Anticausatives in Classical Armenian

Reviewed by: Tense and aspect in Indo-European languages: Theory, typology, diachrony by John Hewson, Vit Bubenik Benji Wald Tense and aspect in Indo-European languages: Theory, typology, diachrony. By John Hewson and Vit Bubenik. (Current issues in linguistic theory 145.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1997. Pp. xii, 403. This is an important study, both for the conceptual framework it proposes for the analysis of tense and aspect and for the wealth of data it discusses. As stated by the authors in a preface, the volume is the outgrowth of a PhD seminar. This accounts for the comprehensiveness of the survey undertaken of the various Indo-European languages and also for the somewhat speculative quality of some of the analyses. By this I mean that it is an excellently integrated and coordinated effort involving many scholars rather than the product of extensive refinement and readjustment of analyses by a few scholars over a long period of research. The clarity of the general exposition far outweighs the residual unclarities in some specific analyses. Ch. 1 establishes the tense-aspect descriptive framework, called ‘chronogenesis’, positing basic cognitive notions of time relations and event perspectives and how they map onto various morphological systems. Some innovative terminology is used, based on the tense/aspect theory of the early twentieth century French linguist Gustave Guillaume (applied to Classical Greek and Latin), but some of the unclarities and incoherencies of that theory are eliminated. While the framework is tailored for IE languages, its explicit cognitive underpinnings and the method of mapping, as proposed by the authors, imply that the framework is not limited to any particular language family. Therefore, the interest of the work goes beyond IE to TA systems in general. Nevertheless, since the theory is systematically applied exclusively to IE in the book, it is within the analysis of the variety of systems in IE that its more general applicability can be appreciated here. In this vein, the framework is successful in allowing revealing comparisons across IE languages and avoiding confusions of traditional terminology applied to those languages, e.g. preterit, aorist, imperfect, etc.—used differently for different languages. With regard to utility for cross-linguistic typological comparisons, the ensuing Chs. 2–12 are organized into larger sections; (A) ‘Languages with the original three-aspect system’ (Ch. 2, Ancient Greek; Ch. 3, Vedic and Classical Sanskrit); (B) ‘Languages with the original present-aorist system and innovative perfect’ (Ch. 4, Classical Armenian; Ch. 5, Old Church Slavic; Ch. 6, Albanian; Ch. 7, Tocharian); (C) ‘Languages with a three-tense system’ (Ch. 8, Baltic; Ch. 9, Celtic; Ch. 10, Latin); (D) ‘Languages which merged the original aorist and perfect into preterit’ (Ch. 11, Germanic: Gothic, Old English; Ch. 12, Anatolian: Hittite). Note that the traditional terms featured in the section headings are used interchangeably with innovative terminology in the text, e.g. ‘aorist’ = ‘perfective past’, probably as a convenient habit in addressing IEists. The above section headings also presuppose a reconstruction of the Proto-IE tense-aspect system, e.g. with three aspects. The book does not explicitly reconstruct the entire system but suggests basic parts of it on the basis of the trajectories of the attested historical systems. Sometimes I got the impression that the authors are figuring out the PIE system as they write, e.g. hesitation in whether certain aspects of the Hittite system are innovative or conservative (243ff). This is understandable given the huge amount of data involved in PIE TA reconstruction, and it is even helpful to understanding to see the process of reconstruction carried out rather than having a presentation of the results of that process with less attention paid to the problems encountered along the way. Incomplete programmatic observations include such matters as incipient ergativity in Tokharian, and the differences between aorist vs. perfect usage in the original (New Testament) Greek sources and Old Armenian translations (cf. the title of Section B given above). Section E, ‘Later developments’, contains Ch. 13, ‘From Ancient to Modern Greek’; Ch. 14, ‘Development of the modern Indic tense-aspect system’; Ch. 15, ‘Development of the Modern Slavic tense-aspect system’; Ch. 16, ‘Development of the Modern Iranian tense-aspect system’; Ch. 17, ‘From...

