(In)felicitous use of subjects in Greek and Spanish in monolingual and contact settings

This paper focuses on subject distribution in Greek and Chilean Spanish, both null subject languages, as evidenced in the oral production of monolingual and bilingual speakers. Narratives elicited from 40 monolinguals and 76 bilinguals of different types, namely, first-generation immigrants, heritage speakers and L2 speakers, were analysed to explore potential differences in expressing subject reference between the groups in monolingual and contact settings. The qualitative analysis of contexts of topic continuity and topic shift showed no overextension of the scope of the overt subject pronoun, expected to be found in the bilingual performance according to the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011, 2012) and previous research. The findings also show that the redundancy of lexical subjects observed in topic continuity contexts mostly involved felicitous (pragmatically appropriate) constructions. Moreover, while null subjects in topic shift were also found to be felicitous in both monolinguals and bilinguals, cases of ambiguity were observed in the bilingual performance in this discourse context.

Overt subject pronoun in Gothic vs null subject in Greek

The Gothic translation of the Bible is a word-for-word rendition of a lost Greek Vorlage (reconstructed by W. Streitberg in 1908; 2nd revised edition in 1919). As previous studies have pointed out, one of the most interesting features of this version is the presence of the overt subject pronoun in instances where there is a null subject in Greek. Considering that Gothic is a null subject language, how is it possible to justify this feature? Based on a new collation that uses biblical textual witnesses not considered by Streitberg (i.e. Greek majuscule and minuscule manuscripts, Church Fathers, commentaries, lectionaries, and Vetus Latina manuscripts), this paper analyses the Gothic-Greek divergences involving the presence of the overt subject pronoun in the Gospel of John, in order to verify previous hypotheses and shed new light on this debated topic.

First-Person Plural Subject Pronoun Expression in Mexican Spanish Spoken in Georgia

Variationist research on subject pronoun expression (SPE) in Spanish typically incorporates all grammatical persons/numbers into the same analysis, with important exceptions such as studies focusing exclusively on first-person singular (e.g., Travis, Catherine E. 2005. The yo-yo effect: Priming in subject expression in Colombian Spanish. In Randall Gess & Edward J Rubin (eds.), Selected papers from the 34th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL), 329–349. Amsterdam, Salt Lake City: Benjamins 2004; Travis, Catherine E. 2007. Genre effects on subject expression in Spanish: Priming in narrative and conversation. Language Variation and Change 19. 101–135; Travis, Catherine E. & Rena Torres Cacoullos. 2012. What do subject pronouns do in discourse? Cognitive, mechanical and constructional factors in variation. Cognitive Linguistics 23(4). 711–748), third-person singular (Shin, Naomi Lapidus. 2014. Grammatical complexification in Spanish in New York: 3sg pronoun expression and verbal ambiguity. Language Variation and Change 26. 303–330), and third-person plural subjects (Lapidus, Naomi & Ricardo Otheguy. 2005. Overt nonspecific ellos in Spanish in New York. Spanish in Context 2(2). 157–174). The current study is the first variationist analysis (to the best of my knowledge) to focus solely on first-person plural SPE. It is well-established that nosotros/nosotras exhibits one of the lowest rates of SPE relative to the other persons/numbers; however, factors conditioning its variation are less understood. Conversational corpus data from Mexican Spanish are employed to examine tokens of first-person plural SPE (n=660) in terms of frequency and constraints, incorporating factors such as TMA, switch reference, and verb class in logistic regression analyses. Results suggest that nosotros, like other subjects, is strongly impacted by switch reference and tense-mood-aspect (TMA). However, the TMA effect is unique in that preterit aspect is shown to favor overt nosotros relative to other TMAs, diverging from previous studies. Furthermore, verb class — a factor found to be repeatedly significant in the literature — is inoperative for nosotros. These results suggest that nosotros does not respond to the same factors as other persons/numbers. Additionally, the findings lend support to researchers regarding the importance of studying individual persons/numbers in subject variation research.

Ziej is a woman and het is a girl

In this paper, we report on a study of gender reference in Limburgian, specifically the use of the neuter subject pronoun het ‘she’ (lit. ‘it’) to refer to a female referent. This pronoun is used in addition to the feminine pronoun ze ‘she’. We investigate the role of the referent’s social and grammatical characteristics in the variation between grammatically feminine and ‘non-feminine’ (nf; i.e., neuter and masculine) pronouns in two experiments. First, we test the effect of a referent’s age in a language production study, in which 41 native speakers participated. The results of this study indicate that speakers use het more often to refer to younger than to older women. Second, we use an acceptability judgment task (N = 72) to assess whether the preference for non-feminine pronouns for younger women might be explained by grammatical agreement with non-feminine antecedent nouns (e.g., grammatically neuter maedje ‘girl’). The results indicate that this is not the case: het is preferred as a pronoun for younger but not older women, regardless of an antecedent noun’s grammatical gender. We conclude that the variation in pronoun gender in Limburgian is a socio-pragmatic phenomenon, and we offer suggestions for future research in this area.

