Tsiakmakis, Borràs-Comes & Espinal (2021). The interpretation of plural mass nouns in Greek

Autors:

Evripidis Tsiakmakis, Joan Borràs-Comes, M.Teresa Espinal

Títol:

The interpretation of plural mass nouns in Greek, Journal of Pragmatics 181

Editorial: Elsevier
Data de publicació: Agost 2021

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This paper focuses on the interpretation of what has been considered an expletive marker in the grammar of the Greek nominal domain: the plural number of mass nouns. We present the results of an experimental investigation on the interpretation of plural mass nouns by native speakers of this language, and we propose a speech act analysis according to which at the time of producing utterances that contain plural mass nouns the speaker performs two speech acts: an assertion and an expressive speech act by which (s)he publicly commits to an emotive stance of dislike towards the expressed proposition φ. This stance is analyzed as an emotive judgment with respect to φ, the expression of which directly transfers the speaker's emotion from the conversation into the speaker and addressee's common ground.

Mateu & Oniga (2020). Contemporary theoretical approaches to word formation in Latin

Autors:

Jaume Mateu & Renato Oniga

Títol:

Lingue antiche e moderne, 9

Editorial: Università degli Studi di Udine
Data de publicació: Setembre de 2020
ISBN13: 2281-4841

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Word formation in Latin is a fascinating subject that has been approached from different theoretical perspectives in recent decades. In this area there are some prominent topics that have captured the attention of various researchers.
Within the 20th International Colloquium on Latin Linguistics, held at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria on 17-21 June 2019, we organized a workshop to congregate researchers who are working on word formation in Latin from different theoretical perspectives. Our goal was to begin a free and informal exchange of ideas in order to promote a fruitful cross-theoretical debate.
In this number of the journal we have collected a selection of the papers presented in the workshop. Each paper has been reviewed by two anonymous reviewers and we are very grateful to them for their efforts and help to improve the quality of the contributions. The papers offer different paths of argumentation and linguistic theorizing, which provide a substantial overview on the area of word formation in Latin today.

Mateu (2014). Argument structure

Autors:

Jaume Mateu

Títol:

The Routledge Handbook of Syntax

Editorial: Routledge
Data de publicació: Maig del 2014
ISBN13: 9780415533942

Més informació

In this chapter, I concentrate on some of the most relevant theoretical and empirical issues where argument structure has been shown to play an important role. Below, I address the question of to what extent (verbal) argument structures are projected from lexical-semantic structures or are constructed outside of the lexicon. In doing so, I review the recent debate between projectionist and neo-constructionist approaches to argument structure. In this context, some special attention is also devoted to some syntactic approaches to argument structure like Hale and Keyser’s (1993, 2002) configurational theory, which has been very influential for many syntacticians interested in analyzing argument structure from a minimalist perspective.

Acedo-Matellán & Mateu (2013). Satellite-framed Latin vs. verb-framed Romace: A syntactic approach

Autors:

V. Acedo-Matellán & J. Mateu

Títol:

Probus, International Journal of Latin and Romance Linguistics

Editorial: De Gruyter
Data de publicació: Gener del 2013
ISBN13: https://doi.org/10.1515/probus-2013-0008

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In this paper we are interested in the relation between two facts accompanying the diachronic change from Latin to Romance within the domain of the morphological and argument-structural properties of the predicates expressing change. On the one hand, the element encoding the transition itself, which we call the Path, and the verb are realised as two distinct morphemes in Latin, but as one and the same morpheme in the daughter languages: in Talmy's (2000) terms, the former is a satellite-framed language and the latter are verb-framed languages. On the other hand, there is a whole range of argument-structural patterns which are found in Latin but not in Romance: unselected object constructions, complex directed motion constructions, productive locative alternation, etc. We show, within a syntactic view of argument structure and morphology, that both facts are intimately related. Furthermore, we provide data from Old Catalan showing an intermediate stage between the Latin satellite-framed system and the Romance verb-framed system.

Zhu, Franck, Rizzi & Gavarró (2021). Do infants have abstract grammatical knowledge of word order…?

Autors:

Jingtao Zhu, Julie Franck, Luigi Rizzi & Anna Gavarró

Títol:

Do infants have abstract grammatical knowledge of word order at 17 months? Evidence from Mandarin Chinese

Editorial: Journal of Child Language, Cambridge University Press
Data de publicació: Febrer del 2021

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We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months) participated and the same experiment was conducted with eighteen adults. The results show that hearing well-formed NP-V-NP sentences triggered infants to fixate more on a transitive scene than on a reflexive scene. In contrast, when they heard deviant NP-NP-V sequences, no such preference pattern was found, a performance pattern that is adult-like. This is at variance with some of the results from Candan et al. (2012), who only found evidence for canonical word order comprehension at almost age 3 when considering fixation time. Furthermore, within the age range tested, performance showed no effect of age or vocabulary size.