Pleonastic tet in the Lapscheure dialect

The paper explores the semantic value and the distributional and formal properties of the element tet in West Flemish and assesses its main properties in both aspects. It is also shown that a proper analysis of tet shed further light on other apparently unrelated properties of German Languages, such as the properties of the Vorfeld and the position of the subject. After revising the possibilities of analysing this element as a contrastive, evaluative, or Focus marker of the CP domain, the authors reject this possibility by taking into consideration the fact that it is dependent on facts related to Case licensing of the subject, and propose to merge it in a FP projection belonging to the TP domain. Furthermore, the distribution of tet can be used as a milestone that permits new insights onto the distribution of lexical material in the Germanic Vorfeld, specifically on the controversial issue about the movement of the subject out of TP, which the authors argue has not to move in all cases

English Index

No abstract

On some effects of Utterance Finality, with special consideration of South Asian languages

Pitch lowering, avoidance of prosodic prominence, and segmental reductions in utterance-final position are well known crosslinguistic tendencies. In verb-final languages the prosodic effects of Utterance Finality intersect with an independent, crosslinguistic tendency of verbs to receive relatively weak prominence within larger prosodic domains. As a consequence, verbs in SOV languages are special targets for the effects of Utterance Finality. After providing crosslinguistic illustrations of these effects I focus on a number of phenomena in South Asian languages which can be explained in terms of the intersection between Utterance Finality and Verb Finality. These include the relative order of negation and verb and the apparent optionality of ‘be’-deletion in Hindi, the difference in verb accentuation between main and dependent clauses in Vedic, and (possibly) the fact that Kashmiri ki/zi-clauses, unlike relative clauses, have V2, rather than verb-final order

Pronominal subjects in the English of Arabic, Finnish and French speakers

Ph. D. ThesisPrevious studies designed to investigate whether null-subject parameter settings transfer in second-language acquisition (L2A/SLA) have produced inconclusive, differing, and even conflicting results. While some researchers claim that the first language (L1) value of the parameter does not transfer into L2A, others argue that it does; furthermore, they disagree about whether its L1 value could be reset to a value appropriate to the second language (L2) (i.e., White, 1985; Hilles, 1986; Phinney, 1987; Tsimpli and Roussou, 1991; Al-Kasey and Pérez-Leroux, 1998; Liceras and Díaz, 1999; LaFond, 2001; Sauter, 2002; Judy, 2011; Orfitelli and Grüter, 2013). The aim of this study is to address these issues in a more accurate way by paying attention to a number of factors both internal and external to learners that have been overlooked in previous studies, resulting in conflicting conclusions about null-subject transfer and parameter resetting in L2A. This study investigates the acquisition of the obligatory overt subject pronouns in English by three groups of learners whose L1s belongs to three distinct language types – namely, non-null subject languages (French), partial-null subject languages (Finnish), and consistent-null subject languages (Arabic). The participants in each group were divided into three subgroups – lower intermediate, upper-intermediate, and advanced – on the basis of their scores on the proficiency test in order to examine how the investigated L2 grammar changes at the different developmental stages in relation to the learners’ different native languages. The data were collected from 487 participants by means of a grammaticality judgement (GJ) task and a translation task. The findings from the GJ task show evidence that all learners, regardless of linguistic background, start off with pro-drop and then transfer their L1 parameter setting at the intermediate and late stages of L2A, whereas the findings from the translation task suggest that the L1 setting of the null subject parameter transfers in L2A. However, the results show that there are structural, developmental, and situational/contextual (realised as task-type) constraints on when, where, and to what extent pronominal subjects can be null. The results indicate that learners persistently accept referential embedded null subjects in the GJ task beyond the stage of L2 development when they have established the requirement for overt subjects in their production. Moreover, the results provide evidence that all participants, as proficiency subgroups, regardless of their L1 backgrounds, treated null subjects in the two types of experimental sentences differently; they accepted significantly fewer null subjects in complement clauses than in adverbial clauses. However, only the French participants converged on the target grammar in all respects; the Arabic and the Finnish participants continued to perform non-target-like like in their judgement of null subjects, if only in adverbial clauses. Group results indicating that L2 learners’ performance varies from task to task and from structure to structure suggest that null subject parameter settings cannot be reset in L2A. These findings, which show that there are structural and situational or contextual constraints on when and where pronominal subjects can be null, suggest that L2 learners rely on discourse licensing of null subjects. In other words, the results indicate that argument omission vs. overt expression in L2 depends on the referent’s discourse status, which can be defined in terms of a range of discourse and pragmatic notions. The results also raise and leave unanswered several questions that require further investigation.Taibah Universit

