THE TENSE-ASPECT SYSTEM IN PIDGINS AND NATURALISTICALLY LEARNED L2

2003 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Clancy Clements

The advantages and disadvantages of wider or narrower definitions of pidginization and pidgin are reviewed to determine the differences between pidgins and naturalistically learned second languages (L2s). It is argued that a wider definition is preferred because it avoids problematic counterexamples and captures generalizations that allow us to view the difference between naturalistic L2 varieties and pidgins as one of degree, not of type. In first language (L1) acquisition, Bates and Goodman (1999) showed the link between the development of vocabulary and grammar and argued that this may be explained by, among other things, logical and perceptual bootstrapping. It is suggested that these types of bootstrapping are also relevant for explaining the pace of grammar development in pidgins and naturalistic L2 varieties. The tense-aspect system of a Spanish variety spoken by a Chinese immigrant in Spain is examined in detail. The data, taken from a 90-minute interview that yielded 602 tokens, reveal several clear traits of the informant's verbal system: (a) All nonfinite, imperfective verb forms (gerunds) correspond exclusively to Vendlerian activities; (b) all but three of the perfective nonfinite forms (past participles) correspond to telic verbs or predicates; and (c) 81% of the stative verbs appear in the third-person-singular present form. The sensitivity to aspectual distinctions in the informant's variety of Spanish is not addressed by logical and perceptual bootstrapping. Furthermore, although this sensitivity can be partially explained by language-specific considerations (i.e., transfer from Mandarin), such an explanation does not speak to precise form–function mappings found, which are best accounted for by appealing to the Primacy of Aspect and Distributional Bias hypotheses (Andersen, 1993; Andersen & Shirai, 1996).

Author(s):  
Nina Sumbatova

This chapter is a description of Dargwa based on the data of the Tanti dialect. Dargwa, which is spoken in Central Dagestan, constitutes a separate branch of the Nakh-Dagestanian family. Dargwa is known for its dialectal variation: many researchers believe that it should be treated as a language group. Nouns in Dargwa have the category of gender (in the singular: masculine–feminine–neuter, in the plural: first/second person plural–human–non-human). Nominal forms are derived from two stems, direct and oblique, in both singular and plural. The nominal system includes five to seven forms of non-locative cases and a number of locative (spatial) forms opposed as to localization, orientation, and, in some dialects, direction. Most verbal roots have a perfective and an imperfective form within a single verbal paradigm. The verbal system is also rich with multiple TAM-paradigms and non-finite forms (participles, convers, deverbal nouns). An important syntactic feature of Dargwa is a well-developed system of person agreement with a typologically rare opposition of the second person singular versus first person (singular and plural) + second person plural (the third person is usually unmarked). Like other Nakh-Dagestanian languages, Dargwa is morphologically ergative, left-branching (SOV), with free word order. Clause coordination is relatively rare, most dependent clauses are headed by non-finite verb forms.


2019 ◽  
pp. 176-231
Author(s):  
D. Gary Miller

Verbs in Gothic are thematic, athematic, or preterite present. Several classes, including modals, are discussed. Strong verbs have seven classes, weak verbs four. Inflectional categories are first, second, and third person, singular, dual (except in the third person), and plural number. Tenses are nonpast and past/preterite. There are two inflected moods, indicative and optative, and two voices (active, passive). The passive is synthetic in the nonpast indicative and optative. The past system features two periphrastic passives, one stative-eventive with wisan (be), the other inchoative and change of state with wairþan (become). Middle functions are mostly represented by simple reflexive structures and -nan verbs. Nonfinite categories include one voice-underspecified infinitive, a nonpast and past participle, and a present active imperative. The third person imperative is normally expressed by an optative.


Author(s):  
Elena Mihas

This chapter’s goal is to survey Ashaninka Satipo (Arawak) commanding communicative moves. It argues that imperatives form a paradigm consisting of the first person cohortative construction with the discourse particle tsame ‘come on’, second person canonical imperative construction characterized by a special intonation, and the third person jussive construction formed either with the intentional =ta on the lexical verb or on the copula kant ‘be this way’. In positive commands, the verbs are inflected for irrealis. The canonical imperative has a negative counterpart, whereas the cohortative and jussive verb forms lack them. While commanding, conversationalists tend to select specific linguistic resources which reflect their group membership status. Social equals have recourse to the same linguistic means as conversationalists in superior roles, but they also use the ‘want’ and ‘wish’ constructions and counter-assertive pronouns. The basic second person imperative forms are employed irrespective of the social status.


