Indirect structural crosslinguistic influence in early Catalan–Spanish bilinguals in adulthood: Predicate selection in Catalan existential constructions

This study reports an oral production experiment investigating the expression of existentiality in the Catalan of adult Catalan–Spanish early bilinguals (N = 58) with comparable proficiencies but different language dominance. The results show qualitative differences among the bilinguals in existential predicate selection and in their supply of partitive pronouns, modulated by language dominance. Balanced Bilinguals as well as Spanish-dominant bilinguals significantly produced more estar (in detriment of ser-hi and haver-hi) not only in locative contexts, where Catalan already presents optionality regulated by semantic differences, but also in existential constructions, where this optionality does not exist. We argue for indirect crosslinguistic influence (CLI), when the bilingual perceives certain structural overlap within constructions, mediating the influence from one structure to another one and expanding the limits of CLI. The qualitative differences found among bilinguals challenge the idea of a bilingualism continuum in Catalan–Spanish bilingualism with an identical mental representation.

Nobody there? On the non-existence of nobody in Mandarin Chinese and related issues

The present article demonstrates how the so far unchallenged misanalysis within Chinese linguistics of a few, but central, data points has led to a distorted picture biasing, inter alia, the general typology of wh-in-situ languages as well as the crosslinguistic study of Quantifier Phrases. This is the case for méi yǒu rén ‘not exist person’, hěnshǎo yǒu rén ‘rarely exist person’, and zhǐ yǒu DP ‘only exist DP’, which are not nominal projections equivalent of ‘nobody’, ‘only DP’, and ‘few people’ as currently assumed, but existential constructions: ‘there isn't anybody’, ‘there is only DP’, and ‘there are rarely people’. In addition, a subset of speakers has reanalyzed hěnshǎo (yǒu) rén with a covert yǒu ‘exist’ as a QP hěnshǎo rén ‘few people’. A corpus study highlights the limited distribution of hěnshǎo rén ‘few people’, which shows that it is not on a par with its antonym hěn duō rén ‘many people’.

Lexicon or grammar? Using memory-based learning to investigate the syntactic relationship between Belgian and Netherlandic Dutch

This article builds on computational tools to investigate the syntactic relationship between the highly related European national varieties of Dutch, viz. Belgian Dutch (BD) and Netherlandic Dutch (ND). It reports on a series of memory-based learning analyses of the post-verbal distribution of er “there” in adjunct-initial existential constructions like Op het dak staat (er) een schoorsteen “On the roof (there) is a chimney,’, which has been claimed to be among the most notoriously difficult variables in Dutch. On the basis of balanced datasets extracted from Flemish and Dutch newspaper corpora, it is shown that er’s distribution in both national varieties can be learned to a considerable extent from bare lexical input which is not assigned to higher-level categories. However, whereas this yields good results for ND, BD scores are consistently lower, suggesting that BD cannot do with lexical features alone to attain accuracy scores comparable to ND. This ties in with earlier findings that the more advanced standardization of ND materializes in a higher lexical collocability, whereas Flemish speakers need additional higher-level linguistic information to insert er.

existential in Xhosa in relation to indefiniteness

Bare nouns in languages without articles can be semantically ambiguous between definite and indefinite interpretations. It is here assumed that speakers of such languages can still signal to the hearer when they refer to unique and identifiable referents. This paper contributes to the long-standing cross-linguistic question of how bare nouns are interpreted and what means languages without articles have to disambiguate between definite and indefinite readings. This question is largely unexplored for Bantu languages. The answer is sought in the use of different word orders and morphosyntactic constructions, with a focus on the existential in this paper. In many languages of the world, there is a restriction on definites as pivots in existential constructions, serving as a motivation for exploring these constructions in Xhosa. Xhosa makes use of a non-verbal copula in prototypical existentials as well as predicate locatives, to express the existence or presence of a referent. The paper argues that the existential is used for inactive referents and the predicate locative for (semi-) active referents. The inactive referents of the existential are mainly indefinite referential or non-referential. The active referents of the predicate locative are referential indefinite or definite. There is no absolute definiteness effect in the existential. A further motivation for this study is the occurrence of this copula in a short and a long form, giving rise to four different structures. The paper reveals an unexpected analogy between the use of the short and long form and the use of the so called conjoint and disjoint forms in Xhosa tense-aspect paradigms.

