John Mansfield
List of John Benjamins publications in which John Mansfield is involved.
Articles
2025 Managing expectations: Referential expectedness and uncertainty in a syntactically flexible language Studies in Language 49:1, pp. 194–223 | Article
One of the central goals of human language is to convey intended messages successfully to the addressee. However, communication inherently involves uncertainty or unexpectedness which hinders this delivery. Different languages have different strategies to manage unexpectedness. In this article,… read more
2025 The diachrony of verbal classification: Classifier mergers and semantic incoherence in Southern and Western Daly Diachronica 42:2, pp. 161–197 | Article
Classifier systems apply a semantic classification to nouns or verbs, though in some systems the number of classes is much reduced, and classes may lose their semantic coherence. In this article I investigate the diachronic process by which classifier systems undergo set reduction and semantic… read more
2015 Morphotactic variation, prosodic domains and the changing structure of the Murrinhpatha verb Asia-Pacific Language Variation 1:2, pp. 163–189 | Article
Bound morphology is usually realized on lexical stems following fixed rules of sequencing, but in some highly agglutinative languages this is not the case. Morphotactic variation has previously been described in detail for Chintang and Tagalog, and more briefly noted for various other languages… read more