bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Compiling parallel text corpora
Authors: Mihailov Mihail , Tommola Hannu
Published: March 2014

The aim of the research project running at the Department of Translation Studies of the University of Tampere is to collect a Russian-Finnish parallel corpus of fiction. The corpus will be equipped with efficient search and analysis tools. The texts of the corpus will be stored as ordinary text files. Each text will be registered in a Microsoft Access database and supplied with a description. Automated parallel concordancing is being developed for the corpus. The program will find the keywords in text A (Russian), then look for possible translation equivalents of the keywords in language B (Finnish), and then search for the portion of text B (Finnish) where most of the keywords in question can be found.
Examining the “voice of interpreting” in speech pathology
Authors: Merlini Raffaela , Favaron Roberta
Published: March 2014

This paper investigates professional interpreting practice in the setting of speech pathology through a multifaceted analysis of the transcripts of three recorded sessions involving first-generation Italian-speaking immigrants to Australia and English-speaking healthcare professionals working in Melbourne. Applying Mishler’s notion of “voice” to the context of interpreter-mediated communication and focusing on a selection of linguistic features — ranging from turn-taking and topic development to the interpreter’s choice of footing, departures from the primary speakers’ utterances, and use of prosodic resources — the discussion identifies the voice that interpreters, as third participants in the interaction, choose to adopt between the “voice of medicine” and the “voice of the lifeworld”. The study is of a qualitative nature, although a general indication of the frequency of certain features is supplied, and interpreting conduct is described rather than prescribed. The reporting and interpretation of findings are, however, informed by and reflect issues of value revolving around the concept of “humane medical care”.
Stratégies et tactiques en traduction et interprétation
Authors: Gambier Yves
Published: March 2014

Translation Studies (TS) has borrowed and still borrows concepts from different disciplines. These loan words do not yet comprise a coherent system, hence the weakness of our metalanguage. The paper deals with the concept of strategy and its various terms, as used in the literature on translation and interpreting. To what extent do the different classifications overlap? Do translation and interpreting scholars define and apply similar types of strategies? I argue that we need the notion of tactics as well as that of strategy in order to better explain what is going on in translating and interpreting. The paper compares statements and claims by different authors, with the aim of strengthening the terminology of TS.
Doctoral training programmes: Research skills for the discipline or career management skills?
Authors: Schäffner Christina
Published: March 2014

As for any academic discipline, the future of Translation Studies depends on new generations of researchers. But new researchers need to have knowledge in their discipline and also competence in research skills. This paper addresses the issue of skills training for doctoral students, mainly from the perspective of the United Kingdom. UK Research Councils expect doctoral students to be able to demonstrate research skills and techniques specific to their topic, but they also expect them to understand research funding procedures and to manage their career progression. The paper explores the extent to which such a complex set of skills can be achieved effectively in a doctoral training programme.
Construct-ing quality
Authors: Moser-Mercer Barbara
Published: March 2014

There is a large body of research devoted to exploring quality in interpreting and various authors have identified survey methodology as one of the most frequently applied to this line of research. However, this line of research lacks fundamental and principled guidance regarding survey methodology, in spite of a fairly rich literature on survey design. This paper attempts to remedy this by developing a succinct, yet comprehensive guide to questionnaire design for quality research in interpreting, covering important concepts such as validity, reliability, construct design and ethical dimensions.
Translating cultural paradigms: The role of the Revue Britannique for the first Brazilian fiction writers
Authors: Ramicelli Maria Eulália
Published: March 2014

From the 1830s on, Brazilian men of letters largely borrowed fictional and nonfictional texts from French and British magazines to publish in periodicals which they founded, directed, and/or contributed to in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The translation and publication of these texts were seen as a means of paving the way for Brazilian society towards civilization and cultural progress as Brazil was just coming out of a long period of colonization marked by severe restrictions on intellectual production. In this circulation of texts, the French magazine Revue Britannique played an important role as agent of translation of British ideas and cultural forms for Brazilians. As the French version of British narratives has strong correspondences with the first Brazilian fictional texts, this article discusses the Brazilian grounds for the selection of the Revue Britannique as a mediator of British fiction. This discussion takes into account the specific British, French, and Brazilian contexts of periodical production at the time.
Translation as representation: Fukuzawa Yukichi's representation of the "Others"
Authors: Uchiyama Akiko
Published: March 2014

