Learner Development of a Morphosyntactic Feature in Argentina: The Case of vos

Students have been found to improve their sociolinguistic competence, particularly regarding the acquisition of dialectal features, while studying abroad. Nevertheless, most of the research on learner development of morphosyntactic features in Spanish-speaking immersion contexts has examined that of variants characteristic of Peninsular Spanish in Spain, namely clitics and the informal second-person plural vosotros. Since the informal second-person singular, vos, is more prevalent than its equivalent, tú, in several Latin American countries, learner acquisition of this feature also merits investigation. This article explores second-language learner production of vos among 23 English speakers during a 5-month semester in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a popular study abroad destination. The findings from the multivariate analysis of over 1200 tokens of tú and vos indicate that learners used vos verb forms over 70% of the time by the end of the sojourn. Factors including social networks, proficiency level, mood, and task significantly influenced this use. Most notably, the stronger the learners’ social networks, the more they used vos verb forms and learners with high proficiency levels used these forms more than lower-proficiency learners. This study provides one of the first accounts of the acquisition of a widespread morphosyntactic feature of Latin American Spanish.

Positional dependency in Murrinhpatha: expanding the typology of non-canonical morphotactics

Principles of morphotactics are a major source of morphological diversity amongst the world’s languages, and it is well-known that languages exhibit many different types of deviation from a canonical ideal in which there is a unique and consistent mapping between function and form. In this paper we present data from Murrinhpatha (non-Pama-Nyungan, northern Australia) that demonstrates a type of non-canonical morphotactics so far unattested in the literature, one which we call positional dependency. This type is unusual in that the non-canonical pattern is driven by morphological form rather than by morphosyntactic function. In this case the realisation of one morph is dependent on the position in the verbal template of another morph. Thus, it is the linearisation of morphs that conditions the morphological realisation, not the morphosyntactic feature set. Positional dependency in Murrinhpatha thus expands our typology of content-form interactions and non-canonical morphotactics with implications for our understanding of morphological structure cross-linguistically.

Gender agreement hierarchy in common gender and epicene nouns in Spanish

Gender is a grammatical category defined as an abstract morphosyntactic feature of nouns reflected in characteristics of associated words (i.e. agreement) (Hockett, 1958; Corbett, 1991). Agreement is, in fact, easily established in “transparent” nouns which follow either semantic or formal rule of gender agreement. However, when we deal with ambiguous nouns regarding their gender, agreement is not straightforward. In this article we aim to pursue two main goals. Firstly, to review and briefly describe grammatical gender system in Spanish (§1) with a special focus on so called “ambiguous” or “problematic” nouns (§2). Secondly, to review agreement hierarchy theories and explore if they are applicable for Spanish epicenes and common gender nouns (§3). Discussion and conclusion remarks are presented in (§4).

Predicting surface forms in complex inflectional paradigms through phonological constraints

This paper describes a new approach to the 'cell-filling problem' in inflectional paradigms (Ackerman and Malouf 2013) that builds on an account in Rosen (2019) in the framework of Gradient Symbolic Computation ('GSC') (Smolensky and Goldrick 2016). Exponents in a paradigm are derived through (a) Faithfulness to gradiently-weighted input blends of phonological material that occur both as part of a lexeme and on a morphosyntactic feature combination and (b) a gradiently weighted constraint that rewards a candidate for identity with a principal part form (Finkel and Stump 2007) in the paradigm. The analysis is applied to complex paradigms in Ngiti and Kwerba (Finkel and Stump 2007), both of which the previous account was unable to capture, and is presented as evidence in favour of the partially-activated features and weighted constrains in the GSC model.

Dan

The Mande language Dan, which is spoken in the West African countries of Guinea, the Ivory Coast, and Liberia, is among the few African languages that distinguish between five tone registers. Metrical feet in this language play a role with respect to nasal harmony as well as tonal and vocalic combinations. This chapter also presents a general overview of simple and complex sentences, with a special focus on locative marking, which constitutes a prominent morphosyntactic feature of Dan nouns, as well as on lability, which is a typologically interesting feature of the other major category in the language, the verb.

