scholarly journals A quantitative survey of N Prep N constructions in Romance languages and prepositional variability

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (22) ◽  
pp. 129
Author(s):  
Inga Hennecke ◽  
Harald Baayen
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Quantitative Survey ◽  
Current Discussion ◽  
Specific Variation ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Syntactic Status ◽  
Internal Element

The distinction between syntagmatic compounds of the type N Prep N, such as Fr. jouet d’enfant, and nominal syntagms of the type N Prep N, such as the partially equivalent Fr. jouet pour enfants, remains unclear and vague. This is mainly because the lexical and syntactic status of syntagmatic compounds still is controversial. In some cases, as in jouet d’enfant and jouet pour enfants, partial equivalent syntagmatic compounds and nominal syntagms may coexist and underlie a specific variation and alternation. In other cases, such as Pt. bracelete de aço and bracelete em aço, two variants of a syntagmatic compound may alternate and coexist. The first part of this paper provides an overview of the current discussion on these two types of constructions. The second part addresses the alternation and variation of syntagmatic compounds and nominal syntagms by means of analysis of large-scale corpus data, the French, Spanish and Portuguese corpus of the TenTen family. Here, the focus lies on the variation of the prepositional internal element of these constructions as well as on a comparison of different word formation patterns.

Adjectival Suffixes: From Latin to Romance

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franz Rainer
Keyword(s):  
Language Contact ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Change Processes ◽  
Semantic Change ◽  
Semantic Categories ◽  
European Languages

All languages seem to have nouns and verbs, while the dimension of the class of adjectives varies considerably cross-linguistically. In some languages, verbs or, to a lesser extent, nouns take over the functions that adjectives fulfill in Indo-European languages. Like other such languages, Latin and the Romance languages have a rich category of adjectives, with a well-developed inventory of patterns of word formation that can be used to enrich it. There are about 100 patterns in Romance standard languages. The semantic categories expressed by adjectival derivation in Latin have remained remarkably stable in Romance, despite important changes at the level of single patterns. To some extent, this stability is certainly due to the profound process of relatinization that especially the Romance standard languages have undergone over the last 1,000 years; however, we may assume that it also reflects the cognitive importance of the semantic categories involved. Losses were mainly due to phonological attrition (Latin unstressed suffixes were generally doomed) and to the fact that many derived adjectives became nouns via ellipsis, thereby often reducing the stock of adjectives. At the same time, new adjectival patterns arose as a consequence of language contact and through semantic change, processes of noun–adjective conversion, and the transformation of evaluative suffixes into ethnic suffixes. Overall, the inventory of adjectival patterns of word formation is richer in present-day Romance languages than it was in Latin.

Agreement Paradigms across Moods and Tenses: The Case of Romanian Subjunctives and Imperatives

2009 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-156
Author(s):  
Mihaela Pirvulescu
Keyword(s):  
Distributed Morphology ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Close Resemblance ◽  
Syntactic Representation ◽  
Agreement Morphology ◽  
Verbal Agreement ◽  
Syntactic Status

AbstractThis article argues that the realization of agreement in subjunctive and imperative verbs is a consequence of the syntactic status of Tense in these two moods. Crucially, certain agreement paradigms across Romance languages show very a close resemblance: the subjunctive and imperative paradigms are identical, in most cases, to the indicative paradigms. Systematically, moods such as the subjunctive and the imperative do not show specific tense affixes or specific tense-induced allomorphy on their agreement affixes. The proposal is illustrated with Romanian verbal agreement, which is analyzed within the Distributed Morphology framework. The analysis shows that tense information is not used in subjunctive and imperative agreement morphology, unless it is exactly the same information as in another paradigm — the present indicative. It is proposed that at the syntactic level, Tense is unspecified in the subjunctive and absent in the imperative, and that the realization of agreement affixes is a consequence of this syntactic representation.