The Franciscan presence in China is one of the first expressions of the Chinese encounter with Christianity. Despite the significant number of preserved documents and archives, research on the Franciscans in China is still limited. Furthermore, previous studies have predominantly focused on the texts and activities of foreign missionaries, often neglecting the role of their Chinese collaborators and converts. The purpose of this paper is to examine the interactions between Franciscans and Chinese people from a diachronic perspective, starting from the first phases of the Franciscan presence in China during the Yuan dynasty and tracing its development through the centuries up to the 20th century. Analyzing the transformation of these interactions, this paper will outline the long and gradual evolution of Franciscan foreign missions into expressions of a local church, detecting unexplored issues such as the establishment of institutes for the local clergy or the shift in the assignment of significant tasks in the Order to Chinese members. The preliminary findings of this research underscore the necessity for further studies to fully address these complex dynamics.

This article shows how the unearthing of new historical data on a language can contribute to diachronic studies and language reconstruction. †Old Zamuco is an extinct Zamucoan language, for which the only extant dictionary was recently rediscovered. This dictionary is the main source on the language and is very rich in morphological information. In particular, it contains many new verb paradigms with previously undescribed or only conjectured characteristics. These features were analyzed in order to compare them with the present‐day Zamucoan languages, Ayoreo and Chamacoco. This gave us the opportunity to formulate hypotheses on the historical development of Zamucoan verb morphology and to improve the already available reconstruction of Proto‐Zamucoan verb inflection.

This study investigates the reclassification of English locative verbs with the following question: What factors caused the change? Firstly, the patten of the class change is observed in terms of both synchronic and diachronic perspectives, and then possible factors that cause the change are investigated sequentially by examining whether the factors may be operable. In addition, this study observed what factor can work at the base and what factor can be applied extensively. Reclassified verbs have changed their class from Ground-only to alternating verb class, and there is a preference to use most alternating locative verbs in Figure precedent constructions. This study reveals that there are two processes or two levels of processing that affect the syntactic change involved in the use of locative verbs, but they are independent. In one case, semantic change directly affects the structure of locative verbs. In the second case, the cognitive process directly causes the class change. However, this change is not affected by semantic change. Figure Precedence Principle can be an important factor in explaining the change in the use of locative verbs by reflecting on the cognitive process of human brain.

The paper discusses the different evolution of the English preposition (P) to and the Romanian P la “at/to” which can be observed in the history of English and Romanian ditransitives. In Modern English (ModE), the preposition to can occur in configurations with (i) ditransitive predicates and (b) unaccusative predicates. Within ditransitives, the English to only functions in the prepositional frame and it has a narrow distribution; the to-dative is a genuine Goal or a Recipient with certain verb classes. The first focus of this paper is to investigate the presence of the to-dative in Old English (OldE). The investigation will reveal that the to-dative construction was neither rare nor restricted, but already present in OldE. By way of contrast, Romanian la has a richer distribution (Possessor Goal, Beneficiary, Maleficiary and Source) and it has shifted from a case marker to a [Person] marker and it has moved in the direction of inflectional dative. The second focus of the paper is to investigate the presence of la in OldR. I will show that Romanian la evolved from the Latin P ad; diachronically, Romanian has kept the analytical marking of the Dative which is realized through the P la “at/to”.

