bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Aspects of variation in educated Nigerian Pidgin
Authors: Deuber Dagmar
Published: March 2014

This paper presents quantitative analyses of variation in selected areas of the grammar of Nigerian Pidgin as spoken by educated speakers (who also have a good command of English, the lexifier): tense/aspect marking, copula forms and verbal negation. The background is the theory going back to work by DeCamp and Bickerton in the 1970s on Jamaica and Guyana, respectively, that a linguistic continuum inevitably develops in certain situations of contact between a pidgin/creole and its lexifier. The data presented here, however, do not indicate the existence of a pidgin-to-English continuum in Nigeria. This may be taken as evidence that the Caribbean creole continua have arisen due to specific sociohistorical circumstances and that such continua are not bound to develop elsewhere.
The late transfer of serial verb constructions as stylistic variants in Saramaccan creole
Authors: Kramer Marvin
Published: March 2014

Verb serialization in Saramaccan is a transferred feature from Fongbe, where in both languages there are non-serial alternatives to serial verb constructions (SVCs).McWhorter (2002) argues that only features minimally necessary to language would transfer during creole genesis, isomorphically precluding stylistic variants. In a pidgin stage with speakers of English and Fongbe there would be no need for SVCs, as both languages have the same basic word order. But in modern Saramaccan and the historical texts there are non-serial constructions with SVCs as stylistic variants, not an unexpected aspect of creole expansion. Verb serialization would then have transferred during creole expansion, when the language was primarily a medium for community solidarity by Africans, and would represent the transfer of a non-essential feature.
12. Reading to assess in professional life
Authors: Neutelings Rob
Published: March 2014

A very important reading task in professional life is “reading to assess”: professionals have to form judgements on the basis of documents. Hitherto, the research into reading-to-assess tasks has been very fragmentary and incoherent. To develop a comprehensive theory of reading to assess, I present descriptions of 20 reading-to-assess processes of Dutch parliamentarians reading policy documents. All subjects read their document while thinking aloud. The thinking-aloud comments and the observations of their behavior resulted in different styles for the three aspects that constitute reading to assess: information selection, information processing and reading goals. These styles make it possible to characterize individual reading-to-assess processes, and to distinguish reading-to-assess from other reading tasks in the realization qualities of the task.
The rhetoric of 'dialogue' in metadiscourse: Possibility/impossibility arguments and critical events
Authors: Craig Robert T.
Published: March 2014

Regarding ‘dialogue’ as a normative rather than a purely descriptive concept, this study describes the rhetoric of practical arguments about the possibility or impossibility of dialogue in a corpus of discourse samples primarily drawn from the Internet. Political, social, and personal domains of dialogue are distinguished and associated respectively with realist, moral, and experiential discourses that intermix in practical argumentation. Arguments for or against the possibility of dialogue may appeal to objective conditions (convergence of interests or beliefs, relatively equal power, a just and supportive sociopolitical order) as well as to morally accountable attitudes and actions (respect, trust, and reaching out versus hatred, dogmatism, dishonesty, and violence). Arguments may also appeal to critical events that interrupt routine patterns of thought and communication and are said to open a potential for dialogue that may or may not be realized in practice. Implications for normative theories of dialogue and rhetoric are considered.
What is the role of arguments? Fundamental human rights in the age of spin
Authors: Teubert Wolfgang
Published: March 2014

In our Western democracies, parliamentary debates are seen less as a collaborative effort to achieve a shareable interpretation of an issue than a fight between contestants to be arbitrated by the media as the sole interface between text producers and text consumers. Arguments are no longer designed to convince or persuade. Rather the role of argumentation is twofold. By constant repetition, arguments construct ideological identity. But reformulations, permutations and recombinations of arguments can also give rise to gradual innovation. My illustration is the House of Commons debate of the Lisbon Treaty’s Charter of Fundamental Rights. That the argumentation we find in this debate is full of blatant repetition and void of any new aspects may be caused to some extent by the media industry’s growing grip on text production. Yet it also questions the role assigned to argumentation in our society.
Diatexts of media dilemmas: The rhetorical construction of euthanasia
Authors: Mininni Giuseppe , Manuti Amelia , Rubino Rossella
Published: March 2014

In the post-modern era the global conscience has to deal with various dilemmas, which are made more complex by media interaction. These issues mostly pertain to the bioethical sphere of human experience, i.e. the discursive sphere linked to the necessity to overcome any interpretative routine of marked separation between ‘public’ and ‘private’. A specific effect of such an enunciative claim can be seen in the social debate on euthanasia recently hosted by the media since through subtle argumentative strategies it focuses on different interpretative repertoires of the dignity of human life. The present paper aims to discuss the results of a qualitative study, the aim of which is to investigate certain segments of the “dialogue about euthanasia”, collected from the Italian media (press, television, internet). Diatextual analysis has been adopted as a methodological tool to highlight the recurrence of specific rhetorical assets of both pro and contra positions.
The mind as ground
Authors: Chen Rong
Published: March 2014

