Vladimir A. Plungian

The place of evidentiality within the universal grammatical space

Abstract The paper discusses the cross-linguistic classification of evidential values (including the so-called admirative value) and proposes a typology of evidential systems based on the distinction between ‘direct’, ‘reflected’, and ‘mediated’ evidence.

Towards a typology of discontinuous past marking

Abstract The paper discusses verbal markers of the past tense with a meaning roughly charac-terizable as “past and not present” or “past with no present relevance”. This type of past time reference (labelled “discontinuous”) is opposed to standard past markers, which normally do not provide any information about the state of affairs in the present domain. Discontinuous past can be analyzed as a special cross-linguistically valid type of past tense marking. It occurs in a considerable amount of genetically unrelated languages of different areas (especially in Oceania and West Africa), though in cur-rent descriptions it may sometimes hide behind misleading terms or fall under the broad headings of “past” or “anterior”.

Towards a Lexical Typology of 'Flying' and 'Jumping'

This paper focuses on some lexical properties of two groups of verbs in the languages of the world, without trying to provide an exhaustive typological description of these groups. The first group includes the verbs of movement through air (verbs of ‘flying’); the other includes those verbs that designate temporary separation from a supporting surface (verbs of ‘jumping’).