BOOK NOTICES 713 runes, printing, Caxton suggest that written English was as important in the first millennium of the language as it has become in the last three or four centuries. B offers some discussion of pronunciation and grammar, but gives more attention to vocabulary and spelling. It is not clear what he intends by 'disjunctive' in the heading ofCh. 4. The OED gives no help; the definitions there (and in B's supplement) are largely restricted to the uses ofthe term in logic and grammar . In fact, ofthe halfdozen or so dictionaries that come to hand, only one gives a meaning that seems to fit: Webster's 9th Collegiate gives 'marked by breaks or disunity'. At least a part of Ch. 4 describes the 'breaks and disunity' caused by the spread ofEnglish to America, and the latter portion discusses the conflict between descriptive and prescriptive attitudes toward the language during the last century. As a good lexicographer should, B comes down on the descriptive and permissive side: "There is little doubt that most of the new features that are intensely disliked by linguistic conservatives will triumph in the end. But the language will not bleed to death' (57). Ch. 5, 'Literature, ritualistic works, and language ', sketches the history ofpoetic and prose style from Beowulf'to Hopkins and Joyce, and traces Biblical translation from Wyclif to the New English Bible. As might be expected, B has little use for the modernizers; in fact, he finds their efforts producing a 'loss for society as a whole—not so much ofparticular words as of the way they are put together—[which] is grievous beyond all knowing' (76). In Chs. 6 ("The recording of English in dictionaries and grammars'), 7 ('Vocabulary'), and 8 ('Pronunciation and spelling'), B is in his element as a lexicographer. His review of dictionaries and grammars is a useful historical record, from the beginnings to his own OED supplement and the 1971 grammar of R. Quirk et al. (now replaced by their 1985 Comprehensive grammar ). The chapter ends with a few paragraphs on 'what has come to be called transformational/ generative grammar' (103). B seems to have ended his study of this with Chomsky's Syntactic structures (1957), and he is quite skeptical about its value. This skepticism is further evinced in Ch. 9 on "The syntactical arrangement of words', which concludes: 'Much ground has been lost and many fine minds blunted on the complications of transformational generative grammar' (155). The final chapter, 'Dispersed forms of English ', presents a brief history of the spread of English from the 16th century to the present, first as colonial varieties and then as distinctive national languages having a back-influence on the language of the homeland; it closes with a short section on 'English as a lingua franca'. B concludes: 'English, when first recorded in the eighth century, was already a fissiparous language . It will continue to divide and subdivide, and to exhibit a thousand different faces in the centuries ahead.' But it is his pious hope that it will remain 'a communicative force ... for many centuries to come' (173). [W. Nelson Francis, Brown University.] English etymology. By Alfred Bammesberger . Heidelberg: Winter, 1984. Pp. 163. B begins his little book by apologizing for its being an 'appetizer' for 'beginners'. But the book requires no apologies: it is clear, concise, and well organized. Its title, however, is slightly misleading, in that the book as a whole deals less with the history of individual words than with the English language over a 5,000-year period . The individual chapters deal sequentially with the following topics: (1) linguistics, (2) cognate languages, (3) Indo-European to Germanic, (4) Germanic to Old English, (5) Old English to Modern English, (6) word formation, (7) semantics , (8) loan words, (9) etymological dictionaries , and (10) a history of30 English words. There are three bones that I would pick with B: first, his definition of language as a system of 'arbitrary vocal symbols' (I believe that language is sometimes iconic and sometimes visual ); second, his characterization oflanguage as a uniquely human ability (I believe that apes exhibit linguistic capacity comparable to that of human children); and third, his assertion that every...

This volume presents a detailed survey of the systems of verb-verb complexes in Asian languages from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. Many Asian languages share, to a greater or lesser extent, a unique class of compound verbs each consisting of a main verb and a quasi-auxiliary verb known as a ‘vector’ or ‘explicator’. These quasi-auxiliary verbs exhibit unique grammatical behavior that suggests that they have an intermediate status between full lexical verbs and wholly reduced auxiliaries. They are also semantically unique, in that when they are combined with main verbs, they can convey a rich variety of functional meanings beyond the traditional notions of tense, aspect, and modality, such as manner and intensity of action, benefaction for speaker or hearer, and polite or derogatory styles in speech. In this book, leading specialists in a range of Asian languages offer an in-depth analysis of the longstanding questions relating to the diachrony and geographical distribution of verb-verb complexes. The findings have implications for the general understanding of the grammaticalization of verb categories, complex predicate formation, aktionsart and event semantics, the morphology-syntax-semantics interface, areal linguistics, and typology.

