization. Subjects, and arguments in general (e.g., direct and indirect objects), may be nonovert. So is the copula, except in Malayalam. A number of properties of Dravidian are of interest from a universalist perspective, beginning with the observation that not all syntactic categories N, V, A, and P are primitive. Dravidian postpositions are nominal or verbal in origin. A mere 30 Proto-Dravidian roots have been identified as adjectival; the adjectival function is performed by inflected verbs (participles) and nouns. The nominal encoding of experiences (e.g., as fear rather than afraid/afeared) and the absence of the verb have arguably correlate with the appearance of dative case on experiencers. “Possessed” or genitive-marked N may fulfill the adjectival function, as noticed for languages like Ulwa (a less exotic parallel is the English of-possessive construction: circles of light, cloth of gold). More uniquely perhaps, Kannada instantiates dative-marked N as predicative adjectives. A recent argument that Malayalam verbs originate as dative-marked N suggests both that N is the only primitive syntactic category, and the seminal role of the dative case. Other important aspects of Dravidian morphosyntax to receive attention are anaphors and pronouns (not discussed here; see separate article, anaphora in Dravidian), in particular the long-distance anaphor taan and the verbal reflexive morpheme; question (wh-) words and the question/disjunction morphemes, which combine in a semantically transparent way to form quantifier words like someone; the use of reduplication for distributive quantification; and the occurrence of ‘monstrous agreement’ (first-person agreement in clauses embedded under a speech predicate, triggered by matrix third-person antecedents). Traditionally, agreement has been considered the finiteness marker in Dravidian. Modals, and a finite form of negation, also serve to mark finiteness. The nonfinite verbal complement to the finite negative may give the negative clause a tense interpretation. Dravidian thus attests matrix nonfinite verbs in finite clauses, challenging the equation of finiteness with tense. The Dravidian languages are considered wh-in situ languages. However, wh-words in Malayalam appear in a pre-verbal position in the unmarked word order. The apparently rightward movement of some wh-arguments could be explained by assuming a universal VO order, and wh-movement to a preverbal focus phrase. An alternative analysis is that the verb undergoes V-to-C movement.

Article

Neoclassical Compounding in the Romance Languages  

Fabio Montermini

The label “neoclassical compounds” (NC) encompasses a set of phenomena found in, but not limited to, Romance languages. They can be roughly characterized as the emergence, in the lexicon of a language, of lexical units totally or partially made up of elements borrowed from ancient (classical) languages, namely Greek and Latin, and constructed by means of processes not (or not necessarily) corresponding to the “canonical” morphological processes at work in the language in question. Historically, the existence of NC in Romance languages is linked, on the one side, to the role played by Latin, and partly Greek, in the intellectual history of Europe; and, on the other side, to the various waves of relatinization Romance languages were subject to at different times, with two major turning points, in the 15th and 16th centuries, with the revival of classical authors advocated by Humanism and the Renaissance, and from the 18th century onward, with the development and democratization of scientific and technical knowledge. Progressively, NC have served as models for the emergence of productive word formation patterns which are, today, perfectly integrated into the derivational systems of Romance languages. However, rather than constituting a clearly delimited and homogeneous class, the label NC encompasses a constellation of phenomena sharing some characteristics that can globally be attributed to their common origin in the lexicon of neoclassical descent that has been transferred to Romance languages across the centuries.

Article

Nominal Inflectional Morphology in Germanic: Adjectives  

Hans-Olav Enger

The article surveys the different types of adjective inflection: gradation and agreement. Agreement inflection on adjectives in Germanic can involve gender, number, case, and strong/weak (definiteness). The languages differ in their agreement inflection. The different modes of exponence for the different inflections are shown (e.g., periphrasis, affixation, and vowel change). There are adjectives that are defective and those that are completely indeclinable. The article also surveys deviations such as suppletion and syncretisms. The article shows how the notion of construction may be relevant for Germanic adjective inflection, how there is a difference between attributive and predicative use in that the former typically involves “more inflection,” and this is also shown for cases of semantic agreement. Perhaps some differences between Germanic languages in their adjective inflection relate to sociolinguistic factors.

