Learning aspect in Italian as additional language. The role of second languages

The study examines the role played by English and Romance languages (L2s) when learning grammatical aspect in Italian as additional language (Ln). Swedish university students of Italian (n = 34), divided according to knowledge of a Romance L2 and English aspectual knowledge, completed an interpretation task of aspectual contrast in Italian. Eight native speakers served as a control group. The findings showed that knowledge of a Romance language as L2 and high English aspectual knowledge exerted a differential influence on learning aspect in Italian. This outcome is discussed in the light of a consistent form-meaning relationship between the L2s and Italian. Yet, with a mismatch between grammatical and lexical aspect, the learners’ judgments differed from the native speakers’ judgments. Thus, our findings also support the idea of the existence of differential learning paths sustained by the L2s when learning complex aspectual configurations.

Grammatical encoding of agency in Asturian middle constructions

Middle-passive constructions in Asturian –a Romance language spoken in the diglossic region of Asturias, in northern Spain– appear to optionally allow the occurrence of the reflexive pronoun se in them; this has been traditionally considered a pleonastic use of the reflexive due to the influence of Spanish, i.e. the dominant language in the territory (ALLA 2001). Here, I show that the presence of such pronoun is neither aspectual nor stylistic; instead, I argue that this clitic spells out a passivized Voice head encoding the participation of an implicit generic agent/experiencer in the event, i.e. a generic passive construction. The non-pronominal variant, on the contrary, is only possible with unaccusative verbs or those undergoing the causative alternation, i.e. in inchoative configurations, which can be generic. Evidence for this claim is that only the pronominal counterpart can control into a purpose clause but does not license the insertion of the PP por sí mesmu (‘by itself’), and vice versa. Additionally, these structures can host an additional dative argument which can only be interpreted as an unintentional causer of the event in absence of the reflexive, therefore supporting Suárez-Palma’s (2020) claim that there exists a mutual incompatibility between Voice and a high applicative head –both different realizations of i* (Wood & Marantz 2017)–, which compete for the position above the verbalizing head in generic passives. Finally, cases of linguistic transfer between Asturian and Asturian Spanish are discussed.

Subject Clitics in Microcontact: A Case Study from Heritage Friulian in Argentina and Brazil

In this paper we present data from first generation immigrants (G1) and second and third generation heritage speakers of Friulian, a Rhaeto-Romance language spoken in North-Eastern Italy and also found in Argentina and Brazil. The target phenomenon is subject clitics (SCL s). We show that SCL s in heritage Friulian are in a process of being reanalyzed from being agreement markers to pronouns. While SCL s are obligatory in Friulian as spoken in Italy, they are often dropped in heritage Friulian in Argentina and Brazil; this phenomenon, we argue, needs to be interpreted as the drop of pronominal subjects, and not of agreement-like SCL s. We also demonstrate that the use of SCL s (reanalyzed as pronominal subjects) is conditioned both by grammatical factors (it happens more in some grammatical persons than in others) and by discourse factors (they are used more in the case of a continuation topic than in other topicalization contexts). This means that in heritage Friulian, discourse constraints on the expression of subjects are not being lost or weakened; in fact, against the general grammaticalization trend of pronominal forms, new discourse constraints are introduced.

Trailing Harry Potter into Romanian

Characteristic of English and other Germanic languages, Goal of Motion constructions represent a challenge for any translator rendering them into a Romance language. This is because to express the motion of an entity to/towards a Goal in a particular manner, English typically combines a manner-of-motion verb or a verb of sound emission with a dynamic preposition like into in He ran into the park. However, the combination is not generally available in Romanian and other Romance languages, since they not only lack dynamic prepositions, but also have far fewer manner-of-motion verbs. Consequently, to render Goal of Motion into Romanian with as little loss as possible, a translator will have to resort to various translation techniques to compensate not only for the lack of dynamic prepositions in this language, but also for its far poorer class of manner-of-motion verbs. This paper proposes several strategies for the translation of Goal of Motion constructions into Romanian and shows that they depend on the lexical and syntactic resources available in this language. An analysis of the techniques employed in a selected sample from two Romanian translations of the Harry Potter series indicates that the translators' strategies generally mirror Talmy's (1985, 2000) typological classification of Germanic and Romance languages into satellite-framed and verb-framed languages, respectively.

