LANGUAGE

JOURNAL OF THE LINGUISTIC

SOCIETY OF AMERICA

VOLUME 84, NUMBER 1 MARCH 2008

Letters to Language ............................................................................................................ 1

The Editor’s Department: On making a mark and making marks ........... Brian D. Joseph 3

Construction after construction and its theoretical challenges ................. Ray Jackendoff 8
An AAE camouflage construction .............................................................. Chris Collins,
Simanique Moody, & Paul M. Postal 29
The extension of dependency beyond the sentence ............................... Marianne Mithun 69
An event-based account of -kan constructions in
Standard Indonesian ......................................................... Minjeong Son & Peter Cole 120

Obituary:
William G. Moulton ............................................................................ Mark L. Louden 161

Reviews:
Aikhenvald: Evidentiality ............................................... J. van der Auwera & K. Boye 170
Alexiadou et al. (eds.): The unaccusativity puzzle:
Explorations of the syntax-lexicon interface ......................................... W. Abraham 173
Aronoff & Fudeman: What is morphology? ................................................... G. Stump 177
Belletti (ed.): Structures and beyond: The cartography of
syntactic structures, vol. 3 ................................................................. G. Grewendorf 179
Carnie et al. (eds.): Verb first: On the syntax of
verb-initial languages ........................................................................... M. Tallerman 182
Dabrowska: Language, mind and brain: Some psychological and
neurological constraints on theories of grammar ..................................... H. Diessel 186
Heine and Kuteva: Language contact and grammatical change ......... A. Y. Aikhenvald 189
Kortmann et al. (eds.): A handbook of varieties of English ............................. T. Odlin 193
Kroll and de Groot (eds.): Handbook of bilingualism:
Psycholinguistic approaches ......................................................................... V. Cook 196
Martinet: Économie des changements phonétiques:
Traité de phonologie diachronique ..................................................... C. W. Kreidler 199
O’Grady: How children learn language ........................................................ D. Ingram 201
Ryding: A reference grammar of Modern Standard Arabic ....................... E. McCarus 204
Siewierska: Person ................................................................................ M. Haspelmath 206

Recent Publications ............................................................................................................ 210

PUBLISHED BY THE LINGUISTIC SOCIETY OF AMERICA

Abstracts:
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CONSTRUCTION AFTER CONSTRUCTION AND ITS THEORETICAL CHALLENGES

Ray Jackendoff
Tufts University

The English NPN construction, exemplified by construction after construction, is productive

with five prepositions—by, for, to, after, and upon—with a variety of meanings, including
succession, juxtaposition, and comparison; it also has numerous idiomatic cases. This mixture of
regularity and idiosyncrasy lends itself to an account in the spirit of construction grammar, in
which the lexicon includes specified syntactic structures matched with meanings. The internal
syntactic structure of NPN violates standard principles of phrase structure, and the required
identity of the two nouns (in most cases) presents descriptive difficulties. Furthermore, when
NPN appears in NP positions, it can take normal NP complements and modifiers, and it has
quantificational semantics despite the absence of a lexical quantifier. These peculiarities
collectively present interesting challenges to linguistic theory. The best hope lies in a theory of
grammar that (i) recognizes meaningful constructions as theoretical entities; (ii) recognizes a
continuum of regularity between words and rules; and (iii) recognizes the autonomy of syntax
from semantics and vice versa.

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AN AAE CAMOUFLAGE CONSTRUCTION

Chris Collins
New York University

Simanique Moody
New York University

Paul M. Postal
New York University

Spears 1998 discusses a use of the word ass in African American English (AAE) in sentences
like They done arrested her stupid ass and I’m gonna sue her ass. We refer to DPs like her
stupid ass generically as the ACC (ass CAMOUFLAGE CONSTRUCTION), and we view the ACC as
an instance of a universal grammatical phenomenon we call CAMOUFLAGE. The ACC is also
attested in non-AAE dialects of American English (Beavers & Koontz-Garboden 2006a).
For certain syntactic properties, the possessor of the ACC behaves as if it were external to the
larger DP (e.g. binding, control, selection); for others, it behaves as if it were internal to the
larger DP (e.g. finite verb agreement, traditional constituent-structure tests). To account for this
dual behavior, we propose that the ACC possessor DP originates in a position external to the
ACC, and moves into its possessor position.
We discuss the implications of our analysis for other areas of AAE syntax, including the
resumptive-with construction, a previously undocumented grammatical phenomenon, and the use
of self in various constructions, which we suggest are illuminated by the notion camouflage. We
briefly consider arguable instances of camouflage crosslinguistically in languages such as
Georgian, French, the Mayan languages K’ekchi and Tzotzil, and Yoruba. Genuine similarities
between the ACC and these other constructions support our perspective on the ACC.
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THE EXTENSION OF DEPENDENCY BEYOND THE SENTENCE

Marianne Mithun
University of California, Santa Barbara

This article examines several grammatical developments that have received relatively little
attention, but that may be more pervasive than previously recognized. They involve the
functional extension of markers of grammatical dependency from sentence-level syntax into
larger discourse and pragmatic domains. Such developments are first illustrated with material
from Navajo and Central Alaskan Yup’ik, then surveyed more briefly in several other unrelated
languages. In some cases, secondary effects of such changes can reshape basic clause structure.
An awareness of these processes can accordingly aid in understanding certain recurring but
hitherto unexplained arrays of basic morphological and syntactic patterns, exemplified here with
cases of homophonous grammatical markers and of ergative/accusative splits. Like
developments described by Gildea (1997, 1998) and Evans (2007), they involve the use of
dependent clauses as independent sentences, but the processes described here differ from those in
both the mechanisms at work and their results.

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AN EVENT-BASED ACCOUNT OF -KAN CONSTRUCTIONS IN STANDARD INDONESIAN

Minjeong Son
University of Tromsø

Peter Cole
University of Delaware and Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

A widely held position in the literature on verbal meaning is that the lexical-semantic
representation of verbs involves complex event structures with semantic primitives like CAUSE
and BECOME (e.g. Dowty 1979). A growing number of recent works on predicate
decomposition have shown that there is a close correlation between the semantics of event
structure and the syntax (e.g. Hale & Keyser 1993, Harley 1995, Travis 2000, van Hout 2000,
Ramchand 2003, 2007). This article presents an additional empirical argument for the view that
there is a direct mapping between semantic decomposition of predicates and the (morpho)syntax
by developing an explicit analysis of the semantics and syntax of the verbal suffix -kan in
Standard Indonesian. We argue that -kan is a morphological reflex of the RESULT head, the
semantics of which gives rise to a causative interpretation. By treating -kan as being sensitive to
a syntactic configuration involving a result state, the current analysis not only provides important
empirical support for the event decomposition of predicates in the syntax but also leads to a
unified semantic and syntactic account of -kan, which captures straightforwardly distributional
properties of the suffix.