I give a uniform account of French mood from a semantic and nano-syntactic perspective by revising the criteria for the distribution of indicative vs. subjunctive mood. I claim that the subjunctive is selected by the semantic property of emotivity encoded in the main clause verb. I develop a definition and a syntactic representation of emotive vs. non-emotive verbs and a set of diagnostics for the two classes. I also reexamine the notion of veridicality and show that it is not the determining factor in the choice of mood (contra Giannakidou 1998, 2009, a.o.).
This paper sets the basis for a uniform account of the alternation between the two Spanish copulas (ser and estar) in adjectival and passive clauses. While the copular contrast has been attributed to the different properties of adjectives (e.g. individual vs. stage level) and to an eventive vs. resultative stative dichotomy in passives, this work shows that they all behave alike regarding their temporal interpretation. We derive such uniformity from the syntactic properties of the copulas themselves: estar includes an additional component ser lacks that makes everything it merges with stative, with particular temporoaspectual properties.
This paper examines the behavior of the French scalar focus-sensitive particles même, quand même, ne serait-ce que, and seulement as compared to English even and only. I first show that French même displays a more restricted distribution than even; this behavior and that of its antonym quand même argue for the scope theory against the ambiguity theory of even. Secondly, I demonstrate that the behavior of ne serait-ce que and seulement reveal the existence of an intrinsic link between even-like particles and only-like particles. To capture this observation, and more generally the organic relation between scalar particles, I propose a new, parsimonious, theory that builds scalarity, additivity, and exclusivity of scalar particles into a conjunctive or disjunctive meaning.
In this paper, we tackle the issue of the semantics of semelfactive predicates by looking at ata-nominalisations built on instrument semelfactive verbs in Italian. Being nomen vicis forms, these nominalisations denote singular instances of events. The comparison allows us to cast new light on the issue of what counts as a unit in the domain of semelfactive verbs. We then apply this line of exploration to the issue of the double reading of semelfactives – semel and processive, and show that the two readings of their ata-nominalisations correspond to predicates belonging to distinct aspectual types.
This paper discusses and analyzes the syntactic correlation between three different phenomena in Spanish: The presence of the accusative clitic, the presence/absence of number agreement in the dative clitic (a phenomenon called “le-for-les”), and the presence/absence of gender agreement in the dative clitic in laísta dialects. Assuming that accusative clitics manifest exclusively an agreement morpheme and that dative clitics can be decomposed into an applicative morpheme and an optional agreement morpheme, we argue for a unified account of these structures as follows: The presence of the accusative clitic and obligatory agreement in the dative are reflexes of the realization of an agreement morpheme in the structure. The analysis we propose also accounts uniformly for the unavailability of “la-for-las” or partial agreement in laísta dialects.
This paper investigates the morphological markedness of φ features encoded on perfective auxiliaries in a subset of Upper Southern Italian dialects (USIDs).
Following a Distributed Morphology approach (cf. Halle & Marantz 1993, 1994, a.o.), we treat perfective auxiliaries in USIDs as syntactic heads composed of Tense and φ features whose phonological entries are inserted at PF by means of a process called Spell-Out.
Here, we argue that the overt marking of φ features attested on perfective auxiliaries in a group of USIDs depends on the application of a post-syntactic operation called Default Marking, according to which a dedicated set of φ features gets overtly marked only if its grade of markedness is uniform with the one expressed by Tense.
In between the minority of Romance languages that have full paradigms of subject clitics (e.g. Standard French) and the unmarked null subject grammars (e.g. Spanish, Italian and most Occitan dialects), a continuum of transitional varieties shows between one and five nominative clitics. Unlike the better documented Northern Italian Dialects, Northern Occitan Dialects have nominative clitics paradigms which typically begin with distinct meteorological subjects. The shape and sequence of the partial nominative clitic paradigms maps the progressive diachronic introduction of contrasts using underspecified monovalent features organized hierarchically to reflect implicational dependencies, following Harley & Ritter’s (2002) Feature Geometry. Meteorological subject pronouns play a crucial role in this diachronic progression precisely because they lack morphological features and therefore can map onto non-referential subjects.
We developed an automated algorithm to retrieve direct object clitic doubling (DOCLD) examples in Spanish data from texts and the web. We focused on the Rioplatense dialect, where this kind of doubling is rather common. Given an electronic text, our procedure has two steps: first, tagging the text with an available part-of speech (PoS) tagger (TreeTagger), then inputing the tagged text into java-based code that extracts all sentences containing direct object clitics and attempts to match each clitic to a candidate doubled NP in its sentence. Identification of DOCLD cases in a short story (edited text) was 100%, whereas on unedited, raw text it was only 50%. Missing DOCLD cases are mainly caused by misspellings and lack of punctuation in the raw texts. We discuss how to improve accuracy mainly by reducing the number of false negatives.
