26 febrer, 2025
Autors:
Morosi & Espinal
Títol:
Indefinite definites in ItalianEditorial: Natural Language & Linguistic Theory
Data de publicació: 25-02-2025
Pàgines: 38 Més informació
Text completThis paper examines indefinite interpretations associated with morphologically definite articles in Italian, such as Ha comprato {i tulipani / l’olio} (‘She bought (the) tulips / (the) oil’), which allow both a default definite reading and an indefinite interpretation. The paper addresses two main research questions: (i) what grammatical conditions allow indefinite definites in Italian?, and (ii) why do only Italo-Romance varieties, and not other Romance languages, allow the presence of indefinite definites (in addition to bare nouns, the so called “partitive article” and even a bare di)? The primary contribution of the paper is to show that the indefinite reading of definite internal arguments in Italian cannot be derived from a weak definite approach, from kind denotation, or from an operation of derived kind predication. Instead, we argue that internal definite (plural and mass) arguments can be interpreted as conveying an indefinite reading, as long as the event in which they participate denotes incremental homogeneity (Landman and Rothstein 2010, 2012a, 2012b). This hypothesis is supported by the productivity of indefinite definites in habitual (and iterative) contexts, which are incrementally homogeneous by definition; and their compatibility with per ‘for’ (and ogni ‘every’ N) temporal modifiers. Concerning the cross-linguistic and cross-dialectal puzzle, the paper highlights that the use of indefinite definites for the expression of weak indefiniteness reveals the bidirectional influence between dialectal substrata and the national language, giving prominence to the role of competing grammars in speakers of informal Italian.
27 febrer, 2025
Autors:
Gemma Repiso-Puigdelliura
Títol:
Development of Vowel Intrusion in Spanish Heritage SpeakersEditorial: Language and Speech
Data de publicació: 27-02-2025
Més informacióThis study investigates the sound system of heritage speakers (henceforth, HSs) as they shift dominance from their heritage language to their majority language. Specifically, it analyzes the production of intrusive vowels in Spanish consonant clusters across the lifespan of HSs, focusing on tautosyllabic clusters (i.e., /Cɾ/) and heterosyllabic clusters (i.e., /ɾ.C/). Semi-spontaneous speech was elicited from three age groups of Spanish HSs—younger children, older children, and adults—for whom American English is the majority language, as well as from three age-matched groups of non-heritage Spanish speakers raised in Mexico. The presence and duration of intrusive vowels were examined, with the latter calculated as a ratio of intrusive vowel duration to tap duration. Overall, the results indicate that all speaker groups more frequently produce consonant clusters with intrusive vowels than without. However, Spanish HSs produced fewer and shorter intrusive vowels compared with their non-heritage counterparts. In addition, heritage and non-heritage speakers exhibited a lower rate of intrusive vowel production in the 5-to-8 -year-old group compared with adults. Despite this, the absence of an interaction between age group and speaker type suggests a parallel pattern of change in intrusive vowel production across all ages. Voicing emerged as the most consistent phonetic factor, predicting a higher rate of intrusive vowels with a longer duration relative to the tap.
21 gener, 2025
Autors:
Salmons, Muntané-Sanchez, & Gavarró
Títol:
An analysis of descriptions by Catalan-speaking individuals with aphasiaEditorial: Aphasiology
Data de publicació: 20-11-2024
Més informacióBackground
Description tasks are used to evaluate and investigate the production abilities of people with language impairments such as aphasia.
Aims
The goal of the present study is to investigate the production abilities of Catalan-speaking individuals with aphasia (IWA), as well as a smaller sample of individuals with cognitive impairment (IWCI), in comparison with those of healthy controls. A second goal is to evaluate whether the scoring system of the Catalan version of the CAT (CAT-CAT) is helpful to discriminate different patterns of language impairment.
Methods and procedure
In the study, 109 control subjects, 20 IWA and 4 IWCI were asked to orally describe a picture from the CAT-CAT. The scoring method consisted in a closed-rating system that evaluates productivity, discourse efficiency, fluency, grammatical complexity and grammaticality.
Results
The results show that the overall scores of the control subjects were significantly higher than those of the experimental groups; the difference between the two experimental groups was not significant. Yet, the group of IWA showed greater intersubject variability than the group of IWCI. Also, the IWA were consistently worse in fluency, grammaticality and grammatical complexity than the IWCI, which indicated a different pattern of performance between the two groups.
Conclusions
Our findings therefore show that the oral picture description of the CAT-CAT is sensitive to the language impairment of subjects with aphasia and cognitive impairment. Moreover, the rating system put forward allows us to uncover different patterns of language impairment, since it includes variables to evaluate separately content and discourse efficiency on the one hand, and grammatical features on the other hand.
28 abril, 2025
Autors:
Espinal & Cyrino
Títol:
Experiencers at the syntax-pragmatics interface. The case of the jo ‘I’ – construction in CatalanEditorial: Glossa: a journal of general linguistics
Data de publicació: 18-04-2025
Pàgines: 33 Més informació
Text completThis paper aims to support the thesis that Speech Act related operators have landing sites in syntax, specifically at the syntax-pragmatics interface. In order to attain this goal, it presents the first formal analysis of a construction, dubbed the jo ‘I’ – construction, that shows an overt first person strong pronoun sitting in sentence-initial position of declarative sentences both in pro-drop and partial pro-drop languages of the Romance family. Taking Catalan as a case in point, it is shown that, prosodically, this first person strong pronoun has a particular intonation (a rising pitch accent followed by a high boundary tone). Syntactically, it corresponds not to a subject but to a (kind of) hanging topic that requires a resumptive element in the clause, while semantically it introduces a reference to the speaker who at the time of uttering the sentence is performing a subjective declaration speech act.
