Voprosy Jazykoznanija

The paper is devoted to the basic principles of verbal colexification defined at the cross-linguistic level. We understand colexification as a non-random association of two or more meanings within one and the same lexical item. We argue that these associations, reproducing in different languages, should follow certain principles and form clear patterns. Drawing on our extensive experience of lexical typological research and our new field data on the semantics of simple and complex verbs in Shughni, we show that verbal meanings colexify due to their partial denotative intersection, hence this process can be described in terms of the phase structure of the situation. As an illustration, we consider the structure of the semantic field of disappearance in Shughni, where the concept ‘disappear’ turns out to be adjacent to motion from the speaker / observer (tidow ‘to go, to flow’, sitow ‘to go’, zibidow ‘to jump’, etc.), processes of destruction (θidow ‘to burn’, virix̌tow ‘to break’, etc.), topological changes (gāx̌tow ‘to turn’, xangi / xāmb δêdow ‘disappear from sight’, lit. ‘a hollow / bend’ + a light verb ‘to fall’, etc.), and frustrating emotions (ayf sitow ‘go to waste’, lit. ‘alas’ + a light verb ‘to go’). We show what meanings constitute the domain of disappearance and how they relate denotatively to the adjacent concepts of directed motion, destruction, topological changes, and frustrating emotions.

Prosodic systems of Southern Russian dialects spoken in the regions of Kaluga, Ryazan’, and Lipetsk possess a specific rising tonal accent H*+^H* (level high + rising + level extra-high + falling tone) utilized in yes-no questions and non-final parts of utterances. In the oldest speakers’ speech this accent is accompanied by some kind of laryngeal activity, acoustic correlates of which are quite similar to those of Danish stød: it is a non-modal phonation type (glottal squeak) where the first part of the syllable is characterized acoustically by a high intensity level; in the second part there is a considerable decrease in intensity, a noticeable leap in fundamental frequency, and an evident aperiodicity of the speech signal; on the boundary between the two phases most speakers have a strong glottal constriction. Phonologically, the F₀ perturbation of Danish stød is a side effect of laryngealization and the stød itself, bound to definite syllables in certain word types, and is seen as a single object attaching to a particular node in the metrical structure, not a composite tonal entity; while in Russian dialects it is a significant part of the H*+^H*pitch accent, used to distinguish it from the very similar L*+H* one found in narrow focus statements. Diachronically, Russian “stød” in the H*+^H* pitch accent may be seen as a consequence of the compression of an archaic L*+H H- L% melodic contour into one syllable; nowadays the original H*+^H* accent seems to be transforming into the much simpler H* found in Western Russian dialects.

The article deals with simulative constructions meaning ‘pretend to do something’ in Tatyshly Udmurt. We mainly use the data collected during fieldwork as well as the corpus of oral narratives and information on simulative constructions in Standard Udmurt found in previous studies. In Tatyshly Udmurt, there are several strategies to express simulative meaning: a synthetic one (using the suffix -mn’äs’k) and two analytic strategies (with the verbs karis’kə̑nə̑ ‘be done, become’ and lu̇ə̈nə̈ ‘be, become’). We compare the strategies according to the parameters of variation cited in the typological literature: the base form that attaches the simulative marker; (in)transitivity of the simulative predicate; (in)animacy of the subject. We also consider the semantic shifts of simulative derivations into the domain of scalarity: an attenuative meaning of the constructions with -mn’äs’k and karis’kə̑nə̑, as well as an attemptive meaning close to the attenuative one and a neglective interpretation of the forms with -mn’äs’k. As for the construction with the verb lu̇ə̈nə̈, we reveal the possibility of its simulative interpretation in secondary predication with a converb lu̇sa. We show that such a meaning appears in a limited number of subject-oriented contexts, in which an emotional state, result state, or life stage is described. We suggest additional morphosyntactic parameters that may be relevant for further language-specific and typological studies of simulative constructions: negation scope, availability of (non)coreferential subjects in biclausal constructions, and indexical shift in the dependent clause. We discuss both the general grammatical acceptability of these strategies and idiolect variation in their use.

This paper compares two grammar architectures in the context of intralingual variation. Using the case of agreement variation in Russian, we highlight the advantages and limitations of approaches that imply a binary division of linguistic data (grammatical vs. ungrammatical) as well as those that consider gradient judgments. In the first case, modelling of variation is limited: existing models either presume a single definite derivation, thereby excluding any variation, or fail to restrict the distribution of variants. The second approach entails ranking grammatical constraints: in particular, agreement variation is subject to factors of varying strength that influence the selection of the variants. However, this approach is used inconsistently and lacks sufficient empirical justification. To integrate variation into the model of grammar, we advocate shifting the methodological framework from descriptive to parametric. We take the parametric nature to be the main requirement for the model of intralingual variation: in the case of agreement, it is implied that all parameters influencing the choice of the agreement variant are taken into account. The assessment of the contribution of individual parameters or their interaction is possible by means of multifactorial quantitative approaches. In particular, the experimental method in combination with meta-analysis techniques allows us to generalize both the effects of multiple factors within a single construction and the effect of a given factor across various constructions. Moreover, quantitative methods offer novel insights into how grammatical constraints are distributed across individual grammars of speakers. Thus, the multifactorial approach yields profoundly innovative generalizations about variable linguistic phenomena.