Constructional creativity in a Romance language

The present contribution summarizes findings on the understudied area of Italian valency coercion – i. e. the interaction of verbs and argument structure constructions in novel and creative ways – from four different studies. It highlights their innovative character, theoretical significance, and crosslinguistic implications for Construction Grammar. The paper suggests that valency coercion resolution involve different phenomena, such as distributional properties of constructions and compatibility between verb and construction. Sociolinguistic factors such as age and diatopic variables are also suggested to be relevant.

Deconstructing Stylistic Fronting in Old Norwegian and Old Spanish

Stylistic Fronting (SF) is usually defined as a special kind of fronting, where a constituent (or part of a constituent) which is not the subject is moved to a position that precedes the finite verb. SF is found in both Old Spanish and Old Norwegian. In this chapter we show that the two languages share several common properties regarding fronting patterns in embedded clauses, more specifically in restrictive relative clauses, and that in both languages, apparent heads and unambiguous phrases may be fronted. In both languages a fronted element may cooccur with an overt phrasal subject. These findings contribute to the ongoing debate on the phenomenon of Stylistic Fronting, suggesting that the original strong claims made regarding SF in Icelandic are idiosyncratic, and that the term Stylistic Fronting in fact subsumes several types of movement operations (Labelle & Hirschbühler 2017), some of which have none of the properties originally claimed for Stylistic Fronting in Icelandic. Furthermore, it appears as though the pragmatic effects of the fronting were similar in the two languages; fronting in restrictive relative clauses occurs to check an anaphoric feature (López 2009). The striking parallelisms between Old Spanish, a Romance language, and Old Norwegian, a Germanic one, invites further comparative research on similar syntactic phenomena in the languages.

On complementizers and relative pronouns in Germanic vs. Romance

Many Germanic languages have a finite-clause complementizer that resembles a demonstrative, e.g. English that, Dutch dat, German dass. No Romance language does. The traditional view of complementizers as simplex projecting heads that take IP or some comparable category as a complement has no way of accounting for this difference between Germanic and Romance. In this chapter, I will attempt to make progress toward an account, in part by reinterpreting finite-clause complementizers as relative pronouns.

Circumventing the ‘That-Trace’ Effect: Different Strategies between Germanic and Romance

In our paper, we deal with the Germanic–Romance language contact, focusing on Cimbrian, a Germanic minority language spoken in Northern Italy. Specifically, we focus on the violation of the well-known that-trace filter, as it appears to be an interesting case of the superficial convergence that we ascribe to the status of T, which is either too rich (model language) or too weak (replica language) to represent a viable landing site for subject extraction.

The contribution of women to the Spanish linguistic tradition

In Spain, despite the unfavourable environment, some exceptional women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were eager readers of the classics; ‘learned in grammar’ and professors of Latin. At the same time, female ascetic-mystic writers helped to dignify the Spanish Romance language. The eighteenth century witnessed a proliferation of literary salons presided over by distinguished women, while translators abounded. By the late nineteenth century, female university professors were ceasing to be uncommon; they shone as translators and philologists, although certain renowned linguistic and literary institutions continued to close their doors to them. These women with a passion for languages made a key contribution to linguistics in Spain, but were sidelined due to the historical circumstances in which they lived; since then, they have faced a further exclusion, in that they are conspicuously absent from official linguistic historiography.

Bible Translation by Jews and Christians in Medieval Catalan-Speaking Territories

Despite bans on the reading or possession of Bibles in the vernacular, numerous medieval Catalan translations of the Bible survive, in particular a complete Bible from the fourteenth century, some ten psalters, and a fifteenth-century version of the four Gospels. Moreover, Catalan was the second Romance language in which a full Bible was printed (1478), following the Tuscan Bible of 1471. Most of these translations were commissioned by Christians for the use of Christians. In some cases, however, it is clear that the translators were converted Jews. In some others, the translations appear to have been written by Jews for Jewish readers. We also find one case in which Catalan was the source rather than the target language: the first extant translation of the four Gospels into Hebrew (late fifteenth century) was undertaken, probably by a Jew, using the aforementioned fourteenth-century Catalan Bible.