The focus of this essay is Fukuzawa Yukichi’s representation, or translation, of non-Western cultures, which had a significant bearing on the Japanese reader’s perception of these cultures. He was a renowned nineteenth-century educator and intellectual whose translation work is recognized to have contributed to modernization of the country. However, Fukuzawa’s representation of these cultures, specifically his writings on China and Korea, has been under scrutiny as evidence for him being a nationalistic expansionist who contributed to instigating Japan’s aggression towards Asia. This essay examines how his act of translation is linked to the image of Fukuzawa as a proponent of Japan’s aggression and how Fukuzawa is responsible for ideologically framing Japan’s relationship with other non-Western cultures. Although Fukuzawa lived in the nineteenth century, his representation is still important for contemporary Japan.
Translating Europe: The case of Ahmed Midhat as an Ottoman agent of translation
Authors: Demircioğlu Cemal
Published: March 2014

This paper examines the concept of agency by focusing retrospectively on the diverse translation practice of Ahmed Midhat (1844–1913), who was an important Ottoman novelist, translator, publisher, journalist and the owner of the newspaper Tercüman-ı Hakikat [Interpreter of Truth]. Ahmed Midhat’s writings provide an exemplary framework for rethinking agency in terms of multiple translation-related practices in a period of Ottoman contact with European culture in the late 19th century. Through the examination of his translation activity and discourse on translation, this paper will emphasize that Ahmed Midhat was a good example of provocative agency, (i) which generated significant dynamism in Ottoman writing, publishing and journalism, (ii) and which functioned as a “mediator” in conveying Western culture to Ottoman society by performing different forms of translation practices. He was also the major provocative figure in the so-called “classics debate” of 1897 which was on translating neo-European classical works into Ottoman Turkish. Thus, in his dialogue with Europe, Ahmed Midhat appears as an agent of translation in the private sphere who made a great contribution to the shaping and modernization of Ottoman culture and literature in the late 19th century.
Cheikh Anta Diop: Translation at the service of history
Authors: Bandia Paul
Published: March 2014

This is a case study of how the knowledge and practice of translation can be put to the service of history. The study addresses in particular the efforts of a renowned African scholar, Cheikh Anta Diop, in tracing the African antecedents of the Ancient Egyptian civilization. The focus is on Cheikh Anta Diop’s mastery and translation (or deciphering) of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and Meroitic script into a modern written language script. Diop’s ultimate goal was to establish a historical and cultural connection between ancient Egypt and Black Africa, through a systematic translation of certain keywords and a comparative linguistic study of Ancient Egyptian and African languages. Diop was also interested in refuting arguments or hypotheses regarding the untranslatability of cultures, particularly between so-called primitive languages and modern, highly scientific languages. Although the debate about the link between Black Africa and Ancient Egypt had lost steam by the end of the 20th century, Diop’s work still carries weight in some scholarly circles, especially given the contemporary ideological importance of issues related to ethnicity and “identities” in disciplines such as postcolonialism and cultural studies. Whatever position one chooses to take on the debate on the subject of a ‘Black Egypt’, one cannot deny the considerable impact of Diop’s scholarship and, from a translation studies perspective, his role as an agent of translation in the writing of history.
The agency of the poets and the impact of their translations: Sur, Poesía Buenos Aires, and Diario de Poesía as aesthetic arenas for twentieth-century Argentine letters
Authors: Bradford Lisa Rose
Published: March 2014

In an attempt to locate the role of poetry translation in the development of Argentine twentieth-century literature, this essay focuses on the work done by specific groups of poet/translators associated with three major literary magazines. An overview of the relationship between national production and translation in Argentina is first presented, and then, through a brief summary of the century’s political events, certain parallelisms with literary movements are established. This is followed by an analysis of the imported expressions, which are often found to be incongruent or de/recontextualized within the local repertoire. Notions of cultural agency (Bourdieu) and cultural poetics (Greenblatt) serve to reveal both how these groups maintain a tradition of discernable discourse practices in their translations and how the imported schools of poetry generally served to legitimize the poet/translators’ own poetic practices in forming a readership for their works by enforcing modes of reception through the inclusion of selected foreign poets.
Are translations longer than source texts?: A corpus-based study of explicitation
Authors: Frankenberg-Garcia Ana
Published: March 2014

Explicitation is the process of rendering information which is only implicit in the source text explicit in the target text, and is believed to be one of the universals of translation (Blum-Kulka 1986, Olohan and Baker 2000, Øverås 1998, Séguinot 1988, Vanderauwera 1985). The present study uses corpus technology to attempt to shed some light on the complex relationship between translation, text length and explicitation. An awareness of what makes translations longer (or shorter) and more explicit than source texts can help trainee translators make more informed decisions during the translation process. This is felt to be an important component of translator education.
Translating tragedy into Kannada
Authors: Tharakeshwar V.B.
Published: March 2014

Despite an apparently rich literary heritage in nineteenth-century India, Indians and English Orientalists were bewildered that literary cultures in the ‘Indian’ context lacked what they perceived as the culmination of aesthetic complexity, the tragic form. Although the explanations they came up with might fall short of a convincing answer, the debate and the consequent translation of Greek tragedies into Indian languages so as to address this lack offer a fertile ground for investigating the issues of politics of genre and the question of colonialism and nationalism. This paper argues that translations of Greek tragedies into Kannada, the official language of Karnataka, reflected the colonial subject’s negotiation with white literary supremacy.
Being-in-translation
Authors: Kothari Rita
Published: March 2014

