Indefiniteness and Specificity in Old Italian Texts

Object of this study is the marking of nominal indefiniteness in Old Italian, more precisely Old Tuscan texts, in three collections of novellas

Natural Virtual Reality User Interface to Define Assembly Sequences for Digital Human Models

Digital human models (DHMs) are virtual representations of human beings. They are used to conduct, among other things, ergonomic assessments in factory layout planning. DHM software tools are challenging in their use and thus require a high amount of training for engineers. In this paper, we present a virtual reality (VR) application that enables engineers to work with DHMs easily. Since VR systems with head-mounted displays (HMDs) are less expensive than CAVE systems, HMDs can be integrated more extensively into the product development process. Our application provides a reality-based interface and allows users to conduct an assembly task in VR and thus to manipulate the virtual scene with their real hands. These manipulations are used as input for the DHM to simulate, on that basis, human ergonomics. Therefore, we introduce a software and hardware architecture, the VATS (virtual action tracking system). This paper furthermore presents the results of a user study in which the VATS was compared to the existing WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointer) interface. The results show that the VATS system enables users to conduct tasks in a significantly faster way

What’s up, Switzerland? A corpus-based research project in a multilingual country

This paper offers some initial insights into the first large-scale and multilingual corpus of WhatsApp messages for linguistic research and the related research project “What’s up, Swit-zerland?”. Data was gathered in Switzerland in the summer of 2014 and will be made availa-ble to the academic public online at the end of the project (end of 2018). This article presents facts and figures about the corpus and the participants’ demographic data as well as an over-view of (the lack of) existing linguistic research in the field and the research intended in the SNSF-funded research project

Differential Object Marking in Corsican: Regularities and triggering factors

The paper deals with Differential Object Marking in Corsican. After a short introduction, it gives an overview of the main local triggering factors for marking direct objects in general (animacy, referentiality). It then presents the few main assumptions about Corsican DOM in the literature as well as findings of a new corpus study, based on written Corsican texts. Strong personal pronouns and proper names for human referents are consistently marked by the DOM marker à, but toponyms and metonymically used proper names are marked as well. Universal and negative quantifiers with a human denotation are also DOM-marked, whereas all other pronouns are not; thus animacy plays only a minor role in Corsican. The presence of determiners, quantifiers or numerals within nominals excludes the presence of à, irrespective of the nominals' denotation. Non-specific bare nominals are never DOM-marked, also irrespective of the nominals' denotation. The discussion then explains that the Corsican DOM is triggered much more by syntactic definiteness than animacy, a hypothesis strengthened by the most prominent morphosyntactic regularity at work in Corsican: nominals in combination with determiners and quantifiers cannot be marked by the DOM-marker à, even if they denote human beings. The complementary distribution of à and prenominal functional elements requires a further detailed syntactic analysi

Non-Maximal Definites in Romance

Mainly based on data from Old Spanish and Modern Francoprovençal, this paper discusses a hitherto underresearched use of the Romance definite article that cannot straightforwardly be explained by recurring to any of the standard analyses of semantic definiteness, i.e., maximality and/or familiarity. We show that such weakly referential definites are definites with representative object interpretations licensed by the kind-oriented mode of talk and not short weak definites. They denote inherently non-specific, semantically number neutral regular objects whose only co(n)textual relevance is their being typical instantiations of their corresponding kind. Representative object definites are shown to be favored by ‘habitual’ readings of the predicate (and text genres like recipes, treatises, narratives about what people used to do in former times, etc.). In Francoprovençal, this is the case especially in the scope of non-perfective verb tenses in prepositional or presentational complements and sometimes in direct objects. In Old Spanish, non-maximal definites often occur in the scope of non-assertive mood (imperative/subjunctive, due to the genre of recipes), while, at the same time, introducing important discourse referents. In addition, in the latter language such definites are demonstrated to be positively susceptible to priming by preceding non-maximal definites

Francoprovençal: a spatial analysis of ‘partitive articles’ and potential correlates in Swiss and Italian varieties

In this paper, we focus on partitive articles (PAs), i.e., determiners which, generally, have an indefinite interpretation, and on one of their potential correlates, i.e., invariable de, in Francoprovençal, a non-standardized, highly endangered Gallo-Romance language (cf. Zulato, Kasstan & Nagy 2018), and show the fine-grained spatial distribution of these elements in the Swiss and Aosta Valley (Italy) varieties. Presenting several maps based on fieldwork data from Valais (Switzerland) and the Aosta Valley (Italy), we demonstrate that the spatial distribution of PAs and de is more complex than reported in the literature: we complement the basic subdivision of Francoprovençal into two types, Francoprovençal A and B (cf. Kristol 2014, 2016), with a more nuanced picture, in which the morphosyntactic features of PAs play a crucial role: in Francoprovençal A, the presence of PAs depends on the syntactic context whereas, in Francoprovençal B, their presence is limited mainly to two areas, in which singular and plural PAs do not occur together (one area only has singular PAs whereas the other one only has plural PAs). We also show that there is no correlation between phonologically overt plural marking on nouns and absence of PAs; however, we found a correlation between overt sigmatic number marking on nouns and absence of PAs

Gendered Hate Speech in Swiss WhatsApp Messages

This paper provides a first manual analysis of the use of 14 gender-specific swear words in Swiss WhatsApp messages in (Swiss) German, French and Italian. We will show that gender-specific swear words only concern non-participants of the discourse when used offensively, in our data. When such items are directly addressed to the interlocutor, they are rather used ironically or even hypocoristically. Furthermore, we will show that gendered hate speech in this context is not a matter of mutual discrimination by the two sexes, but that Swiss WhatsApp users also refer to people of their own sex using gender-specific swear words