2001 ◽  
Vol 66 ◽  
pp. 23-39
Author(s):  
Ineke van de Craats

This paper deals with the question in which respects L1 acquisition differs from L2 acquisition. For this purpose, the way children learning Dutch as their mother tongue acquire possessive constructions is compared to how children and adults learning Dutch as a second language acquire them. The comparison is restricted to the third person role as possessor. Although L1 and L2 learners have many learner variants in common, L2 learners - both children and adults - are initially guided by the structure of their mother tongue. The influence of the L1 can even be resistent for a long time in the preference of one of the two possessive patterns of Dutch. A more conspicuous outcome is that young children are much more susceptibe to weak pronouns in the environmental input and use them at an earlier time than adults and older children.


2018 ◽  
pp. 384-401 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frederic Guerrero-Solé ◽  
Hibai Lopez-Gonzalez ◽  
Mark D. Griffiths

Gambling disorder is known to have a negatively detrimental impact on affected individual's physical and psychological health, social relationships, and finances. Via remote technologies (e.g., Internet, mobile phones, and interactive television), gambling has come out of gambling venues and has brought the potential for online gambling to occur anywhere (e.g., the home, the workplace, and on the move). Alongside the rise of online gambling, online gambling advertising have spread throughout all type of media. In a sample of 201 Spanish university students, the present study explored the perceived influence of online gambling advertising. More specifically it examined the Third-Person Effect (TPE), and its consequences on individuals' willingness to support censorship or public service advertising. The findings demonstrate that despite the difference on the perception of the effects of online gambling advertising, it scarcely accounts for the behavioural outcomes analysed. On the contrary, awareness of problem gambling and, above all, paternalistic attitudes appear to explain this support.


Author(s):  
Ewa Data-Bukowska

Coming nearer and nearer: A cognitive grammar account of the third person plural impersonalThe present paper analyses different readings of the 3pl impersonal pronoun (3pl IMP) from the Cognitive Grammar (CG) perspective. While the well-known taxonomy established for 3pl impersonals in European languages by Siewierska & Papastathi (2011) highlights contextual features of different readings of the pronoun, CG is able to focus on what has been neglected in this approach and offers a more adequate analysis of the 3pl IMP as an important means of portraying the agent. In the article the impersonal agent is presented as unspecified and, as such, defocused to various degrees. Evidence is provided for a set of four prototypical readings of the pronoun – the corporate, the vague, the specific and the universal – constituting reference points within a continuum and differentiated as to the agent portrayal. Establishing such portrayals is seen as a phenomenon rooted in the cognitively basic mechanism of distancing, which in the case of the 3pl IMPs means approaching the perceived object by the conceptualizer, as in the schema underlying the difference between a count noun and a mass noun. The mechanism is illustrated by language data taken from English and Swedish. Podchodząc coraz bliżej. Odczytania zaimka 3 os. l. mn. w funkcji bezosobowej w ujęciu gramatyki kognitywnejNiniejszy artykuł analizuje różne odczytania zaimka 3 os. l. mn. (np. pol. oni, ang. they), wykorzystywanego w funkcji bezosobowej, z punktu widzenia gramatyki kognitywnej w ujęciu R. W. Langackera. Podczas gdy taksonomia opracowana dla tego typu zaimków w językach europejskich przez Siewierską i Papastathi (2011) eksponuje cechy kontekstowe decydujące o różnych interpretacjach treści zaimka, gramatyka kognitywna uzupełnia te ujęcia i proponuje jego opis jako środka zróżnicowanego przedstawiania agensa w wypowiedzeniach. Omówione zostają cztery prototypowe odczytania zaimka - korporacyjne, niejasne, specyficzne i uniwersalne, stanowiące punkty odniesienia w kontinuum, które umożliwia określoną interpretację treści analizowanej jednostki językowej. Ustanowienie takich wzorcowych „portretów” opiera się na podstawowym mechanizmie poznawczym, którym jest przybliżanie się konceptualizatora do obiektu konceptualizacji, co w przypadku zaimka 3 os. l. mn. oznacza płynne przejście od obiektu postrzeganego jako dyskretny do obiektu konceptualizowanego jako homogeniczna substancja. Mechanizm ilustrują dane językowe zaczerpnięte z języka angielskiego i języka szwedzkiego.


2004 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyunyi Cho ◽  
Miejeong Han

This study represents the first cross-cultural investigation of the third person effect hypothesis, which states that individuals overestimate mass media effect on others (Davidson, 1983). It is predicted that the difference between perceived effects of the media on self vs. other will be greater in an individualistic than collectivistic culture, because in the latter self and other are not as separate and the motivation for self-enhancement is not as salient as in the former. Survey data were collected from 671 South Korean (n=351) and U.S. (n=320) college students regarding their perceptions about the effects of beer commercials, liquor advertisements, television news about AIDS, and television news about the effects of smoking. The third person effect of undesirable media content emerged from both American and Korean samples, but the size was consistently greater among Americans compared to Koreans. Likewise, the first person effect was greater among Americans rather than Koreans.


