The origin of Spanish entre tú y yo “between you and me”

Diachronica ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 139-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joel Rini
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Subject Pronouns ◽  
Syntactic Change ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Historical Grammar

The present study analyzes both diachronically and typologically the synchronically irregular Spanish syntagm, entre tú y yo “between you and me”, which employs the subject pronouns, tú and yo, rather than the expected prepositional pronouns, ti and mí. First, a thorough examination of Old Spanish texts reveals that the Old Spanish syntagm did indeed exhibit prepositional pronouns, i.e., OSp. entre mí & ti (a fact virtually unknown to specialists of Spanish historical grammar), thus unveiling a syntactic change from entre mí & ti > entre tú y yo. Next, the change is compared to the typologically similar ongoing change in Modern English, namely, between you and me > between you and I. It is then shown here that although the change in these languages appears, on the surface, to be an exact parallel, the origin, or cause, of the change in each language is different. Nevertheless, certain factors — including the ultimate inability of the preposition to govern the second of two conjoined elements, as well as word-order patterns of the subject pronouns — were indeed found to have played a role in the development of both entre tú y yo and between you and I.

Syntactic features of medieval Hispano-Romance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven N. Dworkin
Keyword(s):  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Direct Object ◽  
Standard Language ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Subject Pronouns ◽  
Syntactic Features ◽  
Object Marking ◽  
Syntactic Differences ◽  
Modern Standard

This chapter describes selected issues of noun phrase, verb phrase, and sentential syntax. It emphasizes differences between the selected constructions in Old Spanish and in the modern standard language. Specific issues discussed include the function of determiners, the use of subject pronouns, the preverbal or postverbal placement of clitic object pronouns, direct object marking, and issues involving subject-verb-object and noun-adjective word order. The section on verbal syntax examines the use of the present, imperfect, and preterit tenses in medieval Hispano-Romance, the syntax of analytic or compound tenses, the syntactic differences between the synthetic and analytic futures, the syntax and semantics of the subjunctive, and the syntax of aver/tener and ser/estar.

On the Subject of Negative Auxiliary Inversion

2018 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frances Blanchette ◽  
Chris Collins
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Left Periphery ◽  
Negative Concord ◽  
Double Negation ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
West Texas ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Scope Freezing

AbstractThis article presents a novel analysis ofNegative Auxiliary Inversion(NAI) constructions such asdidn't many people eat, in which a negated auxiliary appears in pre-subject position. NAI, found in varieties including Appalachian, African American, and West Texas English, has a word order identical to a yes/no question, but is pronounced and interpreted as a declarative. We propose that NAI subjects are negative DPs, and that the negation raises from the subject DP to adjoin to Fin (a functional head in the left periphery). Three properties of NAI motivate this analysis: (i) scope freezing effects, (ii) the various possible and impossible NAI subject types, and (iii) the incompatibility of NAI constructions with true Double-Negation interpretations. Implications for theories of Negative Concord, Negative Polarity Items, and the representation of negation are discussed.

scholarly journals Optimality Analysis of Vowel Harmony in ÀÍKA

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Ibikunle Abiodun Samuel
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Optimality Theory ◽  
Vowel Harmony ◽  
Morphological Effect ◽  
Subject Pronouns ◽  
Non Linear ◽  
Demonstrative Pronouns ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Object Pronouns

This paper gives an Optimality Theory (Henceforth OT) account of advanced tongue root (ATR) vowel harmony in ÀÍKAan Edoid language that consists of four speech forms spoken in Akoko-Edo area in Nigeria. The ATR harmony manifests within as well as across morpheme boundaries. The ATR harmony across morphemes affects the subject pronouns, prefixes as well as demonstrative pronouns because they are underspecified for ATR value while object pronouns are underlyingly specified. It is further noted that ATR has a morphological effect on the items it affects as it triggers phonological allomorphy in them. In addition to right-to-left spreading analysis in the literature (Abiodun 1999, Ibikunle 2014, and 2016), this research further reveals that there are pieces of evidence for left-to-right spreading of harmonic value. More importantly, this analysis shows that OT is viable and problem-solving efficient compared with the Non-Linear or traditional generative account on Vowel Harmony system of the language.  