Sentential complements

Not only transitive verbs can take a sentential complement. The lexical category of adjectives contains a limited number of items that can take a sentential complement. Also certain nouns, such as kinship terms, make sense only with some other notion in the background, and there are two ways in which this is expressed: by a genitive-possessive construction or by a nominal compound with a sentential complement. The third section shows that adjectives, nouns, and adverbs expressing an epistemic modality take their sentential complements in a similar way. An alternative is found in existential constructions with an infinitival complement in the dative. This pattern is common to predicates expressing a deontic modality as well. Postpositional sentential complements are treated in the final sections.

Breton a-marking of (internal) verbal arguments: A result of language contact?

We discuss a potential case of borrowing in this paper: Breton a- ‘of’, ‘from’ marking of (internal) verbal arguments, unique in Insular Celtic languages, and reminiscent of Gallo-Romance de/du- (and en-) arguments. Looking at potential Gallo-Romance parallels of three Middle Breton constructions analyzed in some detail (a with indefinite mass nominals in direct object position, a-marking of internal arguments under the scope of negation, a [allomorphs an(ez)-/ahan-] with personal pronouns for internal arguments, subjects (mainly of predicative constructions) and as expletive subjects of existential constructions), we demonstrate that even if there are some semantic parallels and one strong structural overlap (a and de under the scope of negation), the amount of divergences in morphology, syntax and semantics and the only partially fitting relative chronology of the different constructions do not allow to conclude with certainty that language-contact is an explanation of the Breton facts, which might have come into being also because of internal change (bound to restructuring of the pronominal system in Breton). More research is necessary to complete our knowledge of a-marking in Middle Breton and Modern Breton varieties and on the precise history of French en, in order to decide for one or the other explanation.

Partitivity in Slavic-Romance language contact: The case of Molise Slavic in Italy

Molise Slavic is a south Slavic micro-language, spoken in three municipalities in the Italian region of Molise. It has been in a situation of total language contact with Romance varieties for about 500 years, with strong foreign influence on all linguistic levels. This paper is intended as a contribution to two combined fields of linguistics: contact linguistics and the expression of partitivity in Slavic in different settings. The paper opens with a short description of the position of the (morphological) partitive case in Russian, followed by a comparison of the role of case in expressing partitive objects in Russian, Croatian and Molise Slavic. The subsequent section will deal with other means of rendering pure and ablativic partitivity in Italian as the dominant model language and in the Molise Slavic replica, in particular with respect to the similarities and differences in existential constructions. Special attention will be paid to the Italian partitive particle ne and its formal and functional equivalents in Molise Slavic, including the particle na/ne, partitive personal pronouns, quantifiers, the genitive and the role of intonation and word order. Finally we will test various hypotheses about the origin of the particle na/ne, whose formal variation in one of the Molise Slavic dialects causes serious problems for both loanword integration and semantic calquing.

An interface analysis of marked copular constructions: The case of there-sentences

This paper proposes an interface account of existential sentences, in which the examination of the semantic, morphosyntactic, discourse and prosodic properties of these and related constructions is aimed to explore the similarities and differences with other types of IS-marked copular structures. In particular, a structural parallelism is proposed between existentials and clefts, as well as between (inverted) locatives and (inverted) pseudoclefts. In the analysis of existential constructions, the investigation of the Definiteness Effect reveals the need for a distinction across there-sentences; in particular, the interface properties of the relevant structures suggest that different analyses should be provided for existential and presentational there-sentences, which present crucial formal asymmetries at various levels of analysis.

Modal Existential Constructions in Modern Standard Arabic

Modal existential wh-constructions can be associated with three different types of structures, namely, wh-constructions, existential constructions, and modal constructions, but also have their own unique features. Idiosyncratic though it may look, the structure is characterized cross-linguistically by several shared properties. In this paper, we aim to examine in detail the properties of these constructions in Modern Standard Arabic. We show that MECs in Modern Standard Arabic share the defining and universal properties found in MECs cross-linguistically. Furthermore, we find that MSA’s MECs differ in three tendencies, namely; the relative nature of the wh-word in MSA, syntactic transparency and sluicing confirming the assumption that a relativization strategy, as opposed to the interrogative strategy found in plenty of other languages, is the one available for MECs in Modern Standard Arabic. We argue that these differences are also related to the [Spec, FP] position occupied by the wh-word.