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The focus of this paper is the perspectivization of thematic roles generally and the recipient role specifically. Whereas perspective is defined here as the representation of something for someone from a given position (Sandig 1996: 37), perspectivization refers to the verbalization of a situation in the speech generation process (Storrer 1996: 233). In a prototypical act of giving, for example, the focus of perception (the attention of the external observer) may be on the person who gives (agent), the transferred object (patient) or the person who receives the transferred object (recipient). The languages of the world provide differing linguistic means to perspectivize such an act of giving, or better: to perspectivize the participants of such an action. In this article, the linguistic means of three selected continental West Germanic languages –German, Dutch and Luxembourgish– will be taken into consideration, with an emphasis on the perspectivization of the recipient role.
Nominalization in Rawang
(2009)
This paper discusses the types of relative clause and noun complement structures found in the Rawang language, a Tibeto-Burman language of northern Myanmar, as well as their origin and uses, with data taken mainly from naturally occurring texts. Two types are preposed relative clauses, but in one the relative clause is nominalized, and in the other it is not. The non-nominalized form with a general head led to the development of nominalizing suffixes and one type of nominalized relative clause structure. As the nominalized form is a nominal itself, it can be postposed to the head in an appositional structure. There is also discussion of the Rawang structures in the context of Tibeto-Burman and the development of relative clause structures in the language family.
Many linguists in China and the West have talked about Chinese as a topic-comment language, that is, a language in which the structure of the clause takes the form of a topic, about which something is to be said, and a comment, which is what is said about the topic, rather than being a language with a subject-predicate structure like that of English. Y. R. Chao (1968), for example, said that all Chinese clauses have topic-comment structure and there are no exceptions.
All's well that ends well
(2009)
A few years ago, Jasanoff adopted the central tenet of my accentological theory, viz. that the Balto-Slavic acute was a stød or glottal stop, not a rising tone (cf. Kortlandt 1975, 1977, 2004, Jasanoff 2004a). Of course, nobody will believe Jasanoff’s claim that he arrived at the same result independently thirty years after I published it and ten years after we discussed it when he came to Leiden to visit us. Though at the time he haughtily dismissed “the tangle of secondary hypotheses and “laws” that clutter the ground in the field of Balto-Slavic accentology” (Jasanoff 2004b: 171), he has now recognized the importance of Pedersen’s law, Hirt’s law, Winter’s law, Meillet’s law, Dolobko’s law, Dybo’s law and Stang’s law and largely accepted my relative chronology of these accent laws, including the loss of the acute shortly before Stang’s law (cf. Jasanoff 2008). He has also accepted my split of Pedersen’s law into a Balto-Slavic and a Slavic phase (to which a Lithuanian phase must be added), my thesis that the tonal contours of Baltic and Slavic languages are post-Balto-Slavic innovations (cf. Jasanoff 2008: 344, fn. 10), and the rise of a tonal distinction on non-acute initial syllables before Dybo’s law which I discussed at some length in my review (1978) of Garde’s monograph (1976). This is great progress.