Diachronic features of Romanian in a broader comparative setting

2019 ◽  
pp. 217-222
Author(s):  
Alexandru Nicolae
Keyword(s):  
Structural Properties ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Romance Language ◽  
Syntactic Theory ◽  
Syntactic Change ◽  
History Of ◽  
Diachronic Development

Chapter 6 highlights the novel theoretical and empirical facts brought about by the word order changes that occurring in the passage from old to modern Romanian, showing how the diachrony of Romanian may contribute to a better understanding of the history of the Romance languages and of the Balkan Sprachbund, as well as to syntactic theory and syntactic change in general. One important dimension of diachronic variation and change is the height of nouns and verbs along their extended projections (lower vs higher V- and N-movement). The two perspectives from which language contact proves relevant in the diachronic development of word order in Romanian, language contact by means of translation and areal language contact, are discussed. The chapter also addresses the issue of surface analogy vs deep structural properties; once again, Romanian emerges as a Romance language in a Balkan suit, as Romance deep structural properties are instantiated by means of Balkan word order patterns.

Objects in the German prefield

2020 ◽  
pp. 15-39
Author(s):  
Markus Bader
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Language Production ◽  
Initial Position ◽  
Experimental Investigations ◽  
Demonstrative Pronoun ◽  
New Findings ◽  
The Subject ◽  
New Speakers ◽  
Referential Form ◽  
Free Word

From the perspective of language production, this chapter discusses the question of whether to move the subject or the object to the clause-initial position in a German Verb Second clause. A review of experimental investigations of language production shows that speakers of German tend to order arguments in such a way that the most accessible argument comes first, with accessibility defined in terms like animacy (‘animate before inanimate’) and discourse status (e.g. ‘given before new’). Speakers of German thus obey the same ordering principles that have been found to be at work in English and other languages. Despite the relative free word order of German, speakers rarely produce sentences with object-before-subject word order in experimental investigations. Instead, they behave like speakers of English and mostly use passivization in order to bring the underlying object argument in front of the underlying subject argument when the object is more accessible than the subject. Corpus data, however, show that object-initial clauses are not so infrequent after all. The second part of the chapter, therefore, discusses new findings concerning the discourse conditions that favour the production of object-initial clauses. These findings indicate, among other things, that the clausal position of an object is affected not only by its referent’s discourse status but also by its referential form. Objects occur in clause-initial position most frequently when referring to a given referent in the form of a demonstrative pronoun or NP.

scholarly journals Universals of word order reflect optimization of grammars for efficient communication

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (5) ◽  
pp. 2347-2353 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Hahn ◽  
Dan Jurafsky ◽  
Richard Futrell
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Network Models ◽  
Neural Network Models ◽  
Information Theoretic ◽  
Large Scale Data ◽  
Efficient Communication ◽  
Universal Properties ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Scale Data

The universal properties of human languages have been the subject of intense study across the language sciences. We report computational and corpus evidence for the hypothesis that a prominent subset of these universal properties—those related to word order—result from a process of optimization for efficient communication among humans, trading off the need to reduce complexity with the need to reduce ambiguity. We formalize these two pressures with information-theoretic and neural-network models of complexity and ambiguity and simulate grammars with optimized word-order parameters on large-scale data from 51 languages. Evolution of grammars toward efficiency results in word-order patterns that predict a large subset of the major word-order correlations across languages.