Working within the cognitive linguistics theoretical framework (Langacker 1987, 1991; Talmy 2000a, 2000b) and based on the Ground-before-Figure (GbF) model developed in Chen (2003), this paper argues that the there-existential construction presents a ground before a figure. As such, the construction is motivated by perceptual considerations (Radden & Panther 2004), resulting in the kind of cognitive efficiency that aids the processing of information for the hearer.
The conceptual motivation of aspect
Authors: Matlock Teenie
Published: March 2014

Aspect expresses information about how events unfold in time. In English, imperfective aspect is known to widen the temporal scope of the event described, but little is known about how such imperfective descriptions are processed or what motivates their use. This chapter investigates the conceptual impact of aspect, especially imperfective descriptions of past events, and argues that it shapes our understanding of events, and that its use and function is motivated by our everyday experience of perceiving and simulating events.
Metonymy and cognitive operations
Authors: Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez Francisco José
Published: March 2014

This chapter begins with a distinction made in Ruiz de Mendoza and Peña (2005) between two broad kinds of cognitive operations: formal and content operations. The former are higher-level processes whose activity is necessary for lower-level processes to take place. The latter are used to make inferences on the basis of cues provided by the linguistic expression and its context. The chapter proposes that metonymy can be broken down into two content operations, domain expansion and domain reduction, the latter of which can be further broken down into other two processes: facetization and zone activation. It then explores how these operations relate to or contrast with other content operations and the way in which they are supported by formal operations.
Metonymy, category broadening and narrowing, and vertical polysemy
Authors: Koskela Anu
Published: March 2014

This chapter examines the relationship between metonymy and cases of category broadening and narrowing and the resulting state of vertical polysemy (e.g., cat ‘domestic cat’ > ‘any feline’ and drink ‘consume liquid’ > ‘consume alcohol’). Broadening and narrowing have been argued to be motivated by metonymic processes where a category member stands for the whole category or vice versa (Radden and Kövecses, 1999; cf. also Lakoff, 1987). Here, I show that there is a crucial difference between the domain structures involved in metonymy and in vertical polysemy. Unlike metonymies, broadening and narrowing do not involve a shift in the salience of domains (see Croft, 1993). Instead, I argue that there are four possible domain configurations that may underlie vertically related meanings.
The definition of modality
Authors: Declerck Renaat
Published: March 2014

This chapter offers a definition of modality that is as concrete and complete as possible. Modality means that there is reference to actualization of a situation in a world that is not represented as being the factual world. All types of modality are pigeonholed, regardless of whether the ‘modalizer’ is an auxiliary, lexical verb, adverb, conditional clause, a morphological operation like ‘modal backshifting’ or ‘conditionalization’, etc. Clear definitions are given of root and epistemic modality, and it is shown that not all epistemic values are modal values. On the basis of a rich modal world typology and a number of possible relations between a modal world and the factual world, different subtypes of modality are distinguished.
Cognitive science meets language pedagogy
Authors: Ziem Alexander
Published: March 2014

Bringing together insights from cognitive schema theories and studies on vocabulary acquisition in a foreign/second language (L2), this chapter singles out the importance of semantic schemas for teaching and learning word meanings. Its main theoretical hypothesis is that cognitive schemas underlying semantic representations of lexical meanings are effective didactic tools for teaching vocabulary. Relevant language-pedagogical concepts are discussed, such as “explicit teaching” and “rich instructions”. Having introduced basic elements of schemas, it is shown how schema-based illustrations could help to explain sense relations between words as well as the emergence of new meanings in complex constructions.
head and eye in German and Indonesian figurative uses
Authors: Siahaan Poppy
Published: March 2014

n this chapter I investigate the importance of the human body in shaping conceptualization and categorization, relying on a corpus constructed from German and Indonesian newspapers. The figurative extensions of two source concepts, head and eye, are compared across the two genetically unrelated languages. My data provide evidence that a given source concept often targets the same conceptual domain in both languages (e.g. (human) leader or character traits); yet they also reveal interesting language-specific distinctions. A quantitative analysis of the corpus data shows that the metaphoric and metonymic extensions of head and eye differ strikingly in frequency of occurrence in the two languages. The findings indicate that German speakers have a preference for targeting the function of Kopf ‘head’ and Auge ‘eye’, while Indonesian speakers preferentially target the position of kepala ‘head’ and the appearance or shape of mata ‘eye’.
On the subject of impersonals
Authors: Langacker Ronald W.
Published: March 2014

In accordance with basic principles of Cognitive Grammar, impersonal it (e.g. It’s obvious that he’s angry) is claimed to be meaningful. Three avenues of approach are followed in the characterization of it and the constructions it appears in: a comparison with related constructions; a comparison to other pronouns; and examination of a basic cognitive model called the “control cycle”. This broad perspective leads to a unified account in which the meaning of impersonal it is a special case of the general semantic value of this pronoun.
Corpus data in usage-based linguistics
Authors: Gries Stefan Th.
Published: March 2014

