This contribution explores the concept of selection as an integral part of Haugen's standardisation model from a theoretical as well as an empirical angle. It focuses on different types of factors of selection and how they are relevant to the study of selection processes both on the level of individual variants and whole varieties. The question of…

This dissertation examines complementizer agreement (CA) phenomena in which phi-features appear on a complementizer, clause-linking marker, or otherwise, syntactically speaking, at the C[superscript 0] position. This dissertation will argue that CA is in fact a straightforward output of the syntax module under standard Minimalist assumptions, and…

This corpus-based diachronic study aims to investigate the change in the use of English relative clauses over a 45-year time span. It does not only focus on change over time but also change between two varieties of English (British and American). The data were taken from the Brown family of corpora. Each corpus in the Brown family corpora consists…

Across the centuries, the question of the origin of language has captivated the human imagination. Many theories have been proposed to address fundamental questions such as: Where do languages come from? How do they evolve? What are the societal drivers of this change? Historically, one of the biggest challenges in addressing these questions has…

Depending on the demands of a particular communicative situation, bilingual or multilingual speakers ("bilingualism-multilingualism") will switch between language varieties. Code-switching is the practice of moving between variations of languages in different contexts. In an educational context, code-switching is defined as the practice…

Vantage Theory (VT) and Cognitive Grammar (CG) both rely crucially on the cognitive phenomenon of categorization as well as on the semantic/pragmatic notion of participant point of view in making claims about human linguistic production and perception. In this paper these commonalities of commitment are explored, as are the differences in the ways…

Holmberg's Generalization (Holmberg 1986) was originally stated to describe the "object shift" phenomena found in the modern Scandinavian languages. This dissertation argues that object shift is merely a subcase of scrambling, a type of adjunction, and that Holmberg's Generalization is a subcase of a universal constraint, the "Generalized Holmberg…

This paper examines the concept of polysemy which serves as the basis of the "principled polysemy model" of spatial prepositions proposed by A. Tyler and V. Evans in a number of recent publications [Tyler, Andrea, Evans, Vyvyan, 2001. Reconsidering prepositional polysemy networks: The case of "over". Language 77, 724-765;…

Discusses Anderson's (1971) theory of semantic naturalness, and investigates ways in which exceptions to the derived theory of lexical naturalness may be accomodated within it. (AM)

A number of syntactic constructions in Mandarin Chinese are analyzed which, synchronically, are unrelated and highly irregular. However, all reflect a diachronic drift which has been operating in Mandarin Chinese, in the light of which the syntactic constructions can be viewed as structures in transition. (Author/RM)

A discussion of the sources of certain language universals argues that adjective/noun constructions pattern similarly to genitive/noun and relative-noun constructions because they are typical diachronic sources for adjectivals, and that relatives and genitives have the same diachronic source and thus the same set of synchronic behavior. It is also…

This article argues for a set of ordered rules for morphophonemic alternations in the N-class in Swahili, positing /n/ as the class prefix and an abstract segment as stem initial in certain words. The rules are: (1) liquids and the labial glide become corresponding voiced stops; (2) the nasal prefix assimilates in coronality and backness, and…

This paper discusses the term "ergative" and traces the history of this and related terms and concepts in descriptive linguistics. Early attempts at defining the ergative illustrate the preoccupation with its supposedly passive nature. Other questions include the simple identification of the ergative, co-occurring cases, supposed…

Conversion, the deliberate transfer of a word from one part of speech to another without any change in its form, is a typically English phenomenon, conditioned but not caused by the extensive wearing-off of word endings and weakening of inflections. It has typically been treated as a syntactic matter, since no new words are produced, and its…