What factors determine object expression in Kîîtharaka

Across world languages, speakers are known to structure information in such a way that they accommodate the discourse context in which the utterances are made. In so doing they put into consideration the mental state of the hearer and also their own communication intentions (see Dooley 2020). This achieves effective communication. Such strategies in information structure are found in object expression. The data for this research was gathered from narratives collected through story telling sessions organized during the field study. Elicitation was also used to complement the data collected this way. The investigation was guided by the hypothesis that the accessibility hierarchy is the main discourse factor that determines the choice of object expression. The results are that the hypothesis holds true for most referring expression such as full lexical NP, demonstratives and their NP combinations (though with exceptions), object markers, NP + relative clause, and zero anaphora. This notwithstanding, there are substantial cases of deviations that lay ground for discovery of complementary factors like predicate type, use of direct speech and pragmatic emphasis. It can therefore be concluded that while accessibility is key, there are other complementary factors that come into play in determining the Kîîtharaka object expression paradigm.

CLASSROOM LEARNERS’ ACQUISITION OF THE SPANISH COPULA WITH ADJECTIVES

Research on the second language (L2) acquisition of the Spanish copulas has been central to our understanding of key concepts and issues in the field of SLA such as stages of development and variability in L2s. However, this research has focused nearly exclusively on native English-speaking learners. The present study examined native Korean-speaking learners’ acquisition and use of the Spanish copulas with adjectives in oral production. Analyses of the range and frequency of copula forms produced across four levels of Spanish language study revealed an increase in ser and estar use and a decrease in developmental omission as learner level increased. Predicate type, resultant state, and Spanish grammar score significantly influenced use of estar over ser. Comparison with native English-speaking learners revealed differences between first language groups in terms of rates of form use, but similar developmental trends and predictors of estar use overall.

Oblique and nominative nominal possessors in Forest Enets

Two types of possessor encoding are distinguished in Forest Enets, the nominative and the oblique. Elicited data show that the oblique possessor is a part of the noun phrase headed by the possessee, whereas the nominative possessor shows the properties both of a detached topicalized constituent and of an external possessor. The main focus of the study is on the use of these strategies in texts. I examine their distribution in terms of the syntactic function and semantic class of the possessee and the predicate type. The nominative possessor encoding is shown to be strongly associated with constructions that describe 1) various types of possessive relations (predicating possession, stating the possessor’s age and name) and 2) the state of the possessor’s body part. Oblique possessors typically serve as referential anchors and are less determined by constructional semantics, in particular they are more common when the possessee is agentive and animate. Kokkuvõte. Maria Ovsjannikova: Metsaeenetsi keele obliikvakäändelised ja nimetavakäändelised nominaalsed omajad. Metsaeenetsi keeles eristatakse kaht tüüpi omajakodeeringut: nimetavakäändeline ja obliikvakäändeline. Küsitlemise teel kogutud andmed näitavad, et obliikvakäändeline omaja on osa noomenifraasist, milles omatav esineb põhisõnana, samas kui nimetavakäändelisel omajal on nii eraldatud topikaliseeritud moodustaja kui ka välise omaja tunnused. Selle töö eesmärk on uurida nende omajastrateegiate kasutamist tekstis. Uurin nende distributsiooni omatava süntaktiliste funktsioonide ja semantilise klassi ning predikaadi tüübi mõttes. Nimetavakäändeline omajakodeering näib olevat tugevalt seotud konstruktsioonidega, mis kirjeldavad 1) erinevat tüüpi omajasuhteid (omamise väljendamine predikaadi kaudu, omaja vanuse ja nime väljendamine) ja 2) omaja kehaosade olukorda. Obliikvakäändelised omajad toimivad tüüpiliselt referentsiaalsete ankrutena ja ei ole konstruktsioonisemantika poolt nii määratletud, täpsemalt on nad sagedasemad siis, kui omatav on agentiivne ja elus. Аннотация. Мария Овсянникова: Косвенное и номинативное кодирование именного посессора в лесном диалекте энецкого языка. В лесном диалекте энецкого языка выделяются два способа кодирования посессора: косвенная форма и форма номинатива. Данные элицитации показывают, что посессор в косвенной форме является частью именной группы обладаемого, в то время как номинативный посессор обладает сходством как с вынесенным топиком, так и с внешним посессором. Основное внимание уделяется употреблению двух способов кодирования в текстах. Рассматривается их распределение в зависимости от синтаксической позиции и семантического класса обладаемого, а также от типа предиката. Номинативное кодирование связано прежде всего с конструкциями, которые описывают 1) различные посессивные отношения (такими как собственно предикативная посессивная конструкция и конструкции, называющие возраст и имя посессора), а также 2) состояние части тела посессора. Посессор в косвенной форме обычно служит «референциальным якорем» и менее избирателен к типу конструкции, в частности такое кодирование чаще встречается при агентивном одушевленном обладаемом.