The use of corpus data in cognitive linguistics brings with it a host of methodological problems. One concerns the degree of granularity that provides the most insightful results. The present study investigates two granularity issues – different inflectional forms and (register-)based corpus parts. First, I compare the results of a lemma-based corpus analysis of an English argument structure construction to an inflectional-form-based corpus analysis to determine whether the two approaches result in different suggestions concerning the semantics of the construction at issue. Second, I outline how to determine whether data from different corpus parts/registers result in different semantic generalizations of the same construction and how relevant corpus distinctions can be determined in an objective bottom-up manner.
6. Modelling temporal reasoning
Authors: ter Meulen Alice G.B.
Published: March 2014

The interaction of determiners with aspectual adverbs is subject to interesting constraints to structure information. This chapter presents an investigation based only on English data to clarify the logical properties of these constraints and study their effects in temporal reasoning, as a modus of indexical inference at the level of information structure. The interaction is analysed of determiners, interpreted as relations between subsets of the domain, and the dynamic DRT semantics of aspectual adverbs of Smessaert &and ter Meulen (2004). Temporal reasoning with aspectual adverbs constitutes a form of dynamic indexical inference. The causal interpretation of temporal information requires a partitioning of information structure into focus and common ground, not unlike what is known in quantifier theory.
10. Motion events in Japanese and English
Authors: Luk Zoe Pei-sui
Published: March 2014

This study investigates the effect of a typologically different second language on learners’ attention to different aspects of a motion event. Results revealed that L2 learners are not significantly different from the monolinguals in their attention to manner or path. It is proposed that education may be a factor that leads learners to attend to dimensions other than those guided by their native language. The theoretical implication is that language is not the only way to expand habitual attention, which is consistent with the results of other studies that show world knowledge about motion events (Vidaković, this volume) and universal cognitive mechanisms (Marotta and Meini, this volume) play a role in L2 acquisition in the spatial domain.
Chapter 4. Locating metaphor candidates in specialized corpora using raw frequency and keyword lists
Authors: Philip Gill
Published: March 2014

This chapter explains one method that can be used to extract linguistic metaphors from a specialized corpus of Italian political speeches, using statistically-based measures incorporated into most standard corpus query software – in this case, WordSmith Tools (Scott 2004). This method can be used alone or in combination with existing manual or semi-manual analyses. While software has been developed for the automatic extraction of metaphors in English, minority languages, including Italian, lack tools for semantic annotation and probability measures that underlie such applications. The method presented in this chapter is intended for users who have no access to lemmatizers, semantic taggers, etc., and/or are working with under-resourced languages, for which no such tools are generally available.
Chapter 9. English native speakers’ interpretations of culture-bound Japanese figurative expressions
Authors: Azuma Masumi
Published: March 2014

Every language has its unique figurative expressions. This chapter focuses on culture-bound Japanese figurative expressions, how these were interpreted by speakers of English, and the strategies that were used in their interpretations. The Japanese expressions used in the investigation were translated literally into English (called here ‘raw’ translations). Among the test items, there were included figurative expressions displaying highly culture-bound elements, which made these expressions problematic for non-native speakers of Japanese. The participants in this study used a variety of strategies when interpreting them: for example, resorting to the knowledge of their mother tongue, utilizing schematic knowledge, and/or logical thinking. However, these cognitive processes may have ambivalent effects, especially on the interpretations of highly culture-bound figurative expressions in a foreign language.
Chapter 12. Gestures, language, and what they reveal about thought
Authors: Chuang Ya-Chin
Published: March 2014

Music is abstract and elusive enough that we are often forced to describe it using metaphors, referencing more concrete and familiar experiences. The research reported in this chapter aims to apply cognitive, sociocultural, and applied linguistic theories to metaphor use in music classrooms in Taiwan, where Mandarin Chinese is used. Analysing data recorded in a junior high school classroom in Taiwan, in this preliminary study I seek to develop (i) an understanding of how teachers talk about, describe, and construct meanings of music as reflected by the use of metaphor and metaphorically-used gestures in music classrooms, and (ii) an understanding of the functions, distribution, and clustering of the metaphors used. The results indicate that metaphor is an essential instrument in teaching music.
Chapter 14. Trolls
Authors: Alm-Arvius Christina
Published: March 2014

This chapter explores the use of troll in modern Swedish in order to show how culturally entrenched concepts, and the attitudes that are associated with them, are integrated in the language of a speech community as part of its heritage. The noun has a complex and variable sense potential, and both literal and metaphorical uses of the noun are attitudinally coloured, although these attitudes may be ambiguous and even contradictory. Using linguistic evidence gathered from dictionaries and Internet sources, this chapter describes and discusses the rich and partly antithetical set of attitudes expressed by the conventional and novel metaphorical expressions that draw on this Scandinavian mythological concept, and briefly compares Swedish uses of troll with those found in English.
Typology as a continuum
Authors: Filipović Luna
Published: March 2014

