Many languages (e.g. Spanish, German, and Swedish) have more than one morpheme corresponding to the English “but”. It has been argued by Anscombre & Ducrot (1977) and by Horn (1989) that two of these morphemes covary with two different functions of natural language negation. Anscombre's and Ducrot's descriptions of these BUTs are examined, and it is shown that there is no such link. There is, however, an interesting connection between “but” and negation. One of the two morphemes imposes a restriction on the use of negation in the clause that follows it, which suggests that natural language negation does not correspond to a truth function.

It is widely believed that copulas perform a mere grammatical function, as carriers of grammatical categories such as Tense, Mood and Aspect in sentences with non-verbal predicates. Accordingly, zero copulas are predicted to occur only in contexts where these grammatical categories are unmarked. This article argues that this view of copulas, and especially of zero copula encoding, is untenable as a principle of Universal Grammar. More generally, the article demonstrates how typological generalizations can be used as an evaluation measure for putative abstract principles of linguistic theory.

An attempt is made to incorporate the concept of sentence topic into a general model of sentence formation. The article begins with a morphosyntactic typology of topic constructions attested across languages, followed by an examination of the types of discourse contexts in which these constructions are employed by different languages, which allows a correlation to be established between formal types of topic constructions and their discourse functions. It turns out that both the formal distinctions between major types of topic constructions and their functional distribution obtain a straightforward explanation, if they are taken to be derived by different cognitive strategies. A model based on this idea makes it possible to explain some aspects of interaction between formal properties of languages and their relative “topic-prominence”.

Anaphors and the grammatical roles of their antecedents are examined in Finnish language data in order to establish a correlation between two universal hierarchies: the Keenan & Comrie (1977) NP Accessibility Hierarchy and the hierarchy of accessibility of referential expressions (Accessibility Marking Scale) (Ariel 1985, 1988, 1990). A more or less clear correlation pattern between the type of anaphoric NPs and the grammatical roles of their antecedents arises in Finnish intuition data (Section 2), and this pattern is corroborated by the data from prose text counts (Section 3). Even though a one-to-one mapping between the two hierarchies remains an idealization, it is clear that grammatical relations do bear on the type of anaphoric expression employed.

This article gives a cognitively based account of polysemous transitivity alternations, which are Agent-preserving with some verbs and Object-preserving with others. The data from three languages – Asiatic Eskimo, Boumaa Fijian and Bambara – are presented. It is argued that the mechanism of the distribution of the meanings of these TAs is semantic in nature and does not depend upon the coding technique used by a language.

A multiple methods approach was applied to the study of morphology on the processing of lexical items in Swedish. Data from slips-of-the-tongue, agrammatic speech production, agrammatic oral reading, and lexical decision experiments were used. The results indicate that whole word processing as well as morphological processing takes place in the different types of tasks. The type of processing seems to vary along a continuum, with whole word processing as the most commonly applied type in automatized and relatively simple processing (such as lexical decision for common Swedish words), whereas signs of morpheme-based processing appear less often, and perhaps in less automatized tasks (such as agrammatic speech production).

Some structural similarities between English and the Polynesian language Tokelau are investigated, especially regarding the multifunctionality of linguistic forms. Observations are made with respect to the relative distribution of overt processes and conversion, and it is argued that conversion should be regarded as a negatively defined cover notion for all cross-categorial lexical processes that do not involve formal modification of the input. The similarities with respect to the inventory and patterning of word-formational processes are motivated by certain similarities in the morphological type of the two languages.

This article is concerned with the basic syntactic and semantic structure of Riau Indonesian, a hitherto undescribed dialect differing in many respects from standard Indonesian and Malay. Riau Indonesian appears to exhibit an abundance of zero-markings of various kinds, in which a wide variety of syntactic constructions and semantic categories lack overt morphosyntactic expression. Two alternative descriptions are provided: an “easy” description, couched in traditional grammatical terminology and a Eurocentric perspective, and a “simple” description, positing a single open syntactic category, and unconstrained rules of semantic interpretation. The latter, simple description, is argued to be superior.

This article deals with the marking of grammatical relations in Tariana, North-Arawakan, and how this marking interrelates with topicality, definiteness and other discourse characteristics of nominal constituents. The following four case-marking systems are distinguished in Tariana: (i) a subject vs object case system, used with personal pronouns with animate reference; (ii) a case system characterized by an enclitic -nuku for marking topicalized and referential non-subjects, used with all types of nominal constituents; (iii) an ergative case-marking used with all types of nominal constituents under emphasis in A function, the ergative case marker being the same as instrumental; (iv) a system of peripheral cases – locative and instrumental, used with all types of nominal constituents, but obligatory only with pronouns. The overt case-marking in Tariana is related to such parameters as topicality, definiteness and emphasis, and consequently is dependent on the structure of discourse. I will argue that the unusual case-marking patterns in Tariana corroborate cross-linguistic generalizations on a dependency between case-marking and topical properties of NPs in languages with an opposition between marked and unmarked case forms.

This article discusses a phenomenon which has been referred to as ‘double determination’, ‘double definiteness’, or in the Scandinavian tradition ‘over-definiteness’. In this article, I define double determination and double definiteness, so that a distinction is made between the two terms. I use ‘double determination’ when both elements can function independently as semantic determiners. ‘Double definiteness’, on the other hand, is a form of agreement. A number of Swedish constructions are then examined which are plausible candidates for double determination. It is shown that only some of these are genuine cases of double determination, the others are more accurately described as double definiteness. In the cases of double determination, the determination is represented once as a syntactic element and once as a morphological element. The second part of this article focuses on this ‘morphological determiner’, referred to as def. The Swedish morphological determiner is compared with those of the other Scandinavian languages and the languages of the Balkans. It is shown that in languages which have an element like the Swedish def there is considerable variation in how this element functions within the language and in its status with respect to double determination and double definiteness.