Categories and Frequency: Cognition Verbs in Spanish Subject Expression

Are semantic classes of verbs genuine or do they merely mask idiosyncrasies of frequent verbs? Here, we examine the interplay between semantic classes and frequent verb-form combinations, providing new evidence from variation patterns in spontaneous speech that linguistic categories are centered on high frequency members to which other members are similar. We offer an account of the well-known favoring effect of cognition verbs on Spanish subject pronoun expression by considering the role of high-frequency verbs (e.g., creer ‘think’ and saber ‘know’) and particular expressions ((yo) creo ‘I think’, (yo) no sé ‘I don’t know’). Analysis of variation in nearly 3000 tokens of unexpressed and pronominal subjects in conversational data replicates well-established predictors, but highlights that the cognition verb effect is really one of 1sg cognition verbs. In addition, particular expressions stand out for their high frequency relative to their component parts (for (yo) creo, proportion of lexical type, and proportion of pronoun). Further analysis of 1sg verbs with frequent expressions as fixed effects reveals shared patterns with other cognition verbs, including an association with non-coreferential contexts. Thus, classes can be identified by variation constraints and contextual distributions that are shared among class members and are measurably different from those of the more general variable structure. Cognition verbs in variable Spanish subject expression form a class anchored in lexically particular constructions.

Interface Delay

Interface Delay is a theory of syntactic development, which attempts to explain an array of constructions that are slow to develop, which are characterized by being sensitive to discourse-pragmatic considerations of the type associated with the natural semantic class of definites. The theory claims that neither syntax itself, nor the discourse-pragmatic abilities related to executive function and theory of mind themselves are slow to develop. Rather, the claim is that the nexus or interface between the two cognitive domains is slow to develop. We review the development of subjects in child Spanish as an example of this delayed growth trajectory. Further, we review evidence that a delay in the development of tense causes concomitant delays in the seemingly unrelated phenomena of non-nominative case subject pronoun use and un-inverted wh- questions.

THE STRATEGIES APPLIED BY EFL LEARNERS TO OVERCOME MORPHO-SYNTACTIC DEVIATION IN SECTION 2 OF TOEFL TEST IN A PESANTREN-BASED UNIVERSITY

The study aims at revealing the morphological and syntactical deviations patterned by EFL students, and their strategies to respond structure and written expression of TOEFL-Like Test. 70 students participated in this study. The students who were from study programs of English Literature, Technical Information, and Political Sciences of Universitas Sains Alqur’an were involved in this study. Their feedback were analyzed based on a qualitative approach. The findings exposed that 70 test-takers constructed 1.711 morpho-syntactic deviations. The most six morpho-syntactic problematic queries based on EFL students’ responses are epithet in parallel structure, subject-verb needs, object needs in noun phrase forms, quantifier-noun agreement, inversion of negative expression, connector subject pronoun in the adjective clause. Concerning strategies adopted by the students, they revealed that paying to the object of the preposition, focusing on past participles, making in mind that verbs of the sentence agree to the subject in cases of prepositional phrases, making in mind verbs agreement on an expression of quantity cases, and focusing on the present participle questions need to be put in. Furthermore, this study suggested that the EFL students are encouraged to take into consideration those six most morpho-syntactic deviations.

A Reconsideration and Elaboration of a Previously Proposed Hypothesis for the Origin of the —y of Spanish soy, doy, voy, estoy

The origin of –y of Sp. soy, doy, voy, estoy remains unresolved to date. The present study reconsiders and elaborates the ‘post-verbal yo hypothesis’, originally proposed by Ford (1911), which has been rejected by most scholars because they have misunderstood it to suggest that the post-verbal subject pronoun yo became atonic and agglutinated to the verb, subsequently reducing to –y. It is suggested here that the phenomenon of ‘leftward palatal spreading’ from the post-verbal subject pronoun yo, with no agglutination nor reduction in form, first produced phonetic variants, e.g., so yo > ['soi̯-'yo], which were later morphologized and raised to allomorphic status before becoming full-fledged morphological variants upon extraction from the new syntagms, e.g., soy yo > soy (yo) > soy.

Polarity, Low Tone Spread, and Underspecification in the Kabiye Verb Phrase

This autosegmental analysis of Kabiye verbal derivations and inflections demonstrates that tone patterns on adjectives and locative nominalizations are not the underlying forms of verb roots, as claimed by previous researchers, because they are in complementary distribution. Rather, verb roots are analyzed as being underlyingly /H, L/, and two additional morphological elements – verbal extensions and TAM prefixes – both reveal a ternary /H, -L, -∅/ contrast. In toneless extensions, this resolves an adjacency issue with regard to polarity of the TAM suffix, while the three floating tonal TAM prefixes either block, pre-empt or permit L tone spread from the subject pronoun onto the stem. The result is an integrated analysis of derivational and inflectional forms that dovetails with a previous analysis of the associative noun phrase.

First-person singular and third-person subject pronoun variation: The case of Mexican Spanish in the U.S. state of Georgia

The current study analyzes variable subject pronoun expression (SPE) for first-person singular (1sg) and third-person subjects in a variety of Mexican Spanish spoken by first-generation Mexican immigrants in the state of Georgia, Southeastern U.S. Conversational data from sociolinguistic interviews are employed to examine tokens of 1sg and third-person variable SPE and their usage patterns, considering factors such as tense-mood-aspect (TMA), switch reference, polarity, and verb class by means of logistic regression analyses. Results suggest that all four factors influence 1sg variation, but that third-person variation is restricted to switch reference and TMA. In addition, a significant link between switch reference and TMA is found for third-person subjects, but not for 1sg. The findings lend further support to previous scholars advocating the importance of studying individual grammatical persons in SPE research as this can reveal previously obfuscated nuances in the patterns of subject variation.