Le but du présent article est de présenter, sous une forme explicite, et d’illustrer trois des principes de base qui régissent la description sémantique des unités lexicales dans un dictionnaire explicatif et combinatoire (DEC). Il s’agit des principes suivants: principe d’adéquation, principe de pont sémantique, et principe d’uniformité. Le premier principe concerne un lexeme isolé; le deuxième, tous les lexemes appartenant à un vocable; et le troisième, les vocables différents qui sont sémantiquement apparentés.

Il convient de souligner que les principes énoncés sont depuis longtemps bien connus en lexicographie. Ce que nous revendiquons comme originalité, c’est le caractère formel et précis de leur formulation et, beaucoup plus important encore, le caractère strict et systématique de leur application.

When Powell published his exhaustive classification of the aboriginal languages of North America north of Mexico (1891), he set up 58 independent linguistic families. Since he was interested in establishing nomenclature as well as in determining families, he adopted the convention of adding the suffix -an or -ian to each of his proposed names. Even though it is desirable to have a uniform way of designating linguistic families, it turns out that the device has tended to obscure an extremely noteworthy fact about these families, namely that over 40 per cent of them are language isolates, that is, single languages with no demonstrable close relationship to any other single language or family of languages. Moreover, the majority of these language isolates were concentrated in two principal areas: (1) the “Pacific” area along the Pacific Coast from Southern Alaska to Baja California, and (2) the “Gulf” area along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico from Florida to Coahuila. Notwithstanding the fact that many of the language isolates of these two areas have now been subincluded in larger groupings, they remain, for the most part, but distantly related to their nearest congeners. For this reason they still play a significant role in imparting to these two large areas their distinctive character of great linguistic diversity.

Most studies of code switching have focussed on its use in informal, oral settings, but written examples also occur. The Castilian-Hebrew switching in the Jewish taqqanot ‘statutes’ of Valladolid, Spain, written in 1432, provides important data for testing the different constraints proposed in studies on code switching. Examples of switches between determiner-noun, preposition-noun, possessive-noun, quantifier-noun, and ser-participle indicate that the code switches in the taqqanot usually conform to some of the constraints already proposed: the Free Morpheme Constraint, the Equivalence Constraint, and the Closed-Class Constraint. At the same time, the analysis of these medieval switches confronts the same unresolved issues as other studies, for instance, the need to adequately distinguish between borrowings and code switches and the question of whether bilingual utterances always have an identifiable matrix language.

This article aims to examine to what extent English and Jordanian Arabic (JA) have the same classification of N + N compounds based on their degree of compositionality. It also attempts to propose a universally applicable classification of compositionality in N + N compounds. I suggest a modified version of the degree of compositionality based on previous classifications by Fernando (1996), Dirven and Verspoor (1998), and Kavka (2009). The new classification is based on the semantic contribution of the head and the non-head to the meaning of the whole compound. After I have applied the new scale to the JA data, I argue that English and JA have compounds that exhibit the four degrees of compositionality; namely completely compositional, semi-compositional, semi non-compositional and completely non-compositional. The article concludes with some recommendations for future research.

The grammatical tradition has excluded lexical plurals from the category of collective nouns on the sole basis of their morphology (no discrepancy between singular form and so-called plural reference); but this criterion has led to hesitations, some linguists including, for instance, cattle or people. This study therefore considers other, semantic, criteria to establish more convincingly whether lexical plurals that denote pluralities of entities may be collective nouns. Relying on distinctions between meronymy and (non-taxonomic) hyperonymy, collectiveness and cohesion, and (a) crew (collective sense) / (several) crew (uninflected plural), it concludes that they are definitely not collective nouns, but aggregate nouns (or senses of nouns). Two sets are established. Some, mainly denoting humans, typically originate in the collective sense of the noun through a coercion mechanism; the others, mainly denoting objects, result from an operation of abstraction. For some of these, the notion of “hyperonyms of plural classes” is put forward.

The goal of this article is to diagnose a verbal construction which has made it to common use in Austrian German and is typically unknown to many speakers of Federal German who have not been exposed to Austrian German. This construction is based on the verb gehen (‘go’) conjoined by a particle and the reflexive. An argument for its analysis as a degree-based sufficiency construction is developed, which is constructed by extending existing approaches in the literature on enough constructions and suggesting a meaning of the construction at hand, which is presuppositional in multiple respects. The results of diachronic corpus searches as well as the significance of the results of this work for the space of possibilities of the semantic change of motion verbs are discussed.

Stowell (1981) demonstrates that nominal phrases in VP or PP are subject to certain constraints which are not pertinent in the domain of NP or AP. Nominal phrases in VP or PP are obligatory and they must be realized in a position which is adjacent to the head of the phrase (i.e., in a phrase marker; “V° NP” or “P° NP”). In contrast, nominal phrases in NP or AP are optional and do not have to be adjacent to the head. There is a systematic exception to this generalization in the lexically determined class of nouns known as Bare NP adverbs (cf. Larson 1985). Nominal phrases headed by one of this class of nouns appear optionally in VP and they are not required to be adjacent to the verb.

