‘Have’ in English and Romance

2021 ◽  
pp. 495-532
Author(s):  
John Charles Smith
Keyword(s):  
Romance Languages ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
Epistemic Modal ◽  
Light Verb ◽  
Progressive Loss ◽  
The Status

This paper compares and contrasts the forms and usage of the verb ‘have’ in different varieties of English and Romance. ‘Have’ may serve as a verb of possession, a perfect auxiliary, a deontic modal, and a presentative in both English and Romance. However, its English uses as an epistemic modal, as a dynamic light verb, and as a causative have no counterparts in Romance, whilst the ‘double perfect’ of many Romance varieties is absent from English. Although restricted to certain varieties, parallels may be noted between English and some Romance languages (dissociation of auxiliary and possessive ‘have’; progressive loss of past participle agreement and of the competing auxiliary ‘be’ in the perfect; apparent ‘aoristic drift’). The paper concludes by discussing the significance of the data for the distinction between main verbs and auxiliaries; the status of ‘have’, particularly as a verb of possession; and the nature of grammaticalization.

Comparatives and Superlatives in the Romance Languages

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marleen Van Peteghem
Keyword(s):  
Romance Languages ◽  
Definite Article ◽  
Linguistic Differences ◽  
Equal Degree ◽  
European Languages ◽  
The Status ◽  
Comparative Constructions ◽  
Standard Of Comparison ◽  
Traditional Grammar ◽  
Standard Marker

Comparison expresses a relation involving two or more entities which are ordered on a scale with respect to a gradable property, called the parameter of comparison. In European languages, it is typically expressed through two constructions, comparatives and superlatives. Comparative constructions generally involve two entities, and indicate whether the compared entity shows a higher, lesser, or equal degree of the parameter with respect to the other entity, which is the standard of comparison. Superlatives set out one entity against a class of entities and indicate that the compared entity shows the highest or lowest degree of the parameter. Hence, comparatives may express either inequality (superiority or inferiority) or equality, whereas superlatives necessarily express superiority or inferiority. In traditional grammar, the terms comparative and superlative are primarily used to refer to the morphology of adjectives and adverbs in languages with synthetic marking (cf. Eng. slow, slower, slowest). However, while Latin has such synthetic marking, modern Romance languages no longer possess productive comparative or superlative suffixes. All Romance languages use analytic markers consisting of dedicated adverbs (e.g., Fr. plus ‘more’, moins ‘less’, aussi ‘as, also’) and determiners (e.g., Sp./It. tanto, Ro. atât ‘so much’). Superlatives are marked with the same markers and are mainly distinguished from comparatives by their association with definiteness. Another difference between comparatives and superlatives lies in the complements they license. Comparatives license a comparative complement, which may be clausal or phrasal, and which identifies the standard of comparison. As for superlatives, they license partitive PPs denoting the comparison set, which may be further specified by other PPs, a relative clause, or an infinitive clause. The Romance languages show many similarities with respect to the morphosyntactic encoding of comparatives and superlatives, but they also display important cross-linguistic differences. These differences may be related to the status of the comparative marker, the encoding of the standard marker, ellipsis phenomena in the comparative clause, and the dependence of the superlative on the definite article.

Past participles of strong verbs in Jutland Danish: A real-time study of regionalization and standardization

2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Torben Juel Jensen ◽  
Marie Maegaard
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Geographical Location ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
Time Study ◽  
The Past ◽  
Time Period ◽  
The Status ◽  
Standardization Process ◽  
Large Corpus ◽  
Strong Verbs

The article presents a real-time study of standardization and regionalization processes with respect to the use of past participles of strong verbs in the western part of Denmark. Analyses of a large corpus of recordings of informants from two localities show that the use of the dialectalenform of the past participle suffix has been in decline during the last 30 years. Theenforms are replaced by three other forms, one of which is (partly) dialectal, one regional and one standard Danish. The study indicates that a regionalization process has taken place prior to the time period studied, but that it has now been overtaken by a Copenhagen-based standardization process. The study also shows interesting differences between the two localities, arguably due to the geographical location and size, and to the status of the different participle forms in the traditional local dialects.

