3 setembre, 2024

Autors:
Anna Gavarró & Alejandra Keidel
Títol:
Subject-verb agreement: Three experiments on CatalanEditorial: First Language (Sage Journals)
Data de publicació: Agost, 2024
Pàgines: 22 Text completThis study delves into the syntactic parsing abilities of children and infants exposed to Catalan as their first language. Focusing first on ages 3 to 6, we conducted two sentence-picture matching tasks. In experiment 1, 3 to 4-year-old children failed in identifying singular third-person subjects within null-subject sentences, although they performed above chance in all other scenarios, including plural third-person subjects and sentences with overt full DP subjects. This is reminiscent of the results of Pérez-Leroux for Spanish. In experiment 2, with the same design but involving numeral distractors, children’s performance was above chance level across all conditions from age 3 to 4. Then, in experiment 3, we moved to a younger age range with the help of eye-tracking techniques. The findings revealed that infants at 22 months had the ability to parse subject–verb agreement in sentences with third-person null subjects, and at 19 months there was evidence of parsing for third-person plural null subjects. These findings are inconsistent with the perception of children grappling with syntactic agreement computation. We argue that instances of underperformance in subject–verb agreement parsing identified in the literature often stem from task-related and pragmatic issues rather than core syntactic delay. If so, the putative asymmetry between early production of verbal inflection and late comprehension disappears; rather, the results suggest early establishment of matching operations and mastery of language-specific agreement properties before production starts.
15 maig, 1982

Autors:
M. Lluïsa Hernanz
Títol:
El infinitivo en españolEditorial: Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Servei de Publicacions
Col·lecció: Sèrie Lingüística #2Data de publicació: 1982
Pàgines: 570 Text completEl presenta trabajo constituye un intento de estudiar desde una perspectiva generativo-transformacional el infinitivo en español. No pretende ser un estudio exhaustivo: se trata de una investigación el la que se ha intentado contrastar las hipótesis con respecto a la naturaleza sintáctico-semántica de dicha forma no personal principalmente con una parcela dentro del campo de la oración compuesta: las completivas.
Títols de la col·lecció / Also in this series:
19 agost, 2005

Autors:
Montserrat Batllori, Maria-Lluïsa Hernanz, Carme Picallo, and Francesc Roca
Títol:
Grammaticalization and Parametric VariationEditorial: Oxford University Press
Data de publicació: 2005
Pàgines: 332ISBN13: 9780199272129
Més informacióIn this book the methods and theories of formal syntax are focussed on grammatical variation and change.
The book opens with a detailed introduction to the ideas and techniques deployed in the book and the phenomena and issues on which they are brought to bear. Seventeen chapters follow, divided into two parts, the first part concerned with grammaticalization and the second part with parametric variation. These show what the application of contemporary theories of syntax and language variation can reveal about syntactic change and variation and the processes of parametric change which lie behind them.
The chapters also demonstrate the value of testing and constructing synchronic theories on the basis of historical data. The analyses range over many languages and language families, including Germanic, Romance, Greek, and Chinese.
25 abril, 2022

Autors:
Nicola Lampitelli, Paolo Roseano, Francesc Torres-Tamarit
Títol:
Vowel length in Friulian verbs: a case of mora affixationEditorial: Morphology, 32(1):1-28 (Springer)
Data de publicació: Febrer del 2022
Text completThis paper deals with vowel length in Friulian, and shows that this is sometimes phonologically predictable and sometimes an instance of mora affixation in conjugation 1 verbs. Building on newly collected data on verbal morphology, we make the hypothesis that the Theme morpheme in conjugation 1 verbs in the dialect of Negrons has distinct allomorphs, among which a mora. This analysis of morphological length in Negrons Friulian shows that there is no need for a morphome-based analysis of the data. In our analysis, each morph, including length, spells out a morphosyntactic property.
19 juny, 2023

Autors:
Silke Hamann & Francesc Torres-Tamarit
Títol:
Merger in Eivissan Catalan: an acoustic analysis of the vowel systems of young native speakersEditorial: Phonetica (De Gruyter)
Data de publicació: 16 juny 2023
Més informacióThe vowel system of Catalan has been the focus of many studies, though work on the varieties spoken on the island of Eivissa (Ibiza) are scarce, with a single mention of the possible merger of the mid back vowels /o, ɔ/ (Torres Torres, Marià. 1983. Aspectes del vocalisme tònic eivissenc. Eivissa 14. 22–23). The present article provides the first acoustic analysis of the vowel inventory of 25 young native speakers of Eivissan Catalan, with a focus on the realisations of stressed /ə, ɛ/, and the back mid vowels /o, ɔ/. We employed Pillai scores (Hay, Jennifer, Paul Warren & Katie Drager. 2006. Factors influencing speech perception in the context of a merger-in-progress. Journal of Phonetics 34. 458–484) to compare the possibly merged pairs /ə, ɛ/ and /o, ɔ/ to the fully-contrasting neighbouring pairs /e, ɛ/ and /o, u/. Our results show that all participants had considerable overlap of stressed /ə/ and /ɛ/, and all but one had considerable overlap of the back mid vowels, while the fully contrastive pairs (/e, ɛ/ and /o, u/) showed almost no overlap.