Borrowing, or diffusion, of grammatical categories in language contact is not a unitary process. In the linguistic area of the Vaupés in northwest Amazonia, several different mechanisms help create new contact-induced morphology. Languages which are in continuous contact belong to the genetically unrelated East-Tucanoan and Arawak families. There is a strong cultural inhibition against borrowing forms of any sort (grammatical or lexical). Language contact in the multilingual Vaupés linguistic area has resulted in the development of similar – though far from identical – grammatical structures. In Tariana, an Arawak language spoken in the area, reanalysis and reinterpretation of existing categories takes place when diffusion involves restructuring a pre-existing category for which there is a slot in the structure, such as case. A new grammatical category with no pre-existing slots may evolve via grammaticalization of a free morpheme – this is how aspect and aktionsart marking was developed. The development of a five-term tense-evidentiality paradigm involves a combination of strategies: reanalysis with reinterpretation accounts for the obligatory tense marking, and the history of visual, inferred and reported evidentials. The nonvisual evidential evolved via grammaticalization of a lexical verb while the most recent, assumed, evidential involves reanalysis and reinterpretation of an aspect marker and grammatical accommodation.

It is well known that Semitic languages restrict the co-occurrence of identical and homorganic consonants in the root. The IDENTITY HYPOTHESIS attributes this pattern to distinct constraints on identical and nonidentical homorganic consonants (e.g. McCarthy 1986, 1994). Conversely, the SIMILARITY HYPOTHESIS captures these restrictions in terms of a single monotonic ban on perceived similarity (Pierrehumbert 1993; Frisch, Broe & Pierrehumbert 1997). We compare these accounts by examining the acceptability of roots with identical and homorganic consonants at their end. If well-formedness is an inverse, monotonic function of similarity, then roots with identical (fully similar) consonants should be less acceptable than roots with homorganic (partially similar) consonants. Contrary to this prediction, Hebrew speakers prefer root final identity to homorganicity. Our results suggest that speakers encode long-distance identity among root radicals in a manner that is distinct from feature similarity.

The main purpose of this paper is to provide experimental evidence that two syntactic reflexes of split intransitivity in German – the selection of perfective auxiliaries and the impersonal passive construction – are sensitive to an aspectual/thematic hierarchy of verb classes. We show that there is a split between ‘core’ verbs that elicit categorical intuitions from native speakers, and ‘intermediate’ verbs that exhibit gradience. Furthermore, crossdialectal differences between northern and southern German with respect to auxiliary selection tend to occur only with intermediate verbs. We argue that these findings lend support to the view that the unaccusative/unergative distinction is considerably more unstable than often assumed, and suggest that projectionist theories of the lexicon-syntax interface such as those directly derived from the Unaccusative Hypothesis may not be able to account for the systematic variation exhibited by the data.

This paper focuses on the role of modality in determining certain properties of grammaticalization processes in signed vs. spoken languages. The process examined here is the evolution of a case-marked pronoun in the pronominal system of Israeli Sign Language. This pronoun is shown to have evolved from the homophonous noun PERSON. The grammaticalization path leading to the evolution of a case distinction is compared to the evolution of case markers in spoken languages. This comparison reveals that languages in different modalities target different words as sources for grammaticalization. Case markers in spoken languages usually evolve from certain nouns or verbs denoting spatial relations, while in sign languages this is not the case. It is suggested that this difference might be attributed to the scarcity of prepositions in sign languages, and to the iconicity of spatial predicates, which may restrict the possible grammaticalization processes in which they may participate.

My aim here is to clarify some misinterpretations in Aikhenvald's (2002) review of my book (Campbell 1997). It is an unusual review, written four years after the book appeared, and not so much a book review as a critique of one chapter, on South American languages; even here it concentrates only on languages of Amazonia.

It is the mark of a true scholar to recognise when they have strayed beyond their own area of expertise, and to acknowledge errors.