Margaza & Gavarró (2020). Null/overt subject alternations in L2 Spanish and L2 Greek

Autors:

Panagiota Margaza & Anna Gavarró

Títol:

Null/overt subject alternations in L2 Spanish and L2 Greek

Editorial: Glossa: a journal of general linguistics
Data de publicació: Juny de 2020

Text complet

This study aims at exploring the omission/expression of subjects in L2 Spanish and L2 Greek. The distribution of subjects is examined in the context of the Interface Hypothesis (IH), which locates the difficulty of acquisition at the syntax-pragmatics interface (Sorace & Filiaci 2006; Tsimpli & Sorace 2006) and the language combination examined is a case in point as both languages share the null subject property and yet the IH predicts delay in L2 acquisition. We also examine the predictions of Lozano’s (2016) Pragmatic Principles Violation Hypothesis. We designed two multiple-choice tasks, one in Spanish and one in Greek, testing subjects in various pragmatic contexts. The tasks were administered to L2 intermediate and advanced learners and native speakers of Spanish and Greek. The results obtained indicate that the L2 learners were able to select the felicitous type of subjects in the appropriate contexts, although they did not always achieve native-like patterns. An asymmetry arose between L2 Greek and L2 Spanish, as L2 Greek was native-like, an asymmetry that failed to be predicted by any of the hypotheses entertained. Even though the involvement of the interface levels might have affected L2 performance, the syntax-pragmatics interface was not consistently having a detrimental effect on the results. Furthermore, our results with the control group indicated that the subject distribution in adult Greek is more nuanced than reported in the literature, especially in unambiguous referent-shift contexts.

Brunetti, Mayol & Villalba (2020). Bridging Strength, Monotonicity, and Word Order Choices in Catalan

Autors:

Lisa Brunetti, Laia Mayol & Xavier Villalba

Títol:

Bridging Strength, Monotonicity, and Word Order Choices in Catalan

Editorial: Discourse Processes
Data de publicació: Juny de 2020

Més informació

Three experimental studies are presented testing the choice of a left or a right dislocation in Catalan, depending on the bridging relation between the dislocate and its antecedent. We make the hypothesis that the stronger the anaphoric link between the dislocate and its antecedent, the more appropriate a right dislocation is, whereas the opposite is true for left dislocation. The results of two acceptability judgment experiments partially support our hypothesis: Ratings with right dislocation decrease proportionally to the strength of the anaphoric link; however, it is ratings of canonical sentences (without dislocation at all), rather than of left dislocation, that display the opposite direction. For left dislocation, the picture is more complex and reflects the pragmatic function of this construction as a topic shifter or marker of contrast. A third experiment tests the monotonicity hypothesis, according to which a left dislocation is chosen when the anaphoric relation with the antecedent is either downward monotonic or nonmonotonic, whereas a right dislocation is preferred with an upward monotonic relation. The results partially support such a hypothesis but also further support the importance of taking the pragmatic function of left dislocation into account to explain its choice in discourse by speakers.

Trotzke (2020). Constructions in minimalism: A functional perspective on cyclicity

Autors:

Andreas Trotzke

Títol:

Constructions in minimalism: A functional perspective on cyclicity

Editorial: Frontiers in Psychology
Col·lecció:
Data de publicació: 2020

Més informació

This paper presents a minimalist perspective on syntactic cyclicity that is compatible with fundamental ideas in construction-grammar approaches. In particular, I outline an approach to syntactic structure building where units of potentially any phrasal size can be atomic items in the syntactic derivation, showing that the opposition between words and phrases in minimalism is as artificial as in many construction-grammar approaches. Based on this new perspective on structure building, I focus on the empirical domain of subextraction patterns out of complex subjects, adjuncts, and complements, and I demonstrate that the acceptability patterns in this domain can be explained by a functional approach to syntactic cyclicity: Unacceptable patterns are ruled out not for configurational (and hence syntactic) reasons, but rather they systematically follow from infelicitous interpretations at the syntax-discourse interface. This raises the question of whether syntactic cyclicity is (at least in part) motivated by performance constraints, which I consider another area for fruitful interaction between construction-grammar and usage-based accounts on the one hand and minimalism on the other hand.


Títols de la col·lecció / Also in this series:

Trotzke & Villalba (2020). Exclamatives as responses at the syntax-pragmatics interface

Autors:

Andreas Trotzke & Xavier Villalba

Títol:

Exclamatives as responses at the syntax-pragmatics interface

Editorial: Journal of Pragmatics, 168 (pp. 139–171)
Data de publicació: Octubre del 2020

Més informació
Text complet


In this paper, we explore exclamatives when used as responses in a discourse. Our proposal is based on the following pragmatic observation: so-called that-exclamatives in both Germanic and Romance languages are preferred as responses to polar questions, while wh-exclamatives are restricted to a response use in non-polar contexts. We establish this data pattern empirically by means of two judgment studies, and we then provide a detailed theoretical account for these challenging new data points. In particular, we show that the differences between the response uses of wh-exclamatives and that-exclamatives can be explained on syntactic grounds, analogous to ‘the syntax of answers’ proposed in recent syntactic work by Holmberg (2013, 2015) at the syntax-pragmatics interface. In sum, we provide a pragmatically more refined view on exclamatives and their use in a discourse, suggesting new empirical distinctions at the syntax-pragmatics interface.

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

Més informació

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.