Pons-Moll, Torres-Tamarit & I.Mascaró (2023). Prosodically-driven morpheme non-realization in the Minorcan Catalan DP

Autors:

Clàudia Pons-Moll, Francesc Torres-Tamarit i Ignasi Mascaró

Títol:

Prosodically-driven morpheme non-realization in the Minorcan Catalan DP

Editorial: Linguistics, De Gruyter Mouton
Data de publicació: Abril del 2023

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This article focuses on a case of prosodically-driven morpheme non-realization found in the Minorcan Catalan DP that has not been documented or accounted for in the previous literature. In this variety of Catalan, kinship restrictive appositive phrases show the realization of the masculine personal article if the following personal name starts with a consonant (es conco en Toni, the-def.art.m uncle the-pers.art.m Toni ‘uncle Toni’), but not if it starts with a vowel (es conco Àngel, the-def.art.m uncle Àngel ‘uncle Àngel’). This asymmetrical pattern is entirely unexpected since a preconsonantal coda is generated in the former cases (cf. es conco en Toni [əs.kòŋ.kun.tɔ́.ni]) and an onsetless syllable and a hiatus are generated in the latter (cf. es conco Àngel [əs.kòŋ.ku.án.ʒəl]). The structures obtained are indeed non-optimizing from a strictly syllabic point of view and stand as a clear case of antimarkedness. We argue that this asymmetric behavior is prosodic in nature, and is mainly driven by the need to keep the left edge of the prosodic word free of clitic material, without challenging basic syllabification constraints active in Catalan. We further justify how the cases under scrutiny shed new light on the typology of alignment constraints referred to the alignment between prosodic and lexical categories, on the nature of morpheme realization constraints, and on the morphosyntax-phonology interface.

Tsiakmakis, Borràs-Comes & Espinal (2023). On the distribution and interpretation of voice in Greek anticausatives

Autors:

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

Títol:

On the distribution and interpretation of voice in Greek anticausatives. Frontiers in Psychology

Editorial: Frontiers
Data de publicació: 23 de febrer del 2023
Pàgines: 15

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This paper provides experimental evidence in support of the view that Greek does not have three productive morphological classes of anticausative verbs, but only two: the class of verbs that bear non-active voice morphology and the class of verbs that are morphologically active. Across two experiments, native Greek speakers are found to prefer for each anticausative verb either non-active or active voice morphological marking, in the presence or absence of explicit contextual information. It is also shown experimentally that native speakers prefer an interpretation that involves a specific cause for all anticausatives, especially when the existence of such a cause is favored by the contextual setting. Our empirical findings are consistent with the view that the Voice Phrase that is realized as non-active voice morphology in Greek anticausatives is expletive. From a theoretical perspective, we analyze the expletiveness of this Voice projection as the result of semantic redundancy: the Voice head of Greek anticausatives combines with a v head that encodes a redundant cause meaning component and is, therefore, interpreted merely as introducing an identity function.

Salmons & Gavarró (2022). Intervention effects in Catalan agrammatism

Autors:

Io Salmons & Anna Gavarró

Títol:

Intervention effects in Catalan agrammatism

Editorial: Glossa: a journal of general linguistics (Open Library of Humanities)
Data de publicació: 31 de desembre del 2022

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The goal of the present study is to test the agrammatic comprehension of clitic left dislocation and contrastive focus in Catalan, in order to evaluate the Generalised Minimality hypothesis of Grillo (2009). According to this hypothesis, the comprehension deficit observed in agrammatism is the result of the underspecification of scope-discourse features giving rise to generalised intervention effects. We conducted two sentence-picture matching tasks to assess the comprehension of clitic left dislocation and contrastive focus with nine and seven Broca’s aphasic subjects, respectively, as well as control participants. The results show that the comprehension of SVO sentences and object clitics was preserved, whereas the comprehension of object dislocations and object focalisations was compromised. These findings are consistent with the analysis of the deficit as an instance of generalised intervention effects. Yet, we also examined the prediction that a relevant syntactic feature mismatch between the subject and the object would suffice to block generalised minimality effects; in particular, the number features of subject and object were controlled for. The agrammatic subjects’ performance on mismatched sentences did not differ from their performance on sentences where the subject and the object were matched in number. These findings call the hypothesis into question and stress the need for future research.

Repiso-Puigdelliura (2024). Preferential use of full glottal stops in vowel-initial glottalization in child speech: Evidence from novel words

Autors:

Gemma Repiso-Puigdelliura

Títol:

Preferential use of full glottal stops in vowel-initial glottalization in child speech: Evidence from novel words

Editorial: Journal of Child Language (Cambridge University Press)
Data de publicació: 3 d'octubre 2024

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Vowel-initial glottalization constitutes a cue to prosodic prominence, realized on a strength continuum from creaky phonation to complete glottal stops. While there is considerable research on children’s early utilization of acoustic cues for stress marking, less is understood about the specific implementation of vowel-initial glottalization in American English. Eight sequences of function + novel words were elicited from groups of 5-to-8-year-olds, 8-to-11-year-olds, and adults. Children exhibit a similar rate of prevocalic glottalization to adults but differ in its phonetic implementation, producing a higher rate of glottal stops compared to creaky phonation with respect to adults.

Torres-Tamarit (2024). Contrastive Vowel Length in Romance: How Layered Feet and Uneven Trochees Interact

Autors:

Francesc Torres-Tamarit

Títol:

Proceedings of the 39th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics

Editorial: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, Somerville, MA, USA
Data de publicació: 2024

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According to Loporcaro's (2015) book on Romance length, contrastive vowel length in northern Italo-Romance is metrically-governed and implicationally distributed. CVL in proparoxytones implies CVL in paroxytones, but not the other way around. Likewise, CVL in paroxytones implies CVL in oxytones, but not vice versa. This paper develops a foot-based OT analysis of CVL in northern Italo-Romance that combines layered feet (Martínez-Paricio & Kager 2015) with uneven trochees (Jacobs 2019). The analysis adequately predicts the implicational distribution of CVL and discards unattested patterns.