Despite longstanding arguments concerning the grammatical categories, functions, and status of the Korean and Japanese copulas within each language system, hardly any attention has been given to their comparative study. Researchers have asked about the function and status of the variant forms of the Japanese copula, and whether they should be…

Like many other languages, Hualapai employs the reflexive suffix for several different grammatical purposes. Unlike those languages, however, constructions with a reflexive marker in Hualapai are usually not ambiguous with respect to the expected meanings. This paper identifies four functions that the reflexive suffix may have: reflexive,…

Outlines the history of the terms "derivation,""affix," and "prefix," and of the corresponding grammatical notions, from their origins in the ancient Latin and Hebrew grammars to present day usage. Discusses concepts developed by classic and medieval philosophers on grammatical terminology and theory. (MES)

A study of reciprocals in Japanese compares two kinds: (1) a verbal suffix "aw"; and (2) an NP argument "otagai." Although "otagai" appears to be taken care of by syntactic binding theory, it is proposed that there is no evidence for the existence of a syntactic position of the object NP in the case of "aw." The suffix can be characterized as…

A cross-modal priming experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that lexical access of verbs marked with a specific inflectional suffix would be facilitated by immediately prior exposure to semantically and contextually unrelated verbs with the same suffix. It was hypothesized that while listening to spoken "-ed" sentences,…

This volume of work papers from the Summer Institute of Linguistics includes the following: "Goals and Indirect Objects in Seri" (Stephen A. Marlett); "Seri Kinship Terminology" (Mary B. Moser and Stephen A. Marlett); "Quiegolani Zapotec Phonology" (Sue Regnier); "Role and Reference Grammar" (Robert D. Van…

This paper sketches an explicitly non-lexicalist application of grammatical theory to Huallaga (Huanuco) Quechua (HgQ). The advantages of applying binding theory to many suffixes that have previously been treated only as objects of the morphology are demonstrated. After an introduction, section 2 outlines basic assumptions about the nature of HgQ…

Presents an heuristic procedure, based on cooccurrence of forms, for identifying the closed systems of a language and to show how the systems interlock, differ in meaning, and manifest themselves. (AM)

In the frameword of generalized phrase-structure grammar, possessive clitics (POSS), bound words (BWs), and phrasal affixes (PAs) are analyzed. It is argued that English POSS should be treated as an edge-located inflectional affix, since POSS is suppressed in the presence of other Z affixes (plural, other possessives). (Author/LMO)

Presents hypotheses about the effects of rules of sound change on the development of part of the verb inflectional system of Proto-Nahuatl. (AM)

A careful examination of the location of variation in the grammar is advocated as opposed to attempts to cover linguistic generalizations with a single rule. Such an examination may lead to non-deterministic solutions, since there may be two distinct possible derivations for a single surface structure. For instance, in Portuguese, the variation…

Papers from the conference on the occurrence of verbal constituents in series in certain languages, particularly pidgins and creoles, include the following: "What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Serial Verbs?" (Arnold M. Zwicky); "Serial Verb Constructions" (Pieter Seuren); "On the Definition and Distribution of…

Papers from the conference on linguistic anomaly include: "La definition interactive de la deviance en situation exolingue et bilingue" ("The Interactive Definition of Deviation in Exolinguistic and Bilingual Situations") (Bernard Py); "La negociation ratee: pratiques sociales et methodes interactives du traitement de la…