Deriving anteriority in the perfect of recent past

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 35-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martijn van der Klis
Keyword(s):  
Romance Languages ◽  
Similar Distribution ◽  
Recent Past ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
Passe Compose

Abstract Most Romance languages share a grammaticalized construction to refer to events in the recent past, e.g. the passé récent in French and the pasado reciente in Spanish. In English, typically a present perfect alongside the adverb just is used to convey this meaning, commonly referred to as perfect of recent past (Comrie 1985) or hot news perfect (McCawley 1971). We show the French passé récent leads to a reading of immediate anteriority, which blocks readings that are available for the passé composé (Bres & Labeau 2015). In a parallel corpus study, we find that the Spanish and French recent past forms have a similar distribution, and the Germanic languages generally use perfect + just in translation. We then provide a DRT analysis to derive immediate anteriority compositionally.

scholarly journals A multilingual corpus study of the competition between past and perfect in narrative discourse

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
MARTIJN VAN DER KLIS ◽  
BERT LE BRUYN ◽  
HENRIËTTE DE SWART
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Discourse ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
British English ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Multilingual Corpus ◽  
French Novel ◽  
Crosslinguistic Variation ◽  
Dimensions Of Variation

The western European present perfect is subject to substantial crosslinguistic variation. The literature, however, focuses on individual languages or on comparisons of a restricted number of languages. We piece together the puzzle and do so in a data-driven way by comparing the use of the present perfect through a parallel corpus based on the French novel L’Étranger and its translations in Italian, German, Dutch, European Spanish, British English, and Modern Greek. We introduce and showcase Translation Mining, a software suite combining a parallel corpus database with annotation and analysis tools. Translation Mining allows us to generate descriptive statistics of tense use across languages but also to visualize variation through its multidimensional scaling component and to link the variation we find to the underlying data through its integrated setup. We confirm that the present perfect competes with the past and we reveal the fine-grained scalar nature of the variation. To complete the puzzle, we ascertain the dimensions of variation, ranging from lexical and compositional semantics to dynamic semantics and pragmatics.1

Conceptual metaphors as a tool for the efficient teaching of Dutch and German posture verbs

2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabine De Knop ◽  
Julien Perrez
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Language ◽  
Language Learners ◽  
Semantic Networks ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Conceptual Metaphors ◽  
Foreign Language Learners ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
Awareness Raising ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Germanic Languages

The article deals with the typological differences between the Romance language French and the Germanic languages German and Dutch for the linguistic expressions of posture and location. It describes how these typological differences can be problematic for French-speaking learners of German and Dutch. The main difference between both types of languages is that posture and location tend to be encoded by posture verbs in Germanic languages and by very general verbs in Romance languages (Talmy 2000). After a detailed description of the semantic networks of the German and Dutch posture verbs, the paper takes a critical look at how these expressions are dealt with in teaching manuals. It further presents strategies for the efficient teaching of posture verbs to foreign language learners. These strategies are among others awareness-raising exercises about the compulsory use of posture verbs in Germanic languages and the description of conceptual metaphors in different languages. These pedagogical avenues for the efficient teaching of the Dutch and German posture verbs constitute a first step towards the elaboration of an experimental set-up aiming at verifying them.

scholarly journals Pro-drop in interrogatives and declaratives.

2019 ◽  
Vol 100 (7) ◽  
pp. 95-140
Author(s):  
Federica Cognola ◽  
George Walkden
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Old High German ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Substantial Body ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Subordinate Clauses ◽  
The Asymmetry

While there has been a substantial body of research on the asymmetry between main and subordinate clauses in terms of the licensing of pro-drop, potential differences between types of unembedded clause have received much less attention – despite the fact that competing theories of pro-drop make strong, clear predictions about the distribution of null subjects across clause types, especially with regard to interrogatives. This paper presents the first in-depth comparative study of pro-drop in both declaratives and interrogatives in two asymmetric pro-drop languages: Old High German and Old Italian. Based on a parallel corpus study using two translations of Tatian’s Diatessaron, we show that there is a clear difference in distribution between interrogatives and declaratives: null subjects are more frequent in declarative clauses than in interrogatives, and these also differ in terms of the persons in which pro-drop is licensed. Our results speak against the V-in-C licensing theory of asymmetric pro-drop of Benincà (1984) and Adams (1987), and in favour of an account based on an Agree relation with left-peripheral operators in the sense of Frascarelli (2007, 2018).

1. Primitive Affinity between the Classical and the Low German Languages

1872 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 167-168
Author(s):  
Neaves
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Limited Attention ◽  
Low German ◽  
Vernacular English ◽  
The Family ◽  
German Dialects ◽  
Germanic Languages ◽  
Comparative Philology

In this paper the author adverted to the limited attention that was paid in this country to comparative philology, and noticed the principles it had developed and the progress it had made elsewhere of late years.In illustration of the results thus attained in the Aryan or Indo-Germanic languages, he took as familiar examples the affinities that could be traced between the Latin and the Old English tongues, viewing the Latin as a type of the earlier branches of the family, including the Greek and Indian; and the English as a type of a later branch, consisting chiefly of the Low German dialects. The affinities referred to were not those which connected Latin with English through the romance languages, but those which subsisted between Latin and vernacular English, and which must have arisen from a prehistoric identity or connection.