The Status of the Morpheme

The morpheme was the central notion in morphological theorizing in the 20th century. It has a very intuitive appeal as the indivisible and invariant unit of form and meaning, a minimal linguistic sign. Ideally, that would be all there is to build words and sentences from. But this ideal does not appear to be entirely adequate. At least at a perhaps superficial understanding of form as a series of phonemes, and of meaning as concepts and morphosyntactic feature sets, the form and the meaning side of words are often not structured isomorphically. Different analytical reactions are possible to deal with the empirical challenges resulting from the various kinds of non-isomorphism between form and meaning. One prominent option is to reject the morpheme and to recognize conceptually larger units such as the word or the lexeme and its paradigm as the operands of morphological theory. This contrasts with various theoretical options maintaining the morpheme, terminologically or at least conceptually at some level. One such option is to maintain the morpheme as a minimal unit of form, relaxing the tension imposed by the meaning requirement. Another option is to maintain it as a minimal morphosyntactic unit, relaxing the requirements on the form side. The latter (and to a lesser extent also the former) has been understood in various profoundly different ways: association of one morpheme with several form variants, association of a morpheme with non-self-sufficient phonological units, or association of a morpheme with a formal process distinct from affixation. Variants of all of these possibilities have been entertained and have established distinct schools of thought. The overall architecture of the grammar, in particular the way that the morphology integrates with the syntax and the phonology, has become a driving force in the debate. If there are morpheme-sized units, are they pre-syntactic or post-syntactic units? Is the association between meaning and phonological information pre-syntactic or post-syntactic? Do morpheme-sized pieces have a specific status in the syntax? Invoking some of the main issues involved, this article draws a profile of the debate, following the term morpheme on a by-and-large chronological path from the late 19th century to the 21st century.

Introduction

‘Gender’ is a manifold notion, at the crossroads between sociology, biology, and linguistics. The Introduction delimits the scope of linguistic (or grammatical) gender, which is an inherent morphosyntactic feature of nouns in about half of the world’s languages, introducing the definitions and notions which the present work utilizes to investigate gender. While focusing on grammar, this study has implications far beyond (e.g. for gender studies), and capitalizes on findings from other disciplines, such as cognitive neuropsychology. The chapter introduces the basic aim of the monograph, which intends to account for the steps through which the Latin three-gender system was reshaped into the binary systems shared today by most standard Romance languages (Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, French, and Italian). One crucial definitional tool, highlighted in this chapter, is the distinction between target and controller genders: the two need not coincide everywhere, and mismatches between the two may arise—and did arise in Romance—through change.

Transparadigmatic Output-Output Correspondence: A Case Study from Ese Ejja

One prominent theory capturing unexpected phonological similarity across morphologically-related forms is Output-Output Correspondence (OO-Corr – Benua 1997; Burzio 1998; a.o.). Classic OO-Corr involves correspondence between an output [x-y] and a subconstituent base [x], e.g. a derived stem with a bare root [√-deriv]x↔ [√]x (párent-hood ↔ párent). Further, Paradigmatic OO-Corr (Pa-OO-C) involves correspondence between an output [x-a] and a base [x-b], where the affixes [a] and [b] share a morphosyntactic feature [+f] which places them together in a morphological paradigm (McCarthy 2005, Hall & Scott 2007), e.g. [√-infl[1sg past]]x↔ [√-infl[1sg pres]]x. In contrast, this paper proposes a novel type of OO-Corr termed Transparadigmatic Output-Output Correspondence (Tr-OO-C), involving correspondence between an output [x-y-z] and a base [x-z]. Under Tr-OO-C, morphologically-related forms share the same root as well as share the same outer morphology, but differ in terms of an inner morphology, e.g. [√-deriv-infl]x↔ [√-infl]x. I argue that Ese Ejja (Takanan: Bolivia) is an example of Tr-OO-C, wherein there is unexpected stress uniformity between inflectional and derivational verbal forms. I argue that derivational forms are in correspondence with an inflectional base enforced by highly ranked constraints Id-BO(stress), Corr-BO(root), and Corr-BO(infl), modeled after Agreement-By-Correspondence (Rose & Walker 2004). In total, Ese Ejja prosody is a crucial case study for OO-C and adds to the body of evidence showing how the phonology of words can be shaped by morphologically-related forms.