A number of significant intratypological differences emerge due to the processes that drive the lexicalization of motion events in Serbo-Croatian,namely morphological blocking and combinatory potential Filipović 2007a). These two morphosyntactic processes restrict the use of manner verbs and delimit both verb-prefix combinations and the combinability of prefixed manner verbs with path prepositions in motion expressions. As a result, the use of manner verbs is much more restricted in Serbo-Croatian than in English. In addition, the syntactic structure and the content of motion descriptions in Serbo-Croatian differ from the English pattern. The typology is best understood as a continuum, with the satellite-/verb-framed dichotomy being only one of the relevant typological dimensions in this context whose interaction is highlighted in this chapter.
Same family, different paths
Authors: Hijazo-Gascón Alberto , Ibarretxe-Antuñano Iraide
Published: March 2014

This chapter examines the intratypological variation that exists in verbframed Romance languages with respect to the semantic component of Path. Based on contrastive elicited data from the Frog stories in French, Italian, and Spanish, it is shown that Italian speakers, contrary to what is expected in verb-framed languages and to what Spanish and French speakers do, offer detailed descriptions of Path, prefer Plus-ground verb constructions and mention more than one Path element per verb. These results not only support the presence of intratypological variation in languages within the same genetic family – an underexplored area – but also confirm the existence of a cline of Path salience. Italian, Spanish, and French are undoubtedly verbframed languages, but they occupy different positions on this cline. Italian is a high-path salient language whereas Spanish and even more French are lowpath salient languages.
Disentangling manner and path
Authors: Berthele Raphael
Published: March 2014

The standard theory of lexicalization patterns in the encoding of motion events (STLP in the remainder of this chapter; cf. Talmy 1985; Slobin 1996b; Talmy 2000, 2009) has been used in such a great number of research projects in the past two decades that makes its extensive introduction superfluous. However, in this contribution I argue that that some of the claims of ‘mainstream’ STLP research are problematic, both from an empirical and from a theoretical point of view. Instead of discussing the fundamentals of the theory, I focus directly on the aspect of the approach particularly relevant to this chapter, namely the causal relationships that are presupposed between the expression of two semantic domains, the domain of manner (of motion) and the domain of path.
Lexical splits in the encoding of motion events from Archaic to Classical Greek
Authors: Nikitina Tatiana
Published: March 2014

This chapter explores diachronic evidence from Ancient Greek as a source of data on the categorization of motion verbs. Over its recorded history, Ancient Greek undergoes a change in the dominant goal-encoding strategy: from Homer to Classical Greek, it gradually develops into a consistently satellite-framed language. The study investigates statistical differences in the way the change affected individual verbs, suggesting that three major verb classes should be distinguished: verbs of self-propelled motion, verbs of externally caused motion, and verbs encoding a change of configuration. Change-of-configuration verbs, in particular, are shown to follow a peculiar pattern of development that ultimately leads to the rise, in Classical Greek, of a “lexical split” similar to the one attested in modern Russian.
Caused-motion verbs in the Middle English intransitive motion construction
Authors: Huber Judith
Published: March 2014

Based on an analysis of more than 300 Middle English verbs attested in the intransitive motion construction, this chapter shows that among them, different from Present-Day English, there is a surprisingly high proportion of verbs that are primarily verbs of caused motion, such as throuen ‘throw’. I argue here that the sporadic intransitive motion use of these verbs may be explained by a number of formally and semantically similar patterns in which both intransitive and caused-motion verbs occur. These include be + past participle and the combination with a reflexive pronoun. These patterns form a closely-knit family of constructions tending to blur the distinction between the two types of verbs.
Iconic thumbs, pinkies and pointers
Authors: Herlofsky William J.
Published: March 2014

Sign language research has shown that all sign languages have verbs of motion in which the movement expressed by the verb is combined with an animateentity handshape. These handshapes iconically represent certain salient characteristics of their referents, and are therefore referred to as ‘classifiers’. The objective of this paper is to describe and illustrate the nature of iconic handshapes (especially the thumb, pinky, and pointer) of classifier-like constructions in Japan Sign Language (JSL), and show how their functions and patterns of grammaticalization are in some ways similar to and in other ways different from those identified for classifiers in spoken languages
Is lámatyáve a linguistic heresy?
Authors: Podhorodecka Joanna
Published: March 2014

The aim of this paper is a brief study of iconic effects in the phonology of J.R.R. Tolkien’s invented languages. Tolkien’s notion of lámatyáve or ‘phonetic fitness’ is here explained in reference to Ivan Fónagy’s theory of symbolic vocal gestures – systematic, meaningful distortions of speech sounds that convey emotive messages. By analyzing several samples of Tolkien’s artificial languages, the author proves that effects similar to those that Fónagy describes on phonetic level appear on phonological level in the structure of those languages, most notably in quantitative proportions of particular sounds.
Iconicity in the coding of pragmatic functions
Authors: Bergien Angelika
Published: March 2014

