Peranakan Javanese (PNJ) is a relatively undescribed variety of Javanese spoken primarily by ethnic Chinese native speakers of Javanese in the city of Semarang in Central Java (Indonesia). PNJ makes a structural distinction between auxiliaries and main verbs. Auxiliaries are unique in that they undergo optional head movement to C. Not only do single auxiliaries move to C, as in familiar languages, but sequences of two or three auxiliaries can move to C as well. Significantly, the order of the moved auxiliaries is always the same as the order in their unmoved position. The distribution of auxiliaries in PNJ is predicted if a ‘tucking in’ (Richards 1997) analysis of head movement similar to that of Collins (2002) is adopted. The PNJ facts are of special interest not only because they are an example of an additional language/construction that shows the distribution expected on the basis of ‘tucking in’, but also because PNJ provides evidence that helps to distinguish between a head movement analysis and the ‘standard’ version of the remnant movement analysis, in which adverbs occupy fixed positions in the clause. It is quite difficult to distinguish between these approaches empirically, so the PNJ auxiliary facts are important in this regard.

Examining four constructions in three languages (English quantificational nouns, Japanese subordinating conjunctions, Cantonese coverbs, Japanese deverbal postpositions), this paper shows that semantic properties can change faster than syntactic properties in gradual processes of grammaticalization. In each of these cases, the syntactic properties of one category become associated with the semantic properties of a different category when an item undergoes semantic change, leading to the appearance of mixed categorial properties. We propose that this sort of change is best captured using a multi-modular framework (Sadock 1991, Yuasa 2005), which allows changes to affect semantics independently of syntax, and which shows clearly that the relevant items and constructions still conform to the separate structural constraints of syntax and semantics, despite the unusual combination of properties. These findings are important for theories of grammaticalization because they suggest that the cover term ‘decategorialization’ (the loss of grammatical properties associated with the source category) must be understood in terms of at least two separate processes: (1) the effects of semantic change on an item's distribution; and (2) the effects of frequency (Bybee & Hopper 2001) and Pressure for Structure–Concept Iconicity (Newmeyer 1998) on an item's syntactic categorization. Our case studies show that the first kind of decategorialization effects can occur even in the absence of the second kind. Implications of these findings, including possible reasons for both the instability and the long-term retention of mismatch constructions, are also considered.

A key debate in loanword adaptation is whether the process is primarily phonetic or phonological. Is it possible that researchers on each side are viewing equally plausible, but different, scenarios? Perhaps, in some language situations, adaptation is carried out mainly by those without access to L2 phonology and is, perforce, perceptually driven. In other situations, adaptation may be done by bilinguals who actively draw upon their knowledge of L2 phonology in adapting loanwords. The phonetic strategy would most likely be favored in situations where the vast majority of the population did not know the L2, thus having no possible access to the L2 phonological system. The phonological strategy, on the other hand, is most likely to be favored in situations where there is a high proportion of speakers who are bilingual in the L1 and L2. This possibility is tested by comparing the adaptations of English loanwords in 19th- and early 20th-century Quebec French, when bilinguals were few, to those of contemporary Quebec French, in which the rate of bilingualism is far higher. The results show that even when the proportion of bilinguals in a society is relatively small, they determine how loanwords are pronounced in the borrowing language. Bilinguals adapt loanwords on the basis of phonology, not of faulty perception of foreign sounds and structures. However, in a society where bilinguals are few, there is a slight increase in non-phonological influences in loanword adaptation. We address the small role played by non-phonological factors, including phonetic approximation, orthography, and analogy (true or false), showing that false analogy, in particular, may give the impression that phonetic approximation is more widespread in a loanword corpus than is actually the case.

We challenge the predominant view of the English dative alternation, which takes all alternating verbs to have two meanings: a caused possession meaning realized by the double object variant and a caused motion meaning realized by the to variant. Instead, we argue that verbs like give and sell only have a caused possession meaning, while verbs like throw and send have both caused motion and caused possession meanings. We show that the caused possession meaning may be realized by both variants. Concomitantly, we argue that verbs like give, even in the to variant, lack a conceptual path constituent, and instead have a caused possession meaning which can be understood as the bringing about of a ‘have’ relation. We reassess evidence for alternative approaches adduced from inference patterns and verb–argument combinations and demonstrate how our verb-sensitive analysis, when combined with an account of variant choice, provides a more insightful explanation of this data, while having wider coverage. Our investigation affirms proposals that a verb's own meaning plays a key role in determining its argument realization options. To conclude, we consider the crosslinguistic implications of our study, attempting to explain why so many languages lack a true dative alternation.

This article investigates the types of palatal nasal decomposition from the perspective of three Slavic languages: Slovene, Upper Sorbian and Polish. The prepalatal nasal exhibits three different patterns of behaviour: retention, decomposition and depalatalization. Decomposition results in a cluster of the glide [j] and a nasal consonant. The details of this process are different in each of the three phonological systems considered, for instance, the process can yield either [jn] or [nj], and it can occur either in the onset or in the coda. Also the drivers for decomposition are different and include constraints defining permissible inventories as well as constraints governing assimilation. From the theoretical perspective, nasal decomposition raises the question of whether ident constraints should be bidirectional or unidirectional. It is concluded that the latter are indispensable.