Background: The third-person singular pronoun佢 in Hong Kong Cantonese has several variations, including the more standard (citation) form koei and its variant forms, such as hoei, toei, and oei. Some speakers use both koei and other forms alternatively, while some others consistently use only one of them (Bauer and Benedict 1997). This variation phenomenon is widely observed in current Hong Kon...

Tag questions are a conspicuous feature of spoken Present-day English. In contrast to many other languages, where tags are generally realized by invariant forms (e.g. nicht wahr? in German, oder? in Swiss German, or n’est-ce pas? in French), the canonical English question tag is a reduced interrogative clause whose structure and lexical content is conditioned by the format of the anchor – or ho...

Sentences like these are special insofar as their utterance in appropriate circumstances amounts to performing the action identified by the finite verb. The typical formal properties of such sentences in English include first person subjects, second person indirect objects, a present tense non-progressive active form of a speech act verb and the deictic adverb hereby, but performative sentences...

Most linguistic theories of language offer analysis of agreement describing the rules and constraints involved in the computation and interpretation of this dependency. A good testing ground for theoretical accounts of agreement is mismatching patterns. In this article we focus on a mismatch available in the Spanish agreement system – Unagreement – in which there is a person mismatch in the rea...

The paper studies the grammar features that characterize Moscow revision of Book Needs (Trebnik), composed under patriarch Nikon (1658). research is based on a comparison Nikon’s and Peter Mogila’s (1646) Trebniks. study confirmed scientific statement Nikonian editors revised Trebnik in accordance with recommendations edition M. Smotritsky’s Grammar. This shown, for example, use certain endings...

This paper is about the impersonal passive construction of which modern Irish, a VSO language, has two forms. The impersonal passive form occurs with all verbs of Irish, across all tenses, whether intransitive or transitive. In the second form, the impersonal passive form is to be found productively with the substantive verb (one of the two verbs of ‘to be’ in Irish) across all tenses. It does ...