Slovene ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-169
Author(s):  
Fedor N. Dviniatin

The paper offers data on the quantity and structure of finite verbal forms in Simeon Polotsky’s collection Guslʹ Dobroglasnaia. The results are compared to data from twenty epinician odes by Mikhail Lomonosov and ten odes by Gavriil Derzhavin. We find 851 personal forms in Simeon’s collection, of which 214 belong to past tenses (73 to imperfect, 92 to aorist, 49 to past tense with l morpheme); 363 belong to present tense; 99 to future tense; 51 to imperative mood; 6 to conjunctive mood; and 118 to the forms with the da particle. The total percentage of past tenses in Simeon’s texts (25.1%) is close to the parameters appearing in Lomonosov’s and Derzhavin’s texts (21.4% and 23.5%, respectively), and the same is true for the percentages of non-indicative moods (20.5% vs. 19.1% and 20.5%). Simeon Polotsky’s texts contain fewer present tense forms than those written by the 18th-century poets (42.8% vs. 50.6% and 49.5%), but they contain more future tense forms (11.6% vs. 8.9% and 6.5%). Past tense forms in Simeon’s texts with l suffix include 29 forms of the third person with the auxiliary iestʹ verb, usually given in a rhyme position. In the aorist, the proportion of imperfective and perfective forms to the forms of the byti verb is 9:72:11; in imperfect, this proportion is 52:6:15; and in past tenses with l suffix, it is 8:38:3. We find 99 forms of the future tense, broken down as follows: 69 are forms of simple future; 12 are accompanied by imatʹ and similar forms; and 18 are accompanied by budet and similar forms (there is no semantic difference between these two last cases). Of the forms containing the da particle, 65 belong to present tense, 37 belong to future tense, and 16 are accompanied by byti forms.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 47-51
Author(s):  
Flamur SHALA ◽  
Xhafer BEQIRAJ

The contracted forms of literary Albanian are of dative case of all persons singular and plural and of the accusative case in the third person singular and plural. In certain syntactic constructions they merge and thus form connected contracted forms. When used near each other, the first is dative, while the second is accusative. Their use according to the norm are correct. Their topic in the sentence is arranged and a linguist or a lecturer should not miss the omissions in texts with short, separate, or connected forms. On the contrary, we encounter misuses of short forms of Albanian in texts of published and electronic media. They are incorrectly used in some syntactic constructions, marked by case in case, one by one. Contracted form locations and their referral to a different pronoun or name as a repetition of an object appear to be harmonized with the respective forms as an object or its repetition. They are placed in front of the verb forms of each tense. Except in imperative they have a double topic. The contracted forms during usage in the dative and accusative cases directly mark direct or indirect object. The contracted forms of the first and second person singular and plural, in the dative case, are often used to mark directly the indirect object. (p. 226) The misuse of the contracted forms is more common in the third person of the dative case when i.e. singular (i) is used instead of plural (u). We also encounter the incorrect use of the contracted forms of the second person plural of the dative case (juve) you instead of (atyre u). This research reveals the wrong use of contracted forms in the texts of some electronic media (portals) in Pristina and Tirana.


Author(s):  
Olaf Koeneman ◽  
Hedde Zeijlstra

Many, and according to some estimates most, of the world’s languages allow the subject of the sentence to be unexpressed, a phenomenon known as ‘pro(noun) drop’. In a language like Italian, Gianni parla ‘Gianni speaks’ and Parla ‘(S)he speaks’ are both grammatical sentences. This is in contrast to a language like English, in which not expressing the subject leads to an ungrammatical sentence: *Speaks. The difference between being and not being able to leave the subject unexpressed (or, to put it differently, to have a ‘null subject’) has been related to the richness of the verbal paradigm of a language. Whereas Italian has six different agreement endings in the present tense, English only marks the third-person singular differently (with an -s affix, as in John speak-s). Although this correlation with rich agreement is pervasive, it does not successfully capture all the cross-linguistic variation that is attested. Languages like Japanese and Chinese, for instance, allow unexpressed arguments (including subjects) in the absence of any agreement. For these languages, it has been observed that their pronominal paradigms tend to have transparent, agglutinative nominal morphology, expressing case or number features. Trickier perhaps are languages that allow pro drop under certain conditions only. Some languages, such as Finnish or colloquial variants of German, allow it in certain but not all person/number contexts. Other languages, such as Icelandic, allow the subject to be unexpressed only if it is an expletive, the counterpart of English it (cf. It is raining) or there (There is a man in the garden). For these so-called partial pro drop languages, it is still unclear if one can relate their more restricted absence of overt subjects to other observable properties that they possess.


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