18 gener, 2022
Autors:
Teresa Cabré
Títol:
Syncretism and ordering in the evolution of Catalan pronominal clitic clustersEditorial: Borealis: An International Journal of Hispanic Linguistics, 11(1), pp. 173-190
Data de publicació: Maig de 2022
Més informacióThis paper examines the 3rd person clitic combinations found in a digital corpus of Catalan texts dating from the 11th century to the first half of the 18th (the CICA) and attempts to clarify the origin of the current clitic system of colloquial non-Valencian Catalan. Scrutiny of the database shows that the locative HI (i.e., hi or its variants í/y/hic) replaced the canonical dative clitic of 3rd person clusters in the 14th-15th centuries in both singular and plural forms, contrary to what has previously been claimed. The medieval patterns of usage that the data reveal are very close to those occurring in colloquial non-Valencian Catalan as it is spoken nowadays, as opposed to those seen in Valencian Catalan, where a locative clitic is no longer present. On the basis of the CICA’ data, we argue that the incompatibility of plural morpheme combinations in Old Catalan—among other reasons—forced the generalization of the morpheme /i/ as a dative marker, thus converting it into the true ‘elsewhere’ item of the Catalan clitic system. The similarity between medieval and modern colloquial non-Valencian Catalan clitic forms allows us to analyze them in the same way. Specifically, we suggest that there is only one clitic area for these clusters in which the HI works as a place nominal located structurally in the nominal layer.
20 juny, 2019
Autors:
Dària Serés, M.Teresa Espinal
Títol:
Russian definitional generic sentencesEditorial: Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics, 4(1). Ubiquity Press
Data de publicació: 14 de juny de 2019
Pàgines: 30 Més informació
Text completIn this article we analyse Russian definitional sentences, which are a type of generic sentence. We focus on the structure and meaning of canonical definitions, which express an identity/identification relation between two nominal concepts. In Russian such definitions are given in the form of a bi-nominative structure: NP1 – èto NP2 (‘NP1 is NP2’). We argue that definitional sentences are copular, and they are non-predicational, showing similarities to equative, identificational and specificational sentences. We also argue that (i) both NPs in definitional sentences are kind-referring, whereas èto is non-referential; (ii) a copula be maps a kind entity (the denotation of NP2) to itself (identity function); and (iii) the neuter element èto introduces a presentational function that maps the kind entity in postcopular position to a function that looks for another kind entity (the one corresponding to NP1) and composes a definitional generic sentence.
28 octubre, 2020
Autors:
Olga Borik, Joan Borràs-Comes & Dària Serés
Títol:
Preverbal (in)definites in Russian: An experimental study, chapter 3 in K. Balogh, A. Latrouite & R. D. Van Valin, Jr (eds.) Nominal anchoringEditorial: Language Science Press
Data de publicació: 2020
Més informació
Text completThis paper presents an experimental investigation aimed at determining the exact nature of the relationship between type of interpretation (definite or indefinite) and linear position (pre- or postverbal) of bare nominal subjects of intransitive predi- cates in Russian. The results of our experiment confirm that preverbal position correlates with a definite interpretation, and postverbal position with an indefinite interpretation. However, we also discovered that the acceptance rate of preverbal indefinites is reasonably high. We suggest an explanation for the appearance of indefinites in preverbal subject position in terms of lexical accessibility, which is couched in general terms of D-linking.
6 juny, 2023
Autors:
Dària Serés, Joan Borràs-Comes & M.Teresa Espinal
Títol:
Bridging Inferences and Reference Management: Evidence from an Experimental Investigation in Catalan and RussianEditorial: Language and Speech (Sage Journals)
Data de publicació: 5 juny, 2023
Més informacióThis article focuses on the choice of nominal forms in a language with articles (Catalan) in comparison to a language without articles (Russian). An experimental study (consisting of various naturalness judgment tasks) was run with speakers of these two languages which allowed to show that in bridging contexts native speakers’ preferences vary when reference is made to one single individual or to two disjoint referents. In the former case, Catalan speakers chose (in)definite NPs depending on their accessibility to contextual information that guarantees a unique interpretation (or the lack of it) for the entity referred to. Russian speakers chose bare nominals as a default form. When reference is made to two disjoint referents (as encoded by the presence of an additional altre/drugoj “other” NP), speakers prefer an optimal combination of two indefinite NPs (i.e., un NP followed by un altre NP in Catalan; odin “some/a” NP followed by drugoj NP in Russian). This study shows how speakers of the two languages manage to combine grammatical knowledge (related to the meaning of the definite and the indefinite articles and altre in Catalan; and the meaning of bare nominals, odin and drugoj in Russian) with world knowledge activation and accessibility to discourse information.
3 febrer, 2018
Autors:
Urtzi Etxeberria, Susagna Tubau, Viviane Deprez, Joan Borràs-Comes and M. Teresa Espinal
Títol:
Relating (Un)acceptability to InterpretationEditorial: Frontiers in Psychology
Col·lecció: Frontiers in Psychology #8Data de publicació: 2018
Més informació
Text completAlthough contemporary linguistic studies routinely use unacceptable sentences to determine the boundary of what falls outside the scope of grammar, investigations far more rarely take into consideration the possible interpretations of such sentences, perhaps because these interpretations are commonly prejudged as irrelevant or unreliable across speakers. In this paper we provide the results of two experiments in which participants had to make parallel acceptability and interpretation judgments of sentences presenting various types of negative dependencies in Basque and in two varieties of Spanish (Castilian Spanish and Basque Country Spanish). Our results show that acceptable sentences are uniformly assigned a single negation reading in the two languages. However, while unacceptable sentences consistently convey single negation in Basque, they are interpreted at chance in both varieties of Spanish. These results confirm that judgment data that distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable negative utterances can inform us not only about an adult’s grammar of his/her particular language but also about interesting cross-linguistic differences. We conclude that the acceptability and interpretation of (un)grammatical negative sentences can serve linguistic theory construction by helping to disentangle basic assumptions about the nature of various negative dependencies.
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