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List constructions have been studied extensively for English (e.g. Jefferson 1990, Schriffin 2007). Individual studies exist for other languages, such as French (Kahane and Pietrandrea), Italian (Bonvino, Masini and Pietrandrea 2009), and Japanese (Barotto 2016). Yet, a systematic cross-linguistic survey of list constructions is still missing, even though the comparison of data from different languages reveals a high degree of both formal and functional variation (cf. Mauri 2016 concerning the cross-linguistic variation attested for ad hoc categorization lists).
There are a number of questions that need to be addressed:
- Do list constructions manifest themselves in different ways in languages characterized by different morphological systems, e.g. isolating vs. agglutinative morphology?
- How is listing realized at different syntactic levels across languages (e.g. non-exhaustive connectives, ex.1))?
- Are there recurrent diachronic patterns involving lists, e.g. the development of reduplication (examples 2), 3) and 4))?
- Are there recurrent diachronic patterns leading to specific list constructions and specific list markers (e.g. general extenders)?
1) Japanese (isolate; Kuno 1973: 115)
[Biiru-ya sake-o]drinks takusan nomimashita.
beer-and sake-acc lots drank
‘[I] drank lots of beer and sake and stuff like that.’
2) Turkish (Altaic; Göksel and Kerslake 2005: 91-92)
Eve çat kapı bir alıcı geldi, odalarí modalarí dolaştı.
‘Today a potential buyer came without notification, and looked at the rooms and such things’
3) Lao (Kam-Tai; Enfield 2007)
- A V-N sequence is repeated, substituting the N in the repeated phrase with something semantically related (usually, a synonym or antonym):
man2 pajø sùù4 song5 sùù4 sùa4
3.B DIR.ABL buy trousers buy shirt
‘He (went and) bought clothes (lit. trousers and shirt).’
- A generic, default echo-formative strategy, where the complement element of the repeated phrase is substituted with the indefinite inanimate pronoun ñang3 ‘something, what, whatever’:
man2 pajø sùù4 song5 sùù4 ñang3
3.B DIR.ABL buy trousers buy INDEF.INAN
‘He (went and) bought trousers and so forth.’
4) Italian
B: perché ne ho bisogno perché siccome non guadagno tanto ho bisogno [per comprarmi i mobili] [per comprarmi le cose]
A: ah hai trovato casa xyz (LIP Corpus, Roma B21)
‘B: Because I need it, because since I don’t have a high salary I need (it) to buy myself furniture etcetera (lit. [to buy myself furniture] [to buy myself the things)
A: Ah, you found a new house!’
We aim to:
- examine list constructions in a typological language sample
- examine the diachrony of list constructions, with a view to both recurrent sources and recurrent targets
- integrate cross-linguistic and diachronic evidence with corpus evidence