Child L2 English acquisition of subject properties in an immersion bilingual context

2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabet Pladevall Ballester
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Second Language Acquisition ◽  
Age Of Onset ◽  
First Language ◽  
Control Group ◽  
Single Subject ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Old Spanish ◽  
Developmental Effects ◽  
The Subject

Although thoroughly analysed in adult second language acquisition (L2A), the acquisition of subject properties in child L2A has not received so much attention and the majority of studies deal with longitudinal data or only with a single subject property. This study contributes new cross-sectional data from 5-year-old Spanish children acquiring second language (L2) English in an immersion bilingual context with age of onset three and analyses the acquisition of all the subject properties traditionally associated as a cluster in comparison to a monolingual control group of the same age. The data were obtained by means of an orally elicited judgement/correction experimental task and enabled us to explore the children’s awareness of grammaticality contrasts in their L2, the influence of their L1 after two years of exposure and the extent to which the cluster of subject properties traditionally associated and studied together develop similarly in acquisitional terms. Results suggest that 5-year-old children show sensitivity to grammaticality contrasts in their L2 English and indicate that even after two years of exposure and although the age of onset of acquisition was only three, their L2 is influenced by their first language (L1) subject properties, although developmental effects also need to be taken into account when explaining the results.

Subject expression and discourse embeddedness in Emirati Arabic

2013 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 255-285 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Owens ◽  
Robin Dodsworth ◽  
Mary Kohn
Keyword(s):  
Word Order ◽  
The Other ◽  
Relevant Parameter ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Single Episode ◽  
Discourse Coherence ◽  
Complementary Approach ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Subject Expression ◽  
The One

AbstractSince Prince (1981) and Givón (1983), studies on discourse reference have explained the grammatical realization of referents in terms of general concepts such as “assumed familiarity” or “discourse coherence.” In this paper, we develop a complementary approach based on a detailed statistical tracking of subjects in Emirati Arabic, from which two major categories of subject expression emerge. On the one hand, null subjects are opposed to overt ones; on the other, subject-verb (SV) is opposed to verb-subject (VS). Although null subjects strongly correlate with coreferentiality with the subject of the previous clause, they can also index more distant referents within a single episode. With respect to SV vs. VS, morpholexical classes are found to be biased toward one or the other: nouns are typically VS, pronouns SV. We conclude that the null subject variant is the norm in Emirati Arabic, and when an overt subject is appropriate, lexical identity biases the subject into SV or VS order, generating word order as a discourse-relevant parameter. Overall, our approach attempts to understand Arabic discourse from a microlevel perspective.

scholarly journals Subject case alternation in negated existential, locative, and possessive clauses in Latvian

Kalbotyra ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 71 ◽  
pp. 43-64
Author(s):  
Andra Kalnača ◽  
Ilze Lokmane
Keyword(s):  
Full Article ◽  
Word Order ◽  
Information Structure ◽  
Semantic Type ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Nominative Case ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Adverbial Modifiers ◽  
Strict Rule ◽  
Negative Form

[full article and abstract in English] The goal of this article is to analyse the alternation between the genitive and nominative cases in Latvian. As the alternation between genitive and nominative cases is possible in all clauses in which the verb būt ‘to be’ is used as an independent verb, this article examines existential, locative, and also possessive clauses, while also demonstrating that distinguishing these clause types is problematic for Latvian utilising the criteria given in the linguistic literature. Clauses containing the negative form of būt ‘to be’, i.e. nebūt, form the foundation of those selected for this study, as only in these sentences the genitive/nominative alternation can be seen for the subject in Latvian. There are only fragmentary descriptions of existential clauses as a unique semantic type, primarily in connection with the function of the verb būt ‘to be’ and the problems associated with distinguishing its independent and auxiliary meanings. Word order in existential, locative, and possessive clauses has, until now, been examined in connection with typical clause expanders – adverbial modifiers and the dative of possession as well as the information structure of the clause. At the same time, case choice for objects in negative existential clauses has traditionally been one of the most studied themes regarding language standardisation. In order to determine which factors affect the choice of either the genitive or nominative case, a corpus study was done analysing 979 examples: 882 with a genitive subject and 97 with a nominative subject. It was found that a connection exists between the definiteness of the subject, word order, and case choice; however, this manifests only as a tendency rather than as a strict rule.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document