Alternating Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions

In this article we study the alternation between the two most prominent Italian thetic and sentence-focus constructions, viz. the Syntactic Inversion Construction (henceforth: SIC), e.g. Arriva il treno (‘The train is arriving’), and the Presentational Cleft (henceforth: PC), e.g. C’è il treno che arriva (‘The train is arriving’). Based on the existing literature on the two constructions and drawing inspiration from a number of cognitive-functional hypotheses pertaining to constraints on the amount of referentially new constituents that can be conveyed in a single clause, we put forward the hypothesis that Italian language users are more likely to prefer the PC over the SIC if the utterance involves a high number of referentially new constituents. To assess this hypothesis, we constructed a pilot experiment consisting of a 100-split forced choice task that was administered by means of an online questionnaire to 66 native speaker participants. The results of the experiment indicate that the preference for the PC indeed increases if the number of referentially new constituents is higher. This is however not the only factor involved in the alternation and the preference of the language users seems not only to be determined by the number of referentially new constituents, but also by their syntactic status.

Spanish L2 Chinese Learners’ Awareness of Morpho-Syntactic Structures in the Reading Comprehension of Splittable Compounds

Reading comprehension is never considered a simple task in linguists’ views as it requires a full set of linguistic knowledge, such as word decoding, understanding syntactic and morphological structures, and deriving proper meanings from these structures in a given context. Bearing the simple view of reading, the primary goal of this study is to explore whether the split presentation of Chinese splittable compounds influences the recognition of the compounds in second language (L2) Chinese reading comprehension, and how the reading skills, i.e., word decoding and linguistic comprehension, cooperate to complete this reading comprehension task. Splittable compounds (SCs) in Chinese are typically verbs composed of two constituents with limited separability. The separable property of SCs and their vague morpho-syntactic status are supposed to cause difficulties for L2 Chinese learners in recognizing the compounds. Especially for those whose native language manifests lexical integrity, the split presentation of the compounds may invite the L2 Chinese readers to process them with a mechanism different from that for their non-split forms. To the best of our knowledge, the efforts on investigating this issue are insufficient. In this study, 27 Spanish speaking L2 Chinese learners were invited to complete tasks including reading and interpreting 6 selected SCs in the split and non-split forms, rating their familiarities with each SC and reporting the syntactic category of the SCs based on their existing linguistic knowledge. The results, showed that the split presentation of SCs did cause challenges for L2 Chinese learners in recognizing the compounds in the reading process, regardless of their Chinese proficiencies. The L2 Chinese participants performed significantly worse in recognizing split SCs in salient Verb-Object structures than recognizing those in unsalient Verb-Object structures. These findings underscore the importance of linguistic comprehension in L2 Chinese in-text word reading comprehension and suggest words as the basic processing units.

Defining Aspects of the Logical Subject into the Sentence

Although linguistics, the science of language, has reached a high level of development, anyway in syntax there are still many unsolved problems. A very important problem is the one that identifies the parts of the sentences. Therefore, because of inconsistent application of principles, at the analysis of language acts, at the syntactic level, sometimes the extreme structural-grammatical formalism is reached, which, as a result, superimpose parts of sentences over parts of speech, the criterion which conducts to a morphological interpretation of syntax. Such a syntactical analysis is useless, because it makes impossible the real identification of text ideas. Grammarians, situated on morphological positions in syntax, are launching different methodological versions this way. One of them would be that the grammar case form is decisive for identification of the parts of sentences. Such a method is less applicable in Romanian, because at the same grammatical form of the case we have several syntactic functions and at the same function - several forms. In this study the author tries to analyze these morphological and syntactic aspects by demonstration, referring, in particular, to the semantic-syntactic status of the logical subject in the sentence.

From Generative Linguistics to Categorial Grammars: Overt Subjects in Control Infinitives

The present thesis lies at the interface of logic and linguistics; its object of study are control sentences with overt pronouns in Romance languages (European and Brazilian Portuguese, Italian and Spanish). This is a topic that has received considerably more attention on the part of linguists, especially in recent years, than from logicians. Perhaps for this reason, much remains to be understood about these linguistic structures and their underlying logical properties. This thesis seeks to fill the lacunas in the literature or at least take steps in this direction by way of addressing a number of issues that have so far been under-explored. To this end, we put forward two key questions, one linguistic and the other logical. These are, respectively, (1) What is the syntactic status of the surface pronoun? and (2) What are the available mechanisms to reuse semantic resources in a contraction-free logical grammar? Accordingly, the thesis is divided into two parts: generative linguistics and categorial grammar. Part I starts by reviewing the recent discussion within the generative literature on infinitive clauses with overt subjects, paying detailed attention to the main accounts in the field. Part II does the same on the logical grammar front, addressing in particular the issues of control and of anaphoric pronouns. Ultimately, the leading accounts from both camps will be found wanting. The closing chapter of each of Part I and Part II will thus put forward alternative candidates, that we contend are more successful than their predecessors. More specifically, in Part I, we offer a linguistic account along the lines of Landau’s T/Agr theory of control. In Part II, we present two alternative categorial accounts: one based on Combinatory Categorial Grammar, the other on Type-Logical Grammar. Each of these accounts offers an improved, more fine-grained perspective on control infinitives featuring overt pronominal subjects. Finally, we include an Appendix in which our type-logical proposal is implemented in a categorial parser/theorem-prover.Abstract prepared by María Inés Corbalán.E-mail: [email protected]: http://repositorio.unicamp.br/jspui/handle/REPOSIP/331697