This paper is an attempt to understand how the convergence of different languages and religious traditions in the Sufi practice prevalent in Sindh reflects moments of hybridity, migrancy and translation. Sufism emerged in Sindh like a migrant text, constantly crossing borders, being carried over, as if in a state of translation. At the same time it refused to become a final target text and to be bound to a textuality identified with a single religion, language or territory. This state of being-in-translation helped create and sustain, for the most part, identities that were neither Hindu nor Muslim nor Sikh in an exclusivist sense.
Translating against the grain
Authors: Ridge Stanley G.M.
Published: March 2014

Translation and interpreting are always socially embedded practices. They present as practices of mediation, negotiating meaning between languages and discursive forms and cultures. Strategies involved are in a continuum from defamiliarisation to domestication: from deliberately translating so as to make the conceptual frame of the source text challenge received assumptions in the target language, to translating in ways which make the finished text indistinguishable from one originally conceived and socially framed in the target language. The choice of strategies always has a political dimension, whether conscious or unconscious, overt or hidden. This paper analyses the unusually full archival record of a nineteenth-century colonial trial as the nexus of a range of competing practices of translation and interpreting. Of particular interest is the ways in which translation practices in opposition to the rooted assumptions of the dominant culture—and so necessarily “against the grain”—serve to reveal the repressed polyphony of a nineteenth-century colonial society and open up new cultural and interactional possibilities.
4. A discourse of danger and loss
Authors: Kent Stephanie Jo
Published: March 2014

Community and conference interpreters are concerned by misunderstanding and for the preservation of linguistic diversity. Rather than emphasizing differences in context or mode, this chapter seeks to deepen parallels and similarities across the spectrum of professional simultaneous interpretation by describing a discourse of simultaneous interpreters within “the largest professional interpreting community in the world” (Interpreter #2). The multilingual and democratic institution of the European Parliament (EP) provides a unique venue to explore shared responsibility between interpreters and interlocutors. As policy makers who regularly use interpreters, the effectiveness of interpreted communication in the EP is of imminent interest to all participants in interpreted interaction. Because codes of ethics typically constrain interpreters’ ability to provide coherent feedback to the interlocutors with whom we work; this paper summarizes one specific and situated interpreter concern. A contrast between the ritual and transmission views for conceptualizing the purpose of communication is used to illuminate the struggle in Interpreting Studies to clearly distinguish linguistic meaning from socially-emergent meaningfulness.
6. Interpreter ethics versus customary law
Authors: Cooke Michael S.
Published: March 2014

This is is an exploration of the tensions between interpreting ethics and customary law distilled from interviews with interpreters in Aboriginal languages as part of research commissioned by the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia (2006). While accuracy, impartiality and confidentiality are key principles in interpreting ethics, it was found that for Australian Indigenous interpreters each of these principles may be seriously compromised in practice by rules of customary law. Suggested strategies for resolving potential conflict between interpreting ethics and customary law include: Indigenous communities requiring public education about the interpreter’s role; health and legal professionals undertaking cultural awareness training; requiring use of trained and accredited interpreters; and an expanded role for interpreters to occasionally act as cultural broker.
9. Court interpreting in Basque
Authors: Gonzalez Erika , Auzmendi Lurdes
Published: March 2014

Basque is one of the official languages of the Basque Country, a region in ­Northern Spain. Within the legal system, translators and interpreters are mandatory, in order to guarantee the linguistic rights of citizens in their dealings with that system. Because of the nature of the Basque language itself and because of the delicate political situation in the Basque Country, the interpreter’s job is extremely arduous. This chapter will report on the results of an analysis of court cases compiled over the last decade. The cases were classified according to the nature of the trials and hearings in which Basque was used. The strategies developed by Basque interpreters in order to meet the quality criteria which the profession requires are also part of the analysis.
10. Community interpreting in Spain
Authors: Ortega Herráez Juan Miguel , Abril María Isabel , Martin Anne
Published: March 2014

This paper presents the results of a study aimed at determining how community interpreters in Spain perceive their work. The study involves interpreters in different settings including hospitals, social services, emergency and civil defense organisations, the security forces and the law courts. It has basically been conducted in Andalucía and in the case of the justice system it includes data gathered nationwide. The aim is to explore the interpreters’ perception of their role and specifically the limits of that role with regard to adaptation of language register, cultural explanations, expansion and omission of information, the relation with clients, and specialized terminology, amongst other aspects. As in previous studies by the GRETI research group, the methodology is questionnaire-based and has also resorted to a structured interview. The results show that in terms of professionalisation there are certain differences between the law courts (where interpreting is explicitly legally provided for), and other settings. However, in both instances interpreters seem to shape their role according to intuition, and the majority would seem to go beyond the function that most codes of ethics stipulate. Moreover, the results reveal a total lack of knowledge regarding interpreting as a specialized professional activity.
12. Quality in healthcare interpreter training
Authors: Merlini Raffaela , Favaron Roberta
Published: March 2014