Paradigmatic and extraparadigmatic morphology in the mental lexicon: Experimental evidence for a dissociation

The present study discusses psycholinguistic evidence for a difference between paradigmatic and extraparadigmatic morphology by investigating the processing of Finnish inflected and cliticized words. The data are derived from three sources of Finnish: from single-word reading performance in an agrammatic deep dyslectic speaker, as well as from visual lexical decision and wordness/learnability ratings of cliticized vs. inflected items by normal Finnish speakers. The agrammatic speaker showed awareness of the suffixes in multimorphemic words, including clitics, since he attempted to fill in this slot with morphological material. However, he never produced a clitic — either as the correct response or as an error — in any morphological configuration (simplex, derived, inflected, compound). Moreover, he produced more nominative singular errors for case-inflected nouns than he did for the cliticized words, a pattern that is expected if case-inflected forms were closely associated with their lexical heads, i.e., if they were paradigmatic and cliticized words were not. Furthermore, a visual lexical decision task with normal speakers of Finnish, showed an additional processing cost (longer latencies and more errors on cliticized than on case-inflected noun forms). Finally, a rating task indicated no difference in relative wordness between these two types of words. However, the same cliticized words were judged harder to learn as L2 items than the inflected words, most probably due to their conceptual/semantic properties, in other words due to their lack of word-level translation equivalents in SAVE languages. Taken together, the present results suggest that the distinction between paradigmatic and extraparadigmatic morphology is psychologically real

The Representation of Third Person and Its Consequences for Person-Case Effects

In modeling the effects of the Person-Case Constraint (PCC), a common claim is that 3rd person “is not a person”. However, while this claim does work in the syntax, it creates problems in the morphology. For example, characterizing the well-known “spurious se effect” in Spanish simply cannot be done without reference to 3rd person. Inspired by alternatives to underspecification that have emerged in phonology (e.g., Calabrese, 1995), a revised featural system is proposed, whereby syntactic agreement may be relativized to certain values of a feature, in particular, the contrastive and marked values. The range of variation in PCC effects is shown to emerge as a consequence of the parametric options allowed on a Probing head, whereas the representation of person remains constant across modules of the grammar and across languages.Linguistic

Etymology of the Udmurt enimitive uk and grammaticalization of discourse particles

This paper deals with the etymology of the Udmurt enimitive marker uk. Contrary to the existing etymologies, which claim uk to be either a Chuvash or a Tatar borrowing, I claim that it was in fact grammaticalized from a tag question construction, which involves a negative verb and a question particle. This is supported by early written sources and dialectal data. Casting the net in a diachronically and geographically diverse variety of sources allows one to find traces of earlier grammaticalization stages that support my claim. Given that there are conceptually very similar enimitive constructions in the Samoyedic languages, negative interrogatives may prove to be an important grammaticalization source for the enimitive markers. Apart from uk, I examine several other cognate particles, which apparently were formed in a similar way

Syntactic architecture and its consequences III

This volume collects novel contributions to comparative generative linguistics that “rethink” existing approaches to an extensive range of phenomena, domains, and architectural questions in linguistic theory. At the heart of the contributions is the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy which has long animated generative linguistics and which continues to grow thanks to the increasing amount and diversity of data available to us. The chapters develop novel insights into a number of core syntactic phenomena, such as the structure of and variation in diathesis, alignment types, case and agreement splits, and the syntax of null elements. Many of these contributions show the influence of research by Ian Roberts and collaborators and they provide varied perspectives on current research in synchronic and diachronic comparative syntax. This book is complemented by volume I available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/275 and volume II available at https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/276