things (substances, events, abstractions); Corbett (2000, chap. 3) reviewed the relevant evidence regarding linguistic number. Because less imageable referents have less discernible internal boundaries, they may tend to be construed as units even when they are potentially ambiguous in notional number (Eberhard, 1999). Ambiguities in notional number result from conflicts in valuation that can co...

We found o direct relationship between voriotion in informants’ grommoticality intuitions about pronoun coreference and variation in the same informants’ use of a clause segmentation strategy during sentence perception. It hos been proproposed that ‘c-command’, a structural principle defined in terms of constituent dominance relations, constrains within-sentence coreference between pronouns and...

Abstract This paper focuses on the various encoding strategies and other relevant issues pertaining to affirmative negative predicative possession in two Amuric languages, Amur Nivkh Sakhalin (Nighvng). One of goals is demonstrate that possessive negation serves as a major strategy for expressing caritive semantics (= non-involvement). Constructions rendering meanings represent one basic rather...

Many comprehension studies have shown that children as late as age 6 ; 6 misinterpret object pronouns as co-referring with the referential subject about half the time. A recent review of earlier experiments testing children's interpretation of object pronouns in sentences with quantified subjects (Elbourne, 2005) also suggests that there is a 'Pronoun Interpretation Problem'. In contrast, two e...

This first variationist study of ancient Egyptian examines two possessive constructions in Middle and Late Egyptian. Egyptologists maintain that the innovative form does not gain popularity until Late Egyptian, and that in the Late Egyptian stage, the language had two different registers – each favouring a different possessive variant (Allen 2013, Junge 2005). I confirm that the innovative form...

Chechen exhibits three major strategies for the combination of clauses: coordination, chaining, and subordination. The major formal characteristics of these three traditional categories of clause linking are discussed with reference to their basic syntax and semantics as well as to more particular syntactic characteristics, including constituent order and behaviour with respect to negation and ...