This study takes a look at the more abstract and relational form of diagrammatic iconicity. Based on previous research of the discourse-pragmatic level, the paper shows that an understanding of the complex relation between structure, function and context in specific genres may help to provide insight into those phenomena which have traditionally been described as disclaimers. By using disclaimers speakers predefine problematic events for others in order to forestall negative retypification. On the basis of the present study it can be concluded that in spoken everyday interaction disclaimers are used as responses to virtual offences. In written argumentative political discourse, however, they are both: a reaction to real offences and a prevention of further negative evaluation. They are to a large extent transparent and thus iconic in that their use resembles people’s activities and behaviour in conflicting situations.
Chinese. Gender-related use of sentence-final particles in Cantonese
Authors: Chan Marjorie K.M.
Published: March 2014

1.Introduction

2. The Cantonese sentence-final particles je.55, jek.5, ho.35, and wo.33

3. The sentence-final particles la.33, la.55, a.33, and a.55 in two ‘Kaleidoscope’ episodes

4. Concluding remarks

Notes

References
Dutch. Towards a more gender-fair usage in Netherlands Dutch
Authors: Gerritsen Marinel
Published: March 2014

1.Introduction

2. Selected structural properties of Dutch

2.1 Grammatical gender

2.2 Gender-specific vs. gender-indefinite personal nouns

2.3 The morphology of personal nouns

2.3.1 Derivation

2.3.2 Compounding

3. Gender-biased usage: Variation and tendencies of change

3.1 Historical background

3.2 Generic masculine nouns and pronominalisation

3.2.1 Problems in traditional usage

3.2.2 Tendencies of variation and change

3.3 Terms of address and family names

3.3.1 Terms of address

3.3.2 Family names

3.4 Idiomatic expressions and stereotypical descriptions of women and men

3.5 Occupational terms: A case of Dutch language politics

3.5.1 Problems in traditional usage

3.5.2 The recommendations and the public debate

3.5.3 The manual for professional terms of the Dutch Language Union (2000)

4. The use of occupational titles in advertising: An empirical study

5. Conclusion

Notes

References
Gender across languages
Authors: Hellinger Marlis , Bußmann Hadumod
Published: March 2014

1. Aims and scope of “Gender across languages”
2. Gender classes as a special case of noun classes
2.1 Classifier languages
2.2 Noun class languages
3. Categories of gender
3.1 Grammatical gender
3.2 Lexical gender
3.3 Referential gender
3.4 “False generics”: Generic masculines and male generics
3.5 Social gender
4. Gender-related structures
4.1 Word-formation
4.2 Agreement
4.3 Pronominalization
4.4 Coordination
5. Gender-related messages
5.1 Address terms
5.2 Idiomatic expressions and proverbs
5.3 Female and male discourse
6. Language change and language reform
7. Conclusion
Notes
References
English. Spreading the feminist word
Authors: Pauwels Anne
Published: March 2014

1.Feminism and language

1.1 Feminism and linguistic reform

1.2 Evaluating feminist linguistic reform

1.3 Eliminating gender bias in courtesy titles: The options

2. Spreading the feminist word: The case of Ms in Australia

2.1 A profile of Ms- users in Australia: Socio-demographic data

2.2 The main triggers for change

3. Conclusion

Notes

References
English. A corpus-based view of gender in British and American English
Authors: Romaine Suzanne
Published: March 2014

1.Introduction

2. English as pluricentric language

3. English as a gendered language

3.1 Titles and forms of address

3.2 Androcentric generics

3.3 Reforming English

3.4 Language reform in public and private discourse

4. Reforming discourse and rhetoric

5. Conclusions

Notes

References
Russian. Doing gender in Russian
Authors: Doleschal Ursula , Schmid Sonja
Published: March 2014

1.Introduction

2. Structural properties

2.1 Grammatical gender

2.2 Gender agreement

2.3 The morphological structure of personal nouns

2.3.1 Derivation

2.3.2 Compounding

3. The lexical representation of women and men

4. Gender and reference

4.1 Gender-specific reference and agreement conflicts

4.2 Gender-indefinite reference and generic masculines

4.3 The endearing use of the masculine gender

4.4 Summary

5. The interpretation of generic masculines: Empirical evidence

5.1 Personal nouns with specific reference

5.2 Personal nouns with more generic reference

5.3 Metalinguistic test

6. Linguistic gender studies in Russia

6.1 Proverbs and idioms

6.1.1 The androcentric perspective

6.1.2 Ženskij golos – ‘The female voice’

6.1.3 ‘Woman/wife’

6.1.4 ‘Mother’

6.1.5 The “pseudo-female” perspective

6.2 Obscene expressions – a male domain?

7.Language politics

8.Suggestions for future research

Notes

References
The possessor raising construction and the interpretation of subject
Authors: Hasegawa Nobuko
Published: March 2014

