Split Coordination in Otomi

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A Private History of the Preposition By in English: From Instrumental to Passive Agent

In this paper I revisit the controversia1 origin of the preposition by as marker of the demoled agent in the English passive construction. I claim that this use emerged from instrumental schemara which were once highly prominent in the history of English. I organize in a radial category the most relevant senses by conveis, both from historical times and in PDE. This analysis is intended to represent a polysemic network of meanings which show the motivated process leading to the outcome of an agency schema to express the passive agent.En este estudio he querido retomar el origen algo controvertido del uso de la preposición by en inglés como marcador del agente desfocalizado en la construcción pasiva. En el presente trabajo propongo que varios esquemas instrumentales, que en su día fueron relevantes en la historia del inglés, desempeñaron un papel fundamental en el surgimiento de un esquema de agencia para apresar el agente pasivo. Para ello, varios de los sentidos más relevantes de la preposición by, ya históricos como de uso actual, se organizan aquí formando una categoría con estructura radial. Este análisis pretende representar una red polisémica que ilustre los procesos que motivaron la emergencia del esquema de agencia

Description grammaticale, comparaison typologique et approche théorique. De l'otomi à d'autres langues otomangues

Dans le premier volume de ce mémoire, le lecteur trouvera la synthèse de mon activité scientifique depuis l’obtention de mon doctorat en 2000. Ce volume se compose de deux parties. La première partie est formée par cinq chapitres : une introduction générale à l’otomi, qui est une petite famille de langues indigènes du Mexique, et quatre chapitres consacrés à synthétiser mes recherches dans quatre domaines importants de la grammaire de ces langues. Dans la deuxième partie de ce volume, composée de trois chapitres, je fais une projection sur des sujets spécifiques de recherche dans lesquelles je prévois de concentrer mes recherches à court terme.Le deuxième volume contient un CV détaillé, une liste complète de publications et présentations à colloques, et une sélection de 28 études conçue comme étant un appui au document de synthèse du premier volume. Les différents travaux, articles et chapitres d’ouvrages, publiés entre 2004 et 2016, sont classés thématiquement. Je les considère comme étant les plus signifiants pour montrer ma contribution scientifique au domaine de la linguistique mésoaméricaine et typologique après ma thèse de Doctorat

CLEFTS IN OTOMI: EXTENDED USES OF THE COPULAR CONSTRUCTION

International audienceIn this article, I study clefts in Otomi, a small family of languages of Mexico from the Oto-Manguean stock. Clefts represent an area of Otomi syntax that has not been previously reported on. I compare the clefts we find in two very different languages: Tilapa Otomi and Northern Otomi. Clefts in Otomi are based on the copular construction and have three typologically expected elements (i.e., a copula, a focus phrase and a relative-like clause encoding the common ground), but they also have two elements that are unique to Otomi: a pronominal enclitic that cross-references the focus phrase and a focus pronoun. The former is a property of the copular construction, but the latter only occurs in clefts. Clefts in Otomi also display a great amount of surface variation in natural discourse. In the article, I also explore the diachrony of the system by studying the historical sources from the Colonial period

Measuring the Complexity of the Stem Alternation Patterns of Spanish Verbs

International audienceThis paper is about the stem alternation patterns we observe in the inflection of 3700 Spanish verbs. I treat verbs with such patterns as deviating from the inflection of basic, regular verbs. To set out the right context to understand such patterns, I first present a novel description of the inflection of Spanish regular verbs which benefits from the combination of the traditional approach in Alcoba (1999) and the more innovative stem-based approach in Boyé and Cabredo (2006). All stem alternation patterns in Spanish are morphomic in nature. I present two models of how costly the deviation is for the inflectional system in terms of morphological complexity. In one model, a Kolmogorov-style model, every pattern adds an equal measure of complexity because each one involves a longer description. In an alternative model of complexity, based on implicative relations, the complexity of the system is reduced because the distribution of the patterns is not judged to be equally costly for all of them. Such model is more desirable. However, the descriptions of the implicative relations involved, which I give in the form of notebooks of default-overrides, still need to be stored somewhere in the linguistic system, but probably at a less costly price