This paper presents an interpreter training program recently implemented at an Italo-American healthcare facility and illustrates how the notion of “norm”, as developed within Descriptive Translation Studies, successfully shifted the trainees’ attention away from externally imposed instructions onto internally generated behavioural patterns. The process of critical rethinking was carried out through guided self-assessment of both authentic and simulated interpreting performances, based on transcript analysis. Exemplification is provided here by the use of first vs. third person. Given the highly specific context of the medical institution in question, the experience described in this study is significant only insofar as it indicates how to make rigid and undifferentiated rules superfluous while, at the same time, assuring quality services and enhancing the professionalisation of healthcare interpreting.
13. What can interpreters learn from discourse studies?
Authors: Tebble Helen
Published: March 2014

The literature on discourse studies is vast yet the field of community interpreting has been fairly slow in making good use of it. This chapter briefly outlines three approaches to discourse analysis and emphasizes the sociolinguistic importance of the speech event. Implications of some of the findings from discourse studies of medical interpreting using the social semiotic approach (systemic functional linguistics) are discussed. They are: the generic structure of the interpreted medical consultation; interpreting everything that is said including organisational discourse markers and feedback to the patient; understanding the physician’s checking strategies; and the role of cohesion in the interpreted exchange. All are relevant for high quality curriculum design and teaching of community interpreting courses; and high quality professional practice.
15. Research ethics, interpreters and biomedical research
Authors: Kaufert Patricia , Kaufert Joseph M. , LaBine Lisa
Published: March 2014

This paper is based on a project with the title Centering the Human Subject in Health Research: The Meaning and Experience of Research Participation. This paper looks at research interpreters and research workers who are influenced by both professional and ethical codes and broader research policies which govern the ethical conduct of clinical and community-based research. It is based on a review of the research ethics literature and a series of semi-structured in-depth interviews with fourteen key informants including researchers, interpreters and members of Research Ethics Boards (REBs). These interviews were completed with individuals with direct experience working across language barriers, sometimes as interpreters and sometimes as researchers; it is these interviews that provide the framework for this paper. It asks two main questions: (1) What are the differences and similarities between interpreters working in research and medical interpreters; and (2) How do the codes and policies governing research ethics compare with the professional codes of ethical conduct applied to interpreters.  To answer the first question we revisit the three models of the medical interpreter: the interpreter as conduit, the interpreter as cultural broker, and the community embedded interpreter (Avery, 2001). We provide a brief description of each model and discuss the roles of interpreters, focusing on language and relationships. We also examine the implications of language barriers for research ethics, focusing on informed consent and the technical and ethical challenges of translating consent forms from one language to another. We then compare the professional codes of ethical conduct developed for medical interpreters by their own profession with the rules and regulations issued by government policy and research funding agencies and implemented by Research Ethics Boards. Lastly, we look at the question of community consent and at the roles played by some interpreters in speaking “for” a researcher and a research project.
1. Asymmetry in English multi-verb sequences: A corpus-based approach
Authors: Newman John , Rice Sally
Published: March 2014

The English V and V construction provides an ideal opportunity to study asymmetry in the properties of the verbs which enter into each of the two verb slots of this construction. This paper explores the asymmetry evident in this construction by utilizing two corpora of spoken and written New Zealand English (the Wellington Written Corpus and the Wellington Spoken Corpus). The most striking asymmetry which emerges from the corpus data is the dominance of motion verbs and change of position verbs as V1 and their absence in V2. The V2 position shows a preference for verbs referring to activities involving a stationary position. The corpus leads us, therefore, to recognize move (in order) to do as the primary meaning associated with the V and V construction. While speakers of English may sense that this meaning is commonly associated with the V and V construction, only a corpus-based study such as this one is able to quantify the degree to which this meaning is, in fact, present in this construction. The paper also considers the nature of the semantic integration associated with the construction. Examples such as go and tell andgo and visit, though superficially similar, illustrate different kinds of semantic integration. Coordinated verbs, in general, present a typical grammaticalizing context, exemplified by the try and V construction in English, as well as examples such as go and prove me wrong typical of spoken language.
6. Notional asymmetry in syntactic symmetry: Connective and accessibility marker interactions
Authors: Izutsu Katsunobu , Izutsu Mitsuko Narita
Published: March 2014