Innovation on screen

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Reichelt
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
American English ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Formation Processes ◽  
Character Analysis ◽  
Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Abstract This study explores marked affixation as a possible cue for characterization in scripted television dialogue. The data used here is the newly compiled TV Corpus, which encompasses over 265 million words in its North American English context. An initial corpus-based analysis quantifies the innovative use of affixes in word-formation processes across the corpus to allow for comparison with a following character analysis, which investigates how derivational word-formation supports characterization patterns within a specific series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. For this, a list of productive prefixes (e.g. de-, un-) and suffixes (e.g. -y, -ish) is used to elicit relevant contexts. The study thus combines two approaches to word-formation processes in scripted contexts. On a large scale, it shows how derivational neologisms are spread across TV dialogue and on a much smaller scale, it highlights particular instances where these neologisms are used to aid character construction.

The Acquisition of Word-Formation in the Romance Languages

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eve V. Clark
Keyword(s):  
Word Formation ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
New Words ◽  
Word Forms ◽  
Elicitation Studies

Several factors influence children’s initial choices of word-formation options––simplicity of form, transparency of meaning, and productivity in current adult speech. The coining of new words is also constrained by general pragmatic considerations for usage: Reliance on conventionality, contrast, and cooperation between speaker and addressee. For children acquiring French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, the data on what they know about word-formation for the coining of new words consist primarily of diary observations; in some cases, these are supplemented with experimental elicitation studies of the comprehension and production of new word-forms. The general patterns in Romance acquisition of word-formation favor derivation over compounding. Children produce some spontaneous coinages with zero derivation (verbs converted to nouns in French, for example) from as young as 2 years, 6 months (2;6). The earliest suffixes children put to use in these languages tend to be agentive (from 2;6 to 3 years onward), followed by instrumental, objective, locative, and, slightly later, diminutive. The only prefixes that emerge early in child innovations are negative ones used to express reversals of actions. Overall, the general patterns of acquisition for word-formation in Romance are similar to those in Semitic, where derivation is also more productive than compounding, rather than to those in Germanic, where compounding is highly productive, and emerges very early, before any derivational forms.

scholarly journals French subject island? Empirical studies of dont and de qui

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 275-300 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Abeillé ◽  
Elodie Winckel
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Relative Clauses ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
First Century ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
Recent Innovation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Relative Pronouns

AbstractDont has been claimed to be an exception to the ‘subject island’ constraint (Tellier, 1991; Sportiche and Bellier, 1989; Heck, 2009) and to contrast with true relative pronouns such as de qui. We provide corpus data from a literary corpus (Frantext), which show that relativizing out of the subject is possible with dont and de qui in French relative clauses, and is even the most frequent use of both relative clauses. We show that it is not a recent innovation by comparing subcorpora from the beginning of the twentieth century and from the beginning of the twenty-first century. We also show, with an acceptability judgement task, that extraction out of the subject with de qui is well accepted. Why has this possibility been overlooked? We suggest that it may be because de qui relatives in general are less frequent than dont relatives (about 60 times less in our corpus). Turning to de qui interrogatives, we show that extraction out of the subject is not attested, and propose an explanation of the contrast with relative clauses. We conclude that in this respect, French does not seem to differ from other Romance languages.

Sibilant-stop onsets in Romance: Explaining phonotactic complexity

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-84
Author(s):  
Elissa Pustka
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Complex Case ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
French Corpus

Abstract Focusing on sibilant-stop onsets, this paper deals with syllabic complexity in Romance languages. At its core are two empirical studies that address the complex case of French: a type-level study is based on the Petit Robert, and a token-level study uses Parisian and Southern French corpus data elaborated in the framework of the PFC program (Phonologie du Français Contemporain). The paper identifies three factors behind the emergence of phonotactic complexity: (a) vowel elision, (b) borrowing, and (c) expressivity.