The Development of εὑρίσκω ‘find’ as Evidence towards a Diachronic Solution of the Matching-Problem in Ancient Greek Complementation

This paper traces the semantic and constructional development of the complement-taking verb εὑρίσκω ‘find’ from Homeric Greek to Post-Classical Greek. First, the paper details the semantic development of εὑρίσκω using characteristics such as predicate type, semantic role of the subject and factivity. Subsequently, explanations are offered for the constructional development of εὑρίσκω, using insights from grammaticalization research such as reanalysis and analogy. In contrast to previous studies on Ancient Greek complementation which support the idea of a systematic Classical Greek opposition of factive participial versus non-factive infinitival complementation, this paper shows how bridging contexts of mental judgment εὑρίσκω with a participial complement do not follow this opposition as they are non-factive and changed their meaning (with reanalysis) before changing their complementation structure (through analogy). Also, by extending our view to the individual history of other cognitive predicates (ἐπίσταμαι, γιγνώσκω and οἶδα) the author showsthat other cognitive predicates undergo similar developments from factive+object to factive+ ACP to non-factive+ACI, although their individual histories are still in need of a systematic diachronic account. Thus, complementation patterns per period could be analysed in a more fine-grained way by analysing complementation patterns bottom-up from the semantic and constructional evolutions of individual predicates. Also, the findings from this paper provide evidence towards a diachronic solution of the so-called matching-problem: diachronically related semantic and constructional stages strongly motivate the choice of a specific complementation structure but absolute factivity oppositions in Classical Greek complementation are rather strong tendencies.

Mass/Count Distinctions in Ibero-Romance Dialects

Some Ibero-Romance dialects show neuter agreement with uncountable nouns. According to data recently compiled in dialect corpora, mass neuter agreement varies according to word classes, being most frequent in pronouns and moderate in adjectives. Pronouns, both overt and null, regularly give rise to mass neuter agreement. Both the syntactic position of the predicate (attributive or predicative) and the predicate type (individual-level [IL] or stage-level [SL] predicate) play a role in triggering mass neuter agreement. Mass neuter agreement is strongly associated with SL predicates, and it proposed that it’s an extension of the so-called Romance neuter, or agreement with nonlexical antecedents, for it implies the syntactical cancellation of gender and number. The origins of neuter morphology should be thus found in the demonstrative neuter pronouns, from which it gradually extends in steps regulated by the syntactic distance between mass antecedents and the agreeing predicates.

Sign order in Slovenian Sign Language locative constructions

In both sign and spoken languages, locative relations tend to be encoded within constructions that display the non-basic word/sign order. In addition, in such an environment, sign languages habitually use a distinct predicate type – a classifier predicate – which may independently affect the order of constituents in the sentence. In this paper, I present Slovenian Sign Language (SZJ) locative constructions, in which (i) the argument that enables spatial anchoring (“ground”) precedes both the argument that requires spatial anchoring (“figure”) and the predicate. At the same time, (ii) the relative order of the figure with respect to the predicate depends on the type of predicate employed: a non-classifier predicate precedes the figure, while a classifier predicate only comes after the figure.

