The paper proposes that word-level causatives can be classified into two types, simplex causatives and complex causatives. Simplex causatives can be further classified into labile simplex causatives and non-labile simplex causatives, and complex causatives can be further classified into derivational, compounding, and inflectional complex causatives. It shows that it is possible for simplex causatives and some form of complex causatives to co-exist in a language. Moreover, the paper demonstrates that the existence of productive compounding/inflectional causatives tends to lead to the absence of a reasonable number of labile simplex causatives and that there is a functional basis for this. Finally, the paper shows that Chinese manifests a typological shift from the use of non-compounding word-level causatives to the use of productive compounding complex causatives.

Reviewed by (Adam Glaz)After more than a decade since publication, the monograph continues to be an erudite in-depth inquiry into the nature of analogy. The author’s intention is to show that analo...

Practically everyone, it would seem true to say, has an intuitive idea of what politeness is. And this includes the expert as well as the ordinary person in the street. Furthermore, every society o...

Judeo-Italian, a typical Jewish language, is a group of closely related dialects consisting of a basically Italian vocabulary and grammar but including a component of words of Hebrew or Aramaic origin and occasionally words borrowed from other languages, e.g orsai ‘anniversary of a death’ from Yiddish and negro ‘wretched’ from Ladino. The language was traditionally written in the Hebrew alphabet but today is written in Latin letters.Xiao’erjing is a group of closely related dialects spoken by Chinese Muslims living in Mandarin-speaking parts of China. Its vocabulary is largely Chinese, but it includes words borrowed from Arabic. It was written in the Arabic alphabet but today is almost always written in Chinese characters. The borrowings from Hebrew and Arabic frequently are for terms connected with religion, such as cascer in Judeo-Italian and kosher in Yiddish are analogous to halal in Xiao’erjing for food that is ritually permitted. However, the borrowings are not restricted to religion but may fall into any semantic category.Most Jewish languages and Xiao’erjing were widely used a century ago, and both are disappearing today, reflecting political and social changes in Europe, the Americas, and China.

The author of this long-awaited book has published many other important books and articles on Amazonian languages. This monograph synthesizes her findings regarding how several of these languages h...

This paper deals with three copular constructions in French that take bare nominals as a predicative complement (attribut du sujet). From a lexical point of view, these constructions, which are typical of colloquial French, are very open frames. After a detailed analysis of the syntactic and semantic properties of these constructions, I will examine them in the light of a more theoretical question, viz. that of the categorial status of the bare nouns involved. More precisely, I will determine to which extent they are ‘recategorized’ into adjectives.On the basis of a fine-grained syntactic and semantic analysis, I provide a nuanced—gradual—account of adjectivization. First, I discard what I call the ‘lexicalized’ cases of recategorization, i.e. the fully adjectivized ones (vache, chatte,…), in order to focus on ‘syntactic recategorization’, i.e. the occasional adjectival use of (bare) nouns in the constructions under investigation. Then, I show that the first of the three constructions involves a primarily syntactic (i.e. non permanent), contextual recategorization of the bare noun. By contrast, the second adjectival use, which is characterized by a superficial adjectivization, involves the copula as well and should be considered as a copular construction sui generis. Finally, the third use is somewhere in between the two other syntactically as well as semantically.By way of conclusion, I suggest that the best way to account for the recategorization of bare nouns into ‘adjectival’ nodes might still be Tesnière's (1959) concept of translatif. A parallel will be drawn with the role of determiners in nominalizations.

There is an intriguing complementary distribution of phonological harmony in child and adult language. Whereas vowel harmony is frequently, and consonant harmony rarely, found in fully-developed phonologies, the opposite is true of developing phonologies. This contrast materializes in the face of a long list of similarities suggesting that harmony in child and adult language is essentially the same process. The following three factors are shown to have a bearing on phonological harmony—ease of articulation, ease of programming and distinctiveness. Ease of programming is claimed to facilitate harmony in general, ease of articulation to favour consonant harmony and distinctiveness to favour vowel harmony. Because the production of consonants requires more highly developed motor skills than that of vowels, children tend to resort to consonant harmony. Because ease of articulation plays a limited role in adult language, the bias introduced by distinctiveness unfolds itself in unrestrained fashion and occasions vowel harmony in adult phonologies.