The modal particle ma 嘛: theoretical frames, analysis and interpretive perspectives

This article sets out to provide a semantic and pragmatic account of the modal particle ma 嘛, endeavouring to put into light new aspects in its function which, at present, remain widely unexplored in the literature. It presents an analysis of the particle ma by interrogating a written and a spoken corpus, showing how the semantic and the pragmatic levels are tightly interweaved in the functioning of ma: the results supported my hypothesis that the particle is plausibly a marker of interpersonal evidentiality (IE), a category set up by Tantucci (2013), used to signal a socially acknowledged piece of information, playing a fundamental role in the expression of politeness by safeguarding the interlocutors’ face; consequently, ma is always used with information that has an active or accessible status in the interlocutors’ mind and that is always pragmatically salient, independently of its position (at the end or inside the sentence), marking a Topic or a Focus. The particle performs pragmatic functions close to the ones of discourse markers since it increases the relevance of the marked information to the context, therefore also playing a contributing role in the coherence of discourse

Presentational/Existential Structures in Spoken versus Written German: Es Gibt and SEIN

This article presents a synchronic, corpus-based examination of spoken German with regard to the distribution and function of presentational/ existential es gibt NP and a range of SEIN NP structures such as da SEIN , locative SEIN , es SEIN , and zero-locative SEIN . In particular, the use of da SEIN has been neglected in previous research. While es gibt is equally frequent in the spoken and written data, SEIN structures are typical of spoken German only, with da SEIN being the most frequent. The article concentrates on clauses with indefinite NPs, while the presentation of events with da and wider da-usage in spoken German are also considered

The Syntax–Pragmatics Interface in Heritage Languages: The Use of anche (“Also”) in German Heritage Speakers of Italian

This paper deals with the use of anche (“also”) by German heritage speakers of Italian (“IHSs”). Previous research showed that anche and its German counterpart auch share many features but also display language-specific characteristics. According to previous research on bilingualism, heritage speakers show cross-linguistic influence (“CLI”) when a linguistic phenomenon is at the syntax–pragmatics interface and there is a partial overlap in the two languages at stake. Therefore, we expect the use of anche in IHSs to be influenced by CLI. By analysing data from a semi-spontaneous corpus, we investigate the production of anche in order to understand which factors shape the grammar of the IHSs. Our results indicate that a subset of IHSs uses anche in the same way as in homeland Italian. The other informants display CLI effects of different types: on the one hand, they have two positions in the clausal structure for anche dedicated to different syntactic–pragmatic contexts, as in German, and they overextend the use of anche as a modal particle. On the other hand, the intonational properties of anche are not affected by CLI

Contact as catalyst: The case for Coptic influence in the development of Arabic negation

This article discusses similar developments in the expression of negation in the histories of Egyptian-Coptic and Arabic and explores the evidence for these respective developments being related by language contact. Both Coptic and Arabic have undergone a development known as Jespersen’s Cycle (JC), whereby an original negative marker is joined by some new element to form a bipartite negative construction. The original marker then becomes optional while the new element becomes the primary negator. We present the results of a corpus study of negation in late Coptic, showing that, at the time when Arabic speakers began to settle in Egypt, the bipartite negative construction still predominated. This being the case, we argue that native speakers of Coptic learning Arabic as a second language played a key role in the genesis of the Arabic bipartite negative construction. More generally, we give reasons to doubt the a priori preference for internal explanations of syntactic change over those involving contact, as well as the assumption that the two are mutually exclusive. Rather, we suggest that not only purely internal but also (partially) contactinduced change can profitably be accounted for in terms of child language acquisition leading to a change in the grammars of individual speakers

Connective negation and negative concord in Balto-Slavic

With negative indefinite pronouns the Balto-Slavic languages all exhibit strict negative concord. In this study we investigate how negative concord functions in a context in which a connective negator (‘neither ... nor’) combines either phrases or clauses. We show that there are various types of non-concordant patterns