Article

Nominal Inflectional Morphology in Germanic: Nouns  

Christian Zimmer

The modern Germanic languages encode up to three categories on nouns: number (with the values singular and plural), case (with up to four values: nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive), and definiteness (with the values definite and indefinite). The variation within this branch of the Indo-European language family is immense: While, for example, Icelandic encodes all three categories and all the values mentioned, English differentiates only between singular and plural via the inflection of nouns. Such differences in the number of categories that are encoded on nouns are due to the grammaticalization of postnominal articles into bound definiteness markers in the North Germanic languages, which has not taken place in the other Germanic languages, and the loss of case (e.g., in English and most, but not all, other Germanic languages). Furthermore, Germanic languages differ greatly in how number and case are encoded. Firstly, the coding techniques suffixation, stem modulation, subtraction, tone, and combinations of these techniques (plus zero marking) vary in frequency across the languages at hand. Secondly, case and number can be expressed within a cumulative formative (this is the case in Icelandic and Faroese) or with the help of separate formatives. Thirdly, the extent to which allomorphy can be observed varies considerably—ranging from virtually no allomorphy in English (with -s and phonologically determined variants as the only formative) to intricate systems in Icelandic and Faroese. And fourthly, allomorphs are assigned according to different principles, with phonology (both segmental and suprasegmental), semantics, and grammatical gender being of varying importance.

Article

Nominal Inflectional Morphology in Germanic: Pronouns  

Stefan Rabanus

Pronouns are words that represent morphosyntactic features of nominal referents located somewhere else in the sentence or the context. They display the highest degree of morphosyntactic exponence in the nominal domain, including features of person, gender, number, case, animacy, and social relationship. The Germanic languages make use of a common set of pronoun roots in order to form the paradigms of demonstrative, personal, reflexive, interrogative, and indefinite pronouns. Selection and inflection are language specific: for example, the Germanic demonstrative pronoun root *þat developed to the uninflected distal demonstrative that in English, while in German it forms part of the inflectional paradigm of the proximal demonstrative der, die, das. Reciprocal, relative, and possessive pronouns do not have autonomous roots; their forms are derived from the previously mentioned classes; compare the English relative pronouns that (< demonstrative), what, who, whose, which (< interrogative). Suppletion occurs in many paradigms, especially with person features, for example, English first person I, second person you. The 13 Germanic standard languages, Icelandic, Faroese, German, Luxembourgish, Yiddish, Danish, Swedish, Bokmål, Nynorsk, Dutch, Frisian, English, and Afrikaans, form a continuum in which Icelandic is closest to the Germanic roots and has most distinctions while Afrikaans has the least. Often the paradigm structure mirrors the geographical subdivision in Scandinavian and West Germanic. However, in some aspects German (and Luxembourgish, Yiddish) cluster with Insular Scandinavian while Mainland Scandinavian is structurally closer to the rest of the West Germanic languages. Adnominal usage of pronouns and their usage as independent constituents is only in rare cases morphologically distinguished, for example, English adnominal possessive your versus independent pronouns yours.