Linguistic levelling in Spanish: The analogical strong preterites

2010 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-225
Author(s):  
Enrique Pato
Keyword(s):  
Geographic Distribution ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Corpus Data ◽  
Peninsular Spanish

AbstractCertain Peninsular Spanish varieties have two third-person plural forms in the simple past indicative of verbs with ‘strong’ (stem-stressed) preterites. While this phenomenon is documented in large-scale linguistic atlas surveys, its current geographic distribution and diachronic origins remain under-studied. This paper sets out to: 1) establish the geographic distribution of these variants; the differing methodologies and epochs of the data sources make them particularly interesting to compare, showing that these analogical strong preterites have suffered a drastic decline over the last century; 2) use historical corpus data to show that the vernacular variant is by no means a recent phenomenon; 3) examine external history as a source of explanation in linguistic reconstruction, showing that this process of analogical levelling took place after the reconquest and resettlement of these regions. These findings support the hypothesis of a feature which spread over the centuries by linguistic diffusion.

scholarly journals Towards Unrestricted, Large-Scale Acquisition of Feature-Based Conceptual Representations from Corpus Data

2009 ◽  
Vol 7 (2-4) ◽  
pp. 137-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Devereux ◽  
Nicholas Pilkington ◽  
Thierry Poibeau ◽  
Anna Korhonen
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Conceptual Representations ◽  
Feature Based ◽  
Corpus Data

Conversion Syntaxique

1994 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe E. Barbaud
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Data ◽  
Word Formation ◽  
Compound Word ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Compound Words ◽  
Syntactic Structures ◽  
High Productivity ◽  
Structure Level ◽  
Lexical Function ◽  
Verb Raising

In this study, it is shown that the "category changing" property of morphological rules of conversion is unable to account for compound words, for formal and semantic reasons. Several convergent facts demonstrate that the compounding process is syntactic in nature. Consequently, it is argued that X-bar theory must be involved in compound word formation because of the "lexical function" of the syntax. Empirical data are mainly focused on French Noms Composés à base Verbale, or NCV, as tire-bouchon (cork screw),porte-parole (spoke person), gagne-pain (job), etc., which are analyzed as base generated "quasi-VPs" embedded in a NP. Thus, the NPWP exocentric dominance instantiates a "syntactic conversion" at the D-structure level. Such a categorial hierarchy is based on the "distribution changing" property of X-bar theory rather than on the "category changing" property of structuring morphological rules. Therefore, the high productivity of NCVs in French and other Romance languages is due to their morphology, which allows SPEC\HEAD agreement and VERB RAISING movement. The licensing of exocentric X-bar structures in grammar depends on several semantic principles of lexical interpretation, which are relevant to hyperonymy, hyponymy, meronymy, etc.. Thus, the model is dispensed with a superfluous component of "peripheral" rules of compounding. In conclusion, exocentricity of syntactic structures leads the author to claim that X-bar schema is primitive in grammar and that a given phrase is not the necessary projection of its head.

scholarly journals Bird populations most exposed to climate change are less responsive to climatic variation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liam D. Bailey ◽  
Martijn van de Pol ◽  
Frank Adriaensen ◽  
Emilio Barba ◽  
Paul E. Bellamy ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Climatic Variation ◽  
Species Range ◽  
Laying Date ◽  
Impact Of Climate Change ◽  
Bird Populations ◽  
Specific Variation ◽  
Phenological Sensitivity ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThe phenology of many species shows strong sensitivity to climate change; however, with few large scale intra-specific studies it is unclear how such sensitivity varies over a species’ range. We document large intra-specific variation in phenological sensitivity to temperature using laying date information from 67 populations of two European songbirds covering a large part of their breeding range. Populations inhabiting deciduous habitats showed stronger phenological sensitivity compared with those in evergreen and mixed habitats. Strikingly, however, the lowest sensitivity was seen in populations that had experienced the greatest change in climate. Therefore, we predict that the strongest phenological advancement will not occur in those populations with the highest sensitivity. Our results show that to effectively assess the impact of climate change on phenology across a species range it will be necessary to account for intra-specific variation in phenological sensitivity, climate change exposure, and the ecological characteristics of a population.

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