Applying phraseological complexity measures to L2 French

This study partially replicates Paquot’s (2018, 2019) study of phraseological complexity in L2 English by investigating how phraseological complexity compares across proficiency levels as well as how phraseological complexity measures relate to lexical, syntactic and morphological complexity measures in a corpus of L2 French argumentative essays. Phraseological complexity is operationalized as the diversity (root type-token ratio; RTTR) and sophistication (pointwise mutual information; PMI) of three types of grammatical dependencies: adjectival modifiers, adverbial modifiers and direct objects. Results reveal a significant increase in the mean PMI of direct objects and the RTTR of adjectival modifiers across proficiency levels. In addition to phraseological sophistication, important predictors of proficiency include measures of lexical diversity, lexical sophistication, syntactic (phrasal) complexity and morphological complexity. The results provide cross-linguistic validation for the results of Paquot (2018, 2019) and further highlight the importance of including phraseological measures in the current repertoire of L2 complexity measures.

Resolving ambiguous polarity stripping ellipsis structures in Persian

Previous studies have shown that English speakers use a range of factors including locality, information structure, and semantic parallelism to interpret clausal ellipsis structures. Yet, the relative importance of each factor is currently underexplored. As cues to information structure and semantic parallelism are often implicit in English, we turned to Persian which marks information structure overtly via word order scrambling and uses the -rā morpheme to indicate definiteness/specificity on direct objects. To determine what strategies Persian speakers use to disambiguate clausal ellipsis, we conducted a naturalness rating study and sentence completion task on polarity stripping structures. Our results show that information structure and parallelism strongly influence correlate resolution in both tasks, but that a weaker preference for a local correlate emerges in scrambling in the sentence completion task. As these results diverge from those obtained in English studies, we speculate that the morphosyntactic properties of Persian constrain the strategies the processer uses in selecting a contrastive correlate and resolving ambiguity in stripping ellipsis.

TELLING in English, Norwegian and French: A three-way contrast

This paper presents the results of a study of double object constructions containing the cognate verbs English tell and Norwegian fortelle, based on data from the English–Norwegian Parallel Corpus. The results show that there is a certain degree of correspondence between the two verbs in constructions with nominal direct objects, with less mutual correspondence in constructions with finite clausal objects, very little correspondence in constructions with objects in the form of direct speech, and none whatsoever in the case of non-finite clausal objects, which only occur with tell. The paper then expands the topic to include tell predications in French. The data were retrieved from the Oslo Multilingual Corpus. It transpires that the form of French translations of Norwegian expressions are more similar, at least for some constructions, to the Norwegian originals than are their English counterparts.

Ambiguity Avoidance by Means of Function Words in English? Providing Additional Corpus-based Counterevidence

The present paper considers three types of constructions where optional function words have been claimed to be used primarily for the purpose of avoiding a global or local attachment ambiguity. a) In the absence of the complementiser in that-clauses, certain subject NPs might be (temporarily) misconstrued as direct objects of the superordinate verb. b) In the absence of the complementiser that, certain adverbials might be (wrongly) assigned to the subordinate or the superordinate clause. c) In the absence of a relativiser, certain combinations of the antecedent NP and the relative clause subject might be (temporarily) misconstrued as forming a single NP. The paper uses two corpus-based testing procedures to refute these claims. (i) Analysing otherwise comparable ambiguity-free and ambiguity-prone structures in a)–c) we find that they involve similar rates of function word use. (ii) Moreover, it is shown that a variety of other ambiguity-free constructions, containing the same or other optional grammatical markers, display similar distributional profiles.

Differential object marking in Modern Romanian

Chapter 4 focuses on DOM in Modern Romanian, for both direct and indirect objects. The data are organized according to the type of DOM mechanisms, with separate sections for CD, DOM-p, and CD+DOM-p. The pragmatic effects noticed for Old Romanian DOM are re-assessed, considering that the contrasting interpretation of CD versus DOM-p is neutralized. The major changes concern the loss of CD with direct objects and its recycling in conjunction with DOM-p. While DOM-p declines and becomes more specialized for the end of the specificity scale, CD+DOM-p turns into the default option for DOM with direct objects, as opposed to CD, which becomes the default option for DOM with indirect objects. Increased productivity for CD+DOM-p coincides with the parallel expansion of Clitic Left Dislocation in the language, which completely replaces the constituent fronting through Topicalization.

A formal approach to Romanian DOM

Chapter 7 adopts a cartographic representation of nominal phrases that provides the basis on which a formal analysis is developed for Romanian DOM. The gist is that the triggers for DOM operate within the nominal domain in Romanian (as in Sardinian and unlike Spanish), which accounts for the insensitivity of Romanian verbs to marked versus unmarked direct objects in the derivation of verb argument structures. Any additional processing of the DOM-ed DP on the verb spine responds to side-effect requirements for feature checking (e.g., the secondary licensing in Irimia 2019). This is in contrast with Spanish DOM, where the main trigger for DOM is merged on the verb spine, and it acts as a probe for a certain type of DP (i.e., those with an extra-layer at the left periphery).

Introduction

The Introduction summarizes the objectives of the book: (i) to identify the diachronic changes to Romanian DOM with (in)direct objects; (ii) to identify the extent to which the concurrently developing pronominal clitic system interacted with the development of DOM in this language; (iii) to formalize the diachronic changes in the mapping and nature of formal features that trigger DOM in Romanian. Methodologically, these objectives require new criteria for searching the texts ranging from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries; namely, the adoption of a three-way distinction of DOM mechanisms (i.e. CD, DOM-p, and CD+DOM-p), combined with a separation of the doubling from the resumptive pronominal clitics, and syntactically (versus semantically) based statistics that contrast nouns and pronouns under DOM.

Differential object marking in Old Romanian

Chapter 3 focuses on DOM in Old Romanian, for both direct and indirect objects. The data are organized according to the type of DOM mechanisms, with separate sections for CD, DOM-p, and CD+DOM-p. The focus is on the pragmatic effects of DOM, since this operation is discourse triggered in Old Romanian (i.e., CD for backgrounding, as opposed to DOM-p for foregrounding the object). The discourse triggers for DOM are defined and illustrated, as well as their changes. The synopsis is that CD becomes productive with indirect objects but unproductive with direct objects; DOM-p is at the peak of its productivity with nouns and extends up to the end of both semantic scales (i.e., definiteness/specificity and animacy); whereas CD+DOM-p is in its emerging stages and affects pronouns rather than nouns.