Multiple exponence in Oto-Manguean

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Subjects and focus in clefts: The case of Tilapa Otomi

International audienceThis paper is an exploration of the syntax-pragmatics interface in the pseudo-clefts of Tilapa Otomi, an Oto-Manguean language of Mexico. The goal of this paper is to show that the focus phrase in the clefts of Tilapa Otomi is the subject of the cleft construction, which is entirely based on the copular construction. This claim has a theoretical interest because the alignment of focus and subject has been tainted as problematic in certain approaches to clefts that want the subject to be the topic. The subject in clefts in Tilapa Otomi conveys contrastive focus, but clefts in Tilapa Otomi may also be used as thetic constructions to express broad focus, in which case it is the whole clause that is in focus

Paradigmatic structure in the tonal inflection of Amuzgo

Ce travail a bénéficié / bénéficié partiellement d'une aide de l’Etat gérée par l'Agence Nationale de la Recherche au titre du programme "Investissements d’Avenir" portant la référence ANR-10-LABX-0083. Il contribue à l’IdEx Université de Paris - ANR-18-IDEX-0001International audienceThe tonal inflection of verbs of the Amuzgo language of San Pedro Amuzgos (Oto-Manguean, Mexico) displays a great degree of allomorphy. When faced with allomorphy of this sort, the inflectional class model often reveals an internal logic in a system, but in the case of Amuzgo organizing the inflection into tonal classes results instead in a system which is seemingly chaotic, and somewhat impractical for descriptive purposes. In order to make sense of the apparent chaos, in this paper I pursue an alternative view of the data based on characterizing verbs firstly according to their paradigmatic structure with regard to tonal inflection and then characterizing tonal exponents by way of default and implicative rules of exponence which allow us to comprehend the core of this inflectional system. Having identified this core, I then show how verbs relate to each other on a continuum of morphological complexity

Relative Clauses in Tilapa Otomi

International audienceTilapa Otomi (Oto-Manguean; Oto-Pamean; Otomian) has three types of relative clauses in headed relative constructions: (i) an asyndetic relative clause (i.e., a relative clause introduced by no subordinator); (ii) a RC introduced by a determiner that I argue works as a relativizer; and (iii) a relative clause introduced by a relative pronoun recruited from WH-words. Types (i) and (ii) use a gap relativization strategy, and they have a wide functional scope in the relativization hierarchy. Type (iii) only allows for WHO and WHERE in headed relative constructions, and these constructions are remarkable for two reasons. On the one hand, the locative relative pronoun strategy based on WHERE is the only construction that is available to relativize a locative adjunct. On the other hand, the relative clause based on WHO can only relativize a human subject and a human possessor, which is typologically surprising, although also found in Zenzontepec Chatino (see Campbell, this volume). All three types of relative clauses can be used as headless relative clauses with the addition of a fourth type involving a light head. In contrast to what happens in headed relative constructions, type (iii) involves a larger set of relative pronouns with a wider functional scope

New light from Otomi

International audienceIn this paper, I argue that in some languages clausal juxtaposition can be used not only as a mechanism of semantic or pragmatic subordination, but also as as a device signaling syntactic subordination. This implies that the presence of clausal juxtaposition in the discourse of a given language does not necessarily imply the absence of the typical morphosyntactic hallmarks that characterize dependent clauses formally in other languages, especially if the relevant languages use juxtaposition as a typical clause combining device to encode semantically dependent events. In other words, I argue that it is important to keep apart the presence or absence of (i) syntactic dependency and (ii) markers of subordination (cf. Lehmann 1988). I illustrate this claim with data from a specific grammatical construction in Northern Otomi (Oto-Pamean, Oto-Manguean) from the variety of San Ildefonso Tultepec, which involves a juxtaposed dependent clause with a number of (morpho)syntactic properties commonly associated with subordination, in particular ‘cross-clausal dependencies’ as described by Gast & Diessel (this volume), and the prosodic realization of the clauses concerned in a single intonation contour