8 febrer, 2024
Autors:
Xavier Villalba
Títol:
Expressive commitments: A normative approach to exclamationsEditorial: International Review of Pragmatics (Brill)
Data de publicació: 5 de febrer del 2024
Pàgines: 22 Més informacióPragmatics has made a Copernican shift from Gricean intentional approaches to normative approaches based in commitments. This has been good news for assertions, and questions of several stripes, but we still don’t know whether the commitment approach can be extended to expressive speech acts in general, and exclamations in particular. In this article, I will show that an approach to exclamations based on commitments at different levels of meaning, namely, the descriptive and expressive level, can be devised and it can offer interesting answers to old issues, like the contribution of exclamations to discourse, or their at-issue status, while raising new theoretical and empirical questions on lying and deceiving and commitment strength.
12 febrer, 2024
Autors:
M.Teresa Espinal i Giuliana Giusti
Títol:
On the property-denoting clitic ne and the determiner de/di: a comparative analysis of Catalan and ItalianEditorial: Linguistics (De Gruyter)
Data de publicació: 10 de febrer 2024
Text completThe clitic pronoun ne and the functional element de introducing nominal constituents have many nominal and prepositional functions across Romance languages. In this article, we focus on the nominal functions, singling out three different bundles of semantic features that characterize both ne and de. They can denote properties of individual entities, properties of kinds, or predicate properties. The article shows that Catalan ne and de display the three types of denotation, while Italian ne and de only display the first one. This article further supports the hypothesis that the indefinite determiner de can be overt or silent, thereby unifying de-phrases (and the Italian partitive article) with bare nouns. The analysis of de as an indefinite determiner is then extended to adjectival de, which is claimed to mark concord features on adjectives in both Catalan and Italian.
15 febrer, 2024
Autors:
M.Teresa Espinal, Cristina Real-Puidgollers i Xavier Villalba
Títol:
From a movement verb to an epistemic discourse marker. The diachronic change of Spanish 'vaya'Editorial: Linguistic Variation (John Benjamins)
Data de publicació: Febrer del 2024
Pàgines: 36 Més informacióBesides its main use as a form of the movement verb ir ‘to go’, the Spanish form vaya (lit. go) is also used as a verbal discourse marker. Here we trace this transition from a purely verbal form to a discourse marker by searching a historical corpus of documents in Spanish, which reveals the increasing use over time of vaya in exclamatives to replace a presentational construction. We focus on vaya in isolation and in combination with an indefinite DP or a bare NP. We analyze the meaning of vaya as an epistemic discourse marker, by means of which the speaker expresses a judgment, a subjective epistemic and evidential evaluation of a proposition accessible from context. We postulate that these constructions sit in a Judgment Phrase at the syntactic-pragmatic interface (Krifka 2020), a position to which vaya also moves when its meaning is that of an expressive intensifier that directly modifies over one or more (contextually salient) properties of the noun contained in the DP/NP.
8 juliol, 2019
Autors:
Wojciech Lewandowski & Şeyda Özçalışkan
Títol:
How language type influences patterns of motion expression in bilingual speakersEditorial: Second Language Research
Data de publicació: 7 d'octubre de 2019
Més informacióExpression of motion shows systematic inter-typological variability between language types, particularly with respect to manner and path components of motion: speakers of satellite-framed languages (S-language; e.g. German) frequently conflate manner and path into a single clause, while verb-framed language speakers (V-language; e.g. Spanish) typically express manner and path in separate clauses, a pattern that also becomes evident in bilinguals’ expression of motion events in each language type. However, less is known about intra-typological variability within each language type, particularly for the expression of motion events among bilingual speakers. In this study, we examine motion descriptions produced by two groups of bilinguals – with Polish as first language – learning a second language that belongs to the same (Polish–German) or a different language type (Polish–Spanish), in comparison to monolinguals in each language (German, Spanish, Polish). Our results, based on written descriptions of animated motion scenes, showed evidence for both inter-typological and intra-typological variation in the expression of motion, with greater attunement to first-language (L1) patterns in learning a language of the same type, and closer alignment to second-language (L2) patterns in learning a language that belongs to a different language type.