The present study examines the use of creaky voice in the Spanish of two groups of Spanish-English bilinguals, namely, U.S. heritage speakers of Mexican Spanish and English L2 learners of Spanish. In American English, creaky voice is used utterance-finally, especially among young women, while it has rarely been found in Mexican Spanish. Participants’ H1-H2 values in utterance-final position were calculated to measure the degree of creaky voice and the values were compared to those of monolingual speakers of Mexican Spanish. Results showed that while monolinguals did not use creaky voice, both heritage speakers and L2 learners did, especially the female speakers. The findings imply that, like other linguistic features, voice quality can be transferred from one language to another.
This paper investigates the development of English and Spanish subject production in 8 heritage bilingual children (age range: 4;1–5;3; mean age: 4;7). Oral production of overt and null subjects was assessed using a picture-based story re-telling task and a description task. Subjects were coded according to type (overt or null), and pragmatic function (new information, topic continuation, recovery, contrast and change of topic). Results indicate a robust distribution of pragmatically appropriate subjects in Spanish; however, non adult-like null subjects were also found in a subset of the English utterances. We propose that cross-linguistic influence from Spanish encouraged children to have more than one grammar available (Amaral & Roeper 2014), with the option to treat English as a null-subject language.
This study investigates a potential case of near-merger in legacy French data from Frenchville, Pennsylvania. With previous research having found a robust differentiation in production between French schwa and the front mid rounded vowels by the final generation of Frenchville French speakers, we hypothesize that a former near-merger of these vowels enabled a subsequent demerger. The present analysis examines schwa and the mid vowels in interview data from the penultimate generation of Frenchville speakers and finds evidence for a near-merger, as the vowels are similar but not identical in duration and spectral quality. The data also support the notion that the differentiation of these vowels by the final generation was likely an innovation, rather than the result of transmission.
This paper examines whether L2 learners of Spanish can attain native-like interpretive and parsing patterns in intrasentential subject anaphor resolution, and the extent to which these patterns are modulated by L1 transfer. Adult advanced L2 learners of Spanish with different L1s (Moroccan Arabic, a null-subject language, and English, a non-null subject language) completed an experiment utilizing online (the moving window paradigm) and offline (answers to comprehension questions) techniques. Both Arabic and English learners of Spanish performed in a native-like way at the interpretive and parsing levels. These patterns suggest that L1 transfer plays no crucial role when interpreting and processing intrasentential anaphoric subjects at least at the advanced level.
I give a uniform account of French mood from a semantic and nano-syntactic perspective by revising the criteria for the distribution of indicative vs. subjunctive mood. I claim that the subjunctive is selected by the semantic property of emotivity encoded in the main clause verb. I develop a definition and a syntactic representation of emotive vs. non-emotive verbs and a set of diagnostics for the two classes. I also reexamine the notion of veridicality and show that it is not the determining factor in the choice of mood (contra Giannakidou 1998, 2009, a.o.).
This paper sets the basis for a uniform account of the alternation between the two Spanish copulas (ser and estar) in adjectival and passive clauses. While the copular contrast has been attributed to the different properties of adjectives (e.g. individual vs. stage level) and to an eventive vs. resultative stative dichotomy in passives, this work shows that they all behave alike regarding their temporal interpretation. We derive such uniformity from the syntactic properties of the copulas themselves: estar includes an additional component ser lacks that makes everything it merges with stative, with particular temporoaspectual properties.
This paper examines the behavior of the French scalar focus-sensitive particles même, quand même, ne serait-ce que, and seulement as compared to English even and only. I first show that French même displays a more restricted distribution than even; this behavior and that of its antonym quand même argue for the scope theory against the ambiguity theory of even. Secondly, I demonstrate that the behavior of ne serait-ce que and seulement reveal the existence of an intrinsic link between even-like particles and only-like particles. To capture this observation, and more generally the organic relation between scalar particles, I propose a new, parsimonious, theory that builds scalarity, additivity, and exclusivity of scalar particles into a conjunctive or disjunctive meaning.
In this paper, we tackle the issue of the semantics of semelfactive predicates by looking at ata-nominalisations built on instrument semelfactive verbs in Italian. Being nomen vicis forms, these nominalisations denote singular instances of events. The comparison allows us to cast new light on the issue of what counts as a unit in the domain of semelfactive verbs. We then apply this line of exploration to the issue of the double reading of semelfactives – semel and processive, and show that the two readings of their ata-nominalisations correspond to predicates belonging to distinct aspectual types.
This paper discusses and analyzes the syntactic correlation between three different phenomena in Spanish: The presence of the accusative clitic, the presence/absence of number agreement in the dative clitic (a phenomenon called “le-for-les”), and the presence/absence of gender agreement in the dative clitic in laísta dialects. Assuming that accusative clitics manifest exclusively an agreement morpheme and that dative clitics can be decomposed into an applicative morpheme and an optional agreement morpheme, we argue for a unified account of these structures as follows: The presence of the accusative clitic and obligatory agreement in the dative are reflexes of the realization of an agreement morpheme in the structure. The analysis we propose also accounts uniformly for the unavailability of “la-for-las” or partial agreement in laísta dialects.
