On the Structure of the French DP

1996 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 349-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Valois
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Functional Structure ◽  
The Status ◽  
French And English ◽  
Rightward Movement ◽  
Peculiar Case

AbstractThis paper discusses and expands upon various ideas concerning the structure of nominals in general (DPs) and of French nominals in particular, with the underlying idea that CP and DP have parallel argumental and functional structure. The main topics discussed are: (i) the projection of arguments in French and English; (ii) the parameterization of N-movement, which accounts for some word order differences between French and English; (iii) the distribution of adjectives in event nominals, which reflects that of adverbs in clauses in both French and English; (iv) a peculiar case of rightward movement out of DP that provides further evidence for N-movement as well as for the claim concerning the prohibition on right adjunction of genitive nominals within DP; and (v) extraction facts that are a consequence of the status of [Spec, DP] as an A′-position in French.

Morphological Means in Russian: Clarification of the Concept

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (9) ◽  
pp. 23-33
Author(s):  
Galina I. Panova ◽  
Tatiana V. Viktorina ◽  
Antonina E. Kuzmina
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Morphological Structure ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
Word Form ◽  
Similar Function ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
The Status ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Linguistic Units ◽  
The Russian Language

The concept of “morphological / grammatical means” is widely used in studies on the Russian language, although there is no generally accepted interpretation. This work analyzes the reflection of this concept in Russian studies and clarifies the status of those linguistic units that are traditionally referred to as morphological means: form-building affixes, alternating sounds (internal inflection), stress, supplementary word stems, auxiliary words, intonation, as well as word order. Our research has shown that these linguistic units have different functional status in the morphological structure of the Russian language. First, these are categorical, or actually morphological, means, represented by formative affixes and auxiliary words. They are carriers of morphological meanings in the structure of abstracted morphological forms – the basic units of inflectional Russian morphology. Secondly, a non-categorical means, syncretic and accidental for morphology, are supplementary stems that contain not only lexical, but also morphological meaning and thus duplicate the expression of morphological information in a word form with a form-building affix. Thirdly, these are linguistic units that are not elements of the morphological structure, but have morphological significance, which is manifested in their ability to differentiate homonymous morphological forms in the structure of word forms (alternating sounds and stress) or utterances (intonation). Word order can also perform a similar function. The study allows us to clarify the definition of the concept under consideration: morphological means are linguistic units that are carriers of morphological meanings and constituents of morphological forms.

Language, Rights, Remedies, and the Rule of Law

1988 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-62
Author(s):  
Denise Réaume
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Prima Facie ◽  
Supreme Court Of Canada ◽  
Language Rights ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
English Only ◽  
The Status ◽  
French And English ◽  
Manitoba Act

When Georges Forest challenged the validity of Manitoba’s Official Language Act in 1976, he opened up the larger issue of the status of the province’s English-only legislation. The courts had little difficulty in concluding that the Act, which purported to make English the only language used in the courts and legislature of Manitoba, violated s. 23 of the Manitoba Act, 1870. This left open the fate of legislation enacted over the preceding ninety years in breach of the obligation to legislate in both French and English. Prima facie, the natural remedy, in the Canadian constitutional context, would be to declare such unconstitutional legislation invalid and therefore of no force and effect. But this would have left the province with virtually no statutory law. To avoid this result the Manitoba Court of Appeal decided that s. 23 is directory rather than mandatory. This decision was appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada. At about the same time the federal government exercised its power under the Supreme Court Act to refer these remedial issues to the Court for its legal opinion. In Reference Re Language Rights under the Manitoba Act, 1870, the Court disagreed with the Court of Appeal’s classification of s. 23 as merely directory, but was equally troubled by leaving Manitoba without any statute law. Therefore, it declared all Manitoba’s statutes since 1890 to be invalid, but deemed the rights and obligations arising under them to be temporarily in force until the province could reasonably be expected to comply with s. 23. In order to reach this unusual result the Court relied on the doctrine of the rule of law. The constitutional remedies issue posed by this case is probably the most challenging that the Canadian courts have ever faced. The Supreme Court’s approach reveals important underlying presuppositions which go unnoticed in less difficult cases.

The status of ‘canonical SVO sentences’ in French: a developmental study of the on-line processing of dislocated sentences

1991 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 591-608 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnès Charvillat ◽  
Michèle Kail
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Developmental Study ◽  
Order Processing ◽  
Monitoring Task ◽  
French Word ◽  
Privileged Status ◽  
The Status ◽  
On Line ◽  
Per Se

ABSTRACTThis on-line study investigates the processing of word order by 30 French children (6;6, 8;6, 10;6) and 10 adults. Its main objective is to show that the privileged status granted to ‘canonical SVO sentences’ is inadequate to account for the on-line processing of pronominal utterances in spoken French. Using a word monitoring task, we showed that word order (NVN vs NNV): (1) is a significant factor in sentences containing no clitic pronoun; (2) stops being significant when sentences contain either one or two clitic pronouns. These results suggest that processing complexity depends upon co-reference (‘linear’, ‘crossed’ or ‘embedding’) assignment constraints rather than upon word order per se. We conclude that, in French, word-order processing always interacts with acceptability considerations provided by cliticization.