scholarly journals On the origins of French and Occitan

2020 ◽  
pp. 307-325
Author(s):  
Clive R. Sneddon
Keyword(s):  
Romance Languages ◽  
Reading And Writing ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Church

The status of the language found in the Clermont-Ferrand manuscript of the Passion and St Leger is unclear. Should it be regarded as French, or French with an admixture of Occitanisms, or something else? A concordance of the early mostly short texts shows that they share a range of common forms, across all three Gallo-Romance languages. A study of the books and manuscripts which have preserved these texts show that they are part of the learned culture of their day. Reading and writing are done in Latin, and the early texts are both innovatory in writing literary vernacular and conservative in keeping as close to Latin conventions as possible, as expected by the church institutions in which these materials were used and preserved.

L-syntax and phono-symbolism: on the status of ideophones in complex predicates

2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ludovico Franco
Keyword(s):  
Complex Predicates ◽  
Light Verb ◽  
Verbal Predicate ◽  
The Status ◽  
Adjacent Position ◽  
Bare Nouns ◽  
Direct Objects

AbstractIn this article, the author demonstrates that verbal compound constructions involving an ideophone and a light verb represent a widespread syntactic device in the world's languages. The author provides evidence that phono-symbolic morphemes cannot be treated as ‘bare’ direct objects in such constructions. Ideophones appearing in the light verb-adjacent position form a semantic unit with the verbal predicate, despite the fact that in some languages they can be syntacticized as (bare) nouns and appear in argumental position. Specifically, ideophones in complex predicates are part of the verbal domain with which they ‘blend’ (yielding a single predicate) through the mechanism of conflation, along the lines of Hale and Keyser (1993, 2002), and building on Ramchand (2008).

scholarly journals Wetlands Conference in the Camargue

Oryx ◽  
1963 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-40
Author(s):  
A. Daubercies
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
Executive Board ◽  
International Union ◽  
North West ◽  
Temperate Wetlands ◽  
Progressive Loss ◽  
The Status ◽  
Special Project ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
Conservation And Management

The progressive loss of marshes, bogs and others wetlands through drainage and “improvement” led the Executive Board and the Ecology Commission of the International Union for Conservation of Nature to undertake a special project—project MAR—on the conservation and management of temperate wetlands. As with their African Special Project, the work is divided into three stages. First came the collection of data on the status and importance of wetlands and the methods by which they might most profitably be conserved: also the compiling of an inventory of important wetland areas in Europe and north-west Africa.

scholarly journals Issues on topics

2000 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 205
Author(s):  
Kerstin Schwabe ◽  
André Meinunger ◽  
Dieter Gasde
Keyword(s):  
Romance Languages ◽  
Present Volume ◽  
European Languages ◽  
The Status ◽  
Syntactic Behavior ◽  
Discourse Topic

The present volume contains papers that bear mainly on issues concerning the topic concept. This concept is of course very broad and diverse. Also, different views are expressed in this volume. Some authors concentrate on the status of topics and non-topics in so-called topic prominent languages (i.e. Chinese), others focus on the syntactic behavior of topical constituents in specific European languages (German, Greek, Romance languages). The last contribution tries to bring together the concept of discourse topic (a non-syntactic notion) and the concept of sentence topic, i.e. that type of topic that all the preceding papers are concerned with.  

The Latin third stem and its survival in Romance

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Maiden
Keyword(s):  
Romance Languages ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of

The implications of Aronoff’s classic example of a morphome—the Latin third stem—for the history of the Romance languages are considered; the third stem is shown to persist in Romance in the form of the past participle (also, in Romanian, in the supine) and to display truly ‘morphomic’ properties in diachrony. Some criticisms of the morphomic status of the third stem in Latin are reviewed. The significance of apparent counterexamples in Portuguese and elsewhere is considered. The diachronic data disclose a probably crucial distinction between derivational and inflexional domains in the definition of morphomic patterns. Such patterns reveal themselves as robust only within inflexional morphology, and it is suggested that perfect lexical identity between alternating word forms is crucial to the existence and persistence of morphomic patterns.