The present paper argues that the distinction between symmetric- and asymmetric-event descriptions determines the pronominal reference in the conjoined structure “S1. discourse connective + S2.” with a pronoun in the S2. Symmetric-event descriptions presuppose an entity which does two things or to which two things are done. Asymmetric-event descriptions evoke an expectation that certain events/states will follow the event/state coded in S1. In asymmetric-event descriptions, the high-accessibility marker refers to the entity that lies inside the expectation, while the low-accessibility marker refers to the entity outside the expectation. We further show that the same phenomena with a different type of discourse connectives (Japanese suruto and Korean geureoja) can also be fully dealt with in the proposed account.
8. Asymmetric events, subordination, and grammatical categories
Authors: Cristofaro Sonia
Published: March 2014

The notion of asymmetric events plays a central role in many theories of subordination. Subordination has been associated with various types of event asymmetry, such as foreground-background, figure-ground, asserted vs. nonasserted information, and presence vs. absence of an autonomous cognitive profile for individual events. This paper discusses the consequences of this view for the definition of subordination as a grammatical category. It is shown that event asymmetry as such does not correspond to any consistent constructional class, either cross-linguistically or within individual languages. As a result, event asymmetry should be kept distinct from subordination as a grammatical category. Event asymmetry is a component of a number of different constructions and provides a sound basis for comparing these constructions both cross-linguistically and within individual languages. However, these constructions correspond to different grammatical categories, any of which may be arbitrarily labeled as subordination. These categories are languagespecific and construction-specific.
9. Asymmetry reversal
Authors: Lichtenberk Frank
Published: March 2014

Subordination is sometimes said to be characterized by a cognitive asymmetry between a matrix clause and its complement clause: the matrix clause is the profile determinant (Langacker 1991); the state of affairs expressed in the matrix clause but not the one expressed in the subordinate clause is (pragmatically) asserted (Cristofaro 2003).

This paper discusses a situation in Toqabaqita, an Austronesian language, where erstwhile bi-clausal structures have been restructured as mono-clausal ones. Has the original asymmetry undergone a change? And how could one tell?

There is a danger in relying exclusively on linguistic structures when dealing with cognitive asymmetry between states of affairs. There should be other kinds of evidence whether such asymmetry does or does not exist.
On the Conceptual Role of Number
Authors: Déprez Viviane
Published: March 2014

Bouchard (2002) proposes that the syntactic position of number — on N or D — affects three aspects of nominal syntax: adjective-order, nounomission and Bare Argument Nominals (BAN). This paper shows that number position incorrectly predicts these nominal properties in some languages, i.e. the French-based Creoles, and argues that better results obtain if the conceptual role of number is taken into account. Number interacts with two distinct processes in language: Quantization and Individuation. Number position matters only for languages with Number Individuation. Accordingly, not all languages that mark number primarily on D have equivalent properties and some are correctly predicted to freely allow BAN. The current paper has three parts. First Bouchard’s proposal, its empirical shortcomings, and the syntax of Haitian Creole (HC) number are discussed. Second, the conceptual role of number is outlined. Third, the author’s proposal is shown to predict the syntactic properties Bouchard noted and to remedy the shortcomings.
A Syntactic Analysis of Italian Deverbal-Nouns
Authors: Ferrari-Bridgers Franca
Published: March 2014

In this paper, I argue that in Italian de-verbal noun formation is a syntactic process due to the merger of a nominal head with a specific set of IP’s functional projections. Looking at the meaning of each de-verbal noun type and at the morphological properties of its verbal base, I determine the nature of the IP’s functional projections involved in the nominal formation. The main goal of the analysis is to show that that semantic and morphological differences across the large variety of Italian de-verbal nouns are reducible to syntactic differences.
Default Morphology in Second Language Spanish
Authors: McCarthy Corrine
Published: March 2014

Morphological variability is a persistent and systematic phenomenon whose source is the subject of current debate in second language theory. In this paper, I argue that variability is not equivalent to missing inflection, as defaults are typically incorrectly inflected for tense and person-number agreement. Data from the spontaneous production of 11 advanced and intermediate speakers of Spanish show that nonfinite defaults are rare, contrary to the expectations of the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis. Furthermore, default morphology is systematic: 3rd person acts as a default in non-3rd contexts, present-tense in past contexts, and singular in plural contexts—the reverse of these does not occur. I propose an underspecification-based theory, coupled with independently-derived markedness criteria, that predicts the morphemes that are adopted as defaults.
Early Object Omission in Child French and English
Authors: Pérez-Leroux Ana Teresa , Pirvulescu Mihaela , Roberge Yves
Published: March 2014

