Frank Seifart

List of John Benjamins publications in which Frank Seifart is involved.

Seifart, Frank 2026 Chapter 15. Pauses, parts of speech, and word order: A comparative corpus study on 27 languages The Documentarist Turn: From observable linguistic behaviour to typological generalizations, Riesberg, Sonja, Uta Reinöhl and Birgit Hellwig (eds.), pp. 376–396 | Chapter

This study investigates how pauses before nouns and verbs interact with word order and prosodic structure across a worldwide sample of 27 languages from the DoReCo corpus. Whereas prior research has suggested that more pauses occur before nouns in general, the results here show that this… read more

Margetts, Anna, Katharina Haude, Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, Dagmar Jung, Sonja Riesberg, Stefan Schnell, Frank Seifart, Harriet Sheppard and Claudia Wegener 2022 Cross-linguistic patterns in the lexicalisation of bring and take Studies in Language 46:4, pp. 934–993 | Article

This study investigates the linguistic expression of bring and take events and more generally of the semantic domain of directed caused accompanied motion (‘directed CAM’) across a sample of eight languages of the Pacific and the Americas. Unlike English, the majority of languages in our sample… read more

Seifart, Frank 2022 Caused accompanied motion in Bora Caused Accompanied Motion: Bringing and taking events in a cross-linguistic perspective, Margetts, Anna, Sonja Riesberg and Birgit Hellwig (eds.), pp. 43–56 | Chapter

The Amazonian language Bora uses a pair of deictically directed, but manner-neutral, bring and take verbs to express caused accompanied motion (CAM), but also an obtain-type verb, and a number of manner-specific, but deictically neutral verbs, e.g. carry and pull. When other verbs express CAM… read more

Seifart, Frank 2018 The semantic reduction of the noun universe and the diachrony of nominal classification The Diachrony of Classification Systems, McGregor, William B. and Søren Wichmann (eds.), pp. 9–32 | Chapter

Classifiers and noun class markers are often semantically general and semantically opaque compared to open-class nouns, and in this sense they constitute a semantic reduction of the noun universe. These two semantic characteristics also play important roles in the diachronic development of nominal… read more

Seifart, Frank 2017 Patterns of affix borrowing in a sample of 100 languages Journal of Historical Linguistics 7:3, pp. 389–431 | Article

Borrowing affixes may be rare compared to lexical borrowing, but it is not random. The current study describes regular patterns of affix borrowing in a database containing 649 borrowed affixes, challenging a number of previous claims about relative borrowability, in particular regarding… read more

Seifart, Frank 2012 The principle of morphosyntactic subsystem integrity in language contact: Evidence from morphological borrowing in Resígaro (Arawakan) Diachronica 29:4, pp. 471–504 | Article

This paper describes a case of non-lexical borrowing in the Northwest Amazonian language Resígaro (Arawakan), which has borrowed from the unrelated Bora language entire paradigms of noun class, gender, and number markers, as well as associated bound grammatical roots, while all other… read more