The historical reality of biolinguistic diversity

Goals. Arguing that the historical application of the biolinguistic model can complement molecular antrhopology to model out a ‘grammatical anthropology’ as a new discipline at the crossroads of cognitive, biological and historical sciences

Incontro di Grammatica Generativa 39 - [Organizzazione]

L'Incontro di Grammatica Generativa (IGG) è un congresso internazionale che si svolge su base annuale in una sede universitaria italiana e che riunisce gli studiosi che si occupano di grammatica formale in Italia e in Europa. Prevede un gruppo di relazioni selezionate da un comitato anonimo di revisori, e alcune relazioni su invito. I relatori invitati all'incontro di Modena-Reggio Emilia sono: Melita Stavrou (Thessaloniki), Theresa Biberauer (Cambridge), Hilda Koopman (UCLA), Maria Rita Manzini (Firenze), Guido Barbujani (Ferrara), Giuseppe Longobardi (Trieste). Durante l'incontro si sono inoltre svolti 3 workshop tematici su sintassi dialettale, acquisizione del linguaggio, cambiamento linguistico

Reference and Definiteness

It has become increasingly clear since Longobardi (1994, 2003) that certain languages (e.g.Romance, but also Classical and Modern Greek, Bulgarian, Arabic (Fassi-Fehri 2003)…;henceforth 'strong D' languages) exhibit overt association of the referential content of nouns(proper names and referential generics) with D (either by overt N-to-D raising, e.g. of propernames, or by an arguably expletive article), others do not (e.g. English, but also probably therest of Germanic, Celtic…; 'weak D' languages). From a number of scattered observation itcan be suspected that a roughly analogous phenomenon arises with respect to anothersemantic property of DPs, namely definiteness: in certain constructions of some languages,but crucially not in the closely comparable constructions of others, the definite reading ofnominal arguments seems to depend on the overt association of some morphosyntacticmaterial with D (fronting to D° or SpecD)

Balkan Romance and Southern Italo-Romance: Differential Object Marking and Its Variation

The main goal of this article is to examine in detail an area of the grammar where standard Romanian, a Balkan Sprachbund language of the Romance phylum, and the Romance dialects of Southern Italy (here we used the dialect of Ragusa, in South-East Sicily) appear to converge, namely differential object marking (DOM). When needed, additional observations from non-Romance Balkan languages were also taken into account. Romanian and Ragusa use a prepositional strategy for differential marking, in a conjunctive system of semantic specifications, of which one is normally humanness/animacy. However, despite these unifying traits, this paper also focuses on important loci of divergence, some of which have generally been ignored in the previous literature. For example, Ragusa does not easily permit clitic doubling and shows differences in terms of binding possibilities and positions of direct objects, two traits that set it aside from both Romanian and non-Romance Balkan languages; additionally, as opposed to Romanian, its prepositional DOM strategy cannot override humanness/animacy. The comparative perspective we adopt allow us to obtain an in-depth picture of differential marking in the Balkan and Romance languages

The underlying unity of Reference and Quantification

The mapping of nominal arguments to semantic interpretation exhibits a certain amount ofintriguing empirical variation across languages; it has become increasingly clear, at least sinceLongobardi (1994), that a good deal of such polymorphy depends on a major parametricdivide, separating two types of languages: certain languages (e.g. Romance, but also Classicaland Modern Greek, Bulgarian, Arabic (Fassi-Fehri 2003)…; henceforth 'strong D' languages)exhibit overt association of nouns functioning as referential constants (proper names andreferential generics) with D (either by overt N-to-D raising, e.g. of proper names, or by anarguably expletive article), others do not (e.g. English, but also probably the rest of Germanic,Celtic…; 'weak D' languages)

Comparing patterns of adjectival modification in Greek: a diachronic approach

This paper investigates the distribution of adjectives in Ancient Greek, with the aim of comparing it to Standard Modern Greek. We use a selection of texts from Classical Attic and New Testament koiné. In Ancient Greek, like in Standard Modern Greek, all types of adjectives are allowed in prenominal position, and there is no evidence of movement of the noun over prenominal adjectives. As far as postnominal adjectives are concerned, in Classical and New Testament Greek they are systematically articulated in definite DPs, in a structure similar to the so-called polydefinite construction, that is typical of Standard Modern Greek. There is little evidence, in the texts explored, of structures of the type Article Adjective Article Noun, which are instead very common in Standard Modern Greek, and have been assumed to follow from fronting of the constituent [Article+Adjective] from a postnominal position. Finally, in Ancient Greek, there are cases of postnominal articulated non-adjectival modifiers of the noun, which are impossible in Standard Modern Greek. The paper explores these patterns, with particular attention to the mechanisms responsible for polydefiniteness

Number Morphology and Bare Nouns in Some Romance Dialects of Italy

This paper explores aspects of microvariation concerning the morphological realization of the feature Number within nominal structures in a selected subset of Romance dialects of Italy. First, the different strategies adopted in the dialects of the dataset for the realization of number alternations on various nominal categories (nouns/adjectives, articles, demonstratives, and possessives) are presented. Then, the relation between the latter and the distribution of “bare” argument nominals (i.e., of nominal structures which, in argument position, occur without any lexicalized determiner) is explored. It will be observed that the distribution of bare arguments in the dialects of the dataset is consistent with the hypotheses made in the literature, which suggest that there is a correlation between the realization of number alternations on nouns and the possibility for “null” (i.e., unpronounced) determiners to be licensed

Historical Bio-Linguistics : A biostatistic approach to the study of linguistic phylogenies and the correlation of genetic, linguistic and geographical data.

Demographic events often leave traces in languages and genes: this prompted Darwin’s prediction that the evolutionary tree of human populations would provide the best possible phylogeny of language relationships. We tested Darwin’s expectation through long-distance genome-language comparisons across Eurasia, relying on independently assessed quantitative tools on both sides. To do so, we had to resort to a linguistic method able to compare across different families, based on abstract syntactic characters, which proved more apt for long-term historical reconstruction than phonemic ones

Learning implicational models of universal grammar parameters

The use of parameters in the description of natural language syntax has to balance between the need to discriminate among (sometimes subtly different) languages, which can be seen as a cross-linguistic version of Chomsky's descriptive adequacy (Chomsky, 1964), and the complexity of the acquisition task that a large number of parameters would imply, which is a problem for explanatory adequacy. Here we first present a novel approach in which machine learning is used to detect hidden dependencies in a table of parameters. The result is a dependency graph in which some of the parameters can be fully predicted from others. These findings can be then subjected to linguistic analysis, which may either refute them by providing typological counter-examples of languages not included in the original dataset, dismiss them on theoretical grounds, or uphold them as tentative empirical laws worth of further study. Machine learning is also used to explore the full sets of parameters that are sufficient to distinguish one historically established language family from others. These results provide a new type of empirical evidence about the historical adequacy of parameter theories