In this paper, an extension of Hasegawa (2001, 2004), I examine the possessor raising construction and the interpretation of the subject. Though it is usually assumed that transitive sentences invariably involve the small v that assigns both an external role and object Case, I claim that non-agentive transitives whose subject is interpreted as an experiencer and serves as the possessor of the object involves the little v that does not have an external role, but assigns Object Case nevertheless. In such transitives, the subject moves from the possessor position of the object, constituting a type of possessor raising construction. Various facts seen in non-agentive causative constructions in Japanese, and the experiencer use of have and get in English, support this claim.
Linear sequencing strategies or UG-defined hierarchical structures in L2 acquisition?
Authors: Schwartz Bonnie D. , Sprouse Rex A.
Published: March 2014

We respond to Meisel (1997), who concludes, based on second language (L2) negation data, that “second language learners, rather than using structuredependent operations constrained by UG, resort to linear sequencing strategies which apply to surface strings” (p. 258). Like Lardiere (1999) and Prévost and White (1999), we argue (contraMeisel), that the L2ers exhibit not an insensitivity to the [}] finite distinction, but rather a delay in uniform Target-like mapping of abstract syntactic features onto phonetic forms. We further show that the data are unexceptional once one considers the syntax of negation in the native language, target-language negation input, and L2 proficiency level. Finally, we show that “linear sequencing strategies” are inadequate to account for well-known Interlanguage data.
Conceptual space
Authors: Wakefield Jennie L. , Wilkins Wendy K.
Published: March 2014

This paper describes the essential cognitive and neurobiological relationships between spatial structure (SpS) and conceptual structure (CS), as relevant for language. We provide evidence that SpS and its underlying anatomical regions (ventral premotor cortex and posterior parietal cortex) are the essential evolutionary precursors of CS and the brain areas that in turn underlie it, namely Broca’s area and the parietal-occipital-temporal junction (POT). We outline a scenario in which a restricted class of SpS primitives – defined as the subset of inherent, action-related spatial property representations of body parts, objects, and extrapersonal locations – translates evolutionarily into the fundamental class of primitives (including Theme, Location, Source, and Goal) that define the content and organization of the spatial tier of CS.
Look across: The paradigmatic axis and Bangla causatives
Authors: Dasgupta Probal
Published: March 2014

The standard notions of suppletion ansd blocking are tried against the data of Bangla causatives and found wanting. The framework of formalist generative grammar that uses these notions are tried against the surprising data of Bangla sarcastic causatives and found wanting. Remedies are suggested along substantivist lines but in a formalist implementation. Look Across, the new device proposed for this purpose, straddles the syntax-pragmatics boundary.
5. Romanian clitic doubling: A view from pragmatics-semantics and diachrony
Authors: Hill Virginia , Tasmowski Liliane
Published: March 2014

This paper argues that an approach to the Romanian C(litic) D(oubling) from a pragmatics-semantics perspective produces a systematic account for three peculiarities of this construction; namely, the obligatory particle pe preceding the D(irect) O(bject) dp, the interaction between this type of marking and the insertion of a doubling clitic, and the DO/I(ndirect) O(bject) asymmetry in the conditions for CD. In particular, speech act effects emerging from the presence versus absence of pe lead us to define this element as a pragmatic marker forprominence in these configurations. Its interaction with the doubling clitic depends on the semantics of reference: only an acceptable degree of stable reference of the dp allows for the coocurrence with a clitic (i.e., for the CD of DOs). These constraints do not extend to the CD of IOs. We consider that an acceptable degree of stable reference is intrinsically ensured in Romanian CD with IOs because of the matching morphological endings for Oblique Case on both the clitic and the dp; prominence, on the other hand, emerges from the high location of IOs on the topicality scale (i.e., close to Agent-like theta-roles), in contrast to the low location of DOs (i.e., close to Theme-like theta-roles). Thus, IOs meet the pragmatic prominence conditions for CD due to their morpho-semantics, whereas DOs need categorial marking (i.e., pe) to qualify for this process. An overview of the CD in three texts of Old Romanian attests a gradual emergence of the modern CD that supports our analysis.
Agreement in thetic VS sentences in Bantu and Romance
Authors: van der Wal Jenneke
Published: March 2014

Both Bantu and Romance languages use a V(erb) S(ubject) construction to express thetic (“out-of-the-blue”) sentences. Two types of languages can be distinguished within these language families, with respect to the verbal agreement in a thetic VS sentence: in type 1 the verb has default agreement, whereas in type 2 the verb agrees with the postverbal subject. In the Bantu languages these two types also display a difference in the use of conjoint and disjoint verb forms. Collins (2004), Carstens (2005), and Baker (2008) have previously analyzed such agreement and word order phenomena. These accounts, attributing the differences between types 1 and 2 to parameter settings of the Agree system, do not offer a satisfactory explanation. This paper proposes that the difference is due to the status of the agreement of the verb, which is pronominal in type 1 languages and purely grammatical in type 2. Arguments for this analysis are found in Case, Binding Theory and information structure. The focus in this paper is on the Romance languages French and Italian, and on the Bantu languages Sesotho and Makhuwa.
Can children tell us anything we did not know about parameter clustering?
Authors: Avram Larisa , Coene Martine
Published: March 2014