Wh-clefts as evidence of resultatives in ASL

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-114
Author(s):  
Ashley Kentner ◽  
Ronnie B. Wilbur
Keyword(s):  
American Sign Language ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Word Order ◽  
American Sign ◽  
Resultative Constructions ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Asl Literature ◽  
The Status ◽  
Change State ◽  
Additional Support

Abstract The status of syntactic resultative constructions has been disputed in the American Sign Language (ASL) literature. These are single sentences such as “Mary hammered the metal flat,” where two predicates share the same object and an event (hammered) causes the affected object (the metal) to change state (flat) as a result. While not all languages permit such constructions, this study shows that (several) alternate multi-sentential analyses can be ruled out. WH-clefts are used to provide a test for independent clausal boundaries, providing additional support that American Sign Language (ASL) permits resultative constructions. We also observe possible word order variations and note common features of the result predicates in these constructions.

Positional distribution of sentence members in the french, english and russian languages

10.12737/7481 ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 0-0 ◽  
Author(s):  
Магомед Газилов ◽  
Magomed Gazilov ◽  
Марина Гозалова ◽  
Marina Gozalova
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Positional Distribution ◽  
International Communication ◽  
Russian Language ◽  
French Language ◽  
Sentence Structure ◽  
French And English ◽  
Popular Language ◽  
Interrogative Sentence ◽  
Free Word

The article presents a comparative analysis of the sentence structure of the French language in comparison to English and Russian, described are differences and similarities for the three languages. English and French, are important languages of international communication, trade, cooperation and business. As for the Russian language, it is the fifth language in the world in the total number of speakers and the second most popular language of the Internet. Traditionally, the French and English languages are considered as analytic with strict fixed word order in a sentence, at the same Russian is a synthetic language with free word order. Recently, however, linguists are increasingly beginning to assert that there are no languages purely synthetic or analytical. The analysis gives grounds to state that despite the fact that the French and British sentences have a fixed word order in their development there is a trend of occurrence of certain "liberties", in particular, modern French interrogative sentence violates the strict word order; It is constructed both with inversion, and without it, and the circumstances occupy not only postposition or preposition, but also interposition in relation to the predicative basis of the sentence. The practical value of the work lies in the fact that the results obtained can be used in the classroom whiles teaching second language, and that would ensure a much easier and faster learning.

Syntax

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-87
Author(s):  
Jochen Zeller
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Close Relation ◽  
African Languages ◽  
The Status ◽  
Wh Questions ◽  
Syntactic Properties

This chapter presents an overview of the most important syntactic properties of African languages and language families. It investigates the status of syntactic word categories (noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, etc.) and examines the different word orders and word order alternations that are observed phrase-internally and at the level of the clause. Also discussed are syntactic constructions such as the passive, wh-questions, and relative clauses, as well as morphological phenomena that bear a close relation to syntax, such as case and agreement. Special attention is drawn to syntactic traits which are attested in African languages but which occur rarely, or not at all, outside Africa, such as the SVO–S-Aux-OV word order alternation (found in Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages as well as in Northern Khoisan), the construct state nominal (a characteristic of Afro-Asiatic languages), or logophoricity (a feature of subgroups of Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, and Afro-Asiatic).

scholarly journals Revisiting the configurationality issue in Old Icelandic

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Booth
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Functional Grammar ◽  
Old Icelandic ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Lexical Functional Grammar ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Status ◽  
Corpus Data

The status of Old Icelandic with respect to (argument) configurationality was subject to debate in the early 1990s (e.g. Faarlund 1990; Rögnvaldsson 1995) and remains unresolved. Since this work, further research on a wide range of languages has enhanced our understanding of configurationality, in particular within Lexical Functional Grammar (e.g. Austin & Bresnan 1996; Nordlinger 1998) and syntactically annotated Old Icelandic data are now available (Wallenberg et al. 2011). It is thus fitting to revisit the matter. In this paper, I show that allowing for argument configurationality as a gradient property, and also taking into account discourse configurationality (Kiss 1995) as a further gradient property, can neatly account for word order patterns in this early stage of Icelandic. Specifically, I show that corpus data supports part of the original claim in Faarlund (1990), that Old Icelandic lacks a VP-constituent, thus being somewhat less argument-configurational than the modern language. Furthermore, the observed word order patterns indicate a designated topic position in the postfinite domain, thus reflecting some degree of discourse configurationality at this early stage of the language.

scholarly journals « Le tournoi des langues » : L’enseignement des langues étrangères dans le système scolaire suédois, 1807-2003

2004 ◽  
pp. 229-255
Author(s):  
Béatrice Cabau-Lampa
Keyword(s):  
School System ◽  
Language Teaching ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
Current State ◽  
The Status ◽  
French And English ◽  
Swedish School

This paper analyses the various issues that influenced the foreign languages policy in the Swedish school system during the 19th and 20th centuries. In fact, language teaching has always occupied a dominant place in the Swedish school system, which remained elitist until the introduction of common compulsory basic schooling in 1962. Language teaching developed not only with different school system reforms in response to social transformations, but also with a succession of foreign influences. The first part of this article examines the development of the Swedish school system. Then, the status and organization of language teaching as a whole are analyzed, before examining the three foreign languages taught : German, French, and English. In conclusion, the article describes the current state of language teaching in Sweden.

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