We examine the syntactic nature of object omissions in child language with a study comparing French and English-speaking children’s elicited production. We adopt a theoretical approach to transitivity where interactions between modules of the grammar create a rich and flexible system of null objects in French (category N or pro); whereas a language like English contains only the former. The different complexity in the input predicts acquisitional differences between the two languages. Children heard stories with an individuated object referent (What did X do with y?) and stories that did not individuate an object referent (What did X do?). Results show that French children had substantially higher rates of omissions in both illicit and optional null object contexts than either French adults or English speaking children. We propose that French children, faced with a variety of null objects in the input, retain the minimal null N, overextending it beyond adult distribution.
An Acoustic Basis for Palatal Geminate Behavior in Spanish
Authors: Baker Gary K.
Published: March 2014

This paper investigates the phonetic bases of aspects of the phonological behavior of the palatal segments (/ɲ ʎ ʝ/) of Spanish. A moraic geminate structure is assumed for these segments to account for rather exceptional distributional and prosodic effects, particularly the narrowing of the stress window apparently triggered by palatal onsets in ultimae. I conduct a series of acoustic analyses on field data to identify acoustic features that might underpin this proposed geminate structure. I focus on prepalatal vowels and, in line with recent research, examine their duration, F2 profiles, and perceptual loudness. Results show that vowels before palatals are significantly longer than those before other types of consonants (occlusives and sonorants). This is explained in coarticulatory terms: anticipatory tongue-raising in the vowels – manifest in pronounced F2 excursions – is posited to exert a lengthening effect on the vowels as speakers negotiate target values with those of the rising F2, providing a perceptual basis for the posited moraic structure of the palatals in question.
An introduction to Finnish spatial relations
Authors: Huumo Tuomas , Ojutkangas Krista
Published: March 2014

In their paper, Tuomas Huumo and Krista Ojutkangas first introduce the system of Finnish local cases in general and then discuss the main features of the system of adpositions. The Finnish system for expressing spatial relations consists of six local cases and many adpositions, the precise number of which cannot be determined since the borderline between adpositions and relator nouns is obscure. The local cases are divided into two series: the so-called internal cases and external cases. The internal cases express relations such as ‘inside’, ‘into’, ‘out of’, while the external cases express relations such as ‘at’,’to the outside of’ and ‘from the outside of’ or ‘on’, ‘onto’ and ‘off’. Thus, a pervasive feature in the case system is the expression of directionality: in both case series there is one static case (‘in’/ ‘at’/ ‘on’), one ‘to’ case and one ‘from’ case. Similar directional oppositions are expressed by many adpositions, since the adpositional stems generally bear locative case suffixes. This is possible because many Finnish adpositions typically originate from nouns; this is reflected in the fact that they still carry local case endings and take their complement in the genitive form. In their structure such adpositional phrases resemble noun phrases where the locative case-marked head is a relator noun preceded by a genitive modifier.
Person in Finnish
Authors: Helasvuo Marja-Liisa , Laitinen Lea
Published: March 2014

The paper by Marja-Liisa Helasvuo and Lea Laitinen provides an overview to person marking in Finnish. It aims to contribute to resolving some of the long-standing confusions surrounding how person has been dealt with in Finnish grammar. In Finnish, the predicate verb agrees with the subject in person (1st, 2nd and 3rd) and number (singular : plural). The verb thus shows the same person as the nominal subject, and there­fore, the nominal and the verbal person marking systems have usually not been discussed separately in Finnish linguistics (see for example Sulkala and Karja­lainen 1992, Hakulinen and Karlsson 1979). Helasvuo and Laitinen show, however, that in colloquial varieties of Finnish the coding of person is more complicated. The verbal and nominal person marking systems intersect, but not in the straightforward manner assumed in mainstream Finnish linguistics. The connections between the two form an intricate network. Helasvuo and Laitinen demonstrate that the verbal person marking is not copied from the subject pronoun in a mechanical way, nor is the personal pronoun redundant. They therefore find it useful to present the nominal and verbal person marking systems as two different paradigmatic systems. They also discuss how the two systems interrelate on the syntagmatic level.
The stability of phonological features within and across segments
Authors: Solé Maria-Josep
Published: March 2014

This paper argues that the articulatory-acoustic stability of phonological features may be affected not only by concurrent features, but also by features in adjacent segments which may coincide in time due to coarticulatory overlap. Specifically, the paper illustrates how frication may be endangered by concurrent and coarticulatory nasality. We review aerodynamic and acoustic evidence showing that fricatives tend to be impaired and become unstable with co-occurring nasalization. Then we examine the stability of fricatives when they come in contact with nasality in adjacent segments. An experiment is described where aerodynamic and acoustic data were obtained for fricative + nasal sequences at slow and fast rates. The results show that anticipatory velophrayngeal opening during the acoustic duration of the fricative vents the high oral pressure required for audible frication, thus providing support for the claim that the same physical principles disfavoring the combination of frication and nasality within a segment are at play when these features combine across segments. It is argued that the instability of frication when combined with nasalization may be at the origin of a number of phonological patterns.
Pre- and postaspirated stops in Andalusian Spanish
Authors: Torreira Francisco
Published: March 2014

