In Spanish causative constructions with <i>dejar</i> ‘let’ and <i>hacer</i> ‘make’ the subject of the embedded infinitive verb can appear in the accusative or the dative case. This case alternation has been accounted for by resorting to the notion of direct vs. indirect causation. Under this account, the accusative clitic with a transitive verb denotes direct causation while the dative clitic with ...

This paper contributes to the study of transitivity as a general property of the clause. Unlike most previous work on the subject, however, transitivity in the present article is used to study a lexical alternation, namely the two causative predicates dejar ‘let’ and hacer ‘make’ in Spanish. To do this, I use the transitivity index (TI), a weighted continuous measure of transitivity based on Hopper ...

Matías Ruíz Blanco (1643-1705/1708?) was a Franciscan friar who served as a missionary, historian and linguist in colonial Venezuela. Born in the village of Estepa in the Spanish region of Andalusia, he was devoted from early youth to religious practice. He was most probably educated in the Convent of Grace. By the age of 23 he was already recognized as a teacher of philosophy at the Monastery of ...

Derivatives ending in ttele are used with a passive meaning in the Kven dialects of Porsanger and Nordreisa. This use is a result of language contact with Sami. As in the Sami model of adversative passive, these Kven passive derivatives express an unfavorable event. They are used with a subject argument which has a semantic role as a patient or experiencer and an agent expressed in the allative case. ...

This article presents a critical analysis of the discursive practices in the public debate on Sámi language in Tromsø. The conflict around the political plan of Tromsø municipality to join the administrative area for the Sámi language lasted for about one year and was largely carried out in the local newspapers, which had established themselves as an arena and broker in the conflict. The ...

This article discusses how public libraries contribute to the generation of social capital and social trust among refugees participating in library programmes while enrolled in a compulsory government introductory programme to Norwegian language and society. The students’ experiences with the library have made them more trusting toward the institution of the public library and library patrons in ...

Pietroski successfully dismantles the idea of a formal semantic theory based on direct truth conditions and offers new and formally constrained alternatives. In this paper, I summarize the arguments but also provide a number of test cases to show that refusing to accept Pietroski's conclusions condemns the field to constantly restating and technically evading its own self‐created paradoxes. In the ...

I Victoria (1898) av Knut Hamsun dør den kvinnelige hovedpersonen av tuberkulose bare 23 år gammel. Victoria er en av Hamsuns mest kjente romaner, men tuberkulosen som motiv har kun i liten grad påkalt kritikernes interesse. I denne artikkelen vil jeg drøfte hvordan fremstillingen av tuberkulose korresponderer med Hamsuns egen sykdomserfaring, samt med de rådende historiske og kulturelle forestillinger ...

The paper examines the structure and distribution of two types of nominal/adjectival predicates in the Northern Mansi language. A nominative noun or adjective serves as the predicate in one construction. The other predicate type contains a predicate noun or adjective that takes translative case marking. In both constructions, the stative-like copula ōl- ’be, exist’ can also appear, though ...

This paper discusses two types of constructions in Norwegian where a combination of a verb of motion and a prepositional phrase are ambiguous between a reading of directed motion and a reading of located motion. Based on the differences in the syntactic behaviour of the two types of constructions with respect to a variety of tests (viz. VP constituency tests, adverbial placement, accent placement ...