Referential Hierarchies in Three-Participant Constructions in Vera'a

the verbal constructions in azari (harzani dialect)

most of the verbal constructions of harzani dialect have got inflectional affixes. the majority of the constructions are made up vy adding a specific verbal affix to the verbal stem (infinitive without infinitive marker). only a few number of them is formed by adding a verbal affix to the past participle of the verb. there are specific rules for the formation of different verbal types. there is...

Ditransitive Alignment and Referential Hierarchies in Araki

Since Bossong (1985), referential hierarchies have proven useful in accounting for patterns of differential object marking (DOM) in monotransitive clauses. More recent studies (Siewierska 1998; Haspelmath 2005; Bickel 2008; papers in this volume) have also shown the relevance of such hierarchies in explaining the alignment patterns of ditransitive verbs – that is, how languages treat formally t...

Politeness Orientation in Social Hierarchies in Urdu

The present research is aimed at investigating how the politeness of the speakers of Urdu is influenced by their relative social status in society. The researcher took politeness theory of Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) as a model. To observe politeness of Urdu speakers, speech act of apology with different strategies was selected. A Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was used as an instrument to...

Non-Referential Uses of Nominalization Constructions: Asian Perspectives

Do You Know What I Know? The Impact of Participant Role in Children's Referential Communication

For successful language use, interlocutors must be able to accurately assess their shared knowledge ("common ground"). Such knowledge can be accumulated through linguistic and non-linguistic context, but the same context can be associated with different patterns of knowledge, depending on the interlocutor's participant role (Wilkes-Gibbs and Clark, 1992). Although there is substantial evidence ...