NP-ellipsis and numeral classifiers in Korean

The syntactic status of numeral classifiers with respect to NP-ellipsis in classifier languages has been a controversial subject in many recent discussions. Addressing this issue, this article argues that Korean numeral classifiers can serve as functional heads that license NP-ellipsis via PF-deletion. A null NP appearing in a numeral classifier context cannot be identified with any other null categories, such as a pro or a null NP pro-form. This null NP induces a different reading from a pro, especially when a possessor argument is stacked with a numeral classifier construction. Unlike an NP pro-form, it allows the extraction of an internal argument and exhibits a complementary distribution with kes ‘one’, a visible counterpart of a Korean NP pro-form. This article’s claim gains additional support from the asymmetries in NP-ellipsis of a uy-marked numeral classifier, contingent on its ambiguity, such as a ‘quantity’ or ‘property’ interpretation. In addition, the distribution of bare numerals in relation to the NP pro-form kes offers further evidence, reinforcing the claim.

The semi-complementizer shuō and non-referential CPs in Mandarin Chinese

The empirical focus of this paper is the syntactic status of the semi-complementizer shuō grammaticalized from verbs of saying, in Mandarin Chinese. Such elements have been shown to exhibit atypical patterns compared to that in English, which triggers discussions of whether shuō should be analyzed as a complementizer (Paul, 2014; Huang, 2018). This paper presents novel data surrounding the distributional patterns of shuō and argues that shuō is a C head that introduces a subtype of CPs called non-referential CPs, following de Cuba (2017).

Topicalization in the Romance Languages

Topic and topicalization are key notions to understand processes of syntactic and prosodic readjustments in Romance. More specifically, topicalization refers to the syntactic mechanisms and constructions available in a language to mark an expression as the topic of the sentence. Despite the lack of a uniform definition of topic, often based on the notions of aboutness or givenness, significant advances have been made in Romance linguistics since the 1990s, yielding a better understanding of the topicalization constructions, their properties, and their grammatical correlates. Prosodically, topics are generally described as being contained in independent intonational phrases. The syntactic and pragmatic characteristics of a specific topicalization construction, by contrast, depend both on the form of resumption of the dislocated topic within the clause and on the types of topic (aboutness, given, and contrastive topics). We can thus distinguish between hanging topic (left dislocation) (HTLD) and clitic left-dislocation (ClLD) for sentence-initial topics, and clitic right-dislocation (ClRD) for sentence-final dislocated constituents. These topicalization constructions are available in most Romance languages, although variation may affect the type and the obligatory presence of the resumptive element. Scholars working on topic and topicalization in the Romance languages have also addressed controversial issues such as the relation between topics and subjects, both grammatical (nominative) subjects and ‘oblique’ subjects such as dative experiencers and locative expressions. Moreover, topicalization has been discussed for medieval Romance, in conjunction with its alleged V2 syntactic status. Some topicalization constructions such as subject inversion, especially in the non-null subject Romance languages, and Resumptive Preposing may indeed be viewed as potential residues of medieval V2 property in contemporary Romance.

ON THE SYNTACTIC STATUS OF ENGLISH DETERMINERS

The article discusses the problem of the syntactic status of the determiner, which is usually not considered to be a part of the sentence proper. The author reveals that the cause of theoretical contradictions lies in mixing the morphological and the syntactic levels of the language analysis. The attribute is a part of the sentence, but the determiner is not; that’s why it would be more reasonable to treat these units alongside with parts of the sentence proper. As determiners combine characteristics of different parts of speech, they can be found on the periphery of not only parts of speech but also parts of the sentence

THE FACTORS INFLUENCING THE PROJECTION OF PRESUPPOSITIONS IN CHUVASH: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

The current paper experimentally studies the projection diversity of the following presupposition triggers in the Standard Chuvash language in assertive sentences, in negated assertive sentences and in conditional sentences: kallex ‘again’ (adverbial), ta ‘too’ (conjunction), mansa kaj ‘forget’ and pəl ‘know/find out’ (mental factive verbs), and pəter ‘finish’ (aspectual verb). Relying upon the presupposition projection in various contexts, [Abusch 2002] suggested to distinguish between hard vs. soft presupposition triggers. According to this view, the former two Chuvash items belong to hard triggers, whereas the latter three items represent soft triggers. The papers by [Xue and Onea 2012; Smith and Hall 2012] among others experimentally confirmed the distinction between hard vs. soft triggers in several West-European languages. The current paper verifies the hypothesis about the distinction between hard vs. soft triggers on the basis of a non-Indo-European language and suggests using a verification task: participants have to choose one of the values on the five-point Likert scale while answering a given question with respect to a given context. The paper only partially confirms the distinction between hard vs. soft triggers. As in [Xue and Onea 2012], the paper shows that soft triggers exhibit a more heterogeneous group than hard triggers. Moreover, contrary to the recent paper by [Tonhauser et al. 2018], the paper does not reveal further distinctions either within each of the presupposition trigger groups or between the presupposition trigger groups. The paper gives two plausible interrelated reasons for the obtained results that are a linear position and a syntactic status (independent vs. embedded) of the first clause in a question that contains the denied presupposition.