Article

Nonverbal Clauses in Wano: A Trans–New Guinea Language  

Willem Burung

West Papua has approximately 300 ethnic languages, which are classified into two main families: the Austronesian languages, of the coastal ethnic groups, and the Papuan languages, of the montane native dwellers. Papuan languages are further sub-divided into 43 language families, of which Trans–New Guinea is the largest in terms of number. Wano is a member of the Trans–New Guinea family. Clauses lacking a verb as a core element in their structures are known as nonverbal clauses, which are intransitive cross-linguistically. Languages like English may grammatically differentiate nonverbal clauses from nonverbal predicates, which is not so in languages like Wano that lack a copula. An English clause, he is my child, for instance, is a verbal clause with a nonverbal predicate, while its equivalent expression in Wano, at nabut ‘he is my child’, with its morphosyntactic structure {he/she/it 1s-child.of male possessor}, is a nonverbal clause with a nonverbal predicate. Nonverbal clauses in Wano may have the forms of (a) subject-predicate, for example, at nica ‘she is my mother’, with its morphosyntactic structure: {he/she/it 1s-mother}, where the inalienable kin noun, nica ‘my mother’ {1s-mother} is the predicate; and (b) subject-object-predicate, for example, kat an nabua ‘you.sg love me’, with its morphosyntactic structure: {you.sg I 1s-love’}, of which the cognition noun, nabua ‘my love’ {1s-love}, functions as predicate head. How a nonverbal clause could be transitive is a fundamental question that is worth the explanatory definition of Wano nouns in terms of their morphology-semantics-pragmatics interface. Noun morphology in Wano is straightforward yet may undergo complex semantic-pragmatic coding with respect to morphosyntactic structures. One reason is that in some kin terminologies, the language distinguishes the sex of the possessor, such as the inalienable kin phrase ‘my child’, that is, nabut, which has the morphological structure of {1s-child.of male possessor} or {1s-fatherling:child}; this is applicable only for male possessor, and nayak {1s-motherling:child} is for female possessor. The distinction may lead to semantic-pragmatic complexity for the interpretation of the English possessive phrase our child in Wano, which is either ninyabut ‘our child’ {1p-fatherling:child}, restricted to male possessors, or ninyayak ‘our child’ {1p-motherling:child}, restricted to female possessors. The other reason is the presence of a type of inalienable noun, that is, physiocognition nouns, in nonverbal clauses as predicate elements, for example, an nanop anduk ‘my head is painful’ {I 1s-head 3s-pain}, where the physiology noun anduk ‘his pain’ {3s-pain} is the predicate, and kat at enokweid ‘you.sg think of him’ {you.sg he 3s-mind} is the clause that has the cognition noun enokweid ‘his mind’ as predicate. Wano divides inalienable nouns into: (2.1) cultural nouns, for example, nayum ‘my netbag’ {1s-netbag}; (2.2) kin nouns, for example, kare ‘your.sg uncle’ {2s-uncle}; (2.3) body part nouns, for example, nanop ‘my head’ {1s-head} for (2.3.1) solid body part nouns and adian ‘his blood’ {3s-blood} for (2.3.2) liquid body part nouns; and (2.4) physiocognition nouns, for example, nabua ‘my love’ {1s-love} for (2.4.1) cognition nouns, and anduk ‘his pain’ {3s-pain} for (2.4.2) physiology nouns. Physiology nouns are found in the subject-predicate structure and cognition nouns in the subject-object-predicate.

Article

Norwegian  

Agnete Nesse

Norwegian is mainly spoken in Norway and is represented in writing by two written languages, Bokmål (90%) and Nynorsk (10%). Both would work well as a written standard for the whole country but are to some extent regionally distributed. The distribution is partly based on the dialects and their likeness to one of the two written standards, and partly on tradition and ideology. There is no codified standard spoken Norwegian, so in formal settings the choice is either to approximate to one of the written standards, or to simply use dialect, which is most often the case. Norwegian is part of the Scandinavian dialect continuum. Due to geography and historical developments in the region, most Norwegians easily understand spoken Swedish but sometimes struggle with written Swedish. Conversely, they easily understand written Danish but sometimes struggle with spoken Danish. Einar Haugen pinned the term Semi Communication to the almost mutual understanding between speakers of Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish. Between Norwegian and the insular Nordic varieties Icelandic and Faroese, there is no mutual intelligibility. Norwegian has both synthetic and analytic language characteristics. Grammatical meaning is partly conveyed morphologically by endings and partly syntactically through word order. The vocabulary is, apart from a group of loanwords from Greek and Latin, almost solely Germanic. Due to the influence from German (Low and High), Danish, and English, parts of Norwegian vocabulary will be recognizable to speakers of other Germanic varieties. The influence caused by the century-long language contact between Sami, Finnish, and Norwegian has not led to great changes in the vocabulary, but, regionally, dialects have changed due to this contact. The part of Norwegian vocabulary that has been retained from Old Norse is to some degree recognizable to modern speakers, but Old Norse as such is not comprehensible to a modern Norwegian reader. Typical grammatical features of Norwegian are 1. A relatively homogenous vowel inventory of nine vowels, and a heterogenous consonant system in which the dialects differ between 17 and more than 25 different phonemes. 2. Two distinctive tonemes in most dialects. 3. Suffixed definite article. 4. V2 word order

