Published papers

This paper explores the semantics and pragmatics of Sidaama (Cushitic; Ethiopia) causative constructions, drawing on acceptability judgments speakers provided for descriptions of video clips depicting causal events, and compares the results with judgment data collected the same way from other languages. The study focuses on the following response types: compact causatives, the non-sentential causer-adjunct construction (‘Because of causer, resulting sub-event occurs’), the non-sentential cause-adjunct construction (‘Because of causing sub-event, resulting sub-event occurs’), the ‘by doing’ construction, the periphrastic causative construction with event nominalization (‘Resulting sub-event is caused by causing sub-event’), and the adverbial-clause construction. The rating data underwent cluster analysis, conditional inference tree analysis, random forest analysis, and multi-dimensional scaling. The Sidaama data exhibited patterns differing from those in the other languages: relatively low ratings for compact causatives, the absence of any Sidaama response type from one of the four crosslinguistically recurrent clusters, causer type as an important variable influencing directness of causation for most constructions, and large inter-speaker variation. The study suggests that some of these may reflect the participants’ preference for detailed descriptions specifying the causing sub-event. These patterns are also compared with those from a related production study, and possible reasons for the differences are examined.

This paper examines the semantics and pragmatics of Japanese causatives based on Japanese speakers’ acceptability ratings of descriptions of video clips depicting causal events. It investigates whether speakers’ ratings of the following Japanese causative response types pattern like comparable constructions in other languages: (i) compact causatives (specifically, the underived transitive verb construction and the non-productive morphological causative construction), (ii) productive morphological causatives marked by -(s)ase, and (iii) the adverbial clause construction with node ‘because’. It also explores how different factors contributing to the directness of causation are iconically reflected in speakers’ preferences for these response types. To address these questions, cluster analysis, random forest and conditional inference tree analyses, and multidimensional scaling analysis were conducted. The major findings are as follows. First, the cluster analysis, conducted without reference to morphosyntactic information, shows that the three response types fall into three of the four clusters attested crosslinguistically. Notably, (i) and (ii), which Shibatani (1973) argued to be semantically and structurally different, exhibit different rating patterns. Second, speakers’ preferences for the three response types generally support the Iconicity Principle (the more direct, the more compact), although the dominant factors differ across them, with mediation strongest for (i) and causee/affectee type for (ii).

This study examines how the constructional choices Japanese and Korean speakers make in describing causal events iconically reflect the directness of causation in the event. We use experimental production data to explore multiple possible factors that could contribute to the perceived directness of causation for a given event. In both the Japanese and Korean data, we find multiple factors of directness of causation reflected iconically through the use of constructions with varying degrees of morphosyntactic compactness, in harmony with the Iconicity Principle (Haiman 1983, 1985). The Japanese and the Korean data exhibit many properties in common, despite their different inventories of constructions.

This paper examines the use of ideophones in motion event descriptions in Kupsapiiny (Southern Nilotic; Uganda; anti-verb-framed with path-affix satellites) and Sidaama (Highland East Cushitic; Ethiopia; verb-framed). Both languages lack verbs for expressive manners of motion, but Kupsapiiny has a much richer inventory of expressive ideophones that can be used to describe motion events than Sidaama. This contradicts Schaefer’s (2001) hypotheses that ideophones are largely restricted to verb-framed languages and that they primarily depict expressive manners of motion, which are absent from these languages’ lexical inventories. Although ideophones might seem irrelevant to Talmy’s (2000) motion typology, a closer examination reveals that while both languages lack direct means of expressing detailed manners through verbs, adverbs, or ideophones, Kupsapiiny distinguishes various sounds using ideophones, only some of which are loosely associated with specific motions, whereas Sidaama often conceptualizes unusual manners as postures, with ideophones only occasionally used to describe posture changes.

This study examines how Sidaama (Sidamo), a Cushitic language of Ethiopia, expresses components of different types of events to test Talmy’s (1985, 1991,2000) typological hypotheses concerning event integration. It shows that although this language clearly exhibits the verb-framed language pattern in the event domains of motion, state change, and realization, it does not clearly exhibit this pattern in the domains of temporal contouring and action correlation

This study shows that the notion of modification within a noun phrase in Sidaama(Sidamo), a Cushitic language of Ethiopia, is often somewhat different from this notion as traditionally used in linguistics. In this language, although there are a few cases where modification in its ordinary sense, which is syntactic, is relevant, a grammatical distinction is made in several portions of the grammar in terms of whether or not a noun is Modified (henceforth, Modified and related words such as Unmodified, Modify, Modification, and Modifiers are capitalized for Sidaama grammar) by the possessive pronominal suffix, as well as a syntactic modifier like an adjective, a numeral, an adnominal demonstrative, an adnominal interrogative, a genitive noun phrase, and a relative clause.

This paper is an introduction to the topic of our joint research project “Studies on event integration patterns in African languages” discussed in the collection of papers in the present issue of the journal. According to Talmy’s typology of event integration (1991, 2000), verb-framed languages typically encode the core-schematic, framing event component of an event complex (the association function) (e.g., path in the case of motion) in the main verb, and express a co-event component (e.g., manner or cause in the case of motion) in an adverbial or a subordinate/non-main clause. On the other hand, satellite-framed languages characteristically use a satellite to express the association function, and encode the co-event component in the verb root. This contrast applies not only in the event domain of motion, but also in state change, realization, temporal contouring (aspect), and action correlation. However, there seem to be no studies that have ever looked at event integration patterns in all of the five domains across African languages. The goal of the present study is to examine how African languages fit and do not fit into Talmy’s typology by investigating ten languages. It shows that all of these languages have multi-verb/clause constructions whose verbs/clauses express a co-event and the association function in this order (what may be called “temporal sequence constructions”), though the construction types vary, and these constructions can at least be used for macro-events whose co-event is a cause. The languages differ in how they can extend these constructions to events whose co-event is not a cause, for example, motion events whose co-event is a manner. Thus, the typology of event integration can be viewed not only in terms of the categories of grammatical constituents (verbs vs. satellites) used for a co-event and an association function, as Talmy discovered, but also in terms of the order in which these event components are expressed.

In Kupsapiiny, a Southern Nilotic language of Uganda, nearly all common nouns in the singular or the plural have two forms depending on the presence vs. absence of a suffix. This study examines how long and short common noun forms (with and without the suffix, respectively) occur in discourse by means of Dryer’s (2014) Reference Hierarchy. It shows that short forms are only infrequently used for indefinites, with their mandatory use restricted to two types of indefinites, semantically nonspecific indefinites involving negation and true-predicate nominals, whereas long forms serve as frequently used, default forms, which occur not only in definite situations, but also – in fact, more commonly than short forms – in most indefinite situations. The present study hypothesizes that long forms have semantically generalized from forms marking definiteness, i.e., the speaker’s assumption about the identifiability or accessibility of the referent to the hearer (Givón 1995, 2001), to those indicating the speaker’s assumption about the accessibility of the referent (type) to the hearer (or sometimes the speaker themself) with the result that their context extended from definite situations to include most indefinite situations, as reported about the diachronic development of definite articles in other languages (e.g., Greenberg 1978). It speculates that the context extension for long forms was brought about by associations between referents in discourse based on the Gricean maxim of relation as well as subjectification. Other types of factors than the speaker’s assumption about the referent (type) accessibility and indefiniteness in the choice between long and short forms (lexical, constructional, contextual, and generational differences as well as special uses of short forms for definites) are also described. This study also points out that the Kupsapiiny noun system as a whole contradicts the grammatical form–frequency correspondence hypothesis (Haspelmath 2021).