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.

Villalba & Planas-Morales (2020). Complementantes preposicionales en las relativas de infinitivo

villalba revista española linguistica

Autors:

Xavier Villalba & Sílvia Planas-Morales

Títol:

Revista Española de Lingüística 50(2), 83-106

Editorial: Sociedad Española de Lingüística

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En este artículo proponemos analizar los elementos que encabezan las relativas preposicionales de infinitivo (libros por/para leer) como complementantes preposicionales que se generan en el núcleo de SFinitud. Ello nos permite trazar claras diferencias con las construcciones preposicionales finales y causales y ofrecer al mismo tiempo un análisis uniforme para todas las relativas, sean finitas o no. También sugerimos que la lectura modal asociada a las relativas preposicionales se expresa mediante una categoría funcional específica ligada a la modalidad radical, lo que nos permite explicar parte de las restricciones combinatorias de estas relativas. Por último, proponemos extender este análisis a las relativas de infinitivo introducidas por que (libros que leer).

Pagliarini, Gavarró et al. (2021). Negative sentences with disjunction in child Catalan

Autors:

Elena Pagliarini, Marta Andrada Reyes, Maria Teresa Guasti, Stephen Crain & Anna Gavarró

Títol:

Negative sentences with disjunction in child Catalan, Language Acquisition 2021

Editorial: Routledge
Data de publicació: Gener del 2021
ISBN13: 1048-9223

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In English, the sentence Mary didn’t eat pizza or sushi is assigned the neither interpretation (both disjuncts must be false). In Mandarin Chinese, the equivalent sentence is assigned the at least one interpretation (at least one disjunct must be false). The cross-linguistic variation in the interpretation of negative sentences with disjunction has been attributed to the Disjunction Parameter. On one value of this lexical parameter, disjunction is a Positive Polarity Item (+PPI). On the other value, disjunction is not a Positive Polarity Item (-PPI). According to the Semantic Subset Principle (SSP), all child language learners are predicted to initially assign the neither interpretation to negative disjunctive sentences, for reasons of language learnability. The present study investigates the interpretation of negative sentences with disjunction in Catalan. The findings confirm that disjunction is +PPI for adults; children show a bimodal distribution. For some children, disjunction is -PPI, as predicted by the SSP. However, some children adopt the adult +PPI value of the Disjunction Parameter. Children’s level of linguistic maturity, as measured by a sentence repetition task, was correlated with their judgments about negative sentences with disjunction such that children with lower scores tended to adopt the -PPI value. To explain the relatively early parameter resetting by some Catalan-speaking children, as compared to children acquiring other languages where disjunction is +PPI, we discuss the possible “blocking effect” of an alternative lexical expression in Catalan, which unambiguously conveys the neither interpretation.

Recasens (2021). Acoustic characteristics and placement within vowel space of full schwa…

Autors:

Daniel Recasens

Títol:

Acoustic characteristics and placement within vowel space of full schwa in the world's languages: A survey

Editorial: Journal of the International Phonetic Association, Cambridge University Press
Data de publicació: 3 de març del 2021

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Data from about one hundred languages reveal that, in spite of resulting typically from articulatory reduction of peripheral vowels in unstressed position, full schwa may also occur in stressed position in stress languages and in unreduced syllables in languages lacking stress. Formant frequency data reveal that this vowel is mid central, though somewhat shifted to the mid back unrounded area (particularly if long and placed in open syllables and at the edges of words), and exhibits a higher or lower realization depending on the number of mid vowels in the vowel system. In spite of occurring in stressed position, full schwa resembles unstressed schwa in being very short, highly variable and possibly low intensity, which accounts for why it is prone to occur in closed syllables and longer words, and may receive stress only if the remaining vowel nuclei in the word are central and/or short peripheral. Moreover, variability in the F1 and F2 dimensions increases with the number of peripheral mid vowels, which appears to obey symmetry and dispersion principles of vowel space organization.