From a diachronic perspective, Germanic languages are in the process of deflection. In this context, there appears to be a rather chaotic amount of variation within the verbal inflectional paradigms of Dutch dialects. Based on the paradigms of the verb leven (“to live”) in 253 Dutch dialects, we provide a description and a paradigmatic analysis of the variation that we found in verbal inflection in geographically determined, synchronic varieties of Dutch. It turns out that the observed variation is remarkably consistent: there are nine different paradigms, eight of which show a geographically delimited distribution. We discuss the observed geographical variation in the context of Germanic deflection. We argue that variation and deflection are determined by paradigmatic simplification of the feature system involved. We demonstrate that the following economy strategies are relevant: (A) the reduction of the number of distinctive features for a particular affix in an inflectional paradigm: each affix within the Dutch verbal inflectional system is characterized by one phi-feature only; (B) the introduction of a default category [+finite]; (C) the reduction of the number of feature categories in an inflectional paradigm: Dutch inflectional paradigms allow the presence of only one inflectional category ([number], [person], [gender]). These strategies largely determine the realm of variation, within which regional varieties occupy different positions. By doing so, we provide a perspective on paradigmatic change, triggered by properties of the language system.

Summary The present paper studies grammaticalisation of verbs in Coptic. Various (classes of) expressions found in this language can be shown to occupy different sections or ‘points’ on the continuum/cline of evolution of verbs posited in linguistics that extends from lexical items to auxiliaries, affixes, parts of other lexemes, and finally zero (nothing). The mechanisms that ‘push’ verbs along this continuum turn out to be those seen also in other languages, and the same holds for the semantic and morpho-syntactic signals thereof. Besides being of typological interest, this again emphasises the importance and necessity of studying Coptic from a more diachronic perspective.

Word classes (‘parts-of-speech’, ‘syntactic categories’, ‘lexical categories’) are the fundamental building blocks of linguistic expressions in all natural human languages. They have been investigated since antiquity and continue to play a central role in modern linguistics. Today an increasingly important role is assigned to the information that is specified in the lexical entry of a word in the lexicon (including, of course, information about its category membership), both in formal and in functional approaches to grammar. Furthermore, there is a growing awareness that the traditional set of word classes is biased towards the better studied European languages and needs to be revised to accommodate unfamiliar word classes in nonEuropean languages.

Abstract: The present study examines the relationship between the so-called Spanish flu, the American suffragettes’ struggles, and the changes in public communication driven by women’s activism. While the First World War plays a significant role in these transformations, the importance of the 1918 influenza pandemic cannot be overlooked. The focus of the study is on the interplay between public crises, gender stereotypes (the stereotypes about the characteristic and roles that society believes women and men must own and perform) and their disruption, and the alterations in public communication. An interdisciplinary approach is used due to the specificity of the research subject. The methodology includes historical analysis in a diachronic perspective, communication analysis, and content analysis of media publications and speeches by presidents, senators and activists in the USA. The combination of these methods helps to better understand the importance and impact of the Spanish flu on American society, the changes in stereotypical attitudes to women, the new phenomena and approaches in public communication and the struggle for suffragette rights. The results of the analysis contribute to a better understanding of how crises affect society, how communication practices change, and what the dynamics of gender legitimization are in a societal respect. The study contributes to expanding knowledge about American women's movement and about the changes to which the efforts of the suffragettes led in socio-cultural and communicative terms. Keywords: public communication, communication practices, voting rights, American women's, movement, suffragettes, crisis.