In this paper, we provide instrumental evidence from an experiment and a spontaneous speech study that, in Andalusian Spanish, /s/ aspiration consistently implies postaspiration in following voiceless stops. In order to explain the occurrence of this sound pattern, we offer a gestural analysis based on the notion of the syllable as a unit of articulatory coordination. Finally, we briefly contrast the Andalusian pattern with parallel sound sequences in other languages and Spanish dialects, and raise the question of an ongoing sound change.
On the effect of (morpho)phonological complexity in the early acquisition of unstressed vowels in European Portuguese
Authors: Freitas M. João
Published: March 2014

The goal of this paper is to examine the acquisition of vowels in European Portuguese by monolingual Portuguese children. The vowel inventory in this language is affected by reduction in unstressed position, which entails allophonic (and allomorphic) variation. This study focuses on the acquisition of the unstressed [ɨ] and [ɐ] resulting from the reduction of the segments /a/, /e/ and /ɛ/. Regarding the analysis of the target system, the process that reduces /a/ to [ɐ] involves the Height node (degree of openness) while the process that reduces /ɛ, e/ to [ɨ] affects both the Height node and the V-Place node (place of articulation). Given the facts attested in the adult system, data obtained from seven children in the process of acquiring Portuguese as their native language is examined in the light of the following research questions: is the order of acquisition related to the featural architecture of segments? Are children sensitive to phonological processes in the early stages of phonological development?
Logistic regression modelling for first and second language perception data
Authors: Morrison Geoffrey-Stewart
Published: March 2014

Logistic regression analysis has, for some time, been successfully applied to L1 speech perception data, but has not been widely applied in L2 speech perception research. This chapter is a tutorial which makes use of simple data sets to introduce logistic regression analysis as applied to categorical response data from L1 and L2 speech perception experiments. Data are taken from an experiment on L1 Spanish vowel perception by Álvarez González, and experiments on L1 and L2 English vowel perception by Escudero & Boersma, and Morrison. Model fitting is demonstrated as a technique to determine which acoustic cues are attended to by listeners. Logistic regression coefficients are used to quantify how listeners use those acoustic cues, to produce graphical representations of their use of acoustic cues, and as statistics in secondary analyses used to determine whether there are significant differences in the perception of stimuli by L1 versus L2 groups of listeners.
Rhythmic typology and variation in first and second languages
Authors: White Laurence , Mattys Sven L.
Published: March 2014

This paper explores the concept of linguistic rhythm classes through a series of studies exploiting metrics designed to quantify speech rhythm. We compared the rhythm of ‘syllable-timed’ French and Spanish with that of ‘stress-timed’ Dutch and English, finding that rate-normalised metrics of vocalic interval variability (VarcoV and nPVI-V), together with a measure of the balance of vocalic and intervocalic intervals (%V), were the most discriminant between the two rhythm groups. The same metrics were also informative about the adaptation of speakers to rhythmically-similar (Dutch and English) or rhythmically-distinct (Spanish and English) second languages, and showed evidence of rhythmic gradience within accents of British English. Patterns of scores in all studies support the notion that rhythmic typology is not strictly categorical. A perceptual study found VarcoV to be the strongest predictor of the rating of a second language speaker’s accent as native or non-native.
6. Intraparadigmatic effects on the perception of voice
Authors: Ernestus Mirjam , Baayen Harald
Published: March 2014

In Dutch, all morpheme-final obstruents are voiceless in word-final position. As a consequence, the distinction between obstruents that are voiced before vowel-initial suffixes and those that are always voiceless is neutralized. This study adds to the existing evidence that the neutralization is incomplete: neutralized, alternating plosives tend to have shorter bursts than non-alternating plosives. Furthermore, in a rating study, listeners scored the alternating plosives as more voiced than the nonalternating plosives, showing sensitivity to the subtle subphonemic cues in the acoustic signal. Importantly, the participants who were presented with the complete words, instead of just the final rhymes, scored the alternating plosives as even more voiced. This shows that listeners’ perception of voice is affected by their knowledge of the obstruent’s realization in the word’s morphological paradigm. Apparently, subphonemic paradigmatic levelling is a characteristic of both production and perception. We explain the effects within an analogy-based approach.
Clitic omission, null objects or both in the acquisition of European Portuguese?
Authors: Costa João , Lobo Maria
Published: March 2014