The present paper provides evidence that children are not different from

adults with respect to phrase structure building, a process considered to

be highly dependent on feature valuation. Lexical heads are taken from

the lexicon with open feature values that are specified in the course of the

derivation. Under such a view, linguistic development is mainly restricted

to the lexicon, the projection of functional structure following from the

stepwise identification and valuation of the features encoded by the

morphological markers on lexical items. Based on data from child language,

it is argued that language acquisition consists in choosing the particular

values that correspond to the target language.
1. Inverse reflexives
Authors: Postal Paul M. , Ross John Robert
Published: March 2014

This chapter discusses the principles that determine legitimate minimal domains for antecedents of reflexive forms. It offers novel critiques of the idea that these principles reduce to some elementary statement involving c‑command or analogs thereof, and proposes a relational account for certain documented constraints.
6. The effect of case marking on subject-verb agreement errors in English
Authors: Nicol Janet L. , Antón-Méndez Ines
Published: March 2014

It is commonly assumed that the occurrence and distribution of processing errors offer a “window” into the architecture of cognitive processors. In recent years, psycholinguists have drawn inferences about syntactic encoding processes in language production by examining the distribution and rate of subject–verb agreement (SVA) errors in different contexts. To date, dozens of studies have used a sentence repetition-completion paradigm to elicit SVA errors. In this task, participants hear a sentence fragment (or “preamble”), repeat it, and provide a well-formed completion. These experiments have shown that when a singular head is modified by a phrase containing a plural NP (e.g. The bill for the accountants...), a significant number of SVA errors may occur. Several experiments have shown that, in English, the phonological form of words within a subject NP plays virtually no role in the rate of error occurrence. Yet recent data from our lab suggests that overt morphophonological case information does matter: speakers are more likely to produce the errorThe bill for the accountants were outrageous than The bill for them were outrageous. In this paper, we will present the results of this case-marking study and discuss the implications for models of language production.
Anaphoric distribution in the prepositional phrase
Authors: Lederer Jenny
Published: March 2014

The distribution of anaphoric pronouns in prepositional phrases has garnered much attention in the literature on antecedent binding since, contrary to fundamental binding principles, this syntactic environment appears to allow either reflexive or coreferential nonreflexive pronouns (c.f. Safir 2004; Reinhart & Reuland 1993; Pollard and Sag 1992). This paper takes a closer look at two prepositional phrase contexts in English and Norwegian, which seem to allow the reflexive pronoun when the PP superficially denotes directionality. With careful examination of the semantics of these constructions, it is shown that a vague notion of directionality evoked in the formal syntax notion of the functional projection PATH is insuffi cient to capture the data’s distribution pattern. The grammar must make reference to more detailed spatial configurations in order to model the real-world examples.
When grammars collide
Authors: Putnam Michael T. , Parafita Couto M. Carmen
Published: March 2014

This study provides a Survive-minimalist analysis of two issues related to DP-structures in code-switching (CS) grammars: (i) the relationship between determiners and nouns in a DP where each respective lexical item originates from a separate language and (ii) the linearization of Det(erminers)-Adj(ectives)- N(ouns) in CS-grammars where each respective language contributing a surface order contrasts with the other. Violable constraints that filter the selection possibilities (i.e., the operation Select) of determiners are posited. We contend that a formal feature, definiteness [+ Def], triggers the re-configuration of lexical items to conform to structural requires of a given CS-grammar. That same feature motivates both the det-adj-n and the det-n-adj orderings. The advantages to pursuing this analysis of DP linearity in CS-grammars are that it is: (i) consistent with the desiderata of Survive-minimalism and (ii) does not require features similar to the EPP to exist in the system.
Evidence for Survive from covert movement
Authors: Lechner Winfried
Published: March 2014

The paper pursues two goals. First, it motivates a particular view of the Survive principle. Concretely, it is suggested to interpret the Survive principle as the syntactic instance of a more general push-up mechanism that is responsible for triggering movement induced by type incompatibility on the semantic side. Second, I identify a particular set of properties that the Survive analysis predicts for configurations involving multiple covert movements. These diagnostics, which help to discriminate between survive and Attract based models of dislocation, are argued to be manifest in scope restrictions on double object constructions and inverse linking. The critical factor setting apart the two models consists in the observation that only the Survive principle is able to express ordering restrictions between different types of movements (Case driven movement vs. QR) in a natural way. The resulting analysis also supports the phonological theory of QR.
Language change and survive
Authors: van Gelderen Elly
Published: March 2014

This paper examines what data from language change can tell us about derivations, and in particular the early part of the derivation where lexical items are selected from the lexicon using the Survive mechanism. It is well-known that in changes often referred to as grammaticalization the features of lexical items are not only lost but reanalyzed from semantic to grammatical. I argue this is due to principles economizing derivations. Unlike many using Survive, I argue that uninterpretable features are in fact necessary.
Le Lexique-Grammaire du grec moderne
Authors: Anastassiadis-Syméonidis Anna
Published: March 2014