Copula use in the Spanish of Venezuela

This investigation extends the research on the use of Spanish copulas ser and estar in Venezuela to all [copula + adjective] contexts (see De Jonge 1993; Malaver 2000 for work on expressions of age). Findings reveal that resultant state, adjective class, predicate type, experience with the referent, susceptibility to change, socioeconomic level, age and frame of reference are included in the statistical model as strong predictors of estar. The analysis of the social factors shows that copula choice in Venezuelan Spanish does not show the typical S-curve pattern to strongly support an analysis of change in progress. The history of copula choice in the language suggests a development with long periods of stability and the strong conditioning of linguistic factors. Copula choice in Venezuelan Spanish shows signs that it is slowly advancing and that younger and older speakers are at different stages in this grammatical change.

The linguistics of weather

This paper is a cross-linguistic investigation of meteorological expressions (such as it is snowing or the wind blows). The paper proposes a three-fold typology of meteorological constructions according to the element primarily responsible for the coding of weather. In the predicate type, a predicate expresses the meteorological event, while an argument has other functions. In the argument type, an argument is responsible for expressing weather, while any eventual predicate is semantically rather vacuous. In the argument-predicate type, finally, both a predicate and an argument are involved. All types include subtypes, depending on the syntactic valency and the parts of speech of the elements involved. Building upon the typology of constructions, a typology of languages is also proposed based on the coding of precipitation and temperature.

Specificational Copular Sentences in Russian and English

The Russian sentence (1), from Padučeva and Uspensky (1979), and English (2) are examples of specificational copular sentences: NP2 provides the ‘specification’, or ‘value’ of the description given by NP1. (1) Vladelec ètogo osobnjaka – juvelir Fužere. owner-NOM this-GEN mansion-GEN jeweler-NOM Fuzhere ‘The owner of this mansion is the jeweler Fuzhere.’ (2) The biggest problem is the recent budget cuts. Williams (1983) and Partee (1986) argued that specificational sentences like (2) result from “inversion around the copula”: that NP1 is a predicate (type ) and NP2 is the subject, a referential expression of type e. Partee (1999) argued that such an analysis is right for Russian, citing arguments from Padučeva and Uspensky (1979) that NP2 is the subject of sentence (1). But in that paper I argued that differences between Russian and English suggest that in English there is no such inversion, contra Williams (1983) and Partee (1986): the subject of (2) is NP1, and both NPs are of type e, but with NP1 less referential than NP2, perhaps “attributive”. Now, based on classic work by Roger Higgins on English and by Paducheva and Uspensky on Russian, and on a wealth of recent work by Mikkelsen, Geist, Romero, Schlenker, and others, a reexamination the semantics and structure of specificational copular sentences in Russian and English in a typological perspective supports a partly different set of conclusions: (i) NP1 is of type and NP2 is of type e in both English and Russian; (ii) but NP1 is subject in English, while NP2 is subject in Russian; and (iii) NP1 in specificational sentences is universally topical (discourse-old), but only in some languages (like English) is that accomplished by putting NP1 into canonical subject position. In other words, both English (2) and Russian (1) move the -type NP1 into some sentence-initial position for information-structure reasons, but in English NP1 ends up as syntactic subject, whereas in Russian, it’s inverted into some other left-periphery position.

Pour un Dictionnaire des Fréquences des Locutions Verbales

Although many frequency dictionaries of French words have been published over the past decades, they rarely include fixed expressions and idioms. I therefore view it as an important task to try to compile a frequency dictionary of French locutions verbales (fixed expressions of the predicate type). A pilot study of the frequency of about twenty expressions in the newspaper Le Monde 1996 and 1997 reveals that particular problems arise in creating such a dictionary. This paper discusses some of these problems, including variation (instability) and ambiguity, and concludes with a model entry for the dictionary.