Article

Okinawan Language  

Shinsho Miyara

Within the Ryukyuan branch of the Japonic family of languages, present-day Okinawan retains numerous regional variants which have evolved for over a thousand years in the Ryukyuan Archipelago. Okinawan is one of the six Ryukyuan languages that UNESCO identified as endangered. One of the theoretically fascinating features is that there is substantial evidence for establishing a high central phonemic vowel in Okinawan although there is currently no overt surface [ï]. Moreover, the word-initial glottal stop [ʔ] in Okinawan is more salient than that in Japanese when followed by vowels, enabling recognition that all Okinawan words are consonant-initial. Except for a few particles, all Okinawan words are composed of two or more morae. Suffixation or vowel lengthening (on nouns, verbs, and adjectives) provides the means for signifying persons as well as things related to human consumption or production. Every finite verb in Okinawan terminates with a mood element. Okinawan exhibits a complex interplay of mood or negative elements and focusing particles. Evidentiality is also realized as an obligatory verbal suffix.

Article

Peculiarities of Portuguese Word-Formation  

Graça Rio-Torto

Portuguese shares major word-formation mechanisms—affixation, composition, conversion, blending, clipping—with Romance languages, but also displays some peculiarities related to different Latin, Celtiberian, Germanic, and Mozarabic lexical heritages and to the internal dynamics of the language from the 12th to the 21st century. Portuguese has preserved the core of the medieval word-formation framework, but new patterns were of course introduced from time to time, especially during the 20th century. Portuguese word-formation peculiarities are partly conservative, partly innovative; some comply with international trends of word-formation, others depart from them. The proliferation of Neo-Latin compounding and the increase of blending, as well as the introduction of phenomena such as clipping, reanalysis, and grammaticalization illustrate the convergence of modern Portuguese with international word-formation tendencies. In Portuguese, as in other languages, learned suffixes tend to be less productive than the corresponding nonlearned ones coexisting with them. However, in specific cases such as gentilic adjectives/nouns, a learned suffix like -ense could also win over its nonlearned rival (in this case, Pt. -ês/-esa), while in Italian the nonlearned suffix -ese prevails. Apart from peculiar phonological outcomes of some Latin suffixes and the greater weight of interfixation due to phonological and prosodic conditions, the major distinctive traits of Portuguese word-formation include: (a) the unique distribution of the major evaluative suffixes, grounded in subjective/attitudinal values; (b) the subjective meanings associated with several suffixes that are not found in the corresponding suffixes of other Romance languages; (c) the specific set of suffixal resources for forming agentive and instrumental deverbal nouns; and (d) the expansion of the categorial bases selected by some suffixes.

Article

Personal Nouns (Agent Nouns) in the Romance Languages  

Riccardo Regis

An agent noun is a derived noun whose general meaning is ‘person who does . . .’. It is thus characterized by the feature [+ Human], regardless of whether the person involved actually performs an action (e.g., French nageur ‘swimmer’, i.e., ‘a person who swims’), carries out a profession (e.g., Spanish cabrero ‘goatherd’, i.e., ‘a person who looks after goats’), adheres to a certain ideology or group (e.g., Italian femminista ‘feminist’, i.e., ‘a person who supports or follows the feminist movement’), and so on. Agent nouns are for the most part denominal (as with cabrero and femminista above) and deverbal (as with nageur above). Latin denominal agent nouns were mainly formed with -arius, though the Latin agentive suffix par excellence was -tor, which derived nouns from verbs. Latin denominal agents were also formed with -ista, a borrowing from Greek -ιστήϛ. The reflexes of all three suffixes are widespread and highly productive in the Romance languages, as in the case of Portuguese/Spanish/Catalan/Occitan pescador ‘fisherman’ (-dor < -torem), French boucher ‘butcher’ (-er < -arium), and Romanian flautist (-ist < -ista). At any rate, the distinction between denominal and deverbal agent nouns is not always straightforward, as demonstrated by the Romance forms connected with the Latin present particle -nte, for whereas the majority display a verbal base (e.g., Italian cantante ‘singer’ ← cantare ‘to sing’), there are some which do not (e.g., Italian bracciante ‘hired hand’ ← braccio ‘arm’), thus allowing them to be regarded as denominal derivations. A minor group of agent nouns is made up of deadjectival derivations, often conveying a pejorative meaning; such is the case with Italian elegantone ‘person of overblown elegance’ (← elegante ‘elegant’) and French richard ‘very rich person’ (← riche ‘rich’).