The introduction of empty nuclear positions in syllable structure goes back to the early 80s. Since then, empty nuclei have been proposed in phonological analyses to account for vocalic epenthesis (vowel/Ø alternation). The analysis of Gen put forth in this article argues for empty nuclei although no vowel/Ø alternation can be observed in the language. Nevertheless, on the basis of the tonal patterns of Gen, it is shown that empty positions must be part of the underlying representation of syllables in the language. Another aspect of the study deals with consonant clusters. Thus far, all analyses supporting empty positions within a cluster have also referred to the absence of cooccurrence restrictions among the consonants surrounding the empty vowel. This paper provides new insights since, in Gen, the consonant clusters in which empty nuclei are proposed are typical of those observed in branching onset languages (like French, Italian and English) or in languages having light diphthongs. We argue that all attested consonant clusters in Gen are heterosyllabic.

This article is concerned with the role of media representations of language use in the promotion of language ideologies and in identity construction. It focuses on media representations of Chiac, a traditionally low-status variety of Acadian French. We consider performances of this variety in the adventures of an animated superhero, Acadieman, presented in a cable TV show running on Rogers TV from 2005 to 2009. We first contextualize Acadieman in terms of the linguistic and cultural contexts in which Chiac is spoken. We then consider how particular social meanings are created through contrasts between Chiac-speaking characters and speakers of other varieties. While the juxtaposition of varieties is at one level quite humorous, on another level it draws on complex indexicalities and valorizes the local variety and, by extension, its speakers. Finally, we argue that the Acadieman phenomenon provides a discursive space within which present-day Acadian identities can be negotiated.

In reconstructing prior stages of languages the comparative method (CM) has been primarily applied to phonology. Two standard statements on the CM in recent times illustrate this restricted application. In his article of 1950 on the comparative method, Hoenigswald defines “reconstruction by the comparative method (as) essentially a problem in phonemics, in which the place of allophones is taken by sets of sound correspondences that are partially alike (share one component) and in complementary distribution” (Joos 1957: 298). And in his comprehensive statement (1960:132), Hoenigswald states that “the comparative method is based on the principle that sets of recurring phoneme correspondences between two related languages continue blocks of positional allophones from the mother language.” Handbooks dealing with reconstructed languages reflect the limitation to the phonological component of language. For statements made about syntax are hesitant (Meillet 1967: 29). And one notable attempt to reconstruct a syntactic sequence in Proto-Indo-European, Schleicher’s fable of the horses and the sheep, has been generally condemned, even though it was given some recognition by Hirt (Meillet 1967: 29, Hirt 1939: 113-115). In contrast with the earlier hesitation about applying the CM to the syntactic component of language I would like to suggest that recent developments in linguistics have made it possible to apply the CM to at least some syntactic patterns in much the way historical linguists have been dealing with phonological patterns.

Perhaps the most remarkable trait of human language is the way it adapts spontaneously to the particular experience the speaker wants to express. Thanks to our mother tongue, the linguistic means are available to render more or less faithfully whatever we intend to communicate regardless of the particular nature or quality of the message. This is remarkable first of all because, in itself, raw experience is strictly private and incommunicable, a fact Northrop Frye (1971:124) depicts quite vividly in the following passage:

Freezing is the cover term for the restriction on extraction from constituents in a derived position. The traditional Freezing cases are illustrated here with topicalization in (1a), heavy-NP shift in (1b), and extraposition in (1c).

Transformational grammar has attempted to outline the systematic nature of language structure while also stressing the creative aspect of language. Language is systematic in that speakers use a finite number of means to make up their messages, and yet it is creative in that there are an infinite number of individual different messages which are possible in any natural language. In natural languages, however, there is not a perfect one-to-one correspondence between possible messages—intended or perceived—and possible linguistic realizations, as there exists in conventional or artificial languages. Often it is found in natural languages that a single linguistic form may have two or more meanings. Homonymy, whether it is lexical or syntactic, is an important notion, not only because syntactic ambiguity plays a central role in linguistic theory, but also because its study gives us a better understanding of the systematics of language and of the way we attach meaning to linguistic representations. Hence, the importance of evaluating how speakers deal with syntactic ambiguity in their attempts to understand and to be understood.

We present a sociolinguistic analysis of the third person plural verbal suffix -ont in the variety of Acadian French spoken in the northeastern region of New Brunswick. The analysis shows that variation in the use of this traditional morpheme is conditioned by external factors and in particular by social network. In addition, retention of -ont is conditioned by an internal factor, as this suffix regularizes the singular/plural contrast in stems, and the 3SG/3PL contrast in verbal paradigms. The more -ont optimizes these contrasts, the greater the tendency to maintain this morpheme. Thus, forms such as i-pouvont, i-voulont, and i-buvont— which allow speakers to communicate their identity and social position within their speech community as well as to optimize the use of forms in the verb paradigms — have a greater probability of being retained than other forms that offer fewer benefits.