This text is a survey of works elaborated in the theoretical framework of the Lexicon-Grammar regarding Modern Greek. These works, numerous and varied, concern inflectional morphology, compounds, fixed expressions, functional verbs and other classes like adverbs, conjunctive sentences, determiners or proverbs.
The electronic dictionary of Greek is not ready yet, but it is quite far advanced. Morphology is very well covered (12,000 verbs, 53,800 nouns and 35,500 adjectives) as well as the inverse dictionary (180,000 entries). These works regarding not only the general language but also languages for special purposes have a theoretical and also a practical interest for automatic translation and teaching of Greek as a mother or/and as a foreign language.
Instrument Nouns and Fusion
Authors: Baptista Jorge
Published: March 2014

Many predicative nouns selecting the support verb dar (to give) in Portuguese allow Conversion, a passive-like transformation, with the support verb levar (to take, to get). Among these, a significant number are related with concrete instrument nouns and expresses violent action predicates. These sentences present a paraphrase with the verbs bater (to hit) or ferir (to hurt) with an instrument complement. Most of these predicative nouns are formed with a common suffix (-ada). Several restrictions can be observed in the choice of the instrument complements that can be inserted in the nominal sentences. High redundancy blocks the insertion of an instrumental complement if the instrument is the same noun as the one to which the predicative nouns is morphologically related. We analyse these nominal sentences by Fusion, a transformational relation proposed by M. Gross (1981), which merges the verbs bater or ferir with the instrument noun to form both the predicative noun and (more rarely) its associated verb.
Dictionnaires électroniques DELAF anglais et français
Authors: Courtois Blandine
Published: March 2014

This paper is based on the comparison between two electronic dictionaries (DELAF) constructed at LADL for English and French. It first describes the structure of the entries, then the formal features that have been recorded for each of them. It then shows how, in the French and English DELAFs, these codes indicate three levels of complexity of linguistic information. We finally give a brief description of the linguistic data which are available in each part of the dictionaries.
Second language acquisition of a regional dialect of American English by native Japanese speakers
Authors: Fox Robert Allen , McGory Julie Tevis
Published: March 2014

Much research, including a wealth of studies by James Emil Flege, has examined the nature of the acquisition of English by non-native speakers. However, the vast majority of these studies have concentrated on the acquisition of Standard American English (SAE) rather than on the acquisition of a regional dialect. This paper examines whether regional dialectal differences found in the vowel systems of Southern American English (SoAE) and SAE are produced and perceived by adult Japanese speakers residing in these two areas. A production study demonstrated that the vowels produced by native English speakers from Alabama and Ohio were consistent with their dialectal region. However the two groups of native Japanese speakers produced vowels that were much more like those of the Ohio English speakers and showed few of the regional dialectal differences existing in SoAE. In a perception study, vowels produced by native Southern and Midwest English speakers were presented to two different groups of Japanese speakers living in these two areas in an identification task in order to observe the speakers’ sensitivity to these dialectal variations. Results indicated that exposure to the SoAE dialect did not improve the perception of SoAE vowels by Japanese speakers living in Alabama and that both groups of Japanese speakers performed significantly worse when identifying SoAE vowels.
Strategies for Realization of L2-Categories
Authors: McAllister Robert
Published: March 2014

This study focuses on the production of the English /s/-/z/ contrast by native speakers of Swedish. The strategies used by Swedes who produce this contrast successfully would seem to be of interest in two respects with reference to Flege’s Speech Learning Model (SLM). Firstly, in relation to SLM hypothesis 6 regarding the choice of features made by the L2 users to realize a contrast and secondly, regarding the results of a recent study based on the SLM which examined the “feature hypothesis”, which seems to be contradicted by the difficulty Swedes demonstrate in the production of the English /s/-/z/ contrast. 17 native speakers of Swedish were examined with regard to the strategies used in successful productions of this contrast. The results are discussed in light of a hypothesis generated by the SLM which suggests that L2 users may, in the realization of an L2 contrast, use different features or feature weights than natives do. The relative inability of native Swedes to produce the /z/ is also discussed in light of a recent study where a feature hypothesis is advanced to account for the ability of L2 learners to successfully acquire the Swedish quantity contrast.
Cross-language consonant identification
Authors: Schmidt Anna Marie
Published: March 2014

Detailed empirical data are needed as a basis for hypothesis testing and model evaluation in L2 speech perception. Predictions from current models depend upon notions of similarity and dissimilarity between L1 and L2 sounds. New data from 20 English listeners labeling 19 Korean syllable-initial consonants in three vowel contexts as the closest English consonant, as well as judging similarity to the English consonant are presented. Results are contrasted with those from an earlier parallel study of Korean listener labeling of English syllable initial consonants. L2 speakers perceive sounds within the comprehensive framework of their L1 phonological system using language specific cues. A better knowledge of cross-language relationships will result in better modeling and experimental design.