Previous studies have established a correlation between early clitic omission and the existence of past participle agreement, explainable with a maturational constraint – the UCC. Since Portuguese doesn’t show past participle agreement, it is expected that Portuguese children will produce clitics early on. I order to find out whether this correlation holds for Portuguese, an experimental study was conducted reproducing Schaeffer’s (1997) and adapting it to particular properties of Portuguese – the availability of null objects and variability of clitic position. The results of this study suggest that Portuguese children do omit clitics, apparently contradicting previous studies. Since clitic omission lasts until later than in other languages, we hypothesize that the explanation may rely on complexity factors.
Metrical structure, tonal association and focus in French
Authors: Delais-Roussarie Elisabeth , Rialland Annie
Published: March 2014

The main purpose of this paper is to show that focus is a pivot in tune-text association, which plays a central role for the anchoring of intonational tones. This paper also presents the main characteristics of the French prosodic system. The first section provides an overview of French metrical structure. The second section introduces intonational tones and profiles. Any utterance has a "Nuclear Contour" made up of three elements (T* T* T%), where T = H or L tone. It is the ‘center’ of the intonational profile and the source of copying processes. The third section concerns focus and intonation. It shows how the Nuclear Contour is mapped from right to left from the right edge of the focus domain. A sub-section is devoted to two types of cleft sentences: i) canonical clefts, and ii) broad-focus clefts. We argue in favor of a model in which the metrical grid provides prominent points for tonal association while focus divides the text into domains with specific intonational characteristics.
On affixal scope and affix-root ordering in Italian
Authors: Di Sciullo Anna Maria
Published: March 2014

I raise the question why different sorts of affixes occupy different canonical positions in morphological expressions, and focus on Italian. I show that the semantic scope between affixes and the precedence relations between affixes and roots follow from Asymmetry Theory (Di Sciullo 2005). First, I define the properties of morphological derivations and morphological domains. Second, I provide evidence that the affixal scope, legible at LF, is derived by the operations of the morphology applying under asymmetric Agree. Finally, I show that the ordering of affixes with respect to roots, legible at PF, follows from the position of affixes in their minimal trees, given a linearization operation that applies to the units of morphological domains.
Scope economy in positive polarity: Extreme degree quantification
Authors: González-Rodríguez Raquel
Published: March 2014

This paper focuses on degree expressions, such as extremadamente‘extremely’, which cannot occur in negative sentences, thus patterning with Positive Polarity Items (PPIs). I describe the properties of these constructions and offer an analysis that accounts for their incompatibility with negation. Contrary to the standard syntactic view on polarity items, I propose that these PPIs remain in the structural position where they are merged, without checking any positive feature by movement or Agree against certain higher functional projection. Their incompatibility with negation is due to the fact that these constructions denote extreme degree quantification, affirming emphatically the degree to which a property is held. The proposed analysis explains the distribution of these PPIs in negative sentences, as well as the differences between the elements studied and other positive items, establishing a distinction between triggers of positive polarity and positive polarity items.
The acquisition of aspect in L2 Portuguese and Spanish. Exploring native / non-native performance differences
Authors: Goodin-Mayeda C. Elizabeth , Rothman Jason
Published: March 2014

This study investigates the possibility of native-like ultimate attainment by analyzing L2 knowledge of aspect as seen in the Preterit/Imperfect contrast of highly successful English L2 learners of Portuguese and Spanish. Building on innovative work by Montrul & Slabakova (2003) and Slabakova & Montrul (2003), we test knowledge of semantic entailments associated with the acquisition of [+/- perfective] features checked in higher AspP. Additionally, we investigate the possibility of a specific pattern of associated target-deviant L2 performance. We hypothesize that L2 performance can be affected by explicit positive evidence (pedagogical rules) despite otherwise demonstrable native-like competence. Indeed, the data reveal a pattern of target-deviant performance noted only in three specific contexts, all of which can be linked to traditional instruction: (a) with particular stative verbs not used in the Preterit (b) when preceded by certain adverbial phrases (e.g.,siempre) and (c) so-called semantic shifting verbs (e.g., sabía vs. supe).
Cartography of postverbal subjects in Spanish and Catalan
Authors: Ordóñez Francisco
Published: March 2014

Subjects in post-verbal position in Romance have been assumed to be in an in situ Spec VP position in many recent analyses in their V S O order (Motapayane1995, Ordóñez 1998, Costa 2000, Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 2001, Cardinaletti 2001). In this paper, we will give arguments for an alternative view in which post-verbal subjects in this order are moved to at least to an Spec positions above VP, which I will call SubjP, and below the final landing site of verbs in TP. Arguments in favor of this characterization come from the comparison of Catalan and Spanish, which differ minimally in patterns of subject inversion with respect to quantifiers, adverbs and restructuring contexts. This work presents new evidence that a richer inflectional structure in the postverbal field leads to a more parsimonious account for parametric difference in patterns of subject distribution in closely related languages.