One of characteristic phenomena in contemporary Polish literary culture is the emergence of a niche phenomenon of mountain literature. The term “mountain literature” has become part of colloquial discourse, also aspiring to be present in the language of literature studies (including literary criticism), which previously featured terms like “Alpine literature”, “mountaineering literature”, “Tatra literature”, “Tatra prose”. Other commonly used terms were “mountain climbing literature” and “exploration literature”. The term “Alpine literature” was introduced into scholarly discourse by Claire-Éliane Engel (1903–1976). The author of the present study points to links between the history of mountain literature, and the history of mountain exploration as well as history of tourism and mountaineering, referring to the literary traditions of various mountain ranges: the Alps, the Tatras, Karkonosze (Giant Mountains), Bieszczady, Gorce, Beskids, Góry Świętokrzyskie (Holy Cross Mountains). In addition, there are strands of research dealing with a typological analysis of mountain motifs and their function. The significance of such studies lies in the fact that they demonstrate in a clear manner the introduction of mountain motifs into literature and the evolution of the artistic forms of their expression. However, transformations in the literary approach to the mountains cannot be documented only by means of a territorial selection of specific motifs, and the whole question of depicting mountains and responding to them cannot be locked within the limited framework of the various national literatures. What is useful in this respect is a comprehensive comparative approach to the subject matter, interpreted both in the synchronic (formation of attitudes) and diachronic perspective (so-called influences, impact of models, borrowing of poetics also in connection with changes in tourist or mountaineering styles). What becomes of crucial significance here is the use of more general categories and comprehensive collective terms — mountain literature, mountaineering literature, mountain climbing literature. These categories encompass works dealing primarily with the mountains and human interactions with them. They bring in a supranational and supraterritorial understanding of the subject of mountains, without limiting the role of territorial detail in the construction of literary motifs and images. In defining mountain literature the author uses the classification of the function of nature motifs in literary works presented by Tadeusz Makowiecki in Sprawozdania Towarzystwa Naukowego w Toruniu in 1951, in his article “Funkcja motywu przyrody w dziele literackim” (Function of a nature motif in a literary work).1 On the other hand, when it comes to the phenomena discussed in the study, what is representative of fiction is a type of narrative genre known as mountain novel (roman de montagne, Bergroman). Referring to archetypic formulas of mountain literature (Dante, Petrarch, Salomon Gessner, Jean A. Deluc, H.B. de Saussure), the author points to their formal aspects: thematic-substantive, linguistic and genological. In addition, he discusses the emergence of mountaineering literature (Edward Whymper, Leslie Stephen, Polish mountaineers’ prose).

In the paper, the array ordering of the TiO2nanotubes obtained by method of the anodic oxidation in different modes in the fluorine-containing aqueous-non-aqueous electrolytes containing glycerin as well as the surface-active reagents is considered. It was shown that such characteristics as the two-dimensional Fourier-spectrum, autocorrelation function and its spectrum allow us to identify the ordering nature and to obtain the preliminary quantitative estimates of SEM order.

In this study several approaches for obtaining more accurate background-error covariances for atmospheric data assimilation are evaluated. Experiments are conducted by replacing the covariances in the operational three-dimensional variational analysis system at the Canadian Meteorological Centre. In the current system, these covariances are computed using the so-called NMC method that is known to suffer from several deficiencies. The approaches evaluated in this study attempt to more realistically sample the probability distribution of background error by simulating (using a Monte Carlo approach) the error generated at each stage of the forecast-analysis process. The ensemble Kalman filter and a simpler approach applied to an existing forecast-analysis system are both used to generate these error samples. In addition, error samples are generated directly from the covariances of the operational system to allow the effects of sampling error to be quantified. Several strategies for estimating the full covariance matrix from a relatively small number of error samples are then employed. Approaches include the use of a spatially localized ensemble representation of the correlations that allows the usual assumptions of homogeneity and isotropy to be relaxed. In addition, the use of a weighted average between such a covariance matrix and a covariance matrix with homogeneous and isotropic correlations is evaluated. Several diagnostic results from the estimated background-error covariances are presented in addition to verification statistics computed from two-week forecast-analysis experiments. Modest forecast improvements are obtained by using the new background-error covariance estimates, mostly in the southern hemisphere. However, additional results suggest that further improvements may be gained by increasing the number of error samples and a preliminary quantitative estimate of the expected gain is computed. © Crown copyright, 2005. Royal Meteorological Society

A new class of dissipative structures is proposed that live in real space rather than phase space. A light ray passing through a soup of randomly moving gravitating masses is a case in point. It suffers a “dynamic path elongation” since the random pushes and pulls have a greater probability of increasing than decreasing its path length. Time reversal then re-shrinks the path in question in a conspirational manner, while a close-by nonselected path gets expanded. This is a new statistical-mechanics phenomenon. The latter at the same time qualitatively reproduces the well-known Hubble phenomenon of distance-proportional light-path expansion in the cosmos. A preliminary quantitative estimate, based on the Birkinshaw equation with an assumed bias factor of three, is also presented.