This paper investigates the morphological markedness of φ features encoded on perfective auxiliaries in a subset of Upper Southern Italian dialects (USIDs).
Following a Distributed Morphology approach (cf. Halle & Marantz 1993, 1994, a.o.), we treat perfective auxiliaries in USIDs as syntactic heads composed of Tense and φ features whose phonological entries are inserted at PF by means of a process called Spell-Out.
Here, we argue that the overt marking of φ features attested on perfective auxiliaries in a group of USIDs depends on the application of a post-syntactic operation called Default Marking, according to which a dedicated set of φ features gets overtly marked only if its grade of markedness is uniform with the one expressed by Tense.
In between the minority of Romance languages that have full paradigms of subject clitics (e.g. Standard French) and the unmarked null subject grammars (e.g. Spanish, Italian and most Occitan dialects), a continuum of transitional varieties shows between one and five nominative clitics. Unlike the better documented Northern Italian Dialects, Northern Occitan Dialects have nominative clitics paradigms which typically begin with distinct meteorological subjects. The shape and sequence of the partial nominative clitic paradigms maps the progressive diachronic introduction of contrasts using underspecified monovalent features organized hierarchically to reflect implicational dependencies, following Harley & Ritter’s (2002) Feature Geometry. Meteorological subject pronouns play a crucial role in this diachronic progression precisely because they lack morphological features and therefore can map onto non-referential subjects.
We developed an automated algorithm to retrieve direct object clitic doubling (DOCLD) examples in Spanish data from texts and the web. We focused on the Rioplatense dialect, where this kind of doubling is rather common. Given an electronic text, our procedure has two steps: first, tagging the text with an available part-of speech (PoS) tagger (TreeTagger), then inputing the tagged text into java-based code that extracts all sentences containing direct object clitics and attempts to match each clitic to a candidate doubled NP in its sentence. Identification of DOCLD cases in a short story (edited text) was 100%, whereas on unedited, raw text it was only 50%. Missing DOCLD cases are mainly caused by misspellings and lack of punctuation in the raw texts. We discuss how to improve accuracy mainly by reducing the number of false negatives.
The present study examines the use of creaky voice in the Spanish of two groups of Spanish-English bilinguals, namely, U.S. heritage speakers of Mexican Spanish and English L2 learners of Spanish. In American English, creaky voice is used utterance-finally, especially among young women, while it has rarely been found in Mexican Spanish. Participants’ H1-H2 values in utterance-final position were calculated to measure the degree of creaky voice and the values were compared to those of monolingual speakers of Mexican Spanish. Results showed that while monolinguals did not use creaky voice, both heritage speakers and L2 learners did, especially the female speakers. The findings imply that, like other linguistic features, voice quality can be transferred from one language to another.
This paper investigates the development of English and Spanish subject production in 8 heritage bilingual children (age range: 4;1–5;3; mean age: 4;7). Oral production of overt and null subjects was assessed using a picture-based story re-telling task and a description task. Subjects were coded according to type (overt or null), and pragmatic function (new information, topic continuation, recovery, contrast and change of topic). Results indicate a robust distribution of pragmatically appropriate subjects in Spanish; however, non adult-like null subjects were also found in a subset of the English utterances. We propose that cross-linguistic influence from Spanish encouraged children to have more than one grammar available (Amaral & Roeper 2014), with the option to treat English as a null-subject language.
This study investigates a potential case of near-merger in legacy French data from Frenchville, Pennsylvania. With previous research having found a robust differentiation in production between French schwa and the front mid rounded vowels by the final generation of Frenchville French speakers, we hypothesize that a former near-merger of these vowels enabled a subsequent demerger. The present analysis examines schwa and the mid vowels in interview data from the penultimate generation of Frenchville speakers and finds evidence for a near-merger, as the vowels are similar but not identical in duration and spectral quality. The data also support the notion that the differentiation of these vowels by the final generation was likely an innovation, rather than the result of transmission.
This paper examines whether L2 learners of Spanish can attain native-like interpretive and parsing patterns in intrasentential subject anaphor resolution, and the extent to which these patterns are modulated by L1 transfer. Adult advanced L2 learners of Spanish with different L1s (Moroccan Arabic, a null-subject language, and English, a non-null subject language) completed an experiment utilizing online (the moving window paradigm) and offline (answers to comprehension questions) techniques. Both Arabic and English learners of Spanish performed in a native-like way at the interpretive and parsing levels. These patterns suggest that L1 transfer plays no crucial role when interpreting and processing intrasentential anaphoric subjects at least at the advanced level.