Eva Schultze-Berndt

The University of Manchester · School of Arts, Languages and Cultures

This article builds on observations from several research areas which hitherto have been pursued relatively independently of one another, to argue that discontinuous nominal expressions are one of the attested strategies for marking a subtype of sentence focus constructions known as thetic constructions. This analysis can be applied to the type of...

This article provides an introduction for the collection of methodologically oriented papers comprising this Special Issue. We define the concept of epistemicity as used in descriptive linguistics and discuss notions related to it-some well-established, some more recent-such as evidentiality, egophoricity, epistemic authority and engagement. We giv...

Ngarinyman is an Aboriginal language of the northern Victoria River District in the Northern Territory (Australia). Many Ngarinyman people live in Yarralin, Bulla Camp, Amanbidji (Kildurk) and around Timber Creek. The Ngarinyman to English Dictionary contains Ngarinyman words with English translations, illustrations and detailed encyclopaedic infor...

This chapter reviews competing analyses of depictive secondary predicate constructions such as the cat ate the mouse alive in the light of cross‐linguistic data. Existing proposals for a syntactic relationship have in common that they aim to capture the semantic relationship between the depictive constituent ( alive ) and one of the arguments of th...

This paper contributes to the typology of complex perspective markers by presenting an in-depth analysis of a system of epistemic authority marking which functionally overlaps with, but has no exact parallels in, similar systems attested cross-linguistically; it is also the first analysis of grammaticalised marking of epistemic authority in a langu...

As any quick survey of the syntactic literature will show, there are almost as many different views of ergativity as there are so-called ergative languages (languages whose basic clause structure instantiates an ergative case-marking or agreement pattern). While ergativity is sometimes referred to as a typological characteristic of languages, resea...

The aim of this paper is to draw attention to the use of the Kriol particle bambai as an apprehensive, i.e. a main clause modal marker indicating that an event will potentially occur but is undesirable, with associated pragmatics of warning or threat. This has to be considered an extension from the temporal/sequential function of this particle that...

Language Documentation has developed relatively recently as a subfield of linguistics in response to the challenge of documenting endangered languages in a fieldwork setting and the ethical, methodological and practical issues accompanying such a task. This article provides an overview of recommended standards in the field and of the factors likely...

This paper contributes to a more general understanding of the semantic diversity in temporal connectives cross-linguistically by investigating in some detail a clitic found in the Australian language Jaminjung. This clitic, =biyang, variously translates into English as now or then. Now and then in English have complex meanings and each can be said...

This paper is a case study in the exploration of the semantic range of single a high-frequency lexical item on the basis of a corpus of spoken language, in this case Moroccan Arabic. Generalised action verbs (‘do’ verbs) are an interesting object of study because cross-linguistically, they can exhibit a wide range of functions including that of cau...

AmberberMengistu, BakerBrett & HarveyMark (eds.), Complex predicates: Cross-linguistic perspectives on event structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. viii+322. - Volume 48 Issue 1 - Eva Schultze-Berndt

Discontinuous noun phrases have posed a long-standing challenge for syntactic analysis. While there exists increasing evidence that discontinuous NPs are associated with specific information structure constellations crosslinguistically, Australian languages continue to be presented in the literature as radically non-configurational, with unlimited...

This paper proposes an analysis of an aspectual construction in Jaminjung, a non-Pama-Nyungan Australian language of the Mirndi family. At first sight, this looks like construction conveying grammatical aspect, specifically progressive, since it bears both formal and functional resemblances to typical progressive constructions. At closer investigat...

Depictive secondary predicates such as 'raw' in 'George ate the fish raw' are important for current issues in syntactic and semantic theory, in particular predication theory, phrase structure theories, issues of control and grammatical relations, and verbal aspect. This book approaches depictive secondary predication from a cross-linguistic point o...

Against the background of the ongoing discussion of the general applicability of Talmy’s typology of motion events, this paper discusses the lexicalisation patterns and discourse uses of motion expressions in Jaminjung, neither of which neatly fit into the ‘verb-framed’, ‘satellite-framed’ or even ‘equipollently-framed’ categories.

In this paper we will investigate the meaning and use of positional verbs in colloquial Standard German. Positional verbs are defined as those verbs which may appear in the basic construction that functions as an answer to a "where"-question, the so-called Basic Locative Construction (BLC). Within this class of verbs, we focus on those positionals...

Introduction: The aim of this paper is to describe the systems of spatial orientation and the linguistic resources that are employed in descriptions of spatial relations and motion events in Jaminjung, an Australian language. The most notable features of Jaminjung in this domain are, first, the existence of two distinct predicative word classes, ve...

This chapter begins with a critical survey of past classifications of adverbials and secondary predicates. It argues that significant overlaps exist between participant-oriented manner adverbials, depictive secondary predicates, and the so-called weak free adjuncts. Thus, from a cross-linguistic viewpoint, it is essential to use an overarching cate...

Little is known about depictive secondary predicates such as raw in She ate the fish raw in languages other than a few European ones. The goal of this paper is to broaden the database for this grammatical construction by reviewing its recurring formal properties, introducing a crosslinguistically applicable def-inition and delimiting it from other,...

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Preverbs constituting a distinct part of speech are found in languages of different genetic affiliation throughout Northern Australia. In a large part of the linguistic area defined by the presence of preverbs, they are used to form complex predicates which at first sight bear striking similarities to the separable complex verbs of Germanic languag...

In many Australian languages, particles or clitics which may be glossed as 'still' or 'only' are particularly frequent on secondary predicates and certain adverbials. This paper presents a detailed account of the multifunctional clitic = (C)ung in Jaminjung, and compares this with functionally similar clitics in a number of other Australian languag...

This paper addresses some rarely-discussed theoretical and methodological issues in the application of a monostratal, construction-based linguistic model to language description. Constructions, in this approach, are defined as complex, schematic signs which are non-compositional, i.e. which have to be learned in a way which is similar to lexical it...