Posture verbs

2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Åke Viberg
Keyword(s):  
Resultative Constructions ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Written Text ◽  
Contrastive Study ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
General Similarity ◽  
Data Source ◽  
Reflexive Verbs ◽  
Rich Data ◽  
Germanic Languages

From a typological perspective, the verbs of sitting, standing and lying have been described relatively extensively. Against this background, the present paper provides a contrastive study of the lexical semantics of the Swedish posture verbs sitta ‘sit’, stå ‘stand’ and ligga ‘lie’ based on the Multilingual Parallel Corpus (MPC), which contains extracts from Swedish novels and their published translations into English, German, French and Finnish. Since the corpus is a very rich data source, the study is focused on the use of posture verbs as locative verbs. It turns out that it is possible to arrange the languages along a continuum with respect to the use of posture verbs versus the copula to describe the location of inanimate objects. In Finnish the copula dominates completely, in English there is more of a balance (in this kind of written text), whereas the posture verbs dominate in German and Swedish. French stands out as a completely different type in this comparison, since the copula is used very little and posture verbs hardly at all. Actually, there is a tension in French between the use of a small number of verbs with a general locative meaning as translations and the use of a large variety of reflexive verbs and resultative constructions with past participles (e.g. être fixé ‘be attached’) which convey fine-grained information about the placement. Among the languages that use posture verbs as locative predicates, there is a general similarity with respect to the factors that condition the choice between lie and stand, whereas even closely related Germanic languages differ with respect to the semantic factors that condition the choice of sit as a locative predicate.

scholarly journals Directionals and re-autonomization in Dutch modals

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Jan Nuyts ◽  
Wim Caers
Keyword(s):  
Corpus Study ◽  
Modal Auxiliaries ◽  
Main Verb ◽  
Alternative Suggestion ◽  
Germanic Languages

Abstract Modal auxiliaries in Present Day Dutch are going through a process of ‘re-autonomization’, i.e. they are increasingly used without a main verb elsewhere in the clause, in ways which are not possible in other Germanic languages. Many Germanic languages do allow omission of the main verb when a modal is combined with a directional phrase in the clause. This paper investigates whether the latter phenomenon may have been the cause of the former process in Dutch. A diachronic corpus study of the Dutch modals shows that the answer is negative. The paper offers an alternative suggestion as to how the re-autonomization trend may have emerged.

A cross-linguistic perspective on the Right-Hand Head Rule: the rule and the exceptions

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdel Rahman Mitib Altakhaineh
Keyword(s):  
Romance Languages ◽  
Right Hand ◽  
Systematic Pattern ◽  
The Right ◽  
Germanic Languages

AbstractThe study investigates the patterning of headedness in compounding, in particular the patterning of regularities and exceptions to the Right-Hand Head Rule (RHHR). An examination of the grammatical descriptions of compounds in English, French, Italian, German, Arabic, Hebrew, Dutch and Spanish indicates that languages such as German and Dutch are strongly right-headed, other languages such as French and Arabic are strongly left-headed, whereas English, Spanish and Italian tend to be mixed between left-headed and right-headed. Despite the existence of some exceptions to RHHR in some of these languages, the rule remains viable, as these exceptions may have a systematic pattern. While in Romance languages the exceptions seem to be phonologically conditioned, in Germanic languages the exceptions appear to be syntactically conditioned. This study raises the question whether internal headedness in a language could be regarded as a fairly arbitrary property, unconnected to the language’s other characteristics, or not.

Social influence in the use of the present perfect in Bilbao

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clara Burgo
Keyword(s):  
Social Influence ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Social Variables ◽  
Present Perfect ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
The Social ◽  
Linguistic Constraints ◽  
Peninsular Spanish ◽  
Semantic Domains

The Present Perfect (PP) in some Peninsular Spanish dialects is following the same path as other Romance languages; it is going through a grammaticalization process where the PP is usurping the semantic domains of the Preterite. This is the case of many Peninsular dialects such as Alicante (Schwenter, 1994) and Madrid (Serrano, 1994) among others as well as Bilbao (Kempas, 2005). He found that the frequencies of PPs in hodiernal contexts were higher than in other Spanish cities so these findings point out to a more advanced path of grammaticalization in this city. Previous studies have paid more attention to the linguistic constraints that favor the use of the PP instead of the Preterite rather than the social factors that influence this linguistic change. In this article, I focus on the study of three social variables (age, gender and class) to account for evidence of a change in progress in Bilbao Spanish.

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