Popular lexicon of Greek origin in Italian varieties

2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-120
Author(s):  
Francesco Crifò
Keyword(s):  
Southern Italy ◽  
Northern Italy ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
The Other ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Many ◽  
The One

AbstractGreek-speaking people have been sailing the Mediterranean for millennia. At various stages of their development from Latin, the Romance languages have been influenced by their idiom. In Italy and in its islands, this role has been particularly evident due to the many rich and culturally active colonies in Southern Italy before and during the Roman period on the one hand, and through the later Byzantine occupation, which lasted several centuries in some areas, on the other. In this article, after a brief summary of the historical background (2.), the characteristics of the lexical borrowings from Greek in the local idioms of Southern (3.) as well as of Central and Northern Italy (4.) will be sketched. Here and there, and in the conclusions (5.), the status quaestionis and the latest orientations of the research will also be broadly outlined.

Choosing an event description: What a PropBank study reveals about the contrast between light verb constructions and counterpart synthetic verbs

2020 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 577-600
Author(s):  
CLAIRE BONIAL ◽  
KIMBERLY A. POLLARD
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
General Function ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Light Verb Constructions ◽  
Light Verb ◽  
Event Description ◽  
Verb Constructions ◽  
Motivating Factor

Light verb constructions (LVCs) in English and Romance languages are somewhat unique crosslinguistically because LVCs in these languages tend to have semantically similar synthetic verb counterparts (Zarco 1999): e.g. make an appearance and appear. This runs contrary to assumptions in linguistic theories that two competing forms are rarely maintained in a language unless they serve distinct purposes (e.g. Grice 1975). Why do English LVCs exist alongside counterpart synthetic verbs, especially given that synthetic verbs are arguably the more efficient form (Zipf 1949)? It has been proposed that LVCs serve an aspectual function (Prince 1972, Live 1973, Wierzbicka 1982, Tanabe 1999, Butt & Geuder 2001), as there are telic LVC counterparts (e.g. have a thought) of atelic verbs (e.g. think).  This proposal has been difficult to evaluate without a large-scale resource providing a markup of both LVCs and counterpart verbs. Addressing this gap in resources, the present research describes the development of guidelines for LVC annotation in the English PropBank (Bonial & Palmer 2015). The focus of this article is the subsequent analysis of these annotations, aimed at uncovering corpus evidence of what contexts call for the use of an LVC over a synthetic verb. The corpus study shows that the general function of LVCs is not an aspectual one and provides distributional evidence that the ease and variety with which LVCs can be modified is the general motivating factor for the use of an LVC.

The Romance Verb

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Maiden
Keyword(s):  
Romance Languages ◽  
Functional Determinant ◽  
Historical Romance ◽  
Determining Factors ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
Identical Material ◽  
Self Replication ◽  
Morphological System ◽  
Morphological Patterns

This book is the first ever comprehensive comparative–historical survey of patterns of alternation in the Romance verb that appear to be autonomously morphological in the sense that, although they can be shown to be persistent through time, they have long ceased to be conditioned by any phonological or functional determinant. Some of these patterns are well known in Romance linguistics, while others have scarcely been noticed. The sheer range of phenomena that participate in them far surpasses what Romance linguists had previously realized. The patterns constitute a kind of abstract leitmotif, which runs through the history of the Romance languages and confers on them a distinctive morphological phsyiognomy. Although intended primarily as a novel contribution to comparative–historical Romance linguistics, the book considers in detail the status of patterns that appear to be, in the terminology of Mark Aronoff, ‘morphomic’: a matter of ‘morphology by itself’, unsupported by determining factors external to the morphological system. Particular attention is paid to the problem of their persistence, self-replication, and reinforcement over time. Why do abstract morphological patterns that quite literally do not make sense display such diachronic robustness? The evidence suggests that speakers, faced with different ways of expressing semantically identical material, seek out distributional templates into which those differences can be deployed. In Romance, the only available templates happen to be morphomic, morphologically accidental effects of old sound changes or defunct functional conditionings. Those patterns are accordingly exploited and reinforced by being made maximally predictable.

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