The nDrapa language (Sichuan, China: Tibeto-Burman) has multiple types of existential sentences, which convey various readings. The reading of a sentence is determined by the existential verb stem, the suffix and/or auxiliary, the constituent order, and the animacy of the arguments. In this article, I describe existential sentences in nDrapa, paying special attention to the correlation between the animacy of arguments and the readings of the sentences. Among the six existential verb stems, the implications of the stem ˉnʌ, in particular, change depending on the animacy of the arguments. A ˉnʌ-existential sentence requires an animate argument either as the subject or the locative noun phrase (NP). If the subject is animate, the ˉnʌ-existential sentence conveys the reading of narrowly defined existence. On the other hand, if the locative NP is animate, the sentence conveys a specific “distributing/gaining” implication; that is, someone distributes the subject to the locative NP, or the locative NP gains the subject. Other existential verb stems generally form sentences that indicate possession if the locative NP is animate, except that the stem ˋɕɨ implies that the animate locative NP wears the subject if the subject is alienable.

Haida has been claimed to be a language of the active-stative type in terms of linguistic typology, in which the subjects of intransitive clauses are marked in two different ways: as transitive subjects and as transitive objects. This phenomenon is termed “split intransitivity,” and it crosslinguistically underlies active type languages. The motivations for split intransitivity have been pursued mostly in semantic terms such as “lexical aspect,” “agency,” and “volition,” among others. The split intransitivity in Haida is manifested only when the first (singular and plural) and second (singular) personal pronouns occur as intransitive subjects. Furthermore, intransitive verbs in Haida can roughly be classified into four groups based on the cases and persons of pronouns that occur as their subjects. The present study argues that the two semantic features of [agency] and [control] can be postulated to explain this phenomenon. [agency] describes the situation wherein a verb requires a participant as its subject that performs an activity or instigates a situation. [control] is concerned with one’s ability to control the activity or situation. This study also points out inconsistencies in case marking on personal pronouns for certain verbs, as well as for speakers, which may be due to the fact that these two features interact with split intransitivity in a fairly complicated manner. Such inconsistencies may be inevitable since the motivation for the split intransitivity is semantically-conditioned, which in turn leads to difficulties in characterizing active type languages in general.

In Indonesia, while Indonesian, its national language, is full of vitality and immensely influential, many indigenous languages are in danger of extinction. Bantik, spoken in North Sulawesi Province, is one of such languages and serves to illustrate how languages change in various ways as their speakers diminish in number. The focus of this paper is to describe some of the significant changes the Bantik language is undergoing in response to the sociolinguistic situation in which it finds itself. After presenting the interaction of Bantik, Manado Malay, and Standard Indonesian, all of which are spoken in North Sulawesi Province, I will describe the actual performances of aged and young speakers of Bantik. In narrative speech, aged speakers, while retaining most traditional aspects of Bantik, use many Manado Malay words. In contrast to the aged speakers, who use Bantik in everyday conversations with family and friends of the same age, young speakers only have a limited knowledge of the language. They also have phonemic and morpho-syntactic rules quite distinct from those of the traditional Bantik, which strongly suggests that Bantik is undergoing attrition.

The Mitsukaido dialect of Japanese has a phenomenon in which a stem-initial fricative turns into a stop (or an affricate) when the stem is the second member of a compound. This hardening alternation results from opaque interactions among four phonological processes: sequential voicing, debuccalization (p→h), continuancy neutralization and consonant devoicing. Consonant devoicing counterfeeds sequential voicing and p→h, and counterbleeds continuancy neutralization. Classic Optimality Theory cannot deal with the phonological opacity behind the hardening alternation. Stratal OT, a weak parallelist OT extension which incorporates level ordering, provides a solution for this phenomenon. Strict parallelist extensions such as Sympathy theory and Candidate Chain theory make the wrong prediction for the hardening alternation.

The type-wise productivity of lexical V-V compounds in Japanese is investigated systematically from the perspective of thematic proto-roles. It is shown that the degrees of productivity are sensitive not only to the quantitative advantage of transitive verbs but also to the complexities encountered in the process of argument matching between two verbs to be combined via compounding. The correlation between such complexities and productivity is captured by an optimality-oriented approach that takes advantage of a set of markedness constraints. The constraints are not simply capable of selecting the most optimal candidate of a single comparison, but useful for comparing different winning candidates from separate and mutually independent comparisons as well. The current approach distinguishes itself from those based on the traditional concept of transitivity of verbs, which merely describe—but are not capable of predicting—the observed patterns of productivity.

Based on the observation on a special type of ECM construction in a certain variety of Kansai Japanese, Ura (2007) argues that the dialect allows a true instance of long-distance case assignment whereby an object NP in an embedded clause is assigned an accusative case by the main verb, as in Boku wa John-ni sono koto-o dekiru (te) omou ‘I think (that) John [DATIVE] can do that [ACCUSATIVE]’. According to his analysis, such an unorthodox operation is made possible by the deletable complementizer in this dialect, which renders the phase of the embedded finite clause ‘weak’, thereby exempting it from the Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC). From this, Ura suggests the generalization that no language allows long-distance ECM (LD-ECM) unless its complementizer is deletable.

This paper investigates the acceptability of the corresponding construction with sixty speakers of non-Kansai Japanese and adduces two types of counterexample to Ura’s generalization: (i) LD-ECM is disallowed even though the complementizer is deletable, and (ii) LD-ECM is allowed even though the complementizer is not deletable. These counterexamples indicate that there is no strong correlation between the deletability of a complementizer and the acceptability of LD-ECM. We thus reject Ura’s analysis utilizing the ‘strength’ of a phase and present an alternative analysis in which the accusative NP in an embedded clause, typically focused with heavy stress, undergoes covert movement to the Spec of CP and gets its accusative case licensed there. The proposed analysis can capture the marked nature of the LD-ECM construction without altering the definitions of such general notions as locality and minimality.